C. J. Cherryh - Fortress 05 (35 page)

You’ve chosen to leave.”

“To come here,” he said, hoping he understood.

Tristen shook his head. “Here is only part of it. If I changed what happened, it wouldn’t altogether change what
will
happen. Cefwyn is well. You are. That’s to the good. And you say you left Gran and Paisi well?”

“Very well, my lord. But my father’s soldiers were after me.”

“Your father’s soldiers. You know they’d never harm you.”

“But they’d bring me back. And I was making trouble for everyone, where I was.”

“You weren’t the trouble,” Tristen said. “You are who you are.”

“
What
am I?”

“Not what,” Tristen corrected him, “
who
. You’re Elfwyn Aswydd.

That was always your name, but you never owned up to it. Now you have to be both Elfwyn and Aswydd, before you can be your father’s son.”

“I tried to be his son,” he said. And added, which made sense to him, but not, he feared, otherwise: “Prince Aewyn is my friend.”

Tristen nodded, as if he did indeed understand how two difficult matters tied together. “So he should be,” Tristen said. “You are his brother.”

“I want to be. I never want to be a trouble to him. I don’t want to be a trouble to anyone.”

“You are who you are,” Tristen said again. “Do you understand yet how Elfwyn Aswydd can be Aewyn’s brother?”

It wasn’t the same as Otter being Aewyn’s brother. He finally saw that, at least glimpsed the edges of what Lord Tristen was telling him.

“You should have carried your real name before you went to Guelemara,” Tristen said. “The name Otter misled you. It misled all expectation around you. People were careless. Drink your tea. It’s cooling.”

He drank it. He tried to take in the deeper sense of what Lord Tristen was telling him. He had come for counsel. He had expected to ask sane questions about where to go next and what to do next, and have a plain answer—not to find himself led this way and that and questioned repeatedly about various people’s welfare.
Should
have carried your real name
, Lord Tristen said. Should he have gone there as Elfwyn Aswydd?

Should he, then, have come to Guelemara as part of Lord Crissand’s household, and tried to be Lord Crissand’s relative, somehow, when Crissand had two sons of his own who had every right he did not?

“What should I do now?” he asked. “I shouldn’t go back to Guelemara, should I?”

Tristen sipped at his own cup. “That would be one course. But that won’t happen now.”

“Do you know that?” He hadn’t felt magic moving, not at that instant, but now he did, the prickly sensation he got when Gran was working, and he kept his hands about his cup to keep from shivering. He daren’t look aside from this young man. He feared what he might see behind him. “I’m afraid to go to Lord Crissand.

It’s not that I’m afraid of him. He’s always been kind. But if I go to him, it means going near my mother.”

Tristen didn’t answer immediately. He stared past him into the fire. Then he said, looking straight at him: “You took the name of Otter. That made you someone else and kept you safe from her as long as you were Otter. Now things are different. You’ve chosen to come back, and you have to make your own safety.”

“I can’t,” he said, and when Lord Tristen gave him a misgiving look: “I don’t think I can, my lord.”

“That’s the difficulty, isn’t it?”

What
was the difficulty? He had known Gran to speak in riddles, but Lord Tristen didn’t make clear sense to him at all.

“I don’t understand, my lord.”

“What do you think you ought to do? Why did you come here?”

“To find out if I’ve done the right things. To find out what’s happening. The dream about Gran being sick wasn’t really so, not as bad as seemed when Paisi and I dreamed it. And then I dreamed of fire.” He’d forgotten that, until just that instant, how profoundly that dream had scared him. “And if it wasn’t Gran, it was my mother that made us dream, wasn’t it, my lord? She didn’t want me to leave Henas’amef. She didn’t want me to go away from her. But I did. What if she’s making all this happen, and it’s not just me? I hate her!”

“No,” Tristen said sharply. “No. Cure that, above all else. Don’t hate her.”

Gran had given him the same advice. And he’d tried to take it, when he was Otter, when he was a boy with nightmares in the dark. Gran’s arms had ceased to hold him by then. Gran only sat by his bedside and gave him advice, Paisi sitting cross-legged in a nest of blankets, likewise wakened…

That night. That night only last year.

“I’ve tried,” he said. “I’ve tried not even to look at the tower, all my life. I think she hates that most.”

“And she likes it best when you hate,” Lord Tristen said quietly.

“Be advised. There are two paths in front of you. One of them is what she wants.”

“And the other, my lord?”

Tristen lifted a shoulder. “It may be what you want, or not. It depends on what you choose.”

“Where should I go, then? Should I go to Lord Crissand?”

“Crissand has to be part of everything,” Tristen said. “And it was a good choice, for you to come here. Your father is my friend. I know him, and I know your gran, and I know he’ll see to her. You should trust him completely, at your next chance, though he makes his own mistakes. You say the Lines appeared. Was it only in the Quinaltine that they frightened you?”

“Yes, m’lord.”

“And what happened?”

“It was like ink running, like ink running between the stones.

And then the Lines. They were red. They seemed to be breaking.”

“Did you tell your father about the Lines?”

“I think Prince Efanor did. And the man, the one that was spying on me for the Holy Father, Brother Trassin—gave me a message, and said the king—my father—was going to send me home in the dark of night. I didn’t want to go with soldiers.”

“But wasn’t it, after all, his will you do so?”

“It was.”

“So you ran before he could do send you home. You outran his good intentions. You caused him worry. He
has
been worried. He does feel very sorry.”

“So do I.” He couldn’t look anywhere but at his own hands. He didn’t want the questions to go on in this direction, about his welcome with his father. “I don’t know. I don’t know, m’lord. I was just scared.”

“And angry that he was sending you home.”

“Scared,” he said. “And worried about Gran.”

“Angry,” Lord Tristen said, which happened to be true, and he had never quite realized it until now, as if something had been clenched up tight in his heart for years and years: anger, that his high hopes were dashed down; anger, that he had ruined all his chances.

“Jealous,” Lord Tristen said. And that could not possibly be true.

Was he jealous of Aewyn, who had had a father, and enough to eat, and a palace to live in?

Every visit of the rich men on horses to Gran’s front fence had hammered that difference home. His father had come every year, but his father had always ridden away, with Aewyn, on horses with rich caparison.

He was shocked to find that was at the heart of it. Anger.

Jealousy. All the wicked thoughts he had smothered and tried to ignore in his heart were still there, stored up through the years.

His discomfiture had disturbed them, and now when Lord Tristen probed into his opinions, they came floating up to the surface like rotten matter from a brook.

“I don’t want to be angry with anyone,” he said. “My lord, I love my father, and my brother.”

“As you love Gran and Paisi. You have no cause for anger with them, do you?”

Only with his mother, he thought at once. He had just cause for anger at his mother, who lived in the tower, and at the poverty that made life hard. The lords who lived up on the hill and had books and feasts whenever they liked—he didn’t hate them. But he found he was jealous. Otter had never been jealous, not humble Otter, who was grateful for everything, and was obliged to be. But if he was Elfwyn Aswydd, he was born to his mother’s debts and his own hatreds…

Elfwyn Aswydd was his mother’s son, and a dead king’s namesake, the Marhanen’s enemy.

“You do love them,” Tristen said.

“I do love them,” he said, but to his profound dismay it was no longer clean and pure, that love. “If I’m Otter, it’s easy to love them.”

“You have two paths,” Tristen said. “And you may not have your own choice.”

Two paths. And no choice. He did not understand, not at all.

“You are Elfwyn,” Tristen said. “Elfwyn Aswydd is your responsibility to shape. Bring all the things Otter knows, and be Elfwyn, as you have to be. There is your best path, if you can get on it and direct it as best you can. The direction it may take yet is not in your power: but what sort of man walks that path, when you are a man, that you
can
decide.”

He did grasp it, then. And suddenly he knew, if he were Aswydd, if he were to be pushed and shoved by fate, what he most wanted for himself, and where he’d set his feet if he could. There was what the Aswydds had, as Gran had, what he’d attempted to have, that morning with the oil and water. He hadn’t much Gift, but he had a little. Tristen had something far, far more than any Aswydd, something that Gran wouldn’t explain to him, but said Sihhë-gift was inborn, and natural for Lord Tristen, and made his very wishes powerful enough to rearrange kingdoms.

“Could I stay here with you a time, my lord? Could I learn wizardry enough to stop my mother? If I haven’t Gift enough, could you possibly give it to me?”

Tristen leaned back from the table, regarding him with a troubled frown, then got up from the table altogether and walked to the fireside. As he went, Elfwyn turned on the bench, and watched him standing there, half in fire, half in shadow, staring into the flames and considering for some little time.

Then Tristen looked his way. And might have spoken, but a curious thing happened. A brown, quick movement appeared at the shadowed end of the table, beyond the glow of the fire, a scruffy little creature that advanced near the plate of cakes and sniffed at it.

“Ah,” Tristen said, and a smile transfigured his face: it had been ageless and cold and terrible. Suddenly it was young, and kind.

“Mouse is out. He’s very old, and he’s gotten very fond of Cook’s cakes. Give him a bit. Owl is never grateful, but Mouse is.”

Feed the mouse
, Elfwyn said to himself in no little disgust, feeling anger, feeling his senses reel. Yet obediently, shaken to his very heart, and still waiting for his answer, he broke off a few crumbs, and held them out. The mouse stayed where it was, whiskers twitching, beady eyes bright, not trusting him. He pushed the crumbs toward Mouse, and pushed them farther, and the little creature darted forward, snatched one, and sat up and ate it.

“You did not insist on your own terms,” Tristen said. “And you have experience of small, shy creatures.”

“A little,” he said. They’d had a fallen sparrow once that they had fed, he and Gran and Paisi, a quick, bright little creature, but it had flown away that summer and not come back. A silly creature, a silly act of charity, in a world in which sparrows fell daily, unrescued. As Mouse was silly, and that a Sihhë-lord took notice of Mouse
or
a stray boy suddenly seemed equally unlikely.

“I’d thought owls were fond of mice,” he said, an outright challenge that drew first a frown, then a guarded smile from Lord Tristen.

“You won’t see them both at the same time,” Tristen said. “Mouse rules this nook. Owl has the whole keep else.”

Elfwyn pushed another crumb close. Mouse took it and scurried off.

“He feels safer below,” Tristen said.

“You said that my father shouldn’t kill my mother,” Elfwyn said, around a bite that stuck in his throat. “Or me. Why?”

“Which?”

“Why, either one?”

“If he’d killed either of you, it would have changed him,” Tristen said. “And if he’d killed your mother, only, what would you have heard of him? That he’d killed your mother. And what would you have thought of your mother? That she must have been a good woman, would you not have thought, if you had never known her?”

“I’d have been very mistaken.”

“Trust your father,” Tristen said. “Trust him and all his house.”

“I would. I shall, from now on. And Aewyn.”

“You were to go hunting together.”

How had he known that? “Yes,” he said meekly, thinking it a demonstration of the Sihhë-lord’s vision. “We were, this spring.”

“Have you killed?” Tristen asked him.

The question shocked him. He had no immediate answer.

“Owl kills,” Tristen said again. “Are you Owl or are you Mouse?”

He didn’t know what to say. “I was Otter,” he said, and attempted silly humor, to relieve the terror that Lord Tristen’s disapproval evoked in him. “I suppose I could hunt fish.”

Tristen looked at him still with that curious intensity. “Fish, perhaps. But no greater game. You should not kill. It’s very well for your brother, but not for you. What are you thinking, now, Elfwyn Aswydd?”

“That you were a great warrior,” he said, the truth startled out of him without his thinking. “They say you’ve killed battlefields full of men.”

“Far too many,” Tristen said somberly, and for a moment there was that distant and terrible look on his face. “It saved my friends at the time. Believe me—keep from blood. Your own balance is far too delicate.”

“But just hunting?”

“A precious thing, your gran’s teaching in you. Don’t cast it away for sport.”

“Aewyn isn’t wicked. If he hunts—Aewyn isn’t wicked, is he?”

“Nor will be made wicked for a deer or two he intends to eat. Be Otter when you must. Not Owl. That would be a terrible thing, were you to be Owl.”

He all but laughed, the admonition was so strange, as if Tristen were half in jest, but he suddenly doubted that and stayed solemn—as if Tristen, giving him that advice, had echoed something as simple and true as a child’s story, the kind of advice Gran had used to give, when he had been on his worst behavior, and she forgave him.

“My lord,” he said, blushing hot.

Then Tristen did smile. “Are you sure about the cakes? You could take one or two.”