Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles (43 page)

swordsman’s bane… and hands so ringed and jeweled they were all but armored in wealth and power. Rustic Amefel did have rich men, and these earls, like Henas’amef, had had wealth unplundered since earliest days.

Love them? No. Not yet. He armored his heart against them as he had learned to do with the lords of Ylesuin. He looked steadily at them as they swore, and some few looked back, but he remembered that Edwyll had not done what he had done in disregard of the rest of the province.

The last of them in the order of precedence was Lund. Crissand still stood, pale and set of countenance, awaiting some word, some acknowledgment, some dismissal or decision. Once the first and the second had sworn, then he had surely known he would not be the third, or the fifth, but that he would swear last, if at all. The order of Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles precedence was not an empty matter. It was like a banner, like the device on a shield, the land rights, the claim on mutual defense, and not a man in the hall could have forgotten that Crissand stood waiting and empty-handed.

Might anger guide this young man to imprudence? He would know it, if that became the case. Ought he to do differently, or show more mercy? He had been generous, until now.

“Crissand, thane of Tas Aden.”

He knew trials: Mauryl had set very hard ones; and now he set a severe one, and knew not what way Crissand might turn in the next moment, but now, too, he understood how greatly Mauryl had struggled to restrain himself from wishes and wizardry, not to constrain or create what he would draw out. Cuthan was wise and clever, a great treasure in a hall. But this young man… this was the one that touched him. This was the one of all of the earls who would dare his wrath to his face or stand by him to the last.

“May I trust you?” he asked Crissand.

“Your Grace.”

“May I trust you?” he said again. He had not heard
my lord
from Crissand Adiran or any man of Meiden. Not yet.

There was a small silence, and the hall was cold, evoking shivers from weary bodies.

“What does Your Grace ask?” Crissand said in the deep silence of all the lords.

“Truth.”

“And will Your Grace believe me, whatever I say?”

Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles He reached into the gray space, just a breath of a touch, and Crissand flinched.

“Yes,” he said to Crissand, thought,
So
, and saw a glimmering of fear staring back at him.

“My lord,” Crissand said, half a whisper, and no more.

“
Now
you say so.” He let the silence linger a moment… did not draw Crissand deeper into the gray space. But this was a young man with wizard-gift. This was an Aswydd, in a hall where his kin had been kings, dispossessed now, and he, at least tonight, was the agent of that dispossession. The silence went on, and on, and the wind blew through that other place, but softly so. “Will you
tell
me the truth?” Tristen asked.

“My lord,” Crissand said, with a lift of his chin, “
what truth
will you? Truth of my father’s life? Truth of his death?
Which
truth?”

“
The
truth. No other. Nothing less. Did your father deal with Tasmôrden?”

The earls were thunderstruck, caught on the outskirts of treason, all, all of them but Cuthan, who clenched his staff tightly, and set his jaw like granite. The hands of king’s men strayed closer to their swords. And none else in this room were armed.

But Crissand spoke in firm, clear tones. “
Yes
, my lord, he did—Her Grace the Regent being betrothed to the Marhanen, my father dealt with the likeliest rebel in Elwynor.”

Treason, treason laid out plain to see. The lord viceroy had advised him of the truth, after all.

Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles But not an irredeemable truth. These lords had sworn. So had he.

And all the truth and all the misdeeds that had existed an hour before were in the past, sealed.

“I dismiss your truth. I forgive it,” he said to the thane of Tas Aden.

“And what say you now?”

“That the Sihhë are back in Hen Amas.” The gray space shivered, settled with final force. And Crissand bent the knee and knelt there on the steps of the dais, with the earls and the Dragon Guard for witness. “That you are my lord
and
my king.”

Breath might have ceased in the hall.

But it was no more nor less than the Amefin oath, stripped of niggling words like
aetheling
.

“I Crissand, Earl of Meiden, swear so…” It had become the oath of fealty, an Amefin lord
kneeling
before him, and what in turn was he to answer? Prudence said he should stop the proceeding, set the self-made earl on his feet by main force, and bind himself to nothing.

But he felt the little shiver in the gray space that Ninévrisë could make, or now and again someone passing near him.

The Sihhë are back in Hen Amos.

Dared he say so? Dared Crissand? And dared an aetheling kneel in this hall, as to an overlord?

The clerk frantically searched his pages, a crackle of paper in the stillness, and looked up in consternation. The earl of Meiden finished his brief swearing, with: “So I will be faithful to you, on my oath and my honor,” and the hapless clerk searched for his place in an appalled silence.

Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles

“I Tristen…”

Another flurry of the clerk’s pages.

“… swear you
are
the earl of Meiden, and have the governance of the land of Meiden, and its villages and rights and privileges. I shall defend you and your rights and lands as you defend me and mine.

To all this I swear by my life.”

The clerk looked up openmouthed, and he realized he had not said the clerk’s words. He drew Crissand to his feet. He ignored the stares of the clerk, the earls, the priests, and of his own men, and looked the heir of the Aswydds straight in the eye.

“Tell me true, Meiden:
are
Elwynim forces across the river?”

The rustle of pages had ceased. Everything had ceased.

“The rising would signal them to cross,” Crissand said, and he knew he had heard the truth, more, that what Crissand confessed was no surprise to any man in this hall.

“Then I fear you are deceived,” Tristen said. “I suspect Tasmôrden would
not
have crossed, not with His Majesty set to plunge into Elwynor from his northern frontier. But he would gladly divert Cefwyn’s attention south to Henas’amef over the next fortnight or so while he takes Ilefínian, which he has just moved to do. Once there, he will slaughter Her Grace’s men and winter in more comfort, recovering his forces. He would leave
you
to engage Cefwyn this winter, all to his profit, and aid you only sufficient to keep the king fighting here until the spring.” He was as sure as he said the words, as if they had Unfolded, but even the guess he made was not as great as the hazard to their lives he felt in the gray space.

Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles

“Tasmôrden opposes
me
, and he would never have crossed the river until he was sure Cefwyn was here and weakened by the encounter, in a hostile province. Then, yes, he would
fight
in Amefel and spare his own fields. You have provoked the lord viceroy only to Tasmôrden’s gain and none of your own.”

“My lord Sihhë,” Crissand began, and would have sunk back to one knee.

And must not. Tristen seized him by both arms this time and looked him straight in the eye. “
Your Grace
is the title I own. I hold it from His Majesty, his gift, no other.”

“My lord, then,” Crissand said faintly as Tristen set him back. “At your will.”

“What I
will
is a secure border. Heryn Aswydd collected too much tax and spent too much money on dinnerplates. Amefel will muster in the spring and set the Lady Regent on the Regent’s throne in Ilefínian.
That
is what I will, sirs.”

The latter part was certainly no news to them. Cefwyn had made no secret of his plans, not even from Tasmôrden. He looked out over the assembled earls, saw great sobriety and consternation at his bluntness and at Crissand’s, and perhaps a reassessment of Tasmôrden’s offers of alliance.

“Some think me foolish,” he said to the earls, “and that may be; but I am a fool far less often these days than I was this summer, and I do learn, sirs. I know, for instance, that many Amefin houses have far closer ties across the river than to Ylesuin. If Ylesuin sets Elwynor safely on her throne, then your villagers will walk across Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles the river bridges by broad daylight and trade as you wish. But if Tasmôrden comes, he will make Amefel his battlefield. That is the truth, sirs.”

There was not a word of objection.

And he had nothing more to say or do here, and wished nothing more now than to go to his own bed, and to have ease of the belts and weapons he had borne now for a day and a night… or was it morning?… with no ease of them. Crissand’s loyalty would stay or it would go. The gray space was utterly roiled, seething with yea and nay and hazard, and he wished Crissand Adiran out of his vicinity before his unsteady wits did lasting harm and willed something unwise.

“Good night,” he said. No one moved for a breath or two, and then one and the other bowed and edged cautiously backward, as if they were each hesitant to be the first to leave. Crissand gazed at him, and in the gray space, winds blew, changing direction on the instant.

Then Crissand bowed his way away from the dais, the guards that had brought him in all standing in uncertainty.

Tristen shook his head at the sergeant, wishing him not to detain the earl of Meiden, or to interfere with him.

And for the rest, he knew no more elaborate ceremony or more ready escape than Cefwyn’s habit, which was to walk out by the lord’s door, that nearest the dais. He gathered up Uwen, Anwyll, a trail of guards, the clerks, and then Tawwys and Syllan outside in the hall at the same time as the earls and clerics had to sort themselves out by the other door a small distance away.

Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles None of the earls, however, ventured near to trouble him, and shielded what they said with turns of their shoulders and furtive glances as they hurried to be away, either seeking safer nooks of the Zeide in which to gossip, or going home as the court would, by the stable-court stairs and the West Gate.

Tristen walked, instead, aware of the dismay of his own guards, toward the center of the building, where the South Court doors let in and where the confluence of stairways gave a choice of upward directions.

“What shall we do wi’ Lord Meiden?” Uwen asked him as he approached that point of choice.

“Let him go,” Tristen said. But all his soul said there was profound danger in Crissand Adiran… Crissand Aswydd, for Aswydd he surely was. “Let him go where he pleases.”

So he ordered. But if Uwen were Idrys, and if he were Cefwyn, then he would know that Meiden would not do anything unwatched, and he would never have to hear of it or trouble his soul unless there was reason.

But Uwen was not Idrys, and he realized only then that he truly had no check on his mercy, and no man to do the dark, the unpleasant things. Uwen asked, perceiving the threat, but Uwen would be grieved to slip furtively about when his lord had made a public show of setting Crissand free on his honor. He had to order it if it would be done, while Idrys would have done it even if his liege had strictly forbidden him.

And he found himself at a pass that Cefwyn with his resources Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles would never have come to. He had given a pledge. Was he now to break it himself? Such things, he being not a Man, had more than ordinary consequence, and he, not being a Man, had more than ordinary need of a Man to do the unpleasant work and examine the dark corners.

They walked by the light of stub candles in sconces up and down the lower hall. The Zeide’s servants had appeared out of whatever holes they had hidden in, and candles were not everywhere, as yet, but there were enough lit at enough points to show the servants working end to end of the hall, sweeping and polishing evidence of death from the stones of Hen Amas.

They
were the true caretakers of this Place, he thought: lords proposed and disposed and worried about the proprieties and the rights of things, but they mopped the dust and the blood away and made it possible to forget the worst of events.

It was one more change of lords for them, in this year yet unended.

There had been four, already, since summer, counting the lord viceroy—who might be the departing rider he heard out in the courtyard, through weapon-scarred doors now closed for the sake of warmth.

The lord viceroy was gone.

He was the fifth lord, in one year.

And in that realization he found himself approaching a scatter-witted weariness. Was it hunger he felt at this hour, or thirst or merely winter chill? His body failed to inform him. Down the corridor ahead, past the great hall, was the ghostly boundary of the Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles mews. There were dead men in the ducal apartment above. There was the lord viceroy’s ungathered baggage in the other lordly residence, that which Cefwyn had used up the other stairs. He longed for his own old, modest dwelling on the uppermost floor, but he who had to fear that wizardry supported his wishes had no hope of recovering that apartment save by arranging a calamity to someone else… as surely someone else was residing there now. He was equally sure the duke of Amefel had to occupy some other residence: Uwen would never let him choose something so small and modest and entirely adequate, nor would Emuin.

Nor, for that matter, would Cefwyn.

Cefwyn. Cefwyn. Cefwyn.
There
was the question tonight. But it was not a question he could solve by thinking on it, not with wits muddled with a day’s riding and a night such as they had just spent.

He felt tremors in all his body, a desperate need of sleep.

“Which rooms shall I use?” he asked Uwen, as they reached that choice between the stairway on the left, that led to Cefwyn’s former rooms, and that on the right, that led up to the Aswydd bedchambers. “Where shall I sleep?” His own question sounded plaintive in his ears. He was lost as a child, and Uwen shepherded him toward the right-hand stairs.