Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles (20 page)

“But not hope of the Quinalt?”

“Have
you
hope of the Patriarch? I have not. Tell me what you did see, what you did feel when you were there?”

“Discord.”

“Like hearing trumpets all out of tune. That kind of feeling.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You have given your penny tithe and you wear
that
.” Emuin indicated the medallion, with the dark substance at the center.

“I have the other one, too, that Cefwyn gave me5 the one bound to my sword. The Teranthine one, that he said was yours. I would not part with it. Efanor says two is surer than one. But ought I to wear his at all? Is there harm in it?”

“Now you ask.”

“You would not answer me before!”

“Blood of the martyrs, indeed,” Emuin scoffed. “There’s no harm in it, except to the sheep that bled for it, I’ll warrant that with no difficulty.”

Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles The slaughter of sheep disturbed him. The thought of blood inside something he was wearing even more disquieted his stomach. “I shall take it off if you—”

“No, no,” Emuin said with a wave of his hand. “His Highness gave it. Therein is its virtue, young lord, no other. A gift in love is impervious to ill wishes. Even if it harmed the sheep. Children doubtless enjoyed the mutton for their suppers. And Efanor does love you, in his way. Such is the way of the world.”

“He gave me a book of devotions. I left it downstairs. I might bring it—”

“Harmless, too. I can judge from here. The Quinalt has no power.”

“The Quinalt say the gods made the world.”

“Perhaps. Lacking witnesses, I would not say whether it was made or found. The Quinalt credit the gods for all good, their enemies for all harm. It keeps things tidy.”

“So was the world always here?” He felt himself still on precarious ground, but he warmed to the exchange, cautiously. The tower chamber felt warmer since he had shut the window, at least by comparison to the earlier, wind-blasted chill, and the rain, after its initial violence, made a pleasant spatter against the shutters. He found his limbs relaxing out of their hunched and shivering knot.

“And where is
here
, pray?” Emuin cheerfully answered question with questions. “Is it where you and I are? Or might it be where two other men sit, and if it is, where is the center of it and when did it begin?”

“I have no idea, sir.
I
was found. Or made. Or Called.” He could use Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles such levity. He had learned it in Cefwyn’s company, and he had the satisfaction of seeing Emuin look askance at it.

“Yet have eyes, and ears, and senses all. Is Efanor so certain and can the king always be so dubious?”

“Cefwyn himself never seems to regard the gods.”

“Nor did his grandfather.”

“But Efanor said one could
hear
the gods. The Quinaltines think so.

Is it true?”

“So say the Quinalt priests. I’ve never quite heard them. Nor expect you to.”

“Because of what we are?”

“Because I doubt the Quinalt priests ever do.”

“Then should I read what Efanor gave me, this little book? Should I go to the shrine on special days as Cefwyn wishes? Or not?”

“I dare not,” Emuin said then, and losing all good humor, sketched some figure in the spillage of water on the table.

“What do you not say to me?” Tristen asked him, and received the quick, bright, and utterly intent look of Emuin’s eyes.

“You looked west, did you not?”

How had Emuin known?

“Why?” he asked Emuin. “Why? Ought I not?”

“You looked west, I say. What did you see?”

“I saw… nothing that alarmed me.”

“Is that so?”

Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles He was uneasy now—he recalled with shame his rapid retreat from that place. His subsequent preoccupation with a fallen log, a curious fungus. He had stopped thinking about the west. He had simply stopped thinking about it, unwillingly preoccupied with a curious log… as he had learned to use a preoccupation to wall off untidy thoughts. Was it wrong to remember Ynefel? Was it wrong, sometimes, to think of being there, where he had been happy, —

even when he knew it was dangerous?

“I thought,” he confessed, “I thought of Mauryl. Of last spring.”

“And was there a shadow in this thought?”

He tried to remember, troubled by Emuin’s delving into what he had woven into a day of distractions. He was unwilling to remember. His wits refused him. And he knew that was dangerous.

He drew a deep breath and tried to seize the threads of it. “I saw the shadow of a shadow. I remembered days and nights at Ynefel. The window of my room. Later—I remembered seeing weather on the horizon. Or thinking it might rain.”

“It never rained that day.”

“You didn’t ask me when we met at supper.”

“I forgot it,” Emuin said, and that was itself a disturbing statement… natural though that was in the confusion of guests and a festive evening.

“So did I forget to tell you. And you were asleep. And I had forgotten it.”

“It never rained that day,” Emuin’s voice was flat as if it was no surprise “Yet you saw
weather
. So you say. And did it see you?”

Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles

“I think not, sir. I took care not.” Now he could not remember the sky that day. The chill seemed deep for a moment, and it was very difficult to confess. “Yet I confess I took care that you failed to see me, too.”

“Was it the first time?”

“No. The first time in a while, sir, but not the first time. You never

—” He began to say
you never advise me
, but that was no excuse.

There were no excuses in wizardry or, though only he knew the laws of it, in magic. He strongly suspected“ that magic was even less forgiving and he knew his folly, that he had thought back, and back, and it had felt so safe… at first.

“I still can catch you out,” Emuin said, not unkindly.

“It was not a long moment that I stood there. I offer no excuse, sir. I can’t even promise not to do it again. It seemed—safe at that moment.” He struggled to remember all the sequence of things, but that was one of the mazes on which wizardry could lead: that they would not assume an order, or a right sense of importance against what seemed far more urgent. Around the tower things seemed to change by the moment, both things that had been and things that might be. “I felt afraid and I ran.”

“Did you>”

“I was afraid. Afraid I might
be
there in the next moment.”

Emuin drew a long slow breath and leaned back. “Is it so, now?”

He had no words to say what had happened to him. The words Men used hardly compassed it. “It felt—” Still there were no words. He
had
words. But they were not in the common tongue and they stuck Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles in his throat. And he had never, strictly speaking, told Emuin all that had happened at Lewenbrook. “I felt in danger. I felt myself in danger. If I thought it came near anyone else, I would have said so at supper that night.”

“Your goodwill is our shield, my young lord; it was Cefwyn’s shield in battle and it stands so, now, with all of us. I trust your looking west and I trust your going to the Quinaltine, little I can do about it.” Emuin had shut away all mention of that disturbing hour as firmly as he had shut the window. No, he wished to say. No, I have more to say.

Yet he could find none of it to say. And despaired, then, that he never would. Emuin had ceased to listen.

164 — C.J. CHERRYH

“—Would a game of draughts suit you on this noisy, rattly, windy night?” Emuin asked him lightly. “I fear the Quinalt and their bonfire are drowned by now, half-burned sins and all. Quinalt sins, to boot. Gods send they make no omen of it.”

“There. You said it again.”

“Said what?”

“Gods send.”

“Plague and pest. A manner of speaking. Men do have them.”

“Gods, sir?”

“Manners of speaking! ”

“Yes, sir,” he said. Emuin had closed off the subject. Emuin tried to joke with him, he tried to joke with Emuin and now he had gotten a Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles rise of Emuin’s eyebrow. And a spark of humor in his eye. He fanned it. “Dare I have them, too, then?”

Emuin rose from the table, sighed, walked toward the shuttered window. And stood there. “The winter stars are rising and the rain and the foolish fire blinds all my observations. —But all they do down there changes nothing.” Emuin looked at him, and that spark was back, defiant, when a moment before he had seen a weary old man. “You and I are here. And chance is abroad tonight. So are a paltry few shadows. They gathered by the fire down there, too.

They danced. Poor fools. For a few hours they were not enemies.”

“Who, sir? The shadows are not our enemies?”

“Nor are we our own, for a few hours at least.” Emuin came back, filled the teakettle. “Best we two sit together, drink tea, and play draughts till dawn. Bid kiss my hand to the Quinalt, and their gods.

I don’t advise you, understand! I inform you the course that
I
would take; that I have taken, gods know, simply to live in Guelessar. Do all that Cefwyn recommends regarding the Quinalt—since you don’t consult me in such things I gladly provide no advice. I do not object to your wearing the silly medal, nor talking to His Highness, but finish going to the shrine as soon as you can.
That
is not advice, either, young lord, only good sense.“

“Yes, sir.” He accepted the chastisement, and the advice.

“Plague and pest, I say. Deliberately you did not ask me.” Emuin found his cheerfulness unexpectedly. Mauryl had used to swear at him, sometimes in despair, sometimes in laughter. And Emuin was very like him, in important ways. “Bother the tea,” the old man said.

“Steal us two cups of the ale from the guards out there. To be sure Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles of its safety, understand.”

Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles
CHAPTER 8

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^
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Wine flowed, along with the traditional ale and beer. The drums and the harps and pipes played through the rumble and crack of thunder, and the lords of Ylesuin and their ladies, their sons and their daughters, all moved in their sprightly, graceful patterns through the dance, safe and dry, immune to the storm that reports said had drowned the bonfire and dispersed the wilder celebration in the square for good and all this time.

The king had been wont to be down in the square at harvesttide, dancing the bawdy peasant dances in his misspent youth, oh, two long years ago, committing new sins while burning old ones. If one were lucky, one could burn them all by morning, new and old, and wake with a light conscience, an empty purse, and a well-earned headache.

This year, crowned, having spent last winter in Amefel, Cefwyn sat a thinly cushioned chair of state on a stone workmen had brought in at great effort, to raise that chair of state a handbreadth above the chair of the woman he could not make queen of Ylesuin, a handbreadth of difference which the king had to remember every time he and his bride-to-be stepped down to dance, a handbreadth of a separation and a symbol of his good fortune not to be in Ninévrisë’s position, a beggar at a foreign, a hostile court. He would not, by his Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles own will, have accepted the damned stone; but he had accepted it all the same, marking down the lord of Ryssand, Corswyndam, in his personal disfavor—for some future time.

The Quinalt had begun to yield until, today, with Ninévrisë casting in her own penny with her own hand, acknowledging Quinalt authority, doing as other lords did with the Quinalt countenancing it, there had been a tacit agreement on the conservative side that she was indeed a head of state and a lord among lords— Ninévrisè wore her circlet crown of office tonight, another point of debate, so he wore the heavy state crown of Ylesuin, and their respective peoples’

honors were preserved by a hand-span stone block.

His grandfather had set himself on the Dragon Throne by murder, baldly put, —had turned on his sworn lord, Elfwyn, the halfling Sihhë, and burned the palace at Althalen, enriching those who followed him. His father, too, had been notoriously jealous of his power, bewilderingly blind to lords fattening their purses by any means they could devise. His courtiers were sure the new-crowned king meant to do something clever, and betray his word to Elwynor, and enrich his faithful barons with new lands beyond any dream of acquisition they had had under his father.

On the other hand—could the new king be a fool? Perhaps he might be weak, and allow his barons to demand far more of him than a stone step. And they still might conquer Elwynor.

Thirteen days were left before the wedding, and then he would have the woman beside him irrefutably, immutably, and
legally
his ally, his wife,
and
the love of his heart, a giddy, frivolous, undutiful pleasure he had never looked for. He bought the priests with that Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles block of stone—as well as with the arrangement that kept the lord of Althalen in his rooms and his old tutor Emuin tucked away in his tower. He congratulated himself that they had carried off the ceremony this morning without a disaster, and in truth the court was abuzz with the presence of the Lord Warden in the shrine, wearing a holy relic of the Quinalt, no less. There was hot and heavy converse at this very moment around Efanor and his priest, who swore to all inquirers as to the authenticity of that medal, dashing hope that it might be a lie. True, some skeptics looked askance at the foul and, in their claims,
ominous
weather tonight, but it was autumn, good lack! when rains were ordinary. What did they expect?

The whole court did know that their new king had been engaged in very chancy business across Assurnbrook, in Amefel. There were far too many eyewitnesses to sorcery. No man who had stood on Lewen field had a precise recollection of all the events there, but every man who had stood there knew that he had seen
something
terrible, and that Elwynim and the king’s odd friend the Lord Warden of Ynefel all had something essential to do with the victory there. In some versions it was the gods themselves who had rescued the Dragon Banner and carried it blazing against the enemy. In others the light that had dawned across that field was spectral and sorcerous, and the Lord Warden of Ynefel had carried the lightning in his hand. Tristen could not, gossip said, even stand in the presence of a priest. He would perish as a lump of cinder if he laid a hand on a Quinalt emblem. He would fail to put in the harvest penny. He would melt at the threshold, and the holy images would avert their faces.