Folly, Crissand thought now. He had made the wrong choice. The ring had misled him. It meant the boy to escape. It might even be Tristen’s doing. He hoped that it was. He refused to think any magic could overwhelm what had been his own guide and talisman all these years.
But he felt a little less safe in his long-held assumptions, where he sat, on a cold and unwilling horse.
Then from across the snowy flat of the surrounding meadows, out of a little spit and flurry of snow in the dark, a rider appeared and advanced steadily toward them.
“It could be a haunt,” one of his guard said, and his captain: “Hush, man. Don’t be a fool. We’re out here searchin’ for riders, aren’t we?”
A figure muffled in a cloak and atop a winter-coated, snow-caked, and piebald horse, as if he had ridden straight out of the blizzard of several hours ago. There was reason his guard viewed this arrival in alarm. It wasn’t ordinary, that rider. It looked white in patches, itself, in the ambient snow light.
And it kept coming toward them, not down the road, as they believed the road to lie, but from across the fields.
“Halt there!” his captain called out. “This is His Grace the duke of Amefel! Who are you?”
“Paisi, Elfwyn Aswydd’s man,” the answer came strongly enough, then, distressedly: “Your Grace, Your Grace, gods save me, I’ve lost ’im. An’ all the food is with me!”
CHAPTER SEVEN
i
THEY HAD HASTENED ALL THE WAY, HAD PRESSED THE HORSES HARD. THEY HAD looked to stop at Gran’s for the night—but the closer they rode, the more stranger and more ominous things seemed. Gran’s chimney did not appear at the turning where it ought.
And when Cefwyn rode past that turning, with his son and his guard, the house was all ashes and timbers, its yard gate open to the road.
Aewyn rode ahead, plunged off his horse, and had gotten to a dangerous place among the timbers before the guards overtook him, and Cefwyn had.
“His dreams!” Aewyn cried. “Papa, his dreams!”
“Hush,” Cefwyn said, laying a hand on his son’s back. “Hush. They may have escaped.”
“Here’s horse tracks, Your Majesty,” a man said, back by the shed, which had survived half-burned. The ashes, the burned beams, cool now, supported a load of new snow. But Cefwyn went out, taking Aewyn with him, and sure enough, where the remnant of a roof had partially sheltered the ground, tracks showed. At least one man had walked here. So had a horse. And there were no remains—there was evidence of horses in the shed, but no remains.
“They may well have gotten out,” Cefwyn said. And, squeezing Aewyn’s shoulder: “They would have gone to the town for help. Let us go.”
Aewyn ran back to his horse and climbed into the saddle, impatient until they were under way, jaw clenched, trying to hold his distress like a man. He spoke hardly a word—no one did, until they came within sight of the town.
The day’s sun was sinking fast and the horses were hard-used before the walls of Henas’amef rose distinct above the snowy fields—only one gate was open, and men were out with shovels, digging clear a path for the gates to swing. The odd, west-sweeping storm that had made yesterday’s travel a trial had unloaded about walls and gates, reason enough for a crew to be out shoveling.
The gate-guards had joined the work party, and at first stood stiff with alarm as they spied a determined party of riders flattening a broader track through the snow, but Cefwyn had ordered the banners out, and the gate-guards no more than stood to attention, and laborers swept off their hats and cowls, Amefin folk, but never in these years hostile to their king. Cefwyn had no hesitation in riding close by these men with his son. A bell started to toll, the gate bell, advising the town and the hill above of arrivals worth attention.
“We shall have a hot drink with my brother,” Aewyn said doggedly. His son was white about the lips and cold-stung, ruddy above—a weary, desperate boy who nevertheless had endured a ride hard even for well-exercised guardsmen, with bad news at the end of it. Cefwyn found he had been far too long in chairs instead of the saddle, and far too long eating too much fine food, and he was glad enough to think of shelter over their heads tonight, where he hoped to find at least some good news. But there was that tall, ghostly tower, which vanished behind brick and stone as they rode through the gates. It loomed above them, like a living presence.
An unannounced royal visit had a certain bitter history in this province— people who stopped their late business on the street stared not only with astonishment, but in stark dismay. It was a very different feeling than they had had coming here in summer, well heralded and with Lord Crissand to meet them at the gates in festivity, with Gran’s place safe and welcoming. This was a suspicious town, an Amefin, Bryalt town, where loyalty to the Marhanen ran only so deep, and once Guelen riders passed the walls, they were scrutinized… particularly if things had gone wrong here.
He didn’t think his son had ever encountered that sort of examination from anyone, let alone found it meeting them up and down the street. Aewyn had fallen grimly silent, and looked anxiously to left and right of them as they rode up the hill, past shuttered windows and occasional spying from the narrowest crack.
The gate-guards above, however, those at the Zeide gate, were instant to open and clear their way in complete compliance, and the ringing of a bell at that gate brought not only servants, but Lord Crissand himself, running out cloakless, despite the snow.
“Your Majesty,” Crissand said, starting to kneel below Cefwyn’s stirrup, but Cefwyn dropped down to his feet and snatched him up by the arms before he could do it. “Your Majesty,” Crissand said, out of breath, “your son was here. He has left.”
“Gran’s farm was burned.”
“Burned, yes. And Gran is dead. But your son, and his man, they came here for shelter. They werehere. Then your son left, in the middle of the storm.”
“Yesterday.”
“Yesterday, Your Majesty.”
“Where did he go?” Aewyn asked, entirely out of turn, and Cefwyn drew a deep, carefully patient breath and asked the same question, in more courtesy.
“Do you know, my friend?”
“West,” Crissand said with conviction. “His man Paisi came back. They were parted in the storm. Your son carried my ring. I gave him that… I wrote to Your Majesty…”
“Best discuss it inside,” Cefwyn said. Crissand was freezing, shivering in the cold wind, clearly full of news they needed, and much as his heart wanted to go chasing off after the boy, the horses were done. He was done. Certainly Aewyn must be. And even if they were to leave on a further search tonight, they would have to supply themselves off Crissand’s resources, saddle new horses, and perhaps go out with Paisi to guide them. If the boy had been gone a day, there was no chasing him. Tracks would be covered.
“Your Majesty,” Crissand said, and led them up into the fortress itself by the side entry, up steps made both foul and passable by ash and sand, a black area that had frozen into ice all about the steps. It had the feeling of times past, of another winter when the snow had kept coming, and things had gone vastly awry.
Tristen was coming. He believed it. He cast Otter’s welfare on it… perhaps more than one Otter’s welfare, counting the boy’s connections to that tower above them. He did not want Aewyn exposed to risk, and the more calmly they dealt with this, the more he could settle his son to calm and reason.
They entered the lower hall, right beneath his old rooms, when he had been viceroy here, and walked down the hall to the little audience chamber, an intimate room with a good fireplace. Heat inside met them like a wall after so long in the cold.
“Find Paisi,” Crissand said to one of his guards. “He’s up in the boy’s rooms. And get mulled wine up here. Tea, with it.”