Fortress of Ice

by C. J. Cherryh

  c. j. cherryh

  Perhaps it was the wine— the lights seemed to dim as he turned in that direction, as if someone had extinguished the candles one by one, while past the great stairs, farther down the corridor, near the place his mother’s guards stood, he saw a blue light and perceived the sound of wings.

  It was the haunt, he thought. Or his dream. But he was sure he was awake.

  He knew its threat. He knew he should run right up the stairs, but up above looked dark, and light only down here, and he stood looking down that rightward hall until he could see that blue light stronger and stronger, like the light of healthy wards. It began to cast the shadow of wings on the other wall.

  That way lay his mother’s tower. Her guards would be there. They must see it, too. And what if it was his mother, testing the strength of those wards?

  He could reinforce them. If her guards were in danger, he might make a difference and prevent any harm. His mother might strike him, but he could engage her and keep her occupied: in that regard he had no fear for his own safety.

  He went in that direction, and with every step the pulse quickened in his veins and the dread and, indeed, the resolution increased.

  And his curiosity. That, too. To his alarm, he didn’t see the guards. The light of the haunt overwhelmed the hall and blotted out the sight of them.

  This, he thought, was where he should stop, and having what Lord Tristen had taught him, he should reinforce the wards. He saw, along the fl oor, faded, near white old Lines, where the stonework was mismatched. Over them lay new, stronger blue lines, like that blazing blue of the haunt itself, shadowed with beating wings, a sound that became like thunder in his ears.

  He looked, and a wind out of it began to stir his hair. There was in fact a gap there, and when he even thought of mending it, the Line belled outward and swept him into a place of long perches, beating wings, and slashing beaks.

  Now in mortal fear, he cast about to escape the haunt, and stepped out, across the Lines, but found himself not where he had been, but at the blank face of a wall, behind which he sensed an even greater horror— he had no notion what should be that terrible in the blank wall he could see, but without even thinking clearly, he spun about to escape, rushing in among the birds, as the lesser danger.

  The birds vanished around him. He stumbled against an upward step, a short stairs in utter dark. He banged his shin on further steps, and staggered up through the clinging, dusty folds of a curtain to . . .

  To the hall where he had started. The place the haunt had been was now 2 7 4

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  just as ordinary as a wall could be. Night candles gleamed placidly in the sconces, untroubled by any wind, and the guards, his mother’s guards, down the way, stood at their posts as if they had never noticed the haunt at all.

  He had just come up a stairway from a level he had no idea existed, behind a tapestry. And if he had more courage, he might go back down the steps behind that tapestry and confront what he was sure now was simply too much strong wine, or an overwrought mind, or too many dreams.

  He had not the courage to go down into that shadowed place. The memory was too strong. He simply turned, trying not to look like an utter fool for having blundered through a curtain, and walked back toward the grand stairs and up.

  Paisi was awake, sharpening his dagger by the fire, bandages and all, as Elfwyn slammed the door of their chambers shut at his back.

  “M’lord?” Paisi asked him.

  “It was the haunt, Paisi.” He came breathlessly down the short entry hall to the fireside, to light that still could not overcome the memory he had of that cold blue light, the sound of wings that still buzzed in his ears. “It was the haunt. I was just in it.”

  “In it?”

  “It was the wings, and I was somewhere else, then, back in the hall and nobody else even noticed. The candles didn’t blow out. The guards didn’t leave their places.”

  “That haunt leads places, is what,” Paisi said. “An’ once’t Lord Tristen and Lord Crissand went all the way to Elwynor by that haunt.”

  “To Elwynor!”

  “Or elsewhere. No knowin’ where ye was. Ye stay away from that place.

  Ye don’t above all go in there.”

  “I didn’t! Or I didn’t mean to. I don’t want to again!”

  “Ye sit down, lad. Ye ain’t used t’ drink, an’ ye had some, didn’t ye? Ye pour your own water in, if someone serves ye strong wine. Specially if it’s more ’n one. Damn, I knew I should ha’ come down t’ serve ye.”

  His head spun and felt stuffed with wool. And he hadn’t wanted Paisi acting as his servant, standing behind his chair. But he’d wished at the time he had dared pour water into what the duke offered him, which was clearly costly wine. Next time, he said to himself, he would do it, and never mind the embarrassment. Crissand had called him cousin, treated him like a grown man. Crissand, however, would forgive his manners.

  “Maybe it was just the wine,” he said. “Maybe I’ve had too many dreams.”

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  c. j. cherryh

  “There’s a good lad. Or maybe ye did see the haunt. I ain’t sayin’ ye didn’t.”

  “I’d swear I did.” He didn’t speak for a while, only sat and watched the fire. “It scared me. It scared me more than anything, and I can’t even say why it did. It was only birds, after all.”

  “Dead ’uns,” Paisi said, and kept sharpening the blade. “An’ how’s ’Is Grace?”

  “The duke,” he said, remembering. “His Grace said it’s not just Lord Tristen who’s coming. He wrote to my father and maybe he’ll ride down when Lord Tristen does. And the lords of the provinces southward. Do you think my father will come?”

  “Oh, aye, he’s bosom friends wi’ Lord Tristen. He always has come, if he rides out.”

  “You already knew that?”

  “I wasn’t goin’ t’ promise it in case of something different happenin’, but it’s likely enough.”

  That good news tingled all the way down his limbs, and he let himself ever so slightly believe that it could be true. If Tristen was here in person to keep his mother at bay, things might work out with his father, too. That scratching at his window might indeed have been Owl. And curse the fear he’d had: he’d been too scared to let Owl in.

  “His Grace said he might,” he said to Paisi, “and he said, too, that he’d raise the stone for Gran, a marker right on the roadside where everybody can read it.”

  Only the king or the duke could put something on the public right of way.

  Even a goatherd knew that.

  “That’s grand,” Paisi said, not too enthusiastically, and shrugged, looking into the fire. After a moment he said, with a sigh: “She’d say it was too grand for her, wouldn’t she?”

  He thought about that. “She would.”

  “I tell you, I think she’d like it if we got the oxen and moved her in a country stone wi’ no writin’ nor fancy carvin’ at all. She’d complain she couldn’t read any writin’, nor ever could learn. It was just a frustration to her, an’ her eyes were too poor when I tried to teach her. But she’d like a good stone.”

  The manners of the fortress, its fine clothes and its ambitions had settled into him so quickly he’d fallen right into the duke’s grand notion, had he not? Paisi was who could make him know what Gran would say, so plain, so matter- of - fact in her speaking. Gran wasn’t someone, he thought, who could be honored by the duke. She was someone who might honor a duke or 2 7 6

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  even a king with her blessing, from such a stone. Calm and peaceful as the earth, she was . . . always had been.

  And it was strange, that when Paisi had said that, just in her words, he heaved a deep sigh, just like Paisi. He could think of her again, not the fi re, not the ashes, but Gran as she was, smiling at them, or poking about her stove, all the fire in the house tame again and under Gran’s dominion . . .

  As ought to be, he thought.
As forever ought to be. A pang of grief still touched him when he remembered now, but for a moment he was convinced that Gran was all right, despite his mother, despite him and his mistakes, despite everything.

  His mother might have power— might have blackest sorcery— might have broken loose the Lines and let loose the haunt in the night . . . but he’d gotten out of it, hadn’t he, all on his own? Despite anything she did to try to scare him or get him up those stairs, he could live under this roof, growing wiser, and stronger, and never, ever visit her again, despite all her tantrums and threats.

  Lord Tristen would see to her. And then there would be justice for Gran.

  iii

  the wings, he dreamed. the wings. the wings were in the wall. and elfwyn knew even amid the dream that he was only dreaming, and he turned over and slammed the pillow with his burned fist, which hurt, and dragged him halfway out of sleep.

  But when he fell back into the pillow he fell into the hallway again, and something pursued him, down the hall, around the turn to the library. He knew the library door: he had visited it with the duke when he was still small.

  He knew every detail of that amazing room, the eagles on the doors, carved shapes that screamed out of the wood, and he worked feverishly to get the latch open in time, as the pursuit of the hunter birds beat and thundered behind him, rattling the very stones of the keep. In there was safety, in there was what he had to have, and the birds behind him threatened that . . .

  The door came open. He was in the library, with its tall windows, its many tables, its tall stacks and shelves of books; and he was so sure that the answer to the hallway behind the tapestry was somewhere in this room, behind something, hidden, and if he could get it, and if he could solve that puzzle, then he would be safe, and Paisi would be safe, and nothing would ever threaten them like this again.

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  c. j. cherryh

  But the blue light and the wings had reached the library door, and beat to get in.

  Lord Tristen needed to know. He had to have what was in this room, and if it went elsewhere, even he was helpless. Tristen grew weaker and his mother more powerful, high up in her tower, so long as this thing stayed hidden . . . she struggled, sending the haunt, to get it into her own hands. If she got it, she would be unstoppable. She was on the track, with the birds, and he couldn’t fi nd it.

  Elfwyn waked, bolt upright in bed, and sweating. Paisi slept, snoring in his sleep, common and welcome sound.

  When sunlight came through the windows again, he was too ashamed to tell Paisi. It was just one of his dreams, fading, now, in import and in detail.

  He couldn’t even remember why he had been so afraid of birds, of all silly things, and what he had been after, and why he had waked screaming.

  His mother’s work.

  Or a warning. There were other haunts here. There were other ghosts besides a gathering of birds, hadn’t Paisi said so.

  iv

  they went down to see the horses in the morning, taking a treat from their breakfast, and finding them in excellent care and glad to see their masters. They lingered there, talked a time with the stableboys, and Paisi and the stablemaster fell to discussing people they’d known in the war years, before Elfwyn was even born.

  Elfwyn knew none of the names, and the wind was cold. His coat was thin, suited only to indoors, and he grew rapidly chill. So while Paisi talked, he simply slipped off quietly, waved, so Paisi would know he was going, and went on inside the fortress, intending to go up to the room and get his warmer cloak before he went outside again.

  He didn’t know why he walked as far as the center stairs of the lower west wing, when he passed a perfectly fi ne stairs he could have used to go above; or why he walked farther than that, down close to the haunt; but he could see, down in the east wing, and with the lower hall lights all lit, where the guards stood watch, and the blank wall where the haunt had appeared.

  Yes, there was indeed a tapestry there, or some sort of hanging, short of that place: it was not the only one in the hallway: there was no sign it con-2 7 8

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  cealed any mystery. And on from that, beyond the guards, but before the end of the hall, was the intersection of the east – west hall with the north hall.

  That way led to the library, and a view of a small garden— he remembered it from his childhood, when he had visited here; and suddenly the dream came back in particular detail. He walked that far, and did see, indeed, a difference in the stones, both in the style of stonework and in the pattern where something had been walled up, a change even in the quarry from which the floor pavings came: something had been walled up and changed, and the Lines here might not be what they ought to be . . . Tristen himself had repaired it, and in great temerity Elfwyn ran his hand along that wall, not looking at his mother’s guards, who must think him a very peculiar sort.

  Stay inside, he told the haunt. Mind your place.

  The tapestry however, gave under his fi ngers, hiding a short stair just as in his dream. He moved it back, and cautiously, mindful that the guards were out there watching this trespass, went down those steps into a dark lit only by a seam of light from under the curtain. He felt his way down, and came up against a blank masonry wall.

  Something else was walled up here. These stairs had surely led somewhere, once. But the little light that came in under the tapestry gave little defi nition to the stones, and his own shadow covered all possible detail. Nothing here seemed so imminently frightening, but he began to think it was not a good place to be. He decided to ask Paisi what had used to be here.

  He went up again, into the hall, and past the place of the haunt then, trailing his fingers along the wall, and past the guards, who stood facing one another, leaning on the columns near them and talking with one another, so absorbed in their conversation they seemed not to have seen his odd behavior. They never looked his way. Or perhaps he had entered again into the dream. The feeling of that dream began to overlay the hall as it was, but the shape of the hall, exactly as his dream had believed he remembered it . . .

  was exactly like this, when he was sure he would never have recalled such detail as the moldings and the shape of the arch at the intersection.

  Now he burned to know if the library doors themselves were exactly as what he had dreamed, or he remembered from so long ago, and he walked that hall, and found the doors open, not shut. He peered into the shadows behind one, and saw the eagle with its beak open, indeed, carved in the upper panel, and when he walked into the doorway, he saw the tables as he had dreamed, and the windows, and the shelves . . . and there was something here. He had dreamed there was something here, of such importance, such dire importance . . .

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  c. j. cherryh

  An old man in dusty robes intercepted him. “Sir?” that man asked. “Are you looking for a particular book?”

  It was what one did in the library. “A history,” he said, trying to seem like a lad bent on business. History was his favorite kind of book. He feared to be caught by a stranger, like this man, and questioned on matters he could ill explain. “A history of Amefel.”

  “Well, now, there is that. There are several. Might I ask your name, young gentleman? Are you a guest?”

  “My name is Elfwyn Aswydd,” he said, and saw the old man’s jaw drop.

  “I’m Lord Crissand’s guest,” he said, trying to erase that dismay. “My name used to be Otter. His Grace always has lent me books, for years and years.”

  “The boy in the cottage,” the old man said.

  “In Gran’s cottage,” he said, with an uncomfortable lump in his throat.

  Clearly the news had not gotten to this place. And all the while, his dream nagged at him with the most dire sense of something, some secret, some hidden thing within this room that he had to find, that could reach out and kill everything he loved. “Might I just look around, sir?” He showed the duke’s ring, and the old man peered at it somewhat more closely than th
e guards ever had, and straightened and bowed, and bowed again.

  “His Grace’s permission. Do be careful,” the old man whispered, meaning of the books, of course, but the caution stirred the hairs on his nape, all the same. There was more and more in this room that seemed oddly familiar to him, as if he’d seen it all before, down to that very stack of books on the first table, or the exact clutter on the old man’s desk, which he could never have expected to see.

  His heart beat faster and faster. The old man directed him to a table, and brought him books. The Chronicle of the Eagle was one. He opened it very carefully, handled the stiff parchment pages exactly as this man’s predecessor had instructed him. The old man hovered a little less near, told him where other histories were kept, and drifted off about his duties.

  He leafed through, standing, finding nothing in particular that caught his eye, except a grand illumination of the Battle of Lewen Field, with soldiers dying and the Eagle banner flying conspicuously. The Sihhë Star was there, black and stark. That he had ever seen that emblem in its proper place still seemed incredible to him, and the ring tingled on his hand as he thought about it.

  The fear, however, dogged him, like something standing just at his shoulder, something that darted from one side of his vision to the other, taunting him. He strayed from the table to the shelf the old man had pointed out.

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  He saw, on the shelves, a large, ancient volume: The Art of War, translated by . . . but the name had worn off the spine. There was The Red Chronicle.

  That book drew him, as one he had long heard mentioned, and he reached toward it, thinking to take it from the shelf.

  Steps came up behind him. He turned, empty - handed, and the librarian passed over a heavy volume. He felt, for some reason he couldn’t understand, an unaccustomed guilt and distress at the interruption in his reach, as if he had lied to the old man and could not even remember the lie he had told.

  The codex the old man gave him was, indeed , A History of Amefel.