He didn’t know the right answer to that. Tristen gave him no clues. He had always been good at saying what the authority that ruled him wanted to hear, and now he found authority who gave him no clue how to please.
“I don’t know, my lord. I don’t know what’s right.”
“Be content. Be content right now.”
“But will I see Aewyn again?” he asked. “And will Gran be safe from my mother?”
“Patience is one thing you lack,” Tristen said quietly. “Patience is one thing you must gain. Vision is another.”
Elfwyn drew a breath, and another, seeing he was losing ground, and that the very person who held all he possibly wanted had, indeed, posed him a lesson: not one he wanted, but at least Tristen posed him a challenge he could overcome.
“I shall try,” he said quietly. “If I understood what you mean, I think I could do better.”
“Words Unfold to me, in their time. Perhaps these words will Unfold to you.”
“Unfold.”
“Like a flower blooming,” Tristen said. “They open.”
“I wish they would,” Elfwyn said in despair, and Tristen said:
“Wishing may indeed help.”
He might have said, in bitter honesty—It would help me more if you explained to me, but the candle-shadow caught Tristen’s face at that moment, and turned it from young man to that grim and somber visage—the Tristen Sihhë of legend, the terrible man on the black horse, the man who became a dragon.
Patience and Vision. Simpleminded advice, each syllable of which struck his heart like a hammerblow, at this dark, lonely hour, in this place.
“I shall wish, my lord. I shall wish it earnestly.”
A somber look, directly at him. “Beware of the quality of your wishes, and beware, not of anger, but of selfish anger.”
“Only selfishanger, my lord?”
“This too: love you must have, love that comes to you from outside, unbought and unasked for. Do you understand? You cannot hold it. You cannot compel it. But you must keep it when it comes.”
He had had a glimmering of that sort of love. He had it from Gran. He had it from Paisi. He knew it now with particular poignancy. He had had the merest taste of it in Aewyn, before Guelen hate drove him out.
“How do I keep it, then?” Elfwyn asked.
“Deserve it,” Tristen said.
The air seemed too heavy to breathe.
“Give as well as get,” Tristen said. “Be honest. Be more than just. Be kind. And consider carefully what you are and what others are.”
Kind. That was Gran’s sort of advice. It wasn’t what he hoped to hear as a beginning of wizard-work.
“Above all,” Tristen said, “you mustn’t stay here when I leave.”
Elfwyn’s heart beat faster and faster. “Are you going somewhere?”
“I believe I must,” Tristen said.
“May I go with you, my lord?”
Tristen shook his head. “No. You will go ahead of me. My enemies are your enemies, and not to your good. You have a knack for opening doors. You must go with first light.”
“Sir?” He was completely dismayed. He’d learned nothing, and now was he dismissed?
“You must go,” Tristen said, “well supplied, and with Owl to guide you out. Otherwise, you might not find your way back to your house. Gran and Paisi are waiting for you.”
“Yes, sir,” he said, deeply disappointed.
“For the safety of us all,” Tristen said, “remember everything I’ve said. Your enemies will want you to forget, and to fear, and you must do neither. Sleep now.”
Elfwyn sank down with one knee on the patchwork quilt, and Tristen lit the candle on the little table beside the bed, then left, closing the door. The latch clicked, and Elfwyn found his eyes growing heavier and heavier. He didn’t want to sleep. He didn’t want to be shut in this room. And he most of all didn’t want to leave in the morning, but he saw no choice for himself. Tristen had never answered his questions, except to warn him—you have a knack for opening doors, as if everything were his fault, the way Trassin had said; and except to explain about wards, and to strengthen one, right in front of him, a crack that, unmended, split the wall and let in the cold.
He got under the covers, having no other recourse. The bed was comfortable and not at all musty, the bedclothes well kept.
And now that Tristen had mentioned Gran and Paisi, he felt a rising anxiousness for them, a surety he truly needed to be going back, that this place, even Uwen’s cottage, was not the right place for him.
He didn’t know what had turned his opinion around. He suspected Tristen had, and he wished he hadn’t, and that his answer had been different, but Gran—Gran did miss him, and Paisi did, and if Lord Tristen was going to ride out into the world again—then the power that had decreed he ought to live in the first place would come and see how things were in the land, and maybe set his life in order. At least there might be a hope for him.
He slept.
And waked again, with the candle out, and in darkness. For some reason he felt alarm. He heard a series of noises, like someone thumping at boards just outside the door.
He lay still, fearing to move, for a long time, and ashamed of himself. Then there came a scratching at his door, as if someone were playing a game with him, and that made him angry. He rolled out of bed, and pulled the latch, to face whatever it was in the light outside.
A rush of air and a battering of claws and broad wings drove him back in.
Owl, he realized. Owl had prevented him leaving. The terrible sight of swinging stairs and faces alive in the walls lingered in his vision, branded there by the one burst of light, before he had slammed the door to keep Owl away from him.
He reeled away, and sat down on the bedclothes, then recalled what Tristen told him about wards.
He made a pass of his hand across the door, and all about the wall, wanting, this time, not to be the one who opened windows. He did it all around three times, to be sure. Then he tucked down into the warm covers, hearing the sigh of wind outside. But everywhere he had just walked, the wards glowed palest blue.
Did I do that? he asked himself in wonder. DidI do that?
Or did Lord Tristen?
vi
A GOOD BOY, TRISTEN THOUGHT, SITTING BY THE FIRE. HE WISHED PAISI MIGHT have come with the boy, though if Gran was ill, there was ample reason not.
Gran being ill, now, that was a very grave business, one that might bring danger on them all prematurely, and whether it was the course of nature or not, he felt uneasy to have that news.
He had reached so seldom out of Ynefel. It was never wise to put forth magic carelessly, however potent, and he disliked breaching his own wards, for whatever purpose.
But this boy—
This boy was the very reason he had pent himself up in Ynefel in recent years: he had been reluctant to lay hands on the situation too early and often, fearing he might blind himself to what truly was moving through it. Now, clear of the quiet workings of Tarien Aswydd, he had gained a certain perspective, enough to see past others’ fears. And his own.
Elfwyn’s heart was clean, still clean. But he had seen him attack Owl himself, up above, and he had felt the wards, how they quivered, not quite what they had been. There was in the boy that little darkness that could well nest something else, something older and more dangerous— thatwas the thing to fear. The sins at first would be inadvertent, the opening of a window for the best of intentions. The boy was a cipher, and with threads of connection running under doors that could not safely be opened… not safely, because there was no sure way to close them after.
And that Elfwyn had recourse here, unasked—that was worth a question: he had battered at the gates asking help—but at whose will? Something had wanted the boy to come to him. Perhaps it was even his own will, in some obscure, inclusive circle of his wards about those he loved: Sihhë magic could work that way. He wondered if Gran herself was strong enough to do it, or if possibly—least likely—the boy’s own will had found its own direction.