“Storm after storm.” Holiday penance brought annual discontent in the Quinalt faith, and now, with snow still coming down, the year did head for spring, regardless. Another year of Tristen’s absence. Nevris’ annual pilgrimage, and the anticipation of the Elwynim… this time she would show them her new daughter, born this last summer: he had to commit her and the baby to the road in only a few months, and Guelenfolk here in the city would raise another hue and cry when the Elwynim acknowledged their Princess, the child the treaty had promised them. Aemaryen would never marry some lord of Ylesuin. She would rule in Elwynor.
The people might have forgotten that provision of the treaty between Elwynor and Ylesuin, as they had forgotten the king’s bastard living in Amefel, and only now took to brawling, in their unease—so it was a year of forgotten matters coming due, for the populace, first Otter, then Aemaryen.
A new Quinaltine? Construction in the city square? That would be gossip for more than a month, perhaps enough stir, if the Holy Father backed it, to divert the people from the Elwynim question. Perhaps change would catch the popular fancy.
“If the Holy Father asks it,” he said to Efanor. “If hedeems it good: think of the old thief, with all those artisans to cheat. That will occupy him. To the greater glory of the gods. Thatshould please the devout.”
“Brother,” Efanor said with a small, tight smile, and took his presence away
Perhaps, Cefwyn thought, in the closing of that door, the visit of a couple of old southern friends with attendant festivities would soothe the spirits of the people and settle their uneasiness—even the eternal politicking of the dour old northern lords, some of them with sons and daughters to marry off, would be a pleasure this year. The zealots always exhausted themselves in Festival, and slowly settled, once the holidays were past. Religion would give way to the more forgiving, liberal days of spring.
A new Quinaltine? It was an idea to catch the imagination. Glory to the gods. A shining new sanctuary.
And more careful masonwork.
He touched the medallion he wore, remembering that not everything could come down to a building project and a revel. He had a glum and unhappy son on his hands… and now bringing all the lords in, and this crazy business of Efanor’s, this building—
No, best leave that sort of thing to Efanor, who cited holy writ back at the Holy Father with a scholar’s deep understanding, and had a knack for catching hold of the priests’ fervor and turning it to his own purposes. To no other man in Guelessar would he have yielded, but he had utmost hope in Efanor, and hang the expense, so long as expense came slowly, year by year, layer by layer of a new foundation, and became a popular cause and a project to divert the damned priests. If Efanor wanted the square ripped up stone by stone, and gave him that, he should have his way.
CHAPTER TWO
i
SNOW LAY THICK IN MARNA WOOD, OUTSIDE THE WALLS, AND MOUSE CAME from his kitchenside hole this dawn with a message of trouble. Mouse would not stay for his morsel of bread on the floor, but ran in circles, stood up, his whiskers twitching in alarm.
Tristen tossed another crumb, nearer Mouse’s safe door, but the trouble was in the wind, it was in the stones of the old fortress. By night the faces that haunted its walls had changed and moved. The stairs themselves proved unreliable, as if they hoped to catch an unwary foot. They shifted restlessly in the last several days and led places they ordinarily didn’t visit.
All these things, and Owl sulked in the loft, making carnage, Tristen feared, among the pigeons.
Omens enough, if the place ever lacked them. The face at the turning of the hall toward the main door wore a worried look, unhappy, perhaps, in its memories or unhappy with present prospects. Tristen avoided that particular countenance, tempted, too tempted, to ask it questions: what slept in Ynefel’s long existence, best slept on; what waked, fared well enough; and what had passed from the world ought to stay past, if the world was to get along as peacefully as it did.
Mouse’s actions this morning were worrisome. Mouse was very old, even from Mauryl’s days, prone to tremors and terrors, that was true, but the peace Tristen had sealed about his keep felt a little thinner this morning—he had sealed them in and sealed things out.
In Mouse’s refusal to have breakfast, Tristen found himself thinking of old friends, and troubles. He pushed open the kitchen door, moving aside the snow, and went out into the safe little courtyard that contained the cottage Uwen had built—a little cottage with several sheds, and the lean-to stable, which had full tenancy this morning, as happened: they had brought all the horses in from pasture, the light horses and the heavy. Uwen was outside with Cook’s nephew, Cadun, clumping about in the snow, carrying grain and hay for hungry animals.
“M’lord!” Uwen called to him. “Goin’ to come a storm, ain’t it? Feels it, in the air.”
“It does,” he said. That might be what had troubled Mouse. Uwen had good weather sense. He had been much in his own thoughts the last several days, and had paid little attention to the weather, which rarely signified to the keep, except to bring the horses in and lay in a supply of firewood.
“Cook’s got porridge on,” Uwen called back. “wi’ the blackberry honey, m’lord!”
He heard that invitation and gladly came down to help Uwen and the boy with the horses before breakfast. His own warhorse, Dysarys, was a handful, as Uwen put it—bow-nosed, contrary, and with a prodigious appetite for a stablemate’s grain. They had put up a log barrier to curb his ambitions, so he took to kicking out. He never had hit anyone: Uwen was wary and Cadun, who was not so quick-witted or skilled with horses, was at least nimble at dodging.
But with his master, black Dys was better behaved, and liked to have his ears rubbed, the great, fierce deceiver: “You don’t really want to kick Cadun,” Tristen whispered into a backturned ear, tugging gently at it while the huge head was down in the grain bin. “There’s a lad.”
His hands were, of course, all over dirt and hair. He bent and washed them in the snow outside the stable, the rain barrel having frozen last night. His breath made puffs on the air, miracles of the day, and when he did trouble himself to reach out and know the weather, he smelled the storm coming, the way Uwen had.
But something else was there.
Someone else was there.
He stood for a moment listening to the world. Then, stamping the snow off, he went into Uwen and Cook’s house, Cadun tagging behind, for a warm breakfast at a cozy table—not that he hadn’t had a slice of bread, but warm porridge and blackberry honey was not to turn down. He sat with the little family—they had become his family as well—at a years-worn table, on a bench Uwen had cut and shaped with his axe—carpentry was not Uwen’s first trade, but one he did well, as he did anything he set his hand to. Above them on the rafters hung bunches of herbs. A winter bouquet of dried flowers sat in an old jam jar on the table—the flowers themselves, out in the garden, were well buried, asleep. Cook had persisted in making a good deep, stone-rimmed bed, bringing in soil from the water-meadow and mulching and composting, and the years had rewarded her with abundant tame flowers and herbs, some of which survived the winters.
Their living here had gentled the old fortress somewhat and brought a little warmth even beyond its courtyard. Green leaves had appeared here and there in Marna Wood in the last few springs and summers. Trees that had seemed dead, right at the old bridge, had leafed out in their uppermost branches, whispering to the winds again, last summer, as they had in Tristen’s earliest memory. The warmth of the house spread outward from the cottage, and from its hearth, and outside—