He had a change of clothing in the baggage. The good brothers among whom he had been in retreat had given him no hired guards, who might have known how to set a tent. The hired guards had been off seeing to the protection of ten brothers going to the blessing of the harvest in this end of season, and the assessment of land-rent for the abbey’s tenants.

Collecting the annual rent was a mission occasionally fraught with high passions, and occasionally beset by banditry, and the soldiers were reasonably called for. The abbot had not anticipated a message from His Highness or, now—if one believed Tristen, and he did—the King, bidding him come to a place and a danger he had tried very hard to avoid.

The brothers shivered in modest propriety in their wet robes, scorning the tyranny of the flesh. They lit the lamp after its overset in the collapse of the tent end: they were at least good for that. The oil had not caught fire, their tent had not burned down, and the brothers thanked the gods in their constant muttering of, “Thank you, sweet gods, thank you, dear gods,” that could drive a man to desperation. The muttering, as of doves, increased in times of trouble. They blessed the lamp, they blessed the tent pole, they blessed the oil-sopped carpet that, with the mud, was going to have the lot of them looking like mendicant friars by morning.

“In the gods’ good name, sit down and be warm, brothers. Don’t press against the canvas. It makes leaks.” Emuin tucked his own dry blanket around him, and wished the lamp oil had not had attar of roses added. It gave off a cloying perfume that had the closeness of the grave to a man who was holding the grave at bay with such difficulty tonight.

The pair settled. They heard the beating of the rain on the canvas.

Thunder boomed, and the good brothers made prayers, quietly, at least.

But true gods, unlike spirits, did not permit themselves to be summoned, did not manifest at a wizard’s whim—or a priest’s—did not answer a mortal’s demand; and did not know, perhaps, mortal needs, or mortal fears. Even the Nineteen, They of Galasien, the hidden gods, were wisps in the ether, a breath, an unanswering, unanswerable riddle.

And a wizard-turned-priest began to ask himself—then what earthly good were they? Were they more or less than Hasufin? Was that what wizards prayed to, and what the Elwynim held sacred? He no longer knew, and now doubted his years of prayers and all his attempt to save the old lore.

Inéreddrin dead, Cefwyn King—and Tristen set at liberty in the midst of it: none of the news that had flooded toward him by earthly messenger and unearthly summons could give a wizard-priest peaceful dreams. He felt the danger in the ether, where Tristen’s every disturbance of that expanse of dream and substance gave advisement to the enemy which sat gathering forces at Ynefel. Every breath of wind through the insubstantial realm informed the power they least wished informed, and Tristen had no inkling what a powerful presence he was there. Tristen could not see himself—Tristen could not see the disturbance he made, could not, at least, understand that his manifestation was not ordinary, that it shouted to the heavens and drew attention. He was Sihhé. He was indubitably Sihhé, and that power was born in him—if he had been born. That power was in his bones, if he had had them shaped in anything but the womb of air and Mauryl’s will.

If he had ever personally doubted since he laid eyes on Tristen, it was only regarding the order of presence he had to deal with—not its potency.

No, Tristen was not a wizard. He did not need to be. No, Tristen did not work magic. Tristen willed things, and the ether bent, bending the earthly realm with it—even when Tristen was unaware he was doing it.

Like a young man, Tristen had reached out to the only elder he saw; or he, like an old fool, had sensed the troubled ether and reached first.

He could not now remember how it had been—but he had become ensnared, and then Cefwyn had, and after him, others, the ineffectual gods save them.

Now Tristen had begun searching the mortal earth for a force he could not master in the unearthly realm, searching—although he was certain Tristen did not know it in so many words, and likely did not think of it in anything like the way a wizard thought of it—for points of Presence in the earthly realm where the enemy was most vulnerable.

And where the enemy was consequently most powerful: unfortunately.

One went with the other.

If Tristen would not be so rash as to dare assail Ynefel itself, still there were even in Amefel places almost as fraught with the enemy’s presence.

He could name one very dangerous site without an instant’s hesitation.

The boy was on the road. He caught impressions now and again as an unskilled presence tried to keep from attracting notice and achieved—if not the opposite—at least a very qualified success.

The boy—the Shaping, the Sihhé-lord, the power that a dying and desperate master had released on an unsuspecting world, where men thought that priests could hold back the dark without being shadowed by it—was looking for answers in a physical realm that could only lead him to trouble. There were places of potency. But in very truth, there was no dark to hold back—at least—the dark that there was had no wellspring and no dividing line that this wizard had ever found. The dark that he knew was general. It was ubiquitous. It had its frontier in every soul that lived and had lived, and the good brothers yonder in their goodness were a pale, powerless nothing if he cared to look. They were all but invisible in the ether, as all but a few of the Teranthines were invisible.

Once he had thought it a refuge, once he had thought it holiness, and a sanctuary where a wizard once stained with his craft could find a lodging for his soul that the Shadows could not find or touch.

But now he began to suspect that the good brothers did not shadow the ether not because they were good, but because they had masked themselves from everything, had carefully erased their stray thoughts, had poured out their human longings, emptied themselves of desires and become so transparent an existence that they had not only ceased to be evil, they had ceased to be good. They had ceased to fight the battles of everyday life, and simply weighed nothing. Not a feather. Not a grain.

They had given up everything, until they vanished from the scale of all that mattered, having given away themselves long before any power declared the contest.

There were those who did cast a shadow in the ether. There were those whose presence could become a Place, and whose Places, however many they created in their lives and the leaving of life, were links to the physical world. Advantageously situated, they could make a power both elusive and unpredictable—like Hasufin.

He could recall a young, smiling boy whose shadow had loomed among wizards at Althalen, a Shadow trading on its child’s shape, and on human sympathy and human scruples, Mauryl had argued, when the most of them among Mauryl’s students saw only the child, and argued that its natural, childish innocence might protect them long enough to let them, through moral teaching, change its character.

Then Mauryl had said a thing which echoed frequently through his nightmares nowadays, that innocence answered no questions, nor wished to, and that a very old soul counted on their reluctance to harm the housing it had chosen. No other disguise could have gotten it to that extent through their defenses.

Most of all he recalled how a child’s body had lain still and helpless while the indwelling spirit ranged abroad in the halls of Althalen, killing men armed and unarmed, ordinary men and wizards, old and young, with no difference, up and down the halls, stifling their breath, stealing the force in them for the strength to break the bonds Mauryl had set on him.