"That night?"
"Before Cefwyn came down the stairs to answer mysummons, and would I'd given it earlier—or perhaps I would not." Emuin gave a wave of his hand much as if he brushed away a gnat. "We never can guess what might have been. What is, is, and that's what we know. What will be is a fine pursuit, but fraught with too damned many possibilities. Fortune-telling, I tell you, is not what it's surmised to be. But herethe child was conceived, in the very room where he'll be born—dare you call that placement utter coincidence, eh?"
"It's a fine room. It was vacant."
"Ah, yes. Of course. Perfectly ordinary. Damn, but these things fit together! Nothing out of the way at all. And on this day, and on this hour…" Emuin showed him the intersection of a half a score arcs and lines, and suddenly shuffled to another parchment. "This was the hour of yourbirth, do you see? This was Mauryl's best moment, as I reckon it, the new moon, the moon of beginnings! It was the earliest moon of spring, and I think near Mauryl's own moment: the hour of his own birth, perhaps, however long ago, or the hour when he had most to hope for success of his enterprise. This, above all others, was your hour to come back into the world… so this day may have been yours already, a natal day, a day of accession, of some auspicious moment in the life you had once. It was your point of correspondence to him, do you see? And no accident that that was so! Hence, your power in this venture! On that, Mauryl relied—as he did in our venture at Althalen, that night, that bloody night." Emuin's hand trembled, and moved on among the arcs and bird-track scribings. "There, there, was Hasufin's last death, the realm's rise; your birth; perhaps Mauryl's, all the same day! do you see? And if Hasufin had lived this long, to see this Year of Years—" Again Emuin's hand moved, to the end of the chart. "—at this hour, that midnight of Midwinter Eve, he would have worked a Working to bind the next age. He failed!"
"Did we?"
Emuin looked distraught, as if that had been the wrong question. "What do you expect of me? I'm a wizard, not born to magic!"
"Forgive me."
"But you set your seal on this age. You. Yourself. You're still here." Emuin searched amid the stack of parchments, discarding one and the other in increasing frustration, until he had disordered all of it. Then: "Aha! This. This is your answer, young lord. This is your new age. This, this dayis where we are now. And that babe—that babe of Tarien's—is on both charts, one for his conception, one for his birth. Follow this arc."
Tristen observed, such as he could, the arcane notes. They were all measures of risings and settings.
"And this is your Day in this new cycle of years, this is your beginning—" Emuin's gnarled finger traveled to an intersection. "And we have a babe about to be born. Tell me what you think the hour will be."
Tristen moved his finger toward the intersection of lines Emuin said was his own, and hesitated, for there was a double set of lines— ominously so, to his unlettered perception. He stared at that coincidence of lines, with not a notion in the world what the numbers signified, or which was which, but all that was within him telling him there was something to fear here.
"Just so," Emuin said, and so stood back from the charts—cast a measuring rod down atop them as if they had become negligible to all further reckonings. "Just so. One for midnight, one for dawn. And to that end I've asked Gran Sedlyn to reckon very carefully and keep me advised down to the hour of her estimations, never forgetting wizardry's in question here. Wish, young lord! Wish the world to your own measure. Wish the babe for any hour but midnight and any day of the year but Hasufin's. Wish the heavens to speed the spring and melt the snow so we can be done with this wretched war. Wish a speedy delivery of this child by daylight. And wish Cefwynwell, when you do all these things."
"I do," he said fervently. "Above all, I do that."
CHAPTER 2
The storm wind came in the night and howled around the eaves and rattled shutters, a new wind, from a different direction, and singing with a different sound, on this, the night before the anniversary of his first night in the world. Tristen sat up in bed and listened, feeling no threat in it, hearing no ominous voice in it, only the banging of a shutter somewhere distant.
Thunder cracked.
That, he thought, sounded more like rain than snow, and he rose from bed, flung on a robe, and went out to the heart of his apartments, already feeling the air warmer than the bone-deep chill of recent days.
Lightning flared in the seam of the draperies before he touched them. He parted them, and with a loud boom of thunder, light blazed down the clear sides of the windows, lit the Aswydd heraldry in colored glass in the center of the window and flashed repeatedly, bringing the dragons within it to fitful life, casting shadows about the room.
Rain spattered the panes, spotting the colored glass, glistening beads on the clear side panes. Lightning lit the adjacent roofs, and the rain came down hard. Droplets, lightning-lit, crawled down the glass.
In the same way rain had come to Ynefel and made crooked trails over the horn panes of his small window.
So the thunder had walked above Ynefel's broken roofs, and the trees outside the walls had sighed with hundreds of voices. Balconies had creaked and beams had moved. Shadows ran along the seams of the stones.
But there in Ynefel he had not known Uwen's presence… as now there was approaching behind his back a very sleepy Uwen, drawn by the sound of the storm, stumbling faithfully from his bed. Emuin, too, was awake at this recasting of the weather, and Paisi had waked, as Tarien and Orien had, as all through the fortress and the town and the camps sleepers waked to the wind and the rain and the thunder that heralded another turn in the fickle, wizard-driven weather.
Uwen came, blanket-cloaked, past the shadows of brazen dragons the lightning made lively with repeated flashes as Tristen looked back at him. Uwen had his hair loose: he raked at it, but achieved little better. In outline he looked like Emuin at his untidiest.
"South wind," Uwen said, and so it was. "It don't sound that cold."
"It doesn't feel cold," Tristen said, turning to put his hand on the glass. As he had gone to bed, frost had patterned the panes. Now these meandering streams of water cast crooked shadows against the lightning.
A prodigious crack of thunder made him jump.
—Rain on the horn-paned window. A hole in the roof of the loft.
—A hole in the Quinaltine roof. Fatal anger of the barons, a threat to Cefwyn that did not go away.
"Oh, 'at were a good 'un," Uwen said. "This is a warmin' rain, this is."
Spring was back. He had gained it once and now gained it back again, as if all influence to the contrary had waned and on this night he reached his ascendancy.
He had all but come full circle now, past sunset and into the night. Morning would bring the anniversary of his beginning, the evening hours, the precise hour of his own origin, likely at sundown.
Tomorrow night, Emuin had said the birth of Tarien's child would be most portentous… and now the weather turned.
He listened for disturbance in the gray space, but Tarien's child slept quietly in his mother's womb this stormy night—a week and more away from entering the world, so Gran Sedlyn insisted. It might not, then, happen tomorrow, on that date Emuin called portentous: there were no signs of it happening, and Tarien's time Tristen understood could not be rushed, even by wizardry: the babe was as the babe was, and at the moment it seemed quiet.