Stormed Fortress

by Janny Wurts

  Teive tried and failed to suppress his sharp qualm. Practical, first, he shouted topside to clear off the Evenstar’s quarterdeck. ‘We don’t need to perk up the ears of the crew,’ he told Feylind. ‘Yes, lady! We’re going to discuss this.’

  She folded her arms and glared back at him.

  Which only moved Teive’s good nature to laughter. ‘You never bite half so well as you bristle. If you’re going to clam up, I’ll toss you in bed. That’s easier than sweating over the clues to your hare-brained habit of thinking.’

  ‘No,’ Feylind said.

  The cabin between them seemed suddenly cold, beyond what the season should warrant. As the quiet stretched, loud with the creak of worked wood, and the wind-driven slap of snugged halyards, Teive sighed. He could be quite as stubborn.

  ‘What if I agree with you?’ he suggested, dead calm. ‘That Arithon is a friend, and his s’Brydion allies might be in need of us. Why should Evenstar put in to Havish?’

  Feylind exploded and stood, as trust smashed her reticence. ‘Who else could go?’ she exclaimed, her voice cracking. ‘If we’re going to smuggle supplies for Alestron, we can’t involve Fiark! The Light’s influence over the southshore towns would have priestly noses poked straight up our backside! Any one of a dozen corrupted officials could tip off the vengeance of the Alliance. King Eldir owes us twice over, after our help throughout last year’s famine. And unlike the other ships loyal to Arithon, Evenstar’s neutral registry can slip us past the curs at Kalesh and Adruin that watchdog the blockaded estuary.’

  Teive scraped his rough chin. ‘You think we could carry the pretence of bearing provender to Lysaer’s camped troops? Then signal, once we’re close enough to be recognized, and our hold’s contents to be overtaken by Alestron’s defenders?’

  ‘Ath!’ Feylind fetched him a cuff on the shoulder, then let him snag her back into his arms. ‘You know my mind much too well for a man who’s never been wed as a husband.’

  ‘And whose fault is that?’ Teive chuckled. ‘Not mine, wild woman.’ Then he sobered. ‘You know by now that wherever you go, I intend to stick like a lamprey.’

  ‘Including the teeth,’ declared Feylind, unmoved. ‘I take it you’re crewing this tub west to Havish?’

  ‘Especially with the teeth.’ The mate bent his neck and nipped at her ear until she shrieked with ticklish outrage. ‘I am going to Havish,’ he added, smug. ‘If only to see what High King Eldir will do when you land this whopper in his royal lap. That’s if his majesty will agree to allow a tramp captain the daylight for a crown audience.’

  Feylind grinned, then kissed Teive’s lips with a will to disrupt the dastardly paper-work. ‘King Eldir will hear me. It’s Fiark,’ she murmured, ‘who’s going to need the threat of Dharkaron’s Black Chariot for softening.’

  And Tharrick, and Jinesse, and Fiark’s wife, prayed the mate, alongside the lunatic, outside hope, that time with the children might prevail against his beloved’s bed-rock sense of loyalty.

  Autumn 5671

  Stirrings

  In the Kingdom of Tysan, buried under the ruin that once housed Avenor’s state treasury, a wrecked coffer enclosing the skulls of four hatchling dragons settles in the debris; and as their singed silk covering crumbles, a wakened flicker of energy spins out a tendril that is almost a thought…

  The same hour that a drifter gifts a weanling colt sired by Isfarenn to Althain Tower, Asandir struggles against driving sleet inside of Scarpdale’s grimward; he still holds the shade of his stallion secured between his cupped palms, though he slips as the footing shifts to glare ice, and a lightning flare blinds his bearings…

  While onloading contraband provisions from a fishing lugger, Alestron’s roving war fleet hears rumours of the Alliance assault, with Keldmar s’Brydion burned alive with his field-troops amid Lysaer’s first onslaught, and through raging grief, Parrien swears to wreak a revenge that will grant the invaders no quarter…

  Autumn 5671

  VII.

  Siege

  A fortnight beyond the initial assault, the entrenched siege gripped Alestron in deadly earnest. Lysaer was not making a second mistake. His troops maintained their fall-back position, past reach of an offensive strike. The duke’s massive trebuchets poised, unused, while their idle crews huddled against biting sea-wind, under the diligent eyes of the garrison. Sentries and armed companies stayed alert at the crenels. They held their posts, watch upon watch, prepared for assault, but offered no useful target. Day upon day, the white-and-gold standards flapped over the Alliance war camp, a view that mocked them with immobile serenity, and a drawn line that enforced their captivity.

  No forays occurred, night after stilled night. Upon the stripped earth, the enemy drilled troops and exercised fractious horses. They sprawled and caroused in their invasive pavilions, while the mewed-up defenders watched their manoeuvres from the cold, distant height of the parapets. To stand down was to risk being taken off guard. Any dark, cloudy night, the Light’s Lord Commander might launch a sneak attack against the watch turrets at the harbourfront. To endure each patrol, hung in fraught expectation, became an agony in itself. The empty hours sawed at the nerves, until the misery of endless inaction blunted the senses like a dull knife.

  Routine begat the worse poison of boredom. Time was the weapon to break steadfast will, while the stockpiled food in the warehouses dwindled, and tight rationing eroded resolve.

  The wait bore hardest of all on Sidir. Not the shrinking portions, which ended each meal on the pinch of unsatisfied hunger. Hard winters had shown him gaunt seasons before. His experience weathered such short-falls in step, and his touch with the fretful and crying children could rival a mystical healer’s. But his lifelong venue had been the free wilds. The enclosure of walls and stone-paved streets wore down his forest-bred spirit: first to short words, then to deep silences, which extended into reclusive retreat atop the swept crags overlooking the bay-side defences. He was not wont to brood. Since the bow stolen from Lysaer’s camp was sub-standard, and the offered replacement from Alestron’s armoury never suited his exacting taste, Elaira found him stirring a glue-pot over a frugal fire. Beside him, spread out on a dry wrap of leather, he had laid out the composite laminates: sinew and shaved strips of ox-horn to bond with the frame for a recurve bow.

  ‘Where’s Fionn Areth?’ the enchantress inquired.

  Sidir looked up, his metallic eyes piercing. ‘Should I care?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Elaira. ‘You’ve been avoiding him.’ Against a sovereign imperative, she did not have to add: this clansman’s expression of polite reserve was as good as a spoken rebuff. ‘Why?’

  Sidir’s eyebrows lowered in bristled offence. ‘You have to ask that?’

  ‘I shouldn’t,’ Elaira agreed. ‘Which is the reason I must.’

  Gusting wind streamered the bronze braid she had tied with plain cord and blushed cheekbones that showed the first edge of privation. Despite the pervasive stench of hot glue, she sat on a mossy rock by the verge, where the cliffs dropped sheer to the closed defences that sheltered Alestron’s cove harbour.

  Sidir’s obstinacy kept him stirring his pot, while the rudely hacked ends of his greying, dark hair lashed at his weathered face. ‘Did you think an encounter should be so easy?’

  Direct to the point of brutality, he inferred the raw pain left from Daon Ramon Barrens, and the horrific cost of the Araethurian’s royal rescue. Earl Jieret had died to draw Arithon clear, as well as eight of the remaining Companions, adult survivors of Tal Quorin’s massacre, who had seen a generation of children put to slaughter by Lysaer’s troops.

  Yet the astute awareness of Koriani training saw past the convenient – the obvious – shield spun from grief: this clansman’s hands were too steady, immersed in his work.

  Elaira shivered. ‘You aren’t that squeamish, concerning your dead.’

  Sidir’s jaw tightened. He looked away then, his spare, rugged profile stamped against sky. His reluctance ran dee
per than recent resentment; was no wounding due to Tal Quorin, or Daon Ramon, after all. He braced before speaking. ‘You weren’t at Vastmark when –’

  But she had been. ‘Look at me, Sidir!’ Exposed to his searching regard, Elaira incited his birth-gifted insight for truth: that she had been made witness to the horrors that Arithon’s hand had unleashed in that mountain campaign. She also knew every twist that occurred in his Grace’s deadly, flawed reasoning. ‘I shared my beloved’s traverse of the maze under Kewar.’

  The clansman unlocked his penetrating stare in discomfort. ‘You saw most. But not everything.’ Attention fixed back on his task, he added, ‘Not what was done to keep your man sane, through the back-lash and during the aftermath.’

  The soft phrase stayed dangling, a warning that failed. Elaira leaned forward, flipped the hide over the fitted bow frame. ‘You will answer this!’ Shown his taut offence, she shoved to her feet and rode over clan stubbornness. ‘Sidir! Without distractions.’

  ‘This weapon can’t equal the ones that are shaped, lashed onto forms for a year,’ the Companion disparaged. Never inclined to swear over set-backs, he relinquished his glue stick and swung his bubbling pot off the fire. ‘That boy’s an errant, wild spark,’ he declared. ‘Sets his stormy, emotional blazes without care for anyone’s dignity.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s why Arithon wants his loyalty grounded,’ Elaira allowed without compromise. ‘Volatile, he’s a danger to all of us. The weak link too likely to fracture.’

  Sidir surveyed her. ‘Fionn’s not so foolish as that, or so angry he won’t listen to Talvish. And yet, to hand such a one my prince’s deepest vulnerabilities feels like a stark breach of trust.’

  Elaira had no grounds to argue that point. Faced by the livid, disfiguring weals on the wrists of a man who was already war-scarred, she said gently, ‘Do you know of another way?’

  Sidir’s recoil was instant. ‘Arithon didn’t,’ he snapped, now annoyed. ‘I protest because I don’t like it.’

  The root reason would be some uncanny awareness garnered through his gift of Sight. Patience might coax his disclosure; or not. Sidir was a tiger, for principles. Elaira gave him space. Further speech was not needed. Sound carried, even to these wind-swept heights: the relentless clash of practise engagement, and the boom of the drums, as the Light drilled its troops through the boredom of deadlocked warfare.

  ‘I don’t trust the heart of that young man,’ Sidir relented at last. ‘He has never been sure of himself, even at home with his herding family. He does not know, at his core, who he is. Which drives him to count coup, and hold grudges. To look outside, seeking for positive proof that his loyalties are not misguided.’ Now came the tortured admission: ‘If I answer his questions, Fionn Areth will use what he knows. Not to stand firm on his chosen ground but to hurt and tear down for advantage.’

  Elaira faced away, watching the eastern sun scatter chipped-diamond reflections across the water below: a view, in these days, unendingly smudged by the smoke from Sevrand’s troops, manning the signal turrets. Into the punishing pause, she said carefully, ‘Fionn’s potential betrayal of Arithon feels altogether too much like disloyalty.’

  ‘To all that I stand for!’ Sidir had not stopped listening after all. Though her calm tone stayed flawless, he unfolded his tall frame. Hands set on her shoulders, quite firmly, he spun her around.

  Her vivid tears streamed. His callused touch a contrite apology, he brushed her wet cheeks with a finger. ‘You feel responsible.’

  Which was too accurate. ‘I helped change that boy’s features,’ Elaira said, bleak. ‘By my Prime’s directive, I laid that fate on to a child just barely six years of age.’ And burning, unspoken: should anyone wonder why this Araethurian does not understand who he is?

  She permitted Sidir’s stringent grip. Let him bundle her into a chaste embrace that did little but break the harsh wind.

  ‘I will meet with your goatherd,’ the clansman allowed. ‘Not so much for my liege’s royal command, but as your service, done without asking.’

  Sidir’s glue-pot, perforce, became relocated to a cramped, barracks fire-place inside the chamber most often used to hear officers’ complaints. The day-to-day grinding of dray wheels, and the tramp of patrols at the watch change did not penetrate the thick walls of the Mathiell Gate keep. The sealed silence kept by old, wakened stone at times seemed to whisper, alive by Paravian magic. Notes or words past hearing, the quickened strain weaved through the echoes of rough conversation that bounced up the steep stair from the ward-room.

  Not every man who lived by the sword could abide that deep presence in comfort.

  A forest-bred clansman would be the exception. Present as well, just come off active duty, Talvish sprawled in a battered, slat seat, one idle knee hooked on the chair arm. Shown the deft expertise of a Halwythwood bowyer, he watched, green eyes never fooled by the quiet skill that affixed the shaved horn to the wood frame. The blond war-captain opened, ‘This place poses no refuge, except from the troops. If they haven’t themselves been dressed down at this trestle, they’ll shun the place where their fellows are cited for punishment.’

  Sidir’s lips flexed. ‘I should be concerned that we might not stay private?’

  ‘Fionn Areth’s likely as not to show up here.’ Talvish tested the murkier waters. ‘If you meet, I presume that can’t be by mistake?’

  Sidir hooked a soaked thong from the nearby bucket and began winding the glued strip for bonding. ‘No need to circle.’ He did not look up. ‘I am prepared to hear out the whelp’s brazen questions.’

  Talvish’s lazy silence extended: a lynx might display such bone stillness. For the duke’s ranking officers, days began before dawn. The wear showed in his pale hair, crimped from his steel helm, and in knuckles grazed red from some bare-fisted labour, performed in salt water below the Sea Gate. Tired or not, the field veteran perceived clearly.

  For his own reason, this well-guarded clansman wanted the coming scene public.

  Sidir knotted off the wet thong with his teeth, just past the splice that stiffened the end that would notch the finished silk bow-string. He stretched his shoulders, then extended the strapped limb of the bow frame into the fire-place. As the thongs shrank themselves dry in the smoke, he broached in soft-spoken reluctance, ‘I am the last left alive, who endured both the reiving at the River Tal Quorin, and the campaign against Lysaer at Vastmark. Twice, I’ve wrestled to subdue the hard aftermath when my liege was forced to fight under Desh-thiere’s directive.’

  Across the dimmed closet, Sidir confronted the most subtle of the duke’s war-captains. ‘I have sensed that your loyalty serves my liege from the heart.’

  Talvish paused. Against a muffled contention in the wardroom below-stairs, he chose not to gainsay, though Sidir’s piercing statement effectively split his allegiances.

  ‘Without pride,’ the clansman laboured on with distaste, ‘some things may be needful to know from inside my store of experience.’

  Talvish resisted his impulse to straighten from informal posture. Against knifing grief, that Vhandon was not the accustomed rock at his side, he scoffed gently, ‘Here I thought you wanted a yapping dog leashed, and no suicide leaps by the idiot hare, thinking to rip the wolf’s jugular.’

  Sidir laughed. ‘That too! The Araethurian pays your soldier’s discipline lip service, at least. Some pitfalls of personal embarrassment might be disarmed by your presence.’

  ‘As Arithon’s won’t be,’ Talvish closed without flinching.

  Humour died. ‘A man’s strengths can break,’ Sidir allowed. ‘During the bad times, three of us at full strength could scarcely contain the set-backs brought on by his nightmares of self-condemnation.’ And those bulwarks were gone. The irascible clan war-captain, Caolle, and the Companion, Eafinn, both years dead; Sidir kept the clenched pain of their memories locked fast.

  ‘We’ve got Dakar and Elaira,’ Talvish pointed out. Their advantage might balance the powerful changes wroug
ht by the maze under Kewar; or might not, which spurred the ongoing concern. He risked the hard question against the creak of thongs, drying in flame. ‘What do you fear, liegeman?’

  This time, Sidir replied at sharp speed. ‘A knife in his Grace’s back.’

  ‘The one he’ll invite out of sheer provocation? Then rest content. We see eye to eye.’ Talvish shoved straight. ‘For now, your royal debt has come due.’

  But forest-bred senses had already flagged the steps from the passage. ‘I’taer chya strieka’an am’ jiere,’ Sidir snapped in Paravian under his breath.

  Then ‘the calm that bred chaos’ banged open the door. Fionn Areth bounced in, bringing the reek of hot horse and oiled steel along with the sweat-ragged fleece of his gambeson. ‘You should see the uproar over today’s wager!’ he blurted. ‘Jeynsa’s thrashed Sevrand at lances, thrown from ambush at moving targets.’ His belated notice encompassed Sidir, which first widened his eyes, then silenced him.

  ‘Today, my knives are for carving dead wood,’ the clansman declared, accent cracking. ‘Take care with your manners, young sprig.’

  ‘Which implies that he’s ready to answer your questions,’ Talvish suggested with sly provocation.

  ‘I would sooner converse with a snake!’ Fionn Areth side-stepped the clutter. Arrived at the trestle, he camped on the bench beside Talvish’s chair and eyed the unfinished staff being cured in the hearth. ‘That’s a bow?’

  ‘Half of one.’ Satisfied with the tension set up by damp leather, Sidir laid the baked frame across his thigh and began daubing glue on the opposite limb. ‘Speak and have done. Even snakes prefer their choice of company.’

  Fionn Areth regarded the clansman’s bent head, dark hair threaded white at the temples; the hunter’s hands confident, as the shaped strip of horn was warped into place with another soaked thong from the bucket. Whether or not such calm should be disturbed, the Araethurian dared the first hurdle. ‘You saw the horrors at Tal Quorin and Vastmark. Endured the brunt of the losses. I wanted to ask of your prince’s intent. Why don’t you believe he’s a criminal sorcerer, shedding the blood of the innocent?’