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creation that he was. So that was one great barrier he had passed. Should he not survive the next? He had no least idea now just why the anniversary of his beginning should loom in his thoughts as some mystic demarcation, but he found it did so with increasing force.
    Perhaps once he passed that day, that anniversary hour of his birth, Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles then he would began to live years as other Men lived, with anticipation of season following season for many, many years.
    And then perhaps he would see something besides gray in his future as other Men did. Or perhaps he would not.
    Or was it possible then that all his gathering of knowledge, none of which precisely answered Mauryl’s purpose for him, was in vain?
    Was it possible that Mauryl’s spell would only last until it met some boundary of nature, and was it possible the year was that barrier?
    Might that identical night next spring send him hurtling again into the dark, all that he treasured forgotten, all that he had gathered dispersed with the elements that had made him?
    Next spring would tell him.
    And how long was a winter? How long, again, would autumn last?
    Did the autumn last the same number of days in every year?
    He had asked master Emuin that a fortnight ago, trying to approach that greater, more confusing subject with the old man, but Emuin had turned yea and nay on the matter of seasons just when he had thought he understood, and Emuin had said, well, mostly autumn lasted a certain time, and added in the next breath that winter might come late this year, and, no, it was not just when the leaves decided to turn color, it was when the air grew cold.
    And why did that happen? he had asked.
    Because the sun goes early to bed, Emuin had said.
    And why was that, sir?
    Probably it grows weary of questions, Emuin had said with sudden asperity, meaning he, a wizard, and the wisest man Tristen knew, Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles had reached the end of his patience, and the world, again, was more complex than a glance discovered.
    Then Emuin, repenting, had pulled out charts and, all one glorious evening in Emuin’s tower room in Guelemara (and with the jewel-breasted pigeons wandering in and out the window) had showed him the travels of the sun through the stars. Emuin said that a year was fixed, but seasons varied, and showed him the chart of a year as the sun traveled and told him autumn varied.
    So what men knew about the seasons was mostly true and sometimes not; it was guessable but not knowable, discernible by its signs but obscure in its presence and in its moment of ending. It was like so many other things men accepted without wonder. Yet in that uncertainty lay the pivot point of his existence—would he continue on, or cease to exist?
    Meanwhile the men talked of mares and bonfires, ale and women, and the road turned and came out of the woods for a while, overlooking first sheep pastures gone all brown and dry, then the plowed fields that foretold a village. On most of the early days in fall when they had ridden this same road, plumes of smoke had marked the horizon once they reached this point, farmers burning off the stubble, adding the stinging smell of burning barley-straw to the smoke that always hung about the valleys.
    But the unsteady wind today, changing from west to south, had made burning off fields and pastures quite foolhardy, so Tristen guessed, or perhaps the farmers were done with burning. The air remained unusually clear and clean as they crossed the edge of the king’s woods near Cressitbrook. A sport of wind, scampering beside Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles the road, whipped up a skirl of leaves out of the wood’s edge uphill of them, and Petelly and Liss danced side by side along a golden path, a last forest enchantment of fire colors, earth colors. Golden fine leaves of alder and birch paved the road under them as they drew a little ahead. The guards jogged to keep up,