“The Fortress of the Crowned Horns is built atop a mountain of solid granite,” Shentorris said, speaking at last.
“For the moment,” Jermayan said. He needed to say nothing more.
“We will hear them if they dig. I will post listeners on the lowest level, where the spring that nourishes the fortress is—every hour of every day,” Tyrvin said. “They will assist Ronethil in her work. But you say you do not think They mean to attack us, Kellen Wildmage?”
“I think Their plan was to lure us into a war with the Shadowed Elves—to make us commit all our resources into a battle to destroy them, as we shall. If we attack them in their caverns, we’re at a disadvantage. If they attack us here, in our place of greatest strength, they’re the ones at a disadvantage. I don’t think they’re after the children; I don’t think that the children were ever their real target.” He tried to choose his words with utmost care. “This is why: They didn’t attack us to get them back once we’d rescued them, and until we met up with the second rescue party from Sentarshadeen, we were quite vulnerable. Nor did they attack any of the caravans that followed Sandalon’s. The whole point seems to me to have been to allow us to discover the existence of the Shadowed Elves in a way that would make us determined to wipe them out.” He knew he sounded puzzled, and he was, because he could not imagine what could possibly come next.
“An odd way of running a war,” Tyrvin said. “Still, unless they can find a way of coming at us here in force, I am confident that if they do attack, we can hold them off—though your news is hardly calculated to help me to rest easy at night. But come. I will show you the rest of our defenses.”
—«♦»—
THE tour took the next several hours. Tyrvin showed Kellen over what seemed as if it were every inch of the fortress—though he saw no more of the children.
There were rooms filled with weapons: arrows and bows, the most fragile and easily-expended items of their defense; spears, swords, shields. Enough to arm and rearm every defender of the fortress a dozen times over.
There were other rooms filled with food: grain, both fresh and parched, dried fruit, dried meat, herbs and teas, spices. Enough to feed an army for years.
Everyone Kellen met—and there were female knights as well as male among the defenders—was in good spirits. No one here doubted the importance of their task, nor was inclined to grow soft and inattentive simply because one day passed seamlessly into another with no sign of overt threat. The Elves were a patient people.
Tyrvin even took him down to the deepest levels of the fortress, where the spring was. If Kellen had not been so intent upon learning all the citadel’s secrets, it would have been an honor he would gladly have done without, for the way was long, down a winding stair that seemed to go on forever. He had the sense that the lanterns the Elves carried to light the way were mostly a courtesy to him.
“This is the lowest level of the fortress,” Shentorris said, when they stood in the center of a great room hollowed from the living rock. In the center of the floor stood a deep round pool.
The others had stopped upon the stairs, letting Kellen go first, and now he knew why.
A unicorn stood beside the pool. Her coat was the grey of winter storm, and her horn was the clear shining brightness of winter’s ice. As he approached, she bowed her head and touched her horn to the pool, and for a moment, the water shone blue.
“Yes,” she said, “it is a spring, called from the depths of the Earth by magic in ancient times. But nothing of the Dark may try these waters and live—not while I, Ronethil, am here, or those who guard this place with me.”
Without conscious thought, Kellen shifted to spell-sight. He looked down into the pool, saw where it flowed up through a crack in the stone so narrow that nothing of any size could pass through it. Nor could it be poisoned or bespelled, while Ronethil stood guard. Beneath that was rock. Nothing but solid rock.
He reached out, to the roots of the whole fortress, in the way a man might check his horse for soundness before he mounted. But he felt nothing. All was untouched. Nothing had come—yet—to try the citadel’s defenses, at least from this direction.
“Safe,” Kellen said with relief, as his spell-sight faded. Only then did he notice that a sort of conduit led from the spring, along the wall up the stairs. Well, he guessed it beat having to walk down all the stairs he was about to walk up again every time you needed water for tea.
“Your Magegifts have told you this,” Tyrvin said. It was not a question.
“No one can truly say what future fruit the blossom of the moment may bear,” Kellen said. It was one of Morusil’s favorite sayings. Idalia said it was the Elven way of saying “Don’t press your luck.”
“He learns quickly,” Jermayan said, a note of pride in his voice.
“Quicker than you learned to counter that low attack to your left side, when you were in my training,” Tyrvin said.
“Ah, Master, I thought those bruises would never heal,” Jermayan agreed ruefully. “Alas, that I have been unable to give Kellen ones to match them.”
Tyrvin glanced at Kellen, and for a moment there was cold speculation in the Elf’s dark eyes. Then he smiled. “Alas, that we do not have time this day for sport. I will show you the top of the tower, and then I think it will be time for you to depart to your duties. Remember us, on the field of battle.”
“Remember us, among the children,” Jermayan answered, and Kellen had the sense that he’d just witnessed one of those side-slips into an almost sacred formality that he guessed you’d have to live as long as an Elf to understand.
Him, he was just Kellen, a human Knight-Mage who (according to Jermayan) couldn’t brew tea and fought like a firesprite—whatever that was. He wondered if asking Jermayan would get him any answers he could understand.
They stopped back at the room where they’d shared tea to collect their heavy fur cloaks and gloves. Kellen was sweating by the time they’d climbed yet another several sets of stairs to a room so small the four of them could barely squeeze into it. In order to make room for them, the two guards who had occupied it needed to retreat down the stairs to the landing below.
“This door,” Tyrvin said, “opens onto the top of the tower of the Fortress of the Crowned Horns. There are always two sentries posted there, and as you have seen, two inside. In this weather, their watch is short. But the door is barred from this side, and can be barred from the other at desperate need. Should the sentries on watch here lose track of the time, or sleep, or fail of attentiveness, those without will die, for should they cry out, or hammer at the door, it cannot be heard from within.”
Trust. That was the hidden message in Tyrvin’s words. Each Elf—and unicorn—here at the fortress trusted every other to hold their lives as dearly as their own.
That was the Crowned Horns’ true defense. Not sword and stone—the Demons could break through that if they came in strength. But Their greatest weapons were tricks of bribery and persuasion, of tainted promises. Kellen was sure now that any attempt to gain a foothold here by those means would fail.
Tyrvin unbolted the door. It thrust inward fiercely, pushed on an icy blast of wind.
“Hold to the guide-ropes!” he shouted over the howl of the wind, and stepped out onto the tower roof.
The “guide-ropes” were thick cables of twisted metal. Kellen grabbed for one instinctively. Without it, he would be pushed along the roof as if he weighed no more than an autumn leaf.
The rooftop was far too small for a dragon to land upon. Walls half the height of an Elf’s body surrounded it, and at each corner was a strange five-pronged blossom standing twice that height—one prong sticking straight up, two curving outward, two curving in. From a distance, they probably gave the top of the fortress the look of a crown. All were sharp.
The surface of the tower floor was not smooth and open, either. Tall spikes were placed at intervals. The cable Kellen clung to was strung between them, making a virtue of necessity. Here, at the highest exposed point in the Icefang Mountains, the icy wind was punishing. It battered at Kellen like a living thing, making his flesh ache even beneath the heavy furs and his insulating Elven armor.
He saw the two sentries, groping carefully along the ropes, their gaze turned outward, toward the surrounding mountains and the sky. Tyrvin moved past him, going to each of them in turn and sending them inside.
Kellen groped his way to the parapet, or as near as he could get without letting go of the guide-rope. If he let go, the wind would take him over the side, unless he was quick enough to fling himself flat. This was a dangerous place.
But he was close enough to see the arrow-slits in the walls. They were clotted with ice now, but through them, a kneeling Elven archer could rain down destruction on an enemy. Or even stand to fire, for the range of Elven bows was long.
He caught Tyrvin’s eye and nodded. He’d seen what he needed to see. Though if he wasn’t in danger of freezing solid, he would have been happy to linger. The mountains were spread out below them in a breathtaking vista—in spring, in sunlight, this must be a beautiful place.
The Master of the Fortress of the Crowned Horns led them carefully inside, and waited until the next four sentries—two outside, two inside—had taken their places. Then he brought them all back to what Kellen now realized must be his private rooms.
“The posts that you saw are not only for show. There are charms of unicorn hair attached to the top, renewed every spring. So none of Them will dare to try us,” Tyrvin said with grim satisfaction.
Kellen thought carefully before he spoke. “I am not sure the Deathwings could land there, but they would not need to. They could come low enough to drop whoever they carried in their claws—or to carry someone away. They are small enough, and nimble enough, for that. And when spring comes—what are the winds like then? Are they constant, or do they soften or stop altogether? The Deathwings can fly by day, but they will be better still at night—and in a fog, or in the clouds, would any see them until it was too late?”
Tyrvin sighed. “Yet we must keep watch.”
“Find another way,” Kellen said bluntly. “Every time you open a door—any door—in this fortress, you expose a weakness. Close and bar it. Confronted with this fortress, if I were contemplating an attack, I would never even consider a frontal assault. I would try treachery, I would try stealth, and I would try by ones and twos, not by thousands. One or two can open the door to thousands, if they come at the wrong time and place. You cannot assume the Enemy to be less cunning than I am. Count your people. Count them constantly—”
At least here he could be single-minded. There was only one duty before these Elves. This was their posting and it was all they needed to concentrate on. Whether or not the attack on the children had been part of a ruse was of no moment to them. So Kellen, too, could be single-minded in his advice.
“And pray to Leaf and Star that someday we may open our gates again,” Tyrvin said, agreeing. “It is good counsel, Kellen Wildmage. It is a great pity you were not born one of us, yet had it been so, you would not be what you are, and we have need of that.”
—«♦»—
“SOMETIMES you terrify me,” Jermayan said conversationally, as they stood at the foot of the causeway, waiting for Ancaladar to arrive. Jermayan said it would only be a matter of a few moments.
“I only said what had to be said,” Kellen said. He knew he sounded a little sullen, but he couldn’t help it. Even Tyrvin seemed to be waiting for the Endarkened to show up as a massed army with banners—not sneak in at the changing of the guard and start slaughtering people. Which Kellen thought was far more likely, if they meant to attack the fortress at all.