At a table near the door, master Peygan’s clerks kept careful account of what went out and what went in. Carts pulled up at the door and bundles of pikes went in, long arrows by the score, as well as buckles, girths, bits, harness, pennons and odder items of equipage: all of it came in from the armory storage, and from the armory’s outlying storage, and the whole flowed in past the clerk, who kept a painstaking and amazingly rapid account in various codices stacked on the table by him, while stacks of requests accumulated beside him, and a junior clerk, reading the requests, sent a score of stout armorer’s boys running with apprentice clerks to read the orders.
It was a tangle, lords’ pages demanding their equipment be taken to shelter immediately, since there were clouds overhead, threatening a shower, and master Peygan’s clerk informing said pages that nothing would go into or out of storage without it being written fair and wide in request, which went on the stack.
Meanwhile Amefin companies were being equipped for weapons-drill, and someone was complaining about a box of buckles that had gotten set down and swept up with someone’s equipment.
A clerkish young man came out lugging an armful of odd plate up to them, then, and said they were to have bards for two horses, and would he approve what he had found so he could put it with their gear.
Tristen had no idea. He had never handled horse armor, but Uwen said that it was very fine, he was sure, but they were mistaken in the number of horses unless they wanted a spare.
Meanwhile another boy came with a tablet and said he had to draw the arms for the man who was going to paint the shield, and was the device correctly displayed?
That, Tristen could answer, and had the Star set a little larger and the Tower a little smaller above it; so the youth went off busily to inform the painter. Uwen said that likely they would stitch up a caparison for his horse and all—the horse Cefwyn had given him being still on his way in from the country, from what they knew. But the standard he would have carried before him would be the one they had unfurled in hall.
It was an amazing amount of activity, and they were often crowded upon, where they sat, so Tristen took the notion to tell the clerks where they were, and go out to the smithy which stood next door.
So they went out into the cool air and in again to the heat and smoke.
He liked to watch the smiths work: he was always entranced by the sparks and most of all by the metal when it was hot and all but transparent. He hung about as long as he had an excuse, but the smiths and the wheelwrights were as harried as the armorer, since several of the lords, independently, it seemed, had been postponing work on various transport in the thought it would last until they got home. Now they were leaving the wagons here in the care of the drivers and the Crown would not count them in unless they were received in good order, so the drivers were frustrated, and felt they were put upon by someone.
It was the most amazing lot of racket, not alone the hammering, but the shouting and the arguing. And things growing hot there, and the wind shifting and carrying smoke into their eyes, they went back to the relative quiet of the armory, to sit and wait again on the bench against the wall, where at least they would not be impeding the traffic coming in and out the door.
It was a lot of standing and sitting and waiting, it was now toward supper, and he had hoped to have it over and done long since. He thought of asking Uwen to go for a book—but watching him read was dull for Uwen, so he sighed and thought otherwise.
“I’ve seen a lot of odd doings,” someone near them was saying, “but I never thought I’d see the Elwynim for allies.”
“In the winter.” He knew that voice. It was Lord Pelumer. He had, Tristen thought, come in while they were gone. Pelumer was talking to someone behind a rack of equipment. “I make no secret I don’t like it at all,” Pelumer said.
“Wizardry, is what it is—grave-dust and cobwebs for an ally. Give me a man that has somewhat more natural in his veins, to my preferences.
Ghosts and now this Elwynim bride? You have the King’s ear. Urge him against this folly.”
“Oh, this is the man that has the King’s ear. I’m certain I don’t, nowadays, sad to say.”
Uwen had started to get up. Tristen prevented him with a touch on his arm. And he recognized the first voice, now, as Sulriggan’s.
“If we deal with the old man of the tower, even dead, what can we look for?” Sulriggan was asking. “This Tristen is Sihhé. There’s Sihhé blood all through Elwynor. Gods know what they’ll do. Did you mark the bride’s eyes, Lanfarnesse? Gray. Gray as I stand here.”
“I confess I mislike the turn things are taking,” said Pelumer. “We were neighbors to Althalen, we in Lanfarnesse. Marna Wood covers a great deal that the east has forgotten. But we remember. Some things there are that cannot be made friendly, even by their own will. I count the new lord of Ynefel as one of them.”
It stung. He knew not what to do or say. Clearly they did not know he was present. Clearly they had said things they would not have said to his face and could not be comfortable with if they knew he had heard them.
Then someone said, a whisper that sounded like one of the boys that ran errands, “He’s here, m’lords. Be careful what you say.”
“Here?” He imagined them looking around, and he knew nothing now that would help matters, except to indicate to them that, indeed, he did know. So he rose from the bench, which was along a rack of axes, and confronted them with, he hoped, a mild if not friendly expression.
“Sirs,” he said. “Good day.”
“Spying on a body,” Pelumer said indignantly.
“Hardly by intent, sir.”
“I make no secret I don’t like the plan you advanced, sir. I’ll say that in polite discourse. I don’t like assuming it will be Emwy and I don’t like to start a campaign in this season.”
“It will be by the new moon, sir. I might be wrong. But I believe that will be the time.”
“He believes that will be the time,” Sulriggan said. “Do you hunt?”
Sulriggan asked. “Do you gamble? D’ ye have any common pleasures, lord of the cobwebby tower? Or do you spend all your time chasing up and down the roads and making mysterious predictions?”
“I read, sir. I feed the pigeons. Such things as that.” He knew that he was being baited. He saw no reason to hunt or to gamble or to be like Lord Sulriggan, which seemed to be all that Sulriggan approved.
But for some reason Sulriggan failed to seize up what he said and mock him in those terms as he expected Sulriggan to do. Sulriggan’s face went quite angry and red.
And abruptly Lord Sulriggan stalked out of the armory.
“Ynefel,” Pelumer said, “he had that for his due. Accept my apology, if for nothing else than indiscretion. I am sure we may differ on a question of tactics without anger.”
“I am not angry, sir. I am sorry he is.”
“Ynefel, you will not win that man. I listened because for His Majesty’s sake I would know what he is about. Believe it or not, as you have learned me to be.”
“Sir, I find no reason to doubt what you say.”
The old man bit his lip and gnawed at his white mustaches, seeming unhappy, but thinking, too.
“Well, well,” Pelumer said then. “He would have been mistaken to attack you at arms. I think he thought you an easier mark than that. I think he had expected to entrap you into a challenge—which is not lawful, under the King’s roof, as you may recall. You possess the field, sir. I congratulate you.”
Pelumer went away then, out the door, pausing to pick up some paper of the clerk at the door.
“I fail to understand,” Tristen said.
“I think Lord Pelumer meant you scairt His Grace who left,” Uwen said. “Meanin’ Sulriggan ain’t the fool altogether. That ’un wasn’t on the field at Emwy. That ’un come in after all was done, and settled in wi’