“Mauryl bade me—”

“Oh, Mauryl,” the lady said. “Pish.”

And the other, exactly like Orien: “So sad of countenance, Sir Tristen.”

“M’ladies,” he said, trying to brush first the one and now the other lady from his arms, “I have explained. Please: I am not permitted to speak to anyone.”

“Such cruel hospitality. How have you offended the prince?”

“Please,” Tristen said, and broke from them and walked quickly through his disturbed guards, back the way he had come. He had offended Orien Aswydd, he thought, yet Emuin had said she was to be avoided. And magic had made two of her. He did not look back. He hurried to climb the stairs.

Face to face with a pair of the gate-guards.

One he knew, a face out of his bad dreams; he met the man’s eyes without willing it, and turned and fled down the steps, taking the side hallway toward the garden.

No one but his own guard followed. On the bench near the pond he sat down and clenched his hands behind his bowed head until he could draw a calm breath.

The gate-guards, he told himself, would not come for him. They had not seen his misbehavior. They had not reported him. His own guards would not. They stood silent, as they must, now, but they were his own, such as he had, and they would have rescued him from the encounter if they had had time, he told himself so, as they had intervened before to save him from untoward encounters, and he hoped that they themselves would meet no reprimand.

He stayed by the pond all the day, save once going to the kitchen to ask a bit of bread, of which he fed half to the birds and the fish, who never knew his foolishness or his failures or his indiscretions.

And in the afternoon he tucked up his knees and rested his head on his arms, risking a little sleep finally in the sun’s warmth, for he had ceased to sleep well of nights. Breezes blew through his dreams. Wings fluttered in panic, and beams and timbers creaked. Stones fell from arches.

Shadows crept among the trees, soundless and menacing, and the wind roared through the treetops, rattling dry twigs and leafy boughs alike, making them speak in voices.

Here—the wind was pent in garden walls, the trees were trimmed by gardeners, the voices were all of passers-by who cared nothing for him.

But someone walked near on the gravel poolside.

And stopped.

He looked up into Idrys’ grim face and started to his feet. He stood with heart pounding, for never had Idrys approved anything he did.

“Prince Cefwyn has sent for you,” Idrys said, then, the shape of his worst fears.

Guards stood at the door of Cefwyn’s apartments, downstairs from his room, grim red-cloaked men with gold and red coats and a gold dragon for their insignia: the Guelen guard, they were, which attended the prince. Idrys went through their midst without a glance, and Tristen followed him through the doors they guarded, through an anteroom and into a place of luxury such as, even imagining the ornament of his room done thrice over, he had never imagined existed.

Patterned carpets, gilt embellishments across a ceiling that was itself adorned with countless pictures, furnishings carved over in curling leaves, a fireplace faced in gold and dark green tiles and burnished brass.

Idrys took up his station by that fire, arms folded, waiting, and Tristen stood still, not daring stare, only darting his eyes about while pretending to look down.

There were windows, tall glass windows such as he had seen in the solar downstairs, clear in the centermost panes and amber and green in the diamonded margins—amber and green that recalled, most inappropriately for his conscience, the ladies’ gowns. The windows looked down, he saw, upon the roofs of the town below the wall, varishadowed angles of black slates and chimneys from which individual plumes arose to mass into a haze of smoke smudging the evening sky.

A door opened to the left, next that alcove in which the windows were. Cefwyn came into the room, stopped, looked at him-  Tristen bowed, as he knew men should with Cefwyn.

“Good day,” Cefwyn bade him, walking to the table.

“Good day, lord Prince.”

“Emuin asked me to see to you.”

It was not, then, the discovery of his wrongdoing that he had feared.

But now, after Emuin’s departure, now the prince unwillingly took direct governance of him? He supposed that was the way things had to be.

He had far, far rather Emuin.

“Do you want for anything?” Cefwyn asked.

“No, sir.”

“Anything?” Cefwyn repeated, although clearly Cefwyn was not pleased to be concerned about him, and clearly he might best please Cefwyn by making himself very little trouble. He knew such moods. Cefwyn threatened him. He had lost Emuin. He was content himself if Cefwyn forgot him for days and days.

“No, sir,” he said dutifully.

“If there is ever anything you need, you will tell me.”

“Yes, m’lord Prince.” He thought perhaps that that last was his dismissal, and he should go, but Cefwyn was staring at him in such a way as said there might be something more.

“You have remembered your condition,” Cefwyn said, “to speak to no one in the halls.”

“Yes, sir.” It was not quite a lie. He trod closer to the truth.

“Sometimes people speak to me, but I don’t seek them out.”  “What do you do with your days, sir student?”

He shrugged, feeling a lump of anger in his throat, and kept his eyes fixed past Cefwyn’s shoulder, beyond the windows, on the roofs and the smoke haze. “I feed the birds.”

“Feed the birds?” Clearly Cefwyn thought it was a joke.

“They are grateful, m’lord, as birds know how to be. And polite as birds know how to be.”  “Is this insolence?”

“No, my lord Prince. I do not intend to be insolent.”

“Do you want for anything at all?”

“No, my lord Prince.”

Cefwyn frowned and jammed his hands into his belt. “Idrys.”

“My lord.”

“Have Annas bring wine. —Sit down,” he bade Tristen, suddenly indicating the group of chairs in the corner of the large room.

Tristen unwillingly chose that nearest him and sat down. Cefwyn sat down facing him, crossed his booted ankles and leaned back, hands folded on his stomach.

“You have no diversions,” Cefwyn observed then. “You cease to eat; I have had report. You pace the halls or sit in the garden doing nothing.”

“I feed the birds, sir.”

“You’ve not tried to leave,” said Cefwyn.

“No, sir, never.”

“Emuin claimed that there was no malice in you. He left you in my keeping. What am I to do with you?”

Cefwyn wanted to have an answer that would let him dismiss the matter. That was all.

“I need nothing.”

“What would you wish me to do?” Cefwyn asked. “Damn what you need, man. I have power. What would you have me do?”  “Have others speak to me.”

“You are gentler company than most. I cannot set you out among these Amefin lords. They would rend you like wolves.”

“I would not speak to the lords, sir. Only to my guards. If you would,  sir.”

The door opened; the aged servant brought the wine and poured two cups, offered to Cefwyn and then to him. Cefwyn lifted his cup and drank, deeply and full; but Tristen only sipped at his, for he had eaten but little in two days, and it came very strongly to his stomach.

“Idrys,” Cefwyn said suddenly.

“Your Highness?”

“Be at ease. I judge no harm in him.”

Idrys unfolded his arms and sank down on a bench by the fire, tucked up one knee and rested his arm against it. His dark eyes did not cease to watch and his frown never left him.

“There are no civilized diversions in Henas’amef,” Cefwyn said.

“Only the hunt. No hunting about Ynefel, I’ll wager.”

Tristen shook his head. Hunting was a Word of blood and death. It shivered down his spine.

“Gods, what did you do there? Grammaries? Wizardry? Unholy sorceries?”