“You did not insist on your own terms,” Tristen said. “And you have experience of small, shy creatures.”

“A little,” he said. They’d had a fallen sparrow once that they had fed, he and Gran and Paisi, a quick, bright little creature, but it had flown away that summer and not come back. A silly creature, a silly act of charity, in a world in which sparrows fell daily, unrescued. As Mouse was silly, and that a Sihhë-lord took notice of Mouse ora stray boy suddenly seemed equally unlikely.

“I’d thought owls were fond of mice,” he said, an outright challenge that drew first a frown, then a guarded smile from Lord Tristen.

“You won’t see them both at the same time,” Tristen said. “Mouse rules this nook. Owl has the whole keep else.”

Elfwyn pushed another crumb close. Mouse took it and scurried off.

“He feels safer below,” Tristen said.

“You said that my father shouldn’t kill my mother,” Elfwyn said, around a bite that stuck in his throat. “Or me. Why?”

“Which?”

“Why, either one?”

“If he’d killed either of you, it would have changed him,” Tristen said. “And if he’d killed your mother, only, what would you have heard of him? That he’d killed your mother. And what would you have thought of your mother? That she must have been a good woman, would you not have thought, if you had never known her?”

“I’d have been very mistaken.”

“Trust your father,” Tristen said. “Trust him and all his house.”

“I would. I shall, from now on. And Aewyn.”

“You were to go hunting together.”

How had he known that? “Yes,” he said meekly, thinking it a demonstration of the Sihhë-lord’s vision. “We were, this spring.”

“Have you killed?” Tristen asked him.

The question shocked him. He had no immediate answer.

“Owl kills,” Tristen said again. “Are you Owl or are you Mouse?”

He didn’t know what to say. “I was Otter,” he said, and attempted silly humor, to relieve the terror that Lord Tristen’s disapproval evoked in him. “I suppose I could hunt fish.”

Tristen looked at him still with that curious intensity. “Fish, perhaps. But no greater game. You should not kill. It’s very well for your brother, but not for you. What are you thinking, now, Elfwyn Aswydd?”

“That you were a great warrior,” he said, the truth startled out of him without his thinking. “They say you’ve killed battlefields full of men.”

“Far too many,” Tristen said somberly, and for a moment there was that distant and terrible look on his face. “It saved my friends at the time. Believe me—keep from blood. Your own balance is far too delicate.”

“But just hunting?”

“A precious thing, your gran’s teaching in you. Don’t cast it away for sport.”

“Aewyn isn’t wicked. If he hunts—Aewyn isn’t wicked, is he?”

“Nor will be made wicked for a deer or two he intends to eat. Be Otter when you must. Not Owl. That would be a terrible thing, were you to be Owl.”

He all but laughed, the admonition was so strange, as if Tristen were half in jest, but he suddenly doubted that and stayed solemn—as if Tristen, giving him that advice, had echoed something as simple and true as a child’s story, the kind of advice Gran had used to give, when he had been on his worst behavior, and she forgave him.

“My lord,” he said, blushing hot.

Then Tristen did smile. “Are you sure about the cakes? You could take one or two.”

“Mouse can have them,” he said. Suddenly it seemed quite reasonable to be discussing Mouse as if he were a person, with a man the whole world feared. “Thank you, my lord. Thank you.” His thoughts plunged deep, and came back up from the depths again with the pieces he had tried to gather before. “But my questions—”

“Your questions.”

“Can you teach me? Can you make me a wizard?”

“You are not yet what you will be,” Tristen said, “and I have been waiting for this question for longer than you know.”

“Waiting, my lord?”

The fortress groaned, and in the tall room beyond, the sounds of massive movement began, a terrible squealing of wood and shifting of stones.

“Come and walk outside with me,” Tristen said as if nothing at all had happened. “Let us see to your horse. Uwen says he took very little any harm of this, grace of your good care, but I shall see to him all the same. Then we can sit by Uwen’s fire and warm our hands. The sky may clear this afternoon. I rather think it will. You may go fishing with Uwen if you wish—he does enjoy it. And I shall look toward Guelemara, such as I can, and see what I can see.”

Look toward Guelemara… as if he could, so easily, look there from this isolate place. And was he to do nothing but fish all afternoon?

Magic was what he had come here to call on.

To hear the Sihhë-lord so simply propose to do something this afternoon, as if it was a troubling chore that had to be done—he had invoked a power he had only suspected in his mother before this: he was, on the one hand, glad to have come, and on the other, appalled that he might have set something in motion that he had no means to command. He was used to Gran’s gentle nudges at planting weather or her recourse to the Sight, which told her sometimes when a neighbor was coming or if someone was sick.

He didn’t know now what he expected from Tristen: a rumble of thunder, a flash of lightning from the greatest magic in the land—should there not be some such appearance? Or had the shifting of the stones and timbers of the keep been an illusion, a trick of his own ears?

He walked where Tristen led, back through the high hall, uneasily looking up as beams creaked. In that moment he saw Owl sitting on a high railing, three or so levels above. Owl ruffled up and turned his head away, pretending not to see him.

iv

FEINY HAD GOTTEN NICKS AND CUTS FROM THE ICE, AND HAD A COUGH. HE was not an easy creature to deal with. But, warned that Feiny kicked and bit, Tristen only said, calmly, “He knows you now, and he won’t.” Tristen laid his hands on the cuts, one and all, and the redness went, and Feiny gave a great sigh and lowered his head, butting gently and gratefully against the Sihhë-lord’s hands.

“Now, see, we might have brought a cake, mightn’t we?” Tristen asked. “The horses like them. We left them inside. But there might be an apple in the barrel yonder.”

There was one apple. How it hadn’t frozen and spoiled, a farmer lad couldn’t imagine, but it hadn’t, and Feiny took it gladly. He was the only horse in the stable at the moment. Tristen said Uwen and the boy had taken the other horses out to a pasture beyond the walls, though where a meadow might be in the depths of Marna Wood a farmer lad couldn’t well imagine either.

Meanwhile the clouds had parted above the keep, and the sun shone down, suddenly blinding bright, as Uwen came back from the postern gate. Uwen and Cadun joined them at the chore of breaking ice on the stone water trough, thumping it with sticks until it broke.

“Elfwyn would like to go fishing,” Tristen said.

“Well,” Uwen said, “well, it’s a sunny day. Fish for supper might be a good thing. We can do that. Get the gear, Cadun, me lad.”

Tristen walked away, paused to wash his hands in the horse trough, then went back in by the way they had come, through the scullery door. Elfwyn— so he had to be—stood a little nonplussed, cast back into Uwen’s domain for the while and not sure what might come next. Was Tristen going inside to open some grimoire and cast spells, and was that why he was banished? Or would Tristen simply look into the fire for his answers?

“Here we are,” Uwen said, when young Cadun came back with poles and baskets, and a dirty pot that likely was bait. “Out to the bridge. That’s the best place.”

So the three of them went out the main gate, and out onto the age-worn span, where Uwen rigged poles and hooks. Indeed, it proved to be a bait pot, a very smelly bait that had to be shaped around the hook.