“But wise, my lord. Not to remove your father from the province with out justice done him—is a good and pious thought. I did applaud it.”

“I have learned from you.” He moved, and winced. “I do thank you, Idrys, for all your dusty labors. I am warned, regarding Emuin, and I shall not forget—but I look for him. I do look for him. I shall thank you, also, if you advise me at whatever hour he arrives.”

“My lord King could thank me well by taking himself to bed before he lames himself.”

“Take to your own for at least two hours. I need your clear wits, Idrys.”

“Majesty,” Idrys bowed, unsmiling, picked up the lists and the levy orders, and departed.

Cefwyn wrapped his arms about his ribs, cursed, and then in febrile restlessness, rose up and began to pace the room, cursing his sore hand at every other step with the stick, which took his mind from the ache in his leg and the greater ache in his sensibilities. He wrapped himself in righteousness and anger sufficient to deal with the Aswyddim and the Quinalt conjoined.

Then he went out into the anteroom and opened the door, little caring now for the pride that had kept him from using the stick in view of others. The pain was more. He gazed across the hall, where guards still stood at Tristen’s door, awaiting what—gods alone knew, doing what, the gods alone cared. They were assigned: they were on duty. No matter that there was no one there to guard.

Soldiers, Tristen asked. Soldiers, for the gods’ sake. In so short a time Tristen’s concerns had changed so much.

He remembered the methodical rise and fall of a blade in Tristen’s hands. A dark figure wreaking destruction without pity.

The bowed, sad figure that rode ahead of them homeward, on the tired red mare.

He leaned painfully on the stick and turned, furious with his own pain and faced with the innocent guards at his own door, two Guelen guards, still of the Prince’s Guard, and, part of the lending of trusted men of other commands, two Lanfarnessemen, giving him Guelen of the Dragon Guard and the Prince’s Guard to spare to other posts.

Then, on unremitting duty, there were the two in chains, lordly Erion and the river-brat Denyn, horseman and pirate, keeping at least the semblance of peace between themselves—and looking anxious under his close notice.

“How do you fare?” he asked them, fighting the pain, compelling himself to be patient and soft-spoken, when an outcry of rage was boiling behind his teeth.

“Well, Your Majesty,” Erion murmured.

“The wounds are healing?”

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

He looked at Denyn. “How do you deal with your companion?”

“Very well, Your Majesty.”

Erion’s right wrist and Denyn’s left were wrapped with leather against the galling chain.

“Do they,” Cefwyn asked the Guelen sergeant, “keep the peace?”

There was a little hesitation, a tense regard from the sergeant. “Aye, m’lord King.” He did not entirely believe that report, and regarded the pair skeptically and at length, but it was unprecedented that a Guelen sergeant should lie for two miscreant foreigners. He had made matters clear to the fractious barons. What remained was cruel, and a difficult matter for his own guard, and it challenged his own pain. “Free them of the chain,” he said, and walked away—insisting to himself that he was himself free, that he was not bound to Tristen; that he owed nothing to Tristen; that Tristen’s apprehensions were of no substance and Tristen’s appearance in his court in this most perilous time for Ylesuin was more related to an old man’s natural demise than to any immutable destiny of the Marhanens—and that Tristen’s fears were no more than innocence confronted with the very frightening sight of the King’s justice.

Which ... had not stayed Tristen’s hand on the field at Emwy. He was, if one believed anything about Tristen, a conjured soul who had shown a frightening skill at arms, a conjured soul who was mostly surely not the feckless, bookish Elfwyn of the Red Chronicle. There had been defenders in that hour who had fought for Elfwyn—some of them his heirs; but Tristen had defended him. Tristen had saved him from certain death. Was that the action of an enemy? Was that a man he should doubt, no matter what Idrys found or did not find in archive?

Perhaps he should have listened to Tristen. But to send troops to combat Tristen’s nightmares of Althalen would do no favor, not to the men nor probably to Tristen’s reputation.

And if Tristen’s fears owned more solid form, if such a band met not with nightmares but with living enemies, come on reconstructed bridges across the Lenfialim, it would engage Ylesuin prematurely on a front he was not ready to open—which he did not wish to open at all if he could delay the matters he had with the Elwynim Regent into sensible negotiation. He was not, whatever his anger, whatever his passion said, about to lay waste the whole Lenfialim valley in retaliation. He had a kingdom of provinces in precarious balance, he had a southern frontier with the Chomaggari always looking for advantage. He could not, for a gesture, for vengeance, for any consideration, give way to temper and attack Elwynor, even when his own spies said Elwynor was in extreme unrest: he dared not lock both their kindred peoples in a struggle the coastal kingdoms would see as their opportunity to take lands long disputed on his own borders.

Meanwhile there was hope: the Regent was old. If the Sihhé prophecy were the substance behind this uneasiness and this resurgency in wizards, if the Elwynim knew the Sihhé standard was brought to light in Henas’amef, and that a Sihhé lord stood high in council, something might well begin to change on the Elwynim side of the river, and peace that had been impossible for two generations might be possible in the third.

Give me opportunity, he asked privately of the gods he privately doubted—because in two generations of Marhanen rule no King of Ylesuin had had sure command of the western marches.

In two generations of Marhanen rule no king of Ylesuin had had a hope of establishing lasting peace on any border.

And he could not allow Tristen to leave him—not in respect to his hopes of peace and a reign that would not be remembered for its disasters.

Nor for his own sake, he found; it was a large part of his anger and distress that, absent Tristen, he could see no one—no one he could look to for his own happiness. Emuin would ask him common sense. Idrys would lay out cruel choices and remorseless reason for taking them. Tristen asked him simple questions that made him look again at simple things he thought he knew.

He had no friend, none, in his entire life, that his father had not minutely examined and appointed to serve that function. He had no prospect or enterprise to draw him from day to day except the duty of a King. And of men who crowded close about an heir apparent, and those, far more numerous, who must settle their future hopes and daily needs upon a king, he had three he relied on: Annas for his comfort and his good sense; Idrys for his dark and practical advice, Emuin for the knotty questions of justice a King could face—but of all he knew, he had never found any man who reached the less definable needs of his heart, until, that was, Tristen asked him foolish questions and touched those things in him he had thought men gave up asking. Tristen had brought the wondering of boyhood back to him, and he found himself thinking about things and looking at them in odd ways, when for years he had simply defended his own thoughts, taken wild pleasures to give his detractors a less vital bone to gnaw, done his duty to the Crown and barred his soul against those with something to gain of him.

A King could live without a friend: gods knew his grandfather had, and his father, by what he knew. He might reign long, might become well respected, might die in a productive, peaceful, perhaps safer, old age, alone.