Fortress of Ice

Finally, finally, the Holy Father held up his arms, invoked the gods for mercy, and dismissed the congregation.

Thank the gods, he said to himself, not half-reckoning what he was thinking. The royal family at least had the precedence in leaving the sanctuary, and he followed his father and his mother down the aisle, Aemaryen suddenly yelling with might and main.

The great doors opened on a white, snowy morning, and they walked out into the clean, cold air, down the sanded steps, and past the lines of Guelen and Dragon Guard who made a barrier against the general townsfolk. They walked, Aemaryen hiccuping and furious, and kicking, now, so the nurse finally intervened, for decorum’s sake. Trumpets blew, and the great iron gates of the Guelesfort swung outward to receive them home again.

All Aewyn was thinking of by now was to slip away from the family and go to Otter’s room, by the first, not the grand, stairway. The moment they passed into the warm, close dark of the Guelesfort he dived aside and ran up the stairs the servants used, with his own guard in confused pursuit.

The upper hall had all the candles lit despite the light from the windows. He hurried to the room Otter had, where guards stood.

“Have you found him?” he asked his father’s guards.

“No, Your Highness,” the answer was. “We’re still searching.”

“Your Highness,” his own guards tried to remonstrate with him, but he ignored their protests and hurried on, then, across the landing for the grand stairs, wickedly racing ahead of his father’s procession upward. He dived into his room and met his own servants’ startled faces.

“Where is he?” he demanded. “Where is Otter?”

“Your Highness.” Captys, senior of his servants, was there. Two others were. And Captys was clearly distraught.

“Where is Otter?”

“Your Highness, the maid, Madelys, saw him at witchcraft, and when—”

His heart turned over on that word. “Who said? Who said so? Madelys?” The girl hovered in the doorway beyond, knotting and unknotting her apron. “Fool! Where is he?”

“He seems to have vanished, Your Highness,” Captys said.

“Useless!” It was what his father would say, when he was at his wits’ end with the servants. “Stay here, the lot of you! You, too,” he added, stabbing a gesture at his guards. “Stay here and tell my father that Ishall find him.”

“Witchery!” Madelys cried. “Your Highness, you might put yourself in danger!”

“I want hergone before I get back! Banished from these rooms, forever!”

“Your Highness!” Madelys wailed.

“Fool, I say!”

“No, Your Highness, I saw it! He had the water and the feather and a charm, and he was at it, plain as plain!”

“And you know so much about witchcraft I should be suspicious? Go down to the kitchens, and do not you say any word of gossip, girl, not one, on your life! Count it lucky I don’t send you to the Guard kitchens! Damn it!”

He spun on his heel and stalked to the door, and out it, with one furious look at his senior guardsman, Selmyn, who attempted to follow. “My orders!” he said. “Carry them out!”

With that, he slammed the door and ran, ran, ignoring his father’s party, which was just going in the doors: little Aemaryen, starving, sleepy, and furious, made noise enough to cover any commotion. He ran right past them for the servants’ stairs, up and up, past even the level where the storerooms were, and where his father’s men always searched if he was missing.

Upstairs, however, farther upstairs—one apparently useless little set of steps in the high end of the endmost workroom, if one got up on the counter, and above, there was a little trapdoor, an access to the eaves. He had shown it to Otter, the two of them up in the very highest part of the Guelesfort, looking out the littlest windows of all and watching people come and go in the yard, while they ate stolen sweets.

He had no candle, this time. He stopped still, standing right over at the opening of the trap, knowing by memory what was next, which was a lot of beams, but if he went farther, he would be utterly blind in the dark, with only the dim light from below to mark where the trapdoor was. If it were to be shut, it might take searching on hands and knees to find it again.

And Otter, if he was here, had shut it.

“Otter!” he called out, fearful to go too much farther without a light. “Otter, it’s Aewyn! Where are you?”

ii

AEWYN WILL FIND HIM,” CEFWYN MUTTERED, HAVING SEEN HIS SON RUNNING in the hall and knowing very well what he was about, given the report from the guards. “If he’s not away out the gates. Damn that girl!”

Ninévrisë set a hand on his shoulder. She had stayed by him. Efanor was elsewhere in the hall, tracking precisely where and to whom the maid had already prattled her tale of witchcraft and trying to forestall a priestly inquiry.

“The court will not have truly expected his appearance,” Ninévrisë said.

“They had rumors of it. And not a sign of him, nor Paisi, either. If they’re anywhere, they’re in the loft. Why doesn’t the Guard ever search the damned loft? We hid up there, in our day, there and the stables, but no one ever searches the loft.”

It was close quarters up there for a man without armor, let alone a guard in full kit, that was one reason. The juniormost servants had to perform that search, if needed—now and again an investigation went into that precinct. But it was a maze of timbers and nooks, and one boy determined to burrow deep into the eaves would not be found until he grew desperate from thirst.

And damn Otter for a fool—damn the circumstances that had sent a hare-witted girl to his rooms to spy on him. And where in the gods’ own name was Paisi?

Things had gone wrong, and gone wrong at several points, and it was not only the serving girl who fretted about magic. The king of Ylesuin had attempted to slip his sorcery-gotten son into respectable notice at court, attempted to gather up all the misdeeds and tag ends of his misspent youth and to do justice by those who hadn’t had it. Most of all he had tried to ignore the old co

He wished, not for the first time, that Tristen had heeded his invitations and come to visit. He wished that, well before this day, he had risked the notoriety of the deed and ridden into the west himself, to visit his old friend. “Help me,” he might have said, had he had the chance to plan this visit for himself.

You left me this boy. You advised me to treat him kindly and do justice by him.

Now look. Now look, my old friend. He can’t come to the Quinaltine. He more than will not: there’s been this maid, this silly maid, it turns out, who spied the young fool doing what his Gran doubtless honestly taught him, and runs gibbering the news through all the Guelesfort.

And who sent the maid?

My youngest son did, Aewyn, who meant the boy no harm, no harm at all. I’m sure of that, among other things far less certain.

Are you aware what’s happened here, my old friend? I fear this is not just bad luck. It can never do so much damage and be nothing more than bad luck, can it?

But you told me once that luck was a sort of magic in itself, did you not? Or the workings of magic, was it?

Well, luck has run completely against the boy you bade me preserve, when it involves the Quinaltine. You told me yourself there was ill in that place, grievous ill, and old harm. Efanor confirmed it. And was it only my desire to be ahead of the priests and the gossip that made me force the boy into this appearance?

1 mislike what I’ve done. I mislike greatly what has happened here, old friend. Be careful, you said. And was 1 careful enough, in my haste to see this through?