“Gods bless us all the same,” said Crissand, and Tristen regarded the uprooted oak, the very symbol of Amefel, asking himself whether wind could in fact have done it.

“An uncommon sight, to be sure,” was Cevulirn’s judgment.

“So the witch that foretold your journey stood there, Your Grace,” said Crissand, “and warned us to look for you, and now see the ruin of the tree.”

“There’s nothing here now,” Tristen said, “nothing harmful, nothing of threat. It’s a very great tree to be rooted up. But the lady of Emwy is no slight matter either. Ride by.”

That they did, and curious as he was and questioning in his own mind what might have befallen the oak, he did not unsettle his men further by turning in the saddle to gawk like an innocent. He was the stay of the guardsmen’s confidence and their courage to confront strange things, and there were strange things enough for a week of gossip once they all reached town.

There was one more strange sight on the other side of the next hill, for their tracks, hitherto utterly blotted out by the snowfall, reappeared, never covered by any fall there, nor all along that earlier part of their road. The storm had never reached there, and they could see all the land before them from that height, with a thick snowfall behind them and none before.

“Not a natural storm,” the soldiers said with anxious looks at the west, which still showed dark. “There weren’t nothin’ natural about it.”

“As we met fair weather,” Cevulirn remarked, “until an hour before our meeting.”

“I think the carts must have gone out, after all,” Tristen said, for he had been convinced until now that Anwyll’s party could not possibly have set out into the teeth of that storm.

But nothing here would have prevented it.

— Master Emuin? he asked the nearest wizard he knew. It’s snowed, have you noticed? Or did snow fall at all in town? I think it did not.

— Have you ever seen an oak overthrown, master Emuin? Some might take it for ominous, and surely the soldiers do. What shall I tell them?

No answer came to him, but that was, lately, no great surprise, though disheartening. At the same time he heard Lusin and Gedd saying to each other, with better cheer, well, that was a relief, no drifts between them and a warm fire.

It was a leaden sunset in the west and a blue evening in the northwest shot through with fire as they came up to the walls, over the tracks of farmers and the heavy tracks of the departed wagons.

They rode through the gates in close order, Lord Crissand making quiet, last-moment converse with Lord Cevulirn, explaining the streets were quiet and peaceful, and their visitor should fear no rebellion. They were well within the town, before the gatekeepers, caught by surprise, began to ring the bell that advised the hill fortress of visitors.

Then the curious began to peer out of shops and windows. The return of their party from a venture all the town had seen go out might not have drawn any but the hardiest out of doors on a frosty evening. But the bell drew attention, and the banners had unfurled, the White Horse of Ivanor among the banners belonging to the town and its own lords, and townsfolk threw on cloaks and mittens and came out into doorways, or peered out from well-situated windows, for not since summer had the White Horse banner been seen in the streets, when Cevulirn among other lords of the south had camped in that broad expanse outside.

Loaded carts had gone out for the border, where war was bruited about, a great lord had come guesting with their new lord and the new lord of Meiden… it surely made for talk, on an evening remarkable only for a light snowfall.

Chapter 3

The herald trumpets faded tremulously from the air, the harpers harped, the pipers piped, and the king and Royal Consort, settling on their dais in the great hall, looked out over the assembled nobles of Ylesuin, as happy as a bride and groom might be, who knew what all their guests were thinking. The king sat above the stone Ryssand had installed under the Dragon Throne, a lasting and symbolic legacy of Ryssand’s attempts to prevent the wedding. That stone remained, though Ryssand was gone at least for a season; that stone would acquire the voice of baronial anguish if removed, for removing that handbreadth height would lower the king of Ylesuin to the height of his bride’s chair of state, and that would unravel all the convolute and, in the end, bloody agreements that had let the court accept the marriage.

In Cefwyn’s glum reckoning, the presence of that stone would only grow more, not less, a necessity, wearing itself into habit and memory until the damned thing was all but sacred. The majesty of Ylesuin must sit higher than his wife Her Grace of Elwynor, or northern baronial noses would be sorely out of joint, and when the barons’ noses were out of joint then the barons would gather in corners and whisper, which at the moment and only of very late date, they dared not do without careful smiles on their faces and occasional sweet-faced bows toward enthroned majesty.

So all in all, the cursed stone was likely to remain, preserving Guelen pride and making it clear that the woman beside the king, his wife, his consort, his bride, and the love of his heart, was notthe queen of Ylesuin.

In fact ever since he had come back from Amefel and the fighting at Lewenbrook to inform the barons that his father was dead and he was king, and that he had, moreover, betrothed himself to the daughter and heir of their old enemy, the Regent of Elwynor, he had met a resistance not only greater than he had anticipated, but more clever and dangerous than he had imagined. He had thought these men simply agreeable to his late father’s unpleasant opinions, had realized too little and too late how very extensively these men were accustomed to having their will of his father and directing those opinions… and nowadays he wondered how many of the worst decisions of his father’s reign had been his father’s and how many were in fact Ryssand’s instigation.

Certainly he had come to court in blither certainty and confidence of the world than he held now. Yet it was Ryssand, ultimately, who had rued the clash of wills… and Cefwyn could congratulate himself on having had his way in all meaningful things. Save this one.

Save this one, for at last, on the eve of the wedding and with the Quinalt granting all else and reconciled to performing the ceremony, he had slipped in the word queen, and a small delegation of lords and priests had presented him in turn the last, the most stringent and inflexible objection of the clergy: royal expectation aside, there had never quite beena queen of Ylesuin, even counting his father’s mother and his, and Efanor’s, and the Quinalt had come armed with chapter and verse to prove its case, a veritable parade of clerks and clerics.

It was true. It might be Cefwyn’s argument that the omission was never intended for precedent, only that his grandmother had died before his grandfather’s rule began and his mother and Efanor’s mother had both been of Guelen burgesses and not royal, only wellborn. It was circumstance, not intent, in his argument, that had kept Ylesuin from having a queen, but that mattered little, when down to the day and in the toppling of all other obstacles, they had come to dicing words and titles and listening to long recitations of clerkly records. Facing the possibility of another disaffection of the Quinalt Patriarch, whom he had bought in costly coin of favors given, Cefwyn had had to admit that perhaps the reluctance to crown the king’s wife was not an insurmountable slight to his bride, who would reign in Elwynor with or without the acknowledgment of Ylesuin, and who was, moreover, pleading with him to accept that slight and get on to the wedding. What she wanted for herself and her people was the alliance, and an army potent enough to drive Tasmôrden from his siege of her capital. She wanted no delays and she wanted that army to set its first contingents in order at the bridges immediately after the wedding. To that he agreed, for the situation in Elwynor had been growing grim then and was growing grimmer to this hour.