“M’lord. M’lord, is ever’thing in order?”

“There’s no danger,” he said to Uwen’s inquiry, and as he said it knew he had just told a great lie, and that he had been telling it to himself all day. “Master Emuin will not be here in anything like good time. He has gone to bed. He will overtake us as he can. Perhaps in Henas’amef.”

“Ah, well,” Uwen said with a sigh, “gods know what he loaded on them axles.”

That was so common a piece of sense he all but laughed despite his temper, and his structure of reasoned disaster tumbled down. It was common, it was maddening, and it was very like the old man: he could well imagine Emuin had found last-moment items that must go onto the wagons, no matter what the advice of the drivers; and here they were, he and Emuin, Emuin’s wagons moving far too slowly, the utmost the oxen could pull, and he and Emuin were two fools arguing in the night with the world upheaved and tottering. Emuin had drunk deep of the fine ale, eased his aches, and now he would become oblivious to him and his anxious questions, perhaps to feel a little less foolish and to be in a better humor in the morning.

“I wish we might go faster,” he said to Uwen, the two of them standing on the dark shore. “I wish we were on the other side tonight.”

“It’d ha’ been wet horses and a cold wind for camp tonight.”

That was another piece of common sense: with no enemy to deal with, it was folly to press this hard.

“It’s a notorious place, besides,” Uwen said, “and folk supposes there’s haunts.”

“There are,” he said. “There are, here. But none harmful that I can tell.” Last night he had wished to know that all the doors were secure. Tonight, in the open and the face of shadows, he feared none of them. He felt, rather, safe. They would not assail any man of his. He was sure that this place was safe.

But he was equally sure that something… somethingwanted him on the other side.

“Wind’s cold,” Uwen said, a polite suggestion, he was sure, that he come in out of the dark and sit by a warm fire where Uwen had far rather be.

Two days on the road had proved a determined sheep could amble faster than the heavy wagons could roll. And within any three days lately, it might rain. Or snow.

It was Amefel on the other side of that brook, and the delay of a night was too long.

He walked back to the fire with Uwen, he sat and drank with Uwen and Captain Anwyll, and listened to Anwyll say they were doing very well, very well indeed, considering the roads and the load on the axles. If they were lucky, none of the wagons would break down coming out of the ford. It was a good gravel bottom. The far bank was the question. So was the overcast sky tonight.

He lay under a canvas roof this night, listening to the water of Assurnbrook flowing nearby, and to the snap and crackle of the fire outside, thinking of the last time he had seen this particular camp, and with what hopes and fears he had ridden into Guelessar with Cefwyn, not knowing what Guelenfolk would think of his presence.

He knew now… and feared that he should have stayed in Amefel, although he supposed that without his sojourn in Guelessar he would never have seen the court, and without seeing the court and knowing the northern lords he would have found Cefwyn’s actions puzzling and unreasonable.

But he was coming back, now, like a stone rolling back to the hole it had shaped around itself, others’ intentions not withstanding. He fit, in Amefel, or at least he perceived he might do so, better than anywhere else in his small experience.

And in his strong suspicion, when he moved with that sort of inevitability, that feeling of things settling firmly into a well-shaped place, then it was not chance moving them. He was returning to the place shaped for him. But he had barked his shins on Mauryl’s steps too often not to have learned some lesson, and the lesson he had learned from those steps was to look not always at what drew his eye without being aware of the ground on which he stood.

And that ground, in this case, was his nature as Mauryl’s Shaping… or Summoning. There was a dreadful, a perilous difference… Whether Mauryl had Shaped him of many elements or Summoned him entire, of one dead soul, at one moment, out of prior moments each with their bonds to a certain shape of things.

So to what small pit was necessity taking him? Was it Mauryl’s purpose that was still being satisfied? Or was something else being satisfied?

A wizard’s spells could outlive the wizard, in terms that Men understood. But in another and more disturbing sense, in a knowledge he tried to set far from his ordinary thinking, thenand nowwere not unbreachable walls. It was, in fact, easy to do. It was dangerously easy, for him to do… and Emuin did not seem to have that power.

But if it were done, by him, by another… then things were not safe… were not safe, in ways that he felt, but could not define in simple words. Done was not done. Sealed was not sealed. Dead… was not dead. That was the very least of what Mauryl might have done.

An owl called.

And called again.

Owl, he called back to it, for an unthinking and unguarded moment reaching out into the gray and the surrounding sky. He had never expected Owl in Guelessar, not really. But the crossing at Assurnbrook was another matter altogether, and that sound drew him, welcomed him, though in one part he feared and did not love and yet missed the creature.

Owl?

The sound did not come again. So maybe it was not Owl, only anowl, out hunting for its supper.

The morning came with still wind and cold. At the edge of the firelight, a thin shelf of ice showed along the shallow edge of Assurnbrook. Men huddled close at their small fires, having a little breakfast before the orders came to move. But Tristen walked to the edge of the water and stared off into Amefel with an uneasiness that now would not leave him.

“M’lord?” Uwen asked from behind him. “Is aught amiss?”

He was embarrassed, realizing Uwen had asked him at least once before. “We should leave the wagons and cross,” he said, and having said it, he found the whole world tumbling into a new order, not a good one, not a bad one, only that when he said it, he was backin the reckoning of things, and he had hung outside them, pondering the shapes, all the night.

“M’lord?”

Anwyll had ordered things without him this morning, assumed he was in charge and that the camp would break immediately. That was beginning. Poles were falling. Canvas was being rolled.

“I shall be lord of Amefel over there,” he said to Uwen, with a nod toward the far side of the stream, “and over there we shall go on ahead of the wagons. Anwyll may not wish us to do it. But I think half the men and the drivers had as soon keep beside their warm fires and sit here at the ford waiting for master Emuin. So tell the captain if he objects, he will gain nothing but packing up and getting a soaking. If he agrees, all the men might stay warm and dry and comfortable. Over there where I am lord, I will order it.”

Uwen looked a good deal set aback, perhaps turning all the conditions of that over in his mind a second time. But then he nodded. “Aye, m’lord, better warm an’ dry.”

Uwen left to relay the order, and Tristen stood and waited.

He was relieved to have decided. The king’s courier would be there today, and he had no doubt at all that the rumors would fly, rumors ranging from an unanticipated royal visit to the garrison being strengthened for a winter campaign—and the province viewed the Guelen Guard with as much suspicion as the Guelen Guard viewed the province.

All these possibilities. But there was only one truth. There was only one act that satisfied the magic that was pulling on him. Only one decision sent the stone rolling back into the place it fit.