I rest in hope of Your Majesty’s good regard.
That was the sum of it.
To Tristen, Cefwyn thought, staring at the words on the paper.
It was, at least, not as bad news as might be. Gran was alive and well. The dreams had come to naught.
But Otter had left, and Paisi had not gone with him.
Had he ridden off directly? Had the grandmother told him to go there, and sent him well prepared and with Tristen’s consent, or had she not?
Damn it all.
He looked up, transported from Amefel in the dead of winter to a hall full of anxious farmers and merchants, all watching their king read a letter that had—he tried to conceal it—greatly shaken his soul.
And what should he do? Roll up the letter and bolt from the hall, leaving the populace to speculate on some province in revolt, some attack on the realm?
He quietly rolled it up, tucked it in his belt, and picked up the document the Lord Chamberlain handed him, a complaint of theft and a counterclaim of conversion of goods, and two lean and angry merchants glowering at each other.
He heard the evidence, and conflicting witnesses, and heard his advisors, and their advocates, then rendered judgment against the foreign merchant, for conversion of a potter’s wares. It was a popular decision in the hall. He hoped it was a just one. He tried to do justice in the several cases following. But to his relief, a number of the attending crowd proved to be attached to the potter, and five to the subsequent case, regarding an inheritance, a minor daughter, and a marriage—easy, since the will was clear. There was the matter of a tavern brawl, which the first time he had heard it had sounded like a city matter, and the mayor’s problem before it even came to Efanor’s hearing: a street preacher and a Quinaltine-Bryaltine dispute, in a tavern near Weavers Street. The argument had gotten to blows, broken benches, and an accusation, though thin, of attempted arson. Even the latter would not have been his province, and it probably would not have been Efanor’s, if it were only a tavern fight. But it was now the Bryaltine holiday, the preacher had tried to tear down the Bryalt decorations and stir up a street mob to break up the tavern, and that had done it: add to that, the fact of an appeal from the queen’s Bryalt priest. He ordered the offending street preacher remanded to the Quinaltine for punishment—the Holy Father was not at all fond of itinerant preachers. The Bryaltine tavern owner was to be recompensed by the Crown, and he issued an edict regarding attacks on religious symbols from either side, offenders to be chained two days in the city square, wherein the crowd might express their own sentiments without hindrance.
That was the last business at hand, thank the gods. The edict had been prepared in advance, and a message already dispatched to the Patriarch: the hearing was no more than a venting of his anger and a public warning; but it exhausted him. Rumblings of discontent in the clergy were slow to settle, Quinalt zealots had made the Bryalt holiday grim, his son moped about, neglected his studies, and erupted in temper with his bodyguard and threatened to dismiss Selmyn himself, not the most pleasant of displays.
Most of all, his son wanted to know any news that arrived from Amefel, and daily seemed to hint it was kept from him. That tried his own temper, and his forbearance, and made his wife unhappy.
Now news had come, and it was not quite the good news he had hoped to give to his son, nor entirely bad, either. It might be the wisest move old Gran could have made, sending Otter off in that direction—if he could get there safely.
He took himself back to the robing room, shed the trappings of kingship and took himself and his message upstairs, Idrys shadowing him the while, ahead of his bodyguard. Idrys being a mortal man, curiosity doubtless consumed him. But he asked no questions until they reached the royal apartments.
There, Cefwyn drew the message from his belt and handed it to Idrys, who read it.
“Gone to the Sihhë-lord,” Idrys said then. “But on whose advice, my lord king?”
“That isthe question, is it not?” On longer thought, he found himself somewhat relieved, but he could not settle in his heart what he felt about his own failure. “The grandmother’s, perhaps. Certainly not his mother’s.”
“That one won’t be happy.”
“No,” he said. “She won’t.” Nor would his son, who would begin to think about that territory and begin to inquire into matters his son had never asked. So there had been a war. So the Sihhë-lord, his father’s good friend, had risen up, then gone away again, and never visited the capital, not since he was born. It had been no concern of Aewyn’s.
Until now.
Wiser, long ago, if he had separated the grandmother’s whole household from Henas’amef—settled her down in Ivanor with Lord Cevulirn, perhaps: his people understood wizards, and revered an honest hedge-witch, much as the Amefin did. Or down in Olmern, where Sovrag was lord. Nothing daunted that old river pirate. He’d made the decision where to put the boy when Tristen had been in Amefel, and he had never changed the arrangement when Tristen left the realm, deeming it wise not to disturb what seemed settled.
Well, he knew what Tristen would say about easy and natural courses… the thing that felt so right and natural to do… the situation unexamined for year upon year, as things subtly or not so subtly shifted: decisions forgotten and allowed to stand, though the safety in them had subtly eroded away.
Maybe—maybe he should have refused advice to send the boy home.
Otter had gotten through Festival and been written down; he could have taken ill for the last ceremonies, attendance at which was often taken somewhat lightly, if the privations and worship of the first days had rendered a body indisposed. They could have gotten through it.
But at least the boy had evaded his mother. He had not gone into the town: he had left, out of his mother’s reach. That was to the good.
“I’ll write a letter,” he said. “All hospitality for the messenger.” Idrys gave him back the letter, rolled up, and Cefwyn laid it on the desk. “We know what we know, and no more. It may be to the good.”
Idrys left. Efanor arrived, before he had quite sat down to write the reply.
“There was a message,” Efanor said, and Cefwyn told him the gist of it.
Efanor sat down unbidden, in the informality of the privy chambers, sat down and rested his arm on the side of Cefwyn’s desk. “Well, better than I had feared.”
“Better than frozen in a snowbank,” Cefwyn said shortly. “Everything’s better than what could have happened.”
“And the woman is well.”
“Perfectly well, as seems,” Cefwyn said. “His dreams were for naught.”
“ Tristenwouldn’t send a false dream.”
“We know who would. Spare me. I have yet to explain to my son where his friend is. He will ask, of course, when he’s coming back, and if he’s gotten my letter, and I have to say no, the letter went to Crissand, but not to our fugitive, and nothing is mended.”
“The spot on the stone, meanwhile—”
“The Holy Father’s masonry, brother, is not my chief concern. And you said—”
“The blot is there again,” Efanor said. “Not visible to everyone. But—”
“How many paving stones has the inner chapel? We are not destitute. They should last until thaw.”
“Don’t make light of it, I pray you, brother. Listen to me. This is not the Holy Father looking for favors. If your son has gone to Lord Tristen—”
“If he has. He most certainly has. There’s nowhere else he could go, in that direction, and what in the gods’ own name does it have to do with the Quinaltine floor?”
“I told you, after the war, after the battle in Elwynor, the foundation—”
“The foundation is flawed. The Lines run amiss. I know it. They wouldn’t have Tristen deal with the matter, oh, no, nothing so reasonable. Now I’m to repave the whole Quinaltine, a stone at a time?”