Tristan 04] - Fortress Of Dragons

Author:CJ Cherryh [Tristan 04]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

“Summat warm to drink,” Gran Sedlyn wished, whether for herself or for her charge was unsure. Paisi hovered over his gran, and Cook was there, summoned by the abbot, so she said, but little needed now as a midwife: Cook had made sweet tea, and brought it, but Tarien turned her face away angrily and swore she could take no such thing, even as that real scent chased the beloved, remembered scent away. Her spell was broken. She suffered loss again. Women bedeviled her, her sister, Gran, Cook: they hovered and chided and would not let her lie alone in her grief.

It was women’s magic. He felt the soothing influence in the gray space; but elsewhere, at the limits of his awareness, Orien Aswydd raged in her new confinement, full of violence, trying desperately to have Tarien’s attention, and attacking her guards.

He feared for Uwen—acutely, in that instant. He cast Emuin only a glance.

“Orien’s threatened Uwen.”

“Go,” Emuin said, and he left matters in the apartment to Emuin’s care and went out, almost without a guard, for the ones at the door had no orders regarding him and the ones guarding him had all gone downstairs with Uwen.

The wards lower down rang to Orien’s efforts. They had shut her behind an iron door and it did nothing to prevent her curses. He ran to the end of the hall, sped down the west stairs and down and down to the guardroom steps, where Uwen was.

Safe, he was glad to see, but not for any of Orien’s wishing.

“There’s an unhappy woman,” Uwen said with a jerk of his thumb toward the closed door.

“She’s done all she can to breach the wards,” Tristen said, and went down himself, and laid a firm binding on the door and all about.

Within, Orien flung herself at the door and hammered at it with her fists, cursed him and raged at the barrier until her voice cracked.

But she would not get out and no Shadow would get in. Tristen turned and looked at the corners of the small nook where the guardhouse stairs came down, at the dark places beyond the smoking tallow candles.

Reeking of death and slaughter, Emuin had said in rejecting such candles, and reek they did. This entire stairwell did. The Aswydds had made this a place of pain, and so it was now: Shadows lurked in the seams of the stone and in the nooks beyond the light—murdered Elwynim, some; malefactors, murderers, thieves, and traitors the innocent and the guilty and the unfortunate: all the pain suffered in this place, all the lives that had ended in this small room.

—Be free, he said to some, and others he bound, for it Unfolded to him how to do that, as he had not known when he was confined here himself. She might have rallied such Shadows. He removed them from her reach.

Then the place was quieter, save only Orien Aswydd’s hoarse shrieks and occasional and faltering strikes at the door.

Last of all he felt

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