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supporter in council, Earl Crissand, was kin of theirs, and heir to the name…so he had sworn to himself, so Auld Syes herself had said, in an appearance as curious and ominous as he had ever seen—and no, these women would not take what was Crissand’s: whatever came of his constrained charity, Crissand’s heirship could not be challenged, not while these stones stood one on the other. It was that certain in his thoughts.
    â€œWhat’s Emuin say?” Uwen asked. They were still standing in the lower hall, Uwen and his guard all deaf to magic and wizardry alike, but Uwen knew his resources, and knew that Master Emuin tended to be awake at night; and knew by experience that his lord’s moments of woolgathering were often conversations.
    â€œHe’s not pleased,” Tristen said, blinking the ordinary world into being. His sight centered on Uwen’s gray-stubbled, earnest face. “Nor am I pleased, but what can I do?”
    â€œI’m sure I don’t know,” Uwen said, and bit his lip, which usually presaged his saying something anyway. “Except as His Majesty might ha’ had their heads on the South Gate, and didn’t, on account of ye told ’im they’d be worse threats to us all if they was ghosts. And, ye know, m’lord, I ain’t so sure on that, now.”
    â€œI’m not sure on that point either,” he said, not in jest, and added: “But I don’t think I can kill them, Uwen.”
    Uwen’s look was the more distressed. “Ye ain’t o’ the mind, nor ever were, m’lord. An’ her sister bein’ with child, an’ all—what’s to happen? Ask Emuin. Ask Emuin, m’lord. This is beyond me.”
    â€œI fear it’s beyond him, too.” Uwen was right: he had never been willing to exercise a lord’s cold justice, nor had done. But despite his thinking on slippery steps, something felt so utterly wrong in the notion of killing the women, he could not compass arguments about it, could not consider it—whether it was wrong in the magical sense or wrong because it was terrible to kill at all, he had no way to sort out. He only knew he shuddered at it. “Emuin’s as surprised as the rest of us.”
    â€œâ€™At there,” Uwen said, with an upward glance, the way the women had gone, “looks to be seven, eight months she’s carryin’.”
    â€œCan you say so?”
    â€œSummat,” Uwen said, as they began to walk their own direction, toward the other stairs. “Looks to be. Nine’s the term of a child that’ll live, an’ by the look, that ’un ain’t far from it. That ’un’s bloomed in the nunnery, gods save us all, but I’ll wager she didn’t get it there.”
    Being not born, himself, and never a child, and never intimate with a woman, he had only uncertain questions where ordinary men had sure knowledge. He felt helpless in his ignorance, and so many things had converged in the last few days…magical things, dreadful things, hopeful things, and now, it turned out, Tarien’s child, which it seemed would come sooner rather than later. He had feared Midwinter, just past, and the turning of the year, when a conjunction of the stars that Emuin said had been his birth had ended, and a new cycle had begun.
    â€œWhen?” he asked. “How will we know?”
    â€œShe ain’t immediate, I don’t think,” Uwen said, who had had a wife, once, and children. “A hellish far walk, she’s been, if they come from Anwyfar, an’ in the snow, and a-horseback before that. If she was near, that might ha’ brought it on. And it didn’t.”
    â€œEight months?”
    â€œSeven or eight, maybe.”
    In magic and wizardry, more particularly in sorcery…there were no coincidences. Seven or eight months…from its beginning, which was also to reckon.
    â€œCould she have gotten