But when he was not present, Tarien did speak. She was impatient and full of tempers and storms, so the servants swore…so the midwife Gran Sedlyn swore, in the one report he had had directly from her lips: the old woman, Paisi’s gran, white-haired and portly, reported most to Emuin, and came and went without fuss.
But Gran Sedlyn hung trinkets about the Aswydds’ door: that he saw, and found some foreign virtue in them. He did not oppose them, seeing they strengthened, rather than weakened, the wards, by however little. The sight of them reassured the guards who stood by that door, as his invisible wards did not, and he wished those wards stronger than they were.
And still the weather stayed bitter cold, spitting snow until the drifts piled deep, and the wind howled about the eaves of the fortress at night, rattling shutters and prying at every edge and nook and cranny.
That, he most distrusted. Unlike Ynefel, which had creaked and complained at the wind’s assault, the Zeide stood strong and resistant, but he heard the wind’s attempts at the roof slates and in his rare dreams he heard it prowling about, looking for weaknesses. It grew bold, and he knew Orien wished counter to his wishes.
For the first time in his memory, he counted days…for the letters, his and Aeself’s, would just be arriving.
In the same number of days, the southern army was ready and past ready to move, awaiting only the break in the weather that as yet his wishes could not gain them.
In the same set of days, the child was approaching birth—soon, now, the midwife said.
Crissand declared he brooded too much, and urged him to go riding…though Crissand himself was busy now with the army, with his lands, with his men, and had no dearth of things to occupy him: and dared he ride out, himself, and leave Orien unguarded in the way that only he and Emuin could watch her?
That was foolishness indeed.
So he waited. And he fed the pigeons.
Until the day when Paisi came to interrupt his breakfast, and to beg his presence in the tower—“As master wishes to speak wi’ Your Grace,” Paisi said with a bow, gasping for breath the while. The boy rarely walked anywhere, but this was uncommon haste.
“I’ll come immediately.” And to Uwen who sat at breakfast with him: “No need. I’ll take the guard. Feed the pigeons, will you? They expect it.”
“Aye,” Uwen promised him, and would, as he did, some mornings—indeed, all through the town, so the rumor came to him, the townsfolk had taken to feeding them—for luck, they said, calling them the lord’s birds. There was certainly no starvation on his windowsill, but they had their rights.
Even on a day when Emuin might have an answer for him.
He threw on his cloak in the chance that Master Emuin had had the shutters thrown wide and hurried on Paisi’s heels, following Paisi’s quick steps until his own breaths came hard, to what he hoped was the news Emuin had been looking for all these days.
The tower was warm, ablaze with light from all the sconces and from the fire. The table was even in moderate order, the parchments stacked, the inkpots capped.
“Master Emuin?” Tristen said, and unfastened the cloak.
“A date,” Emuin said in triumph, and laid a chart atop the other charts, beginning at once to talk to him about the measuring of the heavens, and the calculations of the moon and its motions and the planets’ travels through the Great Year.
It was doubtless the proof—useless words, at least to his understanding of it, but he saw that Emuin had arrived at his answer, and he dutifully observed what Emuin showed him, a crooked finger tracing the results on parchment.
“This is the reckoning of the year past,” Emuin said, “and here’s the hour of Lewenbrook, and here is the day, the very day I’ll wager Aséyneddin looked to provoke his battle—I had not reckoned this, well, well, lying senseless at the time. But this is the day he would have wanted. But Cefwyn roused his troops out and came for him before things were advantageous to Aséyneddin.—And here’s the hour Hasufin would have chosen on the day the battle did take place: noon, the very exactitude of noon; but noon he did not have, because Cefwyn pressed him…and you did, gods, yes, you did, having a sense about such things, and never needing ink and pen.”
“It was Cefwyn who led,” Tristen said. “Cefwyn who chose the time.”
Emuin blinked at him. “But you agreed, did you not? You were there. You urged him forward.”
“I went with him, like his soldiers.”
“To Aséyneddin’s ruin.” Emuin seemed a little put out by his dismissal of any part he had had in choosing the hour of the battle—but truthfully, Tristen thought, it seemed to him that all of them had rushed toward it. Even the horses had taken a fever for battle, pace quickening until the thunder rolled through the earth.
Had he guided the hour? Had he wished the horses faster and faster on that morning? Had he willed axles not to break on days before and all that army hastened into each day’s gain of ground?
It appalled him if he had done so, not knowing: he thought not.
But if not he, then who?
Emuin’s finger traveled back and back through the spidery notes. “Here, the night of your arrival in Henas’amef; I had it from the guard records—my memory I thought was exact, but this has the very hour, as they marked it against the glass. And here, the date of a gift of mine to the Bryaltine shrine…they write down such things. Still not precise. The guard is never precise, and the Bryalt abbot has been known to err, but on this matter, I think not, and not both of them together. ’Twill serve. ’Twill serve. This was the hour.”
“Of my coming here?”
“Why should it matter? Why should it matter, you ask? Because that hour was momentous for your presence, young lord, but not only that. Not only that! In that hour, in that selfsame hour, was this babe’s conception. I have my sources among the maids…not the moment, alas! but at least a time within three hours.”
“That night?”
“Before Cefwyn came down the stairs to answer my summons, and would I’d given it earlier—or perhaps I would not.” Emuin gave a wave of his hand much as if he brushed away a gnat. “We never can guess what might have been. What is, is, and that’s what we know. What will be is a fine pursuit, but fraught with too damned many possibilities. Fortune-telling, I tell you, is not what it’s surmised to be. But here the child was conceived, in the very room where he’ll be born—dare you call that placement utter coincidence, eh?”
“It’s a fine room. It was vacant.”
“Ah, yes. Of course. Perfectly ordinary. Damn, but these things fit together! Nothing out of the way at all. And on this day, and on this hour…” Emuin showed him the intersection of a half a score arcs and lines, and suddenly shuffled to another parchment. “This was the hour of your birth, do you see? This was Mauryl’s best moment, as I reckon it, the new moon, the moon of beginnings! It was the earliest moon of spring, and I think near Mauryl’s own moment: the hour of his own birth, perhaps, however long ago, or the hour when he had most to hope for success of his enterprise. This, above all others, was your hour to come back into the world…so this day may have been yours already, a natal day, a day of accession, of some auspicious moment in the life you had once. It was your point of correspondence to him, do you see? And no accident that that was so! Hence, your power in this venture! On that, Mauryl relied—as he did in our venture at Althalen, that night, that bloody night.” Emuin’s hand trembled, and moved on among the arcs and bird-track scribing. “There, there, was Hasufin’s last death, the realm’s rise; your birth; perhaps Mauryl’s, all the same day! do you see? And if Hasufin had lived this long, to see this year of Years—” Again Emuin’s hand moved, to the end of the chart. “—at this hour, that midnight of Midwinter Eve, he would have worked a Working to bind the next age. He failed!”
“Did we?”
Emuin looked distraught, as if that had been the wrong question. “What do you expect of me? I’m a wizard, not born to magic!”
“Forgive me.”
“But you set your seal on this age. You. Yourself. You’re still here.” Emuin searched amid the stack of parchments, discarding one and the other in increasing frustration, until he had disordered all of it. Then: “Aha! This. This is your answer, young lord. This is your new age. This, this day is where we are now. And that babe—that babe of Tarien’s—is on both charts, one for his conception, one for his birth. Follow this arc.”
Tristen observed, such as he could, the arcane notes. They were all measures of risings and settings.
“And this is your Day in this new cycle of years, this is your beginning—” Emuin’s gnarled finger traveled to an intersection. “And we have a babe about to be born. Tell me what you think the hour will be.”
Tristen moved his finger toward the intersection of lines Emuin said was his own, and hesitated, for there was a double set of lines—ominously so, to his unlettered perception. He stared at that coincidence of lines, with not a notion in the world what the numbers signified, or which was which, but all that was within him telling him there was something to fear here.
“Just so,” Emuin said, and so stood back from the charts—cast a measuring rod down atop them as if they had become negligible to all further reckonings. “Just so. One for midnight, one for dawn. And to that end I’ve asked Gran Sedlyn to reckon very carefully and keep me advised down to the hour of her estimations, never forgetting wizardry’s in question here. Wish, young lord! Wish the world to your own measure. Wish the babe for any hour but midnight and any day of the year but Hasufin’s. Wish the heavens to speed the spring and melt the snow so we can be done with this wretched war. Wish a speedy delivery of this child by daylight. And wish Cefwyn well, when you do all these things.”
“I do,” he said fervently. “Above all, I do that.”
CHAPTER 2
The storm wind came in the night and howled around the eaves and rattled shutters, a new wind, from a different direction, and singing with a different sound, on this, the night before the anniversary of his first night in the world. Tristen sat up in bed and listened, feeling no threat in it, hearing no ominous voice in it, only the banging of a shutter somewhere distant.
Thunder cracked.
That, he thought, sounded more like rain than snow, and he rose from bed, flung on a robe, and went out to the heart of his apartments, already feeling the air warmer than the bone-deep chill of recent days.
Lightning flared in the seam of the draperies before he touched them. He parted them, and with a loud boom of thunder, light blazed down the clear sides of the windows, lit the Aswydd heraldry in colored glass in the center of the window and flashed repeatedly, bringing the dragons within it to fitful life, casting shadows about the room.
Rain spattered the panes, spotting the colored glass, glistening beads on the clear side panes. Lightning lit the adjacent roofs, and the rain came down hard. Droplets, lightning-lit, crawled down the glass.
In the same way rain had come to Ynefel and made crooked trails over the horn panes of his small window.
So the thunder had walked above Ynefel’s broken roofs, and the trees outside the walls had sighed with hundreds of voices. Balconies had creaked and beams had moved. Shadows ran along the seams of the stones.
But there in Ynefel he had not known Uwen’s presence…as now there was approaching behind his back a very sleepy Uwen, drawn by the sound of the storm, stumbling faithfully from his bed. Emuin, too, was awake at this recasting of the weather, and Paisi had waked, as Tarien and Orien had, as all through the fortress and the town and the camps sleepers waked to the wind and the rain and the thunder that heralded another turn in the fickle, wizard-driven weather.
Uwen came, blanket-cloaked, past the shadows of brazen dragons the lightning made lively with repeated flashes as Tristen looked back at him. Uwen had his hair loose: he raked at it, but achieved little better. In outline he looked like Emuin at his untidiest.
“South wind,” Uwen said, and so it was. “It don’t sound that cold.”
“It doesn’t feel cold,” Tristen said, turning to put his hand on the glass. As he had gone to bed, frost had patterned the panes. Now these meandering streams of water cast crooked shadows against the lightning.
A prodigious crack of thunder made him jump.
—Rain on the horn-paned window. A hole in the roof of the loft.
—A hole in the Quinaltine roof. Fatal anger of the barons, a threat to Cefwyn that did not go away.
“Oh, ’at were a good ’un,” Uwen said. “This is a warmin’ rain, this is.”
Spring was back. He had gained it once and now gained it back again, as if all influence to the contrary had waned and on this night he reached his ascendancy.
He had all but come full circle now, past sunset and into the night. Morning would bring the anniversary of his beginning, the evening hours, the precise hour of his own origin, likely at sundown.
Tomorrow night, Emuin had said, the birth of Tarien’s child would be most portentous…and now the weather turned.
He listened for disturbance in the gray space, but Tarien’s child slept quietly in his mother’s womb this stormy night—a week and more away from entering the world, so Gran Sedlyn insisted. It might not, then, happen tomorrow, on that date Emuin called portentous: there were no signs of it happening, and Tarien’s time Tristen understood could not be rushed, even by wizardry: the babe was as the babe was, and at the moment it seemed quiet.
So the Zeide, too, rested quietly, anxious as these days were for him.
One more day before the dreaded day.
He had feared the day of his birth as long ago as this fall, wondering would the wizardry that had brought him forth from the dark give him yet another year. When he had feared that, he had had no imagining even of winter and all it might bring. Now for all his dread, he was indeed approaching that point, and, lo! the weather turned back again in his favor. After holding the land by fitful bursts of bitter cold, after his wishing day after day for the spring to come, lo! the skies turned violent and rainy as they had been in his first memories: full circle, and tomorrow he would truly be able to say, offhandedly, oh, it was thus last year, like any ordinary Man.
“’Twill wash the snow away before morning,” he said.
“If it don’t turn all to ice again,” Uwen said, “as it did. If old North Wind wins the contest one more time an’ comes back in force, there’ll be slippin’ and slidin’ from here to the river.”
Let the rain for good and all erase the snow, Tristen wished, passing his hand across the colored glass panes, and this time feeling power leap to his will.
Let the spring come, he said to himself. Winter had had its day and more. It was time for that season of rain and leaves whispering and roaring in the storm.
It was time for the tracery of water on windows and the crack of thunder in the night.
It was time again for the sheer beauty of a green leaf stuck to gray stone, and the terror of Mauryl’s staff, like thunder, crack! against the pavings.
He had forgotten his clothes that day, and Mauryl had chided him, patiently, always patiently and with a faint sense of grief and disappointment that had stung so keenly then. It still did.
He had remembered a robe tonight—but his heart yearned toward the outside and the rain and the memory of chill water on his skin, and Mauryl’s cloak after, and the fire at Ynefel. If he failed there, Mauryl would forgive him, wrap him in warmth, make all things right.
If he failed here, in his war for Cefwyn’s lady, there was no mercy.
He would have come full circle tomorrow evening, but Mauryl would not come back. Had not Uwen told him—that men did not do over the things they had done, but that the seasons did?
So there was both change and sameness, there was progress and endless circles. The Great Year and the Year of Years themselves produced the same result: Men changed; Men died; babes were born, and grew; and died; the seasons varied little.
Thunder rattled the lea
ded windows, fit to shake the stones.
Owl called.
And elsewhere and to the west a wizardling babe waked, and moved in startlement, heart leaping.
Then pain began, an alarming pain, a sense of sliding inevitability—and change that could not be called back.
Tristen rested his hands on the marble beneath the window, dreaded the thunder he felt imminent, and winced to its rapid crack, feeling it through all his bones at once.
“M’lord?” Uwen said, seizing his arm.
He had felt pain before. This was different. This, this was the pain of a babe attempting to be born in haste, by wizardry.
This was the fear of a woman distraught and alarmed, a woman who well knew the risks.
He heard a voice urging, Let it be now, let it be now.
Now was not the time Orien would choose. But the voice continued relentlessly, striving to coax the babe into the world, urging the mother to join her efforts.
—Master Emuin, he called out into the gray space.
Emuin was there, aware and alarmed.
—She’s trying to force it, Emuin said. She must not. It must not, young lord.
—It’s too early.
—In every way. It wants not to come at all. She begins now to ensure the day of the calendar at least. No—damn! Midnight! She strives for midnight! And she must not succeed. Make it quiet! Hush! Be still!
He had no idea how to calm the babe and the mother, while the thunder cracked and the winds of chance and wizardry roared.
In the gray space Orien’s voice urged haste, urged the babe toward birth, and the pain began, stealing his breath.
“Tassand!”
Uwen called for help, thinking him ill, but he drew in a great breath and willed Tarien still, asleep, if nothing else, and the babe to be well.
He was aware of Orien shaking Tarien’s shoulder, encouraging her.
Then she perceived him, and the anger that swept through the gray place was potent as the storm above the roof. Defiance met him. And pain, Tarien’s pain…that came.