Текст книги "Fortress of Eagles"

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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Distances here were not the same. At one moment Emuin had as well have been in Guelemara, in the next as solidly as if he were in the monastery, and yet Emuin had not stirred from his camp nor he from his chair.

And beyond… beyond and in some direction he could not equate with the chair or the fireside… was an Edge of the sort he had learned was dangerous. It was death … or it was at least a loss of some sort. He had seen it appear with Uleman, the lord Regent, Her Grace’s father, and lost him very soon after. Of a sudden he was afraid for Emuin, and was amazed how very like Mauryl Emuin had become, with his hair and beard far whiter since summer. It shone, in the light there was. He could easily mistake one for the other.

—I am not Mauryl, Emuin said fiercely. I have no wish to become him or to set my hand to his workings, no matter your wishes. Don’t mistake us, young lord! I cannot amend his Working, never think so! Gods forfend! Dont pull at me so!

He was duly chastised, and it was a moment before he dared a wider breath.

—Master Emuin, he said in this waking dream, I meant no such thing. Nor ever mistake you. And I only ask—

Fear had come in from over that dark Edge. There was no clear direction in the gray place, but it had always more or less corresponded with directions in the world of Men. It seemed to him now that he had been facing north, sitting before the fire. That would put the perilous Edge at the west… at the west, where Amefel lay, just across the river, not north, toward Tasmôrden.

But that reckoning set the shadow he had felt in the wind to the east, and the south, which he did not immediately believe. He dared not distract himself with wondering, or trying to find himself in the world of Men. There had been the danger, before. He felt the uncertainty, now, and felt…

—Careful!

He bit down on his lip to draw wits and flesh together. But master Emuin retreated from him without stirring a foot, then ceased to be there, just that quickly. Emuin was safe, escaped from the gray space, and he was alone and still in danger, in a place that gusted with winds.

The shadow-haunted stone of the guesthouse was another breath away. He drew that breath large and deep and became aware first of the glowing substance of the wards and the Lines, secondly of the substance under him.

Perhaps he moved in his chair, perhaps jumped with the startlement of solid wood under his fingers. At least Uwen broke off snoring and lifted his head in muzzy startlement.

“Forgive me, m’lord. I didn’t mean to drop off like that.”

“I must have dreamt,” he said. It felt like that, like a bad dream, and he still felt his breath shortened. “To bed, both of us.”

“Aye, m’lord,” Uwen said, and slowly got up as he did. They went back to the hall and to the fine, snug pair of rooms they had.

But Uwen would not leave him there: Uwen brought his mattress from the other room and settled down on the floor with his sword in his arms, saying he would sleep there or not at all.

Tristen let his sword stand with his shield in the corner, and lay down on a fine goose-feather mattress, but with coarser blankets and with a rougher ceiling above him than he had been accustomed to have since he came to Cefwyn’s company—it was bare rafters, which cast shadows from the watch-candle they had left on the table. The sight put him in mind of Ynefel, and his room, and the towering great hall with the stairs winding crazily up the stonework.

That webwork of stairs had creaked in storms. It had been so very fragile. He had known that even when he was living there, and there was nothing more frightening than being on those stairs in the dark, with the whole tower groaning and complaining with the wind. At such times, the stone faces set in its walls seemed to move, and the candle-shadows shifted… and sounds issued forth which were not the wind: shrieks as of bending metal, or of iron doors opening, or of souls in pain.

Mauryl’s face had seemed to be in that stone. He tried to hold to that thought. Fleeing it gave strength to his enemy, who was dead, but all the same, he would not risk growing uncertain on that point, when so much else was uncertain. Mauryl had gone into the stone, and the timbers had fallen, and Ynefel was not the same, in the autumn in which Cefwyn was king of Ylesuin. He dared not let that memory go.

But the night the candle had gone out, the night he had been on the stairs in the dark… strange, he thought from the vantage of a year of Unfoldings, strange in many respects, and after Lewenbrook, that he should still cast back to that night as the most frightening of his life.

The Edge was almost as dreadful. That kind of terror wafted out of it when it appeared. The Shadow at Lewenbrook had been a thunderous, dreadful threat; but one could be angry at it. The Edge, like that moment on the stairs, was a cold, sweating sort of fear, and a venturer in the gray space could observe it in curiosity until quite without warning he felt everything tilt toward it. That it appeared again troubled him… and it did not seem to him that the threat of the Edge was situated in the world of Men, not a presentiment of danger, of treacherous guards or accident or weather. He feared it was simply in master Emuin’s increasing frailty, the journey, the packing and unpacking and the disturbing of an old man’s peace… and whether that Edge represented something that only endangered master Emuin when he was in the gray space or whether the danger was always there, he was not sure and did not trust master Emuin to tell him.

Even wondering about it set the gray space in reach again, at a safer remove, true, but perilous, tonight, all the same.

The shadow in the wind whisked past him.

Someone was there.

There. In the confusion of a strange building and strange wards, in the turning-about of stairs and steps…

He had last reckoned master Emuin’s presence to what he knew by the road was north… but where was the fireplace now? And which direction was the head of his bed at the moment?

It was not Emuin. It came furtively, quietly, through the gray, but things could suddenly move very fast, and he was not Tristen of Lewen plain at this instant, he was young Tristen, he was Tristen on the stairs in Mauryl’s keep, and knew how a shadow could pounce, and scare, and find access in fear.

Then it seemed less baneful, even anxious to find him. He thought then that it might be Ninévrisë trying in her unschooled way to find him… and she left herself open on such a night to unguessed hazards.

No, he said, rebuffed it with a desperate, confused effort, and it left him.

He lay still then, his eyes open on the rafters above him, asking himself where it had been, whether east or west. Ordinarily he knew, but he had confused himself, and he might have harmed it. He was distressed and feared indeed it had been Ninévrisë, and that he might have frightened her.

Be safe, he wished whoever it had been. Sleep soundly. Be at peace…

Should I wait for you? was what he had reached out to Emuin to ask.

Should I suspect harm? he would have asked at the end of their encounter.

Now he would ask: Have you kept secrets from me, master Emuin?

Or is it only since tonight that the gray place has become dangerous?

CHAPTER 3

The edge of morning brought cold to the monastery. Lanternlight glistened on icy steps as they opened the door to the guesthouse. A guardsman had fallen the three steps to the yard, unhurt, the report was, but only because of the armor.

“You be careful, m’lord,” Uwen said when they reached the small porch, and moved gingerly on the steps himself. Tristen rubbed his ungloved fingers across the stonework of the banister, exploring the sting and the depth of the coating. He had seen frost, but never such a heavy coating of it, and he had met no footing quite so treacherous. But he learned in the first, the second step, like the Unfolding of a Word, and walked down the steps in Uwen’s wake with increasing sureness.

The men showed themselves undaunted, too, despite a few falls. The younger soldiers played games and pushed and shoved one another like boys; the older men minced about more carefully in the lanternlight across the yard, but the horses and oxen seemed to have no great difficulty, particularly in the churned stiff mud that stood in frosty ridges. Teams moved briskly with their drivers, and grooms brought the saddled horses in quick order of their masters’ precedence while the monks scattered sand with brooms.

“M’lord,” Aswys came to ask, “will it be Petelly this morning?”

“Yes,” he said, watching all the activity of men from the side of the steps, wrapped in a warm cloak Tassand had put about him.

Is it winter, now? he would ask Emuin, who was probably warm in a nest he would not leave until later in the day. Has it begun?

And what will it mean to the wagons, if snow follows the ice?

A slight drover’s boy struggled and slid past, scarcely managing to keep upright with his arms full of harness. But Tristen kept quietly to the side of the yard. Ice, in all the colors of white came to him with disquieting force, the deeper Unfolding of a Word, Ice lying in sheets and jagged shards.

The Sihhë-lords had come down from the north, had he not read it?

At some moments he hoped with all his heart that he was the creation of scattered elements, whatever Mauryl had flung together by magic, a new creature, and innocent of past sins. But at other times he had to believe what Idrys had said of him: that he was a revenant, that he was that lord named Barrakkêth… and if that was so, should it surprise him that he found ice and winter touched his heart? He had known Barrakkêth’s writings by heart before he read them. So ought it to be a wonder that Ice began to unfold to him, and winter began to settle into his knowledge in all its white strength?

He thought of Efanor’s little book, which he carried next his shirt, and despaired of gods, despaired of other advice that would replace Emuin’s, and Cefwyn’s, and Idrys’.

Oh, come, he wished Uwen desperately, speak to me, prevent worse things Unfolding.

“M’lord,” Uwen said, an immediate intrusion which frightened him as much as the thoughts inside him. “M’lord, the horses is comin’.”

Mundane matter, mundane advisement. Uwen had needed to speak to him. And the sun, the safe and ordinary sun, was a glow in the east, discernible, now. Breath steamed, men and horses enjoying this edge of dawn. His knees felt weak from the fright, and he stood still, watched the drivers move the teams in, and saw the standard-bearers with their horses near the gate. Saw, as Uwen had said, Aswys and his helpers bringing Petelly and Gia.

“A skittish morning, m’lord,” Aswys ventured to say.

“So it seems.” His knees still lacked strength. He had fallen in fits before this when something so potent came on him. He feared it would happen now, and his heart was beating as if he had been running as he took the reins. Petelly’s hide was as cold as the saddle as he mounted up, and he spread his cloak about him and Petelly, to warm them both.

I cannot wait, he thought. I could not have lingered. If Emuin had wished me to wait, I would have heard him.

Do you hear me, master Emuin? There is Ice, there is Ice all around, master Emuin, and I know its nature, master Emuin… do you not hear?

The men opened the gates. The sun had just broken above the horizon, and sent out a flood of light on a land rimed and hazed with ice. Rime was on the grass stems along the road, on the stones, on the smallest pebbles, and the rising sun hazed it into delicate morning shades. The puddle near the gate had gained a crinkled coating of ice. Even the ridges of common mud at the edges of yesterday’s unsightly puddle had a white coating, and their column of horses and men went out in pale orange clouds of their own breath.

How could he have dreaded such a sight? Everything was touched with dawn, and common things had become wonderful as common things had once been to him. He was on his way. A balance had ripped, around sunrise, and he was on the Road again, where he had business, and urgent business, at that.

For a moment he imagined Ynefel, in such rime-ice and dawn.

Mauryl, he would say. Mauryl, have you seen the stones?

Mauryl, look at the sun above the trees! Look at the light!

And for a moment Mauryl would forget whatever troubled him and his old eyes would gaze at what he found marvelous. And for a moment Mauryl would find wonder in it, too, and tell him the Name of it, and remind him of the thousand things he had forgotten to do, in his distraction of the hour.

He could be distracted, still, by beauty, by the wonder of a stroke of sunlight. Perhaps at such times he made himself open to wizardry—or conversely, was as warded and safe at such moments as Ynefel at its strongest. Perhaps threats simply slid past his attention and he made himself immune. He knew that he wielded magic as well as iron, and yet looked away from it, and made himself fables to explain his own presence in the world, and sought gods who might be more powerful than himself. It would be very comfortable if there were someone more powerful than himself, on this Road, on this particular morning, someone to guide him, even someone to blame: Hasufin Heltain had been a comfort, in that sense, a voice, an answer, where otherwise was only gray and shifting cloud. A few days ago he could not imagine the spring; now he imagined ruling Amefel. Last night he had quit the gray place in fear that there was someone and this morning he thought with regret of his enemy. Last night he had feared an Edge and this morning in a tentative probe of the place he could not find no limit to contain him.

Last night Emuin had been there. This morning Emuin was not, a circumstance which meant nothing more, he told himself, than the very mundane truth of the mortal world, that Emuin was still asleep, and that he would have no thanks for pressing harder and gaining Emuin’s attention on a mere whim.

What would he say in this now glorious dawn?

—Forgive me, master Emuin, but I grew afraid…

–Comfort me, master Emuin: I miss Cefwyn. I have missed him from before we rode out of Amefel together, and this morning, for no good cause, I doubted…

–Forgive me, master Emuin, that this morning I sought gods. Now I have no master but my oath to Cefwyn.

–On the hilltop where I have arrived, I can see all the things I have ever known. I fly free as a leaf on the wind.

–But there are places beyond the hills, and days beyond this one, master Emuin, and there are Shadows where the sun has no power. Do all Men walk as blind as I?

He dared not press harder with his thoughts. It was so easy to slip deeper and deeper into the gray place, where he feared they were no longer alone. The presence last night ran through his thoughts like an escaping dream. Had he dreamed it, thus at the edge of sleep? Was it a memory, or had it truly happened?

That it fled recollection troubled him.

Might Ninévrisë indeed have reached out?

Might she—or Cefwyn—be in difficulty? Had the barons set about some new mischief, and did Cefwyn need him to come back?

If there was any answer from Emuin, the hills hid it from him, while to his backward glance the column had grown behind him, continuing to form inside the monastery walls like a balled string extending itself, and that unwinding was almost done now. They were well and truly on their way to Amefel.

The magic of the frost grew thinner as the sun climbed, as the frost left the eastern side of hills, then the west, persisted only in the shadows, and at last vanished altogether.

By noon the sun had brought a warmth to their backs, an easy warmth. Even toes in boots grew warm, and Petelly, who had shown an uncommon keenness to frolic this morning had settled down to the general pace.

Master Emuin, Tristen was vaguely aware, was decidedly awake now, had made not quite such an early start, and ached in his joints with the bouncing of the wagon. It was not a good beginning, this trailing along the countryside for miles and days, and he was sorry to leave master Emuin further behind, but what more could he do? he posed the peevish question.

He had no more answer than before, and at their noon rest, weary of worry, fretting in Emuin’s protracted and maddening silence, he had Dys brought up in the line and rode him for the rest of the afternoon, a lively contest of wills, since Dys had not worked in a month. Uwen had called up Cassam, his own heavy horse, at the same time, and the two horses being stablemates, and both needing to have a little room around them, they rode at times beside the column, at times ahead.

One could easily drowse on Petelly, rest one’s eyes with caution on Gery, but one never forgot the difference of being on Dys. The big hooves went down with a heavier sound, the motion was broader, softer, and more deliberate. Dys’ ears were constantly up, then flat, for Dysarys expected enemies. Yet Dys loved attention, too, and since most grooms were afraid of him, he got less of it than he liked…

Very like his master, Tristen thought.

But it was a good, level ride, the road presenting no particular difficulty for the wagons and no need to plan alternatives. The bridges on a king’s road would bear a loaded cart without worry, or failing that, offered fords with good firm approaches and no great depth. So he had nothing to do but contend with Dys’ humors and watch the grass blowing in the breeze. He was aware from time to time of master Emuin, eventually that Emuin had reached the monastery at long last and was safe, but full of aches from being tossed about on the wagonseat and sore from a stint of riding. He was sorry for that. Master Emuin settled in for a belated noon meal, and then took a nap.

But as the hours passed he began to realize master Emuin had no intention of leaving the monastery. And when the sun went down in a bank of cloud and they were pressing into a murky twilight to reach their scheduled camp he was aware of master Emuin sitting by a warm fireside sipping ale.

— Master Emuin, he began. But had no answer, only the waft of master Emuin’s extreme vexation.

No more had he stood overlong on the tower stairs on those evenings when master Emuin would not open the door. On prior evenings he had simply set the basket down and gone back to his rooms, reckoning the old man had studies and reading to do of some great moment.

But now he was angry, and the end of a long day on the road had not improved his own spirits or set him in a more cheerful mood. More, a wagon broke down, just as they were coming down the last fairly steep hill to the border. It was the farrier’s wagon, as it proved.

“All that iron,” Uwen said, and there was no way for men to lift it. There would have to be a new axle made, the load all shifted off, then on again. It was within sight of their proposed camp, down where Assurnbrook wended along, intermittent with trees and wild meadow.

“They’ll have it by morning,” Captain Anwyll came riding up beside them to report. “They’ll shape an axle and may have it in good order by daybreak. Otherwise, we can take the rest of the wagons on tomorrow.”

“Could be we’d ha’ broke ’er in the ford,” Uwen said in an attempt to put the best face on matters, “and have all the farrier’s iron to save. As well it broke now.”

“That’s so,” he said. “But I wish nothing else breaks before we get there.”

“Oh, have a care, m’lord, or we’ll all break down in the town gate.”

Tristen laughed in spite of his daylong mood. Then he imagined the gates of Henas’amef, as clearly as if he saw them before his eyes. And he recalled the number of camps ahead and saw his company strung out from the monastery at Clusyn to Assurn Ford to Maudbrook in Amefel by tomorrow night, pieces everywhere, and it was not a cheerful prospect.

Meanwhile the surviving wagons squealed and groaned their way down to Assurn’s edge, and by last light the men were gathering firewood, while he stood on the side of that dark stream with a view of the brushy hills and old walls on the other side of the brook.

Both sides of Assurnbrook afforded a few moldering stone walls that travelers regularly used for windbreaks and shelter. On the Amefin shore was the greater part of the stonework, the ruin of a shrine, but despite the remaining daylight, they had not chosen to cross to that more extensive shelter, not with a wagon under repair higher up the hill. They chose to stay on the Guelessar side of the water, where travelers over decades had set up several well-maintained hearths out of the wind.

The men stretched out a number of the common tents from the sides of the wagons for shelter; and before Tristen had realized what they intended, they had almost gotten down the pavilion for him, too.

“No,” he said to the soldiers, stopping all work, and went to Anwyll to protest any unpacking of the larger tents.

“Your Grace cannot camp in the field.”

“Do not the soldiers, sir?” He was vexed, seeing nothing but delays, nothing but encumbrances from hour to hour, and he walked away in impatience when Anwyll tried to argue with him. He found warmth by the nearest of the three common fires, and stood there waiting for his supper, whenever it might appear.

“Did I do wrong?” he asked Uwen, when Uwen came up to stand by him. “Is Anwyll angry with me?”

“No, m’lord,” Uwen said, who was likewise bound to sleep without a tent tonight, by his decision. “Fewest of these tents we let catch the morning damp, easier to pack. He ain’t that sorry.”

He said nothing.

“Ye’re glum,” Uwen observed after a moment more. “Are ye worrit, m’lord?”

“Anxious to be there,” he said, which had become the all-encompassing truth.

They had a modest supper, bread from the monastery, sausages to toast in the fire, cheese, and a moderate amount of ale, after which Anwyll seemed in far better humor and the men were tolerably merry. The farrier’s wagon made it down the hill at last, to no little commotion and laughter. Tristen left the fire to see it in, wrapped in his cloak, in a dark outside the fires and the shelters. He sent the weary drivers and the farrier and his crew to a late and anticipated supper, and comforted himself that he had one straggled crew at last accounted for.

He lingered after, cherishing the quiet after the groaning wheels had passed him. It was a place and an hour for shadows, and with no particular dread he realized the presence of one that lurked forlornly near the light, and that feared his impatience. Curiosity had perhaps drawn it. Others prowled the other shore, unhappy shadows that flitted and tricked the eye among the ruins. He had all but heard shadows breathing above the noise of men drinking and telling tales. They might be shadows that belonged to Amefel… or to Guelessar. He had no idea. He found no harm in them, only a kind of company.

As for Emuin and the absent rest of their company, Emuin, it seemed, had gone to bed for the night, and attempted a fitful sleep, with no word to him.

— Are you well, sir? he attempted to ask at last, mustering his last remnant of charity.

— Here is no place, no safe place, was all he had in reply, an impression of an old man’s worry… but more than that, more than that, he had a sudden clear sense that master Emuin was determined not to be in his company or in converse with him at all.

In the next moment he received a rebuff and felt a departing presence as strongly as if Emuin had slammed a door.

It was maddening.

And it was not like Emuin.

— Master Emuin! he called out to no avail, and he paced the shore, seeking to overcome his own angry misgivings that Emuin had not behaved reasonably, that if wagons broke down it was not, perhaps, accident, and that if he had better advice or earlier advice he might not be standing on the side of Assurnbrook blind to the night around him, with his adviser a full day behind and with a king’s herald letting loose rumor in Amefel.

— What am I to do? he asked the unresponsive night.

The gray place ebbed away utterly, until he heard the running water and the sounds of the horses and the distant voices of men.

— What am I to do, master Emuin? Answer me!

Mauryl had used to scare him so. He found himself trembling only partly with the cold, and heard the approach of footsteps in the dark, along the pebbled shore.

“M’lord. M’lord, is ever’thing in order?”

“There’s no danger,” he said to Uwen’s inquiry, and as he said it knew he had just told a great lie, and that he had been telling it to himself all day. “Master Emuin will not be here in anything like good time. He has gone to bed. He will overtake us as he can. Perhaps in Henas’amef.”

“Ah, well,” Uwen said with a sigh, “gods know what he loaded on them axles.”

That was so common a piece of sense he all but laughed despite his temper, and his structure of reasoned disaster tumbled down. It was common, it was maddening, and it was very like the old man: he could well imagine Emuin had found last-moment items that must go onto the wagons, no matter what the advice of the drivers; and here they were, he and Emuin, Emuin’s wagons moving far too slowly, the utmost the oxen could pull, and he and Emuin were two fools arguing in the night with the world upheaved and tottering. Emuin had drunk deep of the fine ale, eased his aches, and now he would become oblivious to him and his anxious questions, perhaps to feel a little less foolish and to be in a better humor in the morning.

“I wish we might go faster,” he said to Uwen, the two of them standing on the dark shore. “I wish we were on the other side tonight.”

“It’d ha’ been wet horses and a cold wind for camp tonight.”

That was another piece of common sense: with no enemy to deal with, it was folly to press this hard.

“It’s a notorious place, besides,” Uwen said, “and folk supposes there’s haunts.”

“There are,” he said. “There are, here. But none harmful that I can tell.” Last night he had wished to know that all the doors were secure. Tonight, in the open and the face of shadows, he feared none of them. He felt, rather, safe. They would not assail any man of his. He was sure that this place was safe.

But he was equally sure that something… somethingwanted him on the other side.

“Wind’s cold,” Uwen said, a polite suggestion, he was sure, that he come in out of the dark and sit by a warm fire where Uwen had far rather be.

Two days on the road had proved a determined sheep could amble faster than the heavy wagons could roll. And within any three days lately, it might rain. Or snow.

It was Amefel on the other side of that brook, and the delay of a night was too long.

He walked back to the fire with Uwen, he sat and drank with Uwen and Captain Anwyll, and listened to Anwyll say they were doing very well, very well indeed, considering the roads and the load on the axles. If they were lucky, none of the wagons would break down coming out of the ford. It was a good gravel bottom. The far bank was the question. So was the overcast sky tonight.

He lay under a canvas roof this night, listening to the water of Assurnbrook flowing nearby, and to the snap and crackle of the fire outside, thinking of the last time he had seen this particular camp, and with what hopes and fears he had ridden into Guelessar with Cefwyn, not knowing what Guelenfolk would think of his presence.

He knew now… and feared that he should have stayed in Amefel, although he supposed that without his sojourn in Guelessar he would never have seen the court, and without seeing the court and knowing the northern lords he would have found Cefwyn’s actions puzzling and unreasonable.

But he was coming back, now, like a stone rolling back to the hole it had shaped around itself, others’ intentions not withstanding. He fit, in Amefel, or at least he perceived he might do so, better than anywhere else in his small experience.

And in his strong suspicion, when he moved with that sort of inevitability, that feeling of things settling firmly into a well-shaped place, then it was not chance moving them. He was returning to the place shaped for him. But he had barked his shins on Mauryl’s steps too often not to have learned some lesson, and the lesson he had learned from those steps was to look not always at what drew his eye without being aware of the ground on which he stood.

And that ground, in this case, was his nature as Mauryl’s Shaping… or Summoning. There was a dreadful, a perilous difference… Whether Mauryl had Shaped him of many elements or Summoned him entire, of one dead soul, at one moment, out of prior moments each with their bonds to a certain shape of things.

So to what small pit was necessity taking him? Was it Mauryl’s purpose that was still being satisfied? Or was something else being satisfied?

A wizard’s spells could outlive the wizard, in terms that Men understood. But in another and more disturbing sense, in a knowledge he tried to set far from his ordinary thinking, thenand nowwere not unbreachable walls. It was, in fact, easy to do. It was dangerously easy, for him to do… and Emuin did not seem to have that power.

But if it were done, by him, by another… then things were not safe… were not safe, in ways that he felt, but could not define in simple words. Done was not done. Sealed was not sealed. Dead… was not dead. That was the very least of what Mauryl might have done.

An owl called.

And called again.

Owl, he called back to it, for an unthinking and unguarded moment reaching out into the gray and the surrounding sky. He had never expected Owl in Guelessar, not really. But the crossing at Assurnbrook was another matter altogether, and that sound drew him, welcomed him, though in one part he feared and did not love and yet missed the creature.

Owl?

The sound did not come again. So maybe it was not Owl, only anowl, out hunting for its supper.

The morning came with still wind and cold. At the edge of the firelight, a thin shelf of ice showed along the shallow edge of Assurnbrook. Men huddled close at their small fires, having a little breakfast before the orders came to move. But Tristen walked to the edge of the water and stared off into Amefel with an uneasiness that now would not leave him.