Read Fortress of Owls for Free Online Page A

trusted.
    But still he gathered them—all the servants, all the folk who in some way had dealt with him in his first days. He counted them part of Amefel, and his, even searching after the lad who had first met him as a stranger in Amefel and guided his steps to the gate-guards. He sought them out, guided them into his safekeeping… and thus out of the hands of malign working from across the river, not enough of a staff yet, and those missing pieces were well scattered and hard to find again, which the more persuaded him it was necessary. He was here. He had a Place in the world. Certain things and persons had led him to that Place, and having done so, they were snared in magic: therefore, they had to be found.
    Meanwhile, waiting for the lost to return and for the staff to reknit itself, they were short-handed.
    â€œSo master Emuin is havin’ Tassand’s help after all,” Uwen said, standing beside him at the bottommost step, looking over the yard from that slight advantage, taller than he by that means, when ordinarily that was not the case.
    â€œIf he admits he ever agreed,” Tristen said. “But I’ve learned. I press my advantage while I have it.”
    â€œGods know what’s in them baskets o’ his,” Uwen said. “I ain’t pokin’ into ’em, an’ I hope Tassand’s careful. Gods know what’ll crawl out.”
    The boys were bringing the horses up by now, and the guardsmen that were serving as his escort arrived, already ahorse, passing in front of one of the wagons. Its ox team backed away from the crowding of half a dozen horses, not something an ox hitch or its wagon did well, and its left wheel aimed for a stack of barrels.
    â€œHold there!” Uwen shouted at the standing driver, seeing it in the same instant, and ran to slap the nearer ox on its rump and start it forward. The driver with his goad saw his dilemma and diverted his team on around the small circle of free space to face the gate, cart wheels not making the turn well, where Uwen again got to the fore, holding up both hands. “’At’s good. Now ye hold that cart right here, man, no matter who says otherwise, until His Grace is down the hill. Don’t ye be blockin’ the road.”
    That effectively blocked all the other carts behind, who could not come through to load, but it saved them having that lumbering vehicle before them all the way down the hill … an incongruous precedence for a show of the ducal banners that would have been. The carts were gathering up the tents and heavy stores to take them down the hill, a slow process, that evidently had not started at dawn, when the ice was hard: they must have waited for the sun.
    And that raised a question where Captain Anwyll was, who was supposed to be dealing with the drivers and the setting forth of the supplies to the river. Tristen observed Uwen’s crisp passing of instructions, faulted Anwyll for his absence from the scene, then realized that he himself as the lord of Amefel had been more properly looking out for such considerations as the order of precedence, rather than gazing at the icicles.
    Mooncalf, His Majesty’s commander had been wont to call him.
    â€œWhere is Anwyll?” he asked Uwen.
    â€œDunno, m’lord. I’ll find out.”
    The safety of others depended on him. He saw numerous failings in himself which he was resolved to mend, and knew that, no, it was not usually the grand things in which he failed: he had very reasonably, if high-handedly, contradicted the king’s orders, taken the wide risk with the weather in sending Cefwyn’s carts to the border with necessary supplies instead of back to Cefwyn, where they would wait idle all winter. The carters were irate: they had expected to be done and back on the road in the opposite direction, headed for Guelemara and their homes before the snows blocked the roads for good and all, and instead they were out on