“M’lord?” Paisi asked him, at midmorning the next day, when he cut his hand trying to bend a damaged hinge, where the wind last night had caught the shed door. He just stared into the dark of the shed and lost himself for the moment, sucking at the wound.
“Did you sleep well?” he asked Paisi, that noon.
“Oh, aye,” Paisi said, matter of course. And then asked, more carefully: “Did you, m’lord?”
His mother had slipped her dreams past Gran’s wards, past the protections of a ring Lord Tristen had blessed. She fretted. She threatened.
“I think I’ll visit my mother,” he said. “There’s day enough left. I won’t stay but a moment. But I have to. I don’t want any more dreams.”
Paisi frowned, utterly sober. “Well, ye won’t go alone, m’lord, not there.”
He didn’t refuse Paisi’s offer. Gran was at her knitting—that, she could still do, though stitching taxed her eyesight and had for years.
“Paisi and I will be going into town,” he said, and Gran said, “Well, well, take care,” and let him kiss her cheek. “We’ll be back well in time for supper,” he said. “We might stop at the smith’s and get him to bend that hinge. Our hammer can’t do it. We’re taking it along.”
“Ye can bring a few apples,” Gran said, “an’ there might be tarts.”
“Apples, indeed,” he said, feeling better about the venture, and went outside. Paisi was finishing up saddling Feiny, in the kind of light, blowing snow that might come from the heavens or off the thatch, and he helped, and mounted up. Paisi and he rode out the gate, as before, and down the road. Carts had passed, yesterday, market bound, and come back again.
“Ol’ Semmy’s sold ’is ’ides,” Paisi remarked, reading the tracks and the habits of their neighbor.
“Good profit, in a scant market,” he said. He had his wits about him. Everything seemed easier, now that he had taken the decision to go, and he and Paisi talked about the road, the weather, and Ynefel—which Paisi had tried to get out of him for days. It all became easier to tell.
In his inmost thoughts, he wanted to have the visit with his mother before Lord Tristen came. It was what he had told Lord Crissand, that afterward, things might be confused, and he wanted to do it now, before the rules changed. He wanted, once, to stand up to her and not be afraid, before Lord Tristen came to put fear into her, or to put some new barrier between him and her. He didn’t want to lose that chance, and the dreams she sent told him now with cruel clarity who had drawn him back from Guelemara, and who was at fault, between him and his father.
He and Paisi rode through the town gates and up the hill. “You might go to the smith’s while I’m about this,” Elfwyn said. “Get the hinge fixed. And we can get the apples on the way back to the gate.”
“I ain’t goin’ anywheres but where you are,” Paisi said doggedly. And that was the way things would be.
The ring won admittance for both of them, at least as far as inside the Zeide, and to the bottom of the tower steps, where his mother’s guards stood, day and night.
Paisi would have climbed those stairs with him: Paisi was greatly afraid, and still would have done it, but he stopped Paisi down where the guards stood. “Wait for me. She would raise a fuss about your coming, if only to worry me. I won’t be long. She won’t like what I have to tell her. Not this time.”
“You don’t take to heart anything she says,” Paisi said in a low voice, but he did stay with the one guard when Elfwyn started up the stairs with the other.
He wanted to know what she had been doing, why she had been doing it, and if one actually wanted bad news in the world, his mother was as good a source of it as he knew… she had a habit of telling the truth, on many occasions, especially if it was a truth he didn’t want to hear.
Bony child, she’d been in the habit of calling him, and again she’d said: Your hands are as rough as any peasant’s. Your father’s son, and with such beautiful hands. It’s shameful.
He reached the door—the door was barred, but not guarded above: he suspected the guards didn’t want to stand that near, but the one had come up the steps with him and lifted the large, protected bar—it was necessary to free the bar, first, from a central restraint which no prying from within the room could reach. “You knock loud,” the man said, before he opened it. “You give it three good hard raps when you want out. I’ll stand right out here.”
“Thank you,” he said, and as the door opened, stepped inside.
It was a modest place, a room with figured carpets, a bed surrounded with draperies, and an alcove with windows that had shutters, though his mother rarely drew them. She stood by one of those five windows, the sunlight falling on a face that still was beautiful. She had red hair, and it flowed down her back, loose as a maiden’s—or a witch’s locks.
“Mother,” he said. “I take it you want to see me.”
“Ah, my dear boy.” She came toward him, grandly offering to take his hands, and, mindful of what his right hand had, he gave only his left. “What,” she exclaimed, pressing the offered hand in both of hers and leaning forward. “No kiss for your mother?”
He hadn’t the fortitude. He didn’t recoil, but he did step back. “A kiss when you’ve won it. And you haven’t. You’ve tried your best to make me miserable.”
“Oh?” she asked, and turned her shoulder, walked a space into the shadow. “How is your father?”
“Fair-minded and honest.” He found himself launched in a battle of cold words, an art he had learned from her. He had had as much as a year to think how he would meet her questions next time, yet always she confounded him in her own game. He gave up subtlety this time, his newest mode of attack, which took all the courage he had. “You sent the dreams, Mother. I know you did, so don’t lie to me. I’ve been to Lord Tristen. He advises me carry the name you gave me, so I will, from now on. Does that satisfy you?”
“I’m sure it’s no great matter to me,” she said, “since you’re an ungrateful boy. You always were. And how isthe Sihhë-lord?”
“He’ll speak for himself when he comes here,” he said, “and he will, soon. He didn’t like what he heard.”
“Oh, did you bear tales? And have youcome to threaten me?”
“I came to warn you. He will come here. He’s not pleased. Neither am I, Mother. So if you want one soul in all the world to be sorry for you—”
“To be sorry for me?” Her laughter was silver, and her hand flew to her breast, delicate and eloquent. “Dear boy, I don’t need your charity. You may need mine. Your sojourn in Guelemara was far from happy and fortunate, lad! The priests cursed you, didn’t they? Quinalt priests will never love you. Quinalt priests dug up our dead when your dear father hanged your young uncle: at your dear father’s orders, our graves were emptied, and the moldering dead went into exile, all, all bundled into a common cart and hauled off across the border, for the sanctity of Amefel, you understand—to satisfy the Bloody Marhanen’s spite. Not enough to kill us and exile us. He set up that traitor downstairs, that smiling, perfidious man, who doles out his charity to you—does it taste that sweet?”
He forgot, annually, how he lost arguments with his mother. She changed subjects, switched arguments, and never stopped for breath. “I came to tell you those two things, and to be sure I was right about you. I’ve done both. Good day, Mother.”
“Your father lied to you. Lied, boy. Where was his concern for you, hiding you away, herding goats, peddling penny cures? And now he brings you to Guelemara and humiliates you, dragging you right under the noses of the Quinalt priests, knowing how they hate you, provoking them to act—oh, he’s not innocent of harm, boy. He wants to blunt any success you might have by setting the priests against you. He wants you frightened, and grateful, lapping pity and protection from his hand. Isn’t that the way it was, there? They chase you out, and you’re grateful to your father, who gave you pretty clothes and sweets? Fool, boy, fool!’