Fortress of Owls

“I’m havin’ men pound in pegs now,” Uwen informed him when, wrapped in his heaviest cloak, he visited the camps outside the walls, “there bein’ little difference in the tents, an’ if there is, they’ll rig some-thin’ clever. If this goes on, they’ll just be damned thankful the pegs is drove in before the ground freezes. Granted they can find ’em. We’re settin’ markers, and hope the rest on ’em’s quick arrivin’. I figure they’ll press on into the night to get here.”

“I wish,” Tristen said, “but my wishes aren’t all that’s had effect, or the snow wouldn’t fall yet.”

The lords prowled the hall and the stables and hoped for their tents and supplies, concerned, clearly, while Emuin sat in his tower hoping in vain for a sight of the sky and the stars at night.

And just at sundown, the storm gave up to a general, an eerie quiet.

More riders came in, Ivanim, cold men and cold horses, glad of a great bonfire Uwen had ordered set up for a beacon in the night, to guide men to the town. Cevulirn went down to meet the newcomers, who were his, but the heavy horsemen of Imor with all their gear and remounts were still out in the storm. Sovrag went down to help. Umanon and Pelumer simply fretted, near the town lords gathered in the great hall. It was their men still to come, still out in the storm.

The fact was that contrary to all Pelumer’s intentions the handful of Lanfarnessemen who should have come after their lord were late: Lanfarnesse was late again, and now it was their lord who worried and paced beside Umanon, until, past midnight, the two lords decided to go down to the bonfire, and called for heavy cloaks.

“I’ll go with you, sir,” Tristen said, having no more easy rest than Umanon, thinking that if he were outside the walls and away from the clamor of a living town, he might hear less noisy things, out across the land.

Crissand, too, who kept them company among the local nobles, said he would go, or even send out his household men searching for the missing.

“My men know the road,” Pelumer said—temerity to suggest that the rangers of Lanfarnesse could not find Henas’amef. “They’re delayed, is all. My folk don’t press the weather if they see a hazard in it.

“They may well have stopped for the night,” Pelumer added as they rode down through the town, cloaked and gloved and wrapped up snugly. The wind was gathering force again after sunset. Any surface exposed quickly turned white on the side facing the gale, and all of them were half-white by the time they passed the gate.

“Bridges won’t support the heavy wagons,” Umanon said, “and my men will have to ford at several places. That means a camp to dry out, with the wind like this. But if they’re close, they’ll press on, no matter the hour.”

The place outside the walls had blossomed with tents over recent days, and most of the horses were moved out to shelter in the places provided for them, with warm, dry straw, so they were comfortable.

And there, just as they came down, came a last weary number of carts, in from the road.

“They’re here!” Umanon said, knowing his own, and vastly relieved: indeed, the men were riding not the light horses they used for travel, but the heavy horses, whose great strength had brought them in.

So they were safe, and the men from the garrison and the Amefin guard fell on the wagons to get the frozen canvas spread in proper places, and to get wood for warmth.

More, the tavern near the gate had prepared a hot meal on a standing order, and men went through the gates and out again, all on the town’s hospitality, fed and fed well, with no need to rely on their own resources on this bitter cold night.

Everything was taking shape despite the snow, and men called to winter camp were surprised and relieved at the comfort they did have.

“We have everything in order,” Cevulirn came to Tristen to say. “I’ll spend the night with my men, and in good comfort, too. We’ve things to talk about, my lieutenant and I.”

It was not all that easy. Men struggled with stiff canvas, stiffened ropes to unpack the wagons. Umanon’s men elected to move the teams and to leave the wagons standing where they were until morning, and that proved a wise expedient, for the wind was increasing, carrying snow so thick it was difficult to keep the torches lit.

The bonfire alone shone through the veiling snow, a light grown wan and strange in the opening of the heavens.

Nature let loose, Tristen said to himself, hugging his cloak to him and wondering if indeed they would have all the snow they had been due. Gusts buffeted him, carried away a tent from cursing men, who simply let it go and caught it when it fetched up against another tent.

Things went well, but not without struggle. He rode Petelly disconsolately along the aisle, hooded against the fall, and told himself he should give up worrying and take Petelly up to his warm stable, having done all he could do, and the Imorim having come in.

He could do most by wishing for the weather to improve. He might prevail. He had done it once.

Yet he had not heard the Imorim until the last. He had failed with the weather.

Was that the way the new year and the Year of Years was setting the pattern, and had things gone as well as he had hoped on Midwinter Eve?

When he thought that, the gray space worried him with a sense of something amiss, nothing he could catch, only a trace, like a scent the wind might bring one moment and carry away the next. It was none of the men here, nothing like Cevulirn.

He was in the last aisle of Pelumer’s camp, and about to enter Cevulirn’s, when the notion came to him that someone was in the storm, strayed men, perhaps… perhaps some of Pelumer’s men, or stragglers after the Imorim.

Then something brushed his shoulder and made him start, until it happened a second time and he knew it had been Owl.

“What do youwant?” he asked the uncooperative bird. He suddenly realized that he was alone: his guards had helped at the wagons, and somehow now they and he had separated in the driving snow.

Now of a sudden Owl brushed past him and wheeled away, off toward a troubling sense of presence in the storm. Follow. Follow me.

In the world of Men that track led simply down the road, as it bore toward Levey. It was a road he knew, in the heart of his province, and it was the road down which Umanon’s men would come. There might be stragglers.

But stragglers that Owl cared for?

He turned Petelly’s head and followed.

No one knew he had gone. Uwen was at work in the farthest camp, and Crissand had gone to assist Cevulirn, and by now the snow came down so thick the surviving torches were faint, blurred stars, the bonfire a hazy sun.

Owl brushed-his arm on another pass and raked right past Petelly’s mane, startling the horse to a heart-stopping skip under him, a skid on a snowy ditchside, right off the road.

Yet here, remote from all the lives that occupied his attention in the camps, remote from the town and wrapped in snow-laden gusts and storm, he discovered a clear wisp of a presence, not one life, but two, or maybe three.

What was more, now at least one or two sought him, aware of him, and desperate, trying to come toward him. If they were Umanon’s men, at least one had wizard-gift.

He rode Petelly up onto the road again and in that direction, still bearing toward Levey. Owl flew generally ahead of him, appearing at times out of a veil of snow, and gone as quickly, always in that direction. Follow. Follow. Don’t delay.

By now, he thought, there might be a general search for him, and Uwen would be upset with Lusin and his guards, who would blame themselves for his straying.

But Owl was persuasive, and miraculous things had happened on this road, on which the old oak lay overthrown, and Auld Syes had met him.