“They ain’t right natural,” Uwen had remarked, early on, in his calm way. “M’lord, I don’t like the look at all.”
Neither did he, to this hour, to this day—however long they had been caught here. And the icy realm was one kind of a trap for Uwen, but another for himself, a slippage, slow and continual, so that at first he had no memory of entering the place, and now suspected he had no memory of other things more important.
“How long do you think we have ridden today?” he asked Uwen.
“Seems to me it ought to be summat over an hour,” Uwen said. “But I don’t trust my reckonin’ in this place, t’ tell the truth.” They rode in silence a moment, a silence marked by the crash and destruction of a shard, which spawned others. “Is it more than an hour, m’lord?”
“I fear it is,” Tristen said. “I fear—”
But he forgot. He forgot what he had been about to say, and forgot that he had forgotten.
“M’lord,” Uwen said insistently. “M’lord, ye’re driftin’ a wee bit. Ye’ve done that today, time to time.”
He blinked, lost for the moment, then with a chill found he had lost the name of the man beside him, someone who was vitally important to him, someone who was warmth and love itself, and he felt something beyond fear—a loss of hope itself.
The wind blew clear, unveiling a fortress on a snowy hill, and that fortress was built of the ice, a fortress with battlements that glittered like a rusty stain under a wan and fleeting sun.
Here was the first place. Here was the first of all places in his life. It lay far back, far, far in memory. He could only come here when he had forgotten all else. It waited for him.
“M’lord,” the man beside him said.
A wayward gust of mist took the vision away. They were back in the mist again, and the man had leaned from the saddle and seized his horse’s rein near the jaw.
“Ye’re driftin’, m’lord. Come back t’ me. There’s me good lad.”
“Uwen.” He gathered up bits and pieces and drew in a deep, freezing breath. His wards had failed. He had set them about their sleeping place, but their wards had gone down, and let in powers from before Uwen’s time, things long pent, that wanted free. The wards needed straight lines, or circles, even, reasonable structures, but the ice was all an illusion of shining planes. In its very essence, it flowed—was irrational, without Lines, in its depth. Given time, it warped, it bent, it stretched any Line he set on it, and just as readily—it broke, and fractured, making edges sharp enough to draw blood…
“M’lord!” he heard, and struggled to get back to that voice, that Man he had to protect. He knew they were going nowhere. Of a sudden he knew they had gone quite the opposite of where they ought to go, that they had been taken far from where they wanted to be… he could not remember that place, but he knew it was not this place.
Then another voice came, faint and far.
“Tristen,” it called, desperate. “Tristen, hear me. Emuin’s gone. My sons are gone. Tristen, wherever you are, I need you.”
Warmth came with it, warmth that touched him, and reached inside, like the breath of summer.
“Cefwyn?” he said, and reined full about. “Cefwyn, call again. Call louder.” And when it came, faint and torn on the wind: “Uwen, stay close!”
ii
HE’S COMING!” CEFWYN CRIED, HE HAD NO NOTION HOW HE knew it, but he did. Kingship to the winds, he went running for the library door, knocking over a stack of heavy books and disarranging a table. Crissand was on his heels, the two of them rounding the corner of the short hall into the main corridor like two madmen.
The whole hall resounded to the confusion of two sets of guards attempting to stay with them—then, crazily, echoed to the racket of hooves within the hall itself, a thunderous clatter on the stones. Blue light flared, and wings beat in alarm as the haunt broke wide open, sending two riders and their trailing packhorses into the dead middle of the hall—not just any horses, the lead two, but heavy horses, one of them black as sin itself and the other a blue roan with a wicked eye.
A rider in silver armor swung down off the black and lit in the hall, looking toward him, a rider whose curiously crafted armor frosted in the air and gave off fog, and the other man, an ordinary Man in black leather, and thickly coated, stepped down from the roan, his armor and helm likewise frosted.
Cefwyn met his old friend Tristen with an embrace, never minding the burning chill of his touch, and stood him back again and looked into gray, wide eyes, a gaze that could drink a man’s common sense and draw him into whatever mad courage.
“My friend,” Cefwyn said, “my old friend. Thank the gods you heard me. The boys are lost out there. Orien’s cell is empty. Tarien’s fled her prison, gods know how. Emuin came here… did you know Emuin is alive?”
“That I did,” Tristen said. “But not where he was. Did Tarien take the boys with her?”
Tristen knew nothing that they had been trying to tell him, only that they were in distress. The stamp and heavy breathing of unsettled horses was all around him, and the steam went up about their bodies. The cold of Tristen’s armor seared his hands like fire.
“Elfwyn found a lost book in the library. I think it must be Mauryl’s book, from the time the books were burned. He left with it, and lost Paisi along the way.”
“Paisi,” Tristen said, glancing aside, and Paisi said, “m’lord,” almost inaudible in the echoing racket, and held his hands in his belt. “It was one o’ them fogs, m’lord, was what it was. He rode right into it.”
“And Aewyn left here without us knowing,” Cefwyn said, “tracking his brother. Then Emuin arrived. Then the stones blew apart, the windows blew open, and Tarien went—Emuin went after her, for all I know. What can you tell me? Can you find my boys?”
Tristen gazed afar off for a moment, and Cefwyn, having poured out that ill-assorted chronicle like flotsam in a millrace, caught his breath.
Tristen looked down the hall toward the haunt, or toward the library: it was uncertain which. “The book,” he said, out of that choice of calamities. “That’s what it is. The spell on it avoided my finding it years ago—it hid from one thief. It avoids me now. It was Mauryl’s, but not the last spell on it, I fear. And Emuin has been here. He tried to strengthen the wards in my absence. And he could not.”
When had the gray-eyed innocence given way to this look that gazed through distances, and that childlike wonder become such confidence? Cefwyn backed away a pace, chilled by more than the cold that attended them.
But Uwen intruded between them and caught Tristen’s arm sharply. “M’lord! This is Cefwyn, an’ Uwen with ’im. Paisi, too, an’ Lord Crissand. Ye hear? Hear us!”
A shudder went through Tristen’s frame, and that gaze swung to Uwen, then to Cefwyn.
“Elfwyn,” Tristen said. “Elfwyn came to me. And Emuin came to you.”
“Not a half an hour ago,” Cefwyn said. “He left, and I don’t know where.”
Tristen shook his head. “The ways are cut off. They’ve become mazes. I’ve not seen Owl for days. And Elfwyn, and his brother… I can’t find them, though I know they’re out there. Magic is undermined. Wizardry may have a better chance.”
“Brandywine,” Crissand said to someone, and a servant raced off. “We should get the horses down to the stable.”
Exactly how they were to get two great destriers and the loaded pack-horses down the central stairs without calamity was another matter, but Tristen said quietly, “No. We’ll be going as we came. The Line that prevents it no longer holds. You should give this place its own way, Lord Crissand. Let it be a mews, since that’s what it wants to be. It might be safer.”
“M’lord,” Uwen said in concern.
“I cannot mend this place,” Tristen said distractedly. “I even cannot hold my own course over large distances, Uwen. Little I could repair, of things that may now be broken. I sent him aside once, and my wards stood until now, until thatreached the light. Hismust be the spell on the book, that hid it from me from the beginning, that would not go into the hands of a thief, nor be destroyed. I took it for Mauryl’s spell. But sometimes there is very little difference.”