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the small table, next to the watch-candle, a candle pungent, like the one he carried from above, with rowan and rue, rosemary and golden-seal.
    He tipped the cup on Tristen’s bedside and found it empty, delayed to draw the coverlet over Tristen’s bare arm.
    Tristen stirred, a mere breath. The boyish face was always cold and severe in sleep, so stern, for such young features. But—
    There was the shadow of beard on the smooth skin. When, he wondered, had that begun—in only so little time? Just tonight?
    The magic was still Summoning, still working in him. Still—Summoning, that was the unexpected thing.
    Mauryl dipped into the boy’s dreams, precautionary on this night of strange intrusions. He found them nothing more violent than the memory of rain, circles in puddles, scudding clouds above the trees.
    He took his candle again, softly closed the door as he left, renewed the seal with a Word.
    The wind sighed about the towers, but it seemed a natural wind, now, and he climbed the creaking stairs back to his tower study, while the candlelight and candle smoke chased the shadows into momentary retreat, beneath and below and around and around the wooden stairs and balconies of the keep.

CHAPTER 3
    O nce a thought began it might go anywhere and everywhere. Tristen despaired of better mastery of himself. His thoughts were not like Mauryl’s thoughts, all orderly, hewing to one purpose. His leapt, jumped, flitted, wandered about so many idle matters, like the pigeons above hunting for dropped crumbs, pecking here, pecking there, in complete disorder. He found complete distraction in a candle flame or a butterfly, or, just after he skinned his elbow, the thought that elbows were very inconvenient to look at, and that there were parts of him he couldn’t see, like his face, which was a curious way to arrange things.
    It happened on that pesky step, and a fall right onto the stones of the lower floor with, fortunately, nothing in his hands. He gathered himself up, sitting on the stones, trying to look at his elbow, and finding red on his fingers. It hurt a great deal. He got up and went to Mauryl, fearing some permanent damage, but, no, Mauryl said, it was only a little Wound, and Mauryl told him to watch where he put his feet, and worked that tingling cure and put a salve on it. Wound was a Word, a scary one, that occupied his thoughts with dreadful images of red and ruin, and made him sick at his stomach, and made him remember how his elbow hurt.
    But—he learned, too, that the skittering of one’s thoughts could be a useful thing, to take one’s mind off trouble—he still couldn’t see his elbow.
    So he went back to Mauryl, who was in the yard cutting herbs, and asked him if he could see his elbow.
    â€œNot likely,” Mauryl said. “Nor wished to, lately.”
    He began to walk away, rubbing his chin. Then he thought how, lately, he’d felt his chin grown rough, and it itched, and he couldn’t see that, either.
    â€œMauryl, can you see your face?”
    â€œNo more than my elbow,” Mauryl said curtly. The air smelled strongly of bruised herbs. “Stupid question, of course not.”
    He went away, noticing, not for the first time, but for the first time that he had ever wondered about it, all the stone faces set in the walls: some large, some small, grimacing visages that had sometimes frightened him on uneasy nights, when Mauryl was angry for some reason and when he sought his room alone; or when the wind was up and creaking in the roofs and the loft, and he was alone, lighting the sconces on the landings. The faces seemed to change with the candlelight when he walked past them, but Mauryl had said they were only stone, and harmless to him.
    Some of them had pointed teeth and pointed ears. He had felt his teeth with his tongue and his ears with his fingers, so he was certain enough boys looked nothing like the images of that sort. Some of the stone