Fortress of Owls

by C. J. Cherryh

  “Hasufin!”

  “Regarding this matter of the Great Year, I say, sixty-two years of the ordinary sort, and Hasufin Heltain, who was a wizard, and who bound his life to the cycle of the Great Year.

  Great works need great patterns. And his was the most ambitious: to use the Great Year itself would have given him more than one opportunity for a long, difficult magic, at long intervals. But there is more: there’s a Year of Years, a pat 436 / C. J. CHERRYH

  tern of patterns that only the longest-lived can see, let alone use. Do you guess? Hasufin is old, as Mauryl was old. And the dawn of the last Year of Years was the hour of Hasufin’s first seizure of Ynefel, when he drove Mauryl Gestaurien to seek help in the north. But before it was done…the Sihhë came down. And that was the pattern of that beginning. That was what Mauryl did to Hasufin Heltain: he wrought the Sihhëlords into Hasufin’s rise, so he could never be free of them—and the Sihhë-lords, like your horse, respect no boundaries and kick down the bars. He lost. Mauryl rose…and the Sihhë-lords reigned.”

  “And fell.”

  “Ah, and the dawn of the last cycle, the second such time, you may well suspect, sixty-two years ago…was Hasufin’s second rise. We are in the last of the sixty-two years of the Great Year that marks the Year of Years. The spring solstice, last spring, when Hasufin overthrew Mauryl the second time…Mauryl knew his peril; and chose his moment: the time of rebirth, your birth, young lord. Now that Great Year closes and a new Great Year begins the next Year closes and a new Great Year begins the next Year of Years in the season of the deepest dark. At Midwinter the last element of the heavenly court will enter the House in which all the others stand. This movement marks the dawn, at midnight, of that new Year of Years. At Midwinter the moon stands, changeable queen that she is, at the darkest of the dark. By the time the sun rises, either the elements of the Great Year favor Hasufin…or something stands in opposition to him. What is, at that dawn, will be, for centuries of years as Men reckon time.”

  “So Mauryl never sent me to Lewenbrook. That wasn’t what he wanted of me.”

  “Oh, it was certainly part of it. But Cefwyn opposed Hasufin.

  Cefwyn opposed him, and opposes him now, FORTRESS OF OWLS / 437

  and there’s that damned Elwynim prophecy of a King To Come.

  It’s probably true, more’s the pity. Uleman was a good wizard, but he talked too much, and now everyone expects there to be a new High King. It doesn’t serve Cefwyn well at all…and by chance it doesn’t help Uleman’s daughter, either.”

  Here was truth, so much truth it was hard to know what part of it to seize and question, but he found one question salient and unavoidable.

  “And is Hasufin our enemy still?” Tristen asked. “And shall I fight him again? And where?”

  “I can’t say,” Emuin answered him with a shake of his head.

  “Above all, Midwinter Eve is perilous to us, and of all damned days you might have chosen to assemble the lords…that one you never asked me.”

  “I had no knowledge. Now I do. What other times shall I fear?”

  “The spring solstice…evidently,” Emuin said. “But what more may happen I don’t know. I haven’t lived through a Year of Years. You have.”

  “I haven’t lived.”

  “As much as Hasufin. Mauryl’s the only one who’s lasted one in the flesh, as it were. And now is stone, in his own walls, so you say.”

  He shivered, not wishing to recall that day of waiting, that terrible hour, when he knew the enchantment of the faces was not the ordinary course of the world, and that there was something dreadful about Ynefel, where the Sihhë had ruled, where the Lord Barrakkêth had maintained a dreaded fortress…where at last only Mauryl had lived, alone, in solitary correspondence with the latter generations of Men, at Althalen, and what Men had used to call Hen Amas, and now Henas’amef.

  “So Mauryl did the best he could: sent you, without warning, without guidance, without instruction…lord 438 / C. J. CHERRYH

  of Althalen. That you surely are. Lord of Ynefel…I would never dispute. That you are Tristen…I leave that to you, and would never say otherwise. This I do tell you: the stars point to Midwinter. The hinge of the year. The hinge of many years, this time, when all things reach an end, and a beginning, and when patterns begin for the next Year of Years. Against your years, I am a youth.” Emuin reached across the table to lay his gnarled hand on his young one, a touch like Mauryl’s, half-re-membered, touching his very heart. “Tristen is your name. So be it. Have a sip of tea. It’s grown cold, boy. Boy!”

  “Sir!” said Paisi, scrambling up.

  “Tea. Cakes if they’ve escaped your avarice.”

  “Avarice, sir?”

  “Things don’t Unfold to him,” Emuin said, aside, “and, thief that he was, he has no notion what avarice is. A fine boy. A discreet boy, who has no desire to become a toad. Where are the cakes, Paisi?”

  “I’ll ask Cook,” Paisi said, swinging the kettle over the fire and poking up the heat. “I’ll be back, I’ll be right back, sir. I di’n’t hear a thing, I di’n’t.”

  “Toads,” Emuin said, and Paisi adjusted the kettle and fled, banging the door, or the wind did it, seeping in from the cracks in the shutters.

  Quiet occupied the tower, then, only the slight whistle of the wind.

  “He’s no trouble, is he?” Tristen asked, hoping he had not inconvenienced master Emuin.

  Emuin gathered up a handful of beads, a collection of knots and strings and feathers, beads and bits of metal. “A grandmother’s spell, a protection. He came back clattering with it, a thing of moderate potency, in very fact. Do you see the Sihhë coin?”

  “Yes,” he said, curious, for just such a coin had banished him from Guelessar. “And you keep it?”

  “The wretch gave it to me,” Emuin said, “saying I FORTRESS OF OWLS / 439

  surely needed protection. And he had bought it with coin your Uwen gave him.”

  “There’s no harm in it,” Tristen said, lifting it in his fingers.

  “Is there, master Emuin?”

  “You see nothing amiss in it, do you?”

  “No, sir. I don’t.”

  “A grandmother’s spell, cast on me, if you please, and bought with Uwen’s spare pennies, from the rise of his good fortunes.”

  Emuin shook his head, and cast a pinch of powder into the fire. It burst in a shower of smoke, and a smell that would banish vermin. “Boys,” Emuin said. “He takes greatly to the powders and smokes. They make him sure I’m a wizard.”

  “Yet so is he.”

  “And steals cakes, the wretch!” Emuin laid aside the cords and trinkets, and dusted off his hands. “When a request would obtain them, he steals.”

  “As you say, he is a thief. That’s his trade.”

  “Out on it! But he must not curse. I fear that in him, above all else. I’ve told him so, in no uncertain terms.”

  “Accept his gift,” Tristen said. “His stealth is a skill.”

  Emuin lifted a white brow. “That it is, in its good time.” There was a riffle of touch in the gray place, an overwhelming sight of Emuin as a presence there, and the place they occupied was small and furtive in itself, their visits there few, these days, and now, after so much of shared confidences, they sat, touched and touching, only for comfort.

  A little removed was a little mouse of a presence, visible, if one knew to look for it. Paisi the Gray, Tristen thought. Paisi the Mouse.

  Above them the day, and before them the night and the ominous stars. He had a question and wrenched himself out of the comfort of the gray space and into 440 / C. J. CHERRYH

  the clutter of Emuin’s tower, where the old man sat, far less imposing than in that other place, with tea stains on his robe and ink on his fingers.

  “What were the stars when Mauryl Summoned me, sir? Tell me something else. Am I bound to one year? Or to this Great Year of yours?”

  “Gods know what you are bound to. Or…being Sihhë, g
ods know.”

  A horse, running in the field. In his heart he had not known there was a boundary, a place, a fence, a limit to freedom, until Emuin and Uwen had begun to make him know the seasons, and the Year had unfolded to him, in its immutable cycles. He had viewed it with some dismay, to know such repetitions existed.

  On such things Men pinned their memories. Uwen would say, in the winter of the great snow, or in the spring I was fighting in the south, and such wizardry did Men practice, fencing things in, establishing patterns as they made Lines on the earth.

  “Is it wizards who made years?” he asked. Questions still came to him, though few there were he dared ask, these days.

  “I believe it was,” Emuin said. “For so much of the craft relies on it. Yet we have no constraint on the moon, which observes its own cycles.”

  “And what have you bound to this Year of Years? And what have you wrought, regarding me, sir?”

  There was a small silence, and Emuin turned as furtive as Paisi, and did not look him in the eyes at once.

  “I’ve chosen to do very little.”

  “Keeping an eye on me, as Uwen puts it.”

  “So to say. And I can’t fault you, beyond your disposition to raise walls and give away provinces.”

  He laughed, obediently, but his heart still labored under all that Emuin had said.

  “Gods know what you are,” Emuin said then, “but FORTRESS OF OWLS / 441

  I know what I am, which is an old wizard who has seen the largest pattern he knows reach its end and swing round again…or it will do so, on Midwinter, when my young lord is holding feast with the lords of the south. Then’s the hour to keep the wards tight and the fires lit.—After that, I’ll breathe more easily.”

  “The wards.” He had forgotten their strange behavior, in that way wizardry slipped past one’s attention. “Do you remember that night, sir? Did you see it, the night when all the town stood in light?”

  Emuin gazed at him curiously, as if struggling to recall. “Yes.

  That night. And I wondered was it you.”

  Tristen shook his head. “Not that I was aware. I thought of you, sir. Or even Paisi. It wasn’t so much that something tried the wards. It was as if the town waked. As if the building did.”

  Something happened then in the gray space, perhaps a subtle inquiry. And a two-footed mouse skipped on the stairs, fearing shadows and sounds in a hall gone strange to his eyes.

  — Get up the stairs, young fool!

  Emuin was stern and protective at once, and there was a rapid running on the steps from the scullery, and a rapid passage through the lower hall, wherein there was special danger, to a boy with a tray of cakes and a pot of jam.

  — I’m coming, sir. I’m coming.

  So Ynefel had seemed at times to live, and what he knew now for ghosts to haunt the stairs and trip an unwary lad.

  In a strange way he felt grieved not to be Paisi, with no danger apparent to him but his own wise fear of shadows and cold spots on the stairs.

  Had he not learned theft himself, and stealth, and known all the nooks and crannies of the old fortress at Ynefel?

  442 / C. J. CHERRYH

  And had he not gone as oblivious of its wards and its terrible secrets?

  “Silly boy.” Emuin sighed. “He’s learned to hear us, you can tell, and we have few secrets. Now if he only learns a bit more, and respects the wards, we’ll have something in him.”

  The grandmother’s cords and charms seemed peculiarly potent, almost a point of light in the gray space. Elsewhere in the town, an old woman had wished well, and now stopped in her weaving, and held a hand to her heart, for that wish might require a strength she had never had called. That heart all but burst with the shock, the life all but fled, before Tristen realized the outpouring of it and closed the gap with his own hand as he touched the cords of the charm.

  He gathered them up, held them in both hands, and drew a bright, burning line from the Zeide to the roof of a house near the wall, and an old, old woman who had nearly died.

  “Rash,” said Emuin. “Rash. You’ve made that woman a target.”

  “I’ve given her a shield. So with all the town.”

  There was a clatter on the stairs, a crash and a rattle just outside the door, a rush of wind as Paisi struggled to open it, wide-eyed and sweating from his haste.

  “I di’n’t break the pot,” said Paisi, but edged a cake back from among the rest. “This ’un fell. I’ll eat it.”

  “Nobly offered,” Emuin said. “Take two. Go, the water’s long since boiled, and His Grace is patient. Don’t offend him. He’s terribly dangerous when offended.”

  “Aye,” said Paisi faintly, scrambling for the cups. “Aye, an’

  I washed, sir! Cook made me.”

  C H A P T E R 2

  Tailors and purveyors of costly goods were having a prosperous winter…first the royal wedding and now the wedding of Rusyn of Panys with Luriel of Murandys.

  Luriel, who had come within a vow of being queen of Ylesuin, would yield nothing to a royal bride in show or extravagance: she was absolutely determined to have a pageantry to erase all memory of her disgrace, and her expense in satin cloth might have sustained the villages of her province through a far worse winter.

  Cefwyn watched the bustle and hurry with a cautious eye, wondering himself just how much show and pageantry Lord Murandys would allow, and how much Luriel dared, with a keen eye as to whether at any point it went over that fine distinction between the redemption of Luriel and an affront to his wife.

  Most of all he was glad that the to-ing and fro-ing and measuring now involved another bridegroom—and yet, and yet…to his astonishment the piles of fabric in the old scriptorium, the Royal Consort’s domain, brought down another controversy of petticoats, beginning with the fact that Luriel had chosen the traditional gown, and had not modeled herself off the fashion of the consort.

  It was a decision which might have signified the bride’s desire simply to avoid controversy, and to

  444 / C. J. CHERRYH

  avoid a slavish flattery of her royal patron, who, among other things, had no reason to invite comparison with her lord’s former lover.

  But that lack of adherence to Ninévrisë’s side of the petticoat controversy ended up angering him, curious notion. He was offended, when Ninévrisë refused to take offense, and he could not lay his finger on what in Luriel’s choice annoyed him.

  The fact was, the ladies did whisper that Luriel wished a traditional wedding, with all the Quinalt blessing: so the rumor reached him through Idrys, of all unlikely sources, and he was incensed, all but ready to signal his disfavor of Luriel in a public snub.

  But he was not willing to bring the Majesty of Ylesuin to the issue, not ready to stamp the royal seal on a decree, gods help him, regarding ladies’ petticoats. There were limits. He had fought his battles on that ground once, and Ninévrisë had, and he told himself it was done.

  And just as they held back, Fiselle, Ninévrisë’s maid, vain and feckless girl, unwittingly struck the telling blow in the fray, prattling on to Luriel’s maid how Her Grace refrained from sweets and heavy foods to keep her lovely figure, which one of course had to have, in order to wear Her Grace’s shape-re-vealing clothes.

  A siege engine could hardly have kicked up more consternation, and as of one morning’s news, two of the ladies were wearing Ninévrisë’s single petticoats.

  Then Luriel cast all hers away, down to a shift, even taking two panels from the gown.

  If wishes were mangonels, bodies would lie like cordwood.

  But everyone sincerely praised Luriel’s form, and the single petticoats had, in a sevenday, scandalized the Quinalt.

  FORTRESS OF OWLS / 445

  The frivolity of women, certain priests called it, and the flaunting of immorality.

  Then, on royal suggestion, His Holiness countered from the pulpit that certain priests spent too much time considering frivolity and not enough attending the n
eeds of the people.

  Seven days of shot and countershot, and, portentous surely, while the snow piled higher across the river, the wind blew steadily warm in Ylesuin until most of the hills were bare.

  Sorcery, some said, and blessed sigils turned up on doors, and candles burned a sweet savor to the Quinalt, the prayers of the honest faithful, while the priests fired barbs at one another in a doctrinal war that had begun in the women’s court in the issue of petticoats and tradition and continued over the uncommon weather.

  It made the king’s court seem lately quiet by comparison, and in the absence of controversy on his own doorstep, Cefwyn found himself spending untroubled evenings at his own fireside…comfortable and pleasant evenings, in which he might sit in private with his own wife and dine without the constant intervention of ill tidings from the riverside or the Quinaltine.

  Without, too, the clack and clatter of court proceedings, since the lords seemed weary, also, hoping only to pass the wedding without disarrangement of the arrangements that had settled a winter truce. At last they knew where they stood, at least in the middle lands. At last they knew what they must do, beyond all the furor Ryssand had kicked up—and that was to see their young men equipped for war and their lands so arranged that the fisheries and the orchards would not much suffer for the young men’s absence for a season. The grain lands were exempt from the muster, and also the royal granaries would open, giving out the abundance they had stored in the good years previous.

  446 / C. J. CHERRYH

  It would be enough, all taken together.

  In the meanwhile he looked forward to Luriel’s marriage for very private reasons: there seemed something mildly indecent in hearing from his own wife’s lips the doings of his former mistress and confidante, and while both of them could find wry humor in the situation—Luriel was a witty, wonderful young hothead, if it were someone else at whom her malice aimed—he was very ready to have an end of Luriel’s crises.