C. J. Cherryh - Fortress 05 (64 page)

His father would be beyond anger by now. His father would be worried sick, was what, and he was heartily ashamed, the worse since he had fainted half a dozen times and been a weight on his brother, who now had flown off somewhere by wizardry and lost himself in what he was well sure was no ordinary trick of the weather, even in Amefel. There had been ghosts—his shaken wits remembered that. There had been voices, and shadows, and they had been beside the river, but he was nowhere near it now: the river had a voice, and all he heard was the crunch of snow under his own boots and his own panting after breath.

Fool
, he said to himself. He should be thinking where he was.

Even if they had flown randomly about the map, there was a wall, and a wall was a structure, and structures were on his map. It might be the defensive wall, the one they had built in the war, and if that was so, he might come to the hold of Earl Drusenan of Bryn; or if it was farther south, it could even be part of old Althalen, which had been the capital of the High Kings, when the Sihhë had ruled the realm… So he told himself, walking along a wall that seemed to go on forever and trying to gain a sense of what direction he was going in this murk. The fog seemed to have persisted about him. He had never yet come out of it. And the wall went on and on, and seemed in worse and worse repair.

A small group of Elwynim had settled at Althalen. The map had had to be changed because of that. Old Althalen had been cursed ground—cursed by the Quinalt
and
the Bryaltines, which was uncommon; but people who had fled the wars in Elwynor had wanted to live there and farm there again. They wanted to make orchards, which they said had once flourished there. They had tried to take the curse away, so he had heard.

But part of the ground they would not build on. He had read that in notes appended to his map. In the lack of anything substantial to see in the world around him, he built his own room, his work strewn across his desk, the great parchment map fastened up above it. He had committed it all to memory. He could recall the shape of the ruins, some inner details of which were left vague because no one would venture into such a haunted place just to draw a map, even with a lord’s commission. The palace ruin had a long wall on its northern side. In his own safe room he had liked to picture what the Sihhë palace had looked like, building its lost upper tiers in his imagination… all, all of this had filled his lonely hours when Otter had gone away south.

His own room was real enough in his vision that he wondered if he could be there as easily as he could be in the woods or at the old battlefield, if he took the chance and just wished hard enough; but if he succeeded, it would take him leagues away from his father, who would be searching the hills for him, and leagues separate from his brother, who had to be hereabouts, if he just kept looking, and damned if he would give up. They must have arrived close to each other. Perhaps, he thought, he had just started out looking in the wrong direction. Perhaps he should go the other way, and try that, since this direction had led to nothing, not even a corner to the never-ending wall. He was growing desperate in this nightmarish continuance of one solid wall, and being without Elfwyn, he grew afraid, more afraid than he had ever been in his life. Nothing he had ever met had dared threaten him. No one in Guelessar had dared stand up to him, certainly none of the boys brought in to be his associates. But this thwarted him. The unnatural fog and the blowing snow confused him.

He still knew where he was. He knew where he was, the way he knew he was standing on solid ground. It was Elfwyn who was lost.

He was surprised, even indignant, to find his legs growing weak in the struggle to walk, and his hands without feeling. He went all the way to his knees, which was no place for a prince, and he got up, astonished and ashamed, and continued walking—he had lost contact with the wall as he fell, but he found it, hoping it was the same wall, and doggedly followed it back the way he had come. He had had enough of rest, had he not? He had
slept
through the business with the old man, he had
slept
his way through the fog, when they had gotten swept away to the woods, and he was entirely put out with himself. His father would not be sleeping his way through a calamity, would he? His mother, whose blood he had in his veins, would take action and See her way through it, with that Gift she never admitted to the priests.

So Elfwyn was not the only one with wizardry in his blood. If his brother had it, he was sure his mother’s son was not less gifted, only that such ability had never been encouraged in him.

And now he needed it. He so desperately needed it now.

v

IT WAS THE BOOK THAT WAS THE TROUBLE: MASTER

EMUIN SAID IT. TRISTEN HAD located it briefly, and felt it move through the remainder of the dark and through the murky day, a day gray and pale as the space between, that space where Tristen emphatically dared not, at the moment, go.

It had shifted again, and the book and the enemy were very close one to the other—closer than the last time he had felt it, and as every venture he had made toward the boys had driven them farther away, now he feared anything that might upset the balance. Time itself had started to diverge: day and dark, this day and the next grew confused around him, and now, he suspected, had diverged again.

They were a small party that had ridden out from Henas’amef: himself, and Uwen, and Cefwyn, unescorted and on borrowed horses. Lord Crissand had stayed behind, much against his inclination, to bolster Emuin, with Paisi to help. Emuin was wizard enough, he hoped, to hold the Zeide itself against intrusion or attack, where it might well come. A score of the Dragon Guard would have taken to the road behind them, traveling fast, one could be sure, but not fast enough to overtake a desperate father.

Cefwyn had not waited for them. He had delayed only to put on his armor, had taken a warm cloak and headed for the stable to borrow the best horses available, while Uwen had ordered supply out of the kitchens, and they were gone, only the three of them, by the world’s roads.

The shadows that had haunted their riding out by dark persisted by daylight, streaking the snow from time to time, and Tristen did not trust their company in the least—they were part of the disturbance in the gray place and attached themselves to any part of it. The boys’ innocence was no longer a protection to them, not once the spell on that book was involved: he had extended his senses as quietly as he could, risking the gray space with the delicacy of a breath, when the intrusion he tracked had come down like a thunderbolt.

And moved all of them.

One bit of the road was much like another, but he had the dire feeling they had lost time as well as distance, and now their own tracks were, half-snow-covered, ahead of them.

“Someone has been by here,” Cefwyn said, not yet seeing the truth.

“We have,” Tristen said, and beside him, he knew Uwen understood; in the look Cefwyn gave him, he knew Cefwyn did then, too.

“That book?” Cefwyn asked. “Can a damned book do it?”

Tristen knew at least part of the answer—knew he had acted recklessly, that the boys had moved again, and he dreaded to tell Cefwyn the whole truth, but he must do something about the situation he felt; and he reined aside, due south, and away from their own tracks.

“What are we doing?” Cefwyn asked him.

“They have separated. For good or for ill, I could not stop one of them—”

“Which one?”

“Aewyn has arrived south of us. He has fallen away. He draws at the earth. He
wanted
to stop. But Elfwyn went too fast this time, too fast and too far.”

“Too far,” Cefwyn echoed him, shouting through the wind. Their horses drifted apart and together again, knee against knee. Uwen was a shadow on Cefwyn’s other side. “Where is he?”

“We are going toward Aewyn,” Tristen shouted back. “I cannot reach the other without leaving Aewyn in danger. One or the other—we have now to choose.”

“What choice is that?” Cefwyn cried. “How can I?”

“I choose!” Tristen said. “On me, be it—I choose the one we can reach. Where he is, is no good place for him.”

“Althalen,” Cefwyn said. Cefwyn knew as well as he what lay in this direction, down a forgotten road. “There’s the new village there.”

“If he were there,” Tristen said, “I would trust he was safe. He is not.”

A new village had grown up at Althalen, and that safety might be within the boy’s reach, but that was not the way he was tending.

The whole place had become troubled and uncertain, a pond where a small stone had dropped and sunk, and reached depths where it was not good for one of his blood to be. Disturbance rippled through the gray space in that direction. It was a Sihhë place, a place of blood and angry ghosts… the home of Elfwyn’s distant ancestor.

But it was home to one of the boy’s own, too.

They tended south and west, and now every stride of the horses carried them aside from the book and from Elfwyn, and his own guilt rode with him. He had reached instinctively, attempting to divert both boys from plunging through that looming ward, and created disaster as he did it. The boys had been headed right for a suddenly appearing gap in the wards and Elfwyn had shot through as quickly as if he himself willed it. Perhaps he had gone so quickly because Aewyn’s resistance had pulled away—Aewyn, even half-fainting, had clung to where he was with a fierceness that held them to earth; and when he had come loose, perhaps at his jostling the boys, Aewyn had plummeted somewhere in between the two places—not straight down, but aside, to a place with its own will and its own magic, old magic, and a special claim on him. The old ruin, extending constantly into the gray space, might have found a mote flying free, recognized it, and simply snatched it down into itself… while Elfwyn, set free of that bond, had flown like an arrow, and now was entirely out of sight, sealed behind those wards.

Folly
, he said to himself:
Mauryl would have said it, most
certainly
. He had tried because they were both about to vanish through that gap—but he had lost one of them in the process, and where the other had come down was not well-intentioned or safe: not by accident, such events, not even his own failure.

And while there was now every chance that, if he took them all into the gray space to save time, he might reach Aewyn safely, without flinging him into Elfwyn’s predicament, there was equally well the chance that Elfwyn himself maintained some hold on his brother, and that the book’s intent would snatch the second boy through if he pressed hard. The book’s intent reached far, far across Amefel. It
wanted
to be found, and it
wanted
to be loose in the world, and it
wanted
at least one of the boys if not both… which was, Cefwyn would say, a damned great lot for a book to want.

It was that. Say rather, either Mauryl Gestaurien had laid an intent on his work to keep it out of his hands, or that the wizard who had tried to lay hands on it more than a decade ago had laid a geas on whoever found it.

Or say, equally possible, that Elfwyn, with enough magic in him to shake things loose from hiding, had had such a command laid directly on him long, long ago, in those visits to his mother. He had felt attachments he had not trusted when the boy had asked him to be his teacher.

He had said no.

And which of the two of them had done right?

Might he have told the whole uncomfortable truth to a chancy, immature boy?

He had not told all he feared to Cefwyn. He dared not, at this moment, consult Emuin about his choice to go after Aewyn—not with the gray space as chancy as it still was—and he was not sure to this hour that he had made the right choice.

He hesitated to burden Cefwyn with the likelihood that the bond between the brothers was not ordinary—least of all did he want to say what else he sensed, that it might never be broken.

Cefwyn said not a word, in the meantime. Nor had Cefwyn said anything more about Ninévrisë and his daughter being across the river, in the place defended by those icy wards.

Nothing about it boded well for his household.

But there was one more reason for turning aside after Aewyn: Elfwyn Aswydd had more than a compulsion on him: there was also his father’s blood in him, there was a Syrillas brother’s love, Emuin’s concern, and a Sihhë blessing on him. If there was one young lad it might be difficult for any enemy to hold, it might be this one.

He made up his mind. As much as he dared nudge a set of affairs so very precariously balanced, he sent the most delicate thought curling toward what was now an iron wall—a thought that quested after the least, most insignificant gap in the barrier, the sort a brotherly bond might make. And he intended to lay hands on that brother.

«
^
»

i

COUCHES, AND CUSHIONS, AND DRAPES——THEY WERE

EVERYWHERE for comfort. It was that precise green and that precise gold that had been the Aswydd heraldry, forbidden now, but everywhere about, and the monstrous fireplace, with what might have been a dragon, or a grinning devil. The harp. Defying his prison, having heard in Gran’s tales that harps could be enchanted, Elfwyn ran his bruised, cold-burned fingers over the strings and evoked a rippling of notes.

No answer came.

“Ordinary,” he said in his most stinging way. “Besides,” he said to his absent mother, in case she could hear him, “you never played this harp, did you? I would never expect you to like music.”

That drew an answer. The door never opened. But a figure appeared by the fireside—not his mother, but a young man who for all the world looked like Lord Tristen: that kind of youth that was neither young nor old; that kind of beauty that set its owner apart from blemished mankind.

That figure faded, and in its place stood a woman, a woman with long red hair. Her back was to him, her face to the fire, her hands lifted to it.