Fortress of Owls

But when master Emuin’s new tower room had reached its apparent limits, as it had on the day following his arrival, why, baskets and bundles coming up for the week afterward had necessarily accumulated on the stairs and on the very small landing, hardly more than a step, that gave a servant, a petitioner, or the new duke of Amefel himself scant place to stand and knock for admittance.

“Master Emuin?”

“Leave it on the stairs! Gods bless, fool, there’s no more room!”

“Master Emuin, it’s Tristen, if you please.”

Footsteps crossed the floor. The door opened. The old man peered out, hair disarrayed and gusting past his face in a cold wind and a white daylight that said the shutters were open despite the snow sifting down outside.

“Master Emuin, you’ll freeze.” Tristen pushed through the door into the round tower room, where, indeed, shutters were wide to the winds and windows were blazing white with winter sky. Emuin was wrapped in a heavy traveling cloak, and so was Tristen, but for different reasons, Tristen was sure. Master Emuin had kept his room in the Guelesfort in similar state, but in the milder days of autumn, and, however new to his authority over the old man, Tristen was certainly not disposed to tolerate that state of affairs here.

Consequently, he began closing shutters.

To Emuin’s clear indignation: “And how am I to see, pray?”

“Candles. Lanterns. As other people do, sir! People account methe simpleton, and you the wizard and wise man, and you have the hall full of baskets and this tower so cold it gusts cold wind into the lower hall. Whence this notion not to have candles?”

There followed a small, uncomfortable pause in which Emuin looked elsewhere.

“It isthat?” Tristen asked, surprised to have happened on the truth. Then he added that favorite, persistent question that always found so little patience among ordinary folk: “ Why, sir?”

“Plague and bother of lighting fires! Leave my shutters alone! The place is dark as a cave.”

“If you’ll not have Tassand arrange this, then Ishall, sir. I will, with or without your leave.” It was a great impertinence to defy the old man, but he had learned of Cefwyn how to argue, and argue he was prepared to do.

“The duke of Amefel will not carry baskets and build shelves! There are simply too many baskets to fit! They used to fit! I don’t know how it came to be so much. Leave one shutter, I say! How can a man see?”

“Then you’ll accept Tassand’s help.” He faced an obdurate, weary old man, one who had not pla

A tremor of weariness had come into Emuin’s mouth, and more wrinkles than usual mapped the territory around his eyes. He trembled on the verge of yielding. Then: “No! No, youwill not be arranging baskets or carrying them.”

“Then Tassand, sir. His Majesty set me in charge. I must have the baskets up the stairs and the shutters shut.”

A second surly glance.

“I’ll have them set in whatever order you wish,” Tristen said, “a fire laid, candles lit. Please have all the windows shut by this evening, sir, at least by the time the sun goes down.”

“Beeswax. None of your tallow candles, young lord, nothing stinking of slaughter. I will have beeswax.”

Then there was more in it than candles, as there was more in Emuin’s insistence on open windows than a desire for daylight by day and a view of the stars at night. Master Emuin was not a man who chose luxury or spent money profligately, beeswax being the luxury, above tallow. But he wasa wizard, and the question of beeswax or tallow passed not without note and not without significance in Tristen’s thoughts.

“Beeswax,” Tristen said, “you shall have, sir.” He was pressed for time in this small foray up the stairs, and let the precise reason of the candles escape comment, but he marked it for inquiry at some quieter moment. “You’ll have Tassand’s earnest attention to whatever things you need, clothing for attendance in hall… and all set in order in a proper clothespress.” He saw that the one that did exist was crammed so full of bottles and papers the doors stood open.

“Nonsense.”

“Tassand need not retrieve your robes out of baskets.”

“I have no room, I say! Hang them on a peg. For a peg, I have room!”

“Join me at supper this evening, where it’s warm. Cook will have meat pies.”

“When I have found my charts, young lord! IfI have found my charts, which at the moment seems unlikely!”

Emuin shouted in frustration, and Tristen found his own amiability tested. “They might be in those baskets on the stairs, sir. Dogs might come at them. There wasa dog about. I saw him below.” That this had been far out in the yard, from the window, he failed to say. Whatever moved master Emuin to accept help and hasten his baskets up the steps was a benefit.

“Perish the creature! Very well, very well, sendTassand! Gods bless!” Master Emuin cracked his shin against a bench in the dimmed light. “Leave me one window, if you please! I have old eyes. Gods, what a contentious lad you’ve become!”

“For your health’s sake, sir, and the servants’, and the downstairs candles, and to have your advice for a long time to come, without your taking ill up here, yes, I have become extremely contentious.” Tristen relented, leaving one leeward shutter ajar on stiff metal hinges so that the room was not altogether in twilight. He had had a fire laid in the hearth and wood provided in advance of his teacher’s arrival, and it had burned far too fast, thanks to the gusts, he was sure.

The tower room had a fireplace which shared a duct with the guardroom below and the hall below that, three flues and one common stonework that led to the wayward and now wintry winds above the fortress roof. It was thanks to the warm stonework, with other rooms’ smoke passing through, that there was any comfort at all in the room. “You need more firewood. Have you asked?”

“No, no. And I don’t need a fire. The damned wind kicks up a gale in here when the flue’s open. Damn.” Master Emuin had found a pot of powders spilled in the bottom of a basket, and was not in a good humor. “Damn, damn.”

It seemed time for even the lord of Amefel to make a quiet retreat, out the door and down past the numerous baskets of herbs and birds’ nests and down again the rambling East Stairs, with its little nooks and shelves and half levels, themselves piled high with stray baskets. His guard, four men, his constant and trusted companions, had waited below, and followed him from there.

It had not been an entirely satisfactory meeting. He had come upstairs intending to set the fortress generally under master Emuin’s surveillance, had found himself distracted into argument about the shutters.

Distraction in master Emuin’s vicinity was not an uncommon occurrence. He would have liked to have asked master Emuin about the archives and the problems there. He would have liked to consult master Emuin about the vacant earldom of Bryn, but they had ended arguing about other things. He saw no likelihood that all the baskets and bundles were ever going to fit into the tower. Now he walked the hall uneasy in this requirement regarding the candles, which echoed off his own dislike of Emuin’s open and unwarded windows… and there was another piece of unfinished business he had not yet had a chance to discuss with Emuin: the wizard-work that had left the fortress more open than some to wizardous attack.