Fortress of Dragons

  “We kept it our secret. My secret. Even when he sent us away. It never showed until fall, and under all these robes, and then the winter cloaks…only my nurse knew.”

  “Yet the Guelens came,” Orien said with a bitter edge. “So perhaps the nuns did see, and perhaps he does know, this good, this honest king of yours, despite all you say.”

  Tristen shook his head. They were back to that, never resolved. “No. I know he wouldn’t.”

  “What, a Marhanen king refuse a murder? To prevent an Amefin claim on the throne, to keep our secret a secret—come now, what might not our Cefwyn do?”

  “He didn’t do this,” he said with unshaken confidence. “He doesn’t know. He wouldn’t harm you.”

  “Come now. If he knew—oh, indeed, if he knew. You,” Orien said, “who are good, and honest—all these things…you’d stick at murder. You have virtues. But three generations of the Marhanen has taught this province the Marhanen do not!”

  “And this is his child.”

  She gave him a startled, uncertain look at that saying.

  “A child with the wizard-gift,” he added, for in the storm he had heard sometimes two lives, and sometimes and faintly, three.

  “An Aswydd child,” Orien said, “with Marhanen blood.”

  “My child.” It was a small voice. A near whisper from Tarien, that still managed a hint of defiance. “And he’s right. I think he is right; they didn’t come from Cefwyn.”

  “Oh,” Orien hissed, “now we believe him again. Now we think him full of virtue and chivalry, this lover of ours. A Marhanen king would not hesitate to rip that child from your womb and destroy it, never doubt it. But not here. Not from Lord Tristen’s hands. Tristen would never allow it, our gentle Tristen…”

  He liked nothing he heard, least of all Orien Aswydd appealing to his kindness, and now he wished he had called Emuin to this conference. But it was too late. He saw Orien’s confidence far from diminished and her malevolence far from chastened.

  “You think you’ve done all this,” Tristen said, for she seemed to have no grasp of any other state of affairs. “You let Hasufin Heltain past the wards, you dealt with wizardry, and you think it was all yours? The child has the gift. If he’s Cefwyn’s, he might be king. And you dealt with Hasufin Heltain! You know what he did at Althalen, you know Emuin cast him out then, and you know what he wants most of all—is that what you want? This child is his best chance since Althalen!”

  Tarien had her hand on her belly, and she understood his meaning—at last and very least one of the Aswydds heard his warning, she, who held within herself all the consequence of Hasufin’s ambition, and could not escape it, could not on her own prevent Hasufin’s taking the child as his way into the world of Men.

  “Don’t listen to him!” Orien said. “Pay no attention. It’s only Cefwyn’ interest he cares for, nothing, nothing at all for the babe’s sake! Your child will be king!”

  Tarien pulled away and leaned against her chair, arms folded protectively over her belly.

  “Tarien!” Orien insisted, but Tristen drew Tarien’s eyes to him.

  “Don’t listen,” he said.

  “Amefel is ours!” Orien hissed. “We are the aethelings. We are the royals and we were royal before the Sihhë came down from the Hafsandyr! This land belongs to her son!”

  It was indeed her claim, and a claim with some justice. Tristen considered that, considered the angry determination in Orien’s eyes, and her wishes, and the strength they had. “You can’t,” he said, to all her wishes. “Not alone. I wish not. Emuin wishes not. Mauryl wished not, and I don’t think you can wish otherwise to any good at all, Lady Orien. Your servants have gone, Lord Cuthan’s across the river—Lord Edwyll’s dead, and his heir is the aetheling now.”

  “Crissand!” The voice shuddered with scorn.

  “The Witch of Emwy said it, and I say it. Did Tasmôrden promise you what he promised Cuthan? There was no army. There never was an army. He lied to Cuthan. He lied to all the earls, and Edwyll died of the cups in your cupboard…or was it your wish?”

  Orien’s eyes had widened somewhat, at least in some inner recognition.

  “Was it your wish?” Tristen asked her. “Your wish, and not the cups?”

  Orien’s brows lifted somewhat. “The wine. My sister and I had no inclination to die as our brother died. We preferred that to exile.”

  It was not all she preferred to exile: death here, death in her Place, as the Zeide was: foreseeing that danger, even then, he had advised Cefwyn to banish her and the Aswydds of the name. Both dead and alive they had gone out the gate, to prison and burial elsewhere.

  “And Cuthan is in Elwynor,” Orien said, “with the latest usurper. And you sit here. The mooncalf, they called you. The fool. Mauryl’s hatchling.”

  “I was,” he said.

  “And Bryn?” she asked.

  She knew, he was sure now, that Tasmôrden had promised invasion: she likely knew everything Cuthan had done. Messages had gotten to Anwyfar, and she had expected a rising against the Crown. But she had not known anything since Cuthan’s flight: that said something of her sources, and of Cuthan’s slight wizard-gift, remote now from her. It was clear that whispers had gone on in the gray space that neither he nor Emuin had heard. In Guelessar, in the autumn, he had rarely reached out to Amefel. Emuin had forbidden it.

  “What of Bryn?” she demanded to know.

  “Drusenan of Modeyneth is Lord Bryn now.”

  It did not please her. But she turned her face elsewhere and wrapped her wishes inward, tightly held, and he left them unpursued. “So busy you’ve been,” she said, gazing into distance. “Gathering an army in Amefel, all those tents arrayed outside my walls…a winter campaign, is it to be? All for Cefwyn. For Cefwyn’s heir.” Her eyes lanced toward him, direct and challenging. “For his firstborn son—his firstborn Aswydd son—a kingdom.”

  “It is a son,” he said, for Tarien’s child was male, and would be firstborn. That was the truth, and only then knew with full force how it would hurt Ninévrisë.

  And that son, not Ninévrisë’s, would harm the treaty with Elwynor.

  It would harm Cefwyn—the northern lords would reject a child of Aswydd and Marhanen blood out of hand. So would the Elwynim.

  “A son,” Orien said. One set of plans dashed in what he told her, she gathered up others, and recovered herself. “A bastard, he may be, but a royal, firstborn bastard.”

  Bastard was a child without ceremony, unrecognized. Bastard was a child no one would own.

  But that was not so. Someone owned this child. Tarien did. Tarien already held it protected in her arms, her eyes wide with alarm while Orien’s flashed with defiance of him. They were twins, of one mind until that moment: of one ambition, until that heartbeat. He had divided them. The child had. Cefwyn had, for Tarien’s feeling was not Orien’s, and the realization of that shivered through the gray space with the kiss of a knife’s sharp edge.

  He was sorry for their pain, but he was not sorry for Orien.

  And he sealed himself against all their entreaties and their objections. If anyone could bend Orien Aswydd, it might be Tarien. If anyone could sway her, it might be her twin, given time, and a quieter hour. There was the hope for them: Cefwyn’s son he could not reach, not now, not without harm.

  “I’ll ask about the gowns,” he said, intending to leave.

  “Servants,” Orien said. Her lips made a thin white line. Her eyes held storm that, prudently, did not break.

  “Respect the wards,” he said, “and respect the guards.”

  “And if we don’t? Would you harm my sister and the child?” she asked, with the clear expectation he would not.

  It was the truth. She expected to have won the argument, and to have her way, and she would not.

  “I don’t intend her harm,” he said with a glance toward Tarien, whose eyes met his in dread. “I can’t say what she means to do,” he said directly to Tarien. “Take care. Take care for your
self.”

  And with that he walked out, sealed against the roiling confusion they made in the gray space.

  He realized now that Emuin had been listening for the last few moments, subtle and stealthy as Emuin was. But he did not acknowledge that he knew, not this close to the twins’ apartment. He gathered up Uwen and his own guard, who had been talking with the Guelens at the nearer station.

  “They ask for their gowns,” he said to Uwen. “Do you know what happened to them?”

  “I fear they’ve gone, m’lord, I’d imagine they have.”

  “The servants?”

  “I’d say. His Majesty was at Lewenbrook, His Highness bein’ here didn’t know one man from another, comin’ an’ goin’—” When Efanor had been in charge of Henas’amef, Uwen meant, and sure enough there had been no few of the servants fled when Cefwyn came back. “I’ll imagine the pearls an’ such on those gowns just walked out o’ town in purses and tucked in bosoms, and went all the way to Elwynor, or even into noble ladies’ dower chests, closer to home.”

  There had been ladies of various houses near enough the Aswydds to have had access to a wardrobe.

  Without the Aswydd sisters in their red-haired glory, the gowns, the jeweled cups, the gold plate on the tables, the hall would never be as fine or as glorious as he had seen it in Heryn Aswydd’s reign. He was sad to miss the beauty of it, but not at all sad about the grain it bought for the hungry families, or the army it fed, until hands could let go the bow in favor of the shepherd’s staff. Cefwyn had used to say Lord Heryn’s court out-did Guelemara for luxury…and that was not true in size, but in sheer brightness, it might well have been so.

  “I did promise them jewelry, at least. I thought of the necklaces we found in Parsynan’s room. I think those were likely theirs.”

  “’At were generous,” Uwen said. “But a woman’s jewelry is money if she took to the road, an’ off to Elwynor, as these two might if one of the guards don’t watch sharp. An’ one of them jewels is three years’ wage to these men.”

  “They won’t leave this place,” he said, and it had the ring of truth in it as the words came out. “Tarien’s afraid.” He considered who was near them, and knew of a certainty that Emuin was listening, remote in his tower as he told Uwen the simple, the important truth. “Tarien’s child is Cefwyn’s son.”

  “Gods save us, I was afeared so. Ye’re sure?”

  “A son, and a wizard.”

  “…An’ His Majesty’s. Gods save us all.”

  “They think the nuns didn’t know anything, not even that Tarien was with child…but if the nuns did know, word might have gotten to the Quinalt, and to Ryssand, mightn’t it?”

  Uwen gave a soft whistle. “A chain of ifs, m’lord, but it’s a damn short chain, and none of ’em’s impossible.”

  “Ryssand would want them.”

  “Damn sure he would.”

  —To say the least, Emuin said within the gray space, where he had been lurking the last several moments in utter quiet. Cefwyn took chances. Now one of them’s come home.

  —What should I do? Tristen asked Emuin, since Emuin had remarked on the situation. And: “What shall I do?” he asked Uwen, aloud, attention divided, distracted in two conversations at once.

  “Tell His Majesty,” Uwen said. “This ’un’s worth a letter.”

  —Write to Cefwyn, Emuin said, in the same instant. If Ryssand is behind the raid on Anwyfar, gods save us all, then he’s gone far beyond retreat. This is deadly, if he alleges it. And above all else, Cefwyn needs to know before the rumor reaches the streets.

  He had no wish to bear that news—but Emuin was right: the rumor spreading was inevitable. The babe would be born in its due course, with all that he was and might become, and would no one know? It was impossible to keep that secret, impossible to keep it with all the wizardous currents running through the world. Tarien, with her sister, had tried to kill Cefwyn this summer—but was that in fact all they had aimed at?

  And did that matter now to the truth that grew inside her, a creature, like himself, with its own presence and own will within the gray space?

  Mauryl had made him. What had Tarien Aswydd made?

  —The child is a wizard, he said to Emuin. And has he not his own reasons?

  —Weak yet, Emuin said, which in some measure comforted him.

  But not wholly.

  Not so much as to give him ease of mind or spirit.

  And when they reached the stairs, he and Uwen together, and went down, as one must, to go up again to his wing, it cast him momentarily within reach of traffic in the lower hall—in sight, as it chanced, of the master carpenter, who hurried over with the report of a leak in the archive window, which must be dealt with.

  “As it’s endangering the books, Your Lordship…”

  “I’ll attend it,” Lusin said, Lusin, chief of his bodyguard, whose business had nothing to do with the master carpenter; but ice forced snowmelt through cracks, and the woes of the world went on.

  He hourly—even at this hour—expected the report from Modeyneth, of grain headed for storage, safe from Tasmôrden’s reach.

  He expected another report from Haman, tomorrow, of the horses in pasture. Cefwyn had a child of whom Cefwyn knew nothing, and grain moved, and the library window leaked.

  Meanwhile the boy Paisi, who, a former felon, marshaled two servants to carry firewood for him, passed on his way to Master Emuin’s tower. Paisi bowed, and the servants bowed, but Tristen had already set his foot on the step before he even gave a thought to the courtesy, or thought of Paisi as a messenger to bear a quiet word to Emuin, one the twins would not hear.

  “Tell him I’ll see him this afternoon,” he said, and Paisi turned, eyes wide, and bobbed a courtesy, knowing well whichhe he meant: his lord would meet with his master in what quiet and privacy they could arrange in the fortress, but hereafter such moments were difficult to achieve, and all they did in the gray space might flow through it to other interested souls.

  Emuin was right. He had to write to Cefwyn. The more understanding of such a child Unfolded to him, the more he knew that Cefwyn must not be caught by surprise with this news. Cefwyn had to break it to Ninévrisë, and to the lords in his own court: Cefwyn had to tell his friends, and break it to them early and with all the facts in hand…before Ryssand heard it and whispered it piecemeal and had the lords forming a dozen different opinions, each at odds with the other.

  To two lords at least he had no need to send a messenger. At the top of the stairs he slipped quietly into a gray space momentarily untroubled by the Aswydds and whispered to Cevulirn of Ivanor, —Come. Bring all the lords. There’s a matter to discuss.

  Likewise he sought Crissand Adiran.

  But he did not find him, not in the Zeide, nor in the confines of Henas’amef, or yet in the camp outside the walls. Perhaps he was asleep…but the hour argued against it.

  He grew troubled, then, and made his presence bolder, and stronger, and went searching more noisily through the gray space, seeking whether Crissand was indeed simply sleeping, and near at hand, or whether something dire had befallen him.

  He did not expect to find Crissand’s presence far, far north of the town, struggling through drifts. But there he was.

  He did not expect, given all the untoward things that had happened last night, to meet evasions, or to know that Crissand had slipped his guards and risked his life escaping him and his notice.

  He did not expect to meet the pitch of anguish, or the fear that shut Crissand off from him.

  It was not the action of a reasonable man, but that of a man pressed to the limits of his endurance. And he knew nothing that might have sent Crissand out and away from him in that state—except his bringing Crissand’s cousins into Henas’amef, and settling them in the Zeide.

  That was the fear. That was the anger and the anguish.

  He stopped on the stairs, his hand clenched on the stonework, and looked away past the walls of the stairwell. He was hear
t-struck that Crissand had hidden his feelings from him so well until now, and never disturbed him in leaving.

  —Are you well? he asked. Are you safe? Come back. Where are your guards?

  Crissand failed to answer him…too far a thought for Crissand’s scant ability, it might be. And now he did dread the Aswydds’ attention, and feared to make too great a thing of it.

  It might be that Crissand had no inclination to listen: the lord of Meiden rode northerly, toward Anwyll’s garrison and, in between, the village of Modeyneth, and the building of a defensive wall…all these things were in that direction. There were ample things in which Crissand had a legitimate interest, in his lord’s name.

  But nothing about Crissand’s self-appointed mission gave Tristen any sense of quiet or surety. He felt only the keen awareness that Crissand was Aswydd himself, and that the quarrels that had split the Aswydd house and brought it down might not be done—for if there was a lord in Henas’amef who had reason to take strong exception to the return of Orien Aswydd to this hall and to the shelter of this roof, Crissand had that reason. He had buried a father thanks to her.

  —Be safe, Tristen wished Crissand, and continued up the stairs, more than distressed: worried to the depth and breadth of his heart. And he wished Crissand’s welfare whether or not Crissand heard him, and whether or not it accorded with other matters he cared for.

  —Be sensible. Trust Modeyneth and go no farther…above all not to Althalen. And come back to me when you’ve done what you set out to do. Be assured I am your friend.

  That, he wished Crissand to know most of all.

  CHAPTER 3

  The lords came to the summons with snow still unmelted on their cloaks, tracking icemelt through the lower hall and into the great hall itself and delaying not at all for conversation or for ceremony. No one pleaded excuses, except Crissand, who did not appear at all.

  It needed no magic to know why they had been so quick and why the summons had met with immediate compliance. Cevulirn would have come, regardless, out of friendship, and Sovrag, who detested to be left out of any proceedings, would have come, for one thing, to be sure he was not the object of the council.