Fortress of Eagles by C. J. Cherryh Read Free Book Online

ivory, and always what he remembered) sparkled and went thoughtful. Her voice sank very low, to escape the listeners. “Am I the prey tonight or is it Tristen? Policy must attend this festive mood. You are stalking someone.”
    â€œGood lady!” He laid a hand on his breast, above the Marhanen Dragon, worked in gold. “I am suspect?”
    â€œToday since dawn you have held close converse with the captain of your guard, the Patriarch of the Quinalt.” One finger and the next marked the tally. “Your brother the duke of Guelessar, and your brother’s priest, besides a converse again with Idrys, with Captain Gwywyn, and with Captain Kerdin—I discount your tailor—”
    â€œYour spies are everywhere!”
    â€œYou ensconce me in this nest of women all with ambitions, all wishing to persuade me to confide in them, and wonder that I know exactly the object of your inquiry, who was riding to Drysham today—”
    â€œCressitbrook. You don’t know everything.”
    â€œâ€”with his guard. It is he, is it not? Has Tristen done something amiss?”
    â€œTonight,” he said, with a glance at the women in the distance, and with his voice lowered.
    â€œI hear it all, you know. The Warden of Ynefel is out spying on the land. He converses with the horses, quite dire and lengthy discourses, and likely with the sheep. His birds fly over the land and bring him news from every quarter…”
    â€œHis damned pigeons congregate on the ledge and on the porch of the Quinaltine just opposite, where they refine their aim on the Quinaltine steps, therein is the magical offense. Winter’s coming. He feeds them. Why should they fly farther afield?” He had heard enough, today, of the Quinaltine steps. And of his bride’s unorthodoxy…and her scandalous single petticoat, especially in the wedding gown. “Join me tonight. A small supper, a pleasant, quiet evening, no one but ourselves and Tristen. And Emuin. We shall invite Emuin.”
    â€œOh, that will set tongues a-wagging.”
    Doubtless it would—a Teranthine father, the king’s old tutor, was entirely acceptable; a wizard was not; but Emuin was both.
    And, damn the gossip, he missed their quiet suppers, and their days in Amefel. He missed them so much that those Amefin days, which he had once considered exile, now appeared to him in a golden glow of memory, a time when he had had few but faithful confidants every night at supper, when his table had been solely for food and intimate talk, not tiresome sessions with priests and clerks and lords who wished his brother were king. Even the banquets of state in the great hall in Henas’amef had been intimate, by comparison to the echoing hall of the Dragon Throne, where he now held court. The region before the throne was a gilt-and-ivory battlefield of policy wherein every move and every strategic alliance had been laid down by his father and now must be fought and refought and reforged by an unpopular successor. His digestion suffered in consequence, and while he had as yet found no gray hairs among the gold of his carefully clipped beard, nor a lasting crease on his young brow, he looked for them daily—even longed for them as a means to impress authority on the barons. He could no longer ride abroad, not with the press of royal business. He had grooms to exercise his horses. He could not find time for his father’s hounds, who were growing paunches. He could not so much as sit in the royal bothtub on most days without papers to sign, arguments to hear, justice to do, or some petition of the Quinalt about Tristen’s damned pigeons.
    â€œLet them clatter about it,” he said to his bride-to-be. “Let them have a merry round of it. There’s Llymarish cheese and Panan apples stewed up with spices. There’s Guelen ham and Amefin sausages and the red wine from Imor as well as Guelen ale. I had it all carted in and