Fortress of Ice

“So you might like to ride to Amefel.”

“To Amefel!” The sluggard who had shared their table so glumly for days vanished, transformed and bright-eyed—though warily asking, “Might I? Truly?”

“Your brother has slipped off again, in directions not prudent. I think I may ride that way. You might stay with Gran for a few days, if he isn’t there, while I go looking for your brother.”

“I can find him,” Aewyn said, all too pertly. “I have no doubt I can find him.”

He let that pass for the moment. “Go pack,” he said to his son. “Take clothes, no trinkets, and nothing heavy. Do it yourself. Think of it as a hunting trip and a court visit.”

And when his son had left a half-eaten breakfast and walked from the room, half-ru

“Dared you think he would be reluctant, my lord?” Ninévrisë asked him.

“Take care of our daughter,” he asked her, “and of yourself.”

“Take care of our son,” Ninévrisë said. Her hand closed on his. “How will you explain this venture to the court? Have you thought of that?”

“Why, there’s a letter from Crissand. A pressing matter. Letters have flown back and forth like snowflakes. Everyone knows it.” He kissed her cheek. “And I leave Idrys to support Efanor.”

“Dare you?”

“He will obey Efanor,” he said, devoutly hoping that was the case. His departure did remove a certain restraint he imposed on his Commander of the Guard—but Idrys would indeed support Efanor and protect him from his charitable impulses, if not meticulously obey him. He need not fear for Efanor’s life, at very least.

And, uncommon for royal processions, by midmorning he was already on horseback, with his son, a fair company of the Dragon Guard, and a smallish pack train, mostly carrying clothes and three tents. They would sleep under canvas—he wished to give Aewyn the experience of a winter camp—and delay as little as possible along the route. Ninévrisë, with far more baggage and a train of ladies, purposed to depart the capital in two days, and cross northerly into Elwynor. As for the weather, it blew hard for an hour, then spat snow into their faces the moment they passed the city gates.

It was a gray day, windy and biting cold, but his son’s face was bright. So, he suspected, was his own.

CHAPTER FIVE

i

THE RING TINGLED AT TIMES. SIHHË-WORK, GRAN HAD CALLED IT, BUT WHETHER she meant the ring itself or the spell on it, she declined to say. She refused to touch it, herself, saying it would burn the hand that tried to take it, until it went back to its master. Paisi, whose eyes were better, said it looked like a pledge ring from the town market, with its little design of vines and grapes, not outstandingly well made, but silver. Sihhë-work in silver, Paisi said, was much better made.

The ring gave him one night’s sound sleep, at least. But he waked in the memory of freezing in the woods, and of losing Owl, and then of coming home to Gran’s and finding the place all burned.

He waked with such a start he thought surely he must have waked Paisi, but Paisi snored on, and he lay in the dark, sweating and seeing horrors in the common shadows of the room. The fire in the fireplace seemed like a beast caged and trying to break free, and the ring on his finger was cold as ice.

The horror stayed with him. He hardly dared shut his eyes, and when he did, he had to drag himself out of the same horrid dream, in which he wandered among burned timbers and fallen beams. “Gran,” he cried, and no one answered him.

He escaped it, back into the terrible dark of a familiar room, and lay there, not daring to move for a very, very long time. He turned the ring with his thumb, and tried to think of Lord Tristen, or Lord Crissand, but all he found was dark.

“M’lord?” Paisi asked him, at midmorning the next day, when he cut his hand trying to bend a damaged hinge, where the wind last night had caught the shed door. He just stared into the dark of the shed and lost himself for the moment, sucking at the wound.

“Did you sleep well?” he asked Paisi, that noon.

“Oh, aye,” Paisi said, matter of course. And then asked, more carefully: “Did you, m’lord?”

His mother had slipped her dreams past Gran’s wards, past the protections of a ring Lord Tristen had blessed. She fretted. She threatened.

“I think I’ll visit my mother,” he said. “There’s day enough left. I won’t stay but a moment. But I have to. I don’t want any more dreams.”

Paisi frowned, utterly sober. “Well, ye won’t go alone, m’lord, not there.”

He didn’t refuse Paisi’s offer. Gran was at her knitting—that, she could still do, though stitching taxed her eyesight and had for years.

“Paisi and I will be going into town,” he said, and Gran said, “Well, well, take care,” and let him kiss her cheek. “We’ll be back well in time for supper,” he said. “We might stop at the smith’s and get him to bend that hinge. Our hammer can’t do it. We’re taking it along.”

“Ye can bring a few apples,” Gran said, “an’ there might be tarts.”

“Apples, indeed,” he said, feeling better about the venture, and went outside. Paisi was finishing up saddling Feiny, in the kind of light, blowing snow that might come from the heavens or off the thatch, and he helped, and mounted up. Paisi and he rode out the gate, as before, and down the road. Carts had passed, yesterday, market bound, and come back again.

“Ol’ Semmy’s sold ’is ’ides,” Paisi remarked, reading the tracks and the habits of their neighbor.

“Good profit, in a scant market,” he said. He had his wits about him. Everything seemed easier, now that he had taken the decision to go, and he and Paisi talked about the road, the weather, and Ynefel—which Paisi had tried to get out of him for days. It all became easier to tell.

In his inmost thoughts, he wanted to have the visit with his mother before Lord Tristen came. It was what he had told Lord Crissand, that afterward, things might be confused, and he wanted to do it now, before the rules changed. He wanted, once, to stand up to her and not be afraid, before Lord Tristen came to put fear into her, or to put some new barrier between him and her. He didn’t want to lose that chance, and the dreams she sent told him now with cruel clarity who had drawn him back from Guelemara, and who was at fault, between him and his father.

He and Paisi rode through the town gates and up the hill. “You might go to the smith’s while I’m about this,” Elfwyn said. “Get the hinge fixed. And we can get the apples on the way back to the gate.”

“I ain’t goin’ anywheres but where you are,” Paisi said doggedly. And that was the way things would be.

The ring won admittance for both of them, at least as far as inside the Zeide, and to the bottom of the tower steps, where his mother’s guards stood, day and night.

Paisi would have climbed those stairs with him: Paisi was greatly afraid, and still would have done it, but he stopped Paisi down where the guards stood. “Wait for me. She would raise a fuss about your coming, if only to worry me. I won’t be long. She won’t like what I have to tell her. Not this time.”

“You don’t take to heart anything she says,” Paisi said in a low voice, but he did stay with the one guard when Elfwyn started up the stairs with the other.

He wanted to know what she had been doing, why she had been doing it, and if one actually wanted bad news in the world, his mother was as good a source of it as he knew… she had a habit of telling the truth, on many occasions, especially if it was a truth he didn’t want to hear.

Bony child, she’d been in the habit of calling him, and again she’d said: Your hands are as rough as any peasant’s. Your father’s son, and with such beautiful hands. It’s shameful.