He sat down by Uwen on the bench and took a cup of tea from Cook.
“Ye’re thinkin’ about the outside, are ye, m’lord?” Uwen asked him.
“That I am,” he said quietly, aware that Cook was listening with one ear, while putting bread to bake.
“Is it the old enemy, m’lord?” Uwen asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “How could you suspect?”
Uwen shrugged while the whetstone kept moving. “The boy. The Aswydd woman. An’ the king. Things is come together lately.”
“That they have,” Tristen admitted.
“An’ last night ye had the whole hall lit.”
The candles came and went. He rarely thought about them. “I suppose I did.”
“So,” Uwen said. “Ye ain’t slept much since the boy went out.”
“I often don’t.”
“Ye ain’t, ’cept Owl is back, so the boy’s got where he’s goin’. An’ Dys, he come in on ’is own from pasture this mornin’. Ye called him.”
“Did I?” He was amazed. He’d wanted the horse. He’d wanted Uwen. Both knew that without his saying so.
“So,” Uwen said, looking up and down the gray-sheened edge of the metal. “So, well, the bones is some older, but these hands ain’t forgot.”
He’d worked his little magics to keep Uwen hale and strong, and Cook and Cook’s son, too, since Cook made Uwen happy… it was his little secret, a furtive and quiet magic, worked within the walls, and this without polite asking. Dys didn’t age, nor Petelly, nor any of the horses. Cadun grew up, but never older, and if there was wrong in that, he only hoped Uwen forgave him, if Cook and Cadun did not. This morning was as close as Uwen had ever come to remarking on his own long good health.
But he needed Uwen. This was the truth inside the truth: he knew that time ran too fast for his liking, and that Men faded. With them, with this one comfort, he was content; and without them, he was alone.
Since the day he became a Dragon, he held in his heart a vision of a place frozen in ice, remote from all Men—a place before Men, and before love, and before everything. He couldn’t quite remember a time he had been there, but he feared it more than anything. It was that place where the Enemy had been, and yet it seemed to him that he had been there before he knew Mauryl, that he had watched Mauryl arrive at those gates, oh, long before many other things had happened, and long before there was Uwen, to tie him to thisplace and thistime. Tristen had lived his first year in the world of Men less than two decades ago; lived that year, and the next, and many after it. But the cold place was there, always, in the back of his fears, an icy fastness where nothing he loved had yet existed. It had been so easy to spread anger out onto the winds, like the Dragon, and be there again; but once he was there, he might not remember how to get back.
Uwen was his strength, but also his weakness. His Enemy would ever so quickly exploit that weakness if he entered the world again; and his need for Uwen would bring Uwen grief if ever his care had a lapse. He knew it. So did Uwen know it, wise man that he was. He became sure this morning that Uwen knew his somewhat guilty secret, counted the years he had spent here, and did forgive him.
“So,” Uwen said, “do I go, or do we go together this time, m’lord? Ye’ve waited for the boy. Now he’s gone where he’s goin’, or Owl ain’t a prophet.”
“Brave Uwen. We shall both go, and go soon, I think we must. But something is moving, and if I leave the tower, I shall not have the vantage to see where it goes. The wind is up this morning. Do you hear it?”
Uwen looked up, on blue sky and a clear day. “Is it that, m’lord? Is it woke again?”
“I don’t know. Put our packs together. We shan’t take a great deal with us when we go, and we may go at any hour, day or night.”
“Aye, m’lord. Just my gear, an’ yours. As used t’ be.”
iii
THE GOOD CLOAK FROM GUELESSAR HAD FARED THE WORST—IT WOULD NEED mending as well as washing, and there was no time for either. Elfwyn put on Paisi’s best—Paisi insisted; and the two of them kissed Gran and took the horses the king had given them, and rode out to the highway, himself on Feiny, with his saddle, and Paisi on Tammis, with nothing but his halter.
It was a brisk, snowy ride to the gates of Henas’amef, under a blue bright sky at first, then under the frowning shadow of the battlement. They rode cautiously, climbing an icy street they had never before traversed on horseback. And the people of the town, who would never have looked twice at two walkers, looked up at them curiously and suspiciously as they passed like lord and man. Some might know Paisi, who came and went in the town, and if they did, they knew who they might be, though they might wonder greatly that they now came in on horseback. One or two such made the sign against evil, but only one or two, likely more piously Bryalt than the rest—in the main, the townsfolk hung charms about their houses and had no fear of witches or their cures: oh, no, it was the taint of sorcery that drew the ward signs, and the looks askance.
Overall, the town was in a fading holiday mood—the last vestiges of tattered dead evergreen festooned housefronts and shops, the Bryalt holiday having come and gone and lingered during his venture west, and people were likely in the very last throes of too much drink and leftover holiday cakes. The shops were still mostly shut, this early in the morning. The evergreen dripped with icicles here and there, shed needles, or hung haphazardly tattered, ruined by days of wind and weather.
Paisi had not come into town for holiday, so he said. He had been just off a long ride, had been too busy mending leaks and repairing the goat-shed fence for Gran, and besides, as Paisi had said, he had been too worried about a certain fool for a number of days after.
“I was never in danger,” Elfwyn said, and knew that he lied, and wasn’t sure why, except he had no desire yet to tell Paisi what Paisi was so curious to learn—what Tristen had said, or what he had said to Lord Tristen.
He wanted to have the visit to Lord Crissand behind him, that, before anything else, and he didn’t want to think about where he had been, or about Lord Tristen at all until he had to. There was, besides Paisi’s completely reasonable desire to know, that presence that loomed above the town, less so, ironically, as they were nearest to it: the houses cut off all view of the Zeide and its tower, and seemed to cut off all sense of it as well. Elfwyn had ridden out from Gran’s place refusing to look toward the town, and refusing to look up when they drew close to it: he chattered with Paisi or minded the frozen mud, or anything at all he could contrive to keep his mind off that place—he so dreaded coming into town.
But here, in that strange absence of notice from the tower, they rode calmly up the street, and quietly up to the Zeide gates, where gatekeepers, respecting anyone who came on horseback, made haste to open them.
Things came suddenly uncommonly clear, details of the iron gates, of the stones themselves—of that tower, when they had come through the gates and into the broad courtyard of the keep. He wanted to look up. He had the most dire urge to look up. And didn’t.
Vision, Lord Tristen had said. Vision was what he needed, but his Vision of that high window was not with his eyes. He knew what it looked like. He knew every detail of that window, its stone ledge that ran all the way about the tower, the dark birds that sometimes congregated there. He knew the window was vacant at the moment. She didn’t need to look. Her Vision existed whether or not she looked—was that possibly what Lord Tristen meant, that he needed that kind of wizardry, his mother’s Gift, that was always aware? He wanted nothing of his mother, not a whisper of her talent. When he had approached Lord Tristen about wizardry, he had been thinking of himself and Gran, and the things she had shown him, not—not his mother’s sort. Not sorcery.
Gods, had the Sihhë-lord seen something else hiding in him?