Gentle Emuin had killed a child.
And Mauryl, the Mauryl who had fostered him, had ordered it.
He stared at the wound Owl had made, blood, that smeared his fingertips: he worked them back and forth, and looked up where Owl had settled.
Wake, Owl seemed to say to him. Rule. Decide. Blood will attend either choice.
He drew a breath, looked at the solemn, shocked faces of the assembly, with the blood sticky on his fingertips… and knew that the question was Orien Aswydd.
"She won't rule here again," he told the assembly. "Cefwyn set her aside. Now I do." And as he said it he made that doom certain with all his force, all the might that was in him. Emuin turned in alarm and mouthed a caution, half lifting a warding hand, for Emuin above allothers felt the currents shift, much as if he had cast a mountain into the flow.
And half the fortress removed and upstairs, Orien and Tarien surely felt it—for something like a cry went through the very stones of the Zeide and the rock of its hill.
Owl took to his wings, and flew off across the hall to settle on the finial of the ducal throne.
"Amefel," Cevulirn said—Cevulirn, who alone of all of them but Emuin could hear that protest of the wards—"What of the child? What for it?"
He was less sure of that. On few things he was certain. On the matter of Tarien's child and Amefel, he was not.
"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 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. "—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— awareof 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."
"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. Nowhe 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."