Fortress in the Eye of Time

by C. J. Cherryh

  They were afraid of him, and of their lord’s illness, and had no choice but to do what the lady said.

  The lady. Ninévrisë. Cefwyn’s offered bride.

  “You granted her Amefel?”

  It was very rare that one took Idrys entirely aback.

  Cefwyn shook his head and started down the steps to the lower hall, Idrys in close accompaniment, with the other guards.

  “I see no other course. The lesser lords are all a tangle of Amefin allegiances we do not understand, of blood-relations, disputes of inheritance, jealousies and feuds, one

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  district against another. Worse than a united Amefel is one fragmenting under us in civil strife, with this business on the border. The lady, of course, well knows that point.”

  “Why not add Amefel to the grant of Ynefel?” Idrys muttered as they went down the stairs, banquet-bound.

  “I did consider that. But Tristen’s off chasing moonbeams and Orien asked so prettily.”

  “You jest in both, I hope, Your Majesty.”

  “What? That she asked politely?—A basilisk, seeing that woman, would seek thicker cover. But I have a sure hold on her.

  When she weds, her title in Ylesuin passes to her husband, whatever the Amefin hold to be the case. I swear if she crosses me once, I’ll give her one who’ll cut her throat if she crosses me or him. Sovrag, perhaps. There would be a match.”

  “Take my advice and unsay this thing.”

  “I am looking for any excuse, I confess it.”

  They came down together into the lower corridor, and, by the back door, in among the lords gathering and milling about in the Ivory Hall. The herald required attention, the lords bowed and swept a path before him, a storm going through a field, more rapidly than recent habit—it was his dour countenance, Cefwyn thought, and, facing the lords, he tried to better that expression. He took his chair at table, in a room that smelled of food and ale waiting to be served. He still found his appetite lacking, not alone by reason of the Aswyddim: the leg was swelling again, and he looked askance at the food as pages and cooks’ helpers carried in two of the four meat courses, braided breads, dark beer, southern wine, and strong ale. There would be six cheeses, favoring the southern provinces, summer cabbage and sausages, pickled apples, broad beans and buttered turnips, green herbs and peas and pickled eggs. He did not favor the delicate fare of the east and north. He had a peasant’s taste for turnips and cabbage and inflicted it on the court—the King could decree such things. The Amefin lords held out for partridge stuffed with raisins and apricots—which he had ordered to please 478

  them and Umanon, who tended to such luxury; Cevulirn particularly favored the pickled apples, and figs from the southern Isles; Pelumer had a fondness for the famed partridge pies, and Sovrag for ham and sausages: cook had searched out their several weaknesses, and was under orders to keep them content.

  While Efanor and his Quinalt priest dined by choice on Llymaryn beef and the locally disdained mutton; and Duke Sulriggan of Llymaryn—who had ridden in this afternoon with said priest, two cousins, six men-at-arms, twenty-nine stable-bred horses for which they had no stalls, and a useless handful of servants and grooms who had already antagonized master Haman’s staff—claimed distempers gained of an excess of red meat and brought his own supplies, his own cook, his own pots.

  Doubtless Duke Sulriggan was surprised to find Efanor not in possession of the province, and Efanor’s brother not in disfavor, but King.

  The priest and Prince Efanor had closeted themselves in the Quinalt shrine for three hours of prayers and gods knew what excesses of mourning. Sulriggan had attached himself to the affair and there had been some sharp words between the priest and the local prelate over some niggling purchase of oil in unblessed jars.

  Sulriggan’s cook prepared separate fare for Sulriggan and his Llymarish attendants under a canvas in the courtyard: small wonder, that self-established exile, considering the ire of the spurned Amefin-bred cook. It was fear of poisons, he was certain, that underlay Sulriggan’s pretensions of a delicate stomach, but murder all the southern lords at once? Annas was there, super-vising all details, his defense in the kitchens, far more gracious than Sulriggan. Sulriggan perhaps suspected him. And did the offended Amefin aspire to poison Sulriggan and his supercilious cook and his high-handed servants—the King could willingly turn a blind eye if they only warned him of the dish involved.

  The partridge pies and the bread and cheese found instant favor. So did the dark beer and the ale and two sorts of wine.

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  Another arrival—the King set his chin on fist, and stared with basilisk coldness of his own.

  Late—and dramatic—came Her red-haired Grace, Lady Orien, not considered in the culinary selections, but, then, her tastes were wide. Her coming, with the first course served, startled the barons, who went from the pleasantry of ale and men deep in masculine converse, to stark silence, to a lower murmur in the hall, an assessment, an account-taking, even among the Amefin lords present and the servants about the edges of the hall.

  She wore dark green velvet, the Amefin color, and had a bit of funereal black knotted about her right shoulder, like a man; more, she had cut her red hair shoulder-length, like a man’s.

  That despoilment shocked him as nothing else Orien had done.

  And the mourning—which by tradition of Selwyn Marhanen no Marhanen King wore—was a direct and silent insult, worn into this hall, at this time, in Heryn’s cause.

  There were two empty places, Heryn’s being one, and she went to it, an empty seat at Efanor’s left, the place of the host province in council, court and feast-hall. Her eyes should have been downcast: they were not. She stared round at each of the lords in turn as if measuring them as she spread her skirts and took that place.

  “Her Grace Orien Aswydd will swear fealty in her brother’s place,” Cefwyn said in a low voice. “She is my ward; her sister and her cousins will soon depart this court under my extreme displeasure. Amefel is under Crown protection, until Her Grace has a man by her. Or perhaps,” he added, looking askance at her shorn hair, “she will take up the sword in her own defense.”

  “I rule,” she said in a voice startlingly level, “until I also meet the Marhanen’s displeasure.”

  “You are never far from it,” he muttered, which was doubtless heard at the nearer seats, and he hoped that it was. “Your health, my lords. Discuss no policy; Lady Orien will retire after dinner, by my order, and then we may deal among ourselves.”

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  There was, then, a marked scarcity of topics for conversation; it drifted, through the various courses, from a discussion of the relative merits of Amefin and Guelen wines, to the breeding of Cevulirn’s horses versus Sulriggan’s, and finally to the hunt, the latter discussion spirited and the gathering good-natured, until it came down to discussion of districts and game.

  Then Orien’s voice cut through, soft and high. “I wonder how the hunting might be in Lanfarnesse,” Orien said, “since you border Marna, Lord Pelumer. Do you see odd things come from there?—Where is the lord of Ynefel this evening? I had rather looked to see him.”

  Cefwyn struck his cup sharply with his knife, choosing not to have the public scene Orien clearly wanted. “We have business to settle. Clear the tables. Lady Orien, your guards will conduct you. Your interests will be represented here for you.”

  She did not rise. “I am competent to represent my own, Your Majesty.”

  “Then I tell you bluntly that you are still under arrest, and your removal from this council now is for suspicion of your character, not your competence. Must my guards lay hands on you? They will.”

  “My lord King.” She rose, pushed back her chair, dropped a deep curtsy, and strode off, her guards moving to overtake her, a long progress toward the farthest door.

  Idrys closed the doors and returned to stand at Cefwyn’s shoulder.

  “My lords,” Cefwyn said. “You have been patient to remain unde
r hardship of absence from your own lands. Your grace and favor will be remembered throughout my reign. I am about to ask more of you…that you stay while the northern barons come in for their oath-giving—which means staying during harvest-season. I know the hardship. But for the stability of the realm, and in view of the foreign threat,—I ask you to stay.”

  “My lord King,” murmured Umanon, “it is in our interests to remain, if that is the case.”

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  “But,” said Sulriggan, “will Your Majesty not return to the capital?”

  “You’ve not been informed, then.”

  It was not the answer Sulriggan had wanted. It set him down.

  It gave him no ready point of argument.

  “No, Your Majesty, I have not.”

  “My father was murdered. Murdered, sir. I am not done with investigations, and by the gods, no, I do not go to the capital when the evidence is here.”

  Sulriggan said, prudently, whatever the argument he had devised, “I beg Your Majesty’s pardon.”

  “But what,” Sovrag broke in, “is this Aswydd woman about?

  Going as a page?” Sovrag had made a joke. He elbowed his fellow Olmernman in the ribs. “I’d take ’er. And ’er sister.”

  “I decline to know what Lady Aswydd does, save she risks excessively. Our patience has its limits.” He was conscious of the lesser Amefin lords at the lower table, their lord’s head, lately removed from the south gate, rejoined to his body in the Bryalt shrine along with the remains of two earls and their relatives.

  Three of the remaining earls were in bitter dispute of the Aswydd kingship that went back into the aethelings of the years of Sihhë

  rule: he had already heard the stirrings of restless lords, and Annas, who kept careful watch over protocols, had noted new pretensions in three lately received expressions of loyalty to the Crown. Each was petitioning the Marhanen King for honors they claimed had been unjustly denied by the Aswyddim, and which Annas warned him might imply fitness to be Duke of Amefel. Granting any one of them would incite the people to believe such a move was pending. And now came this entrance into hall, a brave show from Orien Aswydd, a provocation that could not but set her brother’s former vassals to thinking each that he might make good those claims and take Heryn’s place if he proved a better man than Orien—as Orien evidently thought unlikely.

  She was aetheling, meaning royal blood of the old Amefin line came through her. No matter the ancient claims of the 482

  earls, legitimacy came through her—for any Amefin earl who could marry her and get children; while the King of Ylesuin and all his horsemen dared not affront so sensitively poised a border province by humiliating the Amefin nobility, meaning that he dared not vent his frustration. Much as he wished to bestow Orien on Sovrag exactly as Sovrag said (and that had been a dangerous remark of Sovrag’s which thank the gods had not carried to the lower tables) he could not do so. What was now a simmering pot of intrigue would boil over in an instant.

  “So,” he said, “regarding the matters we have to deal with, and the safety of lives and livestock on this border—no, I shall not return to the capital until I can bring my father home in good conscience. Prince Efanor will go to the capital if there is urgent need, but for now and until matters are settled I need him more as my right hand on this border. I shall not encourage all the court to assemble here. I shall come to the capital in good time, I hope before the winter. As for those of you remaining to defend the border, I realize your responsibilities elsewhere at this season, and wherein the Crown can assist you we shall most gladly consider your specific requests.” He snapped his fingers and Idrys obtained the charts that he had brought down. He rose as Idrys spread them on a clear space on the high table and other lords rose with a scraping of chairs to gather around.

  It all but covered the beginnings of a commotion, an altercation against the very doors of the hall. It shocked the company to silence, hands reaching for dinner knives.

  And it had an Olmern accent.

  “Bridges,” one voice shouted, penetrating the doors. “M’lord sent to know, and they’re deckin’ bridges. We seen ’em up an’

  down the damn river.”

  The gray light came all laced with Shadows, now, fingers and threads of darkness weaving all about the horizon, coming near the old man, try as Tristen would to chase them. Tristen sat where the guards had bidden him sit, on the low wall that 483

  surrounded the camp. The horses were eating hay at the end of that wall, Petelly among them and, nearer the tent that sat spiderlike in its web of ropes at the heart of this strange and cheerless camp, men sat on stones that lay out across the old pavings. They sat, shoulders hunched, heads bowed together, speaking in voices he could not hear.

  He was aware of the sinking of the sun and the gathering of the true night in the world. Now came the dangerous time, when Shadows were strong, but he was determined to hold them until the dawn. He had discovered a power in himself to dismiss certain Shadows, although he knew no Words to speak and he had nothing but his presence and his refusal to let the Shadows have the old man. One would creep close, and he would face it in that gray place, and challenge it merely with his presence—then it would retreat. But there were very many of them, whatever they were, and so long as he was wary and quick enough he could frighten them singly back before they could combine into a broad, fast-moving Shadow that could threaten the old man.

  But he was slowly losing. He knew that he was. So was the old man. There were more and more threads. It would have been easier if he could have held him, clung to his hand, made one defense of the two of them. He was tiring. His efforts raised a sweat despite the cold of the world of substance. He hoped, though, that if he could last until the dawn, if the old man seemed better—

  Then someone said, very close to him,

  “Here! What’s he doing?”

  “He’s been like that,” one said, and someone drew a sword, a sound that rasped through his hearing with cold familiarity.

  Metal touched him, a shock like a burning fire, but when he blinked and saw it, the sword had done him no harm. The man had only laid its edge along his hand.

  “M’lord, m’lord, be careful of ’im. The Regent said he might be Sihhë for real and all. That he might even be the King. We was only to watch ’im.”

  “The Regent says. And what says Tasien?”

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  “Don’t know, m’lord. Some around the fire say as he’s Lanfarnesse, but the Regent said as he is Sihhë for a fact, m’lord, and ordered us to keep ’im close, and we don’t do ’im no disrespect

  ’ere, m’lord, please.”

  “Some damned Quinalt praying curses on the lord Regent,”

  another man said. “That’s what he is. A Sihhë come wrapped in a Dragon’s cloak! Not likely, say I.”

  They were all shadows to him in the dark, discussing his provenance and his purpose here, which ought to concern him—but in that gray light from which they had called him the Shadows were multiplying so quickly he dared not spare his thoughts for them: he went back. The old man was losing ground quickly. The Shadows had combined into skeins and ropes: they had grown reckless—until he faced them. Then they rapidly un-wove. They became threads again, and tried new tricks to get behind him.

  But now the lord Regent turned toward the attack. The old man knew a Word, and spoke it, but he could not hear it, as he had never been able to hear Mauryl’s Words when there was magic about them.

  The old man was a wizard, he knew that here quite clearly, but no one else had seemed to know it. He liked the old man in that reasonless, trusting way he had liked Mauryl and Emuin. When the old man, exhausted now, beckoned him close, he longed to go—but it seemed to him that in this respite from the Shadows the old man had gained for them both, he would do better to stand and drive the Shadows back.

  —Come closer, the old man said. Come closer, Majesty.

  Forget them. They’re small threat to me now. Let me see


  you. Let me touch you.

  — Sir, he said, I might win. Let me try, first.

  — No. The old man had grown very weak, and caught his hand in a grip he might have broken. But it was not the strength of that hand that held him, it was the expression, the same gentle, kindly expression that had ensnared him when first they met.

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  — You are the one. You are what Mauryl promised. I

  doubted. Forgive my doubt.

  — Sir, he said, I am not as wise as Mauryl wished, nor

  as strong as Mauryl wished. But I do learn. I am learning,

  sir.

  The old man laughed through his tears, and pressed his hand, and laughed again. I warrant you are, that. And Hasufin

  trembles. I warrant he does. Learning! I had not expected

  a brave young man. I expected someone furtive, and hidden

  and wary. Even cruel. But, oh, there you are, there you

  are, my dear boy! Bright and brave as you are, whatever

  you will be, you are my King, you are what we’ve waited

  for—you are all of Mauryl’s promise.

  — But what shall I do, sir? Mauryl never told me what

  I was to do for him. Can you teach me?

  — Teach you, my King? Oh, gods, what first?—First, first

  and always, beware Hasufin’s tricks. He will use your

  hopes as well as your fears. He will trade you dreams for

  dreams. Let me tell you—he came to me in my dreams, oh,

  years and years ago. He promised me visions, and before

  I could break away I saw Ynefel, and Mauryl.

  — You knew Mauryl, sir?

  — Never in the flesh. And not before this. But I knew him,

  the way one knows things in dreams. I saw Mauryl old

  and alone, tired and powerless. It troubled me for days. I