Gray as the lady’s: he had never thought it until that instant, and a chill went with that awareness.
“I shall indeed marry her. —Ride with me. Tell me later what happened.” Whatever Tristen had been up to, he did not think it a story for Umanon’s sensitive ears and gossip-prone mouth. He wanted nothing of any of Tristen’s doings or the lady’s until he had Tristen in private. “Are our Elwynim going to ride with us, or not?”
There was apparent consternation among the Elwynim bunched together on the road. He could guess that at least one of the three lords was unconvinced of their safety and argued for a camp outside the walls.
“Lord Tasien is anxious about coming here,” Tristen said with his accustomed bluntness. “But she will do what she wishes to do.”
“And what is that?” he asked, before he remembered he wanted no news.
“To find men to fight the enemy, sir. Mauryl’s enemy.”
There was consternation on Umanon’s face. Even Cevulirn gave Tristen a troubled glance.
“A matter for council,” Cefwyn said quickly. Religious anxiety would be far more potent among the common soldiers than among their lords, but their lords’ response forecast the commons’. A moment ago he had been half in love. Cefwyn, the lady had said, as if their meeting were chance and he were any would-be lover with not a thought in his head but that pretty face.
The fact was she need not have been pretty. She needed to be the Regent of Elwynor. Better yet if she were at least publicly Quinalt.
Best for his peace of mind if he had not found those eyes suddenly so familiar, and so disturbing. He could not imagine why he had not realized in their ambiguity even in the portrait, that they might be gray—or recalled, when he had fallen under their spell and offered himself in marriage, that they were reputed, like that mass of black, black hair, as a Sihhé trait.
It was nothing he need fear, but, gods! how the whispers would run, even in Amefel, even by this evening.
The Elwynim joined them, and names were named, Lord Tasien of Cassissan; Lord Haurydd of High Saissonnd; Lord Ysdan of Ormadzaran ... names hitherto belonging to aged parchment and crooked trails of ink.
“My lords,” Cefwyn said, and could not resist a bow, ironic mockery of their clear apprehensions. “The bloody Marhanen bids you all welcome and hopes for your good opinion. Bear the Regent’s banner next to mine. Such are the terms the lady Regent requests, and Ylesuin will honor—whatever the lady requests. I cannot daunt her. I am resolved to please her.”
The Elwynim bowed. The lady, to his astonishment, blushed.
But he said to Idrys, as Synanna, on his casual mistouch of the reins, brushed Drugyn’s shoulder: “The west gate, for the gods’ sake, not the south. Bid someone remove the heads tonight.”
Cefwyn was completely occupied with the lords around him, and Tristen thought it a good time to keep silence. It was comfortable enough to ride with Uwen; and it was comfortable to be riding up a street he knew, among people who knew him.
But it was a long ride up that hill, with the townsfolk of Henas’amef turned out to stare and talk together, wide-eyed, at the display of Elwynim banners that he was sure they had never expected in their streets.
Then someone cried out, “Lord Sihhé!” and others took it up, crying
“Lord Sihhé!”
They did not cry out that way for the other lords. He had had his fill of being conspicuous, last night. He was tired, he was aching and, as certain as he had been not so long ago that he could not possibly bear the confines of his rooms and the mundane chatter of Uwen and his servants, he thought now that nothing could be more dear or more welcome to him.
The rain had come down on them most of the night and again during the morning. Petelly was switching his ears and clearly had honeyed oats in mind, and Uwen’s borrowed Ivanim mount had protested strenuously at the gate, knowing that he belonged down in the Ivanim camp, as all but a few of their Ivanim escort went aside to their well-earned rest. The Ivanim had come with provisions, as the Elwynim had, so they had not gone hungry; and they had rested on the journey—at least three times; but only once, toward dawn, had they stopped for enough time for men and horses alike to catch a little sleep.
It had not been enough—nor real rest. Tristen had feared sleep as he had not feared the ghosts that walked the earth of Althalen, and sat half drowsing, content to watch Uwen’s rest as Uwen had sworn himself willing to watch his—but Uwen had very quickly nodded off in the quiet and the stillness of the wind that, after the gale against their wet clothing, had seemed like warmth.
The lady had dreamed. The lady had dreamed of children’s games, and children’s songs, and the childish voices haunted him no less than the ghosts, rhymes about blackbirds and skipping steps, and memories of rain-puddles and gray stone.
They terrified him. He knew that they were her memories and not his.
And in them she had felt small, which he never had. Their memories were so much the same, or hers had delved into his, and diverged again, into being she, and being he, and living in a bright hall and fearing the dark, and living in a keep that always ran and rippled with it.
Ynefel touched his drowsing thoughts with poignant warmth, with longing to see his familiar loft and the stairs to his room, and to hear Mauryl’s familiar step-and-tap; but the lady had waked from his dream with an outcry, afraid of the stone faces, and Tasien had asked her what was wrong.
A nightmare, she had answered Lord Tasien, and hugged her cloak about her and shivered.
That had more than stung: it wounded him; and he had sat watching her while she fell back to sleep, thinking, in his own fears, how very strange it was to have been so small as she had been, and to have weighed so little on the earth, and yet to have enjoyed the same pleasures as he treasured—except, except dodging around the stone walls, and looking at the faces, and thinking of them as familiar.
She had never known her father was a wizard.., or whatever it was that gave her father the strength he had to travel that gray place. He had wondered once if everyone could go there. He had wondered whether it was a place Emuin had made for them alone-or that Emuin had let him into; and here at least was someone as surprised and dismayed by that place as he had been.
It made him feel.., older, somehow. It made him wish he could give her in one instant all that he knew, and have someone then who would always understand the things he saw and how he saw them; it made him wish that he could leave all the others behind in camp and go somewhere alone and tell her and ask her.., so many things, so many questions that stirred tonight in the grass, in the leaves, in the memories of Ynefel’s creakings at night, the force of a gathering storm of Words and Names and so, so much about the world that he might almost understand if events and dangers had not swept him from one thing to the other. It was like the pigeons carried on the storm: they stayed aloft, they flew, but they rode the gusts, not choosing their own path so much as choosing the violence that went where they wished to go; they dived at the last into the safety of the loft on the blast of the rain, and a boy who was never truly a boy waited for them, with the wind blowing straws about and blasting the rain in through the broken boards—that boy called them home to the loft, waved his arms and called out Hurry! hurry! never knowing they were helpless to do more than they did.
He could not have been different than he had been. He could not have been the child that the lady had been. He could not remember the long ago that people kept attributing to him. He could find only dark before the light in Mauryl’s keep.
The banners snapped and thumped in a wind that had never warmed with the sun. He saw, past their intersecting folds, that they were coming to the western gate, the stable gate. They passed beneath the arch, and into the stable-court by the shortest way, and to the western steps of the Zeide, where grooms ran to take the horses, Cefwyn’s first, and the lady’s, Cevulirn’s and Umanon’s, and the other lords’. A boy came running to take Petelly’s reins.