Let Emuin fall utterly from favor, as sometimes, hourly, seemed imminent, and two-score applicants would rise out of the hedges by sundown seeking Emuin’s office and bearing their prince’s humors far more philosophically.
So he told himself—hourly. But Emuin knew him, Emuin had no fear of him, and that, while a sin in a councilor (Emuin had been that in the court at Guelemara), was a virtue in his privy counselor and a necessity in a tutor—which Emuin still was, when m’lord Prince needed a severe lesson read.
His fortunes bound to some wizard-foundling-apprentice with feckless trust writ all over his features?
“I’ve no need of him,” he protested to Emuin.
“Said I ever you had need of him?”
“I have need of advice, master grayfrock, from your ascetic and lofty height, doubtless superior to fornicating mortals. What is this creature, why at my doorstep, why in the middle of my night, why bearing grammaries of unreadable ill, and why in the name of the unnameable in my tenure in Amefel? He could have gone to the Elwynim. He could well have gone to the Elwynim. He may be Elwynim, for what we know—and needs must come to my gates begging supper? Damn the luck, sir tutor, if luck has anything to do with it!”
“There is no violence in him,” Emuin said. “Peace, Cefwyn. I do not yet know the cipher he is, but it would be well to treat him gently. I do much doubt he is the witless creature your men believe. Ynefel, he cried out, and Mauryl. And your guard in an access of wit roused their captain, who, after a candle’s time lodging this boy in the prison’s stench and squalor, became uneasy, roused the magistrate of the hour, and so quite rapidly they came to the staff, and to Idrys, who broke my sleep, and I, after much shorter interrogation, yours. But in all this time, save a disagreement with the gate-guards, no defense did he use, neither by hand nor by word.”
“What is he?”
“My suspicion?”
“I will take your chanciest and rarest guess at this point.”
“Mauryl’s Shaping.”
Shaping was a word that belonged to dark ruins and forests.., not arriving in a man’s own downstairs hall, not standing at his feet, looking at him eye to eye.
But it did accord, he thought with a shiver, with a face without the lines that twenty-odd years of living should have set into muscle and mouth. It could become anything—as it had varied quickly between apprehensive, or bewildered—but nothing stayed there. That was the innocence that attracted him.
And chilled his blood now.
“h revenant.”
“So the accounts say: the dead are the source of souls.”
He rested his chin against his hand, feeling an unstoppable roused-from-bed chill, a quivering of his skin, as if—he knew not what he felt. It was not a terrible face. It was not a cruel face. It had been-childlike, that was his lasting impression.
“Are such things evil, master grayrobe?”
“Not in themselves.”
“Why?” His arm came down hard on the arm of the throne. He was disturbed, not alone for the realm, and for the guest under his roof; he was—personally disturbed that the visitor had that much moved him.
More than moved him. He would not sleep tonight. He knew he would not sleep easy for days after meeting that intimate stare—and hearing what Emuin claimed.
“Why?” Emuin echoed his question. “Why would Mauryl call such a thing? Or why would it come here?”
“Why both? Why either? Why to Mauryl Gestaurien and his mouse-ridden hall? What did the old man want, living there as he did, when the Elwynim would have received him? What does this thing want here? And why did you let me give it hospitality?”
“I gave you my guess, lord Prince. Not my certainty.”
“A plague on your guesses, Emuin! This is, or this is not—a man. Is it a man—or not?”
“And I say that if I knew all about that matter that Mauryl Gestaurien might know, I should be a very dangerous man myself. I merely caution. I by no means know.”
“And counseled me take him in, allow him that cursed book, set him upstairs from my own apartments—”
“At least,” said Emuin, “if he takes wing and flies about the halls you should have earliest warning.”
There was no abating it. There was no more Emuin knew for certain, or, at least, no more that Emuin was willing to say. It was time for sober, direct questions.
“What do you advise?” he asked Emuin. “All recriminations aside, what do you advise me do, since you were so forward to bring him to me?”
“Keep him here; treat him as gently born, but keep silence about him.
There are things he does not need to know. There are those who do not need to know about him. Inform His Majesty of particulars if you must, hut none other. None other. And put strict limit to what order Idrys gives. Idrys does not approve this guest.”
“And do what with him, pray, in the event he does begin to fly?”
Emuin looked up from under white brows in that sidelong way that cautioned, reminding an old student that the old man was no fool.
“Mauryl served Ylesuin for his own reasons. And yet did he ever serve Ylesuin at all? Or why did he turn so absolutely against the Sihhé?
Mauryl is the question here, still.”
Mauryl the recluse, the incorruptible; Mauryl the murderer of his own kin; Mauryl the peacekeeper on the marches of the West. Accounts varied. Nothing in Mauryl had ever been predictable.
Neither was his death, at the last, predictable, nor, one could well surmise, was Mauryl’s last gift at all predictable—if it was indeed his last and not a wellspring of further gifts of dubious benefit.
Cefwyn let his breath hiss between his teeth. “And back to my question: if he begins to fly, or to walk through walls, what in bloody and longstanding reason shall we do with him?”
Emuin bowed his head, ironic homage. “You are the ruler of this province now, young Cefwyn. You say all yeas and nays. I am here merely to assist.”
“In this I purpose, I swear, to take your advice, Emuin. What does this Shaping want here?”
“I am certain I have no idea.” Emuin brushed invisible dust off his gray robes and off his hands. “Time I should attend my devotions, my lord Prince. I grow too old for such nocturnal excitements.” “Emuin!”
Emuin stopped at the bottom of the steps, looked back in the attitude of a father annoyed by a favored son. “Yes, my lord Prince?”
“You brought him here. I want a plain answer. What manner of thing is such a Shaping, what is he likely to do, and what are we to do with him?”
“Ah, no, no, no,” Emuin said softly. “I by no means brought him.
Dismiss that notion from your calculations, my Prince. He brought himself. He has no idea what he is; nor have I; and we are safest if we do well with him.”
“Is he personally dangerous?”
“You know as much as I, my young lord.” Emuin turned his back a second time, which no sober man in the town of Henas’amef would have dared, and ambled away, dismissing his prince as the pupil he had once been. “I am for prayers and bed. Patience will unravel this; force has had its chance. And yes, he is perhaps very dangerous, as Mauryl was very dangerous. Win his love, Cefwyn. That is, in binding dangerous things, always wisest.” “Emuin.”
The door closed. Cefwyn swore, stamped down the steps and stalked out the echoing door through the confusion of abandoned men-at-arms, who gave way in prudent haste before his anger.
He was well up the stairs to his west wing apartment before he realized that, in the disarray of the men-at-arms’ general instructions and posting, the guards below had not followed, Idrys was on the uppermost floor with the prisoner, and he himself was unguarded. No prince of Ylesuin walked alone or slept without steel at his threshold.
“Kerdin,” he hailed the captain below. “Attend me. Now.”
And as the man scrambled to gather up a force of guard and overtake him, he turned and stamped his way up to his floor, his hall, his rooms, where, with a clatter and martial thump, an abundance of guards changed outside his foyer. He stormed through the two sets of foyer doors, seeking the doors of his bedchamber, where a rumpled bed and a lingering musk recalled the twins.