M’lord, they called him, and respected him. That was a different thought, and relieved him of fear somewhat.
He decided to take it for granted, then, that he was set free as Cefwyn had said, and he did venture into the hall. Idrys was not there, to his relief, and he walked down the hall with two guards remaining behind at the room and two guards trailing him, guards who declared they were not to talk to him and who seemed also forbidden to walk beside him.
He wished that they could do both. There were questions he would have liked to ask them. But there was, his consolation, a great deal to see in all this great place.
He explored the polished upstairs hall, where echoes rang with every step. None of the servants returned his attempts to smile, but shied from him as the townsfolk had, and he supposed that they had had their orders, the same as the guards had, not to speak with him.
He went cautiously downstairs, and met the stares of finely dressed men and women who stood in groups, stared with cold eyes and spoke words guarded behind hands and turned shoulders. They seemed to measure him up and down and did not want him among them, that was clear.
He had as fine clothing as they, but no gold, no embroideries—he supposed that as they saw things what Cefwyn had given him was very plain. And perhaps they knew that he was from Ynefel, which no men but Emuin seemed to trust. The men when he did walk past them gave him only cold faces. But the women, some of them, looked over their shoulders at him, and one, with remarkable red hair, did smile.
He stared longer than he should have, perhaps, drawn by that one pleasantness and wishing to speak to her. But he remembered Cefwyn’s instruction, and the woman walked away with a swaying of remarkable bright skirts. Men that witnessed the exchange gave him very cold, very angry stares and made him certain that he should not have smiled back at her. There seemed to be a rule against looking at him. Perhaps Cefwyn had made it.
“Was I wrong, sirs?” he asked his guards. And they looked confused, and one said,
“Certainly not by us, m’lord.” At which the others laughed, but not in an unpleasant way. So he felt he had not done wrong, at least not so the guards could tell where the fault was, and he continued right in their eyes.
But he had, the moment he thought of it, broken Cefwyn’s commandment to him, just by speaking to them. And he heard Mauryl chiding him, saying, Can you not remember, boy?
He seemed to have learned very little, over so much time. Mauryl would still despair of him. Mauryl would still shake his head and say he was a fool, chasing after butterflies again, and forgetting to mind the many, many things he was supposed to remember.
But he did not retreat to his room. There were things still to see and things still to know. There could be no learning if he did not try new things, and there could be no safety, he thought, if Cefwyn did not will him to be safe: Cefwyn was clearly lord of all these people as Emuin was master, and if either of them said that he was free to walk where he would, then he went where he would, trying to ignore the angry looks that came his way.
He walked further, to a place in the downstairs hall where the marble pavings changed to worn flagstones. That dividing line in the plan of the building struck him like a Word: it felt that strange, that important to him. He stopped still, and looked about him across that Division at walls less ornate than the walls elsewhere. He expected doors where there were no doors, he expected a hall—and found one, but hung with Banners out of place there, and the stones were plastered over and painted. It was not right. The doorway was not Right.
There’s a magic to doors and windows, Mauryl had told him. Masons know such things. So do spirits.
“M’lord?” he heard his guards say, faint and far to his ears. He heard the clank of armed men walking. He saw Shadows there, and turned a frightened look to the men with him.
The hall changed. It was only the hall again.
“Are ye well, m’lord? Will ye walk back again? There’s no outlet by this way.”
There was not. Not now. The Place he knew had had a further door.
But the door let them only into what seemed a blind end, bannered and hung with weapons of every sort. He knew another Name, but clearly it was not the right Name, as Kathseide was not right, and men knew what he said, but named it differently, so they thought him a fool, too, and simple. That was what they called a man who lost himself in hallways and stumbled over sills that to his reckoning did not belong there.
He feared that flagstoned hall. He was glad to leave it. It felt wrong, in that doorway. It was fraught with the chance of Words, and he had had enough of Words for a few days: he truly hoped to settle the ones he had, and perhaps to find Owl, if Owl could find his window.
He did not know why the place down there had made him think of Owl. And then he knew: it had been like the loft. There had been a high, peaked end, and exposed rafters. Sunlight had streamed in where now there was stone. Birds had gone in and out that opening that did not exist, Hawks had lived there, and fed on pigeons and on mice, being birds fierce as Owl.
Those were the shadows he saw, the bating of wings, not the still, straight display of dusty banners. Owl might have come there. But Owl could not find an entry, no more than he had found a way to summon Owl.
He thought the more time passed, the stranger and wilder Owl might grow, until Owl quite forgot him.
He wished he could ask his guards if they had seen a large lump anywhere about the eaves, a very unhappy lump, Owl would be.
But, no talking to them, Cefwyn had said. He had learned something.
The place where Owl might have been at home in the Kathseide was shut to him, with the coldness with which shoulders turned to Owl’s master.
Again ... no welcome. No hint of welcome, not for him, nor for Owl.
They would become lost from one another. The windows were too tight, except for here, and here it seemed things should be wood and very little stone, there should be an airy passage, and it should smell of straw. It frightened him. Words and Names had never betrayed him before. It made him doubt other things he thought were sure.
But there was, absent Emuin, no one he thought might advise him what he saw.
And Emuin did not come that day or the next, nor the next.
The size of the building was deceptive. It sprawled its wings and corridors in unexpected directions, and made courts and narrow shafts and mazes of halls in which it was easy, except for the presence of his guards, to become lost.
But six days was sufficient to wander every permitted hallway of it.
There was a tiny cramped library filled with parchments and codices, occupied by two old men who had no love for each other. There was, on a seventh day, when his guards became involved in a dice game in the hall below, a great room of sunny windows where brightly dressed ladies sewed and infants played, but he was not welcome there, and he distressed his guards, two of whom he did not see the next day; he counted it his fault and sent in writing to beg Cefwyn’s pardon, but Cefwyn sent back to him, also by written message, saying they were men, not children, and they knew their duty.
He took that for severest rebuke, and a sign that he was not himself a man, in Cefwyn’s opinion.
He had found the kitchen, a ready source of food at any hour, Cefwyn’s orders refusing him no luxury.
There were Barracks which he avoided, where the guards exchanged long and easy conversation with their fellows, but he could not speak, and he found it tedious and uncomfortable, and full of harsh and disquieting Words.
There was the Armory, which smelled and echoed of Weapons, and his guards said that was no place for him. But there was the Forge not so far from it, where the master Smith and his helpers worked metal glowing bright and almost transparent, making it grow and change, and where sparks flew like stars.