Fortress of Ice

by C. J. Cherryh

  “Very good,” he said, as if he were his uncle hearing a case: he was disappointed that it was no more than his father had found out upstairs. “Very well.” He nodded, to send the man off, then, seeing that the men were entirely interested in the pouring of ale and the heating of an iron, over at the side of the little kitchen, he simply went back up the stairs, put on his cloak, and took his gloves from his belt.

  The kitchen stairs led up right near the western door of the fortress, the little, informal door that led to the sooted steps that led down to the stable, and many people might come and go by it. He put the hood up as he left the bottom of the steps and crossed the yard, taking advantage of the weather, and he moved as Elfwyn had shown him how to move, not like a hunter, darting and stopping, but like a person on perfectly ordinary and lawful business. Paisi had taught Elfwyn, and Elfwyn had taught him, and now it became useful.

  He slipped into the stable yard, where the stablemaster and his boys were tending the Guard horses, and on inside, where his and his father’s fi ne horses were afforded stalls and special care.

  The horses they had come on were much too tired to go on, and only great good luck would get him through the Zeide gate and through the gate below on horseback at all, so it was no good taking one of the others. He simply took one of the guardsmen’s bridles, as an inconspicuous and average sort of bridle, with enough adjustment for whatever he might catch down in the fields. He took bait, a little worn sacking from a peg, with several dippers full of grain, and stuffed it into his coat, then simply slipped out the lesser front door of the stable and walked to the gate, where he had to have his best lie ready. He was carrying a message to a cobbler, to arrange mending for 3 1 8

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  the visitors’ boots . . . none of the guards might recognize him, if he kept his hood on, covering fair Guelen hair.

  But a handbarrow was coming in, it seemed, and the guards were engaged with the man bringing it. So he took his luck as a good sign and slipped past and down, unremarked, just a servant from the hill on late business headed down to the lower town.

  He had no food for himself, except to eat a little of the raw grain, if it came to that. That was a difficulty. But it would not, he was sure, take him that long to find his half brother, the same as it hadn’t in the Guelesfort, after no less than the Dragon Guard had searched for hours. He knew his routes. He had had the map of Amefel in his room, and he had studied it and knew the highways and the byways and every farm and field that had ever been taxed in the history of Amefel.

  More, he knew where Marna began, and he knew the shortest way, and if his brother had gone that way, he would at least spur his father and the duke into tracking him, since they wouldn’t listen to him or even admit him to their councils. He would lead them the right way, and if he had to go all the way to Lord Tristen’s keep, he had the map’s best notion where that was, too. If Gran was dead, if Otter’s sorceress - mother had cast a spell of blindness over the duke and everyone in the keep, then maybe he was the only one in the whole keep who hadn’t fallen under that spell and who didn’t think they could find his brother by sitting and talking about things from before he and Otter were even born.

  Elfwyn. Otter didn’t like that name, but he’d taken it for his. Why? Because it was hostile to his family?

  What was his brother thinking of, except that he was outcast from Guelemara and now had stolen from Duke Crissand. So Otter was running from him, and had lost Gran and now Paisi, in weather like this? He must be afraid, by now, and cold and desperate, and probably lost, not having committed a map to memory.

  So Aewyn couldn’t sit there and talk and drink and discuss old crimes in the kitchen. His mother and his father hadn’t brought up a boy who could be patient when one of his own was threatened, and if the family’s other son didn’t merit a search out into the night, if his father thought the Guard was too tired to go on, Aewyn would see to it.

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  iii

  it was a meticulous business, getting down to the truth—truth from Paisi, who begged nothing more than for them to be out searching for the boy as soon as possible, and from Crissand, who had talked with Elfwyn at some length, with the librarian who had given him the key, the guard, who had reported the matter, and the officer of the special guard who watched over Tarien: no, the boy had not visited his mother since the day Gran’s house burned, nor had he passed that guard station the night he had gotten into the library and vanished: clearly, then, Cefwyn said to himself, regarding a place where he had lived and ruled for a year, clearly, then, the boy had used the servants’ passages— Paisi said he had had nothing to do with it, nor had guided the boy, who, it turned out, was as slippery as his namesake.

  A knock came at the door, and an Amefin guardsman put his head in to beg pardon, but there was the Dragon Guard captain wanting to speak with His Majesty, urgently.

  No deference to their host: Cefwyn gave a peremptory wave, beckoning the man in, and the captain slipped in, looking decidedly worried. “Begging Your Majesty’s pardon,” he said, and came close for a confidence as private as might be, in so small a chamber. “The Prince isn’t downstairs or up.”

  “Where is he?” Cefwyn asked, with a sudden chill.

  “We don’t know, Your Majesty. He was in the kitchens with us, questioning the cooks, about the theft in the library, as was, and we looked around, and he wasn’t there.”

  “Good loving gods!” He flung himself out of his chair.

  “The Guard is searching, Your Majesty. The Amefi n, too.”

  “He’s gone,” Paisi said, and immediately put a hand over his mouth, having talked out of turn; but it drew Cefwyn’s attention:

  “What do you know about it?”

  “Majesty, forgive me, but if ’e’s gone, he’s followed my lord, is all.”

  “More sense than the whole damned passel of you,” Cefwyn said to the mortified captain, the Marhanen temper getting well to the fore— which was not good. He drew a deep breath and reined it back. “There are a thousand nooks a boy could get into. Ask the Amefin. But assume he went to the gate.”

  “Yes, Your Majesty.”

  He snatched his cloak off the peg, marking how his son had taken his own with him— ordinary in a boy being sent off for good, but likewise sensible in a boy who firmly intended to go outdoors.

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  “May I assist, Your Majesty?” Crissand asked.

  “Not your fault,” Cefwyn said shortly. “But come along to the stables. I want to know from the gate - guards up and down if any boy went out, for the gods’ sake. He’s been gone long enough to be out and away.”

  He left, walked down the hall— a king could not run— and walked down the sooty and well - trafficked steps and out to the stables in the dark. The sun had set.

  No, there was no horse missing. That was good news.

  “There’s the horses down to pasture,” Paisi said, unasked. “He’d ha’ had to have a bridle or halter.”

  “Count them,” Cefwyn said.

  The report came flying back that there was one fewer bridle than horses that had come in.

  Clever lad, Cefwyn thought distressedly.

  “He might have gone back to the witch’s farm,” Crissand said.

  “Follow his tracks at the town gate and at the pastures. And my guess is to search west. West. He knows where Marna is.”

  Fear could close in about even a sensible boy, magnifying his doubts and moving him wherever a damned witch wanted. Fear— or overweening determination— could magnify itself, if a boy was particularly vulnerable to magic. And the boy was half-Syrillas.

  “I’ll go,” Paisi said to Crissand. “If I could borrow me horse again, m’lord.”

  “No!” Cefwyn said, and stormed back across the yard and up the torchlit steps, Crissand struggling to stay beside him, with an accompanying straggle of guards, and Paisi.

  “We can
bring horses up,” Crissand said, “and supplies for the road.”

  Every horse they had in stable but three were road - weary and incapable of a chase. “What shall I do?”

  “Do it,” he said. It would take well over an hour to send down the hill, get horses from pasture, and get them up here and saddled and a search un-derway. But Crissand gave those orders.

  He gave others, to the Dragon Guard captain. “Find out exactly what the kitchen staff told him,” he said to that man, reaching the inner hall, while resisting the notion to let his temper fly: it never had done him good, and would not now, to strike out at the inept, to race off on impulse into the dark and miss some clue as to what precise impulse might have sent his son out looking for his brother. He went down the hall, past the grand stairs, with the far hall and the tower guard in his view, and wanted, oh, so much, to 3 2 1

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  walk up those stairs and ask the one person who might have an answer— but she would not be inclined to tell him the truth, not for threats, not for pain.

  She would gloat to see him come up her stairs.

  Worse than that— Tristen wasn’t here, she was, and if she had gotten strong enough to cause this— dared he meddle with the wards on that tower, which were Tristen’s, and which might be failing?

  Not tonight, not in the dark, and not with his sons at issue. If she was nudging this and that, outside her tower, let her think she was safe in her mischief— so long as Tristen was on his way here to deal with her.

  He went instead into the greater audience hall, servants scurrying about him to bring candles, small frantic lights that flared past gilt columns and figures and ledges. He settled onto the ducal throne of Amefel, once the throne of Amefi n kings. He had used it before. It was his right, and no dis-courtesy to Crissand, who arrived with his own guard, bringing a white -

  aproned, white - bearded man, the cook.

  The old man was terrified, and could only wring his hands and say he had talked to the Prince about what everybody knew, the old murder, and the books gone missing . . .

  “Book,” Cefwyn said curtly. “Book. One book.” The legend had already multiplied the theft. And the cook had apparently said nothing to give Aewyn any notion he hadn’t had before.

  “Did he take food with him?” Cefwyn asked.

  “No, Your Majesty. Not that I saw.”

  “His cloak and a bridle,” Cefwyn muttered. “So he doesn’t think he’s going far.”

  “Perhaps he won’t try to go far,” Crissand said, standing near him.

  “I can’t say.” He was at a loss, and the sun was going down outside, setting on a road that had taken his sons away from him— the one by a road that might not even lie in the world of Men and the other trying, the young fool, to follow him . . . all with the highest and best intentions, to be sure.

  “Have you any sense at all from the ring?”

  “None,” Crissand said miserably. “None at all. As if he’d vanished from the land.”

  He laid a hand on his chest, where Tristen’s amulet rested, and it— it tingled, like something alive against his skin. For one blessed moment it seemed he did feel something of direction. It tingled. It burned.

  And there was a commotion in the hall, an expostulation from the guards, and a loud and impatient voice that tugged hard at memory. The chamber door burst open, banged back, and of all things, a bearded old man in volu-3 2 2

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  minous gray robes stalked into the audience hall and walked straight up the center of the room.

  Emuin. Who had been dead for ten years. Cefwyn sat stock - still, watching this apparition of his old tutor, the master wizard who had been at his side through all the wars and the troubles.

  He had snow on his cloak, snow in his hair and beard, and clenched a staff in a hand quite blue with cold. He stamped that staff three times on the pavings.

  “Well,” he said. “Well! And in trouble again, are you?”

  “Emuin?” Cefwyn asked, far from certain of what he saw. The place was given to haunts and apparitions, but of all of them, this one was welcome, more than welcome at the moment. And he was dripping water onto the pavings. “My son is in trouble.”

  “Which son? You have two.”

  “That I do. And both. Both are in trouble.”

  “Not surprising, given their heritage.” Emuin leaned on his staff with both hands. “A long trek, a damned long trek, this. I am quite undone.”

  “Bring a chair,” Cefwyn said, with a wave to the servants, who stood gawking.

  “No time for sitting,” Emuin said, and turned and waved his arm and his staff aloft. “Get that damned woman out of my workshop, that for a beginning.”

  His tower. His place, before they had imprisoned Tarien Aswydd in it.

  It was so exactly what Emuin would say.

  “Not so easy,” Cefwyn said. “Not so easy a matter to dislodge her, my old friend. Tristen put her there.”

  “Well, then where is he?”

  “That’s very much in question,” Cefwyn said, and had his own inquiry to make in the general madness of the moment. “Where have you been, the last ten years, Master Grayrobe?”

  “Where have I been?” Emuin repeated, blinking and looking a little confused for the moment. He looked about the hall, as if he might find an answer there, or somewhere about the cornices. “I suppose I’ve been busy,” he said, and swung about to look squarely at him. “Busy. Busy, until it became clear there was no peace to be had.” He stalked forward, to the disquiet of the guards, and flung the staff rattling onto the floor right at the dais steps.

  “I’ll have that chair. I’ll have it here right now, if you please.”

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  snow had given way to nightbound mist, all

  -

  enveloping mist, so thick

  Elfwyn could not even see the ground under Feiny’s hooves. He had searched and called until he was hoarse, looking for Paisi, and now that it was this ghostly mist, he decided that Paisi, having better sense, and if he had lost him, would either wait for the fog to clear and track him by his trail through the snow, or he would have gone back to town, giving up altogether, and perhaps concluding that he wasn’t meant to go to Ynefel with him this time, either.

  “Please,” he asked the gathering dark, in hope that he would cross Lord Tristen’s path. “I have something I must give you. Please find me. Please keep Paisi safe.”

  The ring that he had hoped would inform him of Lord Tristen told him nothing. At this point, he only hoped he was headed aright, that Owl would come sweeping out of the fog and guide him . . . Owl had seen him safely both ways, and this time his journey was for Lord Tristen’s benefit, and for Paisi’s, none of his own, that he knew . . . because the very last person his mother would destroy would be him, if only because a fool might still be useful to her. He had no wish to be a fool, but he began to think he was not clever enough to do otherwise where his mother was concerned.

  Speed, tonight— speed. As much as he could manage and keep Feiny from going down under him.

  The wind picked up. He thought it might sweep away the fog and give him and Paisi a means to find each other, but the wind became a stinging gale and the fog was no less at all. It sighed, it moaned—

  And then he thought he heard a voice within it, faint and far, something trying to get his attention.

  It might be Tristen— but there was no reason for Tristen’s voice to be so soft, that he knew. He began to think it came from his left, then from his right and again, behind him, as if it sported like the wind, and mocked him, fortress of ice

  as he was sure Lord Tristen never would. It wanted his attention, and now he began to believe it was his mother. He reached a sheltered place, beside a tree - capped and cup - shaped ridge, and for the first time he could see the snow underfoot.

  Now the one voice began to be many voices, and streaks appeared
in the snow, deep gouges, one and four and six and more in the bank beside him, then underfoot, as the horse jumped forward as if something had touched him with a whip.

  He patted Feiny’s neck with a gloved hand, trying to keep both of them from panic, and he began to wonder distractedly if he had heard Paisi hunting him, and mistaken his voice for a haunt. He grew so fearful that he kept Feiny still, still as he could, cold, now, so very cold.

  Here, however, seemed safer than going on with the voices in the wind, and he turned the horse full about, walking a line, a circle, and doing it three times, and wishing his little Line to hold fast, such as it was.

  Streaks ran across the snow as far as his Line, and stopped. Then he knew what he heard was no trick of the wind. He got down from the saddle and held the reins close under Feiny’s jaw, where he could get good leverage.

  He wished them safe, wishes such as Gran would make when they slept at night, and wished the same for Paisi, wherever he was.

  Nothing was going right. He was exhausted, and wanted just to sit down, but he feared doing that— he saw the streaks scarring the snow all about his Line, like some ravening beast trying to get in, and he dared not relax a moment.

  “Lord Tristen,” he whispered, carrying the ring to his lips. “Lord Tristen, help us.”

  But it was as if, as the haunt battered the Line he had drawn, he himself grew wearier and wearier. Feiny, too, drooped, and his head sank, tail tucked for warmth. He opened his cloak and pressed it across the horse and his body against it, and stood there, growing more confused by the moment and no longer certain of the world beyond. He’d lost Gran, lost Paisi, lost everything—

  Everything but one. For some reason he began to think of Aewyn with a vividness that overwhelmed the snow— there was one warm presence in the world, one point of warmth in all this storm. He began to believe there was, and that they could reach each other no matter the distance.

  The laughter of children came down the wind. He blinked, his lashes frozen half - shut, and he saw a strange, sober little girl peering at him from among the rocks.