“From your own father! From the Bloody Marhanen! And Tristen kept you and me alive because he himself wanted a hold on your father.”
“I don’t think he needed that one.”
“Little you know.”
“I know my father. I know black from white. And I now know you.”
“Oh, there was a great deal of gray in that decision, indeed there was.
You really should learn to live in that territory. It’s safer, for the likes of you, neither fish nor fowl, neither Man nor Sihhë. A royal goatherd— what a life for you! You’ll inherit the goats. You’ll deliver cheese and milk to the duke’s table like a good fellow. Oh, damn your soft heart, boy, don’t be blind to those who have everything to gain if you bow the head and tend your goats . . . and that includes Crissand and his whelps. Now you bear his ring, don’t you? What a day!”
He felt the ring burn on his fi nger. He should have left, but he knew she would at least give him her arguments, dark as they were: they were often the dark side of truth, and curiosity and dread alike pinned him fast where he stood.
“Tell me,” she said next, “how did you like your legitimate brother?”
“Well enough,” he said, defiant, and knew instantly that staying to enter her next argument was an utter mistake. His mother regarded him at the moment like a morsel on a plate— and said nothing more. He ached to defend Aewyn, and she didn’t even attack.
“And Tristen,” she said. “Sweet, dear Tristen. Did he teach you magic?”
“He is magical.” His heart beat at his ribs like a creature trapped. “You know that.”
“And did he give you advice?”
Wilder and wilder, that heartbeat. Vision and a word he had utterly forgotten. Did she know how he had failed? “Perhaps he did. Or not.”
“Dear, dear. My son has learned to lie.”
“I’m not sorry for coming here,” he said. “I came to pay my respects and to tell you I’m here, and under what name. Since you gave it to me, I thought in all courtesy you should know. I’ll be going now.”
“You live at their pleasure. You have a right to all of Amefel, and they house you in a hovel with goats.”
“It’s my choice.”
“Fool, it never was your choice. You have the blood to rule, and no priests 2 6 0
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should dare drive you out like a whipped dog. Was it pleasant, the ride home from Guelessar? Was it pleasant to have the people in town look at you and know the bastard was banished again? Damn them! Damn them all! Why aren’t you angry? You bow, you respect that upstart lord downstairs. This is your province, and you have no knowledge what’s inside these walls and under these stones! Open your eyes, boy, and see what you could have, if you only claimed what’s within these stones!”
Vision, Tristen had said. And now his mother challenged him with riddles, and a dreadful presentiment flitted past the back of his mind. Stones, the word echoed, and his mind saw the masonry downstairs. But he daren’t look, daren’t look at what vision his mother could give him if he let her. He stepped back, felt after the wall, and the door.
“That’s right, that’s right,” his mother mocked him. “Turn your back on your power. Even the old granny’s held you prisoner, so, so easily. You’re so biddable. But I tell you I will see my son sit on the throne of the Aswydds! I will see him raise whom he will raise and throw down whom he will throw down, and more than that, far more than that, Elfwyn Aswydd! No one will whisper behind your back in that day!”
That last lanced through like a knife, right to a sore spot. He wanted not to have people whispering ill about him, he wanted that very much, and in that moment something in him moved very unpleasantly, touching those depths of anger he had never believed he had.
Anger, Lord Tristen had said. Anger moved him and made his choices.
He had thought he was humble and willing to stay what he was.
Vision, he said to himself, and clenched his hand on Crissand’s ring, turning about again. He saw his mother suddenly not through a son’s eyes: he saw her not as beautiful, but as someone who had been beautiful, and now faded, a blowsy autumn beauty around a dark and potent heart— he could see it, a dark glow that touched a power he had no wish to use.
“Damn you!” she cried, furious with him, as if she saw something as terrible in him. She strode two steps across the carpet, struck him, and abruptly jerked her hand away, with a cry of pain. “Him!” she cried, cradling a wounded hand. “Him!”
He had no idea what she meant, if not Lord Tristen himself. He found the door and he battered on it, as when he had been a child she could chase him from this room in tears.
The door opened. The guard was there. He exited the room . . . soon to forget the detail of everything she said, he knew: he always did; but the rawness of upheaval she engendered in his heart would linger for days.
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“You will not be his!” Tarien screamed after him. And the door shut, and the bar thumped down.
He avoided the guard’s eyes, nor did the guard ask questions, only brought him downstairs again, where Paisi sat on the stone base of a column, waiting for him.
Paisi usually asked him how it had gone. This time Paisi asked nothing at all, only got up and walked with him down the hall, toward the daylight.
Faster and faster he walked, and Paisi with him.
When he was out in the cold and the daylight again it was no better.
“I shouldn’t have gone,” he said.
“Come on, then,” Paisi said. “We’ll get the horses, an’ we’ll go home.”
Paisi didn’t say a thing about the smith or the apples. Nor did he want to delay to run those errands. He knew how most of the things his mother said could fly right out of his head before the sun set, and he wanted to go to Gran and tell her what he had heard, while he could still remember enough of it to get her advice about it, or just to have her hear him, and salve the sore spots with her voice and her touch and her own spells.
Most of all he wanted to be as far from his mother as possible, as quickly as he could. He would not have believed she could possibly breach the protection he wore. He had thought because it came from Lord Tristen it would keep him safe even in her presence: it had stung her when she tried to harm him, but now he wasn’t sure of its power, and doubt itself was a weakness.
Perhaps, he thought, it hadn’t gotten through. Perhaps it had stirred something already within its protection. Perhaps what disturbed him sat in him.
He put Feiny to a trot as they cleared the town, and Paisi kept beside him, all the way to the turning point, where the road to Henas’amef forked east and west. Their way lay a little east, and just as they turned, he saw a smear of dark smoke on the eastward sky.
“I don’t like that,” Paisi said, but Elfwyn didn’t even stop that long: he laid his heels to Feiny, and sent him flying on that homeward track, Paisi coming up hard behind.
It wasn’t weather for burning brush. Snow persisted in sifting down from an ill - disposed heaven. It wasn’t such a day; yet by the time they had passed the second hill, the smoke rooted itself exactly where Gran’s house was.
Elfwyn’s heart sank, utterly. He was no rider, but he put Feiny to his utmost speed and risked both their necks, and the nearer he came, the worse it was. Gran’s whole roof thatch was ablaze, and as he came skidding to a stop in front of the gate, he didn’t stop to open it: he jumped down and climbed 2 6 2
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the fence and jumped, landing and slipping in the firelit snow. Heat melted the snow in the yard, heat billowed out at him, and when he reached the door and yanked it open, fire rushed out at him, driving him stumbling back.
Paisi seized hold of him, held him fast, and he fought to get free.
“No, no, lad, ye can’t, ye can’t, ain’t no one can go in there. Come on. She might ha’ gone out th’ shed.”
He ran with Paisi around the back, to the y
ard where the goats stood, fi relight reflecting off their slit eyes, and the geese ran this way and that to escape them, all confused. He went as far as inside the shed: the house door was shut, and fire showed in the seams of the logs that made the shed wall.
“Gran?” he cried, searching that darkness. “Gran?”
“Lad,” Paisi said, close by him. Paisi had an armful of Feiny’s tack and shoved it at him. “Get it out. Get out.”
“You get out!” he shouted— the roar of the fire made it necessary to shout, and he carried the gear out and dumped it on the snow, as Paisi rescued a load of tools— that was all they saved.
“As Gran’ll skin us if we let all burn,” Paisi gasped, his face all smeared with soot. “Get another load. Get the grain out.”
“Where’s Gran?” he asked, shaking Paisi by the arms. It was as if Paisi had an overwhelming conviction Gran wasn’t there, couldn’t be there, as if Paisi, who had always been his rock of safety, was as confused as the goats and geese. “Paisi, she’s not out here!”
Paisi turned a shocked face toward the fire, toward the house, as if it had only then come through to him.
“She ain’t,” he said, then Elfwyn took a firm grip on Paisi’s arm, to be sure he didn’t rush back in. They stood there, they and the goats and the geese, and the horses beyond the fence, while the fire roared up, coming out the door, rushing past the shutters and licking up the thatch.
“She did it,” Elfwyn said, fi nding a thread of a voice, when breath itself was hard. “She did it. The ring protected me. It didn’t protect Gran. And it doesn’t protect you.”
“The hell,” Paisi said, and Elfwyn held him harder, and they hugged each other, there being nothing else they could do. They stood there, burned on one side, frozen on the other, and shook like rabbits, until a terrible crash sent sparks flying out at them, scared the goats and geese and the horses, and stung them all into backing up. The whole center of the house had fallen inward, and the open roof shot flames to the twilight sky.
There was nothing to do but stand and watch it, arm in arm, holding on to each other.
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“She didn’t See it,” Paisi mourned. “Sure, she didn’t See it comin’. It’s a terrible end, a terrible way to go.”
“They burned the Aswydds,” Elfwyn said. He hadn’t been alive then, but his mother had told him that. “She did it. No question she did it. Him, she said . . . she hates him, and she couldn’t hit me, so she burned the house down. I dreamed she would. I just didn’t know what I dreamed.”
Paisi’s grip held his arm hard, now. “Was it fire ye dreamed?”
“The second dream was. And the third. And after.” It was hard to speak.
Smoke had made his throat raw. “I hate her, Paisi, I hate her beyond anything in the world.”
“No.” Paisi shook his head fiercely. “Ain’t good. Ain’t good. Gran’d say it ain’t good.”
“Well, she’s not able to say, is she?” He said that because he hurt, but he was sorry in the next moment because he upset Paisi, and he pressed Paisi’s head close to his. “I loved her. I loved her so much, Paisi. I didn’t know I did, but I do. She’s my gran, no matter. And when Lord Tristen comes, he’ll deal with my mother. I can’t, damn it, I can’t!”
“Can’t help Gran,” Paisi said, and wiped his arm across his face. “House was hers anyways. No good to me, was it? We just got to tidy things up an’
get the fire out. She’d hate it burnin’ on like this.”
“Have we got the bucket?” Elfwyn asked, trying for practicality.
They had, and they took turns working the windlass for the well and hauling water up, and the other would take the bucket and fling it on the fi re, bucket after bucket, starting with the herb garden that ran along the wall, and working up to the door and the windows. They worked on and on into the dark, when the interior of the house glowed and lit the pall of smoke that hung over them. They worked, and finally the fire began to sink. It was all blackened timbers by first light, black sticks thrusting up out of a heap of ash and smoking embers. That was all there was.
Paisi had burns on his hands, when gotten, neither of them was sure.
And by the time the sun was rim up on the horizon, Farmer Ost arrived, with his ox hitch and his cart.
“Who’s there?” the farmer called out as he came. “Is ever’body all right?”
And Paisi said no, Gran wasn’t, which was the first time they had said that truth to someone else.
“Gods a - mercy,” Ost said, heaving down from his cart. “I saw the fi re in the night. I should ha’ come straightway.”
“Weren’t nothin’ ye could do, by then,” Paisi said, and clapped the old man on the arm with a hand hanging shreds of blistered skin.
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“Gods, ye’re burnt.”
“Both of us,” Paisi said, and laid his other hand on Elfwyn’s back. “We done all we could. Ain’t no farm left, just the goats an’ the geese, and us and our horses. Gran’d want ye to take the goats an’ geese. Ye been a good neighbor, and ye’re first come. Far as I’m concerned, ye can farm the land, though ye must go to the duke an’ say so, which I’ll agree to. I ain’t no farmer. Never was.”
“What shall we do?” Elfwyn asked. There was no living in the goats and the geese: there never had been. It was all in Gran’s trade in simples.
“I’d say we wait,” Paisi said, “we go to town an’ we wait for him who’s comin’, an’ that’s the best thing. How else are we to feed the horses, ’cept we go to the duke an’ tell him what’s what.”
He wasn’t saying, before Farmer Ost, that there was anything but bad luck to blame, nor did he invoke Tristen by name, but Lord Tristen was, Elfwyn thought, the only choice they had. They caught the goats and geese for Farmer Ost, they told him their names— all but the youngest geese had names, at which Farmer Ost nodded and agreed— though Ost said he would come back for the geese with a proper crate: the goats would go in the cart, tied in place. Paisi threw in the tools, which were more valuable than the goats, and then, with an oddly forlorn look, tossed the bucket into the cart with the rest.
“Just fixed that damn thing,” Paisi muttered, and they went to gather up their rescued horse gear, which was mostly Feiny’s, and had to be fi tted on with burned and bleeding fi ngers.
Osten was off down the road with the goats and the tools.
“I hope he gets back after those geese,” Paisi said, as if it were a matter of ordinary business. He tried to talk in an ordinary way, but Elfwyn was in no sort of spirits to talk at all, now that they faced the ride back to Henas’amef.
I did it, he kept thinking. I did it. I made her angry. She’d already told me what she would do, and I was a fool. I brought it on.
The town guards questioned them as they came in. “What’s happened with you?” one asked, and Paisi answered, “Candle burned the house down, I guess. We’re to see the duke.”
There was a frown at that. There was, on the one hand, the evidence of wealth, in the horses, and of disaster and bad luck, in the soot that blackened both of them. But Elfwyn showed the ring on his grimy hand, and the guards immediately let them pass.
“Ye want one of us should come up wi’ ye?” the senior asked.
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“No,” Elfwyn said. “Thank you.” Nothing seemed real or right. His whole hand tingled, and yet he didn’t feel the sense of threat he was accustomed to feel: it was a furtive presence watching him.
She knew, he thought. Maybe, hurting him, she’d hurt herself— maybe gotten the pain of his burns. He didn’t know, nor wanted to go close to her, but he had no choice but go to Lord Crissand as their immediate lord, and the source of all help. He knew Paisi was right.
They rode halfway up the hill, to the Bryalt shrine, where there was a house of healing, and a fountain for washing on the public side street. They washed there, lettin
g the soot stain the water, and the lay brother who attended the place came out to provide his services.
“We have no money,” Elfwyn informed the old man fi rst of all. “It went in the fire. But you can ask the duke.”
The old man looked at them, and looked at the two fine horses, which told a different story, then shook his head and waved his hand. “You wait,”
he said, “you wait,” and he went into his little shrine. He came out with unguents and bandages, and would have tended Elfwyn’s burns fi rst, but Elfwyn insisted the man deal with Paisi’s hands, which were much worse.
He was only getting to Elfwyn’s hurts when a panting handful of the duke’s own servants showed up from the street, bringing more unguents, and two cloaks, which they refused to put on, being so dirty— “I can’t,” Elfwyn said, and by then the pain and the exhaustion all but overwhelmed Paisi, who simply sat down against the fountain rim and had his head in his hands.
He felt like doing the same.
“His Grace had a report,” the foremost servant said, “and wishes you may come up to the hall as soon as you can.”
It was what they had to hope for, on a day in which they had lost every material possession except two horses they couldn’t feed, and Elfwyn bent down, the one to make the decisions now, as Paisi had done, down at Gran’s farm.
“We have to get up and go,” he said, his head close to Paisi’s, his bandaged hand on Paisi’s shoulder. “I’ll help you get up. When we get up there, there’ll be a place to stay, a roof over our heads, and whatever we need. The duke has sent his own servants down. I think the gate - guards or the priest must have sent word up the hill. Paisi, can you stand up?”
Paisi managed it, and with the servants’ help, and the priest’s, they got onto the horses and rode up the hill and through the gate to the stables.
There they turned the horses over to His Grace’s stablemaster and limped on into the scullery, where His Grace’s own physician came down to see to 2 6 6
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them, and the chief of his servants came to see they had drink enough, and a little watered wine, and warm water to wash in, besides new clothing.