Fortress in the Eye of Time (40 page)

Efanor had risen, and stood by, doing nothing, only looking down at their father, tears running on his face. The King's guard and his own awaited some first move, some gesture of omen, some order to bring the world into sense again. He reached, cold-bloodedly conscious of his choice, and took his brother's hands, which he woodenly held as Efanor knelt, as Efanor dutifully, going through the play, kissed his hand, as Efanor rose and looked him in the face. He made his eyes distant and void of anger as he kissed Efanor's bloody cheek in turn and let go his hands, which were cold as ice. Their father's dying slight seethed in him with bitter, burning jealousy, and armored Efanor with self-righteousness and sacrifice before these men, in whose witness—damn them all—he would shed no tears.

But why feel the sting? he thought then. In death, no different truth than in life. Father loved him, never me.

Father practiced Grandfather's tactics down to his dying breath, and gave Efanor his one victory, his sole recompense to be by one year not the heir.

But no man on the field chose to regard that last gesture as negating the sworn succession. Cevulirn, the Duke of the Ivanim, was a southern man, and his own. And Efanor had knelt, and kissed his hand, and owned to the legal truth—righteous priestling that he was; though he had been nowhere—
nowhere
when their father was fighting for his life, not priestly Efanor.

But that was manifestly unfair. He had sent Efanor for Cevulirn. Efanor had followed his orders. He had brought Cevulirn—too damned late. Efanor had come to the field with Cevulirn's men, on a horse he'd just worn down with a ride back to reach the Duke of the Ivanim and then, anxious for appearances, would not, he would personally swear to it, have sensibly bidden Cevulirn leave him ignobly on the road and make all haste to their father's rescue without him.

Which was also unfair to suppose. He was looking for someone to blame.

Idrys steadied him. Someone had found a linen pad to tuck into the gash on his leg, and a bandage to wrap about his leg, over the reinforced leather. The pain as the man jerked a knot taut hazed his vision, then lessened, over all, as the wound found firm support.

“Get me to a horse, Idrys,” he said, and with a sweeping glance about him at the Ivanim, and to Cevulirn, he said, “Well that you heard my message and followed. I thank you.”

“My lord King,” said Cevulirn, and sent a chill through his blood.

“I heard late,” Idrys said on his other side. “Your message did reach me.” Idrys' hands were gentle as he helped him.

“Is Danvy gone? Did he go down?” He heard himself sounding like a small boy asking after a favorite pet, knowing as a man knew, that miracles did not happen on a field of battle.

And he remembered then, upon that thought of miracles—or of damning wizardry: “Gods, Tristen.
Where's Tristen?
”

“He's well, Your Majesty,” Idrys said calmly, coldly. “I'll have men look for Danvy.”

“Stay,” Cefwyn said thinly, and caught a breath, insisting
to stop at an ankle-high hummock on which he could stand and where Cevulirn and his father's officers could both see him and hear his orders. “Take up the King. Make a litter. We'll carry him—” He lost his breath and his clarity of thought both at once and stood shaking like a leaf.

“To the capital, Your Majesty?”

The notion dazed him, as for the first time he considered that he had personal and royal obligations suddenly far wider than Amefel. The capital: Guelemara. Halls safe from Elwynim assassins.

And, at least for a while, safe from a rebellion in Amefel. Or from any incursion across its borders.

But this was a murder from which a King who meant to reign long—could not retreat.

Delegate their father's funeral, in the capital—to Efanor, with the Quinalt orthodoxy free to stage everything to their satisfaction, and say what they liked?

Let Efanor go home to the capital? Let him stand alone with the Quinalt to bless the proceedings and the northern lords to stand with him, bees around Efanor's sweet-smelling, pious influence, with their lips to his ear?

“No,” he said. He would not give up his brother. He would fight for Efanor, if nothing else. “To Henas'amef,” he said, and saw looks exchanged, subtle consternation among his father's guard.

And no one moved.

They question me, he thought in anger. And then in utter, wild overthrow of his reason: They came here on Heryn's accusations of me. And my father is dead. They think I—
I
—am at fault for this.

“Surely,” said the Commander of the Dragon Guard—Gwywyn was his name—“Surely we should send word to the capital, Your Majesty.”

His heart was beating fit to burst. He was angry. He was shaken to his soul, and in pain. But he stilled the shout and the anger he wanted to let loose. His hands were still shaking and he tucked them in his belt to hide the tremor.

“Lord Commander, surely we shall do that, but we shall send to Guelemara from Henas'amef, where this attack was ordered. I will have answers as to Heryn Aswydd's involvement. He is the source of the message my brother advises me brought you here. Credit my brother for my presence on the field.” He gave Efanor his due. Entirely. And aimed a stroke straight to the heart of Heryn's false report of him. “I rode here from Henas'amef, as hard as I could. I would to the gods you'd sought me there, Lord Commander, not here.”

“I would to the gods, too, Your Majesty.” The Lord Commander seemed both overcome by the loss and relieved in his mind by that small though significant piece of information, and went on his knees and swore him fealty and kissed his hand as he should have done earlier; but this was an honest man, Cefwyn said to himself. He had not known Gwywyn well, but this courageously late acceptance told him this was a man well worth winning to his side. He lifted the man to his feet, confirmed him as continuing among his high officers, and Gwywyn gave orders to his father's men.

To
his
men, he thought in anguish.

There was more to do, quickly, much more,—but first the necessity to move them clear of further attack. “Cevulirn!” he said. “Men of yours to ride ahead on the road, men to lag back, by your grace, Ivanor! We've yet to know whether this is all they have in reserve in this cursed place. Either they swam these horses across, or we've a bridge decked and in use—and we're not in strength to find it out now.”

“Leave it to me, Your Majesty,” Cevulirn said, and gave orders more rapidly and more astutely than he had managed. He had babbled. He had given not commands, but reasons. It was not a way to order soldiers, or lords who might be tempted to give back contrary reasons and not actions. It was not his father's way. It was not a king's voice he had, or a king's confidence-inspiring certainty on the field.

But the things he ordered were being done. He tried to
think what he might have omitted to do. The crown worked at the wound on his head when he clenched his jaw or when he frowned, and was its own bloody misery.

“Efanor,” he said, and his brother came to him. Red-eyed, Efanor was, pale of face, still leaking tears, like the little boy who'd suffered tragedies enormous at the time—the little brother who'd been his constant ally in the house. On an impulse he embraced his brother, as he had rarely done since they'd become men. “Efanor, with all my heart—I would we had all come even moments sooner.” He said it consciously and publicly to remove any sting Efanor might have felt in his late arrival, and to remove any doubt Efanor had had of his acceptance. But Efanor was stiff in his embrace.

“My lord King,” Efanor said through the tears. The face had hardened in that instant of that embrace. The voice had gone cold. It was clearly not a time to press Efanor on anything, least of all with an appeal to familial loyalties which Efanor had ample familial reason to doubt. He had loosened his hold on his heart once: he could not risk it twice, or he might break down in the witness of these men, and perhaps Efanor felt the same. He made himself numb, incapable of further grief or astonishment, in favor of calculation that told him that trouble for Ylesuin was far wider than the loss on this field. He felt sweat on his face, that began to dry and stiffen on his cheeks, and he did not let expression fight against it.

“I will grieve for this tomorrow,” he said then. “Forgive me, Efanor.”

“You have no tears.”

“I shall have. Let be.”

“Where is your Sihhë wizard, Cefwyn king?”

He was still dazed, conscious of Efanor's attack on his associations, and of the bitter nature of that attack—and at the same time keenly reminded of the question of Tristen's whereabouts. Looking about, he saw no sign of him.

“My lord King,” said Idrys, “we can make a litter for you, too, if you need. You need not ride.”

“No,” he said. “Where has Tristen gone? Where is he?”

“Majesty,” Idrys said, “we're searching for him. No one's seen him since the fighting.”

“The man saved my life, damn it—saved the lot of us! I want him found!”

The buzz of flies hung in the air. Men coughed, or cursed or grunted in pain, bandaging their hurts. Men and horses wandered at apparent random through trampled, bloodied grass, seeking order and direction. One such whisper through the grass and accompanying jingle of bits brought him Danvy. A man had found him, Danvy showing a cut on his shoulder but nothing that would not heal, nothing that even precluded him being ridden home, and he wanted not to part from Danvy again: he patted Danvy's neck and gathered up the reins, guilty in recovering a creature so loved, so dear to him, amid other, more grievous losses to the realm.

A man helped him into the saddle. Other men were mounting up. Their dead were too many to take with them, the danger in the area too great to detach more than a squad of Cevulirn's cavalry from their main body to stand watch over them against village looters. He had heard Idrys give necessary orders for the removal of weapons from the dead, so as not to meet them coming back in hostile hands—and to search for clues of allegiance among the fallen enemy.

But that was Idrys' concern and Idrys was giving all the orders for those that stayed: Cevulirn and Efanor were ahorse. Still he saw no sign of Tristen, and could not ask again, petulantly, like a child: Idrys was doing all he could to be sure of the area, and who was in it, and if Tristen and Uwen were among the fallen or the wounded, the men staying behind would advise him and do more than he could do.

The Crown meanwhile had other obligations too urgent, among them to secure his own safety, and Efanor's, as the only two Marhanen, and them without issue. “Shall we move?” Efanor asked him, prompting him to issue orders which no one but he could give, and numbly he said, “Let's be on our way.”

So the King's litter began to move. The elements of Cevulirn's men and the Guelen guard sorted themselves into order, the King's Dragon Guard with their tattered red standards, the men of the Prince's Guard, who now—he realized with faint shock—must attach to Efanor as heir to the throne (but not Idrys, he swore to himself: Efanor should never inherit Idrys). The two red-coated Guard units came first, with the gray and white contingents of Toj Embrel and Ivanor at large riding under their own banners and under their own lord.

At some length Idrys overtook him, and rode beside him, apart from Efanor, who rode with Gwywyn.

“You are not fit to ride,” Idrys grumbled. Idrys' face, whitened by the road dust, was a mask. “You should have taken the litter. The bleeding is worse.”

“Where were you?” Cefwyn snapped. His leg hurt him, now, swelling against the bandage, muscles stretched by sitting the saddle.

“Heryn almost eluded us. He led me a chase. We did overtake him. And he dispatched another messenger. Heryn's man babbled treason—and will say more.”

It was news that flooded strength into him. Vindication. Proof, for his father's men. For all the realm besides. He drew a deep breath. The hooves scuffed deadly slow in what had become a warm day, belying the clouds in the west. The flies pursued them. The band about his head seemed a malicious and burning fire.

“He will believe me,” he said, thinking of Efanor. “My brother will believe me now.”

“My lord?” Idrys asked.

But he chose not to answer. He had said too much, in that, even to Idrys.

 

They came up behind a pair of horsemen on the road, riding ahead of them so slowly that even at their pace they were gradually overtaking them. Cefwyn watched them from his vantage at the head of the column, and knew who they were,
long before the interval closed enough for anyone to see the red color of the mare, and the black of her rider, and the stocky figure of the man on the bay.

“Your Majesty.” It was Gwywyn. “Shall we ride forward and find them out?”

“No,” he said, “I know who they are. Let be.” So the Lord Commander fell silent riding on one side of him with Efanor, and Cevulirn arrived beside Idrys on the other, to hear the same. They drew steadily nearer.

“Majesty,” his father's Lord Commander whispered, justifiably apprehensive, for there was indeed an eeriness about the pair, who had never looked to know what rode behind, as if a king's funeral cortège and the procession of his successor were nothing remotely of interest to them.

The stocky man looked back finally. The other did not, but rode slumped in the saddle, dark head bowed.

He is hurt, Cefwyn thought in anguish, and yet—and yet—in the trick of the setting sun and the dust the two horses raised in the trampled roadway, it was as if two ghosts rode before them, beings not of this time or place, nor accessible to them.

Not Elfwyn, he thought. Whatever soul Mauryl had called—it was surely not Elfwyn's unwarlike soul that had ridden to save their company. It was not the last Sihhë king whose hand and arm and body had found such warlike skills as drove armored enemies in panicked retreat.