Chapter 24
Te leg ached, a constant pain that preyed on temper, with occasional sharp pain that brought a cessation of reason, whereby Annas and the pages walked softly about the place.
There had been no sleep. None. After a late, last converse with Efanor, who had gone off to his third-floor rooms, Cefwyn had not so much as gotten out of his clothes in the hours before dawn, when Uwen Lewen’s-son had come hailing his door-guard, reporting a horse gone from the stables and Tristen out the Zeide gate.
If any other man in the Zeide had slipped the gate on any ordinary night, Cefwyn would have concluded the man was off to some merchant’s daughter. If any other lord had taken a horse from the stables he might have concluded that the man was some partisan of Heryn’s, and that his gate guards and the camp sentries that let him pass were fools.
But the guards knew this man as his partisan, Sihhé that he was, and had never questioned, never questioned Tristen’s right to take a horse from the stables or to ride out two guarded gates in succession, because Tristen wore the King’s own cloak and was known throughout the town to have the King’s friendship. If it had lacked any help in the calamity, Tristen had worn a new riding-coat which had the Tower and the Star on it, plain as plain for any gate-guard who failed to know the Sihhé and any Amefin who would for a the blink of an eye think of arguing with him.
And because, he had to admit it, he had abandoned Tristen downstairs to the care of a rank of guard that had never received the cautions the guards in the royal residences had had regarding Tristen—with Uwen dismissed upstairs, and on a night of driving rain and turn-of-season cold that had persuaded sentries at two gates to keep their noses inside gatehouses and under canvas—no one had asked the right questions, no one had challenged him, and no one had advised Captain Kerdin, who alone might have raised an objection.
If there was wizardry in Tristen it must be the sort to rob sane, preoccupied men of their better sense, and to convince otherwise sensible and experienced gate-guards that here was the most innocent urgency they had ever met—on the King’s business at that. If he had ordered Tristen’s escape himself, he could not have found more plausible stories than the various guards had raised in their defense, and he could only hope that Marhanen cloak did not prove a source of danger in a countryside where armed soldiers on the King’s business went in bands for safety. That was the kind of law Heryn Aswydd had kept in his province, and peace was fragile most of all with Heryn Aswydd’s corpse and six others hanging at his own south gate and no lord at all in power over the Amefin.
Meanwhile Uwen Lewen’s-son, on little sleep and in an agony of failed responsibility, had taken to the road on one of Cevulirn’s better mounts with a captain and an elite fifty of Cevulirn’s light cavalry in search of Tristen. And thank the gods, the lower town guards, damnably lax in other points, swore convincingly that Tristen had left specific word that Ynefel was not his destination.
So where did Tristen know to go in the world, if not to Ynefel? There was Emuin, for one, and in a contrary direction from all the others. The best information they had said that he had gone west, and that only left Althalen, Emwy, and Elwynor, a pretty choice of troubles.
Ask whether lying and evasion were, like swordsmanship and horsemanship, two more lordly arts Tristen had unfolded from his store of amazements. Not that it surmounted the shocking ills of treason and regicide and the consequences that Tristen had seen around him in the last two days, but it was disturbing, all the same, that Tristen had committed such acts so masterfully and so successfully.
And his own restless staring out the window this morning after such events, for a view of, above the wall and the surrounding roofs, gray-bottomed clouds which at least were showing blue sky between, did nothing to ease the ache in his leg or the impatience he felt. He wanted to reach Tristen himself, to have a word with him apart from the officers and the allies, to know what reasoning had prompted Tristen to have left—and to ask what Tristen believed he might do, given what little Tristen knew of the attack against him or the doings up by Althalen.
He paced, bereft of further information on which to decide anything.
He leaned on a stick which he refused to use before outsiders, and it had already made his hand sore and did nothing to mend either the pain in his leg or his ill temper. Walking hurt; it was a different hurt from the throb of the limb while he sat, and that was the variance an ill-humored fate gave him on the first day of his reign over a divided realm, a dukeless province, and a pious brother he had as lief, if Efanor crossed him this morning, drown in the nearest deep well.
“Go back to bed,” Idrys said first, when Idrys decided to report in, red-eyed and dusty.
He did not answer Idrys. He was not in a humor to be chided to bed and he was not in a humor to be told, as he could guess by Idrys’ face, that there was no better news in the search after Tristen. “I take it there is no news of him,” Idrys said.
“I do not have to tell the Lord Commander. You know there isn’t.”
“Lewen’s-son won’t give up. I have every confidence.”
“Would that I had.”
“Would Your Majesty care for other news?”
“Is it better?”
“I have searched for this name Hasufin,” said Idrys. “For some few hours. I have made brief inquiries of the annalists and the archivists, rousing them from their beds, and I and my most reliable clerks have run through, in short, the Zeide archives, the local Quinalt library ... and the Guard records. Then with notes in hand, and with a fair familiarity with the Red Chronicle of Guelen record, I visited the Bryaltines, reckoning the Amefin’s local breed of priests might recall items our godly and proper Guelenish Quinalt has forgotten. And, m’lord King, as you may see, I did my own searching.” Idrys brushed at his doublet in distaste. “I am coated in age and cobwebs.”
“And gained something? Damn it, get to the point.”
“There are Hasufins woven through the warp and weft of the genealogies I plumbed—including, in the Bryalt Book of Kings, one Hasufin, called Heltain, a wizard, rumored as some sort of spiritual antecedent, or, indeed, namesake, of Aswyn, the fourteen-year-old brother of Elfwyn Sihhé of the Guelen Red Chronicle, which, let us recall, our guest had in his hands.”
“And had no time to read. If you believe he made up this tale—”
“By no means. I merely point out he has an interest in the old accounts himself, and one wonders for what he was searching.” “To the point, crow!”
“I’m arriving just now. And I confess I was surprised to see Hasufin as a name of such surprising persistence in the Bryalt accounts—even back hundreds of years. As, let me say, I found several Mauryls of various repute before the records go back into the old Galasite tongue—for which, m’lord, you must obtain a priest. There are Bryaltine clerks who claim to read that language fluently, but without your orders I declined their assistance. It would have necessitated questions and names named which I did not judge you wished made a matter of gossip.”
“The hell with the Bryaltines. Tristen. Is there anything naming him, while you were about it?”
Idrys heaved a sigh, then, leaned on the back of a chair and ducked his head a moment, evidently gathering patience to deal with an impatient and very short-tempered lord; and Cefwyn repented his curt tone. Idrys had been as sleepless as he.