“Mauryl did not like your grandfather.”

It was like the turns of Tristen’s speech: it startled him into laughter.

“None of us liked my grandfather. My grandmother never liked my grandfather. Tell me something more dire than that, sir! Where is your proof? Prove to me your notion!”

“To Mauryl, the Marhanen as successors to the Sihhé were a choice of chance, at best. The Marhanen were there to take advantage of the situation, but your grandfather was very uneasy with Mauryl. Remember that Mauryl was not of this age, not of whatever blood men share. He had no loyalties even to the Galasieni, who were supposedly his people. Elfwyn’s father had besought—call it the gods, the gods some Sihhé worshipped if they worshipped any at all—to raise his stillborn son. The blood had run very thin by that time, and Elfwyn’s father certainly couldn’t have raised the dead. Except—he opened a door. As ’t were. To a dead wizard.”

“Hasufin Heltain,” Idrys supplied, and Emuin cast him a troubled look.

“We have had to seek our own answers,” Cefwyn said. His leg was paining him, acutely, he was peevish, and trying to be patient. “Many of which, it seems, are on the mark, master Emuin. Go on, sir, don’t dole it out like alms. Give me your reasoning. Tell me what you fear happened at Althalen, and why this is Barrakkêth.”

“Young King, Mauryl fought this wizard in Galasien. Mauryl chose in Barrakkêth and his cousins an agency of destruction so ruthless—so ruthless—there is a Galasite word for it ... so lacking in attachment. Yet honest. Mauryl did call him honest. He contended with wizards by magic—magic, not wizardry, mark you—and with men with the sword. I don’t know why. Mauryl said they were not Men as we understand Men to be. The true Sihhé had an innate, untaught power that would not be deterred. What the true Sihhé willed, so I understand, and am beginning to fear, wizardry does not easily prevent.”

“A god,” Idrys said dryly, arms folded, and walked back to stand at the tableside. “You describe a god, master grayfrock.”

“Something very like.” Emuin’s voice was hoarse. He had a large gulp of the heated wine. “Something far too like, for my taste. And the Quinalt and its witch-hunting have been too thorough in their hunt for wizards. There are few wizards left worth the name, m’lord King. There is no one to contain either Hasufin or Barrakkêth.”

“Oh, come now,” Cefwyn said. He had until then been concerned, but drew a longer and easier breath, and massaged the fevered wound in his upper leg. “Our Tristen? A ravening monster? I think not.”  “Ask Barrakkêth’s enemies.”

“Idrys tracked a Hasufin Heltain through generations of musty chronicles. And found a Hasufin in the royal family. So what did become of him? Is he still alive? Or haunting Althalen—or what?”

“My lord, I killed that child, I, myself, at Mauryl’s behest. I killed Hasufin’s last mortal shape.” The old man rocked to and fro in discomfort and had another large drink, the last. “Do you suppose, m’lord King, there is anything left in the pot?”

Emuin—kill a child? “Idrys,” Cefwyn said, feeling a chill himself, and Idrys looked, filled another goblet, poured more wine into the pot and swung it further out over the fire to warm.

Emuin took a sip, seeming as glad to warm his hands as his insides. He looked frail tonight. His skin was pale and thin, his lately drenched hair and beard were drying in wisps of white. His shoulders had grown very thin.

I dare not lose him, Cefwyn thought. I dare not. “And what,” he asked Emuin, determined to unravel the matter, “what, precisely, was Mauryl’s judgment on Elfwyn? Was it his father’s sin? Was it retribution?”

“It was simple fear, my lord King. Fear not only of Hasufin, dreadful enough, but the union of Hasufin’s very great wizardry and the innate Sihhé magic, dilute as it had grown by that day. No one could predict what would happen—with a wizard potent enough to bring himself back from death, joined to a Sihhé body. One simply didn’t know.”

“One thought you priests knew such things to a fare-thee-well,”

Idrys said.

“My lord King, I will not bear with his humor. I do not think I have deserved this. This is difficult enough to explain.”

“You might have been here,” Idrys said sharply.

Emuin clamped his lips tight. “Aye, that I might, and added my bit to the brew. You might have been very sorry, Lord Commander, if I had swayed to the left or the right the force that Mauryl had set on course.

His spell was still Summoning, still is, sir. I warned you of it, and I would not to this day put my meager working in the path of that force, no more than I would tamper with a river in flood without knowing what lay downstream—which is the difference between myself and those that meddle with things they do not understand, sir, as is the habit of some people I could name!”

“Peace, peace, good gods, I had forgot the sound of you both under one roof.” Cefwyn poured his own wine from a pitcher on the table, unmulled and untampered-with, and hoped for surcease of the ache in his leg that now beat in time with the ache in his skull. “So you don’t know, in sum, what we are dealing with.”  “I have had years to think on it.”

“More years than most, as a matter of curiosity,” Idrys said.

“Peace! Damn you, Idrys, let us have his account undiverted.”

“Tristen is at Althalen,” Emuin said.

“You are certain of that.”

“I am certain. So, in a wizardly sense, is Hasufin. And something—let loose as a consequence of his dealing. I don’t like to think of it. Quickly!

Ask me another question!”

“The same question! What did Mauryl intend? What are we dealing with? Why Barrakkêth?”

“The same answer, my lord King: the Sihhé were Mauryl’s choice to succeed the folk of Galasien, nine hundred years ago. Mauryl loosed Barrakkêth on the south, from what Mauryl claimed to be his origins up far in the Hafsandyr. No one knew more than that. Barrakkêth arrived well versed in arms, he subdued what is now Amefel and Elwynor and Lanfarnesse with brutal thoroughness. He would not go among Men, but ruled as High King from Ynefel, which was in its present gruesome state: he ordered the building of Althalen and its pleasures, but he rarely stirred from Ynefel except for war, and, save once, he left the begetting of heirs to the handful of Sihhé that arrived with him—who amply attended that duty.”

“He enchanted those faces into the walls?” Cefwyn asked. “I take it, then, that those rumors are true.”

“They are true. They are most awfully true, and contribute to the strength of the place. All I know is what Mauryl said: that the walls of Ynefel became what they are during the battle between Barrakkêth and Hasufin Heltain.”

“And Mauryl.”

“And Mauryl.”

“Who seems to have been a damned busy man. Why should he care what this Hasufin did? He was old. He was dying.”

“My lord king. He is dead. I do not know that he was dying.”

“Meaning?”

“He lost, m’lord. He lost to his enemy. Now we have Hasufin to deal with. But Mauryl was not a man to go down without revenge. We also have Tristen.”

“Revenge on whom?”

“That is the question. What did Mauryl promise the Marhanen when he stopped Hasufin the second time? To rule forever? I think not. Mauryl promised the Elwynim a King. And was it for love of them—or for some sort of balance with the Sihhé themselves? Far less did he love your grandfather, or your father, or care to leave Ynefel long enough to inquire what manner of King you would be. Was this the man they called Mauryl the Kingmaker, who, surrendering all power to the Marhanen and a regency in Elwynor, locked himself away from worldly power and said nothing for eighty years? Was this the action of the man who ruled behind the thrones of two kingdoms? I don’t believe he went down without arranging something to settle accounts.”