Of a sudden another cheer went up. He had no idea why, until he saw the Tower and Star billow out, eerily pale in the light that broke above the walls—his own banner had unfurled.

A horn brayed across the din, and the three standard-bearers began to move out the gates, down through the town, no mad haste in this ride, but solemn deliberation. The bells of the town began to peal, ringing from every town gate and from the citadel, a clangor that started every bird still drowsing in the towers.

Townsfolk that gathered along the street waved and shouted. Boys broke from the crowd as the banners passed, and ran along beside them—boys too young to have been mustered to the Amefin lords, boys clutching bows and carrying old swords, boys some of them with no weapons at all. The young lads coursed their route and stayed with them, though he saw mothers and fathers shout at them to come back. Tristen saw a band of them break from the crowd as the banners passed, and as they rode under the gate and turned to the right, along the long, long line of wagons, the boys burst forth from outside the gates and ran alongside the foremost riders.

Dogs joined the chase. Several stray sheep wandered through, among the wagons, right across the path of the horses, and, with the dogs behind, jogged back through the line in front of them.

Outside the town gates, the nearby rural and town levies mustered in the dark, and there came a flood of Amefin infantry behind a few horsed lords.

The Eagle standard of the Amefin swept in just behind their rank, with the several earls and their separate standards, and behind those the pennons of the various sections with their lieutenants and sergeants in command.

They passed their wagon in line near the head of the column: Dys and Cass were with it, along with Aswys and two of his boys on horseback, and Tassand and the other servants. Lusin and the other fifteen Guelen guards, the four shifts that had stood at his door, all on horseback, rode in to their assigned place behind the King’s guard, the King’s Dragon Guard being under Gwywyn, who rode behind the leaders. But Lusin and the rest were directly under Uwen’s command, since Uwen’s armoring and commission as a Guelen officer and, at least by honor, as Tristen now understood, a captain over the almost nonexistent forces of Ynefel and Althalen.

Uwen had said when Cefwyn had given him the horses that he could not figure how he had gotten to such a station, being a man of the villages, not of the court, and seemed quite overwhelmed by it. Now he had a command.

But Tristen thought most of any honor he simply wanted Uwen and all his folk to come through alive—and Uwen’s rise to fortune occasioned him a guilt he himself did not understand, not because the wish to have Uwen safe was wrong, he decided, but because he had so much he should be thinking about and understanding rather than worry, as he could not help but do, about a household and the men who depended on him.

He was not the same as the lords of the south, he told himself, as he rode beside Cefwyn and Nin6vrisi in the rank of Kings, with their three banners snapping and cracking in the dawn wind ahead of them. He was not the same as Cefwyn, who was born to be a king; he had no attachments for good or for ill the same as they. He had stolen them, he had borrowed them, he had put up the pretense of being a Man, even though he had had but one thing to do from the hour that Mauryl had called him into the world, a dangerous thing, and he had no justification for allowing Men to form such attachments to him, where their dangers were more than they could know. Uwen—had been so confident, had known so well where things ought to be, and what had to be done to move men and horses: he was a calming presence this morning for all the household, and yet Uwen with all his common sense was only giving orders that someone once had given to him, and that the soldiers knew how to obey, anyway.

But, he thought, Uwen more clearly than any of them had an inkling he was facing some danger very different from anything they knew, and Uwen was not spreading fear around him: Uwen had calmed him when he had faltered this morning, when the attachments he had made had suddenly added up and overwhelmed him; and Uwen did all that he did with a kind of courage he did not know if he possessed.

He had said it as clearly as he saw it himself, that if they could defeat Hasufin’s allies on the field, they might deprive Hasufin of agencies to do his bidding—but the cost of that, he saw all around him, this morning: men who were not at harvest, boys who had no notion what they were facing—Ninévrisé and Cefwyn who were arguing about her presence on the field. Ninévrisé had suddenly said she would not stay in camp when it came to a battle, and Cefwyn had relied on her to do exactly that,

“Which is why,” Cefwyn said with asperity, as they rode nearby, “I gave four damned fine horses to get you an escort.”

“We should not be thinking of defeat,” Ninévrisé said, “my lord.”

“I am not thinking of defeat! I am thinking of men who may die satisfying your whim, my lady, to view a battle.”

“I have men at risk at Emwy, —my lord! I owe it to them to come as far as I can!”

“As far as you can come is the camp, woman, without diverting precious reliable men to guard you! You will not give an order on the field!

Leave it to men of experience!”

It went on, several exchanges more, but nothing was resolved. Tristen agreed with Cefwyn: he wanted Ninévrisé safe in camp, too, and would have told her so, but resort to the gray space was dangerous, and he did not wish to do it—or to intervene between Ninévrisé and Cefwyn. It was another attachment he could not spare the thought to maintain now.

Ninévrisé was one more life to fling at the lives Hasufin flung at them.

But she was not Emuin, and whatever her father had been, Ninévrisé had nothing of his ability.

Nor had he. He had not had the strength to reinforce the old man at Althalen, and he was responsible for far more than just the fires being lit days earlier than Cefwyn had expected. He had swept up Cefwyn and all his men into Mauryl’s struggle and carried them from Nin6vrisi’s war into her father’s, and into Emuin’s, and into Mauryl’s.

He did not know, in fact, if Mauryl’s struggle would end on Lewen plain—and did not know, in fact, whether he himself would. It seemed he had little use to Mauryl after that was done, and for all that he knew the magic Mauryl had used to bring him here would be finished, too, win or lose, as Uwen would say.

He had had time to think of very many terrible things during the hours of preparation. Now he watched the road above Petelly’s ears and past the moving barrier of blowing silk—black, white, red and gold. And, Ninévrisé and Cefwyn being largely occupied in argument, he found it needful to say little at all, except to Uwen.

He won the dispute. Cefwyn thought so at least, since Ninévrisé conceded it might not be the wisest thing to advance with the line, but that she might take up an observation point, and be ready to send messengers to advise the officers immersed in battle of any unanticipated flanking movement: she did know whereof she spoke. She had studied, she said. She had read the same writers on the topic. She had read Tashfinen.

“I considered,” she said, “that it behooved me to know what I do and what I ask when I send men in certain numbers to certain tasks, my lord King.”

“You constantly amaze me,” he said.

“I trust you will never be amazed by my competency, my lord.”

What did a man do with such a woman? His lady mother had not answered his father in such terms. “I see I have years of discovery ahead.” Clearly a man dared not let Ninévrisé gain an ell. “—And I commend your zeal to know, my lady, but were you any man of my association, and you had not commanded in the field, you would stand on that hill with no men but your personal guard.”