So, well, and his men had failed to find a single rider in a snowstorm… no miracle, that, no magic—at least not in the single event. But add up all the others. His first riders, the ones sent out to find Paisi and report back, had said not a thing. He had no idea what was going on at Henas’amef, or whether the boy’s ill dreams—and his own false message—were unhappily true.
A dark presence shadowed the doorway. Master Crow was abroad at late hours.
“Crow?”
“My lord king?”
“Damned inquisitive Crow. No news?”
Idrys shook his head. “No, my lord king.” A silence. Idrys didn’t leave. “The storm is abating. There’s a star showing.”
“Oh, things are remarkably settling. The boy is arriving where Tarien desires him to be, is he not? Now all is peaceful.”
“There’s a thought worth a shudder.”
To save a kingdom—a king worked under a different sort of law, did he not, with different constraints? Mercy was at times the wrong mercy, and a king’s mistaken kindness made orphans and widows, laying the dead in heaps and windrows.
Had he possibly been selfish to refuse a murder or two, of a sorceress, even of his own son?
His personal virtue didn’t reside in the gods. He found it in Tristen’s mercy. The Quinalt, be it noted, had driven Tristen away from him and left him without counsel, except his brother Efanor.
And Idrys. Always Idrys, this dark advisor.
“There will be one more mission,” Cefwyn said to Idrys, “and put a good man on it. This letter must not lose itself in a snowstorm, or go astray, or be read by the messenger. It will contain very damning things.”
“My lord king?”
“Sit down. Be still. I have to think.”
Crow sat. Cefwyn picked up the quill, uncapped the inkpot, wrote, at considerable length for a royal message. He wrote, and sanded and sealed it.
“To whom goes this?” Idrys asked, when he delivered it to Idrys’ hand.
“To Crissand. Treat it with extreme caution.”
“Shall I ask?”
“It states that he should be on his guard regarding your very sensible misgivings. And that he should send a message westward.”
Idrys’ chin came up slightly. “Indeed.” Idrys did not disapprove of the notion. Clearly. “High time, indeed, my lord king.”
He more than forbore to check the man in his liberties, he encouraged him, for his soul’s sake—knowing one old advisor at least would never lie to him. He sent Crow out to rouse a messenger at this hour, with the conviction his Commander of the Guard would choose a man of strong loyalty, who would treat the missive as critically as a battlefield dispatch.
And if his own head weren’t burdened with a crown he had never wanted, he’d take horse this hour and ride all the way to Ynefel tower himself, by way of Henas’amef, while he was about it. Devil take the Quinalt and all their works—if he had not the Crown to burden him, he’d take wife and son and daughter with him and stay at Ynefel for all his days, in the company of an honest friend, the one man who had never deceived him, never counseled him to take the expedient, darker paths.
It was not, alas, a choice he had.
BOOK TWO
CHAPTER ONE
i
A BRISK AND SUNNY DAY, AND THE PIEBALD’S FEET BROKE AN ICY CRUST AS THEY traveled. Otter looked over his shoulder now and again as the road rose. Yesterday he had met merchants coming toward him: they by no means scared him. He bade them a courteous good day and wished them well on their travels, well-wished in turn. He lied to them, knowing that if the king’s men met them, too, then they would give news of anyone they had seen traveling this way, so he gave his name as Marden, which was Gran’s distant neighbor’s name, and said he was going to see his uncle in Trys Ceyl, which was a sleepy place on a ways south from Henas’amef.
Good day, they had bidden him, and gone on their way. Perhaps they had met his father’s men by now and had told them the lie, when asked sharply about a young man on the road. He had kept his face muffled against the cold, no unusual thing, and perhaps they failed to know he was that young. He had no idea.
But he had crossed the Lenúalim on thick ice, leading Paisi’s horse, afoot and spread out seeming more prudent for them both, despite cart tracks having left their marks on the snowy path. Above and below the shallows of the ford, the river had not quite frozen, and he had had enough bad luck already to make him wary—but the ice had held. He was well on his way now, and the land he saw today began to have the familiar higgledy-piggledy order of crooked fences that distinguished Amefin ways from Guelen. There were few straight lines in Amefel, nothing of the Guelen sense of order. Certainly the road observed no overall economy of direction, wending among hills and bobbing over a rise and down again.
He thought that he was near home now. He thought that he spied Diel Tor under its snow blanket, and was sure that there had been such a rock, and another, like a pig asleep, on his way to the border. He knew for certain he had seen that twisted tree by the bridge.
He kept going into night, then wrapped in his cloak and huddled up against a tilted stone with the horse near him. His feet kept going numb, and he took off his boots and rubbed the life back into his toes, then struggled to put them on again, never sure that taking his boots off did more good than harm—but Paisi had told him, one winter when he was a small boy: “Never let fingers an’ toes go dead, or they’ll die, an’ turn black an’ rot, an’ if e’er ye get wet boots, boy, you run breakneck to the house straightway an’ take them wet things off quick as you can. Or if ye have to, run barefoot in the snow a bit an’ then rub ’em and sit on ’em a while in your cloak…’s’ far better ’n frozen boots.”
He was so cold he couldn’t tell if his boots had gotten wet and frozen in the night. He had tried to prevent that eventuality, and this night, shivering, he tucked up as tight as he could into the cloaks, head and all. That slowly helped, and he dared sleep just a little. But well before daylight he grew so miserable he set out again, the horse moving slowly along an ill-defined road.
Morning, however, brought the sun, which shone like a lamp through the film of clouds and occasionally broke through. He drowsed as he rode, lying on the horse’s bare back, and waked, the horse pitching him slightly forward as it nipped the tops of grasses that poked through the snow and pawed up others, along the margin of a cultivated field.
It was the first graze they had found since a day ago. He had given the horse anything of his food the horse would eat, and his own stomach was as empty as he could remember. He let the horse wander down the drystone wall, eating as it went, while he had the rest of the sausage, and they were both happier for it.
A raven sat down on the wall, cocked its head, and whetted its beak against bare stone. It had a dark, glittering eye, and seemed to watch him with a certain smugness, as if it knew his venture to his father’s house had brought nothing but disaster.
He didn’t like it staring at him. It showed no decent fear of a boy’s presence. Leaning from the horse’s back, holding to the ragged mane, he scooped a handful of snow off the wall and shied a clenched fistful at the bird, which only dodged and settled again.
The grain was gone, the last stalk ripped up. He had had the last of the sausage. And he thumped the horse’s sides with his heels and got the horse moving again, leaving the raven in sole possession of the wall. The sun, friendly for the moment, hid its face, and the wind picked up out of the west, chilling his face and his knees.
But toward evening they came to a brook, and it was a crossing Otter had known all his life. They broke the ice on shallow, fast-moving water, scarcely enough to wet Tammis’s hooves, and climbed a shallow bank. From here on Otter knew exactly where he was, which was on Farmer Marden’s land, not far from home, and he urged the horse to all the haste he could manage.