Fortress of Ice

by C. J. Cherryh

  That little door stood open, dark inside the keep.

  He caught his breath, stood doubting a moment, then walked over those tracks, and up those stairs, and entered that doorway.

  It was a scullery all in disarray, pots lying on their sides, a beam fallen down right onto the grating of what had been a fireplace, long, long ago.

  Dust covered everything but the very center of the keep, beyond the arch, where the outside sunlight fell on an often - walked track across old stones.

  He followed that track. He hadn’t seen Owl. He didn’t know if Owl had come into this place. But Owl leapt up from a rafter near the door and dived down and through the open doorway ahead of him.

  Owl had led him this far safely. He took the guidance offered and followed, out into a wider room, where was a stairs, and at the bottom of those stairs a newel post on which Owl settled. He went that way, ignoring all else, as close to Owl as he had ever come. Above, around him, as he looked up, 1 9 9

  c. j. cherryh

  a webwork of stairs led to crazed balconies and ledges, up and up, again, to places where the wall was rent and sunlight came in, shafting through the dusty heights. A wayward sunbeam let in a flock of winter sparrows that circled confusedly in the tower, and that same light fell on faces in the surrounding walls, faces like those outside, some shocked, some somnolent, some seeming to cry out.

  He looked down again at Owl’s amber eyes and reached out for comfort, to offer Owl a perch on his arm if he wanted.

  Owl struck like a serpent, and he snatched a bleeding hand to his mouth as Owl leapt up and flew off, spiraling up and up into the dizzy heights.

  Sparrows fl ed, fluttering and diving in terror, escaping every way they could find, but Owl lost himself in the heights, leaving him with the taste of blood in his mouth.

  “Owl is not a grateful bird,” a voice said, a young voice, a calm, still voice that resonated off every stone of the keep, as if it came from everywhere at once. “You came to see me?”

  The voice settled to his right hand, and came from there, and when he looked beyond the bright light of the center of the hall, he saw a dim nook and a table, where a young man in dark colors stood by a fi reside.

  “To see you.” This young man could not be a man present at his birth.

  Lord Tristen should be older than Paisi. But nothing seemed sure at the moment, and he walked aside, sucking the wounded hand to stop the blood.

  “Perhaps. If you are Lord Tristen.”

  “Come,” the young man said, and he walked close, even yet seeing none of those signs of age he expected. “I am Tristen Sihhë.”

  “Lord Tristen,” he amended himself, finding his manners, and thought he should bow— but this was not just a duke of Ylesuin: this was the High King himself, the king above even his father, if he ever cared to go out of Ynefel.

  He thought he should kneel, but there was no convenient place, in the little nook next to the chairs, and he was caught, snared, the while, in a gray, pale stare like his own. The Sihhë - lord’s hair was as dark as his own, and his face might have been a brother’s. “My lord.” He hadn’t intended to call him that, of all things, as if Lord Tristen were his lord, but there it was: it fell out of his mouth all in a rush, and it was, after all, true, from the hour of his birth.

  He managed to say: “Otter is my name.”

  “No,” Tristen said casually. “Otter is not your name.”

  It was as if someone had stripped his cloak away and left him in the wind, not knowing where shelter was.

  “You are Elfwyn,” Tristen said. That was the name his mother had given 2 0 0

  fortress of ice

  him, and now the Sihhë - lord gave him, and it was his, and he had no wish at all to wrap that dark name around his soul. “Elfwyn Aswydd.”

  “My lord,” he said again, and felt the world sliding. He had called him that twice now. What had Gran always said, about three times fi xing a charm?

  Breath came difficult. This was the lord who had permitted him to live.

  And who might as easily unsay that gift. “I came to ask,” he began.

  “Candles are precious this season,” Tristen interrupted him. “The boat from the south won’t come until snowmelt. There is breakfast, if you have slipped Cook’s hands.”

  “My lord,” he began, intending to say he had had breakfast, and there that word had slipped his lips the third time, and this time felt strangely comfortable, like long - forgotten old clothes. “I’ve eaten already, thank you.

  But I came— I came—”

  “At least for tea,” Tristen said. “You are shivering.” He turned, this power not of the world, and sifted tea into a pot, then took the kettle from its hook, poured, and hung it back in its place. He set two cups on the table, besides, with a honey pot, a spoon, and a plate with half a dozen small cakes, the provenance of which Otter had missed in the shadows. “Sit down, Elfwyn Aswydd.”

  He sat, obediently. Tristen set a cup before him and sat down across the table from him. Firelight flickered on those gray eyes. Tristen took a sip of tea. He took a sip, too, using the cup to warm his hands.

  “Will you have a cake?” Tristen asked.

  “No, thank you very much, my lord.”

  “So why have you come?”

  “My lord, I—” The size of the question appalled him, and he didn’t know where to begin, without wasting the Sihhë - lord’s patience, and losing his only chance. “I was in Guelemara. The king— my father—” He was always uncertain with that word.

  “How is Cefwyn?”

  “Oh, well.” As he would have answered Gran about a neighbor. “He’s well. The queen and the baby. And Aewyn. They all are well.”

  “Go on.”

  The interruption had driven all sense of order out of his mind. “I was there, with Paisi.”

  “Paisi and Gran. Are they well, too?”

  “Yes, my lord, very well. I just left them.” He attempted desperately to find his thread again, trying not to shiver, and could not look away from 2 0 1

  c. j. cherryh

  those eyes. “But while we were there, in Guelemara, I mean, Paisi and I, we dreamed Gran was sick, so Paisi came home. I tried to stay for Festival, and I—” He was hurrying, and wasn’t sounding sensible at all. “A priest dropped the smoke - pot in the sanctuary, and the floor took a mark, and the Lines, my lord— the Lines—”

  “You saw them.”

  “Yes, my lord. I saw them.” He suddenly lost himself, trapped in the fi re-changed gray of those eyes and remembering the acute fear he had felt then.

  “I saw them. And Prince Efanor gave me a Quinalt charm, and took away Gran’s, but that didn’t help. Then I had a message from Gran that she was sick and needed me, or I thought it was from Gran, but it was probably from Lord Crissand. So I left.”

  “So Guelemara was no good place for you,” Tristen summarized, tucking in all the loose ends, and his voice was quiet, weaving its own spell of calm, and attention. “It was inevitable you should try, less inevitable you should fail, perhaps, but there, the course is set. You’ve chosen to leave.”

  “To come here,” he said, hoping he understood.

  Tristen shook his head. “Here is only part of it. If I changed what happened, it wouldn’t altogether change what will happen. Cefwyn is well. You are. That’s to the good. And you say you left Gran and Paisi well?”

  “Very well, my lord. But my father’s soldiers were after me.”

  “Your father’s soldiers. You know they’d never harm you.”

  “But they’d bring me back. And I was making trouble for everyone, where I was.”

  “You weren’t the trouble,” Tristen said. “You are who you are.”

  “What am I?”

  “Not what,” Tristen corrected him, “who. You’re Elfwyn Aswydd. That was always your name, but you never owned up to it. Now you have to be both Elfwyn and Aswydd, before you can be your father’s son.”

  “I tried to
be his son,” he said. And added, which made sense to him, but not, he feared, otherwise: “Prince Aewyn is my friend.”

  Tristen nodded, as if he did indeed understand how two diffi cult matters tied together. “So he should be,” Tristen said. “You are his brother.”

  “I want to be. I never want to be a trouble to him. I don’t want to be a trouble to anyone.”

  “You are who you are,” Tristen said again. “Do you understand yet how Elfwyn Aswydd can be Aewyn’s brother?”

  It wasn’t the same as Otter being Aewyn’s brother. He finally saw that, at least glimpsed the edges of what Lord Tristen was telling him.

  2 0 2

  fortress of ice

  “You should have carried your real name before you went to Guelemara,”

  Tristen said. “The name Otter misled you. It misled all expectation around you. People were careless. Drink your tea. It’s cooling.”

  He drank it. He tried to take in the deeper sense of what Lord Tristen was telling him. He had come for counsel. He had expected to ask sane questions about where to go next and what to do next, and have a plain answer— not to find himself led this way and that and questioned repeatedly about various people’s welfare. Should have carried your real name, Lord Tristen said.

  Should he have gone there as Elfwyn Aswydd?

  Should he, then, have come to Guelemara as part of Lord Crissand’s household, and tried to be Lord Crissand’s relative, somehow, when Crissand had two sons of his own who had every right he did not?

  “What should I do now?” he asked. “I shouldn’t go back to Guelemara, should I?”

  Tristen sipped at his own cup. “That would be one course. But that won’t happen now.”

  “Do you know that?” He hadn’t felt magic moving, not at that instant, but now he did, the prickly sensation he got when Gran was working, and he kept his hands about his cup to keep from shivering. He daren’t look aside from this young man. He feared what he might see behind him. “I’m afraid to go to Lord Crissand. It’s not that I’m afraid of him. He’s always been kind. But if I go to him, it means going near my mother.”

  Tristen didn’t answer immediately. He stared past him into the fi re. Then he said, looking straight at him: “You took the name of Otter. That made you someone else and kept you safe from her as long as you were Otter. Now things are different. You’ve chosen to come back, and you have to make your own safety.”

  “I can’t,” he said, and when Lord Tristen gave him a misgiving look: “I don’t think I can, my lord.”

  “That’s the difficulty, isn’t it?”

  What was the difficulty? He had known Gran to speak in riddles, but Lord Tristen didn’t make clear sense to him at all.

  “I don’t understand, my lord.”

  “What do you think you ought to do? Why did you come here?”

  “To find out if I’ve done the right things. To find out what’s happening.

  The dream about Gran being sick wasn’t really so, not as bad as seemed when Paisi and I dreamed it. And then I dreamed of fire.” He’d forgotten that, until just that instant, how profoundly that dream had scared him.

  “And if it wasn’t Gran, it was my mother that made us dream, wasn’t it, 2 0 3

  c. j. cherryh

  my lord? She didn’t want me to leave Henas’amef. She didn’t want me to go away from her. But I did. What if she’s making all this happen, and it’s not just me? I hate her!”

  “No,” Tristen said sharply. “No. Cure that, above all else. Don’t hate her.”

  Gran had given him the same advice. And he’d tried to take it, when he was Otter, when he was a boy with nightmares in the dark. Gran’s arms had ceased to hold him by then. Gran only sat by his bedside and gave him advice, Paisi sitting cross - legged in a nest of blankets, likewise wakened . . .

  That night. That night only last year.

  “I’ve tried,” he said. “I’ve tried not even to look at the tower, all my life.

  I think she hates that most.”

  “And she likes it best when you hate,” Lord Tristen said quietly. “Be advised. There are two paths in front of you. One of them is what she wants.”

  “And the other, my lord?”

  Tristen lifted a shoulder. “It may be what you want, or not. It depends on what you choose.”

  “Where should I go, then? Should I go to Lord Crissand?”

  “Crissand has to be part of everything,” Tristen said. “And it was a good choice, for you to come here. Your father is my friend. I know him, and I know your gran, and I know he’ll see to her. You should trust him completely, at your next chance, though he makes his own mistakes. You say the Lines appeared. Was it only in the Quinaltine that they frightened you?”

  “Yes, m’lord.”

  “And what happened?”

  “It was like ink running, like ink running between the stones. And then the Lines. They were red. They seemed to be breaking.”

  “Did you tell your father about the Lines?”

  “I think Prince Efanor did. And the man, the one that was spying on me for the Holy Father, Brother Trassin— gave me a message, and said the king— my father— was going to send me home in the dark of night. I didn’t want to go with soldiers.”

  “But wasn’t it, after all, his will you do so?”

  “It was.”

  “So you ran before he could do send you home. You outran his good intentions. You caused him worry. He has been worried. He does feel very sorry.”

  “So do I.” He couldn’t look anywhere but at his own hands. He didn’t want the questions to go on in this direction, about his welcome with his father. “I don’t know. I don’t know, m’lord. I was just scared.”

  2 0 4

  fortress of ice

  “And angry that he was sending you home.”

  “Scared,” he said. “And worried about Gran.”

  “Angry,” Lord Tristen said, which happened to be true, and he had never quite realized it until now, as if something had been clenched up tight in his heart for years and years: anger, that his high hopes were dashed down; anger, that he had ruined all his chances.

  “Jealous,” Lord Tristen said. And that could not possibly be true.

  Was he jealous of Aewyn, who had had a father, and enough to eat, and a palace to live in?

  Every visit of the rich men on horses to Gran’s front fence had hammered that difference home. His father had come every year, but his father had always ridden away, with Aewyn, on horses with rich caparison.

  He was shocked to find that was at the heart of it. Anger. Jealousy. All the wicked thoughts he had smothered and tried to ignore in his heart were still there, stored up through the years. His discomfiture had disturbed them, and now when Lord Tristen probed into his opinions, they came fl oating up to the surface like rotten matter from a brook.

  “I don’t want to be angry with anyone,” he said. “My lord, I love my father, and my brother.”

  “As you love Gran and Paisi. You have no cause for anger with them, do you?”

  Only with his mother, he thought at once. He had just cause for anger at his mother, who lived in the tower, and at the poverty that made life hard.

  The lords who lived up on the hill and had books and feasts whenever they liked— he didn’t hate them. But he found he was jealous. Otter had never been jealous, not humble Otter, who was grateful for everything, and was obliged to be. But if he was Elfwyn Aswydd, he was born to his mother’s debts and his own hatreds . . .

  Elfwyn Aswydd was his mother’s son, and a dead king’s namesake, the Marhanen’s enemy.

  “You do love them,” Tristen said.

  “I do love them,” he said, but to his profound dismay it was no longer clean and pure, that love. “If I’m Otter, it’s easy to love them.”

  “You have two paths,” Tristen said. “And you may not have your own choice.”

  Two paths. And no choice. He did not understand, not at all.

&nb
sp; “You are Elfwyn,” Tristen said. “Elfwyn Aswydd is your responsibility to shape. Bring all the things Otter knows, and be Elfwyn, as you have to be.

  There is your best path, if you can get on it and direct it as best you can. The 2 0 5

  c. j. cherryh

  direction it may take yet is not in your power: but what sort of man walks that path, when you are a man, that you can decide.”

  He did grasp it, then. And suddenly he knew, if he were Aswydd, if he were to be pushed and shoved by fate, what he most wanted for himself, and where he’d set his feet if he could. There was what the Aswydds had, as Gran had, what he’d attempted to have, that morning with the oil and water. He hadn’t much Gift, but he had a little. Tristen had something far, far more than any Aswydd, something that Gran wouldn’t explain to him, but said Sihhë - gift was inborn, and natural for Lord Tristen, and made his very wishes powerful enough to rearrange kingdoms.

  “Could I stay here with you a time, my lord? Could I learn wizardry enough to stop my mother? If I haven’t Gift enough, could you possibly give it to me?”

  Tristen leaned back from the table, regarding him with a troubled frown, then got up from the table altogether and walked to the fireside. As he went, Elfwyn turned on the bench, and watched him standing there, half in fi re, half in shadow, staring into the flames and considering for some little time.

  Then Tristen looked his way. And might have spoken, but a curious thing happened. A brown, quick movement appeared at the shadowed end of the table, beyond the glow of the fire, a scruffy little creature that advanced near the plate of cakes and sniffed at it.

  “Ah,” Tristen said, and a smile transfigured his face: it had been ageless and cold and terrible. Suddenly it was young, and kind. “Mouse is out. He’s very old, and he’s gotten very fond of Cook’s cakes. Give him a bit. Owl is never grateful, but Mouse is.”

  Feed the mouse, Elfwyn said to himself in no little disgust, feeling anger, feeling his senses reel. Yet obediently, shaken to his very heart, and still waiting for his answer, he broke off a few crumbs, and held them out. The mouse stayed where it was, whiskers twitching, beady eyes bright, not trusting him.