Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles (27 page)

It was not at all surprising that Idrys set himself first in that account, not surprising and not at all against Cefwyn’s interest. Tristen firmly believed so, and held the heavy purse in both his hands, rich in gold, in all material things Cefwyn could give him. But the protections all of them had woven about themselves were, like Lines on the earth, stretching very thin, worrisomely thin. “I shall, sir. For his sake, I shall, most of all.”

“Fare you well,” Idrys said solemnly, and again, in that low, deep voice of his: “Fare you very well, Your Grace.”

Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles
BOOK TWO

Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles
CHAPTER 1

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Water dripped from the rafters, falling
plop! plop
! on the benches and making sooty puddles on the paving stones all during the ceremony, but no one affected to notice.

The building was shaken. The roof had been breached. The lightning might have loosed a considerable force within the world of shadows. But, to Tristen’s critical eye, that mismade Line on the earth had held fast… and the faltering magical barrier behind the Patriarch gave forth no troublesome shadows.

Still, when he stood to take the Holy Father’s blessing and when he knelt before Cefwyn to swear as the new duke of Amefel he heard little of what the Patriarch said, in his general unease and in his sense that if anything could go wrong, it had its best chance then and there, to the peril of him and Cefwyn and the peace all at once.

Kneeling in his armor and surcoat, he stared balefully at that roiling mass of shadow while he affected to keep his eyes on the pavings.

He willed it not to advance, and
plop
! went the water, a puddle collecting on the altar, right beside the Patriarch.

The shadows made him giddy. He concentrated on the intricate carvings of the panels below the railing and willed
that
to be the Line.

Plop-plop
! The dirty water threatened everyone’s fine robes, and a Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles big sooty drop had landed on the Patriarch’s shoulder, the stain of a hundred years of candles that had sent their smoke up to the rafters now coming down, washed free, like burned sins returning.

He wished the rain outside would stop.

And just then the light began to increase, the shrine and its statues and its columns growing brighter and brighter around him as if the sun had just broken through the clouds outside.

The Patriarch’s hand came near his head, failed to touch him, and the Patriarch himself looked up: Cefwyn looked up, and since all those present did, Tristen turned his head and looked for the source of that light, which was indeed the sun coming full through the canvas patch they had put on the roof.

The return of the sun had made a momentary silence in the ceremony. He thought it a hopeful thing, himself, but Murandys and Ryssand and no few of the lords made signs against harm.

“The gods smile at us,” Cefwyn said sternly, standing beside the Patriarch. “And on this hour.”

“A blessing on the hour,” the Patriarch said in haste, “and on the realm.” The soot had stained his robe, but in his anxiousness he had not seemed to notice.

“Rise,” Cefwyn said, and Tristen rose. The trumpets sounded. The Patriarch stretched out his arms in dismissal, and chanted a blessing on the assembled lords of the realm.
Confusion to our enemies
, the Patriarch said.
A plague on the infidel and a blessing on His
Majesty
…

Words echoed around and about the columns. Tristen looked up Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles again on his way out, where the sunlit patch of canvas covered the ample hole. The rafters aloft had caught a great deal of rain, and puddles stood on the stone pavings and on the benches. The shadows among the columns seemed more absolute in that strange light from above, some put to flight, others grown more terrible.

Yet the breach had not damaged the wards, as Ynefel’s loft had had a great hole in it, which Mauryl had said was negligible. Such was the nature of bindings, and wards, and magic.

The shrine let them go safely into the early-afternoon sun, the banners first: the Dragon banner of the Marhanen kings lifted, gold and red. Then, in the precedence of the hour, Amefel, red, with the black Eagle outspread, flew for the first time on a gusting wind, Amefel between the two black standards of Ynefel and of Althalen.

Cefwyn stopped beneath the banners, under the clear sky, in the witness of the town, at the top of the Quinalt steps, and held out his hand, staying Tristen at his side.

The people of the town had turned out as they would for any occasion bringing out the clattering pageantry of soldiery, lords and banners. The joyous ringing of Quinalt bells startled the hapless pigeons from the roofs of the Guelesfort and they took flight in a great upward beating of wings against the sun.

I am leaving, Tristen wished the maligned birds to know. He had never yet worked any magic to forbid them the place. He remembered that now, and was concerned for their fate. I am going from this place, he wished to tell them.

And then he thought, Will any among you fly to Amefel? Are you the same birds as I knew there? Can such small, frail birds fly so far Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles as that?

Winter is coming, snow, and ice. So they tell me. Take care, take care. Find me in Amefel if you wish, if you can, if you dare. Come there safely and soon!

Pealing of the bells, flowing cloth, black and red, stretched across the wind, and the martial tramp of soldiers ringing back from the walls of the Guelesfort: such were the impressions of the moment.

Uwen, he was sure, was at his back, and Lusin and the guards waited before him, all ahorse.

“Stay,” Cefwyn said to him, a hand on his arm. The bells, having rung out their chorus, left a numb silence and the last pigeons had fled. “My dear friend,” Cefwyn said publicly, loudly, and it echoed off every wall and house around the square. “
My dear friend. ”

Cefwyn turned him and embraced him in full view of the people, as the very air grew still. “I did what I could,” Cefwyn said close against his ear. “Believe in me. Believe in me, Tristen. Trust me that nothing has changed in our friendship.”

“I do,” he said, in all earnestness. “I shall.” In such a silence it seemed even so that people might be listening, so he added as they broke apart: “Your Majesty.”

“Take care, Tristen. Take great care.” Cefwyn looked up, a glance at the windswept heavens. “We might have used the weather-luck last night,” he said, attempting a laugh. His grip bruised. Meanwhile the people waited, as all the banners hung limp in a momentary want of breeze, then snapped and thumped with a wayward gust.

“The gods send you safe on all your journey. My brother, hear me, Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles my brother dear as blood, you will always be in my heart. Never doubt it.”

Brother. He had looked for no such thing, and he held that word of all Words close to his heart, he who had had neither father nor mother nor mother’s love nor ever been, himself, a child. He had just had the Holy Father’s blessing, and the solemn words of his own oath of fealty and Cefwyn’s pledge to him still rang in his ears.

Words, Words, and Words fell like hammer strokes, pealed like bells across the sky.

But undeniable truth was in the silence of the people in the square, the anxious faces, and most of all in the parting of Cefwyn’s hands from his arms. Cefwyn had no power to prevent this moment, and now as he moved from Cefwyn’s embrace, it felt as if someone had moved from between him and a cold, random wind, one that now would gust and blow and chill him to the bone. He refused to look back as he walked down the steps, nor did he look around as he met Uwen, who offered him Gery’s reins. They mounted up. All the rest of the column that would ride down and away with them began to move at his first start forward.

He allowed himself one glance, and saw Cefwyn standing on the steps as he imagined he would see him. Then he turned Gery’s head away and led his column across the face of the assembled nobles.

He had a thousand questions for Cefwyn, oh, a thousand thousand questions… but there had been no time before now to ask, and now that their necessities drew them too far, too fast apart, he feared there might never be. Brother was a Word, but not a word that could bridge the moment. He saw Efanor amid the crowd of nobles, Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles Efanor with his priest beside him, and he saw how Efanor signed a pious wish for him. He knew Efanor wished him well despite all his fears and his jealousy, and he felt a small pang of regret for Efanor, for Efanor’s faith in absent gods, and most of all for Efanor’s failing of Cefwyn’s love… he knew that he was himself the thief of Cefwyn’s affection; and forgiven by Efanor at oh, so great an effort.

He saw Cevulirn besides, and imagined warmth in his narrow eyes, at least approval of the choice.

But he saw nothing but cold stares else, on the part of the dukes of the north. They were constrained to be there, detesting his presence the while, and he was sure they were in some remote fashion responsible for his departure: he had heard the story about the lightning, the Quinalt roof, and the coin and knew none of them could guide the lightning, but they were skilled at guiding spiteful words. He understood their rules, now, rules set forth in all the chronicles of the Marhanen reign, and how the barons had supported Selwyn Marhanen, one of their own, to be king over them not because they loved him best, but because he was the only one they all feared, the only one who could hold them from fighting each other. Was it not still the same?

He understood, too, the structure they had woven, the realm of Ylesuin, how all the barons’ influence over their own people and all their rights with the king were posed alike on agreements that rested on oaths, and oaths as they saw it rested on the Quinaltine’s validity; they would not keep their word unless they feared the gods’ wrath on them, and therefore they believed that no one else would keep his word unless he was similarly afraid. They were not Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles Cefwyn’s friends. They were certainly not men Cefwyn would ever call brother, and yet they each desperately sought closeness to the king, each seeking any chance to outdo his neighbors. They feared Cevulirn because Cefwyn loved him; feared Emuin for many of the very same reasons. And Ninévrisë… oh, greatly did they fear her influence.

So how much more must they distrust Mauryl’s heir… and how ready were they to see omens in the lightning last night… omens of overthrow and attack on themselves, and most of all, evidence of forbidden wizardry.

(It was no damned wizardry, master Emuin had said this morning.

Why not ask those who
know
, good loving gods? No, no, no one consults a wizard. Everyone in town takes advice from His Holiness on the matter, when if His Holiness had a smidge of wizardry, he would never have a hole in his roof, now would he?) He could all but hear Emuin’s voice echoing down the stairs… as in the square, now, before him, the banner-bearers moved to the lead in a clatter of hooves on cobbles. He saw the half-burned bonfire…

rain had put an end to it.

Uwen moved up beside him in a small burst of speed as he eased off Gery’s reins. There were thirty men behind them, a clattering column of soldiery, as they left the square and entered the town.

Master Emuin might avow there was no wizardry in the stroke. But it had been a large and incontrovertible hole above them in the ceremony—workmen had put that canvas over it last night, a task the hazard of which Tristen could scarcely imagine, going up in the dark and the rain, and with the lightning still playing in the clouds.

Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles So much men dared, relying on the gods, and on the luck Uwen so often invoked.

But was it only blind chance that had dislodged Mauryl’s Shaping and set him on another Road? He dared not guess, and he thought that Emuin protested too loudly: Emuin knew, must know, must be aware of the damage done in his leaving Cefwyn’s side. And did Emuin deny there was wizardry abroad?

Now the sun speared down into the street ahead and people fell back from his path, not cheering, precisely, a few making a faint pretense of it, and the children skipping along for a better view. Red Gery danced sideways as well as forward, excited at the noise of trumpets and the flutter of banners ahead. The men behind him were a night without sleep: no few had drunk too much before they had the news and had struggled to work through the night in spite of aching heads. The king’s entire household had stayed awake, cobbling together a ceremony with no advance warning: Cefwyn had done everything possible to show him honor, arranged the ceremony of his swearing as elaborately as any swearing before him

—and precisely because they had done it not two months ago for the northern lords, it had come off in good order, right down to the trumpeters, who this time had not made a false start in the middle of the Patriarch’s dismissal of the assembly.

So, with a document, an oath, and a blessing, he was lord of a province, and with his banners flying in full view of Guelemara he was riding away to a place he had regretted leaving in the first place. If only it had meant returning to an Amefel preserved in time, an Amefel the way it had been, with Cefwyn free and themselves in Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles all the company they had had there, he would have been deliriously happy.

But the world had changed since summer, in far more than the fall of leaves. He had asked what winter would bring, and now with a nip in the air despite the sunshine, he saw it bringing change, change, and change, himself swept along across dirty cobbles and past doors still adorned with.autumn garlands, moving toward another season of doubt, and hoping for reunion in the spring, on a battlefield.

One unanticipated, utterly foolish pleasure, however, dawned on him amid all the other assaults on his heart in this short ride down the street: this morning he no longer went in unrelieved black. He had become lord of a color, a banner, an emblem, lord of a living land, with people in it, and cattle and horses and orchards and all manner of things that were not true of Ynefel and Althalen. And, against the brown and gray dying of the trees and the threatened white of winter, he bore no quiet color, either, but red, red darker than the Marhanen scarlet: red of rubies, red of old blood, red of roses at dusk.