Fortress of Owls

There was a small silence this time on Crissand’s side. “That you are Sihhë is no fault in their eyes.”

“I am a Summoning and a Shaping,” he said with more directness of his heart than he had ever used on that matter, even with Uwen, who rode close on his other side, Crissand’s captain somewhat back in the column for a word with another man. “That I may be Sihhë seems mere afterthought to being a dead Sihhë.”

“M’lord,” Uwen protested, and Crissand:

“You are our fair lord. None better. None better!”

“A Shaping, and a fool. Uwen knows. Cefwyn’s captain tells me so.”

“Spite.”

“No, I value that in him. And Uwen bears very patiently with my mistakes, knowing all my flaws, and keeps me from the greatest disasters…”

“M’lord!” Even Uwen was scandalized and did not return his fond smile.

“But you do so, and it is true, Uwen. I value your counsel as I value the Lord Commander’s, and your protection above his.”

“M’lord,” Uwen muttered, embarrassed. But it was still true. What Uwen gave him was beyond price or valuation; and he wished ever so much that he might have that kind of honesty from Crissand. He thought he had had it for a moment, and then it had turned to the flattering and the worship Crissand gave him, and he felt that change like a wound.

“Uwen is my friend,” Tristen said to Crissand, riding knee to knee with him, “and Lusin and my guards are my friends, and Tassand and my servants are my friends. And so is king Cefwyn and master Emuin and Her Grace of Elwynor; they know I’m a fool. His Highness Prince Efanor was kind to me, too, and gave me a book of devotions he greatly values. He thinks I’m a heretic. Commander Idrys of the Dragons, too; he calls me a fool and a danger, and I regard his advice. A

“They’re Quinalt,” Crissand said, as if that explained all the world.

“So is Uwen.”

“Not that good a Quinaltine,” Uwen said under his breath.

“And Cefwyn is my friend,” Tristen continued doggedly to his point. “If you wish to be my friend, Crissand Adiran, if you become my friend, you should know that I hold Cefwyn in friendship.”

“For your sake I give up all complaint against him.”

“And will bear him goodwill?”

He had the gift, Emuin had advised him, of both asking and telling too much truth, challenging the polite lies that kept men from inconveniencing each other and the great lies that kept men from each other’s throats. He had learned to moderate that, and wield silence somewhat more often.

But with this young earl who had first met him at sword’s edge and then sworn to him more extravagantly than all the other earls, with this young man who had brought him here to pour half-truths into his ear, he cast down the question like a gage, to see whether Crissand would pick it up or find a polite and empty phrase to avoid allegiance to the Marhanen… and truth to him. Either way, he would thus declare the measure of their friendship.

“What will you, my lord?” Again Crissand attempted to dance sideways, disappointingly so. “I bear all goodwill to the king.”

Uwen cleared his throat and said in a diffident tone, and without looking quite at Crissand: “His Grace is inclined to want the plain truth from a man on any number of points, your lordship, more ’n some is used to, but he ain’t ever apt to hold the truth again’ a man. Bein’ as he’s no older ’n last spring, when he come into this world, he’ll ask ye things ye might wonder at, meanin’ no disrespect by it. But ye’ll have the truth from ’im, if ye will to have it.”

It took courage for Uwen to speak up as he had, a common man, to what Uwen called his betters. But Uwen had shepherded him through courts and village streets and knew him as no other man did, and sometimes spoke for him when the going had gotten too tangled. Not even Cefwyn, nor even Emuin, knew him as Uwen did.

“Then I must tell the truth,” Crissand said in that silence that followed, “and this is the foremost truth: His Majesty’s law may call my father a traitor, and it’s true, traitor to the Marhanen; and so am I. Nor do I repent anything I did. You would have saved my father, I well know. I would that my father had lived and that the lord viceroy had died. From the time I was accountable of anything, my father told me no good could come to Amefel while a Marhanen sat the throne in Guelessar and Heryn Aswydd in Henas’amef. And, yes, Heryn was kin of ours. But no one of my house mourned him—nor were we surprised when the king in Guelemara sent Heryn’s sisters to a nu

All of that Tristen well understood. But the conclusion of it he did not. “Did you hope for better from Tasmôrden?”

“No. We hoped Tasmôrden would set my father in power. And after that, my father would see to Amefel. None other would. I’m not surprised to know there were no troops, nor would there be, coming to our relief. And when Cuthan betrayed us and you came and when the Guelen viceroy ordered us killed, I had no more hope. But I was not surprised.” A small silence followed. It was no good memory, and Crissand gathered a deep breath and a brisker voice. “But when you came into that courtyard and rescued us, and you did justice, my lord, for the first time in a hundred years, someone did justicefor men of Amefel, I knew my father didn’t die in vain, that after all we have a lord I will follow. And if you bid me be loyal to the king, for your sake, my lord, then gods save the king in Guelemara, I say it with all my heart.”

That was a very great thing for an Amefin to say.

And when Crissand said gods save the king, Tristen unthinkingly resorted to the gray space in simple startlement, a recourse for a wizard’s Shaping as easy as a next breath or a wondering beyond the words and into the real motion of a man’s heart. He sped into that space with an awareness of the men closest on either hand, a feather-touch of awareness, of the familiar.

Uwen, for instance: Uwen was rather like a rock, steady, ordinary, incontrovertible, neither there nor quite aware of the things in that space, but coming quite close to reaching it, at times, through familiarity with him. The Meiden captain was dimmer in his awareness. So with the rest of the guards.

But Crissand glowed, faintly but incontrovertibly there. Crissand Earl Meiden himself was distant cousin to the aethelings of Henas’amef, and, with the aetheling blood came wizard-gift. Crissand to all seeming had not a glimmering awareness of the gift that was in him… a gift perhaps enough to bend luck in Crissand’s favor. Luck had failed Crissand’s father, whose heredity was at least half the same; yet Crissand said it: the cause had prospered. Luck had allowed Crissand’s men to save him from the viceroy’s order, so that Crissand and his mother both had lived.

And on that thought Tristen took a small pause, a cold small thought, that Crissand’s slight gift, his luck, was a pivot on which greater things turned, and when things were free to move, then wizardry had its best chance. On a small pin, a great gate swung.

Whose wizardry had it been? Or might it be magic at work, that sense that, somewhere, long ago, he had known Crissand Adiran, or someone very like him?

But Crissand in the gray space now had not a glimmer of ill will. Rather Crissand shone with a pure, plain, and dangerous folly of adoration, a heady wine for anyone who drank.

Like Emuin’s insistence on beeswax, it came with wizard-force, and sober as he had grown this autumn, such blithe excess of adoration frightened him. But in the reckless outpouring of Crissand’s heart, he found Crissand’s happiness and hope spread about him. Even the house guard and the Dragons had made a sort of conversational peace, and the world was incredibly fair and bright despite the grim talk of recent moments. Sunlight through the scudding, gray-bottomed clouds cast sparkling detail where it touched, random grains of snow shining like dust of pale jewels to left and to right of an untrodden road, and every hill and every copse of trees offered new beauty. Creature of a single year, he had imagined winter when it came would be deathly still, and instead he discovered it full of sparkle and motion and wonder around him, and he was warmed by unquestioning love.