He wasn’t quite so sure he disbelieved anything, now. Aewyn would do exactly that.

“But nothing of my mother.”

“Your mother and I have little to do with one another,” Tristen said, and asked: “Has Gran shown you hedge-wizardry?”

“A little,” he confessed. He corrected himself. “I’ve watched her.”

“And did your looking show you things in Henas’amef?”

“No,” he confessed, uncomfortable. “It only brought trouble.”

“Has she ever taught you wards?”

“I’ve watched her.”

“They’re old, in the Guelesfort. If not renewed, they weaken. A spell reaching out the windows can weaken them further. Think of that when you reach out of a place. You make yourself visible when you look out—you open doors and windows as you do. More, they will never close with the force they might have had if you hadn’t crossed Lines with your seeing, if you have not a skill the equal of the one who laid them down.”

“I don’t understand, my lord.” He hesitated to ask, but he feared what Lord Tristen was saying. “Did I make the trouble in the place, myself?”

“Wards are a simple magic,” Tristen said, and rose from the table without answering him. “Come.”

He followed, out into the dark, where a few candles sprang to life without Lord Tristen even seeming to notice them. Lord Tristen led him to the stairs, and up and up the rickety web. The steps trembled and groaned underfoot, and Elfwyn gripped the rail as he went.

They passed one of the faces. He would have sworn it turned, when he looked back, and did catch it in motion.

“Don’t look at them,” Tristen said. “Don’t talk to them. Not all are trustworthy.”

Did they speak? He heard nothing but groaning, nor wanted to hear. He gripped the rail, white-knuckled, and kept close to Lord Tristen as they arrived on an upper balcony.

“You may sleep up here tonight,” Lord Tristen said. “My wards are constant about the keep, and you will not weaken them.”

Tristen took a lighted candle from its sconce, pulled the latch of a door, and let him into a small, stone-walled room with a shuttered horn-pane window. A crack split that wall. It ran around the window and up and down, above the ceiling and below the floor. It was a little room, with scarcely room for the bed and table it contained.

Tristen went to that window and ran his hand across its sill, across the crack. “Follow the line of the window, not the rift: the wall is a Line that Masons drew, do you see, and the stone is a barrier. But in that protection, for us to come and go there must needs be breaches, doors and windows, and these are its weaknesses. Locking a door is a ward. So is a wish to draw a line and to keep harm out. Draw it with fire or with the warmth of a hand.” This he did, and now a faint blue light showed in the shadowy places, a Line brought to life.

Elfwyn drew in his breath, alone with this power, and with magic itself, and not knowing what might happen next.

“Stones remember such things very well,” Tristen said. “And doors and shutters become part of them. The Line Masons draw is potent, if renewed.”

“It glows,” Elfwyn said, and this caused Tristen to look sharply at him.

“Not all will see a light, but this is a magic Men can use even without Seeing, and one you can use without fear—it lies upon the earth, deeply, and has the earth’s bones for strength: it will not come back on you or betray you. It can be broken, by great strength, but never turned against you. Only beware of casting outward, of looking beyond those wards if enemies are about.”

“Are there enemies?” he asked, not believing they would ever come here.

“You know you have enemies,” Tristen said.

“The priests,” he said.

“More than that,” Tristen said. “Be Mouse. Mouse did not grow as old as he is by ignoring Owl. He always looks about him.”

“I don’t know where to look,” Elfwyn said, hoping for an answer, but Tristen walked to the door, and he made his appeal. “Show me wizardry. Teach me. I want to learn.”

“So you can be Owl?”

He didn’t know the right answer to that. Tristen gave him no clues. He had always been good at saying what the authority that ruled him wanted to hear, and now he found authority who gave him no clue how to please.

“I don’t know, my lord. I don’t know what’s right.”

“Be content. Be content right now.”

“But will I see Aewyn again?” he asked. “And will Gran be safe from my mother?”

“Patience is one thing you lack,” Tristen said quietly. “Patience is one thing you must gain. Vision is another.”

Elfwyn drew a breath, and another, seeing he was losing ground, and that the very person who held all he possibly wanted had, indeed, posed him a lesson: not one he wanted, but at least Tristen posed him a challenge he could overcome.

“I shall try,” he said quietly. “If I understood what you mean, I think I could do better.”

“Words Unfold to me, in their time. Perhaps these words will Unfold to you.”

“Unfold.”

“Like a flower blooming,” Tristen said. “They open.”

“I wish they would,” Elfwyn said in despair, and Tristen said:

“Wishing may indeed help.”

He might have said, in bitter honesty—It would help me more if you explained to me, but the candle-shadow caught Tristen’s face at that moment, and turned it from young man to that grim and somber visage—the Tristen Sihhë of legend, the terrible man on the black horse, the man who became a dragon.

Patience and Vision. Simpleminded advice, each syllable of which struck his heart like a hammerblow, at this dark, lonely hour, in this place.

“I shall wish, my lord. I shall wish it earnestly.”

A somber look, directly at him. “Beware of the quality of your wishes, and beware, not of anger, but of selfish anger.”

“Only selfishanger, my lord?”

“This too: love you must have, love that comes to you from outside, unbought and unasked for. Do you understand? You cannot hold it. You cannot compel it. But you must keep it when it comes.”

He had had a glimmering of that sort of love. He had it from Gran. He had it from Paisi. He knew it now with particular poignancy. He had had the merest taste of it in Aewyn, before Guelen hate drove him out.

“How do I keep it, then?” Elfwyn asked.

“Deserve it,” Tristen said.

The air seemed too heavy to breathe.

“Give as well as get,” Tristen said. “Be honest. Be more than just. Be kind. And consider carefully what you are and what others are.”

Kind. That was Gran’s sort of advice. It wasn’t what he hoped to hear as a beginning of wizard-work.

“Above all,” Tristen said, “you mustn’t stay here when I leave.”

Elfwyn’s heart beat faster and faster. “Are you going somewhere?”

“I believe I must,” Tristen said.

“May I go with you, my lord?”

Tristen shook his head. “No. You will go ahead of me. My enemies are your enemies, and not to your good. You have a knack for opening doors. You must go with first light.”

“Sir?” He was completely dismayed. He’d learned nothing, and now was he dismissed?

“You must go,” Tristen said, “well supplied, and with Owl to guide you out. Otherwise, you might not find your way back to your house. Gran and Paisi are waiting for you.”

“Yes, sir,” he said, deeply disappointed.

“For the safety of us all,” Tristen said, “remember everything I’ve said. Your enemies will want you to forget, and to fear, and you must do neither. Sleep now.”

Elfwyn sank down with one knee on the patchwork quilt, and Tristen lit the candle on the little table beside the bed, then left, closing the door. The latch clicked, and Elfwyn found his eyes growing heavier and heavier. He didn’t want to sleep. He didn’t want to be shut in this room. And he most of all didn’t want to leave in the morning, but he saw no choice for himself. Tristen had never answered his questions, except to warn him—you have a knack for opening doors, as if everything were his fault, the way Trassin had said; and except to explain about wards, and to strengthen one, right in front of him, a crack that, unmended, split the wall and let in the cold.