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The Wind raged and tore at them. Needles of ice and pain lanced
through flesh and bone, and the gulf gaped under them.

Then Owl flashed between, bound away, and with that guidance
Tristen turned toward what he knew was home, with the boy in his
grasp. They traveled toward the darkness beyond the rows of birds
on their perches, and constantly Owl flew ahead of him. Tristen
gripped the boy's shoulder, then his hand, and increasingly as he
walked the hand he held was smaller and smaller, and the steps
faltered, until he must sweep the child up within his arms, and hold
him fast as he walked toward the dark circle.

He saw candlelight. He stepped into it…

And drew a great, deep breath, flavored with the cold of the downstairs hall at the site of the haunt, that stretch of odd flooring that fronted the old mews. He found himself with a newborn baby in his arms, a wizened, bloody creature with tight-clenched eyes and clenched fists, a babe that suddenly drew breath and let it out in a loud and lusty wail.

He slipped the pin of his cloak, the blood red of Amefel, and wrapped the baby in it against the chill… he walked, and guards posted at the stairs stared with misgivings as he passed with the small bundle in his arms.

He climbed the west steps, and passed guards he had not passed going out of Tarien's apartment, men struck with consternation and surely wondering where he had been.

He did not venture the gray space now. He had no idea where that shortcut might send him and the babe both. He had no idea where Owl had gone, but when he reached Tarien's apartment the guards opened the door for him. He carried his small angry charge through the outer chambers into the one where Tarien lay, and Emuin watched, and Gran Sedlyn met him with a face astonished and distraught.

"
You
took it!" Gran Sedlyn said, and behind her, Paisi stared, round-eyed.

fortress of dragons.html

He said not a word, but took the baby to Emuin, who sat by Tarien's bedside, holding her hand, and she all disheveled and with her red hair pasted about her temples.

"We took out the sheets," Gran Sedlyn was saying, a noise in his ears,

"an't was as if maybe we took out the babby amongst 'em by mistake.

We couldn't find 'im, we couldn't find 'im, and Your Grace had 'im all the time… and where was Your Grace?" the confused woman asked.

"Sittin' here, as I thought, and then…"

"He's safe," Tristen said.

"Safe," Emuin echoed him, with meaning, and maintained a fierce ward over the place, over the woman who rested, pale and shrunken, amid the pillows. Only as Tristen unwrapped his small burden and showed her the baby's face did her eyes open wide, and go from grief to wonder. Her hands reached, not as Orien's had reached, but with an urgent, tender desire. He laid the baby on her breast, and Tarien folded her arms around her child, and looked at him as if the very sight poured strength and life into her.

"His name is Elfwyn," Tristen said, and Tarien's eyes flashed wide, lips parted, perhaps to protest she wanted some other name. But she said not a word. Emuin looked at him, too, and with a sharper, worried expression, but without dispute.

"Elfwyn," Emuin said.

"My baby prince," Tarien murmured, with her lips against the infant's pale and matted hair.

"Let's wash 'im," Gran Sedlyn said. "Let's 'ave a look 'ere, m'lady."

"No," Tarien said. "No one will take my baby. No
one will take him
!"

"Hear me, woman," Emuin said harshly, and with a hand on the child and Tarien's arm. "He has his right soul in him. This is truly Cefwyn's child. That
isn't
what your sister wanted. Do you understand?"

"She's dead," Tarien said. Her lips faltered as if they were frozen.

"She's dead. She can't have him. My prince loved
me
, and she'll never have him!"

Emuin looked at Tristen, and Tristen at him, with the feeling in his heart that Tarien was not mistaken. He left the room, unwashed and exhausted, and suddenly aware that Uwen was not there, and Uwen would never have left his heels. Gweyl and all his new guards were fortress of dragons.html

gone somewhere, but Lusin and Tawwys had come in, among the silent wardens of the Zeide, and Syllan and Aran were outside as if they had never left their former duty to him.

"There was fire," Lusin said, and had no sooner said, than Uwen came through the door, soot smeared about him, and with Gweyl close behind.

"Thank the gods," Uwen said. "They said ye'd come downstairs, an'

the fire, an' all—"

"Orien burned," Tristen surmised.

"In her cell," Uwen said, and held his hands as if he wanted a place to wipe them, in this prince's apartment. "Set the pallet alight, the candle to the straw, an' the chokin' smoke afore the flame: it were like an oven in that cell, an' the guards up above didn't know't till the smoke come up the stairs."

That flaring strength in the gray space… Orien's attempt to drive Tarien to birth: in death she had reached for freedom and bound herself to the stones of the Zeide.

"Where was ye, m'lord? Where'd ye go?—An' what's this wi' the babe?"

"In there," Tristen said, still unsure he should have given the child to Tarien, but compelled to it by a magic that spoke to him as strongly as the wind and the earth themselves. "With Lady Tarien."

"Gods bless," Uwen said, and raked his hair back with a sooted hand, leaving streaks on his brow. "Gods bless. An' 'Er Grace dead an 'er ladyship wi' the baby. An' what's to be wi'
him
?"

"He's Cefwyn's," Tristen said. "And Emuin's there. Emuin won't leave him." He felt that as surely as he had felt the strength and the will in Tarien's arms. "He's Cefwyn's son, his name is Elfwyn, and Hasufin won't have him."

There was a new Shadow loose within the wards downstairs. He was sure of that. It was bound to the stones of the place, exactly as he had once feared would happen when he had advised Cefwyn to exile all the Aswydds and not to execute them. An iron door had not been enough to hold Orien Aswydd prisoner: she had proved that well enough.

But in the purpose she held worth her life, she had failed. She was not fortress of dragons.html

done with trying for wizardry, perhaps, and Hasufin himself could not fault her effort or her courage… but she had failed.

He went back to the door to reassure himself all was well within the room, and saw Emuin and Lady Tarien and the babe, all in the light of a single candle.

He saw a life that had not existed before now. He found that, amid all else, the most remarkable thought, and he took with him the remembrance of the boy and the youth who might someday remember meeting him, in the maze of the mews.

Owl joined them as he and Uwen left the apartment, and banked away down the stairs, to the startlement of the guards below, he was sure. Whether Owl was satisfied he had no idea.

But on the precise day on which Emuin calculated Mauryl had Summoned him to life, at the very first light of dawn, an entirely new soul had drawn a first breath, and Cefwyn had a son.

CHAPTER 4

Rain and thunder above canvas brought dreams of campaigns past, recollections of mud and hard living far to the south—of days spent waiting and nights spent in far less luxury than a royal pavilion, two cots made into one, and warmth against one's side.

But that warmth gathered herself in the last hours of the rain-drenched night and stole away… and over to the baggage piled out of the rain, in a corner of the huge tent. Cefwyn paid slight attention, deciding that Ninévrisë had thought of something undone, or left, or needed, in the way one did in the middle of the night on a journey, with all one's belongings confined to chests and boxes, and had the servants remembered the new boots or packed the writing kit?

Gods knew. There were times one simply had to get up and dispose of the question, and this night of noise and fury in the heavens, with the tent blown hard by the gusts and no great likelihood the army was going to break camp in the morning—this was such a troubled night, fortress of dragons.html

on their slow way through the edge of Murandys and to the river camp.

But Ninévrisë, having rummaged up something, or failed to find something, was quiet for a long while after.

Too long, Cefwyn decided. He had made up his mind to sleep late, having waked several times to realize the deluge continued, and still cherished the notion of late sleep until he rolled over to see what she was doing and saw her standing distressedly in the lightning flashes, with something flat and pale pressed to her bosom.

Then he knew that what she had ferreted from the baggage, from her belongings, was a piece of paper,
that
paper, and at this hour.

He shoved an elbow under him, looking at her in concern until he had a glance back.

Then she came back to him, and threw herself on her knees by the bedside.

"The baby's born," she said. "Tonight, the baby's born."

It was certainly not the sort of news to cheer either of them. The letter had told them nothing more till now, until he had ceased to believe it was anything but an inert scrap of unwritten paper.

But now this news broke through the days of silence, at the lightning-shot edge of a dawn that saw the army stalled, the roads surely turned to ponds and rivers.

And now in the dark of the tent he could not judge her expression, whether she wept, or frowned, or had no expression at all.

"More news," she said, and her voice trembled, barely audible above the battering of rain on the canvas walls. "Orien's dead."

"
Orien
." He was taken aback, and wondered whether she had mistaken the twins and misspoken. Women died in childbirth, and should it not be Tarien who died at this birth?

"She burned to death," Ninévrisë said. "She burned in her cell."

"Good gods." His memory of a glorious, beautiful woman could not fit the image of such a death. He raked his hair back, pushed upright and hauled the blanket around him against the chill of the rain and the unhappy report. "I take it it's that letter," he said. "Is that all he says?"

"The baby's name is Elfwyn," she said. "Tarien called him Maur-ydd, fortress of dragons.html

after the old wizard, I think; but Tristen said he was Elfwyn, so Elfwyn he is, now."

A king's name, for a king's bastard. And not only a king's name, but the name of the last High King.
That
would not go unremarked among his uneasy barons. It was provocative and a trouble to the child and to him. Gods, what was Tristen thinking?

"What more?" he asked, unsettled. Tristen could be feckless at the most damnable times. "What news of Tristen?"

"He…" Ninévrisë"'s breath caught in her throat. She seemed to have caught a chill despite her robe, small wonder, at such news, and he moved quickly to gather her up and into his arms, in the warmth of an occupied bed.

The shivering kept up for a moment, and now he knew the truth, for Ninévrisë had taken the matter of Tarien's baby so entirely worldly-wise and matter-of-factly he had convinced himself she accepted it without a ripple.

Now in a stroke he doubted all his assumptions, about this, about all the other slights she took so calmly. She forgave him in the very embrace of her arms and the inclinations of her heart, but the existence of a child named as, gods help them, Tristen of all people…

had named this child… what could she think?

What could anyone think?

And what did Tristen think, giving
his
son that name? Not a damned thing, was the first conclusion that leapt up in him: Tristen could be the most feckless soul alive, did things because those were the thoughts he said Unfolded to him, thoughts that leapt into a head that otherwise could be utterly absorbed with a hawk's flight or the shape of a leaf.

Yet Tristen, the worst liar in all Ylesuin, was not dealing with a hawk or a leaf in this child… this was not something Tristen would treat casually or on a whim, and the other aspect of his flighty concentration was that absolute, terrifying honesty, in which he would leap in where no courtier would tread. He had met that appalling honesty when—gods! when he had left off his folly of love-making with the Aswydd women and gone downstairs to look a stranger in the eyes… and he had never after been able to avoid that stare, that truth, that honesty. Like a boulder in a brook, it had fortress of dragons.html

diverted all his life into a different path.

And now… now the result of that moment was a child, and
Tristen
named him. He was deaf to wizardry, but like a deaf man, he could feel the drumbeat in the ground under him: a moment had come back to haunt him and change his life.

Elfwyn
Tristen named the boy. So, indeed, Elfwyn he was, the will and word of his unacknowledged father and his father's wife notwithstanding.

And this Elfwyn, this bastard prince, was in fact heir to
nothing
, since his only legitimate claim, Amefel—where a maternal lineage did have legal force—had passed to Tristen's hands. But in his Aswydd and Marhanen blood he had substantial claims to everything in reach, if he one day decided to reach for it and cause a world of trouble.

With that name, the name of the last Sihhë High King, he had claims to gods knew what more.

Is
this
, he asked himself, the King To Come? This child?
Mine
? It was not what he had thought.
Tristen
was what he had thought, and trusted Tristen's complete lack of ambition. But this? Did Tristen name his own heir, in this child?

"It's not all," Ninévrisë said faintly, holding to him, "it's not all.

Ryssand's with Tasmôrden."

He laughed, untimely, unseemly given the circumstances. "That's no news."

"He means to kill you."

A second time he laughed, this time because he was already set to laugh and wanted to deny all fears tonight and reassure her… but on his next breath he fully heard what she had said, and knew it was part of that letter, and felt cold through and through—not believing, far from disbelieving a warning from Tristen—and in the context of this newborn child, potential heir, potential pretender to more than two thrones.