The eyes drifted shut. Slitted open a second time. The brow knit, much as if the old man was trying to think of a long-forgotten fact. “He shouldn’t be out there, the fool.”
“Who? Tristen?”
“He’s in danger. He’s particularly in danger. The boy has that book.”
“What sort of book? What sort of book is it, Master Emuin?”
“His unmaking.” Coughing racked the frail body, and Cefwyn propped him up until it stopped—propped him up and took the offered cup of wine, touching the merest edge of it to the old man’s lips.
“Wine, if you can manage it, old master.”
“Ale,” the old man said, never opening his eyes. “I’d rather ale. I’m dry as dust.”
“It’s here, Your Majesty.” The servants had brought up every likely need, when they had been sitting in this room. Liquid splashed into a deep tankard, and a yeasty smell spread through the air before the cup even reached Cefwyn’s hand.
“Here,” he said, and this time the old wizard’s hand reached up and steadied the tankard, and he drank three deep gulps before he breathed.
“Where are my boys?” Cefwyn asked, running short on compassion. The old man seemed less dying than frozen, and warmth was getting back to him. “Where did you leave them?”
“If I knew that, they wouldn’t be lost!” Master Emuin said. “But they’re together. They fell away together.”
CHAPTER TEN
i
THE GRAY SPACE ROARED WITH TROUBLED WINDS. THERE WAS EVERY DANGER of being cast back to the icy waste, and Tristen kept Cefwyn and Uwen very much in mind, his link to the world. He was alone here, but confused and treacherous as things could become, he had deliberately left ties to draw him back, and as quickly as the bitter cold bit to the bone he drew in a deep breath and set his feet, making his own warmth, that of living flesh.
He had his sword. Unlike most weapons, this sword had value here, even with ghosts. He had his protections, not least in those ties he maintained to the world of Men. He was glad not to sense Emuin in this place. Emuin had not tried to follow him, having no strength to do so, none, either, to tell him what way he had come—but the track Emuin had left in his passage was still clear, a bright trail shredding on the winds.
He followed it, carefully extending his presence from his staying-place in Henas’amef along that roiled, chill breeze through the void that defined that recent passage.
He saw shapes, hazed in the gray. Going farther, he found two horses where no creatures of Men ought to be, and one he knew: they ran in panic, but he drew his sword and parted the gray space to give them their escape into the world they wanted… natural creatures, nothing of the sort this place could harbor long. Their fear had roiled everything around them, and destroyed the track Emuin had made, lines of passage confused and broken.
A shard of ice thrust itself up. That place tried to form again around him, and he knew its warning signs, and hurled himself back.
Everything shifted. Every track he had followed was gone, confounded and confused.
“Elfwyn!” he called down the winds. “Elfwyn Aswydd! Answer if you hear!”
A wisp of something wafted back at his call. He reached for it.
ii
AEWYN NEVER YET STIRRED FROM UNCONSCIOUSNESS, OR WIZARD-CAST SLEEP, or whatever held him in its grip, despite the fall into a snowbank. Sweating despite the cold, Elfwyn hauled him up into his arms, the wind skirling about them and moaning through old trees. He rocked, as Gran had used to do with him when the night was full of noises; but there was no old man any longer, there was no roof over their head. Master Emuin had left them and there was not the least clue where they were, except in the midst of a woods that could be some lord’s copse or the dark heart of Marna itself. There had been no woods, he said to himself, no woods at all near the cottage. And they had no shelter, no way to ride out of here.
“It’s all right,” he said, over and over again, in time with his moving, in time with the worst shrieks of the wind. “It’s just the wind. It’s the trees making that sound. It’s all right. It’s all right, Aewyn. I’m still here; I won’t leave you, I promise.”
Aewyn moved, lifted a hand as if to fend something off.
“Aewyn?”
A hand caught him in the chin, bringing blood to his lip. Aewyn flailed out, kicking and gasping, and he wrapped his arms about his brother, hard as he could.
“We’re not falling, we shan’t fall,” he said, and felt Aewyn’s breath go out of him and come back. “I’m here. I’m here.”
“Otter?”
“We fell, Aewyn. Something hit the door, the old man left, and we fell.”
“Where are we?” Aewyn asked in a hoarse thread of a voice. “Gods! Where are we?”
“I don’t know. Somewhere in a forest. He was going to take us to your father, and then I couldn’t hold on to you, and I did, and we’re here, is all.”
“Freezing in the snow,” Aewyn said, trying to sit up, and wincing. It wasn’t deep snow here: the trees kept it off, but they were in the edge of a drift, in the dark, in the wind, in a clear spot in the woods. “Have we lost the horses, too?”
“I don’t know where we are.” Elfwyn tried to get to his feet, managed as far as one knee, stiff with cold. “I don’t think he meant to drop us. He might come back. I did ward us here. I did what I could.” He had trampled a line all around them, and done it three times, on his knees, with the wind knocked out of him. The old man had told him, the old man had chided him about his carelessness with protections. He was not to be caught being a fool again.
But Aewyn lurched to his feet and walked a staggering step or two, which took him immediately outside the sorry little circle he had made, and Elfwyn scrambled up and seized Aewyn’s arm to bring him back.
“Where are we?” Aewyn asked desperately, and turned. Now, above their ragged breathing, there began to be noises in the woods around them. Brush cracked, first on this side, then that.
They were still outside his small circle. Elfwyn pulled him back in, and looking between the trees he saw slashes appear in the snow.
“Go away!” he yelled at whatever it was. “Get back! Get away from us!”
The fog swept in about them both. Shadows moved in it, tall shadows, soldiers with pikes, and swords. He heard shouts, and the clangor of weapons, and the ground seemed to go out from under their feet and come back again with a thump that staggered them where they stood.
The fog broke in a rush of snowy wind, and left them, not in a woods, but on flat, open ground, beside a snowy heap of stones, a tall pillar of stones, in a sea of snowdrifts.
It was a cairn, and a flat stone was set against it: writing on it was obscured by snow, and when Elfwyn brushed the face of it clear…
Andas, it said. Just that.
“Andas Andas-son,” Aewyn said. “The standard-bearer. This is where the standard-bearer fell. Oh, gods, Otter, this isn’t a good place! We’re at Lewen Field!”
All around them in the dim, snow-sifted light, as Elfwyn turned to look, the snowdrifts blew off other cairns piercing the white, hundreds of low hummocks of stone that had gathered snow, looking for all the world like drifts, and unnaturally blowing clear all at once. He seized Aewyn’s arm, and all of a sudden the fog began to close in again about them, in a rush of shouting and tumult, the clash of armed men and the howl of a dark edge so, so close to them…