He came back to his edge, his reliable little cliff. He looked down on the four men the king had lent him, and on Uwen Lewen’s-son, a gray-haired soldier whom the king had appointed to be his friend, his constant companion, his adviser in the world. He knew he should go down now and not put them to the trouble of riding up this narrow trail to find him.
But he continued to be disturbed, having found things on the hilltop not what he had expected, having thought thoughts he had never planned, and he knew Uwen and the other men rarely objected to time to sit and talk amongst themselves, which they were doing quite happily at the moment.
So he left Petelly to his search for bits of green, sure he would not stray far, or that if he did, Uwen would intercept him below. He waded through brush and ducked through thickets to the south and west of the hill… snagged his hair doing it, hair as black and thick and long as Petelly’s mane, and by now, like Petelly’s mane, stuck through with twigs and leaves. He was not willfully inconvenient to those who watched over him. But he was chasing the vision of Amefin hills, a sight and a knowledge that mattered to him in ways he could not explain. If he could but achieve that vantage before his guards lost patience, if he could come just a little to the side and past a rocky shoulder of the hill—if he could know he was not that far from his beginnings and fix the territory of his memories as a place, not a state of mind…
Then perhaps he could dream forward and not constantly back toward the lost things he remembered. Making peace with that, he could perhaps begin to see things as vividly ahead of him, instead of the gray space that seemed to occupy all his future…
Oh, indeed, he saw more hills westward, gray and brown with barren trees that he imagined might be the very edge of Amefel. And from this hill, on this day of leaf fall at the end of autumn, he imagined that he looked back all along the course he had come.
Foolish pursuit, perhaps. It was, after all, nothing but hills and gray trees like the other views from this place. It was his heart that saw the rolling hills, the land of his summer and his innocence, the land where he had met Cefwyn, the land which had taught him so much and which had nothing to do with this autumn, these trees, this hill in Guelessar. He hung a moment with his arms on a thick, low branch, the wind cold on his face, the sights of summer in his eyes, and with a sigh and a thought, he saw all the way to spring, to Ynefel. He heard the kiss of the river Lenúalim on the tower’s foundations. He looked down from the high tower of Ynefel over the tops of storm-tossed trees, and out over the Road from the half-ruined roof of the loft where Owl had lived.
The narrow, rickety steps to his room came to him, too, exactly so. The study and the fireside flitted through his thoughts, warm and cozy. Ynefel was so much smallera place than the high-walled Guelesfort, or even Amefel’s Zeide, which hove up above Henas’amef and housed hundreds of people.
Mauryl’s forest-girt tower had been so very much smaller, so much plainer in all respects, he knew that now, yet it had been so full of memorable things… as for instance he could recall in sharp detail every twist of grain in the weathered wood of the sill in his bedroom; he could conjure every detail and imperfection of the horn-paned window of his room, whereupon the rains and the lightning had written mysterious patterns in the night. Ynefel seemed far larger in his memory than such a small place should reasonably be, as if by some enchantment it held more life, or had been more substantial than ordinary buildings.
He remembered the loft, oh, the loft, the silky, gray-brown dust, and the pigeons on the rafters there, each and every nameless one, and he remembered the day he had discovered Owl.
Ynefel was in ruins now. Mauryl was gone. He had seen Owl last at Lewenbrook, before the banners fell, before so many died. On that day, too, the world had had a terrible wealth of detail, and every rock and every tree had found edges. Every shadow had been alive and rolling down like midnight on embattled armies.
He remembered the cold and the dark of that hour, and a shadow become substance. He felt the bitter chill of sorcery and felt—was it only memory?—a perilous slippage in place and time.
Then he knew he had gone not forward but back into memories he wished only to escape. He began hastily to retrace his steps in all senses, retreating from the sight, fleeing from the unwardened west, back toward Petelly.
The urgency grew less immediately as he left that side of the hill. It was only a hillside. Only a hillside in Guelessar, so great a relief he might have laughed at his own foolish fears. It was autumn, again, among the leaves, the opposite end of autumn, at that, from the battle at Lewenbrook, and as he reached Petelly he saw that Petelly had no concern whatsoever… had not even interrupted his browsing. So he had been completely foolish, he thought, to have feared anything. Shaken, he patted a winter-coated shoulder and caught Petelly’s reins, leading Petelly along toward the trail and a meek and dutiful return to his guards.
Petelly was in no hurry to go, however, and with a great, unbalancing jerk on the reins stopped and lowered his head among the leaves, sure he had smelled some tidbit he favored. It was just as easy to let him finish his search as quarrel with him.
There, close by, was the most curious log, shelved with velvet fungus.
Now here was a wonder of the woods, marvelous in its smoothness: Tristen abandoned the discipline of his horse, knelt to touch and found the velvety shelves unexpectedly tough, resisting his inquisitive, ungloved fingers.
The wood, peeling in patches, was gray and weathered beneath, long dead. This growth, on the other hand, was alive, out of that death. Was it not a miracle?
Or did spring hide in apparent death, and was spring lying hidden in winter, as signs of winter had hidden these last few days in autumn?
Were the seeds of next things always there, in the circle of the year, and was that how the world worked its miracles? The wellspring out of which things Unfolded to him said yes, yes, the life did not wholly die. Even in utter ruin and winter to come, there was hope. Even in a dead log were miracles waiting.
And had this particular, velvety, curious growth any virtue in wizard-craft, he wondered in a practical vein, hunkering down for a very much closer look and tucking his cloak about his knees to protect it from the damp? Would Emuin like it? He had no wish to spoil what was curious and wonderful if Emuin had no use for it, but it did look like something a wizard would admire… and something that might be useful, a point of change and regrowth that might have potency. He brought Emuin birds’ eggs fallen in the wind—like the dry one he had in his purse just now, along with a curious oak gall from a grove near a sheep fence at Dury.
Had he feared the sight of distant woods, a mere moment ago? There was no fear in him now. At times he was well aware how he skipped from serious thoughts to thoughts other folk saw as quite frivolous, and he suspected on his own that this might be one of those moments, but the thought he had fled was past and the sight that had led him to that thought was hidden now by the hill. His guards had not yet grown annoyed with him, and he knew he was safe on this hilltop. He had also spent his short life with wizards, who as a type observed a different sense of priorities and set a different importance on strange objects than ordinary folk.
Had the fungus been there in the summer? Or did it appear when a tree died? Or did it appear only seasonally as another sign of winter?
The latter was the kind of question he would have asked Mauryl more than Emuin, Mauryl being far more inclined to far-ranging questions.
But Mauryl was gone with Ynefel, and all such questions of the natural world went unanswered these days. Emuin was far more likely to tell him the use of a fungus than the behavior of it—when he could gain Emuin’s attention at all.
No, there was probably no use in bringing it with him. He could by no means bring all of it, and bringing less than that would spoil it. He meanwhile had the bird’s egg, which was pretty, speckled finely brown on white, and he knew Emuin would admire it. He stood up, tugged at Petelly’s reins, seeking the trail through a maze of leafless branches on what should have been a shorter route. But it proved choked with thorns. He stopped, stood, looked for a way through the maze.