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What is this Shadow?”
“Evil,” said Cevulirn.
“Tristen.” Cefwyn seized his arm, hard, compelling his attention.
“As6yneddin provided a Place,” Tristen said, “and it must have a Place.
Shadows are coward things. But this one.., this one.., is very ...”
“Tristen!”
“The lord Regent denied it a Place here. But ... it can find others-even here. It’s trying. Men in camp mustn’t listen to it. Hasufin sent this man. He helped him through the gray place, to see us. To see us, and know our numbers.”
“Tristen!” Cefwyn shook at him, aware of the fear of the lords near him, and the priest-fed superstition and the palpable terror this messenger had already engendered.
“It shifts,” Tristen said faintly. “It moves. The trees of Marna are its Place. The stones of the river are its Place. The Road changes and moves.
The things that are—change from moment to moment. It’s advancing.
But it much prefers the trees.”
“What is he talking about?” Umanon asked. “—My lord King, do you understand him?”
“I should take him to his bed, Your Majesty,” Uwen said.
“No!” Tristen said. “No, Cefwyn. Hear me. We must ride and stop them.”
“Now? At night? Men are exhausted, Tristen. We have mortal limits.”
That seemed to make sense to Tristen, at least. But he made none to anyone else.
“We will have panic in the camp,” Cevulirn said, and cast a fierce look about him, lingering on the servants. “Say nothing of this death, do you hear, you!” It was a voice very loud and sharp for Cevulirn, and it sent cold fingers down the backbone. “Sire, we must send men through the camp, to quiet rumors. Very many saw this man come in.”
“We must advance,” Tristen said with a shake of his head, and in a voice hardly more than a whisper. “Nothing can help Tasien. The enemy is advancing. There’s a Place we must meet it. But that Place could become closer, and worse for us. We must go.”
“Now?” Umanon asked sharply, and Tristen left that hazy-eyed look long enough to say,
“Emwy would help us.”
Cevulirn was frowning, Umanon no less than he; and pressing exhausted men on this advice, in the chance of catching the Elwynim at some sorcerous disadvantage—it might be their only hope. It might be their damnation. Tristen knew no common sense at such moments. What Tristen might do—other men might not.
“No,” Cefwyn said, then, deciding. “Weary as we are, we ca
But without a by-your-leave, Your Majesty, Tristen had simply—left, with Uwen close with him.
That Distance came on him, and he could not breathe. He went to his tent past startled guards and servants.
He had not reckoned that Uwen had followed him; but when he reached the shelter of his own tent, he caught his breath and wiped his eyes, and turned to find Uwen staring at him.
Trembling, he shrugged as if it had been nothing.
Then the shadow came on him again, so that he caught for the tent pole and leaned there, half-feeling Uwen’s hands on him. Uwen gripped his shoulder hard and shook at him; and he saw the two boys had somehow retrieved the chair from Cefwyn’s tent. “Uwen. Ask them to go. Please.”
Silently Uwen braced an arm about him, and said to the servants what he wished him to say, in kinder terms than he could manage, and steered him for his chair. He sat down. He saw that, clever as his servants were, by whatever means they knew such things, they had his armor laid out ready for him—the suit of aged brigandine, of all that the armory had had, the one that best pleased him, because of its ease of movement. That was as it should be. And he already wore the sword he would use.
He took the sword from his belt, and sat with it in his arms.
“M’lord,” said Uwen, and knelt by him, hand on his knee.
“Uwen,” he whispered. “Go away.”
“M’lord, ye listen to me, ye listen. What am I to do wi’ ye? Out wi’ the army and one of your fits come on ye—what am I to do? What am I to do when some Elwynim aims for your head and ye stand there starin’ at him? Nothin’ ye done has scairt me, m’lord, but this—this does scare me.
I don’t like ye doin’ that on the field. If we go to fight tomorrow—ye can’t do this.”
“It will not happen.”
“I didn’t like goin’ out to them ruins. I had bad feelings.”
“It will not happen. —Uwen!” Uwen had started to rise and Tristen gripped his shoulder hard enough Uwen winced. “Uwen, you will not go to Cefwyn. You will not.”
“Aye, m’lord,” Uwen muttered reluctantly, and Tristen let him go.
“Please,” he said carefully. It was so great an effort to deal with love ... that, more than anything, distracted him, and caused him pain. “Please, Uwen. Believe me. Trust me that I know what I do.” “Ye tell me what to do, m’lord, and I’ll do it.”
He held the sheathed sword against him, rocking slightly, gazing into the fire as he had done at Mauryl’s fireside. “When the time comes, tomorrow, I shall know very well what I must do. Never fear that.”
“And I’ll take care of ye, whatever, gods help me. But, m’lord, give me the sword.” “No.”
“M’lord, I don’t like ye sittin’ like that when ye hain’t your right wits about ye.”
“Please,” he said, for the grayness was back and he could not deal with here and there together any longer. “Please, Uwen!”
Uwen tried all the same to take the sword from his hands, but he clenched it to him, and Uwen abandoned the effort.
Then he felt a ma
Puddles and raindrops, circle-patterns, and the scudding clouds ...
Pigeons and straw and the rustle of a hundred wings ... Candle-light and warmth and the clatter of pottery at suppertime ...
The dusty creak of stairs and balconies, gargoyle-faces, and, seen through the horn window, golden sun ...
“Silver,” he murmured, coming back from that Place, remembering the black threads and the silver mirror. He wondered where he should find silver other than that—then put a hand to his chest, where the chain and the amulet lay, which Emuin had worn, before he gave it to Cefwyn and Cefwyn had given it to him.
He took it off, silver and belonging to two people who had wished him well, one of them not unskilled in wishing. He eased the sword from its sheath.
“My lord,” Uwen said in a hushed and anxious voice, and stirred from his chair. “What in the gods’ good name are ye doin’, there?”
He could not spare the thought to explain. He took the Teranthine circlet on its chain and held it in his hand while he passed the blade of the sword through it. He saw no way to anchor it but to bend it, and he bent the circlet until it met on either side of the hilt with all the strength of his fingers he bent it, and shaped it, and bound the chain around it.
When he looked up at Uwen then, Uwen was watching in mingled curiosity and fear. “Silver. And what beast would be ye hunting wi’ such a thing, m’lord?”
He had no idea why silver should have effect—only that in that Place the dark threads evaded it.
And it shone. It soothed. It felt right. Mauryl had done such odd things. The pigeons had known. The old mice in the walls had known.
He had known. Could living things not feel, smell, breathe, sense such things when they were right? He would ask Emuin how that was, but Emuin had faded away into distance, having, perhaps, prompted him: the touch had been that slight.
He fingered the worn leather hilt, the iron pommel. It was an old hilt, but a new and strong blade, so the armorer had declared; and so he felt with his hands and his sense of what should be: it was a blade forged in fire for honor, carried in stealth for murder and taken for defense of a dead king and a living one, by a man himself neither dead nor alive.