“Then we break camp,” Cevulirn said. “Do as he says.” To an-other man, one of his guards, Cevulirn said, “Food and drink for all these men, and Lord Tristen, whatever we can provide until we get to horse.”
“Is it a fight comin’?” Sovrag asked, perplexed as the rest. “Give me what’ll yield to an axe, an’ I’m ready.”
“There’s a great deal that will yield to it,” Tristen assured him, and reached out for all the rest of them. “I may not ride with you all the way. I don’t know. If I can’t be there when the time comes, I set Cevulirn in charge. Our enemy won’t make the mistake with me he made at Lewenbrook. What comes won’t be just at us. It’s not one enemy.”
“Is it that one?” Cevulirn asked in dismay. “The ghost at Lewen field?”
“More than that,” Tristen said, uneasy in naming entirely what Unfolded to him, as if by never saying it he could dispell it. Yet he must say it. “It wasn’t only Hasufin who brought down Ynefel. And it wasn’t only Hasufin who drove Mauryl north to find the Sihhë-lords.” Even as he said it he saw icy mountains and a wizard much younger in those days, riding through trackless snow. He saw a great black height, and a fortress of dark stone, and a hall without servants. He felt the cold, and recalled the clean sting of the north wind on his face and the icy stone through the soles of his boots.
He had known the battlements, and all the chambers under his feet; and he had known before Mauryl came what Mauryl would say… all these things, all at once. He longed for Mauryl’s face, the word, the kindness… he watched that lonely figure leaning on the wind beneath his walls, and yearned with all his heart to give the old man at once what he had come to find.
But that was now. Then he had foreknown the quest itself, and the middle-aged wizard at his gates.
He knew the peace of the ice, and the company of his fellows. They were only five, five who bore the gift and the curse of magic, and foreknew this wizard’s seeking them.
He drew a deep, ice-edged breath, and saw through the years.
“ ‘Ere, m’lord.” Uwen had his arm.
“Ale,” Sovrag said. “The lad’s seen a haunt, is what.”
He was no longer in that place of black stone. He sat beneath a canvas roof, with canvas under him and the lords of the south serving him with their own hands. Uwen set his hands on his shoulders, saying, “Brace up, m’lord, there’s a lad, come, take a sip, take a breath.”
“I saw the Hafsandyr,” Tristen said in the breath of a voice he commanded. “I saw the Fortress of Mists.” He did not know how he knew its name, but that was the fortress the Sihhë had held in the far northern mountains, the Qenes, in the language they shared with Mauryl, far, far from Elwynor. He found Unfolding to him a host of things nameless and thoughts unthinkable in the language of Ylesuin and Elwynor, things his hand had written in that small Book he had given to the fire, the night before Lewenbrook.
As now… he recalled the north, and the black peaks crowned with ice, and the rap of a wizard’s staff against the gates.
Once.
Twice.
Magical thrice.
He ceased to breathe, and then must, and saw all the faces of his friends as strangers’ faces, perhaps enemies’ faces, even Uwen’s.
Had he known these folk? Had he foreseen them?
Then he was mortally afraid, and reached for Uwen’s hand and gripped it as Uwen gripped his, until bone ached and flesh turned white-edge. He looked into Uwen’s grizzled face and dark eyes and saw a Man, and a good man, and the one above all others whose voice could Call him.
“Speak to me,” he begged Uwen. “Say anything at all.”
“Ye’re me dear lad,” Uwen said. “An’ my lord, and I’ll have no other. Steady. Take a breath. There’s a lad.”
“I’m here,” he said, for those threads bound him to safety and let him draw breath. “I am here.”
He knew Uwen would do his best to make sense of half answers, and he fought to leave that other place, to be unequivocally in the world of Men. He wished to make Uwen at least understand, and then Uwen would tell the others.
But another hand took his arm, and a faith as clear as the morning sun shone in that face, and out of those eyes.
“My lord,” Crissand said, the aetheling, the foretold, and the long-remembered.
“I know he’ll strike at Cefwyn,” Tristen warned him. “And he’ll strike at you.”
“Tasmôrden?”
“Tasmôrden?” For a moment, the name was only sound, a sound bearing no relation to his fears, and once the name did achieve meaning, he shook his head in denial. Then on the next breath he realized: “Possibly. It’s well possible, if Hasufin had his way about it, isn’t it? Hasufin moved Tasmôrden so long as Hasufin was enough to move him. Whatever houses our enemy… it might be Tasmôrden, but more likely… more likely our enemy has no Shape in this world. Hasufin dealt with him. Hasufin brought him to Ynefel… but such Place in the world as he’s claimed now, is never far from Ilefínian. Uleman didn’t know the enemy’s presence there. He only saw the rebels that rose against him. Orien didn’t know he was speaking to her. She only heard Hasufin. I didn’t know what brought down Ynefel. I only heard the Wind, as I heard it behind Hasufin, when he killed one of the birds; I only saw the Dark, when it rolled down on Lewen field.”
“So we all saw the Dark,” Uwen said. “Gods save us, this Wind and the Dark… Is that ahead of us?”
“It may be. It may. But Hasufin is a shell for it. He’s all hollow, behind. Mauryl knew what Hasufin had listened to. That’s why he called down the Sihhë to deal with it…”
“What d’ ye say, lad?” Uwen had his hand on his shoulder, and pressed it hard, that voice, above all voices, commanding him to make clear the things he saw.
He struggled with words. But he found several. “Old. Very old. Hasufin listened to it in Galasien the way Orien listened to Hasufin in Henas’amef, with no better result.”
“Summat else, ye say.”
“Before Mauryl. Before Galasien’s towers stood.” He was aware of his gaze fixed on nothing, on darkness and deep, on the depths of Ynefel’s foundations, the work of the master Builders, and the Masons who had laid the Lines. “They weren’t content to observe the seasons, these old ones. They shaped Lines to master the Shadows, and make Seemings stand in the light of day.” It too aptly described him. He was not unaware of the irony of his struggle against this darkness that Mauryl had fought. He had ridden so far and set all this in motion, mustered all these men, and now that he was called to ride for the very purpose of Mauryl’s Summoning him, did he fall down in trembling and weakness? He was angry with himself, and afraid for the outcome for these men he loved, and took one deep breath after another until the shapes of the world came clear to his eyes, at least as far as a huddle of pale gray that hovered about him.
He clung to that sight. He sought to leave the reckoning of things insubstantial and the maze of gray that wanted his attention, and to shape that maze in substance, of lords of Men who stood for powers on the earth, and men-at-arms of flesh and bone who stood for the earthier, more common magic of hearth and fence and field.
Men ruled the earth now, and the Shadows obeyed the stones that Masons laid in rows on the land.
“I must face him,” he said, for him was as apt as any word. It thought. It moved. It wished and worked and willed, and the Qenes stood against its wishing and working. He was sure of that. The Qenes, the work of master Masons, the home of Shadows and the fortress of the Shadow-lords: there all the powers within the earth held a Line that must not be broken.