Mauryl had fallen silent, then, and gazed into the fire—a younger Mauryl, he had been, with gray instead of silver about him; and much of gray Mauryl had always been, dealing in powers which he advised his students never to attempt to manage. It will stain the heart, Mauryl had said. Of the soul I do not speak: the corruption of the living foredooms the dead. We are none of us safe.
None of them, in that dreadful hour before the fall of Althalen, had dared breach Mauryl’s inner thought, not knowing for certain, but sensing that Mauryl wandered just then free of the bounds of the room. And true enough, Mauryl had come back to them with a hard face and an iron purpose.
I shall tell you, for the youngest of you, Mauryl said, and laid out for them all an incredible tale, how, journeying to the north, he had brought back the five true Sihhë-lords; how in one night of terror he had brought down the Galasieni and raised up a more potent wizard than Hasufin himself; how Mauryl had, shivering in the heart of the citadel of Galasien, helped the bright towers fall and the people perish, locked within the very stones of Ynefel, Hasufin seeking lives upon lives to increase his magic against the Sihhë-lord who bent his will against him, and Mauryl sealing all the people in the stones of the remaining tower—the Sihhë fortress, after that night: Ynefel.
And long the Sihhë kings had ruled, unnaturally long, as men counted years. After them had come four halfling dynasties still able to keep their power intact, whether by innate Sihhë magic, or by conscious and learned wizardry—until (unnatural and, to a wizard mind, fraught with danger) a Sihhë queen gave birth to a babe that died, and was alive again—a miracle, oh, indeed.
But in such unhingings of natural process more things might come unhinged, and all
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Mauryl’s skill could not pry the queen’s mother-love (another force of fearsome potency) from a child which cast that terrible shadow in the gray. Talented, the queen maintained—and by the age of ten that child, uncatchable and clever, had murdered two of his elder brothers.
He was a spirit more precocious and more cruel thus far in his young years than, Mauryl swore, the last time this spirit had walked the earth. This spirit remembered its skill, and its former choices, and all… all…moral instruction was wasted on it.
Mauryl had opened the doors of the secret chambers, that heart of Althalen in which the Sihhë housed their greatest mystery, and let the Marhanen, lords of the East, loot and burn and kill without mercy those who escaped the wizardly struggle that resulted; Mauryl had simply cared little, one suspected, that the Marhanen seized the opportunity in the opening of those doors and the theft of something the present location of which one feared to surmise.
Mauryl had persuaded the lords of the Elwynim, who had Sihhë blood in their veins at least as much as the last dynasty, not to attack the Marhanen in the persecutions that followed. Mauryl swore to them that he had not utterly betrayed the Sihhë, that a King should come of Sihhë blood and inherent wizardry—a king to whom magic should be as ordinary as breathing, as it had been to the true Sihhë, who were not Men, as Men were nowadays. And that King-to-Come would save his own.
A Man such as he was learned wizardry as best he could. A Man and a young Man beginning in the craft simply did as elder wizards bade him and tried to guard his soul from the consequences.
Now there were no elder wizards—or, rather, and more troubling still, he was eldest. Mauryl was gone and Mauryl sent him—sent him Tristen.
I think, Cefwyn’s last and pleading message to him had said, that our guest is becoming what he will be, and he remains affec-tionate and well-disposed. He repays loyalty 431
with loyalty, and is a moral creature. You bade me win his love, old master, and I greatly fear he has won mine in turn. Is this wise? You ignore my letters. I have the faith of the messenger that you do receive them. Why this silence? I need your presence. I need your counsel. Come to Henas’amef and help me advise this gift Mauryl gave us.
So he came. He had been on his way when that one found him on the road. But it was too late, he began to fear. What Tristen did now, Tristen had chosen to do. He had evaded Tristen so long as he feared Mauryl’s spell was still working in him—hoping for virtue. And now in one terrible day Tristen had learned killing and fled the prospect of meeting with him in the earthly world, where he might affect his heart, and where Men under Cefwyn’s orders or his might lay physical restraint on him.
Tristen had run, whatever his reasons, toward Hasufin’s domain, for that was the nature of Althalen, running as a deer would run when the dogs were baying at its heels.
No. Not a deer. Nothing at all so defenseless as that.
Tristen was doing what was in him to do, whether by Mauryl’s Shaping or that he was moving now beyond Mauryl’s intent and toward—toward something unpredictable. Sihhë were not natural Men. However they had arisen, out of Arachis as rumor among wizards had held, or from whatever source Mauryl had called them, they were not limited to wizardry and could act without learning. The egg, as Cefwyn put it, had indeed begun to hatch, and once that happened, a man such as himself, who had learned his wizardry as an art, not a birthright, could only keep himself as securely anchored to the world as possible.
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C H A P T E R 2 4
T he leg ached, a constant pain that preyed on temper, with occasional sharp pain that brought a cessation of reason, whereby Annas and the pages walked softly about the place.
There had been no sleep. None. After a late, last converse with Efanor, who had gone off to his third-floor rooms, Cefwyn had not so much as gotten out of his clothes in the hours before dawn, when Uwen Lewen’s-son had come hailing his door-guard, reporting a horse gone from the stables and Tristen out the Zeide gate.
If any other man in the Zeide had slipped the gate on any ordinary night, Cefwyn would have concluded the man was off to some merchant’s daughter. If any other lord had taken a horse from the stables he might have concluded that the man was some partisan of Heryn’s, and that his gate guards and the camp sentries that let him pass were fools.
But the guards knew this man as his partisan, Sihhë that he was, and had never questioned, never questioned Tristen’s right to take a horse from the stables or to ride out two guarded gates in succession, because Tristen wore the King’s own cloak and was known throughout the town to have the King’s friendship.
If it had lacked any help in the calamity, Tristen had worn a new riding-coat which had the Tower and the Star on it, plain as plain for any gate-guard who failed to know the Sihhë and any Amefin who would for the blink of an eye think of arguing with him.
And because, he had to admit it, he had abandoned Tristen downstairs to the care of a rank of guard that had never received the cautions the guards in the royal residences had had regarding Tristen—with Uwen dismissed upstairs, and on a night of driving rain and turn-of-season cold that had persuaded sentries at two gates to keep their noses inside
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gate-houses and under canvas—no one had asked the right questions, no one had challenged him, and no one had advised Captain Kerdin, who alone might have raised an objection.
If there was wizardry in Tristen it must be the sort to rob sane, preoccupied men of their better sense, and to convince otherwise sensible and experienced gate-guards that here was the most innocent urgency they had ever met—on the King’s business at that. If he had ordered Tristen’s escape himself, he could not have found more plausible stories than the various guards had raised in their defense, and he could only hope that Marhanen cloak did not prove a source of danger in a countryside where armed soldiers on the King’s business went in bands for safety.
That was the kind of law Heryn Aswydd had kept in his province, and peace was fragile most of all with Heryn Aswydd’s corpse and six others hanging at his own south gate and no lord at all in power over the Amefin.
Meanwhile Uwen Lewen’s-son, on little sleep and in an agony of failed responsibility, had taken to the road on one of Cevulir
n’s better mounts with a captain and an élite fifty of Cevulirn’s light cavalry in search of Tristen. And thank the gods, the lower town guards, damnably lax in other points, swore convincingly that Tristen had left specific word that Ynefel was not his destination.
So where did Tristen know to go in the world, if not to Ynefel?
There was Emuin, for one, and in a contrary direction from all the others. The best information they had said that he had gone west, and that only left Althalen, Emwy, and Elwynor, a pretty choice of troubles.
Ask whether lying and evasion were, like swordsmanship and horsemanship, two more lordly arts Tristen had unfolded from his store of amazements. Not that it surmounted the shocking ills of treason and regicide and the consequences that Tristen had seen around him in the last two days, but it was disturbing, all the same, that Tristen had committed such acts so masterfully and so successfully.
And his own restless staring out the window this morning after such events, for a view of, above the wall and the 434
surrounding roofs, gray-bottomed clouds which at least were showing blue sky between, did nothing to ease the ache in his leg or the impatience he felt. He wanted to reach Tristen himself, to have a word with him apart from the officers and the allies, to know what reasoning had prompted Tristen to have left—and to ask what Tristen believed he might do, given what little Tristen knew of the attack against him or the doings up by Althalen.
He paced, bereft of further information on which to decide anything. He leaned on a stick which he refused to use before outsiders, and it had already made his hand sore and did nothing to mend either the pain in his leg or his ill temper. Walking hurt; it was a different hurt from the throb of the limb while he sat, and that was the variance an ill-humored fate gave him on the first day of his reign over a divided realm, a dukeless province, and a pious brother he had as lief, if Efanor crossed him this morning, drown in the nearest deep well.
“Go back to bed,” Idrys said first, when Idrys decided to report in, red-eyed and dusty.
He did not answer Idrys. He was not in a humor to be chided to bed and he was not in a humor to be told, as he could guess by Idrys’ face, that there was no better news in the search after Tristen.
“I take it there is no news of him,” Idrys said.
“I do not have to tell the Lord Commander. You know there isn’t.”
“Lewen’s-son won’t give up. I have every confidence.”
“Would that I had.”
“Would Your Majesty care for other news?”
“Is it better?”
“I have searched for this name Hasufin,” said Idrys. “For some few hours. I have made brief inquiries of the annalists and the archivists, rousing them from their beds, and I and my most reliable clerks have run through, in short, the Zeide archives, the local Quinalt library…and the Guard records. Then with notes in hand, and with a fair familiarity with the Red Chronicle of Guelen record, I visited the Bryaltines,
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reckoning the Amefin’s local breed of priests might recall items our godly and proper Guelenish Quinalt has forgotten. And, m’lord King, as you may see, I did my own searching.” Idrys brushed at his doublet in distaste. “I am coated in age and cobwebs.”
“And gained something? Damn it, get to the point.”
“There are Hasufins woven through the warp and weft of the genealogies I plumbed—including, in the Bryalt Book of Kings, one Hasufin, called Heltain, a wizard, rumored as some sort of spiritual antecedent, or, indeed, namesake, of Aswyn, the fourteen-year-old brother of Elfwyn Sihhë of the Guelen Red Chronicle, which, let us recall, our guest had in his hands.”
“And had no time to read. If you believe he made up this tale—”
“By no means. I merely point out he has an interest in the old accounts himself, and one wonders for what he was searching.”
“To the point, crow!”
“I’m arriving just now. And I confess I was surprised to see Hasufin as a name of such surprising persistence in the Bryalt accounts—even back hundreds of years. As, let me say, I found several Mauryls of various repute before the records go back into the old Galasite tongue—for which, m’lord, you must obtain a priest. There are Bryaltine clerks who claim to read that language fluently, but without your orders I declined their assistance. It would have necessitated questions and names named which I did not judge you wished made a matter of gossip.”
“The hell with the Bryaltines. Tristen. Is there anything naming him, while you were about it?”
Idrys heaved a sigh, then, leaned on the back of a chair and ducked his head a moment, evidently gathering patience to deal with an impatient and very short-tempered lord; and Cefwyn repented his curt tone. Idrys had been as sleepless as he.
“No, my lord King,” Idrys said. “I found Triaults, Trisaullyns, Trismindens, and Trisinomes, all married into 436
four Sihhë dynasties, but not a single Tristen under any spelling, in any age, in any chronicle, although I certainly do not claim to have made any exhaustive search in my few hours. I would say the old man plucked his Shaping’s name from his own fancy—or out of Galasien’s long history. Who can know? In any case, I no longer think Elfwyn is at issue. I fear Mauryl sent us a soul far less gentle.”
“Yet this Hasufin supposedly at Ynefel is one certain name we do have in this business. You can remember accounts I can’t. I wasn’t born until Father and Grandfather were speaking to each other only through the Lord Chamberlain. If they weren’t shouting. I had nothing of the gossip after the event. What are you looking for?”
“If,” Idrys said, “if the Hasufin of our Sihhë’s mysterious dream is indeed at Ynefel, those records we cannot possibly find without a perilous venture to Ynefel itself, where Lord Tristen swore—reliably, let us hope—he was not going. But the matter that set me so urgently searching last night—the name Hasufin has the ring of Amefel about it, and, it turns out, by the Bryalt record, it might even be a kinship name for one of the Sihhë of Althalen, though I am hard put to know how a dead prince signifies, or how he could overwhelm Mauryl. But—to confound matters further, the name turns out to be as prevalent as Mauryl’s in the Bryaltine records—which I must say are anecdotal and fragmentary—but,” Idrys said in some satisfaction, “many of that name are reputed to be wizards, all supposedly descended of a very early Hasufin Heltain who studied with someone, yes, my lord King, someone named Mauryl, reputedly in a district which the Bryaltine record called Meliseriedd—a name I’ve never heard attached to it, but I hazard a guess the district it describes is Elwynor. At least it lay to the north of the river. In delving into civil records the one wisdom I have learned is to join no names into one name until I see proof.”
“But it is well possible that our Mauryl is all one Mauryl. So is it not possible that this Hasufin Heltain is one man?”
“A far leap, Your Majesty. I still refuse to make it, or to 437
attribute anything to a name I cannot otherwise put shape to.
So to speak.”
He ignored Idrys’ wry humor. “Yet the name is in the Sihhë
line. That proves some connection to my grandfather, to Mauryl, to Ynefel, and to Tristen.”
“Suggests a connection, my lord King. Which might mislead us. All those things are possible. But none are proved.”
“Still,—”
“Worth inquiry.”
“Prince Aswyn called Hasufin in the Bryaltine book. Was there possibly also another still-living Hasufin when Althalen fell? A namesake uncle? A cousin of the same name? Or was this Aswyn?”
“I looked for all manner of references. One must know, m’lord King, the records, particularly the early ones, are all anecdotal, nothing of a chronicle in the way of the Guelen book, just the notation that a wizard named Mauryl did this or that, a wizard named Mauryl lifted a cattle-curse at Jorysal in a certain year. A wizard named Hasufin was supposedly associated with the Mauryl who may or may not be the same Mauryl as ours. The trouble
is, there are Hasufins aplenty associated with the district for as far back as the records go. And Aswyns. Four at least.
Elfwyn’s youngest—not younger, but youngest—brother, the Book of Kings reports as stillborn. And then the same book turns up an Aswyn as brother to Elfwyn with no mention of the still-birth—typical of the records-keeping.”
Cefwyn leaned heavily on his stick, sank into the nearest chair, and adjusted his leg before him, deciding that this would not be a simple report. “And the lad who died at fourteen?”
“According to the Red Chronicle, which we know, Mauryl’s partisans killed the fourteen-year-old younger brother of Elfwyn king, during your grandfather’s attack. According to the Bryaltine record, the Amefin record, mind you, yes, the one Prince Aswyn died at birth, and turns up in further records as living. Then in that record—the Bryalt one, mark you, m’lord, he has the surname or gift-name Aswyn
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Hasufin. But no further mention for good and all does the record make of him between two and seven—if it is the same Aswyn and not a third. Two brothers of Elfwyn died by accidents. We do not have their names, though I remotely remember hearing in my youth of one called Hafwys or something of the like.
Possibly Hasufin—who knows? I was not born either when Althalen went down.”
“Fevers. Childhood mishaps. In a house reputed for wizardry—one would expect, would one not, fewer fevers and fewer fatal mishaps?”
“There was mention of vows made by the Sihhë king for the life of that infant, some sort of offense to the Galasite pantheon, some hint of an unholy bargain with the gods, the usual sort of thing—but this is a Bryalt record that talks about divine judgment.” Idrys was not a superstitious man. It had the flavor of irony. “From the Bryalt—they might know. The Sihhë king was unlucky in the rest of his reign, at least, lost two sons and died, which brought Elfwyn to the throne within a span of—perhaps fourteen years. That much is not coincidence. And, it seems, even in a royal household, chroniclers grow careless and namesakes confound the record—I’ve searched archives before, on various accounts, and, understand, I find this confusion nothing unusual, Majesty. An entry goes in, no one records the death.