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condition, however, Cook’s was not the only advice he needed now. Master Emuin was awake, and knew, and had known about the ladies even before they reached the town gates.
    â€”What shall I do ? he asked Emuin now within the gray space wizards used. The Aswydd women might hear him, this close, but in this moment he did not care. Where do you say should I put them ?
    â€”I’m sure I don’t know , Emuin said, and as the gray place opened wide, they stood, in their wizardous aspect, in a place of cloud and wind, equally wary of the Aswydds—who were there, unabashedly eavesdropping on them. This is inconvenient .
    They had feared the stars, had gotten through the perilous time of change with no worse calamity than the arrival of Owl, who was somewhere about, and they had hoped that Owl was the end of the last troubled epoch and the beginning of a more auspicious age.
    But, perhaps on the same night, counting the time it took to travel so far—for so it turned out—Orien and Tarien had left their exile and set out to reach Henas’amef and their former home.
    â€”With child, no less , Emuin said, and turned a fierce and forbidding question toward Tarien Aswydd. —Whose, woman ?
    It was harshly, even brutally demanded, so uncharacteristically forceful that Tristen flinched. In the same instant Orien flung an arm about her sister, who shied from answering and winked out of the gray space like a candle in the wind.
    Orien’s was a swift, defiant retreat.
    Emuin’s abrupt question rid them, if only momentarily, of the Aswydds’ wizardous eavesdropping, and for Tristen’s part, he was no little chagrined that he had never asked so important a question in all the long walk back with the women. In his own defense, his attention in those hours had all been to the simple struggle with the snow, and with Orien’s challenge to him…and then with the dismay his allied lords, down in the camps about the town wall, had felt very keenly, simply to see Orien back in Amefel. That Tarien was with child had seemed to him one of those things women could arrange, and one of those states women at times maintained—consequently had he, a wizard’s Shaping, born of fire on a hearth, asked himself that one simple, essential question before bringing the women here?
    No, he had not.
    Whose child, indeed, begun in a nunnery, where, as he understood, there were only women?
    Or perhaps not in the nunnery.
    He felt a shadow pass in the gray space, and at the same moment, in the world, felt the wind of Owl’s wings pass him and sweep on.
    So Owl, who had guided him to find the sisters in the storm, was still abroad in the world. And magic was. And everything that had seemed simple now became a series of choices, each one with consequences.
    â€œThe west wing,” he said to the men waiting for their orders. “Lodge them there.” He knew the house had at least one set of rooms vacant in that wing, since Cevulirn had chosen to camp with his men. And no one lodged in rooms fit for the duke of Ivanor could complain of being slighted; but anything less than her former state as duchess of Amefel was too little in the estimation of Orien Aswydd, who had attempted Cefwyn’s life and on that dice throw, lost everthing. He thought twice and made a firm choice. “ Cefwyn’s rooms.”
    â€œ His Majesty’s old apartments,” Uwen repeated to the servants, as a row of frightened maids and men met them at the inside stairs. “An’ hurry about it. Careful on them marble steps. Mind the ladies’ boots is wet.”
    A slip on the stairs, Tristen thought, an untimely, fatal accident would not happen to a wizard outside of wizardry…he had no fear either would slip. But a true accident might save the whole kingdom the consequences of his charity. He had brought them here. He had acquiesced to whatever sent them, and being what he was—a lord and a