Last fall, leaving the goats and geese, both boys had vanished for far too long—to be discovered far down by the brook, by Gran’s craft and her boy Paisi’s knowledge of Otter’s habits.
Aewyn, unrepentant at the guardsmen’s discomfiture, unabashed to have had the king of Ylesuin wading the brook to retrieve him, had declared he had just invited his brother to come to Guelessar and live with them.
Had the king of Ylesuin quite planned it that way? No. But from the beginning, from Otter’s birth, Cefwyn had had advisement not to make this bastard son Aewyn’s natural enemy—or his own. And he had intended to have Aewyn come down to rustic Amefel to pass a summer, perhaps before he was old enough to get into a man’s kind of mischief in the town.
Perhaps, he had mused on the way home, friendship between the boys had been very good advice, far wiser than trying to conceal one from the other or keep them apart. He already knew power was at issue, not just Gran’s hedge-witchery, but the craft of the woman he had been fool enough to get a son on—the woman kept prisoner all these years in Henas’amef, because there was nowhere else safe to put Tarien Aswydd, and because the old woman at the farm and the lord of Amefel himself and the lord of Ynefel, who was not too far removed, beyond Marna Wood, all were in a position to watch her continually and prevent her from mischief.
Wizardry had always been at issue, in the boy’s getting and in his life. And where wizard-work or worse was at issue, items found ways to reposition themselves, to walk on two feet to where they needed to be, to someone’s fortune or misfortune.
Best know where this one was, at all times. Very wise advice had told him that at the same time he had locked the mother away.
Even the queen his wife, Ninévrisë, had told him the same, when he had told her what Aewyn had promised. At summer’s end she had just given him another child—one Aewyn had so hoped would be a brother, and predicted would be, against all Ninévrisë’s advisement to the contrary. Aewyn had, just after his ride south this summer, gained a little sister, Aemaryen. The birth was a great relief to the people of Ylesuin, who had wanted an heir to be Regent of Elwynor after Ninévrisë—treaty had sworn that the next child of their union would rule that adjacent kingdom, which Ninévrisë now ruled. And if it had been a disappointment to the Elwynim to have a girl born, it had also been a quiet disappointment to a fifteen-year-old prince, who had so earnestly counted on a brother.
The consequence had been foreseeable: Aewyn, a loving, loyal brother to his little sister, had nevertheless fallen off his food, pushed items about on his plate, and sighed a great deal, staring out the windows to the west and south, never once mentioning Otter.
If the baby had been another boy, a prince, Cefwyn thought, he might have had second thoughts about bringing Otter here. But it had been a princess, and he had been entrapped. Aewyn had written him a formal letter, in his own untidy hand, requesting formal audience, and had come into that audience with a written list of reasons why Otter would be no trouble at all in the household, where Otter might live, in an unused apartment down the hall, and how if he had a brother, he would apply himself to his lessons again and forever after.
Well, what could a father say? He had not forced Aewyn to reach the desperate bottom of his list.
And clearly his son suffered from want of companionship. Aewyn had not gotten on as well as he might with certain nobles’ sons—their backbiting of one another and their politicking were not engaging traits, and Cefwyn did not force that society. Otter perhaps had enjoyed a certain gloss in Aewyn’s memory because he was distant, and forbidden. But a father could well understand the situation of a prince—gods, indeed, he knew the taste of solitude and endless lessons and long court sessions. He knew the other side of such matters, too: his father had praised Efanor’s accomplishments extravagantly and driven his elder son to low company and bad behavior with those same bickering lordlings. Without those bad habits he himself had gained, being determined to spite his own father, there would have been no royal bastard to worry this generation, that was the plain truth of matters. So he knew well how a boy’s misery could turn to bad behavior and very foolish actions.
He had already been quite understanding in the matter of tutors; he had given Aewyn every gift, every understanding; he had excused him from lengthy sessions; he had taken him hither and yon about the countryside, and let him milk goats and gather eggs, because he saw value in it. He was already far too open-handed, his father would have told him, far too ready to give the Prince what he wanted.
But the desperation in Aewyn was clear. The promise had been made to the other boy, even if he had intended otherwise. The solution was one he had already leaned toward and dithered over—which was clearly why Aewyn had taken the notion he was leaning toward it. So he had found himself saying, “Perhaps this winter,” and receiving a wild hug that sealed the bargain and became agreement before he had quite thought the realities of the matter to conclusion… a bastard son living down the hall from his proper son, subject to all the jealous stares and gossip the lordlings his son so despised could muster.
Otter, at least, was well aware of his unfortunate connections and his difficulties. He was not baseborn; oh, not in the least—his mother, Lady Tarien Aswydd, imprisoned for life by her remote cousin, Lord Crissand—was alive, like Otter, because those had been Tristen’s orders, before the army had come back to Henas’amef. Let her live, Tristen had said, when others said differently. But Tristen had also said, by no means give her the child.
Tristen’s advice had been law in Amefel. It was also advice Cefwyn took, above all other.
And although Cefwyn had had no stomach for hanging a woman who’d been his mistress, and none at all for doing away with the helpless infant, circumstances had given him no choice but to have that child brought up almost within sight of Tarien’s prison. Again at Tristen’s word, he had had him brought up by a hedge-witch who would spot sorcery if it reared its head in the boy and who might educate him in needful ways.
The boy had the Aswydd look. The gray eyes very certainly couldn’t have come from the Marhanen side of the bed: eyes gray as old ice, in a face dark of complexion, dark-browed and dark-lashed. He was a handsome boy, but not one whose stare Guelenfolk much liked… now that they had finally seen him up close.
Now… gods knew the rumor of his origins was out, now that he was walking the corridors in the Guelesfort. No good to call him Otter any longer. Everyone knew what name his mother bestowed on him: Elfwyn. Elfwyn, after the last Sihhë king of the old kingdom, the enemy of the Marhanen. The name alone had counseled the boy’s demise, all those years ago. The name his mother had given him was a direct challenge to the king of Ylesuin: kill your own son. Do it, and kill me, and see how your life turns.
Mercy was its own revenge. Tarien Aswydd lived. And sixteen years on, her naming had lost much of its sting. The people knew the name. That the boys were friends and the queen accepted him had been delicious gossip for the late fall season, then faded into simple fact—it evoked a little shiver, the Sihhë being a recent memory; but that was a matter no one dared broach with Cefwyn—by the gods, they would not, and knew it. Best now if a boy bearing that name could publicly befriend a Marhanen prince, become his good right hand, and let people see the name sat, not on a wizard, but a sober, studious boy—let them see that dark, somber face break into smiles and laughter as it had, this late fall in Guelemara; as it did now, while the boys caught their breath. And Cefwyn had made his decision: he could have sent the boy home, as seasons turned. But he had not. Festival approached, and the new year. He could send him home. But he purposed not to.