“Gods bless,” Uwen said, and raked his hair back with a sooted hand, leaving streaks on his brow. “Gods bless. An’ ‘Er Grace dead an ‘er ladyship wi’ the baby. An’ what’s to be wi’ him?”
“He’s Cefwyn’s,” Tristen said. “And Emuin’s there. Emuin won’t leave him.” He felt that as surely as he had felt the strength and the will in Tarien’s arms. “He’s Cefwyn’s son, his name is Elfwyn, and Hasufin won’t have him.”
There was a new Shadow loose within the wards downstairs. He was sure of that. It was bound to the stones of the place, exactly as he had once feared would happen when he had advised Cefwyn to exile all the Aswydds and not to execute them. An iron door had not been enough to hold Orien Aswydd prisoner: she had proved that well enough.
But in the purpose she held worth her life, she had failed. She was not done with trying for wizardry, perhaps, and Hasufin himself could not fault her effort or her courage… but she had failed.
He went back to the door to reassure himself all was well within the room, and saw Emuin and Lady Tarien and the babe, all in the light of a single candle.
He saw a life that had not existed before now. He found that, amid all else, the most remarkable thought, and he took with him the remembrance of the boy and the youth who might someday remember meeting him, in the maze of the mews.
Owl joined them as he and Uwen left the apartment, and banked away down the stairs, to the startlement of the guards below, he was sure. Whether Owl was satisfied he had no idea.
But on the precise day on which Emuin calculated Mauryl had Summoned him to life, at the very first light of dawn, an entirely new soul had drawn a first breath, and Cefwyn had a son.
CHAPTER 4
Rain and thunder above canvas brought dreams of campaigns past, recollections of mud and hard living far to the south—of days spent waiting and nights spent in far less luxury than a royal pavilion, two cots made into one, and warmth against one’s side.
But that warmth gathered herself in the last hours of the rain-drenched night and stole away… and over to the baggage piled out of the rain, in a corner of the huge tent. Cefwyn paid slight attention, deciding that Ninévrisë had thought of something undone, or left, or needed, in the way one did in the middle of the night on a journey, with all one’s belongings confined to chests and boxes, and had the servants remembered the new boots or packed the writing kit?
Gods knew. There were times one simply had to get up and dispose of the question, and this night of noise and fury in the heavens, with the tent blown hard by the gusts and no great likelihood the army was going to break camp in the morning—this was such a troubled night, on their slow way through the edge of Murandys and to the river camp.
But Ninévrisë, having rummaged up something, or failed to find something, was quiet for a long while after.
Too long, Cefwyn decided. He had made up his mind to sleep late, having waked several times to realize the deluge continued, and still cherished the notion of late sleep until he rolled over to see what she was doing and saw her standing distressedly in the lightning flashes, with something flat and pale pressed to her bosom.
Then he knew that what she had ferreted from the baggage, from her belongings, was a piece of paper, that paper, and at this hour.
He shoved an elbow under him, looking at her in concern until he had a glance back.
Then she came back to him, and threw herself on her knees by the bedside.
“The baby’s born,” she said. “Tonight, the baby’s born.”
It was certainly not the sort of news to cheer either of them. The letter had told them nothing more till now, until he had ceased to believe it was anything but an inert scrap of unwritten paper.
But now this news broke through the days of silence, at the lightning-shot edge of a dawn that saw the army stalled, the roads surely turned to ponds and rivers.
And now in the dark of the tent he could not judge her expression, whether she wept, or frowned, or had no expression at all.
“More news,” she said, and her voice trembled, barely audible above the battering of rain on the canvas walls. “Orien’s dead.”
“Orien.” He was taken aback, and wondered whether she had mistaken the twins and misspoken. Women died in childbirth, and should it not be Tarien who died at this birth?
“She burned to death,” Ninévrisë said. “She burned in her cell.”
“Good gods.” His memory of a glorious, beautiful woman could not fit the image of such a death. He raked his hair back, pushed upright and hauled the blanket around him against the chill of the rain and the unhappy report. “I take it it’s that letter,” he said. “Is that all he says?”
“The baby’s name is Elfwyn,” she said. “Tarien called him Maur-ydd, after the old wizard, I think; but Tristen said he was Elfwyn, so Elfwyn he is, now.”
A king’s name, for a king’s bastard. And not only a king’s name, but the name of the last High King. That would not go unremarked among his uneasy barons. It was provocative and a trouble to the child and to him. Gods, what was Tristen thinking?
“What more?” he asked, unsettled. Tristen could be feckless at the most damnable times. “What news of Tristen?”
“He…” Ninévris딑s breath caught in her throat. She seemed to have caught a chill despite her robe, small wonder, at such news, and he moved quickly to gather her up and into his arms, in the warmth of an occupied bed.
The shivering kept up for a moment, and now he knew the truth, for Ninévrisë had taken the matter of Tarien’s baby so entirely worldly-wise and matter-of-factly he had convinced himself she accepted it without a ripple.
Now in a stroke he doubted all his assumptions, about this, about all the other slights she took so calmly. She forgave him in the very embrace of her arms and the inclinations of her heart, but the existence of a child named as, gods help them, Tristen of all people… had named this child… what could she think?
What could anyone think?
And what did Tristen think, giving his son that name? Not a damned thing, was the first conclusion that leapt up in him: Tristen could be the most feckless soul alive, did things because those were the thoughts he said Unfolded to him, thoughts that leapt into a head that otherwise could be utterly absorbed with a hawk’s flight or the shape of a leaf.
Yet Tristen, the worst liar in all Ylesuin, was not dealing with a hawk or a leaf in this child… this was not something Tristen would treat casually or on a whim, and the other aspect of his flighty concentration was that absolute, terrifying honesty, in which he would leap in where no courtier would tread. He had met that appalling honesty when—gods! when he had left off his folly of love-making with the Aswydd women and gone downstairs to look a stranger in the eyes… and he had never after been able to avoid that stare, that truth, that honesty. Like a boulder in a brook, it had diverted all his life into a different path.
And now… now the result of that moment was a child, and Tristen named him. He was deaf to wizardry, but like a deaf man, he could feel the drumbeat in the ground under him: a moment had come back to haunt him and change his life.
Elfwyn Tristen named the boy. So, indeed, Elfwyn he was, the will and word of his unacknowledged father and his father’s wife notwithstanding.
And this Elfwyn, this bastard prince, was in fact heir to nothing, since his only legitimate claim, Amefel—where a maternal lineage did have legal force—had passed to Tristen’s hands. But in his Aswydd and Marhanen blood he had substantial claims to everything in reach, if he one day decided to reach for it and cause a world of trouble.