C. J. Cherryh - Fortress 05 (18 page)

All Aewyn was thinking of by now was to slip away from the family and go to Otter’s room, by the first, not the grand, stairway.

The moment they passed into the warm, close dark of the Guelesfort he dived aside and ran up the stairs the servants used, with his own guard in confused pursuit.

The upper hall had all the candles lit despite the light from the windows. He hurried to the room Otter had, where guards stood.

“Have you found him?” he asked his father’s guards.

“No, Your Highness,” the answer was. “We’re still searching.”

“Your Highness,” his own guards tried to remonstrate with him, but he ignored their protests and hurried on, then, across the landing for the grand stairs, wickedly racing ahead of his father’s procession upward. He dived into his room and met his own servants’ startled faces.

“Where is he?” he demanded. “Where is Otter?”

“Your Highness.” Captys, senior of his servants, was there. Two others were. And Captys was clearly distraught.

“Where is Otter?”

“Your Highness, the maid, Madelys, saw him at witchcraft, and when—”

His heart turned over on that word. “Who said? Who said so?

Madelys?” The girl hovered in the doorway beyond, knotting and unknotting her apron. “Fool! Where is he?”

“He seems to have vanished, Your Highness,” Captys said.

“Useless!” It was what his father would say, when he was at his wits’ end with the servants. “Stay here, the lot of you! You, too,” he added, stabbing a gesture at his guards. “Stay here and tell my father that
I
shall find him.”

“Witchery!” Madelys cried. “Your Highness, you might put yourself in danger!”

“I want
her
gone before I get back! Banished from these rooms, forever!”

“Your Highness!” Madelys wailed.

“Fool, I say!”

“No, Your Highness, I saw it! He had the water and the feather and a charm, and he was at it, plain as plain!”

“And you know so much about witchcraft I should be suspicious?

Go down to the kitchens, and do not you say any word of gossip, girl, not one, on your life! Count it lucky I don’t send you to the Guard kitchens! Damn it!”

He spun on his heel and stalked to the door, and out it, with one furious look at his senior guardsman, Selmyn, who attempted to follow. “My orders!” he said. “Carry them out!”

With that, he slammed the door and ran, ran, ignoring his father’s party, which was just going in the doors: little Aemaryen, starving, sleepy, and furious, made noise enough to cover any commotion. He ran right past them for the servants’ stairs, up and up, past even the level where the storerooms were, and where his father’s men always searched if he was missing.

Upstairs, however, farther upstairs—one apparently useless little set of steps in the high end of the endmost workroom, if one got up on the counter, and above, there was a little trapdoor, an access to the eaves. He had shown it to Otter, the two of them up in the very highest part of the Guelesfort, looking out the littlest windows of all and watching people come and go in the yard, while they ate stolen sweets.

He had no candle, this time. He stopped still, standing right over at the opening of the trap, knowing by memory what was next, which was a lot of beams, but if he went farther, he would be utterly blind in the dark, with only the dim light from below to mark where the trapdoor was. If it were to be shut, it might take searching on hands and knees to find it again.

And Otter, if he was here, had shut it.

“Otter!” he called out, fearful to go too much farther without a light. “Otter, it’s Aewyn! Where are you?”

ii

AEWYN WILL FIND HIM,” CEFWYN MUTTERED, HAVING

SEEN HIS SON RUNNING in the hall and knowing very well what he was about, given the report from the guards. “If he’s not away out the gates. Damn that girl!”

Ninévrisë set a hand on his shoulder. She had stayed by him.

Efanor was elsewhere in the hall, tracking precisely where and to whom the maid had already prattled her tale of witchcraft and trying to forestall a priestly inquiry.

“The court will not have truly expected his appearance,”

Ninévrisë said.

“They had rumors of it. And not a sign of him, nor Paisi, either. If they’re anywhere, they’re in the loft. Why doesn’t the Guard ever search the damned loft? We hid up there, in our day, there and the stables, but no one ever searches the loft.”

It was close quarters up there for a man without armor, let alone a guard in full kit, that was one reason. The juniormost servants had to perform that search, if needed—now and again an investigation went into that precinct. But it was a maze of timbers and nooks, and one boy determined to burrow deep into the eaves would not be found until he grew desperate from thirst.

And damn Otter for a fool—damn the circumstances that had sent a hare-witted girl to his rooms to spy on him. And where in the gods’ own name was Paisi?

Things had gone wrong, and gone wrong at several points, and it was not only the serving girl who fretted about magic. The king of Ylesuin had attempted to slip his sorcery-gotten son into respectable notice at court, attempted to gather up all the misdeeds and tag ends of his misspent youth and to do justice by those who hadn’t had it. Most of all he had tried to ignore the old connections, thinking he could just ease the whole untidy situation past the jagged edges of old magic, Sihhë magic, and Tarien Aswydd’s outright curse.

He wished, not for the first time, that Tristen had heeded his invitations and come to visit. He wished that, well before this day, he had risked the notoriety of the deed and ridden into the west himself, to visit his old friend. “Help me,” he might have said, had he had the chance to plan this visit for himself.

You left me this boy. You advised me to treat him kindly and do
justice by him.

Now look. Now look, my old friend. He can’t come to the
Quinaltine. He more than will not: there’s been this maid, this silly
maid, it turns out, who spied the young fool doing what his Gran
doubtless honestly taught him, and runs gibbering the news through
all the Guelesfort.

And who sent the maid?

My youngest son did, Aewyn, who meant the boy no harm, no
harm at all. I’m sure of that, among other things far less certain.

Are you aware what’s happened here, my old friend? I fear this is
not just bad luck. It can never do so much damage and be nothing
more than bad luck, can it?

But you told me once that luck was a sort of magic in itself, did
you not? Or the workings of magic, was it?

Well, luck has run completely against the boy you bade me
preserve, when it involves the Quinaltine. You told me yourself there
was ill in that place, grievous ill, and old harm. Efanor confirmed
it. And was it only my desire to be ahead of the priests and the
gossip that made me force the boy into this appearance?

1 mislike what I’ve done. I mislike greatly what has happened
here, old friend. Be careful, you said. And was 1 careful enough, in
my haste to see this through?

Clearly not so. Not nearly careful enough.

“My love?” Ninévrisë said, in his long silence.

“Do you perceive anything untoward?” he asked. The wizard-gift was in Ninévrisë, from her father and his fathers before him.

Perhaps he should tell her about the writing there in the frost. He knew he was blind and deaf to such stirrings in the world, deaf as a stone; but something for good or for ill made him reticent, and her son, her son, Aewyn, who had always seemed as blind and deaf as his father—where was he, this morning, after fidgeting his way through services?

Their Aewyn had become as slippery as Otter, and sped off on the hunt without a word to his parents, bent on solving matters himself.

A father was the point the boys shared, the blind and deaf heritage. He had always assumed his blond, bluff son was like him; that if there was any witchery to turn up in his children, small, dark Aemaryen would have that perilous gift, and fair, tall Aewyn would be as deaf as his father.

“Otter is afraid,” Ninévrisë said softly. “Be forgiving of him.”

Another woman might take satisfaction in a rival’s child’s difficulty. Not Ninévrisë. Another woman might have been blind to the risks in the boy coming here, and equally those in his never coming here at all. Not Ninévrisë. She knew what was at issue and where it began.

He laid his hand on hers, where it rested on his shoulder.

“Forgiving is all I can be. He is what he is, and I brought him here on Tristen’s advice.”

“None better,” Ninévrisë said. “And I will warrant the boy conjured nothing.” A little contraction of her fingers against his shoulder. “Whatever he did, did not pass the wards. I would feel it if he had.”

“Good for that,” he said, watching the snow fall and hoping he didn’t have a son out on the roads at this moment.

“Your Majesty.” The Lord Chamberlain himself entered the room.

“His Highness Prince Aewyn, with Otter.”

Oh, indeed? That quickly?

He turned a serene countenance toward his staff, slipping Ninévrisë’s hand to his arm.

“Admit them.”

Bows, courtesies, ceremonies of approach and departure delayed everything in his life, and never the ones he wanted delayed. The Lord Chamberlain, an old, old man, went out to the foyer, doors opened, doors closed, opened again, and Aewyn finally came through them with Otter in tow, Otter wrapped in Aewyn’s cloak, the one puzzle in the sight, and Aewyn and Otter both a little cobwebby about the shoulders, which was no puzzle at all.

“He didn’t mean to,” Aewyn began, the immemorial beginning of excuses.

“One is very sure,” Cefwyn said.

“It was that fool Madelys, my serving-maid,” Aewyn said. “I sent her with breakfast, before the hour, and she screamed and Otter spilled oil all over himself, and he’d ruined his clothes. Paisi’s in Amefel.”

Now there was a model of concise reporting.

“Paisi’s in Amefel, you say.”

“He was worried about Gran, Your Majesty,” Otter said faintly,

“with the weather, and all.”

“So I was going to have my staff look after him,” Aewyn said, with no space for a breath between them, “and see he had breakfast, but that fool maid walked in without a sound and thought she saw what she didn’t see.”

“Was there magic?” Ninévrisë asked, dropping her hand from Cefwyn’s arm. “Otter, tell the truth.”

“I tried, Your Majesty,” Otter said in the very faintest of voices.

“I’m very sorry.”

“Why would Paisi go home?” Cefwyn asked.

“A dream, Your Majesty,” Otter said in anguish. “I had a dream.

So did Paisi. So I told him he had to go.”

“When was this?”

“Yesterday.”

A full day on the road, in this weather. Fool boy
, Cefwyn thought, hoping Paisi was not frozen in a snowbank somewhere along the road. He made a little wave of his hand. “Let us see. Let us see the damage. Unwrap the cloak, if you please.”

Otter had clutched it tightly about him. The boots were not auspicious. He opened the garment, and showed a wreckage of good tailoring, from oil to attic cobwebs and dust, head to foot.

“Oh, dear,” Ninévrisë said.

Otter looked as if he wished he could sink through the floor.

“It’s not his fault!” Aewyn said.

“No, now, be still. Let Otter answer for himself. Paisi left yesterday, alone, one presumes.”

“Yes, Your Majesty. Well… not alone. I sent him with some traders.”

Cefwyn raised a brow. There had been a certain resourcefulness in the plot. There was a likelihood Paisi would get through.

“And being without wiser counsel, you took to witchcraft to see his progress? Or was there more to it?”

“I dreamed again. But I don’t know who Sent it.”

“A very prudent thought,” Ninévrisë said, with a look at Cefwyn.

“Paisi’s gran might have Sent to him: there is that special connection. But Sending past all protections? I never felt it.”

Wizardry had passed the wards no less than Tristen Sihhë had laid about the Guelesfort windows… there was a troubling thought.

An ordinary mouse could have made a new hole, a way into the walls, who knew? Ninévrisë saw to such things, quietly, in her own way, but there were ways to make a breach.

And there was—he never forgot it—one ready source of bad dreams in Amefel.

“So you sent Paisi away,” Cefwyn said deliberately, in the tone with which he daunted councillors. “And told no one.”

“He told me,” his younger son said.

“So you joined this conspiracy.”

“Paisi was already gone,” Aewyn protested, “and he wanted to tell you, but there was the dinner, and uncle was there, and he had no chance to, because of how he knew, and the servants coming and going; and he was going to tell you after services today, but the fool maid ruined everything.”

“Indeed. And where is the fool maid at this moment?”

“I sent her to the kitchens and told her not to talk to anyone.”

“In the kitchens, not to talk. Gods save us, boy!”

“I threatened her life,” Aewyn said.

“Of course,” Cefwyn said, ignoring Aewyn’s protestations, and looked straight into Otter’s eyes. “A problem broadening by the hour. Do you understand that?”

“I am the only one to blame, Your Majesty.”

No excuses, no temporizing. And, alas, no ready excuse that would cover it. The pale gray eyes that damned the boy in the observation of honest Guelenfolk stared back at him, incontrovertible heritage.

“Don’t use magic,” he said bluntly. “Am I asking a bird not to fly?”

“No, Your Majesty,” the boy said, and in the silence he left for further comment: “I didn’t want to use it. I won’t use it. I won’t, again, Your Majesty.”

A damned cold word, that.
Father
might have carried more intimacy, but the boy had never used that word to him. The exchanges between himself and his own father had been that remote; the tone recalled that fact with an unpleasant chill about the heart, remembering where that bond had ended.