Fortress of Ice

by C. J. Cherryh

  “Hush,” Cefwyn said, in the approach of the duke of Carys. He managed a smile, a gracious extension of his hand to one who was truly a friend.

  Three days on, one of Idrys’ company came back, having turned back at the river ford to deliver a report. “The lieutenant believes the boy has crossed the river dry - shod,” that man reported, “and the lieutenant crossed on into Amefel to carry the message as ordered. He sent me back to advise the Lord Commander and understand the situation in the capital.”

  “Stay and warm yourself,” Cefwyn said, “and put yourself at your commander’s orders.” He did not dispose Idrys’ men, not ordinarily, and Idrys would have his own questions to ask the man. He was not utterly surprised that Otter had eluded them, and would, at this rate, be home or close to it. He hoped the boy had indeed had a dry crossing, and slept warm.

  He had had a dream of his own last night, however. He had dreamed he rode after the boy, and that he fell farther and farther behind, until in a white gust, Otter vanished. That dream continued to haunt his day.

  Aewyn picked at his meals, an unheard - of degree of distress. He had discharged two of his servants for reporting his mood, he had taken to the library and demanded maps of Amefel, and sulked through the family dinner that quietly celebrated the end of the Bryalt feast.

  “Where is his chair?” he asked loudly, and the servants froze in confusion.

  In fact the table was arranged for the intimate family, and there was no place set for Otter.

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  “He will be back,” Ninévrisë said reasonably. “Your father has made that very clear. And I believe he will come. Do not you?”

  Aewyn frowned and pushed his peas about the plate, disconsolate. He only picked at his dessert, and that final display, with his surliness toward his mother, truly roused Cefwyn’s temper, but he kept it under tight rein nonetheless.

  The evening was full of storms. Aemaryen was fretful. Even the servants went about glum and downcast, and one dropped a dish, a crash that dented a gold - rimmed plate and brought down the majordomo’s silent fury.

  Your father has made that clear, Ninévrisë had said.

  Sent, and by a guardsman. He had been reluctant to put that royal apology on paper. He had turned back, when he had told his son he would do better than that, and his son had hoped, had he not? A son always hoped his father could work a miracle.

  Afterward, in his office, at his desk, he found a blank sheet under his hand and the pen near, and he picked up the pen, and found himself wondering again what he could write, what he dared commit to paper. Messengers had been intercepted before this, and a gods - cursed run of bad luck in the visit counseled caution.

  His queen was waiting. His servants would not go to their beds until they had seen him to his.

  But after all the hurry and flurry of the dinner, after all the press of petitioners and favor- seekers, there was a silence, a very lonely silence.

  It became a very resentful silence.

  One more, he kept thinking, one more piece chipped away by the priests.

  A son, this time. The half of me, before this, when Tristen had quietly slipped even out of Amefel and sent him only a letter, saying, “They hate me too much.”

  Too cursed much. The damned priests. Always, the damned priests. And the people he ruled. The hatred of Guelenfolk for the Sihhë who had ruled the west had not faded at all. Hatred had sent Tristen from the world of Men— though Tristen would never accuse his people or blame those who drove him out.

  The anger that had slowly welled up came brimming over, rendering him furious beyond words. He more than suspected traitors among the priests, mortal men who thought they knew better than their king. The scratches and the spot were all too convenient to create a furor, not yet a sedition, but so easily could the matter have gone to riot and bloodshed, given the bloody -

  handed history of the Quinaltine and its priests.

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  Efanor claimed a manifestation, and he did not disbelieve in such powers; but on the other, and from a king’s jaundiced view, it might have a common, human, seditious origin, even human conjuring of the forces Efanor warned him against. Oh, that that were the truth, and that he could find the author of it and get his hands on one priest’s throat—

  But he was wiser than that. Wiser than his father. He drew no absolute conclusions. He refused the answers his temper wanted— the assumption that hidden enemies in his own realm had done it, forces he already detested, the old contenders for power over the king . . .

  Anger and imprudence had ruled his father Ináreddrin before him, dis-trust of those around him had let the very conspirators, agreeable men, into his father’s deepest confidence, until ultimately those men had brought his father down. The temptation to see enemies and opposition where there was only frustration was, oh, so easy when one wore the crown. It was natural enough that the common folk feared an Aswydd bastard from across the border, it was natural there be whispers . . . it was natural they look to the gods for signs.

  The gods hadn’t helped him, had they, when the kingdom tottered on the brink of sorcerous ruin?

  Magic, however, he had seen work. Sorcery and wizardry he had seen in abundance. Religion he had not seen work at all, except to watch it deny him friends and drive an innocent boy out into a snowstorm.

  So damn all priests— the gods never helped him to what he wanted, never did anything that he could see but gather money from rich and poor alike, paying back a little bread and ale for the poor, and observing silence on sins for the rich.

  The gods were not particularly good about silence for his sins, leaping gleefully onto his mistakes, not even sparing his attempts to do good. The gods deserted him whenever he relied on them in the least— and yet, in all justice, he knew he was never really faithful to them— not like Efanor, whose piety was always tinged with just a little sensible doubt—

  But Efanor still prayed. Efanor saw the same things he saw and somehow managed to think the gods existed behind the false appearances, managed to find divinity hidden behind the priests, power behind the superstition and the terror, all with a doctrine that Efanor never was able to explain.

  And Efanor had at least said he liked the boy, had he not?

  Efanor had counted Tristen a friend, had he not?

  And if there were gods, and if there was faith, Efanor had a grip on that realm and saw merit in the boy. So he was not wrong in what he had done.

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  Above all, he didn’t deserve to have all he loved forever hedged about and threatened by priests as well as dark magic—

  Dark magic. That was the worst of it. Magic of things Tristen hadn’t created, and didn’t wield— magic the Aswydds had slid into when they were kings in Amefel.

  There were facts the Marhanen house would have to deal with: not only was his bastard son half - Aswydd, which entailed a strong Sihhë connection, but there actually ran a faint thread of Sihhë blood in his other son— in Aewyn, himself, through Ninévrisë.

  And that was the knowledge that tainted his relations with the Quinalt priests: that, the way he knew secrets about them, they had his queen’s heredity to call up anytime they wanted to declare war on him. Challenge them for their misdeeds, and they could challenge him with that.

  They had been affronted, when he brought an Aswydd bastard here, installed him in the house, then held him over into Festival. He knew it. He had known it would be not be smooth going when Tristen asked him to care for the boy.

  Had he misinterpreted what Tristen asked of him? Should he have cherished the boy in Amefel, near his mother’s influences, after all, instead of trying to remove him from that district?

  So, well, and his men had failed to find a single rider in a snowstorm . . .

  no miracle, that, no magic— at least not in the single event. But add up all the others. His first riders, the ones sent
out to find Paisi and report back, had said not a thing. He had no idea what was going on at Henas’amef, or whether the boy’s ill dreams— and his own false message— were unhappily true.

  A dark presence shadowed the doorway. Master Crow was abroad at late hours.

  “Crow?”

  “My lord king?”

  “Damned inquisitive Crow. No news?”

  Idrys shook his head. “No, my lord king.” A silence. Idrys didn’t leave.

  “The storm is abating. There’s a star showing.”

  “Oh, things are remarkably settling. The boy is arriving where Tarien desires him to be, is he not? Now all is peaceful.”

  “There’s a thought worth a shudder.”

  To save a kingdom— a king worked under a different sort of law, did he not, with different constraints? Mercy was at times the wrong mercy, and a king’s mistaken kindness made orphans and widows, laying the dead in heaps and windrows.

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  Had he possibly been selfish to refuse a murder or two, of a sorceress, even of his own son?

  His personal virtue didn’t reside in the gods. He found it in Tristen’s mercy. The Quinalt, be it noted, had driven Tristen away from him and left him without counsel, except his brother Efanor.

  And Idrys. Always Idrys, this dark advisor.

  “There will be one more mission,” Cefwyn said to Idrys, “and put a good man on it. This letter must not lose itself in a snowstorm, or go astray, or be read by the messenger. It will contain very damning things.”

  “My lord king?”

  “Sit down. Be still. I have to think.”

  Crow sat. Cefwyn picked up the quill, uncapped the inkpot, wrote, at considerable length for a royal message. He wrote, and sanded and sealed it.

  “To whom goes this?” Idrys asked, when he delivered it to Idrys’ hand.

  “To Crissand. Treat it with extreme caution.”

  “Shall I ask?”

  “It states that he should be on his guard regarding your very sensible misgivings. And that he should send a message westward.”

  Idrys’ chin came up slightly. “Indeed.” Idrys did not disapprove of the notion. Clearly. “High time, indeed, my lord king.”

  He more than forbore to check the man in his liberties, he encouraged him, for his soul’s sake— knowing one old advisor at least would never lie to him. He sent Crow out to rouse a messenger at this hour, with the conviction his Commander of the Guard would choose a man of strong loyalty, who would treat the missive as critically as a battlefi eld dispatch.

  And if his own head weren’t burdened with a crown he had never wanted, he’d take horse this hour and ride all the way to Ynefel tower himself, by way of Henas’amef, while he was about it. Devil take the Quinalt and all their works— if he had not the Crown to burden him, he’d take wife and son and daughter with him and stay at Ynefel for all his days, in the company of an honest friend, the one man who had never deceived him, never counseled him to take the expedient, darker paths.

  It was not, alas, a choice he had.

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  BOOK TWO

  c h a p t e r o n e

  i

  a brisk and sunny day, and the piebald’s feet broke an icy crust as they traveled. Otter looked over his shoulder now and again as the road rose. Yesterday he had met merchants coming toward him: they by no means scared him. He bade them a courteous good day and wished them well on their travels, well - wished in turn. He lied to them, knowing that if the king’s men met them, too, then they would give news of anyone they had seen traveling this way, so he gave his name as Marden, which was Gran’s distant neighbor’s name, and said he was going to see his uncle in Trys Ceyl, which was a sleepy place on a ways south from Henas’amef.

  Good day, they had bidden him, and gone on their way. Perhaps they had met his father’s men by now and had told them the lie, when asked sharply about a young man on the road. He had kept his face muffled against the cold, no unusual thing, and perhaps they failed to know he was that young.

  He had no idea.

  But he had crossed the Lenúalim on thick ice, leading Paisi’s horse, afoot and spread out seeming more prudent for them both, despite cart tracks having left their marks on the snowy path. Above and below the shallows of the ford, the river had not quite frozen, and he had had enough bad luck already to make him wary— but the ice had held. He was well on his way now, and the land he saw today began to have the familiar higgledy - piggledy order of crooked fences that distinguished Amefin ways from Guelen. There were few straight lines in Amefel, nothing of the Guelen sense of order. Certainly the road observed no overall economy of direction, wending among hills and bobbing over a rise and down again.

  He thought that he was near home now. He thought that he spied Diel Tor under its snow blanket, and was sure that there had been such a rock, and another, like a pig asleep, on his way to the border. He knew for certain he had seen that twisted tree by the bridge.

  He kept going into night, then wrapped in his cloak and huddled up c. j. cherryh

  against a tilted stone with the horse near him. His feet kept going numb, and he took off his boots and rubbed the life back into his toes, then struggled to put them on again, never sure that taking his boots off did more good than harm— but Paisi had told him, one winter when he was a small boy: “Never let fingers an’ toes go dead, or they’ll die, an’ turn black an’ rot, an’ if e’er ye get wet boots, boy, you run breakneck to the house straightway an’ take them wet things off quick as you can. Or if ye have to, run barefoot in the snow a bit an’ then rub ’em and sit on ’em a while in your cloak . . . s’ far better ’n frozen boots.”

  He was so cold he couldn’t tell if his boots had gotten wet and frozen in the night. He had tried to prevent that eventuality, and this night, shivering, he tucked up as tight as he could into the cloaks, head and all. That slowly helped, and he dared sleep just a little. But well before daylight he grew so miserable he set out again, the horse moving slowly along an ill - defi ned road.

  Morning, however, brought the sun, which shone like a lamp through the film of clouds and occasionally broke through. He drowsed as he rode, lying on the horse’s bare back, and waked, the horse pitching him slightly forward as it nipped the tops of grasses that poked through the snow and pawed up others, along the margin of a cultivated fi eld.

  It was the first graze they had found since a day ago. He had given the horse anything of his food the horse would eat, and his own stomach was as empty as he could remember. He let the horse wander down the drystone wall, eating as it went, while he had the rest of the sausage, and they were both happier for it.

  A raven sat down on the wall, cocked its head, and whetted its beak against bare stone. It had a dark, glittering eye, and seemed to watch him with a certain smugness, as if it knew his venture to his father’s house had brought nothing but disaster.

  He didn’t like it staring at him. It showed no decent fear of a boy’s presence. Leaning from the horse’s back, holding to the ragged mane, he scooped a handful of snow off the wall and shied a clenched fistful at the bird, which only dodged and settled again.

  The grain was gone, the last stalk ripped up. He had had the last of the sausage. And he thumped the horse’s sides with his heels and got the horse moving again, leaving the raven in sole possession of the wall. The sun, friendly for the moment, hid its face, and the wind picked up out of the west, chilling his face and his knees.

  But toward evening they came to a brook, and it was a crossing Otter had 1 6 8

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  known all his life. They broke the ice on shallow, fast - moving water, scarcely enough to wet Tammis’s hooves, and climbed a shallow bank. From here on Otter knew exactly where he was, which was on Farmer Marden’s land, not far from home, and he urged the horse to all the haste he could manage.

  By sunset a hill stood against the northwest sky, and on that hill a walled town, which was Hen
as’amef, and tallest of all in the town, the faint outlines of the keep, the Zeide. A tower stood atop all, scarcely discernible except at sunset, and in that tower his mother lived, and in that keep his lord, Crissand, ruled; and, right along the highroad he traveled, was Gran’s place. He kicked the horse and applied the end of the halter rope, making all possible haste before full dark could come down, and determinedly not looking toward that tower, which had watched over him all his life. He felt its presence now as he had felt it for years, familiar and uncomfortable, his mother’s eyes continually watching his back, finding out all his mischief and his doings.

  But here were the fields he knew. There was the old, broken berry bush, stark against a snowy land; and there was the boundary stone that was older than anybody remembered, and nobody knew what it marked, except it had Sihhë signs on it, almost weathered away. There were a pair of trees, winter-bare, whose outlines he knew, the farthest ranges of his earliest childhood wanderings, and there was Farmer Ost’s old oak that stood by itself in a pig lot, with a rickety fence and the pig boy’s cottage just down the lane that left the highroad.

  There, there in the last of the daylight, he saw Gran’s thatched roof, the wonderful twisted chimney, perfectly fine, with smoke rising out of it. It was a sight finer than Guelemara’s tall houses: smoke, and someone home, and the warmth of it going out into the gathering dark like a banner on the wind.

  He leaned to open the gate and rode into the yard, past a fence of stones and old, weathered logs, on which snow lay in ridges. Goats peered out of the shed as he latched the gate back, from Tammis’s back. The geese scattered as he turned Tammis into the friendly warm dark of the goat shed.

  A horse snorted and shifted inside, and Tammis gave a low grunt as Otter slid down off his sweaty back, right next to Feiny. The comparative warmth was wonderful, the familiar smell of their goat shed was about him, Feiny was here safely, which meant Paisi was, and aside from Feiny, it was as if he had never left. In a moment more he heard steps crunching through the snow, coming toward the shed door.