POV: the-stranger
Summary
The stranger, one hand braced on a wooden pillar in the side chamber where Sefawynn has just cut him loose, stands inside the first real grief he can remember owning. He cannot picture Jen's face. He can, very clearly, feel that she is gone — a fresh, raw, audible scream of a hurt that has not yet had time to bruise — and a snatch of her voice surfaces with it, marvelling at how thousands of years of human beings have all been the same underneath, and promising that someday, when they can afford it, they will go and see. This dimension, he understands now, was Jen's dream. It is what he has left of her. The pain is too personal to joke about and too real to belong to anyone but him, and he files the rest of the realisation away for later, because Sefawynn is watching from a few feet off, suspicious that a sudden swoon is a feint for the knife.
He plays it off as concussion. They trade barbs — she mocks his accent, the cobwebs near his ears, his inability to say "craeft" with the proper bite — and she reads him as Waelish, a westerner from across the water, since he has clearly never heard of Weswara or the Weswarans. He files Weswara away too: his British history is patchy, but he is fairly sure that name should ring a bell, and it does not.
She picks up a gravy-boat oil lamp, blows out the rest, and walks him out through the courtyard toward the thegn's manor. The bowls of berries and milk set out by candlelight for the wights catch his eye on the way in. By the time the young tower guard has nodded them through, the bowls are still there but their contents are gone, and he startles enough that Sefawynn's hand jumps to her pocket. She relaxes when he points; the wights, she explains, have been hanging around him, and one of them is probably annoyed about the page he stole back from the offering. The page that, as far as he is concerned, was his to begin with. As far as she is concerned, it stopped being his the moment it was given. He decides, as much in self-defence as anything, that this whole arrangement has to be some kind of sham — and notes, sourly, that getting himself caught is not the strongest evidence for his own theory.
Before they reach the door, Sefawynn rehearses their script: she will tell Lord Ealstan that she bound the stranger with his ancient name and is now banishing him, and he is to insist, if asked, that the craeft compels him to do her bidding. He cannot say "craeft" without producing "crayft" instead, which becomes its own ongoing indignity. The bashful young guard — almost reverent toward a skop — admits them, and they cross an entryway hung with oil lamps and laid with a bright orange-and-red rug before turning into the main hall, with its central firebox, its cauldron, its high ceiling, and its walls hung with shields and spears.
Ealstan and his wife are by the fire, speaking with the two cloaked messengers. The stranger sees their faces in profile for the first time. He knows them. The taller one, the brute with the duelling chin and forehead — he is Ulric Stromfin. And the stranger knows, with a violence of certainty he cannot otherwise explain, that Ulric absolutely, completely, no question about it, wants him dead.