Fortress of Owls

by C. J. Cherryh

“But no sight of Elwynim,” Tristen said. “Yet I fortify the bridges, and kept the Guard, having no Amefin troops. The wagons…Cefwyn can spare them a fortnight more, so I hope, if nothing happens northerly.”

  “A fair risk,” Cevulirn said after a moment of silence, leaving Tristen less than certain Cevulirn approved all he had done.

  “Cefwyn told me,” he said, “that he wishes to attack FORTRESS OF OWLS / 75

  Tasmôrden from the eastern bridges and not the south, for glory to the northern barons. And I’ve no wish to take any glory at all, or to have another battle at planting time, when the last was at harvest.”

  So Crissand had just told him, but Crissand was by no means the first to explain that with men drawn away from their farmsteads season after season, no crops grew and the lambing this spring would already go hard…he had not drawn men off the land, not yet. Amefel’s losses had been heaviest, at Lewenbrook, a muster of peasant farmers and herders, where other provinces had sent well-trained troops.

  “So I don’t intend to cross the river,” he said, “but I intend they shan’t cross here, either.”

  “His Majesty’s plan is to set Murandys and Ryssand and Guelessar in the field, all the heavy horse and all the gear,”

  Cevulirn said. “It’s the warfare Guelenfolk know. And I’ve urged His Majesty have a thought to the light horse, and getting a force over those roads, which by all Her Grace has said are none so fine and broad as those in Guelessar. Mud. And difficulty for those wagons His Majesty sets such store by, with all that heavy gear. March to Ilefínian and bring them to bloody battle…with all respect to your good captain, Amefel: the heavy horse will suffer in that plan, every league they travel. It’s too far a march, too many hills that give vantage to archers.”

  “A bloody passage it’ll be,” Uwen said in a low voice, for Cevulirn he knew well. “An’ I agree wi’ Your Grace, and wi’

  my lord, I’d send the light horse.”

  “I’ve said the same,” Tristen said.

  “But that’s not the king’s wish in the matter,” Cevulirn said,

  “for his Guelenfolk. So bloodily they’ll win through, granted Ryssand doesn’t stab our king in the back. The king sets all hope on Ryssand and Murandys, where least it should rest, and here am I in the south, where least I should rest, and His Majesty

  76 / C. J. CHERRYH

  never so in danger from a knife in the dark when he was sleeping in Henas’amef, his guards notwithstanding.”

  A great deal was amiss. Tristen heard that very clearly as they rode. Cefwyn had wished to set Ninévrisë on her throne with no war at all, deeming the rebels broken at Lewenbrook.

  But a lesser lord, Tasmôrden, had leapt to the fore of the rebellion, and the rebels that had not yet crossed into Cefwyn’s battlefield had simply swept aside and fortified a camp inside Elwynor, raising an army out of the stones there, as best they could surmise: certainly it had taxed the villages hard to raise the force it was now.

  Set Ninévrisë on her throne Cefwyn would.

  But Cefwyn averred he had no choice but exclude the south from the war and call this time on the north. Ryssandish folk and Guelenmen were the heart of his Guelen kingdom: the south was of tainted blood…had he not heard it from Cefwyn’s lips?

  And did that not still shiver through his memory? So thoroughly had Cefwyn remembered he was Guelen, and wanted their favor, when he could have called on the likes of Cevulirn and Sovrag. Having Cevulirn and Sovrag with him, he had sent home the Olmernmen; and him; and now Cevulirn?

  The gray space remained untroubled; Tristen’s heart did not.

  Was it a visit without meaning, that Auld Syes guided? He thought not. They two were the king’s friends, and Crissand had pledged himself through him, and so all the earls of Amefel, and Auld Syes herself had heralded Cevulirn’s coming to him.

  Was it without meaning?

  He was Lord Marshal of Althalen, Lord Warden of Ynefel, titles all but lost in his assumption of the dukedom of Amefel…meaningless and vacant of inhabitants, men said.

  FORTRESS OF OWLS / 77

  Men said. But might those be the honors Auld Syes called him to attend…when she as good as hailed Crissand aetheling?

  The King he come again, she had said to Prince Cefwyn in his hearing, and that lanced through his memory like a lightning stroke.

  Had not Uleman, who stood for a King, Lord Regent of Elwynor, also come to Amefel, and died? Young king, Uleman had called him, when he was dying, but in the gray space all things had questionable meaning. Uleman had charged him with defense of the innocent, Uleman, who lay now in ward of Althalen, a power not quite departed from the earth. Cefwyn made him lord here, in Amefel…the keystone in the arch that held Elwynor off Ylesuin’s soil.

  “Look, will ye?” he heard Uwen say as they passed the hill and rode down past the road to Levey, and all through the ranks men blessed themselves or spoke softly to their gods, for the old oak had fallen, its roots uptorn from the muddy ground, great clods fallen all about, and the branches cracked and ruined.

  “Ain’t no wind might topple an oak wi’ that girth,” a Guelenman said. “Gods bless, here were sorcery.”

  “Quiet wi’ your ‘sorcery’!” Uwen said sharply. “Wet ground an’ a gale an’ an old tree, aye, and a wizard-woman, but sorcery’s another thing altogether. My lord don’t dabble in that, so careful how ye use words.”

  “Gods bless us all the same,” said Crissand, and Tristen regarded the uprooted oak, the very symbol of Amefel, asking himself whether wind could in fact have done it.

  “An uncommon sight, to be sure,” was Cevulirn’s judgment.

  “So the witch that foretold your journey stood there, Your Grace,” said Crissand, “and warned us to look for you, and now see the ruin of the tree.”

  78 / C. J. CHERRYH

  “There’s nothing here now,” Tristen said, “nothing harmful, nothing of threat. It’s a very great tree to be rooted up. But the lady of Emwy is no slight matter either. Ride by.”

  That they did, and curious as he was and questioning in his own mind what might have befallen the oak, he did not unsettle his men further by turning in the saddle to gawk like an innocent. He was the stay of the guardsmen’s confidence and their courage to confront strange things, and there were strange things enough for a week of gossip once they all reached town.

  There was one more strange sight on the other side of the next hill, for their tracks, hitherto utterly blotted out by the snowfall, reappeared, never covered by any fall there, nor all along that earlier part of their road. The storm had never reached there, and they could see all the land before them from that height, with a thick snowfall behind them and none before.

  “Not a natural storm,” the soldiers said with anxious looks at the west, which still showed dark. “There weren’t nothin’

  natural about it.”

  “As we met fair weather,” Cevulirn remarked, “until an hour before our meeting.”

  “I think the carts must have gone out, after all,” Tristen said, for he had been convinced until now that Anwyll’s party could not possibly have set out into the teeth of that storm.

  But nothing here would have prevented it.

  — Master Emuin? he asked the nearest wizard he knew.

  It’s snowed, have you noticed? Or did snow fall at all in

  town? I think it did not.

  — Have you ever seen an oak overthrown, master

  Emuin? Some might take it for ominous, and surely the

  soldiers do. What shall I tell them?

  No answer came to him, but that was, lately, no great surprise, though disheartening. At the same time FORTRESS OF OWLS / 79

  he heard Lusin and Gedd saying to each other, with better cheer, well, that was a relief, no drifts between them and a warm fire.

  It was a leaden sunset in the west and a blue evening in the northwest shot through with fire as they came up to the walls, over the tracks of farmers and the heavy trac
ks of the departed wagons.

  They rode through the gates in close order, Lord Crissand making quiet, last-moment converse with Lord Cevulirn, explaining the streets were quiet and peaceful, and their visitor should fear no rebellion. They were well within the town, before the gatekeepers, caught by surprise, began to ring the bell that advised the hill fortress of visitors.

  Then the curious began to peer out of shops and windows.

  The return of their party from a venture all the town had seen go out might not have drawn any but the hardiest out of doors on a frosty evening. But the bell drew attention, and the banners had unfurled, the White Horse of Ivanor among the banners belonging to the town and its own lords, and townsfolk threw on cloaks and mittens and came out into doorways, or peered out from well-situated windows, for not since summer had the White Horse banner been seen in the streets, when Cevulirn among other lords of the south had camped in that broad expanse outside.

  Loaded carts had gone out for the border, where war was bruited about, a great lord had come guesting with their new lord and the new lord of Meiden…it surely made for talk, on an evening remarkable only for a light snowfall.

  C H A P T E R 3

  The herald trumpets faded tremulously from the air, the harpers harped, the pipers piped, and the king and Royal Consort, settling on their dais in the great hall, looked out over the assembled nobles of Ylesuin, as happy as a bride and groom might be, who knew what all their guests were thinking. The king sat above the stone Ryssand had installed under the Dragon Throne, a lasting and symbolic legacy of Ryssand’s attempts to prevent the wedding. That stone remained, though Ryssand was gone at least for a season; that stone would acquire the voice of baronial anguish if removed, for removing that handbreadth height would lower the king of Ylesuin to the height of his bride’s chair of state, and that would unravel all the convolute and, in the end, bloody agreements that had let the court accept the marriage.

  In Cefwyn’s glum reckoning, the presence of that stone would only grow more, not less, a necessity, wearing itself into habit and memory until the damned thing was all but sacred. The majesty of Ylesuin must sit higher than his wife Her Grace of Elwynor, or northern baronial noses would be sorely out of joint, and when the barons’ noses were out of joint then the barons would gather in corners and whisper, which at the moment and only of very late date, they dared not do without careful smiles on their faces and occasional FORTRESS OF OWLS / 81

  sweet-faced bows toward enthroned majesty.

  So all in all, the cursed stone was likely to remain, preserving Guelen pride and making it clear that the woman beside the king, his wife, his consort, his bride, and the love of his heart, was not the queen of Ylesuin.

  In fact ever since he had come back from Amefel and the fighting at Lewenbrook to inform the barons that his father was dead and he was king, and that he had, moreover, betrothed himself to the daughter and heir of their old enemy, the Regent of Elwynor, he had met a resistance not only greater than he had anticipated, but more clever and dangerous than he had imagined. He had thought these men simply agreeable to his late father’s unpleasant opinions, had realized too little and too late how very extensively these men were accustomed to having their will of his father and directing those opinions…and nowadays he wondered how many of the worst decisions of his father’s reign had been his father’s and how many were in fact Ryssand’s instigation.

  Certainly he had come to court in blither certainty and confidence of the world than he held now. Yet it was Ryssand, ultimately, who had rued the clash of wills…and Cefwyn could congratulate himself on having had his way in all meaningful things. Save this one.

  Save this one, for at last, on the eve of the wedding and with the Quinalt granting all else and reconciled to performing the ceremony, he had slipped in the word queen, and a small delegation of lords and priests had presented him in turn the last, the most stringent and inflexible objection of the clergy: royal expectation aside, there had never quite been a queen of Ylesuin, even counting his father’s mother and his, and Efanor’s, and the Quinalt had come armed with chapter and verse to prove its case, a veritable parade of clerks and clerics.

  82 / C. J. CHERRYH

  It was true. It might be Cefwyn’s argument that the omission was never intended for precedent, only that his grandmother had died before his grandfather’s rule began and his mother and Efanor’s mother had both been of Guelen burgesses and not royal, only wellborn. It was circumstance, not intent, in his argument, that had kept Ylesuin from having a queen, but that mattered little, when down to the day and in the toppling of all other obstacles, they had come to dicing words and titles and listening to long recitations of clerkly records. Facing the possibility of another disaffection of the Quinalt Patriarch, whom he had bought in costly coin of favors given, Cefwyn had had to admit that perhaps the reluctance to crown the king’s wife was not an insurmountable slight to his bride, who would reign in Elwynor with or without the acknowledgment of Ylesuin, and who was, moreover, pleading with him to accept that slight and get on to the wedding. What she wanted for herself and her people was the alliance, and an army potent enough to drive Tasmôrden from his siege of her capital. She wanted no delays and she wanted that army to set its first contingents in order at the bridges immediately after the wedding. To that he agreed, for the situation in Elwynor had been growing grim then and was growing grimmer to this hour.

  She would reign, indeed, as he willed: as they did not make her queen, so they could not trammel up her claim to the Regency of Elwynor, and he would provide—was providing—the army even tonight with his first forces camped on riverside.

  And it would be her kingdom, separate from his. That was the unfortunate seed in what his barons had done: they had made it impossible for him to persuade her, win her, contrary to the provisions of the marriage treaty, to an early union of their kingdoms. She had

  FORTRESS OF OWLS / 83

  insisted on her independency and her own lordship over neighboring Elwynor in the nuptial agreement…and that, most precisely, she had, thanks to the barons, without any possibility of argument on his part. Reign she would, in her land, during the summers, so they planned, leaving winters to a vice regent in her land, and gods hope they could ply rowboats between often enough or they would both go mad.

  The raising of armies and the defense of their separate kingdoms aside, they loved one another madly, passionately, and to the edge, but not quite over the brink, of complete folly, and their passion had not abated since the wedding night. There was no having enough of one another. They were entirely happy in their nest upstairs. They would neither one act to the detriment of their separate kingdoms…but their fingers met whenever they found the chance, and had he ever seen eyes light as hers did whenever he came within her presence?

  Gods, how had he lived his life this far without her?

  They still walked through their dream of candlelight and flowers, at least in private. They still existed in the singing and the bells, and saw the garlands and the bright banners that were all he in good truth remembered of the wedding…well, there had been the satisfying and uncommon sight of certain of his unhappy barons trying valiantly to smile through the ceremony, and the equally uncommon sight of the Quinalt Patriarch’s cousin Sulriggan, Duke of Llymaryn, positively aglow with happiness: Sulriggan’s return from near exile having been the coin for the Patriarch’s acceptance of Her Grace, the two were not unrelated circumstances.

  That glow on Sulriggan’s countenance continued to this very hour.

  Looking out over the barons who were in attendance this evening, he saw the same sources of discon 84 / C. J. CHERRYH

  tent, and expressions of gloom on those he had destined for retribution when he found the means…policy, not utter self-indulgence: the barons would learn him, or by the gods make way for those who would.

  One of those acts of retribution, in fact, he would deal out this very evening, and contemplating that prospect, he cou
ld sit on the cursed stone and smile down on his court in honest contentment. Conspiracies to overthrow him would come to nothing, while he held a certain damning letter and while he had the loyalty of such as Tristen of Amefel and Cevulirn and the rest of the lords of the south. Even the middle lands had gained courage from the resolute muster of the south this summer’s end, and might see their own affairs as safer in the hands of a strong monarch than in the hands of the northern tier of self-serving barons.

  Unlikeliest allies of all, he now had the Patriarch and Lord Sulriggan to draw upon…securely bought, and safe so long as they stayed by the agreement: perhaps intruding just a little far upon his patience, but they were learning one another’s limits.

  Sulriggan was clinging close to Efanor, whose friendship he again courted…and would not win. Efanor was once betrayed, and would not listen. Dubious prize as Sulriggan was in most points of courage on a battlefield, however, in the conflicts within the court the man was as agile and as clever as one might ask. That generous nose of Sulriggan’s could gather impending shifts in the wind with great sensitivity, and his cowardice in the field manifested as a sensible discretion of utterance once he knew his own interests were at stake.

  Most central to all considerations of behavior, the lord of Llymaryn had learned once and for all that his wastrel prince would not sit the throne as a lax and tolerant sovereign…having not his father’s inclinas

  FORTRESS OF OWLS / 85

  tion to agree to every document that reached his desk, some unread.

  Nor, Sulriggan had discovered, did his prince, now king, like the sight of unwarranted expense, even extravagance of dress, when he had a war to fund and lords obliged to arm and equip their share of it.

  Accordingly Sulriggan, the bane of his stay in Amefel, the lord who had mortally offended him, was modestly dressed tonight, a Quinalt sigil piously and ostentatiously displayed about his neck…clearly to remind everyone who his cousin was.

  A marriage banquet was a time for forgiving and forgetting.