“The fish find it right tasty,” Uwen said. “But don’t neither of ye get it on your clothes. Bad enough on the hands, an’ it takes a mort o’ scrubbin’ t’ clean it off.”

“Don’t fall in,” Cadun added. “Old Lenúalim is tricky here.”

“Is it all the river there is?” Elfwyn asked. He knew the Lenúalim as a broad, great river, one that divided the realm in two and made the border.

“Oh, it’s deep enough here,” Uwen said, as all of them settled on the rim of the old stone bridge. “It’s mortal deep. There was a battle here, in old Mauryl’s day, so m’lord says, and the rocks themselves was cracked top to bottom. Not all’s mended, and the crack down there’s deep, deep, far deeper than I ever had a line reach, I tell you. The water’s narrow here, but it’s fast. And just enough room for an Olmern boat to squeak under the span, if they take their mast down. The river gets bigger and wider when the brooks in Marna flow in, but no deeper, I’ll wager. And then it goes all the way to Elwynor, where the big bridge is, an’ it widens considerable. An’ so on, until it bends round between Amefel and Guelessar and goes south, where it spreads out shallow and lazy. Ye cross’t the same river comin’ here.”

Elfwyn peered over into murky green water, into which he had dropped his line. Ice rimmed the rocky sides, but none stayed in the center, which roiled with the power of its moving. He sat, patiently watching his float stream outward on the current. He knew how to fish. He’d sat many an afternoon by Weir Brook, near Gran’s place, with Paisi. And they used poles. Paisi wouldn’t let them use traps.

On account if it rains, Paisi had said, and them traps clog up, you kill all them fish to no good. Besides, a weir can trap limbs an’ end by floodin’ Farmer Marden’s turnips, an’ him with a great temper, which ye know. Line’s much the best.

He never did know how Paisi knew where it would flood if they had made a weir, as the name of the brook suggested, but he suspected Paisi had found that out himself once. He had always found it pleasant to rig a line and sit for hours, catching a few small fish, never more than they could use at a meal, and mostly watching the water move between the banks and the sunlight dancing on it.

This water moved under the old bridge with far greater power, and deeper mystery, and he feared it, thinking how fragile they all were, up here. He was startled when his twig-float bobbed. He snatched the line and pulled up.

“I have it, I have it!” he cried, hauling the line with one hand and all his fingers. It fought, a great heavy silver fish, and when he finally hauled it safely onto the stones, he had to seize it with both hands to stop its struggle.

“That’s a fine fish,” Uwen said. “D’ ye need a knife, there?”

He held it pressed to the icy stone, his bare hand freezing from the damp as he worked the hook out of the gasping mouth. Its fins stuck him painfully, and hastily he reached for Uwen’s offered knife.

But the fish’s round eye rolled in its socket and stared back at him, comical, like the laughing fish in Aewyn’s book, while its gills labored as it struggled for breath. He held the knife. He held the fish, pinned against the icy stone.

And he couldn’t kill it.

He let it go. It flipped into the air and sailed free, down and down until it vanished in a silver splash, with a flip of its tail.

Cadun cried out. Cadun tried to catch it for him. But he sat there, seeing the blood he hadn’t shed this time, but had shed, oh, so many times before, and he saw Aewyn by the fire, showing him the book with the brook and the fish. He hadn’t killed this time. He hadn’t been able to do it, nor wanted to watch if Uwen or Cadun did.

Uwen caught his eye. “M’lord ain’t no fisher, neither,” Uwen said sympathetically.

What had happened to him? He didn’t know, but he couldn’t have killed that fish to save his life. He shamefacedly laid down the pole, and tucked up next to the pillar at the edge of the bridge, where he could simply watch the water.

Be Mouse, Lord Tristen had said, and sent him out fishing with Uwen all the same. He sat there, with the door of the wall ajar on the bridge, and with a view of the courtyard and the lower tier of the fortress to remind him it all was real, and that he had talked to Lord Tristen today, and had breakfast with a mouse. His finger was cut, where Owl had bitten him, an oddly shaped cut, from a sharp beak.

Uwen and Cadun caught fish, which met their ordinary fate. He didn’t watch. He sat staring at the water.

The place is changing me, he thought. I can’t do what I did. Clearly I can’t be a cleric. I’m learning to ride, but I can’t be a fighter if I can’t kill anything, so it’s no good my learning the sword, is it? What shall I be?

“Enough fish,” Uwen said, eventually, and they took their catch and went back to the cottage. Uwen trimmed and dressed the fish they had, sending him with Cadun to wash.

“Ain’t never caught a fish?” Cadun asked him.

“I didn’t want to catch this one.” Elfwyn scrubbed his hands in icy water and tucked them under his arms to warm, after.

“Why not?” Cadun asked. “He was a big fish.”

“Maybe that’s why,” Elfwyn said. He didn’t want to talk about it. He wanted to go inside the cottage, and did, and sat by the fireside. Uwen brought the fish to Cook, and said something Elfwyn couldn’t hear before he went out to wash.

“M’lord invites you to supper,” Cook said, “as I’ll cook and send over with ye, if ye will, young sir.”

He wasn’t ready, he thought. He remembered, with a thump of his heart, that Lord Tristen had been looking for answers, all the while he had been finding questions about himself and things he thought he could do, and would do.

“I will,” he said respectfully, and watched as Cook put their dinner on to cook, apple tarts, first, that smelled of southern spice. Then plaincakes, that rose and split and baked all brown on hot iron, and last of all fish that no longer looked like fish, nor smelled like the river.

He was both troubled and relieved to find that the smell made him hungry.

v

MOUSE HAD HIS SHARE, BOTH OF PLAINCAKES AND CHEESE. AND IT TURNED OUT Tristen would eat fish, even if he lent no hand to catching them.

“I was Mouse today,” Elfwyn said. “I wasn’t much help catching fish. I couldn’t. I don’t know why.”

“There has to be Owl,” Tristen said. “If there weren’t Mouse, Owl would starve. And if there weren’t Owl, Mouse wouldn’t be Mouse.”

He thought about that. He wasn’t sure he understood it, entirely, advice one direction and then, of equal force, from the other, like shifting winds. Were both things true?

But they dined on plaincakes and crisp fish and apple pie, a wonderful repast, in which Mouse had a share, sitting on the end of the table, his little whiskers twitching busily between bites.

“Where is Owl?” he asked, and Tristen sailed a glance up and away, toward the dark that now ruled the rafters outside the dining nook.

“Outside the walls, hunting,” Tristen said. “It’s his hour.”

Tarts filled out the meal. Still Lord Tristen had said nothing about his business of the day.

After the tarts, the silence.

Elfwyn stared into the fire, unwilling to question his betters, or to nettle Lord Tristen with asking.

“So,” Tristen said, “have you a question?”

“Have you an answer for me, my lord?”

“That your father is worried for you, and that his men have reached Lord Crissand, who is greatly distressed at your departure. That Paisi has cut a great stack of wood, and has blisters, and Gran is baking bread tomorrow.”

He was not sure he believed Lord Tristen knew so much, so dear and of so little of use to him. The report of people he loved stung his eyes, all the same. He pressed his luck. “And Aewyn?”

“Aewyn is shut in his room, not coming out, and he refuses his new tutor.”