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block: king Cefwyn had stripped title and lands from her, but spared her life, despite the fact her crimes included attempted regicide. Cefwyn had spared her life and sent her off to the nunnery instead on the understanding she would never return to Henas'amef or set claim on the duchy.
    And now, now so very soon after the new year, here she stopped at the west doors of her former hall, drew herself up straight and defiant despite the ravages of weather and a body lately failing from exhaustion, and strongly suggested she be given the honors of her birth and recent office.
    One could—almost—admire her… but one could never, never yield to her.
    "We'll find a place suitable," Tristen said curtly. "Rooms better than the guardhouse, at least." He knew the outrage he provoked by adding that last remark, but it made his point. And turning to Lusin, his chief bodyguard: "Tell Cook to come." Cook, like many of the servants, had served the Aswydd lords before he had taken the dukedom, which was to say only last year; but now he relied on her and trusted Cook as the only woman of his close acquaintance. More, Cook had children, several of them, and might understand Lady Tarien's condition better than a man would.
    Regarding that 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.
    — 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 ?
    — 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 fortress of dragons.html
    out to reach Henas'amef and their former home.
    — 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