Fortress in the Eye of Time Read Free Page A

down, rubbing pale, smooth fingertips against each other.
    â€œIt will mend,” Mauryl said, and felt with only mild foreboding—perhaps a fey, wicked magic lingered—a net settling over the net-caster as well. All his anger was pointless againstthe youth, all his long solitude was helpless against the spell of warm arms, the quickening…not of understanding, but of youthful expectations; the centering of them—on an old man long past answering his own. But he told the lie. He said in an unused, gruff voice, a second time, because the sound of it was strange to him, “It will mend, boy.” He reached for his fallen staff, he struggled with it to bring his aching knees to bear, and stumbled his way to his feet.
    Tristen also stood up—and let slide the singed cloak, as if such things in no wise mattered.
    Mauryl smothered anger, caught the robe with his staff, patiently adjusted it again about the boy’s bare shoulders. Tristen held it and moved away, his attention drawn by something else, the gods knew what—perhaps the clutter of vessels and hanging bunches of herbs in the room beyond.
    â€œStop!” Mauryl snapped, and Tristen halted and looked back, all unwitting.
    Mauryl reached his side and with his staff tapped the single step to draw his attention downward, to the hazard he had never looked down to see.
    â€œTristen,” he said, “now and forever remember: you are flesh as well as wishes, body as well as spirit, and whenever you let one fly without the other, then look to suffer for it. Do you understand me, Tristen?”
    â€œYes,” Tristen said faintly. Tears welled up again, as if the rebuke and the burning were of equal pain.
    â€œTristen, thou—”
    He discovered something long lost, long ago relinquished, and it swelled larger and larger in his heart until his heart seemed about to burst with pain. He tried to laugh, instead, who had neither wept nor laughed since…since some forgotten change, some gradual slipping away of the inclination. He made a sound, he hardly knew of what sort, knew not what to do next, and cleared his throat, instead—which left a silence, and the young man still staring at him. In the absence of all understanding, he put out a hand and wiped an unresisting face.
    â€œAn unwritten tablet, are you not? And a perilous, perilous one to write. But write I shall. And learn you will. Do you say so, Tristen?”
    â€œYes,” the boy said, tears gone, or forgotten, cloud passed. There was tremulous expectation, as if learning should happen now, at once, in a breath.
    And perhaps it should. Perhaps he dared not wait so long as a night.
    â€œCome sit at the table,” he said. “No, no, gods, thou silly, hold the cloak, mind your feet…” Calamity was a constant step away: unsteadiness threatened at every odd set of time-worn stones, so age must take the hand of youth, infirmity must guide strength that went wit-wandering in the search for a fallen cloak—and dropped the cloak again in utter startlement as a chair leg scraped across the stones.
    Age found itself hungry, then, and warmed yesterday’s supper in the pot. Shadows lurked and flickered about the edges of the room. The thunder of a passing rain wandered away above the roof. But such things the Shaping more easily ignored, perhaps as a natural part of the world.
    Waiting, between his stirrings of the iron pot, he came back to the table, where the youth hung on every word he offered, eyes fixed with rapt attention on him when he spoke—though gods knew how many bits and pieces of that flotsam a foolish boy could store away, or how he understood them at all.
    He poured ale, that being the best he had. The youth first tasted it with a grimace and a puzzlement. He served yesterday’s beans—and the youth ate with a child’s grasp of the spoon, then, with the bowl unfinished, upon one cup to drink, fell quite sound