Fortress of Ice

And he knew that voice. It belonged in a tower in Henas’amef. It belonged in a prison Lord Tristen himself had sealed. It was his mother. And his heart plummeted, feeling pursuit closer and closer behind them, and her in front. “Well. Well…”

He tried to dart aside. She was still before him, once, twice, three times, and the hunter came nearer and nearer, a cold presence, and terrible, behind them.

“Come along,” his mother said.

“No!” As the shadow spread out behind him, all-encompassing, now. “Stand away! Let me go!”

“Fool, boy. Great fool.”

He was not standing where he had. The shadow behind him was at a greater distance, his mother had gained them that, but it advanced, inexorable in its pace.

“I can save you,” his mother said. “Death follows you. Do you recognize it? I do.”

He clung to Aewyn, who said nothing, knew nothing, drifting half-conscious beside him. He held Aewyn’s arm close and dragged him with him in a sudden bid to escape.

His mother was before him, lifting her shadowy arms.

“Fool, I say, my dear boy. Let me save you. Let me bring you to warmth, and safety.”

She was a shadow here, but she was imprisoned in Lord Crissand’s fortress. If she brought him there, if she brought both of them with her, they would be within hail of her guards, and safe, safe in her tower, exactly where he wanted to be.

Wanting was enough. He felt Aewyn begin to slip from his arms.

“No!” he cried. “My brother, too! If we go where you like, my brother goes with me!”

“Of course,” his mother said in her silkiest voice. “Of course he will. Let go, let go, dear fool. Trust me to guide us.”

He did nottrust her. He did not believe, in the next instant, that he heard anything like the truth. The hunter came close behind and, in the very moment he felt that darkness reach up for them, Aewyn slipped from his arms and plummeted away into the dark.

“Aewyn!” he called out, a last desperate bid to save him. “Aewyn! Wake up!” If his brother waked, he might escape the fog. It might be a condition of the mist that carried them, that Aewyn seemed to dream, and Aewyn’s waking might drive the hunter away. It was all he could hope. His hands were empty.

And in the very moment of his concern for Aewyn, he felt the ground come up under his feet, and warmth come around him. He was with his mother in what seemed, for a heartbeat, her room.

But it differed from her tower. There were couches, and cushions, and drapes—but the colors were green and gold, not the motley brocades his mother’s room had owned. There was a fireplace with an iron screen that had the aspect of a gri

“Where are we?” he demanded. It was not the Zeide. It was not Lord Crissand’s fortress at all. Nothing smelled or felt the same, and his question met the empty air. “Mother?”

He was alone. There was a door. It was solid oak, and locked, and he beat his fist on it in rage.

“Mother!” he shouted, betrayed—she had deceived him, but never lied. She still had not lied. He had assumed everything and lost everything, even his brother. He raged, and beat at the door, and yelled until his voice cracked.

No answer came.

iv

SNOW COULD BE HARD, HARD ENOUGH TO KNOCK THE BREATH OUT OF A BODY—Aewyn had found that out before this. It was a long time before he wanted to move, and it was a while more before he could gather his elbows and his knees under him and get up.

“Elfwyn?” he asked the surrounding air, in which snow fell thick. He was unsteady on his feet and staggered backward when he tried to turn.

His back met something solid, and when he put out a hand and turned about, he found himself next to a man-high stone wall.

Lucky, he thought, not to have come down on that. Or perhaps he had. The only parts of him that did not hurt were only numb with cold, and his head ached—there was a lump on his brow, he thought, but his fingers were too cold to tell.

“Elfwyn?” he shouted, thinking his brother might well have fallen onto some roof, or onto the other side of the wall. He waded through the snow, following the wall, hoping it would lead to a window, a door, a gate, or some living person—Guelen he was, and Guelen he looked, in Amefel, which did not love Guelenfolk; but he thought he could count on hospitality, Lord Crissand being his father’s friend. He would call Lord Crissand the aetheling when he referred to him, the way Amefin liked to think of him—he would be very respectful of any farmer he met, and ask a message be sent to Lord Crissand—not to his father. That would be the politic way to do things in this countryside.

His father would be beyond anger by now. His father would be worried sick, was what, and he was heartily ashamed, the worse since he had fainted half a dozen times and been a weight on his brother, who now had flown off somewhere by wizardry and lost himself in what he was well sure was no ordinary trick of the weather, even in Amefel. There had been ghosts—his shaken wits remembered that. There had been voices, and shadows, and they had been beside the river, but he was nowhere near it now: the river had a voice, and all he heard was the crunch of snow under his own boots and his own panting after breath.

Fool, he said to himself. He should be thinking where he was. Even if they had flown randomly about the map, there was a wall, and a wall was a structure, and structures were on his map. It might be the defensive wall, the one they had built in the war, and if that was so, he might come to the hold of Earl Drusenan of Bryn; or if it was farther south, it could even be part of old Althalen, which had been the capital of the High Kings, when the Sihhë had ruled the realm… So he told himself, walking along a wall that seemed to go on forever and trying to gain a sense of what direction he was going in this murk. The fog seemed to have persisted about him. He had never yet come out of it. And the wall went on and on, and seemed in worse and worse repair.

A small group of Elwynim had settled at Althalen. The map had had to be changed because of that. Old Althalen had been cursed ground—cursed by the Quinalt andthe Bryaltines, which was uncommon; but people who had fled the wars in Elwynor had wanted to live there and farm there again. They wanted to make orchards, which they said had once flourished there. They had tried to take the curse away, so he had heard.

But part of the ground they would not build on. He had read that in notes appended to his map. In the lack of anything substantial to see in the world around him, he built his own room, his work strewn across his desk, the great parchment map fastened up above it. He had committed it all to memory. He could recall the shape of the ruins, some i

His own room was real enough in his vision that he wondered if he could be there as easily as he could be in the woods or at the old battlefield, if he took the chance and just wished hard enough; but if he succeeded, it would take him leagues away from his father, who would be searching the hills for him, and leagues separate from his brother, who had to be hereabouts, if he just kept looking, and damned if he would give up. They must have arrived close to each other. Perhaps, he thought, he had just started out looking in the wrong direction. Perhaps he should go the other way, and try that, since this direction had led to nothing, not even a corner to the never-ending wall. He was growing desperate in this nightmarish continuance of one solid wall, and being without Elfwyn, he grew afraid, more afraid than he had ever been in his life. Nothing he had ever met had dared threaten him. No one in Guelessar had dared stand up to him, certainly none of the boys brought in to be his associates. But this thwarted him. The u