Free Fortress of Owls - C.J. Cherryh - Fortress 03 by Fortress of Owls

me be loyal to the king, for your sake, my lord, then gods save the king in Guelemara, I say it with all my heart.”
    That was a very great thing for an Amefin to say.

    Fortress of Owls - C.J. Cherryh - Fortress 03
    And when Crissand said gods save the king, Tristen unthinkingly resorted to the gray space in simple startlement, a recourse for a wizard’s Shaping as easy as a next breath or a wondering beyond the words and into the real motion of a man’s heart. He sped into that space with an awareness of the men closest on either hand, a feather-touch of awareness, of the familiar.
    Uwen, for instance: Uwen was rather like a rock, steady, ordinary, incontrovertible, neither there nor quite aware of the things in that space, but coming quite close to reaching it, at times, through familiarity with him. The Meiden captain was dimmer in his awareness. So with the rest of the guards.
    But Crissand glowed , faintly but incontrovertibly there . Crissand Earl Meiden himself was distant cousin to the aethelings of Henas’amef, and, with the aetheling blood came wizard-gift.
    Crissand to all seeming had not a glimmering awareness of the gift that was in him… a gift perhaps enough to bend luck in Crissand’s favor. Luck had failed Crissand’s father, whose heredity was at least half the same; yet Crissand said it: the cause had prospered. Luck had allowed Crissand’s men to save him from the viceroy’s order, so that Crissand and his mother both had lived.
    And on that thought Tristen took a small pause, a cold small thought, that Crissand’s slight gift, his luck, was a pivot on which greater things turned, and when things were free to move, then wizardry had its best chance. On a small pin, a great gate swung.
    Whose wizardry had it been? Or might it be magic at work, that Fortress of Owls - C.J. Cherryh - Fortress 03
    sense that, somewhere, long ago, he had known Crissand Adiran, or someone very like him?
    But Crissand in the gray space now had not a glimmer of ill will.
    Rather Crissand shone with a pure, plain, and dangerous folly of adoration, a heady wine for anyone who drank.
    Like Emuin’s insistence on beeswax, it came with wizard-force, and sober as he had grown this autumn, such blithe excess of adoration frightened him. But in the reckless outpouring of Crissand’s heart, he found Crissand’s happiness and hope spread about him. Even the house guard and the Dragons had made a sort of conversational peace, and the world was incredibly fair and bright despite the grim talk of recent moments. Sunlight through the scudding, gray-bottomed clouds cast sparkling detail where it touched, random grains of snow shining like dust of pale jewels to left and to right of an untrodden road, and every hill and every copse of trees offered new beauty. Creature of a single year, he had imagined winter when it came would be deathly still, and instead he discovered it full of sparkle and motion and wonder around him, and he was warmed by unquestioning love.
    Could there be a snare in too much beauty? Could there be too much expectation of good, and too much faith?
    Could ever there be too much love?
    And could love require lies?
    He asked himself that. He had drawn Crissand once into the gray space himself, though he doubted Crissand had since ventured it Fortress of Owls - C.J. Cherryh - Fortress 03
    on his own. He doubted, too, that Crissand had any least notion what had happened to him in that moment, or how he had found himself confronted while absent and, coatless and desperate, sent out into the snow.
    He could teach Crissand, he thought, how to reach that place where concealment was very difficult. He was sure Crissand’s gift was strong enough. But to set Crissand at liberty in that place… there were dangers in it, dangers in the gift, dangers in the wandering. Dared he believe Crissand would never venture it on his own?
    But Crissand’s attention was suddenly for a snowy ridge. He pointed to it and said, with a