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"I say what I can," he answered Cevulirn.

"So what does His Grace think is coming down on us?" Pelumer asked. "We've Marna on our borders, and an uneasy neighbor it always is, but this winter nothing goes right near it… fires die, bowstrings break, men who know the paths lose their way. Is something coming, the like of what we saw this summer?"

"Not only Marna," Sovrag said. "Haunts here. The servants in the halls is saying there's haunts in the downstairs and a cold spot right next the great hall—and in sight of all of us ye went into the dark and fortress of dragons.html

come out with that owl at that very spot, did ye not, Amefel? Spooks in Marna I can swear to, and so can my neighbor here who sailed in with me. We come here to fight Tasmôrden. So what are we makin'

war on? I ask the same question. Is it Lewen-brook all over again?"

Emuin, too, had heard that shriek through the stones. In him was no fear of haunts in the hall, only a calm assessment that, yes, there was risk.

And it was his assessment.

And all these men knew now what sided with them, and if they were not willing to face what arrayed itself against them, they above all others, knew what it was to face it—they had stood on Lewen held.

He did not count any man in this hall as other than brave.

And oh, he missed Crissand's presence now—missed the assessment of the other presence who might read the gray space and steady him.

"You want to know what we make war on," he answered Sovrag's question. "And I wish there were a simple answer. I don't know what may happen. I know what I have to do. Tasmôrden claims the banner of Althalen."

That dismayed them. No, they had not known.

"Well," said Sovrag, "that man's a fool, ain't he?"

There was a small breath of laughter, a relief, in the hall.

"The camp at the river is secure," Cevulirn said in his quiet, customary calm. "The roads are not so badly drifted. The grain supplies are secure. Our enemy has resources. We trust Your Grace has better. Your Grace proved the stronger at Lewenbrook… and will again."

"I've no easy feeling," he said honestly. Among Guelenfolk he had so carefully tried to be like everyone else; but these, his allies, had drawn away all the concealment and spoken to him frankly until now he felt compelled to give them all he knew, an exchange of honesty, a revelation so private and so profound in this room it was all but painful. "None from the riverside nor anywhere about, either. I can usually hear things if I listen hard, and there's only Earl Cris-sand, who's chosen to ride out that way, but it worries me. Everything along that road worries me, and I wish he may come back safely."

"Does Your Grace see any stir out of Elwynor?" Pelumer asked.

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"—Counting that the owl might, as't were, fly abroad."

"Where Owl goes I don't myself know. Nor the pigeons." They saw the birds as spies, he was aware, and were wrong in that, attributing to Owl what he might learn from the gift. But that Owl guided him in his dreams, and that his dreams were less fair than the condition of the land he knew around him… that he still kept secret until he knew what to make of it. "I don't know their number, daily at Althalen, but I know it's defended. Aeself and his men have my leave to guard the camp, and they do; and Drusenan guards Modeyneth."

"Nothing's troubled them," said Cevulirn.

"Not that I know. None of Tasmôrden's men have tried the bridges that I know, either. And Tasmôrden himself is still in Ilefi-nian, but a great many who survived have left it and come toward our border villages. This I'm sure of."

A silence had attended his words. It persisted, a little fear, and a hopeful confidence.

"And Your Grace knows this," Pelumer said, the third attempt on his secrecy.

"I know," Tristen said, more than knowing—
aware
of the gift, though a very small one, in Pelumer himself, and Pelumer's asking as an uncertainty perhaps keenly self-directed.

"Far less a trouble than riders and horses," Sovrag said under his breath.

"Is Your Grace ever mistaken?" Umanon asked: Umanon did not have a shred of the gift, the only one among the lords who had not the least glimmering of it.

"Yes," he said, "I've made mistakes. A great many of them. But not so many now."

"Wizardry or magic," Emuin said, "alike has its weaknesses, and worst when one commits one's entire plan to them. Lean on a single staff . . . and another wizard or some traveling tinker can tip it right aside in a heartbeat. That there are more settlers at Althalen, yes, that's so, and he knows, does His Grace, who put them there. That they're a resource, yes, I have no doubt. That they're any sort of an answer to Tasmôrden and his army, no. If they were strong enough to fight him, they'd not have lost Ilefínian in the first place."

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"But the weather," Pelumer said. "There's some that have weather-luck… as the Sihhë Kings had. Is that so? And that great storm and the Aswydds—was that in Your Grace's intentions?"

"I wished good weather for us," he said, keenly aware that the land lay deep in snow, and that at this very moment Crissand struggled through a windblown drift, remnant of the Aswydds' storm, leading a strange horse, fearful and berating himself for his plight.
Now
he heard the thought in Crissand's heart—or perhaps Crissand had heard him a moment ago. "I didn't wish the storm, no, and I don't think Orien could."

"Then who?"

"I don't know. It might have just needed to snow. The weather's like that. It lasted a fair time, but whether the snow would have its way or just what turned it, I don't know. I think I can turn the weather good again. But so very much has happened since yesterday I haven't wanted to confuse things further."

"Wise notion," Emuin muttered.

"It can snow a while," Pelumer said, "so long as it snows hard in Elwynor."

"If you enter on that," Emuin muttered, "be advised of the danger.

Wish for good."

"Pray for it," said Umanon, the Quinalt among them.

"That, too," Emuin said, laying a hand to the Teranthine sigil he wore. "Prayers. Wishes. Many of them. Candles by the gross. Gods bless all of us."

Gods remained a mystery to Tristen, but no one had flinched from the questions or the answers.

And he had never depended on mastering the weather.

"The granaries are full," he said. "I can't say whether the river may freeze; but we have the wall at Modeyneth if it lets the enemy across.

I can't say whether Tasmôrden may turn east or south, but there's Cefwyn to one side of the hills and us to the other, and when the weather does serve, we'll not receive an attack: we'll bring one."

"And camp that night in Elwynor!" Sovrag shouted out. "There's the word! In Elwynor!"

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"In Elwynor," others echoed, and,
In Elwynor
became the word throughout the hall.

Then Owl let out an eerie cry that came from every place and no place. Some laughed nervously. Umanon blessed himself.

Tristen wished the recreant bird back to him, and Owl plummeted down and settled onto his arm, turning his head backward to look at the assembly.

He had intended to quiet Owl and make him less a disturbance.

But he doubted his effort had had that effect.

As for the lords' wishes for the weather to improve, he hoped, no, wished with all his might for fair skies and a warm wind out of the south—and he wished that Cefwyn might begin to move against Tasmôrden sooner if the weather bettered itself.

It was time. It was indeed time.

And Sovrag was right: a camp just the other side, by the riverside and still within the compass of his orders not to undertake to win the war, could discomfit Tasmôrden.

More than that, considering rumors of internal weakness in the steady arrival of fugitives at Althalen… he hoped his disturbance at the edge of Elwynor might search out the hollow heart in Tasmor-den's power, the ones only marginally loyal to the usurper, most in fear for their lives. Those Elwynim who would turn again and swear to Ninévrisë Syrillas as liege lady might in such a presence find a place to stand, and Tasmôrden then would find his strength melting away, as the commons found the Lady Regent more to their liking.

In point of fact, it was not alone the weather he wished to change, and had no compunction at all about wishing Elwynim to serve Ninévrisë Syrillas. She had the right to their allegiance, and the good heart to mend the land after its years of war and waiting. There could be no better fate for the Elwynim.

"Time, then," he said aloud, "time for us all to set to work."

So the lords agreed. They were pleased when they left. He had accomplished that.

He remained seated a moment, Owl spreading his broad wings and settling claws into his flesh. "Go," he wished the recalcitrant bird, and fortress of dragons.html

encouraged him with a toss, but Owl only moved to his hand, and drew blood, and clung.

"You were very plain, young lord," Emuin advised him, neither approving nor disapproving. Emuin had stayed, along with Uwen; and Lusin and his men. "Some of your army might be afraid. Not the great lords, perhaps, but some of your ealdormen looked green as new apples."

"Cefwyn says I'm a poor liar." Wind brushed his cheek, distracting him with a flap of wings as Owl flew up to his other favored perch, up on the cornice. "When should they discover the danger, master Emuin? On the field?"

"And what will you? When will you make up your own mind?"

"To what?" He was genuinely bewildered.

Emuin's glance followed Owl's course, and came back to him, dark and direct under his snowy brows. "That you lead this army."

"I know I lead it."

"That you rule this province."

"The man who
should
rule is freezing in a snowdrift right now, between here and Modeyneth."

"Crissand."

"Yes, Crissand. In this one thing I'm certain. About the war itself I won't wish. I observe caution. I learn, you see, I do learn, master Emuin."

"That you do." Emuin walked a few paces to the left, and turned again. "So now the truth is out. Cefwyn's child. Gods save us. A Marhanen Aswydd. A white crow. A black dove. And ours to deal with."

"Ours. And hers." He still felt Emuin's disapproval. "I did the best I knew, bringing them here. I still think it's safest. I think it was best to tell the lords."

"Safest, yes. Safer than most dispositions."

"We could
not
send Cefwyn's son to Elwynor. Nor have him in Ryssand's hands."

"I agree. He'll be born here, under all the auspices of this place— and fortress of dragons.html

if I read the stars aright—he aims for your birth night."

"For mine." He had not remotely thought.

"Wizardry, wizardry,
wizardry
, young lord! Wizardry is an art of
time
and
place
. We have the place, we've missed the turn of the Great Year… what
time
shall we suspect is coming?"

He was appalled. It cast everything in a new and threatening light.

"And we need a midwife," Emuin said. "A woman skilled in childbirth—a woman with the gift—and proof against Orien Aswydd."

"Are there such women in the Zeide?"

"The best is in town. Sedlyn. Paisi's gran, so he calls her, though no more kin to our young jackanapes than Cefwyn is. And she may serve. The date of birth is the question. Sedlyn might help us. A child can be encouraged to come into the world, or held out of it."

He had only book knowledge of births. He sat on the ducal throne of Amefel, empowered to dispose life and death over a province.

But to change a birth, to hasten, to delay, to meddle with what a child in his very existence wanted to be—the sort of meddling Emuin proposed troubled him.

"Was I wise or unwise to obey Mauryl?" the old man asked him, apropos of no question he had asked aloud, and walked away without another word—more, left without a whisper or a breath of wind in the gray space.

No one else could be so silent, or so secret.

No one in his knowledge had done such a deed as Emuin had done—no one carried such a wound as Emuin carried, having murdered the last prince of Althalen, a child he knew… or had known. That was what Emuin meant.

And in the silence Emuin wrapped about him like a mantle, in his secret going, cloaked even from him, for the first time Tristen knew why Mauryl must have chosen this one wizard, of all the others, and sent him to kill Hasufin Heltain—for the silence Emuin could wrap about himself was so great, so deep, that he had never realized it was uncommon among wizards.

He had never truly known, in his reckless, innate magic, that not fortress of dragons.html

every wizard could tell him no.

And now that he saw into that silence, he found himself grateful for master Emuin, deeply, profoundly grateful that his first venture into the world had brought him into Emuin's hands. It seemed now no chance had directed him.

And all this time there had been a warm, soft blanket wrapped about him, protecting him, shielding him, containing him in every sense.

Now, in this moment, Emuin quietly folded it and took it away, and left him feeling the cold winds of wizardry in all its reach.

Behold the world, young lord.

Behold the choices of those who choose for others, and who hold life and death of thousands in their hands.

"Ye ain't quarrelin' wi' master Emuin," Uwen said uneasily.

"No," he said, finding it difficult even to speak in master Emuin's silence. But the mortal world went on. "He just now challenged me.

A lesson."

"A wee bit late for learnin'," Uwen said, "by me."

"He contains the Aswydds. They can't work while he holds them in. I don't know they even know it. He contains what
I
can do. I see now how much harder that is. And now he's let me go, to do what I wish to do."

A clatter startled the silence, right by him. Syllan had dropped a spear, and was red-faced, gathering it up.

Dropped, perhaps. There were small, darting movements, as the servants quietly snuffed all candles on the far side. Darkness advanced, flowed along the channels of the pavings, spread soft grays from its harsher dominion over the deep, curtained corners of the hall. It chased under tables, at the side of the hall. It divided itself and extended tendrils of dark along the joining of wall with floor, and ran between the paving stones, reminding one that 'within the wall, all was dark.