So, well, what had a lord to do, who had only three subjects?
He could let the snow carry his thoughts to his neighbors across the river, beyond Marna Wood. He could stand here, missing old friends today, with his face turned toward the gates that so rarely opened to visitors. He knew a few things that passed in the land, but not many. He knew that Cefwyn queried him; he answered as best he knew, but he thought less and less about the world outside the walls, beyond the forest. He wondered sometimes, and if he wondered, he could know, but he rarely followed more than the thread of Cefwyn’s occasional conversation with him, a warm, friendly voice. He was reluctant, otherwise, to cast far about, having no wish to trouble old and settled things in the land. Occasionally, in summers, he entertained visitors, but lately only two, Sovrag and Cevulirn, who came as they pleased, usually toward the fading of the season. Emuin—Emuin, he greatly missed. Emuin had used to visit, but Emuin had ceased to come, and drew a curtain over himself. Whether his old mentor was alive or dead remained somewhat uncertain to Tristen—though he was never sure that death meant the same thing to Emuin as to other Men.
Uwen traveled as far as Henas’amef from time to time, with Cook’s boy. Uwen reported that Lord Crissand fared quite well in his lands, and from Crissand Uwen gathered news from the capital of Guelemara, where Cefwyn ruled. The queen had had a daughter this fall, so Uwen reported, and that family was happy. It was good to hear.
He longed to see the baby. He so greatly longed to see Cefwyn… to be in hall when the ale flowed and the lords gathered in fine clothes, to celebrate the return of spring—he might go if he chose.
But it was not wise. It was not, in these days, wise. He had fought the king’s war. He had settled the peace.
He had been a dragon.
He could not forget that, and in that memory, he stayed to his ancient keep, hoped for the years to settle what had been unsettled in those years, and let his friends live in peace.
SNOW FELL THICKLY ON GUELEMARA, GRAY CLOUDS SHEETING ALL THE HEAVENS and snow already lay ankle deep in the yard, but the threatening weather had not brought quiet to the courtyard. His Royal Highness Efanor, Prince but no longer heir of Ylesuin, tried manfully to concentrate on his letters, while young lords laid on with thump and clangor below the windows, shouting challenges at one another and laughing. Efanor penned delicate and restrained adjurations to two jealous and small-minded priests of the Quinaltine, while sword rang against sword—fit accompaniment to such a letter, in Efanor’s opinion.
The clergy was in another stew, a matter of a chapel’s income and costs, a niggling charge of error in dogma on the one hand and finance on the other hand—when, among priests, was it not?—and ambition in another man: the latter was, in His Royal Highness’s opinion, the real crux of the matter.
Bang and clang. Pigeons flew up from off the roof in a wild flurry of wings past the window, and Efanor calmly sanded the ink on his second letter, tipped wax onto the paper, and sealed it.
Pigeons settled, fluttering and arranging their feathers. Efanor rose from his chair and walked toward that diamond-paned window—another storm of wings, wheeling away toward the Quinaltine roof, not so far across the processional way.
He had a view of the courtyard from here. And it was not just any two lords’ sons battering at each other below. It was Cefwyn’s sons, his nephews, neither beyond sixteen years. It was a game. It was high spirits. Metal flashed in gray light, and the snow that had already fallen was trampled in a wide circle, the pale stone walls of the Guelesfort echoing with mock battle.
So he and Cefwyn had used to do, in the days when their father Ináreddrin was king.
He still had his skill with the sword. He opted now for a gray goose quill, in battles more constant and with less-defined outcomes.
His brother the king had invited his other son, his illegitimate son, to Guelemara, to spend the holidays. It was not what he would have advised the king to do. But his brother had planned it, planned it for too many years to think now whether this was the right year. The boy was growing up. It was this year, perhaps, or forever too late. Were not the court’s controversies full of brothers who found things to divide them?
Too much had divided these two. Yet they found a way to be friends.
Gods protect them, Efanor thought.
SNOW CAME DOWN, AS KING CEFWYN STOOD ON THE BALCONY OF HIS bedchamber, watching two boys at arms practice in the yard, boys on the verge of becoming men.
Elfwyn was the elder, nicknamed various things, but his caretaker, in the distant countryside of Amefel, had called him Otter, that being a safer name than the one his mother had given him. So Otter he had been for all his life, and the name well fitted him: a dark, quick boy, wary and wild, as free and merry as an otter in a brook: Cefwyn had seen all that before the boy had ever crossed the river or taken up residence under his roof—much as he had restrained himself from loving this boy, his firstborn son. The eyes alone should be a caution—gray as the distant sea, and quick, and denying everyone a direct stare. It was too early to know what he would do in the world or what paths these two young men would take in their lives.
But today, in the snow, in the blurring of distant lines and the changing of the landscape below this window—Cefwyn found himself moved to hope that bringing the boy to Guelemara was a good idea, that Otter’s was a wild heart, but a good one, overall.
His son, now, his legitimate son and heir—Aewyn, a few months the younger—was very much the Marhanen prince: sturdy, blond, and blue-eyed as Guelenfolk ought to be—and where his queen had found such a head of hair in her dark northern ancestry was a wonder: it curled, it bounced, it refused confinement, much like its owner.
Who would have thought it so apt a brotherhood, the slim dark, wily brother, and the sunny, headlong one? Aewyn could overpower his elder brother by sheer strength—but first he had to lay hands on him.
Brothers they had been, partners in mischief from their first meeting. The boys had found each other, in fact, with no one quite ready for it to happen. Ceremonial occasions, the annual visits to the duchy of Amefel, had regularly brought Cefwyn past a certain tiny farm on the roadside, just at the outskirts of Amefel’s capital of Henas’amef. He had paused there, every year that he took this trip, for a dipper of water from the well. Every year he talked to the old woman who held that farm, just to be sure things were still as peaceful as he had left them.
Came the year Aewyn had gotten on his pony and ridden with him, his first long ride out from Guelessar to Amefel, to show himself to the people he would someday rule.
And on the very first visit on which Aewyn had gone with him, Aewyn being barely six—he had spied the dark-haired lad by the shed, the lad by the shed had spied him, and Aewyn, no one quite noticing, had slid down from his pony and escaped through the fence to make his own visit. Otter had been shy and retreating, Aewyn quite bent on his acquaintance.
Every year after that, whenever the royal procession had stopped at Gran’s little farm, Otter had been quick to appear, and Aewyn had been just as quick to get down and renew acquaintances—so eager for that, that the festivities of the Amefin court, the presents and the sweets, proved far less allure to Aewyn than the annual meeting with the boy on the farm. The annual stop at Gran’s place therefore extended itself into half an hour, and an hour— became long enough for the guard to dismount, water their horses, and take a cup of cider; became long enough for a king and a hedge-witch to share a mug of country ale and discuss affairs of curious range, since he had found that the old woman could give him more sense of local events in half an hour than a meeting of the town ealdormen in half a day. The boys had played together at tag, gathered eggs, milked goats—certainly things the Crown Prince never would have done under ordinary circumstances. In earliest days Aewyn had sulked at being set back on his pony, and Otter, in Cefwyn’s keenest memory, had stood silent, grave, and equally unhappy in Gran’s rustic goat yard, watching their departure. Otter had darted one keen glance at him, that first year, a dark, wing-browed glance that had haunted him for miles, it was so like his mother’s.