Fortress of Ice

Anger, Lord Tristen had said. Anger moved him and made his choices. He had thought he was humble and willing to stay what he was.

Vision, he said to himself, and clenched his hand on Crissand’s ring, turning about again. He saw his mother suddenly not through a son’s eyes: he saw her not as beautiful, but as someone who had been beautiful, and now faded, a blowsy autumn beauty around a dark and potent heart—he could see it, a dark glow that touched a power he had no wish to use.

“Damn you!” she cried, furious with him, as if she saw something as terrible in him. She strode two steps across the carpet, struck him, and abruptly jerked her hand away, with a cry of pain. “Him!” she cried, cradling a wounded hand. “ Him!”

He had no idea what she meant, if not Lord Tristen himself. He found the door and he battered on it, as when he had been a child she could chase him from this room in tears.

The door opened. The guard was there. He exited the room… soon to forget the detail of everything she said, he knew: he always did; but the rawness of upheaval she engendered in his heart would linger for days.

“You will not be his!” Tarien screamed after him. And the door shut, and the bar thumped down.

He avoided the guard’s eyes, nor did the guard ask questions, only brought him downstairs again, where Paisi sat on the stone base of a column, waiting for him.

Paisi usually asked him how it had gone. This time Paisi asked nothing at all, only got up and walked with him down the hall, toward the daylight. Faster and faster he walked, and Paisi with him.

When he was out in the cold and the daylight again it was no better.

“I shouldn’t have gone,” he said.

“Come on, then,” Paisi said. “We’ll get the horses, an’ we’ll go home.”

Paisi didn’t say a thing about the smith or the apples. Nor did he want to delay to run those errands. He knew how most of the things his mother said could fly right out of his head before the sun set, and he wanted to go to Gran and tell her what he had heard, while he could still remember enough of it to get her advice about it, or just to have her hear him, and salve the sore spots with her voice and her touch and her own spells.

Most of all he wanted to be as far from his mother as possible, as quickly as he could. He would not have believed she could possibly breach the protection he wore. He had thought because it came from Lord Tristen it would keep him safe even in her presence: it had stung her when she tried to harm him, but now he wasn’t sure of its power, and doubt itself was a weakness.

Perhaps, he thought, it hadn’t gotten through. Perhaps it had stirred something already within its protection. Perhaps what disturbed him sat in him.

He put Feiny to a trot as they cleared the town, and Paisi kept beside him, all the way to the turning point, where the road to Henas’amef forked east and west. Their way lay a little east, and just as they turned, he saw a smear of dark smoke on the eastward sky.

“I don’t like that,” Paisi said, but Elfwyn didn’t even stop that long: he laid his heels to Feiny, and sent him flying on that homeward track, Paisi coming up hard behind.

It wasn’t weather for burning brush. Snow persisted in sifting down from an ill-disposed heaven. It wasn’t such a day; yet by the time they had passed the second hill, the smoke rooted itself exactly where Gran’s house was.

Elfwyn’s heart sank, utterly. He was no rider, but he put Feiny to his utmost speed and risked both their necks, and the nearer he came, the worse it was. Gran’s whole roof thatch was ablaze, and as he came skidding to a stop in front of the gate, he didn’t stop to open it: he jumped down and climbed the fence and jumped, landing and slipping in the firelit snow. Heat melted the snow in the yard, heat billowed out at him, and when he reached the door and yanked it open, fire rushed out at him, driving him stumbling back.

Paisi seized hold of him, held him fast, and he fought to get free.

“No, no, lad, ye can’t, ye can’t, ain’t no one can go in there. Come on. She might ha’ gone out th’ shed.”

He ran with Paisi around the back, to the yard where the goats stood, firelight reflecting off their slit eyes, and the geese ran this way and that to escape them, all confused. He went as far as inside the shed: the house door was shut, and fire showed in the seams of the logs that made the shed wall.

“Gran?” he cried, searching that darkness. “Gran?”

“Lad,” Paisi said, close by him. Paisi had an armful of Feiny’s tack and shoved it at him. “Get it out. Get out.”

“You get out!” he shouted—the roar of the fire made it necessary to shout, and he carried the gear out and dumped it on the snow, as Paisi rescued a load of tools—that was all they saved.

“As Gran’ll skin us if we let all burn,” Paisi gasped, his face all smeared with soot. “Get another load. Get the grain out.”

“Where’s Gran?” he asked, shaking Paisi by the arms. It was as if Paisi had an overwhelming conviction Gran wasn’t there, couldn’t be there, as if Paisi, who had always been his rock of safety, was as confused as the goats and geese. “Paisi, she’s not out here!”

Paisi turned a shocked face toward the fire, toward the house, as if it had only then come through to him.

“She ain’t,” he said, then Elfwyn took a firm grip on Paisi’s arm, to be sure he didn’t rush back in. They stood there, they and the goats and the geese, and the horses beyond the fence, while the fire roared up, coming out the door, rushing past the shutters and licking up the thatch.

“She did it,” Elfwyn said, finding a thread of a voice, when breath itself was hard. “She did it. The ring protected me. It didn’t protect Gran. And it doesn’t protect you.”

“The hell,” Paisi said, and Elfwyn held him harder, and they hugged each other, there being nothing else they could do. They stood there, burned on one side, frozen on the other, and shook like rabbits, until a terrible crash sent sparks flying out at them, scared the goats and geese and the horses, and stung them all into backing up. The whole center of the house had fallen inward, and the open roof shot flames to the twilight sky.

There was nothing to do but stand and watch it, arm in arm, holding on to each other.

“She didn’t See it,” Paisi mourned. “Sure, she didn’t See it comin’. It’s a terrible end, a terrible way to go.”

“They burned the Aswydds,” Elfwyn said. He hadn’t been alive then, but his mother had told him that. “She did it. No question she did it. Him, she said… she hates him, and she couldn’t hit me, so she burned the house down. I dreamed she would. I just didn’t know what I dreamed.”

Paisi’s grip held his arm hard, now. “Was it fire ye dreamed?”

“The second dream was. And the third. And after.” It was hard to speak. Smoke had made his throat raw. “I hate her, Paisi, I hate her beyond anything in the world.”

“No.” Paisi shook his head fiercely. “Ain’t good. Ain’t good. Gran’d say it ain’t good.”

“Well, she’s not able to say, is she?” He said that because he hurt, but he was sorry in the next moment because he upset Paisi, and he pressed Paisi’s head close to his. “I loved her. I loved her so much, Paisi. I didn’t know I did, but I do. She’s my gran, no matter. And when Lord Tristen comes, he’ll deal with my mother. I can’t, damn it, I can’t!”

“Can’t help Gran,” Paisi said, and wiped his arm across his face. “House was hers anyways. No good to me, was it? We just got to tidy things up an’ get the fire out. She’d hate it burnin’ on like this.”

“Have we got the bucket?” Elfwyn asked, trying for practicality.

They had, and they took turns working the windlass for the well and hauling water up, and the other would take the bucket and fling it on the fire, bucket after bucket, starting with the herb garden that ran along the wall, and working up to the door and the windows. They worked on and on into the dark, when the interior of the house glowed and lit the pall of smoke that hung over them. They worked, and finally the fire began to sink. It was all blackened timbers by first light, black sticks thrusting up out of a heap of ash and smoking embers. That was all there was.