C. J. Cherryh - Fortress 05 (3 page)

But the Prince had his way, and when they were not bashing each other with blunt swords in the courtyard, the boys had read, explored, and looked up maps, Aewyn’s one scholarly passion. Maps of the realm. Maps from beyond the borders. Old maps, new ones—they had visited the chart room, where only lords and officers were supposed to be… and pored over military maps. Aewyn had begun this interest as a child: he had been lured into literacy only because the colorful maps had words on them he wanted to read, and, oh, count on it, to this hour he knew his maps and directions down to the most obscure hamlet in Osenan, with any detail of who lived there and how—

A perfect young tax collector, Cefwyn had used to say to his queen, perfect, if he were not the heir to the throne. Now he had drawn Otter into his passion, and of all things, the boys
read
to each other, would anyone believe it? They had gone out and about the halls mapping the passages, and down into the cellars looking for hidden halls and unknown rooms—there were none, but it did turn up a hidden cache of wine.

And who knew? There might be more to Aewyn yet than people suspected. Aewyn had hated the sessions with the Quinalt priest who taught him and attempted to sneak catechism into the reading; Aewyn had sabotaged those lessons with numerous pranks, and the priest, being discharged, had predicted that such an irreverent prince was never going to be a scholar of any sort. The next tutor had come in saying that the best they could do was instill doctrine in him and keep him on the straight and narrow, while his armsmasters turned him into a warrior. That tutor had been discharged in a week, and in that dismissal, of a man the Holy Father had provided, Aewyn had not even had to make the request.

The priestly tutors were wrong. A loving father had concluded that beforehand purely on faith, but with, of all things, Otter’s coming to Guelemara, he was finally vindicated. His legitimate son would have the size, yes, to bully his way through situations: that was what all the tutors wanted to foster in their prince and future king.

But Aewyn’s petition for his brother’s coming to Guelessar had shown certain traces of scholarship, had it not?

Aewyn’s fidgeting, a fond father could suspect, was not after all the restlessness of a simple mind but that of a boy who, contrary to his bluff appearance, had long since understood the point at issue, was bored beyond endurance, particularly by catechisms—had not he been similarly bored? If Aewyn had not had Otter, Aewyn might not have imagined there were better teachers… as Otter, who could dive and dart with native skill, had never learned the value of keeping an enemy a sword’s distance away from his skin. Each learned from the other.

As now. Bang and clang, all measured, interspersed with prankish feints and laughter. A month and more of those two together, more than two fortnights without so much as a quarrel between them or a cross word for the staff from Aewyn… and that, too, was a marvel. Too great a silence and compliance from Aewyn had never boded well for the household’s tranquillity, until now.

But everything was changed, with this boy’s coming. Had he ever seen Aewyn as happy as he was?

Bang, and down went the shield, the royal prince thrown onto his rump, but not defeated. Aewyn scrambled and threw a handful of snow. Snow came back, as Otter shook a sapling branch down on him in a cloud of white. With a shout that rang off the walls, Aewyn surged to his knee, sword be damned, and gathered a mighty snowball behind his shield, but not in time. A well-thrown snowball hit him, but on the fast-moving shield.

Oh, then the fight started, snowballs and shieldwork, as fast as two rascals could form and throw.

Aewyn had the Marhanen knack for offense: his snowballs were accurate, and he flung them with all the strength in his arm, stubborn and strong—but with his namesake’s quickness, Otter dived behind the hedge and worked up the row, to throw from ambush.

Now that, Cefwyn thought, was a boy brought up by a witch and a thief, not an armsmaster. Then Aewyn, baffled at first, took to the hedges that rimmed the little practice-yard, a warfare on which Cefwyn held grand vantage, neither boy paying the least attention upward.

An otter’s cunning was no small gift to bring to the royal line. For all the years these two lads had lived, the realm had been at peace, the two boys born within months on either side of the great battle—but the skills of attack and defense had to come down to them, no matter. Aewyn had the classic training—rode well, stood well, swung well, while Otter had never sat a horse before he rode to Guelessar.

Aewyn, on the other hand, had never had to hunt an otter in the bushes, but he was gaining the knack after being ambushed. An impartial father simply watched from on high, offering no advice.

Snowballs from either side. Neither hit a thing but winter hedge.

And both boys ducked. Aewyn had abandoned his shield. So had Otter. A fast scramble ensued, each seeking new positions. New snowballs formed.

A gust of wind came down off the Guelesfort roof, a white cloud enveloping balcony and garden alike. Cefwyn found snow on his sleeves, on the balcony rail—a second gust and a third, and the boys below, hit by avalanche, shoveled snow at each other with their hands.

But the wind that had come over the roof brought new snow with old, a gray veil rapidly drawn between the yard and the spires and spiked roof ridge of the Quinaltine, across the wall. The noble houses round about grew dimmer still. New snow and old mixed together in sudden violence.

A prudent man knew when to step back into the sheltering room.

A father wondered when his sons would have the same good sense.

A blast came down from the dark cloud that had crept up behind the Guelesfort. Now the afternoon light darkened, and the wind began to whip the snow off all the eaves.

“The weather’s turning.” He said it conversationally, as to an old friend, closing his hand on the amulet he wore beneath the leather and velvet—he conversed, one-sided, at times when his world grew strange or his nobles grew fractious. He rarely had any sense from the locket whether Tristen heard him or not. Faith was a certain part of his wearing it, faith and remembrance, and the warm confidence of friendship, which rode there, close as his own heartbeat—it was not an amulet he wore too openly, nor ever showed the Quinaltine fathers, whose business it was not. Now he did imagine a presence, poised between winter and warmth, and he lingered there, gazing outward into gray.

“My dear friend,” he murmured. “Do you hear? The wind’s rising.

The fickle warmth before, and now the snows come hard. A late winter, and an edge in the wind. Is it snowing where you are?”

Perhaps the sensation was false, wishful thinking. The cold seemed fresh and keen, and a venture to the balcony rail showed the boys heading for shelter, sensibly taking their gear with them, then vying to get through the door at the same time, like sheep.

“I wish you were here this season, my friend. I wish you could see how the boys have grown. I was doubtful. But they teach each other. They teach themselves.”

They made it through the door, which shut. The king had memories of winter practice with his own brother, of scampering through that hall to the stairs, and down to the kitchens, where the ovens maintained the warmest spot in all the Guelesfort.

A memory of berry jam and butter, on fresh-baked bread, while one’s fingers were still numb. Efanor with berry stain on his cheek, chiding him for stain on his nose.

“There’s happiness here, this winter, old friend, there is, never mind Efanor’s dire predictions. There are good qualities in them both.”

Taste of berries that he could have at any time, being king. But jam baked into a twist of dough and hauled out just when brown and hot, that was sweetest, the best thing on a winter day. One had to get such things straight from the oven, not ported up through a chain of ceremony.

“The holidays are on us—well, none so cheery, our Guelen holidays, as those we kept in Amefel. I shall keep the boy with us.

And I wish you could see them. You know you would come welcome, if you would come east this winter—after Festival.” He spoke, but more faintly, the wind skirling about him. “I make the offer, at least.” And doubt welled up, cold as the wind. “Do you still hear me, my friend? Are you well? It’s been so long since you wrote. You know me: magic has to thunder to get my attention.”

Nothing from the amulet. The wind whipped up and drove him to retreat into his chambers. He pulled the doors shut as the draperies whipped about and tried to flee outside, like escaping ghosts.

The latch thumped down and secured the door, imprisoning the curtains and the warmth. The fire in the hearth ceased whipping about.

Outside the diamond panes of the windows, the whole world had gone white.

Mist on the glass, it was, clouding the world outside.

A pattern streaked across that moist surface, the appearance of writing on the inside glass.

Be careful
, the writing said.

«
^
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i

THEY HAD A PANFUL OF JAM-FILLED TREATS, AND TEA FROM THE KETTLE, THE baker’s boy being so obliging as to run a heavy tray straight upstairs, and if they spoiled their supper, they were satisfied. The royal table hosted the duke of Osenan tonight, and Aewyn was ever glad enough to forage and not to have to sit still at his father’s table, at some long-winded state dinner. The fireside in his own room was ever so much nicer, himself and his brother lying on the rug by a well-fed fire, having dessert first.

There were two kinds of sausage for later, three kinds of cheese, and a crusty loaf, besides their treats, and the tea, which they drank down by the cupful.

They were warm again, after their battle. The wind howled about the tall windows, sleet rattling against the diamond panes, and they had drawn the drapes against the cold. The fire before them made towers and battlements of coals, glowing red walls that tumbled and sent up sparks into the dark of the flue, which they imagined as the dark of night above the world.

It was Aewyn’s own room, his private realm—at fifteen going on sixteen he had gained this privacy from his father: his own quarters, near if not next to the king’s and the queen’s chambers, but with his own door and a separate foyer room for his guard and a second small sleeping room for his two constant domestic servants—they were his father’s guard and his father’s staff, in all truth, but they were the same men who had been attending him since he was first out and about the halls and the courtyards on his own recognizance, so they were as good as his.

Most of all he had his own sitting room and his own bedchamber, and this meant Nurse had finally retired to her own numerous children down in Dary, beyond the city walls.

And that meant he no longer had anyone to make him sit in a chair, at a table, like a proper boy, and be served by servants. Otter preferred the fireside, and the warm stones, and the prince of Ylesuin found the close warmth of the fire a thorough delight, the best place in the room. They had their tray of food beside them, and a pitcher of watered wine—very watered, it was—and their book, which Otter read to them both—a record, really, of the properties and the building of the royal lodge at Maedishill. The account had all its local legendry, and it had maps, the most wonderful colored and whimsically detailed maps of a place Aewyn had known from earliest childhood.

“Here,” Aewyn said, tracing a line with his finger, “here is the spring and its outflow. And just down from here, it joins this larger brook.” In his mind was a wonderful place, on an autumn day when he was about five. He had sailed leaf-barges down the current from the spring, to see them wreck in the great rapids of the great brook—he could stride across it now—where the water flowed over rounded rocks. He would never, now, admit to having sailed leaf-boats, but he cherished the memory of them. He snatched a bite of sweet and pointed with the stick of crust to the place where the rapids ended and the brook ran by the lodge. “A falls there, with an old log. See, even the log is on the map. Brother Siene drew it. I remember him. He had a white beard down to his belt. He was caretaker there until I was seven.”

“Why do you have a map of the lodge?”

“Well, because Brother Siene loved to do maps, and he lived there alone most of the time, so he just did. But now anyone who ever wants to know about Maedishill can look in this book and see the lodge and know all its properties, and how far they go, and where the next holding starts. It makes it a legal record, because Brother Siene wrote a date on it, and the library has a date when the book came here. That proves, for instance, that it’s my father’s brook. It starts here, where it comes out of the rocks, so he has title over it until it reaches the boundary with the farmers, and if it had any fish in it—it doesn’t, no matter that Brother Siene drew them in—they would be his only until they reach the boundary.”

“The fish wouldn’t know that,” Otter remarked, so soberly Aewyn had to laugh.

“Fish don’t know anything.”

“I don’t know if they do. Maybe they do.” Otter touched the painted fish with his fingers, ever so carefully. “I like his laughing fish.”

“So do I,” Aewyn said, remembering sun on water, sparkling rays through thick green leaves. “My mother and I used to go there for a month before Papa could get time to come, and when he did, everything would change. Messengers, messengers at all hours, and lords coming in for visits with dozens of servants, all full of arguments, with papers to read, and if two came, there wasn’t room for the second one, and there was dust all over everything if there wasn’t mud, just from the horses. They’d trample the grass down and spoil the meadow, they’d get drunk in the great room, and their sons would be out chasing the rabbits and trying to shoot them.

Mother had the duke of Marisyn’s sons and his servants rounded up by her guard, and Papa—my father—said if he had his choice, he was going to run away to Far Sassury and not tell anybody where he was going. But the next year, the grass would be green again and the brook would have its moss back, and it would be just us, until Papa came.”