Part Four THE PINE TREE

45. Only in Dreams

“For three days and three nights Adis went up and down across Kerniou singing the story of his sad life, and at last the goddess Mesiya, wife of Kernios, let drop a tear of pity. Kernios was so angry that he banished her forever…”

—from “A Child’s Book of the Orphan, and His Life and Death and Reward in Heaven”

She was so tired, so tired. All she wanted to do was sleep until the world was different—but that was very clearly not to be…

“And the Xixian enemy, Highness?”

Briony nodded. “The city is safe. Captain Vansen says they are scattered through the hills, Lord M’Ardall.”

“But there are still many of them… thousands!”

She did her best to keep her voice measured. The young earl was one of the few who had resisted Hendon Tolly’s rule. She would need men like him. “They have shown no sign of wanting to continue their autarch’s lawless attack on Southmarch, and our soldiers are busy subduing the last of the traitor Tolly’s men inside the walls.” She did her best to smile. “I promise you, good M’Ardall, we are watching all our enemies. Let’s not borrow trouble until we have a better chance of paying it back.”

He bowed. “I hear your wisdom, Highness.”

The Throne hall was in ruins, so the seat of power was now a quartet of dining hall benches set in a tent in the middle of the residence’s front garden until the residence itself was sufficiently repaired. At the insistence of Prince Eneas of Syan, Briony alone had been given a chair, both to make sure she held pride of place in the makeshift throne room and to alleviate the misery of having to wear a dress and stays again. She hated it, but it was a sacrifice she would make to show her people that things had gone back to the way they were—even those things she had loathed.

If only my head didn’t feel like an anvil, she thought. If only their voices did not feel so much like hammers, beating on it…

As she looked at the faces around her, many of them as familiar as members of her own family, she could not help a moment’s pang at the strangeness of her situation: though a few still survived, not a single person around her now was an Eddon. Anissa had taken baby Alessandros and retreated to her old haunts in the damaged Tower of Spring. Her great-aunt Merolanna was in ill health and kept to her rooms. Briony’s father lay in state in the one remaining public hall of the residence, his bier surrounded by candles. Briony had wept over him many times. And her brother…

Ah, Barrick, where are you… ?

“Princess? I am sorry, should I come back some other time?”

She opened her eyes to see Hierarch Sisel doing his best to look patient. If nothing else, having Hendon Tolly as a master had made the hierarch and other members of the aristocracy more cautious about angering their ruler.

So I suppose that’s one I owe you, dead man. “No, Eminence, no,” she said out loud. “It is my fault, not yours. Please, ask me again.”

“It is just that we cannot put off your father’s funeral much longer and there is much to decide. The Eddon family chapel is ruined, and the great temple in the outer keep has been badly damaged as well. ...”

“Then we shall have his rites beneath the sky, Eminence. I think he would have preferred it that way.”

“I will arrange it, Princess,” Eneas said, heading off any objections from Sisel. “If you will permit me, of course.”

She nodded. “That is kind of you, Prince Eneas.” But his willingness to help troubled her, too. She could not lean on him too much: she still owed him an answer. “Now, what else? I find myself muddleheaded, and I fear I am not the best judge of things this moment. Nynor? It is good to see you back, my lord. What do you wish to say?”

The old man had been struggling to rise, but let her wave him back into his seat. “How could I stay away when my lady needed me? And your father was one of my dearest friends, a gem among princes, an example to ordinary men ...”

Briony was trying to hide her impatience. Didn’t people understand there was no time now for such formalities and pretty words? Things had to be done. The March Kingdoms, especially Southmarch itself, were in a shambles. Bodies still lay in the ruins as well as in the caves and tunnels beneath the castle, and they were starting to stink. The living needed to be fed, and Tolly had emptied the treasury. Briony doubted he could have spent everything—more likely he had shipped gold and jewelry back to his family home in Summerfield, so on top of everything else she had to contemplate waging war on her relatives to retrieve her own exchequer.

Nynor was still enumerating the ways in which the current state of finances—and in fact the entire day-to-day administration of Southmarch—was a disaster unseen since the days of the Great Death: “… And who will stand witness against the malefactors?” he complained, wagging a knobby finger. “It is virtually impossible to know for certain which of the people supported Tolly and which stayed loyal ...”

Briony did her best to disguise a sigh as a change of position. Why was she tired all the time, every day? “That is not of chiefest importance, my lord,” she told Nynor. “How could the men and women of Southmarch know what to do except support the throne and whoever sat on it?” She had thought about this a great deal on her way back from Syan, all those long days riding through what had been her father’s orderly kingdom but had now, like a deserted farm, begun to go back to nature. “It is not up to us to punish them if they cast in their lots with Tolly, it is up to us to show them the way forward. Unless they used Tolly’s rule as an excuse for crimes and cruelty! Then I will be as hard as steel.”

Whispers passed between the courtiers and nobles and others gathered in the large tent, many of whom were wondering anxiously how their own actions over the last two years might weigh on such a scale. Good, she thought. I will be fair, and even more merciful than some might, but I do not want the wicked to think their deeds will go unnoticed and unpunished. But it pained her to think of all the work to come. And without her father, without many of the old advisers, and even more painfully, without her brother.…

“Where is Avin Brone?” she asked suddenly, interrupting Nynor in the middle of a disquisition about grain stores. “Why isn’t he here?”

Nynor’s wrinkled face flushed at the neck and cheeks. “Lord Brone said… he said he will come at your summons, Princess Briony. At any time of the day or night.”

“But he does not feel obliged to be here at the time of our greatest need?”

Nynor cleared his throat. “He… he said you did not seem to need or want his help, so he would wait. He said he is at peace with the gods and his ruler, and will do as you wish.”

She stared at the old courtier, wondering how he would feel if he knew the things she did. “I will see him, then. Tomorrow or the next day.” She smiled in a way that made a few of the courtiers wince, even though they didn’t know the reason for it any more than Nynor did. “Tell him it should be at his convenience, by all means.” She turned to Prince Eneas. “And of course there are still a hundred or more of Tolly’s men gone to ground in Funderling Town like rats under the rushes. Captain Vansen and your Lord Helkis will be occupied there some days, I think.”

Eneas nodded. “As long as the traitors get no support from the Kallikans living there.”

“Funderlings,” she said a little more sharply than she had intended to. “They are called Funderlings and they are as loyal as any men.”

“Yes, Princess, of course, Funderlings.” Eneas did his best to smile.

“Forgive me,” she said hurriedly. “I have a beastly ache in my head. I did not mean ...”

“Forgiven and forgotten, Princess.” He would have said more, but Briony’s attention was drawn to a very arresting figure in the doorway being kept there by anxious soldiers. “I think we have an embassy to attend to,” she said. “Guards, this visitor is welcome here.”

The gray-skinned woman was now the center of all eyes. Some among the assembly only knew the Qar as the creatures that had tried to kill them; these stared at her with open dislike. Some even scurried back from the tall, slender figure. Others, like Sisel, who had escaped the castle before the siege began and had weathered the worst days on his family lands, watched her with less fear and more interest. But nobody, Briony felt certain, least of all herself, could look at the newcomer without mixed feelings.

“I am Aesi’uah, counselor to Barrick Eddon, the Lord of Winds and Thought.” The fairy-woman had skin the color of a dove’s breast and bowed like a willow in the wind. “I bring his greetings and his gratitude.”

As the courtiers whispered at this, Briony stared at the woman, trying to see past her skin and robin’s-egg eyes. “My brother seems to have found a home among your folk. I am pleased for him—it was not always easy for him here, surrounded by his family and people.”

“You seem angry, Princess Briony,” Aesi’uah said.

“Angry that I have scarcely seen my brother since we all nearly died?” For a moment it was all she could do to contain herself. She took a breath. “Yes, you are right. I cannot help wondering why he does not come to see me, or at least pay his last respects to his own father, who will be buried soon.”

Aesi’uah nodded. “These are strange days, Princess. It is… difficult for him.”

Briony could not help looking doubtful. “Do you think so?”

“Please, Highness, you sent a summons. Your brother did not answer it himself, but he sent me. Let me answer any other questions you have, and your brother will make the rest of his thoughts clear to you soon.”

Briony looked at the confusion and fear on the faces of those around her. A little less than a month ago Southmarch had been at war with these same Qar. She did not want that fear to return—conditions were too volatile. She softened her voice. “Of course, Lady Aesi’uah. Your words make sense. I understand your folk are camped beneath us, on the outskirts of Funderling Town.”

“Until the rest of your enemies are driven from Funderling Town, we thought it best that we remain there, yes. Along with our Funderling hosts, we have made certain your enemies cannot escape into the tunnels, especially those that lead up to the mainland.”

“It is appreciated. And after these last enemies are captured? What will your people do then?”

“We will return to our country in the north. Many of our survivors left families behind all over the shadowlands, and Qul-na-Qar, the great house of our people, is almost deserted. We are too few now to remain scattered.”

“Another question, one that must be asked—will there be peace between us?”

“I think in this one thing I can safely speak for your brother. Yes, there will be peace, if mankind will leave us in our freedom and our isolation.”

The whispers began again; Briony ignored them. “If my brother is truly your leader I will need to hear that from his own lips before I ...” she turned guiltily toward Prince Eneas, “… before we could promise to honor such a pact on behalf of our peoples.”

The eremite bowed her head. “As you say.”

Briony took another deep breath, reminding herself that the business of caring for her people would always be a matter of compromises. “Thank you, Lady Aesi’uah. That eases my mind somewhat. Now, let us speak of other things. What happened down below the castle—I scarcely know how to talk about it. I’ve heard many stories, but I still don’t entirely understand them. That… thing… the giant ...”

“It was Zosim the Trickster, the lord of words and wine and fire. Zosim the Deathlord’s son. Zosim the god.”

The whispers became more urgent, more fearful.

“Forgive us if we doubt,” Eneas said abruptly. “But this flouts everything we Trigonates believe.”

“You need not take my unsupported word as truth, Prince Eneas,” said Aesi’uah. “There are more than a few of Briony’s own subjects who still live, and who saw much of what happened.”

“Little people,” said Eneas unhappily. “Kallikani.”

“They are still my subjects, Prince Eneas,” Briony said as politely as she could. And Ferras Vansen, too, she thought, but he will not talk to me. Scarcely a day passed after Vansen collapsed at her feet before he had gone off to join the Funderlings in hunting for Durstin Crowel and the rest of Tolly’s partisans under the castle. “Even so, Lady Aesi’uah, it is hard for those of us who weren’t there to understand. What happened to… Zosim?”

“He is gone, Princess. Even the oldest and wisest of our race who survived cannot tell for certain what that means. He is an immortal and immortals are, by definition, hard to kill, but it might be possible when they take mortal form. We can feel no trace of him in the waters that roil now beneath us—the inrushing sea quenched his blaze. Where is fire when it ceases to burn? That is where Zosim is.”

“So you are telling me he… it… cannot come back? That we are safe?”

Aesi’uah’s expression was strange—almost a smile. “None who draw breath are safe, Highness.”

Briony checked her temper. It took a moment to answer. “Thank you for this report, Lady Aesi’uah. Have you anything more to tell me?”

“Nothing except that we regret the damage done to your people as well as ours.”

“But it was you fairies who did much of that damage… !” said one of the nobles and the undercurrent of discontent threatened to break the surface and become a true wave.

“Murderers,” called another, loud enough for everyone to hear. “Demons!”

Briony was angry at this, but she knew that many of her own people supported her only because of her family name, and others solely because of the prince of Syan and his soldiers. She could not afford to give her impatience full rein.

“Please,” she said, holding up her hand to still the growing clamor. “Lady Aesi’uah is our guest. Whatever happened before, in the end the Qar fought as our allies and many of them died defending this city and stronghold. Do not forget that.” She turned to the eremite. “But as you can see, our folk are not quite ready to extend the open hand of forgiveness—and who can blame them?”

Aesi’uah inclined her head. “As you say, who can blame them?”

It seemed to Briony there was a mocking undercurrent to the reply, and that decided her. She did not like smugness coming from these creatures, however justified. “Since we still have much to discuss,” she announced, “and my brother will not come to me, then I will go to him.”

She was satisfied to see something like surprise on the eremite’s slender face. “Highness… ?”

“My apologies—was I not clear? I will go to speak to your Barrick, lord of fog and wind or whatever his grand new title is.”

“But, Your Highness, it is… he is surrounded by ...” Aesi’uah was clearly at a loss.

“He is what? He is my brother, yes. He is on the sovereign territory of Southmarch, capital of these March Kingdoms. He is surrounded by fairy folk, whom you have just promised me regret any damage they have done to my people. So why should there be any difficulties?”

Eneas was startled, too. “Briony… Princess… I don’t think this is wise.”

“But I do, Prince Eneas. More, I think it a grave necessity. The people with whom we were recently at war are encamped beneath our feet, within a short distance of miles of tunnels we know almost nothing about. If we are finding it difficult to root out a simple annoyance like Crowel, can you imagine what a hornet’s nest it would be to try to do the same with the Qar should things go badly between us?” She turned and saw, as she had hoped, that all eyes in the capacious tent were on her. “Of course I shall go.” She raised her hand to forestall the prince’s next words. “Alone but for a few guards—this is a parley between allies, after all. Lady Aesi’uah? You may go and inform Barrick that I will come to him today, before sunset.”

Briony sat back in her makeshift throne as the eremite rose and made her graceful, unhurried way out of the tent. Her head was still throbbing but she felt a little better. At least she would finally have a chance to see her brother, face-to-face.

* * *

Tinwright crouched in the indifferent shade of a dying yew tree in the commons before the royal residence and watched Princess Briony march past with her retinue of guards. A group of nearby laborers also saw her and raised a ragged cheer. Tinwright hoped she hadn’t noticed him. Only Elan M’Cory swearing to the princess that Tinwright had resisted Tolly long after others would simply have murdered Briony’s infant brother had kept Tinwright from going back to a stronghold cell—or more likely to the headsman’s block.

But was it really true, he wondered—what would he have done if things had been different? Would he have thrown away his own life, or would he have done what Tolly ordered?

Matty Tinwright had just finished his jug of wine and all he could think of now was that he wished he had been able to afford more. Prices were very high, and all the best things went to the Syannese soldiers—as it was, Tinwright had needed to steal coppers out of his mother’s jewelry box so that he could get drunk and quiet the pain in his chest, which hurt every time he took a deep breath. Still, he supposed he should be grateful he was alive. If he had not had the Zorian prayer book in his breast pocket he would be having this drink in Heaven—or at least not in Southmarch.

“Who would ever think a book could save a man’s life?” the Syannese soldier-surgeon who bandaged his wound had said. Tinwright had been in chains at the time so he had not agreed with the man about his luck. He was free now but didn’t feel much better about things.

And there went the princess, he thought, less than a hundred paces away from where he sat, but it might as well have been a hundred miles. He could only watch as she and the soldiers made their way along the commons path toward the Raven’s Gate—watch and wonder how things had gone so very wrong for Matt Tinwright, Royal Poet.

Elan M’Cory did not love him. She had made that plain. She had thanked him for helping to keep her alive and hidden from Hendon Tolly, but that, she had told him, was gratitude, not love.

“Duke Gailon needs me,” she had said, pointing again at the hideous thing she had spent the last three days nursing. “He nearly died—he thought he was dead! How could I desert him now?”

Even had Tinwright not resented the man for the fortunate accident of his birth, he would have found it painful to have her prefer such a blighted creature to his relatively unblemished self. Gailon Tolly’s face was a mass of open wounds and pocked with dirt and worse things beneath the skin, so that he seemed ravaged by plague. Still, Elan had told him that she wanted only to devote the rest of her life to nursing Gailon back to health. What could be clearer than that? Tinwright himself was of no further interest.

Love, he thought. Subject of so many sweet verses, and yet it stinks like ordure.

He levered himself to his feet and staggered across the green, which now was little more than mud and broken bits of rubble pierced by a few strands of dried, dead grass.

A map of my heart, Tinwright thought.


Would I have done it? Would I have killed the child to save myself—no, to save Elan? It was hard to say now—hard to remember anything except the confusion and terror of that moment. He stared down from wall the and across the outer battlements to the unending roll and crash of the sea. The looming Tower of Summer covered him in cool shadow. Tinwright’s own thoughts on that night were as lost to him as something from the depths of history. How could anyone ever say with certainty what such and such a hero said, or thought, or felt? Tinwright had been in the middle of great events… although he had to admit his part had been a minor one… and could scarcely remember a moment of it except for Hendon Tolly’s mad face glaring like a festival mask. Like something from a play…

He looked up at the sound of footsteps. A slender figure was coming toward him along the top of the wall, an old woman by her face, although she walked with strength and ease. Tinwright realized he was staring and looked out over the water again. The waves, whipped by early summer winds, spat froth as they raced toward the castle wall.

“Ah.” The woman had seen him. “Forgive me. I will leave you alone and find another spot.”

Tinwright shook his head. She was older than his mother, but he was tired of being alone with his own thoughts. “No, stay, please. Are you a priestess?”

“A Zorian sister,” she said.

“So.” He nodded. “No shortage of things for you to do these days, I’m sure.”

“There is never a shortage of things to do, now or any other time.” But she smiled as she said it. Tinwright liked the woman, liked her grave, somber features. “At the moment, though, I want to do nothing except feel some wind on my face.”

Tinwright took this as a request for silence, so he turned away again to contemplate the restless ocean. People said that the sea had now flooded all the depths underneath Funderling Town; ever since he had heard that Tinwright half expected the castle to float away at any moment, like a boat lifted off the beach by a rising tide.

“Tell me,” he said after a while. “How does it feel to know that the gods are not with us?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You must have heard what happened here. Even in your temple or shrine you must have been told something of what happened.”

The woman smiled again. “Oh, I know a bit about it, yes.”

“Then tell me how you can still call yourself a Zorian sister when we are told the gods are asleep—that they have been sleeping for thousands of years. That Zoria herself was killed by her husband back in the beginning of Time. That all the things the priests have told us about Heaven have been lies.” He could not choke off his own bitterness now. “Nobody watches over us. Nobody waits for us when we die. Nobody cares what we do in this world, for good or ill.”

She looked at him carefully, then took a step closer and stood behind him, so that they both looked out over the moving water, which glinted like silver in the afternoon glare. “And how is that different?” she asked after a while.

“What do you mean?”

“How is that different from what we have always had, always known? The gods come to us only in dreams. We must make our own choices every day of our own short lives. Whether they will reward those choices or even notice them, we do not know. I see nothing changed.”

“But it is changed! It was all a lie. We saw what the priests showed us, believed what they told us, but the gods they described to us were only puppets playing out a story. Now we don’t even have the puppets. We don’t have anything.”

“We have the same troubles we always had, young man,” she said sharply. “We have the same needs as always. I see you are injured.” She pointed to the bump of the poultice under his shirt. “But there are many who are more sorely wounded. They need help here on earth, whatever the gods may do. Even if our faith was never anything but a shadow play, we can still learn from it. And it could be that even the gods themselves were only puppets—that there is a larger cause behind it all, for you and for me and for every person here.” She shook her head. “Listen to me go on. Some comfort, eh? I fear I am out of practice.” She patted his arm. “Take care, young man. Despair is the only true enemy. Make yourself useful. Nurse someone who has greater need than you. Feed someone who is hungry. Make something that will help another.”

After the woman had left, Tinwright found himself still thinking about what she had said.

* * *

“Where are Crowel and his renegades now?” Briony asked Lord Helkis, who had been alerted to her coming and had met her at the front gate of Funderling Town.

“All but run to ground, Princess. They have been pushed back to the quarry on the edge of the town, I’m told. It will be over soon.” Helkis seemed to have decided that since it was now all but certain she would marry his prince, he had better start treating her with respect. Briony wasn’t at all sure about his reasoning, but it made for a nice change. “Crowel does not know these tunnels but that man Vansen seems to, and Vansen also has the help of the Kallikans, of course.”

“Vansen makes himself very busy,” she said. So busy that she had not seen him since his recovery. Between the guard captain and her brother, she was beginning to feel quite thoroughly avoided. Does Vansen hate me? she wondered. Fear me? Or do both he and Barrick simply not care, as my brother did his best to make clear the last time?

The Funderlings who had returned to the heart of their city came out to watch Briony as she passed down Gem Street, some of them cheering but the rest watching with fascination and worry on their faces. Apparently the Funderlings were not all happy with her, either.

“I feel the need to talk to Chert Blue Quartz,” she said to Lord Helkis. “Will you ask the Funderlings to send him to me?”

“As you wish, Highness.” He dispatched a runner to the guildhall at the far end of the long, winding street, where reconstruction had already begun on the damage caused in the last few days of fighting before Crowel’s retreat. “No man would ignore your summons, Princess, I promise you.”

Except the ones I truly want to see, she thought.


Aesi’uah came out to meet her in front of the chamber, and though the woman’s face was as calm as always, Briony could not help feeling that the eremite was anxious about something. “He is waiting for you, Princess Briony.” Aesi’uah gestured with her long hands toward the archway and the flickering lights beyond, then stepped discreetly to one side.

“He is my brother,” Briony said when Helkis and his guards would have accompanied her. “Whatever else has happened, I feel certain he is no danger to me.”

Lord Helkis did not look pleased to have to stand so near to Aesi’uah, but he was not going to move any farther away, either; Briony left them to sort it out.

Her brother stood looking down at a table made from two stones set one on top of the other where he had spread many slates and rolls of parchment. Barrick had taken off his armor, and wore only a loose-fitting white shirt with breeches of the same color. His feet were bare, and for a moment she had the illusion that the past year had not happened, that she had left her bedchamber and found him up before her, standing in his nightshirt waiting for her to rise as he had when they were children. Then he looked up, and the strange coldness in his face proved that such an innocent, mostly happy past was truly gone forever. “Briony,” he said calmly. “You wish to talk with me, I hear.”

It was hard to make herself speak. She wanted to rush to him, to throw her arms around him, even to hit him—anything to drive that look from his face. Instead, all she managed was a nod. “Yes, I thought that would be a good idea… since you would not come to me.”

“My apologies,” he said in the way he might have said it to a stranger after treading on her foot, “but it is not so easy. My people… well, they hate yours. That makes it difficult. They are still fearful, and many of them do not trust me completely.”

Your people? Are you talking about elves and goblins?” Briony realized her voice had risen almost to a shout, but she could not help herself. “You are calling these your people now, but you will not come to see your own sister? You will not come to see your father’s body before he is buried?”

He turned his back on her as if to resume studying his papers and slates. “Of course you cannot understand.”

Could this tall, flame-haired stranger really be Barrick? Or had the Qar somehow set a changeling in his place? Was such a thing even possible, or was it just another old wives’ tale? These days legends and fairy stories seemed to be the only things that were unquestionably true. “Do you think things have not changed for me, Barrick? Our father is dead. I have walked all the way to Tessis and back as a traveling player. People have tried to poison me and shoot me with arrows. I met a demigoddess… !”

“I knew a demigoddess, too,” he said. “But she was not the type who made friends with our kind.”

“With our kind. Listen to yourself! A moment ago, the fairies were your people, now you speak as though you remember your true blood! You’ll have to make up your mind, Barrick Eddon.”

“You do not understand. The Fireflower ...”

“Oh!” She turned and walked away, fighting back her anger. “Yes, things have happened to you. To me as well. Zoria’s mercy, Barrick, I killed Hendon Tolly with my own hands! If you have been burned by Heaven’s fire like the Orphan—well, then, so have I! We are both changed! But you haven’t changed all that much—your suffering still must be unequaled by any other’s… !”

He turned, his face tight with rage. “Don’t talk to me about suffering, Briony! You will marry that prince—I have seen him moon over you like a calf following its mother. You will be the queen of Syan and the world will bow to you. What do I have? Do you even care?”

“Barrick, that is foolishness ...”

“Do you know what is ahead for the Qar… and for me? Saqri, the queen of the People, is dying. She sacrificed herself so that Zosim could be defeated—dozens of arrows and rifle balls pierced her. Only her will and her love for her people keep her alive. When she is gone, half of what has kept the Qar race alive will be gone, too. Think of that, sister—when you are planning your marriage, I will be burying my queen and my beloved… !”

“Your beloved… ?” Briony could only stand and gape as if struck. “Who are you talking about—not that Saqri?”

“You don’t understand anything,” he said bitterly. “Come. Come and I will show you.” He beckoned Briony to follow, then led her to a side chamber where a pair of female creatures in garb like Aesi’uah’s, but whose angular shapes were less human, knelt in silence beside a makeshift bed of straw. On it, scarcely visible in the dim light of a few candles, lay a small, slender girl who could not be even as old as she and Barrick were.

“This isn’t Saqri,” she said. “This is the girl that was in the boat with you.”

He stood over the head of the bed, looking down. “Saqri is in the center of the camp, surrounded by her people. This… this is the only person who truly cared whether I lived or died during this entire terrible nightmare. Her name is Qinnitan. For a year she was in my dreams and in my thoughts. She was my companion, my friend, my ...” He stopped and shook himself angrily. “Now she is dying… and we never even spoke face-to-face. Never touched ...” He turned abruptly and walked out.

Briony stood for a moment, gazing down at the motionless girl. If she lived, it was impossible to tell. She showed no movement of breath, no sign of the animation that plays over a sleeper’s face even in quiet slumber.

Who are you? Briony wondered. And what were you to my brother, really? Would you have loved him? Would you have cared for him?

“How long will she live?” she asked the two Qar women, but although they both looked up at her words, neither answered.


“I’m sorry, Barrick,” she said when she had found him again. “I didn’t know. But that is all the more reason ...”

“Cease, Briony, I beg you.” He moved away when she would have touched his arm. “You will say it is all the more reason to cleave to the family I have, but you do not understand. I am no longer one of you.”

“What? An Eddon… ?”

He laughed harshly. “Oh, I am an Eddon all right. Everywhere I go others suffer in my stead. You must know that by now. How many of the men who came with you died so that you could regain Father’s throne? How many others because the Tollys wanted it in the first place? And how many of the Qar have died because our ancestor stole Sanasu from her own family?”

A memory struck her, from the last time she had talked to their father. “There is something you must know ...”

But Barrick did not seem to hear her. “In fact, now that I think on it, the number of current victims doesn’t matter, because eventually the Qar will all have died because of what our family did to them. So if I can repay even a little of the debt that the Eddons owe to Saqri and Ynnir and even Yasammez, then that is what I must do.”

The memory was washed away by anger. “You speak of Yasammez that way? The bitch that murdered so many of our people?”

He waved his hand. “Go away, Briony—you cannot understand. We have no more to say to each other. Soon enough the Qar will be gone from here and I will go with them. You can rebuild your houses in peace—we are too few to trouble mankind again.”

“When I saw you, I wondered at how much you had changed, Barrick,” she told him. “But now I see that in the most important ways you are no different. It’s still your own sorrows you care about and no one else’s, and you still turn away from love and kindness as though it were an attack.”

Her brother’s pale face showed nothing—he seemed as unmoved as the sea itself. Briony turned and walked out of the cavern.

46. The Guttering Candle

“… He told Zoria that if she could lead him out of Kerniou, the Orphan could return to the world and the sun, but if she faltered or failed, he would have to remain among the dead forever.”

—from “A Child’s Book of the Orphan, and His Life and Death and Reward in Heaven”

He could feel her trying not to be amused, although he did not know why. The exact nature of what Saqri found funny often eluded him. Your sister has departed. Did it not go well?

You know it didn’t. You know it as well as I do, I’m sure.

I was not with you. I felt you, but at a distance. Still, the emotions were very great!

Even as she teased him with that strange indulgence she had begun to show toward him since she had been struck down, he could feel her fighting against her own growing weakness. Unlike Saqri, he was only just learning how to politely not notice things. Don’t mock, he told her. I am in pain.

Of course you are. But it is unnecessary. The People have ended. Never was it promised that we would all meet our ends in the same instant, but I doubt not this will be our last generation, at least for those of the long-lived. A few of us shall straggle on for years, but the Defeat has finally come. Your people do not carry quite the same burden as we do, so you likely do not understand that knowing the end has arrived is almost a relief to us. I am sorry I will not be here to see the last, bright flowering that will come of it—I am certain the art and music will be glorious and frightening in a thousand subtle ways!

But if there is no longer a People, Barrick Eddon, there is no need for you to sacrifice yourself. The Fireflower of all our mothers will be gone soon. Then someday soon, even if your time is elongated by what has happened to you, it will happen to you, too, dear manchild—the last Fireflower will flicker and die. Without the Fireflower’s light, the Deep Library will become a stagnant pond. And without the memory of who we are, we will dwindle and die like any mute creatures. The song will go on without our voices.…

It was as if the closer she moved toward death, the older she became. She seemed nearly as ancient as Yasammez now. Perhaps it’s the nearness of eternity and whatever it brings, he thought, but did not share it with her.

When you have finished your moment with the mortal girl, she told him, come to me. I would like to see you with my eyes.

He stood over Qinnitan for a long while, trying not to think. Before he left he lowered himself to his knees and took her hand, but it was so limp and cold, he could not bear to hold it. He kissed it and laid it back on her breast.


Saqri was on a bed that Barrick had asked be made, although if the queen of the fairies had been given her way, she would have been laid on the naked rocks and covered only with her cloak. If we are given the choice of how to die, she had said, we of the old ways, then we prefer the elements just as they are. It is good to learn to deal with the chill of night, because as it comes, death also blows its cold breath upon us. We learn to move less and think more.

But you aren’t being given any choice, Barrick had told her, and so the Daughter of the First Flower was kept comfortable and warm because she was too weak to have it be otherwise. I will not let you die here in this place, Barrick had sworn to her. I will return you to the People’s House.

Foolish boy. Like Yasammez, I will die when the Book says I must die.

Liar. You are alive now when anyone else would have long since crossed the river. It is the strength of your will that gives us this time and you know it.

You saw your sister, she said. She burns more brightly than I had guessed. She would have made a good mate for you.

Barrick could only stare at her. That is disgusting.

Not among our kind—not in our ruling family. I loved Ynnir before I hated him, and hated him before I loved him. I knew him each moment of my life. That is how entwined we were. But your ways are not ours, I realize.

Don’t say such things. Besides, she and I are no longer close. I’ve changed too much.

Have you?

You know I have!

She smiled at him. It was such a small wrinkle of her lips that someone watching less carefully might have missed it. “All can be foretold,” as the Oracles say. In truth, I think you should stay with your people… I am sorry, Barrick Eddon—with your other people.

Never! I can never live among them again. I am nothing like that anymore.

She went on as though he had not responded. I meant no insult. You have earned your blood with us as well, there is no doubt. Even the smallest and most distant of the People’s clans will know about you.

Barrick didn’t care about such things—what did any kind of fame matter when the rest of his life would be little better than a long funeral procession as the Qar and their knowledge slowly died away? And at last he would die, too, either alone among a people that his family had helped destroy or as an alien in the land of his birth. Either way he would be a stranger to those around him.

Be of good cheer, Saqri told him. Life is short at best. Even the long span of Yasammez was a mere flicker beside the stars, and the stars too will go dark some day.

There was nothing to be said to such a blindingly joyful sentiment. Barrick nodded and turned away.

No, she said. Come back. Please sit beside me.

When he had seated himself, he looked at her more carefully. Saqri seemed almost translucent, like a candle that had become little more than a shell, its wick burned far down inside it. Though he knew her blood was red like his, it was not apparent from the outside just now; she seemed to be something other than flesh, like the petal of a white lily.

Why did it all happen? he asked at last.

She did not need to ask him what he meant. It had to, dear manchild. The balance was too precarious to last forever. When Crooked finally died, everything tumbled loose. Now our time is over.

But why? Even without both halves of the Fireflower, there must be something left for the People! They don’t have to simply lie down and die.

Almost a smile again. No, they need not lie down and die, Barrick—but our great age of blooming is over. Perhaps something will come after… perhaps… but I cannot see it.…

She was growing tired, he knew, and he dared not waste her strength. Still, when she was gone, there would not be another person on all the earth who would understand him. Have I told you what I have found?

Her eyes fluttered but stayed closed. No, tell me, manchild.

It was just like the time before he knew the full horror of his father’s illness, those days when Olin would move and talk like a man who had spent the previous days unpleasantly drunk. Poor, blighted man. He understood what plagued him less than I do, and I still cannot fathom it all… To Saqri he said, I learned from some of the Xixian prisoners that there may still be tribes of the People living in the southern deserts and the hills—the Xixians call them Khau-Yisti. And there are tales of beings who must have some kinship to our People in the islands to the south and west of Xand as well…

He realized that Saqri was not listening anymore—she had fallen back into her deep, deep sleep, a retreat to a place just this side of death. Each time it was harder to draw her out, each time she returned there more quickly. Soon the other half of the Fireflower would be gone forever.

Ynnir? What shall I do?

But that voice had also fallen silent.

* * *

“Elan, just speak to me. Surely that is not too much to ask from a man who has loved you as truly as I have?”

She frowned at him, but not in anger. “You know I care for you, Matt. I will always be grateful that you tried so hard to rescue me from Hendon.”

“Tried? Did!”

“Of course. For a time. But things have changed now—you must see that.”

“See what? That you are throwing me over for a dying man… ?”

She drew back from him. “Gailon won’t die! Back at Summerfield Court, he will have the best physicians. He can’t die! The gods would not let such a miracle occur only to snatch it away!”

After the past weeks, Matt Tinwright had a different view of what sort of thing the gods would and wouldn’t do, but he knew it was pointless to argue. Elan had loved Gailon Tolly since she was a girl, and now she would be able to nurse the dying man through his last months.

“There are miracles all around you, Elan,” he said. “I should be dead! I was shot in the heart with a bolt from a crossbow. But the very prayer book I tried to give you stopped the arrow.” He took the small book from his doublet and held it out. Torn parchment flowered from a jagged hole in the cover as big as a silver coin. “Look! My blood is on its back pages! If I hadn’t had it, the arrow would have reached my heart, but instead it merely gouged me. Does that mean nothing to you?”

“It means that I was right to return it, Master Tinwright. If I had accepted your gift, you would have died.”

Tinwright slumped. He had barely slept during the nights since Midsummer. Sometimes he thought that if he couldn’t have Elan, his heart would break and he would die, too—sooner than Gailon Tolly, perhaps—and wouldn’t Elan feel sorry then… !

“Come here,” she said, lifting her pale hands. “Let me give you a kiss.” And to his immense sadness, she did—a chaste, sisterly peck on the cheek. “I will never forget you, Matt. I will never forget you, or your sister, or your mother ...”

“Nobody forgets my mother,” he said bitterly.

“You could be a better son to her, you know. She only wants what is best for you. ...”

Tinwright’s aching heart immediately shrank inward a little, nestling deeper in his ribs. He began to say something sour, then realized that he and Elan were not even speaking the same tongue any more. “Best for me? You must think I’m a child.”

“I think you are a good, kind man.”

“Which it does not take a poet to understand is the same as saying, ‘I don’t need you any more,’ am I right?”

“Don’t be angry, please.”

“Angry?” He stood up and bowed. “Not at all, my lady, not at all. No, I am happy, because I have learned an important thing about love today—and that’s a poet’s proper study, isn’t it—love? Farewell, Elan. I wish you and Gailon very well.”

But when he looked back from the doorway after this noble, poetic leavetaking, Elan M’Cory wasn’t even watching him leave with eyes full of regret and longing, as he had hoped. She had returned to her stitchery.

* * *

“I saw no sign of him,” Chert reported to Opal as he slumped onto the seat. “I asked all over town, and no one else has, either.”

Opal could barely muster the strength to look up. “Why did he lie to me? Why did he tell me I would see him again?”

Chert sat beside her on the bench and wished for the hundredth time that they didn’t have to shelter in his brother’s house, but their own place on Wedge Road was too close to the area where Durstin Crowel and the renegade Tolly supporters held out against capture.

As if to remind him of all the miseries in his life, Nodule Blue Quartz picked this particular moment to come down the stairs and into the dust parlor that was currently serving as his brother’s and sister-in-law’s place of refuge. “Ah, Chert. Sitting about, I see. Surely you can find some way to pitch in and help—the Elders know, there is plenty to do these days.” He nodded slowly, as if the weight of his responsibilities made even such simple movements difficult. “And someone was here from the guildhall claiming you are wanted upground at the castle.” He laughed, but there was more than a little anger in it. “I imagine someone has simply mistaken you for me, but the fool of a messenger kept saying no, it was you who was wanted, so I suppose you must go and find out.” Nodule nodded to Opal, shouldered on his cloak, and went out the front door.

Chert had barely heard what his brother said about the summons; he was still chewing over the insult. Pitch in and help? It was he who almost destroyed everything, Chert thought. My own brother. He tried to stop me without even bothering to find out what I was doing.

Another thought came to him, one that had been there all along but he had been too busy to entertain. I had something to do with all that happened—with things turning out better than they might have otherwise. With the end of that autarch fellow. With us all being alive. For a moment Chert wanted to run after his older brother and skull him with a rock. Me. Not him. But so far most of Funderling Town knew only enough of what had happened to understand that Chert had been instrumental in destroying their most sacred places.

He was startled out of his reverie by Opal’s hand closing on his arm, a hard squeeze with fingernails in it. “Go to her,” she said.

“What? Go to whom? Why?”

Opal’s deep, crippling sadness had fallen away, replaced by a feverish intensity only marginally less worrisome. “To the princess, of course, since you must go up to the castle anyway. You saved her life! She will help us!”

“Saved her life? Perhaps. But she also saved mine. I told you, it was nothing so simple as ...”

“Tell her we need her to find our boy! Tell her all Flint did! She cannot turn you down—she owes you!”

“But, my love, Princess Briony has more than enough to do ...”

“What could be more important than finding our boy, you old fool? You heard what Antimony said—he saved Beetledown so he could deliver the Astion! And the Qar—Flint did things for the Qar, too, although I never quite understood. But… but our boy matters. Tell her that. Flint matters. She must help him!”

Chert shook his head, though he knew the battle was already lost. “I cannot simply go to Briony Eddon, the princess regent of all the March Kingdoms, and say, ‘You must find our son.’ She will think me mad.”

“She will think you a father.” Opal had that look, the one she wore when something was agreed upon, even if she was the only one agreeing. “She had a father herself—in fact she has just lost him. She will understand.”

Chert sighed. The pain of Flint’s absence was terrible, but he felt certain that begging the mistress of all Southmarch for her help wouldn’t change things. If he still lived, Flint would not be found unless he wanted to be found. A new thought chilled him. If they never found Flint, would Opal ever be happy again?

“Of course I will go to her,” was what he said out loud. “Of course I will, my only darling.”

* * *

Sister Utta came back from her walk along the walls heartened. It was good to see so many people already at the work of rebuilding Southmarch, although she knew a long time would have to pass before the scars of the conflict were even partially hidden. How much longer until people’s hearts had also been mended? That Utta couldn’t say, but she could smell summer in the air and that was good enough for now. The day after the ocean had crashed in and drowned the deepest caverns beneath the castle, black clouds had filled the sky over Southmarch, hurling down rain as if to soak all that was aboveground as well. In the storm’s wake, little sprigs of green had already begun sprouting between the broken stones and out of the gouged, naked mud of the commons.

As if to underscore this theme of renewal, Merolanna was sitting up in her bed taking soup from one of her maids. The duchess had seemed at death’s door only a few days ago, but today was feeling so much better that Sister Utta had been able to leave the nursing to others and go out of the house for a little while.

“Utta!” Merolanna pushed away her bowl with a trembling hand and shook her head sternly when the maid offered her more. “I have been asking for you, my dear. I feel as though I have been on a long journey. Tell me all the news, quickly—is it true Hendon Tolly and his bullies are gone?”

“Tolly is dead by all reports,” Utta said, sitting on the edge of the bed. “But you should lie back and rest. We will have plenty of time to talk later.”

“Nonsense. At my age?” Merolanna laughed, although her voice was still weak and reedy. “In any case, I have news of my own! I have met my son.”

“What?” Utta’s heart, so buoyant only a moment before at seeing her friend so much better, suddenly felt cold. Was it still the lingering fever, or was this madness something separate and deeper, something that would not go away even if the dowager duchess regained her health? “You saw him?”

“Not just saw him, met him! He came to me!” The old woman laughed again, then frowned as the maid dabbed at a spot of soup on her chin. “Stop that, girl. And Utta, don’t frown. I can tell by your face that you think this some feebleness of mine, or else a piece of fever-foolery, but it was neither. He came to my bedside last night after you slept. I saw him and spoke to him. He even remembered his true name, the name only I know… Adis.” She looked a little abashed. “I named him for the holy Orphan, yes. But even so, it did not protect him—the fairies stole him anyway.”

Now Utta wondered if Merolanna had been tricked by some enterprising beggar-child who thought he had found himself a patroness that could strew the way before him with gold. Utta wasn’t certain what she would do if that were the case. “Is he coming here, then? Did you invite him to stay with you?”

“Of course I did. But he has too much to do. He was very involved in the war against the fairies, you know.” The old woman frowned. “Or was it the war against the southerners? I cannot quite remember. But in either case he has too much to do to stop here with an old woman. But he has scarcely changed since I lost him! Can you imagine!”

Now Utta felt a real chill. “But, Merolanna, when he was lost… that was fifty years ago.”

“I know. Is it not a strange, miraculous thing?” The dowager duchess sat back among the cushions. “Still, I am happy, and he promised I would see him again. Now tell me everything that has happened while I was ill. I am hungry for more than soup… !”

* * *

Barrick looked down at the girl’s face, so familiar and yet so strange. Only a short while earlier, Briony had stood in this same rock chamber, and she too had seemed an inexplicable mixture of the unknowable and the known. Could she really be his twin sister, the one who had sometimes seemed so close that she might have been just another part of himself ? And could Qinnitan, lying here before him lit only by the deathly gleam of a few candles, really be a stranger he had never seen in the flesh until that moment down in the Mysteries?

Qinnitan? Can you hear me? He emptied his thoughts of everything—Saqri, Briony, all that had happened since the last spring moon began to grow—and tried once more. Qinnitan. It’s Barrick. I need you. I need to speak with you. But he could feel nothing in that distant corner of his thoughts and his heart where she had once lived. Qinnitan!

He sat beside her. The Fireflower voices, quiescent and drowsy as sun-warmed bees, murmured to him of the Deathwatch Chamber, of quiet, dignified passage to the beyond, but he did not want to hear it. For once, the knowledge of the kings of the Qar meant little: they knew of no precedent for what was happening. Without the two halves of the Fireflower, there would be no Deep Library, and the voices there would drift into isolated madness. Qinnitan would leave him. Saqri would vanish, too. Soon his head would be empty but for the Fireflower. All of them gone, across the river or waiting on its banks to ford those dark waters. Even Ynnir had all but left him and was running in the far fields, soon to pass onto whatever was next as the earthly bloodline ended.

The idea came to him like a piece of distant music—only another sound at first, but one whose melody at last won out over more random, ordinary noises. Ynnir. The fields. The river…

Barrick sank down into himself, thinking. The candles glowed. After a time some of them had burned so low that they began to flicker and go out, but still he sat beside the motionless form of the dark-haired girl, considering.

47. Death of the Eddons

“… So she took him by the hand but Kernios sent the spirits of the fearsome dead to follow them and harry them… Zoria went so swiftly that she dared not even look at the Orphan, and he did not cry out or make a sound ...”

—from “A Child’s Book of the Orphan, and His Life and Death and Reward in Heaven”

Briony knew she should dress properly for the meeting, but it was easier when the time came to go to the duchess’ chambers in her morning robes, with a soft cap on her hair and only one of her ladies to accompany her.

It’s like being a child again, she thought—but, of course, it was nothing like that at all.

Utta met her at the door. For a moment the Zorian sister didn’t seem to know what to do, whether to bow to her or embrace her. Briony relieved her of the decision by opening her arms. “Oh, please, Utta, don’t be a stranger! Not after all that’s happened!”

The old woman smiled and embraced her. Utta was thinner than she had been, as were most of the castle’s residents: the siege had bitten hard in the last months.

“I am so pleased to see you, Princess,” Utta said. “But like all of us, I grieve for your father.”

“Of course.” Briony wiped at her eyes and laughed. “It seems every hour I am either doing my best not to cry or trying to look stern and awful, like a true monarch. Ah, but it’s good to see you.”

“And you, Highness.” Utta looked at her with obvious fondness. Briony was comforted to know that at least a few things hadn’t changed.

Utta led Briony to her great-aunt’s bedside. Briony had been prepared for the change, but seeing Merolanna still shocked her: only months before, the dowager duchess had been the very picture of a vigorous elderly woman. Now she seemed quite diminished, both eyes and cheeks sunken, as if she had begun to shrink inward on herself like fruit spoiling in a bowl. Still, the old woman’s eyes were bright, and when she saw Briony, she was able to lift herself up onto her elbows.

“The Three be praised!” she said. “Utta, push these cushions behind me so I can look at my dear Briony properly.” Merolanna shook her head. She wore only a coif instead of her usual wig and elaborate headdress—even her head seemed to have become smaller. “Come and tell me everything. Your poor father! Oh, what dreadful days we have seen here, dreadful days. But things will be better now.”

Briony was still confounded. It was as if some other player had been brought in to play the part—her great-aunt might have aged ten years since last Winter’s Eve.

“Of course,” she said out loud. “Of course, Auntie ’Lanna. Things will all be better now.”


“You look beautiful and strong, my lady,” Rose Trelling told her. Briony’s other companion Moina had been gone from the castle for months, returned to her family’s great house in the east, but Rose had stayed in Southmarch with her uncle Avin Brone and now had taken back her duties as lady-in-waiting with alacrity. She fastened the clasp on the heavy necklace, which lay too brightly against her mistress’ pale skin, like a string of stars.

“I do not feel much of either,” Briony said, turning to examine herself in the mirror. “Especially today, when I must bury my father.” She thought the huge, stiff dress made her look like a ship under sail, and not a fast brig, either. “A merchant’s carrack,” she said. “Wallowing under a full cargo.”

“My lady?”

“Never mind.” Much as she would have liked things to return to what they had once been, Briony could not make it so by wishing: just looking at Rose’s sweet, open face reminded her of Brone, the girl’s uncle. The time was coming fast when she must confront him with what the play-wright Teodoros had seen. It was clear from the way Brone looked at her that King Olin’s closest supporter knew something was wrong, but she could not bear to face him until after her father’s funeral. Still, it could not wait longer than that. If the man was an enemy, as she had become more and more certain, wasn’t it dangerous letting him walk free when he must know that she suspected him? No, she must deal with him tonight, after the funeral.

“Send for Tallow, the master of the royal guard,” she told a waiting page. “I have an hour until the service begins, so I would see him now.”

“Stop squirming!” Rose scolded as the boy hurried out. “If you don’t let me tame this last unruly curl, you will have hair like a beggar woman’s!”


To Briony’s surprise it was not Jem Tallow who responded to her summons.

“Princess,” said Ferras Vansen, kneeling just inside the doorway, “I heard your summons and took it upon myself to answer in Tallow’s place. If I have done wrong, I apologize.”

She sighed, but not so loud that he could hear it. “Apologies certainly seem to be your stock in trade, Captain Vansen. Do you truly think you have so much to be sorry for?”

He colored a little. “More than I would like, Highness. I spoke out of turn when I claimed I brought your brother back to you. The truth is, I left him in the shadowlands, although it was not by choice. He brought himself back to Southmarch.”

It was strange how much he reminded her of Barrick—not in how he looked, or spoke, or acted, all of which could not have been more different, but in how he made her feel, frustrated and yet affectionate at the same time. But there was something more in what she felt for him than she had ever felt for her brother—something she did not know what to do with. And of course, there was Eneas, still waiting for an answer.…

She did her best not to show the confusion of her thoughts. “I have need of the guard tonight, after the funeral. Will you make certain that a troop of them come to me in the new throne room?”

“The tent?” He colored again. “I do not mean to make light of it…”

She laughed. “It is a tent. You only tell the truth.”

“Of course, Highness. A half-pentecount of your best men will be there—I will see to it.” He rose and would have backed out the door, but she held up her hand.

“We have scarcely spoken in this last tennight, Captain Vansen. I will have one of the pages bring you a chair, and you can tell me more about what you have gone through.” She waved to one of the boys. “There is so much about what happened here that I still can’t understand.”

“Nor can any of us, Highness,” he said somberly. “I suspect we would know more if we could hear from everyone who fought here, from Funderlings and upgrounders, even the Qar and the Xixians ...”

“Upgrounders? What does that mean?”

“Your pardon, Princess. That is what the Funderlings call us—that and ‘Big Folk.’ It is strange how living among them I began to forget that I was not one of them, although I had twice their size!”

“Then tell me about them, Captain. Tell me about my brother, too, and what happened to you both in the shadowlands. Tell me everything you can. I bury my father this afternoon, and I dread it.”

“I will never forgive myself that we could not save him,” Vansen said, eyes downcast.

“Enough. You brought his body back to me. And I was able to speak to him once myself, before the final days.”

“Truly?” He had not heard about this, it was clear.

“Yes. So let us talk, Captain Vansen.” She looked around at the maids and the ladies-in-waiting, the half dozen young pages, the life that had recaptured her. “I fear we may never have such a chance again.”


Vansen was ordinarily not much of a speechmaker, but the spirit of the tale caught him up: by the time he had finished telling of the last hours in the Funderling Mysteries, everyone in Briony’s chamber had gathered around, servants and nobility together, all with open mouths and fearful faces. As he warmed to his task, he showed flashes of the dry wit he often hid, and although he downplayed his own role, Briony could see the many places where he shifted the credit to others. It reminded her a little of the way her father had told stories of his year fighting in Hierosol, and this in turn reminded her of the far less pleasant task that awaited her.

“Thank you, Captain Vansen,” she said when he stopped to drink from a cup of wine one of the ladies had brought him. “It is a gift of Heaven that our beloved Southmarch survived, but we lost so many.” She shook her head. “My father, dear Chaven, all your brave Funderlings, and so many more.” She did her best to smile, but it was difficult. “Now it is time to go to the funeral. You will not forget your promise to me, will you?”

He looked startled. “I beg your pardon, Highness? My promise… ?”

“To see that the royal guard attends me tonight after the funeral?”

“Ah.” He seemed both relieved and disappointed. What else had he been expecting? Some embarrassing display of gratitude? Had she been wrong about his feelings for her after all? Not that it mattered. With Olin dead and her brother determined to leave Southmarch behind, Briony knew she no longer had the right to her own affections—to anything except what was good for the land and its people. “Of course, Highness,” he told her. “I will see that your guard remains with you after the funeral.”

“Thank you, Captain Vansen. I owe you an apology and it… it troubles my sleep. I am truly sorry for the things I said to you in my time of pain after Kendrick’s death. You are a good man and you have proved it many times over.”

Something strange moved just beneath his calm features. Anger? Sorrow? “I seek only to serve you, Highness,” was all Vansen said. “And the March Kingdoms, of course.”

He rose quickly, bowed again, and hurried out. Briony sat for a moment, mustering the strength to rise and attend to her duties as chief mourner. Surrounded by her ladies and other folk, she still felt quite alone.

* * *

Vansen did not like Briony’s choice to hold the king’s funeral in the dubious safety of the commons outside the royal residence, although he understood her desire to give the castle’s population a chance to mourn together. Still, even though Durstin Crowel had finally surrendered and had been taken to the stronghold with his last supporters, some of Tolly’s most dangerous allies like Berkan Hood were still unaccounted for, and although the guards were still vigorously searching for Hood, Ferras Vansen thought it was unforgivably dangerous for Briony to put herself and her father’s infant son out in the open where an arrow from some distant rooftop could leave Southmarch without a ruler no matter what the undermanned royal guard tried to do.

It only made him more confused about the days ahead. The royal guard, like the castle that housed them and the Eddon clan that employed them, had to be rebuilt. Jem Tallow had already tried to relinquish control to his former captain several times, but Vansen was not entirely certain he wanted his old position back. For one thing, it would force him to see Briony Eddon every day, and while that was in some ways his fondest wish, he also knew that being so close to her and unable to have her would be torment. And how long would it be until she gave herself to Eneas of Syan? What of Ferras Vansen, then? He would be little more than a page with a sword.

Somehow it also seemed pointless to go back to doing what he had done before, however necessary it might be. Once you had fought both a god-king and an actual god, it would not be easy to return to daily duty rosters and the other more mundane parts of his profession. He was looking forward to peacetime—what soldier who had survived this madness wouldn’t be?—but not to the problems of keeping five pentecounts of men occupied and battle-ready while protecting the rulers at every moment.

Everybody had been waiting in the garden since midday as the long shadow of Wolfstooth Spire passed from west to east, but though the mood was somber, the people themselves seemed gathered for a more festive occasion, their places on the sunny grass marked off with blankets and cloaks, the remains of meals still to be seen. The royal family had been through the funeral service already as King Olin lay in state in the hall of the residence. Now, with his body hidden inside a somber, sparsely decorated coffin draped in the Eddons’ wolf and stars, the mourning chorus sang the threnody and Sisel spoke the good words that had to be spoken over the dead. Olin the just ruler, Olin the protector of his people, Olin the diplomat—Vansen thought the hierarch spoke of him as though he were one of the deathless Trigonate gods. He thought he would rather have known the man who had fathered Briony, Barrick, and Kendrick, the man who had inspired so much feeling in all of them, but it was not to be. That man had been mortal and now he was dead. Now he was only a story.


“Though the terror and gratitude of those who pray fill thine ears always with myriad voice, O brothers who abide on the holy mountain Xand, yet hearken to us also, and grant this day your favor, that good Olin’s exile now may have an end, and that he may return to you and to his native land, at rest from labor of long journeys ...”

The salt had been sprinkled and Sisel had just begun to chant the final prayer meant to guide the spirit of the departed king when Ferras Vansen felt a stirring among the mourners, as if the crowd were a field of flowers rippled by the wind. Was something amiss? He looked quickly to Briony, who had felt it, too.

A procession was coming up the road between the armory and Wolfstooth Spire; the people at the far end of the commons had already turned to watch it. At first Vansen could see little of the newcomers as they passed through the tower’s shadow, but as their leader stepped out into the sun Vansen saw hair that dazzled like flame. Barrick Eddon had arrived at his father’s funeral. The prince wore clothes of loose-fitting white cloth and a hooded white cloak, much as Queen Saqri had done the few times Vansen had seen her; Vansen realized now that white must be the Qar’s mourning color.

He glanced again to Briony Eddon, but her expression was unreadable. Barrick and the company of fairies who came with him made their silent way up the colonnade beside the commons and then emerged into the sunshine again just short of the residence’s front steps and the king’s body, where Barrick stopped and stood, straight as a sentry.

After a confused few moments Hierarch Sisel continued the prayer. When it was ended the mantises came with their rattles and flutes to lead the procession, and the pallbearers lifted the coffin onto the wagon that would carry it toward the graveyard. It seemed the Eddons meant to keep using their family vault, Vansen noted, no matter what had taken place there or what lay beneath it. But before the pallbearers could take a step, Barrick abruptly stepped forward and laid two sprigs atop the coffin, one of meadowsweet and one of mistletoe, the Orphan’s flowers of immortality. As he did so, he paused for a moment. A look of pain and confusion twisted Barrick’s features and he snatched back his hand—the one that had once been withered and useless—almost as though he had burned it.

The prince and his followers did not accompany the coffin all the way to the graveyard, but turned away near the crumbled walls of the Throne hall and walked back toward the Raven’s Gate and their camp in Funderling Town. Some in the crowd turned to watch them depart, making the sign for the pass-evil, but most paid scant attention, as if the king’s son and his odd companions were only another clutch of mourners.

* * *

The funeral feast had ended nearly an hour before, and many of the guests had already retired, though a group of older nobles remained in the residence’s long, low dining room drinking wine and telling tales of the late king and of all that had happened since last Olin had sat on Anglin’s throne. Doubtless, many of them also expressed quiet reservations over the fitness of his daughter to rule, and questioned why her brother had made himself so absent from the business of governing the country, but Vansen ignored their conversations as he pulled a few of his more trustworthy guards from their duties in the dining room and led them to the residence parlor that served as Briony’s royal retiring room. The princess was waiting there already, her face carefully empty. To Ferras Vansen, her expression was like a sort of wound: it hurt him to see it.

When his guards had filed in, he turned to Briony. “Shall I go and get Lord Brone, Your Highness?”

She nodded, but scarcely seemed to see him.

To Vansen’s surprise, Avin Brone was waiting just outside the door of the hall—he had arrived while Vansen had been arranging the guards. The big man nodded. “It is good to see you, Captain Vansen. I assume you will not remain much longer in that low rank… ?”

“No one has spoken to me of any promotion, Lord Brone.”

“Ah, but I am sure you will be rewarded. I hear you did noble, brave-minded work since your return to Southmarch. Many say that if you hadn’t stiffened the Funderling resistance we would all be slaves now. You must tell me everything that happened one day, Vansen. I wish to hear what you saw. I trust your eyes and thoughts more than any others save my own.”

“Thank you, your lordship.”

The count smiled but he looked tired. “Let us not keep our mistress waiting. After all, she will soon be our queen.” He walked past Vansen to the door.

When Brone had bowed to Briony (not without a little difficulty; the old man had gotten even stouter and his limp was now pronounced) she asked for a bench to be brought so he could sit down.

“Before we get to the meat of things,” she said, “I have a question for you, Brone. Berkan Hood will soon be captured or dead. The post of lord constable is empty. Do you have anyone to recommend?”

Brone cleared his throat. “I can think of no one better than this man here, Ferras Vansen.”

“Not yourself, Lord Brone? You held the post a long time. Do you no longer have confidence in your own abilities?”

“With respect, Highness, do not play games with me. I am too old for that, and also too old to try to be what I was. If you did not want my advice, you should not have asked.”

“Very well, then, let’s not circle like two tavern bullies.” Briony’s smile was hard. “You were my father’s trusted adviser, Brone. You were that to my brother and to me as well.”

“I have been lucky enough to serve the throne and the people of the March Kingdoms. That is well known. Many would say I did it well.”

“Many would, yes—but that is not my complaint.” For the first time, Vansen saw that the emotion she had hidden was not weariness or fear, but rage. Her cheeks were red and her eyes narrowed in fury; for the first time he saw how much like her brother she really was. “You betrayed us, Brone, or you planned to. You schemed to see us all dead—my father, my brothers, and me. What do you say to that?”

Brone did not burst out into a torrent of denials, which made Vansen feel even more that the world had tilted on its foundations. Instead, the old man pressed his chin deep into his beard and frowned with his bushy brows until he seemed like a bear staring out of a cave. “And why do you say that, Your Highness? Who has told you such a thing of me?”

“That is not your affair. But a person I trust has told me that you had a list, and on this list was the name of every member of my family and also the method by which each would be apprehended, imprisoned, and then murdered at your order. Do you deny it?”

Ferras Vansen realized he was holding his breath, and even the guards, his best men, looked startled. Only Avin Brone himself, of all in the long room, did not seem unduly troubled. “No,” he said. “I do not deny it.”

Briony let out a ragged gasp like someone struck a painful blow. “So,” she said at last, her voice barely under control. “You told me to trust no one, Avin Brone. I thank you for the honesty of that lesson.”

“Do you not wish to know the reason why?”

“No. No, I don’t. Guards, take him away. The stronghold held a less guilty man in Shaso—it will serve for this villain, too.”

Brone sat, unmoving, as at Ferras Vansen’s signal a quartet of guards in Eddon black and silver surrounded him. “Will you really do this again, Princess?” the old man asked in a mild tone.

“What do you mean?” Briony had pushed her feelings back behind the mask again: she stared like a statue of Divine Retribution.

“You imprisoned Shaso dan-Heza without learning the truth. You regretted it later, as you make clear. Would you repeat that error?”

“Error?” Briony almost jumped out of her chair. “You have admitted you planned to murder my family, Brone! What could you say that would make any difference?” But she did not repeat the order for his removal and Vansen, sensing something afoot, signaled his men to wait. “Speak,” Briony said at last. “It is late and I am tired and sad. I have just buried my father, and I want to go to bed.”

“I loved him, too, Briony.”

“But you planned to kill him!”

“My duty is first and foremost to the throne, Princess. That has always been true. Your father himself was careful to make certain I understood that. Yes, I planned his death—but it was with Olin’s own knowledge.”

“What?” Briony seemed about to spring from her chair and attack him. “Do you claim he wanted see his own family slaughtered… ?”

“No!” Now for the first time Brone lost his temper. “No, of course not, Highness! But your father knew he had an illness that no one could cure—an illness of the blood that brought raging madness upon him. For ten years or more, he also knew that Barrick had that same distemper of the blood. You and Kendrick did not seem afflicted, but who could tell?”

“What does my father’s… blood have to do with… ?”

“He did not trust himself—and to be honest, I could not afford to trust him entirely, either. He was the king, but at least one night every month he was also a beast—a madman. How could I defend the country without planning to deal with the king himself if he went utterly mad? How could I protect the March Kingdoms if his heirs were also infected? If your father lost his mind beyond saving, I was under orders to lock him away—to lock you all away as well until we knew if one of you was trustworthy. And if none of you were, then there would be no point in leaving you alive to foster unrest among the people, who would not understand. I was prepared to put another relative on the throne if necessary, perhaps one of the Brennish cousins—yes, even to kill you all if no other choice was left to me! But I did not wish to, and I only imagined it because your father, may the gods bless his bravery and foresight, ordered me to do so.” So saying, the count of Landsend folded his hands across his belly and stared back at her. “So if you still wish to execute me, Princess, then do so. I will not resist.”

At first, Vansen thought Briony was going to scream at the old man—her face had flushed so deeply he feared for her health. But when she spoke, her words were little more than a whisper.

“Do you have some letter from my father that will prove this?”

He shrugged. “I have letters from him that allude to the plan. I can assemble them for you. All my papers from the time I served your father are yours now, in any case, Princess, though you might prefer to have someone more trustworthy than myself go through them. But choose that person carefully, Briony.” His smile was mirthless. “I suspect there are traitors around you still uncovered. ...”

“Get out of my sight, Brone.” She spoke as if she had a mouth full of poison. “I will send guards with you to collect the papers. Until I decide what to do, you will confine yourself to the inner keep. You will most especially not return to your house in Landsend.”

Avin Brone dipped his head in a small bow, scarcely more than a nod. “You are my sovereign, Princess. Of course I will do what you say.”

* * *

Vansen had finished dividing the guard, keeping double Princess Briony’s standard pair on duty but sending the rest away, and was waiting now as she had asked, but Briony deliberately ignored him as she finished a cup of wine.

Briony knew she should have been happy Brone had a plausible excuse—she could not remember ever dreading a meeting more—but instead she was just as angry as before but with no certain target for it. A tiny part of her had hoped he would laugh at the accusation, that it would turn out to be so transparently absurd she could soon laugh, too, but the greater part of her certainty had been that Brone was guilty, that his warnings to her to trust no one had been a form of thinly veiled confession. And when he had admitted it, every hard, protective thing inside her had clanged down like the portcullis of Raven’s Gate. Now she was still furious with the old man, but just as angry with herself. If Brone’s story was true, what else should he have done but followed her father’s orders? But if he couldn’t prove what he claimed? What then?

The chance that he might simply be dissembling—that she might still have to imprison and likely execute him—made things even worse, like being whirled around in a too-fast dance, stumbling and breathless.

Ferras Vansen was still waiting in the doorway, a look on his face that Briony thought a very annoying picture of noble suffering. She felt almost as unhappy with him as she had with Avin Brone. She beckoned him forward but gave him no indication of what to do. Vansen stopped before the throne, made an awkward bow, and then stood waiting again. After she had regarded him silently for a long moment, he finally said, “Highness?”

“Yes, Captain. Thank you for staying. I’m a bit weary just now, as you might guess, but I wanted to speak with you. What do you think of Lord Brone’s proposal?”

He looked quite startled. “Highness?”

Briony was beginning to fear he would never say anything else. “He suggested you as an able candidate for lord constable, Captain. Lord Constable of Southmarch? You may have heard of the position? Rather well-known in these parts, I’m told.”

He colored and Briony disliked herself more than she had when the conversation began. So many times she had longed to see this man—why did she find herself treating him in this unpleasant way again?

“I understood the question, Highness, but I didn’t understand why you were asking me.”

“Because I want to know if you’re interested, Captain. As I said—and as I sincerely meant—you have done wonderful things for Southmarch. Not simply for my family, but for everyone who shelters under the Five Towers.”

“I did only what any loyal servant of the Eddons would have done, Princess.”

“What any would have liked to have done but few would have had the wit or courage to manage. Do not belittle your own deeds.” He was coloring again. How could she have ever thought this man cared for her? Or that if he did, it was a passion any deeper than a little child’s mute love for his nursemaid? How could such a tall, strong man seem so deep one moment, then so foolish the next? Were all his most appealing traits products of her own imagination? “What of the post, man?”

“I… I am no lord, Princess.”

“A small enough matter. You would not have escaped your heroics without a title and some land in any case, Captain. Shall I make you a marquis? Though I fear you will not relish being a lord. You don’t seem like the type to enjoy the preening and scurrying of court life.”

“It terrifies me.”

She laughed a little despite herself. “Poor Captain Vansen. It does seem a terrible thing to do to you. ...”

He had been looking at the floor. Now he raised his gaze to hers and Briony felt a little shock. Ferras Vansen’s dark eyes were fiercer than she had ever seen—fiercer than she would have imagined possible, like something that can retreat no farther and must now turn and fight.

“Why do you do this to me, Lady? Why?”

“What do you mean, Captain Van… ?”

“This! I mean this! This way of talking to me. I liked it better when you hated me. At least then being lashed again and again was no surprise. But now… you say you are grateful, you praise my deeds, but all the time you act like… like ...” And although he was as flushed as she had ever seen him, anger mottling his cheeks and his forehead, he stopped suddenly. A moment later he said, in a far quieter voice, “Your pardon, Highness. I had no right.”

“My pardon will not be given—not until you tell me how it is that I act.”

“Please…”

“No, Captain Vansen, I insist. In fact, I command you—tell me how I act.”

His eyes roved in desperation as though there might be some way out of the trap into which he had delivered himself, but all of the guards were working hard to seem as though they weren’t listening, that they weren’t even aware other people were in the room.

Vansen squared himself, took a breath, and said: “You act like a spoiled child given a pet with which she has already grown bored. Instead of simply sending it away when it displeases her, she teases and torments it only for her own amusement.” His voice was thick now. “That is what you do, Briony Eddon. That is the part you act with me.”

Part of her was enraged that he should speak that way to her, but close behind it stood a larger part that was horrified to realize what she had done to this kind, good man. “But I did not ...” She could not make the words come out properly. “I never ...”

Vansen, who a moment before had looked so resigned that he might have been a prisoner atop the gallows, now took a step nearer to her. He had a look on his face she could not understand—it looked something like exhilaration but also something like terror. “And I will say more,” he told her in a breathless rush. “No matter what Avin Brone thinks, and even if you yourself do feel something like the gratitude you profess, I can never be the lord constable, nor could I hold a noble’s place in your court—or, if it comes to it, be the captain of your guard. So, with gratitude for what your family have given me and the kindness you yourself have shown me… at times… I must resign my commission.” He pulled his gloves from his belt and laid them on the floor at her feet, then unstrapped his sword and set it beside them. “May the gods watch over Your Highness and the throne of the March Kingdoms.”

He had gone only a few steps before she called to him. “But why? Why would you turn your back on the rewards you have justly earned?”

He turned slowly, knowing that what he said now could never be unsaid. “Because I couldn’t bear working within sight of you the rest of my life, Briony Eddon. I’ve loved you from almost the first moment I saw you, knowing also that moment that the gods in Heaven must be laughing until they wept… because who was I? A mere soldier.”

“No! A brave man,” she said, because it was so much what she had been thinking. “A kind man. A good man.”

“Why do you speak kindly now when you wouldn’t before, Princess?” He no longer seemed to care. “Pity for a fool?”

“I’m the fool, I think.” She laughed. “But you are a fool, too, Captain! Oh, merciful Zoria, I thought you would never speak your heart. How could I let myself love a man who was too frightened to tell me how he felt?”

“You care… for me… ?” She thought he might laugh, or burst out into some kind of great oration like a character in a play, but instead he suddenly called out, “Guards! Go outside and guard the door for a short while. I have a sudden concern about the security of the outer passage.”

“You don’t have to send everyone away ...” Briony began as the soldiers made their way out into the hall. Briony’s heart was beating fast. She felt a strong urge to giggle like a child. “But I do,” Vansen said. “Even if they are discreet, it’s asking too much that they must pretend to be blind and stupid as well. We common folk still have our pride.” He stepped up onto the dais. “And you may send me to the headsman for it tomorrow, Princess, but I must kiss you—I must! I’ve waited so long ...”

At first Briony didn’t speak, because it was all so strange and unexpected that she feared it might vanish if the moment was interrupted. She could scarcely breathe as Vansen reached out and drew her up from her chair, but the feel of his warm breath on her face made her realize how far she had kept from him all these months. “Yes, kiss me, Vansen,” she said at last. “Kiss me, please!”

48. By the Dark River

“The kindly Dawnflower thought she had rescued Adis when she stepped into the sun outside the gates of Kernious and the underworld, but when Zoria looked down she discovered she was holding nothing more than one of the Orphan boy’s wooden arms ...”

—from “A Child’s Book of the Orphan, and His Life and Death and Reward in Heaven”

Barrick Eddon scarcely heard Aesi’uah’s questions as they walked back through the Raven’s Gate and into the outer keep. The guards in the gatehouse carefully looked the other way as the small procession passed, though Barrick could see both curiosity and fear in their postures. It might have been worse, but Barrick had chosen only the most manlike of the Qar to accompany him.

“Are you angry with us or your other people, Barrick Eddon?” the eremite asked him.

They stole Sanasu—she who was to have the Fireflower, the Fireflower voices reminded him—as if he needed reminding. They killed her brother who would have been her husband.

“It doesn’t matter.” He had no answers, and he had more pressing things in his head just now. When he had reached out to lay the offering on his father’s coffin, he had felt a sharp stab of pain in his hand—pain he had not felt for so long he had forgotten how bad it was. It had receded again, but he could not stop thinking about it. Why now, after all this time, should he feel it again?

Barrick and the Qar continued across the outer keep in silence and into the shade of the harbor wall between the West Lagoon and the new walls. The gates to Funderling Town were guarded by more of Vansen’s men, but Barrick’s onetime companion had prepared the soldiers carefully, and they only saluted respectfully as the Qar passed. For a half a moment, Barrick even wondered if it might be possible for his two peoples to live in harmony again, as they had once centuries ago, but the looks of suspicion and even outright fear that he saw when he looked back at the guards’ faces showed what a foolish dream that was.


Barrick flexed his aching fingers and thought about Briony.

The pain had returned to his left hand, and even the muscles themselves seemed to have shrunk again to the way they used to be, tightening like a drying hide so that his hand pulled into a tight clench. It had begun when he touched his father’s coff in… no, it had happened a moment after that, as a memory of his father lifting him high in the air to show him the ocean from the top of the Tower of Summer. With the memory had come a wash of sadness, of missing the man he had spent so much time cursing. And with the memory had come the pain.

He did his best to uncurl his hand. Why should it happen again? Was it just the discomfort of being back among the people of Southmarch? Or of having to argue with his sister, who wanted so much more from him than he had to give… But she had always done that, always demanded his love even when he was too weary of life to give it.

The pain struck him so quickly and so suddenly that he dropped to his knees with a gasp.

She is your past, the Fireflower voices told him, but they seemed almost fearful. Forget her. Forget this place. Be strong for your new people…

Barrick sat on the stony floor and rubbed his aching hand.


The Sleepers took something from me in order to heal me, didn’t they?

Saqri’s sleeping face showed nothing—she was beyond that now, nearly as lifeless as Qinnitan—but he felt her words in his thoughts, thin as a breeze. Everything has its price—life, love, even death. You know that. You know that better than almost any of your kind.

But the price was my family! My love for my sister! He understood that now, although his feelings for Briony remained curiously distant. They took it from me without asking!

They did not take it. Her thoughts already grew faint again. They used it. As a river dammed by stones will rise and flood in other directions, they only changed its flow. Love is a thing that cannot be destroyed, you see, only altered…

Barrick knew he could not wait much longer. The queen of the Fay’s strength was failing very swiftly now. He pushed the Sleepers’ gift from his thoughts and knelt by her bed and took her hand. Sunset Pearl and the other healers stood back, doing their best to seem as if they did not disapprove of the strange thing he planned to do.

Enough of these other matters,” he said. It is time for me to make that journey we spoke of, he told her. To try to save what we can… if you will let me.

He felt a faint sensation of amusement. Why should I not, dear manchild… ?

Two pale warriors of the Unforgiven tribe carried Qinnitan’s bed into the rock chamber and set it beside Saqri’s. The dark-haired girl seemed even smaller than before, as if with every passing hour she shrank farther in on herself, like something being slowly burned away. Her skin was as cold as if her spirit had already fled.

Leave us alone, he told them.

No questions, no argument—the Qar immediately left the chamber, leaving only Barrick, the two motionless women, and the unsteady candlelight.


He thought carefully about what Saqri had taught him back in Qul-na-Qar, as well as what Ynnir had said: “The Fireflower is more than the knowledge of those who went before. It is the map of their journeys, the book of their rituals. But you cannot simply consult it as if it were a dusty scroll in a forgotten niche. You must make it a part of you.”

Barrick fell back into the darkness inside himself; for a long span he simply floated in that emptiness. When he felt he was ready, he thought about Crooked, who had found a way to travel through so many different kinds of darkness, and then thought of himself and the blood they shared, however distantly.

I am a great-grandchild of Sanasu, he announced. I travel where I wish in the lands beyond, the dreamlands of the sleeping gods. My blood is my safe-conduct. There would be many in the darkness, though, who had no respect for such rituals.

A faint light kindled and began to form the void into recognizable shapes—into here and there, up and down. The light was his own, the gleam of the Fireflower on his brow. His feet touched the grassy ground, although he could see little of what was beneath him—two feet, no, four, his weight carried on hard hooves and powerful legs. As Ynnir here in these dreaming lands wore the form of a stag, and Saqri a swan, Barrick found himself in the semblance of a horse—a pale stallion. Overwhelmed by the new sensations, he began to trot, then to gallop.

Where am I? he wondered. Are these Crooked’s roads through the void, or is it the land of dreams where the gods still live? The country of the dead? Or some other place entirely… ?

Barrick Eddon did not understand enough of the Fireflower heritage to know the answers, but he knew he was doing what he needed to do. He pushed his fears aside and kept moving, racing from shadow to shadow, through tangles of darkness so thick he thought he would never unmire himself, out into moments of blinding light that dazzled and confused him. Other shadows haunted that place, too—other beings like him, perhaps, or older, stranger things—but he dared not speak to them. It was too easy for a traveler to become lost here, to stray from the path, and although those that flitted around him now might mean no harm, there were others here that fed on solitude and suffering—he could hear them whispering to him as they followed, like the scrabbling of rats behind wooden walls: Barrick Eddon, you owe the People nothing. We will give you the strength to do anything. Raise the girl from the dead. Command the allegiance of every creature you meet. Make yourself the greatest king that ever walked the earth! All will be yours ... Just wait on the path for us. Let us join you ...!

He hoped the Fireflower’s light would be enough to keep them at bay.


Barrick grew weary, but still the shadows seemed never-ending. He had encountered many sights he did not understand—doorways into nothing, moaning shapes like ghosts caught in their own dreadful dreams, even things that looked to be the ruins of ancient temples, monstrous slabs of tumbled stone as old as the stars. Once a great shape passed over his head, obscured by ragged vertical shadows that might have been trees. He looked up and thought he saw a ship far above him, half-hidden by silvery clouds, with a skeletal crew and only one passenger, a woman as perfectly pale as a full moon, sitting in a high throne upon the deck, but he could study it for only a few instants before it faded away again into the murky skies.

He traveled on until his weariness threatened to overwhelm him. The voices waiting in the shadows became louder, promising more but also demanding more, as though they scented his growing weakness.

You are nothing to me, he declared, and showed them the sign of White Walls, the inner swallowing the outer. They fell back, abashed but furious.

We will find you again, they promised, and he knew they spoke the truth: the things that lived in these places were like forgotten prisoners, with nothing to do but brood on escape. We will find you when you are too weary for such wards. What then, manchild… ?


He had traveled much farther now than he had ever gone with Saqri, but although he was not exactly certain what he sought, he knew he had not found it yet.

You have gone too far beyond the light, the shadows mocked him. We will not just feed on you when you fall at last—we will make a doorway of you, so that we can feed on everything that lives. We will spread ourselves across the night, live in the owl’s cry, hide in a baby’s sudden stillness. We shall leap from this place in our countless numbers like bats flooding from their nests as the dark swallows the dusk.

He knew that at least one thing the shadows told him was all too true: he no longer had the strength to turn back. If he failed in this gamble, every fearsome thing that hid in the darkness beyond sleep and life would fall on him and that would be the end; there was no one left who could save him.

As he stumbled ever more slowly through the outer reaches of dream, followed by a growing crowd of hungry shadows, he finally saw something that brought him hope: a pale, heather-colored glow in the distance (if such a word as “distance” could be used in this place) gave weight and solidity to the dreamscape: where that light lay upon it, the land had substance. A grassy hill now loomed before him, crowded with angular shapes, each with a crown of antlers as wide as a man’s arms.

Barrick made his way toward the twilit hill. The creatures of the shadow-herd turned to look at him as he neared, and though recognition gleamed in some of those dark eyes, many of the other deer scarcely noticed him. Only one—the largest of the stags, or perhaps merely the closest—regarded Barrick as if he knew him. A cloud of lavender light hung above the beast’s brow like an immeasurably distant star.

Manchild. You are a long way from what you know. Has your breath stopped so soon?

He knelt before the great beast. Ynnir—my lord. I am sorry I must trouble you…

Trouble? The mighty head dipped. I am beyond that, child. Soon I will be beyond this as well.

For a moment the mystery of it all drove his other thoughts from his mind. Where will you go, Lord? What is next?

It is not known until it is known, Ynnir said. And even those who know cannot say. Why are you here, manchild? You have gone far beyond what you may safely encompass.

I know. But I have a terrible need. He told the lordly beast of his fear and his hope. When he had finished, the stag waited silently for a moment.

If I do this I will not be able to remain here, it told him at last. I will give my last strength and be forced to move on to whatever waits beyond—perhaps oblivion. And still it may not be enough…

I can only ask you, Lord—for the sake of your sister and for the sake of the Fireflower.

The stag turned and walked away from him.

For a moment, Barrick was stunned, terrified that he had been rejected and would be left helpless in these bleak spaces, waiting for the hungry shadows to move in. But he saw that the great stag was moving through the herd. Each one of his fellows that he approached bowed its head as he came, then they stood together, antlers intertwined. Each time Ynnir stepped away, his own flame had grown a little wider and burned a little more brightly.

One by one, the members of the herd added their glow to Ynnir’s until at last a great ball of cold violet blazed above his brow as he returned to the place where Barrick waited. Ynnir seemed fainter now—Barrick thought he could see the dark hills through his body.

Here, the stag told him. The last of the kings by the river give their blessings, though it costs us all dearly. Bow to me and we will give you this last gift.

Barrick lowered his head. The violet light seemed to surround him, warming everything he looked at, although the darkness still stood close on all sides. He could feel the glow inside him as well, strengthening him where moments before he had been as weary as death, lending him hope when he had been empty of all but need. The blessed strength ran through his veins like molten metal, like honey, like the song of a thousand birds. He blinked, and for an instant the dark hills were as bright as if the full summer sun beat down on them. The things in the shadows, panicky in their surprise, fled back into their hiding-holes.

Then the light faded, and Barrick found himself alone on the dark hillside where grass waved in an unfelt wind. Because the kings had made a sacrifice he did not fully understand, he now had the strength to grab at his last chance.

May the gods or whoever else watches you speed your journey, great kings, he prayed. May you find shelter from the storms. May you find green grass and clear water.


The Fireflower only touches something in us that is already there, Barrick thought, and it seemed like a great understanding. Hatred alone can’t take someone as far as I have traveled this journey. He thought of Zosim waiting for centuries in the darkness of the nightmare lands. Lust and greed aren’t enough, either. In the end only duty, or the love from which duty springs, can provide strength for such a journey.

He had left the hill behind him and traveled through another sort of dark land now, one where trees crowded thickly and the shadows were once more beginning to fill with watching eyes. Somehow he had left his four-legged form behind; he seemed to wear a man’s body and move at a man’s pace.

Exhaustion slowed him until it was all he could do to pick his feet up off the ground, but he persevered, and at last heard the sound he had been listening for for so long—a whisper at first, then a murmur that grew louder and louder until it seemed he was hearing the breath of everything. It was a river… no, it was the river, he knew, although he did not entirely understand. More than a passageway to whatever lay beyond death, it was an idea of what the darkness itself could become.

But most importantly for Barrick at that moment, it was the river. The last boundary before the lands of death.

He found her as he had thought he might, standing thigh-deep in the shallows and groping like a blind woman, as though she could not understand where she was. He went a little way toward her but stopped before he entered the river. He knew that would be a mistake, even here where it seemed so shallow.

“Qinnitan.” He spoke quietly, knowing she would be dizzied, fearful. “I am here. Go no farther.” Even these quiet words startled her. She took a teetering step backward and the opaque waters slithered and lapped at her slender hips. She was so young! How could it be that she had suffered so much, seen so much? “How little you deserved any of this,” he said, half to himself.

She stirred. “Who… who’s there?”

“Qinnitan, it’s me. It’s Barrick.” But as he said the name, he suddenly didn’t know what it meant—was it a mortal’s name, or that of a half-blood mongrel of the Qar royal house? A man driven by love, or a man in whom nothing so soft remained? “Come with me, Qinnitan.”

She still didn’t move, and when she spoke, it was as if repeating a word she didn’t understand. “Barrick… ?”

He slowly extended his hand and saw a little of the violet glow kindle on his fingertips. She leaned away but went no deeper into the water. When he touched her, she gave a little shiver but let herself be led toward the grassy shore.

Once her feet touch the earth you cannot look at her. The chorus of the Fireflower had returned as though awakening from a short sleep.

It is the Orphan’s curse. The gods love their tricks, and dreaming gods are the most whimsical of all…

Hold her hand, but do not open your eyes.

We will sing you the path.

A part of Barrick feared it was only errant nonsense—sometimes the Fireflower voices seemed more like ideas than actual intelligences, fleeting phantoms without the coherence of a living person. Still, he knew he could not save her by himself—she was too close to death. He shut his eyes tight, took her hand, and let the voices guide him.

There were times as they walked away from the river that she seemed so insubstantial Barrick could not even be certain he still held her, but he knew he dared not look—that if he did, even the small chance they had would be lost.

Ignore all other voices, the Fireflower told him.

Even those that seem sweet. Keep your back to the river. Trust what you feel.

He let himself open to the darkness and the moving air, the damp air above the slow but powerful black river. He did his best to keep it behind him.

“Qinnitan? I’m here. Can you hear me?”

She did not reply, so he spoke to her again. At last, and from much farther away than should have been possible with her hand still clutched in his, he heard her say, “Who is calling? I’m frightened.”

Words were little use—only her hand in his was real; he knew that as long as he held it she was still there.

They walked back across the dark lands for what seemed like years. At times, he saw and heard things that made him think they had almost found their way out, but the Fireflower voices warned him not to trust these phantoms, that it was only the lonely, bitter things that lived in this place laying snares for him. At last, Qinnitan became restive and began to fight him. He struggled with her for what seemed hours, trying to calm her but unable to do so. At last, overwhelmed by her terror and pain, he admitted to himself that he could not impel her any farther.

The Fireflower voices urged him not to give up, insisted that he keep fighting.

“No.” He said it for them much as for her. “I will no longer force you. Why are you frightened, Qinnitan? I am trying to help you back toward the light. Why do you fight against me?”

But she couldn’t hear him, or if she could she didn’t understand, and only went on struggling like a frightened child. Barrick feared that if he continued against her will, he might lose her—might even destroy what little remained of her. He could think of nothing else to do, though it terrified him, so he let go of her hand.

“I am going on,” he told her. “Follow me if you can—if you wish—and I’ll lead you out of here.”

And then, with the startled Fireflower chorus crying its anguish until his head echoed, Barrick again began to walk.

The voices gradually fell silent, but more from surprise than despair. Barrick felt his fear ease a little. Qinnitan must be following.

Now was the hardest time. He pushed his way through tangled branches that clawed and tore, and forded streams as cold and black as the river in which he had found her. He made his way down a long, dangerous slope into a valley where he saw lights twinkling in the dark, but when he got there, the place was empty but for a field of leaning stones.

Dozens of times he stopped himself from looking back. The Fireflower voices were almost completely silent now, but he felt certain he would know if Qinnitan fell away from him, whether they told him or not. Hadn’t they found each other time after time in their dreams? Hadn’t he found her here as well, on the very border of death’s inescapable kingdom?

Then at last she did stop—he felt her warmth diminish. He stopped, too, and it took all his strength to keep looking forward.

“We’re almost there,” he told her. “Only a little farther. Don’t fear!” But it was not her courage that had deserted her, he suddenly realized, but her strength.

They had been walking through a valley of high cliffs and deep darkness; now he moved slowly ahead, groping along the side of the path until he found what seemed like a crevice in the rocky wall.

“Come,” he called to her. “Follow me inside. You can rest here and be safe from any… hunting things.”

He made his way into a narrow space scarcely his own height and only a little wider and longer than he was, but he heard her moving behind him, and his heart once again grew light. He lowered himself to the cold ground, and when she reached him he opened his arms so that she could curl herself into his embrace like an ailing child. He could smell her now, a scent he had never known before but which seemed utterly familiar. He could even hear her breathing in his ear, fretful at first but slowing as she let sleep (or whatever passed for sleep in this nameless place) claim her.

Soon Barrick felt himself sliding away as well, and wondered whether he would wake again in this world or any other.


He didn’t understand at first what was happening. He had been deep in an unremembered dream, but now he was awake in darkness. Something was wrapped around him. He reached out and found her face, let his fingers trail across her cheek to her mouth.

“Barrick?” she asked, startling him.

“Qinnitan! Yes, it’s me. Can you really hear me?”

She did not answer for a moment. “Yes. But you seem far away. Why do you seem so far away when I can feel you next to me? Where are we?”

He didn’t really know—even the Fireflower voices could not tell him exactly where he was. He also did not want to frighten her, because if he lost her now, it would be forever. “On our way home.”

She touched his face. “Can you see me? I can’t see anything.”

Barrick was taking no chances—he kept his eyes tight-closed, even in utter blackness. “No, I can’t see you, but that’s only because we’re in a dark place. Do you remember anything?”

“I remember you.” She pushed herself close against him. She was taller than he would have guessed, her head just beneath his chin while her legs curled around his legs and her body pressed against him chest to chest and belly to belly. He had forgotten what it felt like to hold somebody, to be held. “And I remember the fire,” she said. “Something burning. Something big.”

Barrick remembered those terrible last hours in the deeps below the castle very well, but he had no urge to talk about it. Who knew if the god of lies was even dead? What if Zosim now roamed these dark places, too? “Don’t think about it,” he told her. “Think about leaving this place. Think about coming with me.”

“But I’m so tired.” She said not as someone asking for help, but as a matter of fact. “I can scarcely hold you.”

“Actually, you seem to be doing that quite well.” Unexpected joy bubbled up inside him. “You’re holding me very tightly.”

“Because I don’t want to lose you in the dark. Do you realize how long I’ve waited to hold you… to touch you… ?” She tensed a little. “I am sorry. You must think I’m terrible. What kind of girl would say such things?”

“The right kind.” He was afraid to speak now, fearful of anything that might end this moment. “You didn’t recognize me before,” he said. “When I found you in the river. Do you remember?”

“I don’t remember anything except waking up here,” she said. “Will you kiss me?”

“Kiss you… ?”

“No man has ever done that. I don’t think we need to be able to see, do you?”

His heart felt as though it would burst in his chest. “No. No, I don’t think we need to be able to see to do that.”

Barrick marveled at how he could feel everything so completely, the warmth of her skin, the sweetness of her breath, the downy hairs of her cheek and the tickling softness of her eyelashes… even the wetness of her tears.

“Why are you crying?”

“Because I never thought this would happen—I prayed for it but I didn’t believe the gods would let it happen. And I don’t want it to end,” she said. “But it is going to end, isn’t it? You and I will never be together.”

“No!” But at that moment he could not make himself lie. “I don’t know, Qinnitan, truly I don’t. Don’t ask me to say more than that.”

“I won’t.” But her cheeks were still wet. She pushed herself so close against him that she seemed to be trying to push herself into him as well, as though their separated flesh could somehow be blended into one body, their hearts into one pulse. “Kiss me again, Barrick. If we cannot be together, let’s make a memory that neither death nor fire can take away. Stay here with me. Make love with me.”

He kissed her again, as she asked. The darkness might have hidden them from other eyes, but it revealed far more to them than light would have, and the hours fled like minutes.


When he awoke again, Barrick was alone. Terrified, he scrambled out of the bower they had made for themselves with nothing more than the bliss of being together at last. At the last moment he remembered to close his eyes and thus escaped a more certain doom. “Qinnitan!” he called. “Where are you? Come back!”

At last he heard her voice, as if from a distance: “I’m here, Barrick. But you must go.”

“What do you mean? You have to come with me!”

“I cannot.” She sounded sad but certain. “I don’t have the strength to cross back over. I know where I am now, Barrick, and I know what is possible. You have brought me as near to the lands of the living as you can. Now you must continue on your own.”

“No! I’ll never leave you! I will stay here with you… !”

“You will not,” she said calmly. “We would have a little time, but then we would both have to cross the river and who knows what would happen after that?”

“But I won’t give you up to death. I won’t.”

“You are too fearful. I will be able to remain here, close to the lands of the living—our love has made that certain. What we made together is strong, my sweet Barrick, like a great stone set deep in the ground. I can cling to it for at least a little while.” She reached out then—he felt her fingers on his face, warmer now, as though some life had flowed back into them. “Go back now. I sense you had something planned—perhaps it will still save us.”

He tried not to sound bitter. “It will save others. You will suffer from it, as I have.”

She laughed, an astounding noise to hear in this place. “Then I will suffer, Barrick, and be grateful for it. What sort of life do you think I had before this? I would rather a hundred times the suffering if I also have your love.”

He didn’t even need to think. “You have it. You have it always.”

“Then go, and trust that.”

Never before had he felt so uncertain of anything. But never before had he known anything for which he was so willing to fight. Trusting, though—that was harder than fighting. “Wait for me, Qinnitan, my sweet voice, my dear one. Promise me that no matter how long it seems, no matter how impossible that I am still coming… that you will wait for me.”

And then he turned and hurried toward the land of the waking and the living. Unkind Fate denied him even a last look back.


Barrick knelt beside Saqri. He could not bear to look at Qinnitan’s face only a short distance away, so still, so much like death. “I have brought her as close as I can. Can you find her?”

Saqri’s eyes were half open, a trapped creature breathing its last desperate breaths. I… cannot… see… anything… beyond this…

“Then let me help.” He ignored his own bone-deep weariness to bend over. He lifted Saqri’s dry, cold hand and placed it on Qinnitan’s brow. A slight constriction of the muscles around Saqri’s eyes was the only sign that she still survived. At last, her voice came, a murmur, a defeated sigh…

I cannot find her…

Barrick set his own hand on top of the Queen of the Fay’s, then closed his eyes and let himself tumble down into the darkness he had just escaped. The Fireflower voices cried out in sudden terror:

Too weak, manchild! You are too weak…

You will die, too. You, Saqri, and the girl. Everything gone… !

Do not risk it!

But Barrick could do nothing else. Without Qinnitan, he would become something ugly—a cold, raging shadow of himself, a living ghost haunting his own life. Better to go now if he could not save her, to leap into the fire and make a quick ending.

Down, down Barrick Eddon fell. He could sense Saqri beside him, a white, winged shape diving beside him as though falling out of the clouds at the end of a long journey. The dark lands rose up and then rushed past as they skimmed over them, acres of silent forest and silvery meadows threaded with shining black streams. He led her as best he could, but it was not easy—her freedom returned and her crippled mortal body left behind, Saqri wanted to soar.

It was only as he realized he had reached the valley again that Barrick remembered he dared not look at Qinnitan, that like the Orphan, his eyes upon her would break the spell, and the black lands would claim her forever. He shut his eyes tightly, or dreamed that he did, but now he had to go blindly through a land far bigger than any earthly country. How could he find her? He reached outward, thinking that surely in this cold world she must be the only warm thing, the only thing that lived and cared…

I am here. The voice was faint as a cricket in a thunderstorm. I am waiting.

He turned toward her, letting the darkness shape itself as it would. He could only follow. He could only trust.

When he found her, he kissed her, his tight-shut eyes hot with tears. “Saqri!” he called. “She is here! Qinnitan… the one who also carries some of Crooked’s blood!”

The great shape dropped out of the sky like a white storm, wings cracking.

“Has he asked you, womanchild? Has he warned you what it will mean if you take the Fireflower?” Saqri asked in a voice like solemn music. “Will you take this terrible burden onto yourself?”

“Yes.” In that moment Qinnitan seemed to know all that she needed to know. “I will.”

“She still cannot return, Barrick Eddon, even with the Fireflower,” Saqri warned him. “In your world she will still sleep, even as I once did. She may never wake.”

“I will find a way to wake her.” He reached out to find his Qinnitan. He could feel the ripple and blaze of the Fireflower all around them, as if Saqri breathed cold fire. “If it takes me a lifetime, still I will do it. Do you hear me? I will wake you.”

Qinnitan lifted his hand to her lips. “I wait for no man to save me—even you, beloved. I will find a way to wake myself.”

Saqri laughed. “Well said, child—you may be a worthy successor after all. Take the Fireflower, Qinnitan, daughter of Cheshret and Tusiya. You and Barrick will hold all that remains of my family’s long, painful legacy. May the Book record a new future for both our kinds.”

And then it was done and Saqri was gone.


Barrick awoke slowly, as weak and sore as if he had been beaten. All around him the Qar were in active mourning, singing as they prepared Saqri’s body. He crawled to where Qinnitan lay ignored beside her and rested his head on the girl’s delicate chest to hear the slow but reassuring sound of her heartbeat. As he sat up he saw a faint silvery glimmer above her brow and the Fireflower inside him vibrated in sympathy like a plucked string. When he dragged himself to his feet, he was so unsteady that even the calmest of the attendants looked at him worriedly. “Fit a wagon to carry Queen Saqri’s body,” he said. “We will take her back to Qul-na-Qar so that she can lie with her ancestors, and so that her remaining subjects can mourn her as she deserves.”

“And the other?” asked one of the healers. “The girl?”

“Dress her in bridal raiment,” he said. “She is alive, although she sleeps. She, too, will go to Qul-na-Qar. See how the Fireflower glows in her? She is what remains of Saqri and all her grandmothers. Take care of her. Make her… make her comfortable.” For a moment he could barely speak. “She is my love.”

49. Two Boats

“Filled with despair, the goddess went to her father Perin and her uncle Erivor and begged them to intervene… But the other two brothers agreed that the Earthlord was within his rights, and that the Orphan could not live again because Zoria had failed to bring him out.”

—from “A Child’s Book of the Orphan, and His Life and Death and Reward in Heaven”

This has become a city of broken stone and silk tents—beauty amid the ruins. And what beauty… ! Ferras Vansen did not particularly like the new and unfamiliar, but he had already fallen out of the world he knew. There was no turning back—the impossible had become his lifeblood, and it seemed to froth inside him like sea foam. Did she mean what she said? Of course she did, you foolish man, and showed you with her lips and arms that she meant it! But would it make any difference when set against the hard facts of the world?

“Perin’s Hammer, Dab, why are there no archers on the walls?” His good mood blew away in a moment, chased by fear. The responsibility of protecting Briony seemed almost impossibly large. “What do you expect the men up there to do if the Xixians play some trick? Spit on them? This is the life of the king’s only daughter in our hands!”

“The archers are on the way, Captain Vansen,” Dawley assured him. “Ten Kertishmen, good shots every one. They will be there as you ordered.”

“I would have been even happier if you’d said ‘ten Dalesmen.’” Vansen mopped his brow. He was terrified that something might go wrong, just when a happiness he had never believed possible was in his hands. “Tell me when these bowmen are in place.” Vansen looked around. The pavilion that had been built covered much of the spit of land in front of the Basilisk Gate; the road up the rocky slope was all that remained of the near end of the mainland causeway. Vansen didn’t really believe the Xixians planned any treachery, not with their own new monarch accompanying them, but Ferras Vansen didn’t trust the Xixians not to do something arrogantly stupid. As Donal Murroy had always told him, it was better to be ready than to be sorry.


The day had turned out fine and sunny, with a fresh warm wind off the bay, and the attendants began rolling back the curtains of the pavilion as Briony arrived with the rest of her guards and Prince Eneas, who had brought a small company of his own men—“the Temple Dogs,” as he called them. Ferras Vansen thought it a showy name for what was only another group of soldiers, after all. He had never held with the Syannese custom of self-glorying nicknames.

He approached Princess Briony, bowed, and said, “The guards are all in place, Highness. You will be as safe here as men can make you.”

To his alarm, she laughed. He looked up, terrified he would see mockery, but the look on her face seemed to be a fond one. “Captain Vansen, we will have to return to the subject of your promotion soon. If you remain with the royal guard, you will drain the resources of the kingdom protecting me. I think I see three pentecounts of soldiers here!”

He felt himself flushing and cursed silently. “Your Highness is the heart of Southmarch. You have come through too much for us to risk losing you now.”

“He is right, Princess,” said Eneas in his soft midlander accent.

Vansen was doing his best not to hate the man. From everything he had heard, the Syannese prince was not only an honorable man and an admirable soldier but had been a gentleman and true friend to Briony as well; if Vansen had not feared him so much, he would have wished the chance to know him better. But Eneas had every right to marry Briony, while Ferras Vansen, however she might feel about him, had none. Even now, with his heart more firmly hers than ever before, Vansen felt certain she would do the politic thing—in truth, the only sensible thing—and marry the prince of Syan.

And then I will have to leave this place I love, as well as the only woman I desire. He did his best to push away self-pity. But what can be done, after all? I am a soldier, she is my queen—the heights are not meant for such as me. At least I have the sun and the wind back again.…

How long had he spent entombed in deathly twilight or under a terrible reach of stone? He had gone so long without open sky and bright sun in the year past that he had forgotten the simple goodness of its warmth on his skin, as well as the bewitching tang of sea air which to a boy of the distant hills still seemed a kind of magic, the stuff of his father’s stories.

He must have missed it, Vansen thought. Must have missed the sea when he left it and his home behind. A thought was in his head now, and he had to dig at it carefully to find its true shape. Even more, he must have loved my mother very much to give it up.

“’Ware the ship!” shouted someone from the wall. Vansen turned to see a small, covered boat bobbing toward them over the swells, the oars on each side moving like the legs of a water beetle. It was painted and gilded in the full glory of the Xixian colors, a huge carving of a spread-winged falcon perched on its prow as if trying to lift the entire craft from the water and fly away with it.

A fitting symbol, Vansen thought with a twinge of satisfaction. They thought they had the strength to take what they wanted here, but they underestimated the will of the Marchmen… especially the courage of the Funderlings. And now they come to us as humble as you please.

When the boat had been drawn up to the makeshift dock, built from the last stones that remained of the causeway, a group of Xixian soldiers in leopard-spotted cloaks filed off it and lined up on either side of the causeway, followed by a slow-moving figure in an elaborate ceremonial robe. As this lean old fellow made his way forward, propped on the arm of a youthful servant, the soldiers still on the boat began to lift out a large, covered litter.

The old man reached the front of the pavilion where Briony sat with Eneas standing protectively beside her. The prince of Syan looked so much the handsome royal husband already that Vansen could have happily seen him shot with an arrow. The Xixian made an elaborate bow that did not quite cross over into actual humility. Then the youthful servant made a shrill announcement that his stumbling words suggested he had been forced to memorize, “I parsent His Revered Seff… Revered Self, the Wise Elder, Paramount Mis… Minister Pinimmon Vash.”

“You are safe in our company, Minister Vash,” Briony told the old man. “And so are all who travel with you.”

The paramount minister pressed his hands together and bowed to her again. “Your Highness is too kind. Before we begin our formal discussion, may I take this moment to extend my deepest sorrows on the death of your father? I came to know him well in the last months—almost we were friends, I would say ...”

“Friends?” Briony’s voice had lost its smooth strength. “Your master killed my father, Minister Vash. Is this not hypocritical, to feign sorrow?”

“It is not feigned, Highness,” he said with the ease of a veteran courtier. “And it is about my late… master that we wish to speak.”

“We?”

“My present monarch… and myself. But I must beg your indulgence. Autarch Prusus has certain frailties that make it difficult for him to speak clearly. We hope you will indulge us and let me assist him.”

“How do we know you will not simply say what you wish—that you are not the true ruler of Xis now?” demanded Eneas.

“Oh, my master can speak your tongue,” the old man assured him. “He is a scholar. But it is difficult for him.” At this, Vash turned and clapped his hands. The litter was carried forward and set down in front of the pavilion. When the curtains were drawn back even Briony had a difficult time hiding her surprise.

The new autarch was a simpleton, or so it appeared, his head lolling, a sheen of drool on his chin. Even his legs and arms seemed unwilling to be led by such a creature and seemed to be struggling clumsily to remove themselves from his trunk.

“Forgive me, but what is this?” demanded Prince Eneas. “Is this a jest or a trick, Xixian?”

“Please, Highness,” Briony said. “Do not be hasty. Autarch Prusus, do you understand me?”

The man in the litter nodded, a complicated affair of wags and hitches.

“And do you truly speak our tongue?”

The autarch made a long series of stammering noises. Vansen actually heard a word he understood. “… Dignity.”

“He says he does, and he apologizes,” Vash said. “The Golden One says the gods gave him more wit than dignity.”

Briony smiled a hard smile. “Then he would be an ill fit in most courts, where it is generally the other way around—but come into our tent and we will speak. There is no forgiveness in my heart for Xis, but I want no more fighting if it can be avoided.”


“Please, Princess Briony,” said ancient Vash, “it was your father’s own scheme that brought Prusus and I together—he alone saw through the scotarch’s outer seeming and made me aware as well. That is why at the last I found a few sympathetic men to help me carry the scotarch and we escaped. That is why we did not die in the caverns beneath your castle. It was your father’s cleverness that saved us.”

“Do not think to flatter me with what my father did while he struggled for his life—a life your master eventually took from him.” Vansen could see that Briony was fighting to stay calm. He longed more than anything to be able to put his hand upon her, to let her know she was not alone—but of course he couldn’t. “From what I have been told about your people, it is scarcely worth our while to negotiate. As soon as you return to Xis, this man ...” she gestured to the new autarch, who was being helped to drink watered wine by a servant, “will be replaced by another member of your mad royal family. So why should I not simply leave you all to make your way across Eion by land and let things fall out as they will?” Her smile this time was even harder. “I do not think you would have a happy time leading your survivors through Syan and Hierosol.”

Vash nodded, but it was plain he too was nettled. “Yes, and more innocents would be killed. I do not speak of our soldiers here, Highness. We invaded you… or rather, the previous autarch forced us to invade. And ordinarily you would be correct—Prusus would have only a short time to rule before a successor was chosen. But he and I think we have a better plan. There is an old law among our people that the scotarch will rule until a successor has been chosen. However, if the autarch is not dead but simply gone, the successor cannot be chosen until five years have passed.” Vash smiled. For all his age he had the confident smile of a younger man. “We will be able to do much in five years, I think, to change that which we like least about our country. For one, if you let us take passage from here, we will withdraw our army from Hierosol as well.”

“Truly?” said Eneas. His skepticism was plain. “Why should you do that?”

Prusus abruptly spoke up. Vansen could make out an occasional word now, but much of it still sounded like animal noises.

“He says, ‘Because conquest is expensive, and maintaining it is more so,’” the old man explained. “Xis has overstretched its boundaries and resources. We have enough to do taking care of our empire in Xand. All of the adventuring here in the north was the obsession of Sulepis, all bent toward what he thought to do here, in Southmarch.” Vash bowed. “But Prusus says that he, who is scarcely a man, has no illusions that he is fit to be a god. He thinks he can be a goodly autarch, however, for as long as the gods give him to rule.”

“You promise this?” Briony said, looking not at Vash now but at Prusus. “If we let you and your men take ship—and you Xixians will pay for those ships and pay for everything that goes upon them—then you promise you will withdraw your armies from the rest of Eion?”

Prusus’ head wagged several times before he could get out the words. They were hard to understand, but not impossible.

“Yiy ... I ... do. I ... puh ... rah ... misss.”

“You and Minister Vash may return to your camp in the hills. My counselors, Prince Eneas, and I must talk together.”


“I am disposed to trust them, not because I believe everything they say—Vash, it is clear to me, is a man who has long acquaintance with the manipulation of truth—but because I see no choice.” In the privacy of the tent she had taken off her headpiece. A sheen of sweat flecked her brow. Vansen realized he was staring.

“I do not like it, Briony,” said Prince Eneas. “Don’t do it. I think it is a mistake.”

She gave him enough of a nettled look to make Ferras Vansen happier than he had been in hours. “I’m grateful for your advice, Eneas, but please remember, this is Southmarch soil, and although I will never be able to repay all you have done for me and my people, I am still the mistress here, even if I have not yet been crowned.”

She truly has changed, Vansen realized. Most of the petty angers have gone. What remains is just and necessary… even queenly.

Briony frowned. “In any case, what can we do? Imprison them all? Execute them… ?”

As she spoke a guard came in, clearly in haste. He bent and whispered his message to Vansen, who immediately stepped forward.

“Princess,” he said, “my men say that a boat is coming, not from the Southmarch mainland but across the bay from Oscastle ...”

“Surely that is not so unusual, Captain Vansen? Or is it a warship?”

“No, but ...” He did not know what to say. “Perhaps you should come and see.”

It took only a short time to throw back the curtains again and open the pavilion to the blue sky and the green bay all around. The Marrinswalk ship was impossible to mistake, a single-masted cog of the type usually meant for fast travel and vital news, but what caught Vansen’s attention were the three flags she flew. One was the owl of the Marrinswalk’s ducal family, but she also showed the black and silver of the Eddons and another pennant with a strange sigil that Vansen did not recognize.

“By the gods,” said Steffens Nynor, his wispy hair a little disarranged with drink and the heat of the day, “they’re flying the battle standard of the Southmarch master of arms. But we have no master of arms. Not since ...”

“Do not say it,” Briony told him. “Do not tempt the gods to cruelty or tricks.”

The ship anchored a short distance out in the bay and a boat rowed across to the causeway and tied up on the opposite side from the Xixian falcon boat, which was just raising anchor. As if in studied imitation of the southern delegation, this boat too disgorged a man in dark traveling clothes and a broad hat; the man at the front of the landing boat was even darker of skin than Pinimmon Vash.

“Oh, merciful Zoria, is that truly Dawet?” Briony said. She stood up and waved her hand. “Master Dan-Faar, is it you?”

The newcomer waved from the end of the causeway, but Vansen thought it a subdued gesture. The dark man climbed out as the boat was still being tied and walked up the road toward the pavilion.

Briony clapped her hands. “I am so pleased you have come to us!” she called. “I feared something had happened to you—that you would never see the happy result of all our labors together in Syan.”

The man Vansen had last seen as the envoy of Ludis Drakava mounted the wooden steps to the pavilion. He bowed and kissed Briony’s hand. “I rejoice to see you back on your throne again, Princess.” He turned and made a bow to the prince as well. “Your Royal Highness.”

Eneas and Ferras Vansen looked at each other, unhappy with the arrival of this handsome newcomer and with Briony’s obvious affection for him.

“But why did you come in such a manner, Master Dan-Faar, flying the flag of the master of arms?” Briony asked him. “Do you seek to fill the position?” She laughed, but suddenly looked unsure. “And why are you dressed so, all in black? Has something happened?

Dawet was still on his knees, as if he were too weary to rise. He took a square of parchment from his cloak and offered it to her. “Here, Princess. This is for you.”

Watching the way Briony flinched at the letter, Vansen wanted to leap forward and snatch it from her hand, but he knew he could not. She took it and broke the seal, then spread it on her lap. For a moment she read it in silence, then held it out to Dan-Faar, blinking away tears. “I cannot… I ...” She shook her head. “Please read it to me.”

“To Princess Briony from her friend and servant, Idite ela-dan-Mozan, greetings.

On the night of the fire, we were able to bring the great man Shaso dan-Heza out of the flames of my husband’s house, may the Great Mother guide and protect them both on their journeys. Shaso had taken great injury fighting with the men who set the fire, giving the women, children, and others a chance to escape the destruction, but he lived long enough to ask after your safety. When we told him you could not be found but had not been captured, he seemed satisfied, and died without saying more. Shaso was a man of great honor and wisdom. Tuan and Southmarch are both sadder places for his loss. ...”

Dawet lowered the letter and turned to Briony. “I have returned a great man to Southmarch, my lady, so my ship bears his insignia. I am dressed in mourning because I bring back only his ashes.” He lowered his head. “Princess, I come to confirm what was heretofore only a sad belief. Shaso dan-Heza is dead.”

* * *

“Are you certain we are allowed to be here?” Opal asked again. Even the stolid presence of Brother Antimony did not seem to reassure her. The Tower of Summer, at the very heart of the castle, was not the kind of place where most Funderlings would ever feel comfortable, even though their ancestors had helped build it.

“The Big Folk owe a debt to the Rooftoppers now,” said Brother Antimony. “I do not think they would grudge their use of an abandoned tower.”

“Be grateful,” Chert told his wife as they trooped up past another closed room. “When I wanted to visit them, I had to climb onto the roof.”

“You? At your age? What were you thinking?”

“Fracture and fissure, woman, I’m not that old.”

But he knew she didn’t really mean it—like him, she was struggling to make sense of a world that had gone completely downside-up. Funderling Town remained a madhouse, with some neighborhoods still sealed off by the Guild and patrolled by the Big Folk’s royal guards until the last of Durstin Crowel’s men were rounded up. Almost every home had at least one survivor of the war, many of them wounded, not to mention all the surviving monks who had lost not just the Mysteries themselves but their temple home as well—and that, of course, had been mostly Chert’s doing. And even though many of Funderling Town’s citizens regarded flooding the depths as a heroic, brilliant act that might well have saved all their lives, Chert and Antimony and the engineers that had accomplished it were now despised by the most traditional and conservative of their kind, including the Metamorphic Brothers, many of whom had made it clear that Chert Blue Quartz would never be forgiven for what he (as they saw it) had taken from them.

“Here,” he said as they reached the final landing. He pushed open the door. “The top floor.”

Opal went through first. “Oh,” she said in a faint voice. “Oh, look how many… !”


We’ll be attending quite a few more of these, Chert thought. A vast assembly of such unhappy gatherings, funerals and memorials for fallen friends, awaited them in the days ahead. But in truth, he decided, what they watched now was more than a bit like a Funderling memorial ceremony, but one seen from the very back row of the guildhall: the tiny figures came out and performed their parts, but he and Opal could scarcely hear them and had to guess at what was being said and done. There was no coffin, of course, and no image of Beetledown the Bowman that he could see either, but the Rooftoppers’ tiny voices were convincingly somber and the attitude of the mourners indisputably sad. Chert’s friend had been well-loved by his people, that was clear, and understanding this reminded him that he would never see Beetledown’s tiny, friendly face again. It was strange, because he had never known whether the little scout was married or had children, so he could scarcely claim to have been close to him, but they had been through adventures together nobody else could even imagine, let alone claim to have shared.

Chert found himself suddenly dabbing at his eyes with his sleeve, trying to hide what he was doing from Antimony and Opal. Because of this, he did not see the queen of the Rooftoppers’ first steps out into the center of the empty fireplace, but he heard the tiny shell trumpets that announced her and hastily finished wiping away his tears.

She stood, smaller than a child’s doll, in a beautiful dress of stiff, shiny fabric studded with beads so small Chert could scarcely even make them out. Beside him, Opal took a deep breath.

“My,” his wife whispered, “isn’t she so pretty!”

“That’s the queen,” he whispered back.

“Don’t you think I could tell, you old fool?”

“Her most Insidious and Unalloyed Majesty, Upsteeplebat the Queen!” announced a crier the size of a darning needle, then blew on his fluted shell trumpet again.

“Upsteeplebat?” Opal murmured. “What kind of name is that?”

“Hush.”

The queen looked up into the heights of the room—or so it must have seemed to her—where the faces of her giant guests loomed like three moons hanging in the sky. She nodded in a way that suggested that she was glad to see them, but she directed her words to the crowd of mourners.

“I do not come here to lament over the death of Beetledown the Bowman, chief of my Gutter-Scouts,” she began in a surprisingly loud, high voice, “because we know that he is with the Hand of the Sky in the heights above the heights, and in that attic of delight there is no sadness, no pain.

“But I do stand before you to say that we will miss him, because our love for him was fierce—as was his love for his race and his nation, from the tip of the Iron Needle to the depths of the terrifying earth, from the Great Wainscoting to the fields of the South Roofs where our sky-steeds graze. Beetledown gave the greatest gift he had so that these things could survive, and so you and I could see our people prosper in a world that so often taxes us with hardship, but which is nevertheless the only world we the living have. ...”

“She speaks wondrous well,” whispered Antimony.

“She is their queen,” said Chert. “She is altogether admirable.”

Opal gave him a look that he could feel without seeing. “Admirable, is she?”

“She is their queen and a goodly one, that is all I am saying!”

“Bad enough you are a troublesome old dog who likes to roam,” she said with quiet intensity, “but when you cast your eye on a woman no bigger than a baby’s rattle… !”

“Oh, stop.” He was mortified, and fearful that their voices might carry farther than they guessed among such small, sharp-eared creatures. “That is nonsense, woman, and you know it.”

Opal sniffed, but fell silent again.

“… And without a moment’s hesitation, after all that he had already given to his people and his queen, he said he would do it.” Upsteeplebat was still extolling Beetledown’s virtues. “Let those who are children this day look to his example—no finer one could have been set for you.”

The thought of children made Chert’s heart grow even heavier. Opal was not really angry with him, he knew, nor did she believe for a moment he felt anything for the tiny queen of the Rooftoppers. She was angry at him for letting Flint go, and angry at herself more than at him. This day’s ceremony was no doubt reminding her of the day the boy had disappeared, that he had last been seen helping Beetledown escape a deadly attack to reach Antimony with the Astion, and that shortly after that sighting everything beneath that place, including the spot where Flint had been, had vanished in a remorseless crush of water. Corpses were still drifting up to the surface of the Salt Pool from its new tributaries below, bodies of Funderlings and Xixians and Qar alike. Chert knew Opal was terrified that Flint’s fate had been the same as theirs, that their house would be one of those to receive a visit from a gang of men carrying a dripping body on a covered bier.

He lost track then of exactly what the queen of the Rooftoppers was saying, his thoughts spinning in unhappy circles until the ceremony was over.

* * *

The tiny man with the trumpet stood at Chert’s feet, shouting at the top of his lungs. “Her Majesty wishes to speak to you, Chert of Blue Quartz.”

Antimony patted him on the back. “You go. I will wait for you on the stairs. I am too fretful I will step on someone here.”

“Don’t take long with your flirtations, old man,” his wife told him. “We have a great deal to see to at home.”

“What are you talking about?” said Chert. “You must meet the queen, Opal. It is an honor. How many queens have you met?”

“Really? But I’m not dressed for it ...”

“Gods of raw earth, woman, you spent the entire morning making certain you had on the right garb. Come along. Beetledown was my friend—and he helped rescue Flint, too.”

His wife’s face suddenly betrayed such deep unhappiness that he wished he hadn’t said anything, but it was too late to take it back. He took her arm and led her forward, walking with small, sliding steps to give their hosts ample time to get out of his way.

Queen Upsteeplebat had been lifted up onto her saddled dove and waited for them with the serenity of a small but artful carving. When Chert and Opal had shuffled close enough, they carefully lowered themselves to their knees so they could see her better.

“You are very kind to come, Chert of Blue Quartz,” the queen said. “And this must be your wife, the Lady Opal.” She nodded. “We have heard so much good of you from Flint and Chert, Mistress. I thank you also for coming. Beetledown the Bowman meant much to us.” She shook her head. “We will never forget him, nor will we ever be able to replace him.”

To Chert’s surprise and pleasure, Opal was clearly charmed by the miniature queen. “You are too kind, Your Majesty. I liked Beetledown so much, too. A lovely lit… a lovely man. So many have been lost in the war—what terrible times!”

As he listened to his wife and the queen, Chert’s attention was caught by Antimony, who was standing in the doorway of the Rooftoppers’ sanctuary trying to catch his eye, beckoning. Chert carefully made his way back across the floor.

“You had better come.” Antimony’s face betrayed nothing.

“What is it?”

“Bring your wife, too, Master Chert.”

He went back and made apologies to the Rooftoppers’ monarch, who did not seem either insulted or unduly surprised, and led Opal out.

“What is this about?” his wife demanded. “You wanted me to meet her, then as soon as we’re talking friendly-like, you yank me off as though I were a ...” She stopped in the doorway, looking past Antimony at something Chert could not yet see. “Oh,” she said. “Oh!” And then she was hurrying across the landing. “Praise the Elders!” she shouted. “Oh, come see!”

It was the boy, of course—Chert had known that by the sound of his wife’s voice. As Opal squeezed him and rubbed tears all over his shoulder and neck—he had grown even taller in the past days, it seemed—Flint gave Chert a look that seemed to mix amusement and bafflement.

“But Mama Opal, I’m well,” he said as she wept and touched his face. “I said I would see you again. Didn’t they tell you?”

She laughed through her tears. “Hark to the boy. As if I shouldn’t worry when he’s vanished and half the world’s tumbled down—and him right at the center of it all!”

Chert joined the embrace, if a little awkwardly. The boy was almost a head taller than he was now but still looked as though he might have seen nine summers at most. “Still, you shouldn’t have made your mother worry so, lad. We didn’t know where you were ...”

“Come home,” Opal said. “Come home and I will make your favorite—muldywarp stew. Oh, Chert, let’s take him home.”

Chert could not help noticing that Brother Antimony looked uncomfortable, even troubled. As the boy tried to get down the stairs under Opal’s continued assault, hugging him and trying to hold his hands and several times almost toppling them both off the steep steps, Chert slowed until he was walking beside Antimony.

“Why the worried face?” he asked the monk as lightly as he could.

“Oh, it is nothing,” Antimony said. “It only troubled me that bad luck should have forced me to leave Beetledown behind just so I could carry Nickel to safety—that… that ...” He looked around as though Brother Nickel’s supporters might even be there, in the upper floors of the Tower of Summer. “That miserly, self-important creature. What a waste to lose little Beetledown instead of him!”

“The Elders’ plans are not always written clear,” Chert said.

“But then I was thinking about how Flint knew just where to be—just where to be! Of all the tunnels of the Mysteries, he knew just where Beetledown would be coming and where the owl would catch him ...” Antimony shook his head. “And I was thinking of that, and how he disappeared, and wondering how a mere boy could know such things… and then there he was! Standing directly in front of me on the stairs as if I had… as if I had conjured him up.”

Chert felt a bit of a chill, too—not the first that his adopted son’s actions had given him. “We have all had to get used to that. The boy… the boy is not like others.”

Antimony’s laugh was almost angry. “You are a wise man, Chert Blue Quartz, but that is far from the cleverest thing you’ve ever said. The boy is not like any other!”

“Chert!” Opal called back. “Did you hear what Flint said? You’re going to have an audience with the princess—and I will be going, too!”

“What? Flint, what are you talking about?”

“An audience with the princess and many others, in two days’ time,” the boy said. “It is very important, Papa Chert. You really must go.”

“With Princess Briony? And how did you hear of this?” he asked. “Did someone in the princess’ household tell you?”

“Oh, no,” he said, opening the door as they reached the bottommost floor. The late afternoon sun flooded in, so that for a moment Chert could not entirely make out the boy’s shape and he seemed something else, something unknown. “No,” Flint told him. “No one told me. I just thought of it.”

50. Cuckoo in the Nest

“Great Kernios declared that that since he had sent his wife away he was in need of another wife, and that if Zoria would take Mesiya’s place, Kernios would let the gods take the Orphan up into heaven to live with them ...”

—from “A Child’s Book of the Orphan, and His Life and Death and Reward in Heaven”

To His Royal Highness, Eneas Karallios, Prince of Syan and North Krace,

My dear friend and protector,

It is with a heart still mourning my beloved father as well as pained by the loss of my twin brother, although at this moment he lives and breathes only a short walk from the room where I write this letter, that I come to this, a task I have been avoiding all day. I would rather tend to any number of dreary chores, such as the examination of the accounts with Nynor, which demonstrate my kingdom to be in just as shocking a condition of poverty and mismanagement as anyone might guess, than to write this. But write it I will, because the alternative would be to speak these painful words to your person, and to see their effect in your kind face.

Eneas, I cannot marry you. I promised I would consider it when I knew what fate awaited me here in Southmarch, and so I have pondered your proposal with the deepest and most grateful attention. Who would not be honored to have received such an offer? More importantly, what woman, even if she did not admire you as I do, would be foolish enough to turn such an offer down? Having traveled with you these months and seen your quality, I can promise you I am more honored than I can ever say, but I still cannot be your wife. The woman who will someday have that good fortune and reign at your side as queen, whoever she may be, will be perhaps the most fortunate of my sex in all of Eion.

Please understand, noble Eneas, there is no failing in yourself which leads me to this decision, no insufficiency in either your character or your treatment of me which urge me to decline you. You have been nothing but honorable to me, and your kindness has been far more than I could ever deserve, were I to dedicate my life from this moment on solely to earning it. Rather, it is my country that makes demands upon me, my people who need me, and my ruined home that begs for my complete attention. I know that if I married you, I would not be discouraged from rebuilding Southmarch, or even giving the greatest part of my thoughts to my own people, but you would be doing your own subjects a disservice if you absented yourself from them, so we would marry division as well as each other. It also seems true to me that eventually, by the nature of your sex and the importance of your own country, Southmarch would become merely an outpost of Syan. That alone is enough to ensure that I marry no other monarch. Seeing what the last years have done to my beloved home has torn at my heart, and I have come to realize that I am, above all else, my father’s daughter. I truly value my people more than my own happiness.

You will say that none of these are true impediments to a marriage, that they are the fears of a young woman who has suffered many losses. That may be, but you deserve better than to marry a halfhearted bride. You are the very paragon of Trigonate knighthood, dear Eneas, and you deserve a consort who can be always by your side without lamenting her own neglected kingdom.

But please know this—my debt to you is deep. Whatever happens, I pray that our two countries always remain friends, but even more so that you and I remain fast friends as well.…

* * *

The guards observed his expression with alarm, but he ignored them—it was not the guards who had earned his anger.

One of the maids let him in; he paced the antechamber until she returned and led him through into Briony’s retiring room. The princess had been writing a letter; as he came in she blotted it, rolled the parchment, and put it aside. The summer night was warm but Briony wore a heavy sleeping robe, perhaps for modesty’s sake. The rest of the maids were still dressed, which was a good thing considering Ferras Vansen’s plans.

“I must have some time to speak privily with Her Royal Highness,” he said. “Princess, will you send your attendants away? I apologize for the intrusion, but it is a matter of utmost urgency.”

She looked at him, trying to read his face. “Of course, Captain Vansen. Give them a moment to compose themselves. Ladies, I know that Duchess Merolanna sits up late these nights because she has trouble sleeping. You can find a fire and some company in her chambers.”

When they had all trooped out, whispering at this strange and sudden intrusion, Briony seated herself in a large chair and drew her feet up beneath her. “You have my attention, Captain Vansen.” She shook her head. “I will not be able to call you that much longer, will I? Soon the coronation will come, and the honors will be given ...”

“Hang that,” he said. “I care nothing for honors or titles. You know that.”

“Why such anger at me?” she asked. “I looked to you many times yesterday but all I saw was your frowning displeasure. You would not meet my eye.” For the first time her mask slipped a little and her voice shook. “I offered you my heart and my lips the night before. Why should that earn your scorn?”

He stood in front of her with fists clenching and unclenching. “Scorn? It was you who would not look at me! I tried to catch your eye when you first came and you stared at me as though you had never seen me before! As though you were so choked in shame you could not bear to show me even the kindness you show to the youngest stable boy, or even old Puzzle!”

Briony laughed, a sudden burst of merriment that caught him by surprise. “Puzzle! Gods, are you jealous of the jester because I kissed his head and gave him a couple of coppers? He is a century old if he is a day!”

Vansen hated being laughed at; he would rather have been back in the depths of the Mysteries being strangled by the autarch himself than to have this woman, whom he loved so much his heart ached when he was away from her, laugh at him that way. “You mock me, my lady. You mock your servant because he is nothing more than that—a servant. Your pardon. I was foolish to think I could be anything more.” He turned and walked stiffly toward the door, his head like a windy night full of blowing leaves.

“Wait.”

He stopped. She was his sovereign, after all.

“Turn and face me, Captain. It is not proper to stand with your backside to your queen.”

Vansen turned. “With respect, Highness, you are not the queen yet.”

Her eyes were red, but she was fighting not to laugh, which confused Ferras Vansen mightily. “Merciful Zoria, you were right, Captain Vansen. You are a fool!”

“Then if my ruler has no further need of me,” he said loudly, “perhaps she will be so kind as to release me ...”

“Gods in heaven, Vansen, what is wrong with you?” She put her pale feet on the floor and stood up, her arms wrapped tightly around herself. “Release you? Are you truly upset with me because I would not gaze at you lovingly in front of all my subjects, in front of Prince Eneas and the new autarch? What do you want, man?”

“A sign.” He did his best to calm himself. He had a sudden vision of Briony’s ladies standing in the hallway with the guards, all of them listening at the door. “Some small sign that the other night meant… something.”

Now she came toward him, spreading her arms. “Meant something? Oh, sweet Heaven, how can you ask? Does this mean something?” And as she pressed herself against him her robe fell open and he felt the length of her whole and warm, with only a thin cotton nightdress separating him from her flesh.

He pulled her close and for a long time only held her, squeezing until she could barely find her breath. “Oh, gods, I hunger for you, Briony. I am no poet, no courtier. I have never loved like this before and I do not know the rules of the game! I was frightened because I saw nothing in your eyes. It was as though… I could not ...” He shook his head and buried his face in her golden hair, which was still so short he could feel the skin of her neck hot against his cheek. “It was as though everything else we had together… had been a lie.”

“Fool, dear fool. I am soon to be a queen. I cannot show people my thoughts in the construction of my face. I would be dead today if I could not hide my feeling from others.”

“But there are no others here now,” he said, and lifted her chin until he could look into her face, the face he had been able to see only in memory for so long; for a moment it all seemed a dream again, but the feel of her reassured him. “No others. No one but us.”

“Then you will see what our love is truly made of,” she said, and brought her lips to his.


“Are you well, my love?”

She stirred. “Well, indeed. A little pain, that’s all. They say the first time is always that way.” She smiled. “You are my man now, forever and ever—the only husband I will ever have, even if a temple never hears our vows. Do you know that?”

“I would be nothing else.” He traced circles on the skin of her belly, but could not do so for more than a moment before the urge to kiss her there became overwhelming.

“Stop!” Briony said, laughing. “We cannot! Just think of my ladies-in-waiting, who will be spreading this story all over Southmarch tomorrow morning if I do not bring them back from Merolanna’s rooms before midnight.”

“I told them it was a matter of grave importance,” he said. “Did I lie?”

She smacked at his head and then rolled over so she could kiss him. “Oh, I wish we could be like this forever, Vansen.”

“My first name is Ferras,” he told her, almost shyly.

“Do you think I don’t know?” She laughed again. “I know everything about you that I could discover. At first because I thought you the worst man ever. Later… well, my feelings changed… or at least became clearer.” She looked at him, her face suddenly earnest. “Would you prefer I call you by your first name?”

“I don’t care which you choose as long as you speak it with that look in your eyes, always,” he said.

She rolled onto her back. “But I can’t, you know. Not in front of others. You know that, don’t you? Please say that you do.”

“I suppose,” he said. “But how can you love someone so much lower than yourself, that you must hide that love from everyone?”

“Foolish Captain Vansen! I could make you a noble in an instant. I will make you a noble—otherwise, you cannot be my lord constable. But even so, the way we feel for each other must stay a close-held secret.”

“There are no secrets in a place like this—the servants and guards know everything, always.” He shook his head. “I can live without marrying you, Briony, although I will die if you marry another… but why must our love stay hidden? Don’t you feel the same for me?” He suddenly felt stricken. “You do, don’t you? Feel the same?”

“Of course, you wonderful, truehearted man—but I have more than my own happiness to think about. If Kendrick or my father had lived, things would be different. Even if Barrick had not changed so greatly ...” She shook her head, her expression darkening like a sky clouding over. “But an ordinary life is not what Fate has given me. I must keep myself aloof, or seem to. I’ll have to pretend no man has won my heart… but that any man might, if he brings a useful alliance to Southmarch. That’s how I’ll make policy. That’s how I’ll keep our country free from the influence of powerful neighbors.”

“Even Syan?” he said suspiciously.

She smiled, but it was a sad one this time. “Even Syan. Especially Syan.”

He crept closer to her. “Let us not talk of Syan any more. Kiss me.”

When they had done that and more for a while, he sat up.

“Don’t go,” she said, her voice growing a little slow and sleepy. “I take back what I said. The ladies can find beds in Merolanna’s chambers. Tell me more of what you saw down in the caverns. I can scarcely believe any of it. Did you truly fight a god?”

“Not me, no. Not even your brother did. The creature was too far beyond any of us.” He shook his head. “I don’t want to talk about it. It is still too close.”

She shook her head. “It’s hard for me even to understand. You say my brother this, my brother that—he fought a hundred men! He swung down on a rope! Some powerful magic must be at work—that is not the brother I knew, who couldn’t even cut his own meat without falling to cursing and knocking his trencher on the floor!”

Vansen smiled, but there was a touch of puzzlement to it. “Magic indeed. It’s as if he aged ten years in a few months. And his arm is healed! He’s changed so much that I hardly recognized him. When the stone-swallowing demons came at us, every last one of us would have died if Barrick and the Qar had not shown up ...”

“The stone what?” She had a strange, troubled look on her face now. “Stone-swallowing… ? I have not heard this tale before. Tell me.”

He pulled her closer. “Your maids and ladies… ?”

“Leave them be a little longer.”

He described the final battle in the Maze in detail now, of how he and the Funderlings gave ground until there was no more ground to give.

“So brave!” she said. “And not just you, dearest Captain Vansen. Chert’s people have astonished me.”

“All of us,” he said. “We did them a disservice for many years, it seems. But even they could do nothing when the Stone Swallowers came. I don’t know what they were truly called—there were three of them. But each one placed a stone in his mouth and… and then began to change ...” He hesitated, feeling her body grow rigid beside him. “Briony?”

“Are you certain they were men?”

He considered. “To be honest, I never saw them before they had already become those… things. ...”

“Tell me again. Tell me what the stones looked like.”

“I don’t know,” he said, laughing a little. “Perin’s Hammer, girl, we were in almost complete darkness… !”

“Tell me all you remember!” There was nothing of the sweet young woman in her voice now.

And Vansen did, marveling to find that all this time he had been kissing not just his beloved, but also a queen.

* * *

Steffens Nynor was wrapped in a heavy wool cloak, but his ankles were bare of hose and he was clearly feeling the cold. “Is it truly necessary to do this now, Highness?” he asked.

“I have learned a lesson.” Briony motioned for one of the guards to knock on the tower’s heavy front door. The booming sound echoed and died. She was just about to order him to do it again when a quavering, childish voice from behind the door said, “Who goes there?”

“It is the Princess Regent, to see Queen Anissa,” the guard said.

The door opened enough for the boy to peer out at the visitors, then the door swung wide. “But the queen is sleeping!” he said, as if the people knocking might not have realized that the time was well after midnight. “She is in mourning,” he offered next, but the guards had already pushed past him and he was left talking to Briony, Vansen, and Lord Nynor.

“Of course she is,” Briony told him, not unkindly. “And so am I. Do you see my black dress?”

He scuttled off up the stairs to the queen’s bedchamber as if Briony had frightened him. The guards on duty in the reception hall had dropped to their knees; she waved them to their feet. Several of them looked to their longtime captain as though he might explain why this ordinarily sleepy duty had been interrupted, but Ferras Vansen took his lead from Briony and kept his thoughts to himself.

Anissa and her retinue were long enough coming down that Briony had begun to consider sending the soldiers up to get them when she heard the queen’s voice preceding her down the stairs. “But why? Why should she want to come here in the night this way? It frightens me!” Now she appeared, accompanied by half a dozen women, one of whom held her little son, Alessandros.

Olin Alessandros, Briony reminded herself. My brother. My father’s child, too.

The sight of Anissa in her nightdress brought back dreadful memories—memories of fire and living shadows, memories of last Winter’s Eve when her entire world had been turned upside down—but Briony did her best to keep her voice even. “I am sorry to bother you at such a time, Anissa, but my sleep was troubled by a thought that you alone can answer.”

Anissa turned to Nynor with a show of confusion, but the aged counselor had no duty here but that of observer. He nodded respectfully to her but made no other sign. “What is it?” she said. “What do you want of me, Briony, that you frighten me so?”

“I want to know how it was that your maid Selia came to you. Do not turn so pale, stepmother. I have recently learned something about the Autarch of Xis and now I need to know this from you. How did your maid come to you?”

“I… I do not know. I do not remember!” Anissa looked around as if one of her maids might help her remember, but none of them would meet her eye. Many of them were themselves from the queen’s home in Devonis and knew themselves to be foreigners in the court, protected only by Anissa’s position, but they seemed curiously unwilling to speak in her defense. “She… was sent to me,” Anissa said at last. “I asked my mother’s chamberlain to send me a good girl, someone to be my bodyservant. That is all. I scarcely knew her! I had no idea she was a witch! But I have told you this already, Briony—why do you tax me with this now, when your father is dead and I am so upset?”

“Why indeed?” Briony shook her head. “You ask a fair question. Nynor, did you find the letter?”

The old man was looking at Anissa with an expression Briony hadn’t seen before. It took him a moment to realize she was speaking to him. “Oh. Oh, yes. Yes, it’s here.” He drew it out of the pocket of his cloak with a shaking hand. “I never throw anything away, and I am lucky that the fool who took my place did not change that.” He held it out to Briony, but she shook her head.

“Read it to us, please.”

“Let me ...” he squinted, scissoring his spectacles until he could fit them properly over both eyes. “Let me f ind… ah. Here. From a letter Queen Anissa wrote to me in Heptamene of last year, a few months after the king had been imprisoned by Hesper of Jellon and then ransomed to Drakava in Hierosol.”

“… And at King Olin’s express wish, I have been bringing Lady Selia ei’Dicte, my dear friend of childhood, to be my companion in his absence. She is very close to me and of high birth, so please see she does not wait at the dock and is not put through some rude treatment like a common servant.”

Briony stared at her. “So which was she—a dear companion from childhood, or a servant you scarcely knew?”

Anissa took a few steps back toward the stairs. Some of the guards tensed—Briony could feel it; the air in the tower’s reception hall, large and drafty as it was, seemed to have grown tight. “How can I remember? I knew her, perhaps! That does not mean I had anything to do with what she did. I would never ...”

“I know now that the stone your maid used must have come from the autarch—it was one of the same magical Kulikos stones he gave to others during the last hours of the fighting under the castle, changing them into dreadful, demonic things. Captain Vansen saw one of them putting the Kulikos in his mouth.” She frowned. “No, not ‘his mouth,’ but ‘hers.’ The demons must have been women to begin with. Chaven said the stones only worked on women.”

Briony moved closer to Anissa. “So I can only suppose that the autarch, who had several of these Kulikos stones, and also had several spies in the Tollys’ Summerfield Court, gave one of these deadly talismans to your maid instead. But why? On the very unlikely chance she would use it to murder my brother Kendrick?” Just saying the words made Briony violently angry, but she forced herself to speak even more calmly. “Why? How would he know that Selia could be trusted, or would even do such a thing at all? Unless she was brought here with no other purpose in mind. Unless she was, perhaps, someone that had already been picked out for the task ...”

The maids and ladies drew back a little, some of them whispering anxiously. Anissa’s eyes were round. “What are you saying? That I knew? That is foolish! Why would I hurt Prince Kendrick?”

“I’m not certain,” Briony said through her teeth, “but let me guess. You can answer one question for me, though, Anissa—did the autarch’s servant first come to you before you left Devonis, or was it here, in Southmarch? My wager is that although you may have spoken to him before, when he finally approached you it was here, after you found out you were carrying my father’s child.”

“What do you say? I don’t understand.”

“This, Stepmother—although it galls me even to call you that. I think you do understand, all too well. I think that one of the autarch’s spies came to you and told you that the child in your womb was doomed if Kendrick or either of the two younger children—Barrick or myself—took the throne. He told you that if Olin died in captivity, Kendrick and the rest of us would not stand any rivals for the throne, that Kendrick would have the baby done away with, and probably you, too. Am I right? Is that what he told you?”

“No! No!” But she had the sound of a woman in despair, not one protesting her innocence.

Briony, with a cold, sinking feeling in her belly, knew she had guessed correctly. “Tell the truth, Anissa. I am not the Autarch of Xis, but I’ll not spare harsher means if I don’t hear the truth from you now.”

“Stop frightening me!” Anissa began to cry. For a moment, Briony almost felt sorry for the small, pretty woman who had brought her father such happiness, but she also remembered what had happened to her in Anissa’s chamber the night her exile began—the night when the maid Selia had put the stone in her mouth and turned into something otherwordly and deadly. Briony couldn’t bear to imagine what Kendrick’s last hour must have been like at the hands of that monstrosity.

“Guards. She will go to the stronghold now, I think.”

“No!” Anissa suddenly fell to her knees and scrambled forward, trying to throw her arms around Briony’s legs. Ferras Vansen stepped out and blocked her, then lifted her to her feet with surprising gentleness. “Do not do that to me, please, Briony!” her stepmother wailed. “I was terrified, so! He said that my baby would be taken and murdered! He told me I would never see my home again—that I would be poisoned here in Southmarch… buried in cold ground… !” She was weeping so hard now it was difficult to understand her. Briony looked at Vansen, whose face showed a complicated mixture of pity and disgust as he held Anissa upright.

“Who said that? Who approached you?”

“It was a man from my own country. A merchant. He told me he had news from home, so I let him come to me.” She could barely stand. “Please, please do not kill me! Do not hurt my baby! I did not want to do it, but they said that Kendrick would murder me and the child. I was so frightened!”

“So you helped the autarch kill my brother instead.” Briony felt as if she were a vessel full to the brim with caustic liquid, that if she spilled even a drop it would burn wherever it touched. “Lock her away,” she told Vansen.

“In the stronghold?”

“No. That is no place for the mother of my father’s child. She can stay here—under guard.” She turned to Anissa. “But you will not keep the boy.” She reached out her hands to the maid and took little Olin Alessandros while Vansen held the struggling Anissa. “He is something of my father, not of you.”

“Do not murder me!”

“She must have a trial, no matter what, Highness,” said Nynor. “Her father has been a close ally for years.”

“A close ally who harbored agents of the autarch. Who allowed those same agents to send a witch here to murder my brother!” She wanted nothing more at that moment than to have done with Anissa once and for all, but she could not bring herself to do it. “Yes, you will have a trial, lady. Then you will be locked away so long that your name will be forgotten. You will die unremembered.”

The child was crying now, too, moved by his mother’s loud distress. As Vansen detailed new men to relieve those who had been guarding the Tower of Summer until he better understood their loyalties, Briony held the small body close to her breast.

As she reached the door and stepped out into the cold night air, Briony stumbled. The weight of what she had undertaken suddenly seemed too much—she felt she would never have the strength even to reach her chambers. But Ferras Vansen reached out and caught her arm to steady her, then they walked back to the residence side by side.

51. A Shared Admiration

“Zoria the Dove, of all gods and goddesses the kindest, agreed to marry her uncle if he would let the Orphan go, though all the earth and Heaven mourned to lose her.”

—from “A Child’s Book of the Orphan, and His Life and Death and Reward in Heaven”

In honor of the royal visit, Gem Street was ablaze with lanterns, so Funderling Town’s famous ceiling and the faces of its public buildings could be seen in all their intricate, ornamented glory.

“It is quite astonishing,” Briony said, staring up as Vansen led her horse along the narrow main road. “All this beauty. I knew it was here, but I scarcely noticed—my father brought me here several times, you know.”

“Try to look down as well, Highness,” said Nynor. “Your subjects desire your attention, too.”

“Don’t scold me, Count Steffens. I know they’re waiting. That’s why I’m here.” But she made certain to wave and smile as they passed the junction of Gem and Ore where the crowds were gathered close together and had been waiting for some time. “There, I see the guildhall,” Briony said. “Most impressive, isn’t it, Captain Vansen?”

He grunted, being too engaged at the moment in trying to clear a path for Briony to approach the building’s wide front steps. The castle was at peace in the largest sense, but a few of Hendon Tolly’s most desperate supporters still lurked in the unfrequented outer reaches of Funderling Town, and there were rumors that some Xixian soldiers and even a giant askorab or two might be hiding in the outer tunnels as well. After a time so strange it was hard to guess when anything would be completely ordinary again.

Several Funderlings called out Vansen’s name, which surprised him. When he turned, he recognized men who had fought with him in the Maze and saluted them in return, but he felt awkward doing it. He was moved that they should consider him one of their own, but he didn’t like being at the center of things and he never would.

And what will I let myself in for as lord constable, then? I will never be able to look the true nobles in the face… But, he reminded himself, many of the “true” nobles had managed to avoid fighting for Southmarch entirely. Many of those same nobles had also made it clear they would never come down into Funderling Town, even to hear what the princess regent had to say today. Which shows that birth alone does not make or mar any man completely , he thought, catching an upward drift of his heart and clutching it firmly for once. Look at me! The princess says she loves me—do I have cause to complain of anything?

It did not harm his mood that almost as many Funderlings seemed to be cheering for him as for Briony, though he carefully gave no sign of it. He helped her down from her horse in front of the guildhall and formed up her royal guards to accompany her inside.

“You are a well-liked man in these neighborhoods, Captain,” said Briony, smiling.

“Any man who did not cut and run from trouble would be treated the same way.” But he couldn’t help being pleased she had noticed.

“Your Royal Highness,” called out Malachite Copper, dressed in high finery, arms and neck glinting with gems and polished metal, “please forgive me for bearing bad tidings, but I must report that your captain is a terrible liar. There is no man more honored in our city, ordinary or Big.”

“I know that, Master Copper,” said Briony. “And it is a pleasure to see you again in less trying circumstances than on the day the ocean rushed in.”

“The sentiment is mutual, Highness.” He bowed and extended his arm. “Come, let me take you into the guildhall. You may leave your gloomy escort to join you when he is ready.”

“She may certainly walk with you, Master Copper, but I will be right behind you,” Vansen said firmly. “Her Highness goes nowhere without the captain of her guards along to keep her safe. She owes it to her subjects. Am I not right, Princess Briony?”

She smiled as she took Copper’s arm. “Of course, Captain Vansen. You know best.”


It was a baffling gathering, he thought—like something from the depths of the months just passed, when so many different kinds of folk had been thrown together by the desperation of their situation. A good number of the Southmarch royal court was there, and, of course, the Funderlings were present in force—it was their guildhall, after all—with the four Highwardens in their usual positions of power. That was not the end of those who crowded the council chamber, either. The Skimmers were present in large numbers as well, most of the men wearing ceremonial hats and mantles of fish skin—thoroughly dried and almost odorless, Vansen was glad to note, since the chamber was not large. The Rooftoppers had also made an appearance, their entire delegation seated on top of a Funderling ore wagon specially prepared for them. Even the Qar were represented, although only by the eremite Aesi’uah and a few silent, robed figures; like the rest of her kin, Aesi’uah looked as though she could wait politely until the sun itself was consumed if necessary. Barrick had not come.

One of the Highwardens, a Funderling named Sard who looked to Vansen’s eyes to be older than the ancient building itself, opened the proceedings with words of greeting and extravagant promises of Funderling fealty which somehow had a less than sincere ring to them. Vansen wondered if he was the only one who noticed.

“And now, in a gesture which we must take as a show of great respect,” the wizened elder finished, “she has come to our humble habitation to speak to us. Give heed to your monarch, the daughter of Olin Eddon and Princess Regent—yes, yes, soon to be crowned as queen, I’m told—Princess Briony. All bow.”

Briony stood up in the general murmur and rustle of the Funderlings showing their respect. Of all those present only the Qar did not bow or salute. Many of Briony’s courtiers saw that and did not like it, Vansen could not help noticing. It is those who did not fight who have the least patience with our strange allies, he thought.

“I accept this honor in the name of the throne, and of my father,” Briony said loudly. “But I do not deserve it for myself. I hope one day it will be otherwise.”

Some of the Funderlings murmured, confused.

“We have survived a terrible danger,” she went on. “I believe that we were delivered from our doom by Heaven itself—but for a reason. Everything that we treasure was within a breath of annihilation—our kingdom, our city, our lives, perhaps even our souls. I cannot believe that such things happen without reason. And whether it was the gods my people worship, or the Earth Elders of the Funderlings ...” A stir passed through the crowd as she listed the sacred names, “Egye-Var, Protector of the Skimmer-folk, or the Lord of the Peak,” she nodded toward the Rooftoppers’ wagon, “the matter stands thus—we were saved when it seemed certain all would die.

“We are here in part to thank those who fought for Southmarch, from the smallest to the tallest—I will speak of some of those contributions later—but perhaps even more importantly, we are here because I am determined that we should learn from what has happened.

“We may never know exactly what mysterious hand shaped the destiny of the people of this castle, the Qar, and the Xixians, and brought us all together in this place. What we can know is that only with the help of every single one of us were we spared a terrible doom. I cannot rule this kingdom in good faith without understanding Heaven’s clear message to us.

“Funderlings!” Her voice suddenly rose. “My family, which once called you brothers, has in more recent years treated you poorly. We enjoyed the fruits of your work but gave you little say in your own governance. So, too, with the Skimmers. And you Rooftoppers—well, we cannot entirely be blamed for that, because you hid so well under our very noses that all but a few of us had forgotten you even existed.” A shrill chorus of laughter arose from the delegation in the wagon bed, a little like the chirping of crickets.

Briony next turned toward Aesi’uah and the other hooded eremites. “And even the Qar deserved better of us.” This caused a resentful murmur among the ordinary citizens. “It seems likely that we deserved better of them as well,” Briony added, but without hurry or concern. “No one can answer that riddle yet. The hurts we have done to each other will not be unraveled in an afternoon.

“But now the time has come for us to rebuild Southmarch, from these beautiful streets and houses of Funderling Town, cracked by cannon’s fire, to the deserted wilderness that the mainland city has become. We will need everyone’s help. And thus, as we make right what has been harmed by war and treachery, we will need to work as one people. No longer will there be a royal council that has no Funderling members, or decisions about Southmarch that do not take into account all its residents. Do not mistake me!” And here Briony’s voice rose a little as the crowd began to murmur. “Decisions will have to be made and not all will be popular. That is why the one who sits on the throne, whether it is I or perhaps one of my brothers someday, must have the weight of law behind them, just as before. But never again will that law be exercised without all Marchfolk being heard.”

The voices of the crowd, which had grown louder during this strange and unexpected speech, became so loud that for a moment Vansen thought he might have to pull Briony from the dais for her own safety—some of the Funderlings were actually shouting. After a moment though, he came to realize that most of the noise was being made by a group of younger Funderlings cheering for the princess regent. The older Funderlings, as well as many of the courtiers and Skimmers, mostly looked dumbfounded.

“I come here today,” she went on, “to proclaim a new synedrion which will advise the ruler of the March Kingdoms. This Council of Southmarch will be made of all the peoples of Southmarch, big folk and small, drylanders and Skimmers. Together we will keep safe this ancient seat that is home to all of us—dear to all of us…”


The long afternoon was finally ending. As Vansen waited, his beloved listened to Steffens Nynor, who was trying to speak to her confidentially in a guildhall full of Funderlings and others.

“But, Highness,” he said in an agitated whisper, “there is no precedent for this!”

“Royalty makes its own precedents,” laughed Dawet dan-Faar. “Briony begins her rule like a true queen. It is to be commended.”

Nynor scowled. “There is no precedent for you, either, Master Dan-Faar. It seems to me that the last time we saw you, you were ransoming our king.”

“It’s true,” Dawet said. “I am a busy man.”

Vansen stepped between the two of them, not that he thought Nynor would do anything dangerous, but he did not like to see the old man teased, either, and Dawet was a bit like a cat. “Please, Highness,” he said to the princess, “you should be getting back to the residence.”

She gave him a look. “Why is it everyone seems to think I must be looked after like a child?”

“Because like doting parents, we none of us have anything else so precious and dare not risk it.” Dawet was pleased with himself. Vansen found himself wondering when this smooth, dangerous fellow would move on to cause trouble in some other kingdom. For him, it could not be soon enough.

Vansen was startled to find Aesi’uah standing beside him. She had appeared as if from nowhere, and her coven stood with her, faces hidden in their hoods; everyone else on the guildhall platform seemed happy to give them a wide berth. “Princess Briony,” the eremite said, “I beg your pardon for interrupting. I bring a message from your brother.”

“Really?” Briony’s voice was cool. “Surely it is not so far to your camp that he couldn’t come himself.”

“Do you wish to hear the message?”

The princess flicked her hand. “I suppose.”

“He wishes you to know that we are leaving tomorrow. The survivors of the People will go back to Qul-na-Qar. But he said he would like to speak to you one last time, if you will come to bid him farewell.”

“Where?” Briony looked angry, but there was something else in her face that Vansen could not quite understand.

“Where the two of you said good-bye the last time he left.” She brought her hands together on her breast. “The Coast Road at sunset. If you cannot come so far he will understand ...”

“I will be there.” Briony turned from her as though the Qar woman had ceased to exist. “Come, Captain Vansen, round up your men. Nynor, you may tell the castle folk that we are going back now.” She smiled, but it was the merest tightening of her lips. “We have given them all something to talk about today, haven’t we?”

Nynor shook his head and sighed. “Oh, Highness, you certainly have. You are your father’s daughter, true enough.”

* * *

Rain had swept through in the morning but by the time Sister Utta was on her way back from the shrine, the skies had cleared to a blue just barely streaked with clouds. With the help of a few royal guards loaned to her by their handsome but reticent captain, she had set most of the worst damage to right, although the mosaics had been rattled to pieces by cannon fire and spread across the floor of the shrine. Separating and reassembling them would require months of careful work. Still, it was a grand feeling to be doing something useful, and especially to be doing something useful with Zoria’s place of worship. After the events of the last months, Utta felt closer to her patroness than ever.

In fact, she thought as she made her way to Merolanna’s apartments, why settle for just rebuilding the old shrine, which had always been small? Why not build a new one better able to serve the castle’s populace? A bigger shrine could bring in more tithes, which would allow her to help some of the folk made homeless or destitute by these long seasons of war.

Utta was so caught up with these new ideas that she did not immediately notice the boy sitting on the bench in Merolanna’s antechamber like a young scholar banished from the classroom to consider his sins.

“Oh!” She took a step back when she finally saw him. He was a young boy, perhaps nine or ten years old, with hair of so pale a yellow that in the dark room it seemed white. His clothes made her think for a moment that she was looking at one of the Funderlings; his face though, despite its solemnity, was that of a child. “Hello,” she said, recovering a little. “The blessings of the Three on you, and the good grace of Zoria.”

He slid from the bench and stood up. “Blessings to you, Sister Utta. I need to leave now, but I wanted to say something to you before I went.”

The child was odd, although she could not say exactly why, but there was something so compelling about him that she did not back away again even when he came to her and took her hand. “Please, look after Merolanna. She is important to me and she will be sad when she finds I’ve gone. She doesn’t have much longer—I fear she will be called onward before spring comes again—so I think the task will not be too much for you.” As she stared at him in amazement and more than a little disquiet, the boy squeezed her hand. His eyes were as blue as a clear spring sky. “I must go to the stable now.” He continued without explaining. “You have many years still, Sister, so you need not worry that your kindness to Merolanna will cheat you of your ambitions. I can tell you that you will bring many, many hearts to my mother’s service in the days ahead.”

With these words still ringing in her head, the child let go of Utta’s hand and walked out of the dowager duchess’ apartments.

“Oh, what a morning!” Merolanna said when Utta came to her bedside. “My son came to me! Here in my room! I wish you could have seen him!”

Utta could think of nothing she trusted herself to say, except, “That must have been a blessing.”

“A blessing, yes, that is just the word. He came to me and told me so many wonderful things that he will show me one day! I can scarcely wait.”

Utta looked at the old woman’s smile for a long moment, then turned away to dab discreetly at her eyes. “All things come in the gods’ time.”

“You sound as if you don’t think he’ll be back soon,” the duchess said, “but he had better not dawdle. After all, it is my coach and driver he’s taken!” Merolanna arranged her cushions and sat back, then reached out for Utta’s hand. “But until then, dear friend, sit with me for an hour, if you would be so kind. What is the weather like today? Is it truly summer at last?”

Utta let herself be pulled down into the chair, her thoughts skittering like mice. “Summer? Oh, yes, I… I think so, Duchess. It is not overly warm today, but the sky is bright and big ...”

* * *

“She is guilty of murder. More importantly, she is guilty of conniving at the death of a ruling prince. You cannot let her live, Princess.”

Rose was fussing with a loose ribbon on her stomacher and it was beginning to annoy Briony severely. She waved the young woman away. “Master Dan-Faar, this is my stepmother we are talking about—my father’s widow. It is nothing so simple as you make it sound.”

“It is just as simple as that. If there is discontent with your rule, Anissa will become the center of all resistance—she’s the baby’s mother, after all. “Put King Olin’s son on the throne!” they will say. “We need a king!”

“As opposed to a queen?” Briony asked. “You do not know the history of my folk as well as you think you do, Dawet. ...”

“Yes, we all have heard of Queen Lily, pride of the Eddons, yes, yes.” He laughed in that infuriating way he had, as if everyone else’s thoughts had already occurred to him, been considered, then dismissed. “But that was long ago and nobody dared speak against Anglin’s blood. Times have changed, Highness. The world has turned topsy-turvy, especially here in Southmarch, and nobody will ever again feel quite so certain about what is important and what is not.”

Briony shook her head. “Not all you say is wrong, Master Dan-Faar, but I am not you, this is not Tuan or any other Xandian satrapy, and we do not kill our relatives.”

“Any prince would execute a relative who has already tried to kill him. We are not so uncivilized in the south as you think us, Princess.”

She felt herself caught out. “I meant no offense, Dawet.”

He made a little bow. “I know, Highness. But the facts remain.”

“Enough. Tell me of something else. What of the Xixians? Did the last of them take ship this afternoon?”

“They did—the new Autarch Prusus and the minister and the remainder of the Leopard guards. They sailed in a Helmingsea coastal trader, so they will have a slow journey home.” He grinned. “It was quite satisfying to watch, actually—what remains of the great Xixian army forced to hire ships and slink away. Perhaps someday my own country will joy in such a sight.”

“Perhaps. And Prince Eneas?”

“He and his men are set to begin their own journey home tomorrow. As you know, his father is ill and he is needed at home.”

“Poisoned by the bitch Ananka, I have no doubt. I hope Eneas can put things right there. Meanwhile, we will miss him. I will miss him.” She sighed. “I am glad you are here, Master Dan-Faar. In a time when so much else is in doubt, you have been a good adviser and a good friend. I am grateful.”

“I am happy to take your gold, Princess,” he said, still smiling. “I assure you, my helpfulness is mostly mercenary.”

She laughed. “Oh, yes, you are a famous villain, are you not? I had forgotten.” Her brightened mood was short-lived. “I will never forget that… that you brought Shaso home. I know you were enemies in life, Dawet.”

He shrugged. “In the end, I could not forget that he and I shared something important—a love and admiration for the same young woman.”

“Ah.” Briony nodded wisely. “Shaso’s daughter—the one who died. Of course.”

Dawet seemed surprised but did his best not to show it. “Ah. Yes, her. Of course.”

52. The Crooked Piece

“... And so the Orphan boy was taken up to heaven to live with the gods, where he lives still ...”

—from “A Child’s Book of the Orphan, and His Life and Death and Reward in Heaven”

Vansen rode as far from them as he decently could, but wished Briony had not insisted he come along. Just the kindness and intimacy with which she spoke to Eneas, the obvious fact of her admiration for the Syannese prince, pained him.

“Do not take them yet,” he heard her beg Eneas. “Let me thank them again.”

He frowned. “They are soldiers, Princess. They do not expect to be thanked for what it was their honor to perform.”

“Most men like to be praised when it is well deserved. I think your soldiers will not think too ill of me if I speak again of their bravery and sacrifice.” She rode to the spot where Lord Helkis, Eneas’ lieutenant, had assembled the troops at the crossing of the broad Coast Road. “Men of Syan!” she called. “I have been fortunate enough to ride with you. I count my pride at being allowed to ride as a Temple Dog as second only to the blood of Anglin running in my veins… !”

“She will give everything she has to this country of yours,” Eneas said, watching the rapt soldiers. It took Ferras Vansen a moment to realize the prince was speaking to him. “Someone must watch over her. Protect her.”

Vansen felt a moment of resentment. “We have soldiers in this country, too, Prince Eneas.”

The prince laughed and turned toward him. “Did I say that aloud? My apologies, Captain. I meant no slight on you or the men of Southmarch—I only spoke what was in my heart. I knew I would never hold her, never tame her. She is too noble and singular a creature.”

“She is not a creature, Your Highness.” Vansen knew it was foolish to argue with a prince, but something more primal was going on beneath the words and he could not easily let go of it, either. “But we will agree that she is singular.”

“Fairly spoken!” Oddly, the prince did not seem to take offense. “I meant only that her… determination is such a pure thing. Like a bird’s need to fly ...”

A great cheer went up, although it faded quickly beside the open, windy road. Several of the Temple Dogs were waving their swords and standards in the air, crowding around Briony to call their farewells, all semblance of military order gone. But men are so few and the world is so big, thought Vansen, looking from the knot of soldiers and mounted men to the empty hills. How will we live without the gods?

Fool, he chided himself a moment later. We have exactly as much of the gods as we have always had.


When Prince Eneas and the others had at last turned south toward their homeland, Briony rode with her retinue back through the mainland city, as empty and haunted as the places Vansen had seen on Northmarch Road that day so long ago, when he rode with Collum Dyer and the poor merchant lad, Raemon Beck.

“I go to meet my brother now,” Briony told him. “There is much for you to do back home and Sergeant Dawley can look after me.”

Young Dab Dawley, Vansen knew, was nearly as enthralled with the princess as was Ferras Vansen himself, and had no love for the Qar. Vansen had no doubt he would look after her carefully, but that was not his only concern. “No,” he said. “You may dismiss me, of course, Highness, but if you will permit me, I would like to see your brother once more. We traveled together for a long time.”

“What happened to him behind the Shadowline, dear Captain?”

He shook his head in frustration. “I cannot tell you, not truly. When I saw him last in Greatdeeps he had not changed much from what you knew. A little harder, perhaps. A little quieter. Becoming a man, I would say, because he wouldn’t have survived that terrible place any other way.” The sun was dropping down toward the tops of the western hills as they rode up Market Road toward the Coast Road crossing just outside the city. “Then Gyir, the fairy I’ve told you about, gave him a commission to take a mirror from Yasammez to the king of the Qar. I am still not entirely certain why, but it was meant to wake Saqri the queen, so he must have succeeded.” He shrugged. “The next time I saw him was a few hours before you did. It was like meeting another person.”

“Not entirely.” She shielded her eyes against the sun as she looked up the road. “He was always full of secrets. It is just like him to wish to meet me out here, away from everyone else. When we were young we used to hide from our family and servants—or at least Barrick would. But I always found him.” She looked so sad that Ferras Vansen almost pulled her to him and kissed her, despite the presence of all her guards and grooms and pages. “We would hide from the world together. I suppose that is what most galls me. Again, he runs away to hide, but this time I cannot go. Someone has to stay. Someone has to play the ruler.”


The sun was very low, but the crossroad was still empty. At Vansen’s insistence a tent had been erected so that the princess could rest out of the sun and the wind while she waited for her brother, and she was there taking a cup of wine and thinking her own silent thoughts when the scouts brought the news that someone was approaching. It was not the army of fairies Vansen had expected, but a single two-horse carriage that was rattling toward them along the rutted road.

If Vansen was surprised by the vehicle, which bore the crest of the late Duke Daman, King Olin’s brother, and a coachman in full livery, he was even more surprised by the passengers who clambered down its narrow folding steps when it stopped—the Funderlings, Chert and Opal, followed by their adoptive child Flint.

“Master Blue Quartz!” Vansen said in astonishment. “What are you doing here, so far from Funderling Town?”

Chert did not speak until he was certain Opal’s feet were safely on the ground. “I am not certain myself, Captain Vansen. It is all our son’s idea—our son and Duchess Merolanna, whose cart this is.”

“Good excuse to take it out of the stable, sir,” said the coachman cheerfully.

“Did you come to see the princess?” Vansen asked. “Or to say farewell to Prince Barrick?”

Chert shook his head and pointed to Flint, who was already leading Opal toward Briony’s tent. “You’ll have to speak to the boy. I know it sounds foolish, but I promised I would ask no more questions until he was ready to explain.”

Vansen knew the boy’s history, so he was not surprised that Chert had been forced to come along, if only because Opal would have insisted. But why the strange child wanted to bring them here of all places, and just at this time, he couldn’t understand.

By the time Vansen led Chert into the tent, Opal and Flint were sitting on cushions at Briony’s feet. Chert reluctantly allowed himself to be convinced to sit beside them, but Vansen chose to stand beside the door flap so he could hear what was going on outside. He had no fear of Chert and his Funderling family, but he did not much like the notion of more unexpected arrivals.

“Well, Mistress Opal,” Briony said, “we have not met before, but you must know that your husband means much to me. He likely saved my life.”

Opal colored a little. “Well, he’s always up to something, my Chert. It’s a bit much for me to keep up with it all, sometimes.”

“It has been difficult for all of us lately,” Briony said. “These have been confusing, sorrowful times. But if I am not mistaken, we may learn a little more today about some of the mysteries that have plagued us.”

“Not from me!” Opal said breathlessly. “Goodness, no, I don’t think so ...!”

Briony turned toward the boy. “You have flitted in and out through many of the tales I have been told in the last few days, young Master Flint. Is it time now to talk about you? It is plain enough that whatever your relationship with Chert and Opal, you are not a Funderling by birth.”

“That is true, Briony Eddon,” the boy said gravely.

Vansen was a little shocked. “Lad, it is polite to address the princess as ‘Highness’ or ‘Your Royal Highness ...’”

Briony lifted her hand. “Generally that is true, Captain. But I suspect we are facing something a bit different than the ordinary here.”

The boy nodded. “I’m not Chert and Opal’s child, that is commonly known.” Watching the boy speak, Vansen felt the hackles lift on his neck and arms. He did not act like any child Vansen had ever known. Flint was not even acting much like himself—surely the child never spoke this formally when Vansen had seen him before.

“Where were you born, then?” Briony asked.

“Here in Southmarch… but it was a long time ago, as you measure it. Fifty years and more.” The boy nodded. “Merolanna is my mother. My father is Avin Brone, count of Landsend.”

Through everything that had happened, Vansen had never seen Briony truly astonished… until now.

“Avin Brone?” she cried. “Avin Brone was your father? He was Merolanna’s secret lover? But she said the child’s father was dead!” Her eyes narrowed. “And whatever else you may be, you are no comfortable old man of fifty years… !”

“The Qar took me when I was small. A childless Qar woman stole me from the house of my nursemaid, but they were disturbed in the doing and did not leave a changeling child to hide their deed. They took me to Qul-na-Qar and raised me. Although I aged but little, many years passed here during the time I was behind the Shadowline. At last Ynnir the blind king sent me here as part of his pact with Lady Yasammez—if I could bring out the essence of the god Kupilas to wake Queen Saqri, then the castle and its inhabitants would be spared.

“The queen was dying in slow drifts, like snow carried away by wind even as it falls—but the god was dying, too, and had been for centuries. Kupilas, as he is called by northern men, had long been failing from the treacherous wound Zosim had given him. But now his true end was upon him, and all who could sense such things knew it. In their place beyond this world, the sleeping gods could sense it. Even those only partly of the blood of Mount Xandos could sense it, too—Jikuyin, the great one-eyed demigod that Ferras Vansen met, and even your own brother and father, Briony Eddon.”

Vansen was startled to hear his own name, but no more startled than was Briony. “Do you mean to tell me Father and Barrick knew what was coming?” she demanded.

“No, but the nearness of the dying god and of the place beneath Southmarch where Heaven touched earth when the gods were banished troubled their blood and their thoughts.”

“But how can a child like you, even if you were raised by the fairies, know all this—know the business of all the gods and of my family, too?” A cold, hard sound had crept into the princess’ voice, and for the first time Ferras Vansen recognized it for what it was—not contempt but fear: Briony was frightened by what she might hear from this prodigy, and when she was frightened, she hid behind her royal mask.

“That is part of the tale,” the golden-haired child said. “It is what comes next—my tale. Only now can I see it whole and clear. It has the shape of a riddle.” He nodded, almost with satisfaction. “My first mother asked my second mother to hide me. My third mother stole me from my second mother. My fourth mother took me in when my third mother lost me. And then my first first mother saved me.”

Vansen did not like the aura of mystery that hung over the child’s speech. Briony’s discomfort was clear and the two Funderlings were no happier than she was. “What does that mean, ‘First first mother’?”

“My first mother was the duchess, who gave me to my second mother the nursemaid in one of the farm villages outside Southmarch. A woman of the fairy folk stole me from the nursemaid, even though she had no changeling to give in turn, so the theft was discovered. My third mother in turn lost me to the blind king of the Qar, who had a higher purpose for me than simply to keep the thief-mother’s fires tended and her house swept. And when I was taken across the Shadowline, Mama Opal and Papa Chert took me in.”

“Yes, we did,” said Opal with some feeling. “We wanted you. Didn’t we, old man?”

Her husband did not hesitate. “Yes, we did, lad.”

“And I have learned things from you that I learned from none of the others,” Flint said. “In truth, I needed the wisdom of all my families, because the days ahead proved to be very, very dark.

“When I brought Ynnir’s glass to the place where Crooked had banished the last of the gods, to the thing called the Shining Man, the vitality of Kupilas flowing into the glass threw me into a kind of ecstasy. Even a dying god is made of forces that mankind cannot understand, let alone harness, and a bit of the god’s dying thought touched my own. For just that moment I could see as the god saw, I could look through mountains as if they were glass, I could see what might be nearly as well as I could see what was and what had been—and I could see them all at the same instant.

“And in that instant, though I did not realize it then, Kupilas of the Ivory Hand and the Bronze Hand left a piece of his godly essence in me—a seed, as it were. And it has grown in my head and my heart ever since. More and more, it came to shadow my own thoughts with perceptions that were foreign to me—and yet not entirely so—and with understandings that were beyond me also… but not completely so. Slowly the presence grew, and slowly I grew with it, until I can no longer tell what is me and what is the seed of Crooked that has sprouted in me. ...”

“It could be just a sprite,” Opal said abruptly. “Some sort of earthboggin deviling your spirit. We can ask the Metamorphic Brothers ...”

“The Brothers probably would not help me if they could, Mama Opal,” the boy said with a kind smile. “Do not forget, it is in part thanks to me as well as Papa Chert that they no longer have a temple.”

“Good… !” Vansen laughed, but it was not a comfortable sound. “I nearly said ‘Good Gods.’ Can any of this be real? My head is spinning.”

“Can any of this be true is the question, I think,” Briony said. “I mean no offense to you, Flint, but why should we believe you? I have had my eyes opened to many things, but I am still not sure they are wide enough to see the god of healing hidden in the body of a little boy.”

Flint smiled again. “You are right to be cautious, Briony Eddon… but I don’t ask anything of you. In fact, I’m leaving Southmarch.”

Opal’s muffled cry of despair was immediately followed by a flurry of half-articulated questions from everyone present. The boy waited calmly until the uproar had lessened.

“I can’t stay, Mama,” he said when they were ready to listen again. He smiled sadly as Chert did his best to comfort Opal. “I’ve never been this sort of thing before, don’t you see? A part of me feels as if it has been released after centuries in a prison. Even the part of me that’s just Flint is a confusion of different things—not Qar and not Funderling, neither human nor immortal. I must find what kind of thing I am. I need to go about in the world, to wander… to learn.”

“So is it you, then, who truly stands behind the defeat of Zosim, the demon-god?” Briony said. “I have heard many stories of those last hours, but all of them seem to be missing a piece.”

“Any one of them, taken by itself, is missing a piece,” the child said. “Without Vansen’s courage and wit and the bravery of the Funderlings, no one could have held the autarch back long enough. Without the Qar’s sacrifice of so many lives, the Trickster god would have escaped to the surface and then no one could have halted him. Without the Rooftopper Beetledown giving up his own life, none of it would have mattered. Even with a piece of a god growing inside me, I did not understand until very late who the true enemy was and what he planned. Did I help here and there? Yes. But it would have meant nothing without the actions of others.” Flint smiled and looked up, as if he meant his words for all of them together. “When you wonder in the days ahead if the gods are with you, think how even the smallest, cruelest whims of a sleeping god nearly became the end of all things. But if you think that means you are helpless in the hands of Fate, think of this: that same immortal god, master of fire and deceit, Death’s own son, was brought down in large part by a man so small that my Papa Chert used to hold him in the cup of his hand.” Flint stood up. “Now it’s time for me to leave. Soon your brother will be here, Briony Eddon, and I think you still have things to say to each other.”

“But… but why are you telling all this to us now?” The princess looked quite shocked, as close to helplessness as he had ever seen her. She turned to Vansen as though he might have some idea that had escaped her. “And why all the way out here?”

“Because first my parents must release me from a promise I made not to leave. Just as importantly, though, I want you to take them with you to the castle when you go back from here.” He said this as though it should have been obvious. “I have learned enough about people to know that they will be sad when I’m gone, especially Mama Opal. Take her back with you so that she can help you care for your brother, little Olin Alessandros. She is a very fine mother. You will see.”

Opal, who had calmed herself a little, started wailing again.

“Of course… of course I will see that your mother and father are… are well taken care of ...” Briony began.

“No,” Flint said firmly. “It does not take the god in me to know that you will be busy in the days ahead. Too busy to be a proper parent to a growing child. Do you want your father’s youngest son, who might become either your own heir or your greatest enemy someday, to be raised by servants you scarcely know?”

“But… how… why… ?” Briony held out her hands; Vansen marveled to see the young woman who would in a matter of a tennight or two become queen of all the March Kingdoms rendered helpless by the arguments of a tow-headed child.

“To give things shape,” Flint told her. “That is one thing the gods do. They give shape to the stories of men.” He rose. “Now I must go, if you will let me. Papa Chert? You once made me promise not to leave until five years had passed. I cannot wait that long.”

Chert spread his hands helplessly. “I could not hold you to a promise I forced on you when I did not understand everything. Of course—you are released. ...”

“No! Don’t go! It will be dark soon!” Opal cried.

“Mama Opal, do you really think I am afraid of the dark?” The boy looked at her sternly. “Even if I was only as old as I look, I would still have at least ten summers!” He went to her then and embraced her, holding on for a long time. Chert joined them and as Vansen watched, the three whispered to each other, heads close together; Chert and his wife both had tears in their eyes.

“Your other guests have arrived, Briony Eddon,” little Flint said at last, pulling away. “I hear them now.”

Vansen had only a moment to reflect that he himself had heard nothing, but then one of his guards called for him. He leaned out.

“A large force coming this way up the road,” the soldier told him. “I think it’s them Qar.”

“It is,” said Flint. “I will leave you to meet them. Farewell!”

* * *

The sun had dropped behind the hills, but although the fire built outside her tent was bright, and was undoubtedly cheering the hearts of Ferras Vansen and the guards waiting for her there, the Qar themselves had built no fires and raised no tents. They waited beside the road in their silent hundreds while their leader spoke with the mistress of the mortal castle they had so nearly overthrown.

The mistress of the castle was also their leader’s sister, a fact that Barrick Eddon seemed to remember now for the first time in a very long while.

“I’m sorry,” he told her as they made their way slowly along the road, their backs to their obligations. His crippled hand, which had seemed quite cured the last time she saw him, was all white knuckled and cramping fingers, and he carried it like it had begun to hurt him again. “I see now that, in a way, I was blinded by all that has happened. I was wrong, Briony, very wrong—there is much for us to talk about, but we have no time for it now.”

“What do you mean? We have all the time in the world. The war is over, Barrick. There is nothing to do now but rebuild, and trust me, there is enough of that to go around. Stay and help us. Do you mean to make me beg?”

He looked at her for a moment, then slowly shook his head.

“Curse you, Barrick!” she said angrily. “Can you never unbend enough to let someone reach out to you?”

“That’s not what I meant,” he said. “We don’t have enough time because we don’t speak the same tongue anymore, Briony. I have found some of what I lost—some of what I loved about this place and you—but for us to speak with true understanding, I would have to teach you all that happened to me in the time we were apart, and you would have to do the same so that I could understand everything you think and say. We have become… different.” He lowered his chin toward his chest as though it were cold, although the early evening was warm and she doubted Barrick even felt cold much anymore. “And I do have to go, Briony. If I stay here, Qinnitan will surely die.” He led his sister from the road and through the fringes of the waiting Qar, who watched her pass with the suspicious eyes of animals. “At Qul-na-Qar I might be able to save her, or at least learn how to keep her close enough that one day I can cure her.”

“Qinnitan.” Briony tried to swallow her unhappiness. How could so much be changing at the same time, and seemingly forever? “So that’s it. Because of this girl you scarcely know, you will go away and I will never see you again? The only real family I have left?”

He stopped. She thought she had angered him and braced herself for his furious words, but when he spoke, it was something quite different.

“I had not thought of that,” he said. “I… there is a part of me now, a large part, that does not easily remember those things—it has too many memories of its own to protect. My apologies.”

She gasped a little at that, frightened. “Merciful Zoria, you sound just like that Flint. He told us he has a piece of a god inside him.”

“He does.” Her brother reached out and took her hand; both the unexpected gesture and the coldness of his skin startled her. “With me, it is something only a little less unusual. I am not the same, Briony… but a little of what I was has begun to come back, too.” He held up his knotted hand; the knuckles were white from being so tightly clenched. After a moment, and with only a small grimace, he managed to uncurl his fingers almost all the way. He showed his hand to her, smiling through his pain, and although she did not quite understand, she knew he was showing her something important. Tears came to her eyes. “Perhaps someday there will be so much of the old Barrick that I will come riding up to the gate, shouting for you to let me back in!” He laughed at the notion. “Maybe I will even bring a wife and children.”

“This will always be your home.” She didn’t want it to be a jest. She could barely keep the tears from overwhelming her. “Always. And I will always, always miss you.”

They began walking again. For a while neither spoke.

“It is the place, not you,” he said at last.

“What?”

“That which makes it hard for me to stay here, even if I did not need to take Qinnitan to the House of the People. This place, its… history. The Qar hate it here. They won no victory. In fact, this may still be the site of their final destruction. And it has not been good to me, either. But I can change things, I think, both for the survivors and myself.”

“You are wrong about some things,” she said.

He looked at her with a little surprise. “Tell me.”

“The last time I saw him, Father told me a story about Kellick and Sanasu. He loved her, did you know?”

“What?”

“He loved her. Father said that in Kellick’s own words, he meant only to find out what the Qar did beneath our castle, and so he took men to question them. But the first time he saw Sanasu of the Qar, his heart filled with love for her so completely that he could not imagine going home without her again. In the middle of dispute, anger, and suspicion, he told her brother, not understanding that Janniya was not just her brother but also her betrothed. Enraged by this terrible insult, as he saw it, Janniya struck out at Kellick and in the fighting that followed, Janniya was killed and the few Qar who survived fled. Kellick took Sanasu and before too much longer they were wed. Whether she was unwilling, Father told me, no one can say, but they lived together in what seemed like harmony until Kellick died.”

“So the crime was no crime because it happened for love?”

“No.” Briony reached out and took his cold hand again. “But even you must admit the crime is different than the stories have made it. Love and a foolish, deadly accident is a far cry from murder and rape.”

He thought for long moments. “There’s something in that,” he said. “I’ll think about it. And I will tell the Qar about it, too. It may change nothing.” In the dying light of evening Briony could see little of him except the hard angles of his face, and although it was her twin’s voice that spoke, she could hear that it was different, too: Barrick was no longer the beloved, infuriating, pitiable companion of her childhood, but something altogether stranger and stronger.

“And now that you’re going away, that’s the Barrick I won’t get to know,” she said, airing her thoughts aloud.

He shrugged. “The old Barrick would never have survived without you. Besides, we shared blood in the pantry, remember? Even the new Barrick can’t forget that.”

She looked up in surprise. “I had never thought to hear that again.”

“It could be that we’ll also find ways to share our thoughts that you don’t anticipate,” he said with a serious face. “We will be two monarchs. Brother and sister rulers should stay in touch.” He tapped his head. “I will give that some consideration, too.”

Tears threatened again. “Still, it’ll be years at best before we see each other again! The one thought that got me through all of this was that at the end, if we survived, we would be a family again.”

“We are family, Briony. The more I change, the more I see that which will never change in me. I was an Eddon before I was anything else.” He bent and kissed her forehead, then pulled her close. Surprised, she resisted for a moment, then wrapped her arms around him and clung. For long moments they just stood that way, two people on a green hill at the side of the Coast Road as the moon rose.

“Oh, Redling, I will miss you so!”

“I know, Briony.” A smile crept onto his face. “I mean, ‘I know, Strawhead…’ and I’ll miss you. But that means we will never be completely apart.”

* * *

Vansen found it hard to think clearly on the ride back. Just helping the Funderling Chert to get his grieving wife back into the carriage felt like helping to betray someone.

“But how can he go off on his own?” Opal kept asking. “Our boy—what will he do? Who will feed him?”

“He will manage,” Chert told her over and over, but the little man looked quite stunned himself. Vansen felt for him. He knew what it was like not to be able to mourn because others needed you. “Flint has always managed, long before we heard of any so-called god.”

“Don’t you believe him, then?” Vansen asked.

Chert scowled. “No, the wretched thing is, I do believe him… that is what is so dreadful. Even if we see the boy again, he will never be our Flint, not truly.” He nodded toward the carriage where Opal waited for him and lowered his voice. “That is what makes her so sad.”

“But your boy was always something other than what everyone thought him,” Vansen said slowly. “We none of us truly knew him.”

“And Opal knows that—she knows it better than we do.” Chert reached out a small, callused hand so that Vansen could help him up onto the carriage steps. “Don’t worry for us too much, Captain Vansen. We Funderlings are a thick-skinned race. We’ll live.”

“When you’ve had a little while to yourselves, bring whatever you need to the castle and we’ll find you a place of your own there, in the royal residence.” Vansen had spent so long without a real home that he couldn’t quite think of what ordinary folk carried around with them. “Weapons, if you have them. Keepsakes.”

Chert smiled despite the quiet noises of sorrow coming from the carriage. “Yes, my grand weapon collection, of course. To be honest, I won’t need much room for that. But Opal may have a few pans.” He nodded as he considered. “And I won’t be sad to leave my brother’s house. He’ll be around the place a great deal more now that Cinnabar has convinced the Highwardens to remove Nodule from the Magisters’ Slate for his dangerous meddling, and I’m certain he blames it all on me.” Chert’s smile became a wide grin. “Which gives me a great deal of pleasure, Captain—a great deal of pleasure.”


When Merolanna’s bewildered driver had at last been allowed to leave the crossroads and the carriage had become just another shadow ahead of them, Vansen and Briony rode back to the castle in the silent company of the royal guards.

The princess and the guard captain didn’t have much to say on the way back, either. Vansen did not entirely trust words at the best of times, and just now could not summon even one word that would make sense of what he was feeling. Briony was as remote as he had ever seen her.

This “festive” mood was only enhanced when they were greeted at the causeway by another contingent of guards, this one led by a royal messenger who bowed only long enough for his knee to brush the ground before leaping to his feet and handing Briony a sealed letter from Steffens Nynor.

“Sweet Zoria,” she said as she read it. “Or whoever it is now to whom we must turn. Mercy upon us all.”

“What?” Vansen hated the look of alarm on her face, but he hated the look of pain and exhaustion even more.

“It is Anissa, my stepmother,” Briony said, looking up at the looming castle walls. “She has fallen from her tower window—or she has jumped. She is dead.”

53. Shadowplayers

“... And the gods have given him a pair of beautiful golden arms to replace those which were burned away by the sun. Tessideme, the village where the Orphan was welcomed and celebrated, became the city of Tessis, the center and heart of our Trigonate faith on earth. The Trigonarch himself lives there today ...”

—from “A Child’s Book of the Orphan, and His Life and Death and Reward in Heaven”

“You are lucky I didn’t have you brought to mein in shackles,” Briony told him, her fists clenched so hard her knuckles had gone white. “How dare you!”

Dawet dan-Faar raised an eyebrow. “How dare I what, Princess?”

“You know precisely what, you rogue! While I was out of the castle, you went to the Tower of Spring. Anissa fell to her death while you were with her. Do you think I’m a fool, Dawet? You as much as told me you thought she should be murdered!”

He smiled. “I believe I suggested that it would be dangerous for you to let such a woman live. I was not aware a person could be killed with words.”

“You were there! You were with her when she died—you pushed her from that window!”

Dawet cocked his head, his brown eyes as wide and innocent as a fawn’s. “What makes you say such a terrible thing, Highness?”

“You were seen going in. One of the guards had stepped away— doubtless pursuing some blind of your own—but as he came back, he saw you go inside the tower.”

He shook his head gravely. “He saw an intruder but did not say anything to him? Did not try to stop the man? Did it ever occur to you that this guard is trying to make up for his own failing, Princess?”

“He saw you! He did not interfere because he knows you are a friend of the royal family.”

“He was obviously mistaken, Princess. I was nowhere near the place. Several people will swear I was playing picket with them in a little establishment newly reopened near the West Lagoon.”

“A gambling den,” she said.

“You may call it such.” He made a little bow. “Certainly there is an element of chance involved in the pastimes pursued there ...”

“Enough! I thought you an honest man even in your most dishonest moments, Dawet. Why do you lie to me now? And why did you do what I told you I could not bear to see done? Kill that poor, stupid woman?”

“That poor stupid woman helped murder your brother.” Dawet’s voice was suddenly hard and serious. “In days to come she would have become a danger to you, too. As to lying—my lady, why would I lie? The only reason I can imagine why anyone who loved you and wished to help might lie to you is so that you can rule as you must, with a clear conscience. Because you, Briony Eddon, are no murderer.”

She stared at him for a long time, then sagged back in her chair, her face sad and weary. “And what am I to do with you, Dan-Faar?”

“If I were truly the villain you think me, Mistress, I would suggest you keep me close to you where I might be useful. A prince never knows when he may need the service of a rogue, after all, and I suspect that things are little different for queens.”

She stared at him for long moments, but the anger had gone from her eyes. “And of course your gambling cronies will swear you were with them all the day.”

“Of course.”

She waved her hand. “Go away, Dan-Faar. Go back to your cards and your convenient friends. I have another funeral to arrange.”

“As you wish, Highness. But I would suggest you bury the late Queen Anissa with the full pomp of her position. She was the mother of your father’s last child, after all. Her tragic accident, so soon after your father’s death, has surprised and saddened all of Southmarch.”

She could not stifle a bitter laugh. “Gods save me! As always, you are most helpful, Master Dan-Faar. Now go away and at least spare me seeing your face for a tennight or two.”

“As you wish, Highness.” He bowed, more deeply this time, and went out.

* * *

Vansen was worried, even frightened, by what she told him in the privacy of her chamber. “You cannot let such a man stay in Southmarch! Even if nothing can be proved, you and I both know he is guilty. He is dangerous!”

“Perhaps. But not to me.”

“You can’t be sure of that!”

She reached out and took his hand. “The Kupileia is almost upon us, along with my coronation. I will be the queen. I will be the queen, my dearest captain, and much as I am almost foolish with love for you, I must be the ruler of the March Kingdoms, not you. I know something of Dawet, and I know that he thinks to help me.”

“Help you… !”

She put a finger on his lips. “He is my problem, not yours, my brave knight. And it occurs to me that whether he meant to or not, Dawet has also proved that I owe Avin Brone an apology… but not tonight.” She stood. “Now let’s not talk about any of this any longer.”

“I am your lover, yes, but remember I am also your constable.”

“And you are admirable in both occupations. Come with me down to the retiring room. Some friends of mine have returned to Southmarch and I would like you to meet them.”

“Friends?” Vansen had a dreadful vision of more suitors, more handsome foreign princes, a line of rivals stretching out until doomsday. “What sort?”

“The educated sort. Come, now—let me show you off to the only people who will not judge me badly!”


“Makewell’s sister forbade him to come, Highness,” said Nevin Hewney. “But we have found someone to take his place. I introduce you to Matthias Tinwright, poet.”

Briony raised her eyebrow. The shamefaced Tinwright would not meet her eyes. “We’ve met. In fact, we saw each other rather recently. Master Tinwright was trying to kill my infant brother.”

Now it was Hewney’s turn to look bemused. “Truly? I never thought you disliked children so violently, Tinwright. I underestimated you.”

While Vansen tried to make sense of this, Briony turned and threw her arms wide. “Finn!” she cried, embracing the third man with a joy that Vansen did his best to ignore. “It is so good to see you again! And you, too, Hewney, disreputable soul that you are.”

The man named Finn Teodoros drew back, a little red-faced at his greeting. “All thanks to Zosim, patron of players, Princess ...”

“Not him,” Vansen growled.

Teodoros looked at him curiously for a moment, then back to Briony. “In any case, all thanks to the gods, we are here—and you are the queen! We should be down on our knees to you, not strolling in at this late hour with a couple of jugs of cheap wine!”

“By the time we finish both jugs, someone will certainly be on his knees,” Hewney said, “but I suspect it will be young Tinwright.”

“And this,” said Briony, “is Ferras Vansen, captain of the royal guard and soon to be lord constable. He, more than any other man, saved this castle and my throne.” She ordered one of her pages to fetch cups, then waved to Nevin Hewney. “Now bring that jug over here and let me tell you the truth about everything.”

Vansen regarded his beloved with growing horror. “Highness ...”

“You will have some wine, too, Captain. Tallow is in charge of the guardroom tonight and you are at liberty. These are my friends, and here we all are.” She took a cup from the page. “Here—pour! And some for my captain, too. Did you know that he is my lover?”

“Princess!”

“It was not hard to guess, the way you keep clutching at his hand,” said Finn Teodoros, grinning. “I hope you are more discreet in front of the paying public.”

“Yes. But you are my only friends, and I am tired of secrets.” She drank her wine at a gulp, then held out her cup again. “A few more of these, and I will begin declaiming Zoria’s words.” She smiled at Tinwright, who still looked a bit anxious. “I mean no blasphemy,” she said. “Teodoros wrote them for a play, and I played the part of the goddess.”

“No one could have played it better,” said Finn Teodoros fondly.

“Chaste as old Zoria herself, too,” grumbled Hewney. “No matter how often I tried to ...” He blinked. “Why is this guard captain standing so close to me? And looking as though he might like to give me a thrashing?”

“If you are jealous of these fine folk, you haven’t had enough wine yet, Captain,” Briony said, then turned to give Vansen a kiss on the cheek. “I love you,” she whispered, then said much more loudly, “Fill that man’s cup again!”


Vansen and Finn Teodoros were deep in a slightly frog-mouthed discussion about the Qar, comparing their experiences, Vansen’s mostly personal, Teodoros’ mostly learned from study. Nevin Hewney, perhaps depressed by the lack of available female company or just overcome by all the wine he had downed, had fallen asleep between the two of them, so that they both had to lean forward to talk around his bobbing, bearded head.

“… But Phayallos says that when the gods walked the earth they could take any form, so why should Zosim, if it truly was him, not simply take the form of a bird or a fiery arrow and fly out of the deeps that way?”

Vansen shook his head firmly, then shook it again. “Because… because… curse it, Teodoros, I don’t know. Why should I? He was a god! If you’d have been there, you could have asked him.”

“I am not so brave, Captain ...”

Briony, who had been admiring Ferras Vansen’s face, the almost child-like earnestness that appeared so quickly even when he looked his most mature and handsome, did not notice for some moments that Matt Tinwright was standing beside her, swaying slightly from side to side.

“Yes, Master Tinwright?”

“Are you… do you still… I did not want to hurt your brother, Princess. Truly I didn’t. ...”

“I know, Tinwright. That’s why you are standing free here before me, drunk to the gills on my good Perikal red wine.”

He frowned. “I thought… that Hewney brought the wine ...”

“We’ve moved on to the royal stores long ago,” she said. “You should sit down again, man, before you fall and hurt yourself.”

“I… I wanted to talk to you, Princess Briony. To thank you for making me your poet.”

She smiled. “You are welcome.”

“I have a question.” He licked his lips, clearly uneasy. “Do you remember that… that I was writing a poem about you? How you were like Zoria?”

She nodded, although the memory was very vague indeed. It hadn’t been very good was all she could recall. “Of course, Master Tinwright.”

He smiled in relief. “Well, I was thinking I might go back to it… but I was thinking. That’s what I was doing—thinking about the poem. I was thinking that I couldn’t make a poem about you that didn’t have anything about… about, you know, the things that happened. Here and while you were in Syan. I’ve been asking people. Trying to find out the truth.”

“I’ll be happy to answer your questions, Matt,” she said kindly. “But not tonight. Tonight is for merriment.”

“I know!” He waved his hands as though accused of theft. “But I was thinking and thinking about how the whole thing has been like… well, like one of Finn’s or Nevin’s plays from the very first.”

“I’m not certain I understand.” She looked over to Vansen and Teodoros, still talking like fast friends—or maybe Finn just fancied her guard captain. She could hardly blame him. “Like a play?”

“All of it. Like a puppet play. Someone was always behind everything we saw. From what I’m told ...” he screwed up his face, trying hard to get it right, “from what I’m told, Zosim was behind it all, pretending to be Kernios. But Hendon Tolly thought it was someone else, a goddess—he sometimes seemed to think it was Zoria herself! But it was all Zosim wearing disguises, do you see? Just like a player!”

“I suppose ...”

“All of it like a play. You were a princess, but you disguised yourself, just as in so many stories. The villain of the piece hid in the shadows and had others do his bidding, like that southern king, that autarch. That’s just like one of Hewney’s plays, too. But what really made me stop and wonder was when I thought, ‘but if Zosim was behind it all, but he was beaten in the end ... who did that?’”

Briony, a little the worse for wear herself after several cups of Perikal, could only shake her head. “Who did what?”

“Beat Zosim. Tricked him and defeated him.”

“Well, the boy Flint, that I told you about earlier… he claims that part of Crooked lives inside him. ...”

“Exactly!” said Tinwright loudly, then blushed. “Yes, Highness. And when you told me that, I really got to thinking. You know the stories from the old days about how Kupilas beat Kernios and Zosim both, right here!” He frowned. “I mean, down underneath the earth. You know, don’t you?”

“I have heard many stories in the last year. But yes, I know about what Kupilas was supposed to have done to Kernios and Zosim and the rest.”

“But who else was there all the time? Who else was present when that all happened?”

Briony was beginning to wonder if it might be time to end the festivities. “I don’t know, Master Tinwright. Whom?”

He smiled in pink-cheeked triumph. “Zoria was—Zoria, the Dawnflower. She was there. Kernios killed her for betraying him—or at least that’s what the stories say. But what if she didn’t die, like Zosim didn’t die? What if she stayed alive in those… whatever places?”

She looked at him and realized that he was not quite as drunk as he looked. “It’s… it’s a fascinating idea, Master Tinwright ...”

“It was your Zorian prayer book that saved me from your archer, you know.” He said the words very carefully, then smiled when he had successfully navigated the sentence. “It was over my heart and stopped the bolt. Zoria’s hand. Your prayer book. Do you see?”

Briony didn’t know what to say. “I suppose ...”

“Very well. One last question, Princess. I heard you’re building a shrine to the forest goddess Lisiya. Can I ask you why?”

“Demigoddess. Because… because I promised if I survived that I would build one for her. I would rather not say anything more about it. Why do you ask?”

He nodded. “Can I show you something I found in a book?” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a thin volume, then fumbled it open. “It’s written by Phayallos. He wrote a lot about the gods ...” Tinwright squinted as he turned pages. “Ah, here it is.” He cleared his throat. “… And these goddesses and demigoddesses, especially Lisiya of the Silver Glade and her sisters, were commonly called the Handmaidens of Zoria, and strove to see that the Dawnflower’s wishes were carried out in the world, that Zoria’s worshipers were rewarded and her foes were thwarted.” He closed it, spoiling his moment of triumph a bit by dropping the book on the floor.

“Master Matty is drunk!” laughed Finn Teodoros. “Time to take him home.”

As Finn and Matt Tinwright helped Hewney onto his feet, Briony could not help asking the young poet, “And will you continue with your poem?”

“Oh, yes,” he said, his eyes shining. “I have so many ideas—it will be the best thing I ever did! I was miserable because… because of a woman… but now I know why. I was meant to do this!”

He was still burbling as Vansen helped the three of them out the door. “Help them down the stairs!” Vansen shouted to a page. “We do not want the princess’ guests breaking their necks. And tell the coachman to take them back to their inn.”

“Oh, gods,” groaned Hewney, waking up. “Not the Quiller’s Mint! I’d rather sleep in the gutter.”

Ferras Vansen came back in a little unsteadily and threw his arms around Briony. She kissed him, but she was preoccupied and he could tell.

“What were you talking with that fool of a poet about?”

“The gods,” she said. “And whether or not earthly life is only a sort of play.”

“I’m glad I missed it, then,” he said. “I never had the wit for such things. Now come to bed, my beautiful Briony, and let me love you a while before we both have to get into costume and go back to playing our own parts once more.”

54. Evergreen

... And that is the end of my tale, which is meant both to instruct and to please His Highness, and all other young people who shall read the Orphan’s story.”

—from “A Child’s Book of the Orphan, and His Life and Death and Reward in Heaven”, written by Matthias Tinwright and presented to His Highness Prince Olin Alessandros on the occasion of his first birthday.

The morning dawned bright and much hotter than the day before. Barrick could smell the sap beginning to move in the pines and firs, the slow sweetness that ran through their veins as the Fireflower did in his. The Qar had traveled through the night, but slowly; now that Saqri had died, there was no need to go faster than what the many wounded could comfortably manage.

Duke Kaske of the Unforgiven brought the reports from the scouts: the road ahead was all but empty for several leagues. “But after that there are several mortal villages, and then a walled city with towers,” Kaske said. His almond-shaped eyes were drawn up ever so slightly at their outer edges, which Barrick knew meant that the corpse-pale fairy was fighting with strong emotions. “We did not pass this way when Yasammez led us. We have not come against it before.”

Barrick nodded. He leaned down to pat the neck of his horse, then drew back on the reins so that the black charger pulled up with anxious, skittering feet; even the horses didn’t like this place and longed for the dark meadows of home. “Stop here,” he called out, then repeated it again without spoken words. The procession behind him slowed and began to split into smaller pieces, horses and other steeds taken down the small slope to water, some of the Changing tribe joining them in four-footed form, which made the other animals restive. “Don’t worry, Kaske, we’ll go around it. There is no dishonor in that.”

But the Unforgiven, a terrifying and fearless warrior, was still troubled. “But you know these mortals. We can avoid them now, but someday they will come into our lands. With the death of Yasammez the Mantle will vanish. How can we keep them out?” The skin of his face pulled ever so slightly tighter. “The Mantle—gone!”

“What do you care?” Barrick asked him. “You and your folk live in the snowy hills. Surely you will be grateful to see the sun again.”

Kaske shook his head. “It… it will be strange. Everything will be strange now.”

Barrick spread his fingers—Tale of Years—and said, “Yes, it will.”


My love.

You are there! Barrick’s heart, which for two days had felt like Kaske’s mountain home, an icy stone beneath freezing gray skies, now suddenly was drenched with sunshine. You came back to me! Oh, praise the Book, you came back. I feared… I feared…

I was frightened, too, she said. Her thoughts, the voice, it was hers, blessedly hers… but so weak! The Fireflower women—the mothers and grandmothers, they are so stern, so… beautiful and terrible… ! I thought they would sweep me away likeaflooding river…

I did, too! I was terrified! But I had Ynnir to help me. Do you know him?

Know him? He is my son, grandfather, my husband, Qinnitan said, still a little dreamy and confused. I know what Saqri knew, and what all who came before her knew… !

Ynnir helped me. I do not think I could have survived otherwise. Who helped you?

You. He felt it come from her like a caress. The thought that we would be separated again if I could not find a way to live with it. I have had too much of that, Barrick Eddon. Her thoughts twisted a little, took a tone of amusement and wonder. And you are King Olin’s son—of course! To think that all that time I didn’t know… ! As she said it, he could see his father plainly, but it was a different Olin who faced him, the man Qinnitan had known, a kind, brave man unshadowed by rage, who valued his own life far lower than that of any innocent.

Tell me about him, Barrick said. Stay with me as long as you can and tell me what I missed all those years that the shadows fell between my father and me…


When she grew weary and her words began to slow, he stopped her, kissed her with a word and a thought, and let her go. Only when she had slipped down into sleep and he could no longer feel her did he let the sadness he had been holding at bay so long wash over him. He looked at the couch on which Qinnitan’s small, slender body lay, in a wagon pulled by two patient nightsteeds. What if they never had more than this? Ynnir and Saqri had lived that way for centuries. That was some solace, anyway. Barrick doubted he would live so long.

He stood for a long time gazing back across the hills. The gleam in the distance was the tilted windvane on top of Wolfstooth Spire’s shattered roof; the rest of the castle was invisible below the intervening hills. It was strange to be looking back on his old home. The last time he had stood in such a place he had wondered whether he would ever see it again, and this time was no different.

As he stared, he felt something strange happening all around him, a sudden warmth and a feeling of the air being pulled in many directions at once. Then something snapped like a large branch breaking and the space immediately in front of Barrick’s face was full of flapping blackness. Without thinking, he reached out and grabbed the dark shape. It was feathery and fat and smelled like carrion.

“Don’t hurt us!” it croaked. “Us be a bird of artfullest power—a wishing raven! Spare us and us’ll grant you all manner of wishery, that you’ll see!”

Barrick stared in astonishment. “Skurn? Is that you?”

The bird slowed its thrashing, turning its desperately shiny black eye on him. “Mought be. Then again, it equal-like moughtn’t.”

“Don’t you remember me?”

“Well, doubtless that you look like the Barrick lad I helped so many times. But us has seen many a few others nearly as much like him since us first went through that darksome gate out of Sleep ...”

“Where have you been, Skurn? You never reached Qul-na-Qar—I didn’t see you after we escaped from the city of Sleep! And I never saw Raemon Beck again.”

“Us hasn’t seen that one either, though in our travels, us has seen a few creatures that were Beck-ish. Thanks mightily for telling where you’ve been—but not much help when us needed it, was it?” The bird fluttered up out of Barrick’s open hand and onto a branch just a little overhead. “Been flapping in and out of some dreadful places since then. Some nice ones, too, to say fair, but still strange as down on a toad.” He preened himself a bit. “Rather grand, our adventures have doubtless been, you and us. No doubt some fairy bard will want to make a tune of it all, with clever words to show how dangerous our fates narrowly was.”

Barrick almost smiled, but was not going to be so easily lulled. “You talk more than you ever did, bird.”

“It goes to show the gods live and the world be still full of miracles, as our mam used to say when us were scarce out the egg.”

“And I suppose you’ll want to go with me.”

“Nay, don’t think thyself so grand!” The bird looked up as if in search of some even higher perch more suitable to his stature. “Any bargain us made is long past. No need for us to follow all draggity-tail and call anyone master.”

“Who said anything about calling someone master?” Barrick turned and called to Kaske and Sunset Pearl that it was time to gather up their people and return to the road. “I just thought you might like to keep company with me for a while. I’m more or less the king of the fairies now. Did you know?”

“King of the fairies?” Skurn hopped down the branch and looked him up and down carefully. “Them Qar must have lost a lot of their important folk somewhere.” The bird made a harsh spitting noise. “Must be scraping the barrel now, us means.”


My love?

So soon? I hoped you would sleep until tomorrow.

It is a beautiful night. I can feel it even if I can’t see it. Is that horrible bird asleep?

Barrick looked down at Skurn bouncing on the front of the saddle. The raven’s head was settled deep in his fluffed up collar of black-and-white-spotted feathers. Yes. He’s actually not as bad as he seems.

He couldn’t be.

Don’t be cruel. He helped me many times. Saved my life at least once.

I’m sorry. In Xis they were birds of ill-omen. I will try to be kinder. My Fireflower mothers are scolding me, too. They say his kind are Whitefire’s messengers… Oh, Barrick, there is so much to know!

Look, he said. The Twilight Lands. I can see them in the distance… and I can see the stars, too!

What do you mean?

The Mantle. The cloud of separation and protection that hung over this place so long. It’s gone. Nothing left now but wisps like fog. He sighed, dazzled by the painful brightness of the stars in the night sky. Ah, if you could only see this land of ours!

I hear its beauty in your thoughts.

She went quiet then, but it was a companionable silence, both of them close despite their terrible separation.

My love? he asked sometime later. Qinnitan, my heart, are you still awake?

She stirred. I drifted.

I drifted with you.

I miss the House of the People, she said, though I have never seen it with my own eyes. Is it as beautiful as my memories?

It’s a very old place. It has every kind of beauty. But there is more to it than that.

Of course, she said, then a moment later: Barrick, I can feel the moon. Is it bright?

It is.

It makes me stronger just feeling it. By the Hive, I think I can hear it, too… I feel as if I can hear everything!

He took a deep breath, in part to ease the rush of feeling. Even his thoughts were muddled, stumbling. You do too… ? I thought I would be… I thought I would never…

I know, she told him, and for just a moment he could feel her as if she were beside him, as if they again held each other in the dark dreamland. Talk to me, Barrick. It was close, as intimate as a whisper. Tell me everything. I know everything the Fireflower knows, but the Fireflower knows scarcely anything about you. At least scarcely anything of the sort of things a lover wants to know.

I will, he said. And the first thing you must know about me is that I am not an ordinary person…

He could feel her amusement. Of course you aren’t! As you told that foul bird, you are a mortal who became monarch of the fairies… !

No, that isn’t it. I was about to say that I am a twin.…

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