Fortress of Eagles by C. J. Cherryh Page A

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 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, alongside the substantial stream that came babbling and flowing on their right. It was a walk through a treasure-house, the last thin arch of branches. The snow might come before they rode this way again. All the colors would vanish from the land, buried in white and gray and cold.
    They rounded the hill where the road forked. They took the right-hand choice, and that led them to the wooden bridge where a marker stone stood, a pillar beside the bridgehead with the king’s mark on it. Another such post, this one of wood, stood just the other side. They rode across the planks and startled a flight of blackbirds from their brigandage in the stubble of the barleyfield beyond.
    The stone marker defined the point the road left the king’s preserve. The fields just the other side of the bridge—indeed, the plowed land visible before this—belonged to the village of Wys-on-Cressit, not to be confounded with Wys-on-Wyettan or Wys in Palys-under-Grostan…there were very many Wyses, very much, alike, all Guelen, even the one in Palys province, so he had heard from Uwen, who himself was Guelen (as opposed to Ryssandish, the other, dark-haired folk common in northern Ylesuin) and who had lived in such a village before he became a soldier.
    Wys-on-Cressit was a place of grainfields and apple orchards and small gardens. They passed the walls of Wys necessarily as they rode down among the fields, he and his guards, and were the day’s sole sensation, a band of King’s men and a lord… the Sihhë-lord, the people called him, not always out of earshot, as they made sings against wizardry not quite hidden from his sight.
    It happened in all the villages. At first, in his folly, he had thought himself less remarkable than Uwen. Uwen’s hair had grown longer now that he was a captain, almost long enough that it stayed in its short tail, and by that dark-shot silver hair Uwen looked more the lord, at least to an eye impressed by a look of experience and a fine horse such as Liss was. So Tristen thought. But the villagers had known the stranger from the first, a dark-haired young man, common soldier’s coat or no. Guelenfolk were commonly fair and