Fortress of Dragons

One heart was not enough to hold it all. It overflowed. It required several. It required sharing. He pointed out a squirrel on a limb, and Uwen and Crissand, as different as men ever could be, both smiled at its antics. He heard Cevulirn and Umanon and Sovrag talk together as if they had always been good neighbors; and Pelumer joined them, doubtless to tell them how things had been before they all were born. Strange, he thought, to hold so many years in memory: it was strange enough to him to hold a single year and know that, indeed, he had lived into the next, and found new things still to meet.

He enjoyed the taste of cold rations and plain water, for in the dark whence he had come there was nothing at all, and he might go back into that dark again without warning, for the world was stretched so thin and fine the enemy might rupture it, as he might, unwittingly rending what was and what might be. In the gray space, time itself was not fixed: nothing was fixed or sure: he had been in the mews. He had held a boy's hand, and carried out a newborn. He had slept in Marna Wood, and felt a presence coming through the woods, which was his own.

He adjusted a buckle at his shoulder with particular concentration, thinking he could not leave things until a further moment, and the closer he moved to Ilefínian, the more he could not trust the next moment to remain stable and fixed… though he willed it: he willed it with all the magic he could command. Every glance at the woods was a spell, every breath a conjuration.

"Ye're uncommon quiet, the both of ye," Uwen said, as if he had taken Crissand, too, in his charge. "Not a word to say?"

"None," Crissand said with a small, brave laugh. "I was thinking about the lambing."

"M'lord'll like the lambs," Uwen said. "Havin' not seen any but half-grown."

"I look forward to it," Tristen said. He clung to Uwen's voice as to life itself: for if all in his thoughts was gray and uncertain, Uwen's voice gave him back the solidity of earth, the rough detail of a gray-stubbled face, the imperfect beauty of eyes lined with long exposure to the world's bright suns. Uwen made him think of lambs, which he imagined as like half-grown sheep, but smaller… but that might not be so, thinking of Tarien's baby, and how little Elfwyn looked like a grown man.

It was spring. The world still held miracles. The forest around him did. About them he wove his spells.

Desperately he asked, with a glance aside, "What tree is that?"

"Hawthorn," Uwen said.

Hawthorn, ash and oak, wild blackberry and wild currant. Everything had a name and kept its separate nature. With all the flux in the gray space, the earth stayed faithful and solid under him, and the buds on the trees held an event yet to come, the promise of leaves, and summer yet unseen, precious promise, full of its own magic, an incorruptible order of events.

He embraced it, held it, bound himself to it with a fervor of love.

"There's blooms to come," Uwen said. "These little scraggly 'uns'll surprise ye, how they shine. Ye don't see 'em all summer when the great old oaks is leafed. Then you just curse 'em for bein' brush in your way, but they'll bloom to theirselves come the first warm days an' be pretty as maids at festival. Same's the blackberry vines, as ain't pleasant to ride into, or to catch your feet if ye're chasin' some stray sheep, but they dress fine for spring an' give ye a fine treat in the summer… ain't never complained about 'em, meself, if the thorns catch me unawares. As I was a boy, I knew all the patches 'twixt my house an' the hills, an' me mum'd bake up cakes… ain't had the same, since."

"I know a few patches," Crissand said. "I'll have my folk send you some."

"Oh, but ye have to pick 'em yourself, Your Grace, and eat a few as they're warm in the sun."

"Then I'll show you where they are," Crissand said, and the earl of Meiden and the captain of Amefel made their plans, as they said, to go blackberrying in the country, so only half the berries might reach the kitchen.

Their idle chatter, their plans—they held promises and order, too, and Tristen wished with all his heart to go with them and taste the blackberries.

And about that thought, tenacious as the vines, he feared he had begun to weave a more perilous magic: he had thought of the three of them together, after the battle that was to come, and he had wished, and that wish coming from his heart had as much power as he had bound between himself and the earth. The more he decided not to wish that day to come, the more easily it might not, and the more easily one or all of them might perish beforehand.

Bind Crissand and Uwen's fate to his, for good or for ill, and set the integrity of the world at issue in that simple, homely wish of friends to eat blackberries… dared he? Had he done such a fatal, reckless thing?

That was the peril and the strength of Sihhë magic, that it worked so easily, and fear of what he had done sent him to the threshold of a tortuous course of half-doing and half-undoing that Emuin himself could not riddle out, Emuin who labored over his wizard-work and consulted charts and stars and seasons to which he himself was not bound. The plain fact was that he couldwish it, and halfway in and halfway out was an untenably dangerous position.

Flesh as well as spirit, had not Mauryl said it? He was both.

"I wish it," he said suddenly, aloud and with all his heart. "Pray to the gods, if they hear you: we may need it!"

"My lord?" Crissand asked, alarmed, but Uwen, who was a plain Man, said, quietly:

"M'lord's worked a magic, an' wants help in it; and if prayer'll do it, why, I'll dust mine off and do my best, m'lord, that I will."

So they rode, after that, sometimes silent, sometimes in converse, talking on things that, like the blackberries, assumed an unaccustomed seriousness.

In this, perhaps Uwen even more than Crissand and Cevulirn understood how grave the crisis had been in him, and how dangerous the choice he had made. Cevulirn rode up the column to join them a time, not a talkative man on a day less fraught with consequence, and now seeming content to be near them, a presence at the edge of the gray space, as they were to him… perhaps after all Cevulirn had felt more of what happened than seemed likely, and offered his strength, such as it was. They had become friends, beyond that meeting Auld Syes' had foretold; and friendship was its own reason now, three of them, their touch at each other in the gray space as solid as their sight of each other in the world, with Uwen to support them all.

"Getting dark," Crissand remarked. "We may have to camp in this wood."

Tristen shook his head, for he had the sense of a place farther on, where water ran, where one of Pelumer's men waited. He hoped so, for as they passed into the wood beyond a small ruined wall, shadows ran like ink deep among the trees, and the wood grew colder, the branches seeming to rattle without a wind.

"Shall we stop?" Uwen asked.

"No," he said. "Half an hour more."

A glance upward through bare branches gave the only proof day still lingered, and conversations grew quieter, until there was only the crack of dry branches, the scuff of hooves on old leaves, the steady creak of leather. Shadows began to move and flow, Shadows indeed, Tristen thought, and caught Crissand's sudden turn to try to see one. Cevulirn, too, looked askance, and Uwen took alarm from them.

"Nothing harmful to us," he said, though he was less than sure, wary lest the Shadows turn prankish or become more aware of them than they were. As it was, they tended to be harmless: but he reminded himself it was not Amefel, and these were not Shadows he had met before. He had no idea to what authority they did answer, or whether they had any dealings with Ynefel, to the south… or worse.