“From the loft,” he said, shamefacedly. “—But I didn’t go on the parapet. I looked through the hole the storm made.”  “And said nothing of it to me?”

“I—saw it only once, Mauryl. I never looked again.”

Mauryl still frowned, but not so angrily. “And what else have you seen from this vantage?”

“Water. Woods. —Stones.”

“Ruins. Ruins of long ago. What more?”

“Mountains.” That Word tumbled onto his heart, when he remembered the horizon above the forest.

“Hills. The foothills of Ilen~luin, which stretch far up to the Shadow Hills in the north. There are far greater mountains in the world. —What more have you found, in this escapade?”

“The sky. The clouds. Only that.”

For a moment Mauryl stood with his arms folded, still seeming angry.

“Names are power over a thing, for a wizard or for a man. This fortress has a name: Ynefel. The forest is Marna. A river lies between the walls of Ynefel and Marna Wood and it winds beyond Marna Wood again: Lenfialim is the river. These are their names. Do you take all of that, Tristen?”

They were not names. They were each of them Words—Words that came to him with dark, and cold, and terror; with trees and branches and depth and cold. They were Words that carried the world wider than he could see, and full of threats he did not guess, and animals and birds and creatures far more terrible than Owl.

Ilen~luin: stone and storm and ice.

Lenfialim: secrets and division, and dreadful dark.

Ynefel: B

He wanted not to know. He saw the stones around him, that was all, a place of rickety stairs and balconies spiraling up a stone-walled height, stone faces staring at them, stone hands reaching and never escaping the  walls.

“Some things happen against our wishes,” Mauryl said, “and some things we desired come in ways we would gladly refuse.” Mauryl laid his hand on his shoulder. Mauryl wanted his strict attention, and that frightened him more than all things else. “Tristen, there will come a day. Soon.

You have all I could give you, all I could mend afterward. Beware of trust, boy, but most of all beware of doubt. Both are deadly to us.”

It was a stifling fear Mauryl laid on him. “I try to understand what you tell me, Mauryl. I do try.”

“Go to your studies. Go find your Book. It’s upstairs, is it not?”

“Yes. But—” He became convinced of secrets, of some deception Mauryl played at his expense. He knew his questions wearied Mauryl and his mistakes vexed Mauryl, and his slowness was Mauryl’s despair. “Can you not help me a little, Mauryl, only a little? Show me just a word or two.

Other things come to me without my even trying. This—that I most want to learn—I make no sense of it. It will not come.”

“It will. In its own time, it will. Magic is like that.” Mauryl’s fingers squeezed his arm. “Be clever. Be no fool, boy. Tristen. Go.”

He was disheartened at that. He took his gifts from Mauryl, the little mirror, the razor and the stone to sharpen it, he bowed politely, and went toward the stairs.

A sound rattled off the walls—a strangely muffled thunder that made him glance away to the study wall. Thunder, he thought. Rain would make the loft untenable. He would have to come downstairs to study, then, and perhaps, after all, Mauryl would take pity and give him at least a hint.

He laid his hand on the banister. And it was not thunder that made the banister tremble. He looked up in alarm as that rumbling came again.

“Go,” Mauryl said.

“There’s a sound, Mauryl. What is it?”

“Go upstairs.”

“But—” He had almost protested it came from upstairs. But it came then from all about, and it rattled and thundered like nothing he had ever heard. Mauryl left him and stood staring toward the farther hall—it seemed to be coming from there, at the moment. It shook at the doors they never opened, never unbarred. It hammered. The thunder echoed through the stones.  “Mauryl!”

“Upstairs!” Mauryl slammed a heavy codex shut, and dust flew out in a cloud. “These are no threat to me. A petty nuisance. A triviality. —Get upstairs, I say!”

The hammering had become a steady, regular thumping. The huge book had overset the inkpot as Mauryl shut it, and a trail of ink ran over the table, snaked among the parchments, and dripped on the floor as Tristen wavered between saving the parchments and obeying Mauryl-but then Mauryl shouted at him a Word without a sound to his ears, and a stifling fear came over him, a fear that left him no thought but to do what Mauryl had told him, while the hammering and banging racketed through the lower hall and shook the walls and the wooden steps.

He ran up the stairs faster than he had ever climbed. He reached his own balcony and ran for his own room—flung open the door and shut it again, trembling as he leaned against it, thinking then, by Mauryl’s mastery of things, to have safety. But the hammering downstairs seemed to shake the wooden floor under his feet. The room felt dank and precarious-it smothered, it held him prisoner.

No safety, no hiding place, something said to him, and he felt a sense of peril so imminent he felt he had to have the door open again or suffocate. Mauryl had said no. Mauryl had said be here, but the thundering in the stone walls seemed to come from right below his window. He saw a crack run up the wall. To his horror he saw it advance rapidly along the mason-work and right up to the wooden frame of the horn-paned window itself—then around the latched side of the frame. The latch parted, the gap grown too wide, and white daylight came through.

He hardly knew what he was thinking, then, in that stifling terror, except of the Book, Mauryl’s Book, that Mauryl had said was what he had to know, and he had to have—he snatched it from the table and thrust it into his shirt and grasped the door latch.

But after that nothing could stay the panic. He fled the room, sped down the balcony as the wooden supports quaked to the hammering at the doors—up, Mauryl had said, go upstairs, and his room was not safe.

He ran the stairs that spiraled up and up past Mauryl’s balcony, as the whole structure of the balconies creaked and groaned—he raced up into the high, mad reach of braces and timbers, and the narrow, low-ceilinged stairs that led into the shadow of the loft.

He could scarcely get his breath. He went to the boarded division of the loft, seeking a place sheltered from the holes and gaps in the shingles, a hidden place, a stable place. He clambered out under the eaves, guarding his head from the rafters, an arm braced against the dust-silked wood.

Cobwebs, the work of determined spiders, tangled across his face and hair; he brushed them away, while all about him the fortress resounded to the hammering and the air tingled and rumbled.

Came a moaning, then, as if the entire fortress were in pain—and a rising babble, like rain dancing into the cistern, he thought, and crept further into his nook, tucked up with his arms about him. He shivered, as pigeons fluttered in alarm and more and more of them took wing out the gaps in the boards of the loft.

The babbling swelled, sounding now like voices, as if—as if, he thought, trying to reason in himself what it was—the whole fortress were full of people, all trying to be heard. The hammering had stopped, and began again, a sharp sound, now, ringing off the walls—the sound of an axe, he thought, and at first was bewildered, then knew, like a Word, that it was the doors that sound threatened.

Then—then the howling began, the same horrid sound that had frightened him from his bed—and if it was from inside, Mauryl must have called it, he said to himself. He felt it drawing at him. He felt Mauryl’s presence tingling in the air around him. Wind swept in and scoured the straw from the floor; wind ripped holes in the shingles that patched the slates; wind sent a blast of straw out of the nests in the peak of the roof. He ducked and covered his eyes, and finally—finally in desperation locked his arms over his head and squeezed his eyes shut against the gale.