“I am not natural,” Tristen said. “Whatever you have heard of me, I think it must be true.”
“That ye be Sihhé? I don’t know about such things. Ye’re my good young lad, m’lord, ye ain’t nothing but good.”
“Can I be?” He spread the fingers of his hand wide, held it before them, against the firelight. “This knows what I am. It fought for me. And I dreamed just now of Ynefel. I saw threads going out of it. My enemy lives there now and he wants this land. He reaches into all the regions around us. He reaches even into this room, Uwen. I felt it.”
“Then tell m’lord Cefwyn. He’s the King, now. He can call on the priests. Or master Emuin, what’s more like. He could help.”
“No. Cefwyn doesn’t understand. I do. Leave me, Uwen. Go back to the guard where you were. Of all the soldiers I must take there-not you.”
“The King won’t have ye go wi’ any soldiers,” Uwen forecast with a slow shake of his head. “This is priest’s business. Little as I like ’em, they got their uses, lad, and this has to be one.”
“Priests.” He recalled the priests he had seen—those he had met only today in tile Quinalt shrine, where the King’s body was, priests scattering before him, cringing, lest their robes touch him. “They fear me. How could they face my enemy?”
“Then I don’t know, m’lord. King or no, His Majesty hain’t got no soldiers willing to march that road.”
He found nothing to say, then. He had no plan, else, if even Uwen said he was wrong.
“M’lord,” Uwen said, “m’lord, —I’d go wi’ ye. I’d go wi’ yet’ very hell, but I wouldn’t see ye go there. I’d put meself in your way right at these gates, wi’ all respect t’ your lordship, I won’t see ye go there. No.”
“Uwen, what if this enemy comes out from Ynefel? What if he comes across to Althalen?”
“I don’t know nothing about that, m’lord. I don’t know nothing about wizards, and I don’t want to know. I’ll guard your back from any enemy I can see wi’ my two eyes and smite ’im wi’ whate’er I find to hand, but, gods, I don’t like this ’un. Send to Emuin, m’lord. He’d know what to do.
He’s a wise ’un. He ain’t no real priest.”
He shook his head. “Emuin doesn’t know at all what to do with this.
He’s afraid.”
“Ye don’t know that, m’lord?”
“I spoke with him. I spoke with him just now, Uwen.”
“M’lord, you was dreaming. That was all.”
“I did speak to him.” The ceiling seemed more solid now, a pattern of woodworking and lights. “I’m warm now. Go to bed, Uwen.” “I’m comfortable here, m’lord.”
“I’m in no danger now. Go rest. Think about going back to the guard.
The servants can manage for me.” He reached for Uwen’s scar-traced arm, pressed it, careful of new cuts, and a bruise that, the size of his fist, darkened the side of Uwen’s forearm. “I want you to be safe, Uwen.”
“I hain’t got no family,” Uwen said finally. “The guard’s me mistress.
But I couldn’t leave ye for the barracks again, m’lord. Couldn’t. Wouldn’t be nothing then. I’m getting old. I feel the cold in winter, I think on my wife and my girls and my boy that the fever got, and there ain’t no use for me beginning again. Damn, no, I couldn’t leave ye, my lord.”
And he tucked the blanket about him and got up and wandered away to his own small room between the doors.
Tristen watched him. He had never known about Uwen’s wife or children. He had made Uwen remember them, and he saw that Uwen had attached to him a feeling that Uwen had nowhere to bestow; as he had had for Mauryl, and had nowhere now to bestow it—not on Emuin, who had not Mauryl’s wisdom, and not Mauryl’s strength: Emuin had fled him and refused to be known, or loved, or held to, and he respected that wish, even understood it as fear. Cefwyn asked him to be his friend, but Cefwyn had so many people he had to look out for and to take care of.
But Uwen had only him. Uwen by what he said had lost everyone else.
Uwen was not so wise as Mauryclass="underline" he was as brave as anyone could ask, but somehow he had ceased to depend on Uwen for advice as much as Uwen had begun to take orders from him.
And when had that happened? When had he grown to be anyone’s source of advice in the world, when he did not understand the world himself?
He lay still in his bed, and longed for daylight. Time—of which he had rarely been acutely conscious—again seemed to be slipping rapidly toward some event he could not predict or understand.
Far away he heard movements in the halls. From the yard came the occasional clatter of hooves, horsemen abroad in the dark, bound to or from the lower town or countryside or the camps—there was no cause to be dashing about on horses within the Zeide courts. Perhaps messengers, he said to himself, and tried to think what might be going on that had so much astir.
He had no inclination to sleep and confront another bad dream. Sweat prickled on him, the blankets weighed like iron. The beats of his heart measured interminable time, and he lay and stared at the lightless glitter of the windowpanes.
The darkness seemed a little less outside, a reddish murk, but not in the east, a glow that reflected on the higher roofs and walls—and from outside came a noise he could not at first recognize, then decided it was many voices shouting at something. Thunder rumbled. Rain spattered the glass, a few drops, and the air stayed chill—he could feel it with his fingers to the glass, and the fire seemed more than convenience tonight.
The glow outside was much too early, unless, he thought, in this’ wretched day the laws of nature were bent and that murkish light was an ill-placed dawn or an effect of storm he had never seen.
But whatever the cause of it there was less and less chance of sleeping or resting in such goings-on, with the accumulation of unanswered questions and unidentifiable sounds and light. He rose from bed, determined at last and least to know what was happening that kept other people awake, and searched out clean, warm clothes. He had half dressed before, probably because of his opening the clothes-press, which had a stubborn door, Uwen arrived from the other room, rubbing his eyes and limping.
“M’lord,” Uwen murmured, “what’s the matter?”
“I don’t know,” he said, and thought of going quickly, taking just the door guard, not wishing Uwen to have to dress and break his sleep, but then he remembered Cefwyn’s order about wearing the mail, and it was too serious an order to dismiss lightly. He went to get it. “There’s a great deal of going and coming. I’m going downstairs to see.” “I will, m’lord. Ye don’t need to stir out.”
“I want to see, Uwen. I want to know.” It seemed to him his whole life until now had swung on his ignorance of the things around him—that too often he had taken others’ seeing and others’ doing, and not always had the result of that turned out for the good. He knew much too little, now, when Cefwyn was becoming King and Cefwyn’s brother was entering the household. So much else was changing, not alone in Henas’amef, as he knew it to be, but in Elwynor and the whole of the lands he had ever heard about.
While he was putting on his boots Uwen had stumbled back to his own space, and came back fastening his breeches and carrying his boots and his coat—Uwen did not intend to let him go alone, that was clear, and of all orders he could give Uwen that he knew Uwen would obey, he had had clear warning that Uwen would disobey him wide and at large if he bade him stay.
There came an outcry from some distant place. They both looked toward the windows. “M’lord,” Uwen said, “don’t be going out. I don’t know what’s happening. I don’t think it’s nothing good. I swear to ye, I’ll go down fast and see, and report to ye before ye could dress and be down.”
“No,” Tristen said, wound his hair out of the way as best he could and began to struggle with the mail shirt himself until Uwen came to help him.