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earliest days in the world he could lose himself in the contemplation of the textures of common dust, and in such uncommon sights as Petelly’s mane, in which a yellow leaf had just now lodged. But nowadays he had questions not so much of what he saw before him as of what he did not see, or seeing, failed to comprehend. This festival to celebrate the death of the year was one. The constant company of guards against threats he knew dared not assail him was another: while what he most feared they could not so much as imagine—not the king’s men, not even Uwen, whose honesty he never doubted and who had ridden with him into the heart of shadows. Uwen’s this summer was part of it. But not all.
    Still, in this province of Guelessar he did what pleased the king and did his best to comfort his detractors. He emulated the other lords at court in speech and manners. He feigned boredom when he was near them, but he knew he never did it well… Cefwyn had told him Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles from the beginning that he was very bad at lying. From his side, he found their malice tiresome and tedious, while he still found wonders to stare at in the sparkle of glass or the color of a lady’s skirt—and dared not.
    Ask questions of them? He dared not that, either… as, today, he would, if he dared, ask any man the same questions that he had asked Emuin, and still worried at, still unanswered: how long will this autumn last? How long will winter be? How long until the spring? And could Uwen imagine tomorrow… or next year… so easily? A man who was not a Man in the ordinary sense was by no means sure of such matters when wizards talked about the wanderings of the sun. There was so much else, so very much else that Men took for granted and seemed to foresee with such clear assurance, while that gray space Men could not reach was always waiting to draw him in, more real and more truthful than he found comfortable.
    The year, the true Year, by which Men reckoned time, would begin on Midwinter Night. But when spring came, then his year began all over again, or at least he would have reached his own beginning point.
    When spring came, king Cefwyn and all the men said, the kingdom of Ylesuin would go to war across the river to win Lady Ninévrisë her kingdom. Next spring this and next spring that ran through all court conversations as if winter, this dead, dying, most ominous season, were a negligible affair that they would all endure and think nothing of.
    And perhaps winter and change were negligible, for ordinary men.

    Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles But in his darkest hours, in everyone’s blithe talk of seasons and this constant repetition of in the spring , he knew that Uwen most surely had a confidence and a vision of things to come that he simply did not have and had never had. Ordinary men, too, took for granted they would fare better in the next year than the last. And he did not have that confidence. He had never seen a year but this one… and the glance homeward this afternoon had struck a strange and persistent uneasiness into his heart, as if he had looked beyond a boundary of more than rock and stone… as if long-stable forces had lurched into movement today, a small slippage in what had been fixed, and he had done it. He had begun it.
    Perhaps when he came full circle of a year it would complete something. Mauryl had Called him into being for Mauryl’s reasons, but now that winter was coming and the wedding was near, Cefwyn found no use for him. Emuin had no time. Uwen was at his direction, not the other way around. That left him waiting, at loose ends, unable to imagine what that new year would bring him, or what he would do in it, or what he had ever been meant to do, beyond Mauryl’s purpose for him, which had been to defeat the enemy at Lewen field.
    He had survived the field at Lewenbrook. He had defeated Mauryl’s enemy Hasufin and not ceased to exist afterward, unnatural