He caught his breath, stood doubting a moment, then walked over those tracks, and up those stairs, and entered that doorway.
It was a scullery all in disarray, pots lying on their sides, a beam fallen down right onto the grating of what had been a fireplace, long, long ago. Dust covered everything but the very center of the keep, beyond the arch, where the outside sunlight fell on an often-walked track across old stones.
He followed that track. He hadn’t seen Owl. He didn’t know if Owl had come into this place. But Owl leapt up from a rafter near the door and dived down and through the open doorway ahead of him.
Owl had led him this far safely. He took the guidance offered and followed, out into a wider room, where was a stairs, and at the bottom of those stairs a newel post on which Owl settled. He went that way, ignoring all else, as close to Owl as he had ever come. Above, around him, as he looked up, a webwork of stairs led to crazed balconies and ledges, up and up, again, to places where the wall was rent and sunlight came in, shafting through the dusty heights. A wayward sunbeam let in a flock of winter sparrows that circled confusedly in the tower, and that same light fell on faces in the surrounding walls, faces like those outside, some shocked, some somnolent, some seeming to cry out.
He looked down again at Owl’s amber eyes and reached out for comfort, to offer Owl a perch on his arm if he wanted.
Owl struck like a serpent, and he snatched a bleeding hand to his mouth as Owl leapt up and flew off, spiraling up and up into the dizzy heights. Sparrows fled, fluttering and diving in terror, escaping every way they could find, but Owl lost himself in the heights, leaving him with the taste of blood in his mouth.
“Owl is not a grateful bird,” a voice said, a young voice, a calm, still voice that resonated off every stone of the keep, as if it came from everywhere at once. “You came to see me?”
The voice settled to his right hand, and came from there, and when he looked beyond the bright light of the center of the hall, he saw a dim nook and a table, where a young man in dark colors stood by a fireside.
“To see you.” This young man could not be a man present at his birth. Lord Tristen should be older than Paisi. But nothing seemed sure at the moment, and he walked aside, sucking the wounded hand to stop the blood. “Perhaps. If you are Lord Tristen.”
“Come,” the young man said, and he walked close, even yet seeing none of those signs of age he expected. “I am Tristen Sihhë.”
“Lord Tristen,” he amended himself, finding his manners, and thought he should bow—but this was not just a duke of Ylesuin: this was the High King himself, the king above even his father, if he ever cared to go out of Ynefel. He thought he should kneel, but there was no convenient place, in the little nook next to the chairs, and he was caught, snared, the while, in a gray, pale stare like his own. The Sihhë-lord’s hair was as dark as his own, and his face might have been a brother’s. “My lord.” He hadn’t intended to call him that, of all things, as if Lord Tristen were his lord, but there it was: it fell out of his mouth all in a rush, and it was, after all, true, from the hour of his birth. He managed to say: “Otter is my name.”
“No,” Tristen said casually. “Otter is not your name.”
It was as if someone had stripped his cloak away and left him in the wind, not knowing where shelter was.
“You are Elfwyn,” Tristen said. That was the name his mother had given him, and now the Sihhë-lord gave him, and it was his, and he had no wish at all to wrap that dark name around his soul. “Elfwyn Aswydd.”
“My lord,” he said again, and felt the world sliding. He had called him that twice now. What had Gran always said, about three times fixing a charm?
Breath came difficult. This was the lord who had permitted him to live. And who might as easily unsay that gift. “I came to ask,” he began.
“Candles are precious this season,” Tristen interrupted him. “The boat from the south won’t come until snowmelt. There is breakfast, if you have slipped Cook’s hands.”
“My lord,” he began, intending to say he had had breakfast, and there that word had slipped his lips the third time, and this time felt strangely comfortable, like long-forgotten old clothes. “I’ve eaten already, thank you. But I came—I came—”
“At least for tea,” Tristen said. “You are shivering.” He turned, this power not of the world, and sifted tea into a pot, then took the kettle from its hook, poured, and hung it back in its place. He set two cups on the table, besides, with a honey pot, a spoon, and a plate with half a dozen small cakes, the provenance of which Otter had missed in the shadows. “Sit down, Elfwyn Aswydd.”
He sat, obediently. Tristen set a cup before him and sat down across the table from him. Firelight flickered on those gray eyes. Tristen took a sip of tea. He took a sip, too, using the cup to warm his hands.
“Will you have a cake?” Tristen asked.
“No, thank you very much, my lord.”
“So why have you come?”
“My lord, I—” The size of the question appalled him, and he didn’t know where to begin, without wasting the Sihhë-lord’s patience, and losing his only chance. “I was in Guelemara. The king—my father—” He was always uncertain with that word.
“How is Cefwyn?”
“Oh, well.” As he would have answered Gran about a neighbor. “He’s well. The queen and the baby. And Aewyn. They all are well.”
“Go on.”
The interruption had driven all sense of order out of his mind. “I was there, with Paisi.”
“Paisi and Gran. Are they well, too?”
“Yes, my lord, very well. I just left them.” He attempted desperately to find his thread again, trying not to shiver, and could not look away from those eyes. “But while we were there, in Guelemara, I mean, Paisi and I, we dreamed Gran was sick, so Paisi came home. I tried to stay for Festival, and I—” He was hurrying, and wasn’t sounding sensible at all. “A priest dropped the smoke-pot in the sanctuary, and the floor took a mark, and the Lines, my lord—the Lines—”
“You saw them.”
“Yes, my lord. I saw them.” He suddenly lost himself, trapped in the fire-changed gray of those eyes and remembering the acute fear he had felt then. “I saw them. And Prince Efanor gave me a Quinalt charm, and took away Gran’s, but that didn’t help. Then I had a message from Gran that she was sick and needed me, or I thought it was from Gran, but it was probably from Lord Crissand. So I left.”
“So Guelemara was no good place for you,” Tristen summarized, tucking in all the loose ends, and his voice was quiet, weaving its own spell of calm, and attention. “It was inevitable you should try, less inevitable you should fail, perhaps, but there, the course is set. You’ve chosen to leave.”
“To come here,” he said, hoping he understood.
Tristen shook his head. “Here is only part of it. If I changed what happened, it wouldn’t altogether change what will happen. Cefwyn is well. You are. That’s to the good. And you say you left Gran and Paisi well?”
“Very well, my lord. But my father’s soldiers were after me.”
“Your father’s soldiers. You know they’d never harm you.”
“But they’d bring me back. And I was making trouble for everyone, where I was.”
“You weren’t the trouble,” Tristen said. “You are who you are.”
“What am I?”
“Not what,” Tristen corrected him, “who. You’re Elfwyn Aswydd. That was always your name, but you never owned up to it. Now you have to be both Elfwyn and Aswydd, before you can be your father’s son.”
“I tried to be his son,” he said. And added, which made sense to him, but not, he feared, otherwise: “Prince Aewyn is my friend.”