If there was wizardry in Tristen it must be the sort to rob sane, preoccupied men of their better sense, and to convince otherwise sensible and experienced gate-guards that here was the most innocent urgency they had ever met—on the King’s business at that. If he had ordered Tristen’s escape himself, he could not have found more plausible stories than the various guards had raised in their defense, and he could only hope that Marhanen cloak did not prove a source of danger in a countryside where armed soldiers on the King’s business went in bands for safety. That was the kind of law Heryn Aswydd had kept in his province, and peace was fragile most of all with Heryn Aswydd’s corpse and six others hanging at his own south gate and no lord at all in power over the Amefin.

Meanwhile Uwen Lewen’s-son, on little sleep and in an agony of failed responsibility, had taken to the road on one of Cevulirn’s better mounts with a captain and an elite fifty of Cevulirn’s light cavalry in search of Tristen. And thank the gods, the lower town guards, damnably lax in other points, swore convincingly that Tristen had left specific word that Ynefel was not his destination.

So where did Tristen know to go in the world, if not to Ynefel? There was Emuin, for one, and in a contrary direction from all the others. The best information they had said that he had gone west, and that only left Althalen, Emwy, and Elwynor, a pretty choice of troubles.

Ask whether lying and evasion were, like swordsmanship and horsemanship, two more lordly arts Tristen had unfolded from his store of amazements. Not that it surmounted the shocking ills of treason and regicide and the consequences that Tristen had seen around him in the last two days, but it was disturbing, all the same, that Tristen had committed such acts so masterfully and so successfully.

And his own restless staring out the window this morning after such events, for a view of, above the wall and the surrounding roofs, gray-bottomed clouds which at least were showing blue sky between, did nothing to ease the ache in his leg or the impatience he felt. He wanted to reach Tristen himself, to have a word with him apart from the officers and the allies, to know what reasoning had prompted Tristen to have left—and to ask what Tristen believed he might do, given what little Tristen knew of the attack against him or the doings up by Althalen.

He paced, bereft of further information on which to decide anything.

He leaned on a stick which he refused to use before outsiders, and it had already made his hand sore and did nothing to mend either the pain in his leg or his ill temper. Walking hurt; it was a different hurt from the throb of the limb while he sat, and that was the variance an ill-humored fate gave him on the first day of his reign over a divided realm, a dukeless province, and a pious brother he had as lief, if Efanor crossed him this morning, drown in the nearest deep well.

“Go back to bed,” Idrys said first, when Idrys decided to report in, red-eyed and dusty.

He did not answer Idrys. He was not in a humor to be chided to bed and he was not in a humor to be told, as he could guess by Idrys’ face, that there was no better news in the search after Tristen.  “I take it there is no news of him,” Idrys said.

“I do not have to tell the Lord Commander. You know there isn’t.”

“Lewen’s-son won’t give up. I have every confidence.”

“Would that I had.”

“Would Your Majesty care for other news?”

“Is it better?”

“I have searched for this name Hasufin,” said Idrys. “For some few hours. I have made brief inquiries of the annalists and the archivists, rousing them from their beds, and I and my most reliable clerks have run through, in short, the Zeide archives, the local Quinalt library ... and the Guard records. Then with notes in hand, and with a fair familiarity with the Red Chronicle of Guelen record, I visited the Bryaltines, reckoning the Amefin’s local breed of priests might recall items our godly and proper Guelenish Quinalt has forgotten. And, m’lord King, as you may see, I did my own searching.” Idrys brushed at his doublet in distaste. “I am coated in age and cobwebs.”

“And gained something? Damn it, get to the point.”

“There are Hasufins woven through the warp and weft of the genealogies I plumbed—including, in the Bryalt Book of Kings, one Hasufin, called Heltain, a wizard, rumored as some sort of spiritual antecedent, or, indeed, namesake, of Aswyn, the fourteen-year-old brother of Elfwyn Sihhé of the Guelen Red Chronicle, which, let us recall, our guest had in his hands.”

“And had no time to read. If you believe he made up this tale­—”

“By no means. I merely point out he has an interest in the old accounts himself, and one wonders for what he was searching.”  “To the point, crow!”

“I’m arriving just now. And I confess I was surprised to see Hasufin as a name of such surprising persistence in the Bryalt accounts—even back hundreds of years. As, let me say, I found several Mauryls of various repute before the records go back into the old Galasite tongue—for which, m’lord, you must obtain a priest. There are Bryaltine clerks who claim to read that language fluently, but without your orders I declined their assistance. It would have necessitated questions and names named which I did not judge you wished made a matter of gossip.”

“The hell with the Bryaltines. Tristen. Is there anything naming him, while you were about it?”

Idrys heaved a sigh, then, leaned on the back of a chair and ducked his head a moment, evidently gathering patience to deal with an impatient and very short-tempered lord; and Cefwyn repented his curt tone. Idrys had been as sleepless as he.

“No, my lord King,” Idrys said, “I found Triaults, Trisaullyns, Trismindens, and Trisinomes, all married into four Sihhé dynasties, but not a single Tristen under any spelling, in any age, in any chronicle, although I certainly do not claim to have made any exhaustive search in my few hours. I would say the old man plucked his Shaping’s name from his own fancy—or out of Galasien’s long history. Who can know? In any case, I no longer think Elfwyn is at issue. I fear Mauryl sent us a soul far less gentle.”

“Yet this Hasufin supposedly at Ynefel is one certain name we do have in this business. You can remember accounts I can’t. I wasn’t born until Father and Grandfather were speaking to each other only through the Lord Chamberlain. If they weren’t shouting. I had nothing of the gossip after the event. What are you looking for?”

“If,” Idrys said, “if the Hasufin of our Sihhé’s mysterious dream is indeed at Ynefel, those records we cannot possibly find without a perilous venture to Ynefel itself, where Lord Tristen swore—reliably, let us hope—he was not going. But the matter that set me so urgently searching last night—the name Hasufin has the ring of Amefel about it, and, it turns out, by the Bryalt record, it might even be a kinship name for one of the Sihhé of Althalen, though I am hard put to know how a dead prince signifies, or how he could overwhelm Mauryl. But—to confound matters further, the name turns out to be as prevalent as Mauryl’s in the Bryaltine records—which I must say are anecdotal and fragmentary-but,” Idrys said in some satisfaction, “many of that name are reputed to be wizards, all supposedly descended of a very early Hasufin Heltain who studied with someone, yes, my lord King, someone named Mauryl, reputedly in a district which the Bryaltine record called Meliseriedd—a name I’ve never heard attached to it, but I hazard a guess the district it describes is Elwynor. At least it lay to the north of the river. In delving into civil records the one wisdom I have learned is to join no names into one name until I see proof.”

“But it is well possible that our Mauryl is all one Mauryl. So is it not possible that this Hasufin Heltain is one man?”