C. J. Cherryh - Fortress 05 (12 page)

Manhood meant explaining what he had done, as soon as he could, as soon as Paisi was inconveniently far away, and it meant taking whatever blame might fall on him, from the king, from his father, who had invited him here and given him Feiny for his own.

That he did not look forward to with any pleasure at all. He would do that when the time was right, but well before any accusation got to his father, who would pay little attention to the ordinary running of the Guelesfort and ask no questions of the various staff and guards until someone grew troubled enough to pass a report up the line. Once Paisi was too far to overtake, he thought, the king might frown and be angry about it, but he would let Paisi go on to reach Gran. That was the essential thing.

vi

THE LUCK CONTINUED. THE GUELESFORT GUARDS ASKED

NO QUESTIONS OF HIM except, “Are ye well, m’lord?”

“Oh, yes,” Otter answered them, and added, perhaps foolishly: “I sent my man on an errand.”

“Aye, m’lord,” the captain said, as if a little surprised to be told that, and that was all he said.

Otter avoided the stable precinct entirely, skirting all the way around the yard to a side door that mostly servants used, inside and up a scantly lighted stair to the main floor, and upward again.

He was hungry now. His breakfast was on its way to Amefel with Paisi, and he was not foolish enough to go down to the kitchen asking for more. He took off the cloak and slung it over his arm as he climbed. The next was the floor where his rooms were, but that was also the floor where the king’s and the queen’s chambers were, with their guards, and where Aewyn’s was, more to the point, guards who regularly dealt with him and who might tell Aewyn he was behaving oddly. He climbed up yet one more level of the Guelesfort, and yet another, up where the household servants lived in far less circumstance and far narrower rooms. The dim upper hall was the regular means by which he and Aewyn had skirted watchful guards and gotten past the central stairs, and he used it this time, passing this and that servant, who bowed or bobbed and gave him the whole hallway as he went, not unaccustomed to see a youngster here.

At the farthest end of the servants’ level was another narrow stairs that led down past a narrow slit of a window, which dimly lit the passage above, and by this stairs, he descended back to his own hall—a long, polished hall largely untenanted in winter, except for him. At this end of the hall, the last watch-candles had burned down to guttering stubs, overpowered by the light of the tall windows at the landing of the central stairs.

His part of the hall was in shadow, and with a considerable agitation he opened his own door and slipped into his own empty rooms.

Their fire was all coals, lending heat to the room. The tall windows, on which the curtains were drawn back, were milky with frost but gave their cold, dim light. The last remnants of Paisi’s preparations remained on the little table, the things he had thought Paisi should take, like bits of cord and the fine new boots, which Paisi had declined. Paisi had worn all his shirts, and both his pairs of trousers, for warmth. The good boots, he said he would not take, but he had worn his second-best.

And all was done.

Now Otter had only to wait, and delay notice of their conspiracy.

He started to sit down on the fireplace stones, in the homey way, but he took the chair instead, constrained to be a man, and a lord at that, and to command the servants and maintain a young lord’s dignity—if he had to order servants about, it was hardly the time to have soot on one’s knees or scuffed boots. He shifted his feet down when the soles grew too hot, watched the line of moisture ebb on the darkened leather: lord he might pretend to be, but he had to tend his own soaked boots and rub the luster back into them to cover the evidence—he was obliged to put away their leavings and make his bed and do all those things Paisi had been doing since he came here, things which he very well knew how to do. At Gran’s, bedmaking was a matter of throwing a coverlet over and making a sitting place out of their sleeping place. Here, all the bedclothes were ordered, and precise, and immaculate.

If he could keep up the pretense for three days, he thought, and not let slip to Aewyn that Paisi was gone, then Paisi could get as far as Averyne crossing, where he would pass into Amefel, well, granted the snow might make his passage somewhat slower—but close enough.

There was a flaw in their plan, which loomed perfectly clear now that everything was beyond recall: the stablemaster, and Feiny, and Feiny’s empty stall. The stablemaster would ask the stableboy, the stableboy would say that Feiny had gone out in the earliest light, then—then the stablemaster, who knew who Feiny belonged to, would start wondering what the king’s bastard son was up to and when he would come back. He might waste a little time inquiring down the hill and asking someone to find out whether Paisi’s horse was still in pasture, but possibly not.

Despite all that luck could do, by dark, perhaps even by noon, the stablemaster might ask questions of the gate wardens uptown and down, and the gate wardens were attached to the Guard Commander, and the Guard Commander might start thinking that perhaps he should tell the king’s personal guard or the seniormost of the king’s servants that the king’s son had failed to bring Feiny back from an early-morning ride.

But he had told the gate warden, hadn’t he, that he had sent Paisi on an errand, so there. That might bring the question down to Feiny’s being missing, with all his gear, and the stableboy having been part of it, the boy might be in for punishment for having helped them. He was worried on that account, but he knew nothing he could do that would not put their plans at risk and possibly have Paisi in trouble. He would have to make it up to the boy if he took a beating.

The word would eventually get to his father, however, by whatever route, and he would do well to tell his father first, would he not?

He hoped that all the luck that had run with them was now going with Paisi, because it suddenly seemed to be quite precarious, where he sat.

He could run down the hall and beg audience. But the king was busy with important things, and news of his misdeeds would not find sympathy with anyone in the king’s entourage. The king surely wouldn’t be too concerned if a servant ran an errand home, with the intention to come back.

And hadn’t the king given him Feiny outright? Better if they could have used Paisi’s horse, who was coated for the weather, but they had all Feiny’s gear, and had him warm, and assured him being fed, and if Gran’s luck was moving Paisi home—he just had to hold out.

He stopped dead on that thought, stopped so long that his boot soles scorched and stung. He imagined the moment he would face his father. “Sire,” he would say, “Paisi went home to see to Gran.”

That was certainly the truth.

But then, inevitably: “Why?” his father would ask.

And what could he say? They were all Quinalts here, except the queen, who had no reason to love him because he was the king’s bastard, whose presence here had to be an embarrassment to the family; and it was the Festival, when everybody was confessing sins and being particularly holy—

And what could he say to excuse his actions? Gran sent us a dream? Or: because we dreamed the same dream, Paisi had to go?

They hadn’t quite thought that part through. Thinking of Gran, it seemed so natural and reasonable, what they did, even the unnatural run of luck that had guided them, and guided Paisi. But the moment he thought of explaining his reasoning to his father, things appeared in a Quinalt, Guelenish light, and it was neither natural nor reasonable, as Quinalt priests would look at it. It was a Sending that had called out in their dreams. It was witchcraft, pure and simple, which was the same as wizardry: Gran was a witch, and he the son not just of a witch, but of an Amefin sorceress—he was the lasting embarrassment of his father, who never should have slept with such a woman.

So above all, he couldn’t just confess about the dream—his father might understand, but the moment it got to a servant’s ears, there was no telling where the news would go next or how it would take new shape. He could plead for understanding, that he never had had any sorcery about him, not once in his life, nor wanted any, and he could say that Gran must be desperate to have Sent that dream.

He could hope that his father, who had known Lord Tristen himself, would look on the matter with complete sympathy— and overlook the horse, and Paisi’s going off. They had been lucky about their misdeed. He might argue they had been under a compulsion—he knew from Paisi’s stories and Gran’s that sometimes, when wizardry or magic was working, things couldn’t be helped falling into place, and even people who ordinarily didn’t have a smidge of wizardry might just go along with things, cooperating more slowly than some, but move they might, not thinking as clearly as they might.

And now the stableboy might be beaten, and the priests might get wind of his having heard Gran and remember, if they had ever forgotten, who the king’s bastard’s mother was. And he still had to ask Aewyn about the red coat, and ask if that was right, and now it was all tangled together. He couldn’t lie to Aewyn and ask for his help at the same time.

Luck, when it ran so strongly and so suddenly, could be bad luck as well as good: it could be sorcery as well as wizardry. It could even be magic, which he didn’t understand, except that it was Sihhë-born, Sihhë-made, and sometimes inherent in things, and a foolish boy could pick up something with magic about it and have very little choice or sense about what he did next. He might not be making it up about a compulsion.

He hadn’t acquired anything he could blame for his folly, had he; and he had assumed the dream had come from Gran…

That was the problem. He and Paisi had assumed it came from Gran, when his mother sat there in Henas’amef in her tower, silent through all his life.

But his mother’s son had been called away to his father’s palace, and his mother hated his father, did she not? She hated him beyond all measure, and all the magic that bound her to her tower prison had kept her spells inside. They had never been able to get out.

Gran said they couldn’t: Gran said that it wasn’t her witch-work that kept his mother in her prison, but Lord Tristen himself, with magic no wizard or sorcerer could bend, let alone break.

That was what Gran had assured him when, after the earliest visit to his mother he could remember, he had had nightmares, terrible nightmares of her breaking out of her prison and turning up outside their window, in the dark.

She could not get out, Gran had assured him. “Not her nor her wishes, neither.”

And was that not still true?

If his mother found out he had gone to his father, and if she grew very, very angry… who knew what strength she might find?

It became more and more urgent to tell his father, and to get an older, wiser head to work on the matter. Aewyn would, he had said it to Paisi, likely sleep until noon. And maybe he didn’t even want to see Aewyn yet. He had to find the right time to tell his father and make sure no one heard… not easy, to gain a completely private audience with the king of all Ylesuin, but he had to try. And meanwhile if bad luck started showering around him, he would know it was his mother; and if good, then he would be more hopeful that it was Gran’s work: that was one clue he might have to the origin of it.

The best thing to do, in any event, was take care to have a clear head and a calm heart, to tell the truth where it did good, and to say nothing to anyone at all until he could reach the king.

First was to satisfy the hunger pangs and settle himself to live alone. Paisi might be on the road with their breakfast, but there was a pitcher of drinking water in the bedchamber, and Paisi had left behind the food they had in the room for simple moments of hunger. There was a stale end of bread from two days ago, though the sausage he had thought was there, was not. There was the fireplace poker, in the absence of a toasting stick.

He wiped down the poker, skewered a stale bit of bread, showering crumbs on the hearth. The toasted bread revived itself, there was indeed water in the pitcher, and it made a fine, even homey breakfast, making his thoughts happier, for the moment. He was warm and dry, he had found his breakfast, and ill seemed at least a little further removed from the day’s doings. Afterward he sat waiting, holding on to the three-coin luck piece that Gran had blessed and watching the snow come past the windows.

Paisi must be beyond Guelemara’s farms soon. He would be chatting with the merchant as they went, finding out all the gossip—Paisi was good at that—and tonight Paisi would be warm and safe by a fire, helping with the mules. Feiny would be warm and safe, too, with other creatures about, if he would only get along with the mules.

And when Paisi did get home, he would see that Gran had what she needed, and cook her meals, and renew the indoor wood stack, just about in time for the Bryalt festival to start, with its dances and its feasts and all the merriment in town. Paisi deserved that.

Lord Crissand was a kind lord, who would understand perfectly well why Paisi would have come home, and he would, by the king’s own order, see that Gran had everything she needed before Paisi rode back again.

He could, perhaps, tell his father that Paisi had been so homesick for the Bryalt holidays he had sent him home. That would save him having to admit to the dream.

He could say that Paisi and he both had grown very worried for Gran, considering the storms this last several weeks, and that they had not been sure they had left enough wood, and they had not wanted to bother the king or have soldiers going out to do what they should have done in the first place: the first was almost the truth, and the second fact was that Gran would never tell the truth to soldiers. Paisi was right. She would meet them at the door and say there was nothing she needed, no matter what.

Blaming it all on their worry about the weather might be a very good lie, maybe even a white lie, since it would protect everyone from blame and even save the king his father from having the priests all in a flutter. It wasn’t that bad a lie.