Up, then, the central stairs.
She knew when he would arrive, knew that he suffered a sudden blush of awkwardness just outside her doors, his brash, common effrontery brought to an adamant halt by her guards.
Why had he come? He pursued his own curiosity, his own sense of duty. He had come to find her and to learn what she meant to that other concern of his, who slept with his mother in yet another room, with a baby’s untaught awareness.
She rose, went to her door, and opened it to find a gangling boy with wide dark eyes, face flushed with the vehemence of his argument with her guards.
“Lady,” he said, never once abashed, but with a quick bow.
“This is my ally,” she said to the guards. “He doesn’t know it yet, but he is.” She swept the boy inside, and the guards shut the door. All her attention was for a boy her heart told her defended a sleeping baby, for reasons unclear to the boy himself, and defended him even against the babe’s own Aswydd mother. It seemed to his loyal heart that the baby had had no defenders; and he had grown up with none but an old woman, and so he took it as his duty, himself, when no one else cared, to care for Tarien’s baby. All of that passion was in him, all at once, and for the babe’s sake.
In Tristen’s absence, he was here at her door—no accident.
And no boyish curiosity had brought him to her, but a wizard’s lively attachment to all the world around him: she felt it as she had felt her father’s curiosity about the world and never known it was uncommon: Paisi had the same tone of mind and heart, as if she were in the heart of her family again. They faced one another, and at the far remove of his tower, Emuin had stopped his breakfast, and had stopped it for a full several breaths, now, slowly grown present enough that they both knew.
“ ‘E ain’t sayin’ anything,” Paisi said faintly. “ ‘E ain’t upset wi’ me, but ‘e knows. The old man knows ever’thin’ ‘at goes on.”
“A very great wizard,” Ninévrisë said, “as I never shall be.” All her little wizardry had been bent to the north, in earnest hope of a whisper in the gray space, and now this boy distracted her from her watch and made her aware how constant it had been. It both gave her second thoughts, this potent distraction the boy posed, and made her question her own wisdom and her own fate in this war of powers.
It was a small fate, it might be; or a greater one. She had always thought of it as her fate—but seemingly now her fate had become wrapped about the child, her child, Cefwyn’s child. She had been proud, had commanded in the field, come close to power, and seen all her power over her fate unexpectedly involved in this union with Cefwyn. Now she saw it devolving upon their child, changed in direction and inevitable as the stoop of a hawk—to that extent she knew she had failed of all she purposed, and had failed in it even if she should rule in Elwynor. Neither Cefwyn’s rule nor hers, she foresaw, would suffice to settle the border or make a lasting peace. They became forerunners of one who might.
And this boy… this all-elbows, tousle-haired boy… this self-appointed warden of Cefwyn’s other son… he came to her to know what she was, and found himself too abashed to look her in the eye.
“Were you always with Emuin?” she asked, a more answerable question.
“No,” Paisi said. “ ‘Is Grace sent me to ‘im.”
“And do you like Emuin?”
Paisi blushed and looked abashed. “May be.”
“And how do you regard Tristen?”
“It ain’t for me to say about ‘Is Grace,” Paisi said in a breath. “ ‘E just is, is all.”
“Yet you do like him.”
“Aye,” Paisi admitted, with all his soul in that answer.
“And Lady Tarien?”
Silence was that answer.
“Do you love the Aswydds?” Ninévrisë asked. “Or not?”
A shake of Paisi’s head, a downward look, and a half glance. “Lady Tarien ain’t as bad.”
“And her son?”
That drew a look up, so direct and so open it held nothing back.
“ ‘E’s a babby, is all.”
“No,” she said, “not all. Never all.”
“Then what ‘e is… ‘e ain’t, yet.”
“All the same, he has a friend,” she said in the deep silence, for that was how she judged Paisi. “He has one friend; and that friend is a wizard, or will be. And when my son sees the light… will you love him, too?”
Paisi’s eyes darted hither and thither, as if he sought to see some answer just past her; but when he looked at her, and again she could see all the way to the depth of him. “I ain’t sighted,” Paisi said. “I don’t know, lady.”
“Yet will you wish him harm?” She asked for half, since she could not immediately have the whole. And seeing every certainty of her own life overturned and changed, she fought for her son’s certainties. “Or do you wish him well?”
“I ain’t ever wishin’ anybody harm,” Paisi said with a fierce shake of his head. “Master Emuin says a fool’d wish harm to anybody, on account of it’s apt to fly back in a body’s face an’ do gods know what, so, far as I can wish, I wish your babby’s happy.”
“So do I,” Ninévrisë said, and the bands about her heart seemed to loose. This boy, something said to her, this boy is worth winning. “I wish peace, and good, and all such things.”
Most of all she wished Cefwyn might see both his sons, and might come alive out of the war. She wished that more than she wished herself to rule; but for Elwynor itself she never gave up her wishes to see it become again what it had been.
She had lost confidence herself… had lost it the morning Tristen left, and did not know where to find it again in Henas’amef. She was out of place here, and regretted with all her heart that she had not ridden with Tristen, but she felt the presence of life within her and knew what dire thing their enemy had tried to do with Tarien’s babe. She would not chance that for her own son, Cefwyn’s son, the heir of two kingdoms.
“Do you think Lady Tarien will see me?” she asked.
“I don’t know she won’t,” Paisi said.
What Emuin thought of it was another matter: caution flowed from that quarter, for down in the depths, not so far away, was a tightly warded fear, one so closely bound to Tarien it gave Emuin constant worry.
But all the same she gathered the boy by the arm and went to the door and out, where she swept up half her Amefin bodyguard and walked up the stairs to the hall above.
There was a guard of state at Tarien’s door, too, and now Tarien Aswydd knew she had a visitor, and met that notion warily. They were not friends. They had never been. But she came with Paisi, and Paisi knew the old woman who stayed with Tarien, knew her as if she were kin of his, as for all Ninévrisë knew the old woman might be.
Only now she and Emuin and the elderly earl whom Tristen had left in charge of the town were the only authority; and she used hers to pass the doors of that apartment.
The place smelled of baby, and the gray space there was close with protections and wards that tingled along her skin and over Paisi’s. She could see them for a moment, a flare of blue in the foyer, and at the sunlit window beyond, and about the door that let them in.
They were not against her, but against any wizard who came here; against anyone who might wish to invade this small fortified and enchanted space. And at the very heart of it sat Tarien, tucked up with quilts in a chair by the fire, and in her arms her baby, and her attention was all for the child, nothing for her visitor.