armor, carry them into battle. Nor dared he have wagons and draft teams broken down under rushed and imprudent handling: that would be as fatal as losing them to the enemy.
He looked across at Tristen to ask what he thought…and saw that Tristen gazed as often he did toward the west, toward Marna.
Toward Ynefel, Cefwyn thought. Now the nature of Tristen’s lapses seemed transparent, which they had never been to this degree before, with walls to mask their direction.
“If it will satisfy you,” Cefwyn said to him, fearing that attention of his to the west, “once we have settled with the Elwynim matter, next spring, I shall agree we must concern ourselves with Ynefel. So I plead with you, my friend, as you swore to be my friend, delay what you can delay. Sovrag’s boats can provide you and what forces you need a safe way to Ynefel, if go you must. No walking that end of Marna. You may have done it once under Mauryl’s protection, but never think of going there alone. Never think of leaving us. I shall stand by you at your need—but now I have need of you. You are my eyes toward that enemy. If you fail me I am blind. Do you understand that?”
Tristen looked at him, lifted his hand to the northwest, between forest edge and plains. “He will meet us before Emwy.”
It was possible Tristen had heard nothing of what he said.
“Are you certain?” he asked Tristen.
“Yes,” Tristen said distantly. Then: “Yes. I have feared so all day. Now I know. I wish not.”
It meant Tasien’s annihilation, almost certainly. Cefwyn’s heart sank, and he glanced aside to see who rode in hearing of them. Idrys was. Ninévrisë was speaking with one of the Guelen guards he had assigned to guard her, and could not have heard.
“More of Mauryl’s visions?”
Tristen shook his head. “Mine, sir.”
“Is Lord Tasien fallen, then?”
“I think he is, sir. I feel it certain. I have feared it for hours.”
The news was maddening. He did not want to believe it.
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“Then Aséyneddin has crossed the river. That is what you are saying.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Don’t say it to Her Grace, and don’t say it to anyone yet.
Even Uwen. Not until I say so.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Across the river.—Then, damn it.—” He looked where the scouts had ridden over the hills to the south. “Where is Lord Cevulirn?—And when will we find him?” he asked, with his father’s irreverence for visions and, still, a hope that wizardry would fail or find exception. “Vision me that vision and save my scouts the hazard.”
Tristen gave a visible shiver, a drawing in of the shoulders.
“No. I would not venture to say, lord King. I don’t see them.
But I do see a shadow on the land…westward and north, that is not good. That is not at all good.”
“A shadow. Wizardry, you mean.”
“It is, sir. But it’s all the same a Shadow.”
Cefwyn scanned the western horizon and saw nothing. “You can see bad news but not good? Is that it? Or what do you see?”
“Things that a wizard touches. My enemy is with Aséyneddin.
He is at Ynefel.”
“One’s at the bridge, one’s in the heart of Marna! How can he be two places at once?”
“I don’t think he’s at Althalen. I hope, sir, I do hope for Althalen to be safe. If it isn’t—”
“If it isn’t, we’re destined to camp there tonight. We rely on camping there and passing that place without being engaged. If there was a possibility of this, you might have told me before now!”
“I would have told you, sir, if I thought he was there. I don’t think so. And going overland is far slower.—But where Lord Cevulirn is, I don’t know.”
Wizards. It was enough to give a man pause. And when Tristen was rapt in thought he forgot all instructions of protocols, all agreements, all that was between them—he
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simply told what he believed; and increasingly he did believe it.
He had a sudden vision of himself, a man of practical Marhanen blood, pursuing Tristen’s will-o’-the-wisp enemies across two provinces of ancient superstitions, elder gods, and demonstrable wizardry.
Scratch an Amefin and wizard blood bled forth. And if he fought for Amefel against what tried to claim its ancient soil—it was most reasonably a war of wizards. By his own choice, a Sihhë standard, black and ominous, fluttered beside the Marhanen Dragon. By his own choices the Amefin rural folk, emboldened by the fall of the Aswydds and the impotence of their own lords, had flocked to Tristen’s standard. He could bear with that.
But in Guelessar and the northern provinces were honest and good and loyal men who would shrink in horror from what their King had allied with, even if their King won.
If their King lost a province—and retreated into the heartland of Ylesuin, with sorcery let loose in Amefel and the Elwynim in its employ—he would have failed his oath to his own people.
The wailing of slain children had haunted his grandfather to his dying hour. In the gods’ good name—what might haunt him hereafter?
“A rider,” Tristen said, and he saw it at the same moment: a scout coming back full tilt down the hills toward them.
More bad news? he asked himself. He braced himself for it.
Idrys swung closer, clearly seeing it. Gwywyn and Ninévrisë
came near.
The man—of the Prince’s Guard, as all their scouts were of that regiment—slid to a walk alongside them. “Your Majesty,”
the scout breathed, while his horse panted and blew. “Your Majesty,—dust on the south—all along the south, m’lord. My companion rode ahead to see.”
“Fall back and find Qwyll’s-son. Have him inform the ranks.
Pass it back by rider.”
“Yes, m’lord.” The man drew rein and fell back in the line.
“It may be Cevulirn,” Cefwyn said. “That would be very good news.”
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“Certainly better than such sightings on our north,” Idrys muttered. Idrys had been close on Tristen’s other side, close enough to have heard his exchange with Tristen. And Idrys believed bad news before good. Always.
“Coming from the south, they must be ours,” Ninévrisë said.
Tristen said, solemnly, “They are ours, my lady. But we are to their north. Best they be certain who we are.”
Tristen said such a thing. Something else had clearly unfolded to him, in only so few days.
Possibilities unfolded to the Marhanen King, too.
What if it were the writer of the Art of War Mauryl had brought back? His mentor of that long-ago text, riding unguessed beside him?
It was too cursed poetic. And, no, Tashânen was an engineer and a strategist.
He recalled their last council before the barons had left. He said to himself as they rode side by side looking for that encounter, Tristen knows strategy—Certainly he knows the sword.
Uwen says he knows the lance, that he will ride Dys, and that he has no doubts of him. The Sihhë brought the heavy horses with them to the land: how should he not know them?
Tristen counseled us no earthen walls. He spoke out against fortifications. Everyone will die, Tristen said, and we didn’t heed him—when he was counseling us, damn it, on the one answer I could never find in Tashânen’s book, the one question I most wanted to know, and I didn’t hear what he was saying.
Tashânen didn’t write it in his book because the Sihhë of his age knew that answer. It was the art of siege Tashânen invented—against enemies who used other Sihhë tactics as a matter of course. Tashânen had all prior lore—books burned at Althalen—and why should he write down the use of magic innate in his kind? Other texts would have held that—whatever a man’s born with, there’s always a cleverer way to use it: that would have been his object in writing: what he wrote 715
down was the new thing, not the old. Why should we expect a Sihhë or
any man to write down the obvious?
What held me from hearing Tristen?
Are we all so blind? Or is it another blow his enemy has struck us, through Orien Aswydd?
What did one do, he went on asking himself, without that knowledge innate (Emuin had said it) in Tristen’s kind?
Strike at flesh and blood? That he could do. The other possibilities—he did not even see. And in his blindly following a Sihhë
text, he had not regarded Tristen’s warning—he had seen only the dangers of Tristen confronting him in council; and in his infatuation with Sihhë skill in war, he had sent men to an untenable, fatal position against wizardry.
He had let his bride’s kinsman make a deadly mistake. Tasien had acted the best he knew against his enemy, in the absence of any trust of Guelen kings. But as King, he certainly could have argued with Tasien with more force, rather than accept Tasien’s plan as he had done and (gods forgive him) embroider it with his own boyhood fancies.
Trenches in the herb garden. Good blessed gods, why had he not used his wits?
But without sending Emuin, or Tristen, neither of which was possible—what could he have done against a wizardous attack?
What could he do against the one he knew was coming at them all?
And how did he break the news of Tasien to Ninévrisë?
In a plume of sunlit dust the remaining scout from the south came riding up over the swell of land. “The Ivanim! ” that man called out as he came near. “I saw their banners, and the sun on their helms!”
Even as that rider came, the sun was picking up color in the west, and they all could see a second plume of dust on that horizon, farther away, behind the first.
“That is Umanon,” Cefwyn speculated aloud, his heart lifting.
Idrys, quick as his own thought, pulled back in the column and gave orders, and two more scouts immediately rode away 716
from the column and overland in that direction, this time to welcome the lostlings in.
“Thank the gods,” Cefwyn breathed, certain now that they had found at least two of their missing contingents.
Within the hour the riders from the south had crested the rise along the road, a rolling tide of the swift-moving Ivanim light horse, and behind them, their slower-moving allies of Imor, a dark mass of riders and warhorses at lead. The banners were plain in the sunset, and Tristen drew a deep, glad breath when he saw it.
“Two of them,” Cefwyn said in Tristen’s hearing. “Now, gods save us, if now Pelumer will come in…”
Olmern had perhaps succeeded, Tristen thought when Cefwyn made that wish. He could in no wise tell for certain, but he felt none of the hostile influence to the northeast, and that said to him that their enemy had not gone that way. The way they had left open to Aséyneddin had cost them dearly, those two bridges eastward of Emwy district, which Cefwyn had hoped would make an incursion from the forest-edged west the only answer if Aséyneddin wished to cross quickly into Amefel. Tasien was gone. The Elwynim had crossed and committed themselves. No second rebel force could threaten Henas’amef without coming by way of Emwy, and without passing them.
That portion of the plan was, he hoped, working. Cefwyn had designated reciprocal messengers that daily came to Henas’amef from the east reach of the river, upstream, and one would have reached Henas’amef last night. After that, Efanor should have sent the regular relay out north to the river and sent another courier west after them, bringing Cefwyn word of the riverside and Sovrag.
Cefwyn’s system of messengers, Tristen thought, was very well done; it had freed him personally of the necessity to try to reach Emuin, which was the most dangerous thing he could do short of speaking to Hasufin himself. Cefwyn’s 717
couriers had gone out from the army directly north this morning, to reach Sovrag directly and to bear Ninévrisë’s second messages of reassurance and encouragement to the Amefin riverside villages, jointly with Cefwyn’s, to assure them they were not abandoned, that Sovrag was not a threat to them, and to urge the villages to report to them directly overland in the now remote chance Lord Aséyneddin should cross somehow—on that matter, the defense of the province might have turned.
But now the bonfires they had lit on the hills had brought them Cevulirn and Umanon, and that was another wonder of Cefwyn’s forethought: the simultaneous muster of the barons and their being able to join Cefwyn’s column on the move had all relied on measuring distances, which Cefwyn had done in advance, and knowing very accurately how fast the various forces could move, granted they saw the signal fires and moved at all.
If one had no way into the gray space, it was a very clever way of doing things. It was a way of getting around wizards—and it was important to know how that could be done.
He marked it always to remember, and never to become complacent in what he saw.
And the gray place was constantly urging at him. It was full of shadows and lights and whispers. Now with the sun taking the light from the land and making the hills gold, and with their allies riding toward them, he felt that the missing pieces that had to exist had now come together.
But he did not have that feeling of inevitability about Pelumer that he had had all along about Cevulirn’s coming and Umanon’s. Marna’s dark edge was Pelumer’s route—and he had no wish to look deeply or long in that direction.
Cevulirn came riding up in the sunset with the White Horse flying, leading his own warhorse with him, as every man in his company had a remount with him and his lance and shield and a small amount of provisions packed on the warhorse’s saddle.
That was the way the southern horsemen had done forever, 718
constantly changing from mount to mount. So Cefwyn advised him as the riders came, and it unfolded in Tristen’s thoughts that it had indeed been that way, that on their longest marches they had two and even three horses in their string. He saw it so vividly that a Name almost came to him, and he felt comfortable with the Ivanim, and knew their thinking, for reasons he did not clearly know.
Cefwyn told Cevulirn his place in line and his place in camp from memory—a precedence in line behind the Amefin, whose province it was, and ahead of Umanon, whom he had beaten in—Cefwyn told Cevulirn where his warhorses should be, and where his wagon was and where his tents would be, which they had brought for him.
“Your Majesty leaves no work for the scribes,” Cevulirn said with the mild lifting of a brow. It had seemed a point of amazement among the barons in all the preparations that Cefwyn did remember such things in very certain detail.
“Join us this evening!” Cefwyn wished him in sending him off.
“We’ll take a cup of wine together—and explain this haste!”
Umanon also came riding up, his men traveling in the same style as the Ivanim, leading a contingent of heavy horse.
“Majesty!” Umanon called out. “A short stay at home. I’d scarcely built a fire in the hearth!”
“I shall explain tonight!” Cefwyn said. “But things are as well as they can be. Thank the gods for your meeting us. We’re in good order, with you here, Your Grace! See me when first you’ve set your tents!” And Cefwyn told Umanon the numbers and place of his camp as well, after which Umanon rode off to his assigned place in the order, and to claim his personal baggage.
The day had worn hard on Cefwyn. He had started the day as he had started yesterday, riding strongly, but now despite the good news of a moment ago, he seemed to Tristen to be clinging to his courage and to his composure even at Danvy’s sedate walk. Danvy had given a couple of quick steps as horses came up to him, and Cefwyn had corrected that, but at a price.
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“Not far,” Tristen said to him, the only encouragement he could offer, for if there was one road in the world he knew it was this one and if there was one thing he could now sense like his own bonfire in this night, it was Althalen.
It was deepest dusk when they came to their projected camp, in that area of the road respecting Althalen’s perimeter and across the
road from any accidental encroachment on what Cefwyn called the cursed precinct. Tristen was very glad, himself, to get down. The wagons were yet to come and the least essential ones, with the units of horse that guarded them, would be arriving long into the night.
“Set the unit standards with their units,” Cefwyn called out, pointed warning against any such carryings-on as yesterday night. “Bid everyone keep their standards in good order. From this place on, there is danger of the enemy at any hour!”
Ninévrisë had not gotten off her horse, and Tristen walked over to see if she needed help; so did Cefwyn, at the same time.
“My lady?” Cefwyn said.
“My father’s grave is here,” she said. “I wish to ride just to the edge of the ruin, my lord, to stay only for a moment, if I can do it without endangering the camp. But I feel—I wish to, my lord.”
Tristen stood by, having been ready to offer Ninévrisë a hand down. He knew that Cefwyn did not want to grant such a request, and that Cefwyn out of his willingness to please Ninévrisë
would get back on Danvy and take a guard and go, though he was in pain. He would not send Ninévrisë only with an escort.
“I shall go with you,” Cefwyn said, with never a protest.
“My lord,” Tristen said. “My lord King, this is a place where I can see things others may not, and defend against things others cannot. I can take Uwen and my guards.”
Cefwyn looked at him, seemed to consider, and let weariness and gratitude touch his face. “Half yours,” he said. “Six 720
of the Dragon Guard. We’ve tents to raise.—And be careful. In this matter, I trust you as no other, but for the gods’ own sake, for the gods’ sake and on your oath to me, be careful.”
“Yes, sir.” He went to get Petelly and gave orders to Uwen, glad that Cefwyn had been reasonable—but most of all feeling now in his heart, as clearly as he saw the sun sinking, that Ninévrisë’s request was both urgent and advised.