Fortress of Owls

by C. J. Cherryh

  “Gods save us.” That was Lusin, chief of his guards, and Uwen with a rapid gesture signed safety to them all, a Guelenman, a Quinalt man by upbringing, asking, “Lad, are we safe here?”

  “We ride south,” Tristen said, turning Gery’s head. “I think that was what she wanted.” He beheld guardsmen’s faces as shocked as Crissand’s. Snow had stuck to the sides of helmets and stuck in the eyelets of mail coats and the coats of the horses, while more was falling from the sky, thicker and thicker, not the knife edge of sleet, now, but soft, wet clumps that stuck where they landed. Banners hung limp, all in the shelter of the oak.

  “This is the road to Levey,” Crissand said faintly and foolishly, as if his guidance were called in question along with their safety. “I am not mistaken in this.”

  “Then our journey is not to Levey,” Tristen said, and by the folly of that protest guessed that Crissand was far yet from understanding Auld Syes or any other spirit that might go about her, some of them danger

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  ous to more than life. “Ride back to the town, you and your men, before the weather becomes worse. Uwen and I will go on, with my guard. I can’t say what we may meet.”

  “No, my lord! And the woman said, did she not, friends to the south? What should we fear?”

  What indeed? Much, he answered the question in his own heart. “So she did,” he said aloud, “but I can’t speak to what sort of friends.”

  The Guelenmen in the company, his own standard-bearers, and his four guards, looked more dismayed than Crissand and his men, and Uwen, who had met Auld Syes before this, bore a willing but worried frown.

  “Last time she came, m’lord,” Uwen said, “there were no good event, and men died for’t.”

  “Yet she never did us harm,” Tristen said. Truth: a king and a Regent had fallen, and men had died at her first appearance; at her second appearance, which Uwen had not seen, he had been in peril of his own life, but he had found Ninévrisë as a result of it.

  Now he saw no choice: Auld Syes warned them, yes, but to his understanding of her nature she was not responsible for what then followed. And with a touch of his heels on Gery’s sides, he threaded the column back through itself to reach the main road.

  There he turned south, and Sergeant Gedd and the two other men carrying the banners urged their horses through low drifts and up the side of a ditch to get to the fore of him. The Guelenmen were bound by their honor and the king’s order to go on if he would; but true to his word and also for honor’s sake, Crissand and his men did not part their company, either.

  No more did he forbid them as Crissand came riding up the slant of the ditch to catch up with him and Uwen, the Amefin captain trailing him and slipping on the steep.

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  Snow began to fall more finely and more quickly from the sky, graying all the world as the wind swept down with a renewed vengeance, scouring blasts that carried so much snow that in a moment the trees of the apple orchard stood like gray ghosts, and the low wall was a faint shadow. The standard-bearers had never yet furled the banners. Now they rode with them tilted doggedly forward as if they defied the wind itself, a knife-edged and formless enemy that whisked their cloaks away from their bodies while they struggled two-handed and half-blind to keep the banners from being torn away.

  “Furl the standards!” Tristen called out to them, dismayed at such gallant folly. What did they think they fought? he asked himself; and the next gust shook even the horses, and in better sense than their masters they tried to turn their backs; but riders forced them around into it by rein and heel. Meanwhile the imperiled banners came safely in, and the banner-bearers snatched their cloaks about their bodies. The cold had grown bitter. Crissand struggled with his coif and the reins and an escaping cloak edge, and Tristen was glad of both coif and heavy cloak.

  “We’ll be off the road in another such,” Uwen said through chattering teeth. “An’ fallin’ in the ditch an’ not found till spring. I hope to the gods ye can see our way, m’lord; I can’t.”

  Tristen knew his way, sure at least that he knew where south was, but he pitied the men and the horses. He had never truly dared the gray space with Auld Syes, and only for his men’s sake and justice did he try it now. “Auld Syes! ” he said aloud, here and there alike, to whatever might be listening. “We’re doing as you wish! What more will you? Is this your doing, Auld Syes? ”

  The wind had a voice, and it spoke, but not so any FORTRESS OF OWLS / 67

  man could understand it. What Auld Syes would and would not was without care for mortal discomfort or men’s lives…so he feared: Auld Syes had made her effort and had left them to their fate.

  But one there was not immune to pity.

  “Seddiwy! ” he called out. “Speak kindly to your mother! ” For as he thought of it, Auld Syes’ daughter might well be in this capricious upheaval of the elements, a shadow, certainly, if she still played skip and raced about the old woman’s skirts. The wind itself might be a child’s game, a game of shadows, sometimes prankish, sometimes deadly to her mother’s foes…small willful child in dangerous company.

  But potent child, for all that.

  “Seddiwy! Cease this! ”

  It seemed someone heard, for the gale fell away so suddenly that the wall of wind against which they leaned was suddenly absent. Gery threw her head up, whinnied at the empty air, and gave a little skip in startlement.

  Crissand set a hand behind him and looked all about, as if looking for apparitions or worse.

  “She’s a shadow,” Tristen said, “a little girl. She means no harm to us. The elements are overturned with her mother’s goings and comings, at least that may be the cause.”

  “A little girl!”

  “A mischievous one. But good-hearted.”

  “I take you at your word, my lord.” Crissand’s voice was hushed and thin, and no less than the guards and the other captain, Uwen looked warily about him…justly so: more than a child might manifest about Auld Syes.

  But now that the gusts had ceased, the snow began to congeal in great soft lumps as it fell, so that now they could see the road and the roll of the ditches

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  alongside it quite clearly through a veil of fat, white puffs.

  “There’s a moment,” Crissand said at last, breathlessly, in their apparent rescue. “There’s a moment I shan’t forget so long as I live. Good gods, you keep uncommon allies, my lord.”

  “She’s Amefel’s ally,” Tristen said, for so it had always seemed to him. The air was less cold where they rode, now, yet a glance confirmed a shadow, an impression of dark in the all-enveloping gray, boding storm in the west. “Uwen’s right that she’s warned of ambushes before now. She spoke to me in the woods at Emwy near such a spring, and it may be, such a shrine.”

  He suspected he had never told that to Uwen, and did not explain now, but brought all his faculties to bear on the road southward, searching through the white distance and testing within the gray space unseen to the rest of them whether there was any presence on the road behind or ahead.

  He felt all the cold-stung men beside him quite clearly, the faint and distant presence of what must be Levey village away and to the west.

  He felt Gery under him and the horses around him, and he felt the dim presence of living things out across the orchards, small creatures, perhaps a rabbit in its burrow, or in a brush heap. Auld Syes spoke of sheltering birds; but he knew it to mean something else, and urgent, as he distractedly hoped for the safety of his birds and all creatures who had set out so blithely unforeseeing a storm such as this.

  He had not foreseen it. Emuin had not. And all the wizard-sense he owned felt something ominous in the west this hour, something that otherwise should make them turn now and fare home quickly, to put themselves behind walls and wards.

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  And now he recalled how he had felt foreboding even before he had set out from Guelessar: a
sense of threat, from a hill above the king’s forest.

  Do you find anything amiss? he had asked Emuin today, and had no answer, only talk of beeswax candles.

  And why? Why indeed? And why no warning of storm or magic today, when the like of Auld Syes arrived out of the winter with warnings and directions to venture out?

  He was not comforted, even while he pressed red Gery forward in the snow.

  — Do you hear me, sir? he asked Emuin. Do you yet hear

  me? Do you know what’s happened?

  Was it anger that moved him? He was close to it, beset like this and taken without warning. He had found baffling Emuin’s deserting the king to come with him in the first place, and yet never having advice for him, nor even traveling with him on the road.

  He found Emuin’s dereliction more and more portentous and troubling in light of Auld Syes’ appearance just now, and still he rode through this storm telling himself that, of course, wizards had their ways and their necessary silences.

  Oh, yes, Emuin had warned him…warned him Emuin feared his wishes and his will, and wished him to use either as sparingly as possible. So it was perfectly understandable that Emuin kept silent on all manner of things.

  But something, perhaps even the extremity of the effort, had sent Auld Syes away with an appeal to him to invite her past the wards that surrounded him, and now violence boded in the west, and still Emuin said nothing, though others had acted.

  This was beyond prudence regarding what he would do. This silence encompassed what others intended, and he grew vastly out of sorts with it.

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  Conversation had meanwhile ceased among the guardsmen behind him, except the Guelenmen asked in the quiet of the fall was there ever the like, and the Amefin swore they had never seen anything to equal this weather.

  “Are we still in Meiden lands?” Uwen wanted to know, and, yes, the Amefin captain said, they were still in his lord’s lands, but only scarcely. Past the next brook Meiden’s lands ceased, and the aged earl of Athel held sway.

  It was a distant sound to him, their talk, in the strange quiet of the snowfall, like the floating silence of a dream, as if some magic had made an isle of calm around them and kept the dark of the storm elsewhere at bay. Seddiwy’s lingering mischief or merely the troubling of nature Auld Syes had wrought, flurries of white appeared, but confined themselves to the hills and the horizon, small opaque patches beyond which they could not see.

  They rode thus for an hour, at least, in such gentle snowfall, meeting no great accumulation on the road, which seemed unnaturally spared of the drifts that deepened on the hills, and the men’s wonder informed him that, no, this was not the ordinary conduct of snow-storms.

  They began to ride out of their area of peace as they rode into the sheep-meadows of the southern hills. A wind almost as fierce as the first stung their faces with sleet like icy sand and made the horses go with half-shut eyes and flattened ears.

  “How far shall we ride?” some guardsman complained, and Uwen said, “Far as His Grace wishes it, man. Bear wi’ it.”

  Soon now, was Tristen’s increasing conviction. And now it seemed to him that the opposing storm was not all troubled nature, but that someone, somewhere,

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  troubled nature deliberately, opposing Auld Syes, never wishing her to speak to him: she had asked his summons, his leave, which opened his wards to her, as a fugitive might ask a door be left unlocked.

  It was dangerous, what she had asked; so was what he had granted; and yet thus far the only penalty of his venture was a dusting of snow and the chill that numbed and made decision difficult. Someone else, someone opposed to Auld Syes, instead of Seddiwy, might have roused this weather to make things difficult, but had no power or no desire to make it worse, and that someone else might even be master Emuin, angry at the venture, but he did not think so.

  With sudden sureness, however, he knew the friends Auld Syes had warned him of were just the other side of the hill.

  Awareness of a presence reached through the gray of his Sight and into his heart…a faint glow about Crissand and another such glow of presence in the storm-blown haze ahead of them, blue and soft, advisory of wizard-gift.

  There, his heart said. It was someone uncommon.

  And a friend? Almost he dared guess, and his heart lifted.

  Welcome, he said to the white before them, and just then, on a hill made invisible by the blowing white, shadows of riders appeared as if in midair, three riders who approached them, each with a second, shadowy horse at lead.

  Then came four, five, and two more out of the white, men whose colors were the snow and the storm themselves.

  Gray cloaks and mingled gray horses, the foremost horse near to white. And, yes, here indeed were friends, Ivanim, from the province neighboring to the south.

  Perhaps they had set out north as a courtesy to him, once the news of his accession in Amefel had reached Ivanor: that was the natural thought.

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  Yet did something so simple come heralded by Auld Syes, at such effort?

  Clearer and clearer they came, both sides continuing to move, and the foremost rider proved no less than the lord of Ivanor himself, Cevulirn…who should not have been in the south at all, but eastward, in Guelessar, with Cefwyn.

  That portended something in itself ominous.

  “Ivanor!” Tristen called out, though the men with him made pious gestures against ghosts and shadows.

  “Is it Tristen?” came the answering shout.

  There was no need to break out the banners for reassurance in this murk, but Gedd had done so; and now the banners of Ivanor came forth, the White Horse; and Crissand’s own, Sun on a blue whitened like ice.

  “Welcome,” Tristen called out to the lord of Ivanor, as their two parties met. He offered Cevulirn his hand as they met, the clasp of gauntlets well dusted with snow and frozen stiff with ice. “Welcome, sir. But how does Cefwyn fare?”

  “Safely wedded, so I had word. I lingered at Clusyn monastery to know, on my way home. And how are matters in Henas’amef?”

  “Very well. Very well, sir.” It struck him only then that other courtesies were due, and he made them, self-conscious in his new lordship. “Your Grace, Crissand, Earl of Meiden; our friend, the duke of Ivanor.”

  “I’ve seen you in hall,” Crissand said, “but as my father’s son.

  Lord Cevulirn, count me your friend as devotedly as you are my lord’s friend.”

  “Your Grace,” Cevulirn said. That Crissand was earl had told a tale in itself, one Cevulirn would have no trouble reading: a father’s death, the son’s accession to the earldom, but there was no leisure here for asking and answering further than that.

  The wind tugged at cloaks

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  and pried with icy fingers into every gap, and they were standing hard-worked horses in a chilling storm. “I take it your journey is to me,” Tristen said above the buffeting of the gale, for there was nowhere else of note this road led, before it came to Henas’amef. “You’re very welcome, you and your men. Shall we have the horses moving?”

  “Indeed,” Cevulirn said, and they reined about and Cevulirn with them. The wind came more comfortably at their backs as Tristen began to thread his own column again back through itself, and Ivanim sorted themselves out among Guelenmen and Amefin.

  “Does His Majesty need me in Guelemara?” Tristen asked, first and clearest of his worries once they were faced about and headed home. “Are you here because things are going well, or because they aren’t?”

  “Well and ill. His Majesty sent me south for my health. It’s high time His Majesty’s friends put their heads together.”

  Cevulirn did not readily give up words, not before strangers, most of all. He only knew that Cevulirn had purposed to stay by the king this winter, to report to the southern lords any untoward demand of their rivals of the north, and to make it clear to the amb
itious north that the south would not see its interests trampled. Yet Cevulirn had heard of the wedding only from the vantage of the monastery at Clusyn, and had come home contrary to his firm intentions.

  So whatever had happened in the capital, it was not according to plan.

  “Earl Crissand is trustworthy,” Tristen said. “What do you mean we should put our heads together?”

  “The northerners are rid of me,” came the answer. “As they are of you, and yet they could not prevent the wedding. So at least half their plans came to naught, but gods know what Ryssand’s done.”

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  “Surely lightning hasn’t struck the Quinalt.” He was half in jest, but that was how the barons had been rid of him: he could not imagine how they had proceeded against Cevulirn, who was one of the greatest men in the land.

  “Would lightning had struck Ryssand. No. But I struck him a grievous hurt, hence my ride south, hence a winter for us to arrange things more to His Majesty’s liking. Hence my visit to you. How have you fared here?”

  There was far too much to tell, and much of it bitter to Crissand, of whose witness he was entirely conscious. “Well enough,” Tristen said, “considering all that’s happened. Meiden lost a good many men. There were Guard killed. I sent Lord Parsynan out afoot, since he stole Uwen’s horse; and I sent His Majesty’s wagons to the border to fortify the bridges—or I had sent them this morning. The weather may have prevented them going.”

  “Have you, indeed?” Cevulirn’s tone was flat, implying neither approval nor disapproval, only, for him, query. “Has there been difficulty there?”

  It was another matter that touched heavily on Crissand’s pride.

  “My father, sir,” Crissand said before he could speak, “had correspondence with Tasmôrden. The rebels offered to come in to support rebellion, and rebellion there was, to my father’s grief and misfortune, sir.”