Fortress of Owls

by C. J. Cherryh

  “What can we do?”

  “Accuse a murderer…accuse Tasmôrden, who’s the likeliest the people know.”

  “An Elwynim. And will that make me safe?”

  “It’s a better direction than any other. It’s all we can do. Say it was sorcery and Tasmôrden suborned it. If you can’t damn a man for what you know he’s done, damn him anyway. It was a spy. An assassin slipping in from outside, concealed by sorcery, moved by sorcery.”

  “And my people, innocent people, are taking refuge in Amefel, inside Ylesuin, where they have such charms. Where will that go?”

  “We can’t let it turn to Amefel. We can’t let people ever take the notion. It was sorcery, and it was Tasmôrden, from straight across the river. Gods know we’ve bodies to spare: sixteen dead and one burned beyond recognition. We’ll say first we caught the assassin. We have him in chains. We dole out the news day by day and keep the people in expectation. Then we display the remains. Sorcery killed him in his cell.” He felt no pride in what he was saying, or planning. He liked far less making her party to it…but it was her advice that had prompted him. “Where will the people’s anger light then, but where we need it to nest?”

  “The murderer will know,” Ninévrisë whispered. “And what will he think?”

  “He’ll tell Ryssand and Ryssand will know. And Ryssand will share our secret, only Ryssand and the mur 522 / C. J. CHERRYH

  derer…and one day Idrys will see justice is done. It may not be tomorrow. But it will happen. Efanor’s Jormys is in office now—the Quinalt council has to confirm, but the Holy Father had enough votes to rule there, and they hate the zealots. We’ll banish sorcery. We’ll make saints of Benwyn and the Holy Father.”

  “Sorcery isn’t remote from us,” Ninévrisë said faintly, leaning her head against him. “And it might, after all, be true, this lie.

  Send to Emuin. He should know this.”

  “We can’t send a letter like that. No. There’s far too much risk. Our couriers have had narrow escapes.” He forgot, at times, that Ninévrisë had wizardry of her own. And now it worried him. “Was Benwyn a wizard?”

  She shook her head, a motion against his heart. “Not a shred of one.”

  “Are there wizards?”

  “There’s Emuin. There’s Tristen, if one counts him.”

  “I’d count him.”

  “He’s—”

  “Not a wizard.” He understood the exception. “But there are others.”

  “One hears them. One feels them.”

  “Do you think what we plan might not be a lie?”

  “I don’t know,” she said faintly. “At first I thought so, but now I don’t know.”

  Ryssand would expect blame for the Holy Father’s death.

  He had immediately to send a message to reassure Ryssand of that notion, dangle favor before him to keep him from the desperation that would drive the scoundrel to protect himself.

  Desperate, Ryssand could bring the kingdom down.

  It was a dangerous course they steered, but it was one that would keep the north united. In the Holy Father he had lost a valuable ally. In Jormys, loyal to Efanor, he had another.

  FORTRESS OF OWLS / 523

  Yet he must send condolences to Sulriggan, the late Patriarch’s cousin, and keep that lord tied to him, assured of his continued favor even with the Patriarch dead. That man could be useful.

  Luriel’s marriage had to go forward, early. Young Rusyn might become a hero of the defense of the Quinaltine. He had deserved it. His father certainly had. A reward of lands would shore up Panys’ wounded dignity: he cared not a jot about Murandys, though he supposed he must.

  Something rattled like claws against the window.

  Rain, he thought it first, but saw no drops on the glass.

  It kept up, and kept up.

  It was sleet coming down.

  C H A P T E R 7

  To Tristen’s distress the weather turned…natural weather for winter, so everyone said as the sleet came, and then the snow. Owl must have found some nook out of the wind, or was hunting mice: the pigeons came fearlessly to the window for bread, and the servants mopped and swept continually in the halls against the traffic that came and went.

  But it was not Tristen’s wish that the weather turn, and he found something ominous in the worsening storm. Wagons with tents and other gear were on the road in the storm that first froze the roads—that was a help—and then began to ice them, and that was no help at all.

  Umanon’s few wagons arrived out of a blinding white, to set up camp in ground beginning to freeze.

  “One can’t hold off nature forever,” Emuin said with a shake of his head, when Tristen went to his tower to consult. “I’ve not seen such a spell, and I suppose it’s simply given us all the snow at once.”

  “I’m havin’ men pound in pegs now,” Uwen informed him when, wrapped in his heaviest cloak, he visited the camps outside the walls, “there bein’ little difference in the tents, an’

  if there is, they’ll rig somethin’ clever. If this goes on, they’ll just be damned thankful the pegs is drove in before the ground freezes. Granted they can find ’em. We’re settin’ markers, and FORTRESS OF OWLS / 525

  hope the rest on ’em’s quick arrivin’. I figure they’ll press on into the night to get here.”

  “I wish,” Tristen said, “but my wishes aren’t all that’s had effect, or the snow wouldn’t fall yet.”

  The lords prowled the hall and the stables and hoped for their tents and supplies, concerned, clearly, while Emuin sat in his tower hoping in vain for a sight of the sky and the stars at night.

  And just at sundown, the storm gave up to a general, an eerie quiet.

  More riders came in, Ivanim, cold men and cold horses, glad of a great bonfire Uwen had ordered set up for a beacon in the night, to guide men to the town. Cevulirn went down to meet the newcomers, who were his, but the heavy horsemen of Imor with all their gear and remounts were still out in the storm.

  Sovrag went down to help. Umanon and Pelumer simply fretted, near the town lords gathered in the great hall. It was their men still to come, still out in the storm.

  The fact was that contrary to all Pelumer’s intentions the handful of Lanfarnessemen who should have come after their lord were late: Lanfarnesse was late again, and now it was their lord who worried and paced beside Umanon, until, past midnight, the two lords decided to go down to the bonfire, and called for heavy cloaks.

  “I’ll go with you, sir,” Tristen said, having no more easy rest than Umanon, thinking that if he were outside the walls and away from the clamor of a living town, he might hear less noisy things, out across the land.

  Crissand, too, who kept them company among the local nobles, said he would go, or even send out his household men searching for the missing.

  “My men know the road,” Pelumer said—temerity to suggest that the rangers of Lanfarnesse could not 526 / C. J. CHERRYH

  find Henas’amef. “They’re delayed, is all. My folk don’t press the weather if they see a hazard in it.

  “They may well have stopped for the night,” Pelumer added as they rode down through the town, cloaked and gloved and wrapped up snugly. The wind was gathering force again after sunset. Any surface exposed quickly turned white on the side facing the gale, and all of them were half-white by the time they passed the gate.

  “Bridges won’t support the heavy wagons,” Umanon said,

  “and my men will have to ford at several places. That means a camp to dry out, with the wind like this. But if they’re close, they’ll press on, no matter the hour.”

  The place outside the walls had blossomed with tents over recent days, and most of the horses were moved out to shelter in the places provided for them, with warm, dry straw, so they were comfortable.

  And there, just as they came down, came a last weary number of carts, in from the road.

  “They’re here!” Umanon said, knowing his own, and vastly relieved: indeed,
the men were riding not the light horses they used for travel, but the heavy horses, whose great strength had brought them in.

  So they were safe, and so the men from the garrison and the Amefin guard fell on the wagons to get the frozen canvas spread in proper places, and to get wood for warmth.

  More, the tavern near the gate had prepared a hot meal on a standing order, and men went through the gates and out again, all on the town’s hospitality, fed and fed well, with no need to rely on their own resources on this bitter cold night.

  Everything was taking shape despite the snow, and men called to winter camp were surprised and relieved at the comfort they did have.

  FORTRESS OF OWLS / 527

  “We have everything in order,” Cevulirn came to Tristen to say. “I’ll spend the night with my men, and in good comfort, too. We’ve things to talk about, my lieutenant and I.”

  It was not all that easy. Men struggled with stiff canvas, stiffened ropes to unpack the wagons. Umanon’s men elected to move the teams and to leave the wagons standing where they were until morning, and that proved a wise expedient, for the wind was increasing, carrying snow so thick it was difficult to keep the torches lit.

  The bonfire alone shone through the veiling snow, a light grown wan and strange in the opening of the heavens.

  Nature let loose, Tristen said to himself, hugging his cloak to him and wondering if indeed they would have all the snow they had been due. Gusts buffeted him, carried away a tent from cursing men, who simply let it go and caught it when it fetched up against another tent.

  Things went well, but not without struggle. He rode Petelly disconsolately along the aisle, hooded against the fall, and told himself he should give up worrying and take Petelly up to his warm stable, having done all he could do, and the Imorim having come in.

  He could do most by wishing for the weather to improve.

  He might prevail. He had done it once.

  Yet he had not heard the Imorim until the last. He had failed with the weather.

  Was that the way the new year and the Year of Years was setting the pattern, and had things gone as well as he had hoped on Midwinter Eve?

  When he thought that, the gray space worried him with a sense of something amiss, nothing he could catch, only a trace, like a scent the wind might bring one moment and carry away the next. It was none of the men here, nothing like Cevulirn.

  528 / C. J. CHERRYH

  He was in the last aisle of Pelumer’s camp, and about to enter Cevulirn’s when the notion came to him that someone was in the storm, strayed men, perhaps…perhaps some of Pelumer’s men, or stragglers after the Imorim.

  Then something brushed his shoulder and made him start, until it happened a second time and he knew it had been Owl.

  “What do you want?” he asked the uncooperative bird. He suddenly realized that he was alone: his guards had helped at the wagons, and somehow now they and he had separated in the driving snow.

  Now of a sudden Owl brushed past him and wheeled away, off toward a troubling sense of presence in the storm. Follow.

  Follow me.

  In the world of Men that track led simply down the road, as it bore toward Levey. It was a road he knew, in the heart of his province, and it was the road down which Umanon’s men would come. There might be stragglers.

  But stragglers that Owl cared for?

  He turned Petelly’s head and followed.

  No one knew he had gone. Uwen was at work in the farthest camp, and Crissand had gone to assist Cevulirn, and by now the snow came down so thick the surviving torches were faint, blurred stars, the bonfire a hazy sun.

  Owl brushed his arm on another pass and raked right past Petelly’s mane, startling the horse to a heart-stopping skip under him, a skid on a snowy ditchside, right off the road.

  Yet here, remote from all the lives that occupied his attention in the camps, remote from the town and wrapped in snow-laden gusts and storm, he discovered a clear wisp of a presence, not one life, but two, or maybe three.

  FORTRESS OF OWLS / 529

  What was more, now at least one or two sought him, aware of him, and desperate, trying to come toward him. If they were Umanon’s men, at least one had wizard-gift.

  He rode Petelly up onto the road again and in that direction, still bearing toward Levey. Owl flew generally ahead of him, appearing at times out of a veil of snow, and gone as quickly, always in that direction. Follow. Follow. Don’t delay.

  By now, he thought, there might be a general search for him, and Uwen would be upset with Lusin and his guards, who would blame themselves for his straying.

  But Owl was persuasive, and miraculous things had happened on this road, on which the old oak lay overthrown, and Auld Syes had met him.

  It could not be Auld Syes using the gray space. It was a fearsome thought, for something about her and her daughter he had always been reluctant to challenge there.

  Yet he went on. If danger was here, it was not the sort Uwen or Lusin could face, nor Crissand with a dozen men-at-arms behind him, and the presence he felt was faint and weary and fading, as if at any moment it would go out and leave him no guide at all in this snow-choked night.

  “Hallo!” he called out, and searched the gray space, as well, trying to learn its nature.

  But fainter and fainter the presence grew, no longer moving toward him. Whether the travelers had a horse, or whether they went afoot he had not been sure, but he often could tell whether creatures lived and moved in a place, a fox, a hare, a horse, or a man: he had no such sense tonight, only of himself and Petelly—not even of Owl. Such as a wish would help, he wished them to stay alive and not to sink down and become lost in the snow, for things were chancier and 530 / C. J. CHERRYH

  chancier, and he no longer trusted the gray space to tell him…only Owl, only Owl, moving against the obstinacy of the storm that did not want him to reach these lives. The weather fought him—had broken free of his will, poured snow and sleet and bitter ice, and now he fought it, and Owl fought it, and brave Petelly lowered his head and plodded as best he could, shaken by the gusts, wishing continually to turn back.

  Came the third and the fourth hill, and a cold so great Petelly stumbled to his knees and he had to get off before Petelly could rise again. He stood with his arms about Petelly’s ice-coated neck, wishing him health, wishing not to have harmed him by this mad venture, and Petelly all at once gave a great sigh and brought his head up, as if he had taken a second wind.

  Mount he did not, however, for Petelly’s sake. He led him, the reins wrapped securely in gloved fingers too stiff with ice to feel what they held, and he walked, and walked, until he saw a something like a rock in the middle of the road, a lump that should not be there.

  He reached it, and prodded it, and it Unfolded into a cloaked, exhausted woman, and another, in her arms.

  “Lord!” she breathed, and clung to him as he helped her up.

  “My sister…my sister. Help us.”

  Even in the dark and the driving snow he knew that voice and that shadowed face, knew it from his earliest meetings in the world of Men. Lady Orien clasped his arms in entreaty, the thick snow gathering apace to the side of her hooded cloak and her face, and he bent to help her fallen sister, who lay huddled in the snow, limp and difficult to rouse. “Come now,” he said, and laid his hands on Lady Tarien, and wished her to wake.

  But he did not wish alone. Orien lent her efforts laid her hands on his, and the gray space shivered FORTRESS OF OWLS / 531

  around them. Then the limpness became shivering, and Tarien half waked.

  “They burned the nunnery,” Orien said between chattering teeth, the snow battering their faces. “They would have killed us. We had no choice but flee. And my sister, my sister…we couldn’t walk any farther.”

  “We’ll put her on my horse,” he said, and gathered Tarien up to her feet, feeling the thickness of her body as he held her.

  It was not at all the lithe, lissome Tarien he knew.

&nb
sp; “She’s with child,” Orien said as he half carried her. “Be careful of her.”

  He stopped, looked at her, dismayed at what he heard, dismayed that Owl had betrayed him, and led him here, to this unwelcome presence. Yet what could he do but leave them to die here, and nowhere had he learned to be that heartless.

  Half-fainting, Tarien tried to grasp the saddle leather herself.

  He lifted her as high as he could, and willed Petelly to stand still while with some difficulty and Orien’s help with Tarien’s skirts and cloak he managed to settle Tarien upright on Petelly’s back.

  “He’ll warm you,” he said, and settled the cloak over her and Petelly together, about her legs. He reached up, caught its edges, and closed her half-senseless fingers on it. “Keep hold of it. It’s not that far to Henas’amef, and the wind will be at our backs, now. It’s not that far to shelter.”

  “We were nearly there,” Orien said.

  And Owl had led him.

  Orien faltered in the high snow, her boots snow-caked and inadequate, but Petelly had enough to do with one. They walked, and Tarien rode. Orien leaned against him at times, seeking to shore up her strength through wizardry as she must have done for more than one night on this road—not a good heart, but brave,

  532 / C. J. CHERRYH

  and now failing. With trepidation he lent her what she must have to walk, not at all pleased with the rescue, and strengthened that much, she began to speak in broken phrases of fire and sword, of their walking day and night.

  “Where was this?” he asked, and learned from Orien’s labored speech of an attack on Teranthine nuns, of the two of them hunted through the night as the nunnery burned.

  “We had a horse,” Orien said. “But he ran last night. The snow came, and the weather grew worse and worse—we slept in a farmer’s haystack, and never found the house. We walked, and walked…and then we heard you, where we had all but given up.”