The villagers were afraid. Tristen was afraid. The air still seemed to him to be alive with threat. The elderly villagers kept protesting their innocence. But the air tingled. The light was strange.
“Uwen Lewen’s-son,” Cefwyn said then, “take your charge and ride as fast as the horses can bear. Tell them at Henas’amef we’ve stayed in this village asking questions, and we’ll hold these people under guard until the patrol comes back with you. —Take Tristen with you!”
“Aye, Your Highness.” Uwen turned his horse, reached out, leaning for Gery’s rein, and drew Gery about with him perforce. “No!” Tristen said, fighting him for the rein.
“M’lord,” Uwen said, and would not give the rein up as Gery jerked and shook her head, hurt, Tristen saw, and abandoned his attempt to hold her back. “We’re ridin’ for help for the prince, m’lord! His Highness don’t need no argument. Come on!”
Gery went, fighting a step more, and then Uwen let go the rein and expected him to follow. He knew that Uwen had no time to spare for his fear. He steered Gery with his knee as Gery joined Uwen’s horse in a brisk gait, back along the road.
“Prince Cefwyn will manage,” Uwen said. “Unarmed and unschooled ye ain’t much help, m’lord. We’re bound to do what we’re told, ride to the other side of that damned woods, and fast back as we can.” “What are they looking for?”
“Just you leave the village to His Highness!”‘ Uwen said to him. “An’ stay wi’ me, m’lord. We got to get us past them trees. If we start summat from cover up there in the rocks, that woods is all one woods, clear to the other end of Lanfarnesse, and full of trails. —Can ye stay a fast ride?”
“Yes,” Tristen answered. His breath was coming hard. Idrys had spoken of enemies, and that word he did know—Mauryl had had enemies.
The Shadows were enemies, and the forest seemed the most apt place for them to hide. He rode with Uwen, and glanced back as two more of the guard came riding breakneck down the road and their own horses picked up pace to match.
“Hawith, Jeony,” Uwen said, waving his arm toward the road and the woods ahead. “Get yerself out to the fore of us, we got a m’lord to get through here.” He took off his helm as they jounced knee to knee and offered it to Tristen across the gap. “Put that on, m’lord. No disputing me on this.”
Tristen settled Uwen’s helm, warm and damp with Uwen’s sweat, on his head, and made Uwen no more trouble. They were coming to the woods, with the danger of some sort to pass, he understood well enough, trouble which might try to stop them. He understood the concern to know where the village men were, if they were supposed to be in the fields, but some of Cefwyn’s men had gone up in the hillside meadows chasing those who had run—and what they thought those fugitive women had done or might do, he did not understand. Their own course seemed the most dangerous, a road winding past gray rocky knolls and through thick forest shadow, and as they approached the forest, with the horses already tiring, Uwen reined back, jogging a little distance, letting the horses take their breath.
“We’ll ride hard through,” Uwen said. “Fast as we can. Ain’t no deceiving anybody. If they come on us, if happen I don’t come through, ye ride straight on for town, hear me? Woods or fields, overland, wherever ye can find a way, ye get to the Zeide gate and tell the Lord Captain of the Watch—his name is Kerdin, he’s always on duty at night, and he’ll get us help. Mind the village is Emwy, and ye don’t talk to no Amefin officers, ye hear me, young m’lord?”
“Yes, sir,” he said. They were passing into the green shade, and Uwen took a faster pace. The men, Hawith and Jeony, had vanished ahead of them through intermittent shafts of light that hazed the way ahead.
Their own horses’ hoofbeats sounded lonely on the earth. Sounds began to come strangely, and the sunlight seemed brighter, the edges of things unnaturally sharp and clear. Gery caught-step under him and threw her head, and that sharp-edged clarity was all around them, making things dangerous.
“Uwen!” he said, caught in strangling fear.
He reined back in fright, heard a hiss—before or after his hand had moved. Something hit his side in a whistling flight of missiles and Gery jolted forward, crashed through brush and under a branch.
He spun over the cantle sideways and crashed down into brush on his back as he held tight to Gery’s reins. Men were shouting, rushing downhill, motley clothed and motley armed. Stones whisked through the leaves, cracked against trees. Arrows hissed and one thumped and sang near him.
He got up again—found the stirrup and hauled himself, winded as he was, to Gery’s back. He reached the road, ducked low and hung on as Gery ran.
He heard nothing of the hoofbeats. He was in that bright light, that grayness, he and Gery both, though brush stung his face and raked over his shoulders. He had lost Uwen. He had lost the other men. Gery broke out of the woods and he saw not the road home, but the village where Cefwyn and the others were.
He had gone the wrong way. But there was no choice, now. He rode up at all Gery’s speed, and Idrys’ men swept him up with them, in what he only then realized was safety.
“They Shot the men.” He could scarcely speak. He was trembling. So was Gery. But no one had followed him. There were no arrows here.
“Uwen might have gotten away,” he said, teeth chattering as with chill.
“I don’t know, sirs. I’m sorry.”
“Damn them,” Cefwyn said.
“Overland,” Idrys said. “We go overland. I know the map, m’lord. We can make it through. Damn the village and their witch! They’ll wait for night.”
Cefwyn was not pleased. Cefwyn was taut-lipped and furious.
“Call the searchers back!” he said, and a man lifted a horn to his lips and sounded a quick series of notes that echoed off the hills.
He hoped Uwen was alive. He had heard the sound of arrows: he would never forget it in all his life. He shivered still, held Gery as quiet as she would stand and felt her shiver, too. Breezes brushed against his face, and he felt it chill, but that was only fear, not—not the stifling foreboding he had felt in the woods.
The men Idrys had sent out came back over the hills, down the lane beside the orchard, six men filling out their number again, on tired horses.
“Overland,” Cefwyn said. “As best we can. Idrys! Take the lead.”
It had not been the outcome Cefwyn had wished. They had not gained anything. The old woman, tottering on her feet, still disheveled, came out from among the others and down the street, calling out,
“The King, he come again, he come again, Marhanen lord, ye mark me well! The King, he come again!”
“One should silence that crone,” Idrys said. Tristen caught his breath up to plead otherwise, that the woman was old and she was afraid and she sent only a little presence into the air.
But Cefwyn said, “Let be,” and that stopped it. Idrys took the lead in leaving the road, back down the lane that led downhill past the village and toward a meadow pasturage.
The banner-bearers followed. Cefwyn led the rest of them, down this lane that sheep recently had used.
He thought he should have tried to help Uwen, but he had thought he was doing what Uwen said.
He had made a mistake, a foolish, foolish mistake, when, after getting back in Gery’s saddle, he had turned back instead toward Cefwyn, blinded by fear, mistaking his direction. Fool, Mauryl would say.
Deservedly.
Chapter 13
One of the men said he knew the way, and that he had ridden patrol here, so, he said, he could lead them around the woods and they would come to the road again before it entered the trees.
“We’ll have our reinforcements,” Cefwyn said to Idrys, “by morning.