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Knowing everything could ravel and fly away from his grasp, he savored every scent in the air he breathed, from the damp forest earth to the smell of horses and leather and oiled metal, the scent of the woods and the meadows as they woke, waterlogged and cold, from winter. He found wonder in the light on Dys' black hide and on the fortress of dragons.html

bare boughs of the trees. He looked out at the subtle grays and browns of the forest, finding shades as subtle as a wren's wing and evergreen dark and stubborn at the woods' edge—and there, oh, like a remembrance of summer, an unlovely sapling had half-broken buds.

Everything he loved was around him and he loved all he saw, the kiss of a chill breeze and the warmth and glitter of a noon sun, the harsh voices of soldiers at their midday rest, the soft sound of a horse greeting its master, the voices of friends and the laughter of men who knew the same as he did that these days of march together might be all that remained to them in the world.

One heart was not enough to hold it all. It overflowed. It required several. It required sharing. He pointed out a squirrel on a limb, and Uwen and Crissand, as different as men ever could be, both smiled at its antics. He heard Cevulirn and Umanon and Sovrag talk together as if they had always been good neighbors; and Pelumer joined them, doubtless to tell them how things had been before they all were born.

Strange, he thought, to hold so many years in memory: it was strange enough to him to hold a single year and know that, indeed, he had lived into the next, and found new things still to meet.

He enjoyed the taste of cold rations and plain water, for in the dark whence he had come there was nothing at all, and he might go back into that dark again without warning, for the world was stretched so thin and fine the enemy might rupture it, as he might, unwittingly rending what was and what might be. In the gray space, time itself was not fixed: nothing was fixed or sure: he had been in the mews.

He had held a boy's hand, and carried out a newborn. He had slept in Marna Wood, and felt a presence coming through the woods, which was his own.

He adjusted a buckle at his shoulder with particular concentration, thinking he could not leave things until a further moment, and the closer he moved to Ilefínian, the more he could not trust the next moment to remain stable and fixed… though he willed it: he willed it with all the magic he could command. Every glance at the woods was a spell, every breath a conjuration.

"Ye're uncommon quiet, the both of ye," Uwen said, as if he had taken Crissand, too, in his charge. "Not a word to say?"

"None," Crissand said with a small, brave laugh. "I was thinking fortress of dragons.html

about the lambing."

"M'lord'll like the lambs," Uwen said. "Havin' not seen any but half-grown."

"I look forward to it," Tristen said. He clung to Uwen's voice as to life itself: for if all in his thoughts was gray and uncertain, Uwen's voice gave him back the solidity of earth, the rough detail of a gray-stubbled face, the imperfect beauty of eyes lined with long exposure to the world's bright suns. Uwen made him think of lambs, which he imagined as like half-grown sheep, but smaller… but that might not be so, thinking of Tarien's baby, and how little Elfwyn looked like a grown man.

It was spring. The world still held miracles. The forest around him did. About them he wove his spells.

Desperately he asked, with a glance aside, "What tree is that?"

"Hawthorn," Uwen said.

Hawthorn, ash and oak, wild blackberry and wild currant. Everything had a name and kept its separate nature. With all the flux in the gray space, the earth stayed faithful and solid under him, and the buds on the trees held an event yet to come, the promise of leaves, and summer yet unseen, precious promise, full of its own magic, an incorruptible order of events.

He embraced it, held it, bound himself to it with a fervor of love.

"There's blooms to come," Uwen said. "These little scraggly 'uns'll surprise ye, how they shine. Ye don't see 'em all summer when the great old oaks is leafed. Then you just curse 'em for bein' brush in your way, but they'll bloom to theirselves come the first warm days an' be pretty as maids at festival. Same's the blackberry vines, as ain't pleasant to ride into, or to catch your feet if ye're chasin' some stray sheep, but they dress fine for spring an' give ye a fine treat in the summer… ain't never complained about 'em, meself, if the thorns catch me unawares. As I was a boy, I knew all the patches 'twixt my house an' the hills, an' me mum'd bake up cakes… ain't had the same, since."

"I know a few patches," Crissand said. "I'll have my folk send you some."

"Oh, but ye have to pick 'em yourself, Your Grace, and eat a few as fortress of dragons.html

they're warm in the sun."

"Then I'll show you where they are," Crissand said, and the earl of Meiden and the captain of Amefel made their plans, as they said, to go blackberrying in the country, so only half the berries might reach the kitchen.

Their idle chatter, their plans—they held promises and order, too, and Tristen wished with all his heart to go with them and taste the blackberries.

And about that thought, tenacious as the vines, he feared he had begun to weave a more perilous magic: he had thought of the three of them together, after the battle that was to come, and he had wished, and that wish coming from his heart had as much power as he had bound between himself and the earth. The more he decided not to wish that day to come, the more easily it might not, and the more easily one or all of them might perish beforehand.

Bind Crissand and Uwen's fate to his, for good or for ill, and set the integrity of the world at issue in that simple, homely wish of friends to eat blackberries… dared he? Had he done such a fatal, reckless thing?

That was the peril and the strength of Sihhë magic, that it worked so easily, and fear of what he had done sent him to the threshold of a tortuous course of half-doing and half-undoing that Emuin himself could not riddle out, Emuin who labored over his wizard-work and consulted charts and stars and seasons to which he himself was not bound. The plain fact was that he
could
wish it, and halfway in and halfway out was an untenably dangerous position.

Flesh as well as spirit, had not Mauryl said it? He was
both
.

"I wish it," he said suddenly, aloud and with all his heart. "Pray to the gods, if they hear you: we may need it!"

"My lord?" Crissand asked, alarmed, but Uwen, who was a plain Man, said, quietly:

"M'lord's worked a magic, an' wants help in it; and if prayer'll do it, why, I'll dust mine off and do my best, m'lord, that I will."

So they rode, after that, sometimes silent, sometimes in converse, talking on things that, like the blackberries, assumed an unaccustomed seriousness.

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In this, perhaps Uwen even more than Crissand and Cevulirn understood how grave the crisis had been in him, and how dangerous the choice he had made. Cevulirn rode up the column to join them a time, not a talkative man on a day less fraught with consequence, and now seeming content to be near them, a presence at the edge of the gray space, as they were to him… perhaps after all Cevulirn had felt more of what happened than seemed likely, and offered his strength, such as it was. They had become friends, beyond that meeting Auld Syes' had foretold; and friendship was its own reason now, three of them, their touch at each other in the gray space as solid as their sight of each other in the world, with Uwen to support them all.

"Getting dark," Crissand remarked. "We may have to camp in this wood."

Tristen shook his head, for he had the sense of a place farther on, where water ran, where one of Pelumer's men waited. He hoped so, for as they passed into the wood beyond a small ruined wall, shadows ran like ink deep among the trees, and the wood grew colder, the branches seeming to rattle without a wind.

"Shall we stop?" Uwen asked.

"No," he said. "Half an hour more."

A glance upward through bare branches gave the only proof day still lingered, and conversations grew quieter, until there was only the crack of dry branches, the scuff of hooves on old leaves, the steady creak of leather. Shadows began to move and flow, Shadows indeed, Tristen thought, and caught Crissand's sudden turn to try to see one.

Cevulirn, too, looked askance, and Uwen took alarm from them.

"Nothing harmful to us," he said, though he was less than sure, wary lest the Shadows turn prankish or become more aware of them than they were. As it was, they tended to be harmless: but he reminded himself it was not Amefel, and these were not Shadows he had met before. He had no idea to what authority they did answer, or whether they had any dealings with Ynefel, to the south… or worse.

Something else, a wisp of something, begged his attention, but was gone when he tried to ask what, and it seemed to him that neither Crissand nor Cevulirn had noticed it. He almost thought it was Ninévrisë, and that thought greatly worried him, as if something might have gone amiss at Henas'amef, something he dared not fortress of dragons.html

pursue. He had to trust Emuin for that: he had to remind himself he could not be everywhere, informed on everything at once.

So they rode a moment more in the silence that followed; but now the trees were thinning to a last curtain of scrub before a meadow, and they crossed a rill that wended its way through the last of them, not to a soggy water-meadow as they had found at their last rest, but by the last of the light, onto grassy dry ground.

And there one of the Lanfarnesse rangers sat waiting on a flat rock, expecting them, having spied out this place.

"Safety for the night," Pelumer rode up to declare, and so it seemed, under the fair evening sky, under the first stars. So Tristen felt some of his fear depart.

But he cast a glance back at the dark wall of the wood. Strange territory in every sense, and strange musings lurked under those bare branches: Owl had not joined him, and he was anxious, still ahorse, while men waited, looking to him to dismount first.

He settled the reins and stepped down from Dys' tall back, landed squarely and looked back a second time, as if he could surprise a Shadow, or Owl, watching him.

"Is something amiss?" Crissand asked.

He shook his head. "Disturbed," he said, and the truth came to him as he began to speak it. "Troubled, but not against us. Still, better here, than among the trees. Better to be who we are. Tasmôrden's men would fare very badly here, if they came."

"They haven't," Cevulirn observed.

"They have not," Tristen said, but with a sudden dread. It was suddenly sure in his heart that indeed Tasmôrden had moved from where he had last felt his presence, that the main force of the enemy army had moved the other direction from Ilefínian, away from him.

That conviction lent a chill to the evening wind, one that made him gather his cloak about him, and wish Cefwyn every protection he could offer.

"M'lord?" Uwen asked, distracting him. And he felt now pulled in two directions at once, one the desire to bid them all ride on— that was folly: they would defeat themselves if they wore themselves with a further march. And he wished to go back into the woods and learn fortress of dragons.html

what moved there, but that, too, was folly. They were well out of it, and lucky, Uwen would say, because with the sinking of the sun, the Shadows gathered in this land to which they were strangers and intruders, and he wished safety on the rangers, that they, too, might go against their habit and come into the camp tonight.

By twilight the carts creaked and squealed their way about the weedy meadow on the lines of a camp in formation, dumping off tents as they went. Tents already distributed went up like white mushrooms at the edge of an unculled, brush-choked wood in the fading light.

Groups of men dug bare earth patches for campfires… not for every man, in this overgrown area, but sufficient: Cefwyn had no wish to burn the wood down to give notice of his presence, but there was no persuading Guelenmen to camp like the Lanfarnesse rangers, and fight on cold rations, either. And there was no concealing the approach of an army that moved with carts. But not every man had a tent tonight, and fewer would have them on the following night. They shed canvas like a snake its skin, and hereafter trusted a handful of carts with the most essential supplies, but every man would carry dry rations, and every man had a good woollen cloak, the king's gift, that was blanket, litter for the wounded, and windbreak at need. The Guelen book of war insisted the baggage was everything, and that if they lost their heavy gear, the army was doomed; but Guelenfolk nowadays were no longer invaders far from home, and he saw how even his grandfather had relied on old wisdom. Tristen urged otherwise, their feckless lord of shadows and cobwebs, as Idrys had been wont to call him: but not feckless on the battlefield, far from it, and not feckless now, leading an army northward in support of him.

Tristen had spoken against carts and baggage and a long wait until spring; and he had gone instead on his own advice, to the very brink.

Now that things went astray it was Tristen's advice that guided him, and it was huntsman's economy he meant to practice: that was how he explained it to lords who had never ridden Ivanim fashion to war.

Maudyn was dismayed to hear he meant to abandon the careful fortifications he had made, and worse, to make every individual man responsible for his own food and warmth hereafter. All day long the line of carts on a narrow, perilously forested road had kept Ryssand at his tail, for Ryssand had not been able to maneuver past.

Ryssand had surely taken the point, for Ryssand had not sent so much fortress of dragons.html

as a messenger forward to hack his way through the brush and seek converse with his king. The carts having gotten onto the bridge ahead of Ryssand's forces, and the army having moved past Lord Maudyn's camp without stopping, and some of
those
carts having maneuvered into the road, why, there they were, all day long, moving through wooded land well suited for scattered ambush by archers, but utterly safe from large movements of cavalry such as Tasmôrden commanded. If an army of fools was bound to quarrel in enemy territory, it was an area as forgiving of folly as he could hope for…