He had come to drive his enemy from that Road, from a Place and a crossroads of events which lent Hasufin’s sorcery its power. He had cast Hasufin Heltain away from that foothold on existence. But might Hasufin have others?
—Or might he?
He had felt nothing this night, perhaps. But this summer, the first time he had entered the lower hall, he had felt and seen a presence… the old mews, they told him, from an age when the modern great hall had been only a space in a far wider East Court. He still felt the terror of it.
And might at least one visitation in that haunted place be his own, involved in some terrible event, perhaps even his decision on the East Court steps? Shadows were certainly abundant there… and perhaps they were not all the ghostly kind of shadow, nor the great and violent kind, but the sorrowful kind, the personally frightening kind: shadows of better intentions, better thoughts, regrets traveling down a road that bent back on itself like the year-circle, forever and ever haunting that place, that jointure of might-have-been and might-yet-be.
His hands were cold on the stone. He perceived no ghost of himself here, in this hall, at least, only a scatter of soldiery, doubtless wholly bewildered at his woolgathering.
The battle in the downstairs hall had run past that place of joinings, and blood had fallen on that floor…
Blood, which was potent to call the dead, bridge the gaps in time, unify all that was. Emuin would never work such a spell.
But had Mauryl, once? And did it sit in this hall, on this seat, meditating questions of life and death for a province? And did it sit here of its own will? Or of Mauryl’s?
“The nobles, m’lord,” Uwen prompted him. “They’re waitin’ for ye, lad.”
The soldiers were all staring at him, and did they bless themselves in fear of his lapses, or fear of their own at this haunted hour?
It was the joining point of the night. It was the hour of beginnings and endings.
“Let them in,” he said to Uwen.
CHAPTER 2
The Amefin nobles, all released from their confinement in the stable-court, and waiting outside, must have seen Parsynan’s angry departure from the hall.
Don’t wish Parsynan ill, Uwen said, and no, Tristen said to himself, he would not. But he did not wish Parsynan well, either, and if wishes could lend him wings, he wished the former viceroy out of Amefel before he finished speaking to these men, and wished his influence out of the town before he had begun the pattern of the Amefel he wished to exist.
“I will see the earls,” he repeated, and to Uwen, a moment of weariness, and remembering that ducal power in this hall could command little acts as well as life and death and the movement of armies: “Is there a cup of clean water?”
“I’ll bring one,” Uwen said, and did, from a soldier’s water flask. It tasted strongly of sulfur, and Clusyn monastery.
But before he had taken more than two sips of it, the Amefin lords began to come in, exhausted men, indignant men, frightened men.
He gave the flask back to Uwen, and his hand trembled doing it, less to do with the cold stone seat than with utter weariness. He still had blood and soot on his garments, and he faced the tatters of a court, one missing one of its strongest men, one whose alliances bound smaller houses together and made peace between great ones. “Where is thane Crissand?” he asked Uwen, in a low voice. “Has he gone or is he here?”
“’S under close guard outside,” Uwen said. “He went to his house an’ he come back. His wish is to come into hall an’ stand in his father’s place, an’ there, I’ve delivered ’is message to ye, an’ the rest ain’t in my hands, m’lord. Shall we let ’im in?”
The son of a rebel, the son of a decimated house, with grievances the lord viceroy had made real and just, was a weight not only in the world of Men. He foreknew Anwyll’s objection. And there wereconsequences. Mauryl had dinned that into his very heart, first principle of wizardry and first in governing.
“Not so easily,” Tristen said. “But bring him in.”
“Your Grace,” Anwyll said, coming up the low steps of the dais also to lean close. “Shall I have the clerk read the document again? Some may not have heard it. Then Your Grace may ask they give the oaths, if it please Your Grace, which you should very soon.”
The Guelenfolk guarding him were anxious that there be ceremony, always that there be ceremony and oaths: it was the sort of magic they felt they could work, the setting of wards such as they could do, indeed wards of some potency, if he could judge; and Anwyll, who had his instruction directly from Idrys, was extremely anxious that this at least go smoothly. Otherwise, he pitied Anwyll his return to Guelessar.
“Do so,” he said, and at Anwyll’s bidding the clerk positioned himself in the spot of best light from the candles in the sconces, canted the parchment for the clearest view and read out the proclamation in good ringing tones, with fewer mistakes than when he had read it before the gates.
This time, in this solemn hall, however, and among these sober men, there were no cheers of Lord Sihhë! And this time Tristen paid the reading little heed, instead watching the faces of the earls as he struggled to gather up names he had not used in two months… Cuthan, there, foremost of them, had not been in the stable-court when the arrows were flying, but understandably so. He was elderly, a wisp of a man, doddering to look at him, but not so in wits or power: he recalled that from his sojourn here in the summer. Cuthan was a power among the earls, the one man Cefwyn might have made duke of Amefel if Cuthan had been willing; but Cuthan had begged off on account of his age and health. Then Edwyll had put forward his own claims to the honor, and with the man he would choose unwilling and with the man who waswilling blood-tied to the Aswydds he had just exiled, Cefwyn had installed Lord Parsynan instead.
More agreeable was Murras, a fat, cheerful man, and bravest of the earls was Drumman, lean as a post and one of the youngest, bearing a bloody bandage with evident pride and good humor, his badge of honor from the stable-court. Dusky-skinned Edracht, and gray-streaked Prushan: neither of them loved old Cuthan, which might have made them natural allies for other factions, but neither of them loved his brother lords any better, so far as he had observed.
They were western lords. The Earl Marmaschen, he with the forked beard, a quiet man: whether he was wise was still to learn; and with him Zereshadd, Moridedd, and Brestandin. They were always together, those four, from lands closest about Henas’amef. Their odd names had always been a matter of curiosity: they did not belong in Amefel, and were originally southern, even more than the Ivanim, was his impression, but nothing told him how he was so sure or why nothing else Unfolded.
Of the easterners fronting Guelessar, there was Durell, who drank far too much at festivities, but who was entirely sober this night; there was Civas, a quiet man, a cipher; there was Lund, who looked more like a farmer than an earl, and Azant, who bordered the river.
The clerics had come in, too, having now come out of their hiding places to learn the outcome of the struggle. The Teranthine patriarch, Pachyll, did not look at all displeased: immaculate in his gray, fingering his beard and nodding to himself at almost every line as the clerk read the proclamation. The Bryaltine abbot, Cadell, unadorned and without his symbols on this chancy night, gazed at his new duke with eyes bright and high color suffusing his cheeks. But the Quinalt father stood in the shadows against the opposite wall, near the Guelen soldiers tonight, and had his hands tucked in the safety of his sleeves.