Free Fortress of Owls by C. J. Cherryh Page B

yarns. Streaks appeared in the snow around her, short, broad gouges that kicked up new-fallen snow, passing around and around her like the skips of dancers. Whatever veil Auld Syes had parted to reach into the world was closing with a vengeance, and other spirits flowed along the edges of her power, spirits more dangerous and less wise.
    â€œLad!” Uwen cried in alarm, and the wind dislodged snow from the oak above them, a thicker and thicker curtain of white that hid the old woman in its heart, a gray shadow.
    â€œAuld Syes!” Tristen shouted, disturbed by this talk of sparrows, friends, and kings. “Auld Syes, I am not done with questions for you! May I hold you?”
    â€œBid me under your roof, lord of Amefel!” The voice was fading now, obscured in the wind. “Dare you do so?”
    â€œCome at your will, Auld Syes!”
    â€œGods,” someone breathed. It might have been Crissand. It might have been Uwen. He himself invoked no more power than already roared about them as the veil of snow collapsed.
    Then the wind slacked enough to clear the air, and to their eyes there was no woman, only tear-shaped streaks in a great broad ring, around and around where she had stood. Of Syes’ feet there was no track at all: pure and undisturbed, the snow lay in the center of that ring, and the snow that fell now in fat clumps plopped down onto the stacked stones. A plain clay bowl, filled with snow, sat atop that pile, as the bowls had stood on the altar table in the Quinaltine, this open to the sky and filled with a winter offering, to what gods was uncertain.
    â€œGods save us.” That was Lusin, chief of his guards, and Uwen with a rapid gesture signed safety to them all, a Guelenman, a Quinalt man by upbringing, asking, “Lad, are we safe here?”
    â€œWe ride south,” Tristen said, turning Gery’s head. “I think that was what she wanted.” He beheld guardsmen’s faces as shocked as Crissand’s. Snow had stuck to the sides of helmets and stuck in the eyelets of mail coats and the coats of the horses, while more was falling from the sky, thicker and thicker, not the knife edge of sleet, now, but soft, wet clumps that stuck where they landed. Banners hung limp, all in the shelter of the oak.
    â€œThis is the road to Levey,” Crissand said faintly and foolishly, as if his guidance were called in question along with their safety. “I am not mistaken in this.”
    â€œThen our journey is not to Levey,” Tristen said, and by the folly of that protest guessed that Crissand was far yet from understanding Auld Syes or any other spirit that might go about her, some of them dangerous to more than life. “Ride back to the town, you and your men, before the weather becomes worse. Uwen and I will go on, with my guard. I can’t say what we may meet.”
    â€œNo, my lord! And the woman said, did she not, friends to the south? What should we fear?”
    What indeed? Much, he answered the question in his own heart. “So she did,” he said aloud, “but I can’t speak to what sort of friends.”
    The Guelenmen in the company, his own standard-bearers, and his four guards, looked more dismayed than Crissand and his men, and Uwen, who had met Auld Syes before this, bore a willing but worried frown.
    â€œLast time she came, m’lord,” Uwen said, “there were no good event, and men died for’t.”
    â€œYet she never did us harm,” Tristen said. Truth: a king and a Regent had fallen, and men had died at her first appearance; at her second appearance, which Uwen had not seen, he had been in peril of his own life, but he had found Ninévrisë as a result of it.
    Now he saw no choice: Auld Syes warned them, yes, but to his understanding of her nature she was not responsible for what then followed. And with a touch of his heels on Gery’s sides, he threaded the column back through itself to reach the