Fortress of Owls

by C. J. Cherryh

  That rang strangely, ominously out of the air, and lightly as he knew it was meant, he felt dread grow out of it, dread of encounters, dread learned where strangers feared other strangers, and encounters were mostly unpleasant. He felt shy, and afraid of a sudden, afraid of his own power over men’s lives. He felt afraid because Crissand felt afraid of him, and it should not be so. The other lords feared him. So did the common folk. He recalled the breaking forth of Sihhë stars on doorways, the cheers in the streets. “Love?” He thought on that a moment.

  There was a small silence this time on Crissand’s side. “That you are Sihhë is no fault in their eyes.”

  “I am a Summoning and a Shaping,” he said with more directness of his heart than he had ever used on that matter, even with Uwen, who rode close on his other side, Crissand’s captain somewhat back in the column for a word with another man.

  “That I may be Sihhë seems mere afterthought to being a dead Sihhë.”

  “M’lord,” Uwen protested, and Crissand:

  “You are our fair lord. None better. None better!”

  “A Shaping, and a fool. Uwen knows. Cefwyn’s captain tells me so.”

  54 / C. J. CHERRYH

  “Spite.”

  “No, I value that in him. And Uwen bears very patiently with my mistakes, knowing all my flaws, and keeps me from the greatest disasters…”

  “M’lord!” Even Uwen was scandalized and did not return his fond smile.

  “But you do so, and it is true, Uwen. I value your counsel as I value the Lord Commander’s, and your protection above his.”

  “M’lord,” Uwen muttered, embarrassed. But it was still true.

  What Uwen gave him was beyond price or valuation; and he wished ever so much that he might have that kind of honesty from Crissand. He thought he had had it for a moment, and then it had turned to the flattering and the worship Crissand gave him, and he felt that change like a wound.

  “Uwen is my friend,” Tristen said to Crissand, riding knee to knee with him, “and Lusin and my guards are my friends, and Tassand and my servants are my friends. And so is king Cefwyn and master Emuin and Her Grace of Elwynor; they know I’m a fool. His Highness Prince Efanor was kind to me, too, and gave me a book of devotions he greatly values. He thinks I’m a heretic. Commander Idrys of the Dragons, too; he calls me a fool and a danger, and I regard his advice. Annas, and Cook, here in Amefel, master Haman, all were kind to me, and I think they regard me as somewhat simple. But Guelessar was a lonely place. Lords, ladies, the servants in the halls and the cook and his men and all, all used to gods-bless themselves and didn’t deal with me.”

  “They’re Quinalt,” Crissand said, as if that explained all the world.

  “So is Uwen.”

  “Not that good a Quinaltine,” Uwen said under his breath.

  FORTRESS OF OWLS / 55

  “And Cefwyn is my friend,” Tristen continued doggedly to his point. “If you wish to be my friend, Crissand Adiran, if you become my friend, you should know that I hold Cefwyn in friendship.”

  “For your sake I give up all complaint against him.”

  “And will bear him goodwill?”

  He had the gift, Emuin had advised him, of both asking and telling too much truth, challenging the polite lies that kept men from inconveniencing each other and the great lies that kept men from each other’s throats. He had learned to moderate that, and wield silence somewhat more often.

  But with this young earl who had first met him at sword’s edge and then sworn to him more extravagantly than all the other earls, with this young man who had brought him here to pour half-truths into his ear, he cast down the question like a gage, to see whether Crissand would pick it up or find a polite and empty phrase to avoid allegiance to the Marhanen…and truth to him. Either way, he would thus declare the measure of their friendship.

  “What will you, my lord?” Again Crissand attempted to dance sideways, disappointingly so. “I bear all goodwill to the king.”

  Uwen cleared his throat and said in a diffident tone, and without looking quite at Crissand: “His Grace is inclined to want the plain truth from a man on any number of points, your lordship, more ’n some is used to, but he ain’t ever apt to hold the truth again’ a man. Bein’ as he’s no older ’n last spring, when he come into this world, he’ll ask ye things ye might wonder at, meanin’ no disrespect by it. But ye’ll have the truth from ’im, if ye will to have it.”

  It took courage for Uwen to speak up as he had, a common man, to what Uwen called his betters. But Uwen had shepherded him through courts and village 56 / C. J. CHERRYH

  streets and knew him as no other man did, and sometimes spoke for him when the going had gotten too tangled. Not even Cefwyn, nor even Emuin, knew him as Uwen did.

  “Then I must tell the truth,” Crissand said in that silence that followed, “and this is the foremost truth: His Majesty’s law may call my father a traitor, and it’s true, traitor to the Marhanen; and so am I. Nor do I repent anything I did. You would have saved my father, I well know. I would that my father had lived and that the lord viceroy had died. From the time I was accountable of anything, my father told me no good could come to Amefel while a Marhanen sat the throne in Guelessar and Heryn Aswydd in Henas’amef. And, yes, Heryn was kin of ours. But no one of my house mourned him—nor were we surprised when the king in Guelemara sent Heryn’s sisters to a nunnery and set the viceroy over us. Nor were we at all surprised when the viceroy was a thief. Need he be better than Heryn Aswydd?”

  All of that Tristen well understood. But the conclusion of it he did not. “Did you hope for better from Tasmôrden?”

  “No. We hoped Tasmôrden would set my father in power.

  And after that, my father would see to Amefel. None other would. I’m not surprised to know there were no troops, nor would there be, coming to our relief. And when Cuthan betrayed us and you came and when the Guelen viceroy ordered us killed, I had no more hope. But I was not surprised.” A small silence followed. It was no good memory, and Crissand gathered a deep breath and a brisker voice. “But when you came into that courtyard and rescued us, and you did justice, my lord, for the first time in a hundred years, someone did justice for men of Amefel, I knew my father didn’t die in vain, that after all we

  FORTRESS OF OWLS / 57

  have a lord I will follow. And if you bid me be loyal to the king, for your sake, my lord, then gods save the king in Guelemara, I say it with all my heart.”

  That was a very great thing for an Amefin to say.

  And when Crissand said gods save the king, Tristen unthinkingly resorted to the gray space in simple startlement, a recourse for a wizard’s Shaping as easy as a next breath or a wondering beyond the words and into the real motion of a man’s heart.

  He sped into that space with an awareness of the men closest on either hand, a feather-touch of awareness, of the familiar.

  Uwen, for instance: Uwen was rather like a rock, steady, ordinary, incontrovertible, neither there nor quite aware of the things in that space, but coming quite close to reaching it, at times, through familiarity with him. The Meiden captain was dimmer in his awareness. So with the rest of the guards.

  But Crissand glowed, faintly but incontrovertibly there.

  Crissand Earl Meiden himself was distant cousin to the aethelings of Henas’amef, and, with the aetheling blood came wizard-gift. Crissand to all seeming had not a glimmering awareness of the gift that was in him…a gift perhaps enough to bend luck in Crissand’s favor. Luck had failed Crissand’s father, whose heredity was at least half the same; yet Crissand said it: the cause had prospered. Luck had allowed Crissand’s men to save him from the viceroy’s order, so that Crissand and his mother both had lived.

  And on that thought Tristen took a small pause, a cold small thought, that Crissand’s slight gift, his luck, was a pivot on which greater things turned, and when things were free to move, then wizardry had its best chance. On a small pin, a great gate swung.


  Whose wizardry had it been? Or might it be magic at work, that sense that, somewhere, long ago, he had 58 / C. J. CHERRYH

  known Crissand Adiran, or someone very like him?

  But Crissand in the gray space now had not a glimmer of ill will. Rather Crissand shone with a pure, plain, and dangerous folly of adoration, a heady wine for anyone who drank.

  Like Emuin’s insistence on beeswax, it came with wizard-force, and sober as he had grown this autumn, such blithe excess of adoration frightened him. But in the reckless outpouring of Crissand’s heart, he found Crissand’s happiness and hope spread about him. Even the house guard and the Dragons had made a sort of conversational peace, and the world was incredibly fair and bright despite the grim talk of recent moments.

  Sunlight through the scudding, gray-bottomed clouds cast sparkling detail where it touched, random grains of snow shining like dust of pale jewels to left and to right of an untrodden road, and every hill and every copse of trees offered new beauty. Creature of a single year, he had imagined winter when it came would be deathly still, and instead he discovered it full of sparkle and motion and wonder around him, and he was warmed by unquestioning love.

  Could there be a snare in too much beauty? Could there be too much expectation of good, and too much faith?

  Could ever there be too much love?

  And could love require lies?

  He asked himself that. He had drawn Crissand once into the gray space himself, though he doubted Crissand had since ventured it on his own. He doubted, too, that Crissand had any least notion what had happened to him in that moment, or how he had found himself confronted while absent and, coatless and desperate, sent out into the snow.

  He could teach Crissand, he thought, how to reach that place where concealment was very difficult. He FORTRESS OF OWLS / 59

  was sure Crissand’s gift was strong enough. But to set Crissand at liberty in that place…there were dangers in it, dangers in the gift, dangers in the wandering. Dared he believe Crissand would never venture it on his own?

  But Crissand’s attention was suddenly for a snowy ridge. He pointed to it and said, with a whitened barleyfield on the one hand and a bare-limbed apple orchard on the other, that they were coming to the crossroads.

  “There is Padys Ridge, and the shrine and the spring just below it.”

  A very old oak, winter-bare, fronted that ancient outcrop, sole wild representative of his kind in an otherwise tame land of orchards and small, pruned trees. Just beyond it, still within the reach of its limbs, snow-covered, was the slight evidence of a road.

  “There’s our turn to Levey, my lord.”

  “Banners!” Uwen ordered, as they turned onto that track beside the oak, and the banners, dark and bright, unfurled.

  Crissand had said there was a shrine of sorts. Indeed, with the scouring of the morning’s wind, a small pile of man-set stones was peeping out from its snow blanket. It recalled one near Emwy village far to the west. That had been summer. The spring here was frozen where it flowed out of the natural rock, and had made a glorious mass of icicles.

  “Padys Spring and the shrine, my lord. One of the last of the old places. The king’s men overthrew most, wherever they found them. I ask you’ll keep it. The village sets great store by it.”

  “A shrine of the Bryalt?” he asked, largely ignorant of gods, study as he would in Efanor’s little book.

  “Perhaps older, my lord. Though Bryalt offerings may turn up here, the king’s law and the Quinalt

  60 / C. J. CHERRYH

  notwithstanding.” Crissand spoke in the hearing of Guelenmen, in Uwen’s hearing most of all, and was surely aware it. “We go uphill from here, a clear, smooth road, as I recall it, no ditches or pits to fear on either side.”

  No track disturbing the snow since the last snowfall, either, but the blanket sank down considerably in a long line through the ridge, showing where the road was, and the stone sheep walls on either side, visible ahead of them, confirmed it. They rode past old stones, and many of the Guelenmen made a small sign against harm.

  “The farmer folk are staunch Bryaltine,” Crissand began to say as they rode past.

  But just as they passed under the spreading branches of the oak a fierce gust of wind blew past them, driving the banners sideways and startling the horses with a pelting of snow from laden branches.

  C H A P T E R 2

  Gods!” Crissand said in dismay, and reined up sharply…for an old woman stood by the shrine, so gray and brown in her shawl and skirts she might have been part of the oak in the last blink of their eyes. She had drawn her shawl over her gray head, but hanks of her hair flew in the gale and the driven snow. She had a necklace hung with smooth river stones and knots of straw. Her skirts were weighted with braided cords and coins, and the fringes of her shawl flew wild as the icy wind skirled up.

  “Gods!” Crissand said a second time, with an anxious laugh, soothing his horse with his off hand. “You gave me a fright, mother. I don’t know you. Are you from Levey?”

  She was no stranger and no common woman, Tristen knew it, and held Gery still: Uwen had halted beside him. So had all the column behind halted, and the banner-bearers ahead had turned back to face the woman in dismay.

  “Auld Syes,” Tristen said, for to name a thing was to have some power to bid it. “What brings you so far from Emwy?”

  “Why, I come to bring the lord of Amefel to his senses,” the old woman said, and pointed a bony bare arm from out of the clutch of flying fringes, stark and commanding as the wind continued to blow. “Lord of Amefel and the aetheling! Why do I find the twain of

  62 / C. J. CHERRYH

  you riding west like common fools, when your road lies south?

  South for friends, lord of Amefel, north and east for foes, and blest the lord who knows one from the other! Mistake them not again, lord of Amefel!”

  North for enemies and south for friends was no news; but east was Guelessar, and the king…and many another enemy, the barons not least. Tristen doubted nothing, and listened with ears and heart. Auld Syes had told him truth before.

  And aetheling she said, the lord of Amefel and the aetheling, as if they were not the same thing… the twain of you, she said, lord and aetheling—which met his heart with a loud echo of all the wonderings he had had to himself. The guards who heard might not have heard that salutation in the same way: the common folk attributed both titles to him. Perhaps even Crissand failed to gather that implied duality.

  But he did, and sat staunchly holding the red mare still between his knees, resolved not to flinch no matter the news out of the east.

  “Lord of Amefel I am now. What shall I do for you, lady of Emwy?”

  “Can truly you do aught, new lord? Have you true power, or is it only illusion you wield?”

  A second shot winged home with an accuracy that might miss all attention but Uwen’s: Illusion was one of the two words hammered in silver on the blade of the sword he bore at his side; Truth was written on the other, in bright letters of long ago, and of all men present, only Uwen knew what the writing on the blade signified: Uwen, and this old woman.

  Of a sudden he found himself afraid, trembling with the old woman’s challenge not in the gray space but on the earth and in it, and under his horse’s feet. The blade he had rarely drawn, that dark metal presence that generally lurked quiescent at his hearthside.

  FORTRESS OF OWLS / 63

  Truth…and illusion. He was both, and would she show him the division in himself?

  “If I have power to grant anything for you, lady, that will I.”

  “The living king at last sits in judgment. South, south, lord of Amefel, fare south today. And when you find my sparrows, my little birds, lord of Amefel, warm them, feed them. The wind is too cold.”

  His bones shook. He could not obtain his next breath.

  “Find my sparrows!” Auld Syes cried, or the wind cried to him. “Find my sparrows when you have found your friends!”

 
A brutal gust slammed into the banners, tilting them despite the struggles of the bearers, who swung them into the teeth of the gale. Horses shied up, some fighting to bolt, but battle-trained Gery danced in place, head up, ears flat. Auld Syes still stood at the center of the gale, her fringes and her necklaces flying about her as the winds circled round and round her, winding her strings of amulets and charms, tangling their yarns.

  Streaks appeared in the snow around her, short, broad gouges that kicked up new-fallen snow, passing around and around her like the skips of dancers. Whatever veil Auld Syes had parted to reach into the world was closing with a vengeance, and other spirits flowed along the edges of her power, spirits more dangerous and less wise.

  “Lad!” Uwen cried in alarm, and the wind dislodged snow from the oak above them, a thicker and thicker curtain of white that hid the old woman in its heart, a gray shadow.

  “Auld Syes!” Tristen shouted, disturbed by this talk of sparrows, friends, and kings. “Auld Syes, I am not done with questions for you! May I hold you?”

  “Bid me under your roof, lord of Amefel!” The voice was fading now, obscured in the wind. “Dare you do so?”

  64 / C. J. CHERRYH

  “Come at your will, Auld Syes!”

  “Gods,” someone breathed. It might have been Crissand. It might have been Uwen. He himself invoked no more power than already roared about them as the veil of snow collapsed.

  Then the wind slacked enough to clear the air, and to their eyes there was no woman, only tear-shaped streaks in a great broad ring, around and around where she had stood. Of Syes’

  feet there was no track at all: pure and undisturbed, the snow lay in the center of that ring, and the snow that fell now in fat clumps plopped down onto the stacked stones. A plain clay bowl, filled with snow, sat atop that pile, as the bowls had stood on the altar table in the Quinaltine, this open to the sky and filled with a winter offering, to what gods was uncertain.