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That Orien Aswydd also knew these things he was not wholly certain, for he had never associated her with charts and scribing— and that she might not know the complexities as well as Emuin… that failed to comfort him. It reminded him instead that she had relied on an outside source. Having the gift, lacking skill and learning—she had used the gift and listened to whispers from the gray space, whispers which might have told her all those things a better wizard might cipher for himself, whispers which had counseled her to do things which a better wizard would fear even to contemplate.

And that same source of advice was likely at least in the conception of the child—if she lacked it now, as they strongly hoped she did, it meant that her advisor was no longer in the world of Men and had not been since Lewenbrook, but they did not rely on that belief.

She might be cast adrift, ignorant of seasons; but she might have known from the beginning
when
the child had to be born; or the child might have that knowledge within himself—nothing told him how children knew their time, he, who had been Summoned whole from the fire of a hearth.

Certainly Orien would resist any time of Emuin's choosing. That went without saying.

Meanwhile Tarien, who contained the subject of all Master Emuin's reckoning and Orien's wishing, sat with her sister in the apartment that had been Cefwyn's—there was troubling irony in that choice—and stitched and stitched patterns in linen.

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So Tristen observed. He visited them daily since the weather had turned contrary, not that he found their presence pleasant, but that he wished them to know he thought of them constantly, with all that meant. And always when he visited, it was the stitching that occupied them.

They were spells, he was sure, these squares of black thread on white, these growing structures like ebon snowflakes. It was a marvelous skill they had, a mystery in itself, but what these things meant, Emuin said he did not know.

Was this the wish for snow, that made their movement of men and supplies so difficult? Did it exist, worked in thread?

And while Orien remained a creature of edges and angles and angers, Tarien waxed like the moon toward full.

They stitched in his presence, while by day and night the wizard that was Orien Aswydd prowled the confines of their condition like a wolf before the fold and wished for freedom and rule.

They stitched, and wore their cherished jewels only for each other's benefit. They had two fine gowns which did little to recover the glory of their appearance in the summer. They dressed in costly cloth in the isolation of their prison, and Orien chose dark Aswydd green against which her skin showed stark, unhealthy white. Her cropped hair flew like a fire about her face, and she took no pains with it, while Tarien wore hers loose, and her laces loose. She only grew more silent, less responsive to his visits, until on the most recent visit she did not respond at all.

They stitched and whenever he came near the wizard that was within Tarien turned and shifted and turned again, innocent and restless, not yet wanting freedom.

But when he was not present, Tarien did speak. She was impatient and full of tempers and storms, so the servants swore… so the midwife Gran Sedlyn swore, in the one report he had had directly from her lips: the old woman, Paisi's gran, white-haired and portly, reported most to Emuin, and came and went without fuss.

But Gran Sedlyn hung trinkets about the Aswydds' door: that he saw, and found some foreign virtue in them. He did not oppose them, seeing they strengthened, rather than weakened, the wards, by however little. The sight of them reassured the guards who stood by fortress of dragons.html

that door, as his invisible wards did not, and he wished those wards stronger than they were.

And still the weather stayed bitter cold, spitting snow until the drifts piled deep, and the wind howled about the eaves of the fortress at night, rattling shutters and prying at every edge and nook and cranny.

That, he most distrusted. Unlike Ynefel, which had creaked and complained at the wind's assault, the Zeide stood strong and resistant, but he heard the wind's attempts at the roof slates and in his rare dreams he heard it prowling about, looking for weaknesses. It grew bold, and he knew Orien wished counter to his wishes.

For the first time in his memory, he counted days… for the letters, his and Aeself's, would just be arriving.

In the same number of days, the southern army was ready and past ready to move, awaiting only the break in the weather that as yet his wishes could not gain them.

In the same set of days, the child was approaching birth—soon, now, the midwife said.

Crissand declared he brooded too much, and urged him to go riding… though Crissand himself was busy now with the army, with his lands, with his men, and had no dearth of things to occupy him: and dared he ride out, himself, and leave Orien unguarded in the way that only he and Emuin could watch her?

That was foolishness indeed.

So he waited. And he fed the pigeons.

Until the day when Paisi came to interrupt his breakfast, and to beg his presence in the tower—"As master wishes to speak wi' Your Grace," Paisi said with a bow, gasping for breath the while. The boy rarely walked anywhere, but this was uncommon haste.

"I'll come immediately." And to Uwen who sat at breakfast with him:

"No need. I'll take the guard. Feed the pigeons, will you? They expect it."

"Aye," Uwen promised him, and would, as he did, some mornings—indeed, all through the town, so the rumor came to him, the townsfolk had taken to feeding them—for luck, they said, calling them the lord's birds. There was certainly no starvation on his windowsill, but they had their rights.

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Even on a day when Emuin might have an answer for him.

He threw on his cloak in the chance that master Emuin had had the shutters thrown wide and hurried on Paisi's heels, following Paisi's quick steps until his own breaths came hard, to what he hoped was the news Emuin had been looking for all these days.

The tower was warm, ablaze with light from all the sconces and from the fire. The table was even in moderate order, the parchments stacked, the inkpots capped.

"Master Emuin?" Tristen said, and unfastened the cloak.

"A date," Emuin said in triumph, and laid a chart atop the other charts, beginning at once to talk to him about the measuring of the heavens, and the calculations of the moon and its motions and the planets' travels through the Great Year.

It was doubtless the proof—useless words, at least to his understanding of it, but he saw that Emuin had arrived at his answer, and he dutifully observed what Emuin showed him, a crooked finger tracing the results on parchment.

"This is the reckoning of the year past," Emuin said, "and here's the hour of Lewenbrook, and
here
is the day, the very day I'll wager Aséyneddin looked to provoke his battle—I had not reckoned this, well, well, lying senseless at the time. But this is the day he would have wanted. But Cefwyn roused his troops out and came for him before things were advantageous to Aséyneddin.—And here's the hour Hasufin would have chosen on the day the battle did take place: noon, the very exactitude of noon; but noon he did not have, because Cefwyn pressed him… and you did, gods, yes, you did, having a sense about such things, and never needing ink and pen."

"It was
Cefwyn
who led," Tristen said. "
Cefwyn
who chose the time."

Emuin blinked at him. "But you agreed, did you not? You were there.

You urged him forward."

"I went with him, like his soldiers."

"To Aséyneddin's ruin." Emuin seemed a little put out by his dismissal of any part he had had in choosing the hour of the battle—

but truthfully, Tristen thought, it seemed to him that all of them had rushed toward it. Even the horses had taken a fever for battle, pace quickening until the thunder rolled through the earth.

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Had he guided the hour? Had he wished the horses faster and faster on that morning? Had he willed axles not to break on days before and all that army hastened into each day's gain of ground?

It appalled him if he had done so, not knowing: he thought not.

But if not he, then who?

Emuin's finger traveled back and back through the spidery notes.

"Here, the night of your arrival in Henas'amef; I had it from the guard records—my memory I thought was exact, but this has the very hour, as they marked it against the glass. And here, the date of a gift of mine to the Bryaltine shrine… they write down such things. Still not precise. The guard is never precise, and the Bryalt abbot has been known to err, but on this matter, I think not, and not both of them together. 'Twill serve. 'Twill serve. This was the hour."

"Of my coming
here
?"

"Why should it matter? Why should it matter, you ask? Because that hour was momentous for your presence, young lord, but not only that. Not only that! In that hour, in that selfsame hour, was this babe's conception. I have my sources among the maids… not the moment, alas! but at least a time within three hours."

"That night?"

"Before Cefwyn came down the stairs to answer
my
summons, and would I'd given it earlier—or perhaps I would
not
." Emuin gave a wave of his hand much as if he brushed away a gnat. "We never can guess what might have been. What is, is, and that's what we know.

What will be is a fine pursuit, but fraught with too damned many possibilities. Fortune-telling, I tell you, is not what it's surmised to be.

But
here
the child was conceived, in the very room where he'll be born—dare you call that placement utter coincidence, eh?"

"It's a fine room. It was vacant."

"Ah, yes. Of course. Perfectly ordinary. Damn, but these things fit together! Nothing out of the way at all. And on this day, and on this hour…" Emuin showed him the intersection of a half a score arcs and lines, and suddenly shuffled to another parchment. "This was the hour of
your
birth, do you see? This was Mauryl's best moment, as I reckon it, the new moon, the moon of beginnings! It was the earliest moon of spring, and I think near Mauryl's own moment: the hour of fortress of dragons.html

his own birth, perhaps, however long ago, or the hour when he had most to hope for success of his enterprise. This, above all others, was your hour to come back into the world… so this day may have been yours already, a natal day, a day of accession, of some auspicious moment in the life you had once. It was your point of correspondence to him, do you see? And no accident that that was so!
Hence
, your power in this venture! On that, Mauryl relied—as he did in our venture at Althalen, that night, that bloody night." Emuin's hand trembled, and moved on among the arcs and bird-track scribings.

"There, there, was Hasufin's last death, the realm's rise; your birth; perhaps Mauryl's, all the same day! do you see? And if Hasufin had lived this long, to see this Year of Years—" Again Emuin's hand moved, to the end of the chart. "—at this hour, that midnight of Midwinter Eve, he would have worked a Working to bind the next age. He failed!"

"Did we?"

Emuin looked distraught, as if that had been the wrong question.

"What do you expect of me? I'm a wizard, not born to magic!"

"Forgive me."

"But you set your seal on this age.
You
. Yourself. You're still here."

Emuin searched amid the stack of parchments, discarding one and the other in increasing frustration, until he had disordered all of it. Then:

"Aha! This. This is your answer, young lord. This is your new age.

This, this day
is where we are now. And that babe—that babe of Tarien's—is on both charts, one for his conception, one for his birth.

Follow this arc."

Tristen observed, such as he could, the arcane notes. They were all measures of risings and settings.

"And this is your Day in this new cycle of years, this is your beginning—" Emuin's gnarled finger traveled to an intersection.

"And we have a babe about to be born. Tell me what you think the hour will be."

Tristen moved his finger toward the intersection of lines Emuin said was his own, and hesitated, for there was a double set of lines—

ominously so, to his unlettered perception. He stared at that coincidence of lines, with not a notion in the world what the numbers signified, or which was which, but all that was within him telling him fortress of dragons.html

there was something to fear here.

"Just so," Emuin said, and so stood back from the charts—cast a measuring rod down atop them as if they had become negligible to all further reckonings. "Just so. One for midnight, one for dawn. And to that end I've asked Gran Sedlyn to reckon very carefully and keep me advised down to the hour of her estimations, never forgetting wizardry's in question here. Wish, young lord! Wish the world to your own measure. Wish the babe for any hour but midnight and any day of the year but Hasufin's. Wish the heavens to speed the spring and melt the snow so we can be done with this wretched war. Wish a speedy delivery of this child by daylight. And wish
Cefwyn
well, when you do all these things."

"I do," he said fervently. "Above all, I do that."

CHAPTER 2

The storm wind came in the night and howled around the eaves and rattled shutters, a new wind, from a different direction, and singing with a different sound, on this, the night before the anniversary of his first night in the world. Tristen sat up in bed and listened, feeling no threat in it, hearing no ominous voice in it, only the banging of a shutter somewhere distant.

Thunder cracked.

That, he thought, sounded more like rain than snow, and he rose from bed, flung on a robe, and went out to the heart of his apartments, already feeling the air warmer than the bone-deep chill of recent days.

Lightning flared in the seam of the draperies before he touched them.

He parted them, and with a loud boom of thunder, light blazed down the clear sides of the windows, lit the Aswydd heraldry in colored glass in the center of the window and flashed repeatedly, bringing the dragons within it to fitful life, casting shadows about the room.