“A lord, is he?” The man slowly took his feet off the table—Mauryl would have been appalled, Tristen decided uneasily. He was surrounded by behavior and manners he began to be certain that Mauryl would not at all approve, manners which far more reminded him of the men in the woods. And from one master, now there seemed two, and they wondered whether he was a Lord, which held its own bewilderments.

But, then, they had brought him in under stone, where he was safer.

They might have shoved him about quite rudely, but they had not harmed him.

“And what,” the man in the chair wanted to know, “what would be your name?”

“Tristen, sir, thank you. And I came to find the master of the Kathseide.”

The man frowned, the grim man looked puzzled, and the one sneezed or laughed, he was not certain which.

“Is he the Mooncalf all along? Or only now?”

“A mooncalf in lord’s cloth, to us at least. All up and down the town, nothing of trouble nor of stealin’ that we’ve heard yet, and the boy had no trouble to win his copper. But he come strolling up from the low town, bright as brass, and he had to be through the gates sometime today, though Ness an’ Selmwy don’t report seein’ ’im.”

“So how long have ye been lurkin’ about the streets, rascal?”

“Not lurking, sir,” Tristen replied, he thought respectfully, but the man at his back fetched him a shove between the shoulders. “Walking.”

“How long have ye been in the town?” the foremost man asked, and he was glad to understand it was a simple question, and anxious to lay everything in their laps.

“I came in from the Road, sir. I walked through the gates down below, and the boy led me up to this gate to see the master of this Place before the dark came.”

“Did you, now?” the man said, leaning back again, and one of the other two shut the door, a soft, ominous thump, after which he heard the drop of a heavy bar.

“Paisi certainly done better ’n Ness an’ his fool cousin,” the grim man  said.

“And how, pray,” asked the man in charge, “did you pass through the gate, sir mooncalf?”

“I walked through, sir.” He remembered ducking behind the cart. He knew he was in the wrong.

“Is that so?” The man brought the chair legs down with a thump and waved a hand at the two who had brought him in. “Is he armed? Did you make certain?”

One man took him by the arm and held him still while the other ran hands over him and searched his belt and the tops of his boots. That began to frighten him, the more when the man, searching the front of his shirt, discovered the Book and the mirror and razor.  “Now what’s this?”

“Mine, sir.” He saw the man open the Book and anxiously watched him leaf through the pages, turn it upside down and shake it. “Please be careful.”

“Careful, eh?” The man laid the Book on the table, showing it, open, to the man in the chair. “It don’t look proper to me.”

“Foreign writin’.”

“It’s mine, sir. Please.” He reached to have the Book back, and the man behind him seized his arm and twisted it back, hard.

It hurt, and it scared him. He turned to be free of the pain. The man shoved him into the wall, hurting his other shoulder, and he tried then to make them stop and to have his Book back.

But they began to strike him and to kick him, and they tried to hold him. He had never dealt with men like this, and he had no notion what to do but run: he swept himself a clear space, swept up his Book and fled for the door, trying to throw the bar up.

A heavy weight hit him across the neck and shoulders and smashed his forehead into the door. He came about with a sweep of his arm to make the man stop, but in the same instant arms wrapped around his knees, hands seized his belt, and the weight of two men dragged him down to the floor. A third landed on his side and, setting an arm across his throat, choked him, while the other struck him across the head.

The dark went across his sight. He fought to breathe and to escape, he had no idea where or to what, or even how. But blows across his shoulders and across his head kept on, making the dark across his eyes flash red.

One man ripped the Book from his hand. The other kept sitting on his legs, not hitting him, and the third man had given up hitting him, and rummaged all over him, continuing his search. He was too stunned and too breathless to protest. He was willing to lie still in the dark and catch his breath if they would only cease the blows.

The dark, meanwhile, began to be dim light—and his head hurt, the more so when the man above his head seized him by the hair and hauled him not to his feet nor quite as far as his knees.

“Can ye make aught of it?” asked the man holding him, and the man in charge, turning the Book this way and that:

“I’m no Scribe. Nor’s he, by the look of ’im. A thief, I’d say.”

Thief. Stealing. Theft. Crime. Gallows. Hanging.

Dreadful images. Terrifying images, from his position, in pain and unbalanced—the man had a knee in his back, and his eyes were watering with the pull on his hair.

“Well?” the man asked him, shaking him. “Where did ye come by it, thief?”

“The Book is mine,” Tristen said. “I am no thief, sir.”

“It ain’t like honest writing to me,” the grim man said.

And the other, holding it out in front of his eyes: “What’s it say? Eh?”

“I can’t read it.”

“Ye can’t read it, eh? So you are a thief. A brigand. A robber. Who did you kill to get them fine clothes, eh?”

From Stealing to Killing. He shook his head. “No, sir, I killed no one.”

“Another lurking after the Marhanen,” one said to his fellows.

“He might be,” the third man said. “He might, that, but do they send a fool?”

“I am no thief,” Tristen said. The very word was strange to his mouth.

He fought to get a foot and a knee beneath him, and the man let him, but no more. “It is my Book, sirs. Please let me up.”

“And what would you do wi’ a book, hey, if you can’t read it?”

“A novice priest, by ’is talk, I’d say,” said the man at his head. “Stole a book an’ run, by me. Killt somebody for the clothes.”

“No, sirs,” Tristen said desperately. “It belongs to me. I’m not to lose it.”

“Not to lose it,” the man in charge said. “And who said?”

“My master, sir.”

“Ah. Now His Lordship has finally owned a master. And who would that be?”

“My master said—” He knew dangerous questions by some experience now; and not to name Names carelessly. “My master said—I should follow the Road.”

“And who said this?”

“My master, sir.” He truly did not want to answer that question. He feared that they had their minds made up that he was in the wrong, and the men in the woods had liked least of all where he had come from. He was light-headed from hunger and from exhaustion, and he began to fear they would hit him again. “Please give me the Book, sir.”  “He’s mad,” the man on his feet said.

“And never will answer the question. —Who is this master, man?

Answer, or I’ll become angry with you.”

He feared to answer. He feared not to. He had no knowledge how to lie.

“Mauryl,” he said, and by the look on the man’s face once he said that Name, he feared it would have been far better for him to have kept still, no matter what they did.

Chapter 9

Te assizes were done, the evening headache, promoted by a boundary dispute and a squabbling lot of voices, had given way to a pleasant warmth of wine, and a wind from the west stirred the air from the open window-panels above a candlelit tumble in the silken sheets. Orien and Tarien were a red-haired bedful, a welcome diversion on this night when Cefwyn felt the need to forget the day’s necessities. Together the twins had the wit of half the council combined, a more astute judgment, a keener humor; and their perfumed oil, Orien’s hands and Tarien’s lips were a potent, delirious persuasion to think of nothing else at all and hold himself as long as he could manage—Which he could do, thinking of the water rights of Assurn-brook and two border lords at each others’ throats. He could distract himself quite effectively for perhaps a breath or two, asking himself whether bribery, diversion, or main force was the appropriate answer to fools—a mandated marriage, perhaps: Esrydd’s light-of-wit son, the thane of Assurn—­Hawasyr, and Durell’s plump wayward daughter, both with ambitions, both lascivious, both—Was it through the female line the lands of Payny could descend?