C. J. Cherryh - Fortress 05 (24 page)

He
had force enough. Efanor had discovered it in him on that day, call it prayer, call it a Working, in Tristen’s terms: he had prayed, then, not to the Five, but to justice, and fairness, and to the balance that kept the living in possession of the hill: he prayed now for the lives of all those present, all the city round about, for his duchy of Guelessar, for all the realm, all weighed against the dead, and whatever force tried to break those Lines that held the shadow back.

Shadow pressed back. The blue Lines turned red, and gold, and a few snapped. The boy shivered, and flinched, and Efanor loosened his grip somewhat, praying with all his might, lips moving now.

The boy’s other hand closed atop his, circle closed, force running through all the boy’s being, and Efanor locked his left hand atop all, willing safety on the lot of them, on all present.

The Lines held. What he held, what he met, in that completed grip, tingled through him in a way he had rarely felt.

It held. It held through the singing and the Holy Father’s sermon, the old man talking on and on about thanksgiving for deliverance from sins, and uttering inanities, outright inanities about birth indicating a soul’s righteousness and rank being given by the gods.

What rank, this boy
? Efanor wondered, distracted.
What holiness,
this lad, the bastard, whose presence this place abhors
?

Whose life this place fears…

It fears him, fears the Aswydd blood. The old enemy, is it, you
shadows?

The Marhanen lie buried here
, Efanor thought:
my father, my
grandfather, the queens, the forgotten princes, those who never
reigned, and those who did
—
my grandfather who slaughtered the
Sihhë-lords and overthrew their palaces… who suborned the
Aswydds in the doing of it, but the Aswydds were never the object of
the attack and never suffered what their lords did. The Aswydds
ruled on, under special provision, with their own peculiar titles and
honors preserved
—
the Aswydds still rule, by Cefwyn’s own
dispensation
.

Aswydd blood can’t be the disturbance here
.

Something else is.

A howling wind seemed to go through the sanctuary, up among the banners, but none of the audience stirred. The boy, however, looked up, candlelight reflecting in his eyes. The boy had heard it.

The boy had felt it.

Had he heard some threat yesterday, when the censer fell?

There had been a thunderclap in that moment, in Efanor’s ears.

Thunder in the snowfall, that no one seemed to have heard, only the fall of the censer, the ringing of metal, the racket of the congregation all out of their seats, striving to see…

“Good lad,” Efanor whispered, under the singing. “Good lad.”

A desperate look turned to him. The boy’s hands were like ice.

Beyond, Aewyn had looked aloft, and cast them a worried look, as if perceiving some trouble beyond his ken.

“You should not come here,” Efanor said to the boy in his grip. “I know that. I shall talk to your father.”

“My lord.” The boy tried to withdraw one hand, and Efanor let him, retaining only a hold on his wrist.

“I shall see you safely out of here, when the congregation rises.

Walk quietly. I shall keep close by.” Efanor let go the boy’s wrist as the congregation rose. He slipped an arm around him instead, and when Cefwyn and Ninévrisë began the procession, drew him into the aisle, proceeding together behind the king and queen, down the long walk toward the opening doors. Aewyn came up on Otter’s other side, and put his arm about him, the image of familial devotion as they came out the doors.

It was surely more familial devotion than Cefwyn might want displayed, making clear to all the witnessing crowd outside that here was the Aswydd sorceress’s son, the family mistake, in the very heart of the family, embraced by both generations. Cefwyn might not see the shadows running the aisles like spilled ink, might not feel the bands of terror loosed from about his ribs as they passed the doors or see the sunlight as the cleansing force it was.

Otter must not go there again
, Efanor said to himself, shaken.
He
must not go there. Cefwyn’s will or no, he dares not
.

He slipped his hand from the boy’s shoulder then, letting Aewyn and Otter go their way in the mistaken blitheness of boys, the darkness inside now past. They made a game of walking together through the snow as they reached the bottom of the steps, kicking it into flurries.

Boys, still. Boys whose fates rested in other hands than their own—

In the hands of grown men, who had to act with the limited understanding they had; and Efanor turned back forthwith toward the Quinaltine, taking an untracked walk toward the priests’ door, along the side of the building, where a wintry, snowy hedge concealed his visit from common view.

He opened the unlocked door, walked into the close, echoing warren that held the private chapels, the robing rooms, the wardens’ chambers, and the storerooms that supplied the less public aspects of the Quinaltine services. He climbed up a flight of narrow steps, and into His Holiness’ less public domain, where the Holy Father, the Patriarch, was shedding the heavy gold miter. His sparse white hair had wisped up into random peaks. He looked like any old man caught in dressing, except for the golden raiments, except for priests and lay brothers who raced up to him to ask questions and receive instructions, departing again at a run. It was a hive overturned, buzzing with distress and worry.

“Your Holiness,” Efanor said.

“Your Grace, the spot is back. It’s back, it’s on the new stone, and it’s larger. The whole city will see the mark!”

“Shut the doors.”

“Shut the doors? It’s Thanksgiving, the day before Praise. I have another service to hold in an hour, and the commons at eventide.

We can’t shut the doors!”

“We’ve other stones. We’ll lay another stone. The services will be late today.”

“What will we tell the populace?”

“Tell them anything. Lie. Decry excessive drunkenness in the crowd. Say you’ve taken ill. But shut the doors!”

He turned on his heel and left a royal order hanging in the air.

The Patriarch might send to the king to confirm it; and he had to reach his brother beforehand.

He lost no time at all, crossing between the Quinaltine and the Guelesfort. Unlike his brother, he moved at times without guard or escort, and this was notably such a moment, in which his plain raiment and his haste was disguise enough, given the sifting fall of snow. The crowd in the square was waiting to be let into services that would, alas, be hours delayed. The guardsmen closing the Guelesfort gate realized who he was and let him pass.

He left melting snow behind him as he climbed the servants’

stairs, up to the level of the royal apartments and straight down the hall… past the boy’s rooms, and past Aewyn’s, straight for his brother’s.

But not without interception. A black-clad guardsman checked him with a hand on his arm, right near his brother’s door.

Idrys.

“Your Grace,” the Lord Commander said in a low voice. “I take it that it was not without disturbance.”

“No,” he said, “it was not.”

ii

IT WAS A VISITATION OF ILL OMEN: CEFWYN SAW IT

COMING——EFANOR, PASSING the guard at his chamber doors with no lingering courtesies, went straight to the point, just when the Lord Chamberlain had begun a report, and asked for complete privacy.

“The mark is back,” Efanor said directly.

“No such thing!” Cefwyn said. “I looked. I saw nothing at all.”

“Some see it. Some, among the priests, the Holy Father—as well as your Aswydd son—do.
I
see it. It will manifest again. I’ve ordered the doors shut, the stone replaced. Your miracle, brother, has failed; worse, it’s gone wrong. All through the service, I was with the boy…”

“Who did nothing!”

“I will warrant myself, by deed or word or invocation, he did nothing— but what he saw, and what I saw, brother—”

“These Lines.”

“You’ve seen them yourself. I know you can see them.”

“I agree they’re there. Once and twice, yes, I’ve seen them elsewhere, in darkest night. Why should we be so blessed this time?

And why should it be the boy’s fault? Why not one of the priests doing this?”

“I don’t at all deny that it could be. But the fact is, other things manifest when the boy is there. They frighten him, and what I saw there this morning frightens me. Listen this time, brother.

Whatever the cause, for the boy’s sake, for yours, the boy must not go through those doors again.”

Master Crow had come in, sole exception to the request for utter privacy, and stood by, arms folded, the last man on earth who might see mysterious Lines or give way to superstition; but he, like Efanor, had seen far more unaccountable things in his life.

“My lord king,” Idrys said unbidden, “consider, not alone the boy’s mother, but the mother’s sister. Born at a sorceress’s will—”

“You are about to offend me, Crow.”

“Sorcery brought you into the Aswydd’s bed, sorcery conceived a son you will not now disavow—on what advice, yes, has generally been good advice, but Lord Tristen never counseled you to bring that boy into the Quinalt, my lord king. I would wager heavily on that. This was your own notion.”

“Damn you, Crow!”

“Oh, I’ll deserve it more before I’m done speaking. What you do, you do broad and far. You were a wild and froward boy. You are a generous and occasionally excessive man, where it touches your demonstrations of the gentler sentiments: love me, love my boys, or be damned to you all. Do I mistake your intent to press popular sentiment to the wall? You appointed the Holy Father: you can unseat him if he crosses you—but you’ll come to me to do the deed.

Oh, I do serve you, my lord king, but His Grace has warned you, and I warn you. I
miss
Master Grayfrock. He’d mince no words.

You find yourself hell-bent on a course that will destroy you—wizards are in it. And is there not a smell of wizardry about this boy? Say no, and I’ll know for a certainty you’re bespelled, my lord king.”

It was one of Crow’s better speeches. It left Cefwyn silent, except to say:

“You advised me drown him at birth.”

“I don’t think I specified the method, my lord king, but I did foresee this moment.”

“So did His Majesty,” Efanor said, “or he’d not have been so stubborn in this matter.”

“Damn both of you! This is not for jest!”

“You brought this boy in,” Idrys said in measured tones, “while I was otherwise occupied. You had no wish to hear my opinions on the matter. But being here now, I give them, gratis.”

“If I’m ever cut, Idrys will bring salt, will he not?”

“The boy,” Efanor said, “has no ill will, nor malice in him, nor practices anything unwholesome. He is innocent, and as Emuin would say, worse than that, he is ignorant. That said, this morning proves he has the Gift, in what measure I cannot tell—but enough: enough to make him a door through which Tarien Aswydd can look into this place, if not enter. The Quinaltine dead are roused… to what, I cannot say. It was no simple sneeze that hurled that censer to the stones. It was a struggle between what thin line protects the Quinaltine and what forces would bring utmost harm on you, on the queen, and on both your sons.”

“No.”

“Hear me. In him, Tarien has what she still lusts after: power.

You always meant to take him from his mother. You snatched him from her at birth, you instructed him to fear her. But you had no power to break her desire for him.”

“What would I, kill her and loose another ghost?”

“What will you? Disinherit Crissand’s sons and install this boy as the Aswydd?”

“No. That is not my intent.”

“No place for him, then, in Amefel, where he might live. What shall you teach him to be, then? A captain of the Guard? He can’t ride, or fence. A
cleric
, perhaps! An Aswydd cleric!”

“If I wanted him a cleric, I’d send him to the Teranthines.”

“If we could find one. Their shrines stand vacant. And even they would fear him. For what do you prepare this boy?”

“I am making a lasting peace between my sons, exactly the reverse of our father’s intent for us.”

“Sons defy their fathers’ wishes. What, when your sons defy yours?”

He could argue with Master Crow. Crow only vexed him. Efanor had a way of cutting deeper, touching his fear for Nevris, for his daughter, and his son, in for the likelihood that Aswydd sorcery had indeed some purpose for his long-ago misdeeds, and revenge as its object. His stomach was upset, and for a moment he averted his face from the arguments, standing, arms folded, face to the windows.

“The boy should go home,” Idrys said.

“Crow.” The Marhanen temper threatened to get the better of him. “Time you left.”

“He’s done all you wished,” Efanor said. “He’s forgiven and blessed, and written in the holy record. And if his gran, as we have now established with Brother Trassin, is ill—if she should get worse—if there were a messenger to arrive with dire news, if the boy were simply to fly home to his gran, as a consequence of such a missive, it would be a great success he has achieved here. Would it not? There would be an explanation for his departure. And talk would die down.”

Cefwyn let go a long, difficult breath.

“I like the boy,” Efanor said. “He has admirable qualities.”

“We are not burying him, damn it all! He will be back!”

“Indeed.” Idrys had not gone away as requested. Cefwyn looked at him, where Idrys leaned, long arms folded, against the royal writing desk. “The stench of fire in the sanctuary is too evident, my lord king. And if we strip another stone from the chapel, and another, why, the priests will pray on bare earth by snowmelt.”

“Aewyn will be in mourning,” Cefwyn said.

“And what ever endeared itself to a boy’s heart like the forbidden?” Efanor asked. “Separate them, and they’ll fly together.”