Fortress of Eagles by C. J. Cherryh

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. Nest 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. 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 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, 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, 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