C. J. Cherryh - Fortress 05 (36 page)

“Mouse can have them,” he said. Suddenly it seemed quite reasonable to be discussing Mouse as if he were a person, with a man the whole world feared. “Thank you, my lord. Thank you.” His thoughts plunged deep, and came back up from the depths again with the pieces he had tried to gather before. “But my questions—”

“Your questions.”

“Can you teach me? Can you make me a wizard?”

“You are not yet what you will be,” Tristen said, “and I have been waiting for this question for longer than you know.”

“Waiting, my lord?”

The fortress groaned, and in the tall room beyond, the sounds of massive movement began, a terrible squealing of wood and shifting of stones.

“Come and walk outside with me,” Tristen said as if nothing at all had happened. “Let us see to your horse. Uwen says he took very little any harm of this, grace of your good care, but I shall see to him all the same. Then we can sit by Uwen’s fire and warm our hands. The sky may clear this afternoon. I rather think it will. You may go fishing with Uwen if you wish—he does enjoy it. And I shall look toward Guelemara, such as I can, and see what I can see.”

Look toward Guelemara… as if he could, so easily, look there from this isolate place. And was he to do nothing but fish all afternoon?

Magic was what he had come here to call on.

To hear the Sihhë-lord so simply propose to do something this afternoon, as if it was a troubling chore that had to be done—he had invoked a power he had only suspected in his mother before this: he was, on the one hand, glad to have come, and on the other, appalled that he might have set something in motion that he had no means to command. He was used to Gran’s gentle nudges at planting weather or her recourse to the Sight, which told her sometimes when a neighbor was coming or if someone was sick.

He didn’t know now what he expected from Tristen: a rumble of thunder, a flash of lightning from the greatest magic in the land—should there not be some such appearance? Or had the shifting of the stones and timbers of the keep been an illusion, a trick of his own ears?

He walked where Tristen led, back through the high hall, uneasily looking up as beams creaked. In that moment he saw Owl sitting on a high railing, three or so levels above. Owl ruffled up and turned his head away, pretending not to see him.

iv

FEINY HAD GOTTEN NICKS AND CUTS FROM THE ICE, AND

HAD A COUGH. HE was not an easy creature to deal with. But, warned that Feiny kicked and bit, Tristen only said, calmly, “He knows you now, and he won’t.” Tristen laid his hands on the cuts, one and all, and the redness went, and Feiny gave a great sigh and lowered his head, butting gently and gratefully against the Sihhë-lord’s hands.

“Now, see, we might have brought a cake, mightn’t we?” Tristen asked. “The horses like them. We left them inside. But there might be an apple in the barrel yonder.”

There was one apple. How it hadn’t frozen and spoiled, a farmer lad couldn’t imagine, but it hadn’t, and Feiny took it gladly. He was the only horse in the stable at the moment. Tristen said Uwen and the boy had taken the other horses out to a pasture beyond the walls, though where a meadow might be in the depths of Marna Wood a farmer lad couldn’t well imagine either.

Meanwhile the clouds had parted above the keep, and the sun shone down, suddenly blinding bright, as Uwen came back from the postern gate. Uwen and Cadun joined them at the chore of breaking ice on the stone water trough, thumping it with sticks until it broke.

“Elfwyn would like to go fishing,” Tristen said.

“Well,” Uwen said, “well, it’s a sunny day. Fish for supper might be a good thing. We can do that. Get the gear, Cadun, me lad.”

Tristen walked away, paused to wash his hands in the horse trough, then went back in by the way they had come, through the scullery door. Elfwyn— so he had to be—stood a little nonplussed, cast back into Uwen’s domain for the while and not sure what might come next. Was Tristen going inside to open some grimoire and cast spells, and was that why he was banished? Or would Tristen simply look into the fire for his answers?

“Here we are,” Uwen said, when young Cadun came back with poles and baskets, and a dirty pot that likely was bait. “Out to the bridge. That’s the best place.”

So the three of them went out the main gate, and out onto the age-worn span, where Uwen rigged poles and hooks. Indeed, it proved to be a bait pot, a very smelly bait that had to be shaped around the hook.

“The fish find it right tasty,” Uwen said. “But don’t neither of ye get it on your clothes. Bad enough on the hands, an’ it takes a mort o’ scrubbin’ t’ clean it off.”

“Don’t fall in,” Cadun added. “Old Lenúalim is tricky here.”

“Is it all the river there is?” Elfwyn asked. He knew the Lenúalim as a broad, great river, one that divided the realm in two and made the border.

“Oh, it’s deep enough here,” Uwen said, as all of them settled on the rim of the old stone bridge. “It’s mortal deep. There was a battle here, in old Mauryl’s day, so m’lord says, and the rocks themselves was cracked top to bottom. Not all’s mended, and the crack down there’s deep, deep, far deeper than I ever had a line reach, I tell you. The water’s narrow here, but it’s fast. And just enough room for an Olmern boat to squeak under the span, if they take their mast down. The river gets bigger and wider when the brooks in Marna flow in, but no deeper, I’ll wager. And then it goes all the way to Elwynor, where the big bridge is, an’ it widens considerable.

An’ so on, until it bends round between Amefel and Guelessar and goes south, where it spreads out shallow and lazy. Ye cross’t the same river comin’ here.”

Elfwyn peered over into murky green water, into which he had dropped his line. Ice rimmed the rocky sides, but none stayed in the center, which roiled with the power of its moving. He sat, patiently watching his float stream outward on the current. He knew how to fish. He’d sat many an afternoon by Weir Brook, near Gran’s place, with Paisi. And they used poles. Paisi wouldn’t let them use traps.

On account if it rains, Paisi had said, and them traps clog up, you kill all them fish to no good. Besides, a weir can trap limbs an’ end by floodin’ Farmer Marden’s turnips, an’ him with a great temper, which ye know. Line’s much the best.

He never did know how Paisi knew where it would flood if they had made a weir, as the name of the brook suggested, but he suspected Paisi had found that out himself once. He had always found it pleasant to rig a line and sit for hours, catching a few small fish, never more than they could use at a meal, and mostly watching the water move between the banks and the sunlight dancing on it.

This water moved under the old bridge with far greater power, and deeper mystery, and he feared it, thinking how fragile they all were, up here. He was startled when his twig-float bobbed. He snatched the line and pulled up.

“I have it, I have it!” he cried, hauling the line with one hand and all his fingers. It fought, a great heavy silver fish, and when he finally hauled it safely onto the stones, he had to seize it with both hands to stop its struggle.

“That’s a fine fish,” Uwen said. “D’ ye need a knife, there?”

He held it pressed to the icy stone, his bare hand freezing from the damp as he worked the hook out of the gasping mouth. Its fins stuck him painfully, and hastily he reached for Uwen’s offered knife.

But the fish’s round eye rolled in its socket and stared back at him, comical, like the laughing fish in Aewyn’s book, while its gills labored as it struggled for breath. He held the knife. He held the fish, pinned against the icy stone.

And he couldn’t kill it.

He let it go. It flipped into the air and sailed free, down and down until it vanished in a silver splash, with a flip of its tail.

Cadun cried out. Cadun tried to catch it for him. But he sat there, seeing the blood he hadn’t shed this time, but had shed, oh, so many times before, and he saw Aewyn by the fire, showing him the book with the brook and the fish. He hadn’t killed this time. He hadn’t been able to do it, nor wanted to watch if Uwen or Cadun did.

Uwen caught his eye. “M’lord ain’t no fisher, neither,” Uwen said sympathetically.

What had happened to him? He didn’t know, but he couldn’t have killed that fish to save his life. He shamefacedly laid down the pole, and tucked up next to the pillar at the edge of the bridge, where he could simply watch the water.

Be Mouse, Lord Tristen had said, and sent him out fishing with Uwen all the same. He sat there, with the door of the wall ajar on the bridge, and with a view of the courtyard and the lower tier of the fortress to remind him it all was real, and that he had talked to Lord Tristen today, and had breakfast with a mouse. His finger was cut, where Owl had bitten him, an oddly shaped cut, from a sharp beak.

Uwen and Cadun caught fish, which met their ordinary fate. He didn’t watch. He sat staring at the water.

The place is changing me
, he thought.
I can’t do what I did.

Clearly I can’t be a cleric. I’m learning to ride, but I can’t be a
fighter if I can’t kill anything, so it’s no good my learning the
sword, is it? What shall I be
?

“Enough fish,” Uwen said, eventually, and they took their catch and went back to the cottage. Uwen trimmed and dressed the fish they had, sending him with Cadun to wash.

“Ain’t never caught a fish?” Cadun asked him.

“I didn’t want to catch this one.” Elfwyn scrubbed his hands in icy water and tucked them under his arms to warm, after.

“Why not?” Cadun asked. “He was a big fish.”

“Maybe that’s why,” Elfwyn said. He didn’t want to talk about it.

He wanted to go inside the cottage, and did, and sat by the fireside.

Uwen brought the fish to Cook, and said something Elfwyn couldn’t hear before he went out to wash.

“M’lord invites you to supper,” Cook said, “as I’ll cook and send over with ye, if ye will, young sir.”

He wasn’t ready, he thought. He remembered, with a thump of his heart, that Lord Tristen had been looking for answers, all the while he had been finding questions about himself and things he thought he could do, and would do.

“I will,” he said respectfully, and watched as Cook put their dinner on to cook, apple tarts, first, that smelled of southern spice.

Then plaincakes, that rose and split and baked all brown on hot iron, and last of all fish that no longer looked like fish, nor smelled like the river.

He was both troubled and relieved to find that the smell made him hungry.

v

MOUSE HAD HIS SHARE, BOTH OF PLAINCAKES AND

CHEESE. AND IT TURNED OUT Tristen would eat fish, even if he lent no hand to catching them.

“I was Mouse today,” Elfwyn said. “I wasn’t much help catching fish. I couldn’t. I don’t know why.”

“There has to be Owl,” Tristen said. “If there weren’t Mouse, Owl would starve. And if there weren’t Owl, Mouse wouldn’t be Mouse.”

He thought about that. He wasn’t sure he understood it, entirely, advice one direction and then, of equal force, from the other, like shifting winds. Were both things true?

But they dined on plaincakes and crisp fish and apple pie, a wonderful repast, in which Mouse had a share, sitting on the end of the table, his little whiskers twitching busily between bites.

“Where is Owl?” he asked, and Tristen sailed a glance up and away, toward the dark that now ruled the rafters outside the dining nook.

“Outside the walls, hunting,” Tristen said. “It’s his hour.”

Tarts filled out the meal. Still Lord Tristen had said nothing about his business of the day.

After the tarts, the silence.

Elfwyn stared into the fire, unwilling to question his betters, or to nettle Lord Tristen with asking.

“So,” Tristen said, “have you a question?”

“Have you an answer for me, my lord?”

“That your father is worried for you, and that his men have reached Lord Crissand, who is greatly distressed at your departure.

That Paisi has cut a great stack of wood, and has blisters, and Gran is baking bread tomorrow.”

He was not sure he believed Lord Tristen knew so much, so dear and of so little of use to him. The report of people he loved stung his eyes, all the same. He pressed his luck. “And Aewyn?”

“Aewyn is shut in his room, not coming out, and he refuses his new tutor.”

He wasn’t quite so sure he disbelieved anything, now. Aewyn would do exactly that.

“But nothing of my mother.”

“Your mother and I have little to do with one another,” Tristen said, and asked: “Has Gran shown you hedge-wizardry?”

“A little,” he confessed. He corrected himself. “I’ve watched her.”

“And did your looking show you things in Henas’amef?”

“No,” he confessed, uncomfortable. “It only brought trouble.”

“Has she ever taught you wards?”

“I’ve watched her.”

“They’re old, in the Guelesfort. If not renewed, they weaken. A spell reaching out the windows can weaken them further. Think of that when you reach out of a place. You make yourself visible when you look out—you open doors and windows as you do. More, they will never close with the force they might have had if you hadn’t crossed Lines with your seeing, if you have not a skill the equal of the one who laid them down.”

“I don’t understand, my lord.” He hesitated to ask, but he feared what Lord Tristen was saying. “Did I make the trouble in the place, myself?”

“Wards are a simple magic,” Tristen said, and rose from the table without answering him. “Come.”

He followed, out into the dark, where a few candles sprang to life without Lord Tristen even seeming to notice them. Lord Tristen led him to the stairs, and up and up the rickety web. The steps trembled and groaned underfoot, and Elfwyn gripped the rail as he went.

They passed one of the faces. He would have sworn it turned, when he looked back, and did catch it in motion.

“Don’t look at them,” Tristen said. “Don’t talk to them. Not all are trustworthy.”

Did they speak? He heard nothing but groaning, nor wanted to hear. He gripped the rail, white-knuckled, and kept close to Lord Tristen as they arrived on an upper balcony.