Fortress in the Eye of Time (29 page)

Cefwyn went back to the wardrobe to revise his selection of clothing while Annas arranged an early cup of tea. Pages
arrived, seeking use, and by their grace he bathed, merely an affair of a hot towel: the bath which he had left unused and cold still stood. Over his linen went bezainted leather, nothing approaching the two stones' weight of the shirt he had worn on the ride to Emwy. It was for lighter weapons, the kind that came from close at hand, and it glittered with suitably decorative but martial effect.

It did sit well, at least, between the Amefin and a Marhanen heart.

 

The breakfast arrived in the hands of Annas, two senior guards and two pages; the maps were discreetly rolled—except the one for Emwy district, which he deliberately left in plainest view—and he had had the pages move the dining board into the sunlit alcove beneath the windows.

Annas provided them a simple meal and a hot one, easy to eat a quick sufficiency and end the meeting early; or, if he pleased, to linger over the breads and jams. Cefwyn settled into place at the table and waited, sipping at a cup of tea.

Shortly Idrys arrived with Heryn in tow, a sullen and scowling Heryn, who stopped and bowed at formal distance from the table while Idrys continued to the warm window-side, where he took up his station, arms folded, waiting.

Cefwyn rose, bowed, and gestured to the seat at the far end of the table. “Welcome, Your Grace.”

Heryn came to the offered seat, stood with his hands clenched on the back of the chair.

“Your Highness,—”

“Sit, sit down, Amefel. No doubt you have questions.”

“With armed guards—”

“You could not protect me, Your Grace. That Amefin patrols were in the area of Emwy I do take your word for, but I do think they would have regarded our displayed standards and my banner. I fear you have been misinformed on the nature of the attack at Emwy, which casts into doubt not you, of course, but certain assumptions. Therefore I've moved to
secure the premises until we learn whether there has been compromise of your informers. Surely your own life is not secure. Trust my guards. They are honest men.”

The color had utterly fled Heryn's handsome face.

Cefwyn smiled, lips only, sure that Heryn took his double meaning. “Sit, sit down. I assure you that this apartment is at least as secure as your own.”

Heryn sank into the chair, picked up the cup and carried it almost to his lips as Annas began to serve the breakfast. Heryn stopped in mid-sip with a look at him, guarded, terrified.

“Your health,” Cefwyn said, still smiling, lifted his cup and drank.

The sweat stood visible on Heryn's face. And Cefwyn half-turned, looking at Idrys.

“Idrys.”

“Your Highness.”

“Any sign of the horses out of Emwy?”

“Aye, my lord, a few. The dun and three bays made their way back last night. Peasants brought them for reward, knowing the King's mark.”

“You rewarded them.”

“Amply, my lord.”

“Excellent.” He looked at Heryn and divided up a sausage. “It's clear that the general countryside still has reverence for the Crown.”

“I would assure Your Highness so,” Heryn said.

“Our patrols will be searching the country round about very thoroughly. We wish to find that bandit group and question them.”

“I would have thought all your men were on duty here,” Heryn said bitterly, while the sausage went down quite well. “So many in the halls.”

“I assure you, it's to your own advantage that the Crown should take direct responsibility for my welfare. The cost to the town for losing the Marhanen heir would be bloody and extreme, and—regrettable as it might be, and no matter your
efforts—there would be that certain cost to pay. His Majesty and I have quarreled, but the depth of our quarrel is vastly exaggerated. Vastly. Marhanens may quarrel with each other. Attack us—and he
is
head of our house.”

“I assure Your Highness—”

“Oh, we do believe your efforts might well succeed. But I refuse to put that manner of responsibility on this province and on you, Amefel. The Guelen are seasoned men. They know the extent of their duty, and they'll stand their posts indefinitely, until we are sure the persons responsible have been hunted out and hanged.—Sausage, Your Grace?”

Annas made a trip to Heryn's end of the table, but Heryn took only bread.

“Your Highness,” Heryn said, “surely your personal guard will be under hardship. I assure you my own men are sufficient for myself. You might at least relieve the ones at my door—”

“I will not hear of it. The welfare of this province is my special concern. My guards stay.” He filled his mouth with bread and honey and ate, enjoying the breakfast. “Amefin honey. I shall send some to my father with personal recommendation.”

“Thank you, my lord,” Heryn murmured, although he seemed to have difficulty breathing, let alone eating.

“You must not take the issue so to heart. You have done your best to guard me. Now I shall do mine.—Do you not care for the bread, Lord Heryn?”

Heryn gathered up the knife and his knuckles were white on the handle as he dipped into the butter.

 

“I have,” Idrys said, “set Anwyll to watching Tarien and Sergeant Gedd to Orien's door.”

Cefwyn smiled grimly. Anwyll was immovable, and Gedd was by his preference immune to Orien and all her servants.

“I've made certain promises of liberal reward among the ranks, m'lord Prince,” Idrys added, “once this period of
double watch is safely carried. The men are in excellent spirits on that account.”

“Promise it on my authority.” Cefwyn gathered up his sword and buckled it on. “I will see that reward paid.”

“Where are you going, m'lord Prince?”

“To see to our guest.”

Idrys' frown was instant. Cefwyn started to the doors, and Idrys shadowed him past the guards and into the hall.

“Be rid of this ill-omened guest,” Idrys said. “Send him to Emuin's retreat. Send him to the Quinalt in Guelessar, if you ask my advice in this matter, m'lord.”

“Not in this.”

“I wish you would wait for Emuin's arrival.”

“You have mentioned that.” He had glanced at Idrys as he walked out the door of his apartments. He looked back, and stopped in what he purposed to say next. There was but one pair of guards at Tristen's door. “What's going on here?” he demanded of those men. “Where are the other two?”

“Gone wi' him, Your Highness,” said one man. “Wi' Uwen.”

“He waked.”

“Natural as morning, Your Highness, and ate breakfast and left.”

“I left word to wake me!”

“You had a guest, Your Highness. We was told not to interrupt.”

“Damn.” He was aware of Idrys watching and forbore to scatter blame for what were doubtless contradictory instructions. “Where did he go?”

“To the stables, Your Highness. Something about his horse.”

Cefwyn swore. “Stand your post,” he ordered, and strode off for the stairway, with Idrys and an anxious pair of the Guelen guard close at his back.

G
uards snapped to attention at the doors, and another pair at the stableyard gate: evidence of Idrys' efficient arrangements. And at that clash of weapons, old Haman came out in a scatter of stableboys—the man was at his post, to Cefwyn's mild surprise—but Haman had no frown nor seemed other than cheerful.

“Your Highness.” Haman bowed. Amefin, Haman was a man of the land, not the Amefin court. His politics was the care of his animals and he cared for absolutely nothing else. A Prince could restrain his temper in respect to such a man. And in the replacement of Amefin guards from their posts, both Cook and stablemaster were left unquestioned.

“Haman. My guest, the young man. Where is he at the moment?”

“Come to see to his horse, Your Highness. And gone back inside again.”

Cefwyn bit his lip, refused to turn immediately and acknowledge Idrys' self-sure stare, which he was certain awaited him. He drew a slow breath and looked instead toward the stable, where his own Danvy was putting out his head. He walked to that stall door, lingered to give his favorite a pat and an apple from the barrel.

“He's fit enough, Your Highness,” Haman said. “Throwed a shoe in that affair, no more. Smith's already seen to him. I'm for putting him out to the far pens for a sennight, by 'r leave, Your Highness.”

“Give him good care, master Haman. I've no questions. Pasture it is. And best you give both my horses good exercise. Work the fat off Kanwy.—Did my guest say nothing of his further business this morning?”

“No, Your Highness. Concerned for the horse, he was.
Wanted to see her before we sent her down to pasture. He walked to the paddocks back there, he brought her some grain with his own hands and he spoke wi' her a while, and then he and his man, they went back inside again.—He were fearful pale, Your Highness. I thought then of sending word. But his man and your guard was with him all the while, and I thought he was there on proper business.”

“I'm certain he was. Thank you, master Haman.” He turned to go, met Idrys' eyes by complete accident, and scowled. He brushed past Idrys, stalked across the yard and heard him and the guard following as he mounted the steps again into the lower hall.

“My lord Prince,” Idrys said as they came into the corridor above, “leave it in my hands. I'll find him.”

“
We
will find him.” He cast Idrys a look over his shoulder and found precisely the expression he had thought to find.

“Warm this egg in your bosom, my lord Prince, and you may find it hatches something other than a sparrow. We've done quite well with the lord of the Amefin. I advise you confine this fledgling of Mauryl's. Confine him in whatever comfort you deem suitable, but confine him closely, at least until Emuin is at hand to deal with him. This man will surprise you with some action you will most assuredly regret.”

He glanced away and strode ahead, seeking the windows that had best view of the garden, ignoring Idrys and his advice.

Tristen was not in the garden, either.

In the end he was compelled to stand and wait, chafing while Idrys consulted with a chance-met group of Amefin servants in the hall, who pointed down the hall toward the archive and bowed in frightened confusion, uncertain in what affairs they were involved on this chancy day, with Guelen guards posted everywhere and rumors by now running the halls.

“The library,” Idrys reported, “m'lord Prince. The horse…and the archive.”

Cefwyn exhaled shortly, relieved, as they walked toward the east wing, to think that it was nothing more sinister than books that drew Tristen…until he began to wonder with what insistence Tristen must have prevailed upon his guards and Uwen, and why, rising from a profound sleep, so unnatural a sleep, he had insisted after fatuous poesies, philosophies…

Books, in these particular hands, were not harmless…which was exactly what Idrys was thinking, he knew it. He could hear it hanging in the air in Idrys' very tones.

He could see, with the same clarity, Tristen's unlined and sleeping face yestereve—which Idrys had seen; and he could see that wild-eyed visage at Althalen, that same face with horror all the way to the depths of those uncommon eyes when he overtook him on the road. Idrys had also seen it.

He did not forget it, nor ever would. And now, lo, the unnatural sleep, leading straightway to, the guards had said, a natural waking and the visit to the paddock, which was perfectly of a piece with the gentle moonstruck youth he'd taken under Emuin's less than explicit instructions and led out into conspiracy and eldritch ruin.

Now books. Archives? Gods
knew
what the Amefin archive might hold in its dusty stacks and pigeonholes.

He quickened his step, came through the door into the musty precincts of the archive, where books and chaotic piles of civil records shared a room that had not, by reports, known order in ages, a room where tax records had been most effectively misplaced, and where, pursuant to last night's orders, his own accountant still commanded a battalion of pages rummaging the west wall of the archive.

“Your Highness,” Tamurin said, mistaking his mission and the object of his inquiry. “I am immediately requesting the records necessary—immediately, m'lord Prince.”

“And in good haste, master Tamurin. I approve all you need do.”

Master Tamurin passed from his acute attention. In the dim light that came through a cloudy window some distance down
the east wall, at a reading table almost overwhelmed with stacks of parchments and codices and towers of decaying paper…there, run to earth, sat Tristen, with a massive codex open on the overloaded table, with Uwen and the two guards leaning against chairs on either side of him, peering at the work as if they could possibly read much more than their pay vouchers, and waiting as if at any moment Tristen might pronounce some extraordinary wisdom.

“Out,” Cefwyn bade them, and included Uwen with that princely sweep of his arm.

Tristen lifted his head, his face lost in shadow, his hair a darkness in the dusty sunlight. It was—a chill touched Cefwyn's skin—a stranger's face, with the light touching only the planes and not the hollows: it was a man's face, a forbidding face.

The guards, conspirators in Tristen's wanderings, perhaps at last recalling that they were to have reported a change in Tristen's condition, eased past, trying to slip unobtrusively out of the way. The guards he had brought with him held their position, but somewhat to the rear. Only Idrys pressed close enough to involve himself in the situation, and Cefwyn considered banishing him as well. But on principle and to have another opinion of the encounter, he decided otherwise.

“Lord Prince.” Tristen rose and started to close the massive codex. Cefwyn took two steps forward and thrust his hand into the descending leaves as Tristen stood stock still. Cefwyn dragged the book across the table, reopened the heavy pages and turned the book on the table, dislodging clutter, to look on the crabbed Amefin script, the crude illuminations, the miniature map of the Ylesuin that had once been, when it had been a mere tributary to the wizard-ruled west, the wide realm of the Sihhë kings.

He half-closed the book, then opened to the first page and the title:
The Annals of the Reign of Selwyn Marhanen
.

“Ah. Grandfather,” Cefwyn murmured wryly with a look at Tristen's shadowed face. Still standing, he turned back to the pages that Tristen had been reading and angled the page to the light of the dust-clouded windows. “
Althalen
,” he read aloud,
and Tristen's face had a strange, now fearful expression, still shaped in shadows.

Cefwyn set his foot in the seat of the chair, dragged the great codex up on his knee and inclined the whole face of the page to the light of the same dusty window. “
The account of the taking of Althalen by the Marhanens
.”

He looked up to see Tristen, whether that face was contrite, puzzled, angry, or any other readable expression. Window light made it still a white, forbidding mask. He took a loose parchment from the table and laid it on that open page for a marker, closed the codex and gave the massive volume into Idrys' keeping, dust and all.

He looked at Tristen to see what Tristen thought of that—which seemed no more than Tristen thought of his intervention here at all. The frightened Amefin chief archivist stood in the shadow of the stacks by the other archway.

“How did he find this book?” Cefwyn asked, fixing that man with his stare. “Did he ask? Did you suggest it him?”

“He—asked for a history of Althalen, Your Highness.”

Cefwyn cast a look about the other volumes stacked high on the tables all around him: census files, tax records, deeds of sale, meager books of poetics, science, and philosophy. And history. Oh, indeed, Amefel had history.

He looked toward Idrys' black shape and frowning countenance. “There are witnesses,” Idrys cautioned him, meaning that his questions were already too full of particulars and betrayed too much.

“Tristen,” Cefwyn said mildly, “walk with me.”

“Yes, m'lord,” Tristen said meekly. He looked into light as he bowed and the gray eyes seemed as naked as ever they had been. Fear was there. Cefwyn thought so, at least. Bewilderment. All the things that might placate an angry prince.

Tristen turned, started to pass Idrys on his way to the door, but Idrys, unbidden, set down the book, laid a hand on Tristen's arm, and roughly searched him for weapons. Tristen endured it, stone-still, in midstep.

It was carrying matters too far, unordered: a protest leapt
to Cefwyn's lips, in Tristen's defense, this time; but on a morning like this, in a hostile hall, a prince was a fool who blunted his guards' attention to his protection. When it was done, Tristen continued down the aisle of the library, seeming only mildly disturbed by an indignity that would have racketed to the King's ear had Idrys inflicted it on Heryn or Heryn's familiars. He walked behind with Idrys while Tristen walked ahead in a downcast privacy and careless dignity that, had Idrys stripped him naked, he did not think Idrys could have breached. It was no astonished, defenseless youth such as Emuin had brought him that night in the lesser hall. This morning the jaw was set. The broad shoulders, in velvet and silk, declared a restraint of self, emanating not from fear but from fearlessness, and he did not think Idrys failed to be aware of whether a man feared or disregarded an outrageous interference in his affairs.

Tristen walked down the aisle of cluttered tables, past the business of account-gathering and agitated archivists, and the guards joined them at the door, escorting them down the corridor and up the stairs.

Anger blinded him, Cefwyn saw that in himself now, anger he had not let break. Anger had gathered in his chest and dammed up his reason; and now came a strange sense of grief, of betrayal, if he could lay a word on it: loss—of some rare and precious treasure that he had briefly seen, desperately longed for in this man.

Mauryl's gift, he reminded himself, in a morning fraught with dealings with traitors, in a morning after breakfast with Heryn Aswydd. It was Mauryl's Shaping of present flesh and something other; and, given he had adequate wit to rule a province, he should have seen hazard in Tristen's fecklessness toward all and sundry threats; he should have seen it did not come of helplessness, but of Mauryl's work. He should have armored himself and steeled his heart.

And had not, had not. Had not.

 

Upstairs, safe behind the doors of his apartment, he looked again into that too-clear gaze and met the absolute challenge to trust that Tristen posed.

“Out,” he said to the guards, but Idrys did not budge. “Out, Idrys.”

“In this alone I am your father's man, my lord Prince. I
will
stay.”

Tristen stood alone by the table. The book lay beside him. Cefwyn sat down by it, laid his arm on the leather, fingered the edges of it.

“Why,” he asked, looking up at Tristen, “
why
did Mauryl send you to me?”

“He did not send me to you, sir, not in anything he told me.”

“One forgets. The road brought you.”

“The road did, yes, m'lord.”

“Did you sleep well last night?”

“I slept, yes, m'lord.”

“Rather long, as happened.”

“Uwen says I did, sir.” There was the least edge of distress, now. “I had no knowledge of it.”

“What happened in Althalen? What did you see? Ghosts?”

“No, m'lord.” Wariness crept in. “Nothing happened.”

“You rode with the devil on your heels. You rode such a course as I've scarcely seen and none including myself could overtake. And you never having ridden. How did you manage?”

“I don't know, sir.”

“Wizardry?”

“No, sir.” The voice was faint. Respectful. Convincing, if less in the province were amiss. “I was afraid.”

Tristen had a faculty for adding the unexpected, the ridiculous, that tempted a man even in the heat of temper to burst out in laughter.

“Afraid.”

“There was something very bad there, m'lord Prince.”

“Something bad,” he echoed. A child's word. A child's look in eyes gray as a boundless sea. He refused to be turned from
anger this time. “So you broke from the company, you risked lives, you deserted me, you deserted the men guarding you, and rushed onto the road into the hands of you knew not whom, because something bad frightened you.”

“Yes, sir.”

“‘
Yes
, sir.' Say something more than ‘yes, sir,' ‘yes, m'lord,' ‘beg your grace, m'lord Prince.' These are serious matters, Tristen, and I refuse to be set aside with ‘yes, m'lord.' If I ask you, I want a full and considered answer in this matter. What frightened you? Something bad? Good living
gods
, man, credit me for good will, and tell me what you saw.”