Laughter came from the empty air, more clearly than its wont.

—You are weaker tonight, said the Wind. Mauryl, let me in.

He banged his staff on the wooden floor, tapped the gold-shod heel of it against the sealed shutters. The seal remained firm.

Mauryl, the Wind said again. Mauryl Gestaurien. I saw him today. I  did.

He scorned to answer. To answer at all opened barriers. He leaned on his staff, eyes shut, remaking his inner defenses, while the sweat beaded cold on his forehead.

—Once it was no trouble at all for you to keep me out. It must have been the Shaping that weakened you, Gestaurien. Do you think? And was he worth the cost?

—You cannot read him, Mauryl thought, not meaning that to be his answer, but the Wind beard, all the same. He clenched the next thought tightly in his defenses, wove it firmly and strongly inside, armored as his own memory. The sense of presence faded for a moment.

—Come, let me in. The voice came from another direction, rich and soft and chilling. You are failing, Gestaurien. Harder and harder now for you to shut me out. —And what is be to do for you, this flesh-clothed Shaping of yours?

Dangerous to answer. Think nothing, do nothing.

—Ah, Gestaurien, Kingsbane, —What do you call him?

Tristen, he thought, and wished in vain not to have made that slip.

Laughter circled the tower room, rattling one shutter after another.

Tristen, Tristen, Tristen. Is be a peril to me, Gestaurien? This puling innocent? I think not.  —Begone, wretch!

Shutters rattled, one after another. The wind chuckled, bowled, roared, and stirred the shadows in the corners.

—Ah, secrets. The Wind sniggered, a mild rattling at a window latch.

Perhaps the great, the awesome secret is that you failed. So great a magic. So ambitious. And all so useless.  —Begone, I say!

The shadows flowed back. The wind fell suddenly. The shutters were quiet. It bad ventured too arrogantly, too soon.

Mauryl sank into his chair, bowed his head against trembling bands.

And then upon a dreadful thought-    —leapt to his feet, seized his staff in one hand, the candlestick in the other, tottering with the weakness in his knees. With his staff he ventured onto the creaking balconies, by flickering, precarious light that left the depths all dark.

He took the stairs much too fast for a lame old man and came down, aching and short of breath, feeling about him constantly with his magic, as far as the next balcony, and to Tristen’s sealed door. He opened it and leaned against the door frame, breathless.

The boy was safely asleep, his breathing gentle and undisturbed. He could have heard nothing. The shutters of this room had never rattled, never attracted the wind.

With a shaking hand he set the candle down on the small table, next to the watch-candle, a candle pungent, like the one he carried from above, with rowan and rue, rosemary and golden-seal.

He tipped the cup on Tristen’s bedside and found it empty, delayed to draw the coverlet over Tristen’s bare arm.

Tristen stirred, a mere breath. The boyish face was always cold and severe in sleep, so stern, for such young features. But—

There was the shadow of beard on the smooth skin. When, he wondered, had that begun—in only so little time? Just tonight?

The magic was still Summoning, still working in him. Still-Summoning, that was the unexpected thing.

Mauryl dipped into the boy’s dreams, precautionary on this night of strange intrusions. He found them nothing more violent than the memory of rain, circles in puddles, scudding clouds above the trees.

He took his candle again, softly closed the door as he left, renewed the seal with a Word.

The wind sighed about the towers, but it seemed a natural wind, now, and he climbed the creaking stairs back to his tower study, while the candlelight and candle smoke chased the shadows into momentary retreat, beneath and below and around and around the wooden stairs and balconies of the keep.

Chapter 3

Once a thought began it might go anywhere and everywhere. Tristen despaired of better mastery of himself.

His thoughts were not like Mauryl’s thoughts, all orderly, hewing to one purpose. His leapt, jumped, flitted, wandered about so many idle matters, like the pigeons above hunting for dropped crumbs, pecking here, pecking there, in complete disorder. He found complete distraction in a candle flame or a butterfly, or, just after he skinned his elbow, the thought that elbows were very inconvenient to look at, and that there were parts of him he couldn’t see, like his face, which was a curious way to arrange things.

It happened on that pesky step, and a fall right onto the stones of the lower floor with, fortunately, nothing in his hands. He gathered himself up, sitting on the stones, trying to look at his elbow, and finding red on his fingers. It hurt a great deal. He got up and went to Mauryl, fearing some permanent damage, but, no, Mauryl said, it was only a little Wound, and Mauryl told him to watch where he put his feet, and worked that tingling cure and put a salve on it. Wound was a Word, a scary one, that occupied his thoughts with dreadful images of red and ruin, and made him sick at his stomach, and made him remember how his elbow  hurt.

But—he learned, too, that the skittering of one’s thoughts could be a useful thing, to take one’s mind off trouble—he still couldn’t see his elbow.

So he went back to Mauryl, who was in the yard cutting herbs, and asked him if he could see his elbow.

“Not likely,” Mauryl said. “Nor wished to, lately.”

He began to walk away, rubbing his chin. Then he thought how, lately, he’d felt his chin grown rough, and it itched, and he couldn’t see that, either.

“Mauryl, can you see your face?”

“No more than my elbow,” Mauryl said curtly. The air smelled strongly of bruised herbs. “Stupid question, of course not.”

He went away, noticing, not for the first time, but for the first time that he had ever wondered about it, all the stone faces set in the walls: some large, some small, grimacing visages that had sometimes frightened him on uneasy nights, when Mauryl was angry for some reason and when he sought his room alone; or when the wind was up and creaking in the roofs and the loft, and he was alone, lighting the sconces on the landings. The faces seemed to change with the candlelight when he walked past them, but Mauryl had said they were only stone, and harmless to him.

Some of them had pointed teeth and pointed ears. He had felt his teeth with his tongue and his ears with his fingers, so he was certain enough boys looked nothing like the images of that sort. Some of the stone faces had beards, and looked like Mauryl. Some were smooth-faced. Some looked more afraid than angry. Mauryl’s face went through such changes of expression, and such changes portended important things to him—but the changing statues, Mauryl assured him, portended nothing.

He had been aware, too, in this growing curiosity about faces, that his hair was dark, where Mauryl’s was silver, that Mauryl had a long beard and his face was, until lately, smoother than the statue’s stone; that Mauryl’s hands were wrinkled and his were not—his hands looked more like the stone hands that in places reached from the wall, not the clawed ones, but the hands with fingers. He was aware, now that he thought about it, that his face must be changing in some way, and different than Mauryl’s in more than the beard.

He was thinking about such things when, the next day, he leaned over the rain barrel out by the scullery and saw just a shadow of a boy, hardly more than a shadow, but not, surely, a wicked and dangerous Shadow, as Owl was to the birds.

The shadow was his, true, but he could see in it no reason for his face to be rough or whether it was a good face or a frightening face. He thought that the sun was wrong, and his hair was shading the water, so he moved, and held his hair back at the nape of his neck, but it hardly helped. It was a dark barrel and the sun did little to light it.