The first two attempts fell useless: Cefwyn and Emuin both survived.
The third, Aséyneddin’s, was the real one, aimed not at kingship—Aséyneddin’s purpose—but specifically at Tristen, whom Hasufin recognized as Mauryl’s last and most effective weapon, and who must go down if Hasufin was to prevent Tristen’s rise as a Sihhë-lord.
Sorcery, a wizardous art reliant on chaos, was strongest in a moment of chance and upheaval, and there was no moment of upheaval among Men greater than the shifting tides of a battlefield. So Hasufin made his strongest bid to destroy Tristen, who stood between him and the life and substance he could gain through Aséyneddin.
In the world of Men, at a place called Lewenbrook, near Ynefel, the Elwynim rebels, under Lord Aséyneddin, met Cefwyn Marha-nen’s opposing army. That was the conflict Men fought.
But when Aséyneddin faltered, Hasufin sent out tides of sorcery in reckless disregard. A wall of Shadow rolled down on the field, and those it touched it took and did not give up. It was Hasufin’s manifestation, and all aimed at Tristen’s destruction.
Tristen, however, took up magic as he took up his weapons, when the challenge came. When Hasufin Heltain loosed his sorcery, Tristen rode into the Shadow, penetrated into Ynefel itself, and drove Hasufin from his Place in the world.
Cefwyn meanwhile had prevailed in the unnatural darkness, and when the sun broke free of the Shadow, he had managed to hold his army together and continue the assault. Aséyneddin’s forces, such as survived, shattered and ran in panic.
It was a long way back to the world, however, from where Tristen had gone to fight. Exhausted, hurt, at the end of his purpose, Tristen all but resigned his wizard-made life, finished with Mauryl’s purpose, too weary to wake to the world of Men.
But he had once given his shieldman Uwen, an ordinary Man with not a shred of magic in him, the power to call his name. This Uwen did, the devotion of a simple man seeking his lost lord on the battlefield, and Tristen came.
There was a moment, then, when Cefwyn stood victorious over the rebels, that he might have launched forward into Elwynor: the southern lords had rallied to the new king, and would have followed him. But Cefwyn saw his army badly battered and in need of regrouping. He knew the enemy was on the run, meaning they would sink invisibly into Elwynor’s forested depths—and he knew, as a new king, that he had left matters uncertain behind him. The majority of his kingdom did not even know they had changed one king for another, and the treaty he had made with Ninévrisë had never reached his people. He stood in the situation his grandfather had faced, at the end of summer, with a winter before him.
Good campaigning weather still remained, but harsh northern winters and the Elwynim woods could make fighting impossible. So for good or for ill, Cefwyn opted not to plunge his exhausted army, lacking maps or any sort of preparation, into the unknown situation inside Elwynor, which had been several years in anarchy and still had rival claimants to the Regency. Instead he chose to regroup, settle his domestic affairs, marry the Lady Regent, ratify the marriage treaty, and rally the rest of his kingdom behind him in a campaign to begin in the spring. It seemed unlikely that any great power could rise in Elwynor during autumn and a winter, given that the rebels were now fighting among themselves and that his army and Tristen had already defeated the two strongest forces Elwynor could field.
So Cefwyn went home, trusting his father’s trusted men, gathering up his brother Efanor, to take up the power of the monarchy as it had been.
So he thought. But when he reached his capital, he discovered his father’s closest friends among the barons meant to wrest the real power into their own hands, for his father had let them do much as they pleased for years—had taken their decisions and put his royal seal on them. The clerics had preferred Efanor: that was a known difficulty. But the barons had for the last decade had a king they could rule. They meant to have another one, and in their minds and by all prior reports, Cefwyn was a wastrel prince who would be a weak king if they simply provided him diversions and women. He could be managed, they had said among themselves.
That was not, however, the nature of the king who came home to them: Cefwyn arrived surrounded by their southern rivals, who were clearly in favor, and allied to Mauryl’s heir, betrothed to the Elwynim Regent, advised by a wizard, and proposing war on the Elwynim rebels. The barons quickly realized they were not facing Ináreddrin’s dissolute son: it was Selwyn’s hard-handed grandson, and the barons, accustomed to dictating to the father, were set down hard.
So the most powerful barons of the north took a new tactic… they were older, cannier, more experienced in court politics: they already had the good will of the most conservative priests. They would use the Quinaltine and the people’s faith, prevent the marriage, treat the lady Regent as a captive—and seize land in Elwynor.
Cefwyn determined just as resolutely to bring them into line and shake the kingdom into order. He sent the southern barons home to attend their harvests and to prepare for war, all but Lord Cevulirn of Ivanor, whose horsemen had less reliance on such seasons, and who stayed as a shadowy observer for southern interests.
In Elwynor, meanwhile, the wars had come to a swifter conclusion than anyone expected. One rebel lord brought a largely hired army out of the hills, supplied it off the resources of the peasants, besieged his own capital of llefinian, and declared the Lady Regent a helpless captive in the hands of the Marhanen king. This brought the situation Cefwyn had left in Elwynor to a state of crisis, and Cefwyn took immediate steps to set elite cavalry at the bridges that faced Elwynor. This both stabilized the border and removed some of the force on which the Crown maintained its authority.
Cefwyn took immediate measures to assure that the Quinalt would approve both the marriage and the treaty that recognized Ni-névrisë as Lady Regent of Elwynor, independent of the Crown of Ylesuin, and renounced all claims to each other’s kingdoms.
The barons retaliated with an attempt to limit the monarchy over them, and to reject both the marriage treaty and their king’s associates.
Tristen and Emuin both had kept to themselves since their arrival… for Cefwyn, fighting for his right to wed the woman he loved and trying to wrest back greater sovereignty in his own capital, wished to obscure the presence of wizardry in his court.
Obscurity, however, only increased the mystery surrounding Tristen. The barons saw him and Emuin as an influence on Cefwyn that must be eliminated, and on a night when lightning, whether by chance or wizardry, struck the Quinalt roof, a penny in the offering in the Quinaltine was found to be Sihhë coinage, with forbidden symbols on it.
The charge against Tristen was to be sacrilege, wizardry attacking the Quinalt and the gods.
Cefwyn suspected that His Holiness the Patriarch himself was devious enough to have substituted the damning coin, and Cefwyn moved quickly to compel the Patriarch into his camp. But the rumors were so rife that Cefwyn felt compelled to remove Tristen further from controversy and from the site of rumors. In what he thought a clever and protective stroke, he sent Tristen back to Amefel not as a refugee in disgrace, but as duke of Amefel… a replacement for the viceroy he had left to replace the disgraced Orien Aswydd.
Now this viceroy was Parsynan, a minor noble appointed on the advice of some of these same troublesome barons, notably Murandys and Ryssand … or Cefwyn had exiled Orien Aswydd and her sister to a Teranthine nunnery for their betrayal, and had never appointed another duke, until now.
Hearing that Tristen was going to Amefel, and that Parsynan was recalled, Corswyndam Lord Ryssand panicked, for he feared certain records might fall into Tristen’s hands and thus into Cef-wyn’s. He sent a rider to advise Parsynan of his imminent replacement.