Fortress of Eagles

by C. J. Cherryh

  And he looked about him at a courtyard choked with soldiery, at walls on which the torches cast giant shadows of warlike men, at the Zeide itself, the fortress of the citadel, standing with its windows dark as he had never seen them, its doors open and showing the only pure light, the glow of candles.

  This was his. This was his.

  Had they left the camp only this morning? And was it morning again?

  And had so much changed?

  BOOK THREE

  C H A P T E R 1

  Candles burned in great numbers in the lesser hall, which had no windows, no fire-place. Candles struggled wanly with the pervading cold of a room unopened for two months, since the viceroy had not, for whatever reason, used it in that length of time.

  That was the hall Tristen chose in these last hours before the dawn. He still felt the fever-warmth of battle, but in this place the cold of stone and neglect stole under the armor and padding. He chose this lesser hall partly because the great hall was still Cefwyn’s, to his scattered wits, and partly because this little, older hall was an easy recourse and easier to light, when his few reliable men had more urgent tasks than scouring up candles.

  And he chose it because this little marble chamber was the first place in the Zeide he had ever known, except the guardroom and the hall leading here. He had stood just there, at the foot of the steps. He had been looking up at Cefwyn, who had sat where he sat now; now, Uwen at his back, he looked down at one of Cefwyn’s officers, the sort whose obstinacy had made Cefwyn’s reign difficult in Guelessar.

  Parsynan was stolidly defiant. He had thus far been silent except to say, “Your Grace sent for me?” in those round, precise tones of Guelen nobility that said he was 347

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  not only unrepentant, but nobler than anyone who accused him, and Tristen looked very long and hard at a man who could do so much harm with so little profit even to himself.

  He was sure Cefwyn would not have appointed a fool. Yet the man had behaved as one. Cefwyn would not have appointed a Guelen noble so rigidly Quinalt he could not deal with Amefin nobles. Yet this man, in his insistence on the king’s law, had all but slaughtered an entire Amefin household, leaving its villages stripped of young men. Even a sometime fool whose life had begun this spring knew the damage Parsynan had done.

  And why? Why such useless malice?

  The contemplation of Parsynan’s actions gave him the same feeling that that apartment upstairs had given him, one of affairs unhinged. Cefwyn would not have appointed a man he knew would do such things. But wizardry could find the weak place in a latch…or in a man’s character…and use it.

  Cefwyn’s man had assuredly had other failures. The Dragon Guard had found Lord Parsynan not directing his men, not in command of the slaughter he had ordered, but inside the fortress, in his rooms, packing a box of women’s jewelry and a small bag of things a man might need when traveling light. He had not involved his servants in preparing to quit Henas’amef and he had not ordered prepared the boxes and bundles that naturally attended a noble-man’s movement across the country.

  The Guard said Parsynan had no lady here. So one had to ask whether he owned the jewels, and why he had not bidden his servants assist him.

  “You ordered the prisoners killed,” Tristen said now, without preface, “when I ordered them safe.”

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  “According to law, Your Grace, in the king’s name, I did so.

  And they are consequently extremely safe.”

  “The king sent me here and you are no longer viceroy.”

  “Still a king’s officer, Your Grace.”

  “Captain Anwyll.” With a motion of his hand he requested Anwyll’s account, which he had warned Anwyll he must give, and Anwyll came from the door to stand at the side of the steps.

  “Your Grace, his lordship took charge of the prisoners. I advised his lordship of Your Grace’s orders to have them under guard…”

  “Dare you say so!” Parsynan cried. “I received no such advisement! I executed traitors according to the king’s law, and dare any man, noble or commonborn, say they were not traitors?

  I will not be slandered here! I have His Majesty’s summons to return to the capital, and that will I, with my escort!”

  “Whose were the jewels?” Tristen asked.

  “Given me in gift, Your Grace!”

  “You may have a horse and a man to go with you, sir, and when the wagons come I will send your belongings to you.”

  “You send a king’s officer out in the night, as if I were some servant?”

  “As you were prepared to go, sir, except the jewelry, about which I will make inquiry. And you may not slander a king’s captain, either.”

  “I am not under your orders! And I will not be dismissed in this manner or with such implied accusations!”

  “Nothing is implied. You are in Henas’amef, sir, and the daylight is coming. There were three townsmen swept up in your killing. These were innocent men sup 350 / C. J. CHERRYH

  porting me, sir. I advise you go, and go now, before the sun rises!”

  The man hesitated, perhaps the space of two breaths, but it seemed forever. Leave without a word, Tristen wished him; and the anger snapped like a bent branch. Parsynan bent his head in scant courtesy, backed, bowed, turned and left, in strictest propriety.

  “M’lord,” Uwen said faintly at his shoulder, and leaned just a little lower, in the privacy of a hall vacant of all but guardsmen. “M’lord, I beg ye don’t wish him ill. There’d be rumors run riot if he slipped on the steps outside, rumors run riot in Amefel, and no end of trouble for us all.”

  Uwen had never before given him such a caution against malice. Perhaps Uwen saw the anger that had risen in him. But Emuin had said to him…

  Emuin had said to him…

  He drew a deep breath and let it go. He had not thought of Emuin. He had not thought of Emuin in hours. Or asked advice.

  There was confusion now in the gray place. He felt it on the instant he so much as wondered how things stood there, and he retreated in a heartbeat, resolved not to resort to that place again until he felt things far quieter than they were. The gods’

  orderly world was sliding, bits and pieces as yet unsettled as to what order they would soon assume, and he stayed the timbers where he could, shored up others in hopes of achieving his own design, all with the sense of limited time in which to do so.

  Young Crissand was not dead. Crissand’s men had snatched him from the Guelen Guard who had taken him, and they had defended him to the last, but many,

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  many of Crissand’s household and the men of his district were dead as a result. And as he had told Lord Parsynan, so were the three brave townsmen who had tried to intervene, though by the viceroy’s sole mercy other townsfolk who had rushed in to fight the rebels had been put out of the courtyard before the killing, and the Amefin lords, too, had been shut in the stable-court for their protection.

  Parsynan would take his advice and go. That left him with the destruction to deal with, but not the destroyer.

  And count among the ruin Parsynan had wrought the damaged reputation of the company of Guelen Guard, the town garrison. They had obeyed orders and carried out the slaughter.

  Anwyll advised him, and Uwen agreed, that he should send only a token of that regiment with Parsynan, reminding him that he had no direct order to reduce the garrison and that Cefwyn would not take it amiss.

  So while some few more of that unit must go back to Guelessar to guard Parsynan’s belongings when the wagons came, the rest should remain. Men who had been used in such an act needed to recover themselves and their honor, so said Anwyll and Uwen both, and could do it best here, where they would not have to deal with Parsynan’s wrenching the facts of the case aside from the truth or persuading them the orders had ever been honorable. There was nothing the Guelens could take pride in after this, save only if another lord could give t
hem some distinction, one that would wipe out the shame they had now, and Parsynan was not the lord to do it.

  Anwyll spoke eloquently for the Guelen Guard; but the shame was not only in the Guelen Guard, who evaded the eyes of men of the Dragon, but in Captain

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  Anwyll, himself, as Tristen saw it. Anwyll had been caught unprepared, had not refused Parsynan’s confiscating the prisoners, and now and forever rued the moment he had obeyed a king’s officer instead of the duke of Amefel. Once Anwyll had ceded the prisoners to Parsynan, with no idea what Parsynan intended, he could not have prevented the massacre without leading Dragon against Guelen Guard, an action that would have had only blame for the lowly captain and a scant reprimand for the lord who had behaved as Parsynan had. So no one had come off with clean hands, and two regiments of Cefwyn’s Guard had had to meet at swords’ point.

  That was Parsynan’s work tonight. No Guelenman had been killed, but the deed was there, and the entire Guelen army might never be the same as if it had never happened…while Amefin blood was shed even before the slaughter in the courtyard.

  And for all these reasons the day and the new rule in Amefel would dawn less bright than it might have done. Given his private choice of what to do now, Tristen thought, he would go see to his horses, take account of the men he personally knew, find a cup of water that did not come from Lady Orien’s cupboard and a bed in which she had not slept…or sit anywhere but in this hall letting guilty men go free and dealing with those he had provoked.

  But along with the power the new duke of Amefel had to dismiss everything and take those comforts by decree, he found himself obliged. He had watched Cefwyn, in utmost weariness and at any hour, gather himself up and attend what duty wanted attending, and now he knew Cefwyn had given him what neither Mauryl nor Emuin could give him: the model of FORTRESS OF EAGLES / 353

  a lord of men. So he knew what he had to do while he had the strength to hold up his head.

  But, but, with that sense of obligation came a temptation in which Mauryl and Emuin had taught him, with a strong sense of fear…he sorely wished to have done thus, and thus, and so to have prevented all the ill that had happened this night. He wished he could go back to that moment on the East Court steps and not have given the prisoners to Anwyll to escort. He regretted…and unlike Uwen and Anwyll, or any man not a wizard, he had a power to reach into the gray space, where moments might be all moments. He saw deaths at his feet, and knew he could seek back into the gray space, revisit that moment—not to change what ultimately had happened, but to gain a vantage much like his clear view from that hilltop in Guelessar, a chance to stand again on that step on the East Court, and to see himself, and Anwyll…but more importantly, see the doings in the gray place in that moment as well.

  Then he might see what influences had been at work.

  He might go back. That was always the temptation. He might walk that Road he had walked from Marna, do what could be done in the gray space, where moments defined themselves differently and where all roads were the same Road.

  And would he? Dared he? More to the point, had he…or would he ever?

  And had he at any moment on the east steps felt the skin on his arms prickle and the hair rise on his nape? In such a way one felt a visitor from after the event…the way he had met a shadow in the woods, once, on his way to the world of Men, a shadow which had been himself, wiser, going back on a Road fraught with peril.

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  from a Place and a crossroads of events which lent Hasufin’s sorcery its power. He had cast Hasufin Heltain away from that foothold on existence. But might Hasufin have others?

  —Or might he?

  He had felt nothing this night, perhaps. But this summer, the first time he had entered the lower hall, he had felt and seen a presence…the old mews, they told him, from an age when the modern great hall had been only a space in a far wider East Court. He still felt the terror of it.

  And might at least one visitation in that haunted place be his own, involved in some terrible event, perhaps even his decision on the East Court steps? Shadows were certainly abundant there…and perhaps they were not all the ghostly kind of shadow, nor the great and violent kind, but the sorrowful kind, the personally frightening kind: shadows of better intentions, better thoughts, regrets traveling down a road that bent back on itself like the year-circle, forever and ever haunting that place, that jointure of might-have-been and might-yet-be.

  His hands were cold on the stone. He perceived no ghost of himself here, in this hall, at least, only a scatter of soldiery, doubtless wholly bewildered at his woolgathering.

  The battle in the downstairs hall had run past that place of joinings, and blood had fallen on that floor…

  Blood, which was potent to call the dead, bridge the gaps in time, unify all that was. Emuin would never work such a spell.

  But had Mauryl, once? And did it sit in this hall, on this seat, meditating questions of life and death for a province? And did it sit here of its own will? Or of Mauryl’s?

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  “The nobles, m’lord,” Uwen prompted him. “They’re waitin’

  for ye, lad.”

  The soldiers were all staring at him, and did they bless themselves in fear of his lapses, or fear of their own at this haunted hour?

  It was the joining point of the night. It was the hour of beginnings and endings.

  “Let them in,” he said to Uwen.

  C H A P T E R 2

  The Amefin nobles, all released from their confinement in the stable-court, and waiting outside, must have seen Parsynan’s angry departure from the hall.

  Don’t wish Parsynan ill, Uwen said, and no, Tristen said to himself, he would not. But he did not wish Parsynan well, either, and if wishes could lend him wings, he wished the former viceroy out of Amefel before he finished speaking to these men, and wished his influence out of the town before he had begun the pattern of the Amefel he wished to exist.

  “I will see the earls,” he repeated, and to Uwen, a moment of weariness, and remembering that ducal power in this hall could command little acts as well as life and death and the movement of armies: “Is there a cup of clean water?”

  “I’ll bring one,” Uwen said, and did, from a soldier’s water flask. It tasted strongly of sulfur, and Clusyn monastery.

  But before he had taken more than two sips of it, the Amefin lords began to come in, exhausted men, indignant men, frightened men.

  He gave the flask back to Uwen, and his hand trembled doing it, less to do with the cold stone seat than with utter weariness.

  He still had blood and soot on his

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  garments, and he faced the tatters of a court, one missing one of its strongest men, one whose alliances bound smaller houses together and made peace between great ones. “Where is thane Crissand?” he asked Uwen, in a low voice. “Has he gone or is he here?”

  “’S under close guard outside,” Uwen said. “He went to his house an’ he come back. His wish is to come into hall an’ stand in his father’s place, an’ there, I’ve delivered ’is message to ye, an’ the the rest ain’t in my hands, m’lord. Shall we let ’im in?”

  The son of a rebel, the son of a decimated house, with grievances the lord viceroy had made real and just, was a weight not only in the world of Men. He foreknew Anwyll’s objection.

  And there were consequences. Mauryl had dinned that into his very heart, first principle of wizardry and first in governing.

  “Not so easily,” Tristen said. “But bring him in.”

  “Your Grace,” Anwyll said, coming up the low steps of the dais also to lean close. “Shall I have the clerk read the document again? Some may not have heard it. Then Your Grace may ask they give the oaths, if it please Your Grace, which you should very soon.”

  The Guelenfolk guarding him were anxious that there b
e ceremony, always that there be ceremony and oaths: it was the sort of magic they felt they could work, the setting of wards such as they could do, indeed wards of some potency, if he could judge; and Anwyll, who had his instruction directly from Idrys, was extremely anxious that this at least go smoothly.

  Otherwise, he pitied Anwyll his return to Guelessar.

  “Do so,” he said, and at Anwyll’s bidding the clerk positioned himself in the spot of best light from the candles in the sconces, canted the parchment for the clearest view and read out the proclamation in good

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  ringing tones, with fewer mistakes than when he had read it before the gates.

  This time, in this solemn hall, however, and among these sober men, there were no cheers of Lord Sihhë! And this time Tristen paid the reading little heed, instead watching the faces of the earls as he struggled to gather up names he had not used in two months…Cuthan, there, foremost of them, had not been in the stable-court when the arrows were flying, but understandably so. He was elderly, a wisp of a man, doddering to look at him, but not so in wits or power: he recalled that from his sojourn here in the summer. Cuthan was a power among the earls, the one man Cefwyn might have made duke of Amefel if Cuthan had been willing; but Cuthan had begged off on account of his age and health. Then Edwyll had put forward his own claims to the honor, and with the man he would choose unwilling and with the man who was willing blood-tied to the Aswydds he had just exiled, Cefwyn had installed Lord Parsynan instead.

  More agreeable was Murras, a fat, cheerful man, and bravest of the earls was Drumman, lean as a post and one of the youngest, bearing a bloody bandage with evident pride and good humor, his badge of honor from the stable-court. Dusky-skinned Edracht, and gray-streaked Prushan: neither of them loved old Cuthan, which might have made them natural allies for other factions, but neither of them loved his brother lords any better, so far as he had observed.