"I don't know," Cook said. "I've never traveled by horse. I hain't the least idea. Was it Midwinter, m'lord?"

"Or before. It might have been before. They might have tried to be hereon Midwinter, and come late."

"For wizardous reasons, m'lord?" Cook's eyes narrowed. Little frightened her, but she ventured her question in a hushed and respectful tone.

"I don't know," he said.

Cook said not a thing to that. She was a discreet soul, in her way, and not a word would she say to the maids that she knew she was saying, but the gossip was bound to fly, and had already flown. He saw the looks from the staff all about them. At a certain point the rattle of a spoon sounded like doom, and swiftly hushed.

"Get back to your work!" Cook said sharply, and: "M'lord, there's sweets, there."

He took one. It was honey and fine flour, and stuck to his fingers. The lord of Amefel licked fingertips on the way out, and then turned back and took two more, which he saved as he climbed the rebuilt scullery stairs.

He ascended to the west stairs, and up to an area of the Zeide which had had a very different feeling for him this summer past, when Cefwyn had been in residence.

Not Cefwyn's bodyguard, now, but Guelen guards from the town garrison stood at that door, and more in Guelen colors stood down the hall. Guards guarding the guards: that was the seriousness of Uwen's precaution where it regarded Orien Aswydd and her sister.

The guards on watch opened the foyer door for him, not advising those within; and at a wave of his hand, he set his own watch on that threshold, a ward, a pass of his hand, and a wish, whether the guards knew it or not… but Orien knew it. He felt her attention, and her anger: she had set her own ward on the door, and he violated it with hardly more than a chill.

Her precaution was reasonable and he was hardly angry, but he was sorry not to have set his own last night, for the guards' safety.

His two nunnish guests, clad all in gray, sat at the snowy window, and as he entered, Orien rose straight as a candleflame to defy him, gray habit, red hair unveiled in its cropped despoilment. She had been a lord's sister, accustomed to luxury, sought after for her beauty, her birth, her access to power, even before she had been duchess of Amefel.

Now instead of the glittering court gowns, the velvets and jewels and the circlet on her wealth of autumn hair, she wore a travel-stained gray robe. They had both cast off the nun's wimple, and the red hair—that she had cut to spite Cefwyn—stood in stark, untidy disorder. It was her twin sister, seated in the white window light, who still kept that glory about her shoulders.

From a lush, luxurious woman to this lean, harsh creature that was now Orien—it astonished him how dreadfully the more powerful of the twins had changed, even while the white light that fell on Lady Tarien's seated form found softer edges. Tarien's pale face lacked any of the anger that suffused Orien's: a young face, a bosom modestly robed in gray, a body grown strange and potent with the child inside. Orien stood with her hands on Tarien's shoulders, as if her sister were some sort of barrier to him—and for the first time without the cloak and in the daylight from the window he faced a woman far along with child. He saw in her not one change but an alchemy of changes, the scope of which he did not clearly imagine, and which spun wildly through the gray space, fraught with possibilities. Powerwas there, power over the powerful, in the hand that rested on Tarien's robed belly.

"How may we please your lordship?" Orien asked, and, oh, there was thick irony in that salutation, to the lord who had title now to all that had been hers and her sister's.

"I came," he began, "to see how you fared, and whether you needed anything." He proffered the sweets. "From the kitchens."

He knew Orien would not take them. He saw, however, that Tarien wanted them, and he set them on the table near him. "At your convenience," he said.

"Where are our servants?" Orien asked in ringing tones. "Surely the great Marhanen won't have been so petty as to harm them. Where are my sister's maids?"

"Most of your servants fled across the river when Cefwyn came. The others are my servants now… or the gods'."

"I demand my servants!"

"And I say they aren't here any longer."

"And our gowns?" Tarien asked. " SurelyYour Grace has no use for our gowns."

"I've no idea where they are." In fact he had never wondered where the ladies' wardrobe had gone: he had supposed it had gone with them to Anwyfar, in all the chests. The gowns they had worn in their days of power here had been gloriously beautiful, and with all the jewels, he supposed they were as valuable as Lord Heryn's dinner plates—which he had in the treasury. "I've seen no store of clothes, not a stitch of them."

"And our jewels?"

The whereabouts of certain of the Aswydd jewelry he did know, and was sure in his heart that the province's need for grain was far greater than their need for adornment. But he regretted the beauty and the sparkle of the stones, too, all shut up in the dark treasury.

"I shall send up some of the jewels," he said, and then added, because they took every gift as their right: "I lend them, understand, until we need them for grain."

"For grain!" Orien cried. "These are the history, the glory of Amefel! These are the treasure of the Aswydds, my property! How dare you sell them for grain?"

"If you were duchess of Amefel, I would agree you own them. But you aren't. And I give them to the treasury."

"I am stillduchess of Amefel, and damn the Marhanen! If you hold me here prisoner in my own hall, then look to yourself, sir!"

"I'm sorry about the gowns. I don't know where they went. I'll ask; and if I can't find them, I'll find you others. It's all I can do."

Orien drew a deep breath, and perhaps reconsidered her position. "You were always good-hearted, always kind to us before. I see you still have a kind heart."

"I wish you no harm, and ask you wish none."

"Harm to the bloody Marhanen!"

"I ask you not do that." He felt her anger in the gray space and rebuffed it strongly, refusing to encounter her there. In the world her face seemed all eyes, and the eyes a window into a place he chose not to go. He remembered how Cefwyn had wished to kill the twins, at least Lady Orien, and he had pleaded otherwise—not even so much out of mercy, although that had been in his heart—but rather the fear of Orien's spirit let loose among the Shadows in the Zeide, set unbarriered within the wards and the Lines of Henas'amef, in those days when the sorcerous ally she had dealt with still threatened them.

Now they had defeated that ally of hers, at Lewenbrook. And if Cefwyn had now proposed it, he did not know whether he would have been so quick to save her life, or Cefwyn to hear him: to that extent they both had changed.

—Is it so? Orien asked him, a voice as sharp and cold as a dagger. Is it so? Did you save us? And had the bloody Marhanen not a shred of remorse?

"Can you keep us in this prison?" Tarien asked, assailing him from the other side. "We have nothing, not even a change of clothes. My sister is the aetheling. Whatever else, she is the aetheling, and no one should forget it, least of all under this roof!" Tarien's eyes glistened as she confronted him. A handkerchief suffered murder in her clenched hands.

"Aethelings, yes," Tristen corrected her gently. "Both of you. But Crissand of Meiden is theaetheling now, and there's no changing that."