C. J. Cherryh - Fortress 05 (52 page)

The sally port was enough for two riders. They ducked through singly and picked up the pace, quitting the vicinity of the gate as fast as they could. Snow wrapped them about, and still no bell sounded.

Paisi might indeed ask him, now that they were away, why they ran. He was less and less sure he knew the answer, except he had gone mad for the moment, and panicked, and the terror of his mother’s sorcery grew less with every stride the horses took.

Fear had driven him. Fear had taken away Guelemara, and now it had taken his own town, and with Gran gone, fear behind him was all he had left for a guide.

iii

THERE WAS A DISTURBANCE OF SOME KIND, SOME

RACKET FAR AWAY IN THE apartment, which roused Crissand from his wife’s side. She slept, but he leaned on one arm, sure he had heard something, and grew surer still, when he heard the sounds of quiet debate, far off in his chambers… debate, then very quiet footsteps and a mouselike knock at the door.

Crissand got out of bed, reached for his dressing robe: Cenas, his valet, had already let himself in, and soft-footed it over to him.

“My lord, a difficulty with your guest,” Cenas whispered. “He’s gone.”

His heart sank. “Gone where?” he whispered back.

“The gates, as seems,” Cenas said, then hastened to stay with him as Crissand strode out the door and down the hall, wrapping his dressing robe about him and still barefoot.

The night duty captain was there, with another guardsman, grim-faced and still a little diffident.

“What’s the matter?” he asked them sharply. “What’s this, gone?”

“Your Grace, the boy, the boy who carries your ring—”

“My cousin,” Crissand said sharply. “What of him?”

“He’s taken to horseback,” the captain said. “He and his man. He was in the library—”

“The library?”

“A fire was burning there, late, and when the guard roused out the librarian and investigated, for the safety of the premises, Your Grace—”

“What has this to do with my cousin?”

“He had one of the keys. Your Grace, there was plaster, loose plaster, and a hole dug under a counter, right through the wall.

And the fire was burning.”

On the surface, it was ridiculous. The whole story was ridiculous.

But there had been a dark deed in the library, the murder of an elderly librarian, the flight of a thief, the burning of certain wizardly manuscripts—Mauryl Gestaurien’s, no less. They had thought they had recovered the remainder, those that had been carried off. He rubbed his face, asking himself if he had slipped in time, in a dream that had subtly changed the shape of things.

“And the librarian said he didn’t know, that there were four keys, and he had one, and you another, my lord, Master Rue the third, and your cousin— your cousin the fourth. So we went upstairs. No one was there, and the fire was left burning in the hearth…”

“Plague take the fire! Where is my cousin?”

“We looked to the kitchens, where boys do go, Your Grace—”

“Go on.”

“And found tracks in the snow, from the side entry and from the kitchens, both to the stables, and the night watch had saddled their horses. The boy showed your ring.”

“Clever lad,” Crissand said, with a sinking heart.

“And they went out the town gate, the same way. It’s come on a blizzard, Your Grace. It’s snowing to beat all.”

“It would,” he said. “Double the watch on the tower. Search Lady Tarien’s room for any book or scroll or scrap of parchment.

Whatever you find, take charge of, keep, and throw her in irons if you find any such thing. Tell her nothing. Nothing! Meanwhile, get my horse and get the guard out to ride with me. Good gods, why didn’t you rouse me before this? Which direction did he go? Has anyone looked out to find the tracks?”

“The gate-guard didn’t say, Your Grace.”

“Damn!”

“Your Grace,” the captain protested, but Crissand stalked back to his bedchamber, the servant chasing him and calling on others to wake.

Clever, clever boy
, he said to himself.
Snowing heavily, no report
on where he’d gone, and no tracks left by now
. Elfwyn had searched for something lost before he was born, something no one expected ever to find, and, if the recovered books were any guide, he had looked for something that any witch or wizard would give his soul to obtain.

Then he’d run, whether or not he had found what he was looking for.

But there was the ring. There was that, once he wondered about it, and once he simply wanted to know. Tristen had bound it to him in that way, so that his idlest wondering would find it, if he wished.

The boy had gone west. No question.

iv

SNOW, SNOW SO THICK IN THE DRIVING WIND THAT IT

WHITED OUT ALL THE world, and it was only themselves, and the horses. They moved, and seemed to go nowhere at all, like a dream of pursuit in which one could not gain, only lose. The only measure of distance was the anger that came at them from behind, sorcerous anger, sorcerous desire, so dark and hot a passion it burned through the cold, and snarled even conscious thought into a tangle of guilt and uncertainty.

Elfwyn glanced back from time to time to be sure at least of Paisi, riding near him; but the cold and the wind discouraged any attempt he made to speak, or explain. Paisi had never questioned him, beyond knowing that the guards were after him for theft, and he didn’t know how he would explain to Paisi what had driven him to this extremity, or why he was so sure this thing, this horrid thing, would reach to his mother if it stayed where it was. She might have lied and murdered and prodded and tormented him into laying hands on it for her, but she could not get up him those stairs.

But someone else could bring it into her reach. And Crissand would blame him. His mother’s spite would whisper into Crissand’s dreams at night, reminding him that his guest had lied, and stolen, and deserved only his contempt. Things would happen, until Crissand believed it, and worse and worse happened.

He should take off the ring Crissand had given him, the thing Crissand had said would betray him if he betrayed Crissand’s trust.

He should take it off and fling it into a snowbank, but it was a precious thing, and in his keeping; most of all it was Tristen’s magic, not his mother’s sorcery, and he was not sure but what it was the protection that had let him, however belatedly, recover his wits and run away. It might even be leading him to Tristen.

And if it had any power, he should try to use it. Shivering and blasted by the wind, he tried to marshal his thoughts, and to tell the friendly powers of the world, as best he could, that he was no thief: he muttered into the wind, “Lord Tristen, can you hear me?

Can you find us? We can’t see, we can’t find our way, and my mother wants this thing I have. I think it belongs to you. Maybe I should never have taken it, but now it has to come to you. Please answer me.”

But no answer came.

Maybe, he thought, he should just have left a note in his room, explaining all he could. But he had thought only of running. He had left the key, of all things, but never a word to explain himself. It was too late for all second choices. And it was wizard writing in the book. And hadn’t Gran always said that such things had a mind of their own, a way of getting where they wanted to be, when they wanted to go? There was his mother’s will, and there might be the book’s own inclination, this
thing
that rode against his heart, urgently needing to be somewhere else, perhaps back with Tristen.

Are we so sure? a voice said to him. Is this thing leading us to him, or wide astray in this storm? Has it urged us to honesty? Has it led us to any good act?

Maybe he could have stayed where he was and sent Paisi with the book. He could lie to Crissand. He could even tell the truth. But the book would be away from his mother.

No. He would not have sent Paisi alone with this thing. Paisi had always taken care of him, but now, all of a sudden, he found himself trying to protect Paisi, and taking care of him, and he could never ask Paisi to take on his mother, which was what it would amount to. His mother might try to stop him, might try to kill him, for all he knew, but she would not come at Paisi—he would not let her come at Paisi, come what might.

A blast of sleet-edged wind came right in their faces. It made Feiny veer. He fought the horse full circle, then reined back the way he thought they had been going, and kicked him into motion in the direction he felt was west. Then he looked back to be sure he and Paisi kept the same course.

With a chill straight to his heart, he saw nothing but snowy murk, not even the ground he was riding over.

“Paisi?” he called out into the night. And shouted, over the blast of the wind, “Paisi!”

The wind howled, and skirled sharp-edged sleet around them.

There was neither up nor down in the murk, and no answer came to him, none at all.

v

HOURS ON THE SEARCH, AND NO TRACES IN THE

WIND-DRIVEN SNOW. THE STORM had blown past, but covered all tracks. Crissand was chilled through, his men likewise. A flask went the rounds, but it lent only false warmth, a comfort for the moment, and a cure for raw throats.

There had been three choices, the ruins of the farm; the highroad back to Guelessar, toward Cefwyn, which seemed unlikely for a boy running from theft; or the way west, the way that Tristen would come, and Crissand’s every impulse, every wondering about the ring, the boy, and his reasons, had laid his wager firmly on the latter, not even stopping to investigate the ruin.

Now, however, the surety he had felt in his choice of directions abruptly faded, leaving, like most magical touches, only a vague conviction that one’s reason had been unreasonably overset, and that choices previously made were all folly and unproven. Before, the fact that there had been no tracks could be blamed on the wind; afterward, Crissand could only wish he had in fact investigated the farm before leading four good men out into a driving snow.

But he knew the tendencies of things magical, and since they had come this far, he told his men they should press on as far at least as Wye Crossing—this to encourage them that there was a sure limit to his madness, and that they would get back to warm quarters before they froze.

But when the snow turned out to have made drifts across the road short of their mark, and chilled and weary men, however brave, hesitated and reined about in dismay, it seemed time to reconsider even that. Nothing had broken those drifts, not since they had begun to form.

Folly, Crissand thought now. He had made the wrong choice. The ring had misled him. It meant the boy to escape. It might even be Tristen’s doing. He hoped that it was. He refused to think any magic could overwhelm what had been his own guide and talisman all these years.

But he felt a little less safe in his long-held assumptions, where he sat, on a cold and unwilling horse.

Then from across the snowy flat of the surrounding meadows, out of a little spit and flurry of snow in the dark, a rider appeared and advanced steadily toward them.

“It could be a haunt,” one of his guard said, and his captain:

“Hush, man. Don’t be a fool. We’re out here searchin’ for riders, aren’t we?”

A figure muffled in a cloak and atop a winter-coated, snow-caked, and piebald horse, as if he had ridden straight out of the blizzard of several hours ago. There was reason his guard viewed this arrival in alarm. It wasn’t ordinary, that rider. It looked white in patches, itself, in the ambient snow light.

And it kept coming toward them, not down the road, as they believed the road to lie, but from across the fields.

“Halt there!” his captain called out. “This is His Grace the duke of Amefel! Who are you?”

“Paisi, Elfwyn Aswydd’s man,” the answer came strongly enough, then, distressedly: “Your Grace, Your Grace, gods save me, I’ve lost

’im. An’ all the food is with me!”

«
^
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i

THEY HAD HASTENED ALL THE WAY, HAD PRESSED THE

HORSES HARD. THEY HAD looked to stop at Gran’s for the night—but the closer they rode, the more stranger and more ominous things seemed. Gran’s chimney did not appear at the turning where it ought.

And when Cefwyn rode past that turning, with his son and his guard, the house was all ashes and timbers, its yard gate open to the road.

Aewyn rode ahead, plunged off his horse, and had gotten to a dangerous place among the timbers before the guards overtook him, and Cefwyn had.

“His dreams!” Aewyn cried. “Papa, his dreams!”

“Hush,” Cefwyn said, laying a hand on his son’s back. “Hush.

They may have escaped.”

“Here’s horse tracks, Your Majesty,” a man said, back by the shed, which had survived half-burned. The ashes, the burned beams, cool now, supported a load of new snow. But Cefwyn went out, taking Aewyn with him, and sure enough, where the remnant of a roof had partially sheltered the ground, tracks showed. At least one man had walked here. So had a horse. And there were no remains—there was evidence of horses in the shed, but no remains.

“They may well have gotten out,” Cefwyn said. And, squeezing Aewyn’s shoulder: “They would have gone to the town for help. Let us go.”

Aewyn ran back to his horse and climbed into the saddle, impatient until they were under way, jaw clenched, trying to hold his distress like a man. He spoke hardly a word—no one did, until they came within sight of the town.

The day’s sun was sinking fast and the horses were hard-used before the walls of Henas’amef rose distinct above the snowy fields—only one gate was open, and men were out with shovels, digging clear a path for the gates to swing. The odd, west-sweeping storm that had made yesterday’s travel a trial had unloaded about walls and gates, reason enough for a crew to be out shoveling.

The gate-guards had joined the work party, and at first stood stiff with alarm as they spied a determined party of riders flattening a broader track through the snow, but Cefwyn had ordered the banners out, and the gate-guards no more than stood to attention, and laborers swept off their hats and cowls, Amefin folk, but never in these years hostile to their king. Cefwyn had no hesitation in riding close by these men with his son. A bell started to toll, the gate bell, advising the town and the hill above of arrivals worth attention.