Fortress of Ice

by C. J. Cherryh

  It’s the other boy who did that.”

  “What he did when Otter was here— No, no, I don’t blame Otter at all.

  He’s a wild creature. He always will be, I fear, and no ill against him. Our son, on the other hand, needs to read and mope a bit. Kings have to do that.”

  He rested his head against hers. It was a comfortable place to be. “Perhaps this one needs to do a little less of it. His penmanship is too good. I ache to be out there, Nevris. I ache to be in Ynefel.”

  “And I, to tell the truth. I ache to be on the road, snow and all. We’ll have to conspire, and appoint a tryst.”

  “Where?”

  “In Henas’amef, at fi rst bloom?”

  His head came up. He looked at her. “That’s a long time for us to be away from court.”

  “Time enough for Efanor to be thoroughly weary of petitions. Time enough for the Holy Father to know he can’t bluff Efanor.” Her fi ngers ran, warm and soft, over his brow, and a smile quirked her lips. “You’ve gotten a little worry line, love. Shed it before it sets. It doesn’t become you.”

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  He kissed the fingers in question. “In Henas’amef,” he said. “We’ll ride home together from there, at fi rst bloom.”

  “Crocuses in the muddy fields,” she said, “and standing puddles to drown a pony in. I love Amefel in the springtime.”

  He laughed. Iron bands let go from about his heart, when he thought of those muddy roads, and Tristen, and a ride or two together with him, the way it had used to be. He would never convince Tristen to go hunting. They would just ride, and visit odd places, and let the boys tag along.

  And Nevris would come. And they would ride where they liked and meet old friends.

  His people would be jealous, him conspiring with the Elwynim Regent down in Amefel, all the lords’ politicking therefore obliged to be done in the Amefin court, which meant a long, long ride for the northern ones— that might, in fact, mean far fewer of the northern, more quarrelsome lords at court this season. They might not think their petitions quite that desperate.

  The south, now: it would be more convenient for them. He might manage a meeting with Cevulirn and Sovrag as well as Crissand. It would be old times again, the way they had begun.

  He went and broke the news to Idrys, who lifted a brow, and said, “Indeed, my lord king,” and shook his head before he went off to disarrange the Guard from its winter quarters.

  He broke the news to Efanor at dinner, and Efanor gave a long, thoughtful sigh, and shook his head, and said, “I’ll send the thorny cases on to you, dear brother. A muddy ride will damp the petitioners’ ardor. But before you go riding off, write a decree to possess the tract I have in mind. I have a large space on the hill— one that could give us the building space we need.”

  “Where, for the gods’ sake? Who’s died?”

  “Grenden. The only burgher so situated, elderly, and rattling in that house of his.”

  “You’ll have the authority.”

  “Best this come from you. I have in mind to settle Lord Grenden on a portion of the royal lands, a new estate at Mynford. It’s terrible hunting there.

  New management and enforcement of the boundaries might improve it. But with it goes an elevation, to the honor of a new place at court, new arms.

  He’s lusted after nobility all his life. And at his age, a little sanctity might come welcome.”

  Grenden. Grenden, was it, a rich man who had bought a vacant property on the hill, abode of a house perished in the war, a partisan of Ryssand’s, and in no favor. Old Grenden was always at court, in outdated finery, an ob-2 5 3

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  ject of gossip. “You know our grandfather would have found the man guilty of something and outright seized the old house.”

  “Oh, aye, but Grenden’s old, he doesn’t hunt, and he has no issue. The estate will revert in a decade, or he’ll take my very kind advice and adopt Squire Widin’s six girls.”

  “Oh, I do like that,” Cefwyn said. “The cousin goes begging. And the new lord Mynford gets Widin’s holdings, with the fisheries and the farms across the river, no need to clear the deep woods. An ample dowry . . . safety for the girls. A posterity for poor old Grenden.”

  “See? So simply solved. The old trees at Mynford stand, the deer increase, we have the hilltop grounds for the Holy Father— he doesn’t think it can be done— and we get Widin’s orphans out of the hands of Leismond.”

  “Brother, you have my utmost confi dence.”

  Efanor smiled, his shy, true smile, not the one he showed ordinarily. “I win my case?”

  “You win it. I’ll sign your decree. You have the spring court, all your own.

  I’m for Amefel.”

  “I do miss him,” Efanor said. “Give him my regards. And Crissand, too.

  Tell Crissand I shall be riding by, when you come back. I’ll be due a rest of my own, by then.”

  “Done,” he said. “And you’ll have every right.”

  Packing went apace, then. He requested Ninévrisë entrust Aemaryen to the nurse for the night. They spent the early evening dining alone by the fire, and the later evening as lovers. They still were, after bringing two children in the world: missing Nevris was the only sorrowful part of the trip.

  In the morning, having summoned Aewyn for breakfast, he broke the not - unwelcome news.

  “I take it,” he said, “that you would gladly miss your history lessons in favor of a small trip outdoors.”

  “I’ve done my lessons,” Aewyn said, frowning, his defenses up. “My tutor can’t say I haven’t.”

  “So you might like to ride to Amefel.”

  “To Amefel!” The sluggard who had shared their table so glumly for days vanished, transformed and bright - eyed— though warily asking, “Might I?

  Truly?”

  “Your brother has slipped off again, in directions not prudent. I think I may ride that way. You might stay with Gran for a few days, if he isn’t there, while I go looking for your brother.”

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  “I can find him,” Aewyn said, all too pertly. “I have no doubt I can fi nd him.”

  He let that pass for the moment. “Go pack,” he said to his son. “Take clothes, no trinkets, and nothing heavy. Do it yourself. Think of it as a hunting trip and a court visit.”

  And when his son had left a half - eaten breakfast and walked from the room, half - running, he got up and set his hand on his wife’s.

  “Dared you think he would be reluctant, my lord?” Ninévrisë asked him.

  “Take care of our daughter,” he asked her, “and of yourself.”

  “Take care of our son,” Ninévrisë said. Her hand closed on his. “How will you explain this venture to the court? Have you thought of that?”

  “Why, there’s a letter from Crissand. A pressing matter. Letters have flown back and forth like snowflakes. Everyone knows it.” He kissed her cheek. “And I leave Idrys to support Efanor.”

  “Dare you?”

  “He will obey Efanor,” he said, devoutly hoping that was the case. His departure did remove a certain restraint he imposed on his Commander of the Guard— but Idrys would indeed support Efanor and protect him from his charitable impulses, if not meticulously obey him. He need not fear for Efanor’s life, at very least.

  And, uncommon for royal processions, by midmorning he was already on horseback, with his son, a fair company of the Dragon Guard, and a smallish pack train, mostly carrying clothes and three tents. They would sleep under canvas— he wished to give Aewyn the experience of a winter camp— and delay as little as possible along the route. Ninévrisë, with far more baggage and a train of ladies, purposed to depart the capital in two days, and cross northerly into Elwynor. As for the weather, it blew hard for an hour, then spat snow into their faces the moment they passed the city gates.

  It was a gray day, windy and biting cold, but his son’s face was
bright. So, he suspected, was his own.

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  the ring tingled at times. sihhë-work, gran had called it, but whether she meant the ring itself or the spell on it, she declined to say. She refused to touch it, herself, saying it would burn the hand that tried to take it, until it went back to its master. Paisi, whose eyes were better, said it looked like a pledge ring from the town market, with its little design of vines and grapes, not outstandingly well made, but silver. Sihhë - work in silver, Paisi said, was much better made.

  The ring gave him one night’s sound sleep, at least. But he waked in the memory of freezing in the woods, and of losing Owl, and then of coming home to Gran’s and finding the place all burned.

  He waked with such a start he thought surely he must have waked Paisi, but Paisi snored on, and he lay in the dark, sweating and seeing horrors in the common shadows of the room. The fire in the fireplace seemed like a beast caged and trying to break free, and the ring on his finger was cold as ice.

  The horror stayed with him. He hardly dared shut his eyes, and when he did, he had to drag himself out of the same horrid dream, in which he wandered among burned timbers and fallen beams. “Gran,” he cried, and no one answered him.

  He escaped it, back into the terrible dark of a familiar room, and lay there, not daring to move for a very, very long time. He turned the ring with his thumb, and tried to think of Lord Tristen, or Lord Crissand, but all he found was dark.

  “M’lord?” Paisi asked him, at midmorning the next day, when he cut his hand trying to bend a damaged hinge, where the wind last night had caught the shed door. He just stared into the dark of the shed and lost himself for the moment, sucking at the wound.

  “Did you sleep well?” he asked Paisi, that noon.

  “Oh, aye,” Paisi said, matter of course. And then asked, more carefully:

  “Did you, m’lord?”

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  His mother had slipped her dreams past Gran’s wards, past the protections of a ring Lord Tristen had blessed. She fretted. She threatened.

  “I think I’ll visit my mother,” he said. “There’s day enough left. I won’t stay but a moment. But I have to. I don’t want any more dreams.”

  Paisi frowned, utterly sober. “Well, ye won’t go alone, m’lord, not there.”

  He didn’t refuse Paisi’s offer. Gran was at her knitting— that, she could still do, though stitching taxed her eyesight and had for years.

  “Paisi and I will be going into town,” he said, and Gran said, “Well, well, take care,” and let him kiss her cheek. “We’ll be back well in time for supper,” he said. “We might stop at the smith’s and get him to bend that hinge.

  Our hammer can’t do it. We’re taking it along.”

  “Ye can bring a few apples,” Gran said, “an’ there might be tarts.”

  “Apples, indeed,” he said, feeling better about the venture, and went outside. Paisi was finishing up saddling Feiny, in the kind of light, blowing snow that might come from the heavens or off the thatch, and he helped, and mounted up. Paisi and he rode out the gate, as before, and down the road.

  Carts had passed, yesterday, market bound, and come back again.

  “Ol’ Semmy’s sold ’is ’ides,” Paisi remarked, reading the tracks and the habits of their neighbor.

  “Good profit, in a scant market,” he said. He had his wits about him.

  Everything seemed easier, now that he had taken the decision to go, and he and Paisi talked about the road, the weather, and Ynefel— which Paisi had tried to get out of him for days. It all became easier to tell.

  In his inmost thoughts, he wanted to have the visit with his mother before Lord Tristen came. It was what he had told Lord Crissand, that afterward, things might be confused, and he wanted to do it now, before the rules changed. He wanted, once, to stand up to her and not be afraid, before Lord Tristen came to put fear into her, or to put some new barrier between him and her. He didn’t want to lose that chance, and the dreams she sent told him now with cruel clarity who had drawn him back from Guelemara, and who was at fault, between him and his father.

  He and Paisi rode through the town gates and up the hill. “You might go to the smith’s while I’m about this,” Elfwyn said. “Get the hinge fi xed. And we can get the apples on the way back to the gate.”

  “I ain’t goin’ anywheres but where you are,” Paisi said doggedly. And that was the way things would be.

  The ring won admittance for both of them, at least as far as inside the Zeide, and to the bottom of the tower steps, where his mother’s guards stood, day and night.

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  Paisi would have climbed those stairs with him: Paisi was greatly afraid, and still would have done it, but he stopped Paisi down where the guards stood. “Wait for me. She would raise a fuss about your coming, if only to worry me. I won’t be long. She won’t like what I have to tell her. Not this time.”

  “You don’t take to heart anything she says,” Paisi said in a low voice, but he did stay with the one guard when Elfwyn started up the stairs with the other.

  He wanted to know what she had been doing, why she had been doing it, and if one actually wanted bad news in the world, his mother was as good a source of it as he knew . . . she had a habit of telling the truth, on many occasions, especially if it was a truth he didn’t want to hear.

  Bony child, she’d been in the habit of calling him, and again she’d said: Your hands are as rough as any peasant’s. Your father’s son, and with such beautiful hands. It’s shameful.

  He reached the door— the door was barred, but not guarded above: he suspected the guards didn’t want to stand that near, but the one had come up the steps with him and lifted the large, protected bar— it was necessary to free the bar, first, from a central restraint which no prying from within the room could reach. “You knock loud,” the man said, before he opened it. “You give it three good hard raps when you want out. I’ll stand right out here.”

  “Thank you,” he said, and as the door opened, stepped inside.

  It was a modest place, a room with figured carpets, a bed surrounded with draperies, and an alcove with windows that had shutters, though his mother rarely drew them. She stood by one of those fi ve windows, the sunlight falling on a face that still was beautiful. She had red hair, and it fl owed down her back, loose as a maiden’s— or a witch’s locks.

  “Mother,” he said. “I take it you want to see me.”

  “Ah, my dear boy.” She came toward him, grandly offering to take his hands, and, mindful of what his right hand had, he gave only his left.

  “What,” she exclaimed, pressing the offered hand in both of hers and leaning forward. “No kiss for your mother?”

  He hadn’t the fortitude. He didn’t recoil, but he did step back. “A kiss when you’ve won it. And you haven’t. You’ve tried your best to make me miserable.”

  “Oh?” she asked, and turned her shoulder, walked a space into the shadow. “How is your father?”

  “Fair- minded and honest.” He found himself launched in a battle of cold 2 5 8

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  words, an art he had learned from her. He had had as much as a year to think how he would meet her questions next time, yet always she confounded him in her own game. He gave up subtlety this time, his newest mode of attack, which took all the courage he had. “You sent the dreams, Mother. I know you did, so don’t lie to me. I’ve been to Lord Tristen. He advises me carry the name you gave me, so I will, from now on. Does that satisfy you?”

  “I’m sure it’s no great matter to me,” she said, “since you’re an ungrateful boy. You always were. And how is the Sihhë - lord?”

  “He’ll speak for himself when he comes here,” he said, “and he will, soon. He didn’t like what he heard.”

  “Oh, did you bear tales? And have you come to threaten me?”

  “I came to war
n you. He will come here. He’s not pleased. Neither am I, Mother. So if you want one soul in all the world to be sorry for you—”

  “To be sorry for me?” Her laughter was silver, and her hand flew to her breast, delicate and eloquent. “Dear boy, I don’t need your charity. You may need mine. Your sojourn in Guelemara was far from happy and fortunate, lad! The priests cursed you, didn’t they? Quinalt priests will never love you.

  Quinalt priests dug up our dead when your dear father hanged your young uncle: at your dear father’s orders, our graves were emptied, and the moldering dead went into exile, all, all bundled into a common cart and hauled off across the border, for the sanctity of Amefel, you understand— to satisfy the Bloody Marhanen’s spite. Not enough to kill us and exile us. He set up that traitor downstairs, that smiling, perfidious man, who doles out his charity to you— does it taste that sweet?”

  He forgot, annually, how he lost arguments with his mother. She changed subjects, switched arguments, and never stopped for breath. “I came to tell you those two things, and to be sure I was right about you. I’ve done both.

  Good day, Mother.”

  “Your father lied to you. Lied, boy. Where was his concern for you, hiding you away, herding goats, peddling penny cures? And now he brings you to Guelemara and humiliates you, dragging you right under the noses of the Quinalt priests, knowing how they hate you, provoking them to act— oh, he’s not innocent of harm, boy. He wants to blunt any success you might have by setting the priests against you. He wants you frightened, and grateful, lapping pity and protection from his hand. Isn’t that the way it was, there? They chase you out, and you’re grateful to your father, who gave you pretty clothes and sweets? Fool, boy, fool!”

  “You named me Elfwyn.”

  “Elfwyn you should be, and are not! Elfwyn! The Sihhë blood runs in 2 5 9

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  your veins as it runs in mine, and, twice fool, you go riding off to Tristen Sihhë, as if he has any reason to protect you and see you rise in the world.”

  “He protected me once.”