Uwen was silent, in what mind he could not read.

"You don't ask me what I am," he said, curious, for curiosity was always his fault, and he could never understand the lack of it.

"Ye don't rightly know, do ye?" Uwen answered him with a wry smile. "Nor me. Nor do I need to. Ye're my good lad."

"Uwen is what you are," he said, "and the captain of my guard, and my right hand." He reached out to Uwen's leather-guarded shoulder, as much to feel his solid strength as to reassure Uwen. "Set us to horse. Make these men move. Cefwyn needs me. That'swhat I know."

"Aye, m'lord," Uwen said with relief.

That was Uwen's answer.

And for his own, when he went back to Cevulirn and Crissand, he took their hands, and embraced them in the murmurous hush of the army. He embraced Sovrag's huge shoulders, and Umanon's stiff back, and Pelumer's thin and aged frame: he opened his arms to Aeself, when Aeself would have cast himself to his knees, and made him stand and have that, and not a lord to worship.

"My lord," Aeself whispered.

"You can't make me King," Tristen whispered back. "Mauryl didn't, and you can't. But Sihhë, yes, as the five were, that I do fear I am." Ice came to him, as strong a vision as if it had Unfolded for the first time, ice, and the fortress of the Qenes, a dizzying long view, a dizzying long remembrance, for memory it might be. He did not know where he had begun, but he knew what the boundaries of the world should be.

"Yet," Aeself said, "others will join us, my lord, if only they see there's hope: they'll come as these men have come—not for me, not even for my cousin, gods save her: they'll come to the name of the King."

"Then believe there is such a King," he said, for he drew that certainty out of his heart, breathless with the urgency with which he knew it. "He'll be born: Ninévrisë's child, and Cefwyn's. And Cris-sand aetheling will sit the throne in Amefel. But my banner is not the High King's."

Loyalty that so yearned to bestow itself somewhere worth its hopes shone in Aeself's eyes. "Then whatever that banner is, I am your man, and so are the rest of us. The forest brought us here. The earth poured us out. I don't know how we came, but we've come here, and nothing frights us after this."

"Auld Syes brought you. She may bring others. Until there is a King, I cansay what is and what's to be, and I set you in charge of all the Elwynim that come to my banner."

"I am no experienced man—"

"I say what is."

" Yes, my lord." So Aeself said, and Tristen turned to a clearing filled with men and horses, and more men and horses within the trees. Their company had become an army, between dark and dawn.

"We go on!" Tristen said. "Everyone to your horses! Cefwyn needs us!" And turning from Aeself, he encountered Crissand, and pressed Crissand's arm, for he saw confusion on Crissand's face: the dawn showed it to him, a silent, but heartfelt distress.

"Auld Syes said it: aetheling. King of Amefel. —But Uwen I keep for myself."

"My heart you keep, my lord! Have no doubt of it!"

He clapped Crissand on the arm. In the next moment he heard Uwen shouting at the men:

"Arm an' out, arm an' out, you lads, and get them horses ready. We're off to give Tasmôrden 'is comeuppance."

It was a voice to give courage, a voice that had soothed his night fears and his darkest hours: give Tasmôrden his Comeuppance… there was a Word that by no means Unfolded to him, and yet did, as an outcome wider and more true than justice a king might deal out… it was justice for the Shadows that had joined them in the night, justice for Crissand's father and Cefwyn's messenger, for the old archivist and the soldiers dead at Emwy and on Lewen field… justice for very many wrongs: not a justice of death for death—rather the settling of balances back into true and the world back to peace.

Men moved, horses snorted and pulled at their tethers: the whole clearing seethed with an army setting itself rapidly in an order of march.

So Tasmôrden had moved, carrying the threat against Cefwyn, to deal hurt where their enemy could, to gain an advantage, a hostage, a distraction.

The five first Sihhë had retreated to the ice to avoid this very conflict as long as possible: had met it once in its ascendency and brought down Galasien. In its slow working, in retaliation, the enemy had seized Althalen… and lost it, destroyed Ynefel, and lost it.

Now it bided the second assault against its domain, beneath all the movement of armies and threat of iron: five Places in the land, where Shadows seethed, a Working of wizardous sort: five points of attack to confront five Sihhë-lords who afflicted it. Ynefel was last to fall to this onslaught: the old mews in the Zeide was the next to last, where now Emuin and Ninévrisë stood guard over Orien's restive spirit. The third was Althalen, where Uleman now warded the way; the fourth he had set Efanor to watch, to shut the very first door it might ever have used…

All these ways it had had once at its command, and one by one he had denied it use of them, if the wardens he had set in place could hold firm the Lines.

All but one was shut, that in Ilefínian's fortress, the way Crissand had discovered, when Tasmôrden had lost his banner.

And it Unfolded to him with the breaking of the dawn that their enemy might have arranged them to come to this conflict: but equally they were here because of what they were. There was no turning back now. The Sun King and the Lord of Shadows had come together to set the world and the gray space in balance as best they knew how, while their enemy meant to confound it entirely, and they had no choice. Whatever the grief it brought either of them, whatever the loss or the pain, they had come to do what neither wizardry nor magic yet had done, and not, this time, be held in check, one power with the other.

Halfway had not sufficed, and Mauryl had surely known it when he Shaped him out of fire and Shadow.

And he had known when he looked the first time at the aetheling, that he had found something essential to what he was. Mauryl's spell had finished its Summoning, and he was here, finally, where all along he had needed to be, wizardry and magic opposed to the Wind that had torn Ynefel's stones apart.

CHAPTER 4

The hills that had been only knowledge on a map became a forbidding rampart of stone and bristling evergreen distantly visible on the left hand, a rough land out of which small bands might come to spy or to harry the approach of an invader on the road that led to Ilefínian. Cefwyn had scouts out well ahead looking for just such a force, but they reported there was no sign of enemy presence.

It was troubling not to meet opposition: leaving unexploited the advantage that rocky ridge posed to its native lord was certainly not what Cefwyn would have done, were he defending Ilefínian, but then, Tasmôrden had failed all along to do those things that a prudent commander would have arranged—first of all not having a force at the bridge to have hindered their crossing, and archers in the woods to make their advance far slower than it had been for two days now.

And in that consideration Cefwyn heard the reports of the scouts and frowned, wishing his enemy would do predictable things that had to be fought: the man's brutal dealing with the villages was a terror to Elwynor. Pretenders to the throne and the Regency for a time had been thick as the leaves in this land. It was worth remarking that all the other pretenders were dead, including Aséyneddin, who had perished at Lewenbrook, and that this man was at last report among the living.