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might bleed for it, in great numbers.

"And if not, Your Majesty?"

"If not…" Cefwyn looked at Anwyll, who as an undercaptain had offered not a word during all of this. "What do
you
think, Captain? You've dealt with the Lord of Amefel, latest. What do you expect of him?"

"That he will not desert Your Majesty," Anwyll said, and seemed to hold thoughts back, in diffidence or perhaps in knowledge of Tristen.

What he held back seemed likely to exceed what he said.

"And does he remain true to us?" he asked Anwyll.

Anwyll's gaze flashed to him, wary as a hunted creature's.

"Does he?" He did not doubt. He refused to doubt. "I think so. I think so." He set Danvy to a quicker pace. They passed beyond the camp, and he relayed orders to Maudyn. "Your men to hold this ground, come what may."

"Shall we let Ryssand pass?"

There was the question, the question whether one province of Ylesuin should fight another. And that was, indeed, one answer to the challenge: set Maudyn as his rear guard, against his own troops.

"Let him pass," Cefwyn said. "Let him have his way for now. There'll be the day, not so long from now."

They had passed the camp and led on, so that all the men and vehicles behind them would follow.

They were on the march and would proceed a day's march north and west, with the blind hills to their left and a traitor at their backs.

"Ryssand can stew and fret," he added, "but it won't get him past the ox teams in the woods."

CHAPTER 2

Wind tore the morning's white clouds to ragged gray rags by noon, fortress of dragons.html

rain threatening but never falling.
Wizardry
? Crissand asked silently, with a worried look, knowing Tristen wished them fair weather, and Tristen refused to agree or disagree: whatever power willed storms to oppose his wishes seemed less mindful opposition than a negligent contrariness, a surly, preoccupied opposition in the north not even caring that it spilled into the heavens for all to see.

Worse thought, that power husbanded its self-restraint, not its strength, as if to hold back and shape its force was a greater effort than to loose it.

Emuin struggled with times and seasons and nudged, rather than commanded, his designs into the grand flow of nature. Emuin moved by knowledge and plan.

Hasufin
had learned of Mauryl, before he turned to self-will and attempted to overthrow nature. Mauryl was a wizard. What he could teach was wizardry: all Mauryl's charts, all Emuin's, all those notes, calculations and records… that was wizardry.

This, he began to fear… this negligent, careless force… was not.

They moved through a last descent of hills toward the river, wending down a last terrace of that gray stone so frequent in the district, and then the road tended generally down a pitch that, around a hill, would bring them to the site of what they had used to call Anwyll's camp, on the river.

They were in the district of Anas Mallorn. And of that village and of all the villages of the district, they saw occasional traces as they rode, the droppings of sheep, the stray bit of wool at the edge of a thicket, but they never caught sight of flocks or shepherds: Tristen had noticed that fact and had pondered it even before Uwen remarked on the vacancy of the land.

"Not a sheep from here to the river," Uwen said. "So's the shepherds has the smell o' war, an' ain't havin' their flocks for soldiers' suppers, no. They've seen too much comin' an' goin' of armies hereabouts in recent years."

And Crissand, whose own lands depended primarily on the herding of sheep, nodded. "They'll be high in the hills," he said, lifting his eyes toward the rugged land to the east, that obdurate rock that had no easy passage except the river… and how even the Lenúalim had won its passage down to the sea was a distracting wonder.

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Had the mountain split for it?

Had ancient magic made a way… or Efanor's hitherto silent gods commanded it?

His mind even at this time of urgency hared off onto such tracks, and followed then a forbidden course, wondering how Idrys fared.

That, he would not wonder, not when he had been thinking of their enemy.

The gray space risked too much. What came and went there flitted, skipped, was there and gone again. The gray clouds that had appeared tore to wisps in the heavens and went to nothing with disquieting swiftness. The men noticed, and pointed aloft.

Not a wizard: his thoughts flew back to that uncomfortable suspicion.

Even sorcerors worked a sort of wizardry. Such had been Hasufin Heltain, such he still was, if anything still survived.

But if it was within a wizard's ability to so disturb the weather as this, it was not possible for a wizard then to ignore it as trivial, or to change his mind and change the weather to something else.

Did Emuin know that this force existed? Had Emuin known that something this swiftly-changing opposed them, and never told him?

Mauryl
had failed a contest with his own student, Hasufin, and the long-ago folk of Galasien had fallen under Hasufin's rule for a time…

until Mauryl had made the long journey north to the ice, to the Hafsandyr where the Sihhë dwelled. The tales were not, as he had heard, that Mauryl had Called the Sihhë south, but that Mauryl had gone to them to persuade them south.

And what lay there, in the frozen reaches of the mountains that Mauryl must respect, but magic: and why had only five met him, five sole occupants, as legend said, of one fortress? He could all but see those walls, black and severe against the mountains and the ice.

And where were the fields and the crops, the sheep and the people in this vision?

Had the Sihhë-lords not wives and children and homes to leave?

He could not remember. He could not gather that out of the mists of memory even with effort, whether there had been women, or children, or what had sustained the Sihhë in that frozen, high keep.

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Yet Men said that
he
was Sihhë, and he bled, and feared, and did other things that Men did.

He did things, however, that Men and wizards did not do, and saw things they did not see, and had read the Book, and knew he had written it, though it was Barrakketh's own hand, the first of the Sihhë-

lords. It had wanted wizardry and cleverness to read that mirror-written writing… wizardry, but not all wizardry; trickery such as Men used, but not all trickery: a mirror and the light of the gray space. In that much… had not he done what any wizard could do?

Nothing was simple: wizardry and sorcery and magic commingled, and two of those three depended on times and seasons; the second was the perverted use of the first; the third was innate in those who had it—

And if wizardry had a dark mirror…

Might
magic
have one?

Why had Mauryl
gone
to the north rather than speaking to the Sihhë at a distance, as he was sure Mauryl had known how to do?

And how had he gone? By roads? And if by ordinary roads, fearing the ascendancy of his enemy,
why
had it taken five Sihhë-lords coming back with him to overthrow the rule of one mere student of Mauryl Gestaurien—Mauryl, whom all the Men he knew called the greatest and oldest of wizards?

What indeed had Mauryl and the five Sihhë had to face in the south?

Hasufin? The might of old Galasien arrayed against Mauryl?

"Strays is apt to end in stewpots," Uwen was saying, regarding sheep and pigs. "Even wi' the best of soldiers… and there's that ragtag lot that's come 'mongst Aeself's lads, who ain't themselves come with wagons nor supply. It ain't sayin' there ain't some Elwynim up in the hills even now, bands not wantin' to join Aeself's lot, not desirous of goin' home, neither. The war's gone one way an another in Elwynor, and that don't lead all the captains to be friends of one another, nor to trust comin' into Aeself's camp, even if they wasn't ever Tasmôrden's men."

"I don't see any there," Tristen murmured, for to his awareness the hills rising in the east were barren of men and sheep, the same. "The people have fled, if they were able, farther to the south. It was hungry fortress of dragons.html

men that came to raid Aeself's camp, and the Lady of Emwy didn't let them in.—But Aeself's moved," he said, for his awareness of the land flared dangerously wide for a moment, a lightning stroke of a wish that lit the landscape all around him. In fear he stifled that vision and made himself see the land between his horse's ears, the road in front of him, the company on either side.

"Gods bless," Uwen muttered. "Moved, ye say?"

"I sent Cevulirn's men by this road," Tristen recalled, "while we visited Aeself: I haven't been this far toward the river since Cevulirn and I traveled this road… and all the land is empty now. The people have gone to Drusenan's wall, or they've gone to the south, none toward the river, none toward the hills."

"They wouldn't," Crissand said somberly. "The hills to the east are for bandits and outlaws."

"There aren't any of those there, now, either."

"Taken hire wi' Tasmôrden," Uwen said. "
There's a
sorry way't' clean th' land of bandits."

"Taken hire with Tasmôrden right along with the Aswydd servants,"

Crissand said. "Every outpouring of Heryn's court is over there, and every common cutthroat from our woods. It's our sins that wait across the river."

"And Elwynor's," Tristen said, for it seemed to him that was the case… that the timid had fled and the strong had chosen sides, the strong good men being beaten time and time again and pulled this way and that by successive claimants to the Regency, until this day, that the best men were a small band in Aeself's hands and the worst were an army sacking Ilefínian.

"And Elwynor's," Crissand agreed with him, and added, a moment later: "Gods save Her Grace."

"Amen to that," Uwen said. "As she won't have an easy reign when she has 'er kingdom."

Crissand said nothing to that. The gray space was troubled for a moment, and troubled in the way not of a wizard thinking secret thoughts, but troubled as it grew troubled when words rang wrong.

And everything Uwen had said suddenly rang wrong, out of joint with what was now in motion. Crissand had not meant
gods save Her
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Grace
as a benison, only as a commiseration, as if their positions were equivalent… it seemed, suddenly and for no reason, true.

How? Tristen asked himself. How was Crissand's state balanced with Ninévrisë's within things-as-they-were? That they both were bereft of fathers?

—That they both were, in a sense, heirs to thrones and kingdom, but not crowned?

Therein, perhaps, the Unity of Things that wizardry so loved and through which it found its power.

Unity of Things, Unity of Direction, Unity of Time…

The three were all met, in those two. And a piece of the world as it ought to be went into place like a sword into its scabbard, a weapon ready to his hand.

But in the beginning, Mauryl had called down five Sihhë to help him, not one.

And Mauryl had overthrown the last faint trace of a Sihhë blood dilute with generations among Men, finding in the last of them, as in the first, no model of virtue.

Mauryl had set a Man in power, the Marhanen, to bridge the gap.

But in the right season, consulting the heavens, Mauryl had called
him
into his study, born of fire and a wizard's wishes—Mauryl had declared him lacking, and sent him forth into the world, all the same.

What had Mauryl calculated he would be… that he had not been?

All Mauryl's papers and parchments had fallen prey to the elements and the vagrant winds at the last. There was no record And if he had been Barrakketh, why did it not Unfold to him what that enemy was, and what it was called, and how to defeat it? He cudgeled his mind, battered at its walls, but, seeking a name for his fears, he could think of nothing at all, it was so opposed to all he understood. He could not go near it. It was as if he could grasp it, he would inevitably contain it and be changed by it, and he could not,
would
not accept it within himself… nameless it remained and it would not Unfold to him.

Five Sihhë, without wives, without children… without fields or flocks: it was no kingdom such as Ylesuin: it was contained in one fortress of dragons.html

fortress, a gathering of those with magic inborn, having nothing to do with Galasien or Mauryl, nothing at all… except Mauryl's appeal to magic, where wizardry went awry.

And whatever might have moved the Sihhë-lords to gather their resources and come south, abandoning all purpose but one? What lure but curiosity could move them?

Surely something greater than curiosity had drawn them south to change the world.

He tested all around the edges of that idea, to see whether there might have been more than five Sihhë, or even whether there might still be, but all that seemed in any sense to Unfold to him was a surety that five was the sum of them, that the Hafsandyr had raised a fortress against some great ill, and that there was enough of Men in the nature of the Sihhë that they had left children in the world.

But where had they gone, one by one? Had they died as Men died?

Or had they wandered across the Edge in the gray space and joined the Shadows that way, as Uleman of Elwynor had gone? Was
that
the darkness he recalled at the foundation of everything?

If he had ever died, the memory of death eluded him. If he had met defeat, he had never recalled it. If he had loved a woman of the race of Men, he had no memory of it. There was danger, he suspected, in slipping too far back, and remembering too much, and becoming bound to it.

Yet there was danger in not knowing, too, insofar as he had weaknesses. Of harm he had dealt with since Lewenbrook, he suspected it was Hasufin who had moved Cuthan, and Orien. It was Hasufin who had attempted to steal his way among Men, and it was surely Hasufin's wizard-work that had moved the archivist, for more than any other thief, principally a wizard would want to know the things hinted at in Mauryl's letters, would seek after any ragtag piece of knowledge, something that might fix only one date, one hour, to make clear all the others, and find a way into Mauryl's workings to threaten him. Indeed, wizardry could harm him, as wizardry had Called him.