He was shocked to find that was at the heart of it. Anger. Jealousy. All the wicked thoughts he had smothered and tried to ignore in his heart were still there, stored up through the years. His discomfiture had disturbed them, and now when Lord Tristen probed into his opinions, they came floating up to the surface like rotten matter from a brook.
“I don’t want to be angry with anyone,” he said. “My lord, I love my father, and my brother.”
“As you love Gran and Paisi. You have no cause for anger with them, do you?”
Only with his mother, he thought at once. He had just cause for anger at his mother, who lived in the tower, and at the poverty that made life hard. The lords who lived up on the hill and had books and feasts whenever they liked—he didn’t hate them. But he found he was jealous. Otter had never been jealous, not humble Otter, who was grateful for everything, and was obliged to be. But if he was Elfwyn Aswydd, he was born to his mother’s debts and his own hatreds…
Elfwyn Aswydd was his mother’s son, and a dead king’s namesake, the Marhanen’s enemy.
“You do love them,” Tristen said.
“I do love them,” he said, but to his profound dismay it was no longer clean and pure, that love. “If I’m Otter, it’s easy to love them.”
“You have two paths,” Tristen said. “And you may not have your own choice.”
Two paths. And no choice. He did not understand, not at all.
“You are Elfwyn,” Tristen said. “Elfwyn Aswydd is your responsibility to shape. Bring all the things Otter knows, and be Elfwyn, as you have to be. There is your best path, if you can get on it and direct it as best you can. The direction it may take yet is not in your power: but what sort of man walks that path, when you are a man, that you candecide.”
He did grasp it, then. And suddenly he knew, if he were Aswydd, if he were to be pushed and shoved by fate, what he most wanted for himself, and where he’d set his feet if he could. There was what the Aswydds had, as Gran had, what he’d attempted to have, that morning with the oil and water. He hadn’t much Gift, but he had a little. Tristen had something far, far more than any Aswydd, something that Gran wouldn’t explain to him, but said Sihhë-gift was inborn, and natural for Lord Tristen, and made his very wishes powerful enough to rearrange kingdoms.
“Could I stay here with you a time, my lord? Could I learn wizardry enough to stop my mother? If I haven’t Gift enough, could you possibly give it to me?”
Tristen leaned back from the table, regarding him with a troubled frown, then got up from the table altogether and walked to the fireside. As he went, Elfwyn turned on the bench, and watched him standing there, half in fire, half in shadow, staring into the flames and considering for some little time.
Then Tristen looked his way. And might have spoken, but a curious thing happened. A brown, quick movement appeared at the shadowed end of the table, beyond the glow of the fire, a scruffy little creature that advanced near the plate of cakes and sniffed at it.
“Ah,” Tristen said, and a smile transfigured his face: it had been ageless and cold and terrible. Suddenly it was young, and kind. “Mouse is out. He’s very old, and he’s gotten very fond of Cook’s cakes. Give him a bit. Owl is never grateful, but Mouse is.”
Feed the mouse, Elfwyn said to himself in no little disgust, feeling anger, feeling his senses reel. Yet obediently, shaken to his very heart, and still waiting for his answer, he broke off a few crumbs, and held them out. The mouse stayed where it was, whiskers twitching, beady eyes bright, not trusting him. He pushed the crumbs toward Mouse, and pushed them farther, and the little creature darted forward, snatched one, and sat up and ate it.
“You did not insist on your own terms,” Tristen said. “And you have experience of small, shy creatures.”
“A little,” he said. They’d had a fallen sparrow once that they had fed, he and Gran and Paisi, a quick, bright little creature, but it had flown away that summer and not come back. A silly creature, a silly act of charity, in a world in which sparrows fell daily, unrescued. As Mouse was silly, and that a Sihhë-lord took notice of Mouse ora stray boy suddenly seemed equally unlikely.
“I’d thought owls were fond of mice,” he said, an outright challenge that drew first a frown, then a guarded smile from Lord Tristen.
“You won’t see them both at the same time,” Tristen said. “Mouse rules this nook. Owl has the whole keep else.”
Elfwyn pushed another crumb close. Mouse took it and scurried off.
“He feels safer below,” Tristen said.
“You said that my father shouldn’t kill my mother,” Elfwyn said, around a bite that stuck in his throat. “Or me. Why?”
“Which?”
“Why, either one?”
“If he’d killed either of you, it would have changed him,” Tristen said. “And if he’d killed your mother, only, what would you have heard of him? That he’d killed your mother. And what would you have thought of your mother? That she must have been a good woman, would you not have thought, if you had never known her?”
“I’d have been very mistaken.”
“Trust your father,” Tristen said. “Trust him and all his house.”
“I would. I shall, from now on. And Aewyn.”
“You were to go hunting together.”
How had he known that? “Yes,” he said meekly, thinking it a demonstration of the Sihhë-lord’s vision. “We were, this spring.”
“Have you killed?” Tristen asked him.
The question shocked him. He had no immediate answer.
“Owl kills,” Tristen said again. “Are you Owl or are you Mouse?”
He didn’t know what to say. “I was Otter,” he said, and attempted silly humor, to relieve the terror that Lord Tristen’s disapproval evoked in him. “I suppose I could hunt fish.”
Tristen looked at him still with that curious intensity. “Fish, perhaps. But no greater game. You should not kill. It’s very well for your brother, but not for you. What are you thinking, now, Elfwyn Aswydd?”
“That you were a great warrior,” he said, the truth startled out of him without his thinking. “They say you’ve killed battlefields full of men.”
“Far too many,” Tristen said somberly, and for a moment there was that distant and terrible look on his face. “It saved my friends at the time. Believe me—keep from blood. Your own balance is far too delicate.”
“But just hunting?”
“A precious thing, your gran’s teaching in you. Don’t cast it away for sport.”
“Aewyn isn’t wicked. If he hunts—Aewyn isn’t wicked, is he?”
“Nor will be made wicked for a deer or two he intends to eat. Be Otter when you must. Not Owl. That would be a terrible thing, were you to be Owl.”
He all but laughed, the admonition was so strange, as if Tristen were half in jest, but he suddenly doubted that and stayed solemn—as if Tristen, giving him that advice, had echoed something as simple and true as a child’s story, the kind of advice Gran had used to give, when he had been on his worst behavior, and she forgave him.
“My lord,” he said, blushing hot.
Then Tristen did smile. “Are you sure about the cakes? You could take one or two.”
“Mouse can have them,” he said. Suddenly it seemed quite reasonable to be discussing Mouse as if he were a person, with a man the whole world feared. “Thank you, my lord. Thank you.” His thoughts plunged deep, and came back up from the depths again with the pieces he had tried to gather before. “But my questions—”
“Your questions.”
“Can you teach me? Can you make me a wizard?”
“You are not yet what you will be,” Tristen said, “and I have been waiting for this question for longer than you know.”
“Waiting, my lord?”
The fortress groaned, and in the tall room beyond, the sounds of massive movement began, a terrible squealing of wood and shifting of stones.