“In a bit. Go up to the room and rest if you like.”
“More like down to the kitchens to get a bite,” Paisi said. “I’m half-starved. D’ ye want anything, m’lord? Shall I have your supper sent upstairs?”
“In an hour or so,” he said. “Thank you, Paisi.” He didn’t feel hungry. He turned a page carefully, wishing only not to be distracted from where he was, as if he were walking a rail and mustn’t fall off, mustn’t distract himself.
Paisi, probably annoyed with him, or at least not understanding what he was about, left on his own business.
This book was not the thing he wanted. But the library was the place he wanted. He didn’t want to leave it. He didn’t want to look away from his pages. He just wanted to stay where he was, where his heart didn’t hurt and his memories and his dreams didn’t keep slipping into his head.
“Might I stay longer?” he asked when the librarian said that he had to go to supper, and went about to turn out the few old men who had occupied other tables.
The old man looked at him carefully and gave him a key. “These are very, very few,” the old man said. “You may come in and read, lad, as pleases you. I can see you read like a scholar. Admirable. Admirable in a lad. But have extreme care of candles, bank the fire, and lock the door when you leave. These books are the kingdom’s treasures, and irreplaceable.”
“I shall be careful, sir,” he said, taking the key, which tingled in his fingers, the longed-for prize. “I shall be ever so careful.”
He stayed a little while after. Once he was sure the old man was gone, he got up and took The Red Chroniclefrom its shelf. He read by close candlelight—the windows were dimming—how the Sihhë-lords’ reign had extended over Amefel, Elwynor, and most that was now Ylesuin. In those days magic had been ordinary, and the Sihhë lived long lives, spanning generations of Men, doing as they pleased. Guelemara had not been the capital in those days: it was a place called Althalen, in Amefel. And a great wizard, Mauryl Gestaurien, had served the Sihhë-lords, from the fortress of Ynefel. So had Selwyn Marhanen, a warlord under the Sihhë King.
Nothing was then as it was now. Gran had never told him these things. Paisi hadn’t.
And this Selwyn Marhanen, this warlord out of Guelessar, had defended the borders of the Sihhë from attacks from the south, while making secret alliances with a priest of a militant sect, the Quinalt—in that day when most Men were Bryalt, or, always in the case of wizards, Teranthine…
Was the Quinaltine not yet built, then? Or all the great city of Guelemara? He tried to imagine the world as it had been, and leafed carefully ahead to see that Selwyn Marhanen had killed several of his brother lords among the districts of Men, and entered into agreements with others. The Sihhë King in those days was Elfwyn, Elfwyn Sihhë, who relied on the Marhanen and trusted him.
The guttering candle wavered, making the letters crawl and move. He looked up, realized that the windows were now completely dark, the fire in the little fireplace was out, and his whole body was stiffened from long sitting.
He shivered, held his chilling fingers above the candleflame to warm them, and simultaneously realized, with a little touch of dismay, that Paisi might not realize he was still here, now that the door shut.
There was tomorrow. There were any number of tomorrows for books. He shut the History of Amefelon the table, to protect its pages from drafts, before returning The Red Chronicleto the shelf. He would, he told himself, be back when he was not cold and hungry and getting to the end of a candle stub. He lifted the candleholder to light his way to the door, careful not to spill the brimming wax, and as it tipped, a little did spill into the catch-basin, and the flame leapt up on a clear wick, showing him the way, indeed, but making all the room a threatening place, the tall cases and the looming stacks full of secrets, tales that had shaped his present existence, laws and rights of rule—so, so many things he didn’t understand and needed to know, if only to defend himself from forces he did not comprehend.
But for now he took his single candle to the door and let himself out, blew out the candle stub, and left it on the ledge outside the door, to be renewed by servants who saw that such things appeared in due order. The halls were mostly deserted, and he remembered that horrid apparition—he hadn’t realized he’d trapped himself on the other side of it, after dark, and he didn’t want to go near that place, not even with his mother’s guards on watch down there.
There was, however, the way the servants used.
He went down to the end of the short hall, and found, indeed, the servants’ stairs, and climbed up those short, dark stairs to a dimly lighted hall above—one bend and another, which took him above the haunt. He hurried along, breathless, trying not to break into a fearful run. Servants were going up and down the halls at this hour, collecting the washing and used dishes of other residents, the minor lords of the town and the province, lords who lived here, or visited here, where now a witch’s son found refuge from calamity.
He didn’t feel he belonged in this place. He wanted not to be here, under his mother’s witness. He wanted to be back in Guelessar if he had to live in a palace. He wasn’t sure he wanted to read more of the book, and to know how his namesake had died, and, in detail, how Aewyn’s family had turned on the Sihhë King.
He reached his own door, pushed the latch and whipped inside, breathlessly glad to meet light and warmth and, indeed, the smell of supper.
“Well, now,” Paisi said. “Thank the gods. Where wasyou? With ’is Grace?”
“In the library, still,” he said.
“I came by, an’ the door shut. I hoped ye was with ’is Grace, but I couldn’t get no sense out of the servants. There’s supper, if ye wish’t.”
“In a bit. A little wine, maybe.”
“That we can do.” Paisi went to the table and poured a cup, and from a second pitcher, water. “What was you readin’ so late and so urgent?”
“A history. A history of Elfwyn King.”
“Oh, well,” Paisi said, worried-looking. The same boding dark was outside the windows, firelight glittering on the glass, as he gave him the cup. “That ain’t too cheery, is it?”
“No. It wasn’t.” He didn’t want to explain the tightness in his chest or the unrest in his heart. He drank, and sat down by the fire, ignoring supper. It was only the drink he wanted, to take the dust of the place out of his mouth and the attraction of it out of his mind. “It wasn’t.”
Paisi stretched his feet out in front him, warming his boots. “Well, I got a far simpler question for ye. I was talkin’ to the stablemaster, an’ they were talkin’ o’ takin’ the horses down to the pastures as they do, to the winter stables. But the four paddocks left free down there is way on the end, an’ they’re askin’ if we’re apt to be needin’ the horses too often. I said I’d ask you.”
“I don’t know,” he said, which was foolish, because he did know, and there wasn’t much chance they’d be riding about the countryside anytime soon.
Unless Aewyn came with his father. There was that.
“Maybe they could stay up here just a little longer,” he said.
“It’s fair cramped here, m’lord. They’d be happier.”
“I don’t want my horse down the hill!” he said, more curtly than he meant. But he couldn’t think of a reason. He took another sip and swallowed half the cup after. “He’s mine. I want him here, is all.”
“I’ll tell ’em so,” Paisi said. “Ain’t ye goin’ t’ eat, m’lord?”
“I’m not that hungry,” he said glumly, but he came and sat at the table and picked at the food, and had another cup of watered wine. Paisi had his own wine plain, not in the brightest of moods.
They sat for a while. “If Aewyn should come,” Elfwyn said, to mend his earlier tone, and because what had sat for hours at the bottom of his thoughts had finally bobbed up to the surface, the conviction that nothing they would do here was permanent—“and with Lord Tristen here, too—I might want my horse—I’d hope to go riding with Aewyn. I don’t know when they will come. I don’t know what might happen.”