Fortress of Ice

He still knew where he was. He knew where he was, the way he knew he was standing on solid ground. It was Elfwyn who was lost.

He was surprised, even indignant, to find his legs growing weak in the struggle to walk, and his hands without feeling. He went all the way to his knees, which was no place for a prince, and he got up, astonished and ashamed, and continued walking—he had lost contact with the wall as he fell, but he found it, hoping it was the same wall, and doggedly followed it back the way he had come. He had had enough of rest, had he not? He had sleptthrough the business with the old man, he had slepthis way through the fog, when they had gotten swept away to the woods, and he was entirely put out with himself. His father would not be sleeping his way through a calamity, would he? His mother, whose blood he had in his veins, would take action and See her way through it, with that Gift she never admitted to the priests.

So Elfwyn was not the only one with wizardry in his blood. If his brother had it, he was sure his mother’s son was not less gifted, only that such ability had never been encouraged in him.

And now he needed it. He so desperately needed it now.

v

IT WAS THE BOOK THAT WAS THE TROUBLE: MASTER EMUIN SAID IT. TRISTEN HAD located it briefly, and felt it move through the remainder of the dark and through the murky day, a day gray and pale as the space between, that space where Tristen emphatically dared not, at the moment, go.

It had shifted again, and the book and the enemy were very close one to the other—closer than the last time he had felt it, and as every venture he had made toward the boys had driven them farther away, now he feared anything that might upset the balance. Time itself had started to diverge: day and dark, this day and the next grew confused around him, and now, he suspected, had diverged again.

They were a small party that had ridden out from Henas’amef: himself, and Uwen, and Cefwyn, unescorted and on borrowed horses. Lord Crissand had stayed behind, much against his inclination, to bolster Emuin, with Paisi to help. Emuin was wizard enough, he hoped, to hold the Zeide itself against intrusion or attack, where it might well come. A score of the Dragon Guard would have taken to the road behind them, traveling fast, one could be sure, but not fast enough to overtake a desperate father.

Cefwyn had not waited for them. He had delayed only to put on his armor, had taken a warm cloak and headed for the stable to borrow the best horses available, while Uwen had ordered supply out of the kitchens, and they were gone, only the three of them, by the world’s roads.

The shadows that had haunted their riding out by dark persisted by daylight, streaking the snow from time to time, and Tristen did not trust their company in the least—they were part of the disturbance in the gray place and attached themselves to any part of it. The boys’ i

And moved all of them.

One bit of the road was much like another, but he had the dire feeling they had lost time as well as distance, and now their own tracks were, half-snow-covered, ahead of them.

“Someone has been by here,” Cefwyn said, not yet seeing the truth.

“We have,” Tristen said, and beside him, he knew Uwen understood; in the look Cefwyn gave him, he knew Cefwyn did then, too.

“That book?” Cefwyn asked. “Can a damned book do it?”

Tristen knew at least part of the answer—knew he had acted recklessly, that the boys had moved again, and he dreaded to tell Cefwyn the whole truth, but he must do something about the situation he felt; and he reined aside, due south, and away from their own tracks.

“What are we doing?” Cefwyn asked him.

“They have separated. For good or for ill, I could not stop one of them—”

“Which one?”

“Aewyn has arrived south of us. He has fallen away. He draws at the earth. He wantedto stop. But Elfwyn went too fast this time, too fast and too far.”

“Too far,” Cefwyn echoed him, shouting through the wind. Their horses drifted apart and together again, knee against knee. Uwen was a shadow on Cefwyn’s other side. “Where is he?”

“We are going toward Aewyn,” Tristen shouted back. “I ca

“What choice is that?” Cefwyn cried. “How can I?”

“I choose!” Tristen said. “On me, be it—I choose the one we can reach. Where he is, is no good place for him.”

“Althalen,” Cefwyn said. Cefwyn knew as well as he what lay in this direction, down a forgotten road. “There’s the new village there.”

“If he were there,” Tristen said, “I would trust he was safe. He is not.”

A new village had grown up at Althalen, and that safety might be within the boy’s reach, but that was not the way he was tending. The whole place had become troubled and uncertain, a pond where a small stone had dropped and sunk, and reached depths where it was not good for one of his blood to be. Disturbance rippled through the gray space in that direction. It was a Sihhë place, a place of blood and angry ghosts… the home of Elfwyn’s distant ancestor.

But it was home to one of the boy’s own, too.

They tended south and west, and now every stride of the horses carried them aside from the book and from Elfwyn, and his own guilt rode with him. He had reached instinctively, attempting to divert both boys from plunging through that looming ward, and created disaster as he did it. The boys had been headed right for a suddenly appearing gap in the wards and Elfwyn had shot through as quickly as if he himself willed it. Perhaps he had gone so quickly because Aewyn’s resistance had pulled away—Aewyn, even half-fainting, had clung to where he was with a fierceness that held them to earth; and when he had come loose, perhaps at his jostling the boys, Aewyn had plummeted somewhere in between the two places—not straight down, but aside, to a place with its own will and its own magic, old magic, and a special claim on him. The old ruin, extending constantly into the gray space, might have found a mote flying free, recognized it, and simply snatched it down into itself… while Elfwyn, set free of that bond, had flown like an arrow, and now was entirely out of sight, sealed behind those wards.

Folly, he said to himself: Mauryl would have said it, most certainly. He had tried because they were both about to vanish through that gap—but he had lost one of them in the process, and where the other had come down was not well-intentioned or safe: not by accident, such events, not even his own failure.

And while there was now every chance that, if he took them all into the gray space to save time, he might reach Aewyn safely, without flinging him into Elfwyn’s predicament, there was equally well the chance that Elfwyn himself maintained some hold on his brother, and that the book’s intent would snatch the second boy through if he pressed hard. The book’s intent reached far, far across Amefel. It wantedto be found, and it wantedto be loose in the world, and it wantedat least one of the boys if not both… which was, Cefwyn would say, a damned great lot for a book to want.

It was that. Say rather, either Mauryl Gestaurien had laid an intent on his work to keep it out of his hands, or that the wizard who had tried to lay hands on it more than a decade ago had laid a geas on whoever found it.

Or say, equally possible, that Elfwyn, with enough magic in him to shake things loose from hiding, had had such a command laid directly on him long, long ago, in those visits to his mother. He had felt attachments he had not trusted when the boy had asked him to be his teacher.