Elfwyn fell into it, and kept falling, but he was patient. He knew there would be a bottom sooner or later and that he would find it.
When he did, it was white, a long stretch of white, but when his feet hit it and skidded, and when he started walking, it was just another snowy patch of ground. It looked like a road. In the dim snowlight he could see walls on either side, and a little wish, a very little wish, made the ring tingle on his finger. He knew what way he ought to go. It was strongest in one particular direction.
So he kept walking. He pressed the book that rode inside his shirt, to be sure it was safe. He had made one mistake with a message, and was not prepared to make another. It was still there. It felt warm against his skin, and he kept his hand pressed there for a long time—growing colder as he walked, over snow that made a sound convincingly like snow.
He could endure the cold. He had endured worse, and would have endured worse, where he had been. He was determined, if another fog showed itself and tried to take him back, that he would sit down, hold to the rocks around him, and simply refuse to budge until bright daylight.
But none did.
He might have walked in that way for the better part of an hour, before he heard a strange sound behind him that was neither the wind nor the occasional cracking of ice crust under his feet. It was that sort of regular sound, but many feet—like horses.
He stopped, turned, straining his senses against the night, and saw three riders slowly overtaking him. There was nowhere for him to hide. It hardly seemed likely his mother would be riding here—but then it was not terribly likely that he would be here, either. He wondered, with a little shiver of fear, should he try wizardry again, and attempt the fog that had betrayed him.
He tried to bring it. He meant to bring it. But:
“Elfwyn!” someone called, a ragged, youngish voice.
“Aewyn?” he called back, all efforts stopped for a heartbeat. “Is it you?” His mother was full of lies, and he suspected it and was ready to run, but he stood his ground when he heard:
“Son?” That was his father. He never mistook that voice. He planted both feet in the snow and stood fast, waiting, as the three, no, four riders reached him.
One was Lord Tristen himself. Another was Uwen, who reached down a hand to lift him up. But before he could take it, Aewyn slid down from behind his father and seized him in his arms, pounding him about the back.
“Elfwyn!” Aewyn cried. “I thought we’d lost you.”
“I came home,” was all he could think to say. He hugged his brother, and now his father had dismounted, and put arms about him, and pressed the breath out of him.
The ring all but stung him. He looked up sharply, at Lord Tristen’s shadowy form, at a Sihhë-lord in armor, with the white Star blazoned on him, the sight that belonged in Paisi’s stories and not in the world as it was now.
“My lord,” he said, though his own father, the king of Ylesuin, had a hand on his shoulder at the time.
“Get up behind Uwen,” Tristen told him, and Uwen rode near, offering his hand a second time. He took it, hand to wrist, hauled up aboard a powerful, broad-rumped horse to settle behind Uwen Lewen’s-son, while his father and his brother climbed back to the saddle of his father’s horse, and Lord Tristen waited in silence. Owl showed up, and flew a curve half about him, then sped ahead.
There were a thousand questions. Aewyn answered a few of them when he said, in a voice hoarse with cold, “I never gave you up.”
“Nor I, you,” he answered, from behind Uwen’s saddle.
He hoped that was the truth. With all his heart, he meant it to be.
My lord, he had called Tristen Sihhë. And he wished he had known how to say that to his father instead, when his father had put his arms about him; but what he had said, he had said, and meant it, as best he could.
He should have offered up the book. He should have surrendered the ring immediately. But he had given himself, instead. He supposed that counted for honesty.
EPILOGUE
SNOW FELL, AS IT HAD FALLEN FOR DAYS. SNOW LAY THICK ON ROOFTOPS OF THE town, with only this noon a promise of blue sky, a lazy slit above, as if the heavens watched, only pretending to sleep.
It was the courtyard of the Zeide, and the window from which King Cefwyn had looked out on the world as Prince Cefwyn. From this diamond-paned window he had watched, oh, so many grim things in his tenure here.
Two boys were at arms practice in the yard below, next to the armory, boys only weeks ago, but now—
Now a father saw changes. Elfwyn, the one had called himself, now and forever, but—Spider, Emuin called him, while Tristen called him Mouse. No longer Otter, to Cefwyn’s sorrow. Nevermore Otter. The boy had gone places even Emuin did not guess and Tristen only hinted at. Even Elfwyn’s eyes had changed, gray and seeming at times lately to look into distances, or to spark fire. The face had grown somber, the stare more direct, at times so very direct that the servants looked away.
His father would not look away from him. Cefwyn would not give him up to the enemy that had tried to take him. He had fought for his kingdom. He would fight for his sons and his daughter.
Take both boys back to Guelemara? No. Elfwyn was home, now, at least as at home as Elfwyn was ever apt to be. His was still a wild heart, but he had ceased to run. He was furtive, but that furtiveness had turned full about: it had become a hunter’s stealth—the look of pursuit, not flight—that displayed itself in his sword-play.
Elfwyn got past his brother’s guard. Aewyn had to jump back. Twice.
And when had that manner taken hold? Was it something gained at Ynefel? Or—elsewhere?
Bump and thump from great distance, from beyond the diamond panes and a floor below. Aewyn recovered, and pressed back, both boys with padded swords. Now Elfwyn retreated, and circled.
No one here in Amefel questioned a bastard’s right to bear arms, no one questioned the boy’s royal paternity—a few, perhaps, shuddered at the taint of sorcery on the Aswydd side, and oh, yes, the good Quinalt father—the lone Quinalt authority in this Bryalt town—had come puffing into the audience hall to express his opinion, and gone out from his king’s presence much more meekly than he had arrived…
A hit. Aewyn, pursuing too rashly, landed on his backside in the snow, and scrambled up again, shield and sword flailing. Then swords hit the snow, shields did, and brothers tumbled, locked in each other’s arms.
They rolled, they wrestled. Cefwyn afforded himself a smile, a hope of a moment’s duration, that the brothers might find their innocence again—that they might somehow get back what they had left behind in this dire winter. He hoped they laughed, but the window cut him off from sound: from his vantage, he simply saw boys struggling for advantage, pounding snow down each other’s necks. Surely there would by now be laughter. He hoped there was. He looked for signs of it.
Oh, there went Elfwyn free of the clinch, quick and wily, leaping onto his feet, crouched low. Elfwyn gathered up a double handful of snow and flung it, a spray of white.
Aewyn charged right through, but Elfwyn was suddenly back a good half his length, and retreating first.
My sons, my sons, Cefwyn said to himself. Both my sons. A man could do much worse. The clergy called Elfwyn a calamity. And Cefwyn had feared. He still feared, if he let worry have sway over him. But he shut out the dark thoughts, as hard, as persistently as he could. He insisted to believe in this boy, in both of them. Belief, so Emuin had taught him, was its own magic—so long as it was carefully placed, often examined, like a bridge kept in careful repair.