Fortress of Dragons

  If he had failed to rally the entire army, so had Ryssand failed to draw his supporters after him…for they were caught in confusion and doubted where their best advantage might be. The rumor of Tarien’s child was unleashed, and far from shocking: it was over the horizon, beyond the border, far away, and young princes committed indiscretions, but the king had married and gotten at least the whisper of an heir. Her Grace riding through the streets found cheers, now, and doubtless scrutiny to see whether she showed signs of her condition, which meant prosperity to a year, to crops, to flocks, to gold and fortune. If there was disapproval of her now, it was that she rode…la! she rode astride. It was not appropriate. The king should put his foot down and protect the people’s heir, and by no means take Her Grace near a battlefield…

  Yet she was the Lady Regent, and noble, and noblewomen did such inexplicable things, being made of other stuff than the commons: she rode with authority, and gained cheers as they passed out of the town, and childless women ran up to touch her skirts, which attested how the people believed, both in her condition, and in her royalty, gods-sanctioned to spread blessings.

  Ryssand had never counted on the Royal Consort’s being with child, never counted on a potential heir between Efanor, Artisane’s ambition, and the throne—never counted on the Quinalt-sanctioned potency of a king’s turn to piety and fatherhood. And he had lost his bearings, lost his opening, lost all momentum, and found himself in possession of two houseguests, his chief witnesses, Cuthan and Parsynan, both now linked to Tasmôrden, Amefel, and sorcery.

  “How do you fare?” Cefwyn asked, glancing at Ninévrisë, who sat bundled in furs on the mare’s broad back. He thought he detected discomfort in her shifting about. At the last rest the party had taken she had moved stiffly, and if there was one thing not to his satisfaction in the whole business it was exactly what the people found not to their satisfaction: Ninévrisë’s insistence on riding with him. “We can rest again if you like.”

  “No,” she said.

  She had ridden with him to the battle against Aséyneddin. She had shown sober good sense in the councils of his officers, where her opinion was worth hearing, and she had taken command of the camp without a demur, keeping that in order and keeping herself out of unwarranted danger. In that sense, riding with him to war was safer than staying in the capital without him.

  But the conditions were not the same. Her condition was not the same.

  “You’re frowning,” he said.

  “It’s the months of sitting that’s the matter. It’s four months stitching silly little flowers.”

  “All the same…”

  “I hate little flowers! I don’t want them on my gowns!”

  “Four months sitting in a chair,” he said, and felt sympathy for the discomfort of the saddle. He had his own share of it. “Sitting and signing and sealing and signing and sealing. I have forests I’ve never seen. Lands I’ve never ridden.”

  “You could have taken time.”

  “And left you to Artisane?” That conjured too grim thoughts: Brugan dying at the foot of the Guelesfort stairs, and he chased off to other subjects. “No. The dog-boys have the hounds to run: I’ve even given them a pony, to exercise the dogs at the chase and keep up…gods know, maybe this summer we’ll hunt…” But that was wrong, too. Ninévrisë would not share the sport. She would miss all the summer, and stitch little flowers amid the likes of Artisane and Luriel…while he…

  He grieved at the thought, he discovered. He was appalled to know he was jealous of the child—but he had wished a little time to themselves. He had imagined a year, two, perhaps, for the two of them to be lovers, before the dynastic ambitions of their two nations invaded their bed. Everyone in the kingdom wanted to know the particulars of his wife’s condition, and all his courtiers looked at her for every sign of increased girth.

  Now they rode out: they leapt from war to war and not a summer to themselves, not even the leisure to grow a child in peace.

  But today she had the kiss of the sun on her face, and managed the gray mare with a fine hand, no matter the discomfort of the ride. There was a liveliness in her this morning that he never wanted quenched, no matter the demands others set on them—and he had not seen that fire burn again in her until she was on horseback and under the open sky.

  Perhaps she saw the same change in him, mirror into mirror. In the still-snowy land, in the muster of the forces, he found this was a moment to catch, one of those jewel moments of a lifetime to store away against the ravages of enemies and the chances of war.

  Wrong to risk coming with him? Wrong not to stay in Guelemara, when her own people’s welfare was at risk, in all of this, and Elwynim who thought there was no choice might yet rally to her banner if they saw it?

  They were riding out in hope of everything. They might gain. They might lose. Not being sure of either, they were free as birds…and he might have won his struggle. He might finally have won…for Ryssand had gone and no one had followed: he had boldly set Ryssand the challenge the recalcitrants never once seemed to have expected of a son of his father: march with the army, obey now or be forsworn.

  And now did Ryssand’s neighbor Isin have second thoughts in his support of Ryssand, and did Nelefreíissan, and did the others of the north? They were the martial barons, the warlike, hard north, and had Ryssand miscalculated? No, of course the king was not supposed to have done what he had done. The king was supposed to act modestly and responsibly and take no such risks with his life and the succession—in short, the king should play their game with their dice, by the rules Ryssand dictated moment by moment. His father had. Would not he?

  The king’s consort, moreover, surely would stay in the hands of women of the baronial households, in reach of retribution, and needed their support to have any comfort at all—therefore, the king would be cautious.

  She had certainly thrown that to the winds—and now lords who had been entirely unwilling to place Ninévrisë’s future children in the line of succession complained she was endangering a king’s child with her riding.

  The petticoats had never concerned the lords; this did.

  Her Grace must take care, old Isin had been bold enough to say, frowning as he saw Ninévrisë ahorse at their riding out. Surely, if nothing else, a carriage…

  “Thank you, sir,” Ninévrisë had returned gaily, riposte and straight to the heart of northern pride, “but I rode to Lewen field with the king and will not desert my husband now.”

  Ah, such a look as Isin had had when she said those words about deserting.

  And the army such as the town contained had stood gathered in the square before the great Quinaltine, with the bright brave show of banners, and the sound of bells ringing, and the trumpets blaring—with all that in the air, could hearts a little less selfish than Ryssand’s not be moved?

  At the very last moment before they rode out, the lord of Osanan had come to him, afoot like some peasant farmer, pushing his way through the line of Dragon Guard as he sat Kanwy back and the martial trumpets shivered the air in the Quinaltine square.

  “Gods for Ylesuin!” the Duke of Osanan had shouted from among the last screen of guardsmen, the old battle cry. “Osanan will be there, Your Majesty!”

  Cefwyn believed it, and indeed, before they had cleared the town gates, Osanan’s standard-bearer had come, in earnest of his lord. Osanan had a far ride home and the mustering of his men, in order to recover his standard, but that pebble was suddenly in motion. Ryssand’s edifice of pride had crumbled that little bit more, at the stirring of an old warhorse’s heart.

  Cefwyn gazed ahead of him now, with the heavy flap and snap of the royal banners in his ears, his, and Ninévrisë colors flying before them. It was his order to display those banners all the way to the river and beyond, to show them in every village as they gathered that ragtag of peasantry that would come to their sovereign’s call along the way.

  They moved up the long road that passed ultimately through Murandys itself, b
ound for the bridge that would take them across the Lenúalim and commit them once and for all to keeping his promise to his bride. And the sun shone down on them as they began.

  But toward noon, the east shadowed horizon to horizon with cloud, and by midafternoon it was clear that weather-luck was only for their setting-forth.

  Soldiers grumbled, seeing rain in the offing.

  But the wind that blasted down as the cloud came was bitter cold, buffeting the standards and making it clear that rain was not the threat.

  “So, well,” Ninévrisë said cheerfully, bringing up her hood. The first snowflakes stood unmelted in her dark hair, and her face bore a wind-stung blush. “It will be better than mud, will it not?”

  “So much for weather-luck and fasting,” Cefwyn said, so only she heard.

  And in very little time winter enfolded them: the sky grew leaden and the air turned gray with flying snow.

  “If Tristen managed this,” Cefwyn said across the voice of the wind, “could he not have managed to hold the sunshine just until we crossed the river?”

  CHAPTER 1

  The weather turned back to brutal cold, troubling in itself: Tristen saw it coming on the afternoon after Anwyll’s departure and no wish he could make brought back the sun. Gray cloud closed in, and bitter wind, and the drifts lately melted froze hard, a fine dust of snowflakes blowing across it at first, then sticking, with a night’s greater fall. And days subsequent were no better.

  Beeswax candles by the score lit Master Emuin’s studies, meanwhile, candles to light the crabbed note-taking that had gone on at any moment of every day, every night. Drafts swept through the tower and down into the guardroom on rare clear nights, and by that, Tristen knew Master Emuin peered into the heavens despite his promises to observe the wards and keep the shutters closed.

  On the obscured nights there were no such drafts: then Emuin delved into old texts, and by dawn and dusk sent Paisi on this and that mysterious errand to the archive and to the Bryalt shrine, after which the nuns, too, came with texts.

  It was precise times Master Emuin avowed he sought, the times of Tristen’s arrival here, of Tarien’s baby’s likeliest conception, and of other events months and even centuries past.

  Most of all Master Emuin sought the very hour of Mauryl’s Summoning him. Emuin had guessed it, by gross reckoning, as the first day of spring, but the precision and the sure reckoning—that was the chimera Emuin stalked through the old records, through guardhouse accounts and even Cook’s recollections of his arrival: with so many grandchildren to her credit, and the duties she had regarding festivals and solemnities, Cook had a sense of dates and birthdays and feast days, and preserved a better reckoning in her head than the archives did on paper, regarding some events.

  All this, Emuin said, was to determine the most auspicious day—and the least—for Cefwyn’s son to be born, while the weather raged in rebellion outside the windows.

  Books, anecdotes, the stars: such were Emuin’s sources, as Emuin sought understanding in ways Tristen himself could not have done—for one thing because nothing of Emuin’s knowledge had ever Unfolded to him, and for another because he had not thought to ask the questions Emuin asked. He felt the impulse to magic and chose his moments by some reading of the insubstantial wind of the gray space, while a wizard reckoned and reckoned and consumed ink and paper and kept records it had never remotely occurred to him to keep.

  But to know in advance that a moment was coming…this seemed valuable, if one could. He sometimes failed to know what men might do, as he had failed to know how the soldiers would behave when he dismissed them; and in this Emuin surpassed him. So, too, Emuin professed to him, could any wizard: hence wizards had bested the Sihhë-lords in the past: let it be a lesson to you, Emuin said.

  To know when a thing had been in the past was not quite as useful as to know when it would be in time to come, but Emuin could tell him that, too, and fit together the scattered accounts of the Red Chronicle and the Bryalt account. He had read them, read every history he could find—but he had had no awareness of time at the first of his reading and still had a faltering grasp of it. The better part of an hour could slip past while he fed the birds. He could still grow fascinated by some new question and chase it through convolutions, unhearing while one of his advisors spoke to him, patiently telling him what he doubtless did need to know.

  In sum, the same faults he had had at the beginning he had, though in lesser measure, and he tried to mend them, where he saw them. He tried to give Emuin answers to his questions now, for instance, since he had been there and Emuin had not been entirely aware of Mauryl’s doings, but his own beginnings in particular were a haze to him, and he retained only few keen impressions of that hour—or rather he retained them all, but not the ones Emuin wished.

  He recalled fire—his senses had all been overwhelmed by fire…and he recalled pain: he still bore a scar on his finger. He remembered getting that.

  But most of all, the more he needed to remember the structure by which Men reckoned time, the more keenly he remembered the unbridled extravagance of those days, fire which had never seemed brighter, air which had moved over his skin with a touch like fingers, dusty stone underfoot which had had a texture so curious and so smooth…and, oh, the rain, and the thunder…the tastes, the smells, all these things that had poured in on his senses, new and wonderful and commanding his utter attention—to Mauryl’s distress.

  But on what night of all nights this had happened, he had no recollection at all, nor any sense how many suns had risen and set before he first beheld the forest outside Ynefel’s walls, or how much of a season had passed before he knew the source of that sighing of leaves which rose to the winds outside the fortress walls.

  After he had learned the world from the loft he had known day and night as related to the sun, but he had not known how to count the days—it had never occurred to him that days had a number, or that they would be different one from the other. As a consequence only certain days stood out like signposts, significant to him later, in terms of what would come, but then only days like other days, when miracles of dust and wings and sunlight were all one long vision.

  That such times and movements of the stars had been important to Mauryl while he was watching pigeons in the loft, oh, that he could well believe now. He recalled every detail of Mauryl’s presence at the sole table. Their dinners had always competed with the charts and the inkpots for room, and he had read none of them, but he recalled how they looked.

  And that Emuin, with his books and his charts and his reports from Gran Sedlyn on Lady Tarien’s condition could fix one date above others as the time for the child to be born, he could also believe, for he had learned there was a regularity in the heavens beyond the simple repetition of day and night and full moon and new—but he could not help Emuin in the reckoning.

  That Orien Aswydd also knew these things he was not wholly certain, for he had never associated her with charts and scribing—and that she might not know the complexities as well as Emuin…that failed to comfort him. It reminded him instead that she had relied on an outside source. Having the gift, lacking skill and learning—she had used the gift and listened to whispers from the gray space, whispers which might have told her all those things a better wizard might cipher for himself, whispers which had counseled her to do things which a better wizard would fear even to contemplate.

  And that same source of advice was likely at least in the conception of the child—if she lacked it now, as they strongly hoped she did, it meant that her advisor was no longer in the world of Men and had not been since Lewenbrook, but they did not rely on that belief.

  She might be cast adrift, ignorant of seasons; but she might have known from the beginning when the child had to be born; or the child might have that knowledge within himself—nothing told him how children knew their time, he, who had been Summoned whole from the fire of a hearth.

  Certainly Orien would resist any time of Emuin’s choosing. T
hat went without saying.

  Meanwhile Tarien, who contained the subject of all Master Emuin’s reckoning and Orien’s wishing, sat with her sister in the apartment that had been Cefwyn’s—there was troubling irony in that choice—and stitched and stitched patterns in linen.

  So Tristen observed. He visited them daily since the weather had turned contrary, not that he found their presence pleasant, but that he wished them to know he thought of them constantly, with all that meant. And always when he visited, it was the stitching that occupied them.

  They were spells, he was sure, these squares of black thread on white, these growing structures like ebon snowflakes. It was a marvelous skill they had, a mystery in itself, but what these things meant, Emuin said he did not know.

  Was this the wish for snow, that made their movement of men and supplies so difficult? Did it exist, worked in thread?

  And while Orien remained a creature of edges and angles and angers, Tarien waxed like the moon toward full.

  They stitched in his presence, while by day and night the wizard that was Orien Aswydd prowled the confines of their condition like a wolf before the fold and wished for freedom and rule.

  They stitched, and wore their cherished jewels only for each other’s benefit. They had two fine gowns which did little to recover the glory of their appearance in the summer. They dressed in costly cloth in the isolation of their prison, and Orien chose dark Aswydd green against which her skin showed stark, unhealthy white. Her cropped hair flew like a fire about her face, and she took no pains with it, while Tarien wore hers loose, and her laces loose. She only grew more silent, less responsive to his visits, until on the most recent visit she did not respond at all.

  They stitched and whenever he came near the wizard that was within Tarien turned and shifted and turned again, innocent and restless, not yet wanting freedom.