C. J. Cherryh - Fortress 05 (20 page)

“I suppose so. But I don’t truly need him.”

“Well, you certainly need someone. Or you can stay in my quarters until Paisi comes back! Father didn’t forbid it, did he?”

The spark showed in Otter’s eye, then faded. “No. No, I shan’t cause any more trouble. And I daren’t have you caught in it.”

“Me?”

“The girl ran. I have a sorceress for a mother and a witch for my gran. Everybody already thinks what they think, and I never want them to think ill of you. That would be the worst thing.”

“Well, let them try to do anything! You shouldn’t be afraid.”

“They burned Bryalt folk here.”

“They never did.”

“They burned your mother’s priest. Paisi told me.”

Aewyn was taken aback. He never had heard that, but Paisi had never told an untruth, either. It must have happened before he was born, in the trouble in those years. “Well, a good many things happened before us. They never will do it again. Father won’t let them.”

“Maybe not. But people here hate witches. Quinalt priests do.”

“You’re not a witch.”

“Wizard. Men are wizards. Women are—”

“Well, I wish you were. My father’s favorite tutor was a wizard, for what it matters. Emuin Udaman was a Teranthine, and Teranthines can be wizards, just like Bryaltines can be, with their priests saying not a thing about it, so there you are!” Aewyn swung his feet. “Father says if he could find another Teranthine,
he’d
be my tutor and I’d learn some sense. I almost remember Emuin. I think he should look again.”

Otter gave a grudging laugh, finally.

Aewyn asked: “So what were you truly doing with the water and the charm?”

“I was trying to see Gran, or Paisi. But I failed.”

That was disappointing. “I wish you
could
do magic.”

“Wizardry. Magic is born in you.”

“Well, whatever it is, I wish you had it. I wish you could show me. I should like to see it.”

Otter looked about them. The servants were all in the other room, and it had been a foolish thing to say, Aewyn knew it: but there, it was said.

“I wish I could,” Otter said. “It was the first time I ever really, truly tried, and it was no good.”

“But you had the dream.”

“I dreamed, but that was none of my doing, the dreaming, I mean. It would be a Sending. And we shouldn’t at all be talking about this.”

“Well, it is all nonsense, is it not?” The candle still sat on the table, where Otter had set it down. Aewyn slid off the bed and went and set it on the mantel instead, amid its evergreen bough. “See?

Now we shall have a proper holiday, just like in Amefel and Elwynor. Change your mind and stay in my rooms!”

“I think I should stay here. I have trouble enough. And you should let the queen send her servants. Keep Captys. Thank you—thank you for rescuing me.”

“Piffle.” That was what his mother said to nonsense. “Piffle. I’m going back to my rooms, I suppose. But come after dark. Then we can have supper. Right after services tomorrow we can eat, and you can come to my rooms for supper then, too, do you agree?”

That drew a brighter look, a hungry look. Otter nodded yes, and Aewyn winked—his father’s wink—before he walked into the other room and gathered his servants.

v

THE WORLD SEEMED MUCH BETTER IN OTTER’S EYES: HE

HAD THE KING’S FORGIVENESS, his brother’s invitation to supper tonight, the noon meal, and supper tomorrow, and the promise of the queen’s servants’ help if only he could keep out of trouble.

His brother had taken away his own servants and the guards.

The rooms were neater than Paisi had ever made them, and he would like a bath. Baths were a luxury he had gotten to love, with all the chill of winter outside the windows and creeping into the stones, and, filthy as he was, he longed to be clean. There was the way they did it at Gran’s in the winter, a matter of soaking towels in hot water and scrubbing off; which was its own sort of comfort to wind-raw hands and cold-numbed feet, and he began to heat water in the bedwarmer to do just that.

He wondered how Paisi fared tonight: he would be well along to the river crossing by now, and he hoped Paisi was toasting his feet by a good fireside, with no constraints of fasting or praying in the merchants’ company. He had thought a great deal about Paisi, and how he could join him, during his hours of hiding in the drafty heights. He had been so chilled and hungry he had thought he would never be warm or fed again.

But the king forgave him. No one even seemed that angry. And the queen…

He visited the candle while the water heated. He smelled its green scent but did not touch it: it had a tingling about it, a magical feeling that whispered of forces, kindly forces, he thought… but forces, all the same, and a power that was neither Gran’s nor yet his own mother’s, and he was sure that if it were lit, the fire would loose those things around him. He was grateful to the queen, but he dared not be ready to loose a force he didn’t wholly know and let it have its way in his room. Gran and his mother alike had made him cautious in such regards, and Gran’s sort of witchcraft had gone amiss this morning, whether it was his fault or the Quinalt’s. He was not ready to try another pass at it.

Besides, the scent reminded him of home and weakened him, which was a spell unto itself; and had a power in its very nature.

He felt it. And the queen was Ninévrisë Syrillas, of the old blood, the Sihhë blood, from long ago, like his mother’s Gift, though light and not dark. And Gran had warned him, had she not?

Ye respect the queen, young lad, ye respect that great lady. The
Sight is in her, no question, like in her da, him under the hill in
Amefel, an’ don’t ye e’er doubt it.

He gave a little shiver, as if a draft had touched him.

Or a door had opened.

It had. His heart jumped, as he found Efanor standing in his front room, Prince Efanor, accompanied by a priest in black robes.

“Your Highness,” Otter murmured, and achieved a small bow, trying to gather his wits in the process. And to the priest, respectfully, with another bow: “Sir.”

“Well, Otter,” Efanor said quietly. “You certainly had a cold, dusty day.”

“Yes, Your Highness.” Perhaps the king or the Prince might have disapproved of Aewyn’s visiting here, after his misdeeds—or perhaps Efanor’s forgiveness would not come as easily as his father had led him to believe. Perhaps they had come to punish him, after all.

“Sending your man away was one thing,” Efanor said, “and whether that was wisely done or not remains to be known; but pretending otherwise, Otter, and deceiving your father and attempting matters which ought not to be undertaken here—by such small gaps in judgment other forces find their way where they ought not, getting into places where otherwise they cannot come.

Have you any least notion what we tell you?”

“That I was a fool, Your Highness.” Efanor was the most scholarly Quinalt of anyone he had met, except the priests, and while much that Efanor said racketed through his hearing and never stuck at all, he had the one matter clear, that there was fault, and it was his, and that what he had done was dangerous in ways beyond his understanding.

“Well, well,” Efanor said, “you were that. And it was a boy’s fault, not to be repeated. Loneliness at holidays brings dark thoughts, which we simply shall not allow. The true story will go abroad, that illness in your gran’s house detained you this morning—that is the truth, is it not?”

It was, when he looked at it that way, a certain version of the truth. “Yes, Your Highness.”

“Well, and hereafter you will not be alone. Brother Trassin will attend your needs, whatever they be, until your man finds his way back again, as I trust he will. Will he not?”

“He will, Your Highness.” He was distracted, casting an apprehensive glance at the man in priestly black. This was a dour-faced and solemn man, his hands tucked up into his sleeves: Quinalt, very surely Quinalt—though a monk, by the title, and not quite a priest.

Still a spy, Paisi would say. A sneak and a spy set here to catch a boy doing what he ought not, and what word of protest would priests believe if this man reported mischief of any kind?

“Come.” Efanor walked into Otter’s bedroom, and to the white-frosted window. There, having beckoned him near, Efanor set a hand on his shoulder and looked straight into his eyes at close range. “This man is a servant of the Patriarch, and will search and spy to prove there is no harm. You understand me. Have you anything you ought not to have in these rooms?”

“Gran’s amulet.” He pressed his hand against his chest, where, since this morning, it rested beneath his clothes.

“Give it to me, for the while.”

He was reluctant, but dared not refuse. He reached into his collar and drew it out, warm from his body, warm with Gran’s protection.

Burning cold flowed toward him from the window the while, chill enough to sting.

“Good lad.” Efanor pressed something else into his hand, another warm object, on a chain. “Whatever gift comes in love is potent,”

Efanor said, “against all manner of ills. Keep this close tonight and tomorrow, wear it openly, do well, and by Festival end, this man will be gone from your premises with a good report for the Patriarch himself—a costly favor I ask you, understand; a penance for you, one that will pay for your indiscretion.” Again the intimate touch of Efanor’s hand, but a calming one, a peaceful one on his shoulder.

It was a Quinalt sigil in his hand. It had no liveliness such as Gran’s coins had. But he obediently slipped the chain over his head and let it rest in plain sight, while his heart thumped away in fear.

“Good, good,” Efanor said. “There’s good sense there. Endure the brother. A necessary matter.”

“Yes, sir,” he whispered, and Efanor went away.

“Why is there an empty bedwarmer in the fireplace?” Brother Trassin asked.

It had boiled dry. “I would like a bath, sir,” he said. “Will you arrange one?”

Trassin frowned but went and did that. Water arrived, hot water and cold, and he did bathe, letting Brother Trassin see the Quinalt sigil, but he did not want the brother in the little bath while he was bathing. He wrapped in towels, dried his hair with them, and hung things neatly. The clothes—he hardly knew what to do with. He hung them up, too, in the bath, and dressed in his most ordinary clothing.

“I need my clothes cleaned, sir,” he said to Brother Trassin, and Brother Trassin, instead of taking them himself, went and called servants to do that, standing by in great disapproval until the dirty clothes and the towels disappeared.

“Were other clothes to come?” he asked.

“I have no idea,” Trassin said, paying him no m’lord and no courtesy. He simply stood in the room, arms in his sleeves, the Quinalt sigil prominent on his breast, and that was that.

Brother Trassin stayed, no fount of conversation or pleasantry, and while he sat in his bedroom pretending to read, Brother Trassin pretended to clean the place again, opening all the cupboards and drawers and looking into everything in the process. Brother Trassin spoke never a voluntary word to him, except to give him certain long, long looks, as if he expected him to turn into a rat or a snake on the spot.

In those moments he felt very uncomfortable. Efanor had given him the other sigil he was wearing, a reminder that the Prince himself had contrived this and set a protection on him, perhaps for his father’s sake, or Aewyn’s.

Trassin continued his cleaning in the room where he sat. The queen’s candle drew another such look from Brother Trassin, and a sniff. The man went his way then into the bath, into more nooks and crannies.

Otter went on pretending to read until the light failed in the window, and Brother Trassin fed the fire in the other room until that light was brighter.

“We may break our fast now,” the lay brother pronounced, the only thing he had said, all day. “Shall I send down to the kitchens?”

“Do,” he said, as he would have said to Paisi—though Paisi would have gone down himself, and so far as he knew, there was no one for Brother Trassin to send. But he remembered with great relief that he himself had somewhere to go. “For yourself only, sir. I’m bidden to the Prince’s table tonight.”

“Then I shall conduct you there,” the monk said, and did just that—not lingering with Prince Aewyn’s staff when they arrived.

Trassin departed farther down the hall, on his way to the kitchens, or to report to someone, Otter had no notion which. He was greatly relieved to find himself on the other side of the doors, in Aewyn’s receiving room, which smelled of a savory meal laid out.

“Ha! Just in time!” Aewyn called out, arriving in the other doorway, and came and flung an arm about him. “On time and hungry, are we?”

He took it for a reprimand and found nothing to say. He was in a glum humor. But Aewyn shook him in a friendly way and drew him toward the laden table—feast, as the long day had been famine—and poured a cup of watered wine. “Here, for a thirst as great as mine! I waited for you faithfully.”

“You needn’t have done that.”

“Of course I needn’t, I needn’t
anything
, but I wanted to. How is the spy?”

The wine caught in his throat.

“Brother Trassin?”

“He’s clearly the Patriarch’s spy,” Aewyn said, “the nasty old man.”

Otter looked left and right, to see which of the servants was in earshot. “Don’t say so.”

“Oh, nonsense. Uncle knows exactly what he is, and His Holiness sent him over here after the rumor reached him. Papa doesn’t like the fellow. He was
my
tutor for six whole weeks before Uncle found out he was the Patriarch’s man, taking notes. He was the most boring tutor ever anyway. All catechism. He loves to read lists.

Probably he’s making one, in your rooms.”

It was not encouraging to hear. “Lists of what?”

“Oh, horrid charms and things. Which you don’t have.”

“No. Your uncle took it.”

“
Your
uncle, too. His Grace is not partial to Brother Trassin, I do assure you. Far from it. If he can get him in trouble, he’ll be ever so happy. Cheer up. Have some pie. It’s a wonderful meat pie.”