Fortress in the Eye of Time

CHAPTER 25

Petelly had tired, long since — had run as far as he could and went at long, brisk walks along the Emwy road, among the wood-crowned hills. Petelly was not as fast as Gery, but he was strong. Perhaps Uwen could overtake him, Tristen thought. Uwen was good at things a soldier did. But for the while he was free, and he had no wish, at least for a day or two, to be near anyone who knew him, though dearly he loved the sound of Uwenʼs voice, and already missed him. He worried about him, as well, if Uwen followed him too closely or somehow failed to hear his message; but he counted on Uwen to be wise, and to read the trail he was leaving on the muddy road.

Such a din of things had begun bearing in on him, so many echoes and voices had begun clamoring for his attention and his understanding, that he longed for his space of silence before Uwen or someone of the Zeide did overtake him. He no longer made sense of any single voice. He felt drawn thin, overwhelmed with pieces and shattered bits of knowledge of Henasʼamef and of things that meant nothing to him, that everyone believed should be vastly significant.

Now — now, deep in the hills, at last with only Words he knew about him, and no one speaking to him, he could draw a peaceful, considered breath.

He could not have borne, last night, some new constraint of Cefwynʼs fears holding him locked in his rooms. He could not bear some new, more dreadful event tumbling in on him before he had understood the last.

Most of all, he could not bear Cefwyn making some new demand of his unquestioning belief — or Emuin arriving to take charge of him and severing him from Cefwyn — for Cefwyn might well yield him up to someone who could occupy him for a time; and then forget about him and his advice for days upon days. He did not fault that Cefwyn would abandon him: he knew that Cefwyn was busy. But he knew that his concerns were important. And it occurred to him that, absent, he would weigh far more heavily on Cefwynʼs thoughts, and what he had said might weigh far more than it ordinarily did.

But if Cefwyn could lock him away and know where he was, Cefwyn would cease to think about what he had said. So, absent, he decided, he was far more present than if he were at Cefwynʼs elbow.

Here he felt free, no longer hedged about with constraints, no longer so unremittingly battered by chance. He rode in both fear and anticipation of what lay ahead of him, at least to discover more truths of the world than he knew now, and, by that, to be less helpless than he was among men who knew who they were.

It was not without discomfort, this journey: he was still soaked through, although the sun warmed the cloak and Petellyʼs body warmed him. He had eaten very little on the road to Emwy, nothing on the way back, had missed his supper asleep yesterday evening, and his breakfast this morning, and after that his noon meal, so that by now he was a little light-headed, but he did not at all miss the clatter of his well-meaning and kindly servants. He had been hungry before, on the Road. He took it for no great hardship. He let Petelly graze a little for his midday meal as they went. Petelly had left a warm, dry stable and run both far and fast for his asking, and was surely as glad as he was to see the sky clearing and to feel a warm afternoon sun touch his back. Petelly had mouthfuls of thistle-bloom, one after another — he seemed to favor the purple, feathery sprays, and they grew profusely on the hillsides and along the road, silvery, jagged leaves, and tassel-like puffs rising above the gold and green of the grass and the thickets of broom.

He had wrung water out of Cefwynʼs beautiful cloak, and knew he owed Cefwyn both its return and an apology for its condition. He had taken off his coat as he rode this morning and wrung it out, but wearing it, rumpled as it was, and wearing the cloak spread out on Petellyʼs rump was the only way he could find of drying them, save this early morning when he had let Petelly rest. Then he had spread the cloak out on stones under the sun, so it had become merely damp instead of sodden. His new coat with the silver stitching seemed ruined for good — it was soaked, the padding under the mail was soaked, — his boots had stayed somewhat dry during the ride, but walking in the wet grass this morning, leading Petelly, had soaked through their seams, and he did not want to get down and walk on the road, and gather mud that would end up on Petelly and his saddle-skirts.

Fool, Mauryl would say, fool, out in the rain again.

But Maurylʼs rebuke carried no sting at all now. It had become a bittersweet memory of an old man who had been very patient with him, and with his own perpetual failure of Maurylʼs desperate expectations.

He could hear Mauryl in the quiet of the countryside: at least the memories of Ynefel had begun to come clear to him in greater detail and with more color than in Henasʼamef. He had had his head and his ears all stuffed with the presence of Henasʼamef, the Words of Henasʼamef, the Names of Henasʼamef, some of which had touched him and taught him and made him wiser.

But now, in the hills, under the sky, he found himself thinking very clearly of Ynefel, and Mauryl, and the things of his earliest memories. The advice of Men had filled his ears with a clamorous assault in town. Here, he listened to the Lark and watched a Fox trot along the hill and thought — how Mauryl had said it was very easy to make things do what they wanted to do.

And if Men in Henasʼamef called that wizardry, he never recalled Mauryl calling his work that, though Mauryl had called himself a wizard. Mauryl had simply expected a thing to be as it wanted to be. And it was. Mauryl never seemed to think it remarkable. He didnʼt think it remarkable, either.

So perhaps it had been easy to make himself be here — because this was what he wanted to do, and this was the direction he wanted to ride. Nothing had been able to stop him last night and nothing had prevented him this morning.

He recalled Mauryl saying he would know what to do when the time came for him to go. And he had indeed known. He had followed the Road and found Emuin. So what Mauryl had promised him had come true.

And now that he thought about it, it did seem that he might know when it was time for him to do other things, and to take other Roads, even to take up the one he had been on, which he had once thought led through the gate of Henasʼamef.

But perhaps his Road had only turned there, and gone along beside the wall of the town. Perhaps that was why it now drew him out again, and perhaps the clamor and clatter of the town and the gathering of lords and their men had troubled him because they were all outside Maurylʼs wishes.

That was one state of his thoughts. There were two. One state of his thoughts was calm and safe, and he knew he could rest as he rode, and do as he pleased, and arrive where he wished to arrive, and ask the questions he wished to ask. That was the freedom.

The other state of his thoughts was not calm. The other was full of jagged edges and Words half-unfolded and things that might and might not be, and all the ties he had made to people. That state of his thoughts was full of Cefwynʼs expectations of him, and Emuinʼs, and Uwenʼs, all unfulfilled. He did not know where good or bad resided, whether with the things Mauryl had wished him to do, or with the things that bound him by friendship to Cefwyn. The thoughts did not at the moment seem compatible.

He knew that in the simplest thinking of all, he should have stayed for Emuin and accepted Emuinʼs advice, even if it was to stay in his room and keep silent.

But it seemed to him — leaping to that other way of thinking — that he had found his way past the gates without hindrance because that too was the way things wanted to be. If that indeed was wizardry, then Mauryl had done it or he had.

Lady Orien did not expect visitors this afternoon. That was evident. Maids snatched at sewing and scattered, white-faced, from the benches at the solar windows. Orien herself cast aside her laprobe and rose up in a scattering of colored threads.

Orien was not at her best. There was little color in her face, and her clothing was gray, looking old and outworn, a gown chosen for comfort, surely, not show. The red curls were drawn back severely and braided in a long braid. Small bruises marked her left cheek and her chin, marks the source of which Cefwyn did not know, but guessed as possibly one of his guards. She seemed entirely unnerved at his sudden intrusion. Her fine hands locked together as if to stop their movement. But she was never at a loss for argument.

“I should have thought you would pay me some courtesy of announcement, Your Majesty. But, then, you own the guards and doubtless you will make free of my door when you will.”

It was by no means the contrition he had had reported to him. The soft, even voice had little quaver in it; the eyes, none.

I misjudged Heryn to my fatherʼs ruin, he thought. Have I likewise misjudged my act of mercy? It grows late to order other deaths; now it would have the taint of persecution.

“You are safe here,” he said coldly. “Do not presume too much on my patience. You asked to be heard. I am here.”

“I thought it was myself who would be summoned,” she said, and brushed at her gray skirts. “This is all I can do for mourning.” Now, now came the quavering voice. Worse, it did not have the sound of pretense. “Do I learn now what will be done with me and my sister?”

“What would you ask, Lady Orien?”

Her head came up; her chin lifted. “I would ask, my lord King, for Amefel.”

Her audacity astounded him. He recalled with shame how she had flattered her way into his bed, while she plotted with her brother against his life and against his fatherʼs life. His gullibility appalled him.

“I am Aswydd,” she said. “Like other Aswydds, I can divorce sentiment and policy. Give me Amefel for my holding. I shall mourn my brother and bow to circumstance. It will save Your Majesty division and confusion within the province at a time when Your Majesty has greatest need of unity. And it will prevent contention among other lords as to who may claim the spoils — with all the feuds and history entailed.”

“I need no advice from you or your sister on policy.”

“No, my lord King, since you well know these things to be true.”

What she said made clear sense, but he did not stop hating the woman. “Have what you ask,” he said then, and was gratified that it surprised her. The color quite fled her face and she looked as if she would gladly sit down; but she could not, in the Kingʼs presence, and he did not give her that leave. “Your cousins I shall banish, all, far eastward, stripped of all properties, which I give to you. That will doubtless give them great love for you, Orien Duchess of Amefel, and constant hope of your charity. But extend them none, on pain of death. Your sister Tarien will have no estate. It is yours, and you may not bestow it in your lifetime. You will remain under arrest, Your Grace of Amefel and Henasʼamef, until it pleases me to release you. You will be in all particulars…sole holder of the title.”

“So that there will be no lord to face you in council but myself, and no man to stand for me.”

“Ah, but I shall stand for you. Is it not the ancient custom of Amefel that a man who deprives a lady of her male kin must see to her welfare? A Crown wardship for you, Your Grace. And Lady Tarienʼs wardship and that of your cousins to you. No one will harm you. But I would not have a dozen of my lords competing for your tarnished favors, or have you or your sister politicking between the sheets. When you wed, Your Grace, if ever you know another man — and I shall take a dim view of impropriety — it will be with my approval; and the Aswyddsʼ rule over Amefel ends with your name, by one means or another. Be assured, you are lord and lady in Amefel.”

Orienʼs face had gone quite pale. She made a slow curtsy. “My lord King,—”

“I let you live. I let your sister live. If you were Herynʼs brother, Your Grace, you would fare differently, I assure you. Cross me again and youʼll find no further mercy. That I would execute a woman — never doubt. But your brother swore in dying that you no more than obeyed his orders as lord of Amefel; and therefore you and your sister and your cousins are alive.”

“My lord,” she breathed, and her face was rigid.

“Never grow arrogant, my lady. You will never have any champion for your opinions but myself, and I like them little. Your head is insecurely set and might make pair with your brotherʼs on the south gate at any moment.”

“I beg my lord King, his body for burial.”

“That I do grant. Neither I nor the ravens have more use for it. But on condition the burial be private and seemly. Yourself, the priests, your sister,…my soldiers.”

Orien swept another curtsy, slow and deep, showing her breast. He lingered, looking at her, wondering what had ever attracted him to this cold, scheming woman, or why he let her have her life now. The look she gave him was not Herynʼs, but something more direct and more defiant.

“The bloody Marhanens,” she said in a soft voice. “Always extravagant in revenge. I thank my lord King, that I have discovered a gentler nature to moderate your justice.”

The fact of her sex was there again, and mitigated the epithet generally used and seldom dared to the Marhanensʼ face. Again a different Orien flashed into memory, pale skin and silks and tumbled hair. Her bruised face offended his sensibilities.

“We have beheaded women before, we Marhanens. Remember that. I shall never trust you. But neither will I persecute you, Lady Orien.”

“My women and I,” she said gravely, “will make prayers of gratitude for that.”

He cast a sharp look at the servants in the shadows of the room — well-born, some might be, even bastard cousins. But two were peasant-looking, darker-haired, of Amefin blood and maybe older, wearing such talismans as Amefin women wore. He looked at Orien, lady of Amefel in more than in his grant, and feared their curses, and witchery.

“Pray rather that my good humor continues,” he said. “Where is your sister?”

“At her own prayers, my lord King. For our brotherʼs soul. We are a pious people.”

“Horses may fly,” he said, “but I am little interested in pious Aswydds.”

He turned then, conscious of the limp that would not bear him from them with any authority. He made his departure all the same deliberate and casual, and lingered at the door for a backward look. None of them had moved. Most looked frightened, even Orien.

Petelly had had his fill of thistle-tops, at least for a while, and moved along with ears up as the forest shade drank up the road ahead. Tristen felt only a little shiver of apprehension, knowing that this was the place that had claimed lives of his companions, but as a woods it beckoned green and living, not like Marna, of which it might even be an outgrowth. He went cautiously on both accounts, and he had not gone far inside that shade before he saw, recent in the mud of last nightʼs rain, the print of another horse.

He knew that Cefwyn would send men up here to bring back their dead. He knew that Heryn had claimed to have rangers in the district — as Cefwyn might have men here that he had not known about.

There were also the men who had killed Cefwynʼs father. There were reasons aplenty to fear the shade ahead. He vividly recalled the arrows that had flown at him when he had ridden with Uwen, when men very near him had died; and he recalled that track of a horse that had appeared as a dark line in the grass near Ravenʼs Knob that evening he and Cefwyn had fled from Emwy, a warning of someone besides themselves out and about the hills.

But Heryn must have sent a message to Cefwynʼs father, to urge him to come to Emwy. It was even possible, he thought, that Cefwyn by going to Emwy had fallen into the trap prematurely: if Cefwyn had died there, the King would have come; all the same, to Emwy; and there — possibly — the King might have died all the same, and Efanor would have become King. That was the way he put Cefwynʼs suspicions together, to explain the uneasiness he had heard between Cefwyn and his brother.

But ifs, Idrys had said to him, counted nothing. It had not happened the way Heryn wished. And Heryn would not plan anything else. Nor, he thought, had Efanor done anything to harm Cefwyn.

It did not mean, however, that the Elwynim Lord Heryn had dealt with were done with their actions.

He thought of that as he rode Petelly further and further into that green shade.

He thought of it with great urgency when, in the mud which the rain had made an unwritten sheet, he saw a manʼs footprint on the road, one place where someone had trod amiss, and slid on the mud, and then recovered himself and gone up onto the leaves. He looked up on the hillside where bracken hid further traces.

It might be someone from Emwy village. There were surely reasons for the villagers to be out and about the woods, pursuing their claims of lost sheep, and there were indeed signs of sheep about. But there had been a horseʼs track earlier, and he could not but worry about the safety of Uwen following him, along with whatever other men Uwen might have swept up. He was not concerned for himself. But Uwen would not turn back at a sign like this: Uwen would search the more desperately, and come into trouble.

He said to himself now that he should turn back, wait on the road for Uwen and see what Uwen thought, now that he had chosen the meeting, and now that there was something else at issue besides himself. He might persuade Uwen to wait, send someone back, supposing that Uwen came with soldiers, as Cefwynʼs men seemed generally to travel about the land — and if Uwen did, then he might see whether, having gained, however indirectly, the soldiers he had asked Cefwyn to give him, he could stay on the fringe of Marna a time with wise and experienced men under his orders and discover the secrets the woods had. They were important secrets, he was certain, secrets that might tell him much more about himself, and about Maurylʼs intentions; he could talk to Uwen, and Uwen would scratch his head and offer Uwenʼs kind of sensible opinions, which were different than Emuinʼs, but no less thoughtful.

That was the best thing to do, he thought, and he began to turn Petelly about on the road.

But that gray place flickered across his sight, an uncertain touch like the light through leaves, like a brush of spider-silk across the nape of his neck.

He turned Petelly full circle.

A gray, shaggy figure stood among the trees, in the green light, a figure in ragged skirts, wrapping her fringed shawl closely about her. It was the old woman of Emwy. Perhaps she was the reason he had had to persist on this road — as he might be the reason of the old womanʼs coming here, into this perilous woods.

She said nothing. She turned and walked uphill through the bracken.

He touched Petelly and rode him up the gentle slope. He did not trust himself safe from harm in doing so. Nor, he thought, did she trust there was no harm to fear from him, but surely she had some purpose in coming out into this green and gold and breathless forest.

She stopped. She waited by a spring that welled up out of the hill, where someone had placed rocks in an arch. The Sihhë star was carved on the centermost, and one stone was a carved head, while others, separately, had acorns, and bits of vines, and one, a hand. The pieces did not belong together. But they made an adornment for the fountain. Someone had brought them there, perhaps from Althalen, he thought, where there were such things.

“Auld Syes,” he said. He had not forgotten the name. “Why did you act as you did against us?”

The old woman hugged her shawl about her, bony hands clenched on the edges. Her hair was gray and trailed about her face, which was a map of years. Her mouth was clamped tight. Her eyes were as gray as his own.

“Sihhë lord,” she said in a faint, harsh voice, “Sihhë lord, who sent ye?”

“Mauryl, lady.”

She laughed, improbable as it was that such lips could ever laugh. She turned once full about, spread her arms, and her skirts and the fringes of her shawl flew like feathers in the green light. It might have made him laugh. But the feeling in the air was not laughter. It was ominous. The place tingled with it. She bent down and from among the rocks about the spring took a silver cup. She filled it, and drank, and offered the same cup up to him, on Petellyʼs high back.

“Drink, drink of Emwy waters, Sihhë lord. Bless the spring. Bless the woods.”

He did not think the drinking mattered so much. He took it from her, and drank the cool water. He gave it back, and the old woman was pleased, grinning and hugging herself, and he felt that tingle in the air that Maurylʼs healings had made. In that moment all the weariness of the road fell away, and Petelly, who had put down his head to drink, brought his head up with a jerk and a snort, the white of his eye showing as he looked askance at the old woman and backed away with more liveliness and willing spring in his step than he had had since last night.

He quieted Petelly with an unthought shift of his knees, and found himself brushing at that gray space again, himself and Petelly both, where white light shone, and fingers of light flowed through the old womanʼs fringes.

Came a child through the light, then, skipping through the gray shadow of the woods, as if a mist had moved in: in the gray place, the child moved, and yet the trees were in that place as well.

— Seddiwy, lamb, the old woman said. Show the Sihhë lord the paths ye know. Ye know where the good man is, do ye not?

— Aye, the little girl said, aye, mama, I do. I can. I will. The lord maʼ follow me.

The child skipped away through the shadow-trees, playing solitary games of the sort children played.

He was not aware of having turned downslope. But Petelly began to move. He saw nothing but a breeze going along the hillside, a light little breeze that only rustled the leaves of the trees.

Down across the road it went, disturbing the trees on the other side.

He did not trust children. But there seemed no harm in this one, who existed in that gray space which was no place for the innocent and the defenseless, but she had not stayed there long. She was a flutter of leaves and a skitter of pebbles on the lower slope, a little disturbance of the dust, that danced and skipped and danced.

She was a rippling on the water, a bending in the grass. A sparkle through the leaves of a stand of birches. There was not enough of her to catch. She made less stir than Auld Syes did, and that was little.

But, childlike, she did not go straight along the way. It was halfway up a hill and down again, it was in and out a thicket. Silly child, Tristen thought, and did not follow the wanderings, only the general line she took.

And now he had Emwy village on his left. But of buildings that had once stood there — he saw thatchless ruin, gray walls stained with black.

Idrys was going to fire the haystacks, Idrys had said. But there had been worse, far worse than that, done against the village. He was troubled by the sight. He would have argued with Idrys — or whoever had done this.

— Child, he said. Who burned the village?

The faint presence hovered, like the movement of a dragonfly, a quivering in the shadows.

And flitted on again, more present, and angry.

He took Petelly along ways that might once have been roads or paths, toward the south and east behind that fluttering in the leaves — which now was not the only such. Gusts flattened grasses in long streaks. Petelly, nonetheless, snatched up a thistle or two, and a gust blew his mane and twisted it in a tangle.

Saplings bowed and shook. Three such streaks in the grass combined and a sapling bent and cracked, splintered, showing white wood.

That was more ominous. He had had no fear for himself or for Uwen in his dealing with Auld Syes, but now he began to be concerned, and wished he had gained some word of safety from the old woman, not so much for him but for anyone following him.

Crack! went weed-stalks. Crack! went another sapling, and another and another, an entire stand of young birches broken halfway up their trunks.

— Be still, he said. It was wanton destruction. It proved nothing but bad behavior. Be still, he said, and wished the young child to come back again. I have men behind me, good men. Donʼt trouble them. They mean you no harm. Be polite. Be good to them.

It might have been a collection of old leaves that blew up then in the depth of a thicket, some distance away. It might have been, but he would have said it was the old woman herself. A single course of disturbance skipped toward it, a bent passage through the grass that tended this way and that way, that sported along a low spot and scuffed through the pebbles. And the ragged-skirted shape of leaves whisked through the thicket and dissolved again, with the little one skipping on where it had been and beyond.

Still the streaks of flattened grass appeared on the hillside, intermittent and angry, and the sun declined in the sky, making the shadows long, his and Petellyʼs, on the grass.

But he had come into that vicinity where he had ridden with Cefwyn as they were coming away from the ambush someone had laid for them in the woods — he recognized the hills. They touched on shapes — not shapes arriving out of some unguessed recollection, as the servants said he remembered things, but out of the certainty that he had seen these hills, and he knew where he was. It was near Ravenʼs Knob, where he had seen the tracks that led around the hill, the warning they had had of men hiding in the hills.

They were near Althalen — though nothing of that Name unfolded for him: just, it was Althalen, where he had been with Cefwyn. He thought that perhaps what guided him now was a kind of Shadow, though a simple and harmless one. He did not take her companions for simple and harmless, and did not want to deal with them after dark fell. But the guide he had sported this way and that with abandon through dry leaves and green grass, and the sun turned the greens darker and more sharp-edged with shadow as it inclined toward the hills.

— Do you know this place? he asked of Auld Syes, in the chance that she heard. Cefwyn thinks I should. But what should I know? Can you say?

There was no answer.

Still, there was nothing of the smothering fear he had felt when he had ridden through it before — the very dreadful presence he had felt that night, a Shadow of some kind, maybe many of them, that would keep to the deep places at the roots of wild hedges, and the depth of arches, and creep about at night, frightening and doing such harm as they could. Mauryl had not told him how to fight against Shadows, only how to avoid them, and that was by locks and doors. He had none such here — and perhaps he was foolish for letting Syesʼ child become his guide.

But he did not come now to disturb the Shadows. He came only for the truth, and rode among the old stones, following his wisp of a guide, thinking of the Name, Althalen, trying to coax more pieces of relevance to come to him. But the expectation that did come to him on the wings of that Name was an expectation of pleasant gardens — the thought of halls where elegant folk moved and laughed and met, and where children played at chasing hoops and hiding from each other, much as his guide went skipping through the stones.

He rode Petelly among the mazy foundations of what had been not a fortress like Ynefel but a community of buildings scarcely fortified at all. It had never had walls. That certainty came to him with the Name of Althalen: it had been a peaceful place, never considering its defense — trusting folk. Gentle folk, perhaps.

Or powerful.

But everywhere about him now, as he had seen at the village, fire had blackened the remnant of windows and doors. He smelled smoke, as where had he not? It might be the smoke of old Althalen; or of yesterdayʼs Emwy; or perhaps the dreadful smoke of the Zeide courtyard had clung to him and Petelly even through last nightʼs rain — he was not certain, but he felt a loosening of his ties to the rock and stone around him, a dispossession as if something, perhaps many such things, did not accept him here, as if — smothering fear met him and just scarcely avoided him.

The world became pearly gray. The walls stood, still burned, still broken, and Petelly and he moved all in that gray place, in a shifting succession of broken walls, less substance than shadow here. The burning and the smell of smoke was true in the gray world too. Only the Fear that Emuin had named to him…Hasufin…rolled through his attention, and seemed to have power here, power like that tingling of Maurylʼs cures for skinned knees and bumped chins.

That tingle in the air might, he thought, be wizardry, and if it was, he reminded himself staunchly of things as they ought to be: he thought of Ynefel, and, feeling a sudden chill and a sense of dreadful presence, drew back out of that gray light.

Then a wind sported through the grass, an ominous, tree-bending sort of wind which swept in a discrete line across the ground.

— Child! he called out in warning — because that gust made him think of the wind in the courtyard, that had raised the shape of dust and leaves, and he heard the faint wail of a frightened voice, as a breeze skipped behind him, at Petellyʼs tail. Be still, child, he said to it. Go back. Be safe. I know my way now. Go back to your fountain. Thereʼs danger here!

— Very noble, the Wind challenged him, blowing up a puff of leaves. Elfwyn would have done that sort of thing. And see what it won him.

— Hasufin? he challenged it. If that is your name, answer me.

— Why? Are you lost? Could you be lost? Or confused? — Youʼre certainly in the wrong place, poor lost Shaping.

The wind whirled through the brush, whipped leaves into Petellyʼs face, and Petelly reared, not at all liking this presence.

Neither did Petellyʼs rider. Begone! Tristen wished it, and the wind raced away, making a crooked line along the ground, raising little puffs of dust among the stones very much as the child had done, but far, far more rapidly.

It was no natural wind, no more than the other had been. It retreated as far as an old foundation, and a heap of stones, where it blew leaves off the brush.

Then the line of disturbed dust swept back toward them. This is Death, it said. All the Sihhë in this place died, even the children, should you find that sad. Mauryl and Emuin conspired to murder us. I was a child, did you know? I was a child of Althalen. But it did not stop the Marhanen. They murdered all the children in the presence of their mothers and fathers. And Mauryl was one of them that did the murder. Were you here?

He expected wickedness of it. Now it lied to him. Mauryl would not have killed children.

But the gray place filled with halls lit with pale sunrise fire, and children and all the people were running from the flames. They did die. They burned. They ran like living torches, their clothes set ablaze with that faded light and arrows shot them down.

A young boy lay sleeping on a bed. A man came, one thought, to rescue that child. But the man stabbed the sleeping boy, and that manʼs face was Emuinʼs.

“No!”

It was wickedness. And a lie. He had pulled at Petellyʼs mouth by accident, making Petelly back and turn as he cleared his eyes of dream and wished the brush and the stones back into his sight. Petelly smelled something, or heard something still: even after he had resumed his even grip on the reins, Petelly kept bending his neck this way and that, trying to turn, backing a step at a time, showing the whites of his eyes and flaring his nostrils; but an even hold on the reins and a firm press of his knees steadied Petellyʼs heart and kept him moving.

That the enemy would lie and deceive — why should it not? What could a lie weigh against murder?

So he argued with himself, refusing to believe, having learned deception, and having used it himself.

The wind blew dust into his eyes, making him blink them shut on that gray space, but, tears running on his face, he doggedly watched the space between Petellyʼs ears, refusing to start at the Shadows that urged on the edges of his sight. He saw the taunting breeze skirl along the dust. It performed wild antics in his path, it danced in the brush, and turning, blasted him with chaff and grass.

— Tristen, it said to him. Tristen, you dare not blind yourself. These are not lies. I do not lie to you. Youʼve believed the Guelenfolk, and Emuin. Very foolish of you, though you might not know it. Shall I tell you what Mauryl called Emuin?

He smelled the smoke still. It seemed stronger. He saw shadow-shapes flitting to the stones and through the brush, shapes which he might have believed, except they passed the most delicate thorn-boughs without disturbing them.

— Mauryl called him weak. Mauryl called him timid. Mauryl called him many names. And you rely on him. Not wise. Not wise at all. You surely died here.

— Go away! he cried. Begone!

— Oh, but you havenʼt Maurylʼs force, have you? And you should indeed listen. Mauryl was my teacher. And Emuinʼs. Dear Mauryl. Do you remember how he served the Sihhë Kings? He betrayed them: they would not let him have his way — so he dealt with Guelenfolk, and conspired with the Marhanens, who were mere servants to the Sihhë. Do you know how I know? I–I was that murdered child, I was the great and fearsome enemy Mauryl dared not face alone, and all this ruin and all this death he made for me, for me, do you hear me? Because Mauryl feared me, he opened the gates to the Marhanen, he pent me in my room, and sent Emuin to do murder. Would you hear more?

— Heryn Aswydd seemed an honest man, he said, struggling to find resistance to the voice that now seemed so aggrieved, and so reasonable. Heryn twice tried to kill us all.

— Oh, seemed, seemed. The Marhanen seems. Did Mauryl ever bid you trust the Marhanen? I think not. I know Maurylʼs advice. He sent you on the Road, but at Ynefel is your answer, Shaping. I have your answer. All you have to do is ask me.

The voice roared close and swept about him, a rush of wind along the ground. It blasted a growth of brushwood, and laid bare a slab of stone whereon something had burned.

— Oh, many of us, many of us, the Wind said. Hasufin…said. They burned the dead. They burned the living, did your precious Marhanen. They meant to leave no charred chip of bone to anchor us to the earth. But I have found that anchor. Ask! Come! Temporize with your fate. Ask me all your questions! Shall we search for your Grave, Sihhë soul?

Petelly fought the rein, turning and turning, pressed back by his knees. He saw the gray light, and the towers of Ynefel under shadow as the blackness arced across toward him.

— Then where and when was I born? he asked it, he knew not by what impulse, but it was his question, it was the question only Mauryl knew. Tell me that, or own you are ignorant and tell me nothing at all!

The Wind whipped away from him, breaking branches as it went. It poured across the sky in a scream of frustration and rage.

Then was quiet. Utter quiet. Foolish, he thought, striving to hold Petelly from a wild rush across the ruins. He was aware of another, subtle presence, so faint and so far he all but missed it. He had not driven away the danger alone. This presence had helped him. This presence had given him steadiness when he most needed it.

— Young man! it said, ever so faintly, now. Young man! Be aware. Be away…

— Master Emuin? he asked. It felt very much like Emuinʼs presence, but it was too elusive to see or to catch in this place. In that other world darkness had enclosed the area of silver gray where he and Petelly stood — all but that place and a patch of brightness ahead of him, and he saw it glow and falter like the guttering of a candle-flame.

— Emuin? he asked, again, not certain that it was, but not daring leave his ally weak and faltering as he seemed to be.

But it was a plump, kindly-seeming man who came toward him from that guttering light, a man he did not know in life — a man who called to him and held out hands in urgency — but the winds caught him away and their reaching fingers missed before ever he thought that there might have been a chance to catch him. He was gone. The encroaching Shadows flowed like water, broke like waves against the pearl-gray of the world.

He felt — afraid, then. Bereft of help. He shook himself and tried to come away from that gray place, fearing tricks.

He sat, trembling, on a shivering horse. Petelly stood with feet braced and head up, sniffing the wind.

He might have done the right thing, he said to himself. He had set the spirit aback. It was unable to answer that simple question, who he was, and what he was — and somehow that prevented it — Hasufin — from mischief. He thought that the child had gotten away from danger. He no longer saw the flitter in the leaves that betokened her presence.

But he thought, strangely, that he knew direction — amid the vast maze of lines of mostly-buried stones that was Althalen. There was presence at the heart of it: he thought so, from time to time, but it was a presence he did not think harmful. He thought rather the contrary, now, that the old man was someone he needed to find, another who had the right and the ability to travel in that gray space.

Petelly had not liked the Shadow that had come near them, but Petelly was not quite terrified, for he had the presence of mind to snatch a thistle-top, went, walking along through ripe grasses, along a line of stones that had been a wall.

Some distance he went, down a stream-course he thought might have been the same stream bent back again, perhaps tributary to the Lenúalim, who knew?

“Hold there!” someone cried.

He looked up atop a wall, at a man with a bent bow and an arrow ready to let fly at him. It was a man in gray and brown, and another, appearing in front of him.

Woolgathering, Mauryl had used to call it, when he let his wits go wandering.

“Sirs,” he said, in the courtesy he hoped would prevent arrows flying. “Good day.” Neither of these was the presence he had felt. He supposed they thought him quite foolish, being where he was, so unaware; or perhaps they thought him a danger.

The one man came closer. “Your sword,” that man said.

“I have none,” he said. “Nor any weapon. Have you a master, sir? I believe Iʼve come to see him.”

The man on the rocks relaxed his draw and leaned on his bow. “And whose man would you be?”

“Cefwynʼs,” he said. “And you, sir?”

“Men of Uleman,” the archer said. “The lord Regent of Elwynor.”