“To the stables, Your Highness. Something about his horse.”

Cefwyn swore. “Stand your post,” he ordered, and strode off for the stairway, with Idrys and an anxious pair of the Guelen guard close at his back.

Chapter 15  

Guards snapped to attention at the doors, and another pair at the stableyard gate: evidence of Idrys’ efficient arrangements. And at that clash of weapons, old Haman came out in a scatter of stableboys—the man was at his post, to Cefwyn’s mild surprise-but Haman had no frown nor seemed other than cheerful.

“Your Highness.” Haman bowed. Amefin, Haman was a man of the land, not the Amefin court. His politics was the care of his animals and he cared for absolutely nothing else. A Prince could restrain his temper in respect to such a man. And in the replacement of Amefin guards from their posts, both Cook and stablemaster were left unquestioned.

“Haman. My guest, the young man. Where is he at the moment?”

“Come to see to his horse, Your Highness. And gone back inside again.”

Cefwyn bit his lip, refused to turn immediately and acknowledge Idrys’ self-sure stare, which he was certain awaited him. He drew a slow breath and looked instead toward the stable, where his own Danvy was putting out his head. He walked to that stall door, lingered to give his favorite a pat and an apple from the barrel.

“He’s fit enough, Your Highness,” Haman said. “Throwed a shoe in that affair, no more. Smith’s already seen to him. I’m for putting him out to the far pens for a sennight, by ’r leave, Your Highness.’

“Give him good care, master Haman. I’ve no questions. Pasture it is.

And best you give both my horses good exercise. Work the fat off Kanwy.

“Did my guest say nothing of his further business this morning?”

“No, Your Highness. Concerned for the horse, he was. Wanted to see her before we sent her down to pasture. He walked to the paddocks back there, he brought her some grain with his own hands and he spoke wi’ her a while, and then he and his man, they went back inside again. —He were fearful pale, Your Highness. I thought then of sending word. But his man and your guard was with him all the while, and I thought he was there on proper business.”

“I’m certain he was. Thank you, master Haman.” He turned to go, met Idrys’ eyes by complete accident, and scowled. He brushed past Idrys, stalked across the yard and heard him and the guard following as he mounted the steps again into the lower hall.

“My lord Prince,” Idrys said as they came into the corridor above,

“leave it in my hands. I’ll find him.”

“We will find him.” He cast Idrys a look over his shoulder and found precisely the expression he had thought to find.

“Warm this egg in your bosom, my lord Prince, and you may find it hatches something other than a sparrow. We’ve done quite well with the lord of the Amefin. I advise you confine this fledgling of Mauryl’s.

Confine him in whatever comfort you deem suitable, but confine him closely, at least until Emuin is at hand to deal with him. This man will surprise you with some action you will most assuredly regret.”

He glanced away and strode ahead, seeking the windows that had best view of the garden, ignoring Idrys and his advice.  Tristen was not in the garden, either.

In the end he was compelled to stand and wait, chafing while Idrys consulted with a chance-met group of Amefin servants in the hall, who pointed down the hall toward the archive and bowed in frightened confusion, uncertain in what affairs they were involved on this chancy day, with Guelen guards posted everywhere and rumors by now running the halls.

“The library,” Idrys reported, “m’lord Prince. The horse.., and the archive.”

Cefwyn exhaled shortly, relieved, as they walked toward the east wing, to think that it was nothing more sinister than books that drew Tristen ... until he began to wonder with what insistence Tristen must have prevailed upon his guards and Uwen, and why, rising from a profound sleep, so unnatural a sleep, he had insisted after fatuous poesies, philosophies ...

Books, in these particular hands, were not harmless ... which was exactly what Idrys was thinking, he knew it. He could hear it hanging in the air in Idrys’ very tones.

He could see, with the same clarity, Tristen’s unlined and sleeping face yestereve—which Idrys had seen; and he could see that wild-eyed visage at Althalen, that same face with horror all the way to the depths of those uncommon eyes when he overtook him on the road. Idrys had also seen it.

He did not forget it, nor ever would. And now, lo, the unnatural sleep, leading straightway to, the guards had said, a natural waking and the visit to the paddock, which was perfectly of a piece with the gentle moonstruck youth he’d taken under Emuin’s less than explicit instructions and led out into conspiracy and eldritch ruin.

Now books. Archives? Gods knew what the Amefin archive might hold in its dusty stacks and pigeonholes.

He quickened his step, came through the door into the musty precincts of the archive, where books and chaotic piles of civil records shared a room that had not, by reports, known order in ages, a room where tax records had been most effectively misplaced, and where, pursuant to last night’s orders, his own accountant still commanded a battalion of pages rummaging the west wall of the archive.

“Your Highness,” Tamurin said, mistaking his mission and the object of his inquiry. “I am immediately requesting the records necessary-immediately, m’lord Prince.”

“And in good haste, master Tamurin. I approve all you need do.”

Master Tamurin passed from his acute attention. In the dim light that came through a cloudy window some distance down the east wall, at a reading table almost overwhelmed with stacks of parchments and codices and towers of decaying paper.., there, run to earth, sat Tristen, with a massive codex open on the overloaded table, with Uwen and the two guards leaning against chairs on either side of him, peering at the work as if they could possibly read much more than their pay vouchers, and waiting as if at any moment Tristen might pronounce some extraordinary wisdom.

“Out,” Cefwyn bade them, and included Uwen with that princely sweep of his arm.

Tristen lifted his head, his face lost in shadow, his hair a darkness in the dusty sunlight. It was—a chill touched Cefwyn’s skin—a stranger’s face, with the light touching only the planes and not the hollows: it was a man’s face, a forbidding face.

The guards, conspirators in Tristen’s wanderings, perhaps at last recalling that they were to have reported a change in Tristen’s condition, eased past, trying to slip unobtrusively out of the way. The guards he had brought with him held their position, but somewhat to the rear. Only Idrys pressed close enough to involve himself in the situation, and Cefwyn considered banishing him as well. But on principle and to have another opinion of the encounter, he decided otherwise.

“Lord Prince.” Tristen rose and started to close the massive codex.

Cefwyn took two steps forward and thrust his hand into the descending leaves as Tristen stood stock still. Cefwyn dragged the book across the table, reopened the heavy pages and turned the book on the table, dislodging clutter, to look on the crabbed Amefin script, the crude illuminations, the miniature map of the Ylesuin that had once been, when it had been a mere tributary to the wizard-ruled west, the wide realm of the Sihhé kings.

He half-closed the book, then opened to the first page and the title:

The Annals of the Reign of Selwyn Marhanen.

“Ah. Grandfather,” Cefwyn murmured wryly with a look at Tristen’s shadowed face. Still standing, he turned back to the pages that Tristen had been reading and angled the page to the light of the dust-clouded windows. “Althalen,” he read aloud, and Tristen’s face had a strange, now fearful expression, still shaped in shadows.