Gods, could it be wizardry? If some wizard joined Tasmôrden, there would be the devil of a war.
The candleflames in the sconces swayed: a door closed in the privy chamber. His Holiness had come in.
186 / C. J. CHERRYH
Damn, again. The Quinalt roof was far from his concern, balanced against this news; and yet it was the point of attack—and correctly so. Everything depended on a few scorched roof slates. Tristen’s safety was at issue because of it. Ninévrisë’s safety was. A charge of sorcery attached to his dearest, his most loyal, his most intimate friends…might be sorcery indeed. But not Tristen’s. And it was at least possible it was no more than ill-timed chance.
“Set a watch on Tristen,” he said, very quietly, and walked from behind the sheltering tapestry into the dim chamber. He settled himself on the cushionless, cold chair, and the guard brought in two candles, in a room tapestried in the deeds of the Marhanen, the murder of the Sihhë, the raising of the Quinalt shrine, the battle against the Elwynim. The predominant color was red, Marhanen red, the red of blood, red of fire, red of royal power.
For two pennies and a breath of breeze tonight he would order the walls stripped and the tapestries added to the year-fire, His Holiness, his roof, and Tasmôrden across the river be damned together.
Perhaps he should be such a king as his grandfather had been. A judicious murder or two, friends protected, and his enemies, even clergy, not allowed to leave this room alive—no tales whispered by servants either. He looked sullenly at the Patriarch’s pale presence in the dim light, with Efanor, like him, in Marhanen red, just behind, and wondered how the Patriarch had dealt with his grandfather and survived…for this had been his grandfather’s priest, raised, with his entire sect, to primacy in his father’s reign.
“This fatal penny.” he said, before the Patriarch could open his mouth. “This attack on the harvest festival, and on the welfare of the realm, and on me,
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Holy Father, I find disturbing; I agree that it may be sorcerous, but not from my hand, not from the Lord Warden’s hand, not from any friendly hand. I call on Your Holiness to uphold me in this matter. I trust Your Holiness will adhere to me as you adhered to my father, as faithfully, as staunch in defense.”
“Your late father, gods give him rest, upheld the Quinalt, and did not accept a breath of witchery in his court.”
“Nor I! Dare you say so?”
The Patriarch, being a canny old man, was not set back, however lightning-rattled. “I say that wickedness is afoot and it will seek out the unwary, Your Majesty. It will find doors. It will insinuate itself at any opportunity. It was lately potent in Amefel.”
“It was lately potent beyond Amefel,”
“In Elwynor!”
“By news just now arrived, we may spend a winter knowing Tasmôrden sits in Ilefínian killing every man who favors Her Grace’s cause, and if you would surmise where we might look for sorcery, let me remind Your Holiness sorcery killed my lady’s father, killed her loyal men, and made her an exile in this court. If I had had a little less discourse on the height of my seat and the colors of the hangings for harvesttide, if I had had my reliable reckonings out of the villages faster, and not bungled beyond all redemption, if we had had the enthusiasm of the Quinalt behind this war, we might have done something to prevent this disaster that now confronts us. Sorcery, aye, sorcery—”
“The coin—”
“Did we search every purse? I think not, Holy Father. But I know that Lord Tristen’s gift was pure! I 188 / C. J. CHERRYH
gave him the coin myself, since he had none, Holy Father. I gave him a purse of good Guelen pennies, and such as he had, he gave to you. Wherein some traitor to me in Guelemara attempted to foment disharmony at this hinge point of the year, or whether the enemy of Her Grace had a hand in it, in such dire news from across the river, I hold the action on the one hand impious and hostile sorcery, and on the other hand treasonous, Holy Father!”
He ran out of wind and words alike and lost the thread of his thought altogether. He had heard his father’s rages at his advisers and as those went, this one had its effect; but temper passed beyond policy and overwhelmed his reason. There was utter silence, as his brother and the Patriarch alike sifted through that spate for pebbles safe to pick up. A candle spat.
It was that deep a hush.
Two deep breaths forewarned the Patriarch’s intent to speak.
“I assure Your Majesty, we are fully in agreement on sorcery, but the Lord of Ynefel is not willingly Quinalt, however noble Your Highness’s effort.” This last with a nod to Efanor.
“He is no further from us than Bryaltine,” Cefwyn said, straining at the truth, which was that Tristen knew less of any of the three faiths than he did of pig-keeping.
“But a Sihhë soul,” the Patriarch said, “if he has a soul. Which is to debate…”
“If he had not a soul, how could a wizard have gotten him out of death? What did Mauryl bring back to this world, if not a soul?”
“He said the devotions,” Efanor ventured, bending all those years of priestly study, arguing with the Holy Father on Tristen’s behalf: it was a gallant effort, and Cefwyn drew a breath of gratitude.
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“Yet,” the Patriarch said, “sorcery gained power with that coin—”
“Bother the coin!” He gathered up the scraps of his eloquence.
“Your Holiness, the Quinalt is our strength, our reliance, and to make a breach between Crown and Quinalt, who would benefit? I don’t doubt that one might have ridden the other, but it was not Tristen. Look to Elwynor!”
“Yet…” The old man trembled, wobbled, and still, the adder, attacked: “Yet…to bring that banner into the shrine…Your Majesty, we may see the worth in the Lord Warden, but the Lord Warden is not even a man in the sense that Men are Men, and to bring those symbols, charged with sorcery, into the very shrine…I did fear, and objected, if Your Majesty will recall.
Therefore, our defenses were breached.”
“Nonsense!—Forgive me, Holy Father, but nonsense! A good Guelen lady stitched that banner, as you name it. It did not come from Ynefel, not a stitch that the Lord Warden owns came from Ynefel, no medals, medallions, coins, cantrips, nor spells that Your Holiness ever detected or complained of, which Your Holiness can as well say in public quickly and in that hall, if Your Holiness has any care of my goodwill.”
“Yet…” the Patriarch said.
“Yet.” He recovered breath and composure. This was not a religious man. This was a man of temporal power, affrighted by the manifestation of nature, a man frightened into belief in his own predecessors’ creation in these hours of darkness and lightning strokes.
“The Star and Tower are not benign, lord king. There will be talk.”
“Which you can quell at will, Your Holiness.”
“The Crown and the Quinalt must stand together 190 / C. J. CHERRYH
against sorcery, Your Majesty. But that banner cannot be sanctified. I feared no good would come of it. The gods themselves failed to sustain he roof.”
The hell with the roof, he wanted to say, and glared, but dared not. That was the thing: he dared not. There were limits which neither he nor the Patriarch had yet searched out with each other. He only prayed for the pragmatic man to rise to reason with him, the old man he knew.
But that old man had heard the report out of Amefel, and gods forfend he believed his own sermons, to think he and the gods of his sermons could match the real, rolling darkness on Lewen field.
“This is a sign,” the Patriarch said. “Very clearly a sign. Your Majesty, I stood beneath that roof. I heard the strike! My ears still ring with it! The people in the square, sheltering from the rain, they all fled in terror. What will they say around about the town?”
“What the Quinalt bids them say,” he said angrily. Gods forfend, too, that the old man should take to faith in his own gods at this pass. “The Quinalt ca
n mend this rumormongering.”
“Not against this, Your Majesty. We cannot lie to the people.
We cannot ignore sorcery! We cannot shelter it, or permit it in the sacred precinct. I cannot countenance it.”
“Are you telling me, Holy Father, that you will bar the Lord Warden, in my court, from your door?”
“I beg Your Highness not test the gods.”
“This is treason, Holy Father. Look out, or you will discover my grandfather in me. Do not dare to tell me…”
“Brother.” There was starkest fear in Efanor’s face. “I beg you. Is this what you wish? Dare we have this FORTRESS OF EAGLES / 191
division? I was not at Lewen field. I had not that honor. But I heard the reports, Holy Father. I know that the Lord Warden helped overcome sorcery.”
“With sorcery,” the Patriarch said hoarsely. “Sorcery with sorcery, that is the point, lord king. You wish me to bless this marriage, you wish me to say grace over a union with the Lady Regent, which while unorthodox offers a hope of the gods’
grace over the far shore, but in the Lord Warden you have an association I fear owes more to Teranthine advice than mine.—We are willing to bless this union, Your Majesty, do not mistake me!”
The last was just in time. He had drawn breath to reply.
“—And shall,” the Patriarch hastened to say, all but choking on the words. “And shall, with all our good offices. Your Majesty. But how much of the strange and sorcerous will you ask good folk to countenance? Where shall we draw the line,
—but at Assurnbrook, as we have always drawn it? You say that I can prevent the gossip. What shall we do? Fly to every house, of every common man who ran from the public square tonight as bits of the roof came down, and bid the commons not say a Sihhë presence cursed us? How shall I say, in all observances, ‘bless the king and his court’ when one of that court is Sihhë? How shall I say, ‘strike down the unbeliever’
when he sits in the congregation? How shall I say, ‘the cursed signs and symbols be far from your houses’ when that banner stands in brazen contradiction?”
His Holiness had named the real argument when he had said, more Teranthine than my advice. There was the old fox he knew. There was the old man’s concern: Emuin’s influence with the new king. Now they were down to realities.
192 / C. J. CHERRYH
“Your liturgy is no older than my grandfather. Change the words.”
“Your Majesty cannot ask that!”
“If Your Holiness wants his roof patched, change the damned words!”
“This is an unseemly discussion!”
“This is a royal order. A command of the Crown. Dare you deny me? I say Tristen is an ally, Tristen is our friend, and a defender of this realm. Do not attempt my patience, Holy Father. Do not dare do it. He stands where Ynefel has always stood, and I would recommend Your Holiness not tamper with that bulwark.”
“I say I cannot prevent the gossip, Your Majesty! I say no one can call back the lightning bolt, undo what eyes have seen in the square tonight, or on Lewen field. There will be disaster.
Mark me, if there is one stain, one taint, now…what if it taint the marriage?”
The old fox, Cefwyn said to himself, seeing the look in the old man’s eyes. The malevolent old fox. The man who had damned near reigned during his father’s reign, and the last years of his grandfather’s, at least where peace in the realm was the issue. He was well capable of having dropped that coin in, himself, even after the lightning stroke. He was a dangerous man. He had always been a dangerous man, snuggling right up next Marhanen warmth, looking for advantage from the Marhanen, most chancy in allegiance, seeing he had, now, a hostage.
Ninévrisë. The wedding.
Oh, this was a fit adviser for his grandfather.
Dared he think… dared he suspect that this priest had always ruled the rulers, by seizing upon and increasing their fears—fears of ghosts, in his grandfather; fears of his own heir in his father, driving the
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wedge between father and son, brother and brother?
The thought came on him like the levin stroke next door, stopped his breath and robbed him of clear thought. He had hated Aséyneddin, who had slaughtered men of his, but that was war. He had not been fond of the assassins whose heads had graced the fortress gate in Henas’amef, but that was political, and they had been Aséyneddin’s men, following a lord’s orders. He had hated Sulriggan, and Heryn Aswydd.
But had this poisonous man been the author of his father’s fear of him, setting him away from him, always, always at arm’s length, so that Ináreddrin had preferred Efanor to his dying breath?
He looked at his hands, resting joined across his belt, studied the sword scars on his knuckle, the lesson he would not learn, no matter how many times master Peygan had whacked right past his guard with exactly the same move.
He had learned. He needed no one these days to hit him three and four times. He looked up at His Holiness, —smiled his grandfather’s smile, and saw his brother blanch and the Holy Father’s jaw set.
Did he need the Holy Father? The Holy Father might hold his fiefdom from the gods, but he needed the blessing of the Marhanen king as much as the king needed the Quinalt’s.
But later? After the wedding?
“A narrow path,” he said, “a narrow path, Your Holiness, royal disfavor on one side, in which, who knows, I might find a new Patriarch and Your Holiness might suffer a fatal indigestion. Consider your path: royal disfavor on the one hand and a wakening of the Old Magic on the other. Sorcery, you fear—so say I, and I tell you, I will have myself a new priest before I suffer
194 / C. J. CHERRYH
any discommodation in my marriage, in this campaign, in the installation of Her Grace as Regent of Elwynor.”
The Holy Father’s face had gone stark and pale as ivory. A vein throbbed in his temple. The thunder still rumbled overhead.
“Your Majesty is close to blasphemy.”
“Dare I suggest, Your Holiness, that Your Holiness has seized marvelously on opportunity tonight. I daresay some priest would confess, if questioned stringently, and, oh, I would not stick at that to get that confession, never doubt me. Such a man would swear that Your Holiness bade him obtain a Sihhë coin among the small practitioners of magics that still flourish, yes, even in Guelessar, even in the heart of Quinalt piety. I know I could find such a man and his tale would be whatever I wish.
The lightning was only opportune.”
“Brother,” Efanor said, overwhelmed, “for the good gods…”
“Oh, let us not couple good and gods in this priest’s company. His Holiness would create a breach between himself and me only if he were an utter fool—which he is not. Being no fool, nor dealing with one, he will bless the wedding and make very certain there are no ill omens or offending liturgy in the ceremony. He has overreached himself, coming perilously close to extinction. Let us see if we can arrive at a definition of our positions, we two, tonight. Now.”
“I advised two kings, most gracious Majesty, I counseled your grandfather and your father. I advise you now for your good, that the Quinalt can find exception for everything you ask. Everything but one. Nor can I unsay what is being said in half the houses in Guelemara tonight. If Your Majesty wishes not to see a breach between Quinalt and Crown, let him not place
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the Quinaltine at odds with him! The northern barons are in doubt of this marriage. The Quinaltine, on Your Majesty’s part, would stand firmly with Your Majesty, but cannot do so with the presence of that banner and such allies!”
“I shall value Your Holiness’s view,” Cefwyn said, coldly purposeful as the old man was purposeful in every well-prepared word. “Her Grace has a strong right to inherit of her father the Regent, and now this new Usurper is advancing on her capital…with wizardous assistance, Holy Father. Threatening all of us. As witness your roof. Tristen it was who came to us with the first wa
rning of sorcery, Mauryl’s heir, and would I had understood that warning earlier than I did, but I suggest if Your Holiness can muster the where-withal to turn sorcery from the Quinalt roof, Your Holiness should consider doing so quite urgently. Even so great a wizard as Mauryl Gestaurien did not withstand what assailed us at Lewenbrook and could not safeguard his tower from destruction or his own life from extinction. Dare you take up the battle—without the Warden of Ynefel?”
“The prayers of the righteous are not to be despised.”
“Excellent. Pray away and keep a supply of roof tiles. Meanwhile we stand a chance of settling the Elwynim succession in a lasting peace, gods send us common sense. As Mauryl’s heir, Tristen opposed hostile sorcery by force of arms on Lewen field. And did Your Holiness wish to hear us who were on Lewen field, I do strongly believe that we are appointed one vital chance, by Mauryl’s defense, and that the gods have guided us to this marriage, these unlikely allies—”
“Do not lesson us on the gods, Your Majesty!”
196 / C. J. CHERRYH
“Do not lesson me on policy! Sorcery has bent all its strength to prevent this marriage!”
“To gain this marriage, equally well!”
“Oh, no, no, no, you dare not say so much, Holy Father. I assure you, you dare not say so much. I was there, Holy Father.
Sorcery threw the rebel Aseynéddin at us, at Lewenbrook. That failed. Now it advances on Ilefínian through Tasmôrden’s attack; and if that lightning bolt that descended on your roof is sorcery, then the prayers of the righteous did damned little to prevent it. Sorcery tried once to overthrow us. It tries to cast misfortune in the path of a marriage it does not want, Holy Father, and if there was by any remote chance some sorcerous transformation of a good Guelen penny, I suggest sorcery did so precisely to discredit the heir of the Warden of Ynefel, who has fought against an enemy that—by the gods!—I shall send you to face in his stead, if you wish to replace Ynefel in the battle line. How say you to that, Holy Father? Dare you?”