—I am not Mauryl, Emuin said fiercely. I have no wish to become him or to set my hand to his workings, no matter your wishes. Don’t mistake us, young lord! I cannot amend his Working, never think so! Gods forfend! Dont pull at me so!

He was duly chastised, and it was a moment before he dared a wider breath.

—Master Emuin, he said in this waking dream, I meant no such thing. Nor ever mistake you. And I only ask—

Fear had come in from over that dark Edge. There was no clear direction in the gray place, but it had always more or less corresponded with directions in the world of Men. It seemed to him now that he had been facing north, sitting before the fire. That would put the perilous Edge at the west… at the west, where Amefel lay, just across the river, not north, toward Tasmôrden.

But that reckoning set the shadow he had felt in the wind to the east, and the south, which he did not immediately believe. He dared not distract himself with wondering, or trying to find himself in the world of Men. There had been the danger, before. He felt the uncertainty, now, and felt…

—Careful!

He bit down on his lip to draw wits and flesh together. But master Emuin retreated from him without stirring a foot, then ceased to be there, just that quickly. Emuin was safe, escaped from the gray space, and he was alone and still in danger, in a place that gusted with winds.

The shadow-haunted stone of the guesthouse was another breath away. He drew that breath large and deep and became aware first of the glowing substance of the wards and the Lines, secondly of the substance under him.

Perhaps he moved in his chair, perhaps jumped with the startlement of solid wood under his fingers. At least Uwen broke off snoring and lifted his head in muzzy startlement.

“Forgive me, m’lord. I didn’t mean to drop off like that.”

“I must have dreamt,” he said. It felt like that, like a bad dream, and he still felt his breath shortened. “To bed, both of us.”

“Aye, m’lord,” Uwen said, and slowly got up as he did. They went back to the hall and to the fine, snug pair of rooms they had.

But Uwen would not leave him there: Uwen brought his mattress from the other room and settled down on the floor with his sword in his arms, saying he would sleep there or not at all.

Tristen let his sword stand with his shield in the corner, and lay down on a fine goose-feather mattress, but with coarser blankets and with a rougher ceiling above him than he had been accustomed to have since he came to Cefwyn’s company—it was bare rafters, which cast shadows from the watch-candle they had left on the table. The sight put him in mind of Ynefel, and his room, and the towering great hall with the stairs winding crazily up the stonework.

That webwork of stairs had creaked in storms. It had been so very fragile. He had known that even when he was living there, and there was nothing more frightening than being on those stairs in the dark, with the whole tower groaning and complaining with the wind. At such times, the stone faces set in its walls seemed to move, and the candle-shadows shifted… and sounds issued forth which were not the wind: shrieks as of bending metal, or of iron doors opening, or of souls in pain.

Mauryl’s face had seemed to be in that stone. He tried to hold to that thought. Fleeing it gave strength to his enemy, who was dead, but all the same, he would not risk growing uncertain on that point, when so much else was uncertain. Mauryl had gone into the stone, and the timbers had fallen, and Ynefel was not the same, in the autumn in which Cefwyn was king of Ylesuin. He dared not let that memory go.

But the night the candle had gone out, the night he had been on the stairs in the dark… strange, he thought from the vantage of a year of Unfoldings, strange in many respects, and after Lewenbrook, that he should still cast back to that night as the most frightening of his life.

The Edge was almost as dreadful. That kind of terror wafted out of it when it appeared. The Shadow at Lewenbrook had been a thunderous, dreadful threat; but one could be angry at it. The Edge, like that moment on the stairs, was a cold, sweating sort of fear, and a venturer in the gray space could observe it in curiosity until quite without warning he felt everything tilt toward it. That it appeared again troubled him… and it did not seem to him that the threat of the Edge was situated in the world of Men, not a presentiment of danger, of treacherous guards or accident or weather. He feared it was simply in master Emuin’s increasing frailty, the journey, the packing and unpacking and the disturbing of an old man’s peace… and whether that Edge represented something that only endangered master Emuin when he was in the gray space or whether the danger was always there, he was not sure and did not trust master Emuin to tell him.

Even wondering about it set the gray space in reach again, at a safer remove, true, but perilous, tonight, all the same.

The shadow in the wind whisked past him.

Someone was there.

There. In the confusion of a strange building and strange wards, in the turning-about of stairs and steps…

He had last reckoned master Emuin’s presence to what he knew by the road was north… but where was the fireplace now? And which direction was the head of his bed at the moment?

It was not Emuin. It came furtively, quietly, through the gray, but things could suddenly move very fast, and he was not Tristen of Lewen plain at this instant, he was young Tristen, he was Tristen on the stairs in Mauryl’s keep, and knew how a shadow could pounce, and scare, and find access in fear.

Then it seemed less baneful, even anxious to find him. He thought then that it might be Ninévrisë trying in her unschooled way to find him… and she left herself open on such a night to unguessed hazards.

No, he said, rebuffed it with a desperate, confused effort, and it left him.

He lay still then, his eyes open on the rafters above him, asking himself where it had been, whether east or west. Ordinarily he knew, but he had confused himself, and he might have harmed it. He was distressed and feared indeed it had been Ninévrisë, and that he might have frightened her.

Be safe, he wished whoever it had been. Sleep soundly. Be at peace…

Should I wait for you? was what he had reached out to Emuin to ask.

Should I suspect harm? he would have asked at the end of their encounter.

Now he would ask: Have you kept secrets from me, master Emuin?

Or is it only since tonight that the gray place has become dangerous?

CHAPTER 3

The edge of morning brought cold to the monastery. Lanternlight glistened on icy steps as they opened the door to the guesthouse. A guardsman had fallen the three steps to the yard, unhurt, the report was, but only because of the armor.

“You be careful, m’lord,” Uwen said when they reached the small porch, and moved gingerly on the steps himself. Tristen rubbed his ungloved fingers across the stonework of the banister, exploring the sting and the depth of the coating. He had seen frost, but never such a heavy coating of it, and he had met no footing quite so treacherous. But he learned in the first, the second step, like the Unfolding of a Word, and walked down the steps in Uwen’s wake with increasing sureness.

The men showed themselves undaunted, too, despite a few falls. The younger soldiers played games and pushed and shoved one another like boys; the older men minced about more carefully in the lanternlight across the yard, but the horses and oxen seemed to have no great difficulty, particularly in the churned stiff mud that stood in frosty ridges. Teams moved briskly with their drivers, and grooms brought the saddled horses in quick order of their masters’ precedence while the monks scattered sand with brooms.