“Because of Lord Tristen?” Aewyn asked.
“Tristen is—”
“Not a sorcerer. I know. There is a difference.”
“There was a sorceress in it, all the same, Tarien’s sister. She didn’t get herselfwith child, but Tarien did.”
“You slept with her sister, too?”
Both in the same bed, but he spared his son that particular news, and simply nodded. “Being a young fool, in one year, I got myself a son with a woman who was my mortal enemy, worse, the enemy of my own house, and my people—then became king. And that, my son, made life no easier for our young Otter—beginning with the fact that Tarien named him Elfwyn to spite us all.”
“To spite the Marhanens. You said so.”
“So I did. And time you know this, son of mine: your great-grandfather would have killed her and her unborn child because the mother and the aunt plotted against us, and because the babe to be born would—all other difficulties aside—mix two very troublesome bloodlines. If she had lived long enough to name him as she did, that defiance alone would have assured your great-grandfather would have killed them both. That was the sort of king he was. Your grandfather would just have beheaded her sister, married Tarien off to some hairy Chomaggari, and had Elfwyn living in a tent down in the south… until, of course, sorcery took a hand in it and brought the boy back to be our lifelong enemy. Perhaps I was wrong to try to make his life comfortable. Sometimes I have had that fear. But I did it on Tristen’s advice. And for my own inclinations, it seemed to me a good thing—not to have my other son for my enemy, or yours. So I took the risk. I’ve done all I could to make him turn out well. And when you asked, I brought him to live with us. I did hope it would work out.”
“I likemy brother.”
“So do I,” he said, and the dark felt a little less cold, when he recalled that earnest, gray-eyed face. “I like him very well. Paisi’s gran did a good job, bringing him up and defending him from his mother.”
“Elfwyn calls her his gran, too. But he knows she’s not really his.”
“An excellent woman, let me tell you. And plain and wise, and capable of a fairly potent charm or two, by all Tristen told me. Thank the gods for her and for Paisi, too, who’s been a brother to him, or no knowing how he might have turned out. So perhaps Tristen’s advice was right after all.” It cheered him to think how Gran had turned to good the evil Tarien had planned.
“What was the name of that other woman?”
“Which woman?”
“The sorceress. The other one.”
“One shouldn’t—”
“—speak their names,” Aewyn said. “I know. But isn’t it good I know that?”
“No need for you to know it. She’s dead. But her name was Orien. Orien Aswydd.”
A moment of silence. Aewyn tucked his coat the more tightly about him, the bitter wind skirling up a skein of sparks. “She’d be Elfwyn’s aunt, wouldn’t she? Does Elfwyn know about her?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Paisi’s gran certainly does. So does Paisi. So does everyone in Henas’amef and half of Ylesuin, for that matter, who were alive in those years. One just doesn’t speak of sorcerers. It’s bad luck. So, no, I don’t know if your brother does know at all. Maybe you’re right. Maybe it’s time I did tell him, as I’m telling you.”
“He doesn’t like his mother at all,” Aewyn said. “I thought it was odd he didn’t. But I understand, now.”
“What did he say about her?”
“He said she lived in a tower in Henas’amef, that she was a prisoner. That Gran was his real mother.”
“Well, then, that is the truth of his heart,” Cefwyn said, “and the word that counts.”
They might have been any father, any son, about a campfire, against the winter storm and wind, and in the way of such conversations, apart from court and hall, and at a time when his dear wife was, by now, likely similarly cold and snowbound in the north—necessary things finally could be said, tales told, things passed on between generations, links forged.
He felt a bond that night that he had never had with his son, a meeting of man with man this night. For the first time in that firelit, sober countenance, he saw the fine outlines of the good man he would become.
He was rich, in Aewyn. He longed to have such a conversation with his other son, wanted to have it soon, before any other misunderstanding could drive a wedge between them. It seemed the year for it.
Something burned him, however, a pang like ice and fire at once. He stood up, facing into the bitter wind, and the pain centered just above his heart.
“Papa?” his son said, breaking the spell of maturity. It was the child asking, plaintively, worriedly: “Papa?”
Tristenwas there, and it was no gentle touch. Cefwyn clenched the amulet under the layers of cloth, and his heart beat high, like a commitment to battle.
Tristen was suddenly on his way out of Ynefel—he had not made the motion, until now, but Tristen was coming, he was as certain of it as if Tristen had suddenly glanced at him within the same room. Tristen had looked toward him, and perhaps just now guided those last things he had told his son.
He suddenly had the notion Tristen had delayed his departure—delayed, first to guide Elfwyn to Henas’amef and last, to bring him and Ninévrisë both safely out of Guelessar, with their respective children.
Now Tristen sent him a warning, an acute warning, and moved eastward in haste.
“Why?” he asked, gazing into the dark, the other side of the fire.
But he had no answer.
“Papa?”
“We shall ride before daylight,” Cefwyn said, clenching his hand on his son’s arm. “The horses have to rest. Get to your blankets and sleep while you can.”
ii
THE BED WAS WARM AND SOFT, AND THE BEDCLOTHES, RENEWED TODAY AS every day, smelled of lavender, an herb Gran had grown in her garden. It should have been a pleasant smell. It touched painful memory, of herbs that had hung from the rafters above a soft feather bed, their own bed, beside which Gran had died. It was a short, dark tumble from that scent to horrid memory and the pain of burns far from healed.
Sleet hit the windows, a winter that never seemed to give up. It had sounded like that in Guelessar, when he had never in his life heard the sound of ice striking glass. Happiness had been all in front of him then, spread out like a banquet. He’d had no idea that it would all go so wrong.
Elfwyn buried his head deep in the crook of his arm and hauled the bedclothes over his ears, but that arrangement rapidly grew too warm.
He kept seeing the shelves and shelves of books, and with them The Red Chronicle, and its dreadful story. He wondered if Aewyn knew it, if Aewyn knew about this kinsman of his and kept it secret from him, fearing, perhaps, for their friendship—
Silly, he said to himself. He was Aswydd, no kin at all to the dead Sihhë King. The first Elfwyn had been no relation whatsoever to the Aswydds.
Had he?
He outright didn’t know. He could ask Lord Crissand, he supposed. But if that information was here, it was surely in that book, for him to find if he kept at it. The tale of the Marhanen warlord might lead down to his own father’s generation and give him all the connections.
He remembered the shadows in the library, and his decision to go home. He had been so tired, and he could no longer remember what had finally made him leave. He had set the candle down, then realized he had to pass the haunt, but he had gotten home safely, anyway.
Had he locked the door?
Hadhe locked the door? He remembered blowing the candle out and setting the stub on the ledge. But he had promised the old man, in return for the privilege of the library, that he would lock the door.
Surely no one would get in there, only to steal a book, in just the few hours until morning. It was cold, and it was quiet in the halls, and he would have to get out of a warm bed and wake Paisi, all to go down there.