They were not the only survivors of that line, to be sure. His friend, his foremost supporter in council, Earl Crissand, was kin of theirs, andheir to the name… so he had sworn to himself, so Auld Syes herself had said, in an appearance as curious and ominous as he had ever seen—and no, these women would not take what was Crissand's: whatever came of his constrained charity, Crissand's heir-ship could not be challenged, not while these stones stood one on the other. It was that certain in his thoughts.
"What's Emuin say?" Uwen asked. They were still standing in the lower hall, Uwen and his guard all deaf to magic and wizardry alike, but Uwen knew his resources, and knew that Master Emuin tended to be awake at night; and knew by experience that his lord's moments of woolgathering were often conversations.
"He's not pleased," Tristen said, blinking the ordinary world into being. His sight centered on Uwen's gray-stubbled, earnest face. "Nor am I pleased, but what can I do?"
"I'm sure I don't know," Uwen said, and bit his lip, which usually presaged his saying something anyway. "Except as His Majesty might ha' had their heads on the South Gate, and didn't, on account of ye told 'im they'd be worse threats to us all if they was ghosts. And, ye know, m'lord, I ain't so sure on that, now."
"I'm not sure on that point either," he said, not in jest, and added: "But I don't think I can kill them, Uwen."
Uwen's look was the more distressed. "Ye ain't o' the mind, nor ever were, m'lord. An' her sister bein' with child, an' all—what's to happen? Ask Emuin. Ask Emuin, m'lord. This is beyond me."
"I fear it's beyond him, too." Uwen was right: he had never been willing to exercise a lord's cold justice, nor had done. But despite his thinking on slippery steps, something felt so utterly wrong in the notion of killing the women, he could not compass arguments about it, could not consider it—whether it was wrong in the magical sense or wrong because it was terrible to kill at all, he had no way to sort out. He only knew he shuddered at it. "Emuin's as surprised as the rest of us."
" 'At there," Uwen said, with an upward glance, the way the women had gone, "looks to be seven, eight months she's carryin'."
"Can you say so?"
"Summat," Uwen said, as they began to walk their own direction, toward the other stairs. "Looks to be. Nine's the term of a child that'll live, an' by the look, that 'un ain't far from it. That 'un's bloomed in the nunnery, gods save us all, but I'll wager she didn't get it there."
Being not born, himself, and never a child, and never intimate with a woman, he had only uncertain questions where ordinary men had sure knowledge. He felt helpless in his ignorance, and so many things had converged in the last few days… magical things, dreadful things, hopeful things, and now, it turned out, Tarien's child, which it seemed would come sooner rather than later. He had feared Midwinter, just past, and the turning of the year, when a conjunction of the stars that Emuin said had been his birth had ended, and a new cycle had begun.
"When?" he asked. "How will we know?"
"She ain't immediate, I don't think," Uwen said, who had had a wife, once, and children. "A hellish far walk, she's been, if they come from Anwyfar, an' in the snow, and a-horseback before that. If she was near, that might ha' brought it on. And it didn't."
"Eight months?"
"Seven or eight, maybe."
In magic and wizardry, more particularly in sorcery… there were no coincidences. Seven or eight months… from its beginning, which was also to reckon.
"Could she have gotten the child in the summer, and no one know?"
"Damn sure she did," Uwen said somberly, "an' all that time, and her bein' a witch an' all, I'd about wager she knew right well, m'lord, that I would."
His thoughts grew vague and frightened and darted here and there in distracted fashion as he walked. His shoulders had felt the burden of armor for hours, as his cloak and his boots were soaked through with snowmelt. He had been scant of sleep for far too long, had walked, letting Tarien ride on the way home—and he thought now, after a month of striving and wrestling with Amefel's danger and Ylesuin's, now that he had done something so irretrievably foolish as this, he might rest… he might finally rest, as if he had done what folly his restlessness had aimed toward, and as he faced the stairs upward all the remaining strength was flowing out of him like blood from a wound.
Tarien knew about the child, he kept thinking to himself. When she went to Anwyfar, she knew. When they dealt with Hasufin Hel-tain, and bargained with him— Orien knew.
"M'lord?" Uwen asked, for he had faltered on the first step. All the accumulated hard days and wakeful nights came down on his shoulders at once, and he found he could not set his foot to the step.
"Are ye hurt, m'lord?"
Uwen's arm came about him, bearing him up, and with that help he essayed the first step. Another arm caught him from the right, Lusin, he thought, and he made the next, telling himself that he must, and that rest was at the top of the stairs, just a little distance down the hall.
"Are ye hurt?" Uwen insisted to know.
"No," he said. "Tired. Very tired, Uwen."
" 'At's good, then, m'lord. Just walk."
He climbed up and up the right-hand steps, those that ascended above the great hall, leaning on two good friends… and there he paused, drawn to turn and look down on that staircase, on that lower hall lit as it was from a mere handful of sconces. There burned but a single candle in each at this dim hour.
He had come up this stairs from the great hall the one night he had come very close to believing Orien and falling into her hands… and then, too, Uwen had seen him home.
He had run these steps the night Parsynan had murdered Cris-sand's men… and the shadows of those men haunted the whole lower hall, all but palpable at this hour.
He had gone down these steps toward the great hall as a new-made lord, and there faced a haunt that now was all but under his feet, the old mews, out of which Owl had come.
And did it stir, tonight, that power, knowing these twin sisters had come home?
He willed not. Trembling in the support of two strong men, he willed strength into the wards that kept the fortress safe. He willed that nothing within these walls, no spirit and no living soul, should obey Lady Orien, accustomed as this house might have been to her commands.
He did all that on three breaths, and was at his weakest, but he was sure then that the haunt below in the mews had not broken out or answered to Orien's presence, and that most of all reassured him, for of all dangers in the fortress, it was the chanciest and the greatest.
"Shall we take him on up, then?" Lusin asked, tightening his arm about his ribs, clearly supposing his lord had lost his way.
" 'E's stopped on 'is own," Uwen said pragmatically, against the other side, and shifted his grip on his wrist and about his waist. "An' 'e'll start on 'is own. 'Is Grace is thinkin' on somethin' worth 'is time, and I ain't askin' what till he's through."
"I'm very well," Tristen said then, although for the life in him he could not think of what he had just been doing.
"Lean on me, lad," Uwen said then—neither Uwen nor Lusin was as tall as he, but they had their leather-clad shoulders beneath his arms, and a firm grip around him, and bore him up the last step and down the corridor. His head drooped. He was next aware of his own foyer, outside Uwen's room.
And could not bear to go back into the bedchamber.
"I'll sit by the fire," he said.
"The fire an' not your bed, m'lord?" Uwen asked. "Your bed's waitin'."
"Not now." It was an effort for him to speak, now, not that it was hard to draw breath, but that his thoughts wanted to wander off, and the firelight seemed safer than the dark in the rooms beyond.