He slammed the last doors, seeking unachievable privacy. The musk smelled as fetid as the prison-stench. He took off his cloak and his boots, stripped the bed, flung sheets this way and that in a fit of incoherent temper, and cast himself down on the bare mattress on his back, still fully clothed.
The candle was all but spent. It flared brightly for a time, then dimmed in fitful spits and spurts. Cefwyn lay with his hands locked behind his head and his eyes fixed on the painted ceiling, his heart still beating for combat, not sleep.
He could not rest with the like of that creature on the floor above him.
Wizardry. Summonings. Shapings. Unreadable grammaries. Every village had its sorcerous pretender here in Amefel, who by sham and sleight of hand and an occasional—perhaps even credible—cattle-curse or -healing, maintained an Amefin tradition of pot-wizards and generally harmless simples-sellers to which the established Bryalt faith turned a blind eye. Poisonings by such practitioners were generally accidental, the occasional curse or healing was inevitably undocumented, the tin and silver amulets were far too numerously displayed in windows and scratched on sheep-bells to credit for great threat to public decency or the common weal.
But greater magics, Old Kingdom wizardry—the Marhanen had rid the land of that and slammed the lid on that box of terrors once and finally, in the fall of the Sihhé, in the fall of Althalen.
That his own house, the Marhanens, had used Mauryl’s help once to gain the throne—well, that debt of his family lay far in the past, two long generations before his own, as happened, and in the living memory, so far as he knew, only of Mauryl Gestaurien, Emuin, and the Duke of Lanfarnesse, who was stretching the point; besides, in the countryside, a handful of gaffers grown ‘fewer and more incredible as the years rolled by. Wizard ... well, yes, Emuin himself could be accounted as such, and of the Old Magic; but Emuin had renounced wizardry and taken the gray robe of holy orders.
And as for Mauryl Gestaurien, arguably the greatest wizard alive, Mauryl had retired from the world to raise cabbages or, gods save them, wayward ghosts, once the old Sihhé hold at Althalen stood in ruins.
Ynefel had been for hundreds of years the haunt of owls and mice, nothing more, its dreadful walls a subject of rumor and legend along the border. Mauryl had never come to Amefel’s court, nor the King’s court in Guelemara, not even to renew his oath to the Marhanen Kings; and one had hardly, except for the Olmern rivermen, spared a thought for the old . man’s doings.
Yet, more worrisome than the amulets and the sheep-bells, the countryfolk of Amefel burned straw men at harvest, reminder of other, bloodier customs; and despite the ban on wizardry in Marhanen lands, the Sihhé star still appeared in fresh paint on rocks out in the Amefin countryside.
And the old silver and copper coinage that bore that mark turned up worn as amulets about Amefin necks despite the threat of the Marhanen King’s law and the ban of Quinalt priests. Such charms the countryfolk sold in open market even here in Henas’amef, as well as other, more dreadful charms, claimed to be bones of the offered dead.
There might well be, in the remote and folded hills of Amefel, a few places remaining where the Nineteen were worshiped openly: a Guelen patrol not a moon ago had found in the ancient shrine at An’s-ford a saucer of something noxious, red, and only slightly dried. Horses and stout ropes had sufficed to pull the old stones apart and scatter them, which would, one hoped, discourage a continued observance at that site, but it had, a reminder how things always stood in Amefel, needed Guelen guardsmen to perform the dismantlement. The Amefin, even those who served to guard the gates at Henas’amef, had refused to aid in it.
Cefwyn tossed on his bed, cursed the whole benighted province, and wished the visitation instead on Efanor his brother, who sat comfortably in the far more entertaining court in Llymaryn (father’s dearly beloved son, Cefwyn thought bitterly) and who needed not endure this provincial exile, this plagued, wizardous frontier with assassins lurking in the streets and poison likely in the wine.
Wine offered by smiling lords and ladies of the Amefin court at Henas’amef, of course, who sat across the table from him on state occasions and heartily wished it might be softer-handed Efanor, just Efanor, faraway Efanor, who would inherit the Marhanen throne.
Or wishing they might sup instead with the hostile land of Elwynor across the river, which once, along with Amefel and much of the rest of Ylesuin, had been under Sihhé rule. Nine bleached skulls adorning the Zeide’s South Gate (which had gained from them a grim new name) and twelve of his own Guelen guardsmen dead preventing them: that was the Elwynim contribution to his peace of mind.
Mauryl Gestaurien had occupied the land between the new and the old and occupied a loyalty between the new and the old—servant, some said, to the first Sihhé lord who had overthrown Galasien; uneasy and absent servant to the Marhanen, who had overthrown the last Sihhé king.
And Mauryl dead—one could only believe, from the young man’s account—dead. At least immured.
What could kill such a man, in such a dire and unnatural way?
If one believed the youth, who seemed as sincere about his account as he knew how to be, the report that wizardry had overwhelmed Mauryl Gestaurien was more than ominous, and suggestive that the old business at Althalen was perhaps still simmering, and that wizardry which few living men had seen was not simply tales of peasant folk and riddling tutors. Emuin himself, one supposed, as young as a student of Mauryl could possibly be, had seen Althalen fall, and Mauryl had been even then no young man, if he were only the last of his line, and not far, far older, as the peasants claimed—as Emuin hinted sometimes to believe. Mauryl had not been Sihhé himself, but a native of lost Galasien, last of its fabled builders—so rumor said.
Rumor said Mauryl had served the Sihhé from the witchlord Barrakkêth to their fall in the death of Elfwyn—deserting them for crimes only wizards understood.
Wizards like Emuin, who would not speak of it, and who, legend now held, had entered holy orders soon after the dreadful night.
Which was not true. Even he could give the lie to that: Emuin had been quietly active in his art and at court in Guelessar for ten years of his own young life, and had taken to the gray habit and religious retreat only lately.., but so readily the Amefin took rumor and legend-making to their hearts that the years between events, most of which had transpired in the very midst of Amefel, mattered nothing to the bards: it fit their expectations, that was all that mattered. If the truth did not fit, why, cast it out.
As gods knew they would take this truth with no small stir.
Mauryl dead. And this, this vacant-eyed youth come in his place ... one could hear the rumors starting. One could hear the gate-guards gossip to their Amefin cohorts, and the lower town guards to the baker and the butcher, and them to the miller and the pigherds, and from there, gods knew, over the fields to the villages, to the hills, to the Elwynim across the river and the Olmern who supplied the old tower with flour, and back again. By the time it had made three trips, Mauryl would have perished in fire and sorceries. Mauryl would have cast himself in stone. Mauryl would have set a curse on the precinct of the tower to entrap any fool who ventured there, Mauryl would have raised cohorts of the dead— Mauryl would have sent this young man- For what? For what purpose, in the gods’ good name, did Mauryl send this innocent-seeming creature, and to him? To him, when all Mauryl’s legendary interventions had been to the ruin of kings Mauryl served?
The candle began to drown and sputter in its own wax, the ceiling to dim at the corners. Cefwyn rolled aside and rescued the flame, tipped the wax out, let the candle flare and the wax puddle and dry on the marble tabletop. He did not trust his reason in the dark, and sleep, as he had foreknown, was entirely eluding him.