Tristen nodded, as if he did indeed understand how two difficult matters tied together. “So he should be,” Tristen said. “You are his brother.”
“I want to be. I never want to be a trouble to him. I don’t want to be a trouble to anyone.”
“You are who you are,” Tristen said again. “Do you understand yet how Elfwyn Aswydd can be Aewyn’s brother?”
It wasn’t the same as Otter being Aewyn’s brother. He finally saw that, at least glimpsed the edges of what Lord Tristen was telling him.
“You should have carried your real name before you went to Guelemara,” Tristen said. “The name Otter misled you. It misled all expectation around you. People were careless. Drink your tea. It’s cooling.”
He drank it. He tried to take in the deeper sense of what Lord Tristen was telling him. He had come for counsel. He had expected to ask sane questions about where to go next and what to do next, and have a plain answer—not to find himself led this way and that and questioned repeatedly about various people’s welfare. Should have carried your real name, Lord Tristen said. Should he have gone there as Elfwyn Aswydd?
Should he, then, have come to Guelemara as part of Lord Crissand’s household, and tried to be Lord Crissand’s relative, somehow, when Crissand had two sons of his own who had every right he did not?
“What should I do now?” he asked. “I shouldn’t go back to Guelemara, should I?”
Tristen sipped at his own cup. “That would be one course. But that won’t happen now.”
“Do you know that?” He hadn’t felt magic moving, not at that instant, but now he did, the prickly sensation he got when Gran was working, and he kept his hands about his cup to keep from shivering. He daren’t look aside from this young man. He feared what he might see behind him. “I’m afraid to go to Lord Crissand. It’s not that I’m afraid of him. He’s always been kind. But if I go to him, it means going near my mother.”
Tristen didn’t answer immediately. He stared past him into the fire. Then he said, looking straight at him: “You took the name of Otter. That made you someone else and kept you safe from her as long as you were Otter. Now things are different. You’ve chosen to come back, and you have to make your own safety.”
“I can’t,” he said, and when Lord Tristen gave him a misgiving look: “I don’t think I can, my lord.”
“That’s the difficulty, isn’t it?”
What was the difficulty? He had known Gran to speak in riddles, but Lord Tristen didn’t make clear sense to him at all.
“I don’t understand, my lord.”
“What do you think you ought to do? Why did you come here?”
“To find out if I’ve done the right things. To find out what’s happening. The dream about Gran being sick wasn’t really so, not as bad as seemed when Paisi and I dreamed it. And then I dreamed of fire.” He’d forgotten that, until just that instant, how profoundly that dream had scared him. “And if it wasn’t Gran, it was my mother that made us dream, wasn’t it, my lord? She didn’t want me to leave Henas’amef. She didn’t want me to go away from her. But I did. What if she’s making all this happen, and it’s not just me? I hate her!”
“No,” Tristen said sharply. “No. Cure that, above all else. Don’t hate her.”
Gran had given him the same advice. And he’d tried to take it, when he was Otter, when he was a boy with nightmares in the dark. Gran’s arms had ceased to hold him by then. Gran only sat by his bedside and gave him advice, Paisi sitting cross-legged in a nest of blankets, likewise wakened…
That night. That night only last year.
“I’ve tried,” he said. “I’ve tried not even to look at the tower, all my life. I think she hates that most.”
“And she likes it best when you hate,” Lord Tristen said quietly. “Be advised. There are two paths in front of you. One of them is what she wants.”
“And the other, my lord?”
Tristen lifted a shoulder. “It may be what you want, or not. It depends on what you choose.”
“Where should I go, then? Should I go to Lord Crissand?”
“Crissand has to be part of everything,” Tristen said. “And it was a good choice, for you to come here. Your father is my friend. I know him, and I know your gran, and I know he’ll see to her. You should trust him completely, at your next chance, though he makes his own mistakes. You say the Lines appeared. Was it only in the Quinaltine that they frightened you?”
“Yes, m’lord.”
“And what happened?”
“It was like ink running, like ink running between the stones. And then the Lines. They were red. They seemed to be breaking.”
“Did you tell your father about the Lines?”
“I think Prince Efanor did. And the man, the one that was spying on me for the Holy Father, Brother Trassin—gave me a message, and said the king—my father—was going to send me home in the dark of night. I didn’t want to go with soldiers.”
“But wasn’t it, after all, his will you do so?”
“It was.”
“So you ran before he could do send you home. You outran his good intentions. You caused him worry. He has been worried. He does feel very sorry.”
“So do I.” He couldn’t look anywhere but at his own hands. He didn’t want the questions to go on in this direction, about his welcome with his father. “I don’t know. I don’t know, m’lord. I was just scared.”
“And angry that he was sending you home.”
“Scared,” he said. “And worried about Gran.”
“Angry,” Lord Tristen said, which happened to be true, and he had never quite realized it until now, as if something had been clenched up tight in his heart for years and years: anger, that his high hopes were dashed down; anger, that he had ruined all his chances.
“Jealous,” Lord Tristen said. And that could not possibly be true.
Was he jealous of Aewyn, who had had a father, and enough to eat, and a palace to live in?
Every visit of the rich men on horses to Gran’s front fence had hammered that difference home. His father had come every year, but his father had always ridden away, with Aewyn, on horses with rich caparison.
He was shocked to find that was at the heart of it. Anger. Jealousy. All the wicked thoughts he had smothered and tried to ignore in his heart were still there, stored up through the years. His discomfiture had disturbed them, and now when Lord Tristen probed into his opinions, they came floating up to the surface like rotten matter from a brook.
“I don’t want to be angry with anyone,” he said. “My lord, I love my father, and my brother.”
“As you love Gran and Paisi. You have no cause for anger with them, do you?”
Only with his mother, he thought at once. He had just cause for anger at his mother, who lived in the tower, and at the poverty that made life hard. The lords who lived up on the hill and had books and feasts whenever they liked—he didn’t hate them. But he found he was jealous. Otter had never been jealous, not humble Otter, who was grateful for everything, and was obliged to be. But if he was Elfwyn Aswydd, he was born to his mother’s debts and his own hatreds…
Elfwyn Aswydd was his mother’s son, and a dead king’s namesake, the Marhanen’s enemy.
“You do love them,” Tristen said.
“I do love them,” he said, but to his profound dismay it was no longer clean and pure, that love. “If I’m Otter, it’s easy to love them.”
“You have two paths,” Tristen said. “And you may not have your own choice.”
Two paths. And no choice. He did not understand, not at all.