Текст книги "Fortress of Ice"

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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Текущая страница: 29 (всего у книги 32 страниц)

“Riddles, again! Don’t trust her, you mean? I never trusted her, and I never knew I had an aunt.”

“Riddles I hardly know how to say—except you are the living Gift. Otter. Elfwyn. Elfwyn. Elfwyn. Say a thing three times and it binds. I suspect you were bound to that name long, long ago, and your mother had no choice in naming you.”

“Tell me what you mean!”

“I mean,” Emuin said, “that you have already gone to the proper source to learn certain things, and left it, one supposes, uninformed. Perhaps even hefailed to know you.”

“Lord Tristen? I asked him to teach me, and he wouldn’t. He told me I was Elfwyn, not Otter.”

“He wouldn’t teach you, or he couldn’t,” Emuin said, and frowned darkly. “And he named you. Then I suspect he did see what I see.”

“What? Give me the truth, Master Emuin! What did he see? What do you?”

“A conjuring,” Emuin said. “A Summoning that opens a door.”

“What door? Make sense, please, sir!”

“ Yougovern what door, if you have the will. Doyou have the will, Spider Prince?”

He drew a deep breath and balked, growing angry, angrier than he had been since the day Gran died. “I have the will for anything, sir, if I’m informed. I’m Otter, if you like. Lord Tristen said I should be Mouse, not Owl. And he said nothing at all about spiders.”

“Good,” Emuin said, looking squarely into his eyes. “Very good, Spider Prince. Otter. Mouse. And Elfwyn. But never Owl? Probably a good idea.”

“Damn you!”

“Oh, that would notbe easy,” Emuin said, laying a hand on the emblem at his breast. “And many have tried. But gratitude… that, I would think, I am due, at least a little, for coming out here in the cold.”

The anger fell away from him. Embarrassment took its place, for ever asking what was beyond his station in life and for ever cursing this man, no matter how desperate. “A great deal, Master Emuin, a very great deal, only—”

“Guard yourself from such words and such thoughts as damning folk. When you were a child you could let words fly. Now, when a man’s mind stirs in you, such things become dangerous. As for the Gift, you could easily make that recalcitrant candle burst in flame.”

“If I could have done it, sir, I certainly would have. I tried. I did try.”

“While you believe you cannot, you will not. Will is all of it. You have decided to be King Cefwyn’s son. You wish to become his acknowledged son, with all the people changing their minds about you. While that wish governs you, so you will become—with all the good or ill for your father or brother that that one choice may bring. But to become the other thing that you are, you must stop wishing to be Cefwyn’s son or Aewyn’s brother.”

“I never can!”

“So you say now,” Emuin said gently. “But the years roll on, and time changes us. You may need to renounce Aewyn to protect him from your enemies. Think of that, Elfwyn Prince.”

A bitter laugh rose up in him. “I’m no prince. And I’ll never renounce my brother or my father.”

“Every person has will, and while wizards have more force than most, the collective populace can be gathered, and swayed, without magic—indeed they, being blind to it, can be swayed that much more easily. They are deaf to magic, but their will, my boy, can be as potent as a wizard’s conjuring—more so than some. So know what you defy, when you send your wishes toward the people. Passion can do a great deal to awaken that giant. Beware of stirring it. And beware, too, of ordinary men: thwart our wishes, that they can, and open doors, or simply leave them unlatched—that they will do with amazing fecklessness, or spite. They can be the hands and feet of a wizard’s wish, individually. They can open any door at all. Never, never discount them. Never trifle with them. And beware of using them. They have their own interests. They fear magic greatly, and will hate you for it if they detect it. They will often turn contrary, when they know they’re meddled with.”

“They already hate me.”

“They scarcely know you exist,” Emuin said. “And they have not decided what you are. That is why I counsel you, beware of waking that giant. Be the spider. Or be Mouse. Use the edges of the walls. Find crevices from which to watch and live quietly, if you can manage it, while you learn.”

“If anyone harms Aewyn,” he began.

“Let no enemy find out how much that would move you, or I assure you that will be their first recourse. Let no enemy know your weaknesses. Strive to be your own master. That is my advice. Know whence come the motions of your heart, Spider Prince, whether they are light or dark, fair or foul, whether they be what you will or what you would not: know them for what they are, and shape yourself as you would wish to become. That will be magic enough, for a start at it. Go to sleep. I shall watch.”

He didn’t want to. But his eyes grew heavy on the instant. He snapped them right open.

“Strong-willed,” Emuin said. “But if you can’t trust me in this, you can trust me in nothing. Trust me, I say!”

Something thumped, outside, in the wind. A good many things had flapped and bumped in the wind, but this came at the door. And Emuin looked that way, sharply, and set his staff against the floor to rise, not with the alacrity of a young man.

“Master Emuin?” Elfwyn asked, and leapt up and took his arm.

“Hold your brother,” Emuin snapped. “ Hold on to him!”

The door burst open. Bitter wind rushed inside, scattering coals, bringing dark as the fire blew up the chimney. Elfwyn flung himself to Aewyn’s side, seized up his brother in his arms as Emuin reached them.

“Hold on!” Emuin shouted at them. “Hold my hand! We are going to your father!”

He reached. He grasped Emuin’s fingers, and the wind caught them, whirled them away through gray mist, a spinning confusion of themselves, and the horses, and their gear, and all the straps loose and confused.

“Otter!” Aewyn cried, and began to slip out of his encircling arm, and to slide away from him, as if they were sliding on ice. He held tight to Aewyn’s coat, and that grip began to fail, as if the wind that moved them excluded Aewyn. He had his choice, hold Emuin, or hold his brother, and he wrapped both arms about Aewyn and held on.

They plummeted, he had no idea how far, or how long a fall. He only held on, eyes tight shut.

“Otter,” Aewyn said against his ear. “Otter, what’s happening?”

But he had no answer.

In the next moment they landed, hard, side by side, in thick snow.

iv

IT WAS A BITTERSWEET GATHERING OF OLD FRIENDS IN CALAMITY, IN THE LITTLE hall. Past the worry and the fear that gnawed at him, Cefwyn saw the weariness that marked Tristen and Uwen, both, and Crissand ordered mulled wine and a platter of food—food Tristen neglected, though he had two sips of the wine.

What can you see? Cefwyn longed to ask, seeing Tristen’s head bowed and his hands clasped before his lips, his elbows braced on the arms of the massive chair. Tristen had not divested himself of his armor, nor had Uwen, though that was the first thing a man just off a long, cold road would long to do. He simply sat, and stared into nothing, but not in futility, Cefwyn was sure. He was earnestly trying to find pieces—scattered pieces. Emuin. Orien. Tarien. And two lost boys.

And he had said nothing for the last candle measure, nor stirred, nothing more than a wisp of his dark hair blowing a bit in the draft from an opened door.

They had been up to the tower room, wherein a whirlwind had wrought utmost havoc, and left the shutters hanging askew. They had been into the cell below, and in front of the blank wall into which Master Emuin had vanished.

They waited in this small room, and the candles in the sconces dripped drop by drop into their pans. Outside, servants removed bits of stone that littered the hall, where the force of the stones blowing out had shredded the tapestry and landed clear against the opposing wall, scarring the stone there. Others, surely with trepidation, had climbed up those stairs into the tower, to clear away the debris of Tarien’s life there. Comrades had taken the bodies of the guards for burial, two decent men with widows and children: Crissand had passed word he would talk with the women as soon as he could. The deaths sat on the king’s conscience: it was the king’s prisoner they had guarded, two brave men, completely defenseless against sorcery, all amulets and protections inadequate to save their lives.

Hate had killed them, spite directed against him. He determined, sitting there, waiting for some breath of an answer, that he would take the women and children under his own protection, the men having died in defense of him and his.

But justice for it—justice was very much in doubt.

Tristen drew a visible breath. The hands didn’t move. The eyes didn’t blink. Everyone hung on that slight motion.

Then Tristen lowered his hands down onto the arm of the chair and leapt up, turning for the door. Uwen jumped to his feet, and Cefwyn, hardly slower, followed, with Crissand right at his heels, and all the bodyguards caught completely off their guard, broke aside from the door, getting out of their path.

The haunt came alive down the hall, beyond the stairs. Servants ran in terror, and the thunder of wings raised a wind that blew down from the tower’s ruined windows and up from the depths of the cell. Tristen reached the midst of it, the rest of them right with him, and the wind blasted them with cold and a spate of snow. Uwen drew his sword, and Cefwyn reached for the dagger he wore, as the sound of swords drawn echoed behind them all.

It was a disheveled figure that came out, a figure all swirling white hair and gray robes, turning back, his hand held out to someone invisible still within, and the winds screaming about them all.

The haunt stopped, stopped cold, leaving the area dark, and snow melting on the floor, and Master Emuin standing baffled and distraught in the middle of it.

“I couldn’t hold them!” Emuin cried in dismay, and Cefwyn’s heart sank. Tristen was there with him, and if anything magical was going on between the two of them, if they had said anything to each other down those corridors wizards used, Cefwyn was deaf to it, and cursed his deafness. It was Crissand to whom Tristen turned next, and said, “A cloak. He is chilled to the bone. A cloak, and the warm wine—Master Emuin.” Tristen seized the old man by the arms and held him upright, the staff trailing from Emuin’s hand and his eyes all but shut. “Stand. Stand fast, Master Emuin. Help is here.”

“The boys.” Emuin’s eyes rolled open, his head sank, and it was all Cefwyn could do to keep his own hands from seizing the old man and shaking him.

“I am here, Master Emuin,” he said. “Where did you lose them?”

“In between,” Tristen answered for Emuin. “Take him, take him, Cefwyn. Uwen, you must stay with him!”

“As I shan’t do, m’lord!” Uwen cried in protest. “No!” But without a breath or a flare from the haunt, Tristen ceased to be there—just—was not there, and Master Emuin was on his way to falling as Cefwyn seized the old man about the body and held him on his feet. Crissand helped him, and Uwen took Emuin’s staff. The lot of them, guards and all, were left there, in a hall in which the snow was melting and the old man they held in their arms was colder than the grave itself.

Servants came running with a cloak, and with a cup of wine. Both were useless.

“The little hall,” Cefwyn said, remembering the warm fireside they had left, its fire stoked to its fullest to warm Tristen and Uwen. They carried the old man, who weighed very little at all, up the hall to this room. Servants hovered as they disposed Master Emuin on the warm stones in front of the fire. Cefwyn knelt, holding the old man, and Crissand disposed his cloak about him and chafed his pale hand, while Uwen laid the staff beside him.

“Old Master,” Cefwyn said. “Master Grayfrock. Come back. Come back to us. Can you hear?”

The old man’s eyes slitted, ever so little, and the pupils rolled just slightly toward him.

“Tristen has gone?” Emuin asked.

“He went after them.”

Emuin shook his head. “I tried.”

“That you did,” Cefwyn said, holding Emuin fast, while the fire blazed and crackled, impotent against the chill in the old man. “Come now. Wake, wake, do you hear me? None of this slipping back again. Stay out of that place you go. Tristen is on their track and needs no help. There’s mulled wine. Uwen Lewen’s-son is here. So is Crissand. Wake and make sense to me. Tristen is out looking for them, I say.”

The eyes drifted shut. Slitted open a second time. The brow knit, much as if the old man was trying to think of a long-forgotten fact. “He shouldn’t be out there, the fool.”

“Who? Tristen?”

“He’s in danger. He’s particularly in danger. The boy has that book.”

“What sort of book? What sort of book is it, Master Emuin?”

“His unmaking.” Coughing racked the frail body, and Cefwyn propped him up until it stopped—propped him up and took the offered cup of wine, touching the merest edge of it to the old man’s lips.

“Wine, if you can manage it, old master.”

“Ale,” the old man said, never opening his eyes. “I’d rather ale. I’m dry as dust.”

“It’s here, Your Majesty.” The servants had brought up every likely need, when they had been sitting in this room. Liquid splashed into a deep tankard, and a yeasty smell spread through the air before the cup even reached Cefwyn’s hand.

“Here,” he said, and this time the old wizard’s hand reached up and steadied the tankard, and he drank three deep gulps before he breathed.

“Where are my boys?” Cefwyn asked, running short on compassion. The old man seemed less dying than frozen, and warmth was getting back to him. “Where did you leave them?”

“If I knew that, they wouldn’t be lost!” Master Emuin said. “But they’re together. They fell away together.”

CHAPTER TEN

i

THE GRAY SPACE ROARED WITH TROUBLED WINDS. THERE WAS EVERY DANGER of being cast back to the icy waste, and Tristen kept Cefwyn and Uwen very much in mind, his link to the world. He was alone here, but confused and treacherous as things could become, he had deliberately left ties to draw him back, and as quickly as the bitter cold bit to the bone he drew in a deep breath and set his feet, making his own warmth, that of living flesh.

He had his sword. Unlike most weapons, this sword had value here, even with ghosts. He had his protections, not least in those ties he maintained to the world of Men. He was glad not to sense Emuin in this place. Emuin had not tried to follow him, having no strength to do so, none, either, to tell him what way he had come—but the track Emuin had left in his passage was still clear, a bright trail shredding on the winds.

He followed it, carefully extending his presence from his staying-place in Henas’amef along that roiled, chill breeze through the void that defined that recent passage.

He saw shapes, hazed in the gray. Going farther, he found two horses where no creatures of Men ought to be, and one he knew: they ran in panic, but he drew his sword and parted the gray space to give them their escape into the world they wanted… natural creatures, nothing of the sort this place could harbor long. Their fear had roiled everything around them, and destroyed the track Emuin had made, lines of passage confused and broken.

A shard of ice thrust itself up. Thatplace tried to form again around him, and he knew its warning signs, and hurled himself back.

Everything shifted. Every track he had followed was gone, confounded and confused.

“Elfwyn!” he called down the winds. “Elfwyn Aswydd! Answer if you hear!”

A wisp of something wafted back at his call. He reached for it.

ii

AEWYN NEVER YET STIRRED FROM UNCONSCIOUSNESS, OR WIZARD-CAST SLEEP, or whatever held him in its grip, despite the fall into a snowbank. Sweating despite the cold, Elfwyn hauled him up into his arms, the wind skirling about them and moaning through old trees. He rocked, as Gran had used to do with him when the night was full of noises; but there was no old man any longer, there was no roof over their head. Master Emuin had left them and there was not the least clue where they were, except in the midst of a woods that could be some lord’s copse or the dark heart of Marna itself. There had been no woods, he said to himself, no woods at all near the cottage. And they had no shelter, no way to ride out of here.

“It’s all right,” he said, over and over again, in time with his moving, in time with the worst shrieks of the wind. “It’s just the wind. It’s the trees making that sound. It’s all right. It’s all right, Aewyn. I’m still here; I won’t leave you, I promise.”

Aewyn moved, lifted a hand as if to fend something off.

“Aewyn?”

A hand caught him in the chin, bringing blood to his lip. Aewyn flailed out, kicking and gasping, and he wrapped his arms about his brother, hard as he could.

“We’re not falling, we shan’t fall,” he said, and felt Aewyn’s breath go out of him and come back. “I’m here. I’m here.”

“Otter?”

“We fell, Aewyn. Something hit the door, the old man left, and we fell.”

“Where are we?” Aewyn asked in a hoarse thread of a voice. “Gods! Where are we?”

“I don’t know. Somewhere in a forest. He was going to take us to your father, and then I couldn’t hold on to you, and I did, and we’re here, is all.”

“Freezing in the snow,” Aewyn said, trying to sit up, and wincing. It wasn’t deep snow here: the trees kept it off, but they were in the edge of a drift, in the dark, in the wind, in a clear spot in the woods. “Have we lost the horses, too?”

“I don’t know where we are.” Elfwyn tried to get to his feet, managed as far as one knee, stiff with cold. “I don’t think he meant to drop us. He might come back. I did ward us here. I did what I could.” He had trampled a line all around them, and done it three times, on his knees, with the wind knocked out of him. The old man had told him, the old man had chided him about his carelessness with protections. He was not to be caught being a fool again.

But Aewyn lurched to his feet and walked a staggering step or two, which took him immediately outside the sorry little circle he had made, and Elfwyn scrambled up and seized Aewyn’s arm to bring him back.

“Where are we?” Aewyn asked desperately, and turned. Now, above their ragged breathing, there began to be noises in the woods around them. Brush cracked, first on this side, then that.

They were still outside his small circle. Elfwyn pulled him back in, and looking between the trees he saw slashes appear in the snow.

“Go away!” he yelled at whatever it was. “Get back! Get away from us!”

The fog swept in about them both. Shadows moved in it, tall shadows, soldiers with pikes, and swords. He heard shouts, and the clangor of weapons, and the ground seemed to go out from under their feet and come back again with a thump that staggered them where they stood.

The fog broke in a rush of snowy wind, and left them, not in a woods, but on flat, open ground, beside a snowy heap of stones, a tall pillar of stones, in a sea of snowdrifts.

It was a cairn, and a flat stone was set against it: writing on it was obscured by snow, and when Elfwyn brushed the face of it clear…

Andas, it said. Just that.

“Andas Andas-son,” Aewyn said. “The standard-bearer. This is where the standard-bearer fell. Oh, gods, Otter, this isn’t a good place! We’re at Lewen Field!”

All around them in the dim, snow-sifted light, as Elfwyn turned to look, the snowdrifts blew off other cairns piercing the white, hundreds of low hummocks of stone that had gathered snow, looking for all the world like drifts, and unnaturally blowing clear all at once. He seized Aewyn’s arm, and all of a sudden the fog began to close in again about them, in a rush of shouting and tumult, the clash of armed men and the howl of a dark edge so, so close to them…

iii

GONE. TRISTEN REACHED OUT, BUT WHEN HE REACHED FOR THE BOYS, THE GRAY space shifted again, and things that had been on the left were above him, and things that had been above him were below. The diminishing trail of a living and double presence retreated on winds he himself had generated, just by moving, like leaves in autumn—while around him, everywhere around him, shadows moved.

“My lord!” some cried, and others howled in rage or screamed in fear. Lewen Field, it was, the old battlefield seething with sorcery, and magic. Here, his enemy had evaded him, had attacked those who followed him, bitter, bitter lesson. Now the battlefield teemed with shadows, some beseeching him, some cursing him, some attempting to go home, some to find their lords, their comrades, their brothers: the whole place had gone down in chaos, and chaos bred and broke out like plague, sweeping into the winds.

Darkness lurked here, too, a dark wind, an ominous track. It had come at him in that day. But where it went now, he turned to see.

It eluded him, and swept away on the course the boys had taken—a stalking presence risen between him and them.

But when he risked leaving his hold on Uwen Lewen’s-son and attempted to follow that trail through the gray space, chill winds flung him or it elsewhere. It was as if the harder he reached to take hold of anything, the farther what he sought retreated.

Once more, he made the attempt. Once the faint whisper of presence that was the boy Elfwyn wafted right past him, but when he reached for it, the boy was immediately far distant, like flotsam on another current, trailing blue fire—magic let loose, and part of it within his grasp, a mystery to him.

Elfwyn he might snatch, might. But Aewyn was lost if he did that. Aewyn resisted. Aewyn clung to the world, and the result slung the brothers no knowing where, a leaf’s mad course through a windstorm.

The gale narrowed, however. A gap appeared in a wall of shards that baffled him: such a wall had never existed, within his ken. Winds wailed through that keyhole of a gap, and if the boys went that way, they might be swept through and lost.

Those were wards, he thought. Wards of unprecedented strength, veiling a power that might suck the boys right through: to him it appeared as an impenetrable wall, when most were gossamer, and shredded when he casually reached through them.

He was dismayed—helpless to prevent the boys’ sweeping course toward that narrow gap, and not knowing, if he passed through that one necessary breach, whether he could rescue the boys, or even save himself.

Two swordlike spires of ice thrust up, blocking his path. One cut his reaching hand. Blood fell, and streamed away like smoke. More shards rose.

“Aewyn Marhanen!” he called out, attempting to enlist that recalcitrant mote. But he had not seen the Guelen brother in years, and had nothing to hold to, no inkling how to compel the one resisting element of that retreating image. “Elfwyn Aswydd!”

Suddenly the track of both boys curled away and vanished, more smoke than substance, streaming among shards of ice, bristling precursors of that wall.

The gray space curled up and stretched out again, and all the shards revised themselves. They became part of the barrier.

He might risk it. For two such lives, even so, he might risk that barrier.

“M’lord,” Uwen said, or he thought Uwen said.

Solid as the mortal earth, Uwen was, and long ago, he had given Uwen the command of him. He began to retreat without deciding.

Overheated air met him, like fire, burning his wounded hand. Blood dripped, Uwen seized him, face-to-face as he caught his balance on solid stone. Cefwyn and Crissand, with Master Emuin, turned in alarm.

“I lost them, too,” he said in despair, and Uwen caught his wounded hand and held on to him, warmth, like the room, and Crissand seized a heavy chair and shoved it under him.

Rest and warmth came welcome. His body was exhausted. And from where he sat, he could look across to Master Emuin, whose face was still unnaturally pale. “Wherever I went, whenever I reached for them, it drove them farther. Well that I came back, before I made matters worse than they are—they stopped, they stopped, somewhere just short of where another power meant to take them. They are fighting. How long they can fight—”

“A book, lad,” Emuin said hoarsely. “We thought it burned… and ’twas hidden in the library wall. It’s come loose in the world now.”

“There was something…” A chill came through his flesh, a memory of that place, and of that blue trail through the winds. He recalled of the Zeide library, a pile of ash, and a basket of burned fragments that resisted every effort to put them back together—fallen to dust, now.

But the boys had fought their fate. Some sort of magic was with them. Magic drew them along the winds, but in their determination—or the determination of one of them—they fought being drawn. That, and at least the one thing of power in the possession of one of them, was how they still held on to the world.

“One book survived,” Emuin said faintly. “One book someone most wanted, time meaning very little to him. Mauryl’s notebook, if I’m a wizard, and Elfwyn has it. He carries it with him.”

Cold settled about his heart, deep suspicion what power would have had the deftness to hide such a thing from Emuin and from him all this time, despite their searching, the deftness to hide it and the patience to wait for years to lay hands on it. Men were born and died, but that ancient soul had maintained a key in the world to get at it. It was not an immortal creature: nor was he, brought into the world for one purpose—to oppose it.

So a book of Mauryl Gestaurien’s had survived, as they had thought– Mauryl, who had taught Hasufin Heltain, but nottaught him all he wanted.

Mauryl, in his battle with Hasufin Heltain, had called himinto being at the last. Tristen’s own making might be in such a book. He had looked for that in the ashes they had found in the library, a burning that had not been complete, and in books they had gotten back at the riverside… to no avail. Now there was a book, which no one could find before.

Now, now the key emerged—the boy with the hollow at his heart, the book that was not burned, the burst tomb, and the sister vanished from her tower…

Hasufin had no pity, nor any desire but one: life and power to hold on to it. He knew his enemy, having reached to the depth of him. And Hasufin knew him: if there was one thing Hasufin wanted most in all the world it was to see him out of it… because Hasufin would not have life until he took and destroyed Mauryl’s own key in the world—his greatest spell, his Shaping clothed in flesh, that walked and breathed and held lordship over Ynefel, where, until Tristen was gone, Hasufin could not be.

The blood dripped down from his hand and puddled on the stones. Uwen was attempting to staunch it with a piece of cloth, but it was cut to the bone. Once he thought of it, he healed himself, only because it distressed Uwen. He was trying to think what else in recent days might be the enemy’s working, the gathering of pieces, the arrangement of items that suited his working.

His and Uwen’s confusion in coming here—oh, that was beyond doubt part and parcel of it: they were not meant to have come here too early. Once things moved, then they could move like lightning. Emuin could reach this place. Tristan had arrived, alas, just a little later than Emuin, having come farther, he suspected.

“Are they lost?” Cefwyn asked him… the dread in his eyes was hard to bear.

“No,” he said quickly and, for Cefwyn, he took a risk: he cast out into the world of Men, sure of a location, at least, now that he knew whatthe boy was carrying, and hoping only not to dislodge them again in the mere attempt to locate them. North, he thought. North of Henas’amef, at the bridge. “I know where they are,” he said. “They’re well enough for the moment.”

“What can we do?”

“I’ve lost Owl somewhere,” he said, not at all extraneously. It was part and parcel of the difficulty they were all in, part of his being lost, part of his immediate helplessness to reach the boys, and that Owl had strayed from him in Marna and not come back was all of a piece with the rest of it, this sudden abstraction of resources that belonged to Ynefel and Mauryl, and to him. Their enemy was pouring a great deal of effort into this working, a very great deal, and moving quickly. “They are north of us, not all the way into Elwynor. If I should reach for them, I fear they would move out of reach.”

“Tristen,” Cefwyn said, laying a hand on his arm. “Tristen, Ninévrisëis in Elwynor. With the baby. Could they be going toward her?”

It was not good news. He shook his head. “The two boys are inthis world. I believe they are. I cannot reach them, but I shall try to hold them on this side of the river, as much as I can. No, I do not think it would be a good thing.”

“Is it that damned woman? Is it Tarien Aswydd?”

“She hasn’t done this alone,” Emuin said.

“Hasufin,” Tristen said quietly. And: “Get horses. We must go in this world, as quickly as we can. If I am nearer to them than he is, I believe I can hold them.”

“The book,” Emuin said. “The book evaded her when he took it; in his hands it is not compliant, and the boy’s will is not inconsiderable. He defied me—and I dared not take it in my own hands—I doubt I could have held on to it, or survived the attempt. He’s done quite well at holding on to it, thus far. But I fear that book is still dragging him bit by bit where he ought not to go, and dragging your other son along with him.”

“If it alone is the cause,” Tristen said. Pieces unfolded to him, bits of knowledge, the rest eluding him; but at his heart was the cold thought that his time in the world, already longer than he had expected, might be running out, and that with scattered pieces that had been Hasufin Heltain coming unstuck from their separate places in the world, it was not good for two unskilled boys to try to hold onto one of them. “It’s going where it’s bespelled to go,” he said, thinking of the fate of the rest of that trove of books. “Where it was always bespelled to go. When we recovered the other manuscripts, they were at the river, were they not, and failed to cross. Best we hurry. The river is some sort of barrier to it, at least for a time.”