“He doesn’t like his mother at all,” Aewyn said. “I thought it was odd he didn’t. But I understand, now.”
“What did he say about her?”
“He said she lived in a tower in Henas’amef, that she was a prisoner. That Gran was his real mother.”
“Well, then, that is the truth of his heart,” Cefwyn said, “and the word that counts.”
They might have been any father, any son, about a campfire, against the winter storm and wind, and in the way of such conversations, apart from court and hall, and at a time when his dear wife was, by now, likely similarly cold and snowbound in the north—necessary things finally could be said, tales told, things passed on between generations, links forged.
He felt a bond that night that he had never had with his son, a meeting of man with man this night. For the first time in that firelit, sober countenance, he saw the fine outlines of the good man he would become.
He was rich, in Aewyn. He longed to have such a conversation with his other son, wanted to have it soon, before any other misunderstanding could drive a wedge between them. It seemed the year for it.
Something burned him, however, a pang like ice and fire at once. He stood up, facing into the bitter wind, and the pain centered just above his heart.
“Papa?” his son said, breaking the spell of maturity. It was the child asking, plaintively, worriedly: “Papa?”
Tristen was there, and it was no gentle touch. Cefwyn clenched the amulet under the layers of cloth, and his heart beat high, like a commitment to battle.
Tristen was suddenly on his way out of Ynefel—he had not made the motion, until now, but Tristen was coming, he was as certain of it as if Tristen had suddenly glanced at him within the same room. Tristen had looked toward him, and perhaps just now guided those last things he had told his son.
He suddenly had the notion Tristen had delayed his departure—delayed, first to guide Elfwyn to Henas’amef and last, to bring him and Ninévrisë both safely out of Guelessar, with their respective children.
Now Tristen sent him a warning, an acute warning, and moved eastward in haste.
“Why?” he asked, gazing into the dark, the other side of the fire.
But he had no answer.
“Papa?”
“We shall ride before daylight,” Cefwyn said, clenching his hand on his son’s arm. “The horses have to rest. Get to your blankets and sleep while you can.”
ii
THE BED WAS WARM AND SOFT, AND THE BEDCLOTHES, RENEWED TODAY AS every day, smelled of lavender, an herb Gran had grown in her garden. It should have been a pleasant smell. It touched painful memory, of herbs that had hung from the rafters above a soft feather bed, their own bed, beside which Gran had died. It was a short, dark tumble from that scent to horrid memory and the pain of burns far from healed.
Sleet hit the windows, a winter that never seemed to give up. It had sounded like that in Guelessar, when he had never in his life heard the sound of ice striking glass. Happiness had been all in front of him then, spread out like a banquet. He’d had no idea that it would all go so wrong.
Elfwyn buried his head deep in the crook of his arm and hauled the bedclothes over his ears, but that arrangement rapidly grew too warm.
He kept seeing the shelves and shelves of books, and with them The Red Chronicle, and its dreadful story. He wondered if Aewyn knew it, if Aewyn knew about this kinsman of his and kept it secret from him, fearing, perhaps, for their friendship—
Silly, he said to himself. He was Aswydd, no kin at all to the dead Sihhë King. The first Elfwyn had been no relation whatsoever to the Aswydds.
Had he?
He outright didn’t know. He could ask Lord Crissand, he supposed. But if that information was here, it was surely in that book, for him to find if he kept at it. The tale of the Marhanen warlord might lead down to his own father’s generation and give him all the connections.
He remembered the shadows in the library, and his decision to go home. He had been so tired, and he could no longer remember what had finally made him leave. He had set the candle down, then realized he had to pass the haunt, but he had gotten home safely, anyway.
Had he locked the door?
Had he locked the door? He remembered blowing the candle out and setting the stub on the ledge. But he had promised the old man, in return for the privilege of the library, that he would lock the door.
Surely no one would get in there, only to steal a book, in just the few hours until morning. It was cold, and it was quiet in the halls, and he would have to get out of a warm bed and wake Paisi, all to go down there.
But the old man would get back in the morning and find that door unlocked, and he would know who had done it.
Surely he had locked it.
But he could not remember even taking the key from his purse.
He stuck a foot out, and another, and slipped from the bed. He hadn’t undressed, more than to take off his coat and belt and boots—the country habit, though lords did differently. He hadn’t waked Paisi, getting up. He quietly located his coat in the dim light of the banked fire in the other room, found his boots in the shadow of the bed, his belt, with the purse and the key, hanging from the chair at the table, and dressed.
Then he as quietly left, taking the same route he had used coming home, and this time he did run, on tiptoe, and lightly. No one was about the upper hall—no guards or even servants visible at this hour. He ran upstairs at the end of his hall, the circuitous route, and along the servants’ hall, where not even the servants were stirring. He ran down the dark little stairway to the library hall without ever passing the haunt or his mother’s guards.
The servants had renewed the candles: only one burned, in this area, and a new one, white and unburned, stood on the ledge. He tried the door latch, and it did open: he had not, indeed, locked it, and he began to reach for the key to lock it safely, then take himself back upstairs to his warm bed as quickly as he could.
But he hadn’t proved that the library was still safe. He didn’t know if anyone had gotten inside, did he?
He took the new candle and went to the midpoint of the short hall, lit it from the single burning candle in its sconce, and brought it back again. He opened one eagle door carefully, wide-awake now, and held the candle aloft to see if there might be any disturbance of things as he had left them.
A sudden draft blew his candle out. His heart skipped a beat. Only a draft, he said to himself. It was only the door being so narrowly open.
Something glowed red, in the deep dark near where he had sat—a glow like a windblown coal where it ought not to be, but not well-defined, either. The light was diffuse, like a ward, with a solid center. It was a color he had only seen in the tangled Lines in the Quinaltine, where horrid things had warred to get out.
He waited in the doorway, with his dead candle. He was afraid even to breathe, and tried to tell himself the light was his imagination but it persisted, cold red fire, when the Lines of the room itself failed to appear, or were so dim, beside that glow, that his eyes failed to see them.
It wasn’t right. Something in that area wasn’t at all right, and it came from underneath the bookshelves, from underneath a table, the counter on which that small bookcase rested. He could see wards. Not everyone could. If something was wrong, he had to know where it was, to report it.