“My own sister, too!” He was truly, deeply offended. And yet the eyes, the wonderful violet eyes, stayed with him, heart-wrenchingly intent on his. “Mother, that’s an abomination!”
“And you have listened too obediently to the Quinalt and the Bryalt. Your queen, and your subject, your one love, or there will be no love at all for you in this world. And you will, like Tristen, live long, very long. Will petty rules matter so much to you, I wonder, when you rule?”
“Well, it’s no matter,” he said with a shrug, “since the sun will come up in the west before I rule anything. Even Gran’s goats. We gave them all away, so I suppose I have no subjects.”
“The pride of a king, certainly,” his mother said.
“The face of one,” the young man said. “The bearing and the manner, when he wills to use it. The Quinalt would have liked him better had he been humble. His speech, do you note, has the courtly lilt, but Amefin, not Guelen. Where did he learn that, I wonder?”
“Perhaps it was a spell,” his mother said. “It could walk out of my cell, with him. He could carry it wherever he wished, right past the wards. I gave him many such gifts.”
That chilled him to the bone. He refused to think he had carried his mother’s curse home with him. If that were so, he was to blame for the fire.
“Well, well,” the young man said. “You have reasoned with him as best you can. Let your sister set him at his lessons.”
“My sister,” his mother said, and spun full about, her skirts swirling. They came to rest, and she looked at him again, but with a she-wolf’s look, a terrible, burning stare, and a smile he had never seen on his mother’s face.
“Nephew,” those same lips said. “Listen to your mother.”
“Leave me alone.” Horror overwhelmed him. “You’re dead. You’ve been dead since I was born.”
“Tristen is ever so much older than that,” his aunt said, “and you had no fear of him. I assure you, you should have had. He did recognize you.”
“My dead aunt and a wisp,” he said, drawing himself up. “Small choice I have.”
“He only wishes to provoke us,” the man said with a tolerant smile. “Be patient. We have time. We have as much time as we wish to take.” Both winked out, with a little gust of wind that disturbed the fire, and left him with a curse in his mouth and nowhere to spit it.
He stood for a moment, in case they might come back and catch him collapsed onto a bench. He stood glaring at the fire, then settled himself with as much dignity as he could muster, given aching legs and frost-stung feet and hands and face. He felt the pain of his injuries now, a pain that grew and grew, and stung his eyes with indignation.
Anger was very, very close to the surface, anger enough to wreck the room, anger enough to fling himself at the shards of ice that barred the door, and die that way, if that was all that would spite them. He had no other hope.
Anger will be your particular struggle. He recalled Emuin saying that. And of Aewyn: He is your chance for redemption and your inclination toward utter fall. Do you understand me?
If I betray him, he had said. And Emuin had said:
If you betray him, it will be fatal to us all.
He had not, had he, betrayed his brother? He had stayed steadfast. He meant to do so.
Emuin had said, too, regarding his mother: As near as she can come to love, she loves you.
Love, was it? Wrong in one, perhaps wrong in both. Perhaps Emuin had not seen as much of his nature as he ought…
Vision. Was that not the word Tristen had given him?
Seeing. Seeing things for what they were. Seeing the truth, without coloring it, or making it other than it was. Was that the beginning of wizardry, to know what a thing really was before one started to wish it to be something else?
Be Mouse, Tristen had said, Mouse, not Owl. Mouse looked out from the base of the walls, was low and quiet, and looked carefully before he committed himself. He more than looked, he listened, and measured his distances—was never caught too far from his hole.
He certainly had been.
And he had forgotten his other word. So much of a wizard he was.
Spider, Emuin had called him. Spider Prince. And he had said pridefully that he didn’t live in a nasty hole.
He was certainly in one now. He’d spun his little web, his wards, and Sir Wisp had smashed right through them without even noticing.
All he could do was do them again, and again, and again, and maybe, as long as he might be a prisoner here, he might do them well enough to be a nuisance, then a hindrance, then, maybe, a barrier… spinning his web, a bit at a time.
Patience.
Patience was his other word. Now he remembered it. Patience, and waiting to talk to Paisi, and waiting to get advice, and approaching things slowly—would have saved him so much grief.
Patience instead of anger. Patience instead of rushing into things headlong. Patience, and Vision… would have mended so much that had gone wrong.
Lord Tristen had advised him of the truth. Would someone do that, for his enemy?
Lord Tristen might. He would have, because that was his nature to deal in truth, not lies.
And what did that say, for the advice he had just been given?
Maybe it was time not to be Otter, diving headlong from this to that, nor Mouse, watching from the peripheries of a situation, but patient Spider, simply building, over and over, and over again.
He sat, hands on his knees, and rebuilt his path, from the cottage, to the woods, to the battlefield, to the bridge, to here, in the unnatural ice that argued for somewhere not quite of the ordinary sort. The fogs that closed in had delivered them here, and here, and here, and at the last, Aewyn, Syrillas, had outright been unable to go with him, or had resisted going, and what pulled him here had been too strong…
Too strong for Aewyn.
Or too foreign to Aewyn, being sorcerous in nature.
Sorcery was a path that might be open to him. He might learn it and use it.
But it did not mend its nature simply because he used it; and he did not think it would improve his own.
So there was wizardry, which Tristen had refused to teach him.
Make me a wizard, he had asked. Or, had it been: Teach me wizardry?
And Lord Tristen had said: You are not yet what you will be, and added, and I have been waiting for this question for longer than you know.
How did he hear that answer now, in light of what his captors had said he was?
Teach you wizardry? He remembered Emuin saying that. Useless. Teach you magic? I cannot. No more can I teach any Sihhë what resides in his blood and bone.