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Tristen saw movement within that dark from the utmost tail of his eye. He felt a draft from some source that might not be the opening of the robing room and its corridor. The drapery there did not stir. Nor did the great green velvet curtains near the front of the dais.

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"We've Shadows in the hall tonight," he said to his guards in the faintest of voices. "Listening. But there's no harm meant."

"Ghosts, m'lord?" Lusin looked anxiously at those dark corners, and Syllan and all his guards gripped their weapons the more tightly.

"Something like. Some were Crissand's men, not bad men at all." He drew a deep breath, and stood, listening. "The hall's been threatened."

"Tasmôrden?"

"I think it comes from outside, and far." He could see the little shadows moving, back among the pillars, and the littlest of all running along the masonwork, like darts of dark fire, flickering like lame. "They're uneasy. They listen. Something's trying to get in."

"Into
your
hall, my lord?" Lusin seemed to take it in indignation, regarding a hall he was charged with guarding.

"The candles don't truly dispel them," Tristen said. "They're al
-

ways here. They're part of the wards, or they're tangled with them: but they're harmless. Don't wish them harm. Especially the Shadows in the great hall. They're all our Shadows, honest Amefin Shadows, and a few Guelen. They're guards, standing their own watch."

"And elsewhere?" Lusin dared ask. "Elsewhere, m'lord? The old mews… what's that place?"

"The old mews leads places. I don't know how many."

"To Ynefel," Uwen said.

He nodded slowly, thinking on that place of strange light and bating wings, row on row of perches, for Ynefel had indeed been within that light and he had been in Ynefel. He recalled the high, rickety stairs and wooden balconies, all bathed in the blue, strange light.

But he had explored them in all their brown, dusty webwork when he was new and when the light was the leakage of daylight through the cracks and the soft glow of candles, casting a shifting, wind-driven light along balconies and out into impenetrable dark of further distances. He had had no idea in those days that dark spots and cold spots and bumps in the night could mean ruin. His fears had been all surmise in those days… Mauryl's anger, the whisperings of the wind, the surprise of a carving on the stairs—such things he had feared.

Had the old mews always led there?

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He had never discovered any other place
from
Ynefel. He had run amongst the Shadows in Ynefel and not known to fear them— at least not the little ones that came out and went back again in the trickery of candlelight. The stone faces within the walls of Ynefel . . .

they were Shadows, themselves, of a sort, that seemed to change and shift on uneasy nights.

And were they destroyed when he drove out Hasufin? Or did they still stand?

"The mews leads to Ynefel, and leads from," he said to Uwen. "And it's a cold spot in this hall. It's the cold spots I like least. Shadows there always are, but the cold ones are never happy."

"What
is
that place?" Uwen asked. "We saw the light, things flutterin'

and movin', leastwise we thought we saw. We agreed we might ha'

seen.—And I could see you, almost, but for the life o' me, all I touched was solid stone."

"Could you see that much?" Tristen asked, surprised and all attention, now.

"I don't know ye could quite call it seein'," Uwen said. "It wasn't like I was lookin' with me eyes."

"You saw into the gray place. Into the haunt. If it opens to you, don't go in, no matter what. Stand on solid ground, and call to me if you find reason to take alarm."

"Take alarm, lad!" Uwen laughed. "I was cold scairt!"

"Did
you
see it?" Tristen asked the other guards, Lusin and Syllan, Tawwys and Aran. "What did you see?"

"Like the cap'n," Lusin said. "Not at first, but the longer we stood there, we all saw a blue light, cold-like. It weren't fire and it didn't burn. And ye come walking toward us like a movin' bright light, and ye had this owl wi' ye."

"Which hadn't any place it come from, that any of us could see,"

Tawwys said. "He scares the lot of us, perchin' outside your door, starin' while we're on watch."

"Does he? I'd thought he was in the stables."

"He comes an' goes," Tawwys said, and Aran:

"An' he ain't friendly. He bit Syllan's finger."

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"I offered 'im a tidbit," Syllan said, "but 'e weren't grateful."

"He's not," Tristen said, and considered the wounds Owl'had dealt him, with the stain on his fingertips. "I fear he'll eat the pigeons. But I can't wish him away."

"Why not?" Uwen asked.

"For one thing, I don't think it would do any good and for another I don't think I ought to. He lived in the loft when I was at Ynefel.

When I lost my way in Marna Wood he guided me. And on Lewen field he flew ahead of me. He's always there when I don't know where to go."

"Then he has a use," Uwen said.

"He seems to. At least when he flies I'm not lost. He's here now, and I don't see my way through, but he's here." He had not thought of Owl's presence as a comfort, but he began to think that way.

"Someday he'll fly, and I'll know it's time to follow him."

"Don't ye talk of goin' after that bird!" Uwen said. "Or of followin'

'im. I don't trust 'im, not a bit. An' if he goes to Ynefel or worse, don't ye dare go wi'out me. There's roads. We can take 'em, the lot of us."

He was silent. He dared not promise that. He looked at Uwen's honest, worried face. "I can't promise you," he said, and looked away again with a shake of his head, as honest with Uwen in return.

CHAPTER 4

There seemed no courteous way to write the letter that circumstances required. Two pieces of paper, three, four, and five Tristen used, and cast each attempt away into the fire of the hearth near his desk. He had every confidence in Tassand and his servant staff, but he found the letters too painful to have lying about, and he would not leave them a moment on his desk—or send them to his friend.

Orien Aswydd came with her sister Tarien. Tarien is with child,
which is yours, and a wizard…

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… Orien and Tarien Aswydd fled Anwyfar when men attacked it.

Tarien has your child, a son, and he has the wizard-gift…

With the Aswydds in residence a few stone walls away it was folly to carry difficult consultation to the gray space, and he feared he was growing so distraught with the letters he had become easy to overhear. He felt alone, abandoned by his friend, by his advisor. He had somehow to say a thing which he knew would bring pain to two he loved, and which might, in the wrong hands, bring bloodshed and war, and he could not find the words to take away the sting of that unanticipated revelation.

Tarien Aswydd came here for refuge and will bear a child in perhaps
a month, which…

The sixth attempt went into the fire. He rested his head against his hands, checked his fingers belatedly for ink—they were clean— and at that one practical thought knew that his later attempts at gentle advisement were worse, not better.

At that point he left his desk in his apartment, gathered only Lusin and Syllan to guard him, and went to Emuin's tower.

He rapped, pushed the latch, and discovered the old man, far from having lain sleepless during his hours of flailing about the edges of the gray space, had fallen sound asleep in his chair. Young Paisi was curled by the fire like a young hound, and their supper dishes stood empty on a table cluttered with charts.

He eased the door shut. The latch went down, and stung, doing so.

Emuin's head came up. Eyes blinked, as if trying to resolve what they saw.

"Well, well," Emuin said. "Is there trouble? Or more trouble?"

"Forgive me. I need words, master Emuin."

Two blinks more. "Words for Cefwyn?"

"Yes, sir."

"Oh, try
folly
and
prodigious fool
."

"You don't mean that, sir."

At this point Paisi waked, looking exhausted and startled at once.

"Oh, I mean it," Emuin said, ignoring the boy. "I said it then, damn fortress of dragons.html

his stubborn ways, and I say it again."

"But I can't. Do I say to him… Tarien Aswydd has your child, a son?

That's what I've written."

"That's fair enough. That should inform a thoughtful young man he's been a fool. That's the essence of the report, isn't it? Maybe he'll hear it from you."

"He listens to you."

"Not in this."

"Ninévrisë will be upset with him, won't she?"

"Oh, I imagine she'll be somewhat upset. She's a lady capable of setting aside her heart's feeling to serve her common sense, but this will test the limit, I rather think."

There had been a time he had not understood Emuin's humors, or his ironies. Now they cut keenly, but he knew that they shielded a worried and fond heart.

"What will she do when she knows?"

"All of that is Cefwyn's to deal with," Emuin said brusquely, not yours. You're not the keeper of his conscience, nor am I. Just deliver him what he needs to know, and let him find the way through this maze. It's enough we have the lady in keeping and she's not making pilgrimage to Guelemara this winter. At very
least
we'll deal with the birth. I don't know what more we can do with the plain, unpleasant truth."

"Am I not to be his friend? Wasn't that your advice? And Wouldn't a friend give him something more than just… the plain truth, on a paper? Shouldn't I have something else to say? Shouldn't I be wise enough to have advice?"

Emuin's frown eased, and the fierce scowl revised itself into a more pensive, wounded look.

"Or can't
you
advise him, sir?" Tristen leaned both hands on the table, on the welter of charts and dishes. "You came here with me, and you left him to fend for himself. Idrys is clever, and Her Grace is wise, and Annas is kind, but
you
aren't there, and I think he'd truly wish you were with him when he reads this letter. He needs your advice.

He needs it most of all."

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"I can't travel in this weather. I'm old. My bones won't stand the saddle, I can't ride through such drifts, and by the time a carriage; made the trip the news would have walked to Guelemara, drifts and all. I can't advise him! Too many people know this.
Someone
is going to tell the wrong person, if they haven't already run to the capital to shout it in the streets, and the longer we wait, the more certain that is.

We don't know we're not already too late to keep it out of Ryssand's hands… particularly if those blackguards of Es-; san's attacked the nuns because someone had found out about Ta-rien. Tarien might have been their reason, more fool they—someone's hope to keep her
and
the babe when it's born. And if that was the case and if they lost her, they'd have run straight to the capital and reported to whoever set them on."

"Or they'd run for the far hills and not come at all."

"There is that hope."

"Orien thought it might be because Cefwyn found out. I don't think so. If he knew, he didn't need to send the Guelen Guard: Idrys, maybe, but not soldiers to attack the nuns. I think they could be; Ryssand's. Maybe Orien said what she did about Cefwyn finding out because she suspected
someone
had found out, but I don't think that someone is Cefwyn. He wouldn't kill the nuns."

"He would not," Emuin mused, raking tangles from his beard. "I can think of two reasons there was an attack on Anwyfar in the first place: first, the one you name, that someone knew there was a child and wanted Tarien in his hands. Ryssand could do gods know what at that point, none good. So could Tasmôrden, if Cuthan spilled what he knows in that quarter, and if he knows too much. That's well possible.—Or it could be someone's blind ill working that bounced off us like a rock off a shield and rebounded on the closest and most vulnerable of our precautions. Our confinement of the Aswydds was always chancy."

"There's a third," he said, taking very seriously what Emuin said.

"That the working was Orien's, to arrange an escape, and to come here. She surely wished it. Ordinarily she couldn't manage it. But she found a current already moving—and maybe she found help."

"Certainly she'd like to be involved," Emuin said. "And think, too: the gainer in what's happened is Orien. She's here. The great loser fortress of dragons.html

thus far in what happened is Ryssand: he'd have been so pleased to have Tarien in his hands. The scandal will still break: there's no hiding it forever. But if
we're
very lucky we might conceal the child until after the attack across the bridges. If Cefwyn wins the war and sets Ninévrisë on the throne, he can do no wrong in her people's eyes and if Ninévrisë has her kingdom back, she may forgive him his old sins. Maybe
we
wished too hard for Cefwyn's safety and something we've done is looking out for his interests… preventing the rumor reaching home, in fact."

"And those women died for
that?'"''
He was appalled by the thought.

"Oh, don't count it our fault: it may be no one's particular fault—except the scoundrels who killed the nuns, of course. They have the fault. The rest is blind chance. Water breaks out where the dike is lowest, young lord, never the strongest point. And by now, after what Mauryl's done, what I've done, what other agencies have done—there's a lot of water flowing."

"Are they guilty, without knowing what they did?"

"Oh, they knew what they did. And it may even have been Orien they were after. These were Quinalt men. They served in Amefel when she ruled here. They knew her for a sorceress and they hate sorcery.

As for the nuns, they were nuns of
my
sect, not the Quinalt, and these men were Ryssand's. Maybe they were looking for nothing more than some charge of latent witch-work to lay against the Teran-thines.