“The bloody Marhanens,” she said in a soft voice. “Always extravagant in revenge. I thank my lord King, that I have discovered a gentler nature to moderate your justice.”
The fact of her sex was there again, and mitigated the epithet generally used and seldom dared to the Marhanens’ face. Again a different Orien flashed into memory, pale skin and silks and tumbled hair. Her bruised face offended his sensibilities.
“We have beheaded women before, we Marhanens. Remember that. I shall never trust you. But neither will I persecute you, Lady Orien.”
“My women and I,” she said gravely, “will make prayers of gratitude for that.”
He cast a sharp look at the servants in the shadows of the room-well-born, some might be, even bastard cousins. But two were peasant-looking, darker-haired, of Amefin blood and maybe older, wearing such talismans as Amefin women wore. He looked at Orien, lady of Amefel in more than in his grant, and feared their curses, and witchery.
“Pray rather that my good humor continues,” he said. “Where is your sister?”
“At her own prayers, my lord King. For our brother’s soul. We are a pious people.”
“Horses may fly,” he said, “but I am little interested in pious Aswydds.”
He turned then, conscious of the limp that would not bear him from them with any authority. He made his departure all the same deliberate and casual, and lingered at the door for a backward look. None of them had moved. Most looked frightened, even Orien.
Petelly had had his fill of thistle-tops, at least for a while, and moved along with ears up as the forest shade drank up the road ahead. Tristen felt only a little shiver of apprehension, knowing that this was the place that had claimed lives of his companions, but as a woods it beckoned green and living, not like Marna, of which it might even be an outgrowth. He went cautiously on both accounts, and he had not gone far inside that shade before he saw, recent in the mud of last night’s rain, the print of another horse.
He knew that Cefwyn would send men up here to bring back their dead. He knew that Heryn had claimed to have rangers in the district—as Cefwyn might have men here that he had not known about.
There were also the men who had killed Cefwyn’s father. There were reasons aplenty to fear the shade ahead. He vividly recalled the arrows that had flown at him when he had ridden with Uwen, when men very near him had died; and he recalled that track of a horse that had appeared as a dark line in the grass near Raven’s Knob that evening he and Cefwyn had fled from Emwy, a warning of someone besides themselves out and about the hills.
But Heryn must have sent a message to Cefwyn’s father, to urge him to come to Emwy. It was even possible, he thought, that Cefwyn by going to Emwy had fallen into the trap prematurely: if Cefwyn had died there, the King would have come, all the same, to Emwy; and there—possibly—the King might have died all the same, and Efanor would have become King.
That was the way he put Cefwyn’s suspicions together, to explain the uneasiness he had heard between Cefwyn and his brother.
But ifs, Idrys had said to him, counted nothing. It had not happened the way Heryn wished. And Heryn would not plan anything else. Nor, he thought, had Efanor done anything to harm Cefwyn.
It did not mean, however, that the Elwynim Lord Heryn had dealt with were done with their actions.
He thought of that as he rode Petelly further and further into that green shade.
He thought of it with great urgency when, in the mud which the rain had made an unwritten sheet, he saw a man’s footprint on the road, one place where someone had trod amiss, and slid on the mud, and then recovered himself and gone up onto the leaves. He looked up on the hillside where bracken hid further traces.
It might be someone from Emwy village. There were surely reasons for the villagers to be out and about the woods, pursuing their claims of lost sheep, and there were indeed signs of sheep about. But there had been a horse’s track earlier, and he could not but worry about the safety of Uwen following him, along with whatever other men Uwen might have swept up. He was not concerned for himself. But Uwen would not turn back at a sign like this: Uwen would search the more desperately, and come into trouble.
He said to himself now that he should turn back, wait on the road for Uwen and see what Uwen thought, now that he had chosen the meeting, and now that there was something else at issue besides himself. He might persuade Uwen to wait, send someone back, supposing that Uwen came with soldiers, as Cefwyn’s men seemed generally to travel about the land—and if Uwen did, then he might see whether, having gained, however indirectly, the soldiers he had asked Cefwyn to give him, he could stay on the fringe of Marna a time with wise and experienced men under his orders and discover the secrets the woods had. They were important secrets, he was certain, secrets that might tell him much more about himself, and about Mauryl’s intentions; he could talk to Uwen, and Uwen would scratch his head and offer Uwen’s kind of sensible opinions, which were different than Emuin’s, but no less thoughtful.
That was the best thing to do, he thought, and he began to turn Petelly about on the road.
But that gray place flickered across his sight, an uncertain touch like the light through leaves, like a brush of spider-silk across the nape of his neck.
He turned Petelly full circle.
A gray, shaggy figure stood among the trees, in the green light, a figure in ragged skirts, wrapping her fringed shawl closely about her. It was the old woman of Emwy. Perhaps she was the reason he had had to persist on this road—as he might be the reason of the old woman’s coming here, into this perilous woods.
She said nothing. She turned and walked uphill through the bracken.
He touched Petelly and rode him up the gentle slope. He did not trust himself safe from harm in doing so. Nor, he thought, did she trust there was no harm to fear from him, but surely she had some purpose in coming out into this green and gold and breathless forest.
She stopped. She waited by a spring that welled up out of the hill, where someone had placed rocks in an arch. The Sihhé star was carved on the centermost, and one stone was a carved head, while others, separately, had acorns, and bits of vines, and one, a hand. The pieces did not belong together. But they made an adornment for the fountain. Someone had brought them there, perhaps from Althalen, he thought, where there were such things.
“Auld Syes,” he said. He had not forgotten the name. “Why did you act as you did against us?”
The old woman hugged her shawl about her, bony hands clenched on the edges. Her hair was gray and trailed about her face, which was a map of years. Her mouth was clamped tight. Her eyes were as gray as his own.
“Sihhé lord,” she said in a faint, harsh voice, “Sihhé lord, who sent ye?”
“Mauryl, lady.”
She laughed, improbable as it was that such lips could ever laugh. She turned once full about, spread her arms, and her skirts and the fringes of her shawl flew like feathers in the green light. It might have made him laugh. But the feeling in the air was not laughter. It was ominous. The place tingled with it. She bent down and from among the rocks about the spring took a silver cup. She filled it, and drank, and offered the same cup up to him, on Petelly’s high back.
“Drink, drink of Emwy waters, Sihhé lord. Bless the spring. Bless the woods.”
He did not think the drinking mattered so much. He took it from her, and drank the cool water. He gave it back, and the old woman was pleased, grinning and hugging herself, and he felt that tingle in the air that Mauryl’s healings had made. In that moment all the weariness of the road fell away, and Petelly, who had put down his head to drink, brought his head up with a jerk and a snort, the white of his eye showing as he looked askance at the old woman and backed away with more liveliness and willing spring in his step than he had had since last night.