Chapter One
They had a panful of jam-filled treats, and tea from the
kettle, the baker’s boy being so obliging as to run a heavy
tray straight upstairs, and if they spoiled their supper, they
were satisfied. The royal table hosted the duke of Osenan
tonight, and Aewyn was ever glad enough to forage and not to
have to sit still at his father’s table, at some long-winded
state dinner. The fireside in his own room was ever so much
nicer, himself and his brother lying on the rug by a well-fed
fire, having dessert first. There were two kinds of sausage
for later, three kinds of cheese, and a crusty loaf, besides
their treats, and the tea, which they drank down by the
cupful.
They were warm again, after their battle. The wind howled
about the tall windows, sleet rattling against the diamond
panes, and they had drawn the drapes against the cold. The
fire before them made towers and battlements of coals, glowing
red walls that tumbled and sent up sparks into the dark of the
flue, which they imagined as the dark of night above the
world.
It was Aewyn’s own room, his private realm-at fifteen going on
sixteen he had gained this privacy from his father: his own
quarters, near if not next to the king’s and the queen’s
chambers, but with his own door and a separate foyer room for
his guard and a second small sleeping room for his two
constant domestic servants-they were his father’s guard and
his father’s staff, in all truth, but they were the same men
who had been attending him since he was first out and about
the halls and the courtyards on his own recognizance, so they
were as good as his.
Most of all he had his own sitting room and his own
bedchamber, and this meant Nurse had finally retired to her
own numerous children down in Dary, beyond the city walls.
And that meant he no longer had anyone to make him sit in a
chair, at a table, like a proper boy, and be served by
servants. Otter preferred the fireside, and the warm stones,
and the prince of Ylesuin found the close warmth of the fire a
thorough delight, the best place in the room. They had their
tray of food beside them, and a pitcher of watered wine-very
watered, it was-and their book, which Otter read to them
both-a record, really, of the properties and the building of
the royal lodge at Maedishill. The account had all its local
legendry, and it had maps, the most wonderful colored and
whimsically detailed maps of a place Aewyn had known from
earliest childhood.
“Here,” Aewyn said, tracing a line with his finger, “here is
the spring and its outflow. And just down from here, it joins
this larger brook.” In his mind was a wonderful place, on an
autumn day when he was about five. He had sailed leaf-barges
down the current from the spring, to see them wreck in the
great rapids of the great brook-he could stride across it
now-where the water flowed over rounded rocks. He would never,
now, admit to having sailed leaf-boats, but he cherished the
memory of them. He snatched a bite of sweet and pointed with
the stick of crust to the place where the rapids ended and the
brook ran by the lodge. “A falls there, with an old log. See,
even the log is on the map. Brother Siene drew it. I remember
him. He had a white beard down to his belt. He was caretaker
there until I was seven.”
“Why do you have a map of the lodge?”
“Well, because Brother Siene loved to do maps, and he lived
there alone most of the time, so he just did. But now anyone
who ever wants to know about Maedishill can look in this book
and see the lodge and know all its properties, and how far
they go, and where the next holding starts. It makes it a
legal record, because Brother Siene wrote a date on it, and
the library has a date when the book came here. That proves,
for instance, that it’s my father’s brook. It starts here,
where it comes out of the rocks, so he has title over it until
it reaches the boundary with the farmers, and if it had any
fish in it-it doesn’t, no matter that Brother Siene drew them
in-they would be his only until they reach the boundary.”
“The fish wouldn’t know that,” Otter remarked, so soberly
Aewyn had to laugh.
“Fish don’t know anything.”
“I don’t know if they do. Maybe they do.” Otter touched the
painted fish with his fingers, ever so carefully. “I like his
laughing fish.”
“So do I,” Aewyn said, remembering sun on water, sparkling
rays through thick green leaves. “My mother and I used to go
there for a month before Papa could get time to come, and when
he did, everything would change. Messengers, messengers at all
hours, and lords coming in for visits with dozens of servants,
all full of arguments, with papers to read, and if two came,
there wasn’t room for the second one, and there was dust all
over every-thing if there wasn’t mud, just from the horses.
They’d trample the grass down and spoil the meadow, they’d get
drunk in the great room, and their sons would be out chasing
the rabbits and trying to shoot them. Mother had the duke of
Marisyn’s sons and his servants rounded up by her guard, and
Papa-my father-said if he had his choice, he was going to run
away to Far Sassury and not tell anybody where he was going.
But the next year, the grass would be green again and the
brook would have its moss back, and it would be just us, until
Papa came.”
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Fortress of Ice
by C. J. Cherryh
Copyright © 2006 by C. J. Cherryh .
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Eos
Copyright © 2006
C. J. Cherryh
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-380-97904-7
