“You dismiss all my advice out of hand, then complain I am too timid.
What shall I say else? Dream, my King, of a safe and pleasant province.”
“I hear you, Idrys. I warn myself by everything you’ve said. And hear me, now: I would rather my brother in court with the northern barons about him than to see him command the southern barons in the field.
These marchlanders, excluding Amefel, are the most formidable troops in the whole of Ylesuin, and Efanor is far more to Amefel’s liking than I; I know it; Efanor is everywhere better loved than I—”
“How not? He has never had to use the hard edge of authority: he can be fair weather to every man. Prince Efanor simply listens and lets every man shape his own desires about him. A reigning king has no such luxury.”
“So there is no remedy.”
“No, no, no, m’lord King. Give Efanor real authority. Give it too much and too early. Let him fail—save his life. Then he will also appear in your debt.”
“What, fail at the cost of my southern lords? Of this border? If he did try to general the south, provoked a war with the Elwynim, and decimated the best troops we have, —then where should we be, Idrys, thou and I? In the capital, —with battalions of courtiers?” The leg hurt at a sudden shift of weight; he winced and eased it, and shook his head. “I will not give him the south.”
“Ah, but release the lords home. They’d not answer a second summons this season. It’s coming up harvest-time, and winter. They will sit in their capitals. Meanwhile let him loose his Quinalt legalists on the Amefin, and he’ll not be the beloved prince by spring. Not in Amefel.”
“Let him loose the Quinalt on the Amefin and I won’t able to hold Amefel.”
“My lord, —”
“I have made up my mind, Idrys.” He waved a hand at the table. “I have signed orders for levies on the villages and master Tamurin has made you lists, names and ages. I do not invoke them yet, understand.
But they are there, against need, and can go out at any hour, as faithful a list as the Aswydds’ taxmen own. —Ah! and speaking of Orien and Tarien—”
“Yes, m’lord King?”
“The ladies Aswydd are mortally penitent, have you heard? They apply to be freed of arrest.”
“Surely Your Majesty jests.”
“Oh, I am considering it. Better them than their rivals, whose account books we have not discovered. —And the mayor of the town wishes to see me. So do various of the Amefin thanes, earls, lords.., whatever they style themselves and however they relate to the Aswydds, who’ve been in every bed in the province. Likewise the local patriarch of the Quinalt wishes audience—I can guess that matter. I shall make donations for ser vices in the capital. And, no, I’ll not send my father’s body with Efanor when he goes—I stand by my word in council. No funeral until I bring our father home, no chance for Efanor to display his extravagant grief in public show, even unintended, to raise hopes of him and rumors about me, have no fear. —Gods! I find this gruesome.”
“But wise, my lord. Not to remove your father from the province with out justice done him—is a good and pious thought. I did applaud it.”
“I have learned from you.” He moved, and winced. “I do thank you, Idrys, for all your dusty labors. I am warned, regarding Emuin, and I shall not forget—but I look for him. I do look for him. I shall thank you, also, if you advise me at whatever hour he arrives.”
“My lord King could thank me well by taking himself to bed before he lames himself.”
“Take to your own for at least two hours. I need your clear wits, Idrys.”
“Majesty,” Idrys bowed, unsmiling, picked up the lists and the levy orders, and departed.
Cefwyn wrapped his arms about his ribs, cursed, and then in febrile restlessness, rose up and began to pace the room, cursing his sore hand at every other step with the stick, which took his mind from the ache in his leg and the greater ache in his sensibilities. He wrapped himself in righteousness and anger sufficient to deal with the Aswyddim and the Quinalt conjoined.
Then he went out into the anteroom and opened the door, little caring now for the pride that had kept him from using the stick in view of others. The pain was more. He gazed across the hall, where guards still stood at Tristen’s door, awaiting what—gods alone knew, doing what, the gods alone cared. They were assigned: they were on duty. No matter that there was no one there to guard.
Soldiers, Tristen asked. Soldiers, for the gods’ sake. In so short a time Tristen’s concerns had changed so much.
He remembered the methodical rise and fall of a blade in Tristen’s hands. A dark figure wreaking destruction without pity.
The bowed, sad figure that rode ahead of them homeward, on the tired red mare.
He leaned painfully on the stick and turned, furious with his own pain and faced with the innocent guards at his own door, two Guelen guards, still of the Prince’s Guard, and, part of the lending of trusted men of other commands, two Lanfarnessemen, giving him Guelen of the Dragon Guard and the Prince’s Guard to spare to other posts.
Then, on unremitting duty, there were the two in chains, lordly Erion and the river-brat Denyn, horseman and pirate, keeping at least the semblance of peace between themselves—and looking anxious under his close notice.
“How do you fare?” he asked them, fighting the pain, compelling himself to be patient and soft-spoken, when an outcry of rage was boiling behind his teeth.
“Well, Your Majesty,” Erion murmured.
“The wounds are healing?”
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
He looked at Denyn. “How do you deal with your companion?”
“Very well, Your Majesty.”
Erion’s right wrist and Denyn’s left were wrapped with leather against the galling chain.
“Do they,” Cefwyn asked the Guelen sergeant, “keep the peace?”
There was a little hesitation, a tense regard from the sergeant. “Aye, m’lord King.” He did not entirely believe that report, and regarded the pair skeptically and at length, but it was unprecedented that a Guelen sergeant should lie for two miscreant foreigners. He had made matters clear to the fractious barons. What remained was cruel, and a difficult matter for his own guard, and it challenged his own pain. “Free them of the chain,” he said, and walked away—insisting to himself that he was himself free, that he was not bound to Tristen; that he owed nothing to Tristen; that Tristen’s apprehensions were of no substance and Tristen’s appearance in his court in this most perilous time for Ylesuin was more related to an old man’s natural demise than to any immutable destiny of the Marhanens—and that Tristen’s fears were no more than innocence confronted with the very frightening sight of the King’s justice.
Which ... had not stayed Tristen’s hand on the field at Emwy. He was, if one believed anything about Tristen, a conjured soul who had shown a frightening skill at arms, a conjured soul who was mostly surely not the feckless, bookish Elfwyn of the Red Chronicle. There had been defenders in that hour who had fought for Elfwyn—some of them his heirs; but Tristen had defended him. Tristen had saved him from certain death. Was that the action of an enemy? Was that a man he should doubt, no matter what Idrys found or did not find in archive?
Perhaps he should have listened to Tristen. But to send troops to combat Tristen’s nightmares of Althalen would do no favor, not to the men nor probably to Tristen’s reputation.
And if Tristen’s fears owned more solid form, if such a band met not with nightmares but with living enemies, come on reconstructed bridges across the Lenfialim, it would engage Ylesuin prematurely on a front he was not ready to open—which he did not wish to open at all if he could delay the matters he had with the Elwynim Regent into sensible negotiation. He was not, whatever his anger, whatever his passion said, about to lay waste the whole Lenfialim valley in retaliation. He had a kingdom of provinces in precarious balance, he had a southern frontier with the Chomaggari always looking for advantage. He could not, for a gesture, for vengeance, for any consideration, give way to temper and attack Elwynor, even when his own spies said Elwynor was in extreme unrest: he dared not lock both their kindred peoples in a struggle the coastal kingdoms would see as their opportunity to take lands long disputed on his own borders.