Idrys continued up the stairs. Uwen turned and went back down with him, saying not a word. Tristen still felt foolish, and deeply embarrassed, and could feel the touch of the woman’s hands.
“You know,” Uwen said, “that widow, the nice-looking one? She dances nice, but I do think she’s in a mind to marry, and I damn well ain’t, m’lord. So I ’scaped, meself.”
“I shouldn’t have believed her. I knew better, Uwen. I did know better, and I’d sworn I wouldn’t go off like that, and there I did. I’m very sorry.”
“Oh,” Uwen said, “well, m’lord, I was worried, but ye had the rare good sense to come back. Remember me coming down the hill, a couple of nights back? I swear I was that glad to see ye coming down them stairs. I was sure me and the captain would have to go battering at the door, and gods know what all, and there ye was, bright as brass and onto her tricks.” Uwen put an arm about his shoulders, however briefly, before they entered the trafficked area where the musicians were still playing and the crowd was busy and thick. “There’s many a man wouldn’t have had the good sense, lad.”
He thought he should be pleased he had understood, but he felt disturbed all over, and wished in some sense that he had stayed and found out those mysteries, and was glad he had not, because he did not think he would have liked to have had such an experience with Orien. “I think I shall go home, though,” he said.
“Seems a fine idea,” Uwen said. “I got me a flask of summat nice and warming, and we can sit by the fire, you and me, like the wise fellows we are, and have a drink and go to bed.”
So the two of them sat by a very comfortable fire in his apartment and had the drink, and Uwen told him about courting girls and his village and where he met his wife.
It was a very enlightening story. He became sure there were nicer ladies than Orien, but it made him feel a little lonely.
“I think your wife was a very fine lady,” he said, and Uwen grinned and said,
“A fine lady she weren’t, oh, but a damn fine woman and a brave one, a brave, brave woman.”
“I would wish to have met her,” he said, and Uwen wiped his eyes and coughed and said he was for bed, now.
So was he. He lay down in the cool sheets and shut his eyes, seeing first Orien, and feeling only discomfort in the memory; but seeing Ninévrisé too, how she had sparkled in the candlelight—how her face was when she laughed, how her eyes were when she was grave and listening. There was nothing about Ninévrisé that was not wonderful, and nothing about her heart that was not good.
He knew. He had touched it, in that gray place this evening. And Emuin had quickly intervened, and told him it was dangerous, and he must not.
He went on feeling what he had felt with Orien, who had lied to him, who was not in the least like Ninévrisé; he went on thinking of Ninévrisé and thinking that marriage meant that Cefwyn and Ninévrisé would share a bed and share their lives, and love each other. Cefwyn gave him gifts and asked him to be his friend—and perhaps he would not lose Cefwyn. Perhaps he would have a chance to speak often with Ninévrisé as he wished, and things would work out.
There was a knot in his throat. It was a hurt, he thought, to which he told himself he had no right, since their being married was long since arranged.
Meanwhile they were going to war against the men that Hasufin brought against them—which, with the skill he had at arms, must be something Mauryl had intended, at least it seemed so now, in the evidence of things tumbling about him.
But Mauryl had been in a hurry, and had brought him for a purpose that mattered, and not thought much, he supposed, about anything else, such as things he might discover and things he might come to want for himself that had no place in Mauryl’s purpose. He remembered in little things it had been that way: he might have been exploring the loft or discovering something he had never seen before—he might just have found the most wonderful thing in Ynefel; but if Mauryl wanted him, he had to leave it at once and answer when Mauryl called, that was what Mauryl had always insisted; and it mattered not that he was older and that both his distractions and his self-will were stronger—it was still true.
He would go where Mauryl had wished. He had gone to Althalen. He had come back again. He could see no one and nothing standing against Mauryl’s purpose for him—not standing against it successfully, or scathelessly: such were his deepest fears for what he loved—and he dared not let them try to oppose what Mauryl had intended.
It was not Mauryl’s fault, of course: he was brought into the world because of Mauryl’s need, and that he inclined in other directions was not Mauryl’s fault. He wished he could speak with someone who understood Mauryl. But he could not reach into the gray space after Emuin tonight: he feared he could not touch the gray space without troubling Ninévrisé’s dreams, and he would not do that. Most of all, he dared not risk that tonight, and with the strange things he was feeling toward her.
He lay watching the fire-shadows dance around the edges of the walls, and once he heard a thump and rattle, as if the latch of the window were disturbed.
If that was Hasufin, he said to himself, well that Hasufin did not trouble him tonight, because he was suddenly very angry—and wished he had somewhere to put that anger.
But no one else he remotely knew deserved it, except Orien. And he had been close enough to wizards he was afraid to stay as angry as he was. He was afraid to dream, or to skim close to that gray place so long as he was in a state of hurt, and anger.
So he got up and tried to read, sitting on the hearth, long into the night, until he fell asleep over his Book, and waked with his neck stiff and his legs cramped and the fire long since gone to glowing ashes.
He waked—with a sense of apprehension. Not the window, he thought. There had been no sound. There had been no breath of wind.
But something had changed while he slept, he thought. Something-perhaps in the gray space he dared not visit, what other men called dreams—had become much more dangerous and much more urgent tonight, and that change seemed to have a sharp edge to it, a point at which it suddenly became true. He did not know whether it was because of his mistake with Orien, or perhaps something Emuin had done in his prayers, or something Ninévrisé herself might have done in the gray space, with him all unaware- But he was increasingly afraid, and knew no one he dared tell. He thought of waking Emuin—and knew if he did, he might say and hear things that might make him more disturbed and more in danger of making a mistake than he was now. He sat there still in the dark with the embers aglow beside him and with the dry, blind parchment of Mauryl’s book in his hands, and he thought to himself with sudden realization:
Orien wanted to harm Cefwyn.
It wasn’t myself she wanted. It was Revenge.
I was very, very foolish to go there.
Chapter 29
In the press of time, as regarded what the King himself willed, the King would gladly have drawn the barons aside for a few moments last evening before the ceremony, and held moderately sober council in the other chamber, considering the situation on the borders, and considering that moderate drinking might even assure a certain harmony in his diverse council—he had worked that ploy before.
But it would have intruded on the dignity of the betrothal, it would have slighted the Elwynim and the lady’s feelings, for whom he was surprised to realize he did have a tender consideration in the matter.
So he was further along the rose-strewn path than he had thought he would ever come for a lady he would for state reasons be obliged to marry. He was amazed to realize that he had spent an unaccountable amount of time today already thinking about the Regent’s daughter and far too little time committing to memory details of the riverside fortifications, which did the Regent’s daughter no practical service, and far too little memorizing the other matters on which he must not make a slip of the tongue, and, gods help him, he kept thinking about her face, her voice, her eyes. Which were gray. Again, gods help him—the Quinalt would not like that, and the Quinalt thought it had a right to be spiritual guides to the queens of Ylesuin—which his affianced bride refused to be, and that news was going to cause a clatter the like of which his father’s approval of Emuin as his tutor had never remotely touched.