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"You were very plain, young lord," Emuin advised him, neither approving nor disapproving. Emuin had stayed, along with Uwen; and Lusin and his men. "Some of your army might be afraid. Not the great lords, perhaps, but some of your ealdormen looked green as new apples."
"Cefwyn says I'm a poor liar." Wind brushed his cheek, distracting him with a flap of wings as Owl flew up to his other favored perch, up on the cornice. "When should they discover the danger, master Emuin? On the field?"
"And what will you? When will you make up your own mind?"
"To what?" He was genuinely bewildered.
Emuin's glance followed Owl's course, and came back to him, dark and direct under his snowy brows. "That you lead this army."
"I know I lead it."
"That you rule this province."
"The man who shouldrule is freezing in a snowdrift right now, between here and Modeyneth."
"Crissand."
"Yes, Crissand. In this one thing I'm certain. About the war itself I won't wish. I observe caution. I learn, you see, I do learn, master Emuin."
"That you do." Emuin walked a few paces to the left, and turned again. "So now the truth is out. Cefwyn's child. Gods save us. A Marhanen Aswydd. A white crow. A black dove. And ours to deal with."
"Ours. And hers." He still felt Emuin's disapproval. "I did the best I knew, bringing them here. I still think it's safest. I think it was best to tell the lords."
"Safest, yes. Safer than most dispositions."
"We could notsend Cefwyn's son to Elwynor. Nor have him in Ryssand's hands."
"I agree. He'll be born here, under all the auspices of this place— and if I read the stars aright—he aims for your birth night."
"For mine." He had not remotely thought.
"Wizardry, wizardry, wizardry, young lord! Wizardry is an art of timeand place. We have the place, we've missed the turn of the Great Year… what timeshall we suspect is coming?"
He was appalled. It cast everything in a new and threatening light.
"And we need a midwife," Emuin said. "A woman skilled in childbirth—a woman with the gift—and proof against Orien Aswydd."
"Are there such women in the Zeide?"
"The best is in town. Sedlyn. Paisi's gran, so he calls her, though no more kin to our young jackanapes than Cefwyn is. And she may serve. The date of birth is the question. Sedlyn might help us. A child can be encouraged to come into the world, or held out of it."
He had only book knowledge of births. He sat on the ducal throne of Amefel, empowered to dispose life and death over a province.
But to change a birth, to hasten, to delay, to meddle with what a child in his very existence wanted to be—the sort of meddling Emuin proposed troubled him.
"Was I wise or unwise to obey Mauryl?" the old man asked him, apropos of no question he had asked aloud, and walked away without another word—more, left without a whisper or a breath of wind in the gray space.
No one else could be so silent, or so secret.
No one in his knowledge had done such a deed as Emuin had done—no one carried such a wound as Emuin carried, having murdered the last prince of Althalen, a child he knew… or had known. That was what Emuin meant.
And in the silence Emuin wrapped about him like a mantle, in his secret going, cloaked even from him, for the first time Tristen knew why Mauryl must have chosen this one wizard, of all the others, and sent him to kill Hasufin Heltain—for the silence Emuin could wrap about himself was so great, so deep, that he had never realized it was uncommon among wizards.
He had never truly known, in his reckless, i
And now that he saw into that silence, he found himself grateful for master Emuin, deeply, profoundly grateful that his first venture into the world had brought him into Emuin's hands. It seemed now no chance had directed him.
And all this time there had been a warm, soft blanket wrapped about him, protecting him, shielding him, containing him in every sense.
Now, in this moment, Emuin quietly folded it and took it away, and left him feeling the cold winds of wizardry in all its reach.
Behold the world, young lord.
Behold the choices of those who choose for others, and who hold life and death of thousands in their hands.
"Ye ain't quarrelin' wi' master Emuin," Uwen said uneasily.
"No," he said, finding it difficult even to speak in master Emuin's silence. But the mortal world went on. "He just now challenged me. A lesson."
"A wee bit late for learnin'," Uwen said, "by me."
"He contains the Aswydds. They can't work while he holds them in. I don't know they even know it. He contains what Ican do. I see now how much harder that is. And now he's let me go, to do what I wish to do."
A clatter startled the silence, right by him. Syllan had dropped a spear, and was red-faced, gathering it up.
Dropped, perhaps. There were small, darting movements, as the servants quietly snuffed all candles on the far side. Darkness advanced, flowed along the cha
Tristen saw movement within that dark from the utmost tail of his eye. He felt a draft from some source that might not be the opening of the robing room and its corridor. The drapery there did not stir. Nor did the great green velvet curtains near the front of the dais.
"We've Shadows in the hall tonight," he said to his guards in the faintest of voices. "Listening. But there's no harm meant."
"Ghosts, m'lord?" Lusin looked anxiously at those dark corners, and Syllan and all his guards gripped their weapons the more tightly.
"Something like. Some were Crissand's men, not bad men at all." He drew a deep breath, and stood, listening. "The hall's been threatened."
"Tasmôrden?"
"I think it comes from outside, and far." He could see the little shadows moving, back among the pillars, and the littlest of all ru
"Into yourhall, my lord?" Lusin seemed to take it in indignation, regarding a hall he was charged with guarding.
"The candles don't truly dispel them," Tristen said. "They're al -
ways here. They're part of the wards, or they're tangled with them: but they're harmless. Don't wish them harm. Especially the Shadows in the great hall. They're all our Shadows, honest Amefin Shadows, and a few Guelen. They're guards, standing their own watch."
"And elsewhere?" Lusin dared ask. "Elsewhere, m'lord? The old mews… what's that place?"
"The old mews leads places. I don't know how many."
"To Ynefel," Uwen said.
He nodded slowly, thinking on that place of strange light and bating wings, row on row of perches, for Ynefel had indeed been within that light and he had been in Ynefel. He recalled the high, rickety stairs and wooden balconies, all bathed in the blue, strange light.
But he had explored them in all their brown, dusty webwork when he was new and when the light was the leakage of daylight through the cracks and the soft glow of candles, casting a shifting, wind-driven light along balconies and out into impenetrable dark of further distances. He had had no idea in those days that dark spots and cold spots and bumps in the night could mean ruin. His fears had been all surmise in those days… Mauryl's anger, the whisperings of the wind, the surprise of a carving on the stairs—such things he had feared.