Emuin. With Idrys. One did hope for consideration from one’s intimates, at least. And was disappointed.

One did expect, being roused at this ungodly hour by those same intimates, at least something of spectacle, an Elwynim assassin, a clutch of lordly conspirators.., a ravished and indignant lady of high degree.

And what was there? A dark-haired and dirty fellow in the ruins of good clothing restrained by two of the Guelen guard, a desperate case, to be sure, but hardly worth two armored men.

Tall for any Elwynim. Lanfarnesseman, perhaps; many were tall and slender, although most were as fair as the Guelenfolk and very few Lanfarnessemen went beardless. The prisoner stared consistently at his feet and one could not be otherwise certain of the features, but the bare, well-muscled forearms and the slender hands, alike the face, said young; and youthfulness said maybe fool enough—counting nine skulls of wouldbe assassins bleached and raven-picked on the Zeide’s south gate, in his year-long tenure here—to carry some personal pique against him, for hire or for, gods save them, the ancestral Amefin grudge.

He truly hoped not to have that old business begin again.

“So what have we?” he asked, swinging his foot in deliberate contempt of amateur intrigues. “A stolen mule? A pig-napper? And two of you to restrain him? Good gods.”

“Highness,” Idrys said. “This were best heard in private.”

“Well, well, my bed chamber was private, at least, the while. Morning would not do for this? Nothing would serve but I come down myself, over cold floors and colder—”

“Highness,” Emuin chided him, his tutorial voice.

Cefwyn waved his hand. “Have your play, then. Proceed.” The hall was emptying of servants and of the curious, a last few lingering near the door; but scribes, the borderland of needful elements of the court, and occasionally discreet, stayed. “Out,” he ordered the lingerers. “No record of this. Back to your beds. Shut the doors.”

The doors shut. He swung his foot, and frowned at the prisoner, who still studied the marble steps in front of him. “So what have we?” he addressed said prisoner, but it was unproductive of answers.

Idrys came to him and offered him a small book, a codex, leather-bound, old, the worse for wear. He flipped the pages open at random, saw a blockish, antique hand, a forgotten—perhaps wizardly—language.

His heart skipped a beat—a little skip, true, and he would not betray the fact, nor mend his posture, no, not for this, which he began to suspect as some priestly game with him. He did not think it was Emuin’s doing. It had the smell of a priestly matter, illicit and heretical practice, meaning the Bryalt faith, dominant in this province, could again be afoul of the orthodox Quinaltines, who had probably come a long and dusty ride from the capital to urge some obscure point of theology and rant to the Prince about cults and conspiracies on the borders.

But that it came through Emuin set it above the inconsequential and the purely theological.

He shut the book, left it idly in his lap, and cast a narrow look at his

01d tutor. “Well, old master. I take it the pig-thief came bearing this. And of course I must be roused out most urgently.”  “He claims it as his, Highness.”

Not likely his, Cefwyn thought, the youth being a youth, and lacking in every sense the plausibility of the occasional graybeard who gulled the villagers and roused—if merely for a season—Amefin expectations and Amefin disaffections from the Crown.

He considered Aman and Nedras, the gate-guards who were the anomaly in this gathering of court and guards—not the restrainers of the culprit, but those whose part in this doubtless intrigue-ridden malfeasance he had yet to hear. They were the ones who had brought with them, as he supposed, this head-hanging, straw-bedecked youth, the unwilling center of all this commotion. He would have thought, absent the gate-guards in the affair, that the Quinalt and the Teranthines were at odds over some point of abstract logic—but, gods, he had thought better of Emuin than to wake him for some priestly rivalry; and the matter did look to be some arrival at the Zeide gate.

“Man,” he said, curiosity aroused, “pig-thief. Look up. Look up here.

Whose book is this?”

The prisoner had been considerably knocked about. He seemed to need the guards’ holding him on his feet, and needed a shake from Aman to have his attention.

That brought his head up, jolted him to alertness ... and for a moment in Cefwyn’s awareness there was nothing—nothing—but that pale gaze.

Fear, Cefwyn thought, heart racing in his breast, his sense derived of judicial experience reasserting reason. It was fear he saw in most faces that came before him under such compulsion; far rarer, however, was the courage to look him in the eyes; and, he was ready to swear, although he had never met it in this court ...

He saw innocence. Absolute, stark, terrifying innocence.

He had moved without thinking—had dropped his knee off the arm without knowing it; had held his next breath and feared the whole assembly in the hall had seen, did see. He was not accustomed to be so moved by anyone, and he was vexed with himself. He felt no threat in the stare, only an uncanny, helpless attraction toward this creature, an attraction all but physical, unprecedented, and intimate, so acute that he felt exposed in that motion of his heart. He had never been so set aback in his life; and he was afraid, as this creature seemed afraid, this ... youth, this.., man, this ...

He had no way to name what he felt or what he saw; he had no reckoning even how much time had passed in the creature’s looking up, and shaking back his loose and tangled hair, and meeting him stare for stare.

But he knew that the men who held him were no restraint at all, if this bedraggled, fragile, glorious creature should decide to contest them.

Did no one but him see it? Did not Emuin, who was reputed wise in such matters, know that this threatening youth was not in any sense held by the guards? They had beaten him. There was straw in his dark hair and dirt on his clothes. If his guards had no terror of him, they were fools.

But maybe they had after all felt afraid—had they not, clearly, exhausted their chain of command?

And had those superior to them not called others, until the affair of the prisoner racketed to Emuin?

And had not Emuin insisted, through Idrys, that His Highness needed to be dragged from bed urgently to intervene in the matter? This was not an ordinary case. In any sense.

“Come. Come here.” Cefwyn beckoned the young man closer, and the two guards brought him to the lowermost step. The young man gazed at him again, that intimate and terrifying stare—as if the young man-            which he could not possibly do—knew secrets that would damn his soul.

The impression was so strong that almost he would have disposed the guards from the hall for fear of the youth speaking too much, or bringing some business worth lives—and he did not even know he owned such dreadful secrets. He found no reason for such a fear; and the youth, besides, seemed weak and uncertain on his feet, apt at moments even to fall to the marble floor without the guards’ steadying hold.

A moment while his thoughts raced, that silence continued in the room, until one could all but hear the snap of candle flames, until the melting of wax—like the melting of flesh just now in chambers above—it made the air cloying sweet. It was Orien’s perfume. It clung to him. His thoughts scurried like mice, this way and that, desperate, looking for an approach to the problem—and found it under his fingertips.

“Is this your book?” Cefwyn asked, lifting it from his lap.

“Yes, sir.”

“And are you indeed a thief?”

“No, sir. I am not.”

“Where were you and what were you doing, to be arrested by my guards?”