Fortress in the Eye of Time by C. J. Cherryh Page B

went gray, he saw no stone to be under. Mauryl had said avoid the Shadows, but he walked through constant shadow, and darker shadow—limped, finally, in a darkness deeper than any the fortress had held except in its blackest depths.
    He was bruised through his thin shoes. His right ankle ached, and he had not remembered exactly where that pain had started, until he recalled his flight off the steps, and his fall off the edge of the step. Body as well as spirit, Mauryl had warned him, and the very hour that Mauryl had left him on his own in the keep, he had forgotten the first lesson he had ever learned, and fallen and done himself harm, exactly as Mauryl had warned him not to do.
    He walked and walked, unhappy with himself, following the ancient stonework until the trees grew so close he could no longer find the next white stone to guide him.
    So he had made another mistake. He had lost the Road. He was afraid, standing alone in the dark and trying to know what to do in this place where the path ran out. But it seemed to him that, if there were no white stones, still a long track stretched ahead clear of trees, and that seemed indisputably the right direction to go.
    And, true enough, when he had gone quite far on thattreeless track he saw something in the starlight that he deluded himself was another of the white stones.
    His heart rose. He went toward it as proof that he had solved the dilemma.
    But it was only a broken tree, white inside, jagged ends of wood showing pale in the night.
    Then he was truly frightened, and when he looked about him he saw nothing even to tell him which way he had come. He might have made, he thought, the worst mistake of all the mistakes he had ever made and lost the Road once for all, Mauryl’s last, Mauryl’s most final instruction—beyond which he had no idea in the world what to do.
    At that moment a shadow brushed his cheek, substantial enough to scare him. It settled on a branch of that dead tree, hunched up its shoulders and waited.
    â€œOwl?” Tristen said. “Owl, is it you?”
    Owl, a sullen bird, only spread his wings and ruffled his feathers with a sound very loud in the hush of the woods.
    â€œDo you know the way?” Tristen asked him, but Owl did nothing.
    â€œHave you come on the same Road?” Tristen asked then, since they came from the same place perhaps at the same moment, and Mauryl had set great importance on his being here. “Did Mauryl tell you to come?”
    Owl gave no sign of understanding.
    He had never trusted Owl. He had never been certain but what the smallest birds disappeared down Owl’s gullet, and he was all but certain about the mice.
    But he felt gladder than he had ever thought he should be of Owl’s presence, simply because Owl was a living creature as well as a Shadow, and because Owl was a force whose behavior he knew—and because he was despondent and lost.
    â€œDo you know where the Road is?” he asked Owl.
    Owl spread his wide blunt wings and, Shadow that he was, flew through the darkness to another tree and perched there. Waiting, Tristen thought, and he followed Owl in desperate hope that Owl knew where he was going. Owl flew on again,which he also followed. A third time Owl took wing, and by now he had no hope else but Owl, because he had no notion as he looked back where he had come from, or where his last memory of the Road might lie.
    Owl kept flying in short hops from tree to tree, never leaving his sight—and by now he feared that he might have done something Mauryl would never have approved, and trusted a bird that Mauryl had never told him was acceptable to trust. One of the pigeons he might have relied upon, never questioning its character or its intentions; but Owl was the chanciest of creatures he knew, and he knew no reason Owl should go to such great difficulty to guide him to the Road. Certainly he would have helped Owl. That was a point: creatures should help one another,