Fortress in the Eye of Time

�From him?� He sprawled backward, legs apart, the calculated image of his student, sullen self. �Master Emuin, surely you jest.�

�I swore, no more students. Iʼll not have you acting the part. Gods, you affront me!�

�I affront you, good sir.�Whence this midnight call, with no counsel, and now my decisions affront you? Now we have dire secrets? I am not fond of being led.� He thumped one booted ankle onto the other. �I am not fond of being hastened into conclusions, nor of having advice presented me on the trembling, crumbling verge of decision, nor of being a pawn of othersʼ ambitions, which�� An uplifted finger, forestalling objection. ��of course the Teranthine Brotherhood does not possibly have, nor you within the brotherhood, nor Idrys toward me, nor, gods know, the captain of the night-guard, whatsoever, toward anyone. So I confess myself entirely nonplussed, master Emuin.�Why the book, why the secrecy, why this midnight alarum out of the hearing of my more slugabed courtiers?�

�Ah, is that why you were so prodigal of your hospitality? To confound me?�� I had rather thought it a glamor on the young man.�

It stung, that Emuin had seen that moment for what it was.

It warned him that others might have seen him bemazed.

And it made him ask himself what he had felt � still felt, when he thought about it: an affinity of the soul for an utter stranger, a young man linked, moreover, to a wizard of dubious repute and legendary antiquity. For a moment in that audience he had felt as though some misstep might take their visitor away from him, and felt as though, if he should by that chance let him go, forever after he would know he had lost the one friend his fate meant him to have.

Which was foolishness. Men were, among the chattels of which the Prince of Ylesuin had usage, the most fickle and the most replaceable. Let Emuin fall utterly from favor, as sometimes, hourly, seemed imminent, and two-score applicants would rise out of the hedges by sundown seeking Emuinʼs office and bearing their princeʼs humors far more philosophically.

So he told himself � hourly. But Emuin knew him, Emuin had no fear of him, and that, while a sin in a councillor (Emuin had been that in the court at Guelemara), was a virtue in his privy counselor and a necessity in a tutor � which Emuin still was, when mʼlord Prince needed a severe lesson read.

His fortunes bound to some wizard-foundling-apprentice with feckless trust writ all over his features?

�Iʼve no need of him,� he protested to Emuin.

�Said I�ever you had need of him?�

�I have need of advice, master grayfrock, from your ascetic and lofty height, doubtless superior to fornicating mortals. What is�this creature, why at my�doorstep, why in the middle of my�night, why bearing grammaries of unreadable ill, and why in the name of the unnameable in my�tenure in Amefel? He could have gone to the Elwynim. He could well have gone to the Elwynim. He may be�Elwynim, for what we know � and needs must come to my gates begging supper? Damn the luck, sir tutor, if luck has anything to do with it!�

�There is no violence in him,� Emuin said. �Peace, Cefwyn. I do not yet know the cipher he is, but it would be well to treat him gently. I do much doubt he is the witless creature your men believe.�Ynefel, he cried out, and�Mauryl. And your guard in an access of wit roused their captain, who, after a candleʼs time lodging this boy in the prisonʼs stench and squalor, became uneasy, roused the magistrate of the hour, and so quite rapidly they came to the staff, and to Idrys, who broke my sleep, and I, after much shorter interrogation, yours. But in all this time, save a disagreement with the gate-guards, no defense did he use, neither by hand nor by word.�

�What is he?�

�My suspicion?�

�I will take your chanciest and rarest guess at this point.�

�Maurylʼs Shaping.�

Shaping was a word that belonged to dark ruins and forests�not arriving in a manʼs own downstairs hall, not standing at his feet, looking at him eye to eye.

But it did accord, he thought with a shiver, with a face without the lines that twenty-odd years of living should have set into muscle and mouth. It could become anything � as it had varied quickly between apprehensive, or bewildered � but nothing stayed there.�That was the innocence that attracted him.

And chilled his blood now.

�A revenant.�

�So the accounts say: the dead are the source of souls.�

He rested his chin against his hand, feeling an unstoppable roused-from-bed chill, a quivering of his skin, as if � he knew not what he felt. It was not a terrible face. It was not a cruel face. It had been � childlike, that was his lasting impression.

�Are such things evil, master grayrobe?�

�Not in themselves.�

�Why?� His arm came down hard on the arm of the throne. He was disturbed, not alone for the realm, and for the guest under his roof; he was � personally disturbed that the visitor had that much moved him.

More than moved him. He would not sleep tonight. He knew he would not sleep easy for days after meeting that intimate stare � and hearing what Emuin claimed.

�Why?� Emuin echoed his question. �Why would Mauryl call such a thing? Or why would it come here?�

�Why both? Why either? Why to Mauryl Gestaurien and his mouse-ridden hall? What did the old man want, living there as he did, when the Elwynim would have received him? What does this thing want here? And why did you let me give it hospitality?�

�I gave you my guess, lord Prince. Not my certainty.�

�A plague on your guesses, Emuin! This is, or this is not � a man. Is it a man � or not?�

�And I say that if I knew all about that matter that Mauryl Gestaurien might know, I should be a very dangerous man myself. I merely caution. I by no means know.�

�And counseled me take him in, allow him that cursed book, set him upstairs from my own apartments��

�At least,� said Emuin, �if he takes wing and flies about the halls you should have earliest warning.�

There was no abating it. There was no more Emuin knew for certain, or, at least, no more that Emuin was willing to say. It was time for sober, direct questions.

�What do you advise?� he asked Emuin. �All recriminations aside, what do you advise me do, since you were so forward to bring him to me?�

�Keep him here; treat him as gently born, but keep silence about him. There are things he does not need to know. There are those who do not need to know about him. Inform His Majesty of particulars if you must, but none other. None other. And put strict limit to what order Idrys gives. Idrys does not approve this guest.�

�And do what with him, pray, in the event he does begin to fly?�

Emuin looked up from under white brows in that sidelong way that cautioned, reminding an old student that the old man was no fool. �Mauryl served Ylesuin for his own reasons. And yet did he ever serve Ylesuin at all? Or why did he turn so absolutely against the Sihh�? Mauryl is the question here, still.�

Mauryl the recluse, the incorruptible; Mauryl the murderer of his own kin; Mauryl the peacekeeper on the marches of the West. Accounts varied. Nothing in Mauryl had ever been predictable.

Neither was his death, at the last, predictable, nor, one could well surmise, was Maurylʼs last gift at all predictable � if it was indeed his last and not a wellspring of further gifts of dubious benefit.

Cefwyn let his breath hiss between his teeth. �And back to my question: if he begins to fly, or to walk through walls, what in bloody and longstanding reason shall we do with him?�