—Hold to her, Tristen said. Master Emuin, help me hold her. She’ll die.
—It’s the baby he wants, Emuin said to him. His hair and beard and garments alike streamed in the gale that the Edge swallowed up. Tarien was half in it, the babe all the way gone…
But something was in the dark: the Wind that gathered itself for a first breath in the World.
—Not yours, Tristen said to the Wind, with all the force that was in him, and of a sudden he felt the rush of Owl’s wings past his hair. Owl soared ahead of him into that gulf and he found himself rushing into it, a familiar place after all, a place of blue light, beating with wings.
A boy stood there, preoccupied among the hawks, a well-dressed, fair-haired boy who began to look toward him, head turning, until the Wind called him by a name Tristen, hearing, could not hear— would not hear, for it was not the name he knew for the child.
—Elfwyn, Tristen said, commanding attention, and now the boy cast him a dark-eyed glance. With the very next blink the boy was a well-grown youth, straight and tall, with Cefwyn’s very look.
—Sir? said the boy, but the dark within the dark was in his eyes.
Tristen reached out his hand, wishing the boy to come to him, wishing him safe and his mother and his father safe.
Fire leapt up, spectral red amid the cool blue light as the Wind called to the boy again. Out of that fire a black figure advanced, outlined in Wind-driven flame, and the boy faltered as that Shape held out a commanding, open hand. The wind roared, and the boy stood transfixed, fair hair torn by that Wind, hand all but touching the hand that reached for his.
—Elfwyn! The second time Tristen called, commanding now, and
the boy’s bead turned, the hand dropped. The name that was not the boy’s Name echoed again in the nameless light and the dark hand seized on the youth’s shoulder.
And in the very teeth of the gale Tristen called a third time, the magical time: Elfwyn!
The boy looked at him in startlement and the dark eyes turned cornflower blue, pale and with a hint of gray, until there was nothing of the darkness in them. The boy’s hand touched his.
The Wind raged and tore at them. Needles of ice and pain lanced through flesh and bone, and the gulf gaped under them.
Then Owl flashed between, bound away, and with that guidance Tristen turned toward what he knew was home, with the boy in his grasp. They traveled toward the darkness beyond the rows of birds on their perches, and constantly Owl flew ahead of him. Tristen gripped the boy’s shoulder, then his hand, and increasingly as he walked the hand he held was smaller and smaller, and the steps faltered, until he must sweep the child up within his arms, and hold him fast as he walked toward the dark circle.
He saw candlelight. He stepped into it…
And drew a great, deep breath, flavored with the cold of the downstairs hall at the site of the haunt, that stretch of odd flooring that fronted the old mews. He found himself with a newborn baby in his arms, a wizened, bloody creature with tight-clenched eyes and clenched fists, a babe that suddenly drew breath and let it out in a loud and lusty wail.
He slipped the pin of his cloak, the blood red of Amefel, and wrapped the baby in it against the chill… he walked, and guards posted at the stairs stared with misgivings as he passed with the small bundle in his arms.
He climbed the west steps, and passed guards he had not passed going out of Tarien’s apartment, men struck with consternation and surely wondering where he had been.
He did not venture the gray space now. He had no idea where that shortcut might send him and the babe both. He had no idea where Owl had gone, but when he reached Tarien’s apartment the guards opened the door for him. He carried his small angry charge through the outer chambers into the one where Tarien lay, and Emuin watched, and Gran Sedlyn met him with a face astonished and distraught.
“You took it!” Gran Sedlyn said, and behind her, Paisi stared, round-eyed.
He said not a word, but took the baby to Emuin, who sat by Tarien’s bedside, holding her hand, and she all disheveled and with her red hair pasted about her temples.
“We took out the sheets,” Gran Sedlyn was saying, a noise in his ears, “an’t was as if maybe we took out the babby amongst ‘em by mistake. We couldn’t find ‘im, we couldn’t find ‘im, and Your Grace had ‘im all the time… and where was Your Grace?” the confused woman asked. “Sittin’ here, as I thought, and then…”
“He’s safe,” Tristen said.
“Safe,” Emuin echoed him, with meaning, and maintained a fierce ward over the place, over the woman who rested, pale and shrunken, amid the pillows. Only as Tristen unwrapped his small burden and showed her the baby’s face did her eyes open wide, and go from grief to wonder. Her hands reached, not as Orien’s had reached, but with an urgent, tender desire. He laid the baby on her breast, and Tarien folded her arms around her child, and looked at him as if the very sight poured strength and life into her.
“His name is Elfwyn,” Tristen said, and Tarien’s eyes flashed wide, lips parted, perhaps to protest she wanted some other name. But she said not a word. Emuin looked at him, too, and with a sharper, worried expression, but without dispute.
“Elfwyn,” Emuin said.
“My baby prince,” Tarien murmured, with her lips against the infant’s pale and matted hair.
“Let’s wash ‘im,” Gran Sedlyn said. “Let’s ‘ave a look ‘ere, m’lady.”
“No,” Tarien said. “No one will take my baby. No one will take him!”
“Hear me, woman,” Emuin said harshly, and with a hand on the child and Tarien’s arm. “He has his right soul in him. This is truly Cefwyn’s child. That isn’t what your sister wanted. Do you understand?”
“She’s dead,” Tarien said. Her lips faltered as if they were frozen. “She’s dead. She can’t have him. My prince loved me, and she’ll never have him!”
Emuin looked at Tristen, and Tristen at him, with the feeling in his heart that Tarien was not mistaken. He left the room, unwashed and exhausted, and suddenly aware that Uwen was not there, and Uwen would never have left his heels. Gweyl and all his new guards were gone somewhere, but Lusin and Tawwys had come in, among the silent wardens of the Zeide, and Syllan and Aran were outside as if they had never left their former duty to him.
“There was fire,” Lusin said, and had no sooner said, than Uwen came through the door, soot smeared about him, and with Gweyl close behind.
“Thank the gods,” Uwen said. “They said ye’d come downstairs, an’ the fire, an’ all—”
“Orien burned,” Tristen surmised.
“In her cell,” Uwen said, and held his hands as if he wanted a place to wipe them, in this prince’s apartment. “Set the pallet alight, the candle to the straw, an’ the chokin’ smoke afore the flame: it were like an oven in that cell, an’ the guards up above didn’t know’t till the smoke come up the stairs.”
That flaring strength in the gray space… Orien’s attempt to drive Tarien to birth: in death she had reached for freedom and bound herself to the stones of the Zeide.
“Where was ye, m’lord? Where’d ye go?—An’ what’s this wi’ the babe?”
“In there,” Tristen said, still unsure he should have given the child to Tarien, but compelled to it by a magic that spoke to him as strongly as the wind and the earth themselves. “With Lady Tarien.”