Fortress of Ice

“The Guard is searching, Your Majesty. The Amefin, too.”

“He’s gone,” Paisi said, and immediately put a hand over his mouth, having talked out of turn; but it drew Cefwyn’s attention:

“What do youknow about it?”

“Majesty, forgive me, but if ’e’s gone, he’s followed my lord, is all.”

“More sense than the whole damned passel of you,” Cefwyn said to the mortified captain, the Marhanen temper getting well to the fore—which was not good. He drew a deep breath and reined it back. “There are a thousand nooks a boy could get into. Ask the Amefin. But assume he went to the gate.”

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

He snatched his cloak off the peg, marking how his son had taken his own with him—ordinary in a boy being sent off for good, but likewise sensible in a boy who firmly intended to go outdoors.

“May I assist, Your Majesty?” Crissand asked.

“Not yourfault,” Cefwyn said shortly. “But come along to the stables. I want to know from the gate-guards up and down if any boy went out, for the gods’ sake. He’s been gone long enough to be out and away.”

He left, walked down the hall—a king could not run—and walked down the sooty and well-trafficked steps and out to the stables in the dark. The sun had set.

No, there was no horse missing. That was good news.

“There’s the horses down to pasture,” Paisi said, unasked. “He’d ha’ had to have a bridle or halter.”

“Count them,” Cefwyn said.

The report came flying back that there was one fewer bridle than horses that had come in.

Clever lad, Cefwyn thought distressedly.

“He might have gone back to the witch’s farm,” Crissand said.

“Follow his tracks at the town gate and at the pastures. And my guess is to search west. West. He knows where Marna is.”

Fear could close in about even a sensible boy, magnifying his doubts and moving him wherever a damned witch wanted. Fear—or overweening determination—could magnify itself, if a boy was particularly vulnerable to magic. And the boy was half-Syrillas.

“I’ll go,” Paisi said to Crissand. “If I could borrow me horse again, m’lord.”

“No!” Cefwyn said, and stormed back across the yard and up the torchlit steps, Crissand struggling to stay beside him, with an accompanying straggle of guards, and Paisi.

“We can bring horses up,” Crissand said, “and supplies for the road.” Every horse they had in stable but three were road-weary and incapable of a chase. “What shall I do?”

“Do it,” he said. It would take well over an hour to send down the hill, get horses from pasture, and get them up here and saddled and a search underway. But Crissand gave those orders.

He gave others, to the Dragon Guard captain. “Find out exactly what the kitchen staff told him,” he said to that man, reaching the i

Worse than that—Tristen wasn’t here, she was, and if she had gotten strong enough to cause this—dared he meddle with the wards on that tower, which were Tristen’s, and which might be failing?

Not tonight, not in the dark, and not with his sons at issue. If she was nudging this and that, outside her tower, let her think she was safe in her mischief—so long as Tristen was on his way here to deal with her.

He went instead into the greater audience hall, servants scurrying about him to bring candles, small frantic lights that flared past gilt columns and figures and ledges. He settled onto the ducal throne of Amefel, once the throne of Amefin kings. He had used it before. It was his right, and no discourtesy to Crissand, who arrived with his own guard, bringing a white-aproned, white-bearded man, the cook.

The old man was terrified, and could only wring his hands and say he had talked to the Prince about what everybody knew, the old murder, and the books gone missing…

“Book,” Cefwyn said curtly. “Book. One book.” The legend had already multiplied the theft. And the cook had apparently said nothing to give Aewyn any notion he hadn’t had before.

“Did he take food with him?” Cefwyn asked.

“No, Your Majesty. Not that I saw.”

“His cloak and a bridle,” Cefwyn muttered. “So he doesn’t think he’s going far.”

“Perhaps he won’t try to go far,” Crissand said, standing near him.

“I can’t say.” He was at a loss, and the sun was going down outside, setting on a road that had taken his sons away from him—the one by a road that might not even lie in the world of Men and the other trying, the young fool, to follow him… all with the highest and best intentions, to be sure.

“Have you any sense at all from the ring?”

“None,” Crissand said miserably. “None at all. As if he’d vanished from the land.”

He laid a hand on his chest, where Tristen’s amulet rested, and it—it tingled, like something alive against his skin. For one blessed moment it seemed he did feel something of direction. It tingled. It burned.

And there was a commotion in the hall, an expostulation from the guards, and a loud and impatient voice that tugged hard at memory. The chamber door burst open, banged back, and of all things, a bearded old man in voluminous gray robes stalked into the audience hall and walked straight up the center of the room.

Emuin. Who had been dead for ten years. Cefwyn sat stock-still, watching this apparition of his old tutor, the master wizard who had been at his side through all the wars and the troubles.

He had snow on his cloak, snow in his hair and beard, and clenched a staff in a hand quite blue with cold. He stamped that staff three times on the pavings.

“Well,” he said. “Well! And in trouble again, are you?”

“Emuin?” Cefwyn asked, far from certain of what he saw. The place was given to haunts and apparitions, but of all of them, this one was welcome, more than welcome at the moment. And he was dripping water onto the pavings. “My son is in trouble.”

“Which son? You have two.”

“That I do. And both. Both are in trouble.”

“Not surprising, given their heritage.” Emuin leaned on his staff with both hands. “A long trek, a damned long trek, this. I am quite undone.”

“Bring a chair,” Cefwyn said, with a wave to the servants, who stood gawking.

“No time for sitting,” Emuin said, and turned and waved his arm and his staff aloft. “Get that damned woman out of my workshop, that for a begi

Histower. His place, before they had imprisoned Tarien Aswydd in it.

It was so exactly what Emuin would say.

“Not so easy,” Cefwyn said. “Not so easy a matter to dislodge her, my old friend. Tristen put her there.”

“Well, then where is he?”

“That’s very much in question,” Cefwyn said, and had his own inquiry to make in the general madness of the moment. “Where have you been, the last ten years, Master Grayrobe?”

“Where have I been?” Emuin repeated, blinking and looking a little confused for the moment. He looked about the hall, as if he might find an answer there, or somewhere about the cornices. “I suppose I’ve been busy,” he said, and swung about to look squarely at him. “Busy. Busy, until it became clear there was no peace to be had.” He stalked forward, to the disquiet of the guards, and flung the staff rattling onto the floor right at the dais steps. “I’ll have that chair. I’ll have it here right now, if you please.”