And what did this conspiracy of wizards want? What had it ever wanted? Something with which Tristen would agree?
If it was the calamity of the house of Marhanen, he much doubted Tristen would consent to it.
He was aware of silence around him, silence of his companions as well as his guards.
“You wonder what I do think?”
“If it please Your Majesty to say.”
“Tasmôrden’s no wizard, but I’ll lay odds someone is, within his court, someone who doesn’t care a fig for Tasmôrden, whether he lives or dies.” Tristen’s fortified the Quinaltine, he thought to himself, with a little chill. He expects something: bloody hell, half a year ago he said there was something wrong about the place.
Aloud he said, to Maudyn and Anwylclass="underline" “And if wizards are in it, we’ve wizardry on our side. Amefel and all the company of the south is at our left hand, if only we both ride past that wedge of rock that divides us one from the other.”
“To join with Tristen, then,” Lord Maudyn said.
“To join with the south if we can. If our enemy stands back that long.” It came to him while he said it that the moment advantage shifted to one strategy or the other, wizardry would incline itself to use that advantage: if he tried to meet Tristen, then opposing wizardry would attempt to prevent him… and where it worked, men might bleed for it, in great numbers.
“And if not, Your Majesty?”
“If not…” Cefwyn looked at Anwyll, who as an undercaptain had offered not a word during all of this. “What do you think,
Captain? You’ve dealt with the Lord of Amefel, latest. What do you expect of him?”
“That he will not desert Your Majesty,” Anwyll said, and seemed to hold thoughts back, in diffidence or perhaps in knowledge of Tristen. What he held back seemed likely to exceed what he said.
“And does he remain true to us?” he asked Anwyll.
Anwyll’s gaze flashed to him, wary as a hunted creature’s.
“Does he?” He did not doubt. He refused to doubt. “I think so. I think so.” He set Danvy to a quicker pace. They passed beyond the camp, and he relayed orders to Maudyn. “Your men to hold this ground, come what may.”
“Shall we let Ryssand pass?”
There was the question, the question whether one province of Ylesuin should fight another. And that was, indeed, one answer to the challenge: set Maudyn as his rear guard, against his own troops.
“Let him pass,” Cefwyn said. “Let him have his way for now. There’ll be the day, not so long from now.”
They had passed the camp and led on, so that all the men and vehicles behind them would follow.
They were on the march and would proceed a day’s march north and west, with the blind hills to their left and a traitor at their backs.
“Ryssand can stew and fret,” he added, “but it won’t get him past the ox teams in the woods.”
CHAPTER 2
Wind tore the morning’s white clouds to ragged gray rags by noon, rain threatening but never falling. Wizardry? Crissand asked silently, with a worried look, knowing Tristen wished them fair weather, and Tristen refused to agree or disagree: whatever power willed storms to oppose his wishes seemed less mindful opposition than a negligent contrariness, a surly, preoccupied opposition in the north not even caring that it spilled into the heavens for all to see.
Worse thought, that power husbanded its self-restraint, not its strength, as if to hold back and shape its force was a greater effort than to loose it.
Emuin struggled with times and seasons and nudged, rather than commanded, his designs into the grand flow of nature. Emuin moved by knowledge and plan.
Hasufin had learned of Mauryl, before he turned to self-will and attempted to overthrow nature. Mauryl was a wizard. What he could teach was wizardry: all Mauryl’s charts, all Emuin’s, all those notes, calculations and records… that was wizardry.
This, he began to fear… this negligent, careless force… was not.
They moved through a last descent of hills toward the river, wending down a last terrace of that gray stone so frequent in the district, and then the road tended generally down a pitch that, around a hill, would bring them to the site of what they had used to call Anwyll’s camp, on the river.
They were in the district of Anas Mallorn. And of that village and of all the villages of the district, they saw occasional traces as they rode, the droppings of sheep, the stray bit of wool at the edge of a thicket, but they never caught sight of flocks or shepherds: Tristen had noticed that fact and had pondered it even before Uwen remarked on the vacancy of the land.
“Not a sheep from here to the river,” Uwen said. “So’s the shepherds has the smell o’ war, an’ ain’t havin’ their flocks for soldiers’ suppers, no. They’ve seen too much comin’ an’ goin’ of armies hereabouts in recent years.”
And Crissand, whose own lands depended primarily on the herding of sheep, nodded. “They’ll be high in the hills,” he said, lifting his eyes toward the rugged land to the east, that obdurate rock that had no easy passage except the river… and how even the Lenúalim had won its passage down to the sea was a distracting wonder.
Had the mountain split for it?
Had ancient magic made a way… or Efanor’s hitherto silent gods commanded it?
His mind even at this time of urgency hared off onto such tracks, and followed then a forbidden course, wondering how Idrys fared.
That, he would not wonder, not when he had been thinking of their enemy.
The gray space risked too much. What came and went there flitted, skipped, was there and gone again. The gray clouds that had appeared tore to wisps in the heavens and went to nothing with disquieting swiftness. The men noticed, and pointed aloft.
Not a wizard: his thoughts flew back to that uncomfortable suspicion.
Even sorcerors worked a sort of wizardry. Such had been Hasufin Heltain, such he still was, if anything still survived.
But if it was within a wizard’s ability to so disturb the weather as this, it was not possible for a wizard then to ignore it as trivial, or to change his mind and change the weather to something else.
Did Emuin know that this force existed? Had Emuin known that something this swiftly-changing opposed them, and never told him?
Mauryl had failed a contest with his own student, Hasufin, and the long-ago folk of Galasien had fallen under Hasufin’s rule for a time… until Mauryl had made the long journey north to the ice, to the Hafsandyr where the Sihhë dwelled. The tales were not, as he had heard, that Mauryl had Called the Sihhë south, but that Mauryl had gone to them to persuade them south.
And what lay there, in the frozen reaches of the mountains that Mauryl must respect, but magic: and why had only five met him, five sole occupants, as legend said, of one fortress? He could all but see those walls, black and severe against the mountains and the ice.
And where were the fields and the crops, the sheep and the people in this vision?
Had the Sihhë-lords not wives and children and homes to leave?
He could not remember. He could not gather that out of the mists of memory even with effort, whether there had been women, or children, or what had sustained the Sihhë in that frozen, high keep.
Yet Men said that he was Sihhë, and he bled, and feared, and did other things that Men did.
He did things, however, that Men and wizards did not do, and saw things they did not see, and had read the Book, and knew he had written it, though it was Barrakketh’s own hand, the first of the Sihhë-lords. It had wanted wizardry and cleverness to read that mirror-written writing… wizardry, but not all wizardry; trickery such as Men used, but not all trickery: a mirror and the light of the gray space. In that much… had not he done what any wizard could do?