Fortress in the Eye of Time (43 page)

While he was putting on his boots Uwen had stumbled back to his own space, and came back fastening his breeches and carrying his boots and his coat—Uwen did not intend to let him go alone, that was clear, and of all orders he could give Uwen that he knew Uwen would obey, he had had clear warning that Uwen would disobey him wide and at large if he bade him stay.

There came an outcry from some distant place. They both looked toward the windows. “M'lord,” Uwen said, “don't be going out. I don't know what's happening. I don't think it's nothing good. I swear to ye, I'll go down fast and see, and report to ye before ye could dress and be down.”

“No,” Tristen said, wound his hair out of the way as best he could and began to struggle with the mail shirt himself until Uwen came to help him.

The mail came down on his shoulders and shaped itself to his body, becoming no weight, a part of him. He picked up a coat that had turned up in the clothes-press, velvet and black like all else they gave him, the heaviest thing he had, against the chill in the night. He put it on over the mail, and Uwen, shaking his head, fastened it snugly down his chest, not pleased with his going, but helping him to be presentable, all the same.

 

The halls upstairs were deserted except for the guards appointed to the various doors. Noise of shouting drifted up from the lower floor, and they walked to the stairs, two of the guards from their own door walking behind them as the guards always did when he went outside.

Half of Cefwyn's door-guards were missing, too, meaning an empty apartment and the likelihood that Cefwyn had never yet come to bed—or that Cefwyn had had to leave it after that clattering of men up and down the hall.

Cefwyn's father lay dead. He thought that, however exhausted Cefwyn was, however strongly Cefwyn had rejected the offers of people who wanted to stay these lonely hours with him, it was unlikely that Cefwyn would have slept at all tonight.

But that Cefwyn would be up wandering the halls—he had not expected.

They descended the stairs into the main hall, where soldiers gathered and servants and lords and ladies stood in knots whispering together, weeping, some of them. He smelled smoke, and recalled Althalen, where Cefwyn swore no fire had come since the Sihhë had died there. But this did not seem ghostly smoke. It made the eyes sting.

The noise came from the halls beyond.

“No farther,” Uwen counseled him. “My lord, stay and I'll see.”

He knew by Uwen's warning that there was no pleasure to come to him by going any farther. But all safety tonight seemed illusory; and his danger was worse, he had already persuaded himself, in biding ignorant of what happened in the place in which he lived, whether Cefwyn acted or others did without Cefwyn's knowledge. Defend him, Cefwyn had bidden him swear: and how could he do that in utter ignorance?

Guards stood in the central hall. He went past them unchallenged, and Uwen stayed with him. So did his personal guards, into the main doors at the Zeide's heart, those that let out into the front court.

Those four doors lay wide open. Their access and the whole corridor was jammed with mingled soldiery and residents of the hall in brocades or velvets or priests' plain habits. Lamps lit the place, as they did in all places where the wind blew through, but the glow outside the doors was the red
glare of a larger fire on vast billows of dark smoke, the stench of which reached far inside the hall.

Voices roared, outside, a wash of sound in which no words made sense.

It was impossible to keep together in the crowd. He plunged past a knot of lords out onto the landing and down the stairs, searching for a clear space to stand, at first, then found himself swept up in the rush, realizing that the crowd was carrying him toward the heart of the disturbance.

“M'lord,” he heard Uwen call to him, one clear, thin voice in that din of voices, but he had found a clearer vantage at the side-facing steps and did not wish to yield it up.

Wind rushed at him in that exposure, cold, rainy wind warmed with smoke. Ash and sparks flew. He wondered if the far wing of the building itself was afire—but he saw as he came past the crowd on the steps that it was a large fire set at the side of the courtyard. Men came and went sparsely in proximity to its light, showing him how large that fire was, a pile of wood more than the height of a man; and the flames lit figures that hung on the curtain wall above it, men dangling from ropes, against the stones of the defenses of the Zeide. While he watched, one plummeted into the fire, in a plume of sparks.

Men. Men hanged by the neck from ropes. Men burning in the fire.

The crowd behind him shouted. Guards broke forth from the doors, jostling him. In that press, for one frightening moment, he saw a distorted face, a bloody wreckage of a man hastened along by armored Guelen guards. Red hair, the man had, and the ruin of fine clothing. For an instant the man had looked straight at him.

Heryn, he thought in horror.

Heryn Aswydd. Cefwyn had blamed him for the men who had attacked the King.

Soldiers keeping the crowd back pressed him against the wall, and he stayed there, his back against it, following with his eyes the progress of that company of soldiers and others
across the yard. Raucous laughter shocked him. He came down the steps, seeking to go closer, in the smell of smoke-warmed wind. There came a rumble he realized belatedly was thunder. Droplets of rain began to fall—it will put out the fires, he thought. It will save Lord Heryn. It will clear the smoke. It will make things clean.

And then he knew that it could not, because it could never bring things back the way they had been, simple, and clear and becoming utterly safe at a word from the men who ruled his life. The fires were not going out for any rain, and the burned men would not come back to life.

“M'lord.” Uwen reached him and caught his arm. “M'lord, best you go in.”

“They mean to kill him,” he said, unable to accept that Uwen was so calm, as that last group mounted the steps toward the fire, taking Heryn with them. His voice choked. He was trembling. “Orien? Tarien, too?”

“That's in King Cefwyn's hands, m'lord, come. Come wi' me. This ain't no place for you.”

He could not let Uwen or anyone conceal any more truths from him. Uwen frightened him with his calm voice, his evident belief that such things as he saw now were ordinary and right. He broke away from Uwen and began to walk across the yard. Rain was falling, pelting him with large, cold drops, spotting the cobbles, making him blink as the wind carried rain into his face.

Uwen caught his arm, forcefully, this time. “King's justice, m'lord, ye can't help here!”

Justice? Was this the Word from the archive's Philosophy? Was this the Word that went with Happiness?

He feared the violence around him, he flinched at the loss of life—he feared the passage from life into death that he had already caused, and saw it happening again before his eyes, and he could not explain or understand it—but the knowledge that it did happen was inside him, a Word racing around a doorless dark and trying to come out. Men feared that passage as they feared nothing else—and he understood the
dying on the field as much as he understood death at all. But in the Zeide, where he lived, Men had gathered to cheer as other men burned—and Uwen seemed to think it was nothing remarkable, but nothing he should look at.

Rain began to pelt down about him, but it had no effect on the fire—the blaze sent out waves of heat too great for any rain to stop.

Then lightning whitened the stone of the top of the fire-stained wall, thunder cracked right over the yard, and rain began to sweep down in fire-lit sheets. Drenched onlookers began to retreat, some running, to the doors. A man slipped and fell on the steps. It was confusion, and in all that crowd was no one he would wish to find, no one whose answers he would want to know. He began to move instead against the crowd, trying to reach that proximity of the fire where he knew he was forbidden, as he was forbidden all harsh things.

But Uwen caught him a third time, pleading with him, half-drowned by a peal of thunder, and in defeat he went with Uwen back to the steps, up under the shelter of the arch.

In the doorway a shadow accosted them with such absolute authority he stopped cold, standing partly in the rain.

It was Idrys.

“Your guards report more faithfully than your man does,” Idrys said. “And what provokes this bloody curiosity, lord Tristen of the Sihhë?”

“Where is Cefwyn, sir? Where shall I find him?”

Idrys' eyes raked him over. “I shall take you there, my lord,” Idrys said with no more than his usual coldness, and turned and led the way, not a far distance once they were inside. Guards with Idrys cleared their way through the gatherings of men and women who shivered and complained in the corridor.

They passed the intersection of hall and stairs and came to that chamber they called the Lesser Hall, where the guards had brought him to meet with Cefwyn the first night he came here.

“Wait outside,” Idrys bade Uwen.

“Uwen, do so,” Tristen said, because Idrys' tone had not been polite. Uwen was soaked; he was; he wanted to have answers from Cefwyn while Cefwyn was to be found; and as quickly as possible take himself and all his guards upstairs into dry clothing. He did not expect it would take long, or that Cefwyn could spare much time for him, but he was determined that Cefwyn should know what was done outside, if Cefwyn was in any wise ignorant. He did not wholly trust Idrys, regardless of Cefwyn's word. He saw reasons the lords around Cefwyn might wish not to inform Cefwyn of everything that happened, and he still found it hard to believe that Cefwyn knew of that horror outside.

He entered the hall behind Idrys, into a space which now held a large table. He brought smoke with him, the reek clinging to his clothes, but he could not be certain he was the sole source. The lords from the south and strangers who had come with Cefwyn's brother were gathered about the table, and their armed escorts stood about, crowding the walls, some of them rain-draggled, proving that they, too, had been outside.

So perhaps Cefwyn did know. But there was no dampness about Cefwyn. He saw Cefwyn and Efanor among those standing at the table, over a collection of maps, and before he could approach, Idrys arrived at Cefwyn's side and whispered something precautionary in Cefwyn's ear.

Cefwyn looked about at him in anger. “I told you stay to your room!”

He was shaken by the anger, dismayed, and he did not thank Idrys for whatever Idrys had said. He remembered that Idrys clearly knew what was going on in the courtyard. But he still held out hope Cefwyn did not. “They've hanged Lord Heryn,” he said to Cefwyn. “And other men. I don't understand, m'lord.”

Cefwyn seemed disturbed, and still angry. “They've
beheaded
Lord Heryn. Noble blood does have its privilege. But you've clearly passed the bounds of things you need to know, sir.—Idrys, why did you bring him here? Damn it, why isn't he in his room?”

“Your Majesty, Lord Tristen begged urgently to have personal audience with you. I thought it might be of more moment than it seems.”

“No, sir,” Tristen said, and evaded Idrys' reach to come to the table between Cefwyn and lord Pelumer. “No, sir. I need to speak with you.”

“Not now, Tristen.”

“Sir,—Emuin—” He had diminishing confidence he had any argument at all regarding Lord Heryn, but that was not the only cause he had of disturbance tonight, and it was not the only thing Cefwyn needed to know. But he recalled that Uwen doubted his hearing Emuin, and Cefwyn did not look patient of his stories or his questions at the moment. “Emuin warned me of a danger—and this—”

There was a murmur among the assembled lords.

“What danger?” Cefwyn asked. “When?”

“Tonight, sir, now.”

“Is Emuin here?” Cefwyn asked. “Has he come?”

“M'lord King,” Idrys said, “Emuin is not here.” Idrys took Tristen's arm, and his fingers hurt. “Let me take you upstairs, young lord.”

“No! M'lord, I saw it—” He resisted Idrys' attempt to draw him away, and it was clear on faces all about that no one of them believed him, or thought it likely he had spoken with Emuin at all. He kept the struggle between himself and Idrys a quiet one, and kept the pain Idrys caused entirely to himself. “I shall wait my turn, m'lord King, if you please. I think I might know something useful, but I don't wish to speak what I don't know.” He thought of Uwen shivering in the hall. “Only let me dismiss Uwen and my guards upstairs. They're wet through.”

“So are you.”

“Yes, sir, but I want to stay.”

“Dismiss your men,” Cefwyn said. “Page. Get him a cloak.”

“From his quarters, Your Majesty?” the page asked.

“Give him mine! Good gods!” Cefwyn was in pain, and
limped when he moved—Cefwyn ought to be in his bed, Tristen thought, but Cefwyn was trying to decide something with his maps that were strewn across the tabletop, and with these men, not all of whom were pleasant or agreeable. Tristen took his small permission to go to the door, and put his head out.

Uwen was there, shivering till his teeth rattled. So were the two night guards, in no better case.

“Cefwyn's guards will see me back,” Tristen said quietly, for there was business and argument going on behind him, among the lords in the room. “Please go upstairs and go to bed, Uwen. Have the guards change clothes. I'll be safe.”

“Ye're sopped, too, m'lord. Shall I bring a cloak down?”

“They have me one. I'll not be long.—Or if I am, please go on to bed. The guards here will see me upstairs. There's no need of you to stay.”

“Aye, m'lord,” Uwen said, not sorry to be sent for a change of clothes, he was certain. Uwen was shivering and miserable, and gave him no argument about it.

He shut the door to the hall and took the heavy cloak from the page who waited at his elbow. He wrapped the thick, lined velvet about him with relief and went back among the others in the room.