“We should wait till spring to become farmers,” Ninévrisë said in all sobriety, and in a voice just low enough to make the eavesdropping maids strain for possible bits and pieces of Lord Brysaulin’s fate. “Beginning a farm in the winter, I fear we would starve.”

“There is that,” he conceded.

“Fifteen days,” she reminded him, which was the number of the days they had to endure until their wedding—the consummation of a treaty as well as a bridal bed, and on both, a stamp of priestly approval. The blessing of the priests would set the king’s consort beyond petty gossip and let the two of them, who ached to touch, do more than let fingertips meet in front of jealous (and spurned) young women.

Meanwhile fault-finding, book-wielding, legalistic priests, worst of all his inconveniences, were sniffing everywhere about the Guelesfort, also allied to various houses by blood and gold. And now the war, which had been advancing, foundered on an old man’s habit.

“Gods send we reach the fifteenth day with my chancellor yet unslaughtered.”

“He is an old man. A fine old man. He was kind to me.”

“A faithful man.” The royal temper fell with that reminder of a small, dutiful kindness when the court had been cold and uncertain in its welcome to his bride and ally. He was left with the ashes of his anger. And the accounts still in the wrong, hostile hands. “He served my father well as Lord Chamberlain. He served mewell until I came home to Guelessar—good gods, he kept the entire realm in order in a difficult time, with wit and goodwill, and for that I owe him gratitude, but good and beneficent gods, why will he not simply read the order I send him? I wrote it fair. —But, oh, I know, I know exactly his ways. Through all my father’s reign, when he dealt chiefly with Guelessar, we have done the harvest tally in Guelessar approaching harvesttide. So this must extend the selfsame inquiry to all Ylesuin and it must be granaries we wish to inspect, not wagons and bowstrings. I would trust Brysaulin to be honest, and to have all virtues of a good man, but, gods, even so, if I do not strangle me that man before Midwinter—”

“Hush, hush.” She laid a finger on his chin, and, thus close to him, whispered, “You must go to Brysaulin, instruct him again. Be patient. You are always patient.”

“I am Marhanen! I am never patient. Plague on Brysaulin. I faint for wit and converse about other than store of pikes and oats. Will you dine with me tonight in chambers—a gathering of old friends? I shall call Tristen, too. He’s out riding. I’ll have him in by sundown if I need send troops to find him.“

Ninévrisë’s eyes had changed from solemn listening to laughter, that quickly; and the gray eyes that sometimes had hints of violets (it was the first image he had seen, painted on ivory, and always what he remembered) sparkled and went thoughtful. Her voice sank very low, to escape the listeners. “Am I the prey tonight or is it Tristen? Policy must attend this festive mood. You are stalking someone.”

“Good lady!” He laid a hand on his breast, above the Marhanen Dragon, worked in gold. “I am suspect?”

“Today since dawn you have held close converse with the captain of your guard, the Patriarch of the Quinalt.” One finger and the next marked the tally. “Your brother the duke of Guelessar, and your brother’s priest, besides a converse again with Idrys, with Captain Gwywyn, and with Captain Kerdin—I discount your tailor—”

“Your spies are everywhere!”

“You ensconce me in this nest of women all with ambitions, all wishing to persuade me to confide in them, and wonder that I know exactlythe object of your inquiry, who was riding to Drysham today—”

“Cressitbrook. You don’t know everything.”

“—with his guard. It is he, is it not? Has Tristen done something amiss?”

“Tonight,” he said, with a glance at the women in the distance, and with his voice lowered.

“I hear it all, you know. The Warden of Ynefel is out spying on the land. He converses with the horses, quite dire and lengthy discourses, and likely with the sheep. His birds fly over the land and bring him news from every quarter…”

“His damned pigeons congregate on the ledge and on the porch of the Quinaltine just opposite, where they refine their aim on the Quinaltine steps, therein is the magical offense. Winter’s coming. He feeds them. Why should they fly farther afield?” He had heard enough, today, of the Quinaltine steps. And of his bride’s unorthodoxy… and her scandalous single petticoat, especially in the wedding gown. “Join me tonight. A small supper, a pleasant, quiet evening, no one but ourselves and Tristen. And Emuin. We shall invite Emuin.”

“Oh, thatwill set tongues a-wagging.”

Doubtless it would—a Teranthine father, the king’s old tutor, was entirely acceptable; a wizard was not; but Emuin was both.

And, damn the gossip, he missed their quiet suppers, and their days in Amefel. He missed them so much that those Amefin days, which he had once considered exile, now appeared to him in a golden glow of memory, a time when he had had few but faithful confidants every night at supper, when his table had been solely for food and intimate talk, not tiresome sessions with priests and clerks and lords who wished his brother were king. Even the banquets of state in the great hall in Henas’amef had been intimate, by comparison to the echoing hall of the Dragon Throne, where he now held court. The region before the throne was a gilt-and-ivory battlefield of policy wherein every move and every strategic alliance had been laid down by his father and now must be fought and refought and reforged by an unpopular successor. His digestion suffered in consequence, and while he had as yet found no gray hairs among the gold of his carefully clipped beard, nor a lasting crease on his young brow, he looked for them daily—even longed for them as a means to impress authority on the barons. He could no longer ride abroad, not with the press of royal business. He had grooms to exercise his horses. He could not find time for his father’s hounds, who were growing paunches. He could not so much as sit in the royal bathtub on most days without papers to sign, arguments to hear, justice to do, or some petition of the Quinalt about Tristen’s damned pigeons.

“Let them clatter about it,” he said to his bride-to-be. “Let them have a merry round of it. There’s Llymarish cheese and Panan apples stewed up with spices. There’s Guelen ham and Amefin sausages and the red wine from Imor as well as Guelen ale. I had it all carted in and set by for harvesttide. I shall serve it up tonight, just the few of us.”

“Seducer,” said his bride. Fingers touched fingers. Oh, very gladly would he have touched more.

It was an intrigue. Everything must be, in these days of his new accession and the making of an Elwynim alliance-by-marriage.

And she saw very clearly that it was Tristen he wished to speak to, involving neither pigeons nor the census nor the desperation that, indeed, sent him here for refuge. He saw the wolves closing on him in this latest folly and he had interests to defend.

But it was, besides a necessity arrived upon him, also an opportunity grown all too rare, that he gather around him the truest hearts in the court. In the press and clatter of his father’s courtiers attempting to assure their influence and those who had been in less favor with his father attempting to gain from him what his father never would have given them, he had lost the peace that he had not valued when he had had it. Yes, the king would have a live wizard and a reputedly dead Sihhë-lord at his table tonight.

The king should have things entirely to hisliking at least now and again.

A fox traversed the hillside, a quick whisk of red and buff: Lusin noticed it first, and called Tristen’s attention to it, with the remark that all such creatures were uncommonly fine-furred this year. But that was a moment’s distraction. Uwen and the men, Lusin and the rest, had fallen to discussing Liss, the chestnut mare Uwen rode for the day. The stables had her up for sale, at a high price—and Uwen could not, would not. He refused such an extravagance on principle.