"Cefwyn didn't harm you," he returned. "And you tried to kill him."

"To win him," Tarien said, but he knew that for a lie, and Tarien perhaps knew he knew, for the gray space grew dark and troubled.

"Emuin's here, too, isn't he?" Orien asked. "I heard him quite clearly."

"He's here."

"Dry old Emuin," Orien said. "Hypocrite."

"He says very ill things of you, too," Tristen said, "and I regard his opinion as far more fair."

It was perhaps more subtle a sting than Orien had expected. Her nostrils flared, but she did not glare. Rather she seemed to grow smaller, and more pliant.

"We shouldn't quarrel. I never held any resentment for you, none at all. You never had a chance but to fall into the Marhanen's hands, the same as we, and you have far more right to be here: I shouldn't chide you."

He felt a subtle wizardry as she said it, and he wondered what she was attempting now.

He broke off the blandishments and the weaving of a spell with a wave of his hand, and she flinched. So did Tarien, for that matter.

"Don't," he said, to Tarien as much as to Orien. "Don't press against the walls. You're in danger, and you're far safer here than anywhere else if you'll accept it."

"Accept it!" Orien said in scorn.

"Accept safety here. It's my best advice."

"I need nothing from you orthat dry stick of a wizard!"

"But you do," he said. "You need it very much." Orien turned her shoulder to him, but he went on trying to reach her, in the World and in the gray space alike. "Lady, you didn't only open the wards and the window, you opened yourself and your sister to Hasufin. You thought it might give you a way to rule here and berid of Cefwyn, but all Hasufin wanted was a way inside the wards."

"And an end of the Marhanen!"

"Lady Orien, the truth is, if you had died and if everyone had died, Hasufin didn't care. It didn't matter to him. It doesn't matter to him now—if there's anything left of him. If sorcery finds a way inside the wards, it won't give you back what you had. Cefwyn might have, but Hasufin Heltain never would and never intended to. If you don't know that, you don't know what he was."

She was angry at what he said, but she might think on it. Perhaps she had already thought on it. Doubtless she had had ample time to think, sitting in a Teranthine nunnery in Guelessar with no fine gowns, no servants, no books, and no one who cared to please her.

And in this moment of her retreat, he pursued, with a question which had troubled him since summer.

"You tried to kill Emuin," he asked her, for someone at summer's end had attacked Emuin and left him lying in a pool of blood. He could think of no one more likely than Orien Aswydd, who had commanded all the resources of Henas'amef. "Didn't you?"

She gave him no answer, but he had the notion he had come very near the truth: Orien or someone sworn to her. And he could think of many, many connections she had had among the servants and the nobility of the province, one of whom had perhaps stayed more loyal than most.

"Lord Cuthan's gone to Elwynor," he said. "Did you know that?"

Perhaps she had not known it. Perhaps she was dismayed to learn that particular resource was no longer within her reach, when he was sure Cuthan had something to do with Orien Aswydd. Perhaps through Cuthan she had even known about the proposed rising against the king, and the Elwynim's promised help.

But she said nothing.

He tried a third question. "Did youbring the attack on the nuns?"

It was as much as if to ask: Did you wish your freedom from the nuns, and, Did you grow desperate because the plan had failed?

And: Did it work finally as you wished?

It all might have shot home, but Orien never met his eyes, and he somewhat doubted she heard… or that she knew any other thing. He only wished that if it were possible she could find another path for her gift, she would do differently. He wished it on her with gentle force, and with kindness, and she stepped back as if he had grossly assaulted her. The white showed all around her eyes.

"I wish you well," he said in the face of her temper, and included Tarien in the circle of his will. "I assure you I do, as Hasufin never did."

"You take my lands," Orien cried, "and wish me well in my poverty! How dare you!"

It was a question, and he knew the answer with an assurance that, yes, he dared, and had the right, and did. The gray space intruded, roiled and full of storm; and in it, he did not retreat: Orien did. In the World, she recoiled a step, and another, and a third, until she met the wall. Tarien rose from her chair, awkward in the heaviness of her body, and turned to reach her sister, still holding to the chair.

"If Aséyneddin had won," Orien said. "If you had died—"

"You promised Cefwyn loyalty," Tristen said, "and you never meant it. Do you think you'd lie to Hasufin, and have what you wanted? If you lied and he lied—what in the world were you expecting to happen?"

She had no idea, he decided sadly. Nothing at all Unfolded to him to make sense of Orien, but he suspected Orien's thoughts constantly soared over the stepping-stones to the far bank of her desires, never reckoning where she had to set her feet to take her there.

Flesh and bone as well as spirit, Mauryl had said to him, when he had been about to plunge down a step while looking at something across the room. He could hear the crack of Mauryl's staff on incontrovertible stone, to this very hour. Look where you're going, Mauryl would say.

It was in some part sad that Orien had had no Mauryl to advise her.

But on a deeper reflection, perhaps it was as well for all of them that Hasufin's counsel had never been other than self-serving.

And she never answered him now, never confessed her expectations, possibly never knew quite what they were or why she continually fell short of her mark.

"What do you hope I should do?" he asked them. "I might send you to Elwynor."

"Send us to Elwynor?" Orien echoed him, and drew herself up with a breath, a shake of her head, a spark in the eye. "Oh, do. Do, and you send king Cefwyn's child to Tasmôrden!"

Cefwyn's child, he said to himself.

A man and a woman made a child together, and would it be with one of the stableboys Tarien had done this magic?

No. It made perfect sense. Now her defiance assumed a purpose, and her coming here disclosed a reason. So did the nuns' deaths, at a far remove: whatever men had killed those hapless women, he knew that greater currents were moving in the world, and that none of them was safe.

"And when will the child be born?" he asked, already having clues to that answer.

"I'm eight months now," Tarien said, and settled into her chair like a queen onto her throne.

Nine was the term of a child that would live. So Uwen had said.

Three times wizards' three, this term of a child. Wizardry set great store by numbers, and moments, and times.

"And have you sent this news to Cefwyn?"

"No," Orien said. And Tarien:

"We kept it our secret. Mysecret. Even when he sent us away. It never showed until fall, and under all these robes, and then the winter cloaks… only my nurse knew."

"Yet the Guelens came," Orien said with a bitter edge. "So perhaps the nuns did see, and perhaps he does know, this good, this honest king of yours, despite all you say."