Fortress of Owls

“Are they the ones from the tower?” Crissand asked, himself looking up.

“I think they are.”

“Do they follow you?” Crissand asked.

“They go where they like. I don’t govern them.”

Did his birds fly sometimes far afield, and did they sometimes meet the pigeons that nested at Ynefel?

He was not sure, indeed, that anything lived at Ynefel. He saw them sweep a turn toward the west, indeed, away, away toward the river… and equally toward the stony hills around ruined Althalen. Ruins suited them well: they liked ledges and stonework. Certainly birds that dared nest at Ynefel, if they were the same birds, would never fear Althalen.

“Nothing of omen,” Crissand wondered in some anxiousness.

“No,” he said as they rode, “only birds.”

A cloud came, passed. Many clouds came and went, and fields blazed white after shadow. Snow on bare gray apple branches made lacework of the eastern view. Moving shadows grayed the hills, and the sky was an amazing clear blue with fat wandering clouds, while the morning’s fall cast a winter glamour on common stones and roadside broom. The horses’ nostrils flared wide, their ears pricked forward in the bracing air. Their steps were willingly quick and light.

“Is it the South Road we use all the way?” he asked Crissand at a certain point. He had looked at maps; but the hills were a maze of small trails, some missing from the charts, he much suspected, and he was very willing to use a shortcut and go up into the wonderful hills if Crissand knew one.

“Yes, my lord, south an hour,” Crissand said, “to Padys Spring. There’s an old shrine, and the village track to Levey comes in there, only over the ridge. We’ll leave the main road there.”

Padys rang not at all off memory, neither the village of Levey, nor Padys Spring… though he was sure there should be water where Crissand described a spring being.

But, also, to his vague thought, the name of the place was not quite Padys.

“Bathurys,” he said suddenly, pleased to have caught it.

“M’lord?”

“Bathurys,” he said. It seemed increasingly sure to him that that was the proper name of the spring, as sometimes the very old names came to him. There was a shrine, Crissand had already said; but he was less sure of that fact.

But there at least should be a spring at a place called Bathurys, and when he set a right name to it, he far better recalled the lay of the land… thought of a village of gray stone, and flocks of sheep.

It was not so far a ride, then. He felt happy both in Gery’s free and cheerful movement and in the increasing good temper of the company around him. He even heard laughter among the soldiers behind, and beside him, Uwen, who habitually was shy of lords’ company, was not shy in Crissand’s presence, and bantered somewhat with Crissand’s captain, riding near them.

The two guard companies, the Dragons and the men of Meiden, had fought each other with bloody determination the night of his arrival; but the Dragons had also rescued Crissand and his men from execution, so with this particular Guelen regiment, the tally sheet of good and bad was mixed. Besides, the Dragons were a Guelen company the Amefin held in higher regard than they had ever held for the Guelen Guard, even before Parsynan’s rule here: the Dragons, better disciplined, had never been hard-handed with the townsfolk, never stolen, never done any of the things the Guelens had done, so he had it reported. So, warily, cautiously, goodwill grew, in the amity of the officers and the lords, so in the ranks.

And, truth, by the time they had passed the first rest and ridden over the icy bridge, Uwen and the captain of Meiden’s house guard were cheerfully comparing winters they had known, and arguing about the merits of sheep, while the men in the ranks had proceeded to local autumn, local ale, the taverns in Guelemara and those in Amefel, and the women they knew.

The men found their ways of talking. But Tristen labored in his converse with Crissand as if they were strangers, for all their prior dealings had been policy and statecraft. Now they talked idly, as common men did, about the autumn, the land, the flocks, and the apples. Uwen, who had been a farmer before he was a soldier, knew far more about any of these things, Tristen was sure, but Crissand knew everything there was to know about apples, their type, and their value. All Tristen found to do was ask question and question and question. Crissand did know his people’s trade, down to the tending of apple orchards and sheep, which he had done with his own hands, and had no hesitation in the answers. “The flocks are most of my people’s living,” Crissand said, “more so than the orchards in the last five years, since the blight. Lord Drumman’s district is all orchards of one kind and another. So is Azant’s. But we fared well enough in Meiden, since we have both sheep and apples: the barley never does well, to speak of: that comes from the east and from Imor and Llymaryn.”

And again, after a time, Crissand said, “Lewenbrook was hardest on Levey of all Meiden’s villages. Fourteen dead is a heavy toll for a village of two hundred, six more wounded, seven lost with my guard, a fortnight gone. That’s a quarter of all the village, and every man they had between sixteen and thirty.”

Tristen had not reckoned the dead in those terms, but it came clear to him, such a hardship.

“A great many widows for a small village,” Crissand said, “and them to do the spring plowing, except I gift younger sons from some of my other villages to go and plant for the widows when they’ve seen to their own fields.”

“We will not have Amefel for a battlefield again,” Tristen vowed, with all knowledge Cefwyn was going to war and that he must. He would not have the war cross the river. He was resolved on that.

“Gods grant,” Crissand said fervently.

Sun flashed about them when Crissand said it. It had been a moment of cloud, which passed… and indeed now there was certainly no tardiness in the heavens, though the wind was still. Spots of sunlight came and went with increasing rapidity across the land, glorious patches of light and gray shadow on the snow.

The talk was, albeit puzzling to him, also enlightening, even in this first part of their ride, of the things Crissand and the other lords had suffered, and what the villages needed. They had a certain shyness of each other at the first, and Crissand seemed to worry about offending him, telling the truth as Crissand would, but everything Crissand said, he heard. From orchards and sheep they talked on about this and that, gossiped about various of the lords, but none unkindly: Drumman’s ambition for a new breed of sheep, Azant’s daughter’s two marriages, her widowed at Lewenbrook, only seven days a bride—but not the only tragedy. Parsynan, so he had no difficulty understanding at all, had done nothing to mend the situation in the villages, nothing to recover Emwy from its destruction, nothing to help Edwyll’s heavy losses, only to collect taxes for the coronation levy and further punish the villages that had helped win the day.

“Then the king’s men came counting granaries and sheep again,” Crissand said, “and that was the thing that pushed my father toward rebellion, my lord. We’ve no villages starving yet, but by next year they’d be eating the seed corn, and that, that, my lord, there’s no recovering. So the Elwynim offer tempted my father, and the king’s men made him angry. That’s the truth of it. I don’t excuse our actions, but I report the reason of them.”

“I’ve yet to understand all Parsynan’s reasons,” Tristen said, “but at least by what I’ve seen, he built nothing. And I want the repairs made and no great amount spent, and no gold ornaments, and none of this. Yet they want to carve the doors, which is a great deal of expense, and more time, yet everyone, even the servants, say I should do it… while the villages want food. Is that good sense?”