He quieted Petelly with an unthought shift of his knees, and found himself brushing at that gray space again, himself and Petelly both, where white light shone, and fingers of light flowed through the old woman’s fringes.
Came a child through the light, then, skipping through the gray shadow of the woods, as if a mist bad moved in: in the gray place, the child moved, and yet the trees were in that place as well.
—Seddiwy, lamb, the old woman said. Show the Sihhé lord the paths ye know. e know where the good man is, do ye not?
—Aye, the little girl said, aye, mama, I do. I can. I will. The lord ma’ follow me.
The child skipped away through the shadow-trees, playing solitary games of the sort children played.
He was not aware of having turned downslope. But Petelly began to move. He saw nothing but a breeze going along the hillside, a light little breeze that only rustled the leaves of the trees.
Down across the road it went, disturbing the trees on the other side.
He did not trust children. But there seemed no harm in this one, who existed in that gray space which was no place for the innocent and the defenseless, but she had not stayed there long. She was a flutter of leaves and a skitter of pebbles on the lower slope, a little disturbance of the dust, that danced and skipped and danced.
She was a rippling on the water, a bending in the grass. A sparkle through the leaves of a stand of birches. There was not enough of her to catch. She made less stir than Auld Syes did, and that was little.
But, childlike, she did not go straight along the way. It was halfway up a hill and down again, it was in and out a thicket. Silly child, Tristen thought, and did not follow the wanderings, only the general line she took.
And now he had Emwy village on his left. But of buildings that had once stood there—he saw thatchless ruin, gray walls stained with black.
Idrys was going to fire the haystacks, Idrys had said. But there had been worse, far worse than that, done against the village. He was troubled by the sight. He would have argued with Idrys—or whoever had done this.
—Child, he said. Who burned the village.
The faint presence hovered, like the movement of a dragonfly, a quivering in the shadows.
And flitted on again, more present, and angry.
He took Petelly along ways that might once have been roads or paths, toward the south and east behind that fluttering in the leaves—which now was not the only such. Gusts flattened grasses in long streaks.
Petelly, nonetheless, snatched up a thistle or two, and a gust blew his mane and twisted it in a tangle.
Saplings bowed and shook. Three such streaks in the grass combined and a sapling bent and cracked, splintered, showing white wood.
That was more ominous. He had had no fear for himself or for Uwen in his dealing with Auld Syes, but now he began to be concerned, and wished he had gained some word of safety from the old woman, not so much for him but for anyone following him.
Crack! went weed-stalks. Crack! went another sapling, and another and another, an entire stand of young birches broken halfway up their trunks.
—Be still, he said. It was wanton destruction. It proved nothing but bad behavior. Be still, he said, and wished the young chiM to come back again. I have men behind me, good men. Don’t trouble them. They mean you no harm. Be polite. Be good to them.
It might have been a collection of old leaves that blew up then in the depth of a thicket, some distance away. It might have been, but he would have said it was the old woman herself. A single course of disturbance skipped toward it, a bent passage through the grass that tended this way and that way, that sported along a low spot and scuffed through the pebbles. And the ragged-skirted shape of leaves whisked through the thicket and dissolved again, with the little one skipping on where it had been and beyond.
Still the streaks of flattened grass appeared on the hillside, intermittent and angry, and the sun declined in the sky, making the shadows long, his and Petelly’s, on the grass.
But he had come into that vicinity where he had ridden with Cefwyn as they were coming away from the ambush someone had laid for them in the woods—he recognized the hills. They touched on shapes—not shapes arriving out of some unguessed recollection, as the servants said he remembered things, but out of the certainty that he had seen these hills, and he knew where he was. It was near Raven’s Knob, where he had seen the tracks that led around the hill, the warning they had had of men hiding in the hills.
They were near Althalen—though nothing of that Name unfolded for him: just, it was Althalen, where he had been with Cefwyn. He thought that perhaps what guided him now was a kind of Shadow, though a simple and harmless one. He did not take her companions for simple and harmless, and did not want to deal with them after dark fell. But the guide he had sported this way and that with abandon through dry leaves and green grass, and the sun turned the greens darker and more sharp edged with shadow as it inclined toward the hills.
—Do you know this place? he asked of Auld Syes, in the chance that she heard. Cefwyn thinks I should. But what should I know? Can you say?
There was no answer.
Still, there was nothing of the smothering fear he had felt when he had ridden through it before—the very dreadful presence he had felt that night, a Shadow of some kind, maybe many of them, that would keep to the deep places at the roots of wild hedges, and the depth of arches, and creep about at night, frightening and doing such harm as they could.
Mauryl had not told him how to fight against Shadows, only how to avoid them, and that was by locks and doors. He had none such here-and perhaps he was foolish for letting Syes’ child become his guide.
But he did not come now to disturb the Shadows. He came only for the truth, and rode among the old stones, following his wisp of a guide, thinking of the Name, Althalen, trying to coax more pieces of relevance to come to him. But the expectation that did come to him on the wings of that Name was an expectation of pleasant gardens—the thought of halls where elegant folk moved and laughed and met, and where children played at chasing hoops and hiding from each other, much as his guide went skipping through the stones.
He rode Petelly among the mazy foundations of what had been not a fortress like Ynefel but a community of buildings scarcely fortified at all.
It had never had walls. That certainty came to him with the Name of Althalen: it had been a peaceful place, never considering its defense-trusting folk. Gentle folk, perhaps. Or powerful.
But everywhere about him now, as he had seen at the village, fire had blackened the remnant of windows and doors. He smelled smoke, as where had he not? It might be the smoke of old Althalen; or of yesterday’s Emwy; or perhaps the dreadful smoke of the Zeide courtyard had clung to him and Petelly even through last night’s rain—he was not certain, but he felt a loosening of his ties to the rock and stone around him, a dispossession as if something, perhaps many such things, did not accept him here, as if—smothering fear met him and just scarcely avoided him.
The world became pearly gray. The walls stood, still burned, still broken, and Petelly and he moved all in that gray place, in a shifting succession of broken walls, less substance than shadow here. The burning and the smell of smoke was true in the gray world too. Only the Fear that Emuin had named to him ... Hasufin ... rolled through his attention, and seemed to have power here, power like that tingling of Mauryl’s cures for skinned knees and bumped chins.
That tingle in the air might, he thought, be wizardry, and if it was, he reminded himself staunchly of things as they ought to be: he thought of Ynefel, and, feeling a sudden chill and a sense of dreadful presence, drew back out of that gray light.
Then a wind sported through the grass, an ominous, tree-bending sort of wind which swept in a discrete line across the ground.
—Child! he called out in warning—because that gust made him think of the wind in the courtyard, that had raised the shape of dust and leaves, and he heard the faint wail of a frightened voice, as a breeze skipped behind him, at Petelly’s tail. Be still, child, he said to it. Go back. Be safe.