Nothing was simple: wizardry and sorcery and magic commingled, and two of those three depended on times and seasons; the second was the perverted use of the first; the third was innate in those who had it—
And if wizardry had a dark mirror…
Might magic have one?
Why had Mauryl gone to the north rather than speaking to the Sihhë at a distance, as he was sure Mauryl had known how to do?
And how had he gone? By roads? And if by ordinary roads, fearing the ascendancy of his enemy, why had it taken five Sihhë-lords coming back with him to overthrow the rule of one mere student of Mauryl Gestaurien—Mauryl, whom all the Men he knew called the greatest and oldest of wizards?
What indeed had Mauryl and the five Sihhë had to face in the south?
Hasufin? The might of old Galasien arrayed against Mauryl?
“Strays is apt to end in stewpots,” Uwen was saying, regarding sheep and pigs. “Even wi’ the best of soldiers… and there’s that ragtag lot that’s come ‘mongst Aeself’s lads, who ain’t themselves come with wagons nor supply. It ain’t sayin’ there ain’t some Elwynim up in the hills even now, bands not wantin’ to join Aeself’s lot, not desirous of goin’ home, neither. The war’s gone one way an another in Elwynor, and that don’t lead all the captains to be friends of one another, nor to trust comin’ into Aeself’s camp, even if they wasn’t ever Tasmôrden’s men.”
“I don’t see any there,” Tristen murmured, for to his awareness the hills rising in the east were barren of men and sheep, the same. “The people have fled, if they were able, farther to the south. It was hungry men that came to raid Aeself’s camp, and the Lady of Emwy didn’t let them in.—But Aeself’s moved,” he said, for his awareness of the land flared dangerously wide for a moment, a lightning stroke of a wish that lit the landscape all around him. In fear he stifled that vision and made himself see the land between his horse’s ears, the road in front of him, the company on either side.
“Gods bless,” Uwen muttered. “Moved, ye say?”
“I sent Cevulirn’s men by this road,” Tristen recalled, “while we visited Aeself: I haven’t been this far toward the river since Cevulirn and I traveled this road… and all the land is empty now. The people have gone to Drusenan’s wall, or they’ve gone to the south, none toward the river, none toward the hills.”
“They wouldn’t,” Crissand said somberly. “The hills to the east are for bandits and outlaws.”
“There aren’t any of those there, now, either.”
“Taken hire wi’ Tasmôrden,” Uwen said. “There’s a sorry way’t’ clean th’ land of bandits.”
“Taken hire with Tasmôrden right along with the Aswydd servants,” Crissand said. “Every outpouring of Heryn’s court is over there, and every common cutthroat from our woods. It’s our sins that wait across the river.”
“And Elwynor’s,” Tristen said, for it seemed to him that was the case… that the timid had fled and the strong had chosen sides, the strong good men being beaten time and time again and pulled this way and that by successive claimants to the Regency, until this day, that the best men were a small band in Aeself’s hands and the worst were an army sacking Ilefínian.
“And Elwynor’s,” Crissand agreed with him, and added, a moment later: “Gods save Her Grace.”
“Amen to that,” Uwen said. “As she won’t have an easy reign when she has ‘er kingdom.”
Crissand said nothing to that. The gray space was troubled for a moment, and troubled in the way not of a wizard thinking secret thoughts, but troubled as it grew troubled when words rang wrong. And everything Uwen had said suddenly rang wrong, out of joint with what was now in motion. Crissand had not meant gods save Her Grace as a benison, only as a commiseration, as if their positions were equivalent… it seemed, suddenly and for no reason, true.
How? Tristen asked himself. How was Crissand’s state balanced with Ninévrisë’s within things-as-they-were? That they both were bereft of fathers?
—That they both were, in a sense, heirs to thrones and kingdom, but not crowned?
Therein, perhaps, the Unity of Things that wizardry so loved and through which it found its power.
Unity of Things, Unity of Direction, Unity of Time…
The three were all met, in those two. And a piece of the world as it ought to be went into place like a sword into its scabbard, a weapon ready to his hand.
But in the beginning, Mauryl had called down five Sihhë to help him, not one.
And Mauryl had overthrown the last faint trace of a Sihhë blood dilute with generations among Men, finding in the last of them, as in the first, no model of virtue.
Mauryl had set a Man in power, the Marhanen, to bridge the gap.
But in the right season, consulting the heavens, Mauryl had called him into his study, born of fire and a wizard’s wishes—Mauryl had declared him lacking, and sent him forth into the world, all the same.
What had Mauryl calculated he would be… that he had not been?
All Mauryl’s papers and parchments had fallen prey to the elements and the vagrant winds at the last. There was no record
And if he had been Barrakketh, why did it not Unfold to him what that enemy was, and what it was called, and how to defeat it? He cudgeled his mind, battered at its walls, but, seeking a name for his fears, he could think of nothing at all, it was so opposed to all he understood. He could not go near it. It was as if he could grasp it, he would inevitably contain it and be changed by it, and he could not, would not accept it within himself… nameless it remained and it would not Unfold to him.
Five Sihhë, without wives, without children… without fields or flocks: it was no kingdom such as Ylesuin: it was contained in one fortress, a gathering of those with magic inborn, having nothing to do with Galasien or Mauryl, nothing at all… except Mauryl’s appeal to magic, where wizardry went awry.
And whatever might have moved the Sihhë-lords to gather their resources and come south, abandoning all purpose but one? What lure but curiosity could move them?
Surely something greater than curiosity had drawn them south to change the world.
He tested all around the edges of that idea, to see whether there might have been more than five Sihhë, or even whether there might still be, but all that seemed in any sense to Unfold to him was a surety that five was the sum of them, that the Hafsandyr had raised a fortress against some great ill, and that there was enough of Men in the nature of the Sihhë that they had left children in the world.
But where had they gone, one by one? Had they died as Men died?
Or had they wandered across the Edge in the gray space and joined the Shadows that way, as Uleman of Elwynor had gone? Was that the darkness he recalled at the foundation of everything?
If he had ever died, the memory of death eluded him. If he had met defeat, he had never recalled it. If he had loved a woman of the race of Men, he had no memory of it. There was danger, he suspected, in slipping too far back, and remembering too much, and becoming bound to it.
Yet there was danger in not knowing, too, insofar as he had weaknesses. Of harm he had dealt with since Lewenbrook, he suspected it was Hasufin who had moved Cuthan, and Orien. It was Hasufin who had attempted to steal his way among Men, and it was surely Hasufin’s wizard-work that had moved the archivist, for more than any other thief, principally a wizard would want to know the things hinted at in Mauryl’s letters, would seek after any ragtag piece of knowledge, something that might fix only one date, one hour, to make clear all the others, and find a way into Mauryl’s workings to threaten him. Indeed, wizardry could harm him, as wizardry had Called him.