“Lucky he didn’t run off,” Paisi said, laying a hand on his shoulder. “Gods, ye’re still cold. Ye shouldn’t have.”
“They were going to send me in the dark, with soldiers. I didn’t want to go with soldiers, Paisi. I just wanted to be here.” His jaw clenched without his wanting it. A muscle jumped, and his heart beat harder. “I did everything the king asked of me. But I’m sure he thought I was a fool.”
“Ye ain’t a fool, and he didn’t think any such thing,” Gran said. “I ain’t feelin’ he’s angry, to this hour.”
Gran’s feelings were not to disregard. It comforted him to think that. It was as warm as the food in his belly, and brighter thoughts occurred to him, now that the adventure was over.
“Prince Aewyn has become my friend,” he said. “We’ll always be friends. And Her Majesty wasn’t angry at my being there.”
“That ’un, she wouldn’t be,” Gran said.
He got several more bites down, the two of them just staring at him as if they could hardly believe he was there, and Paisi got up and put a small log on the dying fire. It was late. They ought all to be going to bed, but Gran got him another bowl of soup, and he began, finally, to be warm inside.
“The horse,” he said, on another mouthful.
“The horses is both fine,” Paisi said, but it came from a far distance. He was home, but he wasn’t. He had gotten where he had to go, but he hadn’t. He had found out who he was, but he didn’t know why it had failed to satisfy his questions. He was back at his starting place, and everything was to do again, all the questions to ask again, all the mistakes to make again… trying to find out where he should be.
“Boy?” Gran asked him, and he couldn’t even look at her. He just sat, with the bowl in one hand and the bread in the other, and stared away at white, white snow and dead branches, as if the journey had never ended at all, and he wasn’t finished.
He wasn’t finished. He couldn’t be home yet.
“Otter, lad.” Paisi took the bowl and the bread from him and set it aside, then tipped him right over onto the bed and started pulling his boots off, then threw covers over him. “There’s a lad. Just too tired, ain’t we?”
“Not finished,” he said. His teeth were chattering as he pulled his own belt off. “Not finished yet.”
“Well, no, I don’t suppose.” Paisi was humoring him, tucking him in like a child. “We’re all right, here. Don’t you fret.”
He shut his eyes, still seeing snow, and dead branches. It was like that, as if he couldn’t finish his journey at all, nor come home until he’d done something very important, something that had only started in Guelemara, when the shadows, the horrid shadows, had started running between the stones. He was aware when Paisi came to bed, warmth and weight beside him under the covers.
“Are ye asleep, Otter?”
“I dream, Paisi. I dream of snow.”
“Well, sma’ wonder, that.”
“You’ve got to take care,” he said, then slipped away. If Paisi said anything or asked anything after that, he didn’t know.
But when he waked, Gran was up, and stirring about breakfast, making porridge in the small pot, and Paisi was lifting his head from the mattress.
“There’s breakfast about to go to waste,” Gran said, as she said most mornings, if they were still abed. Paisi got up, and Otter got up and huddled near the newly fed fire, both of them to take warm bowls in hand. Otter filled his belly with warm porridge and a bit of toasted bread.
“That’s better than the king’s table,” he said to Gran, who grinned at him, pleased, but not believing him in the least.
And the snow came back while he ate the bread. It came back into his heart and into his vision, and he never wanted it, but nothing was finished. It began to grow in him, the notion, then, for the first time, that there was one other person than Gran and Paisi and the king and queen who’d had something to do with his mother and his birth, and that he’d never seen him, nor had to do with him, and that there were things he could learn nowhere else. Ill luck had dogged him every step of his visit to Guelemara, and the source of it was not his father, not Gran, nor Paisi, nor even Brother Trassin. He had brought it there with him, in what he was, and who he was born. Those who loved him most would never tell him there was no hope. They would go on trying to make him better than he was born.
But one person had no reason to lie to him, and one person in the world might see him for what he was.
He felt at that very moment that feeling of eyes at his back, that feeling that the tower, so faint and minute on its hill, was nearer to him and more real than the walls about him, when ordinarily Gran’s walls could keep that attention away from him. Now they were failing. He didn’t want to think about his mother. Gran’s walls were near, and strong, stone and wood and wattle, and potent with Gran’s magic, and at that very moment he saw Gran look very sharply toward the north and say,
“Stop that!”
The feeling of being watched went away then, like a candle going out, so that he could breathe again. Gran hadn’t troubled about the snow; but the tower she rebuked, and wove her magic about him, like warm winds.
But it was not warm enough to stop the snow. It drifted through a forest, all winter-bare, and lay trackless and unvisited in his inner vision.
“Otter?” Paisi asked.
“I’m not done,” he said, and set the porridge bowl down and stood up, aches and all. “It’s not finished.”
Paisi laid a hand on his arm, but Gran motioned him not to, and Paisi let him go. After that, he felt as if he had been set free, even blessed. He looked at Gran and saw no forbidding, no disapproval of him.
“I have to go,” he said.
“Not to her!” Paisi exclaimed.
“No. West. I have to ask him—I have questions to ask.”
“Of ’Im?” Gran asked. “ Whatwill ye ask ’Im, lad?”
“I have no notion yet. But he was there when I was born, wasn’t he? And when I went to Guelemara, where I thought all my life I was supposed to go, it wasn’t where I was supposed to be. I was wrong to go there. I didn’t like it, Gran. I liked Aewyn, and the king was good to me. And Prince Efanor was. And the queen. I liked them all. But Guelemara didn’t fit me, and now, all the way home, I kept thinking I had to be sure you were safe; but now that you are, I don’t know what to do. I can’t go ask—” He made the slightest nod of his head toward Henas’amef, toward the tower, and felt a shiver, even so, as if a tiny chink were opened in Gran’s spells, exposing them to a very persistent force. He tried not to pay attention to it. All his safety seemed elsewhere. Westward. “He’s what’s left to ask, isn’t he? I have to go and ask him—whatever occurs to me to ask.”
“Then ye’re right. Ye should go there,” Gran said. “I’d never stop ye.”
“Can’t it wait,” Paisi asked, “at least until the snow melts?”
“No,” he said. “No. I can’t wait. Soldiers will be here.” A shiver came over him, a terrible sense of urgency. “I’m sure they were behind me on the road. They will come, and I have to go. I have to go today.”
“It ain’t fair to leave Gran!” Paisi said. “She’s lyin’ when she says she ain’t that sickly. She was sick when I come here. An’ we can’t go off an’ leave her.”
“Then don’t think of leaving her alone, Paisi. I’ll go.”
“M’lord!”
“We’re home, and I’m not ‘m’lord’ here, and I can do for myself. I’ll take my own horse. He’s had food and shelter for days. Now yours can rest. There’s only one horse fit to go, anyway.”
“It ain’t right!” Paisi protested. “I’m not to leave ye! Himself said I wasn’t to leave ye!”
He set his hand on Paisi’s shoulder. A year ago, he’d not been tall enough. Now he could, and looked at Paisi almost eye to eye. “But I’m going to him, Paisi. That makes it different. And I can ride. I fell off often enough on the way home, I learned, didn’t I? This time I’ll even have a saddle.”