— Inborn in the Sihhë, a voice whispered, is the skill to
touch other planes. The old blood runs true. Shaping that
he is, he has substance here and there alike, does he not,
Emuin?
— Nothing that should interest you, Emuin warned him.
Young lord, believe nothing it offers you.
Tristen stopped in mid-impulse, drifting close to that familiar place, and Mauryl’s features began to shade and warp until it was another and younger face that looked on him.
He was aware of all the land then, stretched out like the map on Cefwyn’s table, and little tendrils of darkness ran out from Ynefel, curled here and there in the woods and lapped out into Elwynor—while another thread ran through Amefel to Henas’amef itself, growing larger by the instant.
He felt threat in that single black thread, as if it touched something familiar, something close to him. Or was himself. He was not, single chill thought, certain.
Other threads multiplied into Elwynor, a complicated weaving of which he could not see the end.
— Tristen! Emuin commanded him.
He had grown attracted to the voice. He tried now to retreat toward Emuin. He risked becoming as attenuated as the threads.
— Tristen! This is Mauryl’s enemy—this is your enemy!
Come back to me! Come back now!
A hand seized his hand. It pulled him through the air faster than he could get his balance, and he fell.
He struck the floor on his side. His limbs were sprawled on 393
cold stone, aching. He moved his hands, as amazed at the play of tendons under flesh as the first time he had seen it—and felt strong arms lift him up and strong arms encircle him, a shadow intervening between him and the fire.
“M’lord!—Guard! Damn, get help in here, man! He’s had one of his fits!”
He heard Uwen’s voice. Uwen’s shadow enfolded him. He blinked at it dazedly and languidly. Other men crowded about him, lifting him from Uwen’s arms, but not quite—all of them together bore him somewhere, which turned out to be back to bed, down in the cool, tangled covers, which they straightened, tugging them this way and that.
Most left, then, but Uwen remained. Uwen hovered over him, brushing the hair back from his face, kneeling at his bedside.
Uwen’s seamed face was haggard, pale, and frightened.
“I am safe,” Tristen said. It took much effort to say. But he found the effort to say it made it so. He drew a freer breath.
“Ye’re cold, m’lord.” Uwen chafed his hand and arm violently, tucked the arm back beneath the cover and piled blankets on him until the weight made it hard to breathe. Uwen was satisfied, then, but lingered, kneeling by his bed, shivering in the chill of a night colder than Tristen remembered.
“Uwen, go to bed. Rest.”
“No. Not whiles ye go falling on floors in fits.”
Uwen saw through his pretenses, he was certain, although Uwen made light of it. It filled him with sudden foreboding for Uwen’s life. “Uwen,” he said, “my enemies are terrible.”
Uwen did not move. The fear did not leave his look. But neither did he look overwhelmed by it. “Oh, I know your fits, m’lord. They don’t frighten me. And who else knows ye the way I do? And where should I go, worrying about you, and no way to do anything, then? I ain’t leaving for any asking, m’lord, so ye might as well forget about it. Not for your asking. Not even for the King’s.”
Uwen was too proud to run away. Tristen understood so.
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He had no urge to run away himself when the danger came on him, because in the moments it came, he saw no choices. He understood this, too, and did not call it bravery, as it was in Uwen. That place of no choices was very close to him now. It still tried to open behind his eyes, and he shivered, not from fear, but because flesh did not well endure that place.
And bravely Uwen held to his hand until the tremors passed, head bowed, his arms rigid. Uwen would not let him go into that bright place again, and that, he thought, was very wise on Uwen’s part, even if Uwen could see none of it, and could not reach after him. Uwen could hold his body, and make him aware of it, and keep him from slipping away.
“How near is it to morning?” Tristen asked, when the tremors had passed.
“I don’t know, m’lord. D’ ye want I should go ask?”
“There must be soldiers. I must have soldiers.”
“M’lord?”
“There’s an enemy at Ynefel. He mustn’t stay there.”
“Gods, no.” Uwen hugged him tight. “Ye can’t be goin’ again’
that place, m’lord. It ain’t no natural enemy, whatever’s there, and best ye leave it be.”
“I am not natural,” Tristen said. “Whatever you have heard of me, I think it must be true.”
“That ye be Sihhë? I don’t know about such things. Ye’re my good young lad, m’lord, ye ain’t nothing but good.”
“Can I be?” He spread the fingers of his hand wide, held it before them, against the firelight. “This knows what I am. It fought for me. And I dreamed just now of Ynefel. I saw threads going out of it. My enemy lives there now and he wants this land. He reaches into all the regions around us. He reaches even into this room, Uwen. I felt it.”
“Then tell m’lord Cefwyn. He’s the King, now. He can call on the priests. Or master Emuin, what’s more like. He could help.”
“No. Cefwyn doesn’t understand. I do. Leave me, Uwen. Go back to the guard where you were. Of all the soldiers I must take there—not you.”
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“The King won’t have ye go wi’ any soldiers,” Uwen forecast with a slow shake of his head. “This is priest’s business. Little as I like ’em, they got their uses, lad, and this has to be one.”
“Priests.” He recalled the priests he had seen—those he had met only today in the Quinalt shrine, where the King’s body was, priests scattering before him, cringing, lest their robes touch him. “They fear me. How could they face my enemy?”
“Then I don’t know, m’lord. King or no, His Majesty hain’t got no soldiers willing to march that road.”
He found nothing to say, then. He had no plan, else, if even Uwen said he was wrong.
“M’lord,” Uwen said, “m’lord,—I’d go wi’ ye. I’d go wi’ ye t’
very hell, but I wouldn’t see ye go there. I’d put meself in your way right at these gates, wi’ all respect t’ your lordship, I won’t see ye go there. No.”
“Uwen, what if this enemy comes out from Ynefel? What if he comes across to Althalen?”
“I don’t know nothing about that, m’lord. I don’t know nothing about wizards, and I don’t want to know. I’ll guard your back from any enemy I can see wi’ my two eyes and smite
’im wi’ whate’er I find to hand, but, gods, I don’t like this ’un.
Send to Emuin, m’lord. He’d know what to do. He’s a wise ’un.
He ain’t no real priest.”
He shook his head. “Emuin doesn’t know at all what to do with this. He’s afraid.”
“Ye don’t know that, m’lord?”
“I spoke with him. I spoke with him just now, Uwen.”
“M’lord, you was dreaming. That was all.”
“I did speak to him.” The ceiling seemed more solid now, a pattern of woodworking and lights. “I’m warm now. Go to bed, Uwen.”
“I’m comfortable here, m’lord.”
“I’m in no danger now. Go rest. Think about going back to the guard. The servants can manage for me.” He reached for Uwen’s scar-traced arm, pressed it, careful of new cuts, and a 396
bruise that, the size of his fist, darkened the side of Uwen’s forearm. “I want you to be safe, Uwen.”
“I hain’t got no family,” Uwen said finally. “The guard’s me mistress. But I couldn’t leave ye for the barracks again, m’lord.
Couldn’t. Wouldn’t be nothing then. I’m getting old. I feel the cold in winter, I think on my w
ife and my girls and my boy that the fever got, and there ain’t no use for me beginning again.
Damn, no, I couldn’t leave ye, my lord.”
And he tucked the blanket about him and got up and wandered away to his own small room between the doors.
Tristen watched him. He had never known about Uwen’s wife or children. He had made Uwen remember them, and he saw that Uwen had attached to him a feeling that Uwen had nowhere to bestow; as he had had for Mauryl, and had nowhere now to bestow it—not on Emuin, who had not Mauryl’s wisdom, and not Mauryl’s strength: Emuin had fled him and refused to be known, or loved, or held to, and he respected that wish, even understood it as fear. Cefwyn asked him to be his friend, but Cefwyn had so many people he had to look out for and to take care of.
But Uwen had only him. Uwen by what he said had lost everyone else. Uwen was not so wise as Mauryl: he was as brave as anyone could ask, but somehow he had ceased to depend on Uwen for advice as much as Uwen had begun to take orders from him.
And when had that happened? When had he grown to be anyone’s source of advice in the world, when he did not understand the world himself?
He lay still in his bed, and longed for daylight. Time—of which he had rarely been acutely conscious—again seemed to be slipping rapidly toward some event he could not predict or understand.
Far away he heard movements in the halls. From the yard came the occasional clatter of hooves, horsemen abroad in the dark, bound to or from the lower town or countryside or the camps—there was no cause to be dashing about on horses within the Zeide courts. Perhaps messengers, he said to 397
himself, and tried to think what might be going on that had so much astir.
He had no inclination to sleep and confront another bad dream. Sweat prickled on him, the blankets weighed like iron.
The beats of his heart measured interminable time, and he lay and stared at the lightless glitter of the windowpanes.
The darkness seemed a little less outside, a reddish murk, but not in the east, a glow that reflected on the higher roofs and walls—and from outside came a noise he could not at first recognize, then decided it was many voices shouting at something.
Thunder rumbled. Rain spattered the glass, a few drops, and the air stayed chill—he could feel it with his fingers to the glass, and the fire seemed more than convenience tonight.
The glow outside was much too early, unless, he thought, in this wretched day the laws of nature were bent and that murkish light was an ill-placed dawn or an effect of storm he had never seen.
But whatever the cause of it there was less and less chance of sleeping or resting in such goings-on, with the accumulation of unanswered questions and unidentifiable sounds and light. He rose from bed, determined at last and least to know what was happening that kept other people awake, and searched out clean, warm clothes. He had half dressed before, probably because of his opening the clothes-press, which had a stubborn door, Uwen arrived from the other room, rubbing his eyes and limping.
“M’lord,” Uwen murmured, “what’s the matter?”
“I don’t know,” he said, and thought of going quickly, taking just the door guard, not wishing Uwen to have to dress and break his sleep, but then he remembered Cefwyn’s order about wearing the mail, and it was too serious an order to dismiss lightly. He went to get it. “There’s a great deal of going and coming. I’m going downstairs to see.”
“I will, m’lord. Ye don’t need to stir out.”
“I want to see, Uwen. I want to know.” It seemed to him his whole life until now had swung on his ignorance of the 398
things around him—that too often he had taken others’ seeing and others’ doing, and not always had the result of that turned out for the good. He knew much too little, now, when Cefwyn was becoming King and Cefwyn’s brother was entering the household. So much else was changing, not alone in Henas’amef, as he knew it to be, but in Elwynor and the whole of the lands he had ever heard about.
While he was putting on his boots Uwen had stumbled back to his own space, and came back fastening his breeches and carrying his boots and his coat—Uwen did not intend to let him go alone, that was clear, and of all orders he could give Uwen that he knew Uwen would obey, he had had clear warning that Uwen would disobey him wide and at large if he bade him stay.
There came an outcry from some distant place. They both looked toward the windows. “M’lord,” Uwen said, “don’t be going out. I don’t know what’s happening. I don’t think it’s nothing good. I swear to ye, I’ll go down fast and see, and report to ye before ye could dress and be down.”
“No,” Tristen said, wound his hair out of the way as best he could and began to struggle with the mail shirt himself until Uwen came to help him.
The mail came down on his shoulders and shaped itself to his body, becoming no weight, a part of him. He picked up a coat that had turned up in the clothes-press, velvet and black like all else they gave him, the heaviest thing he had, against the chill in the night. He put it on over the mail, and Uwen, shaking his head, fastened it snugly down his chest, not pleased with his going, but helping him to be presentable, all the same.
The halls upstairs were deserted except for the guards appointed to the various doors. Noise of shouting drifted up from the lower floor, and they walked to the stairs, two of the guards from their own door walking behind them as the guards always did when he went outside.
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Half of Cefwyn’s door-guards were missing, too, meaning an empty apartment and the likelihood that Cefwyn had never yet come to bed—or that Cefwyn had had to leave it after that clattering of men up and down the hall.
Cefwyn’s father lay dead. He thought that, however exhausted Cefwyn was, however strongly Cefwyn had rejected the offers of people who wanted to stay these lonely hours with him, it was unlikely that Cefwyn would have slept at all tonight.
But that Cefwyn would be up wandering the halls—he had not expected.
They descended the stairs into the main hall, where soldiers gathered and servants and lords and ladies stood in knots whispering together, weeping, some of them. He smelled smoke, and recalled Althalen, where Cefwyn swore no fire had come since the Sihhë had died there. But this did not seem ghostly smoke. It made the eyes sting.
The noise came from the halls beyond.
“No farther,” Uwen counseled him. “My lord, stay and I’ll see.”
He knew by Uwen’s warning that there was no pleasure to come to him by going any farther. But all safety tonight seemed illusory; and his danger was worse, he had already persuaded himself, in biding ignorant of what happened in the place in which he lived, whether Cefwyn acted or others did without Cefwyn’s knowledge. Defend him, Cefwyn had bidden him swear: and how could he do that in utter ignorance?
Guards stood in the central hall. He went past them unchallenged, and Uwen stayed with him. So did his personal guards, into the main doors at the Zeide’s heart, those that let out into the front court.
Those four doors lay wide open. Their access and the whole corridor was jammed with mingled soldiery and residents of the hall in brocades or velvets or priests’ plain habits. Lamps lit the place, as they did in all places where the wind blew through, but the glow outside the doors was the red
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glare of a larger fire on vast billows of dark smoke, the stench of which reached far inside the hall.
Voices roared, outside, a wash of sound in which no words made sense.
It was impossible to keep together in the crowd. He plunged past a knot of lords out onto the landing and down the stairs, searching for a clear space to stand, at first, then found himself swept up in the rush, realizing that the crowd was carrying him toward the heart of the disturbance.
“M’lord,” he heard Uwen call to him, one clear, thin voice in that din of voices, but he had found a clearer vantage at the side-facing steps and did not wish to yield it up.
Wind rushed at him in that exposure, cold, rainy wind
warmed with smoke. Ash and sparks flew. He wondered if the far wing of the building itself was afire—but he saw as he came past the crowd on the steps that it was a large fire set at the side of the courtyard. Men came and went sparsely in proximity to its light, showing him how large that fire was, a pile of wood more than the height of a man; and the flames lit figures that hung on the curtain wall above it, men dangling from ropes, against the stones of the defenses of the Zeide. While he watched, one plummeted into the fire, in a plume of sparks.
Men. Men hanged by the neck from ropes. Men burning in the fire.
The crowd behind him shouted. Guards broke forth from the doors, jostling him. In that press, for one frightening moment, he saw a distorted face, a bloody wreckage of a man hastened along by armored Guelen guards. Red hair, the man had, and the ruin of fine clothing. For an instant the man had looked straight at him.
Heryn, he thought in horror.
Heryn Aswydd. Cefwyn had blamed him for the men who had attacked the King.
Soldiers keeping the crowd back pressed him against the wall, and he stayed there, his back against it, following with his eyes the progress of that company of soldiers and others 401
across the yard. Raucous laughter shocked him. He came down the steps, seeking to go closer, in the smell of smoke-warmed wind. There came a rumble he realized belatedly was thunder.
Droplets of rain began to fall—it will put out the fires, he thought. It will save Lord Heryn. It will clear the smoke. It will make things clean.
And then he knew that it could not, because it could never bring things back the way they had been, simple, and clear and becoming utterly safe at a word from the men who ruled his life.
The fires were not going out for any rain, and the burned men would not come back to life.
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