C. J. Cherryh - Fortress 05 (38 page)

The eyes of the face moved, and looked at him.

“Let him go,” the stone face said.

Let him go, echoed through the depths of the fortress. Not simple words. Mauryl’s words never were. They had to be understood at every depth. Let him go.

Let go of him. Don’t touch him. Let him fly free. Let him do what he will.

It was not what he wanted to hear. Mauryl’s advice rarely was.

Mauryl himself had been known to be wrong, had he not? Wrong, or Mauryl would not be as he was. But Mauryl had, at the end of his life, known his enemy.

Let him go.

He waited until daylight, then, and went out to the yard by first light. Uwen was up and about, tending the boy’s horse.

“Saddle him,” Tristen said. “Our guest has to go this morning.”

Uwen’s hands stopped their work, a soldier’s hands, gentle at their present task. And Uwen straightened his back and looked at the sky, which was overcast and sifting snow, before he looked back again. “Weather’s hard, still. Shall I escort ’im to the edge, m’lord?”

“No,” Tristen said. “Owl will guide him, such as he can. We shall be riding out ourselves, soon, to Henas’amef. But not today.”

A little silence. Uwen never asked to understand what he did, but seemed to know, at times, more than most Men.

“Aye, m’lord,” Uwen said, and kept at his brushing. “I’ll have ’im ready just after breakfast.”

After that encounter, he went inside to write a message, and to wait until Cook’s boy brought cakes over, and until Elfwyn stirred forth and came down the stairs.

“Breakfast,” Tristen said, and offered him cakes and tea. “Did you sleep well?”

“Mostly, my lord,” Elfwyn said, which was truth with a hollow spot, too. Tristen said nothing to that, only shared breakfast with him and put him out of doors with his own good cloak, a fire kit, and a packet of cakes to go with him.

“Uwen has your horse saddled,” Tristen said, “and grain for him in the bags. Owl will guide you. Don’t stop or turn aside for anything.”

“Yes, my lord,” Elfwyn said, as they stood on the steps. “Thank you very much.”

It had a wistful sound. Elfwyn had wanted ever so much more from him. But he left in possession of his right name, and he had heard the truth and had a bag full of Cook’s cakes. There were less useful answers to a petition.

“Be careful,” Tristen wished him, and took him by the arms and looked him close in the eyes, searching for any flaw. It was not apparent in him, except that little frown: anger, always anger.

“Find Paisi, care for Gran, and take this—” He drew a little sealed paper from his belt and gave it to him. “Take it to Lord Crissand and wish him well from me.”

“Yes, my lord.” The boy tucked the paper into his own bosom, and took his bag and his blessing, and went down the steps to the courtyard, where Uwen and Cook and Cadun all waited outside to bid him good-bye.

In a moment more he had disposed his baggage and gotten into the saddle, settling his cloak around him. Then he waved good-bye to Uwen and his household, looked last at him, with a little respectful bow, then rode quietly out the gate Uwen opened for him. He left of his presence only tracks in the courtyard snow, tracks the sifting white would soon fill. Ynefel was almost as it had been. Almost.

“Go,” Tristen whispered to Owl, and Owl flew from the height and passed the wall, swift as an arrow.

Perhaps, Tristen thought, he should have given the boy plainer warnings about his mother, but that might expose the boy to more influences once he began to wonder more persistently about her.

At very least a warning not to go near his mother would act as a grain of sand in a boot, a slow irritant that might drive that particular boy to doing the very things he ought not. Best lay wards about the young man, as he had done, and keep him safe and quiet, as untroubled by outside forces as he could make him.

For the other matter—he had written a message to Lord Crissand, bidding him not admit Elfwyn any longer to his mother’s tower, no matter what, and to await his arrival.

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i

OWL WAS NO BETTER THAN HE HAD BEEN, A TRICKY BIRD, LEADING PLAINLY AT times, and at others vanishing among the barren limbs, turning his head, and pretending to be a snow clump.

Elfwyn had had hopes of better behavior, but Owl was Owl—untrustworthy in the finer points. Maybe it was a good thing to be feared, Elfwyn thought, during one of those times Owl had deserted him, and it was certainly very humbling to be Mouse. But he could see why Owl wasn’t a pleasant creature, or the sort anyone would want for a friend. Owl did what he had to do, and what he wanted to do, but he repaid a kindly hand with a bite—which was going to scar his hand for good—and he scared people he was helping.

It was not a sort of creature he wanted to be, he decided. He remembered the fish, which was swimming the river now, alive, and he was glad of it, although he had eaten what Uwen had caught. He remembered Mouse, sitting up and eating the crumbs he gave, so wary and wise a creature, and so fragile Owl could carry him off in an instant. But he was clever, and quick, and hard to catch. Perhaps it was not such a bad thing to be Mouse.

Owl flitted ahead of him and was lost again.

Owl appeared, usually when he had stranded himself and had to retrace his steps in the maze of branches at some little difficulty.

Apparent trails turned out to be mere bare spots in the woods.

Trails such as Owl led him were oftenest as choked with brush as places that were not trails, and there was no sign at all that the way they went now was the same way he had come in.

He slept the night, with enough to eat and with enough for Feiny, and waked with snow sifting down on him, a white dusting that grew worse as he rose and rode. Within an hour the downfall grew so thick it obscured everything but the nearer branches.

Owl had left him, of course. He was of a mind to stop until Owl came back, but it was a cold and inconvenient place, where he had realized he had lost his guide. He was on a ridge, and he decided to ride to the bottom of it, where there was shelter from the wind, before he stopped. He weaved his way down between clumps of sapling trees and down onto a flat place. But Feiny lurched, there was a crack of ice, and all at once Feiny fell through an icy shelf into water and spilled him onto cracking ice, going down sideways.

He flailed out amid cutting slabs of ice, Feiny struggling beside him, breasting cracked sheets of ice. The water was no deeper than his waist— Feiny was able to climb out, once he had righted himself, and he did, too, holding to Feiny’s tail, but he was soaked nearly through, and instantly shaking, teeth chattering. Feiny, in his heavy caparison, was soaked. He knew not many things about finding his way in the world, but he knew that he had to find shelter, and he had to warm himself and dry out or die. He let Feiny stand, left the wet wool felt on him for warmth against the wind, and got to the fire kit he carried attached to his belt. The red fiber beneath willow bark, willows growing all about, here, was the least damp fuel he would have at hand: he was trembling so he could hardly keep from curling into a ball, but he persevered. He peeled bark on the underside of a dying limb and collected his little knot of dry fiber. He broke off dry twigs from limbs, and swept a spot clear in the snow, where he sat to work with a pile of dry kindling on a bed of wet, slick leaves, warming himself with furious effort with the fire kit.

He drew sparks. Over and over they failed, or only livened for an instant, and died in the wind. He hunched over his little pile and kept trying, his hands cut, but cold beyond feeling. His feet were numb. He felt nothing from his knees down. And if there was any virtue in this flint and steel being given by Lord Tristen himself, he hoped it would take.

One spark lived, and spread to two strands of the red fiber, and three. He sheltered it with his hand, and made a window between his fingers for a little wind to reach it, until heat burned his palm.

Then he added twigs ever so gingerly. He fed it and fed it, while the feeling left his upper limbs. He stumbled about on half-dead legs, broke dry branches he yanked from off the oaks on the higher bank.

They smoked, their upper surfaces being soaked, but they burned, and he dragged back larger ones and put them in, building a blaze in a spot clear overhead.

Ice had formed in his hair, and it dripped water, now, down his face when he faced the fire he had made. It sent up smoke in plenty: he hoped Lord Tristen himself might see it, and know he was in trouble; but he began to be warmer.

He drew Feiny closer to the fire. He limped over under an oak limb he had seen, still clinging to its tree, a big dead limb from which the bark had fallen. He seized it, wrenched it back and forth and dragged it back, posing the arch of it over his fire, ramming it down so it would take.

His feet had suffered all he dared allow. He sat down by a considerable fire, worked off his boots and stockings down to bare feet, and rubbed life back in until it tingled and hurt. Feiny, having sense, had stayed close by the warmth, and showed no disposition to leave him and go running off. He fed Feiny a little: the grain had not gotten wet, and Feiny’s barding was not wet through, particularly on the side that had not gone into the stream. It was, he was glad to know, quite warm inside. He got down a good blanket, which had stayed dry, and, shivering, took off his cloak and his other garments, wrung them out with all the strength he could command, spreading them on the arch of the large log, then, within his blanket, huddled close to the fire, searching with his eyes into the thicket for more such limbs.

Fool
, he said to himself. He should have had better sense than to ride Feiny across. Nothing else had been that flat. The spot had been too sheltered, and too inviting, and if not the fire kit and the stand of willows, he would be freezing to death. As it was, he set his boots and stockings nearest the fire but could not get them dry again before he had to go out, barefoot in the snow, and crack off more dead limbs and pile them on. The cold hurt his skin. His limbs jerked uncontrollably as he worked, but he hauled back whole branches, unwieldy as they were, and made a larger and larger fire, until it melted back the snow, and melted the cover off a rock overhang, and melted the very edge of the icy stream.

Lord Tristen
, he wished, in Owl’s absence,
Lord Tristen, help us.

Help us, or we freeze to death in your woods
.

But Owl stayed gone, and he piled on the wood hour after hour, until he had a good bed of coals under the burning wood. Whenever the bigger logs burned through, he heaved both their burnt ends closer in on the coals, and kept the blaze high and strong, fire that melted all the snow that fell, and only whipped about in the driving wind, too strong and hot to fail. He sat in the smoke stream, where the greatest warmth was, and finally had strength enough to set his cloak and other clothing up on a frame of dead willow branches, likewise in the smoke, where they would dry faster. The dark came down around him, and by a firelit dawn, he had gotten his clothes and boots dry enough to put on, but not dry enough to risk leaving his fire yet. He unsaddled and fed Feiny, who had kept warm near his fire through the night, and having warmed himself again, he decided he finally dared sleep, his head on his forearms, and all of him tucked in a fire-warmed, smoky blanket, in smoky air.

His nose and his eyes ran. He waked whenever the fire needed feeding, but slept, and finding himself, and now the blanket, damp from the air about him, he dared not leave the fire for long. He stayed all the next miserable day, ranging farther and farther about to find dry, deadwood still on the trees, chilling through in the process, then warming himself again. He was dirty and smoky, but at least not starving, thanks to Cook’s cakes, which he ate sparingly, the while, and which he would have sworn were not so numerous. He began to be quite pleased with himself now that he had recovered from his folly and saved himself and the horse, alone as he was. Paisi, he thought, would be proud of him. Uwen would nod, in that way he had, and approve. He had done as much as anyone could do, on his own, and with no help at all.

In the morning the snow had stopped, and he got up, saddled the horse, and used the end of a log to break up his bonfire and shove the coals and burning wood out onto the ice of the brook, where it fell through. Then he mounted up and rode along his side of the brook, which at least offered him a road through the trees.

Something brushed his shoulder, and shot along in front of him.

Owl had turned up, after two nights and a day, and continued remarkably well behaved until the sun was high, after which he disappeared again, faithless bird.

Elfwyn decided he could be as obstinate as that. He stopped, got off the horse, and waited, sitting, wrapped in his cloak, on a relatively warm fallen log until Owl decided to show up again. He was feeling quite pleased with his management of calamity, sure that Owl would come back, and having slept well enough and eaten a bit of a breakfast. Paisi, he thought, again, would be proud of him; and he was more and more anxious to get home again and tell Gran what he had seen and have her word on things—she and Paisi both had known Lord Tristen, and would want to know everything, every tiniest thing.

After he had gone to Lord Crissand, that was, and—

He had a terrible thought, and looked in his purse, which was empty of everything but his fire kit and a little willow bark; and felt about his person— he remembered putting it into his shirt—but he had had every stitch of his clothing off in that terrible hour, and he had been shaking all over, numb, and the wind had been blowing, so he would never have felt a little thing like a letter fly away from him.

It was a day behind him, that place, and he had no idea now how to find the fire site, or how he would find a scrap of paper in a snowfall. The snow had covered everything. He had been so pleased with himself for staying warm, and never once thought of the message he was carrying, never once put it in a safer place after he had tucked it inside his shirt that morning he had left.