Fortress of Dragons

  “His Majesty’s old apartments,” Uwen repeated to the servants, as a row of frightened maids and men met them at the inside stairs. “An’ hurry about it. Careful on them marble steps. Mind the ladies’ boots is wet.”

  A slip on the stairs, Tristen thought, an untimely, fatal accident would not happen to a wizard outside of wizardry…he had no fear either would slip. But a true accident might save the whole kingdom the consequences of his charity. He had brought them here. He had acquiesced to whatever sent them, and being what he was—a lord and a wizard who could wish harm on the ladies and perhaps ought to—he had never learned to do such things. He nevertheless warred in his own thoughts about the wisdom of having brought them into the citadel at all, and had a frowning look from Lady Orien, back from the stairs.

  Orien knew he was thinking about harm, at least, she who could wish harm back at him, and perhaps had, often. He feared warfare was inevitable if she would not accept less than her former honors—his magic opposed her sorcery, for sorcery it was. She knew it, she had already met it, and he hoped she might come to reconcile with the situation as it was—but he did not readily see how that might be.

  He regretted his act of mercy now, and he wished, if not harm on Orien, at least safety for his staff and all the friends, allies and townsfolk his charity had set at risk by bringing her here. Fool, he was ready to think, as often he had been a fool: but Owl had led him, and Owl, that chancy bird, knew nothing of reason.

  Lives had been at risk already, among those he loved. Uwen had come out into the storm searching for his foolish lord, trailing after him Lusin and the rest of his bodyguard, honest men immeasurably distressed to have lost track of their charge outside safe town walls.

  And not only his household had ridden out to search for him. Crissand Earl of Meiden and the duke of Ivanor had both come searching, the latter two having wizard-gift enough to find him in any storm…and wizard-gift enough to know for a truth what dangerous guests he had brought home.

  From those two he was sure that by now the word of the Aswydds’ return would have slowly, discreetly spread among the lords encamped near the walls. From the servants here on the hill, it would go like wildfire through the staff, some of whom had served the ladies and their brother Heryn. And word would leap from there into the Bryaltine shrine, too, a random thought informed him, to the nuns, who had been maids to Lady Orien and who now repented their lady’s war with the Marhanen through their charitable acts and pious prayers.

  From there, for very little good and a great deal of ill…rumor of the Aswydds’ arrival in Henas’amef would reach every corner of the province, from the border with Guelessar, which had sent the ladies to him, to the borders with the other lords, and northward to those who already distrusted Amefel.

  And it would go northward in Amefel, too, to Captain Anwyll’s camp, Guelenmen, Dragon Guard, who would wonder what to make of it. Anwyll well knew the ladies were supposed to be under ban, and was sworn to uphold the royal decree that kept them so. Word would run to Modeyneth, where the men of Bryn built a wall; and to Althalen, where fugitives out of Elwynor established a settlement under his protection—and was the lord of Amefel’s power that sure, the fugitives must ask themselves, if he housed the sisters of Heryn Aswydd?

  The news would go to their enemy, Tasmôrden, sitting in his newly won capital of Ilefínian, up in Elwynor. He had tried to stir the Amefin to rebel against Cefwyn, with the promise of reestablishing the Aswydds and supporting them in war. What must he think?

  And not last or least, word would reach Cefwyn, telling him that wizardry or the malice of Men had overturned his sentence and freed the two most dangerous prisoners in his kingdom…for they were that. They certainly were that. Sorcery was their crime, not to mention an attempt on Cefwyn’s very life, and on his kingdom.

  Forgive me, should he write to Cefwyn, but I could think of nowhere else to send them?

  The only place he could think of to send them, indeed, at this hour, was to hasten them upstairs, into rooms fit for the royalty they claimed to be…aethelings, of the old noble house of Amefel, with wizard-gift strong in their blood.

  They were not the only survivors of that line, to be sure. His friend, his foremost supporter in council, Earl Crissand, was kin of theirs, and heir to the name…so he had sworn to himself, so Auld Syes herself had said, in an appearance as curious and ominous as he had ever seen—and no, these women would not take what was Crissand’s: whatever came of his constrained charity, Crissand’s heirship could not be challenged, not while these stones stood one on the other. It was that certain in his thoughts.

  “What’s Emuin say?” Uwen asked. They were still standing in the lower hall, Uwen and his guard all deaf to magic and wizardry alike, but Uwen knew his resources, and knew that Master Emuin tended to be awake at night; and knew by experience that his lord’s moments of woolgathering were often conversations.

  “He’s not pleased,” Tristen said, blinking the ordinary world into being. His sight centered on Uwen’s gray-stubbled, earnest face. “Nor am I pleased, but what can I do?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know,” Uwen said, and bit his lip, which usually presaged his saying something anyway. “Except as His Majesty might ha’ had their heads on the South Gate, and didn’t, on account of ye told ’im they’d be worse threats to us all if they was ghosts. And, ye know, m’lord, I ain’t so sure on that, now.”

  “I’m not sure on that point either,” he said, not in jest, and added: “But I don’t think I can kill them, Uwen.”

  Uwen’s look was the more distressed. “Ye ain’t o’ the mind, nor ever were, m’lord. An’ her sister bein’ with child, an’ all—what’s to happen? Ask Emuin. Ask Emuin, m’lord. This is beyond me.”

  “I fear it’s beyond him, too.” Uwen was right: he had never been willing to exercise a lord’s cold justice, nor had done. But despite his thinking on slippery steps, something felt so utterly wrong in the notion of killing the women, he could not compass arguments about it, could not consider it—whether it was wrong in the magical sense or wrong because it was terrible to kill at all, he had no way to sort out. He only knew he shuddered at it. “Emuin’s as surprised as the rest of us.”

  “’At there,” Uwen said, with an upward glance, the way the women had gone, “looks to be seven, eight months she’s carryin’.”

  “Can you say so?”

  “Summat,” Uwen said, as they began to walk their own direction, toward the other stairs. “Looks to be. Nine’s the term of a child that’ll live, an’ by the look, that ’un ain’t far from it. That ’un’s bloomed in the nunnery, gods save us all, but I’ll wager she didn’t get it there.”

  Being not born, himself, and never a child, and never intimate with a woman, he had only uncertain questions where ordinary men had sure knowledge. He felt helpless in his ignorance, and so many things had converged in the last few days…magical things, dreadful things, hopeful things, and now, it turned out, Tarien’s child, which it seemed would come sooner rather than later. He had feared Midwinter, just past, and the turning of the year, when a conjunction of the stars that Emuin said had been his birth had ended, and a new cycle had begun.

  “When?” he asked. “How will we know?”

  “She ain’t immediate, I don’t think,” Uwen said, who had had a wife, once, and children. “A hellish far walk, she’s been, if they come from Anwyfar, an’ in the snow, and a-horseback before that. If she was near, that might ha’ brought it on. And it didn’t.”

  “Eight months?”

  “Seven or eight, maybe.”

  In magic and wizardry, more particularly in sorcery…there were no coincidences. Seven or eight months…from its beginning, which was also to reckon.

  “Could she have gotten the child in the summer, and no one know?”

  “Damn sure she did,” Uwen said somberly, “an’ all that time, and her bein’ a witch an’ all, I’d about wager she knew right well, m’lord, that I would.”
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  His thoughts grew vague and frightened and darted here and there in distracted fashion as he walked. His shoulders had felt the burden of armor for hours, as his cloak and his boots were soaked through with snowmelt. He had been scant of sleep for far too long, had walked, letting Tarien ride on the way home—and he thought now, after a month of striving and wrestling with Amefel’s danger and Ylesuin’s, now that he had done something so irretrievably foolish as this, he might rest…he might finally rest, as if he had done what folly his restlessness had aimed toward, and as he faced the stairs upward all the remaining strength was flowing out of him like blood from a wound.

  Tarien knew about the child, he kept thinking to himself. When she went to Anwyfar, she knew. When they dealt with Hasufin Heltain, and bargained with him—Orien knew.

  “M’lord?” Uwen asked, for he had faltered on the first step. All the accumulated hard days and wakeful nights came down on his shoulders at once, and he found he could not set his foot to the step.

  “Are ye hurt, m’lord?”

  Uwen’s arm came about him, bearing him up, and with that help he essayed the first step. Another arm caught him from the right, Lusin, he thought, and he made the next, telling himself that he must, and that rest was at the top of the stairs, just a little distance down the hall.

  “Are ye hurt?” Uwen insisted to know.

  “No,” he said. “Tired. Very tired, Uwen.”

  “’At’s good, then, m’lord. Just walk.”

  He climbed up and up the right-hand steps, those that ascended above the great hall, leaning on two good friends…and there he paused, drawn to turn and look down on that staircase, on that lower hall lit as it was from a mere handful of sconces. There burned but a single candle in each at this dim hour.

  He had come up this stairs from the great hall the one night he had come very close to believing Orien and falling into her hands…and then, too, Uwen had seen him home.

  He had run these steps the night Parsynan had murdered Crissand’s men…and the shadows of those men haunted the whole lower hall, all but palpable at this hour.

  He had gone down these steps toward the great hall as a new-made lord, and there faced a haunt that now was all but under his feet, the old mews, out of which Owl had come.

  And did it stir, tonight, that power, knowing these twin sisters had come home?

  He willed not. Trembling in the support of two strong men, he willed strength into the wards that kept the fortress safe. He willed that nothing within these walls, no spirit and no living soul, should obey Lady Orien, accustomed as this house might have been to her commands.

  He did all that on three breaths, and was at his weakest, but he was sure then that the haunt below in the mews had not broken out or answered to Orien’s presence, and that most of all reassured him, for of all dangers in the fortress, it was the chanciest and the greatest.

  “Shall we take him on up, then?” Lusin asked, tightening his arm about his ribs, clearly supposing his lord had lost his way.

  “’E’s stopped on ’is own,” Uwen said pragmatically, against the other side, and shifted his grip on his wrist and about his waist. “An’ ’e’ll start on ’is own. ’Is Grace is thinkin’ on somethin’ worth ’is time, and I ain’t askin’ what till he’s through.”

  “I’m very well,” Tristen said then, although for the life in him he could not think of what he had just been doing.

  “Lean on me, lad,” Uwen said then—neither Uwen nor Lusin was as tall as he, but they had their leatherclad shoulders beneath his arms, and a firm grip around him, and bore him up the last step and down the corridor. His head drooped. He was next aware of his own foyer, outside Uwen’s room.

  And could not bear to go back into the bedchamber.

  “I’ll sit by the fire,” he said.

  “The fire an’ not your bed, m’lord?” Uwen asked. “Your bed’s waitin’.”

  “Not now.” It was an effort for him to speak, now, not that it was hard to draw breath, but that his thoughts wanted to wander off, and the firelight seemed safer than the dark in the rooms beyond.

  Time was when he would fall sound asleep at moments of revelation, at any moment when new things poured in on him so fiercely and so fast that his wits failed to keep up. For hours and hours he would sleep afterward, no physician availing to wake him, and when he would wake—when he would wake, then he would have remembered something he never knew.

  But such sound sleeps no longer happened, not since the summer, when War had Unfolded to him in all its terror. He no longer had that grace, nor dared leave his servants and his men a day and more unadvised. He fought to wake, and make his limbs answer him—and yet it was so much effort. If he could only sit by the fire, he thought, and see the light, then he would not fall asleep.

  “Will ye take food, lad?” Uwen asked.

  “Hot tea,” he said.

  “Tea an’ honey,” Uwen said, and a distant murmur went on a time, then a small, distant clatter of cups until one arrived in Tristen’s hand.

  He drank, and the fragile cup weighed like iron, an effort even to lift. There was no strength in him, and he supported one hand with the other to have a sip without spilling it.

  Uwen hovered, waiting for him, perhaps expecting him to drop it. Uwen had ridden through drifts the same as he—but was not half so tired.

  “Petelly,” Tristen said. He did not remember now where he had left his horse. His last memory of Petelly was of his shaggy coat snow-plastered and his head hanging.

  “Havin’ all the grooms make over ’im,” Uwen said, “an’ ’e’s sleepin’ by now, as you should be doin’, m’lord.”

  He gave a small shake of his head. “Not now. I daren’t, now. I’ve things to do.”

  He failed to remember where Owl had gone…Owl had gone off to kill mice, perhaps, or flown off to some place more ominous, but at least Owl had gone, and nothing worse would come tonight.

  “What d’ ye wish, m’lord?”

  That was a fair question, one to which he as yet had no answer.

  “Ye want to post a guard up there wi’ the ladies,” Uwen reminded him. “There’s servants in this house that served the Aswydds.”

  “Do that,” he said, and then heard, in the great distance, Uwen naming names to Lusin, choosing Guelenmen, Quinalt men, men least likely to listen to the Aswydds’ requests or to flee their threats.

  He had another sip of honeyed tea, sitting before a fire that had been Orien’s, in an apartment that had been Orien’s, green velvet and bronze dragons and all. It had been Orien’s apartment, and Lord Heryn’s before her, and on the best of nights he never felt quite safe here. He watched it, guarded it as much as lived in it, and of all places in the Zeide where he could bestow the twins, he would not cede this one to Lady Orien.

  The old mews was virtually under his feet here, that rift in the wards out of which Owl had come, and which he had not been able to shut, since.

  “Tassand’s gone to see to the guests,” the next-senior of his servants came to report to him…Drys, the man’s name was. “Your Grace, would you have another cup? Or will you have the armor off?”

  He had lost his cloak somewhere, or Uwen had taken it. The brigandine’s metal joinings scarred the chair, and the padding beneath it was much too warm.

  He must have assented. Drys knelt and began to undo buckles about his person, and two others helped him from the boots. He stood, then, with Uwen’s help, and shed the brigandine, piece by piece. It was light armor, and lighter still the padding beneath, but the very absence of its weight was enough to send him asleep on his feet.

  “’Ere, m’lord,” Uwen said. “You ain’t stayin’ awake. Best ye go on to your bed an’ sleep. The ladies is under guard an’ dawn’s comin’ afore ye know it. Ain’t a thing in the wide world ye can do else for anyone, but to sleep.”

  He was defeated. Drys set a cup of mulled wine in his hand, and the mere pungent smell of it sent his thoughts reeling toward the pillo
ws and the warmed soft covers. Whatever he had tried to think of before he stood up to shed the armor went fleeting into the dark.

  “’At’s good,” he heard Uwen say, realized he was abed, and felt Uwen draw the coverlet up over his shoulder.

  Mauryl had used to do that small kindness for him. Uwen had done it most nights, from the time Uwen had begun his service…only this summer. So quickly he had sped from youth to manhood—and missed so much, never having the ordinary things a man might know. Summer seemed long ago, an autumn ago, a winter ago. He was wiser now, and knew there were dangers in the world he had never reckoned in the summer.

  But he was not unguarded. He had Uwen. Owl was somewhere about. Emuin was awake and wary. Even knowing the quality of the guests he had brought beneath his roof he could draw himself smaller and smaller and smaller, until he could finally wrap himself up in a small dark ball of awareness, and gather to him his hard-won memories.

  For memories he did have now, not many, but vivid ones that spread themselves like shadowy curtains. He saw visions of battlefields and forest, he smelled the stone of Ynefel’s rain-swept tower, and faced Mauryl’s rain-soaked indignation.

  He met Uwen’s gray-stubbled face by evening candlelight, saying to him, “Lad, ye mean well. ’At’s worth somethin’.”

  And Emuin’s face, gray-streaked beard gone whiter and whiter at the roots, and eyes sunk deep in wells of shadow: “Mean well, young lord? Do well, there’s the challenge!”

  He saw Owl, sitting in a leafless, ghostly tree in Marna Wood. Owl dived away and flew before him through the night, his self-appointed guide, above a white stone path that was the Road into the world.

  He saw Owl, shining with wizard-light, fly before him through an unnatural night of sorcery, amid the clash of iron and the cries of dying men.