“Gods for Ylesuin!” the Duke of Osanan had shouted from among the last screen of guardsmen, the old battle cry. “Osanan will be there, Your Majesty!”
Cefwyn believed it, and indeed, before they had cleared the town gates, Osanan’s standard-bearer had come, in earnest of his lord. Osanan had a far ride home and the mustering of his men, in order to recover his standard, but that pebble was suddenly in motion.
Ryssand’s edifice of pride had crumbled that little bit more, at the stirring of an old warhorse’s heart.
Cefwyn gazed ahead of him now, with the heavy flap and snap of the royal banners in his ears, his, and Ninévrisë’s colors flying before them. It was his order to display those banners all the way to the river and beyond, to show them in every village as they gathered that ragtag of peasantry that would come to their sovereign’s call along the way.
They moved up the long road that passed ultimately through Murandys itself, bound for the bridge that would take them across the Lenúalim and commit them once and for all to keeping his promise to his bride. And the sun shone down on them as they began.
But toward noon, the east shadowed horizon to horizon with cloud, and by midafternoon it was clear that weather-luck was only for their setting-forth.
Soldiers grumbled, seeing rain in the offing.
But the wind that blasted down as the cloud came was bitter cold, buffeting the standards and making it clear that rain was not the threat.
“So, well,” Ninévrisë said cheerfully, bringing up her hood. The first snowflakes stood unmelted in her dark hair, and her face bore a wind-stung blush. “It will be better than mud, will it not?”
“So much for weather-luck and fasting,” Cefwyn said, so only she heard.
And in very little time winter enfolded them: the sky grew leaden and the air turned gray with flying snow.
“If Tristen managed this,” Cefwyn said across the voice of the wind, “could he not have managed to hold the sunshine just until we crossed the river?”
CHAPTER 1
The weather turned back to brutal cold, troubling in itself: Tristen saw it coming on the afternoon after Anwyll’s departure and no wish he could make brought back the sun. Gray cloud closed in, and bitter wind, and the drifts lately melted froze hard, a fine dust of snowflakes blowing across it at first, then sticking, with a night’s greater fall. And days subsequent were no better.
Beeswax candles by the score lit master Emuin’s studies, meanwhile, candles to light the crabbed note-taking that had gone on at any moment of every day, every night. Drafts swept through the tower and down into the guardroom on rare clear nights, and by that, Tristen knew master Emuin peered into the heavens despite his promises to observe the wards and keep the shutters closed.
On the obscured nights there were no such drafts: then Emuin delved into old texts, and by dawn and dusk sent Paisi on this and that mysterious errand to the archive and to the Bryalt shrine, after which the nuns, too, came with texts.
It was precise times master Emuin avowed he sought, the times of Tristen’s arrival here, of Tarien’s baby’s likeliest conception, and of other events months and even centuries past.
Most of all master Emuin sought the very hour of Mauryl’s Summoning him. Emuin had guessed it, by gross reckoning, as the first day of spring, but the precision and the sure reckoning—that was the chimera Emuin stalked through the old records, through guardhouse accounts and even Cook’s recollections of his arrivaclass="underline" with so many grandchildren to her credit, and the duties she had regarding festivals and solemnities, Cook had a sense of dates and birthdays and feast days, and preserved a better reckoning in her head than the archives did on paper, regarding some events.
All this, Emuin said, was to determine the most auspicious day— and the least—for Cefwyn’s son to be born, while the weather raged in rebellion outside the windows.
Books, anecdotes, the stars: such were Emuin’s sources, as Emuin sought understanding in ways Tristen himself could not have done— for one thing because nothing of Emuin’s knowledge had ever Unfolded to him, and for another because he had not thought to ask the questions Emuin asked. He felt the impulse to magic and chose his moments by some reading of the insubstantial wind of the gray space, while a wizard reckoned and reckoned and consumed ink and paper and kept records it had never remotely occurred to him to keep.
But to know in advance that a moment was coming… this seemed valuable, if one could. He sometimes failed to know what men might do, as he had failed to know how the soldiers would behave when he dismissed them; and in this Emuin surpassed him. So, too, Emuin professed to him, could any wizard: hence wizards had bested the Sihhë-lords in the past: let it be a lesson to you, Emuin said.
To know when a thing had been in the past was not quite as useful as to know when it would be in time to come, but Emuin could tell him that, too, and fit together the scattered accounts of the Red Chronicle and the Bryalt account. He had read them, read every history he could find—but he had had no awareness of time at the first of his reading and still had a faltering grasp of it. The better part of an hour could slip past while he fed the birds. He could still grow fascinated by some new question and chase it through convolutions, unhearing while one of his advisors spoke to him, patiently telling him what he doubtless did need to know.
In sum, the same faults he had had at the beginning he had, though in lesser measure, and he tried to mend them, where he saw them. He tried to give Emuin answers to his questions now, for instance, since he had been there and Emuin had not been entirely aware of Mauryl’s doings, but his own beginnings in particular were a haze to him, and he retained only few keen impressions of that hour—or rather he retained them all, but not the ones Emuin wished.
He recalled fire—his senses had all been overwhelmed by fire… and he recalled pain: he still bore a scar on his finger. He remembered getting that.
But most of all, the more he needed to remember the structure by which Men reckoned time, the more keenly he remembered the unbridled extravagance of those days, fire which had never seemed brighter, air which had moved over his skin with a touch like fingers, dusty stone underfoot which had had a texture so curious and so smooth… and, oh, the rain, and the thunder… the tastes, the smells, all these things that had poured in on his senses, new and wonderful and commanding his utter attention—to Mauryl’s distress.
But on what night of all nights this had happened, he had no recollection at all, nor any sense how many suns had risen and set before he first beheld the forest outside Ynefel’s walls, or how much of a season had passed before he knew the source of that sighing of leaves which rose to the winds outside the fortress walls.
After he had learned the world from the loft he had known day and night as related to the sun, but he had not known how to count the days—it had never occurred to him that days had a number, or that they would be different one from the other. As a consequence only certain days stood out like signposts, significant to him later, in terms of what would come, but then only days like other days, when miracles of dust and wings and sunlight were all one long vision.
That such times and movements of the stars had been important to Mauryl while he was watching pigeons in the loft, oh, that he could well believe now. He recalled every detail of Mauryl’s presence at the sole table. Their dinners had always competed with the charts and the inkpots for room, and he had read none of them, but he recalled how they looked.
And that Emuin, with his books and his charts and his reports from Gran Sedlyn on Lady Tarien’s condition could fix one date above others as the time for the child to be born, he could also believe, for he had learned there was a regularity in the heavens beyond the simple repetition of day and night and full moon and new—but he could not help Emuin in the reckoning.