Текст книги "Fortress in the Eye of Time"

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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Текущая страница: 31 (всего у книги 47 страниц)

“With the Marhanen! Gods save us, my lady.”

“I will not see your heads on Ilefinian’s gates, sirs! Nor will I marry As6yneddin! You cannot ask that of me!”

“Will you marry this wandering fool and beg the lords of Elwynor swear oaths to the Marhanen? That is what they seem to suggest!”

“Have respect!” Ninévrisé said. “Have respect for my father, Tasien, if not for me. Lower your voices! Is the whole camp to hear?”

“Lord Tasien,” Tristen said quietly, overwhelmed with anxiety, though he feared that his suggesting anything at the moment was a cause for them to oppose it. “Sir, we are under threat, of wizardry if you call it that. This place feels worse and worse to me. —Lady, if your lord father can do anything, I think we should do exactly what he said, and soon.”

“Do we speak of wizardry?” the lord called Haurydd asked. “Is that what we have to hope for?”

“Yes, sir. So did the lord Regent hope for it. And if we wait we may lose all the hope he had. We should bury him and leave here.”

“My father,” Ninévrisé said, “warned us against going outside these walls after dark.”

“Yes, if there were safety to be had inside. But this place is losing its safety, as Ynefel became unsafe. I do feel so. We should go. Leave the wagon. There is no way to take it. There are men searching for me. There must be. We can find them on the road and they will protect us.”   “Run like thieves, you mean. To Marhanen men.”

“Sir, this is very serious. You should do what the Regent asked. There is danger.”

“Read me no lessons in my lord’s service. And we can afford the decency of daylight,” Tasien said angrily, “for a man who, if you are our King, may have kept your throne safe, sir, little though you may love me for saying it and little though I think there is any likelihood.”  “Tasien!” the lady said.

“My lady, I do not respect him. I do not respect a soft-handed man who bears every insult. He agrees to everything. He has no authority but his orders to bring us into ambush. Perhaps there is some sort of protection in this ruin. He certainly urges us away as hard as he can!”

“We must go, sir.” Arguments could easily confuse him. Words betrayed him. And danger was coming closer, a threat that distracted him, a threat changing and growing by the moment, as if the venture of himself and the lady into that gray place had attracted unwelcome attention, and now it had turned toward them and come to do them harm.

Besides the prowling of the Shadows, there had arisen a sound, a thumping in the earth that reminded him most of horses. “For all our sakes, Lord Tasien.”

“Tasien,” the lady said, “we shall go. We shall bury my father, and we shall go as he says, to speak to Cefwyn Marhanen.”

“This man will not fight your enemies!” Tasien said. “Is this a King? Is this the King we have waited for?”

“Sir.” Tristen looked Lord Tasien square in the face. “I am not afraid of you. I do fear for you.”

Tasien stared back at him, and the anger seemed to desert him for a different expression—almost. “If we go, then we shall have you for a Hostage, lord of Ynefel. If Cefwyn does not respect a Truce, and attacks our lady, I will kill you myself.”

The Words made sense, and offered a way out of this place, both practical and frightening. “If it pleases you, Lord Tasien, and if it please the lady, and if we can leave this place, I have no fear of giving you such a promise.”

“I thought,” Emuin said, his fist firmly about a cup of mulled wine. “I have thought about it and thought about it, m’lord King, and, though in my earliest youth I saw all the royal house of the Sihhé and knew their faces, and, more, knew them in ways a wizard knows—I had no impression I knew the lad. It worried me that night I first saw him and realized what he was: I told myself that of all the dead souls at Althalen Mauryl might have chosen, he could well have chosen Elfwyn’s true brother Aswyn, who died at birth—as a natural restraint upon the one who had that body ....”

“We know that story,” Cefwyn said impatiently. They were upstairs in his apartments. Idrys stood with his shoulder against the door, making certain there were no eavesdroppers even among the trusted guards.

“This is not Elfwyn. Nor any stillborn babe. He is skilled in the sword and horsemanship, which I do not think comes in the cradle. The name, old master. Favor me with the name, no other, no explanations, no long narrative.”

“Plainly—Barrakkêth, m’lord prince—M’lord King.” Emuin was more disturbed than he had ever seen the old man. “The founder of his line. Or one of his cousins. I do believe so.”

“A fair guess,” Idrys said from across the room. “A name that can be written. You could have spared a messenger to say so before now.”

“Peace, sirs.” Cefwyn grew more than impatient. “We knew at Emwy he was no scholar-king. But whence this? Tristen’s is not cold hearted, nor self-seeking, nor a wanton killer. Barrakkêth was. Why Barrakkêth?”

“Mauryl did not like your grandfather.”

It was like the turns of Tristen’s speech: it startled him into laughter.

“None of us liked my grandfather. My grandmother never liked my grandfather. Tell me something more dire than that, sir! Where is your proof? Prove to me your notion!”

“To Mauryl, the Marhanen as successors to the Sihhé were a choice of chance, at best. The Marhanen were there to take advantage of the situation, but your grandfather was very uneasy with Mauryl. Remember that Mauryl was not of this age, not of whatever blood men share. He had no loyalties even to the Galasieni, who were supposedly his people. Elfwyn’s father had besought—call it the gods, the gods some Sihhé worshipped if they worshipped any at all—to raise his stillborn son. The blood had run very thin by that time, and Elfwyn’s father certainly couldn’t have raised the dead. Except—he opened a door. As ’t were. To a dead wizard.”

“Hasufin Heltain,” Idrys supplied, and Emuin cast him a troubled look.

“We have had to seek our own answers,” Cefwyn said. His leg was paining him, acutely, he was peevish, and trying to be patient. “Many of which, it seems, are on the mark, master Emuin. Go on, sir, don’t dole it out like alms. Give me your reasoning. Tell me what you fear happened at Althalen, and why this is Barrakkêth.”

“Young King, Mauryl fought this wizard in Galasien. Mauryl chose in Barrakkêth and his cousins an agency of destruction so ruthless—so ruthless—there is a Galasite word for it ... so lacking in attachment. Yet honest. Mauryl did call him honest. He contended with wizards by magic—magic, not wizardry, mark you—and with men with the sword. I don’t know why. Mauryl said they were not Men as we understand Men to be. The true Sihhé had an innate, untaught power that would not be deterred. What the true Sihhé willed, so I understand, and am beginning to fear, wizardry does not easily prevent.”

“A god,” Idrys said dryly, arms folded, and walked back to stand at the tableside. “You describe a god, master grayfrock.”

“Something very like.” Emuin’s voice was hoarse. He had a large gulp of the heated wine. “Something far too like, for my taste. And the Quinalt and its witch-hunting have been too thorough in their hunt for wizards. There are few wizards left worth the name, m’lord King. There is no one to contain either Hasufin or Barrakkêth.”

“Oh, come now,” Cefwyn said. He had until then been concerned, but drew a longer and easier breath, and massaged the fevered wound in his upper leg. “Our Tristen? A ravening monster? I think not.”  “Ask Barrakkêth’s enemies.”

“Idrys tracked a Hasufin Heltain through generations of musty chronicles. And found a Hasufin in the royal family. So what did become of him? Is he still alive? Or haunting Althalen—or what?”

“My lord, I killed that child, I, myself, at Mauryl’s behest. I killed Hasufin’s last mortal shape.” The old man rocked to and fro in discomfort and had another large drink, the last. “Do you suppose, m’lord King, there is anything left in the pot?”

Emuin—kill a child? “Idrys,” Cefwyn said, feeling a chill himself, and Idrys looked, filled another goblet, poured more wine into the pot and swung it further out over the fire to warm.

Emuin took a sip, seeming as glad to warm his hands as his insides. He looked frail tonight. His skin was pale and thin, his lately drenched hair and beard were drying in wisps of white. His shoulders had grown very thin.

I dare not lose him, Cefwyn thought. I dare not. “And what,” he asked Emuin, determined to unravel the matter, “what, precisely, was Mauryl’s judgment on Elfwyn? Was it his father’s sin? Was it retribution?”

“It was simple fear, my lord King. Fear not only of Hasufin, dreadful enough, but the union of Hasufin’s very great wizardry and the innate Sihhé magic, dilute as it had grown by that day. No one could predict what would happen—with a wizard potent enough to bring himself back from death, joined to a Sihhé body. One simply didn’t know.”

“One thought you priests knew such things to a fare-thee-well,”

Idrys said.

“My lord King, I will not bear with his humor. I do not think I have deserved this. This is difficult enough to explain.”

“You might have been here,” Idrys said sharply.

Emuin clamped his lips tight. “Aye, that I might, and added my bit to the brew. You might have been very sorry, Lord Commander, if I had swayed to the left or the right the force that Mauryl had set on course.

His spell was still Summoning, still is, sir. I warned you of it, and I would not to this day put my meager working in the path of that force, no more than I would tamper with a river in flood without knowing what lay downstream—which is the difference between myself and those that meddle with things they do not understand, sir, as is the habit of some people I could name!”

“Peace, peace, good gods, I had forgot the sound of you both under one roof.” Cefwyn poured his own wine from a pitcher on the table, unmulled and untampered-with, and hoped for surcease of the ache in his leg that now beat in time with the ache in his skull. “So you don’t know, in sum, what we are dealing with.”  “I have had years to think on it.”

“More years than most, as a matter of curiosity,” Idrys said.

“Peace! Damn you, Idrys, let us have his account undiverted.”

“Tristen is at Althalen,” Emuin said.

“You are certain of that.”

“I am certain. So, in a wizardly sense, is Hasufin. And something—let loose as a consequence of his dealing. I don’t like to think of it. Quickly!

Ask me another question!”

“The same question! What did Mauryl intend? What are we dealing with? Why Barrakkêth?”

“The same answer, my lord King: the Sihhé were Mauryl’s choice to succeed the folk of Galasien, nine hundred years ago. Mauryl loosed Barrakkêth on the south, from what Mauryl claimed to be his origins up far in the Hafsandyr. No one knew more than that. Barrakkêth arrived well versed in arms, he subdued what is now Amefel and Elwynor and Lanfarnesse with brutal thoroughness. He would not go among Men, but ruled as High King from Ynefel, which was in its present gruesome state: he ordered the building of Althalen and its pleasures, but he rarely stirred from Ynefel except for war, and, save once, he left the begetting of heirs to the handful of Sihhé that arrived with him—who amply attended that duty.”

“He enchanted those faces into the walls?” Cefwyn asked. “I take it, then, that those rumors are true.”

“They are true. They are most awfully true, and contribute to the strength of the place. All I know is what Mauryl said: that the walls of Ynefel became what they are during the battle between Barrakkêth and Hasufin Heltain.”

“And Mauryl.”

“And Mauryl.”

“Who seems to have been a damned busy man. Why should he care what this Hasufin did? He was old. He was dying.”

“My lord king. He is dead. I do not know that he was dying.”

“Meaning?”

“He lost, m’lord. He lost to his enemy. Now we have Hasufin to deal with. But Mauryl was not a man to go down without revenge. We also have Tristen.”

“Revenge on whom?”

“That is the question. What did Mauryl promise the Marhanen when he stopped Hasufin the second time? To rule forever? I think not. Mauryl promised the Elwynim a King. And was it for love of them—or for some sort of balance with the Sihhé themselves? Far less did he love your grandfather, or your father, or care to leave Ynefel long enough to inquire what manner of King you would be. Was this the man they called Mauryl the Kingmaker, who, surrendering all power to the Marhanen and a regency in Elwynor, locked himself away from worldly power and said nothing for eighty years? Was this the action of the man who ruled behind the thrones of two kingdoms? I don’t believe he went down without arranging something to settle accounts.”

There was no love wasted between Emuin and Mauryl. He saw that, too. And possibly it colored all Emuin said.

“He could have sent a plague on my grandfather. None of us would have cared. He sent us a gentle and reasonable young man.”

“So I apprehended. Mauryl took no oath to your father, neither of homage nor even of fealty. Little it would have mattered to him.”

“Tristen has. He swore to defend me. Knowledgeably. He did swear, Emuin.”

“I am aware. Perhaps that is the test Mauryl set you: to deal with young Barrakkêth.”

“Like lessons? Like that? Guess the reason? Guess the purpose?”

“My old student does remember.”

“Damned right I remember, old master. But is that all your theory?”

“It’s my most hopeful one. And direst magic may have an escape, however improbable. Therefore I said, Win his love. We wizards are cranky, impatient sorts. We live long—unless we abandon our practice-and we grow damned impatient with fools. That is the worst thing about living long. One sees so many mistakes repeated, over and over and over.

It makes one a little mad and desperately angry. Mauryl—was a master wizard. A Man, I have always thought, in the sense that he was not Sihhé himself. But one never knew his loyalties.”

“One never knew,” Idrys echoed him. “And what master do you serve? ‘Win his love, m’lord Prince.’ ‘Win his good will’—all the while telling us nothing of his nature. It is damned late, sir priest, to come to us with your advice!”

“Now you understand me. Not then. Now you’ve dealt with him. I see fear, sir, that may still destroy you; but I see respect for what is by no means like yourself. You are dealing with your greatest enemy. His good will is still your best hope.”

“I said he was a wizard,” Idrys muttered, and paced away again, rubbing the back of his neck.

“He is not a wizard,” Emuin muttered under his breath.

“This man,” Cefwyn said, “whatever he is, this man you advised me to win, this friend, this sworn friend of mine, is nothing evil—a plague on your suspicions, Emuin. I do not believe he is my enemy. I refuse to believe it.”

“That might be best,” Emuin said. “All along, that might be best.”

“Don’t read me such lessons! You think something else, sir. Out with it.”

“That wizardry at its highest is not cattle-curses. That what the Sihhé are, wizards struggle to be. Hasufin was not a greater wizard than Mauryl.

But prone to cheat. Too willing to work in the physical realm, that was what Mauryl said. An assassination here, a tweak of wizardry there-Mauryl despised him. He’d brought Hasufin very far along before Hasufin’s nature became clear to him, is what I very much suspect. Wizardry requires a man search himself very deeply and face all his most secret faults—lest they work the spells, that was what Mauryl used to say: that there comes a point when one realizes one has power, and the faults work the wizard as the wizard works the spells.”

“So with kings,” Cefwyn said, feeling they had wandered far from the subject.

“So with Tristen, too. This is the trap Mauryl set you and me and the Elwynim all in one.”  “You’ve lost me.”

“To live life without him, my lord, or to bring back the reign of magic over the world of Men by our own choice. The Quinalt, with its holy abhorrence of wizardry, has left us all but unarmed against that boy’s lightest wish, and hope to the powerless gods we find better help. Mauryl has left me the last, the last teacher of the higher wizardry that stands any chance of denying that young man what he wishes.”

“To all I know,” Cefwyn said, feeling a most unaccustomed and angry moisture in his eyes, “what Tristen most wishes is my happiness. What are we saying? Tristen named us an enemy! And yet we’re speaking of Tristen as the danger!”

“All the same,” Idrys said, “all the same, I hear what Emuin is saying, my lord King. And it disturbs me. What both of you say—disturbs me profoundly.”

He cast a frowning look at Idrys, and knew that there was yet another danger that Emuin did not reckon of: Idrys’ loyalty, and Idrys’ perception. Idrys had taken oaths of homage to him. Of fealty to him. But in the challenge to the Marhanen that those oaths had never anticipated, he found himself without sure knowledge what Idrys’ attachment was: to him, as King; to the realm; to whatever man Idrys served—or to his own unexpressed sense of honor. Idrys measured things by some scheme that had never yet diverged from his personal welfare.

He had, in that light, to ask himself what that welfare was, or might become, and what Tristen’s was, or might become.

Tristen was now at Althalen, Emuin said. With this Hasufin.

How in hell did Emuin know? How did wizards know?

But Emuin said, Tristen was not a wizard; and presumably did not use wizardry—whatever that fine mincing of words meant. He was no longer certain he knew, and he was sitting at table with a man slipping fast toward wine-drowsiness who was the one and did the other.

In a small alcove of the ruin, a section of the wall with several such arches still standing, the Elwynim made a grave for the lord Regent, piling up loose stone from nearby rubble, in the dark and the misting rain. They had brought out one of the lamps from the tent. One man sheltered it with an upheld arm and his cloak, while others labored by that scant light to make their wall solid and to make the lord Regent a secure resting place.

The lady stood beside Tasien and the other two lords, a quiet, small figure in mail and a man’s heavy, hooded cloak, her father’s, Tristen thought, as the crown was her father’s and the mail shirt was doubtless her father’s, worn over her gown and halfway to her knees.

She was not a tall woman: she would never tower over anyone—but she wielded force of will and wit. She was very young, and was accustomed but not acquiescent to Lord Tasien making decisions, as Lord Tasien had grown accustomed to giving orders, probably, Tristen judged, in the lord Regent’s decline and sickness. And Tasien seemed a good and faithful man, even if Tasien doubted his honesty and his intentions.

Tasien was trying to protect the lady, considering that she was young, while taking as many of her opinions as he dared, because she was her father’s successor.

And honestly seen, that Tasien wished to prevent the lady rushing off into the dark on a stranger’s advice was only sensible—unless Tasien were aware of the threat piling up more and more urgently around the ruin.

Nin6vrisi was aware. Tristen felt it. Having found that gray space-she kept worrying at it, and was too reckless, and very much in danger.

The old lines of the masons held against the Shadows thus far. The horses had begun to grow restive—they knew, and the men who had gone to saddle them and have them ready for departure were having difficulty with them.

There was no preparation to take the wagon: Tasien had sensibly agreed with him, saying they would be able to come back for it and all it contained if all went well, and that if things went badly, they would need nothing at all. But Tasien had ordered certain things taken from the tent, among them the banners, and various small boxes and at least some of the lady’s personal goods, the latter packed onto the backs of the two horses that ordinarily pulled the wagon. All that was going on while the burial proceeded.

But if his help had been at all welcome, Tristen thought, he would have taken up stones and put them in place himself. The men were building at a frighteningly deliberate pace, each one a measured clink of stone on stone as they first formed an arch and then, after the Regent’s body was laid inside, sealed up the opening—stone by stone, while in the awareness he snatched out of the dark around them the lines on the earth were weakening, disturbed by the breaking of an old pattern, and something-some presence coming up on them was pressing more and more insistently, searching, as he thought. It was not alone wizardry, but men, many men.

For such eyes, the lantern-light by which they worked was a beacon.

The place was overgrown round about, concealing them, but it equally concealed danger that moved against them as well, at least in the world of substance.

He dared not reach too often, too far into the gray, lest he guide trouble to them more quickly than he knew it was coming. But it had direction, now. He stood as respectfully, as quietly as the others stood, but he felt his flesh crawling with apprehension, a threat very strong in the same direction as the men taking down the rubble of that other arch to build this one. Stone after stone they brought, and the threat shivered in the air, out of the north, very definitely now from the north. He thought of warning the lady—but his welcome with them was already scant: he feared giving them cause to do something less wise than they were doing.

And possibly she felt it for herself, though awareness of that gray place had not come to him all at once. Reaching far off came with knowing one could do it. She did reach out at times, but he thought that that was an accident: she wanted her father—and that was a danger. She was a burning light in that other Place. She was angry and she was loyal to the old man, and that came through very surely.

But out there in the rainy dark was more than one presence, he thought. He perceived two subtly different sources, now, one wide and diffuse with distance and one terrifyingly, stiflingly close. One, elusive and strong and clever, was pulling the diffuse one, which he could feel only faintly—and which he could only see as a haze in the gray place, defined against the gray place itself. The elusive one was very, very close to them, very difficult to see, a presence tingling in the air, clinging to the stones, as if it possessed all the walls that protected them, and he had not felt it before they began to work.

Wind gusted. Trees down a little removed from the wind sighed and roared with it. The feeling of harm was very strong. Wind pulled at cloaks, seized edges, whipped them free, and the owners struggled to hold them. He had Cefwyn’s cloak about him again, and the wind pressed it against him and rocked him on his feet. A horse called out, a warning cutting through the dark and the spitting rain, and in a distant play of shadows men fought to hold it still.

But by now there remained only a small opening at the crest of the sealing wall they had built and the feeling was worse and worse. Tasien placed a large stone, and the lady came and placed one, and a second: the last. She pressed her brow against the rubble, then, speaking to her father, Tristen thought: he could feel that disturbance in the gray realm, as loud as the panicked horse a moment ago. He was thinking, too, Hurry, oh, lady, hurry, and let us go. Can you not feel it?

He thought she heard him. She turned with a frightened look. The sound of the trees down the slope from them, leaves blowing in the wind, all but overwhelmed the thunder.

But another sound had begun, not in the air, but in the earth, a thumping like horses running, louder and louder.

“Riders!” she exclaimed, and a man near them who had been pulling stones from the wall of the other arch leapt back as, with a rattle of stone and for no evident reason a section of wall crumbled.

Pale bones were in the rubble that fell out, bones sticking up among the tumbled stones. It was another burial they had disturbed, in their meddling with the stones. It had lain unguessed in the walls that protected them, and the feeling that came with that disturbance broke about them in a smothering fear.

The man protecting the lamp lost his battle to a watery gust of wind.

The light failed. The wind sent something noisy skittering across the parings, and in the gray world the lines of blue all faltered and began to fade.

“Lady!” he warned her.

“Let us go!” Ninévrisé cried, and Tasien seized her arm and hurried her toward the horses, the men running with panic just under their movements.

Tristen went, too, all but running among the others, biting his lip on pleas for haste for fear of another debate or anything to delay them.

Petelly was in the number of mounts waiting, rolling his eyes so that the white showed. He took the reins from the man who was managing four of the horses at once, and in his ears and in his heart alike he heard the arrival of riders through the brush to their north.

“Caswyddian!” he heard a man say, and Tasien: “Hold them off, sergeant! Hold them long enough—and join us as you can! The Regent has to live!”

“Aye, m’lord!” a man said, and rattled off the names of others to stay behind as Ninévrisé protested the order.  “There is no choice, m’lady! Ride! Ride!”

The lords, the lady, and two of the men rode for safety, and Tristen turned Petelly’s head and rode with them, to the south of the enclosure, where a doorway in the ruined hall provided them a way out. A number of the men overtook them, but not all: at least half the soldiers had stayed.

They had no hope, Tristen thought. It was impossible against what was coming. He might help them—but he had no weapon, they feared him as much as they feared their enemy, and the lady, Cefwyn’s lady, had to be safe. He knew where the road was—he could see the lines glowing in the dark, marking obstacles for the horses, and Tasien could not. He abandoned care for the men behind and sent Petelly forward as fast as Petelly could run, shouldering horses around him until he reached the fore.

“I can see the path!” he called out and, Tasien willing or not, he took the lead and stayed there, leading them by a twisting path along old walls, through ruined doors, and sharply around an old cistern that gaped in their path. The wind was blasting into their faces. Rain spattered him, stung his eyes. He heard—in one realm or the other—the clash of weapons, horses running over stone—shouts and outcries of men fighting for their lives behind them while the earthly wind shrieked like a multitude of voices. He felt all his senses assaulted at once, and Petelly shied under him, trying to bolt, just when a wall loomed up ahead.

He did not know himself how he made the jump. They lost two men.

The horses came past him riderless. But the rest were with him, and Petelly threw his head, fighting to see in the gusts that flared in their faces.

He rode continually south. He encouraged Petelly with his hands and his knees as he saw masons’ lines ahead of them and turned instead down a brushy slope where there was only darkness—south again, as the wind wailed with voices in his ears, and Shadows streamed about them.

“Where is he?” he heard someone call out in fear.

“This way!” He called out, heard a man swear, and waited at the bottom of the slope, with Petelly trembling and panting for breath.

Tasien and the lady came down. Lightning flickers showed others coming down behind them as quickly as they could. He knew he had to do better. He had to keep their company together, not let them fall behind and not let the Shadows take them. He was certain that, of all who might pursue them, those in the gray world were the deadliest and the ones hardest to outrun.

Then came the sound of horsemen passing above the bank, and all of theirs were here. That was, he thought, pursuit narrowly missing them or their own riders trying to rejoin them. His companions reined in, their horses wild, panting for breath, and all of them alike looked up in fear, trying to find the source of that sound, but the brush and the storm hid whatever riders were up there, heading for the blind end he had led his company away from.

“Follow me!” he said to them. And they did.

Emuin had gone off to bed, in the numbness of the air that had followed such dread confidences. Limping, hurting this evening to the point of outrageous temper, Cefwyn paced the length of the room and back again, goading himself to an outburst he had no moral courage to make otherwise, and Idrys must sense it, since Idrys did not remind him he had warned him.

“So?” he challenged Idrys. “Tell me I was wrong.”

“Lord Tristen saved your life,” Idrys said. “I do not forget it, nor shall.”

Twice over Idrys eluded him. And cheated him now of a fit he wanted to loose on someone able to defend himself.

“Emuin fears him,” Idrys said, “perhaps too much. You, not enough.”

“And you have it right, do you?”

“I make no such claim. I think Emuin was right and I was wrong, how to deal with him—at the first. Not now.”

Three times eluded him. “Then what? What are you saying? Damn it, Idrys, I am unsubtle tonight. The wound aches like very hell. Be clear.”

“I am saying, m’lord King, that I know precious little of wizardry, but if Emuin speaks half the truth, whether this Shaping lodged in Elwynor or in Ylesuin, he would have his own way. Am I mishearing? Your Majesty did study with Emuin.”

“Emuin is full of contradictions. I am half of a mind to send him back to the monks. He’s been too little with practical men. What in hell am I to do? Did you hear practical advice tonight? I did not. Nothing workable. Nothing that brings peace to this border. What Emuin promises seems rather other than that, did it seem so to you?”

“It has always been other than that, m’lord King. And I will not advise we sit idle, but—” Idrys had walked to the window and stared outward, a shadow against the glistening black glass. The window was spattered with rain. Lightning lit edges for a moment and thunder muttered to the west. “I do not trust the lord of Ynefel. But I trust Emuin’s judgment far less.”