“It was very good you came when you did.” He asked himself if he had said that, or thanked Uwen. He could not remember. “I am grateful.
Petelly couldn’t have run further. But, Uwen, be ever so careful when an idea comes into your head to do something you know really is not the safest thing to do. Ideas come to me sometimes, very strongly. I don’t know if they do to you. But I think some ideas come from wizards. And some come from my enemy.”
Uwen made a sign above his heart. It was rare that Uwen did that—or, at least, other men did so more frequently at moments when he discussed things in absolute honesty. “That’s certainly a thought,” Uwen said.
“That is a thought to keep a man awake a’ nights, m’lord.”
“I think it’s wiser not to think a great deal on the tower, at least, or on this place, either. I don’t know if ordinary folk have a gray place they can go to when they think about it, but it’s become very dangerous.”
“A gray place.”
“Do you?”
Uwen scratched his nose. “I guess summat of one if I just shut my eyes.
But it fills up with dreams and such.”
“Mine is shadows,” he said, and Uwen made that sign a second time.
He thought he should not say more to Uwen than he had, or make Uwen wonder about something maybe he never had wondered about before.
And he could not himself answer all those questions—what Shadows were and why they were, except—except he might be one himself, and that was a thought he did not want to pursue.
The old man had wanted to be buried there because it gave him some special power: maybe their moving the stones had made new lines of which the old man was now part—but they had disturbed something else in doing so, and dislodged other bones. He did not know whose, but he hazarded a frightened guess.
—Emuin, he said, touching that grayness. Master Emuin, I’m safe now. We are all safe. I met Uwen and some of Cevulirn’s men. There’s a lady whose picture Cefwyn has, and she will come to see him. I hope that’s not a mistake. Advise me, sir. I do very much need advice.
But no answer came to him, not even that fleeting sense of Emuin’s presence he had had earlier in the day. Toward Althalen he did not wish to venture. Toward Ynefel he least of all wanted to inquire.
At least the Shadows stayed at distance, the ones that belonged to Althalen and the ones that belonged to Emwy, Shadows which, he suspected, down to the witch’s child, had fought for them tonight, for whatever reason.
Chapter 27
Emuin had hangover, abundantly, the natural and just result of a pious life returned suddenly to old habits.
Emuin was, Idrys reported, suffering the prayers of two pious brothers above his bed, and they were brewing a noxious tea.
It served him right, Cefwyn thought. He had, right now, this morning, the departure of the Duke of Murandys to the capitaclass="underline" Murandys had come with his father’s men, had fought at Emwy, and would go back to the capital full of news.
He had, on his desk, the disposition of the Lord Commander of the Dragon Guard. The Prince’s Guard had to guard the heir. That was now Efanor. He would not cede Idrys from his own service, which meant replacing Gwywyn, but he had to consider the morale of the Dragon Guard, which had a strong attachment to its Lord Commander. Promoting Gwywyn to higher office was the apparent answer—but he had to find the right office.
Soon, atop his other worries, delegations from Guelemara were bound to come pouring in, condolences and good wishes from lords offering to give their oaths, as they were obliged to do, and this and that royal secretary with papers to sign—the inevitable flood of petitioners who thought a new reign might give new answers. He had seen his father face it with their grandfather’s death, he braced himself for it, and meanwhile he had the local business to attend. He was already arranging to receive the oaths of the several barons, —counting Orien—who were within daily reach of him, a ceremony which had to be arranged in due formality, with all respect to the color and pageantry that bolstered the dignity of the courtiers as much as that of the King.
But, no, at the moment he did not want to consider the menu for the attendant festivities, or his wardrobe—his Guelen tailor was beside himself, having discovered himself suddenly in charge of a King’s oath-taking for a third of the provinces. Master Rosyn, at the height of his dreams, was obsessed with secrecy and cursing the necessity of dealing with what cloth two very rivalrous and doubtless gossip-prone merchants of Henas’amef had in hand.
He did not count his tailor’s requirements for secrecy quite on a par with the reports that were not coming in from the border. He privately feared there would be no ceremony at all, and that the oath-taking would be on horseback and soon: the account-books on his table now weighed down a set of maps also far more secret than master Rosyn’s forays to the drapers’ shops. The books contained the Aswydds’ reckonings of the armories and the Amefin levies; and, on separate parchments, a small curling pile, were the voluntary but probably far more accurate accounts of the other southern barons detailing their resources. War at least on some scale was all but a foregone conclusion to the building of those bridges, and the death of the Regent (if Emuin’s wizardly knowledge was accurate and Uleman Syrillas was in fact dead and not leading his forces across the river) did not mean peace: it would not affect the Elwynim rebels except to encourage more reckless moves inside and outside Elwynor.
But their fighting each other under such circumstances was a possibility, and he hoped such a war was long and very wearing on them before the victor turned any other direction.
If, in order to gain the advantage of surprise over the Elwynim before they spilled over the river, he went to war immediately, he might face an enemy divided and vulnerable. If he raised an army, however, it meant taking men from the harvest in his own lands, a harvest now in progress and already suffering from the rains—and he would have angry lords and hungry peasants on his hands, especially if later intelligence proved it unnecessary. He had also to consider that there would be no demonstrable gain of land or property from such a war, as he was certain there would not be: they could hold Elwynor out of Amefel, but never hope to take and hold Elwynim territory—while Elwynor could gain a province, if it could peel away Amefel.
The warring earls of Elwynor might unite if he attacked, uneasy and fragile union though it might be. And he himself was a new King, bolstered with the popular expectations of a new reign and vulnerable to those expectations turning very quickly to apprehensions: any early reverse could make the new King of Ylesuin look a fool, not even considering the reasonable anxiousness over Mauryl’s demise, and the shifting of all balance of power in the region—which certainly his barons were considering. In any loss of confidence in him, the barons north and south would have their heads together in two opposing councils making plans to take certain decisions into their own hands, and to assure their own survival.
There was all that at risk in going to war. But if he wagered everything that the Elwynim would not move until spring, and if he acted too late, and could not hold the Elwynim out of his land, they could be defending Henas’amef from siege it was ill-prepared to sustain. The walls of his only walled town in the province were not modern. The inner citadel’s defenses were the only ones up to modern standard, which said a great deal about where Heryn Aswydd regarded his real threats to be, but the outer town defenses were, he had seen from the first hour he rode up on the town, generally too low to protect against the engines he was certain Elwynim engineers were as capable of building as were his own engineers. Modern ballistae would send fire and stones of tremendous weight right over the wall which two generations of Marhanen kings had not seen fit to authorize raised, and which Heryn probably had never asked to raise, preferring to spend the money on his marble floors and his wardrobe.