Fortress of Eagles

“I still can catch you out,” Emuin said, not unkindly.

“It was not a long moment that I stood there. I offer no excuse, sir. I can’t even promise not to do it again. It seemed—safe at that moment.” He struggled to remember all the sequence of things, but that was one of the mazes on which wizardry could lead: that they would not assume an order, or a right sense of importance against what seemed far more urgent. Around the tower things seemed to change by the moment, both things that had been and things that might be. “I felt afraid and I ran.”

“Did you>”

“I was afraid. Afraid I might bethere in the next moment.”

Emuin drew a long slow breath and leaned back. “Is it so, now?”

He had no words to say what had happened to him. The words Men used hardly compassed it. “It felt—” Still there were no words. He hadwords. But they were not in the common tongue and they stuck in his throat. And he had never, strictly speaking, told Emuin all that had happened at Lewenbrook. “I felt in danger. I felt myself in danger. If I thought it came near anyone else, I would have said so at supper that night.”

“Your goodwill is our shield, my young lord; it was Cefwyn’s shield in battle and it stands so, now, with all of us. I trust your looking west and I trust your going to the Quinaltine, little I can do about it.” Emuin had shut away all mention of that disturbing hour as firmly as he had shut the window. No, he wished to say. No, I have more to say.

Yet he could find none of it to say. And despaired, then, that he never would. Emuin had ceased to listen.

164 — C.J. CHERRYH

“—Would a game of draughts suit you on this noisy, rattly, windy night?” Emuin asked him lightly. “I fear the Quinalt and their bonfire are drowned by now, half-burned sins and all. Quinalt sins, to boot. Gods send they make no omen of it.”

“There. You said it again.”

“Said what?”

“Gods send.”

“Plague and pest. A ma

“Gods, sir?”

“Ma

“Yes, sir,” he said. Emuin had closed off the subject. Emuin tried to joke with him, he tried to joke with Emuin and now he had gotten a rise of Emuin’s eyebrow. And a spark of humor in his eye. He fa

Emuin rose from the table, sighed, walked toward the shuttered window. And stood there. “The winter stars are rising and the rain and the foolish fire blinds all my observations. —But all they do down there changes nothing.” Emuin looked at him, and that spark was back, defiant, when a moment before he had seen a weary old man. “You and I are here. And chance is abroad tonight. So are a paltry few shadows. They gathered by the fire down there, too. They danced. Poor fools. For a few hours they were not enemies.”

“Who, sir? The shadows are not our enemies?”

“Nor are we our own, for a few hours at least.” Emuin came back, filled the teakettle. “Best we two sit together, drink tea, and play draughts till dawn. Bid kiss my hand to the Quinalt, and their gods. I don’t advise you, understand! I inform you the course that Iwould take; that I have taken, gods know, simply to live in Guelessar. Do all that Cefwyn recommends regarding the Quinalt—since you don’t consult me in such things I gladly provide no advice. I do not object to your wearing the silly medal, nor talking to His Highness, but finish going to the shrine as soon as you can. Thatis not advice, either, young lord, only good sense.“

“Yes, sir.” He accepted the chastisement, and the advice.

“Plague and pest, I say. Deliberately you did not ask me.” Emuin found his cheerfulness unexpectedly. Mauryl had used to swear at him, sometimes in despair, sometimes in laughter. And Emuin was very like him, in important ways. “Bother the tea,” the old man said. “Steal us two cups of the ale from the guards out there. To be sure of its safety, understand.”

CHAPTER 8

Wine flowed, along with the traditional ale and beer. The drums and the harps and pipes played through the rumble and crack of thunder, and the lords of Ylesuin and their ladies, their sons and their daughters, all moved in their sprightly, graceful patterns through the dance, safe and dry, immune to the storm that reports said had drowned the bonfire and dispersed the wilder celebration in the square for good and all this time.

The king had been wont to be down in the square at harvesttide, dancing the bawdy peasant dances in his misspent youth, oh, two long years ago, committing new sins while burning old ones. If one were lucky, one could burn them all by morning, new and old, and wake with a light conscience, an empty purse, and a well-earned headache.

This year, crowned, having spent last winter in Amefel, Cefwyn sat a thinly cushioned chair of state on a stone workmen had brought in at great effort, to raise that chair of state a handbreadth above the chair of the woman he could not make queen of Ylesuin, a hand-breadth of difference which the king had to remember every time he and his bride-to-be stepped down to dance, a handbreadth of a separation and a symbol of his good fortune not to be in Ninévrisë’s position, a beggar at a foreign, a hostile court. He would not, by his own will, have accepted the damned stone; but he had accepted it all the same, marking down the lord of Ryssand, Corswyndam, in his personal disfavor—for some future time.

The Quinalt had begun to yield until, today, with Ninévrisë casting in her own pe

His grandfather had set himself on the Dragon Throne by murder, baldly put, —had turned on his sworn lord, Elfwyn, the halfling Sihhë, and burned the palace at Althalen, enriching those who followed him. His father, too, had been notoriously jealous of his power, bewilderingly blind to lords fattening their purses by any means they could devise. His courtiers were sure the new-crowned king meant to do something clever, and betray his word to Elwynor, and enrich his faithful barons with new lands beyond any dream of acquisition they had had under his father.

On the other hand—could the new king be a fool? Perhaps he might be weak, and allow his barons to demand far more of him than a stone step. And they still might conquer Elwynor.

Thirteen days were left before the wedding, and then he would have the woman beside him irrefutably, immutably, and legallyhis ally, his wife, andthe love of his heart, a giddy, frivolous, undutiful pleasure he had never looked for. He bought the priests with that block of stone—as well as with the arrangement that kept the lord of Althalen in his rooms and his old tutor Emuin tucked away in his tower. He congratulated himself that they had carried off the ceremony this morning without a disaster, and in truth the court was abuzz with the presence of the Lord Warden in the shrine, wearing a holy relic of the Quinalt, no less. There was hot and heavy converse at this very moment around Efanor and his priest, who swore to all inquirers as to the authenticity of that medal, dashing hope that it might be a lie. True, some skeptics looked askance at the foul and, in their claims, ominousweather tonight, but it was autumn, good lack! when rains were ordinary. What did they expect?

The whole court did know that their new king had been engaged in very chancy business across Assurnbrook, in Amefel. There were far too many eyewitnesses to sorcery. No man who had stood on Lewen field had a precise recollection of all the events there, but every man who had stood there knew that he had seen somethingterrible, and that Elwynim and the king’s odd friend the Lord Warden of Ynefel all had something essential to do with the victory there. In some versions it was the gods themselves who had rescued the Dragon Ba