Fortress of Ice, page 41
Are we so sure? a voice said to him. Is this thing leading us to him, or wide astray in this storm? Has it urged us to honesty? Has it led us to any good act?
Maybe he could have stayed where he was and sent Paisi with the book. He could lie to Crissand. He could even tell the truth. But the book would be away from his mother.
No. He would not have sent Paisi alone with this thing. Paisi had always taken care of him, but now, all of a sudden, he found himself trying to protect Paisi, and taking care of him, and he could never ask Paisi to take on his mother, which was what it would amount to. His mother might try to stop him, might try to kill him, for all he knew, but she would not come at Paisi—he would not let her come at Paisi, come what might.
A blast of sleet-edged wind came right in their faces. It made Feiny veer. He fought the horse full circle, then reined back the way he thought they had been going, and kicked him into motion in the direction he felt was west. Then he looked back to be sure he and Paisi kept the same course.
With a chill straight to his heart, he saw nothing but snowy murk, not even the ground he was riding over.
“Paisi?” he called out into the night. And shouted, over the blast of the wind, “Paisi!”
The wind howled, and skirled sharp-edged sleet around them. There was neither up nor down in the murk, and no answer came to him, none at all.
v
HOURS ON THE SEARCH, AND NO TRACES IN THE WIND-DRIVEN SNOW. THE STORM had blown past, but covered all tracks. Crissand was chilled through, his men likewise. A flask went the rounds, but it lent only false warmth, a comfort for the moment, and a cure for raw throats.
There had been three choices, the ruins of the farm; the highroad back to Guelessar, toward Cefwyn, which seemed unlikely for a boy running from theft; or the way west, the way that Tristen would come, and Crissand’s every impulse, every wondering about the ring, the boy, and his reasons, had laid his wager firmly on the latter, not even stopping to investigate the ruin.
Now, however, the surety he had felt in his choice of directions abruptly faded, leaving, like most magical touches, only a vague conviction that one’s reason had been unreasonably overset, and that choices previously made were all folly and unproven. Before, the fact that there had been no tracks could be blamed on the wind; afterward, Crissand could only wish he had in fact investigated the farm before leading four good men out into a driving snow.
But he knew the tendencies of things magical, and since they had come this far, he told his men they should press on as far at least as Wye Crossing—this to encourage them that there was a sure limit to his madness, and that they would get back to warm quarters before they froze.
But when the snow turned out to have made drifts across the road short of their mark, and chilled and weary men, however brave, hesitated and reined about in dismay, it seemed time to reconsider even that. Nothing had broken those drifts, not since they had begun to form.
Folly, Crissand thought now. He had made the wrong choice. The ring had misled him. It meant the boy to escape. It might even be Tristen’s doing. He hoped that it was. He refused to think any magic could overwhelm what had been his own guide and talisman all these years.
But he felt a little less safe in his long-held assumptions, where he sat, on a cold and unwilling horse.
Then from across the snowy flat of the surrounding meadows, out of a little spit and flurry of snow in the dark, a rider appeared and advanced steadily toward them.
“It could be a haunt,” one of his guard said, and his captain: “Hush, man. Don’t be a fool. We’re out here searchin’ for riders, aren’t we?”
A figure muffled in a cloak and atop a winter-coated, snow-caked, and piebald horse, as if he had ridden straight out of the blizzard of several hours ago. There was reason his guard viewed this arrival in alarm. It wasn’t ordinary, that rider. It looked white in patches, itself, in the ambient snow light.
And it kept coming toward them, not down the road, as they believed the road to lie, but from across the fields.
“Halt there!” his captain called out. “This is His Grace the duke of Amefel! Who are you?”
“Paisi, Elfwyn Aswydd’s man,” the answer came strongly enough, then, distressedly: “Your Grace, Your Grace, gods save me, I’ve lost ’im. An’ all the food is with me!”
CHAPTER SEVEN
i
THEY HAD HASTENED ALL THE WAY, HAD PRESSED THE HORSES HARD. THEY HAD looked to stop at Gran’s for the night—but the closer they rode, the more stranger and more ominous things seemed. Gran’s chimney did not appear at the turning where it ought.
And when Cefwyn rode past that turning, with his son and his guard, the house was all ashes and timbers, its yard gate open to the road.
Aewyn rode ahead, plunged off his horse, and had gotten to a dangerous place among the timbers before the guards overtook him, and Cefwyn had.
“His dreams!” Aewyn cried. “Papa, his dreams!”
“Hush,” Cefwyn said, laying a hand on his son’s back. “Hush. They may have escaped.”
“Here’s horse tracks, Your Majesty,” a man said, back by the shed, which had survived half-burned. The ashes, the burned beams, cool now, supported a load of new snow. But Cefwyn went out, taking Aewyn with him, and sure enough, where the remnant of a roof had partially sheltered the ground, tracks showed. At least one man had walked here. So had a horse. And there were no remains—there was evidence of horses in the shed, but no remains.
“They may well have gotten out,” Cefwyn said. And, squeezing Aewyn’s shoulder: “They would have gone to the town for help. Let us go.”
Aewyn ran back to his horse and climbed into the saddle, impatient until they were under way, jaw clenched, trying to hold his distress like a man. He spoke hardly a word—no one did, until they came within sight of the town.
The day’s sun was sinking fast and the horses were hard-used before the walls of Henas’amef rose distinct above the snowy fields—only one gate was open, and men were out with shovels, digging clear a path for the gates to swing. The odd, west-sweeping storm that had made yesterday’s travel a trial had unloaded about walls and gates, reason enough for a crew to be out shoveling.
The gate-guards had joined the work party, and at first stood stiff with alarm as they spied a determined party of riders flattening a broader track through the snow, but Cefwyn had ordered the banners out, and the gate-guards no more than stood to attention, and laborers swept off their hats and cowls, Amefin folk, but never in these years hostile to their king. Cefwyn had no hesitation in riding close by these men with his son. A bell started to toll, the gate bell, advising the town and the hill above of arrivals worth attention.
“We shall have a hot drink with my brother,” Aewyn said doggedly. His son was white about the lips and cold-stung, ruddy above—a weary, desperate boy who nevertheless had endured a ride hard even for well-exercised guardsmen, with bad news at the end of it. Cefwyn found he had been far too long in chairs instead of the saddle, and far too long eating too much fine food, and he was glad enough to think of shelter over their heads tonight, where he hoped to find at least some good news. But there was that tall, ghostly tower, which vanished behind brick and stone as they rode through the gates. It loomed above them, like a living presence.
An unannounced royal visit had a certain bitter history in this province— people who stopped their late business on the street stared not only with astonishment, but in stark dismay. It was a very different feeling than they had had coming here in summer, well heralded and with Lord Crissand to meet them at the gates in festivity, with Gran’s place safe and welcoming. This was a suspicious town, an Amefin, Bryalt town, where loyalty to the Marhanen ran only so deep, and once Guelen riders passed the walls, they were scrutinized… particularly if things had gone wrong here.
He didn’t think his son had ever encountered that sort of examination from anyone, let alone found it meeting them up and down the street. Aewyn had fallen grimly silent, and looked anxiously to left and right of them as they rode up the hill, past shuttered windows and occasional spying from the narrowest crack.
The gate-guards above, however, those at the Zeide gate, were instant to open and clear their way in complete compliance, and the ringing of a bell at that gate brought not only servants, but Lord Crissand himself, running out cloakless, despite the snow.
“Your Majesty,” Crissand said, starting to kneel below Cefwyn’s stirrup, but Cefwyn dropped down to his feet and snatched him up by the arms before he could do it. “Your Majesty,” Crissand said, out of breath, “your son was here. He has left.”
“Gran’s farm was burned.”
“Burned, yes. And Gran is dead. But your son, and his man, they came here for shelter. They were here. Then your son left, in the middle of the storm.”
“Yesterday.”
“Yesterday, Your Majesty.”
“Where did he go?” Aewyn asked, entirely out of turn, and Cefwyn drew a deep, carefully patient breath and asked the same question, in more courtesy.
“Do you know, my friend?”
“West,” Crissand said with conviction. “His man Paisi came back. They were parted in the storm. Your son carried my ring. I gave him that… I wrote to Your Majesty…”
“Best discuss it inside,” Cefwyn said. Crissand was freezing, shivering in the cold wind, clearly full of news they needed, and much as his heart wanted to go chasing off after the boy, the horses were done. He was done. Certainly Aewyn must be. And even if they were to leave on a further search tonight, they would have to supply themselves off Crissand’s resources, saddle new horses, and perhaps go out with Paisi to guide them. If the boy had been gone a day, there was no chasing him. Tracks would be covered.
“Your Majesty,” Crissand said, and led them up into the fortress itself by the side entry, up steps made both foul and passable by ash and sand, a black area that had frozen into ice all about the steps. It had the feeling of times past, of another winter when the snow had kept coming, and things had gone vastly awry.
Tristen was coming. He believed it. He cast Otter’s welfare on it… perhaps more than one Otter’s welfare, counting the boy’s connections to that tower above them. He did not want Aewyn exposed to risk, and the more calmly they dealt with this, the more he could settle his son to calm and reason.
They entered the lower hall, right beneath his old rooms, when he had been viceroy here, and walked down the hall to the little audience chamber, an intimate room with a good fireplace. Heat inside met them like a wall after so long in the cold.
“Find Paisi,” Crissand said to one of his guards. “He’s up in the boy’s rooms. And get mulled wine up here. Tea, with it.”
The man hastened, all but running back down the hall, shouting indecorously for servants and for a man to go find the witch’s grandson; but before they had even shed their cloaks, Paisi himself showed up at the door.
“Come in, man,” Crissand said. “Come in. You’re wanted.”
“M’lord,” Paisi said, in a quiet, miserable voice.
“Your Majesty,” Crissand said, and offered Cefwyn the seat from which Crissand himself would hold audiences in this room.
Cefwyn sat. He pointed Aewyn to the chair nearest, Crissand to a lordly seat opposite, and said to Crissand, “No ceremony, man, just the news, from the start. What happened here? Where did he go? Have you still got his mother?”
“Her, I have, Your Majesty,” Crissand said, settling into a plain chair, and proceeded to tell him that Paisi’s gran was dead in the fire, that Otter had violated the library and destroyed a wall, finding a book, to which Paisi could attest. Then Otter had taken off ahead of all inquiry, with Crissand’s ring to ease the way, convinced that this newfound treasure should go to Lord Tristen.
“We met Paisi, coming back,” Crissand said. “Paisi had lost him in the blizzard, and all my sense of where the ring was, had faded at what must have been the same time. I had no more indication where he might be, nor have, to this hour. I fear he might have traveled some distance, but I have no more sense where he is.”
“Paisi,” Cefwyn said. Paisi waited, standing, hands clasped, gripped on each other until the knuckles were white. “Have you anything to contribute?”
“Nothin’, Your Majesty, only I’d ha’ died before I’d ha’ left ’im. He were goin’ t’ find Lord Tristen, was all he said. He said what he had, had to go to him.”
“Not the worst notion,” Cefwyn said, as much to comfort Aewyn as because he needed to say it to Crissand or to Paisi. “How did he find this thing?”
“One hardly knows,” Crissand said, and Paisi, when Cefwyn looked at him:
“He was uneasy wi’ his ma,” Paisi said. “He was thinkin’ because he’d told her Lord Tristen was comin’, she’d took it out on Gran an’ burned the house down, an’ he said’t was his fault, which I said not, but he weren’t easy in his mind. They was goin’ to send the horses down t’ winter pasture,” Paisi added, apparently extraneously, “an’ I ask’t him, an’ he said no, right sharp, then again, no, you was comin’ an’ Lord Tristen was comin’ and there might be cause to need ’em, so I told the stablemaster to keep ’em here.”
“When was this?”
“The day before. The day before that night.”
“That night,” Cefwyn said.
“He had a key to the library,” Crissand said, “which the librarian gave him, because he identified himself as Elfwyn Aswydd and had my ring for authority. He read the History of Amefel. He was there all that day and stayed after the librarian left.”
“An’ he come home, he drank wine, he didn’t eat more ’n a bird, an’ woke out of bed,” Paisi said, “whilst I was sleepin’. He went down there, and they say he made a hole in the wall under a counter, and there was plaster all over. All I know is, he come back wi’ a book an’ sayin’ the guards was after him. An’ I should ha’ done better, I know I should, Your Majesty, but ’e were scairt, and sayin’ that book had to get away from ’is ma, fast as it could.”
“From his mother,” Cefwyn said. “Was this what he said?”
“Aye, Your Majesty. An’ bein’ as I served Lord Tristen an’ Master Emuin, meself, I weren’t inclined to ask too deep where it was any wizard writing— if his ma wanted that thing and he wanted to go to Lord Tristen with it, says I, better run for Lord Tristen. So we did. But we didn’t never get there.” Paisi was, in his way, a hard man, from a hard life, and it was something that his chin trembled when he said it. “The wind come between us, an’ the snow blew, and then he weren’t there. I searched and searched, and I couldn’t find ’im, an’ I suppose he couldn’t find me, neither, Your Majesty, because I know he’d ha’ tried.”
“I’ve sent men to Marna today,” Lord Crissand said, “attempting to get through. As yet there’s been no report, but there’s not been time for it.”
“You’ve done the best anyone could,” Cefwyn said. A slow chill ran through him when he contemplated the several branches of the facts at hand. He sat in a room he well knew, in a seat he had occupied when he first laid eyes on Tristen. In that hour he had looked into eyes that knew absolutely nothing of the world of Men, the innocence, the absolute innocence he had never met in man or child since. That gaze had challenged the validity of everything he believed, made him question what he knew for real and just, all those things, in the very hour he was warm and guilty from the Aswydd women’s bed—because Mauryl Gestaurien had called up a soul from out of the dark, and clothed it in flesh, and sent Tristen into the world to confront his enemy.
Mauryl’s enemy, certainly. Mankind’s enemy, by complete inconsequence, he feared, to that entity—individual Men, that force swept aside as casually as sweeping dust off the step. It was beyond dangerous, Tristen’s enemy. It was absolutely inimical to everything he loved, and he, and his, had been in the way of it—it had tried to lay hands on the stolen books, he much suspected—and the Aswydd woman, Elfwyn’s mother, was only its hands remaining in the world.
He’d never been as afraid as he had been in those days. He’d stared it down, on a battlefield in Elwynor. He’d risked everything on that field, and the next, and he’d won, instead, against all expectation, thanks to Tristen.
He had a lifelong friend in Tristen, a friend who’d been unable to stay in the world of Men simply because, in some ways, Tristen was still that innocent, that bewildered by petty wickedness, although he had been reborn to face something very, very dangerously wicked, supposing wickedness was even a word it understood.
Gran was dead, her protections evidently inadequate. And a book had gone missing, from a hiding place they had supposed empty, the books in question either destroyed or in Tristen’s possession, at Ynefel. The boy was right: if, all protections fallen, he had found something of the sort, that was exactly where it belonged.
Breath in the room seemed very close at the moment. He looked into Paisi’s eyes, and into Crissand’s, no king in that moment, but a Man with other Men who’d seen the same improbable things he’d seen and carried the scars of it.
The amulet he wore gave no clue, no hint of a clue what was happening in the world, or where Tristen was.
Find him, he wished his old friend. Find my son. Keep him safe. A book is loose in the world.
And nothing answered that plea, not a whisper or a sensation.
“Your men will not arrest Otter, will they?” Aewyn asked, breaking the spell.
“By no means,” Crissand said earnestly. “But persuade him to come back, that, if they can.”
