He went inside to burn incense and make prayer, feeling the words for the first time in years. He kissed the worn silver letters set in the stone altar and rose, stopped dead as he saw a dark figure standing in the shrine door, with the flash of the silver Star and Tower on black velvet. A second figure joined it: Uwen.

“Lo, your ally,” said Efanor, at his shoulder.

Tristen waited. Cefwyn limped a step toward the foreboding figure, conscious of Efanor’s witness. The family curse, he thought, feeling trapped. Alive and with us.

“Cefwyn,” Tristen said. The voice was faint and bewildered. He heard only terror, the childlike quality that was the gentle man he knew.

He embraced Tristen as he could not embrace his brother at the moment, he rested his aching head on Tristen’s shoulder, looked up at him then and saw in Tristen’s eyes all the compassion and tenderness he longed for in his own brother.

I have nothing but this, he thought. In all the world there is no gentleness toward me but this. Efanor will not reason with me.

“My friend,” he said to Tristen. “You should not have come here. -Uwen, take him to his room. I have other business tonight.”

Tristen lingered, but Uwen tugged on his arm and, like a tired child, Tristen yielded and went where he was bidden.

The priests’ chanting echoed in the vaulted hall. Torches fluttered and scattered sparks of windblown fire about the bier, stinging where they chanced against living skin.

Cefwyn turned and met Idrys’ grim stare.

There was duty. Idrys had something on his mind.

“The messenger,” he remembered then. “Heryn.”

“Both under arrest,” Idrys said. “My lord, see to necessities and mourn later. The messenger could not have been going to the ambush on the road.

It was too late for that. It was surely elsewhere he was sent.”

Cefwyn delayed a moment, his eyes on the haze of wind-whipped torchlight and then on Efanor, standing among the silent Crown officers.

The great bell of the Quinalt shrine began to toll, solemn and terrible.

“Learn where,” he said to Idrys.

Chapter 22  

There were dreams.

Tristen fled the clangor of metal and the sounds of men and horses, woke, and still heard the iron bells peal out their dreadful sound.

Dark had fallen while he slept. He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes to drive away the images of the dreams, and at last dragged his aching limbs from the safe and comfortless sheets, shrugged on a robe and went to the hearthside. He stirred the embers and threw on another small piece of wood, for the light, not for the warmth.

The candles had burned down to one guttering stub. He sought others in the cupboards, barefoot on the chill floor. To his relief he found a few, and pulled out the spent candles and set the new ones in the sconces, lighting them, one to the next, so that they chased the Shadows into the corners and beneath the bed and as far as the shutterless window.

Uwen slept, he was certain, since Uwen had not stirred out with his fire-making or his search after candles. He would not disturb Uwen for any reason of his discomfort. Uwen had done too much, and was sore from bruises. So was he, from exertion, and from the unaccustomed riding. He had taken a few bruises: his arm was sore from the shock of encounters, several, as he thought, from wresting a sword from a man.

But that was all. He had no wounds. He had gone to bed soon after reaching his rooms. He could not tell what hour it was.

The sound of riders echoed up off the cobblestones, briefly overwhelming the relentless tolling of the bells. The sound passed and dimmed; the Zeide, a maze of alleys and roofs and wings, echoed sounds in deceptive fashion, but it was a large number of riders going somewhere in the night, by the stable-court, he thought.

He had dimly heard armed men tramping about the halls earlier ... coming and going from Cefwyn’s apartments, he had judged. He had heard, half-waking, the bells ring out from the lower town as well as from the shrines and from the Zeide gate.

He would have stayed by Cefwyn, but Cefwyn had wanted to be alone, except for Annas and Idrys. Cefwyn had most emphatically told him to go to bed and rest.

And perhaps, Tristen thought, it was because he did not understand having or losing a father, or the questions that proper men had to discuss with each other at such times.

He knew at least what it was to lose and to be lost. He would comfort Cefwyn if he knew how—but he had not known how to comfort himself when he had lost Mauryl except by walking and walking until he had to sleep, and by days coming between himself and that time. He supposed that was not very great wisdom, and that he had, after all, nothing but the perpetual difficulty he posed to offer to anyone—which was no great gift to Cefwyn, when Cefwyn was suffering his own pain.

He shivered as he sank down on his knees by the hearth, seeking warmth. The flames had taken the wood and made a golden sheet before his face, bright, moving, distracting him from memory.  Almost.

He shut his eyes tightly against the remembrance of the noise, the dust, the faces. He buried his face in his hands and stayed so a moment, not breathing until the need for breath made his head spin and he dropped his hands and gasped like a man drowning—flesh as well as spirit, Mauryl had said.

A naked sword stood in the shadows beside the hearth, leaned point-down against the wall. Uwen had cleaned the blood from it.

It was the sword he had wrenched from a man who had attacked him.

He had carried it away from the field, not of any real purpose at first, only that his hands held it, and eventually his thoughts lit on it, possessed it, and he had not, in the end, cast it away as useless to him: such a thing was not useless, in such events as moiled about him.

He had bathed, among first things when he had come home. Even so, and after all the scrubbing, the reek of blood lingered in his nostrils and he could not, no matter the perfumed oils the servants supplied him, feel clean. He looked at his hands in the firelight, at his arms that bore no wounds to betray the thing that had happened to him. He was dismayed at his own unscarred existence, and was most of all appalled that he bore no mark of it, while so many, many others had taken wounds that would mark them forever.

I do this well, he thought. I do this very well. And through his mind flitted the memory of Ynefel, his untutored hands struggling to write, and soon finding that they knew the art.

Mauryl had approved his work. Mauryl had said-    But Mauryl had no longer any clear face in this memory. The whole of Ynefel seemed strange to him and beyond recovery. He was cut off from its good memories. There was no way now back to those days, that innocence. He could not but ask questions, and questions, and questions of men less wise than Mauryl, and the questions led him, every one, farther and farther from home and safety.

Cefwyn said, Idrys said, men all said, and it was probably true, that he was Sihhé; that all the Sihhé had died terribly, and that Mauryl had called him out of death and given him a shape and substance; the servants said, and Cefwyn said, that he did not so much learn things, as remember them.

If I go on, he thought with a shiver, I may remember dying. I would not wish that.

The servants spoke when they thought he was not listening, and he knew that they greatly feared his nature, even if they regarded him kindly. He knew they thought him a wizard. They believed his name had been Elfwyn, and they said that he had died at Althalen.

And perhaps it was true—he thought that they had overheard it from those who knew—but the name of Elfwyn was not a Name to him, although he remembered clearly that Cefwyn had said it to him, trying, he knew now, to discover whether he would remember it—and he had not.