Текст книги "Fortress of Ice"

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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Текущая страница: 30 (всего у книги 32 страниц)

“Horses,” Cefwyn said. “Horses, Crissand! Now!”

iii

THE WIND HAD LET THEM GO AGAIN, AND THEIR FEET HAD FOUND THE GROUND, the two of them clinging together by both hands, refusing to be parted– separately, Elfwyn thought, they would be carried who knew where, but they were down again, standing next to other stonework, next to a wall that broke the wind.

A cliff dropped away at their feet, and the river lay below them, all frozen, in the strange storm light, and a great bridge spanned it.

“Everything is mad,” Elfwyn said. “I don’t know what to do. We aren’t at Lewen Field any longer, I think.”

“That is certainly the Lenúalim,” Aewyn said, his voice ragged with cold. “That’s the bridge. We’ve come to the border, is where we are.” The wind began to blow again, and the fog came with it, a chill that reached the soul. “Don’t let us move, Otter! Stop us!”

Elfwyn had had enough of being swept here and there. He attempted to set his feet on the earth and defy what came down on them, but Aewyn seized hold of the rock face itself and dragged Elfwyn to him with one strong arm, refusing to budge. “Hold to the rock,” Aewyn shouted into his ear. “Don’t let it blow us away again!”

He tried to hold on. But the fog came around them—around him, bone-deep and cold.

“Lord Tristen!” he cried.

All around them, shadows moved, some soldiers, some not, some mere wisps without faces. He knew only one thing for real, which was his brother’s warm grip on his hand, as if Aewyn alone held them.

“Lord Tristen!” he whispered, and had a sense of direction for the moment, as if the man he sought lay somewhere behind them, far distant. “We’re here,” he tried to say, but made only a raven’s creak.

“Don’t leave,” Aewyn implored him, jerking at his arm. “Otter, stay here, stay with me. Hold on!”

“I’m in a place,” he said in a thread of a voice. “I’m in a place without ground under me. I see shadows. And there’s something beside us. There is.”

“Don’t go,” his brother said. “I’m not going again, Otter! I shan’t go, so you have to stop.”

Someone was in the mist, something quick, and stealthy and powerful, and he reached out for it, thinking it was Tristen, and in the next beat of his heart knowing it was different… like Mouse with the crumb, he shied off and would not take it. He became Mouse, and slipped back again, became Otter, and dived deep, and slipped away in the currents of that place…

Something was hunting, something with a presence as quick as lightning: it followed him, and he dived and spun and dived deep, quicker still, and slippery as his namesake, playing the game; but this, he knew, heart thumping hard, was no game.

He treated it as one. He was Otter. He could lead the hunter indefinitely– he slid, and rose, and dived down again, hunter and prey at once. He evaded traps. He spun his own. He laughed, a wicked laugh—don’t get too wise, Paisi would chide him, but he knew what he did. He led the hunter farther and farther. He might be lost, but so was the one chasing him. Aewyn couldn’t find him—his brother, his anchor in the world, was utterly confused, because he relied on a world in which one place connected logically to another, in which moments followed moments and roads led where they had always led…

Not when Otter played. He baffled the hunter. He was smug with his triumph when he surfaced—shook off the fog that he had learned to use and found himself just where he had been, with Aewyn holding on to him.

The places were connected, he thought. One place led to another– the house to Marna, then to the old battlefield, to the river… but why did this place lead to that? How were they associated? The battlefield was from before he was born. Why could they not lead where he wanted, when he wanted?

The hunter hated to be confused, or laughed at. And he laughed. He was all these places, in his own order, and back again. He could be anywhere but where he most wanted to be, which was safe at home, which was cold ashes, and that was the trap, that the snare…

He evaded it, and blinked, and was back with Aewyn again.

The sun was rising above the bridge, yellow and wan, on what he took for the east.

“Otter!” Aewyn exclaimed, and snatched at him hard, while the winds died and the fog cleared. He was too numb in his lower limbs to feel pain any longer. He kept one hand clenched on his brother’s and one arm locked about the rock, the bones of the earth itself, refusing to be swept up again. He grew tired. And the game grew dangerous.

Aewyn could not go where he did. He tried to move him, but Aewyn caught his arm and clung fast to the rock.

“What are you doing?” Aewyn said. “You were gone, Otter—you’ve been gone for hours. One moment your hand just went away, and then you were there again, holding on, and then gone again! Don’t leave me… Don’t leave like that!”

He had never meant to. He had never meant to leave Aewyn. He just hung on, thinking—he must believe—he had done wizardry, on his own. It was something he could do.

But he was by no means sure that he governed what happened when he did. That was the frightening thing.

In time things grew calmer, and he realized all sensation had left his fingers in that hand, so tightly Aewyn held to him. The winds faded, in favor of a thick snowfall. Below, beyond their perch atop the cliff, the river ran, mostly frozen, and the ice snowed over, so that the great Lenúalim, which he had heard about all his life, seemed no wider here than it ran beside Ynefel. His mind conjured a deep chasm, here as there. He grew dizzy, thinking about that river deep. He began to hear the water. He fancied if he thought about it very, very hard, he might reach out through the fogs that came and just be there, safe, at Ynefel. Even if Lord Tristen had left, there was a place no enemy of his would dare to come.

He might try it, if he could only find a way to drag his brother through with him.

He did try, shutting his eyes and wishing very hard for the fog to come close, close, so that he could test where it might send him this time. He couldbring his brother with him. Aewyn had been with him when they moved through Marna, and through the battlefield, had he not? So he coulddo it.

The fog came, deep and pearly-gray, lustrous as a jewel, and wrapped softly around him. He had only to think very hard of Ynefel. He had their escape.

But the hunter slipped onto his track, and now, with Aewyn failing and falling, he tried to hasten him along but failed. The shadow trailed him, tracked him, and Aewyn drifted, as if he were drowning in water.

“Brother!” Elfwyn called, shaking at him till his fair hair flew, and everything proceeded slowly as in a dream. He tried to carry Aewyn, dragging him along, away from what hunted them, his heart pounding and his breath coming so hard he knew the hunter could hear it.

A shadow loomed up before him in the fog, the shadow of a robed figure, clearer and clearer in the gray, while the hunter came behind him, dreamlike and inexorable.

“Well,” the cloaked figure said.

And he knew that voice. It belonged in a tower in Henas’amef. It belonged in a prison Lord Tristen himself had sealed. It was his mother. And his heart plummeted, feeling pursuit closer and closer behind them, and her in front. “Well. Well…”

He tried to dart aside. She was still before him, once, twice, three times, and the hunter came nearer and nearer, a cold presence, and terrible, behind them.

“Come along,” his mother said.

“No!” As the shadow spread out behind him, all-encompassing, now. “Stand away! Let me go!”

“Fool, boy. Great fool.”

He was not standing where he had. The shadow behind him was at a greater distance, his mother had gained them that, but it advanced, inexorable in its pace.

“I can save you,” his mother said. “Death follows you. Do you recognize it? I do.”

He clung to Aewyn, who said nothing, knew nothing, drifting half-conscious beside him. He held Aewyn’s arm close and dragged him with him in a sudden bid to escape.

His mother was before him, lifting her shadowy arms.

“Fool, I say, my dear boy. Let me save you. Let me bring you to warmth, and safety.”

She was a shadow here, but she was imprisoned in Lord Crissand’s fortress. If she brought him there, if she brought both of them with her, they would be within hail of her guards, and safe, safe in her tower, exactly where he wanted to be.

Wanting was enough. He felt Aewyn begin to slip from his arms.

“No!” he cried. “My brother, too! If we go where you like, my brother goes with me!”

“Of course,” his mother said in her silkiest voice. “Of course he will. Let go, let go, dear fool. Trust me to guide us.”

He did nottrust her. He did not believe, in the next instant, that he heard anything like the truth. The hunter came close behind and, in the very moment he felt that darkness reach up for them, Aewyn slipped from his arms and plummeted away into the dark.

“Aewyn!” he called out, a last desperate bid to save him. “Aewyn! Wake up!” If his brother waked, he might escape the fog. It might be a condition of the mist that carried them, that Aewyn seemed to dream, and Aewyn’s waking might drive the hunter away. It was all he could hope. His hands were empty.

And in the very moment of his concern for Aewyn, he felt the ground come up under his feet, and warmth come around him. He was with his mother in what seemed, for a heartbeat, her room.

But it differed from her tower. There were couches, and cushions, and drapes—but the colors were green and gold, not the motley brocades his mother’s room had owned. There was a fireplace with an iron screen that had the aspect of a grinning monster. A harp stood in one corner, and the floor was gray, ancient stone, not wood.

“Where are we?” he demanded. It was not the Zeide. It was not Lord Crissand’s fortress at all. Nothing smelled or felt the same, and his question met the empty air. “Mother?”

He was alone. There was a door. It was solid oak, and locked, and he beat his fist on it in rage.

“Mother!” he shouted, betrayed—she had deceived him, but never lied. She still had not lied. He had assumed everything and lost everything, even his brother. He raged, and beat at the door, and yelled until his voice cracked.

No answer came.

iv

SNOW COULD BE HARD, HARD ENOUGH TO KNOCK THE BREATH OUT OF A BODY—Aewyn had found that out before this. It was a long time before he wanted to move, and it was a while more before he could gather his elbows and his knees under him and get up.

“Elfwyn?” he asked the surrounding air, in which snow fell thick. He was unsteady on his feet and staggered backward when he tried to turn.

His back met something solid, and when he put out a hand and turned about, he found himself next to a man-high stone wall.

Lucky, he thought, not to have come down on that. Or perhaps he had. The only parts of him that did not hurt were only numb with cold, and his head ached—there was a lump on his brow, he thought, but his fingers were too cold to tell.

“Elfwyn?” he shouted, thinking his brother might well have fallen onto some roof, or onto the other side of the wall. He waded through the snow, following the wall, hoping it would lead to a window, a door, a gate, or some living person—Guelen he was, and Guelen he looked, in Amefel, which did not love Guelenfolk; but he thought he could count on hospitality, Lord Crissand being his father’s friend. He would call Lord Crissand the aetheling when he referred to him, the way Amefin liked to think of him—he would be very respectful of any farmer he met, and ask a message be sent to Lord Crissand—not to his father. That would be the politic way to do things in this countryside.

His father would be beyond anger by now. His father would be worried sick, was what, and he was heartily ashamed, the worse since he had fainted half a dozen times and been a weight on his brother, who now had flown off somewhere by wizardry and lost himself in what he was well sure was no ordinary trick of the weather, even in Amefel. There had been ghosts—his shaken wits remembered that. There had been voices, and shadows, and they had been beside the river, but he was nowhere near it now: the river had a voice, and all he heard was the crunch of snow under his own boots and his own panting after breath.

Fool, he said to himself. He should be thinking where he was. Even if they had flown randomly about the map, there was a wall, and a wall was a structure, and structures were on his map. It might be the defensive wall, the one they had built in the war, and if that was so, he might come to the hold of Earl Drusenan of Bryn; or if it was farther south, it could even be part of old Althalen, which had been the capital of the High Kings, when the Sihhë had ruled the realm… So he told himself, walking along a wall that seemed to go on forever and trying to gain a sense of what direction he was going in this murk. The fog seemed to have persisted about him. He had never yet come out of it. And the wall went on and on, and seemed in worse and worse repair.

A small group of Elwynim had settled at Althalen. The map had had to be changed because of that. Old Althalen had been cursed ground—cursed by the Quinalt andthe Bryaltines, which was uncommon; but people who had fled the wars in Elwynor had wanted to live there and farm there again. They wanted to make orchards, which they said had once flourished there. They had tried to take the curse away, so he had heard.

But part of the ground they would not build on. He had read that in notes appended to his map. In the lack of anything substantial to see in the world around him, he built his own room, his work strewn across his desk, the great parchment map fastened up above it. He had committed it all to memory. He could recall the shape of the ruins, some inner details of which were left vague because no one would venture into such a haunted place just to draw a map, even with a lord’s commission. The palace ruin had a long wall on its northern side. In his own safe room he had liked to picture what the Sihhë palace had looked like, building its lost upper tiers in his imagination… all, all of this had filled his lonely hours when Otter had gone away south.

His own room was real enough in his vision that he wondered if he could be there as easily as he could be in the woods or at the old battlefield, if he took the chance and just wished hard enough; but if he succeeded, it would take him leagues away from his father, who would be searching the hills for him, and leagues separate from his brother, who had to be hereabouts, if he just kept looking, and damned if he would give up. They must have arrived close to each other. Perhaps, he thought, he had just started out looking in the wrong direction. Perhaps he should go the other way, and try that, since this direction had led to nothing, not even a corner to the never-ending wall. He was growing desperate in this nightmarish continuance of one solid wall, and being without Elfwyn, he grew afraid, more afraid than he had ever been in his life. Nothing he had ever met had dared threaten him. No one in Guelessar had dared stand up to him, certainly none of the boys brought in to be his associates. But this thwarted him. The unnatural fog and the blowing snow confused him.

He still knew where he was. He knew where he was, the way he knew he was standing on solid ground. It was Elfwyn who was lost.

He was surprised, even indignant, to find his legs growing weak in the struggle to walk, and his hands without feeling. He went all the way to his knees, which was no place for a prince, and he got up, astonished and ashamed, and continued walking—he had lost contact with the wall as he fell, but he found it, hoping it was the same wall, and doggedly followed it back the way he had come. He had had enough of rest, had he not? He had sleptthrough the business with the old man, he had slepthis way through the fog, when they had gotten swept away to the woods, and he was entirely put out with himself. His father would not be sleeping his way through a calamity, would he? His mother, whose blood he had in his veins, would take action and See her way through it, with that Gift she never admitted to the priests.

So Elfwyn was not the only one with wizardry in his blood. If his brother had it, he was sure his mother’s son was not less gifted, only that such ability had never been encouraged in him.

And now he needed it. He so desperately needed it now.

v

IT WAS THE BOOK THAT WAS THE TROUBLE: MASTER EMUIN SAID IT. TRISTEN HAD located it briefly, and felt it move through the remainder of the dark and through the murky day, a day gray and pale as the space between, that space where Tristen emphatically dared not, at the moment, go.

It had shifted again, and the book and the enemy were very close one to the other—closer than the last time he had felt it, and as every venture he had made toward the boys had driven them farther away, now he feared anything that might upset the balance. Time itself had started to diverge: day and dark, this day and the next grew confused around him, and now, he suspected, had diverged again.

They were a small party that had ridden out from Henas’amef: himself, and Uwen, and Cefwyn, unescorted and on borrowed horses. Lord Crissand had stayed behind, much against his inclination, to bolster Emuin, with Paisi to help. Emuin was wizard enough, he hoped, to hold the Zeide itself against intrusion or attack, where it might well come. A score of the Dragon Guard would have taken to the road behind them, traveling fast, one could be sure, but not fast enough to overtake a desperate father.

Cefwyn had not waited for them. He had delayed only to put on his armor, had taken a warm cloak and headed for the stable to borrow the best horses available, while Uwen had ordered supply out of the kitchens, and they were gone, only the three of them, by the world’s roads.

The shadows that had haunted their riding out by dark persisted by daylight, streaking the snow from time to time, and Tristen did not trust their company in the least—they were part of the disturbance in the gray place and attached themselves to any part of it. The boys’ innocence was no longer a protection to them, not once the spell on that book was involved: he had extended his senses as quietly as he could, risking the gray space with the delicacy of a breath, when the intrusion he tracked had come down like a thunderbolt.

And moved all of them.

One bit of the road was much like another, but he had the dire feeling they had lost time as well as distance, and now their own tracks were, half-snow-covered, ahead of them.

“Someone has been by here,” Cefwyn said, not yet seeing the truth.

“We have,” Tristen said, and beside him, he knew Uwen understood; in the look Cefwyn gave him, he knew Cefwyn did then, too.

“That book?” Cefwyn asked. “Can a damned book do it?”

Tristen knew at least part of the answer—knew he had acted recklessly, that the boys had moved again, and he dreaded to tell Cefwyn the whole truth, but he must do something about the situation he felt; and he reined aside, due south, and away from their own tracks.

“What are we doing?” Cefwyn asked him.

“They have separated. For good or for ill, I could not stop one of them—”

“Which one?”

“Aewyn has arrived south of us. He has fallen away. He draws at the earth. He wantedto stop. But Elfwyn went too fast this time, too fast and too far.”

“Too far,” Cefwyn echoed him, shouting through the wind. Their horses drifted apart and together again, knee against knee. Uwen was a shadow on Cefwyn’s other side. “Where is he?”

“We are going toward Aewyn,” Tristen shouted back. “I cannot reach the other without leaving Aewyn in danger. One or the other—we have now to choose.”

“What choice is that?” Cefwyn cried. “How can I?”

“I choose!” Tristen said. “On me, be it—I choose the one we can reach. Where he is, is no good place for him.”

“Althalen,” Cefwyn said. Cefwyn knew as well as he what lay in this direction, down a forgotten road. “There’s the new village there.”

“If he were there,” Tristen said, “I would trust he was safe. He is not.”

A new village had grown up at Althalen, and that safety might be within the boy’s reach, but that was not the way he was tending. The whole place had become troubled and uncertain, a pond where a small stone had dropped and sunk, and reached depths where it was not good for one of his blood to be. Disturbance rippled through the gray space in that direction. It was a Sihhë place, a place of blood and angry ghosts… the home of Elfwyn’s distant ancestor.

But it was home to one of the boy’s own, too.

They tended south and west, and now every stride of the horses carried them aside from the book and from Elfwyn, and his own guilt rode with him. He had reached instinctively, attempting to divert both boys from plunging through that looming ward, and created disaster as he did it. The boys had been headed right for a suddenly appearing gap in the wards and Elfwyn had shot through as quickly as if he himself willed it. Perhaps he had gone so quickly because Aewyn’s resistance had pulled away—Aewyn, even half-fainting, had clung to where he was with a fierceness that held them to earth; and when he had come loose, perhaps at his jostling the boys, Aewyn had plummeted somewhere in between the two places—not straight down, but aside, to a place with its own will and its own magic, old magic, and a special claim on him. The old ruin, extending constantly into the gray space, might have found a mote flying free, recognized it, and simply snatched it down into itself… while Elfwyn, set free of that bond, had flown like an arrow, and now was entirely out of sight, sealed behind those wards.

Folly, he said to himself: Mauryl would have said it, most certainly. He had tried because they were both about to vanish through that gap—but he had lost one of them in the process, and where the other had come down was not well-intentioned or safe: not by accident, such events, not even his own failure.

And while there was now every chance that, if he took them all into the gray space to save time, he might reach Aewyn safely, without flinging him into Elfwyn’s predicament, there was equally well the chance that Elfwyn himself maintained some hold on his brother, and that the book’s intent would snatch the second boy through if he pressed hard. The book’s intent reached far, far across Amefel. It wantedto be found, and it wantedto be loose in the world, and it wantedat least one of the boys if not both… which was, Cefwyn would say, a damned great lot for a book to want.

It was that. Say rather, either Mauryl Gestaurien had laid an intent on his work to keep it out of his hands, or that the wizard who had tried to lay hands on it more than a decade ago had laid a geas on whoever found it.

Or say, equally possible, that Elfwyn, with enough magic in him to shake things loose from hiding, had had such a command laid directly on him long, long ago, in those visits to his mother. He had felt attachments he had not trusted when the boy had asked him to be his teacher.

He had said no.

And which of the two of them had done right?

Might he have told the whole uncomfortable truth to a chancy, immature boy?

He had not told all he feared to Cefwyn. He dared not, at this moment, consult Emuin about his choice to go after Aewyn—not with the gray space as chancy as it still was—and he was not sure to this hour that he had made the right choice.

He hesitated to burden Cefwyn with the likelihood that the bond between the brothers was not ordinary—least of all did he want to say what else he sensed, that it might never be broken.

Cefwyn said not a word, in the meantime. Nor had Cefwyn said anything more about Ninévrisë and his daughter being across the river, in the place defended by those icy wards.

Nothing about it boded well for his household.

But there was one more reason for turning aside after Aewyn: Elfwyn Aswydd had more than a compulsion on him: there was also his father’s blood in him, there was a Syrillas brother’s love, Emuin’s concern, and a Sihhë blessing on him. If there was one young lad it might be difficult for any enemy to hold, it might be this one.

He made up his mind. As much as he dared nudge a set of affairs so very precariously balanced, he sent the most delicate thought curling toward what was now an iron wall—a thought that quested after the least, most insignificant gap in the barrier, the sort a brotherly bond might make. And he intended to lay hands on that brother.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

i

COUCHES, AND CUSHIONS, AND DRAPES–THEY WERE EVERYWHERE for comfort. It was that precise green and that precise gold that had been the Aswydd heraldry, forbidden now, but everywhere about, and the monstrous fireplace, with what might have been a dragon, or a grinning devil. The harp. Defying his prison, having heard in Gran’s tales that harps could be enchanted, Elfwyn ran his bruised, cold-burned fingers over the strings and evoked a rippling of notes.

No answer came.

“Ordinary,” he said in his most stinging way. “Besides,” he said to his absent mother, in case she could hear him, “you never played this harp, did you? I would never expect you to like music.”

That drew an answer. The door never opened. But a figure appeared by the fireside—not his mother, but a young man who for all the world looked like Lord Tristen: that kind of youth that was neither young nor old; that kind of beauty that set its owner apart from blemished mankind.

That figure faded, and in its place stood a woman, a woman with long red hair. Her back was to him, her face to the fire, her hands lifted to it.

“Mother?” Elfwyn asked harshly. “Mother!”

The woman turned, and it was his mother’s face, and his mother’s cant of the head, and it held that same kind of beauty, chilling, severe, and foreign.

“Not your mother,” she said. “Your aunt. Your aunt, dear boy. I pass by any thanks for rescue. I would never expect gratitude, not from your father’s bloodline.”

“Mother!” he shouted, but the figure, like the man before it, faded before his eyes, leaving only the fire.

ii

AEWYN’S FEET HAD LONG SINCE LOST ALL FEELING, HIS LEGS BUCKLED, it was not weakness, he insisted. He was weary, but he had only stumbled this time on a bit of ice. He levered himself up, holding to the wall as he could with fingers that likewise had gone numb within his gloves… it was only the roughened leather that gripped the stones. His fingers would no longer bend.

He was in a predicament. He realized that, in a distant, determined sort of way. He might have made certain wrong choices, but if he turned back a second time, that would be three times down the same stretch of wall.

“Otter?” he called, and was utterly confused to find night settled about him, as if daylight, so newly born, had just given up in exhaustion. “Elfwyn!” He shouted that out whenever he found breath. If only there were an answer, if only they were together, they could share warmth and find a nook to shelter them from the damnable wind. Or if someone heard him, it might be one of the villagers, and he could raise a general search for his brother. He would promise the village—he would promise them whatever a prince of Ylesuin could promise: cattle, sheep, horses, a grant of land, whatever they wanted, if only they could find his brother alive.

As it was, he could only put one foot in front of another, and did that because, if he stopped, he would die, and his father would never know where he was.

“Boy,” someone said behind him. “Boy, what d’ ye want wi’ my Otter?”

He turned, blinking, as snow hit his eyes. A woman stood there, a little old woman in a shawl, then a robed woman in gray skirts, who was almost too dim to see.

“Why, ’tis Prince Aewyn, ain’t it?” the first woman said, and took off her shawl and wrapped it around him, which he protested—the old woman would freeze straightway, in her light clothing. But it warmed him where it touched, warmed his hands just as he tried to give it back to her.

“I’ve lost Otter,” he tried to say, but he stammered too much. He began to make out the other woman, like an Amefin lady, but in a faded, cobwebby gown. And he knew he should not be standing still. He had to keep moving, but he had gotten distracted and forgotten to do that.

But he was so much warmer, just where the old woman had touched his hand, and he thought he knew her. He thought it was Paisi’s gran. Otter had told him she was dead, but here she was, and he had to tell Otter that his gran was safe, when he found him. He had no idea who the other lady was, but he felt safer, and warmer, though the fog closed about him for a moment.

“Grandson,” an old man said from behind him, and he turned about and saw a tall, dignified man with a gold band about his brows, and a fine rich cloak. The old man looked right into his eyes. “Grandson. A fine lad. You have your mother’s look about you.”

“My mother is Ninévrisë, the Lady Regent of Elwynor, Queen of Ylesuin…”

“All these things,” the old man said, “ andmy daughter. A good daughter, she is. Are you a good and honest son? I think you are.”

“My mother’s father is dead,” he said, and that was two conversations with the dead in a matter of moments, which might be too many for safety. He looked about to see where Paisi’s gran was, and if she had advice for him; but she was gone, and the old man laid a hand on his shoulder, sending warmth through him.

“Tell me about yourself,” the old man said. “Tell me why you’ve come.”

“To find my brother!” he said.

“There is no one here,” the old man said.

“Then help me find him,” he said—not that he failed to know he was in dire trouble, but if he was seeing his dead grandfather, and he was dying or dead, he stuck by his mission, and by his brother. “He fell away. He must have come down somewhere. Help me!”

“Then tell me about him,” the old man said, and flung the great warmth of his cloak about him, and when it enfolded him, the warmth all but stole his breath. He fought to keep aware, and to keep awake—he knew better than to sleep in the snow, but the weight of the cloak bore him down, and down, and he rested against the old man’s knees. He felt the touch of the old man’s fingers in his hair, a caress, then something like a kiss on his temple.