Petelly had not liked the Shadow that had come near them, but Petelly was not quite terrified, for he had the presence of mind to snatch a thistletop, went, walking along through ripe grasses, along a line of stones that had been a wall.
Some distance he went, down a stream-course he thought might have been the same stream bent back again, perhaps tributary to the Entail, who knew?
“Hold there!” someone cried.
He looked up atop a wall, at a man with a bent bow and an arrow ready to let fly at him. It was a man in gray and brown, and another, appearing in front of him.
Woolgathering, Mauryl had used to call it, when he let his wits go wandering,
“Sirs,” he said, in the courtesy he hoped would prevent arrows flying.
“Good day.” Neither of these was the presence he had felt. He supposed they thought him quite foolish, being where he was, so unaware; or perhaps they thought him a danger.
The one man came closer. “Your sword,” that man said.
“I have none,” he said. “Nor any weapon. Have you a master, sir? I believe I’ve come to see him.”
The man on the rocks relaxed his draw and leaned on his bow. “And whose man would you be?”
“Cefwyn’s,” he said. “And you, sir?”
“Men of Uleman,” the archer said. “The lord Regent of Elwynor.”
Chapter 26
Sullen, dejected men rose from their seats near the one tent of a fireless camp to lay hands on weapons and stare as, through the deep dusk, Tristen led Petelly in, with the archers walking behind him. Besides the tent, he saw the wagon to carry it, and some number of horses grazing within the ruined wall which surrounded the small camp, a ground with pavings here or there breaking surface amid the trampled grasses: it was some former room, or hall, and of men there were thirty or so, hardly more.
“What’s this?” a man confronted them to ask.
“M’lord,” the older of the archers said, “m’lord, he came unarmed.
He claims to be Cefwyn’s man.”
“A bedraggled sort of emissary. And no attendant? No ring, no seal? A scout, far more likely. Where did you find him?”
The archers gave a quick and slightly muddled explanation, how he had come walking up to their post, how he had not argued with the request to go with them.
The man was not convinced. “And what do you have to say for yourself?”
“Sir,” he said, “I am Cefwyn’s friend, and I’m fully willing to carry messages to him.” He did not add that they were strangers in Cefwyn’s land, and that, absent the weapons, he should most properly be asking them the questions about their intentions and their right to be where they were. “But I came to speak to your lord.”
The man said nothing to his offer, nothing at all, as he turned and went away into the only tent, a tent improbably pitched, its guy-ropes running to the ruined walls, and its pegs driven into earth where they had pried up paving-stones to accommodate them. The Elwynim had been at some great pains to set their tent here, when there was far softer, deeper soil just across the ruined half wall. He found it curious and significant that they had been thus determined to have it inside rather than outside the walls. Lines on the earth, Tristen thought. Someone here knew.
And if the Regent of Elwynor was camped at Althalen, he might well he the one who had killed Cefwyn’s father—and he might be the very lord of the Elwynim with whom Heryn Aswydd had conspired, which cast an even more unpleasant light on the situation.
Of all troubles he had gotten into and of all mistakes he had made, he said to himself, falling into the hands of the Elwynim might be the worst and the most costly to Cefwyn, although so far he could not complain of his treatment. By the archers’ general behavior they were honest men, well-spoken, and not, at least, bandits who fired from hiding and without asking.
The men otherwise stared and talked among themselves and did not venture closer or threaten him. He was wearing Cefwyn’s cloak, with the Marhanen Dragon plain to see: that was one cause of the talk; and he was equally aware of the coat beneath it, which had the Sihhé arms, not plain to see at the moment, but there was no hope of pretending to be other than what he was, and he did not intend to try, thinking it could only make matters worse if he seemed to deceive them.
Finally the man came back out of the tent and beckoned him to come inside, or for someone to bring him, he was by no means certain. He went of his own volition and the archers walked behind him, into an interior warm, lit by oil lamps and partitioned by curtains, one of which was folded back.
He had expected a vigorous and powerful lord—but the two lords present were attending an elderly man who lay on a cot against the back wall of the tent: two other men stood by, guards, or servants; and a darkhaired woman was kneeling by the old man’s side, holding his hand.
“My lady,” said the lord who had summoned him.
The woman glanced around and up. He saw painted ivory, a cloud of dark hair, a crown of violet flowers—and in the selfsame moment he saw on the cot the round, kindly-looking man who had reached for his hand through the light and the advancing shadow.
This was not a wounded leader of soldiers. This was an old man who should be safe under a roof, not out in the elements, and on the wrong side of the river.
And he had not strayed amiss in his riding. He had found the object of his search after answers—he had by no means known what he was looking for, and least of all that he was looking for the Regent of Elwynor; but he had found him all the same, and on an impulse of the heart moved toward him in this world of substance and that of Shadows.
The men behind him pulled him roughly back. The clasp at his neck parted, and the hard-used cloak came off and fell.
“Marhanen,” the young woman said angrily, and then looked up at him. “Oh, dear gods!”
It was his black coat, ruined as it was, with the Sihhé arms embroidered in silver thread.
“Sihhé,” exclaimed the man on the cot. “I hoped, I did hope.”
The old man’s eyes had opened. The look on his face was the same he had had in the gray light, a man of such uncalculated kindness, such affable, cheerful goodness that Tristen wanted at once to take the old man’s hand and draw him back from the dark brink that threatened him. On that thought, gray was suddenly all about them, but the soldiers moved to prevent their touching, although the old man, in this world and that other, reached out his hand.
The woman intervened, caught the old man’s hand instead and pressed it to her. “Father. Father, do you hear me?”
“He—” the old man said, with the gray light of the other world streaming past his shoulders. Tristen could scarcely get his breath, the urgency of that request was so intense, and the shadows were forming patterns in the light, seeming like faces gathered about them, listening.
“Lord of Ynefel. Who are you? Who are you?”
It was the very question Hasufin had asked him in seeking power over him. It was the central question about himself that he could not answer and that Hasufin could not answer. But he had had no fear of this man, on what evidence he did not know, but that his presence in the gray place was most like Emuin, and not at all like the enemy.
“My name is Tristen, sir. I was Mauryl’s student. And lord of Ynefel, yes, sir, I am, so Cefwyn says.”
“Cefwyn,” the daughter said, and clenched her father’s hand tightly, tightly, trying to compel his hearing. “Papa, no more. Send him away. It’s too late for Marhanen tricks. This is no one. Look at him! He’s all draggled and muddy from last night’s rain. He’s just a man, Father, just a man.”
“Lord of Ynefel,” the old man echoed him, seeming to hear nothing of his daughter’s protest. “Are you? Are you in fact Mauryl’s successor in the tower?”