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Uwen and one of the servants pulled him to his feet and took him across a cool floor to his bed. There was a fire going in the hearth, he could see that as he lay back and let Uwen throw the covers over him.
“Was Emuin angry? I don’t remember.”
“He wasn’t angry, m’lord. He said you’d sleep a while. He said not to worry, he’d talk to the King.”
“I am tired, Uwen, unspeakably tired. That’s all, now.” His eyes were shut already, and the mattress was bottomless. “I’ll sleep through supper, I fear.”
“‘At’s all right. ’At’s just all right, lad. Ye’ve done very well.”
“I wish I thought so.”
“Ye’ve weathered more’n ye’ll say, is clear.” Uwen’s gentle hand brushed the hair off his face. “Ye got to stay out of such places.” “They seem where I’m most fit.”
“That ain’t so, m’lord. Don’t ye ever say so!”
“Uwen, forgive me for bringing you out in the rain.”
“There’s naught to forgive, lad. Only I hoped ye’d fled the blood and the killing and just took a ride in the country, is all. And ye found ghosts and worse.”
“I found Hasufin. I found him and he still was too strong. But the old man drew me to the Elwynim. And I drew you to us, at least I think I did.
I was wishing you away, but toward the last, there was nothing I wanted more to see than you coming down that hill.”
“Nothing I wanted to see more than you, lad. But ye done right well, ye done right well. I heard you askin’ master Emuin. It’s a spooky business, I say. The Elwynim talking about fire and smoke, which we was smelling, with the rain coming down in buckets and tubsful. The Ivanim say that’s the reputation of the place, that the haunt often goes with that smell about it. But what broke the trees, m’lord?”
“I think it was the folk of Emwy,” Tristen said, and tried to open his eyes, but they immediately closed again. “Talk of something else. Talk about the village you came from. Talk about the town. Make me laugh. I would like to laugh.”
Uwen talked, and talked, but it became a lazy sound to him, and dear and distant at once, telling him about his aunt and the priest and the pig, which was a fu
Chapter 28
Gossip had run the halls all evening and it had had twins by morning, so A
And mostly it was true what the gossip was saying, simply that there was rebellion in Elwynor, Emwy village was burned to the ground—and the King was marrying the Regent of Elwynor. Cefwyn looked at least to have an hour or two before he had to refute wilder elaborations on that report. He had had a late night of questioning Cevulirn’s captain, and discussing matters with Cevulirn—a later night, with the pain in his leg keeping him awake. But he had not finished his morning cup of tea when Efanor came bursting past the confused guards in a high fit of temper.
“You ca
“I can, and I can and I dare,” Cefwyn muttered over the rim of the tea cup. He felt a sort of triumph to have set Efanor so thoroughly aghast. It was good to have some forces of nature predictable. “Name me a disadvantage, brother, and do sit down, have a cup of tea. Shush! You know I hate uproars before I’ve waked.”
A
There were nods. The door shut.
“The woman is a heretic!” Efanor cried.
“I’ll ask her whether she is. If she consents to my suit.”
“The King ca
Do you really think they notice? he was almost tempted to say. His leg was hurting this morning and he was quick to temper. But he could be at least as crassly self-serving as Efanor’s priests, and cold-bloodedly larded his own unreligious philosophy with priestly cant. “I believe the gods send us chances, Efanor, I do believe that chances to do great good are rare, perhaps one in a lifetime, and this is mine.” Luck was the way he personally thought of it. But, inspired to one impiety, he proceeded to an outright fabrication: “I had a vision, night before last night, and I saw the sun shining on the far side of the Lenfialim. I think it’s the gods’ providence that Tristen came to us instead of across the river where Aséyneddin, who is truly faithless, would have seized on him and used him ill, and I think it’s the gods’ good providence that they have given me a chance to bring the realms together.” “They’re heretics.”
“Good loving gods, Efanor! Whom else can one rescue from sin? The pious? The gods already have them. It’s the heretics the gods have to court!
It’s heresy to deny the gods’ providence, —is it not? These are clearly providential events, absolutely unprecedented, tumbling one upon the other!
And surely the good gods want converts and influence in Elwynor, which the lady can give to them, —if the gods’ pious Guelen worshippers make a good impression and don’t offend the lady by arresting doddering trinket sellers in the market. Let us have a sense of proportion, here, brother, and give affairs their sensible importance! What matters more to the gods?
Scaring some old woman? Or having peaceable relations with Elwynor and the chance to secure a border? Leave the gods to take care of the old women in their good time and let us do what they clearly have set before us, in the matter of this border, and the Regent, and a chance that has never ever come to any king, not for a hundred years. If we fail—if we fail, we shall stand accountable for thousands of lives. We shall lose all we hold dear and defeat the gods’ own purpose. And I would not have that on my soul, Efanor, I would not!”
Efanor’s mouth opened, and shut, and maybe Efanor’s wits had begun, however belatedly, to work. Efanor had gone from sincere childhood fears of things going bump in the stairwell at night to a fierce belief that supernatural things had kept him from the good in life and could be cajoled into working better for him in the hereafter. Efanor had had his wits fairly well about him until his desertion of Emuin’s easy-going Teranthines to the more rigid orthodoxy of the Quinalt, with their rules and abstinences—and their course of atonement for faults. Efanor’s self-doubts and his demand for a solution he himself could apply had brought him to a sect that instilled doubts of the morality of his every thought, every thought of a thought Efanor had, and taught him then how to atone for those sinful thoughts and search for more fault in himself—which took an increasing amount of Efanor’s attention from what was going on in the world.
Probably, Cefwyn guessed, it was the effect of growing up with a grandfather who knew he was damned to some unguessed hell and an uncle who’d said something prophetic about his demise the day before he died. Efanor was clutching at straws of salvation in a flood of the increasingly inexplicable.
But the brother he had loved had owned a keen wit once upon a time; and it seemed to him on an odd provocation that a surfeit of inexplicable ideas, complex beyond that damned priest’s limited wit, might be his best chance to rescue his brother.
So he sipped tea and sat discussing the notions he had of matters military and matters involving Elwynor, and he saw that his brother was pleased—his brother, he saw in a vision at least as thunderous as the one he claimed to have had about the sunlight and the river, hated to be ranked down among the other lords, and hated to have his information when they received it.
So he would have to make time to see that Efanor was not surprised by matters of state. Efanor relaxed over that cup of tea and a second and a third, and, granted he must be very, very careful of the new-sprung and thorny hedges that defended Efanor’s religion, Efanor positively expanded, and considered, and even advanced a rational thought or two.