Fortress of Owls Read online

  C. J.

  CHERRYH

  FORTRESS

  OF

  OWLS

  To my editor, Caitlin,

  whose belief in this story carried it to print—

  To Jane,

  who patiently read and remarked,

  version after version—

  And to Beverly,

  who complied the constantly growing lexicon out of all these pages—

  Thank you

  Contents

  Map of Ylesuin

  vii

  The Zeide

  viii

  Lexicon

  533

  Prologue

  There is magic

  1

  BOOK ONE

  19

  Chapter 1

  Master Emuin had packed in a…

  21

  Chapter 2

  Gods!” Crissand said in dismay…

  61

  Chapter 3

  The herald trumpets faded…

  80

  Chapter 4

  Servants set out supper, prepared…

  99

  Chapter 5

  Yes, m’lord,” was the word from…

  122

  Chapter 6

  Cefwyn’s head hurt, where the…

  151

  Chapter 7

  There was no miraculous word…

  189

  INTERLUDE

  In the old scriptorium that served…

  199

  BOOK TWO

  207

  Chapter 1

  Two lords of Ylesuin rode out…

  209

  Chapter 2

  There were indeed mostly women…

  231

  Chapter 3

  To the royal desk came all the…

  246

  Chapter 4

  In the morning was time enough to…

  271

  Chapter 5

  Efanor’s letter had gone out.

  283

  Chapter 6

  The baskets had disappeared…

  301

  Chapter 7

  The senior clerk came to the ducal…

  316

  Chapter 8

  A letter from Tristen and a letter…

  343

  Chapter 9

  The wind blew and blew in the…

  364

  INTERLUDE

  Stitch and stitch, pearls and more…

  405

  BOOK THREE

  413

  Chapter 1

  Sergeant Gedd was back from…

  415

  Chapter 2

  Tailors and purveyors of costly…

  443

  Chapter 3

  The doors in Henas’amef were…

  458

  Chapter 4

  The morning of Midwinter Eve…

  473

  Chapter 5

  The lords had eaten and drunk…

  493

  Chapter 6

  The smell of burning might be only…

  517

  Chapter 7

  To Tristen’s distress the weather…

  524

  About the Author

  550

  Books by C. J. Cherryh

  551

  Credits

  552

  Cover

  Copyright

  553

  About the Publisher

  554

  Ylesuin

  The Zeide

  PROLOGUE

  There is magic.

  There is wizardry.

  There is sorcery.

  They are not now, nor were then, the same.

  Nine hundred years in the past, in a tower, in a place called Galasien, a prince named Hasufin Heltain had an inordinate fear of death. That fear led him from honest study of wizardry to the darker practice of sorcery.

  His teacher in the craft, Mauryl Gestaurien, seeing his student about to outstrip his knowledge in a forbidden direction, brought allies from the fabled northland, allies whose magic was not taught, but innate. These were the five Sihhë-lords.

  In the storm of conflict that followed, not only Hasufin perished, but also ancient Galasien and all its works. Of all that city, only the tower in which Mauryl stood survived.

  Ynefel, for so later generations named the tower, became a haunted place, isolated within Marna Wood, its walls holding intact the horrified faces of lost Galasien’s people. The old tower was Mauryl’s point of power, and so he remained bound to it through passing centuries, though he sometimes intervened in the struggles that followed.

  The Sihhë took on themselves the task of ruling the southern lands—not the Galasieni, whose fate was bound 2 / C. J. CHERRYH

  up with Ynefel, but other newcomers, notably the race of Men, who themselves had crept down from the north. The Sihhë swept across the land, subduing and building, conquering and changing all that the Galasieni had made, creating new authorities and powers to reward their subordinates.

  The five true Sihhë lived long, after the nature of their kind, and they left a thin presence of halfling descendants among Men before their passing. The kingdom of Men rapidly spread and populated the lands nearest Ynefel, with that halfling dynasty ruling from the Sihhë hall at unwalled Althalen.

  Unchallenged lord of Ynefel’s haunted tower, Mauryl continued in a life by now drawn thin and long, whether by wizardry or by nature: he had now outlasted even the long-lived Sihhë, and watched changes and ominous shifts of power as the blood and the innate Sihhë magic alike ran thinner and thinner in the line of halfling High Kings.

  For of all the old powers, Shadows lingered, and haunted certain places in the land. And one of them was Hasufin Heltain.

  One day, in the Sihhë capital, within the tributary kingdom of Amefel, in the rule of the halfling Elfwyn Sihhë, a queen gave birth to a stillborn babe. The queen was in mourning—but that mourning gave way to joy when the babe miraculously drew breath and lived, warmed, as she thought, by magic and a mother’s love.

  To the queen it was a wonderful gift. But that second life was not the first life. It was not the mother’s innate Sihhë magic, but darkest sorcery that had brought breath into the child—for what lived in the babe was a soul neither Sihhë nor Man: it was Hasufin Heltain, in his second bid for life and power.

  Now Hasufin nestled in the heart of the Sihhë aris FORTRESS OF OWLS / 3

  tocracy, still a child, at a time when Mauryl, who might have known him, was shut away in his tower in seclusion, rarely venturing as far as Althalen, for he was finally showing the weakness of the ages Hasufin had not lived.

  Other children of the royal house died mysteriously as that fey, ingratiating child grew stronger. Now alarmed, warned by his arts, full of fury and advice, Mauryl came to court to confront the danger. But the queen would not hear a wizard’s warning, far less dispose of a son of the house, her favorite, her dearest and most magical darling, who now and by the deaths of all elder princes was near the throne.

  The day that child should attain his majority, and the hour he should rule, Mauryl warned them, the house and the dynasty would perish. But even that plain warning failed to persuade the queen, and the king took his grieving queen’s side, refusing Mauryl’s unthinkable demands to delve into the boy’s nature and destroy their own son.

  In desperation and foreseeing ruin, Mauryl turned not to the halfling Sihhë of the court, but to the Men who served them. He conspired with Selwyn Marhanen, the warlord, the Sihhës trusted general, and encouraged Selwyn and other Men to bring down the halfling dynasty and take the throne for themselves.

  In that fashion Mauryl betrayed the descendants of the very lords he had raised up to prevent Hasufin’s sorc
ery.

  Hence they called Mauryl both Kingmaker, and Kingsbane And with the help of Men and with wizards drawn from all across the kingdom, Mauryl seized the chance, insinuating both the Marhanen and his men and a band of wizards into the royal palace. Then Mauryl

  4 / C. J. CHERRYH

  and his circle held magic at bay while a younger wizard, Emuin, killed the sleeping prince in his chambers—a terrible and bloody deed, and only the first of bloodshed that night.

  Destroying Hasufin, however, was the limit of Mauryl’s interest in the matter. The fate of the Sihhë in the hands of Selwyn and his men, even the fate of the wizards who had aided him, was beyond his reach, and Mauryl again retreated to his tower, weary and sick with age. Young Emuin took holy orders, seeking to forget his deed and find some salvation for himself as a Man and a cleric.

  Given this opportunity, Selwyn’s own ambition and Men’s fear of magic they did not wield led them to rise in earnest against Sihhë rule: province after province fell to the Marhanen.

  The district of Elwynor across the river from Althalen, however, though populated with Men, attempted to remain loyal to the Sihhë-lords, and raised an army to bring against the Marhanen, but dissent and claims and counterclaims of kingship within Elwynor precluded that army from ever taking the field. The Marhanen thus were able to take the entire tributary kingdom of Amefel, in which the capital of Althalen had stood, and treat it as a tributary province.

  But rather than rule from Althalen, remote from the heart of his power, and equally claimed by all the lords of Men, Selwyn Marhanen established a capital in the center of his home territory, declared himself king, and by cleverness and ruthlessness set his own allies under his heel, creating them as barons of a new court.

  From the new capital at Guelemara, Selwyn dominated all the provinces southward. He and his subjects, mostly Guelenfolk and Ryssandish, were true Men, with no gift for wizardry and no love of it either, lean

  FORTRESS OF OWLS / 5

  ing rather to priests of the Quinalt and Teranthine sects. Selwyn raised a great shrine next his palace, the Quinaltine, and favored the Quinalt Patriarch, who set a religious seal on all his acts of domination.

  Of all Men loyal to the Sihhë, only the Elwynim held their border against the Guelenmen…for that border was on the one hand a broad river, the Lenúalim, and on the other, the haunted precincts of Marna Wood, near the old tower.

  So the matter settled…save only the question of Amefel, the province on the Guelen-held side of the Lenúalim River: Selwyn’s hope of holding his lands firm against the Elwynim rested on not allowing an Elwynim presence on that side of the river. So holding Amefel was essential.

  Now the history of Amefel was this: Amefel had been an independent kingdom of Men when the first Sihhë-lords walked up to its walls and demanded entry. The kings of Amefel, the Aswyddim, had flung open their gates and helped the Sihhë in their mission to conquer Guelessar, a fact no Guelen and no Guelen king could quite forget. In return for this treachery, the local Aswydd house had enjoyed a unique status under the Sihhë authority, and always styled themselves as kings, as opposed to High Kings, the title the Sihhë reserved for themselves alone.

  Having conquered the province, but fearing utter collapse of his uneasily joined kingdom if he became embroiled in a dispute with the Aswydds over their prerogatives, Selwyn Marhanen accorded the Aswydds guarantees of many of their ancient rights, including their religion, and including their titles. So while the Aswydds became vassals of the king of Ylesuin, and were called dukes, they were styled aethelings, that is to say, royal, within their own province of Amefel. This purposely left aside the question of whether the other earls of Amefel 6 / C. J. CHERRYH

  bore rank equivalent to the dukes of Guelen and Ryssandish lands. Since Amefin and Guelenfolk generally avoided appearing in one another’s courts, the question remained tacit and unresolved.

  Selwyn thus had Amefel; but the opposing district of Elwynor formed a region almost as large as Ylesuin was with Amefel attached; and its independency from Ylesuin over that first winter had given Elwynor’s lords time to gather forces. By the next spring, with Selwyn in Amefel, the river Lenúalim had become the tacitly unquestioned border. To secure Elwynor as part of Ylesuin remained Selwyn’s unfulfilled dream to his dying day.

  The Elwynim meanwhile, having declared a Regency in place of the lost High King at Althalen, were ruled not by a king, but by one of their earls, himself with a glimmering of Sihhë blood, who styled himself Lord Regent. The people of Elwynor took it on stubborn faith that not all the royal house of the Sihhë-lords had perished, that within their lifetimes a new Sihhë-lord, the one they called the King To Come, some surviving prince, would emerge from hiding to overthrow the Marhanen and reestablish the Sihhë kingdom. This time the kingdom would have faithful Elwynor at its heart, and all the loyal subjects would live in peace and Sihhë-blessed prosperity in a new golden age.

  The Elwynim, therefore, cherished magic and prized the wizard-gift. But outside the Lord Regent’s line there were far too few who could practice wizardry in any degree. Certainly no one possessed such magic as the Sihhë had used, and there were few enough wizards who would even speak of the King To Come…for the wizards of this age had had firsthand experience of Hasufin Heltain, and they remained aloof from the various lords of the Elwynim who

  FORTRESS OF OWLS / 7

  wished to employ them. Those few who had any Sihhë blood whatsoever were likewise reticent, for fear of becoming the center of some rising that could only end in disaster.

  So the Elwynim, deserted by their wizards and by those who did carry the blood, became too little wary of magic and those who promised it…and still the years passed into decades without a credible claimant in Elwynor.

  Selwyn died. Ylesuin’s rule passed to Selwyn’s son Ináreddrin…and this, after Ináreddrin was a middleaged man with two previous marriages and two grown sons.

  Now Ináreddrin was Guelen to the core, which meant devoutly, blindly Quinalt—his mother’s influence. As prince, he had no love of his uncivil warlord father, but a great deal of fear of him.

  He grew up with no tolerance for other faiths, despite the exigencies of the Amefin treaty. He lost patience with his wild eldest son, Cefwyn, for Cefwyn took his grandfather’s example and clung to the Teranthine tutor, Emuin (that same Emuin who had aided Mauryl at Althalen), whom Selwyn had appointed royal tutor for his grandsons.

  This was no accident: Selwyn as a reigning king had found priests and the Quinalt a convenient resource, and to that end he had supported them—they kept the Guelenfolk obedient. But to safeguard his kingdom for the years to come, and with at least some fear of what he had faced at Althalen, Selwyn had wanted his grandsons never to dread priests or wizards—rather to understand them, and to have one of the best on their side.

  This was a source of bitter argument within the royal house: the queen died, Ináreddrin grew more alienated from his father, and the very year Selwyn

  8 / C. J. CHERRYH

  died and Ináreddrin became king, Ináreddrin persuaded his younger son Efanor into the strictest Quinalt faith—lavishing on him all the affection he denied the elder son.

  So did the highest barons, notably of the provinces of Ryssand and Murandys, favor Efanor, and there was talk of overturning the succession—for the more Efanor became religious, the more Cefwyn, the crown prince and heir, consoled himself with wild escapades, sorties on the border, and women…very many women.

  Still, by Guelen law and custom, even by the tenets of the Quinalt itself, Cefwyn was, incontrovertibly, the heir.

  So Ináreddrin, either in hopes that administrative responsibility would temper Cefwyn—or, it was whispered, in hopes some assassin or border skirmish would make Efanor his heir—sent Cefwyn to administer the Amefin garrison with the courtesy title of viceroy, thus keeping a firmer Marhanen hand on that curiously independent province.

  Now, ordinarily and by the treaty, there was no su
ch thing as a viceroy in Amefel, and the duke of Amefel, Heryn Aswydd, was not at all pleased by this gesture…but Heryn kept his discontent to himself, even agreeing to report to Ináreddrin regarding the prince’s behavior, and on the worsening situation across the river—for there was a reason Ináreddrin had felt a need for a firmer Guelen presence in Amefel. The Regent in Elwynor had no children but a daughter of his old age. The lords of Elwynor, weary of waiting for the appearance of a High King, were now saying the Regent should choose one of them to be king, as he was advanced in years…and the only way for one earl to gain any legitimate connection with royalty was by marrying the Lord Regent’s daughter.

  The Regent, Uleman Syrillas, refused all offers, FORTRESS OF OWLS / 9

  swearing that his only child, his daughter Ninévrisë, would wield the power of Regent herself…unprecedented, among the Elwynim and the Sihhë kings, that a woman should rule in her own right.

  But Uleman had prepared his daughter to rule…and when the day came that a suitor tried to enforce his demands with arms and carry Ninévrisë away, the Regent refused to bow.

  Elwynor sank into civil war…and that war insinuated itself across the river into Amefel: there were families with kin on both sides of the river.

  So it was into this situation that Ináreddrin sent Prince Cefwyn to strengthen the garrison.

  And it was entirely characteristic of Ináreddrin that he told Heryn he was to watch Cefwyn and told Cefwyn to watch Heryn, who was, after all, a heretic Bryaltine.

  Unbeknownst to the king, in fact, Duke Heryn was in league with one of the rebel earls in Elwynor.

  Others of the Elwynim rebels, those who lacked force of arms, were keen to have wizardly sanction.

  And Hasufin Heltain, once again dead, as Men knew death, was waiting only for such a moment of crisis and a condition in the stars. Through the situation in Elwynor, that ancient spirit found his way closer and closer to life.

  Mauryl, however, had foreseen the hour, and had saved his strength for one grand, unprecedented spell, a Summoning and a Shaping, a revenant brought forth from the fire of Mauryl’s hearth—not a perfect effort, however, nor mature nor threatening. To Mauryl’s distress the young man thus Summoned lacked all memory of what or who he had been.