If you fail me I am blind. Do you understand that?”

Tristen looked at him, lifted his hand to the northwest, between forest edge and plains. “He will meet us before Emwy.”

It was possible Tristen had heard nothing of what he said. “Are you certain?” he asked Tristen.

“Yes,” Tristen said distantly. Then: “Yes. I have feared so all day. Now I know. I wish not.’

It meant Tasien’s annihilation, almost certainly. Cefwyn’s heart sank, and he glanced aside to see who rode in hearing of them. Idrys was.

Ninévrisé was speaking with one the Guelen guards he had assigned to guard her, and could not have heard. “More of Mauryl’s visions?”

Tristen shook his head. “Mine, sir.”

“Is Lord Tasien fallen, then?”

“I think he is, sir. I feel it certain. I have feared it for hours.”

The news was maddening. He did not want to believe it. “Then Aséyneddin has crossed the river. That is what you are saying.”  “Yes, sir.”

“Don’t say it to Her Grace, and don’t say it to anyone yet. Even Uwen.

Not until I say so.”  “Yes, sir.”

“Across the river —Then, damn it. —” He looked where the scouts had ridden over the hills to the south. “Where is Lord Cevulirn? —And when will we find him?” he asked, with his father’s irreverence for visions and, still, a hope that wizardry would fail or find exception.

“Vision me that vision and save my scouts the hazard.”

Tristen gave a visible shiver, a drawing in of the shoulders. “No. I would not venture to say, lord King. I don’t see them. But I do see a shadow on the land.., westward and north, that is not good. That is not at all good.”

“A shadow. Wizardry, you mean.”

“It is, sir. But it’s all the same a Shadow.”

Cefwyn scanned the western horizon and saw nothing. “You can see bad news but not good? Is that it? Or what do you see?”

“Things that a wizard touches. My enemy is with Aséyneddin. He is at Ynefel.”

“One’s at the bridge, one’s in the heart of Marna! How can he be two places at once?”

“I don’t think he’s at Althalen. I hope, sir, I do hope for Althalen to be safe. If it isn’t—”

“If it isn’t, we’re destined to camp there tonight. We rely on camping there and passing that place without being engaged. If there was a possibility of this, you might have told me before now!”

“I would have told you, sir, if I thought he was there. I don’t think so.

And going overland is far slower. —But where Lord Cevulirn is, I don’t know.”

Wizards. It was enough to give a man pause. And when Tristen was rapt in thought he forgot all instructions of protocols, all agreements, all that was between them—he simply told what he believed; and increasingly he did believe it. He had a sudden vision of himself, a man of practical Marhanen blood, pursuing Tristen’s will-o’-the-wisp enemies across two provinces of ancient superstitions, elder gods, and demonstrable wizardry.

Scratch an Amefin and wizard blood bled forth. And if he fought for Amefel against what tried to claim its ancient soil—it was most reasonably a war of wizards. By his own choice, a Sihhé standard, black and ominous, fluttered beside the Marhanen Dragon. By his own choices the Amefin rural folk, emboldened by the fall of the Aswydds and the impotence of their own lords, had flocked to Tristen’s standard. He could bear with that.

But in Guelessar and the northern provinces were honest and good and loyal men who would shrink in horror from what their King had allied with, even if their King won.

If their King lost a province—and retreated into the heartland of Ylesuin, with sorcery let loose in Amefel and the Elwynim in its employ—he would have failed his oath to his own people. The wailing of slain children had haunted his grandfather to his dying hour. In the gods’ good name—what might haunt him hereafter?

“A rider,” Tristen said, and he saw it at the same moment: a scout coming back full tilt down the hills toward them.

More bad news? he asked himself. He braced himself for it. Idrys swung closer, clearly seeing it. Gwywyn and Ninévrisé came near.

The man—of the Prince’s Guard, as all their scouts were of that regiment-slid to a walk alongside them. “Your Majesty,” the scout breathed, while his horse panted and blew. “Your Majesty, —dust on the south—all along the south, m’lord. My companion rode ahead to see.”

“Fall back and find Qwyll’s-son. Have him inform the ranks. Pass it back by rider.”

“Yes, m’lord.” The man drew rein and fell back in the line.

“It may be Cevulirn,” Cefwyn said. “That would be very good news.”

“Certainly better than such sightings on our north,” Idrys muttered.

Idrys had been close on Tristen’s other side, close enough to have heard his exchange with Tristen. And Idrys believed bad news before good.

Always.

“Coming from the south, they must be ours,” Ninévrisé said.

Tristen said, solemnly, “They are ours, my lady. But we are to their north. Best they be certain who we are.”

Tristen said such a thing. Something else had clearly unfolded to him, in only so few days.

Possibilities unfolded to the Marhanen King, too.

What if it were the writer of the Art of War Mauryl had brought back?

His mentor of that long-ago text, riding unguessed beside him?

It was too cursed poetic. And, no, Tashfinen was an engineer and a strategist.

He recalled their last council before the barons had left. He said to himself as they rode side by side looking for that encounter, Tristen knows strategy— Certainly he knows the sword. Uwen says he knows the lance, that he will ride Dys, and that he has no doubts of him. The Sihhé brought the heavy horses with them to the land: how should he not know them?

Tristen counseled us no earthen walls. He spoke out against fortifications. Everyone will die, Tristen said, and we didn’t heed him—when he was counseling us, damn it, on the one answer I could never find in Tashfinen’s book, the one question I most wanted to know, and I didn’t hear what he was saying.

Tashfinen didn’t write it in his book because the Sihhé of his age knew that answer. It was the art of siege Tashfinen invented—against enemies who used other Sihhé tactics as a matter of course. Tashfinen had all prior lore—books burned at Althalen—and why should he write down the use of magic innate in his kind? Other texts would have held that-whatever a man’s born with, there’s always a cleverer way to use it: that would have been his object in writing: what he wrote down was the new thing, not the old. Why should we expect a Sihhé or any man to write down the obvious?

What held me from hearing Tristen?

Are we all so blind? Or is it another blow his enemy has struck us, through Orien Aswydd?

What did one do, he went on asking himself, without that knowledge innate (Emuin had said it) in Tristen’s kind?

Strike at flesh and blood? That he could do. The other possibilities-he did not even see. And in his blindly following a Sihhé text, he had not regarded Tristen’s warning—he had seen only the dangers of Tristen confronting him in council; and in his infatuation with Sihhé skill in war, he had sent men to an untenable, fatal position against wizardry.

He had let his bride’s kinsman make a deadly mistake. Tasien had acted the best he knew against his enemy, in the absence of any trust of Guelen kings. But as King, he certainly could have argued with Tasien with more force, rather than accept Tasien’s plan as he had done and (gods forgive him) embroider it with his own boyhood fancies.

Trenches in the herb garden. Good blessed gods, why had he not used his wits?

But without sending Emuin, or Tristen, neither of which was possible-what could he have done against a wizardous attack? What could he do against the one he knew was coming at them all?

And how did he break the news of Tasien to Ninévrisé?