C. J. Cherryh - Fortress 05 (60 page)

Gran would use plainer words. “Wishes won’t draw flies. Sweat will.” It had made him laugh, then. Now it reminded him of her, and of her old eyes, far kinder than these.
This man
, he thought,
if
living man he is, has seen hard things. He is harder. And far more
dangerous
.

“I’m still cold,” he said.

“Then move nearer the fire, fool,” the old man said. “Don’t be afraid.”

It set him nearer the old man, who had the best spot, but he did, easing up onto the hearthstones, which had grown warm. The heat comforted his ankles and his feet.

“There,” the old man said. “Is that better?”

“Better, yes.” But he had a greater tremor in his limbs. It was fear, and he liked that less than the cold.

“Let me see the book.”

His heart gave a thump. For the first time he was sure they were trapped here, that he was outmatched by far, and that this man knew exactly what he was looking for.

“Book?” he asked blankly, and the old man sadly shook his head.

“Oh, I had so hoped for more cleverness.”

He had a knife. He knew how to lay wards, too, but had he done that? He had not, despite the night and the storm and them sleeping in a place not his own. He felt the fool. “Maybe I left it somewhere.”

“Maybe you didn’t.”

“I mean to give it to Lord Tristen, and sooner or later he will know about it, if he doesn’t right now. And if
he
wants it, he could take it whenever he wants. So I suppose it really doesn’t matter if you should take it. It’s his, and you ought to be very careful.”

“It’s certainly not yours, fool. And if he could have taken it, he would have done so, long since. Whence came it, and who gave it to you?”

From underneath a table, in a wall in the library, he recalled, as vividly as if he were in that place, under the very fear and the suffocating compulsion he had had in that moment. It was dreams, again, dreams, that had made him find it…

“
Where
did you find it?”

“Why should it matter?” he asked, and the old man looked at him from under his eyebrows in a way that made his hands sweat despite the cold.

“Who gave it to you?” the old man asked again.

“I don’t know. I found it.”

“Found it! Are you a fool?”

“No, sir.” His jaw set. “I hope I am not.”

“Lady Tarien. Does that name touch you?”

“My mother.”

“She’s no longer a prisoner. Do you know that?”

He didn’t. He didn’t truly believe it. He didn’t know what to believe tonight.

“I’ll give you another name. Orien Aswydd. Does that mean anything to you?”

An Aswydd name he had heard a handful of times, but it told him nothing in particular. He shook his head.

“Your mother’s twin sister,” the old man said. “Entombed below the lower hall, near the haunt, right beneath her prison.”

Now the fire could not help the cold. He thought about the bad feeling in that little stairway that went nowhere, the place the haunt had flung him.

“She’s gone, too, right along with your mother. Her tomb burst open and there was nothing inside, not even bones. They’re both fled to the winds.”

“Why should I believe you?” he cried, moving away and scrambling to his feet, and Emuin unwound like a serpent, rising like a much younger man and towering over him like a shadow before the fire, between him and his sleeping brother.

“Because I am your friend, boy, and that book in your hands is deadly dangerous.”

Breath seemed short.

“Would it be better in yours?” he asked, and saw, for the first time, the least doubt—the same doubt he felt about having the book. That alone made him think this terrible man might be telling him the truth, and that shook him as deeply as any threat to their lives.

“If I have such a thing,” he said, “don’t take it. Help me give it to Lord Tristen myself. Then I’ll know you
are
Master Emuin.”

“A dire thing, for a boy’s hands.”

“Almost a man.”

“A very young man, then, who forgets to lay his wards.”

That stung. “I forgot. But I’m no wizard.”

“No,” the old man said—Emuin, if it was Emuin. “You are not.

You’re something else.”

“I don’t want my mother’s Gift.” It blurted out of him, without his willing it. “I don’t want it at all!”

“No,” the old man said sharply, cutting him off. “You don’t want your mother’s Gift, your mother’s foolishness, or your mother’s greed. But the Gift you already have, you might manage better—far better than you have. Can you read the book?”

“No.”

“Not surprising. You won’t, until you want to, though doing so lies within your Gift.”

“It makes no sense to me! I tried. The letters move.”

“They evade you. But not for long. You have very little time to be innocent, boy, because what you guard is not innocent. It’s a handbook, Mauryl Gestaurien’s darkest work, Mauryl, who Shaped Tristen himself, and whose magic keeps him here, for all I can tell.

The secret of it may lie in that book. Do you guess how very many forces in this world would like to lay hands on it?”

“Then help me! If it’s so dangerous, then maybe you shouldn’t take it either. I won’t let you have it. I’ll fight you, if I have to.”

“Oh, lad.” The forbidding shadow shifted, and became an old man leaning on his staff and looking down pensively at the floor. “Lad.

Ninévrisë Syrillas held you in her arms sixteen years ago, and wished you your father’s grace.”

“Her Majesty.”

“The same woman. While she carried Aewyn within her, she wished you well. Lord Tristen himself laid hands on you and wished you well. These are strong bonds, perhaps the stronger now that you know them.” Emuin settled to the floor with a sigh, leaning heavily on the staff. “Ignorance is never safe.”

“The queen. And Lord Tristen.”

“And Gran, an excellent woman. She has not faded. Believe me, she is in good company.”

Elfwyn sat down again, refusing belief, refusing anything that touched what he so wanted to believe… but unwilling to lose that thread, either.

“She wouldn’t become a haunt.”

“No, no.” The old man sank down and leaned his staff against the fireside. “Not the sort of haunt that’s within the Zeide, that much is certain. She was never discontent; but protective of her boys, oh, that she is.”

“She’s dead.”

“Indisputably.”

“I don’t believe you even knew her! I never saw you there.”

“I never came under Gran’s roof,” the old man said. “But meet her, yes, more often than any other in these years. I came to consult with her, oh, many times at the fence, when she was weeding the herb garden, or out in the meadow, when she was herding goats. I came until you started to grow inquisitive. You don’t remember that, do you?”

He did remember a ragged old man at the fence, an old man with a staff—a customer, like many others who wanted Gran’s cures.

But if his mother could conjure dreams, this old man, this wizard—what could he do with memories?

“Then why, like any honest visitor, didn’t you come inside?”

“You were not of an age to keep secrets well.”

“Why did it matter?”

“How often did you see your mother?”

“Once a year.” He didn’t see how that answered his question, and then did. “Once a year, on my birthday. I’d see her, and the duke would give me a present. I didn’t know other boys didn’t get presents from the duke. But I thought it was peculiar that my mother lived in a tower and hated everyone.”

A smile turned the old man’s face gentle. He reached out a long, thin arm and put a small log on the fire.

“I suppose you could keep that one burning all night, if you wanted,” Elfwyn said.

“Oh, perhaps I could, but why want what you already have? The wood is there. I use it, much more easily than that, I assure you.

Do you think wizard-work is easy?”

“If you wanted to, you could have kept Gran from going hungry.”

“If Gran wanted to, I’m sure she could do the same, but she didn’t. She wanted as little of your mother’s attention as she could have, and she never would have allowed your visits to the tower, except it was the agreement with your mother, and to breach that, breached other things.”

“Like wards.”

“Like that,” the old man agreed.

“But she escaped, you said. She and Orien Aswydd. If she had a twin, why didn’t I know?”

“Because that name doesn’t enter pleasant conversation in Amefel. I’m surprised your mother didn’t mention it. Though—
we
should have been surprised she did not. Now it seems indeed we should have taken note.”

“Riddles! It’s my life! It cost Gran’s! My mother killed her!”

“Contain your anger. Anger will be your particular struggle.” He nodded to something behind him, toward, he saw with a glance, no more than Aewyn, sound asleep, deaf to all they said. “You love him. That was Tristen’s wish, and Ninévrisë‘s, and your father’s.

He is your chance for redemption and your inclination toward utter fall. Do you understand me?”

“If I betray him,” Elfwyn said.

“If you betray him,” the old man concluded, “or if you fail in the promises Ninévrisë laid upon you. If you betray him, it will be fatal to us all.”

“I never would.”

“You ought to know: Orien Aswydd wished you born. The only spark of motherhood in that house was in the woman that bore you.
Tarien
would do anything in those days to preserve your life, which she thought threatened.”

“She never loved me!”

“As near as she can come to love, she loves you—loves you as her possession, as much as she hates your father for casting her aside.

She wanted you.
We
took you from her, Tristen, I, the queen, and your father:
we
took you from her, and promised her she might see you once a year, or when you wished. I’ll warrant you generally saw her better side.”

He didn’t want to hear any good about his mother. He shook his head. “She gave me sweets. She gave me things she’d made. Gran said they were charms, and wouldn’t let them in the house.”

“I’ve no doubt,” the old man said. “But she tried, poor creature.

You’re certainly the best thing she ever created. And there is her other side. She and Orien both slept with your father. Orien saw to it that Tarien was the one who got with child, I strongly suspect.

There
was a woman ill suited to motherhood.”

He blushed at hearing such details about his begetting. He couldn’t look the old man in the eyes. But the old man reached out, startling him, and lifted his face with a hand beneath his chin.

“Orien wanted you born, I say. She was Tristen’s enemy. And she’s loose.”

He drew back and still stared at the old man. “I never met her.”

“No. But I have a notion just how she left her prison, and where she resides tonight. What was sundered is rejoined. They were always half of one. Now, I fear, they
are
one.”

“Orien’s haunting my mother?”

“Possession,” the old man said. “Possessing is much different, and much more serious. I doubt your mother has much to say about it.

Your mother is a skilled sorceress. Orien, now, Orien is something else. And Orien has, in the past, had an ally. He’s the one to fear.

He is very much to fear. He wants that book. He failed, in the past, to get it. But try as I might and try as Tristen might, neither of us could find it. I know where it is now: I have no trouble knowing, which argues that someone warded it into that place for the long years we failed to find it, and we assumed it burned along with other manuscripts, since we didn’t recover it with the others. So it never left the library at all. Where
did
you find it? Which wall of the library?”

His mind rebounded from one mad proposal to the other, from a horrid fate for his mother, which he never would wish on her—to some third person he didn’t understand, and back to his own theft.

“The south wall,” he admitted.

“We searched there,” Emuin said. “We should have taken the whole damned wall down. But again—the one who warded it didn’t want Tristen’s hands on it. That could be two wizards: one would be Mauryl himself. The other would be Hasufin Heltain.”

“Is he that other person?”

“Orien’s ally? Yes. He’s Tristen’s enemy. And Mauryl’s.”

“And mine?”

Emuin turned his face away and poked into the fire with another stick. “That is a question, isn’t it?”

“Well, I don’t forgive my mother. I’m sure I don’t love her sister, and I never heard of Hasufin Heltain. I don’t intend any of them should have the book. I want to go and live at Ynefel, and study there.”

“So did he.”

“Who? This Hasufin Heltain?”

“He lived there. He studied there. He ripped the place apart and killed his teacher, ultimately.”

“I’m not him!” Elfwyn said. “I’m King Cefwyn’s son, I’m Gran’s, I’m Paisi’s, and I’m Aewyn’s brother, all these things! And I don’t want to be my mother’s! Help us get to Ynefel!”

“And would that lead, I wonder, in the direction you truly want?

You have an enemy. You have more than one, I suspect. He will come at you when you are most desperate, and his ways may look like escape.”

“Or like friendly old men who come offering help in the middle of the night?”

That rash outburst won a sidelong look, a terrible look. The old man dropped the stick he was using, lifting his hand, and that hand glowed with blue fire. Elfwyn scrambled backward, came up against his sleeping brother, and shook at him, holding him in his arms; but Aewyn hung entirely limp in his embrace, like the dead.

“You might be in a predicament,” the old man said, “if I weren’t who I say I am. But I am. And you and your brother are as safe as I can make you.” The blue fire died. “He oughtn’t to hear certain things. He’ll sleep. He’s quite safe. Let him lie.”

“Emuin.” He had to try to believe it. They both might have been dead, and the book taken, if he were not who he claimed. “Master Emuin, then.”

“Good.” The old man nodded, placid again.

He still trembled. “You taught my father.”

“Indeed I did.”

“You might—” He knew he had just been reprimanded, might be tested again, and that the circumstance was dire. He hardly dared voice his ambition again: ambition did not become him, in his circumstances, but his father had encouraged him. “You might teach me. If all the things you say could happen could come to be, you could show me how to avoid them. If I’ve made mistakes, then you could teach me how to protect myself, and my brother,
and
the little princess.”