Fortress of Ice

They reached their seats. When the king sat, then the nobles and the commons could sit down. The skittish pigeons flew into the sacred place and out again, and the priests arrayed themselves behind the altar that divided the railing.

His father’s bodyguard was always right behind them. So was the Prince’s guards, who still attended Efanor, and Guelen guards stood at intervals by the pillars as the Lord Chamberlain and the Lord Marshal of the North reached their seats. The majority of all the seats went to the nobles, the rest to the richest burghers of Guelemara—the poor were obliged to stand out in the dark as the sun came up and the snow came down, for the whole length of the services, while the priests talked about sin and repentance.

Do the poor people get a service, too? he’d asked his father, a year or so ago, and his father had said, No. The sermon is on sin. Rich si

Hush, my lord, his mother had said, looking about at the servants.

And his father: Rich men give power. That’s the offering the priests most covet. The boy should learn that. He’s of an age to know how the world goes.

The priests shouldn’t hear you say it, his mother had said, and his father had said:

See? Power. Power is what they want most. And, mark me, son of mine: they shouldn’t get too rich a diet of it.

He was supposed to be meditating on his sins, not on the priests’ bad behavior; but there it was: he meditated on that exchange with his father instead, every word of it brought fresh in his memory by present circumstance. He meditated on Otter, and their plot to feed the horses, against the priests’ will; and on Otter’s absence this morning, which worried him no end, and was probably because Otter, who was shocked that people lied, had decided he didn’t want to be lied to when he was as upset as he was about his gran. His father’s guard had failed to turn him up; he had heard no late arrival coming in.

He hoped Otter had just gotten upset and hidden away when the search started—Otter would do that: he had no great trust of soldiers. He knew all the hiding places Otter could use, all the secret places he had shown Otter in the Guelesfort, and if Otter was hiding, he would be deeply hidden, where his father’s guards, not having spent a childhood in the Guelesfort, would not likely look—or fit into.

The Holy Father got up and talked about sin, sin of thoughts and sin of deeds, sins of omission and sins of commission, in clerkly detail. His Holiness said they had to examine all they did and failed to do, all they thought of doing and all they refrained from doing. It seemed to Aewyn that if they did all that, they’d never budge from where they sat, and he was otherwise inclined. His thoughts were already winging through the Guelesfort, impatient to act the moment they escaped the sanctuary.

Aemaryen began to fret, a thin, plaintive cry. Other babies took to crying, which roused still others, so that it was a wonder the priest could remember what came next. But crying babies led him to talk about lamentations for sins: lamentations, as if babes in arms had committed any sins. End to end of the dome it racketed, unfed babies, unhappy mothers and fathers, fretful two-year-olds, who had to be admonished not to fidget, and toddlers, who only knew they were hungry, too, and kept swinging their feet or squirming.

Aewyn sat and clenched and unclenched his hands, clenched his toes in his boots, bit his lip and counted the rosettes on the railing behind the altar. When he was done with that, he counted the orbs that decorated the screen behind the altar; and then he counted the intersections of bars that screened the choir.

The choir stood up and sang, a high, piercing wail, lamenting the sins of the world. By now every baby in the sanctuary was crying—crying for the sins of the world, the priests said, like the dumb, unfed beasts. His mother spent her service trying to comfort the baby, while his father sat stone-faced and unmoving at this comparison.

And somewhere in the halls of the Guelesfort, themselves missing services, his father’s guard kept searching, he supposed, to no avail yet, since they hadn’t dragged Otter into services like some escaped felon.

But, oh, gods, he thought then: if they had started looking for Otter, they were likely looking for Paisi, too—and that trail went clear to the town gate and on.

It certainly wasn’t the way they’d hoped for their father to find out about Paisi’s escape. Otter might think of that, too, and just run for it, being a skittish sort.

Lamentations for sins, and a spate of long, long singing. Aewyn made himself sit still, working his toes to keep his feet from going numb on the chill floor. He lost track of what the Holy Father said, wondering how far Otter could get in three hours, if he had suddenly decided to follow Paisi, and run.

If he had… their spring was ruined. Everything was ruined.

If he had… maybe he was as far as Esbrook, by now, but not if the snow was still coming down outside. It had been snowing before dawn. But in the shadowy bowels of the Quinaltine there was no way to for him to know now whether the snow had stopped or whether it had come on a blinding blizzard.

Third long lamentation, and a prayer for which they all must stand, even the king and queen. Aewyn stood up in his new boots, working his feet to bring the blood back to his toes. The sanctuary by now smelled of musky incense combined with wet fur, furs that had come in snowy and then, soaked from snowmelt, now overheated. Everyone stank, stank of fur, stank of perfume.

He wanted desperately to be back in the Guelesfort. If he was there, he could find Otter. He knew where to look, and he could talk to Otter and get sense out of him—if he hadn’t gone for the gate.

At last, at last, the singing drew down to the final hymn, the one that cursed the Bryalts. Aemaryen had long since exhausted her outrage and dropped off to sleep, one small arm trailing from his mother’s arms, and he saw his mother’s weary and angry expression, her impatient side-to-side rocking of his little sister. Nurse, who was in the row behind, leaned forward and mutely offered again to take the baby, but his mother doggedly shook her head and kept rocking Aemaryen, her lips grimly set.

He had never taken the service seriously in his life. Now the words embarrassed him, angered him. He accidentally met his mother’s eyes. Not that much longer, that expression said. His mother meant to endure the insult for his father’s sake; and his father knew, and his father’s jaw had a muscle jumping. He realized for the first time how very greatly this a

But when he was king, he would have no father to guide him, and he couldn’t at all look forward to that day. So he would be patient, oh, so patient, standing here every year for years and years and years if he had to. He would grow angrier, and angrier, like his father, whose feelings toward the priests and whose occasional blasphemies he began to understand entirely. He would store it all up, for his mother’s sake, for his sister, and for Otter, too. He would make himself strong, and clever, like his uncle Efanor, but, unlike Efanor, he would not work with the priests, to manage them, but against them, one and all, head-on and headlong, as his father would say.