“No farther,” Uwen counseled him. “My lord, stay and I’ll see.”

He knew by Uwen’s warning that there was no pleasure to come to him by going any farther. But all safety tonight seemed illusory; and his danger was worse, he had already persuaded himself, in biding ignorant of what happened in the place in which he lived, whether Cefwyn acted or others did without Cefwyn’s knowledge. Defend him, Cefwyn had bidden him swear: and how could he do that in utter ignorance?

Guards stood in the central hall. He went past them unchallenged, and Uwen stayed with him. So did his personal guards, into the main doors at the Zeide’s heart, those that let out into the front court.

Those four doors lay wide open. Their access and the whole corridor was jammed with mingled soldiery and residents of the hall in brocades or velvets or priests’ plain habits. Lamps lit the place, as they did in all places where the wind blew through, but the glow outside the doors was the red glare of a larger fire on vast billows of dark smoke, the stench of which reached far inside the hall.

Voices roared, outside, a wash of sound in which no words made sense.

It was impossible to keep together in the crowd. He plunged past a knot of lords out onto the landing and down the stairs, searching for a clear space to stand, at first, then found himself swept up in the rush, realizing that the crowd was carrying him toward the heart of the disturbance.

“M’lord,” he heard Uwen call to him, one clear, thin voice in that din of voices, but he had found a clearer vantage at the side-facing steps and did not wish to yield it up.

Wind rushed at him in that exposure, cold, rainy wind warmed with smoke. Ash and sparks flew. He wondered if the far wing of the building itself was afire—but he saw as he came past the crowd on the steps that it was a large fire set at the side of the courtyard. Men came and went sparsely in proximity to its light, showing him how large that fire was, a pile of wood more than the height of a man; and the flames lit figures that hung on the curtain wall above it, men dangling from ropes, against the stones of the defenses of the Zeide. While he watched, one plummeted into the fire, in a plume of sparks.

Men. Men hanged by the neck from ropes. Men burning in the fire.

The crowd behind him shouted. Guards broke forth from the doors, jostling him. In that press, for one frightening moment, he saw a distorted face, a bloody wreckage of a man hastened along by armored Guelen guards. Red hair, the man had, and the ruin of fine clothing. For an instant the man had looked straight at him.  Heryn, he thought in horror.

Heryn Aswydd. Cefwyn had blamed him for the men who had attacked the King.

Soldiers keeping the crowd back pressed him against the wall, and he stayed there, his back against it, following with his eyes the progress of that company of soldiers and others across the yard. Raucous laughter shocked him. He came down the steps, seeking to go closer, in the smell of smoke-warmed wind. There came a rumble he realized belatedly was thunder. Droplets of rain began to fall—it will put out the fires, he thought. It will save Lord Heryn. It will clear the smoke. It will make things clean.

And then he knew that it could not, because it could never bring things back the way they had been, simple, and clear and becoming utterly safe at a word from the men who ruled his life. The fires were not going out for any rain, and the burned men would not come back to life.

“M’lord.” Uwen reached him and caught his arm. “M’lord, best you go in.”

“They mean to kill him,” he said, calm, as that last group mounted the steps toward the fire, taking Heryn with them. His voice choked. He was unable to accept that Uwen was so trembling. “Orien? Tarien, too?”

“That’s in King Cefwyn’s hands, m’lord, come. Come wi’ me. This ain’t no place for you.”

He could not let Uwen or anyone conceal any more truths from him. Uwen frightened him with his calm  voice, his evident belief that such things as he saw now were ordinary and right. He broke away from Uwen and began to walk across the yard. Rain was falling, pelting him with large, cold drops, spotting the cobbles, making him blink as the wind carried rain into his face.

Uwen caught his arm, forcefully, this time. “King’s justice, m’lord, ye can’t help here!”

Justice? Was this the Word from the archive’s Philosophy? Was this the Word that went with Happiness?

He feared the violence around him, he flinched at the loss of life—he feared the passage from life into death that he had already caused, and saw it happening again before his eyes, and he could not explain or understand it—but the knowledge that it did happen was inside him, a Word racing around a doorless dark and trying to come out. Men feared that passage as they feared nothing else—and he understood the dying on the field as much as he understood death at all. But in the Zeide, where he lived, Men had gathered to cheer as other men burned—and Uwen seemed to think it was nothing remarkable, but nothing he should look at.

Rain began to pelt down about him, but it had no effect on the fire-the blaze sent out waves of heat too great for any rain to stop.

Then lightning whitened the stone of the top of the fire-stained wall, thunder cracked right over the yard, and rain began to sweep down in fire-lit sheets. Drenched onlookers began to retreat, some running, to the doors. A man slipped and fell on the steps. It was confusion, and in all that crowd was no one he would wish to find, no one whose answers he would want to know. He began to move instead against the crowd, trying to reach that proximity of the fire where he knew he was forbidden, as he was forbidden all harsh things.

But Uwen caught him a third time, pleading with him, half-drowned by a peal of thunder, and in defeat he went with Uwen back to the steps, up under the shelter of the arch.

In the doorway a shadow accosted them with such absolute authority he stopped cold, standing partly in the rain.  It was Idrys.

“Your guards report more faithfully than your man does,” Idrys said.

“And what provokes this bloody curiosity, lord Tristen of the Sihhé?”

“Where is Cefwyn, sir? Where shall I find him?”

Idrys’ eyes raked him over. “I shall take you there, my lord,” Idrys said with no more than his usual coldness, and turned and led the way, not a far distance once they were inside. Guards with Idrys cleared their way through the gatherings of men and women who shivered and complained in the corridor.

They passed the intersection of hall and stairs and came to that chamber they called the Lesser Hall, where the guards had brought him to meet with Cefwyn the first night he came here.

“Wait outside,” Idrys bade Uwen.

“Uwen, do so,” Tristen said, because Idrys’ tone had not been polite.

Uwen was soaked; he was; he wanted to have answers from Cefwyn while Cefwyn was to be found; and as quickly as possible take himself and all his guards upstairs into dry clothing. He did not expect it would take long, or that Cefwyn could spare much time for him, but he was determined that Cefwyn should know what was done outside, if Cefwyn was in any wise ignorant. He did not wholly trust Idrys, regardless of Cefwyn’s word. He saw reasons the lords around Cefwyn might wish not to inform Cefwyn of everything that happened, and he still found it hard to believe that Cefwyn knew of that horror outside.

He entered the hall behind Idrys, into a space which now held a large table. He brought smoke with him, the reek clinging to his clothes, but he could not be certain he was the sole source. The lords from the south and strangers who had come with Cefwyn’s brother were gathered about the table, and their armed escorts stood about, crowding the walls, some of them rain-draggled, proving that they, too, had been outside.