Slaughter, plain and thorough, Guelen Guard against unarmed Amefin prisoners.

For a moment he could only think of adding to it anyone who opposed him, and it was perilous, very perilous, for Uwen to come up beside him, but Uwen did, a shadow in a wind that blew out of the Edge of the gray place. He was there, on the very brink of death, and he was here, his hands clenched on leather and iron, his body insensible to pain, the wind in his nostrils cold and burning his chest.

“M’lord,” Uwen said quietly, the only voice in all the world. “M’lord, I’m right by ye. So’s Lusin and the lads. We’re with ye.”

“Why have they done this?” He hardly knew where he had found the words. “Why have they done this?” And the next question stooped and struck, sharp as talons. “ Where is Lord Parsynan?”

“ Lord Parsynan,” the call went out and went on and on through the bloody courtyard. But it found no remedy. Life was ebbing out of the fallen, pooling on the stones, and much as he could deal death, he could not mend it. He saw shadows gathered, some new, and terrified, at the edges of the yard. He saw one hovering just above a body, and he wished it back, and it sank into the body like water into dry earth. He willed others, and was aware of living men around him, and of Uwen holding him by the arm, but what those men did, he had no idea. Wherein he could mend, he mended, but shadows flowed like smoke.

“M’lord,” Uwen said. And more sharply, “M’lord. The lord viceroy’s captain is asking to withdraw his men. Ye should grant it, m’lord. It was the lord viceroy’s orders, which the Guelen Guard did, to their shame, and he ain’t to be found, the dastard.“

He felt the bite of the cold wind, felt the aches of his body, and turned his face toward his own men, toward Lusin, and toward Gedd and Aran and Tawwys. He saw all around him the desperation and the grief of a night gone wildly amiss.

“Your Grace.” Crissand said from close at hand, and for a moment the edges of everything were unnaturally sharp, edged with shadow. “Your Grace, they would have killed us unarmed…”

Justice, Crissand had asked him in the East Court, before the shrines and the tombs. And now this.

“You are free,” he said sharply. “Go where you choose.” He was as sure of both the folly and the rightness of freeing this man as he had not been of all his recent life in Guelessar. He must not countenance a rebel against the Crown. But the viceroy’s hate had done this, Guelen hate. He had no doubt at all the earl had had both provocation to rebel and aid in that rebellion. And he coulddo nothing else, on his given and now-violated word and by all that was now between them. “The wounded I shall send to you, each as he can, wherever you choose to lodge or go. I do justice, such as I can.” He expected to hear Your Gracefrom Anwyll, but there was not a sound from Anwyll about the law. And matters echoed into the gray space, into a roil of disturbance in that place.

“I would go home, Your Grace,” Crissand said, “and see my mother safe in my father’s house.”

“Give him escort,” Tristen said. And it came to him with a sinking of his heart that the lord viceroy might not have spared even the loyal earls in his slaughter. The torches, few as they were, shed little light on the courtyard, to know who was dead and living. “Help him find his dead. See him home. And find the other earls and their men.”

“I’d get the Guelen Guard under its sergeants, m’lord,” Uwen said, close by him, “and under its captain, in good order. Let them serve sortin’ out the dead. This is a sorry hour—ain’t no coverin’ it. Let ’em serve here an’ stand guard at your orders, and then send ’em to barracks.”

“Order it,” he said. “And arrest Lord Parsynan.”

“M’lord, —”

“ Do so!”

“ Aye, m’lord.”

He heard Uwen give the orders, heard the captains and the sergeants give orders, and looked straight before him, at the gates, shut again, gates beyond which the people of Henas’amef still wondered about their fate.

It was not a good beginning of his rule here. He had not wished bloodshed. He saw Crissand, weary and bloody, talking to a few of his household, such as remained. He saw dead men scattered across the courtyard, unarmed men, killed by cowardly orders that had slipped past his intentions.

And he looked about him at a courtyard choked with soldiery, at walls on which the torches cast giant shadows of warlike men, at the Zeide itself, the fortress of the citadel, standing with its windows dark as he had never seen them, its doors open and showing the only pure light, the glow of candles.

This was his. Thiswas his.

Had they left the camp only this morning? And was it morning again?

And had so much changed?

BOOK THREE

CHAPTER 1

Candles burned in great numbers in the lesser hall, which had no windows, no fireplace. Candles struggled wanly with the pervading cold of a room unopened for two months, since the viceroy had not, for whatever reason, used it in that length of time.

That was the hall Tristen chose in these last hours before the dawn. He still felt the fever-warmth of battle, but in this place the cold of stone and neglect stole under the armor and padding. He chose this lesser hall partly because the great hall was still Cefwyn’s, to his scattered wits, and partly because this little, older hall was an easy recourse and easier to light, when his few reliable men had more urgent tasks than scouring up candles.

And he chose it because this little marble chamber was the first place in the Zeide he had ever known, except the guardroom and the hall leading here. He had stood just there, at the foot of the steps. He had been looking up at Cefwyn, who had sat where he sat now; now, Uwen at his back, he looked down at one of Cefwyn’s officers, the sort whose obstinacy had made Cefwyn’s reign difficult in Guelessar.

Parsynan was stolidly defiant. He had thus far been silent except to say, “Your Grace sent for me?” in those round, precise tones of Guelen nobility that said he was not only unrepentant, but nobler than anyone who accused him, and Tristen looked very long and hard at a man who could do so much harm with so little profit even to himself. He was sure Cefwyn would not have appointed a fool. Yet the man had behaved as one. Cefwyn would not have appointed a Guelen noble so rigidly Quinalt he could not deal with Amefin nobles. Yet this man, in his insistence on the king’s law, had all but slaughtered an entire Amefin household, leaving its villages stripped of young men. Even a sometime fool whose life had begun this spring knew the damage Parsynan had done.

And why? Why such useless malice?

The contemplation of Parsynan’s actions gave him the same feeling that that apartment upstairs had given him, one of affairs unhinged. Cefwyn would not have appointed a man he knew would do such things. But wizardry could find the weak place in a latch… or in a man’s character… and use it.

Cefwyn’s man had assuredly had other failures. The Dragon Guard had found Lord Parsynan not directing his men, not in command of the slaughter he had ordered, but inside the fortress, in his rooms, packing a box of women’s jewelry and a small bag of things a man might need when traveling light. He had not involved his servants in preparing to quit Henas’amef and he had not ordered prepared the boxes and bundles that naturally attended a nobleman’s movement across the country. The Guard said Parsynan had no lady here. So one had to ask whether he owned the jewels, and why he had not bidden his servants assist him.

“You ordered the prisoners killed,” Tristen said now, without preface, “when I ordered them safe.”