Give the man gifts, Idrys had said. Perhaps that would make him less afraid… for this was a frightened man.

And Crissand, dark as Amefin in general were dark, stood in the downward shadow of a candle-sconce, shadowed in weariness and misfortune. There was no restraint on him. But no lord stood near him, nor the priests either. He was the center of the night’s misfortune, the heir to an unwanted deed… but heir, too, to an Amefin house, standing to claim Meiden, when he might have absented himself until a time of cooler heads and less danger, or begged a friend or a priest to intercede for him. He had come of his own will to state his own case, and thereby risked everything for himself and his people.

Meanwhile the proclamation ran toward its end, with the courtesies and tangles of phrase composed in the Guelen court. The oaths were coming, a second document the clerk had brought, oaths which were unique and entirely unlike those of the rest of Ylesuin. The Aswyddim had been kings in Hen Amas centuries ago, when the five Sihhë-lords came down; so the Bryalt Chronicle said, the Aswyddim, rather than resisting, had flung open their gates, and Barrakkêth had let the Aswydd king of that day continue to call himself aetheling, or royal, as he wished.

So had Barrakkêth’s successors permitted it, and so, for expediency, had the Marhanen kings. Thus the Amefin earls swore to a royalpower of their own, and since the aetheling was an earl among other earls, thatconvolute reasoning let the earls of Amefel all continue in their little holdings, earl being a title which Guelennobility did not acknowledge, but which Amefin folk regarded as each equivalent to duke.

The earls therefore cherished their uniqueness among the provinces of Ylesuin as vital as heart’s blood, even if they no longer had towers and no longer ruled with separate small troops of men-at-arms on their own land, not since two kings ago, when Selwyn Marhanen had torn all the earls’ towers down, after which most of the earls had taken up residence in houses in Henas’amef, the grand houses all about the square. That was the history of the Red Book. That carefully maintained word aethelinglet their lord be royal when he was sitting on what the Amefin not too disguisedly called the throne in Henas’amef… and the Marhanen had never contested the matter, seeing the Aswydd aetheling owned himself a Marhanen vassal when he was outside his own borders.

There was, remotely, an Aswydd heir standing in this chamber, now. But Crissand was not in contention for his father’s claim on that word tonight; so for the first time in the history of Amefel, the earls must either swear to a man neither aetheling nor Aswydd, or they must defy the Marhanen king, precipitating the very crisis Cefwyn had avoided when he deposed and exiled Orien Aswydd and appointed a viceroy over the province.

The earls of Amefel might no longer live in state on their own land, except a few in the east, like Durell; but in their thinking they were a kingdom, and in their thinking they had a right to their own choice of rulers. Why Edwyll had launched so rash a rebellion was still in question, but the causes were everywhere in this assemblage, and wove serpentines in the ancient prerogatives.

The reading was done. The echoes died. The clerk rattled up the second document. “The oaths, the recorded oaths, as last sworn. His Grace the duke of Amefel summons your lordships each to swear fealty according to the terms written herein…”

What will you do? Tristen wondered. And will you swear, or will you not?

I think you will swear. For the peace and your own welfare, I wish you to swear.

Cuthan ducked his head a moment, took a firmer grip with both hands on his gold-headed staff, then looked up as the clerk finished the passage. “Your Grace,” Cuthan said, in a voice thready with age and a manner feeble in all but the steadiness of the glance he cast up. “Your Grace, for all my years I would never have guessed His Majesty in Guelessar would have proposed us Mauryl’s heir to succeed the Aswyddim.”

Proposed. Proposed, the man said, and not decreed, nor chosen. This was a wily old man with a will to find a way to accept the inevitable and still to leave the key principle of Amefin sovereignty alive.

“And will you swear?” Tristen asked.

“Aye,” Cuthan said, and nodded decisively. “Aye, to Mauryl’s heir, aye, I will.”

Fine as dust. Another dicing of loyalties and attachments, a clever, careful, dangerous wording that might itself one day be a matter of contention, and they had no clerk with pen in hand free to record it. “Aye,” was the word behind Cuthan, from lords all about the chamber, even Prushan and Edracht, thorns in Cefwyn’s side, opposed to Cefwyn’s appointment of Parsynan, or any Guelen viceroy; opposed to Edwyll, who wanted to succeed Orien Aswydd. By reason of this old man’s cleverness of phrase, obstacles tumbled. There was reason to be grateful to Cuthan. But a man who could settle tempests so cleverly… could also raise them, both for his own purposes. The man’s aims were yet to discover. Oh, he had seen far more than he wished in Guelessar this autumn.

“I am here both as Mauryl’s heir and as His Majesty’s friend,” Tristen said quietly, doggedly insistent on them, including Cuthan, knowing that from the very beginning. “Lord Edwyll is dead. I did not kill him. As for Lord Parsynan, I have ordered him to leave Amefel, and Iorder the garrison, now.”

There was a cold, deep silence in the hall. Not a man moved, not even the random stirring of a large company.

“I wish you all well, and safe.” His eye swept the earls, the clerics… and Crissand, standing apart. “The clerk has the oaths exactly as you last swore to Lord Heryn. If you will swear, swear.”

“We are all here to swear,” Cuthan said with a clearing of his throat, hands clenched whitely on the head of his stick. Other heads nodded. The young clerk whispered something urgent to Uwen, who told him some answer, and the clerk, with the document of oaths in hand, leafed back through it with a crackling of heavy paper.

“The clerk don’t know the order of precedence,” Uwen said in a low voice, at Tristen’s elbow, “except by the book. The earl of Meiden, his heir an’ all… ’ at’s the first name.”

“The earl of Bryn,” Tristen said instead, and saw Crissand stand thin-lipped and still as Cuthan, Earl of Bryn, took the precedence.

The Amefin swore standing, and clasped right hands, but did not kneel: only their duke did, when he had to swear to the Marhanen king, in an homage even the Sihhë-lord had never asked of Amefel.

So Tristen stood up to take the old man’s hand, looking him in the eye as the clerk began to read, stumbling over the Amefin names. But the old man ran past the prompting at the first pause and set forth his own oath loud and clear by memory:

“I Cuthan, Earl of Bryn, for Taras and Bru Mardan, and all their thanes, swear to defend the rights of him holding Hen Amas, to march to war under his command, to gather levies and revenues, to acknowledge him lord and sovereign over its claims and courts and to abide by his judgments in all disputes.”

Sovereignwas that surviving word that was the uniqueness of the province. Cefwyn had demanded no changes.

“I Tristen holding Hen Amas,” the clerk read out for him, and Tristen repeated… Hen Amas, the old name, as before the citadel had become simply the Zeideit had been the Kathseide. The name Hen Amas conjured a tower, not a town, to him, conjured a village and orchards against familiar hills; more, the next words Unfolded to him, and he had no need of the clerk to say, at the second swearing,

“… to defend your rights against all claims and incursions and to judge rightly as your sovereign lord.” His part was all the same, while the reciprocal oath was longer for some, shorter for others, ending with, in all cases,