Bodies, untended and unburied, lay frozen in doorways and at shrines, under a dusting of snow that began to bring innocence back to the night.

A banner flew above the high fortress of Elwynor, and he knew that banner… not the black-and-white Checker and Tower of the Regent of Elwynor, no, but a black banner, a single star that was very like the black banner of Althalen.

With a crown above the star.

Was it a vision of things now, this very night, and was thatthe banner Tasmôrden claimed? If so, daredthis man appropriate to himself the land and honor Cefwyn had given, and then set a crown on it, the emblem of a king?

Away, he wished Owl, on a thought, and Owl soared away south, bending a long, long turn, and crossed the river again far to the west, where Marna Wood shadowed the snow, and glimmered with far more potent wards.

Up, up, up and aside from the barrier, Owl’s wings tilted sharply, and Owl took a dizzying plunge through buffeting winds as Owl met something and flinched.

Suddenly Tristen found the wind rushing past him and the earth rushing up.

Air turned to substance, became the bedclothes, and the frantic pounding of his heart became a leaden rhythm of recent threat.

He was still in midair, even lying on his bed. That was the way it felt. And Emuin had stopped his pen, having blotted his page. His agitated next reach overset the inkpot. He righted the pot without a second thought and held his breath at the feeling that shivered through the night.

—Tristen? Emuin asked.

—Safe, he said within the gray space.

Yet the west in the gray space shadowed dark as his dream, and the winds blew cold to the bone.

—It was a dream, sir, no more than a dream.

—Was it? Emuin asked. Hovering there within Emuin’s heart was a question and a fear directed toward that shadow, for that was a deep and dark one.

But in the east, now, a second shadow grew, a niggling small one, and a faint glow of light that had no explanation.

And a third, in the north, where the black banner flew.

—There is a wizard, Tristen said, and sat up in bed, catching the covers about him against the chill. There is someone, here, and here, and here. Do you see the glows, sir? It is more than one. One’s come close… one’s followed me…

—Be careful! Emuin chided him.

But Tristen flung himself out of bed, caught the bed covering around him and trailed it to the room next, losing it as he reached the hearth and his sword that stood against the stones. He snatched up the hilt and slung the sheath off.

The silver inscribed on the blade, Illusion, flashed in the dim light, and the sheath clattered across the floor. Naked, sword in hand, he faced the window into the shadowed night, and saw all the town of Henas’amef flared up in Lines beyond the glowing Lines of the Zeide’s walls. There were all the wards, all the magic of craftsmen and householders warding their own doors and walls: the common magic of parents and homekeepers and the pure trust of children… all these things Unfolded to him in that unworldly glow, block by block, house by house, outward toward the great defensive wall of Henas’amef itself, a blue bright Line often retraced and constantly tended.

Something had challenged them.

But they held. They held.

Uwen’s reflection arrived in the glass, Uwen’s pale skin ghostlike across that angular maze of Lines before his vision. Uwen’s silver hair was loose and at odds about his balding temples; he had his sword in hand and a cloak caught about him, nothing more, nor asked the nature of the alarm… he had simply come, armed, to his lord’s side, the two of them naked to the cold of the threatening night and the glory of the town.

“The Lines,” Tristen said, “all have leapt up. Stand, stand still.”

“What does ’e mean?” Other reflections arrived, night guards coming in from the doorway, servants from their quarters and the back hall.

“Nothing’s gotten in,” Tristen said. He was aware of all the Lines before and below and behind and above him, even with his eyes open, a net in which he stood; and then of the stairs that ran to Emuin’s tower.

At that, he was aware of E^rnuin, who with stealth and subtlety he was only learning had been there for the last few moments. Emuin stood with him, there in the gray space, and the blue lines glowed softly, running along the edge of the steps of Emuin’s tower and down and down again and along the lower hall on the opposite side, and up again, quick and live as the spark of the sun on winter ice.

“M’lord?” Uwen asked.

“Nothing has come in,” Tristen said. “The place is safe.”

“Aye, m’lord,” Uwen said, and the guards with him said nothing at all, only looked about them uneasily.

Then, only then, Tristen set his hand on the stone of the sill and wished the whole town safe.

Only one place resisted him, and it was that discontinuity of stones in the lower hall, that change from old to new that marked the join of the old fortress to the new: from the first time he had confronted it he had known it was a weakness in the building.

And was it lack of courage, he asked himself, that he did not tonight go down and dare that black middle of the eastern hall?

Was it, instead, prudence, that he did not directly challenge what at the moment was doing no harm… and what had, with the whole town, resisted whatever his foolish curiosity had roused out of the dark.

He traced the one compromised windowsill, drawing the Line with his finger, and willing it sound and safe.

Then he could say, with some assurance. “I’m sure now. Go back to bed. Go back to bed, all of you. The threat is gone.”

The night guards went, quietly and doubtless to talk among themselves once they reached the hall. Uwen’s reflection remained, pale ghost against the dark that now filled the window.

“I dreamed of Owl,” he said to Uwen. “There’s wizardry abroad.”

“Aye, m’lord, that I rather guessed.”

It struck his fancy, Uwen’s quiet humor. It touched his heart with a relief almost to tears, that Uwen still dared deal with him as friend and guide, and he would not profane that offering or examine it.

“I don’t think it’s a danger tonight.” He turned and faced Uwen’s solid presence with his own, and handed Uwen the sword he held, for he did not trust his own steadiness to sheathe it: his eyes were still bemazed by the vision of Ilefínian and of Henas’amef, and the black banner and the Lines. “Tasmôrden is flying the banner of Althalen.”

“Is he?” Uwen failed to ask how he had seen that, and simply heard it for the truth. “He ain’t right wise, then, is he, m’lord? You an’ His Majesty will have summat to say on that score, I fancy.”

“That we will,” Tristen said, not without thinking of Auld Syes’ birds, and the use to which he had put Althalen’s ruins. Tasmôrden thought to claim back or kill those who had fled his brutal seizure of their land; and by that banner Tasmôrden thought to claim not merely the Regency but the High Kingship, the office the Sihhë-lords had last held and which Cefwyn himself did not aspire to hold.

And did he fly it defiantly above the devastation of Her Grace’s capital and the murder of its citizens?

“Go to bed,” he said to Uwen. “Forgive me the commotion.”

“Forgive you, m’lord, when I persuade ye to sleep an’ the whole night turns on its ear? If something’s amiss out there, it certainly ain’t your doin’.”

“Nor mine. I know now I didn’t draw the lightning stroke on the Quinalt roof. And Cefwyn had to send me here. I had to come. The Quinalt father has gone where he has to go, and Aeself and his company have all come where they have to be. Lord of Althalen and Ynefel: that’s what I am.”