“Haunts!”
“Something like. Or something worse. Our Otter is not welcome there, whether by the dead or the living, whether or not the scratches on the stones were helped along by mortal hands. There is something the matter, Efanor assures me. For his own safety, he should go away for a season—only for a season!—and then, then, I promise you, he will come back when things are quieter. We need not have the heir to Ylesuin involved in any whispers of impropriety, or, gods save us, blasphemy.”
“Blasphemy! He never—”
“Patience. Patience, I say, and we’ll have him back in the summer, or at latest, in the falclass="underline" it’s become imperative to have him back, not to have given in to this. He’ll come back a little wiser, better known to the people, to the priests, to the court. And ourselves a little wiser in the meanwhile. We’ll keep him out of the Quinaltine then. And things will have settled. They do, with time. Be patient.”
“I can be patient! It’s all very well for me to be patient! But he’s out in the snow! He’s had dreams about his gran, terrible dreams!”
“More than the one?”
“More than the one. And he’s been terribly scared for her.”
“Damnation.”
“So send someone to bring him back! To tell him it was all a lie!”
“He’s on his way. He should go.”
“Papa!”
“But I’d not have him riding away with no saddle, taking that damned message for the truth, either. I am entirely at fault here. If he’s afoot, we shall find him. And I count on you,” his father said, lifting a finger, “to remain here, dutifully, attending Festival as you should, being a very model of good behavior. I’ll ride after him myself, beg his pardon, and ask him to come back to us this summer, when you may go to the lodge, hunt, do what you like. May I count on you?”
He had never heard of his father apologizing. Ever. For the king to ride off and miss the last ceremonies of Festival was no small thing. He nodded solemnly. “Yes. Yes, Papa.” He hadn’t used that word in the last year. But this was his papa talking, now, the man who had used to carry him on his back. It was his papa, not the king, who was going after Otter, and who stood the best chance of finding him. “Tell him… tell him I’ll see him this summer, and I’d have done something to stop him if I’d known.”
“I’m sure you would have,” his father said, and stood up and hugged him, and rang for the Guard. “Get my cloak, get my horse, get an escort. Now!”
“My lord king,” the answer was, and things happened quickly from that point.
Aewyn could only trudge back to his room, his troubled guard shadowing him. He wanted to turn and shout at them unreasonably to go away and do something useful, but they had to be there. He was the heir, and the Prince’s Guard always had to be there, for the rest of his life, no matter what he wanted.
v
STABLEBOYS SCURRIED, THE STABLEMASTER PROTESTED HE HAD AUTHORIZED no use of a horse, and sent some feckless boy to take inventory, great loving gods! inventory in the tack room, as if that mended matters, or as if he had time to hear it. But a halter was missing from the stall nearest, and no one could find it.
“Mind your doors, man, mind your gates and fences, now that the horse and the boy are missing!” Cefwyn seized Anfar’s reins from the trembling stableboy and hauled himself into the saddle. He had not waited to arm. He had no helm, no lance, only a mail shirt his bodyguard had brought with them and which he had donned, waiting for his horse and his guards’ horses to be saddled.
“My lord king,” the stablemaster called up to ask, “shall I send to His Grace?”
“Do that,” he said shortly. His brother needed to know: he was in charge in his absence. He had already ordered a message to Idrys, to get out on the search, too, and have the escort that should have taken the boy on to Henas’amef find other horses and get onto his track, too: he had just taken the horses, for his own personal guard.
With that, he turned Anfar’s head and rode out into the snowy courtyard, and on toward the gates, his bodyguard scrambling to keep up with him.
It was Marhanen temper that blazed past the gate-guards and damned them for lazy dogs; it was a more patient frame of mind that rode through the feckless traffic of his city streets, taking a reasonable pace on snow-packed cobbles and in among ordinary walkers.
But he had words for the keepers of the southern gate.
“Did you note a boy go through, probably in a hooded cloak? A boy afoot?”
The confusion that greeted that question, the guilty hesitation in the men, informed him that they had not, and dared neither lie nor tell the whole of the truth. They had likely, at the moment the boy had passed the gates, been doing exactly what he had found them doing: warming themselves in the guardhouse and having jam on toast.
“There will be one man on watch outside hereafter, no matter the weather: one man at least will be out in the elements, come flood, come ice, come all the heavens falling, day or night, to the end of time, and I want a list of those that come and go, for all time to come, at this and every gate, damn you!”
He was ultimately the gate-guards’ master, no less than his brother the duke of Guelessar, and if he had berated the stablemaster for his easy ways, twice caught, now he berated himself for slack, peacetime policy with the city gates here and elsewhere about the realm—it was peace: it had been peace for a decade and more: people had gotten fat and easy. And the burden his order for name-taking imposed on honest citizens might not be temperate or even wise, now that the gate was open and the horse and the boy were gone, but he had the most unwelcome feeling that the easy times were in jeopardy. He would leave it to Efanor to make sense of it, once the guards had remembered their jobs were not sinecures, even in peacetime. Efanor, once shown an error, mended it.
Efanor had attended the boy in sanctuary, and discovered his distress, and tried to protect him, when the king, under public witness, could not touch his own son. Who must have been terrified beyond anything he showed.
Would he had taken a different course. Would he had never agreed to leave the boy believing that damned message for any length of time, nothing so long as an hour, which he had hoped was only enough time to deceive Brother Trassin and see him out the door. All through the boy’s visit, he had left Otter to Aewyn, thinking the world at peace. He had feared too much attention from him might frighten the boy, or, at the other extreme, encourage too much presumption of favor.
Now he had fractured the peace, high and wide.
Now, please the gods he might find the boy still at the pasture, still trying to get up on that tall beast, but he doubted it. Otter was no great fighter, but he was agile, and clearly no moss grew on that lad once he had formed an intention to move.
He only hoped the horse might simply slip the boy softly into a snowbank and take off for his home fields. He hoped, in the whiteness ahead, to see a cloaked figure afoot and coming toward them, dashed in his hopes of escape or doggedly headed toward Amefel afoot.
But when he came to the byroad that led off to the Darkbrook pastures, tracks in the snow showed a boy going in and a horse coming out onto the main road.
No need to divert off the road to the pasture lane and back. The condition of the tracks showed a passage old enough, but not buried: they had to move. The horse in question had only a boy’s weight to carry, and the horse, a piebald gelding, an accidental breeding of one of his own mares, was nevertheless strong, fast, and surefooted on bad ground.