Fortress of Ice

Now Tristen sent him a warning, an acute warning, and moved eastward in haste.

“Why?” he asked, gazing into the dark, the other side of the fire.

But he had no answer.

“Papa?”

“We shall ride before daylight,” Cefwyn said, clenching his hand on his son’s arm. “The horses have to rest. Get to your blankets and sleep while you can.”

ii

THE BED WAS WARM AND SOFT, AND THE BEDCLOTHES, RENEWED TODAY AS every day, smelled of lavender, an herb Gran had grown in her garden. It should have been a pleasant smell. It touched painful memory, of herbs that had hung from the rafters above a soft feather bed, their own bed, beside which Gran had died. It was a short, dark tumble from that scent to horrid memory and the pain of burns far from healed.

Sleet hit the windows, a winter that never seemed to give up. It had sounded like that in Guelessar, when he had never in his life heard the sound of ice striking glass. Happiness had been all in front of him then, spread out like a banquet. He’d had no idea that it would all go so wrong.

Elfwyn buried his head deep in the crook of his arm and hauled the bedclothes over his ears, but that arrangement rapidly grew too warm.

He kept seeing the shelves and shelves of books, and with them The Red Chronicle, and its dreadful story. He wondered if Aewyn knew it, if Aewyn knew about this kinsman of his and kept it secret from him, fearing, perhaps, for their friendship—

Silly, he said to himself. He was Aswydd, no kin at all to the dead Sihhë King. The first Elfwyn had been no relation whatsoever to the Aswydds.

Had he?

He outright didn’t know. He could ask Lord Crissand, he supposed. But if that information was here, it was surely in that book, for him to find if he kept at it. The tale of the Marhanen warlord might lead down to his own father’s generation and give him all the co

He remembered the shadows in the library, and his decision to go home. He had been so tired, and he could no longer remember what had finally made him leave. He had set the candle down, then realized he had to pass the haunt, but he had gotten home safely, anyway.

Had he locked the door?

Hadhe locked the door? He remembered blowing the candle out and setting the stub on the ledge. But he had promised the old man, in return for the privilege of the library, that he would lock the door.

Surely no one would get in there, only to steal a book, in just the few hours until morning. It was cold, and it was quiet in the halls, and he would have to get out of a warm bed and wake Paisi, all to go down there.

But the old man would get back in the morning and find that door unlocked, and he would know who had done it.

Surely he had locked it.

But he could not remember even taking the key from his purse.

He stuck a foot out, and another, and slipped from the bed. He hadn’t undressed, more than to take off his coat and belt and boots—the country habit, though lords did differently. He hadn’t waked Paisi, getting up. He quietly located his coat in the dim light of the banked fire in the other room, found his boots in the shadow of the bed, his belt, with the purse and the key, hanging from the chair at the table, and dressed.

Then he as quietly left, taking the same route he had used coming home, and this time he did run, on tiptoe, and lightly. No one was about the upper hall—no guards or even servants visible at this hour. He ran upstairs at the end of his hall, the circuitous route, and along the servants’ hall, where not even the servants were stirring. He ran down the dark little stairway to the library hall without ever passing the haunt or his mother’s guards.

The servants had renewed the candles: only one burned, in this area, and a new one, white and unburned, stood on the ledge. He tried the door latch, and it did open: he had not, indeed, locked it, and he began to reach for the key to lock it safely, then take himself back upstairs to his warm bed as quickly as he could.

But he hadn’t proved that the library was still safe. He didn’t know if anyone had gotten inside, did he?

He took the new candle and went to the midpoint of the short hall, lit it from the single burning candle in its sconce, and brought it back again. He opened one eagle door carefully, wide-awake now, and held the candle aloft to see if there might be any disturbance of things as he had left them.

A sudden draft blew his candle out. His heart skipped a beat. Only a draft, he said to himself. It was only the door being so narrowly open.

Something glowed red, in the deep dark near where he had sat—a glow like a windblown coal where it ought not to be, but not well-defined, either. The light was diffuse, like a ward, with a solid center. It was a color he had only seen in the tangled Lines in the Quinaltine, where horrid things had warred to get out.

He waited in the doorway, with his dead candle. He was afraid even to breathe, and tried to tell himself the light was his imagination but it persisted, cold red fire, when the Lines of the room itself failed to appear, or were so dim, beside that glow, that his eyes failed to see them.

It wasn’t right. Something in that area wasn’t at all right, and it came from underneath the bookshelves, from underneath a table, the counter on which that small bookcase rested. He could see wards. Not everyone could. If something was wrong, he had to know where it was, to report it.

He took a few steps forward, gently letting the door shut, in the draft that blew. He walked a few paces to the side to find the source of the light.

Right underneath the shelf that held the book he had been reading, and right beside the table where the History of Amefelstill rested—something was there, something that, for no conscious reason, terrified him. It glowed like one baleful eye, of something which, if it were a beast, was too large to be in the room.

His ring tingled. But it protected him. He kept an eye on the glow and saw it neither grow nor shrink as he edged around two tables away, with those barriers between him and it, and looked under all, to see nothing but a glowing spot on the plaster.

It was something that wanted to be found, there was no other way to think of it: he had felt a need today to be at that table, that shelf, and he had sat there reading, searching, had he not? But he had never found what satisfied him, not even reading on into the dark.

He squatted, below the level of the tables and watched it, and moved forward one table, on his knees.

What glowed was not in the room. It was behind the plaster, as if a fire burned there. It was everything he wanted. It made no sense, but he knew it was. He crept all the way to that wall, and touched the plaster, feeling nothing but the tingle of the ring on his finger, and an answering tingle from what was behind the wall.

He had no tool to use, could think of none in the library that he had seen. He took off his belt and tried the only metal he had about him, the capped end of his belt, against the plaster, which was soft, but it was not nearly soft enough, and it would take time. He had marked the place—he could find it, even if the glow vanished with light, and now he sought to find a sharper tool somewhere in the room.

He crawled out, went to the fireside, and took a sharp bit of kindling from the little pile of wood that fed the library fireplace, but that would not be sharp or stout enough. He cast it into the coals in frustration, then, indeed, the fireplace poker offered itself. He took it, and brought it back to the counter, and knelt and dug into the plaster.

Powder fell onto the stones, damning evidence. He knew—he knew in the back of his mind that if he didn’t get this thing now, before the librarian came in, he could never get at it. He could pile books there. If he got whatever it was and got out, he could pile books where the plaster had fallen and conceal the hole. Hadn’t Paisi had taught him how to go quietly, how to cover his traces? Paisi had said he was teaching him hunting and woodcraft, but Paisi had confessed that he had been a thief, when there had been only Paisi to support Gran, and Paisi had said he could be a thief, for a good reason—