Fortress of Eagles

He knew the guardroom and abhorred the thought. But he regarded Uwen’s advice when he regarded no other, and the feeling in the air was disquieting, unsettling to reason.

“Take him to the guardroom,” Tristen said. “For your own safety, sir. I ask you go with them.”

Crissand made no resistance being gathered up in the hands of the guards, but caught Tristen’s eye with a white, shocked stare as he passed, as if asking for what reasonable cause all this had happened… as Tristen asked himself the same question. He had attempted kindness and charity; and disregarded the advice of knowledgeable men, and all this was the issue of it: the king’s messenger, the earl, his servants, all dead, young Crissand stricken with a bitter, unsettling grief, and the harm that he had felt likely in all this journey was real. The earl was dead on the green-velvet coverlet of the bed. The man in the chair in the first room was the king’s messenger, bound to that chair, dead by what cause was not evident. The earl’s men were all dead, five of them, scattered about the place, three near the heavy sideboard.

“Ain’t no mark,” Uwen said, pushing a dead man with his foot. “Poison, I’d guess.” Uwen’s guess was plainly practical, while the gray space roiled with unease.

Then Lusin lifted a cup from among two cups and a pitcher on the table, and turned it sideways.

A red drop spilled out.

“Drunk from,” Lusin said.

There were half a dozen cups in all, some on small tables about the room.

“All these, used,” Tawwys said, examining another near where he stood. “M’lord, all drunk from.”

Servants such as these seemed to be did not drink with their lord on any ordinary occasion. And the king’s messenger as well… had he drunk wine, bound to a chair, with the fighting raging downstairs?

Folly. Outright folly, and villainy. The other earls had hung back to know the issue of it—then disavowed Edwyll altogether. Perhaps he had committed himself to rebellion even before he had ever intercepted the king’s message… but coincidence still smelled of wizardry at the least.

And the wine service… and the death of a messenger, whose person was sacrosanct, even between warring factions…

“Lady Orien’s cups,” he said aloud, and knew it was not alone Lady Orien’s cups… but Lady Orien’s wards: the Zeide servants had sealed the place after Orien’s banishment, after the king returned from Lewenbrook. The rooms had been two months unopened, until the earl moved in.

No few of the men blessed themselves, Uwen halfway so, and then Uwen abandoned the gesture, as Uwen at last renounced such protections in despair.

“Lady Orien’s wine,” Uwen said. “Well, her ladyship hardly had time to pack, did she?”

Not packed, indeed. All about them was the opulence of the Aswydds, the dark green velvet, the brazen dragons that upheld massive candles, the dragon-legged tables and the eagles that, paired wings almost touching, overshadowed even the velvet-covered bed in the other room, where the earl lay.

The messenger sat bound to his ornately carved chair, alone incapable of drinking.

But there was wine stain on the man’s blond beard and on the Marhanen scarlet of his tunic, details apparent, Tristen found, once one walked over to have a closer look. The earl’s servants, their lord dead of poison, the citadel falling, had all drunk from the cups and forced the messenger to drink, too, men not bound by the understandings of earls and dukes. Anger was in this room; uncleansed, untenanted, haunted by Aswydd hate, and the earl the remote kin of the Aswydds: he had been drawn in, drawn down, if he had had the smallest portion of the Aswydd gift. Tristen felt the tug of it himself, and dismissed it, with force.

Then he could draw a whole breath.

“Take them wherever they take the dead,” he said. “Do whatever you judge fit, Uwen.”

“Aye, m’lord,” Uwen said. And then a hesitation. “There’s some as would say burn the rebels’ bodies. Ye want that, m’lord, or buryin’ ’em, like honest men?”

“Do what should be done,” he said again, at the moment lost as to what that was, or what he had the power to do to mend his arrival here. At the moment he ceded all power of decision to Uwen.

Burials. Burning. Neither destroyed the shadows, and Althalen, where all had burned, was most haunted of all. He only clung to the necessity of moderation in himself. Wide, inconsiderate action, Emuin as well as Mauryl had informed him, led to bruises. And worse.

Worst of all, he cast his own responsibility on Uwen, who could not see into the danger in this place—or know the danger of a strong spirit given Place on the earth.

“Bury them,” he decided for himself. “The earl, the servants, all the men who died. Let priests say words, Uwen, whatever they like.”

He had heard ru

“Your Grace.” The man was one of Anwyll’s men, but both Uwen and Lusin held him from coming closer in his agitation. “The captain’s respects—the lord viceroy is killing the prisoners.”

Lightning might have struck. It was like that, throwing into clarity all a dark landscape of Amefin resentments, Guelen angers, potent as the ill that gathered in this room.

“Where?” was his first conscious thought, and the man began to say, “The South Court.”

Tristen pushed the man, Lusin, all his guards, aside.

“M’lord!” he heard Uwen call out, heard Uwen shout orders to some men to stay, some to come with them. Tristen gathered up his shield as he went out into the hall, and stayed for nothing else. He began to run, down the hall, down the stairs, and his men chased him with thumping of shields and the rattle of armor and weapons, down to the vacant center hall and the partially restored candlelight.

Beyond the open doors, torchlight shone in the South Court. He ran out onto the landing, saw a confused straggle of guards, Dragons, standing at the bottom, not opposing them as he came down the steps with his men, rather looking for orders, while a dark wall of red-coated men clustered near torchlight in the center of the yard and screams of threat and dying echoed off the walls beyond.

Death, death above, and death here below… death proceeding methodically, with the rise and fall of swords against unarmed men, death with outcries of anger and fear, death in a mass of men engaged in killing each other at the last curtain wall.

“Shields!” Tristen called out, and, without mercy: “ Swords!” as they came up on that dark knot of shadows, Guelen Guard pe

“Dragon Guard!” Uwen roared out in a voice that echoed off the walls. “Guelens! Stand aside! Stand back! Come to order, here! Way for His Grace, damn ye! Down weapons!”

Men turned stark-faced from the killing, men drew back at a sergeant’s profane voice, except the last handful, gone mad with slaughter, and them Tristen hit with both shield and sword, battering them aside. In the distance Anwyll shouted, “Pull back, pull back for a captain of the Guard!” but Tristen thought only of breaking through the ranks in front of him, overwhelming anyone who resisted him, until the killing stopped.

“Way for His Grace!” Uwen shouted, and at last, again, Anwyll’s voice near at hand. “Draw back, draw back!”

Then other voices, many voices, the sergeants: “Stand aside, stand back there, lads!”

Quiet descended, except the drawing of breath, the moans of the wounded.

Tristen found himself with a strewed mass of bodies at his feet, an area fringed by armed guardsmen… them, and a small surviving knot of earl’s men in the corner of the wall: Crissand, the seven, and a handful more.