Fortress of Owls - C.J. Cherryh - Fortress 03 (54 page)

You say I must win Cefwyn’s friendship… and that doesn’t come of anything I’ve done that I can see. Everything I’ve done has turned his own people against him!”

“Young lord,” Emuin said, “you’ve gained very many things, and know far more, and now you’ve almost become honest.”

“I have never lied, sir!”

Emuin fixed him with a direct and challenging stare. “Have you not?”

“Not often. —Not lately.”

“Ah. And have you often told the truth?”

“Have
you
told it yourself, sir. Forgive me, but is this not the lesson you showed me, to keep silent, to leave and not answer questions. I keep quiet the things I fear could do harm, and the things I don’t understand!”

“Exactly as I do.”

The anger fell, left him nothing, and still no answer.

“Is that all you learned of me?” Emuin asked. “Silence?”

“No, sir, there were very many good lessons.”

“And do you not, as you say, count it good, to keep silent when Fortress of Owls - C.J. Cherryh - Fortress 03

speaking might work harm?”

“What harm would it have worked, for you to have stayed by me this summer? What harm would it work now, for you to tell me the dangers ahead, if I swear to take your advice?”

“Harm that I might do? Oh, much. Much, if I interfere—”

“—If you interfere with Mauryl’s working. But do you say, then, sir, that you
can
interfere with Mauryl’s working? Or can anyone? Are you that great a wizard?”

“Who
are
you?”

Back to wizard-questions, the quick reverse, the subtle attack, and that one went straight as a sword to the heart.

“Who
are
you?” Emuin repeated. “This time
I
require an answer.”

Tristen drew a deep breath, laid his hands on the solid table surface, on the charts, the evidence and record of the heavens, for something solid to grasp… for very nearly he had said, defiantly, out of temper, and only to confound the old man,

I am Barrakkêth
.

So close he had come, so disastrously close it chilled him.

“I am Tristen,” he said calmly, lifting his head and staring straight into Emuin’s measuring eyes. “I am Mauryl’s Shaping. I am Cefwyn’s friend and your student. I am the lord of Althalen and Ynefel.
Tristen
says all, sir, and all these other things are appurtenances.”

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

“Not lord of Amefel?” Emuin asked with that same measuring look, and his heart beat hard.

Crissand
, he thought.

Crissand, Crissand, Crissand.

“Cefwyn must grant me Amefel,” he said to the wall, the wind, the fire in the hearth, not to the boy sitting silent or the wizard gazing at his back. “Cefwyn must grant me this one thing.”

“Has he not? It seems to me he granted you Amefel.”

“No. He made me lord of Amefel, in fealty to him. He hasn’t

given
it to me. And that he must do, for his own safety.”

There was a long, a very long silence.

“You know,” said Emuin, “if other things have disturbed Ryssand and Murandys, this one will hardly calm their fears.”

“Crissand Adiran is lord of Amefel. He is a
king
, master Emuin, he is the Aswydd that should rule, and if I set him here, on this hill, and see him crowned, I would think I had done well, and that I had done Cefwyn no disservice at all.”

There was long silence, a direct stare from Emuin and Paisi’s eyes as large as saucers.

“The next question.
What
are you?”

“Mauryl’s Shaping, sir. Cefwyn’s friend, and your student, lord of Ynefel, lord of Althalen.”

“And of those folk there settled?”

“
If
they remain there.”

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

“And this is your firm will.”

“I am Mauryl’s Shaping.”

“What we say three times gathers force, and what
you
say three times has
uncommon
force, lord of Althalen.”

“I’ve told you all I know, sir, and beyond, into things I hope. So what do you advise me to say? More, what to do, sir? Idrys has a liar in his service, and Cefwyn is in danger.”

“If I knew that, young lord, I’d sleep of nights.” Emuin moved the letter aside and moved one of his charts to the surface, a dry, stiff, and much-scraped parchment. He looked at it one way and another, and then cast it toward him, atop a stack of equally confused parchments.

“
This
, this, young lord, is as much as I do know. This is the reckoning that Mauryl himself would have seen coming, that once in sixty-two years these portents recur in the heavens, and where they occur at the Midwinter, there is the Great Year begun, that is, the time until the wandering stars hold court together and move apart again. This is the season of uncommon change… but this is nothing to you, I suspect.” Emuin’s tone took on a forlorn exasperation, much like Mauryl’s when confronting his helplessness. “Nothing Unfolds. No great revelation.”

“No, sir.” He looked at the parchment, and considered the things Emuin said and cast it down again, unenlightened. “I don’t know what you’re saying. About the stars, I gather, but nothing more. I know Mauryl studied them. And you do. But I’ve never Fortress of Owls - C.J. Cherryh - Fortress 03

understood the things you find.”

“Magic is an unfettered thing.
You
… are an unfettered thing. But wizardry,
wizardry
, young lord, is a matter of numbers…

patterns, as nature itself is patterns, and the gathering of forces.

Think you that winter happens by magic? No. Everything in nature, young lord, is a march of patterns, the chill in the air, the sleep of the trees, the waning of the summer stars and the rise of the winter ones, that in their turn will set…”

“These things I see, and you tell me they recur.”

“Yes! So if you would work a great work of wizardry, do you see, there’s no sense doing hard things, only the easy ones. Do you want a snow? Ask for it in winter! Much easier. Find patterns in nature and lay your own Lines where they go, much as you set the Lines of a great house, observing doors and windows where they want to be.”

Emuin seemed to expect agreement, understanding—something.

“Yes, sir.”

“But you don’t! All this is frivolous to you! You treat patterns the way a young horse treats fences, to have the fine green grass at your pleasure. And gods save us on the day you treat natural laws as that great dark stallion of yours treats stall slats, and simply kick them down.”

“I trust I’m never so inconsiderate of your work, sir, as Dys of master Haman’s boards.”

Emuin grunted, then gave a breath of a laugh, and at last Fortress of Owls - C.J. Cherryh - Fortress 03

chuckled and for the first time in a long time truly did regard him kindly. “Good lad.
Good
lad. When I fear you most, you have your ways to remind me you
are
Tristen.”

“I am. And shall be, sir. And never would treat your patterns carelessly. I have more understanding than my horse.”

Emuin did laugh, and wiped an eye with a gnarled finger, and wiped both, then his nose. “Oh, lad. Oh, young lord. We’re in great danger.”

“But we are
friends
, sir, and I’m yours, as I am Cefwyn’s.”

“That, too, is a snare, young lord, and one I avoid very zealously: we must both look at one another without trust,
assuming

nothing, as we love one another, as we love that rascal Cefwyn.

Fear friendship with me! Avoid it! Examine my actions, as I do yours, and let us save one another.—But you asked, and I answered, and let me answer, again, such as I can. Hasufin—”

“Hasufin!”

“Regarding this matter of the Great Year, I say, sixty-two years of the ordinary sort, and Hasufin Heltain, who
was
a wizard, and who bound his life to the cycle of the Great Year. Great works need great patterns. And his was the most ambitious: to use the Great Year itself would have given him more than one opportunity for a long, difficult magic, at long intervals. But there is more: there’s a Year of Years, a pattern of patterns that only the longest-lived can see, let alone use. Do you guess?

Hasufin is
old
, as Mauryl was
old
. And the dawn of the last Year Fortress of Owls - C.J. Cherryh - Fortress 03

of Years was the hour of Hasufin’s first seizure of Ynefel, when he drove Mauryl Gestaurien to seek help in the north. But before it was done… the Sihhë came down. And
that
was the pattern of that beginning. That was what Mauryl did to Hasufin Heltain: he wrought the Sihhë-lords into Hasufin’s rise, so he could never be free of them—and the Sihhë-lords, like your horse, respect no boundaries and kick down the bars. He lost. Mauryl rose… and the Sihhë-lords reigned.”

“And fell.”

“Ah, and the dawn of the last cycle, the second such time, you may well suspect, sixty-two years ago… was Hasufin’s second rise. We are in the last of the sixty-two years of the Great Year that marks the Year of Years. The spring solstice, last spring, when Hasufin overthrew Mauryl the second time… Mauryl knew his peril; and chose
his
moment: the time of rebirth,
your
birth, young lord. Now that Great Year closes and a new Great Year begins the next Year of Years in the season of the deepest dark.

At Midwinter the last element of the heavenly court will enter the House in which all the others stand. This movement marks the dawn, at midnight, of that new Year of Years. At Midwinter the moon stands, changeable queen that she is, at the darkest of the dark. By the time the sun rises, either the elements of the Great Year favor Hasufin… or something stands in opposition to him.

What is, at that dawn, will be, for centuries of years as Men reckon time.”

“So Mauryl never sent me to Lewenbrook. That wasn’t what he Fortress of Owls - C.J. Cherryh - Fortress 03

wanted of me.”

“Oh, it was certainly part of it. But Cefwyn opposed Hasufin.

Cefwyn
opposed him, and opposes him now, and there’s that damned Elwynim prophecy of a King To Come. It’s probably true, more’s the pity. Uleman was a good wizard, but he talked too much, and now everyone expects there to be a new High King. It doesn’t serve Cefwyn well at all… and by chance it doesn’t help Uleman’s daughter, either.”

Here was truth, so much truth it was hard to know what part of it to seize and question, but he found one question salient and unavoidable.

“And is Hasufin our enemy still?” Tristen asked. “And shall I fight him again? And where?”

“I can’t say,” Emuin answered him with a shake of his head.

“Above all, Midwinter Eve is perilous to us, and of all damned days you might have chosen to assemble the lords… that one you never asked me.”

“I had no knowledge. Now I do. What other times shall I fear?”

“The spring solstice… evidently,” Emuin said. “But what more may happen I don’t know.
I
haven’t lived through a Year of Years. You have.”

“I haven’t
lived
.”

“As much as Hasufin. Mauryl’s the only one who’s lasted one in the flesh, as it were. And now is stone, in his own walls, so you say.”

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

He shivered, not wishing to recall that day of waiting, that terrible hour, when he knew the enchantment of the faces was not the ordinary course of the world, and that there was something dreadful about Ynefel, where the Sihhë had ruled, where the Lord Barrakkêth had maintained a dreaded fortress… where at last only Mauryl had lived, alone, in solitary correspondence with the latter generations of Men, at Althalen, and what Men had used to call Hen Amas, and now Henas’amef.

“So Mauryl did the best he could: sent you, without warning, without guidance, without instruction… lord of Althalen. That you surely are. Lord of Ynefel… I would never dispute. That you are Tristen… I leave that to you, and would never say otherwise.

This I do tell you: the stars point to Midwinter. The hinge of the year. The hinge of many years, this time, when all things reach an end, and a beginning, and when patterns begin for the next Year of Years. Against your years, I am a youth.” Emuin reached across the table to lay his gnarled hand on his young one, a touch like Mauryl’s, half-remembered, touching his very heart. “Tristen is your name. So be it. Have a sip of tea. It’s grown cold, boy.

Boy!”

“Sir!” said Paisi, scrambling up.

“Tea. Cakes if they’ve escaped your avarice.”

“Avarice, sir?”

“Things don’t Unfold to him,” Emuin said, aside, “and, thief that he was, he has no notion what avarice is. A fine boy. A discreet Fortress of Owls - C.J. Cherryh - Fortress 03

boy, who has no desire to become a toad. Where are the cakes, Paisi?”

“I’ll ask Cook,” Paisi said, swinging the kettle over the fire and poking up the heat. “I’ll be back, I’ll be right back, sir. I di’n’t hear a thing, I di’n’t.”

“Toads,” Emuin said, and Paisi adjusted the kettle and fled, banging the door, or the wind did it, seeping in from the cracks in the shutters.

Quiet occupied the tower, then, only the slight whistle of the wind.

“He’s no trouble, is he?” Tristen asked, hoping he had not inconvenienced master Emuin.

Emuin gathered up a handful of beads, a collection of knots and strings and feathers, beads and bits of metal. “A grandmother’s spell, a protection. He came back clattering with it, a thing of moderate potency, in very fact. Do you see the Sihhë coin?”

“Yes,” he said, curious, for just such a coin had banished him from Guelessar. “And you keep it?”

“The wretch gave it to me,” Emuin said, “saying I surely needed protection. And he had bought it with coin your Uwen gave him.”

“There’s no harm in it,” Tristen said, lifting it in his fingers. “Is there, master Emuin?”

“You see nothing amiss in it, do you?”

“No, sir. I don’t.”

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