Fortress of Ice

It was not, alas, a choice he had.

BOOK TWO

CHAPTER ONE

i

A BRISK AND SUNNY DAY, AND THE PIEBALD’S FEET BROKE AN ICY CRUST AS THEY traveled. Otter looked over his shoulder now and again as the road rose. Yesterday he had met merchants coming toward him: they by no means scared him. He bade them a courteous good day and wished them well on their travels, well-wished in turn. He lied to them, knowing that if the king’s men met them, too, then they would give news of anyone they had seen traveling this way, so he gave his name as Marden, which was Gran’s distant neighbor’s name, and said he was going to see his uncle in Trys Ceyl, which was a sleepy place on a ways south from Henas’amef.

Good day, they had bidden him, and gone on their way. Perhaps they had met his father’s men by now and had told them the lie, when asked sharply about a young man on the road. He had kept his face muffled against the cold, no unusual thing, and perhaps they failed to know he was that young. He had no idea.

But he had crossed the Lenúalim on thick ice, leading Paisi’s horse, afoot and spread out seeming more prudent for them both, despite cart tracks having left their marks on the snowy path. Above and below the shallows of the ford, the river had not quite frozen, and he had had enough bad luck already to make him wary—but the ice had held. He was well on his way now, and the land he saw today began to have the familiar higgledy-piggledy order of crooked fences that distinguished Amefin ways from Guelen. There were few straight lines in Amefel, nothing of the Guelen sense of order. Certainly the road observed no overall economy of direction, wending among hills and bobbing over a rise and down again.

He thought that he was near home now. He thought that he spied Diel Tor under its snow blanket, and was sure that there had been such a rock, and another, like a pig asleep, on his way to the border. He knew for certain he had seen that twisted tree by the bridge.

He kept going into night, then wrapped in his cloak and huddled up against a tilted stone with the horse near him. His feet kept going numb, and he took off his boots and rubbed the life back into his toes, then struggled to put them on again, never sure that taking his boots off did more good than harm—but Paisi had told him, one winter when he was a small boy: “Never let fingers an’ toes go dead, or they’ll die, an’ turn black an’ rot, an’ if e’er ye get wet boots, boy, you run breakneck to the house straightway an’ take them wet things off quick as you can. Or if ye have to, run barefoot in the snow a bit an’ then rub ’em and sit on ’em a while in your cloak…’s’ far better ’n frozen boots.”

He was so cold he couldn’t tell if his boots had gotten wet and frozen in the night. He had tried to prevent that eventuality, and this night, shivering, he tucked up as tight as he could into the cloaks, head and all. That slowly helped, and he dared sleep just a little. But well before daylight he grew so miserable he set out again, the horse moving slowly along an ill-defined road.

Morning, however, brought the sun, which shone like a lamp through the film of clouds and occasionally broke through. He drowsed as he rode, lying on the horse’s bare back, and waked, the horse pitching him slightly forward as it nipped the tops of grasses that poked through the snow and pawed up others, along the margin of a cultivated field.

It was the first graze they had found since a day ago. He had given the horse anything of his food the horse would eat, and his own stomach was as empty as he could remember. He let the horse wander down the drystone wall, eating as it went, while he had the rest of the sausage, and they were both happier for it.

A raven sat down on the wall, cocked its head, and whetted its beak against bare stone. It had a dark, glittering eye, and seemed to watch him with a certain smugness, as if it knew his venture to his father’s house had brought nothing but disaster.

He didn’t like it staring at him. It showed no decent fear of a boy’s presence. Leaning from the horse’s back, holding to the ragged mane, he scooped a handful of snow off the wall and shied a clenched fistful at the bird, which only dodged and settled again.

The grain was gone, the last stalk ripped up. He had had the last of the sausage. And he thumped the horse’s sides with his heels and got the horse moving again, leaving the raven in sole possession of the wall. The sun, friendly for the moment, hid its face, and the wind picked up out of the west, chilling his face and his knees.

But toward evening they came to a brook, and it was a crossing Otter had known all his life. They broke the ice on shallow, fast-moving water, scarcely enough to wet Tammis’s hooves, and climbed a shallow bank. From here on Otter knew exactly where he was, which was on Farmer Marden’s land, not far from home, and he urged the horse to all the haste he could manage.

By sunset a hill stood against the northwest sky, and on that hill a walled town, which was Henas’amef, and tallest of all in the town, the faint outlines of the keep, the Zeide. A tower stood atop all, scarcely discernible except at sunset, and in that tower his mother lived, and in that keep his lord, Crissand, ruled; and, right along the highroad he traveled, was Gran’s place. He kicked the horse and applied the end of the halter rope, making all possible haste before full dark could come down, and determinedly not looking toward that tower, which had watched over him all his life. He felt its presence now as he had felt it for years, familiar and uncomfortable, his mother’s eyes continually watching his back, finding out all his mischief and his doings.

But here were the fields he knew. There was the old, broken berry bush, stark against a snowy land; and there was the boundary stone that was older than anybody remembered, and nobody knew what it marked, except it had Sihhë signs on it, almost weathered away. There were a pair of trees, winter-bare, whose outlines he knew, the farthest ranges of his earliest childhood wanderings, and there was Farmer Ost’s old oak that stood by itself in a pig lot, with a rickety fence and the pig boy’s cottage just down the lane that left the highroad.

There, there in the last of the daylight, he saw Gran’s thatched roof, the wonderful twisted chimney, perfectly fine, with smoke rising out of it. It was a sight finer than Guelemara’s tall houses: smoke, and someone home, and the warmth of it going out into the gathering dark like a ba

He leaned to open the gate and rode into the yard, past a fence of stones and old, weathered logs, on which snow lay in ridges. Goats peered out of the shed as he latched the gate back, from Tammis’s back. The geese scattered as he turned Tammis into the friendly warm dark of the goat shed.

A horse snorted and shifted inside, and Tammis gave a low grunt as Otter slid down off his sweaty back, right next to Feiny. The comparative warmth was wonderful, the familiar smell of their goat shed was about him, Feiny was here safely, which meant Paisi was, and aside from Feiny, it was as if he had never left. In a moment more he heard steps crunching through the snow, coming toward the shed door.

A shadow with a stick in hand demanded:

“Who goes there? Who’s in our shed?”

“Paisi!” he exclaimed.

The stick lowered. “Otter? Is it our Otter?” The shadow rushed forward bearlike to embrace him, thump him about the arms and back and smother him in an embrace. “Otter, me lad!”

“How’s Gran?”

“Oh, a little soup and she’s fine, she’s fine, lad, despite she complains. Come on, I’ll see ye in.”

“I have to rub your horse down.”