“If I knew that, young lord, I’d sleep of nights.” Emuin moved the letter aside and moved one of his charts to the surface, a dry, stiff, and much-scraped parchment. He looked at it one way and another, and then cast it toward him, atop a stack of equally confused parchments.
“ This, this, young lord, is as much as I do know. This is the reckoning that Mauryl himself would have seen coming, that once in sixty-two years these portents recur in the heavens, and where they occur at the Midwinter, there is the Great Year begun, that is, the time until the wandering stars hold court together and move apart again. This is the season of uncommon change… but this is nothing to you, I suspect.” Emuin’s tone took on a forlorn exasperation, much like Mauryl’s when confronting his helplessness. “Nothing Unfolds. No great revelation.”
“No, sir.” He looked at the parchment, and considered the things Emuin said and cast it down again, unenlightened. “I don’t know what you’re saying. About the stars, I gather, but nothing more. I know Mauryl studied them. And you do. But I’ve never understood the things you find.”
“Magic is an unfettered thing. You… are an unfettered thing. But wizardry, wizardry, young lord, is a matter of numbers… patterns, as nature itself is patterns, and the gathering of forces. Think you that winter happens by magic? No. Everything in nature, young lord, is a march of patterns, the chill in the air, the sleep of the trees, the waning of the summer stars and the rise of the winter ones, that in their turn will set…”
“These things I see, and you tell me they recur.”
“Yes! So if you would work a great work of wizardry, do you see, there’s no sense doing hard things, only the easy ones. Do you want a snow? Ask for it in winter! Much easier. Find patterns in nature and lay your own Lines where they go, much as you set the Lines of a great house, observing doors and windows where they want to be.”
Emuin seemed to expect agreement, understanding—something.
“Yes, sir.”
“But you don’t! All this is frivolous to you! You treat patterns the way a young horse treats fences, to have the fine green grass at your pleasure. And gods save us on the day you treat natural laws as that great dark stallion of yours treats stall slats, and simply kick them down.”
“I trust I’m never so inconsiderate of your work, sir, as Dys of master Haman’s boards.”
Emuin grunted, then gave a breath of a laugh, and at last chuckled and for the first time in a long time truly did regard him kindly. “Good lad. Goodlad. When I fear you most, you have your ways to remind me you areTristen.”
“I am. And shall be, sir. And never would treat your patterns carelessly. I have more understanding than my horse.”
Emuin did laugh, and wiped an eye with a gnarled finger, and wiped both, then his nose. “Oh, lad. Oh, young lord. We’re in great danger.”
“But we are friends, sir, and I’m yours, as I am Cefwyn’s.”
“That, too, is a snare, young lord, and one I avoid very zealously: we must both look at one another without trust, assumingnothing, as we love one another, as we love that rascal Cefwyn. Fear friendship with me! Avoid it! Examine my actions, as I do yours, and let us save one another.—But you asked, and I answered, and let me answer, again, such as I can. Hasufin—”
“Hasufin!”
“Regarding this matter of the Great Year, I say, sixty-two years of the ordinary sort, and Hasufin Heltain, who wasa wizard, and who bound his life to the cycle of the Great Year. Great works need great patterns. And his was the most ambitious: to use the Great Year itself would have given him more than one opportunity for a long, difficult magic, at long intervals. But there is more: there’s a Year of Years, a pattern of patterns that only the longest-lived can see, let alone use. Do you guess? Hasufin is old, as Mauryl was old. And the dawn of the last Year of Years was the hour of Hasufin’s first seizure of Ynefel, when he drove Mauryl Gestaurien to seek help in the north. But before it was done… the Sihhë came down. And thatwas the pattern of that beginning. That was what Mauryl did to Hasufin Heltain: he wrought the Sihhë-lords into Hasufin’s rise, so he could never be free of them—and the Sihhë-lords, like your horse, respect no boundaries and kick down the bars. He lost. Mauryl rose… and the Sihhë-lords reigned.”
“And fell.”
“Ah, and the dawn of the last cycle, the second such time, you may well suspect, sixty-two years ago… was Hasufin’s second rise. We are in the last of the sixty-two years of the Great Year that marks the Year of Years. The spring solstice, last spring, when Hasufin overthrew Mauryl the second time… Mauryl knew his peril; and chose hismoment: the time of rebirth, yourbirth, young lord. Now that Great Year closes and a new Great Year begins the next Year of Years in the season of the deepest dark. At Midwinter the last element of the heavenly court will enter the House in which all the others stand. This movement marks the dawn, at midnight, of that new Year of Years. At Midwinter the moon stands, changeable queen that she is, at the darkest of the dark. By the time the sun rises, either the elements of the Great Year favor Hasufin… or something stands in opposition to him. What is, at that dawn, will be, for centuries of years as Men reckon time.”
“So Mauryl never sent me to Lewenbrook. That wasn’t what he wanted of me.”
“Oh, it was certainly part of it. But Cefwyn opposed Hasufin. Cefwynopposed him, and opposes him now, and there’s that damned Elwynim prophecy of a King To Come. It’s probably true, more’s the pity. Uleman was a good wizard, but he talked too much, and now everyone expects there to be a new High King. It doesn’t serve Cefwyn well at all… and by chance it doesn’t help Uleman’s daughter, either.”
Here was truth, so much truth it was hard to know what part of it to seize and question, but he found one question salient and unavoidable.
“And is Hasufin our enemy still?” Tristen asked. “And shall I fight him again? And where?”
“I can’t say,” Emuin answered him with a shake of his head. “Above all, Midwinter Eve is perilous to us, and of all damned days you might have chosen to assemble the lords… that one you never asked me.”
“I had no knowledge. Now I do. What other times shall I fear?”
“The spring solstice… evidently,” Emuin said. “But what more may happen I don’t know. Ihaven’t lived through a Year of Years. You have.”
“I haven’t lived.”
“As much as Hasufin. Mauryl’s the only one who’s lasted one in the flesh, as it were. And now is stone, in his own walls, so you say.”
He shivered, not wishing to recall that day of waiting, that terrible hour, when he knew the enchantment of the faces was not the ordinary course of the world, and that there was something dreadful about Ynefel, where the Sihhë had ruled, where the Lord Barrakkêth had maintained a dreaded fortress… where at last only Mauryl had lived, alone, in solitary correspondence with the latter generations of Men, at Althalen, and what Men had used to call Hen Amas, and now Henas’amef.
“So Mauryl did the best he could: sent you, without warning, without guidance, without instruction… lord of Althalen. That you surely are. Lord of Ynefel… I would never dispute. That you are Tristen… I leave that to you, and would never say otherwise. This I do tell you: the stars point to Midwinter. The hinge of the year. The hinge of many years, this time, when all things reach an end, and a beginning, and when patterns begin for the next Year of Years. Against your years, I am a youth.” Emuin reached across the table to lay his gnarled hand on his young one, a touch like Mauryl’s, half-remembered, touching his very heart. “Tristen is your name. So be it. Have a sip of tea. It’s grown cold, boy. Boy!”