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“I could take ye there, Yer Lordship,” the boy said.
“Thank you,” he said fervently. “Thank you, boy.”
He was profoundly relieved, having met practical-minded rescue at the very last before the dark. The boy, for his part, wasted no time, but bobbed a sort of bow, turned on one bare foot, and swung along extravagantly in front of him—it was more alley than street where the boy led him, darker and fouler yet than the gate-road he had generally been following. Every shutter and almost every door here was shut. But the boy swaggered his way ahead with a bold, a confident step, as a vast, somber sound boomed out, brazen and measured and frightening.
“What is that?” Tristen asked, recalling the hammering and wailing of the Shadows in the keep, and looked up at the strip of fading daylight above them. The sound seemed, like the groanings in the keep, to come from the very walls.
“Naught but the Zeide Bell, Yer Lordship,” the boy said, in a tone that said of course it was that, and he was a silly fool to wonder at it. “The Zeide bell tells folk the lower gates is shut.”
“But not the Zeide gates?” he said, concerned for their safety, and distracted by the thought of Bell, Alarm, and warning. “Are they shut, now, too? Are we too late?”
“Nay, nay, Yer Lordship, she don’t never shut most times. Ye follow,
—ye follow me, Yer Lordship, is all.”
He caught perhaps half of that, except that the boy would guide him, and no, there was no danger. He followed, reassured and relieved when the alley let out on a broader, cleaner street, upward bound. The boy strode along, and he walked briskly beside him, with hope, now, that things might turn out as Mauryl had wished. There would be some wise man, there would be someone Mauryl knew, there would be stout doors and clean sheets and supper and a bath.
Oh, very much a bath. He could never lie on clean sheets as dirty as he was. There might be hot bread and butter and ale and turnips; but he would be, oh, so content with a piece of bread and a bit of cheese, and he would invite the boy in, who badly needed a bath and clean clothes, too. Surely the wise master to whom they were going could find something for the boy, a good di
He saw a high stone wall before them, and indeed a gate that swallowed up the street. That—a shiver of recognition came over his skin-that was the Kathseide, he thought when he looked through the gates and saw the keep inside. The fortress on its hill. The Place like Ynefel.
There was nothing crumbling or ramshackle about these stones. There might be grime in the streets outside its wall. There might be washwater thrown carelessly in the town streets, but not here. The buildings below on the hill might be shuttered in fear of the coming night, but the Kathseide’s windows showed bright with colors, a beautiful notion. He thought how it would have brightened the old gables and the shuttered windows of Ynefel had even his humble horn window stood unshuttered to the night.
He saw before him what Ynefel might have been.
Except for the people. And women and children.
Except for the smoothness of the walls, which showed no faces, none.
It was pristine. Beautiful.
His knees ached as they climbed the last steep stretch of cobbles, this road being steeper than Ynefel’s, as the walls were taller than Ynefel’s.
Within the open gateway he saw stones pale gold and clean, unweathered, a cobbled courtyard, beyond a thick archway, and i
He was looking at that instead of watching around him, when dark movement came from the side and, out of nowhere, metal-clad men suddenly confronted him.
“I brung ’im,” the boy said. “I brung ’im, master Aman.”
He was frozen with fear, facing such grim expressions, like Mauryl’s expression when he had done something wrong. The boy was looking quite proud of himself and seeming to expect something of the men, who were holding weapons and waiting, he supposed, for him to account for himself.
“My name is Tristen, sir. Are you the master here?”
One of the men gri
“The master, he wants?” that one asked, leaning on what spoke other Words: Pike, War, and Killing. “Which master in particular, Sir Strangeness?”
“I suppose.., the master of all this Place.”
They laughed. But the men seemed to be perplexed by him. The one leaning on the pike straightened his back and looked at him down a nose guarded by a metal piece, eyes shadowed from the deepening twilight by a metal-and-leather Helm. The third, helmless, had never smiled, not from the begi
“Come along,” that one said, and motioned with his pike for him to enter the arch of the gates.
“The boy,” he said, remembering his ma
“He has,” he said, finding himself wrong, and chased by one of Mauryl’s kind of debates, “he has nowhere to sleep. And he wants supper, I’m sure, sir.”
“He wants supper.” The man thought that strange, and dug in his purse and flipped a coin to the boy, who caught it, quite remarkably.
“Off wi’ ye. And no Gossip, or I’ll cut off your Weasel ears.” Weasel was four-footed and brown.
And there was, clearly, another way one found coins. The guards had coins to give. For himself, he saw no such chances, but he was prepared to go where they asked and wait until the men could make up their minds what to do about him.
“Come along,” said the one the boy called master, and another shoved him, not at all kindly or needfully, in the shoulder. He thought how pigeons fluttered and bumped one another. If this man was indeed master here he seemed a rough and rude sort. But he remembered how the men at the fire had behaved, and how they had grown quite unfriendly once they became afraid of him, and the weapons these men had were far more threatening than knives.
So he thought he should do what they asked and not give them any cause to be afraid; and then, he thought, he might find out whether this man was the master of the Kathseide, or whether he was only master of these men. Perhaps there was someone else, after all, who might ask him inside and talk to him much more reasonably than men outside, and perhaps even be expecting his arrival.
He walked through the gateway, believing they would go through into the courtyard and straightway to the i
But he was not certain. He might have been in the wrong. He let the other man take him by the arm and direct him toward a doorway at the side in the arch, which his fellow opened, showing him a room bright with candlelight, a plain room with a table and chairs, and another man sitting—curious sight—with his feet on the table. Dared one do such a thing?
Not, he suspected, at Mauryl’s table.
“We’ve an odd ’un,” the helmless man said. “Wants to see the master of the Zeide, he says.”
“Does he?” The man at the table wrinkled his nose. “And on what business, I’d like to know. —Is this our report from about town?”
“Seems t’ be our wanderin’ stranger.”
“Has either of ye seen ’im before?”
“Never seen ’im,” one said, and the other shook his head. “Truth t’ tell,
‘t was Paisi picked ’im up, led ’im up to us wi’ no trouble to speak of.”
“Paisi did. Led ’im up, ye say?”
“I was surprised meself. I figured the little Rat could find what smelt odd, so I sent him out. But I never figured he’d bring it himself. Clever little Rat, he is. An’ this ’un—” The man sat half on the table. “Him talking like a Lord,” the man said. “Airs and ma