That spirit is almost as old as I, Mauryl had warned the six of them that night. My student, yes, he was that, long ago, in Galasien. He was a terror to his enemies, but mostly, most of all, Mauryl had said to them on that dreadful night, Hasufin was a despiser of all restraint. As his teacher, I set him limits he immediately disdained. I set him work that was too tedious for his artistry. I set him exercises he overleaped as irrelevant and unengaging to his ability.

This spirit ruled in Galasien. Oh, he was noble-born. He would be a king over Galasien. And as I raised up the Sihhi5 kings to bring him down, now I bring down the Sihhé because they temporized with him, and nothing less than their destruction tonight will prevent him.

Mauryl had fallen silent, then, and gazed into the fire—a younger Mauryl, he had been, with gray instead of silver about him; and much of gray Mauryl had always been, dealing in powers which he advised his students never to attempt to manage. It will stain the heart, Mauryl had said. Of the soul I do not speak: the corruption of the living foredooms the dead. We are none of us safe.

None of them, in that dreadful hour before the fall of Althalen, had dared breach Mauryl’s inner thought, not knowing for certain, but sensing that Mauryl wandered just then free of the bounds of the room. And true enough, Mauryl had come back to them with a hard face and an iron purpose.

I shall tell you, for the youngest of you, Mauryl said, and laid out for them all an incredible tale, how, journeying to the north, he had brought back the five true Sihhé-lords; how in one night of terror he had brought down the Galasieni and raised up a more potent wizard than Hasufin himself; how Mauryl had, shivering in the heart of the citadel of Galasien, helped the bright towers fall and the people perish, locked within the very stones of Ynefel, Hasufin seeking lives upon lives to increase his magic against the Sihhé-lord who bent his will against him, and Mauryl sealing all the people in the stones of the remaining tower-the Sihhé fortress, after that night: Ynefel.

And long the Sihhé kings had ruled, unnaturally long, as men counted years. After them had come four halfling dynasties still able to keep their power intact, whether by innate Sihhé magic, or by conscious and learned wizardry—until (unnatural and, to a wizard mind, fraught with danger) a Sihhé queen gave birth to a babe that died, and was alive again—a miracle, oh, indeed. But in such unhingings of natural process more things might come unhinged, and all Mauryl’s skill could not pry the queen’s mother-love (another force of fearsome potency) from a child which cast that terrible shadow in the gray. Talented, the queen maintained—and by the age of ten that child, uncatchable and clever, had murdered two of his elder brothers.

He was a spirit more precocious and more cruel thus far in his young years than, Mauryl swore, the last time this spirit had walked the earth.

This spirit remembered its skill, and its former choices, and all.., all ... moral instruction was wasted on it.

Mauryl had opened the doors of the secret chambers, that heart of Althalen in which the Sihhé housed their greatest mystery, and let the Marhanen, lords of the East, loot and burn and kill without mercy those who escaped the wizardly struggle that resulted; Mauryl had simply cared little, one suspected, that the Marhanen seized the opportunity in the opening of those doors and the theft of something the present location of which one feared to surmise.

Mauryl had persuaded the lords of the Elwynim, who had Sihhé blood in their veins at least as much as the last dynasty, not to attack the Marhanen in the persecutions that followed. Mauryl swore to them that he had not utterly betrayed the Sihhé, that a King should come of Sihhé blood and inherent wizardry—a king to whom magic should he as ordinary as breathing, as it had been to the true Sihhé, who were not Men, as Men were nowadays. And that King-to-Come would save his own.

A Man such as he was learned wizardry as best he could. A Man and a young Man beginning in the craft simply did as elder wizards bade him and tried to guard his soul from the consequences.

Now there were no elder wizards—or, rather, and more troubling still, he was eldest. Mauryl was gone and Mauryl sent him—sent him Tristen.

I think, Cefwyn’s last and pleading message to him had said, that our guest is becoming what he will be, and he remains affectionate and well-disposed. He repays loyalty with loyalty, and is a moral creature. You bade me win his love, old master, and I greatly fear he has won mine in turn. Is this wise? You ignore my letters. I have the faith of the messenger that you do receive them. Why this silence? I need your presence. I need your counsel. Come to Henas’amef and help me advise this gift Mauryl gave us.

So he came. He had been on his way when that one found him on the road. But it was too late, he began to fear. What Tristen did now, Tristen had chosen to do. He had evaded Tristen so long as he feared Mauryl’s spell was still working in him—hoping for virtue. And now in one terrible day Tristen had learned killing and fled the prospect of meeting with him in the earthly world, where he might affect his heart, and where Men under Cefwyn’s orders or his might lay physical restraint on him.

Tristen had run, whatever his reasons, toward Hasufin’s domain, for that was the nature of Althalen, running as a deer would run when the dogs were baying at its heels.

No. Not a deer. Nothing at all so defenseless as that.

Tristen was doing what was in him to do, whether by Mauryl’s Shaping or that he was moving now beyond Mauryl’s intent and toward-toward something unpredictable. Sihhé were not natural Men. However they had arisen, out of Arachis as rumor among wizards had held, or from whatever source Mauryl had called them, they were not limited to wizardry and could act without learning. The egg, as Cefwyn put it, had indeed begun to hatch, and once that happened, a man such as himself, who had learned his wizardry as an art, not a birthright, could only keep himself as securely anchored to the world as possible.

Chapter 24  

Te leg ached, a constant pain that preyed on temper, with occasional sharp pain that brought a cessation of reason, whereby Annas and the pages walked softly about the place.

There had been no sleep. None. After a late, last converse with Efanor, who had gone off to his third-floor rooms, Cefwyn had not so much as gotten out of his clothes in the hours before dawn, when Uwen Lewen’s-son had come hailing his door-guard, reporting a horse gone from the stables and Tristen out the Zeide gate.

If any other man in the Zeide had slipped the gate on any ordinary night, Cefwyn would have concluded the man was off to some merchant’s daughter. If any other lord had taken a horse from the stables he might have concluded that the man was some partisan of Heryn’s, and that his gate guards and the camp sentries that let him pass were fools.

But the guards knew this man as his partisan, Sihhé that he was, and had never questioned, never questioned Tristen’s right to take a horse from the stables or to ride out two guarded gates in succession, because Tristen wore the King’s own cloak and was known throughout the town to have the King’s friendship. If it had lacked any help in the calamity, Tristen had worn a new riding-coat which had the Tower and the Star on it, plain as plain for any gate-guard who failed to know the Sihhé and any Amefin who would for a the blink of an eye think of arguing with him.

And because, he had to admit it, he had abandoned Tristen downstairs to the care of a rank of guard that had never received the cautions the guards in the royal residences had had regarding Tristen—with Uwen dismissed upstairs, and on a night of driving rain and turn-of-season cold that had persuaded sentries at two gates to keep their noses inside gatehouses and under canvas—no one had asked the right questions, no one had challenged him, and no one had advised Captain Kerdin, who alone might have raised an objection.