You left me this boy. You advised me to treat him kindly and do justice by him.
Now look. Now look, my old friend. He can’t come to the Quinaltine. He more than will not: there’s been this maid, this silly maid, it turns out, who spied the young fool doing what his Gran doubtless honestly taught him, and runs gibbering the news through all the Guelesfort.
And who sent the maid?
My youngest son did, Aewyn, who meant the boy no harm, no harm at all. I’m sure of that, among other things far less certain.
Are you aware what’s happened here, my old friend? I fear this is not just bad luck. It can never do so much damage and be nothing more than bad luck, can it?
But you told me once that luck was a sort of magic in itself, did you not? Or the workings of magic, was it?
Well, luck has run completely against the boy you bade me preserve, when it involves the Quinaltine. You told me yourself there was ill in that place, grievous ill, and old harm. Efanor confirmed it. And was it only my desire to be ahead of the priests and the gossip that made me force the boy into this appearance?
1 mislike what I’ve done. I mislike greatly what has happened here, old friend. Be careful, you said. And was 1 careful enough, in my haste to see this through?
Clearly not so. Not nearly careful enough.
“My love?” Ninévrisë said, in his long silence.
“Do you perceive anything untoward?” he asked. The wizard-gift was in Ninévrisë, from her father and his fathers before him. Perhaps he should tell her about the writing there in the frost. He knew he was blind and deaf to such stirrings in the world, deaf as a stone; but something for good or for ill made him reticent, and her son, her son, Aewyn, who had always seemed as blind and deaf as his father—where was he, this morning, after fidgeting his way through services?
Their Aewyn had become as slippery as Otter, and sped off on the hunt without a word to his parents, bent on solving matters himself.
A father was the point the boys shared, the blind and deaf heritage. He had always assumed his blond, bluff son was like him; that if there was any witchery to turn up in his children, small, dark Aemaryen would have that perilous gift, and fair, tall Aewyn would be as deaf as his father.
“Otter is afraid,” Ninévrisë said softly. “Be forgiving of him.”
Another woman might take satisfaction in a rival’s child’s difficulty. Not Ninévrisë. Another woman might have been blind to the risks in the boy coming here, and equally those in his never coming here at all. Not Ninévrisë. She knew what was at issue and where it began.
He laid his hand on hers, where it rested on his shoulder. “Forgiving is all I can be. He is what he is, and I brought him here on Tristen’s advice.”
“None better,” Ninévrisë said. “And I will warrant the boy conjured nothing.” A little contraction of her fingers against his shoulder. “Whatever he did, did not pass the wards. I would feel it if he had.”
“Good for that,” he said, watching the snow fall and hoping he didn’t have a son out on the roads at this moment.
“Your Majesty.” The Lord Chamberlain himself entered the room. “His Highness Prince Aewyn, with Otter.”
Oh, indeed? That quickly?
He turned a serene countenance toward his staff, slipping Ninévrisë’s hand to his arm.
“Admit them.”
Bows, courtesies, ceremonies of approach and departure delayed everything in his life, and never the ones he wanted delayed. The Lord Chamberlain, an old, old man, went out to the foyer, doors opened, doors closed, opened again, and Aewyn finally came through them with Otter in tow, Otter wrapped in Aewyn’s cloak, the one puzzle in the sight, and Aewyn and Otter both a little cobwebby about the shoulders, which was no puzzle at all.
“He didn’t mean to,” Aewyn began, the immemorial beginning of excuses.
“One is very sure,” Cefwyn said.
“It was that fool Madelys, my serving-maid,” Aewyn said. “I sent her with breakfast, before the hour, and she screamed and Otter spilled oil all over himself, and he’d ruined his clothes. Paisi’s in Amefel.”
Now there was a model of concise reporting.
“Paisi’s in Amefel, you say.”
“He was worried about Gran, Your Majesty,” Otter said faintly, “with the weather, and all.”
“So I was going to have my staff look after him,” Aewyn said, with no space for a breath between them, “and see he had breakfast, but that fool maid walked in without a sound and thought she saw what she didn’t see.”
“Was there magic?” Ninévrisë asked, dropping her hand from Cefwyn’s arm. “Otter, tell the truth.”
“I tried, Your Majesty,” Otter said in the very faintest of voices. “I’m very sorry.”
“Why would Paisi go home?” Cefwyn asked.
“A dream, Your Majesty,” Otter said in anguish. “I had a dream. So did Paisi. So I told him he had to go.”
“When was this?”
“Yesterday.”
A full day on the road, in this weather. Fool boy, Cefwyn thought, hoping Paisi was not frozen in a snowbank somewhere along the road. He made a little wave of his hand. “Let us see. Let us see the damage. Unwrap the cloak, if you please.”
Otter had clutched it tightly about him. The boots were not auspicious. He opened the garment, and showed a wreckage of good tailoring, from oil to attic cobwebs and dust, head to foot.
“Oh, dear,” Ninévrisë said.
Otter looked as if he wished he could sink through the floor.
“It’s not his fault!” Aewyn said.
“No, now, be still. Let Otter answer for himself. Paisi left yesterday, alone, one presumes.”
“Yes, Your Majesty. Well… not alone. I sent him with some traders.”
Cefwyn raised a brow. There had been a certain resourcefulness in the plot. There was a likelihood Paisi would get through.
“And being without wiser counsel, you took to witchcraft to see his progress? Or was there more to it?”
“I dreamed again. But I don’t know who Sent it.”
“A very prudent thought,” Ninévrisë said, with a look at Cefwyn. “Paisi’s gran might have Sent to him: there is that special connection. But Sending past all protections? I never felt it.”
Wizardry had passed the wards no less than Tristen Sihhë had laid about the Guelesfort windows… there was a troubling thought. An ordinary mouse could have made a new hole, a way into the walls, who knew? Ninévrisë saw to such things, quietly, in her own way, but there were ways to make a breach.
And there was—he never forgot it—one ready source of bad dreams in Amefel.
“So you sent Paisi away,” Cefwyn said deliberately, in the tone with which he daunted councillors. “And told no one.”
“He told me,” his younger son said.
“So you joined this conspiracy.”
“Paisi was already gone,” Aewyn protested, “and he wanted to tell you, but there was the dinner, and uncle was there, and he had no chance to, because of how he knew, and the servants coming and going; and he was going to tell you after services today, but the fool maid ruined everything.”
“Indeed. And where is the fool maid at this moment?”
“I sent her to the kitchens and told her not to talk to anyone.”
“In the kitchens, not to talk. Gods save us, boy!”
“I threatened her life,” Aewyn said.