Fortress in the Eye of Time (50 page)

“At her own prayers, my lord King. For our brother's soul. We are a pious people.”

“Horses may fly,” he said, “but I am little interested in pious Aswydds.”

He turned then, conscious of the limp that would not bear him from them with any authority. He made his departure all the same deliberate and casual, and lingered at the door for a backward look. None of them had moved. Most looked frightened, even Orien.

 

Petelly had had his fill of thistle-tops, at least for a while, and moved along with ears up as the forest shade drank up the road ahead. Tristen felt only a little shiver of apprehension, knowing that this was the place that had claimed lives of his companions, but as a woods it beckoned green and living, not like Marna, of which it might even be an outgrowth. He went cautiously on both accounts, and he had not gone far inside that shade before he saw, recent in the mud of last night's rain, the print of another horse.

He knew that Cefwyn would send men up here to bring back their dead. He knew that Heryn had claimed to have rangers in the district—as Cefwyn might have men here that he had not known about.

There were also the men who had killed Cefwyn's father. There were reasons aplenty to fear the shade ahead. He vividly recalled the arrows that had flown at him when he had ridden with Uwen, when men very near him had died; and he recalled that track of a horse that had appeared as a dark line in the grass near Raven's Knob that evening he and Cefwyn had fled from Emwy, a warning of someone besides themselves out and about the hills.

But Heryn must have sent a message to Cefwyn's father, to urge him to come to Emwy. It was even possible, he thought, that Cefwyn by going to Emwy had fallen into the trap prematurely: if Cefwyn had died there, the King would have come; all the same, to Emwy; and there—possibly—the King might have died all the same, and Efanor would have become King. That was the way he put Cefwyn's suspicions together, to explain the uneasiness he had heard between Cefwyn and his brother.

But ifs, Idrys had said to him, counted nothing. It had not happened the way Heryn wished. And Heryn would not plan anything else. Nor, he thought, had Efanor done anything to harm Cefwyn.

It did not mean, however, that the Elwynim Lord Heryn had dealt with were done with their actions.

He thought of that as he rode Petelly further and further into that green shade.

He thought of it with great urgency when, in the mud which the rain had made an unwritten sheet, he saw a man's footprint on the road, one place where someone had trod amiss, and slid on the mud, and then recovered himself and gone up onto the leaves. He looked up on the hillside where bracken hid further traces.

It might be someone from Emwy village. There were surely reasons for the villagers to be out and about the woods, pursuing their claims of lost sheep, and there were indeed signs of sheep about. But there had been a horse's track earlier, and he could not but worry about the safety of Uwen following him, along with whatever other men Uwen might have swept up. He was not concerned for himself. But Uwen
would not turn back at a sign like this: Uwen would search the more desperately, and come into trouble.

He said to himself now that he should turn back, wait on the road for Uwen and see what Uwen thought, now that he had chosen the meeting, and now that there was something else at issue besides himself. He might persuade Uwen to wait, send someone back, supposing that Uwen came with soldiers, as Cefwyn's men seemed generally to travel about the land—and if Uwen did, then he might see whether, having gained, however indirectly, the soldiers he had asked Cefwyn to give him, he could stay on the fringe of Marna a time with wise and experienced men under his orders and discover the secrets the woods had. They were important secrets, he was certain, secrets that might tell him much more about himself, and about Mauryl's intentions; he could talk to Uwen, and Uwen would scratch his head and offer Uwen's kind of sensible opinions, which were different than Emuin's, but no less thoughtful.

That was the best thing to do, he thought, and he began to turn Petelly about on the road.

But that gray place flickered across his sight, an uncertain touch like the light through leaves, like a brush of spider-silk across the nape of his neck.

He turned Petelly full circle.

A gray, shaggy figure stood among the trees, in the green light, a figure in ragged skirts, wrapping her fringed shawl closely about her. It was the old woman of Emwy. Perhaps
she
was the reason he had had to persist on this road—as he might be the reason of the old woman's coming here, into this perilous woods.

She said nothing. She turned and walked uphill through the bracken.

He touched Petelly and rode him up the gentle slope. He did not trust himself safe from harm in doing so. Nor, he thought, did she trust there was no harm to fear from him, but surely she had some purpose in coming out into this green and gold and breathless forest.

She stopped. She waited by a spring that welled up out of
the hill, where someone had placed rocks in an arch. The Sihhë star was carved on the centermost, and one stone was a carved head, while others, separately, had acorns, and bits of vines, and one, a hand. The pieces did not belong together. But they made an adornment for the fountain. Someone had brought them there, perhaps from Althalen, he thought, where there were such things.

“Auld Syes,” he said. He had not forgotten the name. “Why did you act as you did against us?”

The old woman hugged her shawl about her, bony hands clenched on the edges. Her hair was gray and trailed about her face, which was a map of years. Her mouth was clamped tight. Her eyes were as gray as his own.

“Sihhë lord,” she said in a faint, harsh voice, “Sihhë lord, who sent ye?”

“Mauryl, lady.”

She laughed, improbable as it was that such lips could ever laugh. She turned once full about, spread her arms, and her skirts and the fringes of her shawl flew like feathers in the green light. It might have made him laugh. But the feeling in the air was not laughter. It was ominous. The place tingled with it. She bent down and from among the rocks about the spring took a silver cup. She filled it, and drank, and offered the same cup up to him, on Petelly's high back.

“Drink, drink of Emwy waters, Sihhë lord. Bless the spring. Bless the woods.”

He did not think the drinking mattered so much. He took it from her, and drank the cool water. He gave it back, and the old woman was pleased, grinning and hugging herself, and he felt that tingle in the air that Mauryl's healings had made. In that moment all the weariness of the road fell away, and Petelly, who had put down his head to drink, brought his head up with a jerk and a snort, the white of his eye showing as he looked askance at the old woman and backed away with more liveliness and willing spring in his step than he had had since last night.

He quieted Petelly with an unthought shift of his knees,
and found himself brushing at that gray space again, himself and Petelly both, where white light shone, and fingers of light flowed through the old woman's fringes.

Came a child through the light, then, skipping through the gray shadow of the woods, as if a mist had moved in: in the gray place, the child moved, and yet the trees were in that place as well
.

—
Seddiwy, lamb
, the old woman said.
Show the Sihhë lord the paths ye know. Ye know where the good man is, do ye not?

—
Aye
, the little girl said,
aye, mama, I do. I can. I will. The lord ma' follow me
.

The child skipped away through the shadow-trees, playing solitary games of the sort children played
.

He was not aware of having turned downslope. But Petelly began to move. He saw nothing but a breeze going along the hillside, a light little breeze that only rustled the leaves of the trees
.

Down across the road it went, disturbing the trees on the other side
.

He did not trust children. But there seemed no harm in this one, who existed in that gray space which was no place for the innocent and the defenseless, but she had not stayed there long. She was a flutter of leaves and a skitter of pebbles on the lower slope, a little disturbance of the dust, that danced and skipped and danced.

She was a rippling on the water, a bending in the grass. A sparkle through the leaves of a stand of birches. There was not enough of her to catch. She made less stir than Auld Syes did, and that was little.

But, childlike, she did not go straight along the way. It was halfway up a hill and down again, it was in and out a thicket. Silly child, Tristen thought, and did not follow the wanderings, only the general line she took.

And now he had Emwy village on his left. But of buildings that had once stood there—he saw thatchless ruin, gray walls stained with black.

Idrys was going to fire the haystacks, Idrys had said. But there had been worse, far worse than that, done against the village. He was troubled by the sight. He would have argued with Idrys—or whoever had done this.

—
Child
, he said.
Who burned the village?

The faint presence hovered, like the movement of a dragonfly, a quivering in the shadows
.

And flitted on again, more present, and angry
.

He took Petelly along ways that might once have been roads or paths, toward the south and east behind that fluttering in the leaves—which now was not the only such. Gusts flattened grasses in long streaks. Petelly, nonetheless, snatched up a thistle or two, and a gust blew his mane and twisted it in a tangle.

Saplings bowed and shook. Three such streaks in the grass combined and a sapling bent and cracked, splintered, showing white wood.

That was more ominous. He had had no fear for himself or for Uwen in his dealing with Auld Syes, but now he began to be concerned, and wished he had gained some word of safety from the old woman, not so much for him but for anyone following him.

Crack!
went weed-stalks.
Crack!
went another sapling, and another and another, an entire stand of young birches broken halfway up their trunks.

—
Be still
, he said. It was wanton destruction. It proved nothing but bad behavior.
Be still
, he said, and wished the young child to come back again.
I have men behind me, good men. Don't trouble them. They mean you no harm. Be polite. Be good to them
.

It might have been a collection of old leaves that blew up then in the depth of a thicket, some distance away. It might have been, but he would have said it was the old woman herself. A single course of disturbance skipped toward it, a bent passage through the grass that tended this way and that way, that sported along a low spot and scuffed through the pebbles. And the ragged-skirted shape of leaves whisked
through the thicket and dissolved again, with the little one skipping on where it had been and beyond.

Still the streaks of flattened grass appeared on the hillside, intermittent and angry, and the sun declined in the sky, making the shadows long, his and Petelly's, on the grass.

But he had come into that vicinity where he had ridden with Cefwyn as they were coming away from the ambush someone had laid for them in the woods—he recognized the hills. They touched on shapes—not shapes arriving out of some unguessed recollection, as the servants said he remembered things, but out of the certainty that he had seen these hills, and he knew where he was. It was near Raven's Knob, where he had seen the tracks that led around the hill, the warning they had had of men hiding in the hills.

They were near Althalen—though nothing of that Name unfolded for him: just, it was Althalen, where he had been with Cefwyn. He thought that perhaps what guided him now was a kind of Shadow, though a simple and harmless one. He did not take her companions for simple and harmless, and did not want to deal with them after dark fell. But the guide he had sported this way and that with abandon through dry leaves and green grass, and the sun turned the greens darker and more sharp-edged with shadow as it inclined toward the hills.

—
Do you know this place?
he asked of Auld Syes, in the chance that she heard.
Cefwyn thinks I should. But what should I know? Can you say?

There was no answer.

Still, there was nothing of the smothering fear he had felt when he had ridden through it before—the very dreadful presence he had felt that night, a Shadow of some kind, maybe many of them, that would keep to the deep places at the roots of wild hedges, and the depth of arches, and creep about at night, frightening and doing such harm as they could. Mauryl had not told him how to fight against Shadows, only how to avoid them, and that was by locks and doors. He had none such here—and perhaps he was foolish for letting Syes' child become his guide.

But he did not come now to disturb the Shadows. He came only for the truth, and rode among the old stones, following his wisp of a guide, thinking of the Name, Althalen, trying to coax more pieces of relevance to come to him. But the expectation that did come to him on the wings of that Name was an expectation of pleasant gardens—the thought of halls where elegant folk moved and laughed and met, and where children played at chasing hoops and hiding from each other, much as his guide went skipping through the stones.

He rode Petelly among the mazy foundations of what had been not a fortress like Ynefel but a community of buildings scarcely fortified at all. It had never had walls. That certainty came to him with the Name of Althalen: it had been a peaceful place, never considering its defense—trusting folk. Gentle folk, perhaps.

Or powerful.

But everywhere about him now, as he had seen at the village, fire had blackened the remnant of windows and doors. He smelled smoke, as where had he not? It might be the smoke of old Althalen; or of yesterday's Emwy; or perhaps the dreadful smoke of the Zeide courtyard had clung to him and Petelly even through last night's rain—he was not certain, but he felt a loosening of his ties to the rock and stone around him, a dispossession as if something, perhaps many such things, did not accept him here, as if—smothering fear met him and just scarcely avoided him.