The bad men, he heard wafting on the wind. The bad men is coming, the wicked, wicked men. Run, run, run! Mama, run!

It was a child’s voice. Seddiwy’s voice. Child! he cried after her.

But the shadow-shape of a child ran implike back through the company, waving her arms, startling the horses one after another.

After that, what came was dark and angry. The sapling at his right went crack! and broke. Others did, white wounds in the dark thicket.

From the hill and the ruin behind them also came the cracking of brush, then the screams of men overcome by fear. The Elwynim with him looked about them in alarm—but no more trees broke in their vicinity.

The presence—a great many presences—had followed the child, back along their trail. Tristen tried to see them, but they were all darkness in the gray, darkness that walled off all Althalen.

In a moment more there was only the ordinary wind, and the rumble of thunder.

Then a rider was coming down the slope, braving all that was unnatural, and Tristen knew that manner and that posture even in the dark.

“Uwen!”

“M’lord, what is it back there?” Uwen was plainly ready to fight whatever threatened them; and the Elwynim had turned about to face that crashing of brush and the gusting of wind behind them, drawing swords and setting the lady to their backs.

But the enemy who should have overtaken them by now—was up on that hill, where now there was nothing to see but the night and the rain.

“We come chasin’ all about this damn ruin,” Uwen was saying, at his left, breathless, sword in hand as he looked uphill. “Sometimes we was on a path and then again we weren’t, and then, damn! m’lord, but we was smellin’ fire and being rained on at the same time—your pardon.”

Ninévrisé and Tasien had drawn back close to them, Tasien with sword in hand.

“These are your men?” Tasien asked.

“Uwen is mine,” Tristen said. “Who are they, Uwen?”

“Ivanim, m’lord,” Uwen said, “looking for you. Blesset a long chase you run us. I’d draw back, m’lord. It don’t feel good up there.”

It seemed good advice. Even the Elwynim accepted it, and drew away with them up the hill, toward the waiting men.

“M’lord of Ynefel!” a voice came out of that dark, from among shadowy horsemen. “Who is that with you?”

“The lord Regent’s daughter, sir, his heir, three of her lords and—” He looked back, unsure of numbers; there were only a handful of soldiers, no threat to anyone. And the valiant packhorse, that one man led, that had somehow stayed with them. “The lady Regent, her men, half a score of her guard. To see King Cefwyn, sir!”

Tasien shouted toward the hill: “We ask safe conduct for Her Most Honorable Grace, the Regent of Elwynor and her escort, sir: Tasien Earl of Cassissan, His Grace Haurydd Earl of Upper Saissonnd, and His Grace Ysdan of Ormadzaran. The lord of Ynefel has agreed to be our hostage against your King’s safe conduct!”

“Lord Tristen of Ynefel,” the shout came down to them. “What will you?”

The wind was still blowing back on the hill. A new sound had begun in the ruins up there. It sounded as if stones were falling and clattering, as if walls were coming down in the anger of the Shadows—Shadows, he thought, not of the dead of Althalen, but of Emwy—that was where the child had come from. And only the child had guarded them.

“I agree to what he wishes, sir. I think we should go to the road as soon as we can!”

“Gods hope.” The Ivanim rode downhill and met them and Uwen in the dark. “Captain Geisleyn of Toj Embrel, at your service, Your Lordship. How many are there, asking safe conduct?”

“Scarcely fifteen,” the lady said on her own behalf. Lightnings flickered, showing a sheen of wet leather, wet horse, wet metal about all of them. “Captain, please take us to His Majesty of Ylesuin, if he is in Henas’amef. And then we wish ourselves and our men given safe conduct back to the river.”

“Brave lady,” Geisleyn said. “His Majesty himself must say for your return—but on my life, you and yours will reach him without any difficulty.”

“That is agreeable,” Ninévrisé said.

“And if any of Your Lordships,” Geisleyn said then, somewhat sheepishly, “has a notion where the road is, we might all be there the sooner.”

“Follow me,” Tristen said, for he had no doubt at all.

And perhaps, as Uwen said as they rode away in that direction, some wizardry had been acting on Uwen’s side and on his to have gotten them this far and to have brought them together. “We was going one way,”

Uwen put it, “and then we was going another, and we had no idea how, but there you was, m’lord, and, gods! I was glad to see you.”

“I was glad, too,” Tristen said. “I wish I had done better by you, Uwen, I swear I wish so. I knew you would follow me. I didn’t want you to. I’ve treated you very badly.”

“Oh, I knew when ye didn’t come upstairs,” Uwen said, “that you was off somewheres. I just thank the good gods it weren’t the tower.”

“You were entirely right about the tower,” he said with a feeling of cold. “It would have been very foolish to go there. I could not have matched him.”

“Who, m’lord?” He had puzzled Uwen. But it was not an answer he wanted Uwen to deal with, ever.

Uwen said, after they had ridden a distance, “I wish I’d come downstairs sooner.”

“It was very good you came when you did.” He asked himself if he had said that, or thanked Uwen. He could not remember. “I am grateful.

Petelly couldn’t have run further. But, Uwen, be ever so careful when an idea comes into your head to do something you know really is not the safest thing to do. Ideas come to me sometimes, very strongly. I don’t know if they do to you. But I think some ideas come from wizards. And some come from my enemy.”

Uwen made a sign above his heart. It was rare that Uwen did that—or, at least, other men did so more frequently at moments when he discussed things in absolute honesty. “That’s certainly a thought,” Uwen said.

“That is a thought to keep a man awake a’ nights, m’lord.”

“I think it’s wiser not to think a great deal on the tower, at least, or on this place, either. I don’t know if ordinary folk have a gray place they can go to when they think about it, but it’s become very dangerous.”

“A gray place.”

“Do you?”

Uwen scratched his nose. “I guess summat of one if I just shut my eyes.

But it fills up with dreams and such.”

“Mine is shadows,” he said, and Uwen made that sign a second time.

He thought he should not say more to Uwen than he had, or make Uwen wonder about something maybe he never had wondered about before.

And he could not himself answer all those questions—what Shadows were and why they were, except—except he might be one himself, and that was a thought he did not want to pursue.

The old man had wanted to be buried there because it gave him some special power: maybe their moving the stones had made new lines of which the old man was now part—but they had disturbed something else in doing so, and dislodged other bones. He did not know whose, but he hazarded a frightened guess.

—Emuin, he said, touching that grayness. Master Emuin, I’m safe now. We are all safe. I met Uwen and some of Cevulirn’s men. There’s a lady whose picture Cefwyn has, and she will come to see him. I hope that’s not a mistake. Advise me, sir. I do very much need advice.

But no answer came to him, not even that fleeting sense of Emuin’s presence he had had earlier in the day. Toward Althalen he did not wish to venture. Toward Ynefel he least of all wanted to inquire.

At least the Shadows stayed at distance, the ones that belonged to Althalen and the ones that belonged to Emwy, Shadows which, he suspected, down to the witch’s child, had fought for them tonight, for whatever reason.

Chapter 27