Текст книги "Fortress of Ice"

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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Текущая страница: 27 (всего у книги 32 страниц)

They would be safe forever after, he and his brother, coming back to holds and keeps and well-fortified places after their rides, to safe, warm places, where the wind didn’t ever sound like that.

iii

WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN THE LAST FIFTEEN YEARS, MASTER EMUIN?” CEFWYN asked, and the old man, strengthened by ale and two rapidly vanishing seed cakes, wiped a few crumbs from his mustache and blinked, looking very real, indeed, and a little confused by the question.

“That long, has it been?”

“The boys are mostly grown, old master. They’re in dire danger out in the storm.” Fear and desperation made him ever so anxious to trust this apparition; experience with mysterious appearances—and he had seen them– warned him to be very cautious. “How can you have arrived here out of the dark in our hour of trouble and have no inkling what’s gone on?”

“That, yes,” Emuin said. “Didn’t I come for that? I think I did.”

“Then do it!” Cefwyn said. In every particular this old man was the man Cefwyn remembered, the man that Crissand, too, would remember, down to the freckles on Emuin’s high brow and the length of his snowy beard. The ring on his hand was the same—Cefwyn remembered that well, too, a plain silver ring with a black stone; and given the character of the jewelry wizards and the like had passed around, Cefwyn no longer looked on it as personal adornment. He reached a hand to the amulet he himself wore, took it off and held it out, risking he knew not what. “This is Tristen’s. Can youget his attention, pray?”

Emuin held up his hand, preventing him, refusing quite to touch the amulet. “One of his, it certainly is. But may we not just trust to his intentions, and not be shouting to each other all we know through chancy passages? I think waiting is far the wiser course.”

“Shouting down chancy passages, is it?” He didn’t like what he heard– but he did understand that reference to wizardly ways of getting one another’s attention. “My sons are out there freezing to death in a storm at this moment, Master Grayfrock. Risks, I am willing to take, I assure you, and let Tristen handle whatever comes galloping through after such a message.”

“Your son has carried something perilous, carries it right through the shadow.” Emuin gave a wave of his hand, and it trembled. “For that, I would be ever glad to reach for him and drag him here by the hair of the head—but so would she reach after him! Have a care, and put that damned thing back about your neck, boy! For the gods’ sake bring it not so near me! It could happen without our willing it!”

Boy, it was, and him having boys of his own, both older than he had been when Emuin had taken a sullen, wayward young prince in hand and taught him to dread that voice raised in reprimand. He dropped the chain back about his neck and wore his amulet openly, not caring to conceal it in this hall where wizardry and magic had honor. “Is it his mother who’s done this?”

“Certainly she has her fingers well into it,” Emuin said, and took a drink of ale that left beads standing on his mustaches. He wiped his mouth. “She is dangerous.”

“My sons,” Cefwyn said, vexed and worried. “And Tristen, for that matter. Where is he?”

“A serious matter,” Emuin said, and shut his eyes, and went thin-lipped for the moment. “The boys… the boys have the book… they are alive. They’re together.”

“ Together!” He knew not whether to be angry with his wayward heir or overjoyed to hear that he had succeeded against all odds. “Aewyn foundhim!”

“It was inevitable,” Emuin said, “or close to it. Both your sons have the Gift, but not the same gift, have you discovered it?”

“Aewyn? He’s as blind as I am!”

Emuin shook his head. “No. He is not blind, nor helpless. Nor are you quite as blind as you wish to think. The younger of your sons—has the Syrillas Gift.”

Aewyn? “Has he? He has the Sight?”

“He has it in a peculiar way. I’d judge that he Sees, and has no idea that he does. Finding things is an untaught skill with him.”

“His damned maps…”

“The whole world is a map to him. He Sees, I say, but will never quite know when he does, and his scope may widen with age.”

“I’ve gotten twowizards?” It was not completely good news, except as related to his boys’ safety, out in a driving blizzard. “Then help them wizard their way back here, for the gods’ sake. If they have the Gift, then”—he made a vague, descriptive gesture—“slip them through the passages you use and get them here!”

“Hush. Hush.” A look aloft. “If your older boy hadn’t found what he found, the other would have come on it with hisGift, and the worse for him if he had: the one is at least cognizant of wizardry and wary of his mother’s influence. Listen to me. The Gift is not the same in them, nor ever was, but they may link hands.”

“You’re riddling again, Master Grayfrock.”

“The one is no wizard.”

“You said they both—”

“The one is no wizard. The elder of your boys—is no wizard.”

“ Elfwyn? What is he, if not—” A most horrid notion came to him, things at which Tristen had only hinted. “He ismy son, isn’t he?”

“In the flesh, yes, I have no doubt that he is. But there is a hollow spot in him, right about the heart. There always was, from birth.”

“No.” He got up from his chair, to distance himself from such a claim. “A hollow spot? He’s a Summoning, like Tristen? Is that what you’re saying to me?”

“Tristen is not a Summoning. He’s a Shaping, quite a different—”

“Damn it, Master Grayfrock, don’t mince words. Is my son my son?”

“Oh, very much your son. But he’s gone straight where his mother bade him go, and done everything she wanted him to do—up to a point. He has self-will. Hard-won, and hard-held, he has your self-will and your stubborn nature.”

“He has a heart!” Cefwyn declared, outraged. “He has a good heart, not any hollow spot, and if you had been here where you were needed, Master Grayrobe, when you were needed, then you would have had the teaching of him as I asked you from the start, and we wouldn’t be at this pass!”

“Gran did quite well. Admirably well, as happened. So has Paisi.”

Paisi had stood, silent and stricken, at the side of the room the while. But now he took a step forward. “Ye’re sayin’ he ain’t what he seems,” Paisi said angrily, “but I can say there ain’t a bad bone in that lad’s body. He’s a good, proper boy, as ever was.”

“Oh, his bones are quite sound.” Emuin gathered his staff to him, slanted between his knees, and the knob of it against his chest, amid his beard, locked in gnarled hands. “So is his wit and his will. It’s just a hollow spot. It might never even do him harm… unless someone tried to fill it. Unless he allowed it, more to the point, and that is a lad with a very strong will.”

“What do you know of him? You weren’t here.”

“I wasn’t unaware.”

“Damn it,” Cefwyn said. “Damn it, old master, I wish you’d stayed to teach them. At least one of them.”

“There was too much damage I could do, bringing wizardry of greater sort into it. Elfwyn was not ready for a contest. And Aewyn was not ready to believe his own eyes.”

“What was I?” Cefwyn cried. “Was it that needful, old master, to keep me and his mother in the dark?”

“I take it you mean your dear lady.”

“Ninévrisë. Aewyn’s mother, damn it.”

“Well, you were never in the dark,” Emuin said. “You were always in my keeping, and Tristen’s.”

“Tristen knew you were out and about?”

“Oh, I suspect he knew, though ’tis by no means certain, I suppose. Our paths diverged. I visited Gran from time to time, indeed I did. And crossed the edges of Guelessar, and of Elwynor. I visited Cevulirn once, when his wife had the fever, but there was no great need: the lady mended on her own. I have never deserted you, Cefwyn lad, nor forgotten your boys, nor has Tristen, whose delay tonight troubles me exceedingly. I suspect he will come the ordinary way, by horse, that is, not risking the other passage.”

“If hecan’t get through, good gods, how am I to believe the boys are safe? I wish you would speak to him. Or tell me more where the boys are. I would ride after them.”

“To their peril and ours,” Emuin said. “Looking for them lowers our wards. Trying to guide them now diminishes theirs, if they had the wit to set them, and I have the most dire feeling they forgot—they are not safe where they are, not safe at all, and where they are shifts…”

“Then goto him. You’re the wizard. You can do that!”

“I can’t do that! That’s the very point! If I were to venture those paths your reckless sons traveled, there’s no knowing in what province I might land. They’re lucky still to be in Amefel!”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s that book, I suspect—that book, I surmise, takes its own direction in the world, and your lad is hanging on to it, and wrenching it free of his mother, but when he moves, he, she, and it are in grievous dispute about direction.”

“That woman!” Cefwyn said, and absolute loathing welled up in him, the very sort of hatred Tristen had advised him never to countenance toward Tarien Aswydd; but now, in the peril of his sons, it brimmed over. “Tarien Aswydd knows how Paisi’s gran died, and why my son got out of bed at midnight to go dig a hole in the library wall! Master Graybeard, let us get your study back! Let us have answers from that woman, tonight, once for all.”

“Confront Tarien Aswydd?” Emuin asked. “Perhaps.”

“More than perhaps,” Cefwyn said. “You worry about the wards. Assure the strength of what holds her contained. Find out whether or not she truly can reach out of the tower. You can deal with her, I’ve no doubt you can, and we can put that woman somewhere with fewer windows and less luxury. Crissand, are you willing?”

“More than willing,” Crissand said, “whenever it regards getting the truth from my cousin. I shall be glad to know how well she’s held.”

“Not well!” Emuin exclaimed in sudden alarm. “Not well at all! Oh, damn it to hell!” Emuin leapt to his feet, leaning shakily on his staff, and headed for the door of the audience hall. Cefwyn overtook him, and Crissand came close behind as they left the hall and turned toward the tower access.

Two men lay in the hall, both down, as if they had died in their tracks, eyes wide open.

“Guards!” Cefwyn yelled, his battlefield voice, that waked echoes upstairs and down. Emuin ascended the tower steps, Cefwyn fretting behind him, hand on his dagger, and Crissand close after that, round after round of the spiral, into utter dark, except a glow that began to surround Emuin himself and spread about them.

The door above was still barred. Emuin waved at it, and Cefwyn pulled the pin and used fair force to lift the bar. It thumped back, and suddenly the door banged open in their faces, with a howling gust of ice-edged wind. All the windows stood open, and fabrics flew in the wind, the abandoned clothing, the hangings, everything flying at them out of the nightbound tower room.

“Tarien!” Cefwyn shouted into the night.

A crash shook the tower, as if a part of the keep itself had fallen. They were shaken where they stood, thinking the floor might give way, then Crissand, lowermost on the steps, turned and ran downstairs again, Cefwyn behind him and Emuin bringing up the rear.

Guards had gathered in the corridor below, in dark, the gale having blown the lights out, and in that dark the guards pointed to the curtain, which blew in tatters, beside the dark, ordinary wall that was the source of the haunt.

“Bear a light!” Crissand shouted, and Emuin, arriving breathlessly, gasped, “This is not good. Not good.”

Someone had already gone for a light, one of the pine-tar torches they used outside, a light that came in at the stairs and jogged and flickered toward them, fire whipping in the gale, but more difficult for wind to extinguish. Cefwyn waited for it, hand outheld, his heart beating in foreboding as to what he might find in that room at the bottom of the stairs. But Emuin lit his own way, before the torch could arrive, and descended past the flapping curtain. Cefwyn abandoned his request for the torch and came down to protect him with drawn dagger, steps breaking little bits of masonry.

Massive blocks lay scattered outward, the stone walls chipped with the awful force with which those blocks had flown apart, and inside the room beyond, which still held the dry mustiness of a tomb despite the air that blasted in from above, there was only shadow.

Light glowed brighter from Emuin’s hand, blue as day, and showed no bones, nothing but overset chairs, a ledge, and a moldering, dusty cloak.

“She’s gone,” Crissand breathed, from behind them.

Orien Aswydd. The other twin. The dead one, walled alive into her tomb.

“I have to find them,” Emuin said. “I have no choice.”

But who it was he meant to find, he didn’t say. He shoved rudely past them and climbed the steps, struggling with his robes and the staff. They followed him up into the hall above, where the pine torch gave a fitful, windblown light; and suddenly the haunt beside them broke wide open in spectral light, a dark and angry blue, moving with the shadow of wings.

“Find Tristen!” Emuin shouted at them, and stepped off into that place as if it were a doorway.

He vanished. The light from the haunt died, instantly, and left them only the torchlight, and the lingering command.

“Find Tristen,” Cefwyn said, and struck the ordinary stone of the wall with his fist, then looked at Crissand. “Bloody hell, where do we start?”

“The library,” Crissand said. “The library, for a beginning.”

CHAPTER NINE

TRISTEN WAS SURE THAT HE RODE NO LONGER WITHIN MARNA. IT HAD BEEN AN unguessable time since they had slept, waked, and found themselves wrapped in mist, and now Tristen rode far more slowly than he wished, courting no mishaps. This place was not friendly to Uwen, or to their horses, and he kept Uwen close, continually aware of the ice that grew about them.

They changed, these shards of ice. They were sharp enough to pierce flesh and cold enough to stop the heart. They threatened, sometimes rising up suddenly, with a sound like steel sliding on steel.

“They ain’t right natural,” Uwen had remarked, early on, in his calm way. “M’lord, I don’t like the look at all.”

Neither did he, to this hour, to this day—however long they had been caught here. And the icy realm was one kind of a trap for Uwen, but another for himself, a slippage, slow and continual, so that at first he had no memory of entering the place, and now suspected he had no memory of other things more important.

“How long do you think we have ridden today?” he asked Uwen.

“Seems to me it ought to be summat over an hour,” Uwen said. “But I don’t trust my reckonin’ in this place, t’ tell the truth.” They rode in silence a moment, a silence marked by the crash and destruction of a shard, which spawned others. “Is it more than an hour, m’lord?”

“I fear it is,” Tristen said. “I fear—”

But he forgot. He forgot what he had been about to say, and forgot that he had forgotten.

“M’lord,” Uwen said insistently. “M’lord, ye’re driftin’ a wee bit. Ye’ve done that today, time to time.”

He blinked, lost for the moment, then with a chill found he had lost the name of the man beside him, someone who was vitally important to him, someone who was warmth and love itself, and he felt something beyond fear—a loss of hope itself.

The wind blew clear, unveiling a fortress on a snowy hill, and that fortress was built of the ice, a fortress with battlements that glittered like a rusty stain under a wan and fleeting sun.

Here was the first place. Here was the first of all places in his life. It lay far back, far, far in memory. He could only come here when he had forgotten all else. It waited for him.

“M’lord,” the man beside him said.

A wayward gust of mist took the vision away. They were back in the mist again, and the man had leaned from the saddle and seized his horse’s rein near the jaw.

“Ye’re driftin’, m’lord. Come back t’ me. There’s me good lad.”

“Uwen.” He gathered up bits and pieces and drew in a deep, freezing breath. His wards had failed. He had set them about their sleeping place, but their wards had gone down, and let in powers from before Uwen’s time, things long pent, that wanted free. The wards needed straight lines, or circles, even, reasonable structures, but the ice was all an illusion of shining planes. In its very essence, it flowed—was irrational, without Lines, in its depth. Given time, it warped, it bent, it stretched any Line he set on it, and just as readily—it broke, and fractured, making edges sharp enough to draw blood…

“M’lord!” he heard, and struggled to get back to that voice, that Man he had to protect. He knew they were going nowhere. Of a sudden he knew they had gone quite the opposite of where they ought to go, that they had been taken far from where they wanted to be… he could not remember that place, but he knew it was not this place.

Then another voice came, faint and far.

“Tristen,” it called, desperate. “Tristen, hear me. Emuin’s gone. My sons are gone. Tristen, wherever you are, I need you.”

Warmth came with it, warmth that touched him, and reached inside, like the breath of summer.

“Cefwyn?” he said, and reined full about. “Cefwyn, call again. Call louder.” And when it came, faint and torn on the wind: “Uwen, stay close!”

ii

HE’S COMING!” CEFWYN CRIED, HE HAD NO NOTION HOW HE knew it, but he did. Kingship to the winds, he went running for the library door, knocking over a stack of heavy books and disarranging a table. Crissand was on his heels, the two of them rounding the corner of the short hall into the main corridor like two madmen.

The whole hall resounded to the confusion of two sets of guards attempting to stay with them—then, crazily, echoed to the racket of hooves within the hall itself, a thunderous clatter on the stones. Blue light flared, and wings beat in alarm as the haunt broke wide open, sending two riders and their trailing packhorses into the dead middle of the hall—not just any horses, the lead two, but heavy horses, one of them black as sin itself and the other a blue roan with a wicked eye.

A rider in silver armor swung down off the black and lit in the hall, looking toward him, a rider whose curiously crafted armor frosted in the air and gave off fog, and the other man, an ordinary Man in black leather, and thickly coated, stepped down from the roan, his armor and helm likewise frosted.

Cefwyn met his old friend Tristen with an embrace, never minding the burning chill of his touch, and stood him back again and looked into gray, wide eyes, a gaze that could drink a man’s common sense and draw him into whatever mad courage.

“My friend,” Cefwyn said, “my old friend. Thank the gods you heard me. The boys are lost out there. Orien’s cell is empty. Tarien’s fled her prison, gods know how. Emuin came here… did you know Emuin is alive?”

“That I did,” Tristen said. “But not where he was. Did Tarien take the boys with her?”

Tristen knew nothing that they had been trying to tell him, only that they were in distress. The stamp and heavy breathing of unsettled horses was all around him, and the steam went up about their bodies. The cold of Tristen’s armor seared his hands like fire.

“Elfwyn found a lost book in the library. I think it must be Mauryl’s book, from the time the books were burned. He left with it, and lost Paisi along the way.”

“Paisi,” Tristen said, glancing aside, and Paisi said, “m’lord,” almost inaudible in the echoing racket, and held his hands in his belt. “It was one o’ them fogs, m’lord, was what it was. He rode right into it.”

“And Aewyn left here without us knowing,” Cefwyn said, “tracking his brother. Then Emuin arrived. Then the stones blew apart, the windows blew open, and Tarien went—Emuin went after her, for all I know. What can you tell me? Can you find my boys?”

Tristen gazed afar off for a moment, and Cefwyn, having poured out that ill-assorted chronicle like flotsam in a millrace, caught his breath.

Tristen looked down the hall toward the haunt, or toward the library: it was uncertain which. “The book,” he said, out of that choice of calamities. “That’s what it is. The spell on it avoided my finding it years ago—it hid from one thief. It avoids me now. It was Mauryl’s, but not the last spell on it, I fear. And Emuin has been here. He tried to strengthen the wards in my absence. And he could not.”

When had the gray-eyed innocence given way to this look that gazed through distances, and that childlike wonder become such confidence? Cefwyn backed away a pace, chilled by more than the cold that attended them.

But Uwen intruded between them and caught Tristen’s arm sharply. “M’lord! This is Cefwyn, an’ Uwen with ’im. Paisi, too, an’ Lord Crissand. Ye hear? Hear us!”

A shudder went through Tristen’s frame, and that gaze swung to Uwen, then to Cefwyn.

“Elfwyn,” Tristen said. “Elfwyn came to me. And Emuin came to you.”

“Not a half an hour ago,” Cefwyn said. “He left, and I don’t know where.”

Tristen shook his head. “The ways are cut off. They’ve become mazes. I’ve not seen Owl for days. And Elfwyn, and his brother… I can’t find them, though I know they’re out there. Magic is undermined. Wizardry may have a better chance.”

“Brandywine,” Crissand said to someone, and a servant raced off. “We should get the horses down to the stable.”

Exactly how they were to get two great destriers and the loaded pack-horses down the central stairs without calamity was another matter, but Tristen said quietly, “No. We’ll be going as we came. The Line that prevents it no longer holds. You should give this place its own way, Lord Crissand. Let it be a mews, since that’s what it wants to be. It might be safer.”

“M’lord,” Uwen said in concern.

“I cannot mend this place,” Tristen said distractedly. “I even cannot hold my own course over large distances, Uwen. Little I could repair, of things that may now be broken. I sent him aside once, and my wards stood until now, until thatreached the light. Hismust be the spell on the book, that hid it from me from the beginning, that would not go into the hands of a thief, nor be destroyed. I took it for Mauryl’s spell. But sometimes there is very little difference.”

Tristen’s enemy was the heTristen did not name, the one who had been Mauryl’s student, and ultimately his murderer: Cefwyn suspected that much. Hasufin Heltain—servant of the Sihhë-lords, and the one who, even dead, had insinuated himself in Elfwyn Sihhë’s stillborn son, to do murder within the house and bring the Sihhë down… so much he knew, too. His family, the Marhanens, had come into power in that upheaval. The reigning Marhanen knew certain details of that downfall, none of which gave him great pride or comfort. And he did not like to hear that Heltain’s black workings and Mauryl’s in any wise looked alike to Tristen’s eye.

Tristen, in the same heartbeat, had reached for the warhorse’s bridle and looked at Uwen Lewen’s-son, who gathered his own reins from the hands of a frightened house servant.

“Where are you going?” Cefwyn asked in dismay.

“There were keys left in the world,” Tristen said, looking straight at him. “I suspect Tarien was to get to the book. Orien was to bring it to him.”

“Orien was surely dead.” The image of the sorceress living this long in utter darkness, walled within her tomb, was horrid beyond any he could conjure. But there had only been the cloak left, not a bone nor a single leaving else.

“Hasufin died ages ago,” Tristen said, argument enough.

“Our wards are down,” Cefwyn said. “They’re utterly destroyed. Will he come here?”

“No,” Tristen said, when he had in no wise been above stairs, or walked the perimeter as a wizard would. But he was not the young wanderer in the world that he had been, either, whatever he had become, or might be about to become. Cefwyn felt a pang of loss, not unmixed with a fear of what his sons faced if Tristen was to retreat from the world, and as if Tristen had heard his thoughts, Tristen seized his hand. “My friend,” he said, with that gray-eyed gaze. “My oldest friend in the world. I tried to get here, and every accident held me. Now I know the trouble, I shall not leave this place undefended. We shall go to the stables, Uwen and I, and put the horses up. We shall come back straightway, afoot.”

Tristen let go, then.

And was not there, neither he, nor Uwen, nor two destriers and two pack-horses. They left only that sort of evidence iron-shod horses left in the hall, puddles of snowmelt, a scarred floor, and a lingering smell of horse.

The stables, Tristen had said. Tristen had wanted to be there. And was.

Why, then, damn it all, had he not wantedto be in Henas’amef in time to prevent Orien Aswydd’s rising from the grave, or Tarien’s breaking out of her tower?

Every accident, Tristen had said.

The simple answer was that Tristen had indeed wanted to be here, and that a very, very potent sorcery had sent him aside—not destroyed him: it would have, if it were easy; it was not; but that was in fact its aim—even a Man deaf to magic could figure that they were under attack, and that it would not get better with daylight.

A potent sorcery had raised the dead and broken Tristen’s wards. And how had it gotten past those wards, and what had made Tristen himself vulnerable… Cefwyn feared to guess its name, but he thought he had.

One of his two sons was blood kin to the sorceress—one of his sons had gone visiting Ynefel and drawn Tristen into this fight. The other of his sons, tied to that line by loyalty and paternity, had gone chasing after his brother. All of that was a tangle of wizardry and magic that chilled his heart. Nor was his daughter safe, with Ninévrisë in Elwynor, where magic had an ancient foothold. His whole family was tangled in this scheme of a dead sorcerer, and Tristen was the one power another dead wizard had appointed, more than that, Summoned, Shaped, whatever Emuin insisted, to stand on the bridge and keep the dead from taking Ylesuin back from the Marhanen’s hands. Ordinary folk couldn’t challenge Tristen. Not these days. But the powers that he was appointed to prevent—those could.

Those already had, in delaying him.

Back in the wars, he and Emuin and Tristen had managed to isolate the several elements of Hasufin’s power and bring one down, confine another, and another, and hang one chief culprit, peeling Hasufin’s power apart bit by bit, breaking it in this place and that, until Tristen had a chance.

Three pieces of that power, counting that book, had just broken loose again, thanks to Tarien Aswydd and his own eldest son, indicating that even apparent death might be a diversion.

And what did he say?

“Let us go back to the hall and wait,” he said to Crissand. “If he can, he’ll be back in a moment, and use the west door, this time. If I know anything about it, he’ll be searching that place he goes to, trying to find any trace of the boys.”

“That he will,” Crissand said, who had the Sight, himself. “I have no notion where he is. But the ring Elfwyn carries is his: nothing opposing him, he may well be able to see it.”

iii

THEY BOTH SLEPT AND WAKED AMID THE PILED HORSE GEAR, AND THE COLD grew more and more bitter, while exposed flesh grew numb despite the warmth of the horses sharing their shelter, and the thickness of the saddle, which gave up warmth slowly. The horses slept, it might be, but the wind howled and worked at the shingles, finding new places to get in, and made their own rest uneasy. “I think we should stay awake,” Elfwyn said finally, shaking at Aewyn. “We can sleep in the day. If we had food we shouldn’t be so cold, but we don’t, and we should move about a little. Rub your hands. Make them warm.”

“If there were light, we could see if there was a flint or anything in the place,” Aewyn said, his teeth chattering from cold. Aewyn was being very brave, he thought. Aewyn had grown up in a palace, and looked to want of food as their greatest danger, but herecalled the chimney blocking up with snow, and their fire going out, and Gran trying to conjure. They had survived because Paisi had gotten up on the roof with a stick and nearly frozen to death getting the chimney clear.

Safe fire. That was what they needed. For his brother’s safety, he needed it.

“I wish it would light!” Elfwyn cried in bitter frustration, and tried, as Gran had, to see the fire. That was how he imagined it would succeed if it did, that he had to see the fire behind his eyelids, then it would be there.

But nothing happened. He huddled under the horse blanket and cloaks he shared with Aewyn and tried, once, twice, three times, to see, not destroying fire, nor sorcery, but life-giving fire, fire safe in a hearth, imagining how astonished Aewyn would be, imagining how wonderful it would feel to have succeeded, and how he would have something to recommend him to their father, having saved Aewyn. Then he could go to Tristen, deliver the book, and say, “Teach me,” in the confidence he could learn at least a little wizardry. All these things he could foresee.

But the fire would not come. The little spark of fire, the simplest, the most basic thing a real wizard could do, eluded him.

He ever so regretted that Aewyn had not been practical enough to have stolen a loaf of bread when he had come out. Or that he had not had the sense to have divided loads with Paisi. He was more than hungry, now; he was dry and thirsty, and had no wish to battle the door open and shut, just to have cold snow in his mouth.

The wind gave a particularly violent burst, battering at the planks of the door.

Then the door bumped, and rattled, and scraped laboriously outward, someone kicking the snow out of the way.

“Someone’s out there,” Elfwyn whispered, holding Aewyn by the shoulder.

“Maybe it’s the householder come back,” Aewyn whispered back.

“Who’d come home at this hour, in this storm?” Elfwyn said. The horses were growing disturbed, and stirred and made sounds in the dark, treading on something they’d already broken. “If we have to, run out the door.”

“But we’ll freeze out there!”

“Never mind that! Just get out! Bandits live out in the borderlands. They may have gotten desperate for shelter.”