It was a predicament, beyond a doubt, and he felt his father’s disapproval of all he had done. Headlong folly had set him here afoot and alone.
But by the good gods, the battle plan had seemed to work. On a deep breath he recalled the successful sweep of two wings around Tasmôrden’s flanks, while Tasmôrden’s center charged uphill and Tasmôrden cursed his own men helplessly from the bottom of the hill.
Now he recalled the encounter with Tasmôrden. Now he recalled that he had come within sight of Ilefínian, and remembered that the enemy no longer had any semblance of a king or a leader. Orders would no longer come to them. Captains must direct such fighting as remained, and for hired captains, there was no more source of gold, no reason to linger.
But then another realization came to him… that in the bolt that had overthrown him and obscured Tasmôrden’s fall, there was no coincidence—none he accepted since he had stood on Lewen field—none, since he had claimed Tristen for a friend. The hand of wizardry was beyond a doubt in that bolt, and he was still alive— inconvenienced mightily, afoot, half-deaf and three-quarters blind, but alive, while Tasmôrden was lying somewhere below.
He could in no wise say whether it was his wizards or Tasmôrden’s who had just set the heavens afire and brought down the hammer of heaven on the battle with Tasmôrden, but they had called the lightning on the Quinaltine roof, and he began to suspect the answer lay in a wizardous tug of war.
Yet whatever magic had aimed or pulled the bolt this way or that, it had not hit him, and in that fact, he saw Tristen’s hand.
He paused in that astonished thought, gazing toward the town his hazed vision could no longer find. At least he had seen it before the lightning fell… all his promise to Ninévrisë, all the ambition of his grandfather, all wrapped in one. That, and his enemy.
But if it was folly to have charged after Tasmôrden himself, it was greater folly to stand gawping in the middle of the carnage. He could not find a horse, or his guards: he began to realize he would not find either wandering here. From the mere effort to see, his eyes streamed tears. His very bones ached, his skin felt the first instant of scalding, endlessly maintained, and he doubted any man in the vicinity of the lightning could have fared much better. He recalled a field of dead men where he had waked, and told himself he had used all the luck that wizardry had parceled out to him on this field: he could not count on it twice.
And if downhill was the direction of Ilefínian, then he recalled the lay of the land, the spill of boulders that curved down to the flat where he had engaged Tasmôrden. That had been on the right: he knew by that which direction was east and west, where Tasmôrden’s men had been tending; and knew now where he might find a place against which to set his back and live long enough to regain clear sight.
Determined, then, he went toward the west, where the ridge advanced outcrops of rounded stone and brush, and went unchallenged except by one wounded man nearly as blind. They hacked at one another, neither with great success, and blundered by, both shaken, both content to escape, the common soldier having no notion, perhaps, that he had engaged the king of Ylesuin.
His dazed wits wandered: he had caught buffets like that from his father in his day: had sat down with one ear near deaf in the practice yard. He was confused from moment to moment whether it was the practice yard or the battlefield, but after that encounter his ears began to make out sounds that informed him it was no practice, and when he reached a haze of gray winter brush and crashed against a sizable boulder, he was content only to sink down beside it and catch his breath.
Sight began to come to him, alternate with dark.
Uphill, his banners and Ninévrisë’s still flew. Uphill, a band of moving red had swept around the blue ranks of the Elwynim.
It was his design. Ryssand’s retreat had done exactly what he had hoped it would, and the Dragons had not perished in the lightning: they had lived, and charged back uphill. Ryssand in his compact with his Elwynim allies had started a panic retreat in his center, intending the army to break apart in confusion… but Cefwyn rejoiced to know his own plan had driven the wings both full tilt downhill instead, downhill and around, while Tasmôrden’s men had chased uphill into the pocket Ryssand gave them… breaking their line, losing contact with their own wings: too much confidence, too fast an advance. They had chased their own ally’s retreat between Ylesuin’s left wing and right, sure they had won the encounter down to the moment the jaws closed.
And Tasmôrden, who had let his troops slip his hand, could only stand behind them and curse, seeing disaster none of his men on the hill had been able to see.
Now the remnant of Tasmôrden’s center was caught in a tightening noose, for surely in desperation, Ryssand’s peasant muster had held its line better than the cavalry that had deliberately started the rout, and now the Dragons and the men of Panys, coming uphill, had the Elwynim in a bottle from which there was no escape.
And gods knew whether Maudyn was alive, or Gwywyn, or who of all them was giving orders up there. Gods forfend it was Ryssand… who might just have assumed the crown was within his grasp.
On that thought, Cefwyn staggered away from the rocks that had upheld him, began to climb the hill to reach his troops, picking his way past the dead and wounded at the edge of the brush and the rocks and finding this part of the hill woefully steeper on the climb up than it had ever seemed going down it.
CHAPTER 7
The clouds of the gray space flickered with lightning the same as the clouds of the world, but it was not only the sight of the clouds that chilled Tristen’s heart: it was the sight of the Edge, over which a cataract of cloud roared and vanished, endlessly.
—Come inside, the Wind said, a mere thickening in that stream… a curl amidst the cloud.
And in the blink of an eye and half without his will Tristen found himself indeed inside Ilefínian, inside its fortress, within that room where the banner had hung.
More, Crissand was at his back, and four archers confronted them with bows bent.
He stepped back to escape. Then he realized a trap indeed, for the escape at his back instantly seemed to be the old mews. That former retreat was the path his thoughts most easily held and that was the path that his own will by mischance opened, not only to them, but to the enemy.
“Get to safety!” he wished Crissand, for they both stood within the mews. He felt Emuin’s startled presence, and Ninévrisë’s, almost within hail of his voice. He turned to remake the wards, as a vast Shadow poured after them.
The wards held against it, but a lesser Shadow slipped past to find its master a way in, through wards it well knew: Shadows waked within the Zeide’s walls as the ragged remnant that was Hasufin breached the new defenses: a shriek ran through its stones as if iron bent, and a rumbling resounded through its vaults as if stones moved. A crack raced up the several chimneys of the tower.
Tristen knew his ground and held it against all distraction: he had Crissand beside him, and the mews for the moment sealed itself fast, walling out the attack that came from Ilefínian’s heart.