Fortress of Owls - C.J. Cherryh - Fortress 03 (4 page)

But that meant Cevulirn had to leave court, and Cefwyn girded
himself for a confrontation in court with a powerful baron who
had just lost his son… a confrontation that might yet tear the
kingdom apart if the other barons stood with Ryssand.

Into this situation Ryssand’s incriminating letter arrived secretly
into Cefwyn’s hands… and Cefwyn thus had the means to suggest
Ryssand retire to his estates immediately, or have all his actions
made public to the other barons.

So the treaty stood firm, Cefwyn and Ninévrisë married, and
Tristen settled in to rule in the south as lord of Amefel, lord of the
province containing old Althalen and bordering Ynefel and
Elwynor across the river.

And rule he does, in the first glorious winter of his wizard-summoned life.

Fortress of Owls - C.J. Cherryh - Fortress 03

BOOK ONE

Fortress of Owls - C.J. Cherryh - Fortress 03

Chapter 1

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Master Emuin had packed in a night, when His Majesty in Guelemara had decreed a new duke for Amefel. Baskets, barrels, and bundles had gone out of master Emuin’s tower room in the Guelesfort in the heart of Guelemara and into wagons that night of storm and departure, and after a slow transit between provinces, up they had come, a week and more later, into the appointed tower in the fortress of Henas’amef.

But when master Emuin’s new tower room had reached its apparent limits, as it had on the day following his arrival, why, baskets and bundles coming up for the week afterward had necessarily accumulated on the stairs and on the very small landing, hardly more than a step, that gave a servant, a petitioner, or the new duke of Amefel himself scant place to stand and knock for admittance.

“Master Emuin?”

“Leave it on the stairs! Gods bless, fool, there’s no more room!”

“Master Emuin, it’s Tristen, if you please.”

Footsteps crossed the floor. The door opened. The old man peered out, hair disarrayed and gusting past his face in a cold wind and a white daylight that said the shutters were open despite Fortress of Owls - C.J. Cherryh - Fortress 03

the snow sifting down outside.

“Master Emuin, you’ll freeze.” Tristen pushed through the door into the round tower room, where, indeed, shutters were wide to the winds and windows were blazing white with winter sky.

Emuin was wrapped in a heavy traveling cloak, and so was Tristen, but for different reasons, Tristen was sure. Master Emuin had kept his room in the Guelesfort in similar state, but in the milder days of autumn, and, however new to his authority over the old man, Tristen was certainly not disposed to tolerate that state of affairs here.

Consequently, he began closing shutters.

To Emuin’s clear indignation: “And how am I to see, pray?”

“Candles. Lanterns. As other people do, sir! People account
me

the simpleton, and you the wizard and wise man, and you have the hall full of baskets and this tower so cold it gusts cold wind into the lower hall. Whence this notion not to have candles?”

There followed a small, uncomfortable pause in which Emuin looked elsewhere.

“It
is
that?” Tristen asked, surprised to have happened on the truth. Then he added that favorite, persistent question that always found so little patience among ordinary folk: “
Why
, sir?”

“Plague and bother of lighting fires! Leave my shutters alone!

The place is dark as a cave.”

“If you’ll not have Tassand arrange this, then
I
shall, sir. I
will
, with or without your leave.” It was a great impertinence to defy Fortress of Owls - C.J. Cherryh - Fortress 03

the old man, but he had learned of Cefwyn how to argue, and argue he was prepared to do.

“The duke of Amefel will not carry baskets and build shelves!

There are simply too many baskets to fit! They used to fit! I don’t know how it came to be so much. Leave one shutter, I say! How can a man see?”

“Then you’ll accept Tassand’s help.” He faced an obdurate, weary old man, one who had not planned to reestablish his workshop twice, a man at his wits’ end after a hard journey… an old man who still, a week after coming all this journey specifically to advise him in his new office, at least as Emuin had said to him, continually found reasons not to speak to him frankly on far more important matters than baggage obstructing the stairs. “And you
shall
have it, sir, his help or mine. You may choose which, but the lower hall is full of drafts, and the candles blow out when someone opens the east doors.”

A tremor of weariness had come into Emuin’s mouth, and more wrinkles than usual mapped the territory around his eyes. He trembled on the verge of yielding. Then: “No! No,
you
will not be arranging baskets or carrying them.”

“Then Tassand, sir. His Majesty set me in charge. I must have the baskets up the stairs and the shutters shut.”

A second surly glance.

“I’ll have them set in whatever order you wish,” Tristen said, “a fire laid, candles lit. Please have all the windows shut by this Fortress of Owls - C.J. Cherryh - Fortress 03

evening, sir, at least by the time the sun goes down.”

“Beeswax. None of your tallow candles, young lord, nothing stinking of slaughter. I will have beeswax.”

Then there was more in it than candles, as there was more in Emuin’s insistence on open windows than a desire for daylight by day and a view of the stars at night. Master Emuin was not a man who chose luxury or spent money profligately, beeswax being the luxury, above tallow. But he
was
a wizard, and the question of beeswax or tallow passed not without note and not without significance in Tristen’s thoughts.

“Beeswax,” Tristen said, “you shall have, sir.” He was pressed for time in this small foray up the stairs, and let the precise reason of the candles escape comment, but he marked it for inquiry at some quieter moment. “You’ll have Tassand’s earnest attention to whatever things you need, clothing for attendance in hall… and all set in order in a proper clothespress.” He saw that the one that did exist was crammed so full of bottles and papers the doors stood open.

“Nonsense.”

“Tassand need not retrieve your robes out of baskets.”

“I have no room, I say! Hang them on a peg. For a peg, I have room!”

“Join me at supper this evening, where it’s warm. Cook will have meat pies.”

“When I have found my charts, young lord!
If
I have found my Fortress of Owls - C.J. Cherryh - Fortress 03

charts, which at the moment seems unlikely!”

Emuin shouted in frustration, and Tristen found his own amiability tested. “They might be in those baskets on the stairs, sir. Dogs might come at them. There
was
a dog about. I saw him below.” That this had been far out in the yard, from the window, he failed to say. Whatever moved master Emuin to accept help and hasten his baskets up the steps was a benefit.

“Perish the creature! Very well, very well,
send
Tassand! Gods

bless!
” Master Emuin cracked his shin against a bench in the dimmed light. “Leave me one window, if you please! I have old eyes. Gods, what a contentious lad you’ve become!”

“For your health’s sake, sir, and the servants’, and the downstairs candles, and to have your advice for a long time to come, without your taking ill up here, yes, I have become extremely contentious.” Tristen relented, leaving one leeward shutter ajar on stiff metal hinges so that the room was not altogether in twilight. He had had a fire laid in the hearth and wood provided in advance of his teacher’s arrival, and it had burned far too fast, thanks to the gusts, he was sure.

The tower room had a fireplace which shared a duct with the guardroom below and the hall below that, three flues and one common stonework that led to the wayward and now wintry winds above the fortress roof. It was thanks to the warm stonework, with other rooms’ smoke passing through, that there was any comfort at all in the room. “You need more firewood.

Have you asked?”

Fortress of Owls - C.J. Cherryh - Fortress 03

“No, no. And I don’t need a fire. The damned wind kicks up a gale in here when the flue’s open. Damn.” Master Emuin had found a pot of powders spilled in the bottom of a basket, and was not in a good humor. “Damn, damn.”

It seemed time for even the lord of Amefel to make a quiet retreat, out the door and down past the numerous baskets of herbs and birds’ nests and down again the rambling East Stairs, with its little nooks and shelves and half levels, themselves piled high with stray baskets. His guard, four men, his constant and trusted companions, had waited below, and followed him from there.

It had not been an entirely satisfactory meeting. He had come upstairs intending to set the fortress generally under master Emuin’s surveillance, had found himself distracted into argument about the shutters.

Distraction in master Emuin’s vicinity was not an uncommon occurrence. He would have liked to have asked master Emuin about the archives and the problems there. He would have liked to consult master Emuin about the vacant earldom of Bryn, but they had ended arguing about other things. He saw no likelihood that all the baskets and bundles were ever going to fit into the tower. Now he walked the hall uneasy in this requirement regarding the candles, which echoed off his own dislike of Emuin’s open and unwarded windows… and there was another piece of unfinished business he had not yet had a chance to discuss with Emuin: the wizard-work that had left the fortress more open than some to wizardous attack.

Fortress of Owls - C.J. Cherryh - Fortress 03

He most of all wished that master Emuin would leave his charts in whatever disorder they fell, look at events around him, and provide a steady and sober counsel to him in his new rule over the province of Amefel.

Yes, Emuin had advised him in some limited particulars, but there remained the flood of mundane matters which he had not yet been able to persuade the old man to hear, such as the pile of petitions regarding land settlements, and several very much greater ones, involving the king and the situation in Elwynor.

But no, Emuin would not be at peace to hear anything so important until his workshop was in order, which it was not, and showed no prospect of being. Tristen began asking himself where he could find storage outside the tower, which master Emuin thus far refused to consider; he had come upstairs to gain advice about the affairs of the fortress, and instead found himself wondering where he could set a clothes-press.

Now he found himself wondering why he had ever thought he could spare an afternoon to leave the fortress and ride outside the walls.

But Earl Crissand had pleaded with him and cajoled him to take some relief from the demands on his attention. He had a need and a duty, Crissand said, to see the people and be seen by them, a duty he could not accomplish inside the fortress. The ducal seat at Henas’amef had become remote and estranged from the commons even under its recent duke and duchess, and the last Fortress of Owls - C.J. Cherryh - Fortress 03

authority, Lord Parsynan, had brought the land nothing but grief and bloodshed. It was time the people saw hope for better days.

So here they were, he and his guard all cloaked and gloved and equipped for winter riding—an unexpectedly appropriate weight of clothing for venturing the tower room—bound for the west doors and the stable-court. The escape seemed both more attractive and less responsible since the conversation above; and he only hoped to reach the stables.

All through the lower hall the household staff with mops and buckets fought back the thin gloss of mud soldiers and workmen brought from the snowy yard. And around the central doors, that mud mixed with the shavings and dust of workmen repairing the damages of their new lord’s accession. It was a second source of draft in the fortress, where wind leaked through the nailed patches, and it was a hazard to his escape, a source of overseers with questions.

He foresaw it: now a well-dressed master craftsmen intersected his path and showed him a paper, the requests of craftsmen for an order of oak planks.

Consult Tassand, was his answer to no few. He was sure his chief of household knew no more about oak planks than he did about wizardry and herb lore—less, in fact—but Tassand at least knew how to send petitioners to appropriate places. From being merely a body servant, Tassand had become a duke’s master of household, did the office of chamberlain and half the office of seneschal.

Fortress of Owls - C.J. Cherryh - Fortress 03

Tassand seemed to know, moreover, when an order was excessive or excessively expensive, which his lord did not. He did know that money represented hours and quality of a man’s work, and that dukes did not have an endless supply of it.

But today, faced with an order for wood which seemed reasonable for carpenters, and anxious to reach the doors: “Yes,”

he said, and moved on. “Yes,” he said, to a further request, and he had no more than sent that man off, than a third man in court clothes appeared in his path, unrolling drawings of the carvings of the new main doors, and asking whether the design pleased him.

“The Eagle of Amefel in the center panel, do you see, Your Grace, and the border of oak leaves, for endurance…”

He had no idea why he should be asked about the carving for the main doors, which he had simply ordered repaired to stop the draft. The only usefulness of the carving might be a kind of magical seal, and everyone from earls to servants to his close friends had assumed that common doors would not do… nothing common ever suited. Endurance seemed a reasonable, a happy wish, to which he certainly consented, and with a wish of his own he reinforced it… he helped the craftsmen as he could, not knowing what he was supposed to do.

But by now he was sure he was overdue in the stable-court, and he was more and more sure Crissand was right in urging him to ride out for a day: he grew weary and short of patience. His court Fortress of Owls - C.J. Cherryh - Fortress 03