Fortress of Ice

CHAPTER TWO

i

SNOW LAY THICK IN MARNA WOOD, OUTSIDE THE WALLS, AND MOUSE CAME from his kitchenside hole this dawn with a message of trouble. Mouse would not stay for his morsel of bread on the floor, but ran in circles, stood up, his whiskers twitching in alarm.

Tristen tossed another crumb, nearer Mouse’s safe door, but the trouble was in the wind, it was in the stones of the old fortress. By night the faces that haunted its walls had changed and moved. The stairs themselves proved unreliable, as if they hoped to catch an unwary foot. They shifted restlessly in the last several days and led places they ordinarily didn’t visit.

All these things, and Owl sulked in the loft, making carnage, Tristen feared, among the pigeons.

Omens enough, if the place ever lacked them. The face at the turning of the hall toward the main door wore a worried look, unhappy, perhaps, in its memories or unhappy with present prospects. Tristen avoided that particular countenance, tempted, too tempted, to ask it questions: what slept in Ynefel’s long existence, best slept on; what waked, fared well enough; and what had passed from the world ought to stay past, if the world was to get along as peacefully as it did.

Mouse’s actions this morning were worrisome. Mouse was very old, even from Mauryl’s days, prone to tremors and terrors, that was true, but the peace Tristen had sealed about his keep felt a little thi

In Mouse’s refusal to have breakfast, Tristen found himself thinking of old friends, and troubles. He pushed open the kitchen door, moving aside the snow, and went out into the safe little courtyard that contained the cottage Uwen had built—a little cottage with several sheds, and the lean-to stable, which had full tenancy this morning, as happened: they had brought all the horses in from pasture, the light horses and the heavy. Uwen was outside with Cook’s nephew, Cadun, clumping about in the snow, carrying grain and hay for hungry animals.

“M’lord!” Uwen called to him. “Goin’ to come a storm, ain’t it? Feels it, in the air.”

“It does,” he said. That might be what had troubled Mouse. Uwen had good weather sense. He had been much in his own thoughts the last several days, and had paid little attention to the weather, which rarely signified to the keep, except to bring the horses in and lay in a supply of firewood.

“Cook’s got porridge on,” Uwen called back. “wi’ the blackberry honey, m’lord!”

He heard that invitation and gladly came down to help Uwen and the boy with the horses before breakfast. His own warhorse, Dysarys, was a handful, as Uwen put it—bow-nosed, contrary, and with a prodigious appetite for a stablemate’s grain. They had put up a log barrier to curb his ambitions, so he took to kicking out. He never had hit anyone: Uwen was wary and Cadun, who was not so quick-witted or skilled with horses, was at least nimble at dodging.

But with his master, black Dys was better behaved, and liked to have his ears rubbed, the great, fierce deceiver: “You don’t really want to kick Cadun,” Tristen whispered into a backturned ear, tugging gently at it while the huge head was down in the grain bin. “There’s a lad.”

His hands were, of course, all over dirt and hair. He bent and washed them in the snow outside the stable, the rain barrel having frozen last night. His breath made puffs on the air, miracles of the day, and when he did trouble himself to reach out and know the weather, he smelled the storm coming, the way Uwen had.

But something else was there.

Someone else was there.

He stood for a moment listening to the world. Then, stamping the snow off, he went into Uwen and Cook’s house, Cadun tagging behind, for a warm breakfast at a cozy table—not that he hadn’t had a slice of bread, but warm porridge and blackberry honey was not to turn down. He sat with the little family—they had become his family as well—at a years-worn table, on a bench Uwen had cut and shaped with his axe—carpentry was not Uwen’s first trade, but one he did well, as he did anything he set his hand to. Above them on the rafters hung bunches of herbs. A winter bouquet of dried flowers sat in an old jam jar on the table—the flowers themselves, out in the garden, were well buried, asleep. Cook had persisted in making a good deep, stone-rimmed bed, bringing in soil from the water-meadow and mulching and composting, and the years had rewarded her with abundant tame flowers and herbs, some of which survived the winters.

Their living here had gentled the old fortress somewhat and brought a little warmth even beyond its courtyard. Green leaves had appeared here and there in Marna Wood in the last few springs and summers. Trees that had seemed dead, right at the old bridge, had leafed out in their uppermost branches, whispering to the winds again, last summer, as they had in Tristen’s earliest memory. The warmth of the house spread outward from the cottage, and from its hearth, and outside—

Outside, now, however, all was cold, in the breath of winter, and the threat of coming snow.

Outside was a life within that shadow, but not quite as fragile a life as seemed.

“M’lord?” Uwen asked him, porridge standing on his spoon. Someone was coming, Tristen was well sure, now.

And up in the heights of Ynefel keep, in the loft where dust and old feathers blew in the winds, Owl opened his eyes and turned his head about as Owl could.

Go, Tristen told Owl silently, and Owl, that recalcitrant bird, spread blunt, broad wings and with two great flaps and a tilt of his wings, went out through the gap in the boards.

ii

THE DAY HAD BEEN HALF-KIND, HALF-CRUEL—A LITTLE WARMTH IN the morning, but by afternoon a wicked wind kicked up, rattled through the bare, black branches, and suddenly, with a whirl of old snow off the limbs of Marna’s trees, bit to the bone. Otter kept his hands inside his cloak as much as he could, except as now, when he had to get off Feiny’s back and lead him over uncertain ground, down the slope of a little hillock and around a deadfall too big to move and too bristly to jump.

He had exhausted the grain, and Gran’s provisions. He had spent two cold, cold nights in this treacherous place, but he persevered, calmly, surely. Paisi had always told him the woods had its tricky ways, and that it would mislead a traveler if he tried to turn around and get out. So he refused to change his mind and refused to be scared back, no matter the sounds in the dark, no matter the solitude of the place. He was sure he had come about in a circle once—but he was not to be caught by the old woods again: he had taken careful note of certain trees and looked at their shapes from more than one side, the way Paisi had taught him, so he could not be tricked unless the trees themselves changed shape.

But with the wind rising and the snow sifting down like a veil, he found it harder and harder to be sure what he saw, and once the dark began to come down, he had no choice but to stop and wrap himself in his cloak. He had brought himself and the horse up against an icy lump of an outcrop, with icicle-dripping rock between them and the gusts, to wait through the spate of snow. There was not a thing to eat. In that fact, he was more than worried.

Something pale sailed through the falling snow, sailed, and turned, and settled on a branch overhead. He looked up at it.

“Who?” it asked him; and he knew it was no natural bird. He got up on cold-stiff legs, and it flew off a little distance.

“Who?” it asked again.

Otter trembled, knowing the reputation of that bird, and whence it came—Paisi had said so, and Gran had nodded, confirming the story. He could see the fireside that night, when Paisi had told him how that creature had come into the Zeide and stayed with Lord Tristen. “It weren’t no bird as ever was,” Paisi had said. “An’ it weren’t friendly. It’d bite soon as look at ye. But it turned up where he did.”