Fortress of Owls - C.J. Cherryh - Fortress 03 (10 page)

And now he recalled how he had felt foreboding even before he had set out from Guelessar: a sense of threat, from a hill above the king’s forest.

Do you find anything amiss? he had asked Emuin today, and had no answer, only talk of beeswax candles.

And why? Why indeed? And why no warning of storm or magic today, when the like of Auld Syes arrived out of the winter with warnings and directions to venture out?

He was not comforted, even while he pressed red Gery forward in the snow.

—
Do you hear me, sir
? he asked Emuin.
Do you yet hear me?

Do you know what’s happened
?

Fortress of Owls - C.J. Cherryh - Fortress 03

Was it anger that moved him? He was close to it, beset like this and taken without warning. He had found baffling Emuin’s deserting the king to come with him in the first place, and yet never having advice for him, nor even traveling with him on the road.

He found Emuin’s dereliction more and more portentous and troubling in light of Auld Syes’ appearance just now, and still he rode through this storm telling himself that, of course, wizards had their ways and their necessary silences.

Oh, yes, Emuin had warned him… warned him Emuin feared his wishes and his will, and wished him to use either as sparingly as possible. So it was perfectly understandable that Emuin kept silent on all manner of things.

But something, perhaps even the extremity of the effort, had sent Auld Syes away with an appeal to him to invite her past the wards that surrounded him, and now violence boded in the west, and still Emuin said
nothing
, though others had acted. This was beyond prudence regarding what
he
would do. This silence encompassed what others intended, and he grew vastly out of sorts with it.

Conversation had meanwhile ceased among the guardsmen behind him, except the Guelenmen asked in the quiet of the fall was there ever the like, and the Amefin swore they had never seen anything to equal this weather.

“Are we still in Meiden lands?” Uwen wanted to know, and, yes, the Amefin captain said, they were still in his lord’s lands, but Fortress of Owls - C.J. Cherryh - Fortress 03

only scarcely. Past the next brook Meiden’s lands ceased, and the aged earl of Athel held sway.

It was a distant sound to him, their talk, in the strange quiet of the snowfall, like the floating silence of a dream, as if some magic had made an isle of calm around them and kept the dark of the storm elsewhere at bay. Seddiwy’s lingering mischief or merely the troubling of nature Auld Syes had wrought, flurries of white appeared, but confined themselves to the hills and the horizon, small opaque patches beyond which they could not see.

They rode thus for an hour, at least, in such gentle snowfall, meeting no great accumulation on the road, which seemed unnaturally spared of the drifts that deepened on the hills, and the men’s wonder informed him that, no, this was not the ordinary conduct of snowstorms.

They began to ride out of their area of peace as they rode into the sheep-meadows of the southern hills. A wind almost as fierce as the first stung their faces with sleet like icy sand and made the horses go with half-shut eyes and flattened ears.

“How far shall we ride?” some guardsman complained, and Uwen said, “Far as His Grace wishes it, man. Bear wi’ it.”

Soon now, was Tristen’s increasing conviction. And now it seemed to him that the opposing storm was not all troubled nature, but that someone, somewhere, troubled nature deliberately, opposing Auld Syes, never wishing her to speak to him: she had asked his summons, his leave, which opened his Fortress of Owls - C.J. Cherryh - Fortress 03

wards to her, as a fugitive might ask a door be left unlocked.

It was dangerous, what she had asked; so was what he had granted; and yet thus far the only penalty of his venture was a dusting of snow and the chill that numbed and made decision difficult. Someone else, someone opposed to Auld Syes, instead of Seddiwy, might have roused this weather to make things difficult, but had no power or no desire to make it worse, and that someone else might even be master Emuin, angry at the venture, but he did not think so.

With sudden sureness, however, he knew the friends Auld Syes had warned him of were just the other side of the hill. Awareness of a presence reached through the gray of his Sight and into his heart… a faint glow about Crissand and another such glow of presence in the storm-blown haze ahead of them, blue and soft, advisory of wizard-gift.

There
, his heart said. It was someone uncommon.

And a friend? Almost he dared guess, and his heart lifted.

Welcome
, he said to the white before them, and just then, on a hill made invisible by the blowing white, shadows of riders appeared as if in midair, three riders who approached them, each with a second, shadowy horse at lead.

Then came four, five, and two more out of the white, men whose colors were the snow and the storm themselves.

Gray cloaks and mingled gray horses, the foremost horse near to white. And, yes, here indeed were friends, Ivanim, from the Fortress of Owls - C.J. Cherryh - Fortress 03

province neighboring to the south.

Perhaps they had set out north as a courtesy to him, once the news of his accession in Amefel had reached Ivanor: that was the natural thought.

Yet did something so simple come heralded by Auld Syes, at such effort?

Clearer and clearer they came, both sides continuing to move, and the foremost rider proved no less than the lord of Ivanor himself, Cevulirn… who should not have been in the south at all, but eastward, in Guelessar, with Cefwyn.

That portended something in itself ominous.

“Ivanor!” Tristen called out, though the men with him made pious gestures against ghosts and shadows.

“Is it Tristen?” came the answering shout.

There was no need to break out the banners for reassurance in this murk, but Gedd had done so; and now the banners of Ivanor came forth, the White Horse; and Crissand’s own, Sun on a blue whitened like ice.

“Welcome,” Tristen called out to the lord of Ivanor, as their two parties met. He offered Cevulirn his hand as they met, the clasp of gauntlets well dusted with snow and frozen stiff with ice.

“Welcome, sir. But how does Cefwyn fare?”

“Safely wedded, so I had word. I lingered at Clusyn monastery to know, on my way home. And how are matters in Henas’amef?”

“Very well. Very well, sir.” It struck him only then that other Fortress of Owls - C.J. Cherryh - Fortress 03

courtesies were due, and he made them, self-conscious in his new lordship. “Your Grace, Crissand, Earl of Meiden; our friend, the duke of Ivanor.”

“I’ve seen you in hall,” Crissand said, “but as my father’s son.

Lord Cevulirn, count me your friend as devotedly as you are my lord’s friend.”

“Your Grace,” Cevulirn said. That Crissand was earl had told a tale in itself, one Cevulirn would have no trouble reading: a father’s death, the son’s accession to the earldom, but there was no leisure here for asking and answering further than that. The wind tugged at cloaks and pried with icy fingers into every gap, and they were standing hard-worked horses in a chilling storm. “I take it your journey is to me,” Tristen said above the buffeting of the gale, for there was nowhere else of note this road led, before it came to Henas’amef. “You’re very welcome, you and your men. Shall we have the horses moving?”

“Indeed,” Cevulirn said, and they reined about and Cevulirn with them. The wind came more comfortably at their backs as Tristen began to thread his own column again back through itself, and Ivanim sorted themselves out among Guelenmen and Amefin.

“Does His Majesty need me in Guelemara?” Tristen asked, first and clearest of his worries once they were faced about and headed home. “Are you here because things are going well, or because they aren’t?”

“Well and ill. His Majesty sent me south for my health. It’s high Fortress of Owls - C.J. Cherryh - Fortress 03

time His Majesty’s friends put their heads together.”

Cevulirn did not readily give up words, not before strangers, most of all. He only knew that Cevulirn had purposed to stay by the king this winter, to report to the southern lords any untoward demand of their rivals of the north, and to make it clear to the ambitious north that the south would not see its interests trampled. Yet Cevulirn had heard of the wedding only from the vantage of the monastery at Clusyn, and had come home contrary to his firm intentions.

So whatever had happened in the capital, it was not according to plan.

“Earl Crissand is trustworthy,” Tristen said. “What do you mean we should put our heads together?”

“The northerners are rid of me,” came the answer. “As they are of you, and yet they could not prevent the wedding. So at least half their plans came to naught, but gods know what Ryssand’s done.”

“Surely lightning hasn’t struck the Quinalt.” He was half in jest, but that was how the barons had been rid of him: he could not imagine how they had proceeded against Cevulirn, who was one of the greatest men in the land.

“Would lightning had struck Ryssand. No. But
I
struck him a grievous hurt, hence my ride south, hence a winter for us to arrange things more to His Majesty’s liking. Hence my visit to you. How have you fared here?”

Fortress of Owls - C.J. Cherryh - Fortress 03

There was far too much to tell, and much of it bitter to Crissand, of whose witness he was entirely conscious. “Well enough,”

Tristen said, “considering all that’s happened. Meiden lost a good many men. There were Guard killed. I sent Lord Parsynan out afoot, since he stole Uwen’s horse; and I sent His Majesty’s wagons to the border to fortify the bridges—or I had sent them this morning. The weather may have prevented them going.”

“Have you, indeed?” Cevulirn’s tone was flat, implying neither approval nor disapproval, only, for him, query. “Has there been difficulty there?”

It was another matter that touched heavily on Crissand’s pride.

“My father, sir,” Crissand said before he could speak, “had correspondence with Tasmôrden. The rebels offered to come in to support rebellion, and rebellion there was, to my father’s grief and misfortune, sir.”

“But no sight of Elwynim,” Tristen said. “Yet I fortify the bridges, and kept the Guard, having no Amefin troops. The wagons… Cefwyn can spare them a fortnight more, so I hope, if nothing happens northerly.”

“A fair risk,” Cevulirn said after a moment of silence, leaving Tristen less than certain Cevulirn approved all he had done.

“Cefwyn told me,” he said, “that he wishes to attack Tasmôrden from the eastern bridges and not the south, for glory to the northern barons. And I’ve no wish to take any glory at all, or to have another battle at planting time, when the last was at harvest.”

Fortress of Owls - C.J. Cherryh - Fortress 03

So Crissand had just told him, but Crissand was by no means the first to explain that with men drawn away from their farmsteads season after season, no crops grew and the lambing this spring would already go hard… he had not drawn men off the land, not yet. Amefel’s losses had been heaviest, at Lewenbrook, a muster of peasant farmers and herders, where other provinces had sent well-trained troops.

“So I don’t intend to cross the river,” he said, “but I intend they shan’t cross here, either.”

“His Majesty’s plan is to set Murandys and Ryssand and Guelessar in the field, all the heavy horse and all the gear,”

Cevulirn said. “It’s the warfare Guelenfolk know. And I’ve urged His Majesty have a thought to the light horse, and getting a force over those roads, which by all Her Grace has said are none so fine and broad as those in Guelessar. Mud. And difficulty for those wagons His Majesty sets such store by, with all that heavy gear. March to Ilefínian and bring them to bloody battle… with all respect to your good captain, Amefel: the heavy horse will suffer in that plan, every league they travel. It’s too far a march, too many hills that give vantage to archers.”

“A bloody passage it’ll be,” Uwen said in a low voice, for Cevulirn he knew well. “An’ I agree wi’ Your Grace, and wi’ my lord, I’d send the light horse.”

“I’ve said the same,” Tristen said.

“But that’s not the king’s wish in the matter,” Cevulirn said, “for his Guelenfolk. So bloodily they’ll win through, granted Ryssand Fortress of Owls - C.J. Cherryh - Fortress 03

doesn’t stab our king in the back. The king sets all hope on Ryssand and Murandys, where least it should rest, and here am I in the south, where least I should rest, and His Majesty never so in danger from a knife in the dark when he was sleeping in Henas’amef, his guards notwithstanding.”

A great deal was amiss. Tristen heard that very clearly as they rode. Cefwyn had wished to set Ninévrisë on her throne with no war at all, deeming the rebels broken at Lewenbrook. But a lesser lord, Tasmôrden, had leapt to the fore of the rebellion, and the rebels that had not yet crossed into Cefwyn’s battlefield had simply swept aside and fortified a camp inside Elwynor, raising an army out of the stones there, as best they could surmise: certainly it had taxed the villages hard to raise the force it was now.

Set Ninévrisë on her throne Cefwyn would.

But Cefwyn averred he had no choice but exclude the south from the war and call this time on the north. Ryssandish folk and Guelenmen were the heart of his Guelen kingdom: the south was of
tainted
blood… had he not heard it from Cefwyn’s lips?

And did that not still shiver through his memory? So thoroughly had Cefwyn remembered he was Guelen, and wanted their favor, when he could have called on the likes of Cevulirn and Sovrag.

Having Cevulirn and Sovrag with him, he had sent home the Olmernmen; and him; and now Cevulirn?

The gray space remained untroubled; Tristen’s heart did not.

Fortress of Owls - C.J. Cherryh - Fortress 03

Was it a visit without meaning, that Auld Syes guided? He thought not. They two were the king’s friends, and Crissand had pledged himself through him, and so all the earls of Amefel, and Auld Syes herself had heralded Cevulirn’s coming to him. Was it without meaning?