Shadowmarch

27. Candlerstown

He knew he had to pay attention. Barrick knew that what was happening was terribly important, if hard to believe. He also knew that his sister was expecting him to shoulder some of the burden. He just didn’t know whether he could do it or not.

It was the dreams, his harrowing dreams, wearing him away just as the powerful ocean waves broke down the causeway between Southmarch’s castle and town, so that men had to labor constantly to build it back up again. Sometimes he found it difficult to remember what it felt like simply to be Barrick. There were nights when he woke scratching like a beast at the inside of his chamber door, locked each night by his servants to prevent him from walking in his sleep. Other midnights he came gasping up from nightmares, half certain that he had changed into something else entirely, and could only sit in the dark feeling at first his hands and arms and then, reluctantly, his face, terrified that he might find some dreadful transfiguration had taken place to match those dreams of violence. In many of the dreams he was surrounded by faceless shapes that wanted to imprison him, perhaps even kill him, unless he destroyed them first. Always he woke sweating, breathless with fear that he was becoming some brute beast like a shape-changer out of some old nurse’s tale, and worst of all, that this time the dream creature whose neck had just snapped in his hands would turn out to be a real person he had attacked—someone he knew, perhaps even someone he loved.

In fact, there seemed little separation now between the madness of nightmare and what had been the sanctuary of wakefulness In the dim hours of the previous night he had awakened with a voice in his ear, someone speaking as though they sat right next to him, although the room was silent but for the breath of his slumbering page.

“We do not need the mantle any longer,” it had said—a woman’s voice, commanding, cold. It had not been like something heard in a dream, but had seemed to resound inside the very bones of his skull. He had whimpered at the sound, the nearness of it. “We will sweep down on them like fire. They will fear us in light as well as darkness.”

Prince Barrick?" said a gruff voice.

Someone was trying to get his attention—a real voice, not a midnight dream. He shook his head, trying to make sense.

“Prince Barrick, we know it is an effort for you to be here and we are all grateful for that. Shall I have someone bring you wine?” It was Avin Brone speaking, clumsily trying to let him know he was not paying attention.

“Are you ill again?” Briony asked quietly.

“I am well enough. It is the fever, still I do not sleep well.” He took a breath to clear his head, struggling to remember what the others had been saying. He wanted to show that he was worthy to sit beside his sister. “But why should these fairy-beasts come here and attack us? Why now?"

“We do not know anything for certain, Highness.” That was the quiet one, Vansen, the guard captain. Barrick wasn’t certain what he thought about the man. Briony’s anger with him had been reasonable—letting a reigning prince be killed in his own bedroom was obviously a dereliction of duty, and under old King Ustin the captain’s head would probably have been on a spike above the Basilisk Gate weeks ago—so he was not quite certain why she now seemed to be treating the young soldier like an important adviser. He dimly remembered Briony saying something about it as they made their way to this council, but his head had been pounding from the effort of getting up and getting dressed. “All I can say is that the creature we caught said something about someone leading an army, coming to burn our houses,” Vansen went on. “Strangely, it was a she the goblin said was going to do it. ‘She brings white fire,’ that’s what it told us. ‘Burn all your houses to black stones.’ But perhaps the monster did not speak our tongue well enough Barrick felt a chill trace down his back Vansen’s words were much like his dream, the cold, female voice out of the empty night. He almost said something, but the stony, doubting faces all around made him hold his tongue. The prince is imagining things, they would whisper to each other. His wits are going. He should never have confessed his secrets to Briony. Thank the gods he had not given up all caution and had kept the strangest of them to himself.

“Is there some reason this enemy couldn’t be a woman?” Briony demanded. Barrick could not help noticing changes in his sister: it was as though she had grown bigger, harder, while he grew smaller and more helpless daily. “Didn’t Anglin’s granddaughter Lily lead her people against the Gray Companies? If the Twilight People are somehow led by a woman, does that mean we have no need to be wary of them?”

“No, Highness, of course not.” Vansen flushed easily. Barrick wondered if the man was trying to hide a great anger.

“But the princess raises an important question,” said old Steffans Nynor with surprising matter-of-factness. The castellan seemed to have put aside his fluttery servility in this time of need. Eyes of Heaven, Barrick thought, have I been asleep for a hundred years ? Is everyone turning into something else? For a moment the walls of the chapel seemed to drop away and he was turning, falling. He recovered himself by biting his tongue; as the pain jumped into the back of his mouth he heard Nynor say, “… after all. Perhaps they merely wish to test their strength—a raid or two, then back across the Shadowline.”

“Wishful thinking,” declared Tyne of Blueshore. “Unless Vansen is utterly mistaken, that is no raiding party They are bringing a large army, the kind that will stay in the field until it has accomplished its task.”

“But why me?” said Earl Rorick. “First they steal my bride and her splendid dowry, now they will attack my lands. I have done nothing to offend these creatures!”

“Opportunity, my lord—that seems most likely,” said Vansen. He looked at Rorick with such a calm, measured gaze that Barrick could almost see him weighing the man and finding him to be a short measure. But Vansen is a dalesman, isn’t he? So Rorick is his lord. The idea that a liege lord would not receive the unquestioning respect of all his liegemen was a slightly new one to Barrick, who had spent his childhood so taken with his own cynicism that it had not occurred to him others might also find the ancient order of things to be less than perfect.

“Opportunity?” asked Briony.

“When I was in… when I was behind the Shadowline, Highness,” the captain said, “it was like falling into a fast river, even though I was less troubled than many of my men. But time and even… even the substance of things seemed different from place to place there, in the way… in the way that someone swept down a river might for a moment be pulled down and then be lifted to the surface again, or be caught for a moment in an eddy, then pushed helplessly into the rocks.”

“What are you talking about?” Avin Brone demanded. “You said ‘opportunity?…”

Vansen suddenly realized they were all looking at him. He colored again, lowered his head. “Forgive me, I am but a soldier…”

“Speak.” There was something in his sister’s voice that Barrick had never heard before; again he felt adrift, as though Vansen s river had whirled him far away from his own, familiar life. “You are here precisely because you have seen things the rest of us haven’t, Captain Vansen. Speak.”

“I meant only that… that I wonder why, if they have gathered such an army, they should choose to enter the March Kingdoms at Daler’s Troth. I was born there, so I know it well. There are a few large towns, Dale House and Candlerstown and Hawkshill, but mostly it is hill crofts, a few larger farms, scattered villages. If they mean to come against us, and I believe they do, why should they start so far away? Even if they do not know that my men and I spied them and so they still believe they will surprise us, why should they take the chance that others will flee east with news of their coming and allow us to prepare? If they had come across the Shadowline in the Eastmarch hills, they would have been upon us already and I fear we would not be having this council, unless it was to meet our conquerors.”

“That is treason!” said Rorick. “Who is this lowborn soldier to tell us such things? Are you saying we cannot defeat them?”

“No, my lord.” Vansen’s jaw was set. He would not look at Rorick, but didn’t seem cowed. “No, but I saw them with these eyes—they have a great force. Had they come down on Southmarch in the night, this city would have been in terror and disarray.”

“What exactly are you trying to tell us, Captain Vansen?” Briony asked.

“That perhaps the Twilight Lands have their own ebb and flow.” He looked at her, almost imploring her to understand. “Perhaps they came through in the only place they could. It is hard to say what I mean—there are no words for it.

“Perhaps the captain is right,” said Earl Gowan, whose fiefdom in Helmingsea included a small but excellent personal navy. Gowan usually had the air of someone who joined a discussion, no matter how serious, chiefly for amusement. “But perhaps they have no interest in Southmarch. Perhaps the hobgoblins are only a raiding party after all and you are mistaken, or perhaps their goal is farther south, in Syan. Wasn’t it King Karal of Syan who led the armies of Eion against them once upon a time? Perhaps they want revenge.”

Barrick could feel an easing of tension around the table. Some of the other nobles nodded their heads, agreeing. “No,” he said. He had been silent a long time the others seemed surprised even to hear the prince speak. “They want this place—Southmarch. They lived here once.”

“That is an old tale,” Brone said slowly. “I am not certain it is true, Highness…”

But Barrick knew it was true, as certainly as if he had wakened on a cold, damp day and knew it was going to rain, he was not, however, able to explain why he was so sure. “Not just a tale,” was all he could muster. “They lived here once.”

Old Nynor cleared his throat. “It is true that that there are stones beneath the castle and in the deep places that are part of some older stronghold.”

“Men have lived here a long while, even before Anglin’s folk,” said Tyne dismissively. “And the Funderlings were here when men arrived, everyone knows.”

“This is all beside the point,” said Briony. “Much as some of you might wish it, we cannot hope the Twilight People are going to Syan to revenge themselves on Karal’s heirs and leave it at that. They are in our lands. Every farm in Daler’s Troth is a part of the March Kingdoms. Just as Rorick is their lord and must protect those people and those lands, it is up to the crown of Southmarch to help him.”

Earl Rorick brushed a curl back from his forehead. He had made a concession to the fact of a war council—his outfit, though beautifully tailored, was considerably short of his usual extravagance, but he still looked no more ready for combat than would a peacock. “What… what do you plan, Highness?” He looked around at the other nobles, unhappily aware of how glad they all were that his lands, not theirs, would bear the brunt of what was coming.

“We will fight them, of course.” Briony suddenly seemed to remember her brother; she turned to Barrick with the tiniest flicker of the shamefaced smile that he alone knew well enough to recognize. “If you agree.”

“Of course.” A thought had come to him—a simple thing compared to all the dreadful visons that had been plaguing him, simple and satisfying. “We will fight.”

“Then we must finish our preparations,” she said. “Lord Brone, Lord Aldritch, you will proceed as we discussed earlier. We must put an army into the field now—if nothing else, to see how strong they are.”

Avin Brone and Tyne slowly nodded their heads, weighty men with weighty concerns. “And I will lead it,” Barrick announced.

“What?” Briony recoiled as though he had slapped her. He was almost pleased to see her look so startled. A small, resentful part of him knew that she had grown accustomed to making decisions without him. Now that would end. “But, Barrick, you have been ill… !”

Avin Brone thumped his big hands down on the table, then crossed his arms, hiding those hands in his jacket as though he feared they would get into mischief. “You cannot take such a risk, Highness,” he began, but Barrick did not let him finish.

“I am not a fool, Lord Brone. I do not imagine I am going to single-handedly drive off the Twilight People. I know you think I’m only a crippled child, and a headstrong one at that. But I will go and I will lead our army, at least in name. The Silver Wolf of Anglin must be on the field— anything else is unthinkable.” The glorious idea that had seemed so clear and so obvious a moment ago now seemed a bit muddled, but he pushed ahead. “Someone said earlier that Rorick must go, to show that the nobles of these lands will fight for what is theirs. Everyone knows that the people of Southmarch are frightened by the terrible things that have happened— our father a captive, Kendrick dead. If Vansen is right, even darker days are coming to us—a war against things we hardly understand. The people must see that the Eddons will fight for them. There are two regents, after all, which is an uncommon luxury. One of us must go into the field.”

His twin was so angry she could barely speak. It only made Barrick feel more coldly comfortable with his decision. “And what if you’re killed?”

“I told you, Sister, I’m not a fool. When King Lander put on his father’s crown at Coldgray Moor and fought the Twilight People, was he in the vanguard, trading blows? But he was remembered for a great victory and his people treasure his name.” He realized too late he had said something foolish—they would misunderstand.

And they did. “This will be no place for a young man trying to make a name for himself,” Tyne Aldritch declared angrily. “I beg Your Highness’ pardon, but I will not stand silently and see men and land put at risk so you can earn a reputation.”

Now Barrick was angry, too, but mostly at himself. What he couldn’t explain, what he could barely acknowledge himself, was that the lure of his idea wasn’t glory but resolution—that he would thrive in the simplicity of the battlefield, that he would not need to fear his own anger or even the madness growing inside him, and that if he died it would be a relief from the dreams and the great fear. “I know what kind of place it will be, Blueshore,” he told the new master of arms. “Or at least I can guess. And I certainly know my own failings. Would you rub my nose in them?”

Tyne’s mouth snapped shut but his eyes spoke for him.

“Prince Barrick and I must talk about this.” Briony had pushed down her own anger now, hidden it behind a mask of determined calm. She’s turning into Father, Barrick thought, but not the way that I am. It wasn’t a happy realization. She has inherited his grace I have his curse.

“We will talk all you wish,” Barrick told his twin. “But I am going.”And he knew it was true. He was one of the reigning Eddons, after all, and at this moment there was a hard, cold thing inside him that none of them could match. He would have his way.

“Hoy, Chert, have you found that boy?” shouted a woman he only vaguely recognized. He thought she might be one of the Sandstones, the woman with whom she was gossiping on the front porch certainly seemed to have the huge Sedimentary Clan’s telltale chin.

“Not yet,” he called.

“Must tha boom like the wind in the chimneys?” complained Beetledown from his perch on Chert’s shoulder. “Fair collapsed my headbones, that did.”

“Sorry.” Chert was glad that he was far enough away from the women that they couldn’t see the little fellow. Better to have them think he was talking to his own shoulder than to have every child in Funderling Town, and half the grown ones, chasing him down Gypsum Way in hopes of seeing a live Rooftopper. “Are you sure you can’t ride in the pocket of my tunic where no one can see you?”

“And where I can’t smell nothing, neither?” “Ah.True enough.”

Beetledown stirred and sniffed loud enough for even Chert to hear. “Turn turn… Chi’m’ook?” He drummed his tiny heels in frustration. “Where is the sun? Where is sunwise? How can I say the turning?"

“Left and right will have to do, because I don’t think you know where the Stonecutter’s Door or the Silk Door are You do know left and right, don’t you?”

“ ‘Course. But we call uns, ‘leef and ‘reck’ when we speak thy tongue. So go leef, left, what tha will. But there, turn.”

Chert couldn’t understand why the Rooftoppers would use different words than everyone else did in a language that wasn’t even their own, but it had long been clear that Beetledown had his own odd way of talking; of all that small people, only the queen could speak to Chert in a clear, civilized fashion. He wondered again why she spoke the language of the larger world better than her subjects did, but he didn’t waste much thought on it.

As they made a few more turns, Beetledown holding a lock of Chert’s hair so he could stand up without tumbling as he sniffed the air, the odd pair began to move farther and farther from the center of Funderling Town; in fact, it soon became clear that Beetledown’s nose was leading them toward the outermost reaches. If it was a true scent, the boy seemed to have gone by a rather circuitous route, but the overall direction was definitely outward and down. Thus, when they swung close enough to the Salt Pool, Chert turned and carried the little man into the great cavern.

“Going wrong way, th’art.”

“We’ll turn back, but we need something. We’ll be beyond the streetlights soon and, whatever you may have heard about us Funderlings, we can’t see in complete dark. Hoy, Boulder!”

The small Funderling came bounding toward them across the uneven stones, eyes widening at what was no doubt the first adult person smaller than himself he had ever seen. He grinned in surprise and delight. “What is this, Chert?”

“It’s not a this, it’s a who—Beetledown s his name. He’s a Rooftopper. Yes, a real Rooftopper. You heard about Flint? Well, this fellow’s helping me look for him. I’ll explain it next time I come, but I’d appreciate if you’d keep quiet about it for now. Meantime, I’m going down Silk Door way and I’ll need light soon.”

“Just brought up a basketful for the second shift,” Boulder said as he spilled out a selection of glowing coral. “Take your pick, and for free I’m sure the story will be worth it.”

“Many thanks. And you’ve just reminded me of something. Is Rocksalt here today with his basket?”

“Just over there.” Boulder pointed to a group of Funderling men and women and even a few children who were sitting at the edge of the cavern near the great door, waiting for the afternoon shift leader to come for them. As he walked toward them, Chert finally convinced Beetledown to get into his pocket and hide.

He fished out a few copper chips from his pocket and bought bread and soft white cheese from Rocksalt, as well as a waterskin, which cost him a few more chips even though he would be bringing it back to the peddler again afterward Chert didn’t like the expense, but it was becoming clear to him that he would not be back for the evening meal This reminded him of something else.

“Jasper, is your boy staying with you or going home?” he asked a man he knew, one of the fellows waiting to start an afternoon shift.

“Home, of course. Earth Elders! He’d drive me mad in a hundred drips if he came along with me.”

“Good.” Chert turned to the boy. “Here . . little Clay, isn’t it? Pay attention. I’m giving your father this shiny chip, and if you take a message to my wife, he’ll give that chip to you when he gets back from the pit tonight. Do you know my wife, Opal Blue Quartz? On Wedge Road?” The boy, eyes very big at all the attention, nodded solemnly. “Good. Tell her I said that I may be gone a while, searching, and not to hold supper for me. Not to worry if I’m not back by bedtime, even. Can you remember that? Say it back.”

His memory tested and approved, young Clay was dispatched and Chert gave the boy’s father the copper chip to hold in trust. “You’ve earned me a trip up to that fracturing big-folk market, you know,” Jasper said. “He’ll want to spend it up there.”

“Do you good to get some fresh air,” Chert said as he headed off across the uneven, rocky floor.

“Are you mad?” Jasper called after him. “Too much of that wind will suck the life out of a person’s innards!” This was not an uncommon feeling among the inhabitants of Funderling Town and although it might not completely explain why Chert was the first Funderling in centuries to meet a Rooftopper, he reflected, it did explain why there hadn’t been many other opportunities for such a thing to happen.

They went out through the Silk Door, Funderling Town’s back gate, a huge arch carved into a sandstone wall whose natural streaking of pink, ocher, purple, and orange made it look like exquisitely dyed fabric. Once through, they passed in a fairly short time from the careful delving and carving of the town into an area where no digging had been necessary because the underside of the mount was already hollowed out by the ocean and the drip of water from above into the limestone caverns, although the Funderlings had enlarged many of them and created a network of tunnel-roads to connect them all. What was not remembered, at least by anyone of Chert’s acquaintance, was whether the strangely regular caverns below Funderling Town that spiraled deep down into the bedrock of the mount, down below the bottom of the bay itself, had always existed, or had been created by even earlier hands. All that was known for certain by living Funderlings was that the Mysteries were there, hundreds of feet below the heart of the castle s inner keep, and that the less the big folk knew about those secret depths, the better.

Chert stood now far on the outskirts of Funderling Town, at the entrance to those very same Mysteries, looking down at a long, creamy slope gated by two rock walls. At the bottom was a scalloped fringe of pale-pink-and-amber stone that glowed like a translucent curtain in the light of the torches that burned before and behind it. “This way? Are you certain?” Chert asked the Rooftopper. Why would the boy have come so far into the earth, to a place he made it very clear he didn’t like? The Eddon family tombs were two levels up from here, but that was really only a few yards overhead.

“What my nose tells me be true,” Beetledown said. “Stronger here than anywhere past thy home roofs and rookeries.” It took Chert a moment to realize that this very little man meant that he had not smelled Flint so strongly since they had left Chert’s own neighborhood back on Wedge Road. “Well, lead on, then.” He made his way down the stairs that crisscrossed the pale slope and led ultimately into the first antechamber of the caverns.

“Go leef,” announced Beetledown. “No, loft, that is what I mean.” “Left.”

“Aye, that be un.”

They stepped out of the antechamber and beneath a low archway into the first of what Chert had known since childhood as the Festival Halls, a massive set of linked caverns full of columns and flowstone canopies that had begun as natural formations but then been carved and decorated over the centuries until almost every piece had been extensively shaped. Only one extended section of grottoes had been left untouched. Its name was a consonantal grumble in the old Funderling language that roughly translated as “The Lord of the Hot Wet Stones Garden of Earth Shapes.” The carvings in the rest of the Festival Halls were as meticulous as anything in the wonderful roof of Funderling Town, but where the town’s famous roof portrayed a riot of natural greenery, of leaves and branches and fruit, and also birds and small treetop animals, to a people who hadn’t lived among such things in time out of memory, the Festival Halls were something altogether different, a collection of mysterious, endlessly repetitive shapes that made a person’s eyes blur if he or she looked at any one spot too long. These had been done so long ago that nobody remembered whether earlier Funderlings had carved them or why, and it was easy to see almost anything in the odd shapes—animals, demons, portraits of the gods themselves.

“I do not understand this place,” said Beetledown in a voice so quiet and nervous that Chert could barely hear him, despite the immense silence of the caverns.

“We are approaching some of the most sacred spots of the Funderling People,” Chert said. “Very few others ever see them. It is one reason I wanted to hide you from others at the Salt Pool, to avoid someone making a stink if they found out where we were going.”

“Ah, yes.” Beetledown’s voice sounded a little strained. “Laws against it, then? Forbidden, eh? Like us with the Great Gable or the Holy Wainscoting. ‘Course with the Holy Wainscoting, none but the rats be small enough to follow us in.”

Chert couldn’t help smiling. “I can see that would work in your favor Hmm, I suppose most of the big folk would have trouble making their way through some of the tight places down here, too. But you won’t.” He began walking again. “And it’s not really forbidden for you to be in these places, but it’s certainly unusual.”

“Just don’t leave me here,” Beetledown begged him, and Chert suddenly recognized that the undertone he had been hearing in the Rooftopper’s voice was pure fear. For the first time he considered what it must feel like for his minuscule companion to come so far beneath the ground, away from the open roofs and sky. “Not even Beetledown the brave bowman can live long by himself in such a place,” the tiny man said,”—not with the air so tight and close and even un’s breathing’s so unnatural loud.”

“I won’t leave you here.”

They crossed down through the Festival Halls and toward the cavern called the Curtainfall, which was a side doorway to the great honeycomb of caves known as the Temple. But when first seen, it didn’t look like the doorway to anything at one end of the small cave a broad sheet of water drizzled from a lip of jutting rock, down into a pool. The waterfall shimmered blackly in the weak light of the cavern’s single bracketed torch although, as Chert moved closer to the curtain of water, he could also see the pale reflection of his coral lamp move like a firefly across its surface.

“Who comes down here so far to light torches?” Beetledown asked, distractedly sniffing.

“You’ll see.” Chert stepped out into the pool on a bridge of submerged stones near the edge of the cataract and headed straight for the falling water.

“Tha’ll drown us!” Beetledown chirped in alarm.

“Don’t fear There is space between the water and the stone—and look!” There was more than space between water and wall—there was a hole in the great slab of stone, a hole that from most angles was hidden behind the waterfall Chert stepped through, taking more care than he normally would to avoid the edge of the waterfall so that Beetledown would not accidentally be washed off his shoulder. On the far side of the water they entered a single chamber the size of an entire Funderling Town neighborhood, whose walls were lined with bracketed torches and whose high ceiling was covered with the same kind of strange carvings that filled the Garden of Earth Shapes. At the far side of this massive chamber stood the pillared front of the Temple of the Metamorphic Elders, cut directly into the living rock.

“By the Peak!” the little man said in wonder. “Un goes on and on’. Have tha Funderling folk truly dug all the way down in the dark earth and out through the bottom’!”

“Not quite,” Chert told him, looking at the intricately worked stone facade—only the unevenness of some of the shapes showed that it had been natural cavern once. “But we have found many of the deep places of the earth that water dug, then carved them even more to make them our own.”

Beetledown made a face, sniffed. “But for the first time I do not scent the boy strongly. Un’s track runs weaker here, behind the water-wall.”

Chert sighed. “I will ask the temple brothers, anyway,” he said. “But I’m afraid you’ll have to wait here.” “Art coming back for me?”

“I won’t go out of your sight. Just sit here on this stone.” He placed Beetledown atop a relatively flat bit of carved wall, high off the cavern floor. He was glad he didn’t have to go far: he felt a responsibility for the little man he had not expected. He remembered the tiny fellow’s worry about cats and the joke he had made about it and was again struck by shame. It’s true there aren’t too many cats down here, he thought, but I don’t think I remembered to tell him that many here keep snakes against rats and voles and other vermin. I doubt Beetledown likes snakes any better than cats.

He hurried across the wide floor of the temple chamber. It was here that the people of Funderling Town made pilgrimage, gathering on the nights when the Mysteries themselves were celebrated and for other important holiday observances. Chert was relieved to see a dark-robed acolyte standing just inside the doorway of the temple proper, so that he didn’t have to break his word to stay within Beetledown’s sight. “Your pardon, Brother.”

The acolyte came out into the full glow of the torches. The Metamorphic Brothers did not use stonelights, considering them to be dangerously modern, even though the glowing lamps had been used in the streets of Funderling Town for at least two centuries. “What do you seek, Child of the Elders?” he asked. He was dressed in the temple’s costume of archaic, loose-fitting clothes and was younger than Chert would have expected. He looked like he might be from one of the Bismuth families.

“I am Chert Blue Quartz. My foster son is lost.” He took a breath. Here was where the trouble might really begin. “He is one of the big folk. Has he come past here?”

The acolyte raised an eyebrow but only shook his head. “Do not go away just yet, though. One of the brothers came back from the market and said he saw a Gha’jaz child.” Chert was not surprised to hear the man use the old Funderling word—he had spoken the Common Tongue of big folk and Funderlings awkwardly, as though he didn’t use it very often. The Temple had always disliked change. “I will bring him out.”

Chert waited impatiently. When the other acolyte at last emerged, he confirmed that he had seen a boy much like Flint hours earlier, fair-haired and small but clearly not a Funderling, in one of the outer Festival Halls, but heading away from the Temple rather than toward it. Just as Chert was absorbing the implications, he heard a clamor from behind him. Three more acolytes, apparently returning from some errand, had stopped and clustered around the bit of wall where he’d left Beetledown.

“Nickel!” one of them shouted to the first acolyte. “Look, it is a real, living Gha’sun’nk!” Chert cursed under his breath.

Several more of the Metamorphic Brothers spilled out of the temple, some bare-chested and sweaty as though they had just come from forges, kilns, or ovens, within moments a dozen or so had surrounded the Roof-topper. They seemed even more curious than he would have expected. Chert waded through them and lifted the little man up onto his shoulder; Beetledown was looking a bit panicky.

“Is he really Gha’sun’nk?” asked an acolyte, again using the old Funderling name for the Rooftoppers—the little, little people.

“Yes. He is helping me hunt for my foster son.”

As the other acolytes whispered to each other, Nickel approached, a strange gleam in his eyes. “Ah! This is a terrible day,” he said and laid both fists on his chest in a gesture of surrender to the Earth Elders.

“What do you mean?” Chert asked, startled.

“We had hoped that Grandfather Sulphur’s dreams spoke of a time still to come,” said the acolyte. “He is the oldest among us, our master, and the Elders speak to him. Lately he has dreamed that the hour is coming when Old Night will reach out and claim all the di-G’zeh-nah’nk,” —he used an old word that meant something like “left-behinds”—”and that our days of freedom are over.”

The acolytes began to argue among themselves. Chert had left Beetledown on the wall simply to avoid having to explain him and acknowledge the breach of tradition, but the Metamorphic Brothers’ unhappy confusion was real and honest.

“Will they kill me?” Beetledown fluted in his ear.

“No, no. They’re just upset because the times are strange—like your queen and her Lord of the High Place or whatever it was, the one that she said warned you that some kind of storm was coming.”

“The Lord of the Peak,” said Beetledown. “And he is real. The storm is real, too, mark tha—’twill blow the very tiles of our roofs out into darkness.”

Chert did not reply, but stood suddenly rigid in the midst of the tumult like a traveler lost without light on one of the wild roads on the outskirts of Funderling Town. He had just realized where Flint must be going, and it was a fearful thought indeed.

The snores of Finneth’s husband seem loud as the roar of his forge fires.

The clanging all day, she thought, then lying sleepless in the dark with him snorting like a bull all night. The gods gwe us what they think fit, but what have I done that this is my lot? Not that she had only complaints. Her man, called Onsin Oak-arms, was not the worst husband a woman could have. He worked hard in his little smithy and did not spend too much time at the tavern at the end of the drove road. He was not one of the wasters lolling on the bench beneath the eaves, shouting at the passersby. If he was not the most affectionate of men, he was at least a responsible father to their son and daughter, teaching them to love the gods and to honor their parents while hardly ever resorting to any punishment more painful than a cuff on the top of the head or the snap of his thick fingers against a child’s backside. A good thing, too, Finneth thought. He is strong enough to kill a grown man with those big hands. Thinking of his broad back and how the dark curly hair grew tight on his thick neck, the way he held up a bar that would be an ox shoe to show their son the color it should be when it was ready for shaping, she felt a little tickle of desire for him, snoring or no snoring. She rolled against his back and pressed her cheek against him His sleep-rumble changed—there was a note almost of question in it—but then subsided again. Their daughter Agnes stirred in her cot. To her mother’s immense terror, both children had caught the fever that had lately passed through Candlerstown and all the dales, but although little Agnes had taken it the worse, her breathing had been almost normal again for a week Zoria the Queen of Mercy, it seemed, had heard Finneth’s prayers.

She was floating toward sleep, thinking of the damp straw on the floor that would have to be replaced with dry now that wet weather had come, and of how she must also press Onsin to plaster up the cracks around the window of their little house, when she heard the first faint sounds— someone shouting. When she realized it was not the watchman calling out the hour, suddenly all her sleepiness was gone.

At first she thought it must be a fire. It was different living in a town than the village where Finneth had grown up. Here a fire could start so far away that you had never even seen the people whose houses it took first, but still come rushing down your own narrow street like an army of angry demons, jumping from roof to roof at horrifying speed. Was it a fire? Somewhere a bell was ringing, ringing, and more people were shouting. Someone was running through the streets calling for the reeves. It had to be a fire.

She was already shaking Onsin awake when she heard a voice louder than the others, perhaps at the bottom of their own road, screaming, “We are attacked! They are climbing the walls!” Finneth’s heart lurched. Attacked? Climbing the walls? Who? She was heaving at Onsin’s bulk now, but he was like a great tree, too much for her to move. At last he rolled over and sat up, shaking his head.

“War!” she said, tugging his beard until he knocked her hands away. “The reeves are out—everyone’s crying war!”

“What?” He slapped and pinched at his face as though it were not his own, then heaved himself up off their pallet. Agnes was awake and making questioning sounds, crying a little. Finneth pulled the child’s blanket around her and kissed her, but it didn’t soothe her, and Finneth had to see to Fergil as well. The boy was waking but still half in a dream, twitching and looking around as though he had never seen his own house before; for a moment the sight of her confused children brought tears to Finneth’s eyes.

Onsin had pulled on his heavy breeches and, strangely, his best boots, but had not bothered with a shirt. He had his hammer in one hand, the hammer that no one else in the drove road could even lift, and an ax he was straightening for Tully Joiner in the other. Even in this wild moment Finneth thought her husband looked like something out of an old story, a kindly giant, a bearded demigod like Hiliometes. He was listening to the shouting, which had moved down to the end of the street. Now Finneth heard another sound, a rising wail like the wind, and she was filled with a helpless, sickening terror unlike any she had known.

“I will be back,” Onsin said as he hurried out the door. He did not kiss his children or wait for her blessing, which only added to Finneth’s growing despair.

Attacked? Who could it be? We have been at peace with Settland since befort Grandmother’s time Bandit--? Why would bandits attack a town?

“Mama Where did Papa go?" asked little Fergil, and as she squatted to comfort him, she realized she was shivering, wearing nothing but the blanket she had wrapped around her. “Papa went out to help some other men,” she told the children, then began to pull on her clothes.

She couldn’t believe that it could still be the same night—that only just the other side of the midnight bell she had been lying in her bed thinking about Onsin’s snoring, worrying about the sound Agnes was making when she breathed. It was as though Perin himself had lifted a hammer large as a mountain and brought it down on all their lives, smashing everything into powder.

Candlerstown was aflame, but fire was the least of her worries now. The streets were full of shrieking figures, some bleeding, others only running aimlessly mad, eyes staring wide and dark out of pale faces, mouths open holes. It was as though the earth had vomited out all the unhappy dead. Finneth couldn’t think, didn’t want to think—such terror was too large to fit into one head, one heart, especially when she had to cling to a pair of frightened, weeping children and try to find a place where the flames were not burning, where people were not screaming. But there was no such place anywhere.

Worst of all were the glimpses of the invaders, impossible nightmare shapes clambering over walls and dashing across rooftops—some in animal shapes, others bent and twisted as no living thing that could wear armor and carry a weapon should be. As she dragged the children past a pubhc square she saw a tall figure on a rearing horse in the midst of a crowd of Candlerstown men, and that figure looked so much like a man that for an instant she was heartened—here was some noble lord, perhaps even Earl Rorick himself, a person Finneth had never seen despite his importance in her life. Yes, Rorick must have come down from his castle at Dale House to rally the frightened townfolk and lead them against these monstrous invaders. But then she saw that this shaggy-haired lord was taller than any man, that he had too many fingers on his long white hands, and that his eyes, like those of his rearing horse, were as flame-yellow as a cat’s. As for the men around him, the ones she had thought he might be rallying, they were crawhng and moaning beneath his horse’s hooves as he pricked at them with his long spear, driving them like a flock of sheep to slavery or death.

Agnes stumbled and fell and Fergil began to shriek. She caught them both up in her arms and limped away from the square. She was in a part of the town she hardly seemed to know at all, but everything had become something else on this ghastly night it might be her own street for all she could be certain, her own house that she staggered past as barking, whistling shapes came pouring out of the windows like beetles from a split log. Overhead, the stars had vanished Fmneth couldn’t understand that either. Why were there no stars, and why had the sky turned that dull, dark red? Was it blood—was the whole town bleeding up into the sky? Then she knew. It was the smoke of burning Candlerstown itself, hiding what was happening even from Heaven.

She found herself in a crowd of people, although it was more river than crowd, a heedless wash of screams and waving arms that flooded down the Marsh Road, past the Trigonate temple. The outer walls and roof of the temple were crawling with something that looked like moss but which glowed like sullen lightning. The priests had nearly all been slaughtered, although some of them were still crawling despite terrible, obviously mortal wounds In their haste to flee, the shrieking crowd was trampling the survivors, which might have been a mercy. Even Finneth stepped on a motionless human figure and did not care—it was all she could do to keep upright. She could not stop, could not turn, certainly could not waste pity on the dead and soon-dead. She was hemmed in on either side and all she could think of was holding Agnes and Fergil tight against her, so tightly that even the gods could not pull them from her.

All who fell now were crushed underfoot. The crowd moved like a single living thing, rushing to the open Eastside Gate and the darkness beyond, toward the blessed cold fields where no fires burned.

Finneth ran until she couldn’t run any farther, then shoved her way to the outskirts of the torrent of people, which was beginning to slow and scatter.

They were outside the walls, knee-deep in the stubble of a harvested field, when she fell to the ground at last, exhausted and helpless. She wondered if she, too, might be dying, she was not wounded, but it seemed impossible anyone could experience such a night and live. She clutched her son and daughter and wept, every sob clawing painfully at her smoke-scorched throat.

Gone, all gone —Onsin, her house, her few possessions. Only these two small, precious, panting creatures kept her from running back to throw herself into the flames of Candlerstown. Most dreadful of all, as she lay with her shivering children on the cold ground just outside the murdered town, she could hear the destroyers of everything she had, and they were singing. Their voices were painfully lovely.

Darkness claimed her then, but only for a while.

28. Evening Star

She had lost track of how many different Favored had taken her up as though she were an ill-wrapped package, walked her to the next way station, and then turned her over to another functionary, but at last she was led into the receiving room of the paramount wife Arimone looked up from her cushions and smiled indulgently as Qinnitan abased herself. “Oh, do get up, child,” she said, although she looked not much more than a girl herself. “Are we not all sisters here?"

If we were all sisters, Qinnitan could not help thinking, I wouldn’t have gone down on my knees in the first place. The invitation had arrived that morning and Qinnitan had spent hours under the expert ministration of a half dozen slaves, a mix of Favored and born-females, until her appearance had been polished to a blinding brilliance like a gemstone, after some consideration, she was then deconstructed and redressed in slightly less formal splendor.

“After all, we don’t want the Evening Star to think we aspire to become the Light of the Morning, do we?" a Favored named Rusha had said with mocking severity. “We shall be beautiful—but not too beautiful.”

Luian, who had been a bit absent of late, as if ashamed of her part in bringing Qmnitan to meet Jeddin, had not been involved in the preparations for the audience, but she had sent one of her Tuani women to help Qinnitan arrange her hair, which was now piled atop her head and held in place with jeweled pins. Qinnitan had been quite taken with her own image in the glass when it was done, but that seemed like pure foolishness now. Arimone, who was perhaps ten years older than Qinnitan, was unquestionably the most beautiful woman she had ever seen or even imagined, like a temple image of Surigal herself, her hair jet black and so long that even in a braid it coiled like a sleeping snake all over the cushions on which she sat. Qinnitan could only wonder what such an amazing cascade of hair would look like untethered and brushed out, she also felt certain everyone else who met Arimone, most assuredly including any whole men, were meant to wonder about that as well.

The autarch’s paramount wife had an arresting figure, small-waisted and wide-hipped, both features accented by her clinging robe, and she also had a perfect, heart-shaped face, but it was her eyes—huge, thick-lashed, and almost as black as her hair—that made her look as though she belonged with the other goddesses in Heaven rather than languishing among mere mortals in the Seclusion. Qinnitan, who was already frightened and felt a bit of an impostor in her fine clothes, suddenly felt not like one of the all-powerful autarch’s chosen brides, but like the dirtiest street urchin imaginable.

“Come, come, sit with me,” Arimone said in a voice so light and musical it suggested years of exhausting practice. “Will you take some tea? I like to drink it cool on days like this, with plenty of mint and sugar. It’s very refreshing.”

Qinnitan did her best to seat herself without tripping over any of the striped cushions mounded at the center of the room. In one corner a young girl played the lute with surprising skill. Several other servant girls, when they were not waiting on the paramount wife, sat talking quietly in the corners of the room. Two youths with the dewy, beardless faces of the Favored stood behind the cushions waving fans of peacock feathers. The decoration of the receiving room seemed designed to remind visitors of one thing and one thing only—a bedchamber, which was after all the root of Arimone’s power. She had not yet given the autarch an heir, but he had spent much of his first regnal year traveling through all his lands, so none of the other wives dared even whisper rumors of unhappiness in the royal bed. Should another year pass without sign of a male heir, of course, they would do almost nothing else.

“Forgive me for waiting so long before having you to visit,” said the paramount wife. “You have been here, what, half a year?”

“More or less, Highness.”

“You must call me Anmone—as I said, we are all sisters here. I have heard much about you, and you are just as charming as I imagined.” She raised an eyebrow that had been plucked into a line as delicate as a spider’s leg. “I hear you are great friends with Favored Luian. The two of you are cousins, are you not?”

“Oh, no, High… Arimone We are merely from the same neighborhood.” The first wife frowned prettily. “Am I so foolish, then? Why did I think she and you…?”

“Perhaps because Luian is a cousin of Jeddin, the chief of the Leopards.” Arimone was watching her closely, Qinnitan suddenly wished she had kept her mouth shut. She was even more disturbed to realize that she was still babbling about it. “Luian talks of him much, of course. She is… she is very proud of him.”

“Ah, yes, Jeddin. I know him. He’s a handsome fellow, isn’t he?” The Evening Star was still looking at Qinnitan in a way that made her very, very uncomfortable. “A fine, firm piece of manflesh. Don’t you think so?”

Qinnitan did not know what she was supposed to say. The women of the Secluded talked very frankly about men, in a way that virginal Qinnitan often found embarrassingly informative, but this seemed somehow different, as though she were being tested in some way. A chill ran over her. Had the paramount wife heard rumors? “I have scarcely seen him, Arimone, at least since we were all children together. Certainly he could not be as handsome as our lord the autarch, all praise to his name, could he?”

Her hostess smiled as if at a well-played gambit. Qinnitan thought she heard a few of the slave girls giggle behind her. “Oh, that is different, little sister Sulepis is a god on earth, and thus not to be judged as other men. Still, he is very taken by you, it seems.”

The footing was again unsteady. “Taken by me? You mean the autarch?”

“Of course, dear. Has he not had you given special instruction? I hear that you are with that wheezing priest Panhyssir almost every day. That there are prayers and . . rituals of preparation. Arcane practices.”

Qinnitan was confused again. Hadn’t this happened with all the wives? “I did not know that was unusual, Mistress.”

“Arimone, remember! Ah, I suppose it is not surprising that the autarch has become interested in something new. He knows more than the priests, has read more of the ancient texts than they have themselves. He knows everything, my oh-so-clever husband—what the gods whisper to each. other in dreams and why they live forever, the old, forgotten places and cities, the secret history of all of Xand and beyond When he speaks to me, I can scarcely understand him sometimes. But his interests are so widespread that they do not last for long, of course. Like a great golden bee, he moves from flower to flower as his mighty heart leads him. I am sure whatever has taken his interest this time will be… short-lived.”

Qinnitan flinched, but she was puzzled and determined to find out why the other wives seemed to think of her as different. “How… how were you prepared, Arimone? For marriage, I mean. If you will forgive an impertinent question. This is all very new to me.”

“I imagine it is You may not know, but of course I was married before.” My current husband murdered my only child, then killed my first husband, too, and made his death last for weeks, she did not say, nor did she have to—Qinnitan already knew it, as did everyone else in the Seclusion. “So my circumstances were a bit different. I came to our lord and master’s bed already a woman.” She smiled again. “We are quite intrigued by you, many of us here in the Seclusion. Did you know that?”

“You… you are?”

“Ah, yes, of course. A very young girl—a child, really—” Arimone’s smile was a bit cold, “from, let us be frank, an undistinguished family. None of us can quite imagine what it was that lifted you to the Golden One’s eye.” She spread her hands, which glittered with rings. The nails were half the length of her long, slender fingers. “Other than the beauty of your innocence, little sister, which is of course charming and formidable.”

Never in her life, even standing before Autarch Sulepis, had Qinnitan felt less significant.

“Come, will you have a little more tea? I have prepared a surprise for you. I hope it will be a pleasant one. Will you promise not to tell on me if I do something that is a little naughty?”

Qinnitan could only nod.

“Good.That is how it should be between sisters. So you will not be too shocked if I tell you that I have brought a man into my house today—a true man, not one of the Favored. You are not afraid to meet a true man, are you? You have not been so long away from the streets of your childhood that you view them all as monsters and rapists, do you?”

Qinnitan shook her head, confused and frightened. Did the first wife know about Jeddin? Why else all this taunting?

“Good, good. In truth, he is very harmless, this man. So old that I do not think he could mount a mouse.” She laughed between her teeth and her serving girls echoed her. “He is a storyteller. Shall I summon him?” The question was not meant to be answered: Arimone lifted her hands and clapped. A moment later a bent figure in colorful clothes stepped through one of the curtained doors and into the receiving room.

“Hasuris,” she said, “I apologize for keeping you waiting.”

“I would rather wait for you in a dark alcove than be served honeyed figs by any other woman, Mistress.” The old man bowed low to Arimone, then gave Qinnitan a look so saucy and self-satisfied that he might as well have winked at her. “And this must be the young wife you told me of. Greetings, little Mistress.”

“You are a shameless flirt, Hasuris,” said Arimone, laughing. “None of your nonsense or the Golden One’s guards will come and you will join the Favored.”

“My stones and I adventure together only in memory, Great Queen,” he said, “so it makes little difference. But I suppose their departure could be painful, so I will stay silent and behave well.”

“No, to behave well you must not stay silent at all. Instead you must tell us a story. Why else would I have brought you here?”

“To admire the turn of my calf?”

“Wretched old fool. Tell us a tale. Perhaps…” Pondering, or pretending to, the paramount wife put a ringer to her red, red lips. Even Qinnitan could not help staring at her like a lovesick boy. “Perhaps the story of the Foolish Hen.”

“Very well, Great Queen.” The old man bowed Now that he was closer, Qinnitan could see that his white whiskers were stained yellow around his mouth. “Here is the tale, although it is a rather simple one, without any good jokes but the last one:

“Once there was a very foolish hen, who preened and preened herself, certain that she was the most beautiful of her kind in all creation,” he began.

“The other hens grew weary of her posturing and began to talk behind her back, but the foolish hen paid no attention at all. ‘Jealous, that is all they are,’ she told herself. ‘Who cares what they think? They are of no importance compared to the man who feeds us. That is someone whose opinion matters, and who will recognize my quality.’ So she set out to gain the attention of the man who came every day to spread corn on the ground.

“Every time he arrived, she would push her way out from the midst of the other hens and strut back and forth before the man, head held high, breast shoved forward. When he looked away, she would call to him—’Ga-gaw! Ga-gaw!’—until he looked her way again. But still he treated her no differently from any of the others. The foolish hen became very angry and resolved to do whatever it took to be noticed.”

Qinnitan was feeling a chill again. Was there a point to this story? Was Arimone suggesting that the younger wife had gone out of her way somehow to attract attention? The autarch’s? Or someone else’s? It was all too difficult to understand, but the penalties would be no less mortal because the crimes weren’t altogether clear. She suddenly wanted nothing more than to be back in the Temple of the Hive, surrounded by the sweet hum of the sacred bees.

“The foolish hen could not sleep for trying to imagine a way to get the man’s attention. Her lovely voice had not moved him. Perhaps he needed to see that she valued him more than the others did, but how could she do that? She resolved to eat more of the corn he dropped than anyone else, and so she followed him from the first moment he arrived until he went away again, pecking at the other hens to drive them away and eating as much corn as she could,, manage. The other hens despised her as she grew fatter and sleeker, but still the ‘* * * * *man did not speak to her, did not single her out in any way. She decided she would fly to him and show him that she alone was worthy of his attention. It was not easy, because by now she was quite plump, but by practicing every day she at last managed to stay aloft long enough to flutter a good distance.

“One day, after the man finished spreading the corn and began to walk back to the house, the hen flew after him. It was harder than she thought it would be and she did not catch up to him until he had already gone through the door. She hurried after and flew inside, but it was dark and she could not see, so she began to call out —’Ga-gaw! Ga-gaw!’ —to let him know she had arrived.

“The man came to her and picked her up. Her heart was full of joy.

“ ‘I have tried to ignore you, you fat thing,’ he said, ‘because I was going to save you for the Feast of the Rising at the end of the rainy season, but here you are in my kitchen, shouting at the top of your lungs. Clearly it is the great god’s will that I eat you now! And so speaking, he wrung her neck and set a fire in the oven…”

Qinnitan stood suddenly and the old man Hasuris fell silent. He looked a little shamefaced, as if he had somehow guessed the story might upset her, which didn’t seem possible. “I… I don’t feel very well,” she said. She was dizzy and sick to her stomach.

Arimone looked at her with wide eyes. “My poor little sister? Can I get you something?”

“No, I… I think I had better go home I’m v—very s—s—sorry.” She put her hand over her mouth—she had a sudden, powerful urge to vomit all over the first wife’s beautiful striped cushions.

“Oh, no, must you really? Perhaps it would be better for you to have a little more mint tea. Surely that would settle your stomach.” Arimone picked up Qinnitan’s cup and held it out to her, gaze doe-innocent. “Go ahead, little sister. Drink some more. It is made to my special recipe and it cures nearly all ills.”

Filled with horror, Qinnitan shook her head and stumbled out without even bowing. She heard the slaves laughing and whispering behind her.

29. The Shining Man

“Listen carefully,” Chert said when he had put some distance between himself and the temple of the Metamoric Brothers. He raised his hand to his shoulder to let Beetledown climb onto his palm, then held him so that he could see the man’s tiny face. “If your nose is telling you the truth and this is the way Flint went, I think I know where he’s going.”

“If my nose?” The Rooftopper’s features screwed up in indignation. “Wasn’t bred for it like the Grand and Worthy, me, but leaving un out, there be not a better sniffiter in all of the Southmarch heights.

“I believe you.” Chert took a deep, shaky breath. “It’s just that where he’s headed.” His knees felt weak and he had to sit down, which he did carefully the Rooftopper was still standing on his hand. For the first time that Chert Blue Quartz could remember, he wished he were outside, under the sky, instead of beneath the unimaginable weight of stone that had been the top of his world almost all his life, and had always held that place in his thoughts. “Where he’s headed is a very strange place. A sacred place. Sometimes it can be a dangerous place.”

“Cats? Snakes?” The Rooftopper’s eyes were wide. Despite his growing fear, Chert almost smiled. “No, nothing like that. Well, there might be animals down there, but that’s the least of my worries.” “Because th’art a giant.”

Now Chert did smile: being called a giant was something that would probably never happen to him again. “Fair enough. But what I need to tell you is that I have a decision to make. It’s not an easy one.”

The little man looked at him now with keen interest, just like Cinnabar or one of the other Guild leaders being presented with a tricky but possibly lucrative bargain. The Rooftoppers were not just like people, they were people, Chert knew that now; they were just as complicated and lively as the Funderlings or anyone else. So why were they so small? Where did they come from? Had they been punished by the gods, or was there something even stranger in their origins?

Thoughts of the gods and their fabled propensity for vengeance were, at this moment, more compelling than usual.

“Here is my problem,” he told Beetledown. “I told you before that places like the temple… that some of my people might frown on you being there. We are uncomfortable with outsiders seeing the things that are most important to us.”

“Understood,” said the little man.

“Well, I think Flint has gone deeper still into… into what we call the Mysteries. And I know that many of my people will be upset if I bring an outsider there. It was one reason I haven’t even taken Flint anywhere near the place, even though he is my foundling son.”

“Then time has come for me to go back to my own home.” Beetledown sounded quite cheerful about it, and Chert wasn’t surprised: the little man had become less comfortable the longer and deeper their journey became. In fact, he seemed positively to glow with satisfaction at the thought that his travels below ground were about to end, which made Chert’s already wretched position even more so.

“But I’m afraid to lose so much time—if the boy’s down there, it’s been hours already. It’s a dangerous place, Beetledown. Strange, too. I… I’m very frightened for him.”

“So?” The Rooftopper frowned in puzzlement, then gradually his tiny brows unkinked, although the understanding obviously brought him no happiness. “Tha wants to take me down with.”

“I can’t think of anything else to do, any other way to track him—there are many paths, many ways. I’m sorry. But I won’t take you against your will.”

“Th’art much the bigger of us twain.”

“That doesn’t matter. I won’t take you against your will.”

Beetledown’s frown returned. “Tha said ‘twas a sacred place—banned to outliers.”

“That’s why I said I had a difficult decision. But I’ve decided I’d rather break the law and take you into the Mysteries than leave my boy alone down there any longer than I have to—if you’ll go. Besides, the boy himself is no Funderling, so the law’s already fair cracked and riven, as we say.”

The little man sighed, a minuscule noise like the squeak of a worried mouse. “My queen bade me give ‘ee help with nose and otherwise. Can Beetledown the Bowman do less than un’s mistress bids un?”

“The Earth Elders bring you and all your people good luck,” said Chert, relieved. “You are as brave as you keep saying you are.”

“That be the solemn truth.”

Their paths intersected at the doorway of the armory. Vansen had his arms full of polishing cloths, which he was borrowing, since they had run out in the guards’ hall, and he almost did not see her—in fact, almost knocked her over. Astonishingly, she seemed to be alone. She was dressed in a simple long shirt and breeches like a man’s, and Ferras Vansen was so surprised to see the face that had been in his mind’s eye all day that for a long moment he simply couldn’t believe it was true.

“M—My lady,” he said at last. “Highness. Here—you must not do that. It is not fitting.”

Princess Briony had been picking up his dropped cloths, her face wearing a pleasantly distracted expression that was almost insulting—it was obvious that she did not recognize him outside of the formal setting of an audience or council chamber. Her features abruptly changed and tightened, eyebrows lifting in a formal gesture of polite surprise. “Captain Vansen,” she said coolly. He had a brief glimpse of her guards—two of his own men— hurrying toward them across the armory courtyard, as if their own captain might be a threat to the princess.

“Your pardon, please, Highness.” He did his best to get out of her way, a gesture made difficult not only by the fact that she was holding the handle of the door, but because he was full-laden and she was not. He only managed it by clumsily dropping a few of the cloths again as he backed into the armory. He hid his terrible embarrassment by bending to pick them up.

Gods save me! Even when we meet almost as equals, alone in the armory doorway, I immediately turn myself into a bumbling peasant.

A second, equally unpleasant thought suggested that maybe this was just as well. After all, the sooner you get over this stupidity the better, a more sensible part of himself pointed out. If shame alone will do that, then shame is a good thing.

He glanced up at her face, saw the mixture of amusement and annoyance moving there. He had managed to block her way again. But I will never get over it, he thought, and in that painful, radiant instant he couldn’t imagine knowing anything with more certainty, not his love of his family, not his duty to the guards or to the all-seeing gods themselves.

Princess Briony suddenly seemed to realize she was smiling at his discomfiture; the transition of her features back to bland watchfulness was astonishingly swift and more than a little saddening. Such a lively face, he thought. But over the past weeks she had been slowly, purposefully turning it into something else—the marble mask of a portrait bust, something that might stand for decades in one of the castle’s dusty halls. “Do you need any help, Captain Vansen?” She nodded to her two hurrying protectors. “One of these guards could help you carry those things.”

She would lend him one of his own guardsmen to help him carry a few pieces of cloth. Was it real malice, or just girlish snippishness? “No, Highness, I can manage. Thank you.” He bent a knee and bowed a little, careful not to drop his burden again. She took the hint and moved from the doorway so that he could escape, although he had to glare her two panting guards back out of the way first. He was so relieved to escape her overwhelming presence that it was all he could do, after a final turn and bow, to walk rather than run away.

“Captain Vansen?”

He winced, then wheeled to face her again. “Yes, Highness?”

“I do not approve of my brother appointing himself head of this… expedition.You know that.” “It seemed clear, Highness.”

“But he is my brother, and I love him. I have already…” Oddly, she smiled, but it was clear she was also fighting tears. “I have already lost one brother. Barrick is the only one I have left to me.”

He swallowed. “Highness, your brother’s death was…”

She raised her hand, at another time he might have thought she was being imperious. “Enough I do not say it to to blame you again. I just…” She turned away for a moment so she could dab at her eyes with the long sleeve of her man’s shirt as though the tears were little enemies that had to be swiftly and brutally eradicated. “I am asking you, Captain Vansen, to remember that Barrick Eddon is not just a prince, not just a member of the ruling family. He is my brother, my my twin I am terrified that something might happen to him.”

Ferras was moved. Even the guardsmen, a pair of young louts who Vansen knew well and did not think could muster the finer feelings of a shoat between them, were nervous now, unsettled by the openness of the princess regent’s grief. “I will do my best, Highness,” he told her. “Please believe that… I will… I will treat him as though he were my own brother.”

Immediately upon saying it he reahzed that he had been foolish again— had insinuated that under ordinary circumstances he would give more care to his own family than to his lord and master, the prince regent. This seemed a particularly dangerous thing to say considering that one prince regent had already died while he, Vansen, was the officer of record.

I am truly an idiot, he thought. Blinded by my feelings I have spoken to the mistress of the kingdom as though she were a crofter’s daughter from the next farm over.

To his surprise, though, there were tears in Briony’s eyes again. “Thank you, Captain Vansen,” was all she said.

She had looked forward all morning to stealing a little time for practice, been desperate for the release of swinging the heavy wooden sword, but now that the time had finally come, it only made her feel clumsy and tired.

It is that man Vansen. He always unsettled her, made her angry and disturbed—-just seeing him reminded her of Kendrick, of that terrible night. And now it seemed he might be standing by to watch another of her brothers die, for none of her arguments could make Barrick change his mind. But was it Vansen’s fault, or was it only some terrible joke of the gods that he should be attached to so much of her misery?

Nothing made sense. She let the sword drop into the sawdust of the practice ring. One of the guards moved forward to pick it up but she waved him off. Nothing made sense. She was miserable.

Sister Utta. She had scarcely had time for her tutor lately, and Briony suddenly realized how much she missed the older woman’s calming presence. She snatched up a cloth to wipe her hands, then stamped her feet to shake off the sawdust before setting out for Utta’s apartments, guards scuttling after her like chickens behind a gram-scattering farmwife. She had crossed the courtyard and was just walking into the long, narrow Lesser Hall when for the second time in an hour she nearly knocked over a young man. It was not Vansen this time, but the young poet—well, the so-called poet, she could not help thinking—Matty Tinwright. He reacted with elaborately pleased surprise, but by the care he had put into his hair and clothes, his swift breathing, and his position just inside the doorway, she rather thought he had been watching her come across the courtyard from one of the windows and then had hurried down the hall to manufacture this “accidental” meeting.

“Highness, Princess Briony, lovely and serene and wise, it is a pleasure beyond words to see you. And look, you are robed for battle, as is fitting for a warrior queen.” He leaned in close for a conspiratorial whisper. “I have heard that our land is threatened, glorious princess—that the army is being mustered. Would that I were one who could meetly raise a sword as your champion, but my own war must be fought with stirring songs and odes, inducers of brave deeds which I will construct for the good of crown and country!”

He was not at all bad to look at—he was in fact quite handsome, which was likely one of the reasons Barrick disliked him—but she was far too impatient for even this harmless nonsense today. “Do you want to go with the army so you can write poems about the battlefield, Master Tinwright? You have my permission. Now, if you will excuse me…” He seemed to be swallowing something the size of a shuttlecock. “Go with… ?”

“The army, yes. You may. Now if that was all…”

“But I…” He seemed dazed, as though the possibility that he might be directed to join the army of Southmarch had never occurred to him. In truth, Briony was mostly being spiteful—she did not actually wish to saddle any commander with both her brother and this idiot poetaster. “But I did not come to ask .” Tinwright swallowed again. It was not getting easier for him. “In truth I came to you, Highness, because Gil wishes an audience with you.”

“Gil?”

“The potboy, Mistress. Surely you have not forgotten already, since it was his errand that first brought me to your attention.”

She remembered now, the thin man with the strange, calmly mad eyes. “The one who has dreams—he wishes to speak to me?”

Tinwright nodded eagerly. “Yes, Highness. I was visiting him in the stronghold—the poor man scarcely sees anyone, he is almost a prisoner— and he asked me specially to speak to you. He says that he has something important to tell you of what he called ‘the upcoming struggle.’ ” For a moment Tinwright’s forehead wrinkled. “I was surprised to hear him use such a term, to be honest, Mistresss, since he is not at all educated.”

Briony shook her head as if to clear it, a bit overwhelmed by the poet’s swift and highly inflected speech. He was a popinjay in more than just his cheapstreet finery. “Gil the potboy wants to talk to me about the upcoming struggle? He must have heard about it from the guards in the stronghold.” The stronghold held another prisoner, she could not help remembering. A moment of dislocation washed over her, something approaching real panic. Shaso dan-Heza was the one who should be commanding both this war party and the defense of the castle that might come later. Had someone anticipated just that? Had he been made to look guilty of Kendrick’s murder for just that reason?

“Yes, Highness,” Tinwright confirmed. “Doubtless that was where he heard of it. In any case, that is the message I was asked to give you. Now, about this riding off with the soldiers…”

“I already gave you my permission,” she said, then turned and headed off at a fast walk toward Sister Utta’s room. Behind her she could hear her guards snarling as they struggled to push past Matty Tinwright, who seemed to be following her.

“But, Highness…!”

She turned. “The potboy—he gave you a gold dolphin to write that letter, did he not?” “Y-yes…”

“So where did a potboy get a thick, shiny gold piece?” She saw that Tinwright obviously had no answer to that and turned away again.

“I don’t know. But, Highness, about what you said… the army… !” Her mind was too full. She scarcely even heard him.

“We do not often go deeper than the temple,” Chert explained to his small passenger as they made their way down the twisting slope known as the Cascade Stair. The curve of the wide spiral, at its uppermost reaches wider in circumference than Funderling Town itself, was beginning to tighten, and the air was noticeably warmer. A seam of white quartz in the limestone directly above them seemed to undulate back and forth above their heads like a snake as Chert descended. They had left the last of the Funderling wall lamps behind, Chert was glad he had brought coral from the Salt Pool. “I think the acolytes come down this way to make offerings, especially on festival days, and of course all of us come here for the ceremonies when we reach manhood or womanhood.” Even with all his worries he couldn’t help wondering how many young ones the acolytes would take down into the depths this year. Chert would know them all, of course—Funderling Town was a small, clannish community and there were never more than a couple of dozen who had reached the proper age on the night the Mysteries were formally celebrated. As he walked, he told Beetledown some memories from his own initiation into adulthood, so many years ago now—the giddiness brought on by fasting, the strange shadows and voices, and most frightening and exhilarating of all, that brief glimpse of the Shining Man that the young Chert had not been entirely certain was real. In fact, much of the experience now seemed like a dream.

“Shining Man?” asked Beetledown.

Chert shook his head. “Forget I said it. The others will already think it bad enough I bring you to these sacred places.”

As they stepped down from the Cascade Stair and into a natural cavern full of tall, hourglass-shaped columns, Chert walked forward until they stood in front of the one unnatural thing in the chamber. It was a wall even larger than the Silk Door, with five big arched doorways in it, each one a black hole into which the coral-light could not reach.

“Five?” said Beetledown. “Have thy people naught better to do than dig tunnels side by side?"

Chert was still keeping his voice low, although the unlit lamps in these chambers suggested that if the acolytes had been down today they had already left. “That is more to do with the weight of stone and less to do with the number of tunnels. If you cut one tunnel it makes an arch in the fabric of the living stone above it—I cannot think of the words to explain it, since we use an old Funderling word, dh’yok, to describe such a thing.That one arch will be a small one, and eventually the stone above it will crush the tunnel closed again.”

“Wind from the Peak!” swore Beetledown, scrambling in from the point of Chert’s shoulder to the presumably greater protection next to the Funderling’s head, making Chert’s neck itch and tickle in the process. “The stone crushes un?"

“Even that doesn’t happen right away, never fear. But when you make several tunnels beside each other, the dh’yok, the… arch in the stone is much bigger and stronger, and even when the weight of the stone above starts to collapse it at last, it takes the outer tunnels first, giving us plenty of warning to shore up the inside tunnels and eventually to stop using them altogether.”

“You mean, someday mountain will just crush all down? All thy building? All thy digging?” He sounded almost more outraged on the Funderlings’ behalf than fearful of the danger.

Chert laughed a soft laugh. “Someday. But that’s a long time—that’s stone time, as we call it. Unless the gods take it into their minds to send an earthshaking—a far stronger one than we’ve ever had before—even these outside tunnels will still be standing when the grandchildren of the men and women joining the Guilds today are brought down to see… brought down for their coming-of-age.”

His explanation didn’t seem to mollify Beetledown all that much, although the little man was reassured when Chert chose the middle tunnel, presumably the safest, to continue their journey, and Chert didn’t share the less inspiring truth with him—that nobody ever used any of the other tunnels anyway, since they existed purely to support the passage through which he and the Rooftopper were descending to the next level.

“But why build tunnels here at all?” Beetledown asked suddenly, perhaps to break the silence in the close-quartered passage, whose abstract carvings seemed just as weirdly unsettling to Chert now as they had on that long-ago night of his initiation, and which must seem even more so to a stranger like the tiny man.”All else down here in deeps be touched by no hand.”

Again he was struck by the sharpness of the little man’s wits and his keen eye for details in an unfamiliar place. “A good question, that.” But Chert was beginning to feel the power of the place, the importance and the strangeness of it, and did not feel much like talking. His people didn’t enter the Mysteries lightly, and even though he would walk into the smoking heart of J’ezh’kral Pit itself to find the boy and save his Opal from feeling so miserable, he could not be happy about his responsibility for this comparative parade of outsiders, first Flint and now Beetledown, both of whom were in the ceremonied depths because of Chert Blue Quartz and no other.

“I don’t want to tell the whole story now. Perhaps it will be enough to say that our ancestors came to realize that there was another set of caverns they could not reach, and that they cut these tunnels to reach down from the caverns we knew—those in which we have been traveling until now— into these deeper and more unfamiliar spaces.”

It was not enough, of course—it barely explained anything, let alone the profound revelations at the heart of the Mysteries, but there was only so much that could be put into words. Or that should even be put into words at all.

The idea of needing to talk to the potboy had upset her, but not because of the potboy himself. Even if the fellow was some kind of dream-scryer, even if he could do to her what he did to Barrick, calling up and naming the things that haunted her sleep, what Briony feared was no secret from anyone who had any wits at all. She feared that she would lose her brother and father, what remained of her family. She feared that she would fail Southmarch and the March Kingdoms, that in this time of growing danger, with Olin imprisoned and her brother strange and often ill, she would be the last of the Eddons to wield power.

No. I will not let that happen, she swore to herself as she strode along the Lesser Hall toward the residence. I will be ruthless if it is needed. I will bum down all the forests that lie beyond the Shadowline, throw every Tolly into chains. And if Shaso truly is a murderer, I will drag him to the headsman’s block myself to save our kingdom.

This was what had upset her, of course, the thought of her father’s trusted adviser still locked up in the stronghold during such times. If she went to see the potboy Gil in his makeshift accommodations there, could she avoid speaking to Shaso? She didn’t even want to see him: she was not certain of his guilt and never had been, despite all the signs, but much of the autumn had passed with no change in the circumstances and she and Barrick couldn’t avoid passing judgment on him forever. If he had murdered the reigning prince, he must himself be put to death. Still, Briony knew she didn’t really understand what had happened that fatal night, and the idea of executing one of her father’s closest advisers—a man who also, for all his sour temper and rigidity had been almost another parent to her— was very disturbing. No, it was terrifying.

Her guards had caught up to her again as she reached the high-walled Rose Garden, where the Lesser Hall became a covered walkway that ran the garden’s length. It was sometimes called the Traitor’s Garden, because an angry noble had lain in wait there to murder one of Briony’s royal ancestors, Kellick the Second. The assassin had failed and his head had wound up on the Basilisk Gate, the tattered remains of his quartered body shared out over the entrances of the cardinal towers. Something of this legend had stuck to the garden, and it was not her favorite place, even in spring. Now the roses were long gone, their thorny branches so thick on the walls that it looked as though they were holding up the ancient bricks rather than the other way around.

Caught up in her thoughts, Briony barely noticed her guards until one of them sneezed and mumbled a quiet prayer. She suddenly thought, What am I doing? Why should I go down to the stronghold? I am the queen, almost — the princess regent. I will have the potboy brought to one of the council chambers and speak to him there. There is no need for me to go down there at all. The relief that washed over her brought a little shame with it; this would be another day she did not need to think too much about Shaso dan-Heza…

She was startled by a pressure on either side as the two guards suddenly stepped in close to her like a pair of dogs heading a straying sheep. She was about to snap at them—Briony Eddon would not be anyone’s lamb—when she saw a man and a woman rise from a bench in the late-autumn sun and walk toward her. It took her a moment to recognize the first of the pair before they joined her in the shade of the walkway: she had not seen Hendon Tolly for almost a year.

“Your Highness,” he said, sketching a not very convincing bow. The youngest Tolly brother was still thin as a racing dog, all length and tendon. His dark hair had been cut high above his ears in the current Syan-nese style and he even wore a little tuft of beard on his chin, with his short gown in golden satin and his parti-colored hose and velvet trim he looked every inch a prince of one of the more fashion-conscious southern courts. Briony thought it was strange that he could look both so much like his brother Gailon in the face and so little like him in all else— dark for fair, slim for well-muscled, foppish for stolid, as though this were Gailon himself dressed up for some outrageous, impossible Midsummer Festival mummery.

“Ah, I see by your attire we have caught you at a bad time, Princess Briony,” Hendon said with an edge of superiority in his voice that was meant to make her bristle, and did. “You have apparently been engaged in something… strenuous.”

She barely resisted the temptation to look down at what she had worn to practice at the armory. For the first time in longer than she could remember she wished she were dressed properly, in the full panoply of her position.

“Oh, but there are no bad times for relatives,” was what she said, as sweetly as she could, “and family is, of course permitted a certain informality of both dress and speech. But even among family, one can go too far.” She smiled, with teeth showing. “You will, of course, forgive me for meeting you while dressed this way, dear cousin.”

“Oh, Highness, the fault is all ours. My sister-in-law was so anxious to meet you that I took a chance we might find you out and about This is Elan M’Cory, the sister of my brother Caradon’s wife.”

The girl made an elaborate courtesy. “Your Highness.”

“We were introduced at your sisters wedding, I think.” Briony was furious that she should be forced to stand here in her sweaty clothes, but Hendon Tolly was playing a deliberate game and she would not let him see her irritation. She concentrated instead on the young woman, who was roughly her own age and pretty in a translucent, long-boned way. Unlike her brother-in-law, Elan kept her eyes cast down and offered little in the way of reply to Briony’s equally perfunctory questions.

“I really must go,” Briony announced at last. “There is much to do. Lord Tolly, you and I must speak on important matters. Will this evening suit you? And of course you will join us for supper, I hope. We missed your company last night.”

“Tired from the journey,” he said. “And with worry for my missing brother, of course. Doubtless, fears for Duke Gailon have made things difficult for you, too, Highness.”

“It seems there is a conspiracy to make things difficult for me, Lord Tolly, and your brother’s sudden absence is certainly one of them. You might also have heard that my brother Kendrick died.”

He raised an eyebrow at this broad stroke. “But of course, Highness, of course! I was devastated when I heard the news, but I was traveling in northern Syan at the time, and since Gailon was actually here to represent the family at the funeral.

“Yes, certainly.” She suddenly wondered what had really brought Hendon here now, of all times. The two-or-three-day ride from Summerfield Court seemed a bit of a long distance to come simply to cause trouble. Briony couldn’t forget Brone s spy and his warnings that the Autarch had been in touch with theTollys, although she couldn’t quite make sense of it. She did not put treachery beyond them, but it seemed a large step—and a large risk—for a family that was already living a fat and comfortable life. Still, as her father had always said, the prospect of a throne could make people do some very strange things indeed. “Now, as I said, I have much to do I suspect that you will be busy as well. For one thing, you will want to send a message home to your family as soon as you have heard my news.” He was clearly caught by surprise “News? Have you heard something of Gailon?" “I fear not. But I have news, nonetheless.”

“You have the advantage of me, Highness What is afoot? Will you make me wait until tonight to find out?" “I’m surprised you haven’t heard already. We are at war.”

For a moment Hendon Tolly actually blanched—seeing that was worth the humiliation of standing for a quarter of an hour in sweaty clothes. “We… We…”

“Oh, no, not Southmarch and Summerfield Court, Lord Hendon.” She laughed and did not try to make it nice. “No, we are family, of course, your folk and mine. In fact, you will no doubt be joining us—all the March Kingdoms will be going to war together.”

“But but against whom?” he asked. Even the girl was looking up now, staring.

“Why, against the fairies, of course. Now you must excuse me, there really is a great deal to be done. Our army rides out at dawn tomorrow.”

She had the immense satisfaction of leaving Hendon Tolly and his companion speechless, but the cut and thrust with him had driven whatever else she was thinking about straight out of her head, and already a dozen other matters were clamoring for attention. She hoped it had been nothing important.

Neither Chert nor Beetledown spoke much now. The food was long gone, the waterskin was less than half full, and it had become very warm in these very close spaces.

Once through the tunnels bored by the Funderlings and into the caverns on the far side, they had passed down a bewildering variety of passages, all perfectly natural as far as Chert could tell, although it was strange to find natural passages so long and clear. Even though they were not difficult going— in most places he didn’t even have to bend his head—they were complex and confusing: if he had been forced to rely on his memories of his own pilgrimage so many years ago they would have gone far astray. Only Beetledown’s near-silent communication of directions—pokes and prods and the occasional whispered word when his nose detected a stronger scent in one direction—gave Chert any hope of finding Flint and getting out again.

They were decidedly odd places, these tunnels, and not simply because it was difficult to know whether they were entirely natural. The air might be hot and thick, but there was also a strange sweetness to it that made everyone who breathed it light-headed, adding immeasurably to the awe-someness of the ceremonies that took place in the depths.

They were walking along a thin path now, scarcely more than a ledge above a deep emptiness, and Chert was moving very carefully, not least because the light from the first piece of coral was dying. He realized that by any sensible measure they should turn back soon. He hadn’t guessed they would be descending so far, and in fact had thought himself quite clever to have brought a second chunk, but now as he fitted the new lump into his headpiece of polished horn, and the touch of salt water brought it to light, he realized he was one bad choice by little Boulder from being lost in darkness. Chert was a Funderling and did not panic in the dark or deep places, and his sense of touch and knowledge of the deeps were both well-developed, but he still might wander for days before finding his way out— which might be entirely too late for young Flint.

“What does be down here?” rasped Beetledown suddenly. The thick, perfumed air seemed to be affecting his voice. “Thy boy, why should un be here at all?”

“I don’t know.” Chert didn’t have much breath for talking either. He wiped sweat from his forehead, then had a moment of fright when he almost brushed his strapped lantern off his head and down into the pit. “It’s… it’s a powerful place. The boy has always been strange. I don’t know.”

As they continued down the narrow path, Chert soon began to wonder whether the fetid air was beginning to choke him or whether something stranger was going on. There were times when he thought he heard voices—-just the faintest sighing words, as though one of the Guild work gangs were a few hundred steps away down a side passage. At other moments little flashes of light moved through the greater darkness around him, swift as the flecks that gleamed behind closed eyelids Such things could be a sign of poison air, and in any other place Chert would have turned and retreated, but the air in the deepest part of the Mysteries, although never fresh, was also, as far as he knew, never fatal Beetledown was having real trouble breathing, however, the Funderling reminded himself that the little man was used to the clean air of the rooftops In fact, even Chert was beginning to slip in and out of waking dreams about that cold, clean air, so much so that at one point he realized he had wandered only a step from the edge of the path. It was a long way down into blackness, although how long he could only guess.

The murmuring continued all around him. It might have been air currents pushed through the tunnels from the halls above by the tide changing—they were far below the sea now—but Chert thought he could hear snatches of words, sobbing, even distant shouts that raised the hackles on his neck. The temple brothers came down here, he reminded himself, and they survived it, but the thought did little to ease his fears. Who knew what preparations they made, what secret sacrifices they gave to the lords of these deep places? He considered the holy mystery of the Earth Elders and the Quiet Blind Voice and struggled against growing terror.

What was indisputable was that light was growing all around him. Chert could begin to see the shape of the chamber through which they were passing. For the first time in hours he felt something like hope. They were reaching an area he recognized, a part of the pilgrimage route. A few moments later, as he escaped the treacherous ledge-path at last, following it through an arch as it burrowed deep into the stone, the milky, blue-white light rose all around them.

“Moonstone Hall,” Chert announced with relief, if not much breath. The coolness of the glowing walls studded with great fractured chunks of palely translucent gemstone was in strange contrast to the swampy air. “You see, these places down here make their own light. We are near to the center of the Mysteries.”

Beetledown said nothing, only nodded, presumably overcome by the grandeur of the cavern, its walls glowing like smoky blue ice.

Chert continued down through the Chamber of Cloud Crystal and into Emberstone Reach, the light like a living thing all around him. His head swimming and eyes dazzled after so long in darkness, he could not help wondering how these great caves could each be so different: it was like no natural place he had seen anywhere else in Southmarch or in his journeys around Eion in his younger days.

But it isn’t a natural place, he reminded himself. These are the Mysteries. A shiver of superstitious dread climbed his spine. What was he doing here? Caught up in the search for Flint, he hadn’t performed even the simplest rituals before descending, said none of the litanies, made not a single offering. The Earth Elders would be furious.

It was in Emberstone Reach that he suddenly realized there was a reason for Beetledown’s long silence when the little man swayed and tumbled off his shoulder. Chert caught him and crouched, holding him up to look at him in the light from the orange-gold ember crystals. The Gutter-Scout was alive but clearly in great discomfort. “Too hot,” he said weakly. “Can’t… get air.”

Chert fought a powerful dread. He was so close now! They were only a short distance from the end of the tunnels, at least the end of those parts he and the rest of the Funderlings knew, and thus only a short distance from Flint, but he didn’t want to kill the tiny Rooftopper in the act of saving the boy. He forced himself to think as carefully as he could with head and limbs so weary, then untied the shirt he had tied around his waist when the air got too hot and made a nest for the little man. He put Beetledown in it and set him on a knob of stone high off the ground. Chert knew that poison air, even the milder varieties, was heavy and tended to stay low. He also left the little man his coral lantern for company.

“I’ll be back soon,” he said. “I promise. I’m just going down a little farther.” He gave the tiny bowman his kerchief moistened in water to fight thirst.

“Cats… ?” asked Beetledown weakly.

“No cats down here,” Chert assured him. “I already promised you that.”

“Just in case,” the little man said, and sat up—it took much of his strength—then pulled his bow and quiver off and set them down within easy reach before slumping back into the makeshift bed.

Chert hurried on. He had all the more reason for haste now—not just his worries about the boy and about Opal and the dying light of the coral, but also about whether he would repay the kindness of the Rooftopper queen and of brave Beetledown himself with the emissary’s death.

Emberstone Reach ended and the Maze began. He cursed the luck that had brought him into the befuddling labyrinth without the Rooftopper and his keen nose, but there was nothing to be done. Chert remembered something he had been told as a child, at an age when whispering about the initiation was more important than whispering about girls. A lways turn left, his friends had said with the confidence of those who had not been tested. When you hit a dead end, turn and backtrack, then do the same thing again with the next tunnel. At their intiation they had not needed to solve the Maze after all—they had been led in by the acolytes, abandoned for a while, and then led out. Now he had no choice but to try the ancient advice, since this time there were no temple brothers around to help him.

Here between the Reach and the Sea in the Depths there were also no natural lights, and Chert had to make his way through the Maze in darkness, with only the sound of his own ragged, weary breathing and the thump of his heart for company. After what seemed like an hour tracing and retracing what to the touch were indistinguishable passages, he finally grew certain he was lost, he was just about to sit down and weep with despair when he felt moving air on his face. Heart pounding now for joy and relief, he followed the breeze a few more turnings until he stepped out of the Maze and into the blue-lit vastness of the Sea Hall, but his happiness lasted only moments. He was on the balcony on the outside of the Maze with a long fatal drop below him, a barrier so effective that even the pilgrims who completed the Mysteries never saw more of the monsterous Sea Hall cavern than this. There was no way down to the cavern floor, and no sign of Flint on the great raw stone balcony.

There was nowhere else the boy could be.

Now Chert did weep a little, exhausted and despondent. He got down on his knees and crawled close to the edge, half certain that he would see the boy’s mangled body on the jagged, rocky shore beneath him, illuminated by the weird blue crystals of the cavern’s roof Instead, the reach of broken, piled stone was empty all the way to the silvery Sea in the Depths and the unreachable island at its center where the vast rocky form stood that figured in so many Funderling nightmares and revelations. The man-shaped formation was shrouded in shadow, but the roof-stones shed their light almost everywhere else. There was no sign of Flint, either living or dead.

Chert was plunged back into the misery of uncertainty. Had he and Beetledown walked right past Flint at some other turning, not knowing that the boy lay senseless or even dead nearby? The Mysteries and the tunnels and caves above them were unimaginably complex. How could he even guess where to start a new search if the Rooftopper’s nose was not to be trusted’.

Then, as if it had sensed Chert’s distant presence, the huge and mysterious stone figure known as the Shining Man began to flicker alight on its island at the center of the Sea in the Depths, and Chert’s heart sped until he thought it might burst. He had seen the statue only one other time, at his initiation, in the company of other young Funderlings, under the guidance of the Metamorphic Brothers. This time, he was alone and full of an interloper’s guilt. As the massive crystalline shape suddenly blazed with blue and purple and golden light, it threw strange reflections on the sea itself, which was not water but an immense pool of something like quicksilver, so that all the cavern was full of leaping colors and the Shining Man almost appeared to move, as if awakening from a long slumber Chert flung himself down, his belly against the stone. He begged the Earth Elders’ forgiveness and prayed to be spared.

The gods did not see fit to strike him dead, and after a few moments the light dimmed a little, enough that he dared to raise his head, but when he did so, Chert’s superstitious terror was suddenly made worse. In the new light he could see a small shape on the island—a moving figure that advanced, crawling slowly upward from the edge of the shining metal sea toward the feet of the glowing giant, the Shining Man. Even from this distance, with the figure small as an insect, Chert knew who it was.

“Flint!” he shouted, and his voice echoed out across the quicksilver sea, but the small shadow did not stop or even look back.

30. Awakening

The ceiling of the main trigonate temple was so high that even with the great doors closed it had its own subtle winds— the thousands of candles on altars and in alcoves were all fluttering. At this hour of the morning it was also very cold. Barrick’s arm ached.

The prince regent was surrounded by the men who would accompany him into the west, his unloved cousin Rorick Longarren and more proven warriors like Tyne of Blueshore and Tyne’s old friend, the extravagantly mustached Droy Nikomede of Eastlake, along with many others Barrick knew mostly by reputation. In fact, much of the flower of the March Kingdoms’ nobility had gathered for this blessing—doughty Mayne Calough from far Kertewall, Sivney Fiddicks who some called the Piecemeal Knight because his armor and battle array were all prizes he had won in various tilts, Earl Gowan M’Ardall of Helmingsea, and several dozen other high lords dressed in white robes, plus five or six times that number of humbler stature who yet possessed their own horses and armor and at least a cottage or field somewhere so they could call themselves “landed.”

Like all the others, Barrick Eddon was down on one knee, facing the altar where Sisel told the blessing, the ancient Hierosolme phrases rolling from the hierarch’s tongue like the meaningless babble of a fast-running stream. Barrick knew he would soon be riding to war, perhaps even to death Not only that, the enemy they all faced were the wild creatures from the shadowlands, the old terror, the stuff of nightmares—yet he felt oddly flat, empty and unconcerned.

He raised his eyes to the vast tripartite statue behind the altar, the three gods of theTngon standing atop an artfully carved stone plinth that became clouds around the sky god’s feet, stones and waves respectively for the gods of earth and sea. The three towering deities stared outward, with Perin in the center in his rightful place as the highest of the high, fish-scaled Erivor on his right, glowering Kernios on his left They were half brothers, all children of old Sveros, the night sky, from different mothers. Barrick wondered if any one of the Trigon would be willing to die for his brothers as he would give his life for Briony—as he almost certainly was going to give his life for her. But since they were gods and thus immortal and invulnerable, how would such a thing happen? How could gods be brave?

Hierarch Sisel was still droning. The old man had insisted on leading the ceremony himself because of the importance of the occasion—and because, Barrick suspected, like so many others he wished to do something to help, to feel himself a contributor Word had passed swiftly through castle and city there was not one person in a hundred now who did not know that war was coming, and that it was apparently going to be a strange and frightening sort of war as well.

How Barrick himself felt about it all was even stranger, he had to admit—like reaching for something on a high shelf that was just out of reach no matter how one jumped or strained. He simply couldn’t make himself feel much of anything.

When the hierarch’s part of the ceremony was over, Sisel took Barrick aside as the other nobles were having their robes perfumed with sacred smoke by the blue-clad temple mantises. The hierarch had a half-humble, half-irritated expression that Barrick knew very well it was a look his elders often wore when they wanted to scold him but couldn’t help remembering that one or two of Barrick’s ancestors had imprisoned people—or even killed them, if certain popular rumors were true—for giving unwelcome advice.

“It is a brave thing you are doing, my prince,” Sisel said.

He means to say “stupid,” Barrick decided, but of course that was a word even a hierarch of the Tngonate would not use to an enthroned prince. “I have my reasons, Eminence. Some of them are good ones.”

Sisel raised his hand. It was meant to signify no more needs to be said, but to Barrick it was irritatingly close to Shaso’s raised hand, which throughout his childhood usually meant: Shut up, boy. “Of course, Highness. Of course. And the Three Powerful Ones grant that you and the others come home safely. Tyne is to lead, of course?" His forehead wrinkled as he realized what he had said. “In support of you, of course, Prince Barrick.”

He almost smiled. “Of course. But let us be honest. I’m to be a sort of… what do they have on the front of a ship? A masthead?”

“Figurehead?”

“Yes. I don’t expect the soldiers to listen to me, Hierarch—I have no experience of war yet In fact, I hope to learn something from Tyne and the others If the Three grant I come back safely, that is.”

Sisel gave him a strange look—he had perhaps detected something a little false in Barrick’s pious manner—but he was also relieved and clearly didn’t want to think about it much. “You show great wisdom, my prince. You are unquestionably your father’s son.”

“Yes, I think that’s true.”

Sisel was still puzzled by whatever lurked beneath Barrick’s words. “These are not natural creatures we face, my prince. We should not be troubled at what we do.”

We? “What do you mean?”

“These… things. The Twilight People, as they are superstitiously named, the Old Ones. They are unnatural—the enemies of men. They would take what is ours. They must be destroyed like rats or locusts, without compunction.”

Barrick could only nod Rats. Locusts. He let himself be censed. The perfumes in the smoke reminded him of the spice stalls of Market Square, made him wish badly to be there again with Briony, as when they were children and had escaped for a delicious, giggling moment or two with half the household in ragged pursuit.

After he had removed the ceremonial robe, Barrick followed the knights and nobles out of the temple. Tyne Aldritch and the others looked rested and refreshed, as though they had just come from a bath and a nap, and Barrick couldn’t help being jealous that the trip to the temple had given them this comfort—a comfort he himself did not feel.

Earl Tyne saw Barrick’s troubled face and slowed until they were walking side by side. “The gods will protect us, never fear, Prince Barrick. The creatures are uncanny things, but they are real—they are made of flesh. When we cut them, their blood will flow.”

How can you be sure of that? he wanted to ask. After all, the only person in all of Southmarch with any experience of their enemy was that soldier Vansen, who had actually been present for the killing of one of the Shadowline creatures, although admittedly a small and not very dangerous one, and who had also been attacked by a much larger thing that half a dozen soldiers had not managed to harm at all, even as it took one of their company like a child snatching a sweetmeat from an unguarded plate.

Barrick did not share any of these thoughts either.

“The monsters will be frightening, no doubt,” said Tyne quietly. They paused as the temple acolytes pushed open the heavy bronze doors and let the bay air spill in, ruffling hair and clothing and making the candle flames sputter. “Remember, Highness, it is important that we show the men a courageous face.”

“The gods will give us what courage we need, no doubt.”

“Yes,” said Tyne, nodding vigorously. “They did for me when I was a youth.”

Barrick suddenly realized that although Tyne Aldritch was more than twice Barrick’s own age, he was still a great deal younger than the twins’ father, King Olin. He was a man still young enough to have ambitions— perhaps he hoped that Barrick would remember him as a loyal friend and mentor if they all survived, that his fortune would rise even higher if Barrick Eddon became king someday. Tyne’s daughter was nearly of marriageable age, after all. Perhaps he dreamed of a royal connection.

Up until this moment it had been hard for Barrick to think of most of his elders as anything other than an undifferentiated mass, at least those who were not yet dodderingly old. Now for the first time he examined the battle-scarred Earl of Blueshore and wondered what Tyne himself saw when he gazed out at the world, what he thought and hoped and feared. Barrick looked around at Sivney Fiddicks and Ivar of Silverside and the other lords, faces held up, jaws set in expressions meant to be brave and inspiring as the pale sunshine spilled in through the open doors, and realized that every one of these men lived inside his own head just as Barrick lived in his, and that all of the hundreds of people waiting anxiously on the stairs outside the temple for a glimpse of the nobility of Southmarch lived within their own thoughts as well, as completely and separately as Barrick himself did.

It’s as if we live on a thousand, thousand different islands in the middle of an ocean, he thought, but with no boats We can see each other We can shout to each other. But we can none of us leave our own island and travel to another.

This idea hit him with a far stronger force than any of the ritual he had just experienced inside the temple, and so he did not realize for a moment that the crowd of people on the steps was pushing the ring of guards back toward the temple doors, that in their fear over the rumors of war and even more terrifying things, the throng of common folk was only moments away from trampling the very people they expected to defend them Some of the priests began to shut the great doors again. The guards were shoving back with the long handles of their pikes and a few of the crowd were knocked down and bruised. A woman screamed Some men began trying to pull the pikes away from the guards. A few clods of dirt thudded down on the steps, one hit a Marrinswalk baron on the leg and he stared dumbfounded at the stain on his clean hose as though it were blood Rorick shouted in alarm, perhaps as much at the threat to his own cleanliness as the danger to his person Then, as if it happened in a dream—he was still caught up in the idea of people as islands—Barrick watched Tyne draw his sword, heard the rattle and hiss of a dozen blades leaving their scabbards as other nobles followed Blueshore’s lead. The smell of the crowd so close around them was an animal reek, alien and frightening.

Tyne and the others —they’re going to kill people, he realized. It scarcely seemed possible it was happening so swiftly Or the people may kill us. But why? He looked at the faces around him, saw a growing realization reflected between the nobles and commons that things were falling to pieces and that none of them knew how to stop it.

But I can, he realized. It was a heady feeling, although oddly cheerless. He raised his good hand and walked down a few steps Tyne snatched at him but Barrick ducked away.

“Stop!” he cried, but no one could hear his words above the shouting of frightened people most of the faces staring up at the temple portico couldn’t even see him. He turned and bounded back up the steps to where the massive bronze doors still stood halfway open—one of the cleverer priests, perhaps Sisel himself, had realized it would not be a good idea to lock out the prince regent and the other nobles while they were surrounded by a furious mob—then he yanked a pike away from one of the nearest guardsmen, who surrendered it with a look of complete confusion and misery, as though he suspected that for some inscrutable princely reason Barrick was about to strike him with his own weapon. Instead, Barrick used the heavy pike head to pound against the bronze door until the raw echoes flew across the yard. Heads turned and the shouting slowly began to diminish.

Barrick was breathing very hard: it was difficult to wield the pike with only one hand, bracing it under his arm to hammer at the door, but it had worked. Most of the crowd stared openmouthed at their young prince in front of the temple doorway.

“What do you want?” he cried. “Do you want to crush us? We are going out to fight for the city—for our land. In the holy name of the Three, what do you think you’re doing, pressing in on us like this?”

Some of those caught up with the guards stepped back, shamefaced, but others were more entangled; the process of undoing the near-riot was as complicated as unpicking delicate stitchery. A guardsman still grappling with a sullen onlooker overbalanced and fell with a clang of armor and several of his fellow guards moved forward angrily. Barrick raised his voice again. “Stop. Let the people tell me. What do you want?”

“If you and the other lords go, Prince Barrick, who will protect the city?” a man shouted. “The fairy folk will come and take our children!” cried someone else, a woman.

Barrick made a show of his confident smile. It was strange how easily this kind of thing came to him, this useful duplicity. “Who will protect the city? The city is protected by Brenn’s Bay, which is worth more than any knights, even these fine nobles. Look around you! If you -were a warlord, even the warlord of a fairy army, would you want to come up that causeway and against these high walls? And don’t forget, my sister Briony will still be here, an Eddon on the throne—believe me, even the Twilight People don’t want to get her angry.”

A few of the people laughed, but others were still calling out anxious questions. Tyne made a show of sheathing his sword.

“Please!” Barrick said to the crowd. “Let us get on with this day’s work—we are to ride soon. Avin Brone the lord constable will come back here and speak at midday, to tell you of how we will defend the castle and the city, what each of you can do to help.”

“The Three bless you, Prince Barrick!” a woman called, and the pained hope in her voice was real enough to touch him even to frighten him. “Come home safe to us!”

Other blessings and good wishes rained down, a moment before it had been clumps of dirt and even a few stones. The crowd didn’t disperse, but they opened a path so that Barrick and the rest of the knights could head back toward the Raven Gate and the inner keep.

“You handled that well, Highness.” Tyne sounded a little surprised. “The gods told you the right words to say.”

“I am an Eddon. They know my family. They know we do not lie to them.” But he couldn’t help wondering. Did I truly do that? Or did the gods indeed work through me? I felt no god, that’s all I know. In truth he was not certain how he felt at all—proud that he had quelled an anxious mob and given them hope, or distressed by how easily they could be swayed from one extreme to another?

And we are not even truly at war. Not yet, He had a sudden chill of presentiment, What will it be like when things begin to go bad?

And where will the gods be then?

The noise of hammers was almost deafening, as though a flock of monstrous woodpeckers had descended on Southmarch Castle Men clambered on every wall and tower, it seemed, putting up wooden boardings against the possibility of a siege. After the torpor that had gripped the castle in the past months, it was almost a relief to see so much activity, but Briony knew this was no mere attack from a neighboring kingdom against which they must defend themselves. The March Kingdoms were at war with a completely unknown and perhaps unknowable enemy When the men on the walls and towers looked out toward the still innocent western horizon, and they looked often, the fear on their faces was plain even from the ground Not only the workers found their attention compromised the princess regent was so busy watching the work that she stumbled into a low boxwood hedge Rose and Moina hurried forward to help her, but she shook them off, murmuring angrily.

“These cursed hedges! How can a person even walk?” Sister Utta appeared in one of the gallery archways. Despite the cool gray skies she wore only a light wrap over her plain gown. A wimple of the same color covered her hair, so that her handsome face seemed almost to hang in the air like a mask on a wall. “It would be hard to make a knot garden without hedges,” the Zorian sister said gently. “I hope you haven’t hurt yourself, Highness.”

“I’m well, I suppose.” Briony rubbed at her lower leg. She had discovered one of the disadvantages of wearing hose like a man—there was nothing to protect your shins from pokes and bumps.

Utta seemed to know what the princess regent was thinking; in any case, she smiled. “It was kind of you to visit me.”

“Not kind. I’m miserable. I have no one to talk to.” She looked up in time to catch the hurt glance that jumped from Moina to Rose. “No one but these two,” she said hastily, “and I have complained to them so much that they are surely tired of hearing my voice.”

“Never, Highness!” Rose said it in such a clattering hurry to make her feel better that Briony almost laughed. Now she knew that they were tired of listening to her.

“We worry for you, Briony, that’s all,” Moina agreed, and by forgetting to use her mistress’ title she proved that she was speaking the truth.

They are good and kind, these girls, she thought, and for a moment felt herself old enough to be their grown sister, even their mother, although small, yellow-haired Rose was her own age and dark Moina almost a full year her elder.

“How is your great-aunt?” asked Utta.

“Merolanna? Feeling better. With these musters of soldiers marching in and all these guests in the castle, she is in her element—like a sea captain in a storm. She’s been looking in on my stepmother, too, since Anissa’s time is close and Chaven has seen fit to disappear.” It was hard for Briony to keep her anger at the physician to a polite growl. Finished brushing the bits of boxwood off her hose and the bottom of her tunic, she straightened up. The smell of hyssop and especially lavender were strong here despite the cold breeze off the bay, but they were not soothing. She wondered if anything would soothe her. “And you, Sister—are you well?”

“My joints are sore—it always happens when the wind freshens. If you wish to go in out of the garden, I will not complain.”

“I can barely hear you with all this clattering, anyway, and it won’t be better anywhere else out of doors. Where shall we go?”

“I was about to go to the shrine and make an offering for the safety of your brother and the rest. It is quiet there. What do you think?”

“I think that would be lovely,” Briony told her. “Rose, Moina—stop making eyes at those men on the wall and come along.”

The castle’s Zorian shrine had none of the ostentation of the Erivor Chapel, let alone the huge and grand Trigonate temple. Little more than a single large room, it stood in a corner of the keep near the residence, just below the Tower of Summer. The altar was simple and only one small stained-glass window brought in the daylight, a rendition crafted in the previous century of Zona with her arms outstretched and seabirds landing on her hands and flying about her head. It was a strangely beautiful picture, Briony had always thought, and even in today’s poor sunlight the colors glowed. The shrine was empty, although Briony knew that an older Zorian priestess and at least two or three young novices lived in the apartment beside the chapel. They were Utta’s friends—her family, really, since her true kin were far away in theVuttish Isles and far in the past as well.

“When did you last see any of your family?” she asked her tutor. “Your blood family.” Utta appeared startled by the question. “My brother visited me here once some years ago. Before that—oh, my, Princess Briony, I have not seen any of them since I joined the Sisters.”

Which must have been thirty years or more, Briony guessed. “Don’t you miss them?”

“I miss the time when I was young. I miss the sense of being in that house, on that island, and feeling that it was the center of the whole world. I miss how I felt about my mother then, although later I came to feel differently.” She bowed her head for a moment. “Yes, I do, I suppose.”

Briony thought it strange to have to consider whether or not you missed your family. She hid her puzzlement in the act of choosing and lighting a candle and setting it on the altar before the statue of Zoria.This version of the goddess was much more staid than the one in the colorful window; her arms hung at her side and her eyes were cast down as though she looked at her own feet, but there was a faint smile on her lips that Briony had always liked, the smile of a woman who kept her own counsel. Moina and Rose came forward and lit candles also, although they both seemed a little confused and made the three-fingered sign of the Trigon over their breasts as they set the candles down. They were doing their best, Briony reminded herself, fighting annoyance: they were both girls from country families and had barely been exposed to Zoria’s worship or sisterhood at all until coming to live in Southmarch castle.

Merciful Zoria, robed in wisdom, bring my brother Barrick home safe, Briony prayed. Bring them all back safe, even Guard Captain Vansen. He is not such a bad man. And help me do what is best for Southmarch and her people. She looked up, hoping to see something in Zoria’s face that would tell her the goddess had heard her and would honor her request (she was the princess regent, after all—didn’t that count for something?) but the serene features of Perin’s virgin daughter were unchanged.

She suddenly remembered. And bring Father home safe again from Hierosol. She had prayed for that thing every day, but today she had almost forgotten. A quick chill moved over her. Did it mean anything? Was a god whispering to her, trying to tell her something had happened to him? Could it be her fault—had she shown too much pride in her own abilities as ruler of Southmarch?

“I hoped this place would bring you some peace, Princess,” said her tutor. “But you look troubled.” “Oh, Utta, how could I look otherwise?”

Brother and sister were silent as they rode down the causeway across Brenn’s Bay toward the great field where the mustered soldiers had been quartered, a swath of harvested land an hour’s ride distant, at the southernmost edge of Avin Brone’s fiefdom of Landsend. The day was cold and clear but the wind was rising. It wrapped the new cloak Merolanna had embroidered for him around Barrick’s neck in a strangler’s grip. He grunted as he used his crippled arm to free himself, but still did not speak. He knew Briony wanted him to, but he did not want to hear what she would say in turn. He had heard it enough times already.

From the center of the causeway they could see that the low-tide shallows and mud flats at the base of the castle mount were full of workers— almost another army, it seemed, swarming above the mud on makeshift platforms. They had demolished the ramshackle market town before the gate, and now were pulling apart the stones of the causeway itself beneath the castle walls, preparing to replace it with a wooden bridge that could be torn down in moments, thus completely cutting the castle off from the land and forcing any invader to ride over sucking mud with water up to the horses’ necks, or else find a way to get boats across the bay’s tricky currents under fire from the walls when the tide came back in. Little wonder, Barrick reflected, that Envor of the Dark Seas had always been held the special patron of the Eddons. Who else but the sea god had given them this almost unconquerable vantage? Briony and the others will be safe here no matter what, he thought.

His twin didn’t seem to be sharing his thought, but gnawed at her lower lip in the way she did when she was worrying about something, a habit carried over from childhood so completely it almost seemed a cherished memento. He followed the line of her sight.The captain of the guard, Vansen, was riding a short distance to the side of them. Barrick felt a touch of jealousy, although he knew it was absurd.

She still hates that one, he thought Loathes him to the point of unfairness, as if it were all his fault Kendrick died. They rode in silence for a long time, so that Barrick was almost drowsing in his saddle when his sister finally spoke, and at first he could make no sense of her words.

“He won’t defend the city.”

“Who? What city?”

“Avin Brone,” she said, as if the name tasted bad. “The rest of South-march, of course, the mainland. He said that the walls are too long and too low on the inland side, and it’s too hard to defend.”

“He’s right How would we do it?” Barrick pointed to the thicket of gabled roofs stretching away down the coastline and outward as far as the base of the hills. He was grateful to be distracted from his own heavy thoughts, but it seemed odd to be talking with his sister about such things—as though they were playing at being adults.

“I don’t know,” she said. “But we can’t possibly get all those people inside the keep…” “The gods save us, no, we bloody well can’t, Briony! You couldn’t get a quarter of them into the castle and have room for them to sit down, let alone feed them all.”

“So we should just abandon them if there’s a siege?”

“We have to hope there won’t be a siege. Because if there is, we’ll have to do more than leave those people to fend for themselves. We’ll have to burn that part of the city down.”

“What? Just to keep the besiegers from getting their hands on the stores there?”

“And the wood, and everything else that we don’t destroy. As it is, you… we… will probably have to stand by while the catapults throw the stones of our own city onto us.”

“You don’t know that, and neither does Avin Brone.” Her anger seemed mostly sadness. “Nobody knows anything! There haven’t been any sieges of proper cities in the Marchlands for half a hundred years—I heard Father talk about it once. Some people say there won’t ever be again because of cannons and bombards and . and all those other things that blow stones and metal balls through the air. There’s no point.”

It annoyed Barrick to be told things about war by his sister. It annoyed him even more that she had clearly been paying more attention than he had. “No point? So what should we do, just surrender?” “That’s not what I meant and you know it.”

The hour wore on as they rode in silence up the coast road into the lower reaches of Landsend. The chill air carried little except the clean tang of the pines and the ever-present smell of the sea.

Briony finally said, “We can’t be certain it will be a siege, Barrick. We don’t even know what these twilight creatures plan—they’re not men, they’re something else Only the gods can guess what they’ll do.”

“We’ll have an idea soon enough. If they’ve marched into Daler’s Troth, we’ll meet people who know something about them and how they fight. We’ll send you back word as soon as we hear anything.”

She turned abruptly to face him. “Oh, Barrick, you will be careful, won’t you? I’m so angry with you, I don’t want you to go.”

He felt himself stiffen. “I’m old enough to decide for myself.”

“But that doesn’t mean it’s right.” She stared, shook her head. “I’m frightened for you. Don’t let’s argue anymore. Just…just don’t do anything foolish, please. No matter what… what dreams you have, what you fear.”

The cold heaviness that had cast a shadow over him all day was abruptly pierced by a shaft of regret and love. He looked at his sister, her so-familiar face—his own face, but seen in a bright mirror, open where he was pinched and hidden, golden and pink where he was angry, bloody-red, and corpse-pale—and wished that things had turned out a different way. For just as he had been struck earlier that day by the powerful certainty that some unstoppable downward slide had begun, so also he couldn’t help feeling deeply, wordlessly, that he and his beloved twin, his best and perhaps only friend, would never again be together in this way.

The certainty hit him now like a blow in the stomach: a gulf would open between them, something wide and deep. Was it death whose cold breath he could almost feel, or something stranger still? Whatever it was, he began to shudder and it quickly became so strong that he could barely stay upright in his saddle. Suddenly he pitched forward, falling down some dark tunnel, flailing away into a nothingness where a cold, knowing presence awaited him…

“Barrick!” He heard her terrified voice as if from the other side of a crowded, noisy room. “Barrick, what’s wrong?”

The roaring in his ears eased a bit. The gray day returned and pushed back the darkness. He was leaning low over his saddle, his head almost on his horse Kettle’s neck. “I’m well enough. Leave me alone.”

A measure of Briony’s fright was that she had seized his crippled arm. He snatched it back and straightened up. No one around them seemed to be staring, but he could tell by the studied way in which they all looking at anything except the prince and his sister that they had only just averted their eyes.

“The gods make a mockery of us,” he said quietly.

His attention distracted by his near-swoon, he had failed to notice that they had arrived at the field. The mustered men were waiting below them in ragged array among the shorn stalks of grain, a thousand or more of the earliest arrivals who had been chivvied into lines by their sergeants, but still did not look much like an army. More men streamed in every day from the provinces, but instead of joining this westbound company most of the newcomers would bolster the defenses of Southmarch itself.

“Don’t say such things about the gods,” Briony pleaded. “Not when you are about to go away. I can’t bear it.”

He looked at her and despite his shame and misery, felt a thump of love for her in his chest. After all, what else did he have in this world? What else did he fear to lose? Nothing. He reached out and patted her hands where they clutched the reins of her horse Snow. “You’re right, strawhead. I’m sorry. And I don’t mean it. I don’t believe the gods are mocking us.”

And he was telling the truth. For in this open place, beneath this low gray sky, Barrick had suddenly decided that he did not believe in the gods at all.

After clambering all the way down the treacherous paths hidden below the balcony at the end of the Maze—who could have guessed there even were such things as paths going down to the Sea in the Depths? Who used them, the temple brothers?—Chert had finally reached the shore to stand on the rounded stones in a madness of shimmering colors, but he couldn’t find any evidence of how the boy had crossed the silvery sea. He couldn’t help wondering whether he was being punished by the Earth Elders for bringing an outsider down to the sacred Mysteries, for approaching their deep haunts without the proper ceremony. He felt impious just being so close to the Shining Man, which loomed like a mountain at the center of its island. Even here on the shore he could still make little sense of it except for its roughly manlike shape. It wasn’t easy even to see that much the Shining Man’s uneven glow lit the ceiling and reflected from the Sea in the Depths as well, so that all the walls of the huge cavern were painted with smears of wobbly, many-hued light.

But why would the Elders punish me and yet allow the boy to cross? Chert felt a moment of doubt. Perhaps he had not seen Flint at all—perhaps he had been fooled by a bat’s shadow, by his own fatigue, or more likely by the heady, disturbing air of the deepest Mysteries.

Then he saw a movement again on the island, a shadowy silhouette against the glow of the Shining Man that pushed all uncertainty from his mind. “Flint!" he shouted, cupping his hands around his mouth, jumping up and down on the rocky shore. “Flint! It’s me, Chert!”

He fancied that the shadow froze for a moment, but there was no reply to his call and an instant later it vanished in the confusion of pulsing light.

Cursing, he hurried up and down the shore again, but still could find no trace of how the boy had crossed the metallic underground sea. As he stood, muttering in exhausted frustration, he suddenly remembered another small person in his charge, one he had almost completely forgotten in the excitement of seeing what he felt sure was the boy.

“Beetledown! Fissure and fracture, I’ve left him up there alone for an hour or more!” And sick, too, having trouble getting a full breath. Chert was stabbed with the sharp point of his own helplessness—so many things gone wrong and no way to fix any of them. The boy—everything in life had gone wrong since the moment he and Opal saw that sack dropped beside the Shadowline.

We should have left him there, he thought, and even with the aching in his heart, the love he had to admit he felt for the pale-haired child, it was hard to argue with that thought.

He scrambled back up the path, which was really little more than a goat track—but whoever heard of goats living a thousand teet below the ground? That thought had scarcely passed through his head when he saw something gleaming farther up the cliffside, something pale that stood between himself and the balcony at the end of the Maze. He stared in amazement at what he could only believe in these hot, flickering depths must be a sort of fever-vision.

Even on the surface in the waking world—at least this side of the Shadowline—there was no such thing as a deer with skin white to the point of translucence, a ghostly stag with weirdly slender legs and antlers like a tangle of sprouting roots, not to mention those huge, milky-blue eyes that glowed bright as candleflame. But that was what seemed to be staring down at him, at least for one astonishing moment. A heartbeat later it was gone.

Chert paused, clinging to a jutting outcrop, suddenly light-headed and fearful he might fall. Could it have been real? Or had he breathed too deeply of the Mysteries?

Oh, Lord of the Hot Wet Stone, help me —was that what I saw on the island, too? One of those things and not Flint at all? But unless the light and shadow had distorted the island-shape beyond anything he could credit, surely what he had seen there walked on two legs, had a round head—had been, in fact, a person.

When he reached the spot where the glassy-white deer had stood, he found no sign of anything living.

Chert was feeling quite sickened with terror of the gods and their sacred places by the time he reached the spot where he had left Beetledown it took him a few stupefied moments to be quite certain he was standing before the same knob of stone where he had left the Rooftopper, even though his own coral lantern was sitting where he had placed it, still gleaming.

The little man, however, was nowhere to be seen.

His stomach now roiling so that he feared he might be sick—he had lost everyone in his charge, all those who needed him most!—Chert got down on his hands and knees, holding the lantern close to the ground as he searched desperately around the base of the limestone knob for some sign of his companion. He could only pray to the very gods he had impinged upon that when he found him, Beetledown would still be alive.

It was an undignified position to be in, but he did not care at all until he heard a small voice, a yard or so from his ear, say, “Didst tha drop somewhat?"

“Beetledown! Where are you?"

“Just here, hinden this clutter of stone whatnots, but mind tha come quiet. Don’t scare un away.” “Scare who away?” The Funderling crept forward, his gloom lightening a little for the first time since he realized he could not reach the Shining Man’s island. Against all reason, he felt a small swell of hope. “Is it Flint? Did you find my boy?”

“Not unless thy boy wears whiskers and long tail.”

Chert stopped. The bowman was crouching a bit unsteadily in the fork of a two-part stalagmite, a formation that did not reach Chert’s waist but was a hilltop for the little man. Beetledown had his bow trained on something Chert couldn’t see until he crawled closer and marked the shiny black eye and twitching nose in the shadows. Startled by his appearance, the rat flinched and began to skitter along the stone wall, but one of Beetledown’s tiny arrows smacked against the wall just in front of its head and it froze again, only its nose moving.

“How long have you been trying to kill it?” Chert asked, amused as well as relieved. He would never have taken the Rooftopper for such a poor shot, but he supposed the heady, close airs of the caves had taken a toll. “Are you really that hungry?"

“Hungry? Th’art a huge, daft thing. No idea to eat it, I foremeant to ride it.” “Ride it?”

“Too far for me to walk back to the good air,” explained Beetledown. “But now here tha stand with thy huge, daft shoulder.” The tiny man smiled weakly. “So will tha carry me back home again?”

“You were going to ride this rat?” Chert was coming to his understanding slowly, but he had the beginnings of an idea. “All the way back up?”

“A Gutter-Scout am I,” Beetledown said a little indignantly. “Well-used am I to breaking a wild ratling to the saddle.” He shook his head. “And I’ll tell ‘ee true—I cannot take this heavy, choking air much longer.”

“Then let’s catch that rat. He might make us both happy.”

Beetledown was putting the last touches on a makeshift saddle—more of a harness, really—constructed from one strap of the coral lantern knotted with threads and fraying cloth from Chert’s shirt. The saddle’s eventual recipient was currently a prisoner in the bottom of Chert’s bag, happily scavenging up the crumbs left there from the meal Chert had purchased at the Salt Pool. And after he ate, Chert hoped, the beast might stop trying to bite. “But why will tha stay?”

“Because there has to be a way onto that island—the boy’s there, after all. And I’m going to find it.” “P’raps a boat there is, that un’s found and crossed with.”

Chert’s heart sank. He hadn’t thought of that. “Well, even so,” he said at last, “if he comes back across, I’ll be here to make certain he doesn’t get away again. And what if he needs help? How do you cross quicksilver with a boat, anyway? What if it… overturns or comes apart. They come apart sometimes, don’t they?”

“Never tha hast been on a boat, true?” said Beetledown with a little smile. “True,” Chert admitted.

“And I’m to ride away, then send ‘ee help. From where, good Master Funderling?”

“My wife Opal, if you can find her again. Otherwise, ask any of my folk to take you to her.”

Beetledown nodded. He pulled a knot tight on his rat-bridle, squinting at it with a sharp, experienced eye. “Un’ll do.” He stood. “Perchance ‘twould be better were I to send some of yon temple fellows—what did tha call uns? The Metal Marching Brothers, somewhat?”

“The Metamorphic… Oh, fissure and—I never thought of that! And they’ve already met you—they’ll know who you are. Of course.” He was angry with himself for not coming up with such an obvious idea, but events had overwhelmed him.

He helped Beetledown fasten the harness. The rat was calmer now but still not precisely docile and it took no little time. The Rooftopper was patient and skillful, however, and at last Chert was gingerly holding the rat in place while Beetledown climbed onto the creature’s back. As soon as Chert took his hand away, the rat tried to bolt, but the Rooftopper gave the creature a stinging slap on the muzzle with his bow; the rat squealed and tried to take off in another direction and was again punished. When all the cardinal points had proved equally dangerous, the rat crouched low and motionless except for huffing sides and anxiously blinking eyes.

“Un’s learning,” said Beetledown with satisfaction.

“Take a little of the coral light,” Chert told him, breaking off one of the brightest bits; the Rooftopper fastened it under one of the straps of the rat’s harness. “It’ll make it easier to see in some of the dark places Good journey, Beetledown. And thank you for your help and kindness.” He wanted to say something more—he had a sense that this exceptionally small man had become more than an odd acquaintance, that a friendship, however unlikely, had sprung up between them, but Chert was not a man comfortable with sentiment. In any case, he was tired and very frightened. “The Earth Elders protect you.”

“And the Lord of the Peaks watch over ‘ee in thy turn, Chert of Blue Quartz.” The Rooftopper kicked his booted heels against the rat’s sides, but the animal didn’t move. Beetledown smacked his bowstaff against the creature’s flank and it scuttled forward. He was still flicking its hindquarters with the bow, this time trying to get it to turn, as rider and mount vanished into the shadows of the path leading away uphill; all Chert could see of them in the last moments was a moving point of light, the piece of coral strapped to the rat’s back.

“That is, if un can find ‘ee again ‘neath all this mucky stone!” Beetledown called back to Chert, his small voice already sounding as though it came from miles away.

The straggling end of the army had finally disappeared around a bend in the coastal highway, heading toward the Settland Road and the hills, leaving behind only a few hundred watchers and a muddy, trampled field. It wasn’t right, Briony knew—this army should have marched out with trumpets, with a parade through the streets, but there hadn’t been time to arrange such a thing—nor, to be honest, would she have had the heart for it. But the people would be frightened because of this near-secrecy, a thousand men simply gone. In the past, wars had almost always begun with a brave show.

Perhaps the day is coming for a different kind of war, she considered, although she had no idea what such a thing might be. The world is changing swiftly, after all, and not entirely for the worse. Besides, the times are too grim for parades and trumpets.

But then again, she thought, perhaps that is when we need such things most.

She couldn’t eat her food and couldn’t stop weeping. Barrick went away like a man to the gallows, was all she could think. His jests, the cheerful farewell when he kissed her the last time, had not fooled her. Rose and Moina were desperate to get her to lie down, but sleep was the last thing Briony could do, and in any case it was only late afternoon.

Oh, Barrick! she thought. You should have stayed with me. You should have stayed. She sniffled angrily, ignored a maid’s offer of a kerchief and wiped her nose with her sleeve instead, getting a tiny bit of pleasure out of hearing her ladies-in-waiting moan their disapproval.

“I will go and talk to Lord Brone,” she announced to them. “He said there were things he needed to speak to me about—siege preparations, no doubt. And I will have to talk to Lord Nynor about feeding the new muster that just came in from Helmingsea.”

“But… but shouldn’t they come to you?” Rose asked.

“I will walk. I like to walk.” She immediately felt better. Having something to do was so much better than sitting helplessly, thinking about Barrick and the others riding off into… what?

Halfway across the inner keep, her ladies scuttling after her like baby quail, the women followed by a contingent of anxious guardsmen, Briony suddenly remembered what she had forgotten from yesterday—or had it been the day before that? That idiot poet’s message, the mysterious potboy asking to see her. She slowed and was almost knocked down by Rose and Moina in their blind hurry to keep up.

“Have the potboy brought to me,” she told one of the guards. “I will see him in the Erivor Chapel.” “Just him, Highness?”

She thought of the potboy’s erstwhile companion, the poet Tinwright. The last thing she wanted just now was to have to endure his boobish flattery. “Bring him and nobody else.”

She almost forgot the potboy again, but after she left the lord constable, the smell of incense wafting out of the shrine to Enlo in Farmers’ Hall reminded her and she made her way to the chapel.

The strange man named Gil seemed to be waiting extremely patiently, his long, sleepwalker’s face almost empty of expression, but the guards around him looked a little itchy, and Briony realized with some dismay that she’d kept them all waiting for a good piece of the day.

Well, I am the princess regent, am I not?

Yes, she reminded herself, but this was also a castle readying for siege. Perhaps there were other things these men should have been doing. Still, it nettled her a bit.

“Your fellows look tired,” she said to the sergeant. “Did you have a hard time getting him here?” “Not him, Highness. We had a hard time keeping the girl from coming along.” “Girl?” Briony was completely confused. “What girl?”

“The one Captain Vansen brought back, Highness. What’s her name— Willow? The girl from the dales.” “But why should she want to come along?”

The sergeant shrugged, then realized it was not what one did in front of princesses. He lowered his head. “I don’t know, Highness, but the men in the stronghold say she is there every day, watching this one like a cat beside a mousehole, sitting with him when she can. They don’t say nothing, either of them, but she watches him and he doesn’t watch her.” He colored a little. “That’s what I’m told, Ma’am.”

Briony narrowed her eyes, turned to the apparently fascinating potboy. “Did you hear that? Is it true about the girl?” His cool, clear eyes were almost as empty as the stare of a fish. “There are people,” he said slowly. “I seldom look. I am listening.”

“To what?”

“Voices.” He smiled, but there was something wrong with it, as though he had never completely learned the trick. “They try to speak to you, some of them. They bid me to tell you about your brother—the one who has the dreams.”

“What voices?” It was hard not to be angry with someone who looked at you as though you were a chair or a stone. “And what do they tell you about Prince Barrick—your liege lord?”

“I am not certain. The voices speak in my head, in sleep and sometimes even when I am awake.” The blank eyes closed, opened, slow as the flutter of a dead leaf. “And they say he is not to leave the castle—he is not to go into the west.”

“He’s not… ? But he already has left! Why… ?” She was about to rage over being told this only now, but she knew it was her own fault. The flash of anger turned into something quite different, something icy in her chest. “Why shouldn’t he go?”

Gil slowly shook his head. She suddenly realized that she knew nothing about him at all—that Brone had told her only that he worked in a low inn near Skimmer’s Lagoon. “If he goes into the west,” the potboy said, “he must beware of the porcupine’s eye.”

“What does that mean?” The sense of having made a terrible mistake was on her, but what was she to do about it? Even if she believed it utterly, was she to send a fast messenger just to pass Barrick this . . this prophecy? He had already been infuriated once by the man’s soothsaying No, she decided, she would put it in a letter to go with the first regular courier. She would phrase it as though to amuse him—perhaps it would stick in his head, and if there turned out to be any truth to it, that would help him. She offered a prayer to the gods that her foolishness and laxity would not have some terrible cost.

“What does it mean?” The potboy shook his head. “I do not know—the voices do not tell me, they only speak so that I can hear them, like people on the other side of a wall.” He took a maddeningly long breath. “It is happening more often now, because the world is changing.” “Changing?”

“Oh, yes. Because the gods are awakening again.” He said it very simply, as if it were a truth available to all. “Right under our feet.”

31. A Night Visitor

The day’s prayers and rituals had been particularly grueling Qinnitan found herself ill now almost every time Panhyssir gave her one of the potions, but also sometimes full of a useless, undirected vigor, and that was the case now, hours after she had heard the song of midnight prayers. She couldn’t sleep and wasn’t sure she wanted to, but neither did she want to he in bed and listen to her own breathing.

That morning, when she had drunk the priest’s elixir, she could almost feel it scouring away her insides, as though she were being cleaned like a gourd filled with pebbles and boiling water. The weird sense of being un-tethered also seemed to last longer each time, as though she were becoming a guest in her own body, and not a particularly welcome one either Worst of all, and something she could not bear thinking about too much, was that when she drank the Sun’s Blood and dropped into that momentary but still terrifying darkness, that living death, she felt like a cricket stuck flexing on a fishhook, as though she were living bait dangled above ultimate depths while something huge moved beneath her, sniffing, deciding.

And what could that something be, a thing with thoughts as slow and shuddering as the movements of the earth itself. Could there even be such a thing, or was the elixir disordering her mind? Just a few months back one of the young queens had lost her wits and had not been able to stop laughing and weeping. The girl had claimed that the Favored spied on her even in her dreams. She had torn her clothes and walked up and down the passageways singing children’s songs until at last she disappeared from the Seclusion altogether.

What do these people want from me? Qinnitan wondered hopelessly. Do they truly wish to drive me mad? Or are they simply murdering me slowly, for some strange reasons of their own?

She was becoming obsessed with the idea of being poisoned, and not just because of the high priest’s foul elixir. Each time someone handed her a cup, any time she accepted food that was not spooned out of a communal pot, she felt as though she was about to step off a cliff. It was not merely the open and obvious malice of Paramount Wife Arimone—many of the other women had begun to look at her strangely, too, regarding her sessions with Panhyssir and the other priests of Nushash as a sign of some kind of unwarranted favor, as though that daily misery was some prize Qinnitan had secured for herself. Even Luian, who had been her staunchest ally, had grown a little distant from her. Their conversations had become awkward, like two women meeting in a marketplace who both knew that one had slandered the other recently. It was Jeddin and his ridiculous, unreasonable passion for her—it stood between them now like a closed door.

So now Qinnitan lay sleepless in her narrow bed in the deep watches of the night, thoughts scurrying like busy ants, the occasional snoring of her maids outside her door poking at her like a cruel child every time it seemed she might be drifting toward slumber. The days in the Hive seemed impossibly far away Everything that was happy and simple seemed beyond reach. And because she lay wakeful, thinking such feverish, miserable thoughts, Qinnitan heard the quiet noise of someone moving at the far side of her chamber as plainly as if they spoke to her, and knew that she was not alone.

Her heart lurched, sped. She slowly sat up, squinting into the near-darkness beside the door. All she could see by the glow of the shuttered lamp was a shape, but it was a shape that had not been there when she had crawled into her bed.

Tanyssa. The First Wife has sent her for me. She could see the Favored gardener’s square face in her mind’s eye, the eyes empty but for the guarded sullenness of a whipped dog. Even if I scream, she’ll kill me before help can come.

And if the gardener was on Arimone’s business, Qinnitan knew she might scream herself hoarse without bringing any help at all.

She slid out of the bed and onto the floor as quietly as she could, letting out a small whimper like a disturbed sleeper in the hope of covering the sound of her own movements and perhaps even making the assassin stop moving for fear of waking her up. Desperate, her heart still hammering painfully fast, she struggled to think of what she might use for a weapon. The scissors that the slaves used to cut and shape her hair. But they were at the bottom of the basket under her bedside table, inside the ivory sewing kit—she could never get them out in time.

As her hand passed over the small table, she touched something cold and hard and her fingers closed on it. It was a dressing pin Luian had given her, a handspan long and ornamented with a gold-and-enamel nightingale. She curled the nightingale into her fist, raised the pin like a dagger. Tanyssa would not murder her without bleeding for it, Qinnitan decided. Her mouth was dry, her throat as tight as if the strangling cord were already twisting tight.

The shape by the doorway began to move again, slowly, silently, feeling its way with outstretched hands With much of the dim light behind it now, it seemed scarcely even human, too thin of limb to be Tanyssa, let alone any of the other stranglers Arimone or the autarch might send. For a moment Qinnitan’s already racing heart threatened to stop entirely. Was it a ghost? A shadow-demon from out of Argal’s night kingdom?

The thing was almost upon her. She saw a shadowed face loom up and her superstitious terror turned her arm to stone when she should have struck with the pin, should have buried it in the dark spots of the intruder’s eyes; instead she felt the thing bump against her and recoil. The feeling of cool, human flesh was so startling that the sinews of her arm finally caught life and she slashed at it. Her attacker fell back with a strange, breathy whimper but no words, no shout of pain or surprise, and Qinnitan’s heart stuttered again with superstitious fear.

“Leave me alone!” she cried, but it came out a choked murmur. The thing scrambled away from her, still making the strange, animal noise, and cowered on the floor. Qinnitan leaped past it and ran toward the door, ready to scream for the huge Favored guards waiting only a few dozen paces away from the sleeping chambers, but then she stopped in the doorway. The thing was weeping, she realized, a bizarre, rasping sound.

She reached up and burned her fingers pulling the lamp from behind its slotted screen, but when she had the handle and lifted it up, flooding the room with yellow light, she saw that the fearsome thing crouched on her floor was only a small, dark-haired boy.

“Queen of the Hive!” Caution and fear still kept her oath of surprise quiet. She moved closer. The boy looked up at her with wide, frightened eyes. A long scratch down his chest dripped blood, showing where she had caught him with her nightingale pin. “Who are you?" she whispered.

The child stared at her, tears in his eyes and on his cheeks. He opened his mouth but what came out was only a low grunt. She flinched and he threw his arm in front of his face to protect himself.

One of the Silent Favored! He was a mute slave taken in one of the wars of Xis, an infant at his capture, perhaps. The autarchs of the Orchard Palace and their highest servants had always liked to surround themselves with such boys, who could neither spill secrets nor cry out, no matter what kind of cruelties were visited on them. “You poor thing,” Qinnitan said, half to herself— it did not immediately occur to her that one who could not speak might yet be able to hear and understand. She put out a cautious hand and he shrank away again. “I won’t hurt you,” she said, hoping that at least the tone of her voice would convince him. She was talking too loud, she realized—she might wake up her maids, and although moments earlier she would have welcomed it, suddenly she did not want anyone intruding. When she spoke again, only the wounded child could hear her. “Let me help you. I am sorry. Do you understand? I thought you were…You frightened me.”

The boy whimpered again but let her examine his wound. It was long but shallow. Still, blood was already soaking the waist of his white linen breeches. She hunted for a moment until she found one of the clean cloths waiting for her next moonblood and pressed it against the cut, then found an old scarf and tied it around his waist to hold the bandage in place.

“It is not a bad wound,” she whispered. “Can you understand me?”

He touched the cloth gingerly. He still looked as though he might bolt at any moment, but at last he nodded his head. “Good. I am sorry I hurt you. What are you doing here?”

Even in the lamplight she could see his face pale so quickly that she feared she had given him a mortal wound after all. She tried to restrain him, but he clambered grunting to his feet and reached into the blood-soaked waistband of his breeches, making soft hooting noises like a dove. He pulled out a bag that had been tucked away there between his body and the clothing. It was red with the blood of his body and wet, and for a moment she was reluctant to take it, but his expression was so anguished she realized that he was afraid something within had been ruined. She took it from him and saw that the drawstring was sealed with silver thread and wax. She held the lamp close, but did not immediately recognize the seal printed on it. Qinnitan took a breath, suddenly reluctant again, but the boy made a little whimpering sound like a dog waiting to be let out of doors and so she broke the wax away from the string and shook out into her hand a curl of parchment and a gold ring.

The signature at the bottom of the parchment said “Jeddin.” She cursed again, but silently this time.

“I have it,” she said. “It is safe—the blood has not soaked through. Was it the captain who sent this? The Leopard captain?"

The boy shook his head, puzzled. Qinnitan was puzzled, too, then she had another thought. “Luian? Favored Luian? Did she send this?"

Now he smiled, although it was a pamed and sickly one, and nodded his head.

“Very well. You have done what was asked. Now you must go out again, as silently as you came, so as not to wake the ones sleeping outside. I truly am sorry. Have someone dress that wound properly. Tell them . . tell them you fell on a stone in the garden.”

The boy looked doubtful, but he rose and patted his bandage to make sure it was still in place. He bowed to her, and the courtly display was so strange in the middle of the night, with the lamplight and the smears of blood on the floor, that she almost laughed with shock to see it. A moment later he slipped out through the curtains and was gone.

Qinnitan waited, listening to the silence, then bent to the task of cleaning the blood from the floor, blotting it up with another of her own rags. The thought of reading what Jeddin had to say filled her with a sour dismay Was it some foolish love poem that had almost cost a child his life? Or was it something newer and more dangerous, him ordering her to meet him somewhere, with the same sort of threats he had used to cow Luian into cooperation?

Finished, with the room exactly as it had been before the midnight vis-ltors arrival, she set the lamp on her bedside table and sat cross-legged on the bed, leaning close so she could read.

Beloved, it began. She stared at Jeddin’s precise and surprisingly delicate script. At least he’s left my name off it, she thought, but a moment later the power of that single word reached out and struck her as powerfully as a blow How had things come to this? It was like something out of an old story, that this powerful man should risk both their lives to prove his love, and that another even more powerful man—the mightiest on earth—should have already claimed her as his own.

Me! Me, Qinnttan. It was impossible to compass.

I was a fool to take the risk of meeting you. You were right to tell me so. There is talk. One of my enemies suspects. It must be Vash the chief minister but he can prove nothing.

Dread seized her, so powerful it almost stopped her breath. She did not want to read any more. But she did.

However the day may come when he can act against me despite the favor the autarch all praise to His name has shown me. No it is because of the favor that the Golden One has shown me. He hates me. Vash I mean. As do others here.

I must prepare for a day when things might change. I have my own followers loyal to me but my own safety would mean nothing to me without you. If such a day should come I will send a messenger to you who will speak the sacred name Habbih. And just as the son of the great god went down from the mountains and his enemies and onto the boat that brought him wounded to Xis so we will sail to freedom. In the harbor in a ship near to the Habbih temple there is a small fast ship named Morning Star of Kirous. I did not name it after you my beautiful star. I have had it since I was first lifted to my place over the autarch’s Leopards but when I learned that some in the Seclusion called you by that name it only proved to me that the fates have meant this for us from the first. When you go there show the captain this ring. He will know it and show you all courtesy and when I join you you will see how sweetly that morning star sails.

I hope it will not come to this beloved. I may yet defeat Pinimmon Vash and my other enemies and perhaps find some way that our love can grow under the Golden One’s sunshine. But as the saying goes there is no rest in a viper’s den —not even for vipers.

He had signed his name with a flourish.

Fool, she thought Oh Jeddin, you fool! Had the boy woken up the guards or even her servants, had this fallen into anyone’s hand, she and Jeddin and probably Luian would all be kneeling before the executioner this very moment. The captain of the Leopards was infected with a particularly dangerous sort of madness, Qinnitan thought, one in which he could praise the autarch even as he schemed to rob the ruler of the earth of his chosen bride.

She did not love Jeddin, she knew that, but something in his madness touched her. Beneath that powerful body beat the heart of a child—a sad child, running after the rest but forever too slow. And as a grown man he was handsome in a way she could not ignore, that was also true. Qinnitan caught her breath. Could there be something to it after all? Did she dare to have feelings for him? Was there a way he actually could save her from this horrid place?

She thought about it for only a very short time, then burned the parchment in the lamp’s flame until it was powdery, black ash. But she saved the ring.

32. In This Circle of the World

The cold rain was slapping down and Fitters Row was a river of mud. Matty Tinwright stepped gingerly from board to board—some of which, like foundering boats, had sunk into the ooze until only the tip of one end protruded—in a determined effort to keep his shoes clean. His new clothing allowance had not run to wooden clogs, or at least the choice between clogs and the largest, most ostentatious ruff for his collar had been no choice at all as far as he was concerned. More than ever, he was determined to make a good appearance.

One of the boards in mid-street had now disappeared entirely and old Puzzle stood like an allegorical statue of his own name, marooned and peering shortsightedly at the gap in front of him, two full yards of mud as sticky as overboiled marrow. An oxcart was rumbling downhill toward him, filling the road, its drovers making a great clamor as they guided it through the most treacherous spots. Others coming into Fitters Row from Squeak-step Alley—several tradesmen, some soaked apprentices, and more than a few soldiers mustered out of the provinces—now stopped in the shelter beneath the overhanging buildings to watch the unfolding events. The oxcart would not arrive in a hurry, but neither did the ancient jester seem to see it coming.

Tinwright sighed in irritation. He absolutely did not want to go back into the muddy street to drag the man out of danger, but Puzzle was the closest thing to a friend he had these days and he was reluctant to see the old fellow crushed by a wagon.

“Puzzle! The gods damn your shoes, man, come on! That beast will be standing on you in another moment!”

The jester looked up, blinking. Puzzle was dressed in what Tinwright thought of as his civilian attire, funereal dark hose and hooded cloak and a hat whose giant, bedraggled brim made it hard for him to see beyond his own muddy feet. It was a far more comic outfit than his motley could ever be; Tinwright thought the old man should wear it to entertain the nobility.

“Hoy!” shouted Tinwright. The jester seemed to see him at last, then looked around at the approaching oxcart, the irritated animal and its team of cursing drovers so intent on skidding down the muddy street that Puzzle might as well be invisible. He blinked and swallowed, finally understanding his peril. One storklike leg went out, his muck-covered slipper reaching unreasonably for the distant board, then he stepped off and directly into the mud and with a few squeaks and thrashes sank in up to his skinny thighs.

It was fortunate for Puzzle that the oxcart and its drovers were more at tentive than they had seemed. He suffered nothing worse than a further splattering as the cart slewed to a stop a yard or two away. The ox lowered its head and stared at the blinking, mud-slathered jester as though it had never seen such a strange creature.

It was not the entrance that Tinwright had planned, so it was just as well that his old haunt the Quiller’s Mint was dark and crowded and scarcely anyone even glanced up to see them come in. A trio of outland soldiers laughed at the brown shell hardening on Puzzle’s lower extremities, but made a little room for the shivering old man as Tinwright deposited him beside the fire. He snagged the potboy as he ran past—a child of nine or ten had replaced Gil, he noticed, doubtless one of Conary’s multitude of relatives, but young enough not to have become work-shy yet—and bade the boy bring a brush and some rags to get ofFthe worst of the mud. This done, Tinwright sauntered up to the serving table where Conary was breaching a cask. It was a real table now, not just a trestle-board; the poet couldn’t help being impressed and a little irritated. The coming siege had brought some good to someone, as the crowd of unfamiliar drinkers gathered in the Quiller s Mint proved, but it did take a bit of the luster offTin-wright’s own advancement in the world.

Conary’s look was sour, but it took in the huge ruff and the new jacket. “Tinwright, you whoreson, you stole my potboy.”

“Stole him? Not I. Rather, it was him that nearly got me banged up in the stronghold under the keep. But good has come of it, so I do not begrudge him. I am the princess regent’s poet now.” He examined a stool, then wiped it with a kerchief before sitting down.

“The princess gone deaf, then, has she? Poor girl, as if she didn’t have troubles enough.” Conary put his hands on his hips. “And if you’re nz so high in the world, you can bloody well pay me them three starfish you owe, or I’ll have the town watch in to pitch you into the street again.”

Tinwright had forgotten about that and couldn’t help making a face, but he had come flush today thanks to money he had borrowed from Puzzle, and he did his best to move the coins ungrudgingly from his purse to the tabletop. “Of course. I was detained at the pleasure of the regent, you see, or else I would have been back to pay you long ago.”

Conary looked at the coppers as though for the first time—new ruff and quilted jacket notwithstanding—he might consider believing in Tinwright ‘s exalted new position. “Are you drinking, then?”

“Aye. And my companion is the king’s own royal jester, so you would do well to bring a jug of your best ale over to the fire. None of that rubbish you give everyone else.” He waved his hand grandly.

“Another starfish, then,” said Conary. “Because them three are mine, remember?”

Tinwnght grunted—was he not clearly now worthy of credit?—but disdainfully dropped another coin on the tabletop.

Puzzle appeared to have thawed out a bit, although he had abandoned the scraping of his soiled hose and slippers with quite a bit of mud still on them and was staring into the fire as though trying to imagine what such a fascinatingly hot and shiny thing might be called.

“Now, is this not better than trying to find a place to drink in the castle kitchens?” Tinwright asked him loudly, “with the soldiers elbowing and shoving like geese fighting for grain?”

Puzzle looked up. “I… I think I have been in this place before, long ago. It burned down, didn’t it?” Tinwright waved his hand. “Aye, many years back, or so I’m told. It is a low place, but it has its charms. A poet must drink with the common folk or else he will lose himself from too much contemplation of high things, so I sometimes came here before I was raised up.” He looked around to see if anyone had noted his remarks, but the outlanders by the fire were playing at dice and paying no attention.

“Well, well.” A jug of ale and two tankards clanked down onto the hearth at their feet and Puzzle’s eyes bulged at the expanse of bosom revealed by the woman bending over. She straightened up. “Matty Tinwright. I thought you were dead or gone back to West Wharfside.”

He gave Brigid his most amiable nod. “No, I have had other duties that have kept me away.” She pinched at his jacket, let a ringer trail across his starched ruff. “It seems you’ve come high in the world, Matty.”

This was more like it. He smiled and turned to Puzzle. “You see, they remember me here.” The old man didn’t appear to be listening very closely. His weak eyes were following the quiver of flesh above Brigid’s bodice like a starving man eyeing a dripping roast. Tinwright turned back to the girl. “Yes, Zosim has smiled on me. I am now poet to the princess regent herself.”

The wench frowned a little, but then her own smile came back. “Still, you must get a bit lonely up at the castle, even with all those fine ladies. You must miss your old friends—your old bed… ?”

Now it had become a bit much, and even though the old man was still goggling at the girl’s breasts, happily oblivious, Tinwright himself didn’t really want to be reminded of his previous situation. “Ah, yes,” he said, and though he spoke airily he gave her a stern look. “I suppose a few nights Hewney and Theodoros and I did sleep here after having a few scoops too many. Riotous times.” He turned for a moment to Puzzle. “We poets have a weakness for strong drink because it sets the fancy free to roam.” He patted Brigid on the bum, as much to get her attention as anything else, and tried to slip her a ha’fish. “Now, my girl, if you don’t mind, my companion and I have important business to discuss.” She stared at him and his proffered coin. “Be a good lass, Brigid—that is your name, if I remember correctly, yes… ?”

Afterward he was glad she had not been holding a mug or a tray, but even the bare-handed slap on the back of the skull was enough to bring tears to his eyes and pitch his new hat into the ashes at the front of the hearth.

“You dog!” she said, so loud that half the crowded tavern turned to watch. “A few days past the walls of the inner keep and you think your pizzle has turned to solid silver? At least when Nevin Hewney falls asleep on top of a girl, drooling and farting and limp as custard, he doesn’t pretend he’s done her a favor.”

He could hear laughter from the other patrons as she flounced away, but his ears were ringing from the blow and their gibes were no louder in his throbbing head than the noise of a distant river.

With a few tankards of ale in his belly, even the watery piss that Conary sold at the Mint, Puzzle had become positively animated. “But I thought you said the other day that you were commanded to go with the soldiers,” the old man asked, wiping a thin line of froth from his lips. “To be a war-poet or somesuch.”

Much of the good cheer had gone out of him now, but Tinwright did his best. “Oh, that I spoke of it to the castellan—Lord Naynor, his name is?”

“Nynor” Puzzle frowned a little. “Not a mirthful fellow. Never been able to make him laugh. Thinks too much, I suppose.”

“Yes, well I was eager to go, of course, but Nynor felt I would be of more use if I stayed here—to lift up the spirit of the princess, with her brother away and all.” In actuality, it had been Nynor who had come to him to make arrangements—he had heard of Princess Briony’s offhand commission through some source Tinwright could not even guess—and Tinwright had gone down on his knees, even wept a little, swearing that it was all a mistake, that someone had misunderstood one of Briony’s offhand remarks. Nynor had said he would have to speak with her himself, but that had been days ago and the prince regent and the army had ridden out since then, so Tinwright felt he was now fairly safe. Still, even thinking about it, he could barely restrain a shudder. Matty Tinwright going to war! Against monsters and giants and the gods alone knew what else! It didn’t even bear thinking about. No, his smooth skin and handsome face were suited only for battles of the more intimate kind, the sort that took place in beds and secluded hallways, and from which both combatants walked away unharmed.

“I asked to go,” Puzzle suddenly proclaimed. “They’ve no use for me here, those two. Not like their father. There was a good man. He understood my jokes and tricks.” In a moment he had gone from chucklingly cheerful to teary-eyed. “They say he is still alive, King Olin, but I fear he will never come back. Ah, that good man. And now this war and all.” He looked up, blinking. “Who are we fighting? Fairies? I understand none of it.”

“Nobody does,” Tinwright said, and here he was again on firm ground. “The rumormongers are running mad even in the castle, so who knows what they are saying out in the city?” He pointed to a group of men standing over a table, smoking long pipes and sharing a broadsheet. “Do you know what that scurrilous pamphlet claims? That the princess regent and her brother have murdered Gailon Tolly, the Duke of Summerfield.” He shook his head, genuinely angry. To think that someone could speak such calumnies of the lovely young woman who had recognized Tinwright’s quality and raised him up from the undeserved muck of places like this to the heights for which he was meant… He shook his head and downed the remains of his fourth or fifth tankard. He would have liked another, but Brigid was still serving and he dared not call her over again.

Puzzle was looking around, too. “She’s very pretty, that girl.”

“Brigid? Yes, pretty enough, but her heels are as round as the full moon.” He scowled into the lees at the bottom of his mug. “Be grateful you are past the age of such things, my good fellow. Women like that are the bane of man’s existence. A night’s innocent tumble and they feel they can tie a string to your freedom and drag it around behind them like a child’s toy.”

“Past the age… ?” Puzzle said, a little doubtfully perhaps, or merely wistfully, then fell silent. He was quiet for such a long time that Tinwright finally looked up, thinking that the old man had fallen asleep, but instead Puzzle’s eyes were wide. Tinwright stared around, wondering if perhaps Brigid’s dress had come entirely unfastened, but the old fellow was staring at the tavern door as it swung closed, shutting out the rainy afternoon.

“Curfew tonight,” Conary shouted from behind his table on the far side of the room. “Closing time is sunset bell. The jack-o’-lanterns will be here soon, so drink up, drink up!”

“But I thought…” Puzzle said slowly.

“What?” Matty Tinwnght set down his tankard, considered another drink, then tried to decide whether he would prefer a trip to the Mint’s unspeakable privy or to stand in the pouring rain emptying his bladder against a wall on the way back. “What is it?"

“I… I just saw someone I know. Chaven the physician—the royal physician. He was talking to that man in the hood over there.” Puzzle stirred. “No, the one in the hood’s gone too. Maybe they went out together.”

“What is so strange in that? A physician of all people must know the good that ale will do—the best physick of all.” “But he is gone or rather he is not gone, obviously.” Puzzle shook his head. “He has left the castle, gone on a sudden journey. Everyone was surprised. Ah, well, I suppose he has come back.”

“Clearly, he has been somewhere dire indeed, if this is the first place he visits on his return. “ Tinwright heaved himself up onto his feet. He was beginning to think that maybe he had drunk a bit more than he had thought, lost count somewhere. “Come, let us go back ourselves. They are a poor lot here at the Mint, despite the occasional doctor or royal poet.” He helped Puzzle up. “Or king’s jester, of course,” he added kindly. “No, they do not understand quality here.”

Briony had always liked Barrick’s rooms better than her own in some ways. She had the view down to the Privy Garden from her sitting room, and that was pretty enough, especially on sunny days, and on rainy days the doves all perched on the windowsill, murmuring, and it felt as cozy as pulling a blanket over her knees But from her window the stony bulk of Wolfstooth Spire took up most of the horizon, so her view was foreshortened, limited to the local and domestic. Barrick, though, could see out across the rooftops from the small window in his dressing chamber, past the forest of chimneys and all the way to the sea. As Briony stared out of her brother’s window now, the Tower of Autumn was glinting white and brick red, and beyond it lay the open ocean, blue-black and moody. The little storm that had just passed had left the sky sullen, but it was still heartening somehow to look out across all this space and open sky, across the roofs of the castle like mountainous small countries, and to think about how big the world was.

Did they give him these rooms on purpose, because he was the son and I was the daughter? For me the gardens, the quiet places, the old walls, to let me grow used to the idea of a life confined, but for him this view of the world that is part of his birthright—the sky, life, and adventure stretching out in all directions…?

And of course now her brother was riding out into that world and she was terrified for him, but also envious. It is two separate betrayals, not only to leave me behind at all, but to leave me with the throne and all those people clamoring, begging, arguing. Still, it didn’t diminish her love for him, but changed the powerful connection into something like an overfond child who wouldn’t stop pestering but could not be safely put down.

Oh, and Barrick is in danger, if what that strange potboy said is true. But there was nothing she could do—nothing she could do about anything except to wait and prepare for the worst. And the gods awakening, the strange man said, wouldn’t explain it. What did that mean? What does any of this mean? When precisely did the whole world begin to run mad?

A cloud slid past. A single ray of sunlight angled down, dazzled for a moment on the Tower of Summer, then was swallowed up in gray again. Briony sighed and turned to her ladies. “I must dress.”

“But, Highness,” said Moina, startled. “These clothes are… they… you…”

“I have told you what I will do and why. We are at war, and soon that will be more than words. Mv brother is gone off with the army. I am the last of the Eddons in this castle.”

“There is your stepmother,” Rose offered timidly. “The child.

“Until that baby is born, I am the last of the Eddons in Southmarch.” Briony heard the iron in her own voice and was amused and appalled. What am I becoming? “I told you, I cannot merely be myself any longer,” she said. “I am my brother, too I am my whole family.” She saw the looks on her ladies’ faces and made a noise of exasperation. “No, I am not going mad. I know what I’m doing.”

But do I, truly? A person can fall into a rage of grief or despair and do themselves and others harm. Other madnesses could creep into the sufferer’s heart so stealthily that they did not even realize they had gone mad. Was this really just fury against the scorn of men and a desire to hold her brother close in the only way now left to her? Or was this rage against ordinary courtly dress a kind of fever that had taken her, that had gradually grown to un-woman her entirely? Oh, gods and goddesses, I ache so ? They are all gone! Every day I want to weep. Or curse.

She spoke none of this, or let any of it show on her face except perhaps by a certain angry stiffness that silenced Rose and Moina completely. “I must dress,” she said again, and stood as straight as she could, as proudly upright as any queen or empress, while they began to clothe her in her brother’s clothes.

At the very last the ladies pretended they could not do it, that they did not understand the working of the thing, although it was much more simple than any lady’s garment, so she put on the heavy sword belt herself and buckled it tight across her hips before sliding the long blade into the sheath.

If it was a weather change, it was a strange one Vansen stood on the hillside behind the scouts and looked out across the expanse of valley, at the Settland Road winding along at its bottom, and tried to make sense of what he felt. The air was close, but not from the nearness of any storm, although a heavy rain had swept through at midday and the road had been hard going for the rest of the afternoon Neither was it a smell, although the air had a certain sour tang that reminded him of the burning season in autumn, of bonfires now two months past. Even the light seemed inexplicably strange, but for no reason he could name the sky was darkening quickly now, the sun setting behind a slate-colored blanket of clouds, and the hillsides seemed unusually green against the dark pall, but it was nothing he had not seen hundreds of times.

It’s because you’re afraid, he told himself. Because you crossed that line once and you’re afraid you might find yourself behind it again Because you’ve seen what’s coming and you’re afraid to meet it.

All morning and afternoon they had encountered people fleeing the rape of Candlerstown, most merely hurrying ahead of rumors of its end, but some—almost all women and children lucky enough to have escaped in wagons—who had actually survived its destruction. The stories of these last were particularly terrifying and Tyne Aldritch and Vansen and the others had spent much of the afternoon trying to understand what it meant for them, vainly trying to concoct a strategy that could counter such nightmarish madness. The first few refugees’ tales had so unsettled the soldiers who heard them, themselves conscripted farmers little different from the husbands and fathers these families had so recently lost to such ghastly enemies, that with Earl Tyne’s permission Vansen had ridden ahead with a company of scouts to glean what information he could from the oncoming victims and then give them what aid he might before turning them aside to where outliers of the army could give them food and water, hoping to prevent the dreadful stories washing repeatedly across the main body of troops like waves of freezing water. FerrasVansen already knew this second night out from Southmarch would be a grim, anxious camp; no sense in turning it into anything worse.

It was pointless, of course, those who couldn’t stand even to hear about the terrible Twilight People would probably have scant chance of surviving a battle with them, but Vansen hoped that the fact of real combat would give men back their hearts no matter how frightened they were. Any enemy who could be touched, fought, killed, was better than the one you could only imagine.

He turned to Dab Dawley, one of the survivors of his own ill-fated expedition across the Shadowline. It was only with great reluctance and at the express order of Princess Briony that he had increased the responsibility of Mickael Southstead, whom he didn’t trust very much at all—the night he was named a captain he had caused two bad fights back in Southmarch with his bragging—but young Dawley was a different story, cautious and thoughtful despite his years, and much more so since their shared adventure. Had it not been for his own desire to see what was ahead of them, Vansen would happily have let Dawley lead this scouting party himself, despite his lack of experience.

“I think we stay here tonight, Dab, or at least that is what I will suggest to Earl Tyne. Will you take the men down and start looking for water? It seems to me there should be a stream there, beyond that hillock.”

Dawley nodded. The other scouts, wilderness veterans almost to a man, had heard the captain—there was no need for the formality of orders.They clicked softly to their mounts and started down the road.

A few hundred such as these and I might not fear even the Twilight folk, Vansen told himself, but he knew it was not true. Even standing in the midst of a thousand of the stoutest men in the world would not thaw a freezing, terrified heart.

The valley was full of fires.This close to home, they were still eating fresh meat and bread that could be broken without having to saw at it with a knife, which was a rare pleasure on march. Some of the guardsmen from Kertewall were playing pipes and singing. Despite the mournful Kertish tunes it was a pleasingly ordinary sound, Vansen was glad of it and certain that others felt the same.

He was wandering back toward the fire when he saw a figure standing at the crest of one of the low hills, inside the ring of sentries but not near any of them. He puzzled for a moment before he recognized it as Prince Barrick.Vansen was a little surprised, thinking that the prince would have preferred to be in the midst of Lord Aldritch and the other nobles, drinking and being waited upon, but Vansen knew from his experience with the royal family that the boy had always been odd and solitary.

But he’s a boy no longer, I suppose. In fact, Barrick was the same sort of age Vansen himself had been when he first left home to seek his fortune in the city—an age when he had been certain that he was a man, despite no confirming proof. Watching Barrick, he could not help remembering Princess Briony’s fear for her brother. Certainly the lad should be safe enough—he was scarcely two dozen yards from the nearest carnpfire—and Ferras Vansen had a respect for solitude that many others did not, but he couldn’t help being anxious. After all, Collum Dyer was within my arm’s reach when he was taken. It would be horror enough to have to tell that lovely, sad young woman that her brother had died honorably in battle—he couldn’t imagine telling her the prince had been stolen by fairies right out of camp.

As he strode up the hill, the wet grass slapping at his legs, Vansen suddenly wondered what the Twilight People wanted. Although there had been few true wars during his lifetime, he had ample experience of violence and knew that there were some men who could only be stopped from taking what they wanted by strength, and some who feared that others meant to take what was theirs even when it was not true, that greed and fear lay at the bottom of most fights. But that army he had seen beyond the Shadowline, that array of the sublime and terrible, that ghastly, glorious host—what could they want? Why had they left the safety of their misty lands after two centuries or more, a time in which their original enemies had long since disappeared and new mortals unnumbered had been born, lived, and died again, all without knowing the shadow folk as anything but the stuff of old stories and evil dreams?

He fought a shudder. They were not men, not even animals, but demons, as he knew better than anyone, so how could a mere man hope to understand their reasons?

Young Barrick turned at his approach and watched for a moment before turning back to what he had been gazing at so intently—nothing, so far as Vansen could tell. “Prince Barrick, your pardon. Are you well?”

“Captain Vansen.” The young man continued staring out at the night sky. The wind had herded the clouds away and the stars had come out. Fer-ras Vansen couldn’t help remembering how, as a small child, he had once thought they were the cook fires of people like himself—sky shepherds, perhaps, living on the other side of the great bowl of the heavens, who called the fires of the Vansen family and their neighbors stars in turn.

“It is getting cold, Highness. Perhaps you would be more comfortable back with the others.” The prince didn’t answer immediately. “What was it like?” he finally asked. “What was it like… ?”

“Behind the Shadowline. Did it feel different? Smell different?”

“It was frightening, Highness, as I told you and your sister. Misty and dark. Confusing.” “Yes, but what was it like?” His bad arm was hidden in his cloak, but the other hand pointed at the sky. “Did you see the same stars—Demia’s Ladder, the Horns?”

Vansen shook his head. “I can’t quite remember now. It—it was all very much like a dream Stars? I’m not sure.”

Barrick nodded. “I have dreams about… about the other side. I know that now. I’ve had them all my life. I didn’t really know what they were, but hearing what you said about . .” He turned to fix Vansen with a surprisingly sharp glance. “You say you were frightened. Why? Were you afraid you’d die? Or was it something else?”

Vansen had to stop and think for a moment. “Afraid to die? Of course. The gods give us the fear of death so that we won’t squander their gifts too lightly—so that we will use what is given us to the fullest. But that isn’t what I felt there—that’s not the whole of it, anyway.”

Barrick smiled, although there was something incomplete in it. “So we will use what is given us to the fullest. You are a bit of a poet, Captain Vansen, aren’t you?”

“No, Highness. I just… that is what the village priest taught me.” He stiffened a little. “But I think it’s true. Who knows what will happen to us in Kernios’ cold hands?”

“Yes, who indeed?”

Now the memories of his days in the shadowland were seeping back, as though the lid he had put on them had been kicked loose. “I was afraid because the world there was strange to me. Because I could not trust my own senses. Because it made me feel like a madman.”

“And there is nothing more frightening than that.” Barrick was darkly pleased by something. “No, that is true, Captain Vansen.” He peered at him again. “Do you have a first name?”

“Ferras, Highness. It is a common enough name in the dales.” “But Vansen isn’t.”

“My father was from the Vuttish Isles.”

Barrick had turned back to the stars again. “But he made his home in Daler’s Troth. Was he happy? Is he still alive?”

“He died, Highness, years ago now. He was happy enough. He always said he would trade all the wide ocean for a crofters patch and good weather.”

“Perhaps he was born out of his place,” said Prince Barrick. “That happens, I think. Some of us live our whole lives as if we were dreaming, because we haven’t found where we’re meant to be—stumbling through shadows, terrified, strangers just as you were in the Twilight Lands.” He suddenly tucked his other hand under his cloak. “You’re right, Captain Vansen— it’s getting cold. I think I will have some wine and try to sleep.”

The prince turned and walked down the hill.

He is still a boy, really, for all his philosophy, Vansen decided as he followed several paces behind, alert for any threat, even here among the campfires. A child —clever, angry, and fearful. The gods grant that he lives long enough for some of that knowing to turn into wisdom.

The murmur of disapproving conversation, which at times threatened to become a roar, had begun the moment Briony walked into the room and had not stopped since she took her place at the head of the table. Meals in the Great Hall were seldom quiet or restful, and on any other day she would have taken something quietly in her chambers, but she had decided on a brave show and she would take what came.

Hierarch Sisel sat on her right. Brone, although a few others at the table outranked him, took the place on her left because he was the lord constable and the castle was at war—or soon to be so. The hierarch, after an initial widening of the eyes and pursing of the lips when he saw her, had made polite conversation just as though she were wearing proper womanly clothing; she was not certain whether she admired this or disliked it. Brone was disgusted, of course, but she had come to know him well enough to feel certain that his annoyance had more to do with her making what he considered an unnecessary spectacle of herself at a delicate time than any particular disapproval of this provocative unsexing. The lord constable had other things on his mind he deemed more important, and he clearly meant to use the stir over the arrival of the main courses to speak to her.

As the chicken carcasses were carried away, and the huge half-bullock sweating in its own juices was carted in, surrounded by what to Briony’s taste was an overly festive array of peacocks roasted and then dressed again in their own feathers, the dogs barked excitedly and snuffled in the rushes for dropped bones. She reached down and scratched a furry head, glad somebody here was deservedly happy, anyway.

“The work on the fortifications is largely done,” Brone told her quietly. “But the strongest walls will not hold if the hearts inside are weak. The nobles are restive. Several have gone already, preferring to take their chances in their own homes, or even to take to the sea lanes if things seem to go badly.”

“I know.” She had granted enough spurious requests in the last days, thin excuses that she felt certain she could pull to tatters m an instant if she chose. “Let them go, Lord Brone. Those are not the folk we’ll want at our sides if things do grow worse rather than merely seem bad, as they do now.” She glanced at Hendon Tolly and his sister-in-law Elan, halfway down the table but in a different world, surrounded by admirers like Durstin Crowel, the Baron of Graylock, all but the girl laughing broadly at one of Tolly’s jokes. “In truth, it’s too bad they do not all leave. Southmarch might be harder to defend, but the waiting would be more pleasant.”

“But that is just the thing…” Brone leaned back and waited for one of the squires to drop a slice of beef onto his trencher. “For every fainthearted noble that rides off south or sets sail to the east,” he said when the youth had moved on, “a retinue of men-at-arms goes with him, and we can scarcely afford to lose a one of them.”

Briony waved her hand: what could she do? One could not compel love, she had decided, especially not for the child when it was the father who had earned it. All the faces that had come before her, mouthing reasons why they were urgently needed on the family lands or promising to return with a fresh muster of troops had begun to look as distant and dead as the likenesses in the portrait hall. But she would remember them, if one day the sun shone on Southmarch again. She would recall who left and she would most certainly recall who stayed, and she would punish and reward them accordingly. She owed that to her father and Kendrick, now that they were helpless to protect this place both had loved so much.

She was startled to realize that she had been thinking about her father again as though he were dead. She made the sign of pass-evil, something she had scarcely done since childhood when she learned it from one of her nursemaids. He is well, she told herself.I will write him another letter tonight, send it out with a courier on a ship going south. She felt a wash of shame. I have told him nothing of this coming war, if that is what it is, and only the barest details of Kendrick’s death. But was this the sort of news to send to a man imprisoned, that his kingdom stood threatened, and so strangely? Even prisoned in Hierosol, he would have heard about Kendrick, and of Shaso s imprisonment, whether or not he had received her last letter—was that not heartache enough? She suddenly missed her father so badly she found it hard to breathe. Barrick, too. She wished her twin were beside her now, that they could escape together later to discuss all these yawning, greasy-mouthed courtiers, Lady Comfrey M’Neel with her hair already half-undone after drinking too much wine, fat Lord Bratchard who saw himself against all evidence as a wit and a ladies’ man, who used to paw Briony’s hair and face when she was small and tell her what a pretty young woman she was growing to be.

I hope that if this castle falls, the Twilight People take the lot of them and march them off to Vansen’s foggy shadowlands with chains around their necks.

It was a stunningly uncharitable thought, and ignored the many kind and good hearts around her, but at this moment the shout of conversation and clanking of cups and knives seemed little better than the clamor of the barnyard, and these people, for all their finery, little better than pigs shoving to reach the trough.

Hierarch Sisel was trying to say something to her, but at that moment a loud bray of laughter from handsome, stupid Durstin Crowel pricked at her like a needle and she flinched. The Baron of Graylock was roaring at something that Hendon Tolly had said, laughing so hard that he choked on his wine and sprayed some on his ruff and down his front, occasioning fresh laughter from the others around him. The author of the remark met her eye, his lips drawn in a satisfied smile. She knew, or felt certain she did, who was the butt of Hendon Tolly’s jest.

“Lord Tolly,” she called, “like Erilo putting a blessing on the grape harvest, it seems you are bringing much-needed mirth to our table tonight, when otherwise people might be sitting quiet and thoughtful, wondering what the gods have in store for us.”

Beside her Brone cleared his throat and on the other side the hierarch tried his remark again, some innocuous comment about how all the fortification work had made him think about some additions to the temple, but she was paying neither of them any attention. She and Hendon Tolly had locked eyes. She was waiting for his reply, and now others were, too: a few dogs beneath the table were growling and playing tug-o-war with a bone, but otherwise the room had grown remarkably still.

“It is a credit to your hospitality, Princess Briony, that you provide us many diversions. You have given us so many interesting things to think about that I had almost forgotten that I am mourning the loss of my brother, Duke Gailon.”

“Yes, we have all been saddened by Gailon’s disappearance,” she said, ignoring another warning cough from Avin Brone. “It was especially a blow because his departure from this house followed so soon after the death of my own brother.”

A palpable unease had fallen over the table. Even Crowel, who had been ready to laugh, sat with his mouth open, surprised.

“We are all unhappy,” Avin Brone said loudly. “To have lost two such noble men so close together… well, we can only pray that Lord Tolly’s brother comes back to us safe.”

Tolly raised an eyebrow and smiled a little, content to wait and see which way she would take this—whether she would acknowledge Brone s offered flag of truce. His self-confidence was itself an insult.” Briony found it maddening that he should feel so secure as to bandy words with the reigning princess in her own hall, at her own table, and then leave it to her to grasp for peace if she wished.

She did not wish. Not tonight.

“Yes, certainly many people hope that Gailon Tolly appears again after such a mysterious disappearance. My brother Kendrick, though, will not be coming back, not in this circle of the world.”

The Tolly eyebrow climbed yet higher. It was a strangeness she could not get used to, that he was both so much like and unlike his brother. She had never liked Gailon Tolly, had found him dour and self-righteous and even a little dim, but his younger brother had a smell of sulfur about him, a dark glint of something deep and more than a little mad. “Is Her Highness suggesting that my brother—my brother the duke, the head of a family that has served Southmarch for centuries—might have had something to do with the death of the prince regent?"

“Here now!” said Hierarch Sisel, and though it trembled, his voice was surprisingly strong. He had spoken even before Brone, a demonstration of his dismay. “This is a terrible thing to suggest or even to think, and may the gods forgive us all for such talk when our soldiers are riding into danger.”

“Well said,” growled Avin Brone. There were a few nods around the table as the nobles of better—or at least fainter—heart reacted with relief to the puncturing of the growing tension. “No one here suspects Duke Gailon of anything and we all pray for his safe return. The guilty man is chained in the stronghold even as we speak, and we have found not the slightest suggestion that he had any confederates.”

But Briony was suddenly remembering old Puzzle’s strange report of Gailon’s visit to Kendrick’s chamber, as well as Brone’s own revelation that his spy had seen agents he thought were the Autarch’s at Summerfield Court. She kept her mouth shut, but she did not move her eyes from Hendon Tolly’s stony stare.

Let it go, Briony, she told herself. This is pointless. No, worse than pointless. His lips quirked. He was enjoying the moment.

“Of course Lord Brone is right,” she said aloud. It was like swallowing a bitter remedy. “The Summerfields are always welcome here—we are family, after all, heirs of Anglin himself and Kellick Eddon. After the cares of the day, I was merely curious to hear the joke that those around you found so cheering.”

Hendon Tolly’s smile did not falter, but it definitely grew smaller and his eyes narrowed a little as he considered. “It was nothing, Princess,” he said at last. “A bit of drollery I do not even remember it now.”

Lord Brone was murmuring at her ear again, trying to get her attention. Briony was weary. It was time to let it go—let it all go. There were problems enough, the gods knew, without allowing this man under her skin. She nodded, letting him have a more or less graceful retreat, but now Durstin Crowel tugged drunkenly at Tolly’s arm.

“You remember it, Hendon,” he said “It was very droll indeed. About…” he affected a whisper the entire tablecould hear, “… Prince Barrick.”

Something grabbed at Briony s heart. A low groan escaped from the lord constable. “Ah,” she said. “Was it? Then I really think you should share it.”

Tolly gave the Baron of Graylock a look of contempt, then turned back to her. He took a swallow of wine; when he was finished, his face was composed again, but she could still see that strange light dancing in his eye— not drunkenness, but something more permanent. “Very well,” he said. “Since both my friend and my princess insist. I was much taken with your raiment, Briony—your clothes.”

She felt herself grow stiff and cold-masked as a statue. He had deliberately left out her title, as though they were both children again and he was taunting her, the mere girl who wanted to play with her betters. “Yes? I am glad it impresses you, Hendon. These are warlike times so I thought that a more warlike garb might be in order.”

“Yes, of course.” He inclined his head a little. “Of course. Well, all I was wondering is, if you are wearing that…” he made a disdainful gesture, “does it mean that Prince Barrick is riding to battle in a dress?”

The shocked murmur and the few startled gasps of laughter had scarcely begun when Briony found herself standing, her chair tumbled over behind her. Brone grabbed for her arm—she almost struck him for trying—but he could not stop her. Her sword hissed from the scabbard.

“If you think my clothes amusing,” she said through teeth clenched so hard her jaw would ache later, “perhaps you will find my blade amusing, too.”

“Princess!” hissed Sisel, shocked, but he was not such a fool as to grab at someone with a naked blade quivering in her hand, woman or no.

Hendon Tolly stood up slowly, pleased and not doing much about hiding it. His hand dropped to his own hilt and caressed it briefly, his eyes all the time fixed on hers. “Amusing indeed,” he said, “but of course I could not raise my hand against the princess regent, even for such diverting sport. Perhaps we could have a test with children’s weapons sometime, so that no one takes harm.”

Her heart was thundering now. She was tempted to charge him, to force him to unsheathe, no matter the result, if only to wipe that mocking satisfaction from his lean face. She did not even care that he was a well-known swordsman and she was simply the pupil of another famous blade, a pupil who had scarcely practiced since the summer and could not hope to equal Tolly even on her very best day. It would almost be worth it to force him to kill her in self-defense. Nobody would be laughing then, and all her cares would be over.

But I’d never see Barrick again, or Father. Her arm was shaking badly. She lowered the blade until the tip clicked against the table leg. And one of the bloody Tollys would wind up as regent until Anissa’s child is born —if they let it live.

“Get out of my sight,” she said to Hendon Tolly, then turned her eye on the rest of the table, the rows of pale, gaping faces, some still with lumps of gravied meat congealing in their fingers, arrested halfway from plate to mouth. “All of you. All of you!”

But it was Briony herself who slammed the sword back into its sheath and then turned and stalked out of the Great Hall, scattering servants as she went. She managed to wait until the door fell shut behind her before letting the flood of angry tears overwhelm her.

33. The Pale Things

It was a grim thing to stand at the Northmarch crossroad where he had stood only the month before and see the hills now smothered by dark vines and nodding, bruise-colored flowers. The soldiers whispered among themselves and scuffed their feet like restless cattle, but it was a far more disturbing sight for Ferras Vansen. He had seen such vegetation before, but forty miles or more to the west. It had spread far in a short time.

“Where are those scouts?” asked Earl Tyne for the fifth or sixth time in an hour. He slapped his gloved hands together as though the day were bitterly cold, though the sun had not yet set and the wind was mild for Ondekamene. The war leader had dumped his helmet on the ground like an empty bucket and pushed back his arming cap, his coarse, gray-shot hair stood up in tufts. He stared out at the strange sheen of the meadows and the black blossoms moving in the breeze like the heads of children watching them silently from the deep grass. “They should have been back by now.”

“Domey and the others are good men, my lord.” Vansen looked across at the resting soldiers. At any other time after such a long halt they would have gone straying off into the grass like untended sheep, but instead they stood uncomfortably where they had stopped, as if prisoned by the edges of the road. These sons of farmers and shopkeepers wanted no part of the thorny vines or the unnatural, oily-looking flowers.

“You said you’ve seen this before,Vansen.”

“Yes, Lord Aldritch. With my troop, in the north of Silverside. Just a little while before… before things began to go wrong.”

“Well, blood of the gods, keep your mouth shut about that, will you?” Tyne scowled. “This lot are all about ready to turn tail and run all the way back to Southmarch.” He glared at a shaven-headed mantis making an elaborate show of wafting a bowl of incense around in the middle of the crossroad, moaning and singing as he went about his task of banishing evil spirits. Many of the men watched this spectacle with obvious unease. “I’m going to have that priest’s head off,” the Earl of Blueshore growled, almost to himself.

“I think this lot will be all right when the time comes, my lord. Many of them have fought on the Brenland borders or against the Kertish hill bandits. It’s the waiting that’s hard on them.”

Tyne took a drink from his saddle-cup and looked at the guard captain for a long, considering moment. “It’s hard on all of us—that’s the cursed thing. Bad enough waiting for the enemy to show themselves when you know you’re fighting mortal men. What are they supposed to make of all this… ?” He waved his hand at the poisoned hills. Ferras Vansen was glad the earl didn’t really expect an answer.

“Ah,” the older man said suddenly, with real relief in his voice. “There they are.” He squinted. “It is them, isn’t it?” “Yes, lord.” Vansen also felt the tightness in his chest loosen a bit. The sentries had been expected back at noon and the sun was on the hilltops now. “They are riding fast.”

“They look as though they have something to say, don’t they?” Tyne turned and stared back at the line of soldiers on the road. It had been a full day or more since they had encountered the last refugees from Candlers-town, and although the tales were terrible, almost unbelievable, their presence had at least proved that men could cross these hills in safety. But since they had passed the last of those stragglers, the army of Southmarch had traveled through empty, near-silent lands, and now a stir was moving through the ranks at the sight of the distant scouts. Behind the soldiers the first row of drovers, anticipating that the train would soon move out again, began whipping back the oxen who had strayed a little distance from the road to graze. “Ride out to them, bring them straight through to me,” commanded Tyne. “I think under that tree, there, just a short way up the hill.That will let us talk away from sharp ears.”

“Perhaps we should set the men to making camp, lord,” Vansen suggested. “It is getting late to ride much farther and it will occupy them.”

“A good idea, but let’s hear what the scouts say first.” The earl turned to his squire. “Tell Rorick and Mayne and Sivney Fiddicks to join me on the hill there.The young prince, too, of course—wouldn’t do to leave him out Oh, and Brenhall—he’s probably under a tree somewhere, sleeping off his noon meal.”

Vansen barely heard the last of this as the earl’s other squire helped him into the saddle, then he spurred away to meet the scouts.

“But how many are they, curse it?” Tyne tugged at his mustache and looked as though he would like to slap Gar Doiney. “How many times must I ask?”

“I’m sorry, your lordship.” The scout’s voice was dry and cracked, as if he didn’t use it much. “I’ve heard you, sire, it’s just hard to answer, like. With mist and such we can only just tell they’re camped on the hilltop and in the trees. We rode around the long way for a better look—that’s why we’re so long back.” He shook his head. The scar between Doiney’s eye and mouth that pulled up his lip and made him seem to smirk had gotten him into trouble before now, and Vansen guessed it might have had something to do with the man’s choice of a usually solitary profession—but Vansen felt sure that even in his anger Tyne couldn’t fail to mark the skittish look on the scout’s weathered, bony face. Even a hardened, taciturn campaigner like Doiney was disturbed by this unknown, unnatural enemy. “Come back with us, sire—there must be an hour still of light. You’ll see. It’s hard to make out anything. But there are hundreds there, thousands perhaps.”

Tyne waved his hand. “It’s only that it is dangerous to have to guess. At least we know where they are.”

“And you are certain there are no more of them anywhere else?" young Prince Barrick asked. He had joined the circle on the hillside, the nobles standing close together to provide each other some protection from the stiffening wind. The prince looked interested—almost too interested, Vansen thought, as if he had forgotten that the men unrolling their bedrolls would soon have to cross swords with this interesting phenomenon, that some of them would almost certainly die. It was hard for Vansen not to feel a little resentment on behalf of Dab Dawley and all the other soldiers not much older than the prince who would not be surrounded and protected as Barrick would be, to make certain their experience of battle didn’t become too dangerous.

But who is it asked me to take care of the lad, to protect him? Was it the prince himself? No, it was his sister Perhaps I do him a disservice. Vansen was unsure again sometimes Barrick Eddon seemed a mere boy, younger even than his years, petulant and anxious, at other moments he seemed a hundred years old, far beyond anything so mundane as fear of death.

“If Your Highness means perhaps it is a token force to draw us, with the rest in ambush,” said Doiney, awkward and uncomfortable at speaking to royalty, “then I say anything is possible, your good Highness, but if they have another force squirreled away, they are either so small they are hiding under the clovers or they are floating on a cloud in the sky, like, or whatever it is they say fairy folk do. Because of the morning mist we did not mark the ones on the hill until our way back, and we rode far across these lands on both sides of the Settland Road and up the far reaches of the old Northmarch way as well, across all kinds of ground.” He stopped, clearly trying to think it all through, to make sure that he had said what he meant to say. Vansen had never heard so many words out of the man in all the years he had known him. “Meaning to say, Highness, by your pardon, there are none others we can see for miles beyond except for those as are nearly on top of us.”

“What do they look like?" asked Rorick, his voice a little too gruffly ordinary to be quite believable.

“Hard to tell,” Doiney told him. “Apologies, your lordship, but it’s that cursed mist and those trees. But we could see some of them in what looked like good, plain armor, not much different than you or me, and there were horses and tents and and all you’d expect. But there were other shapes too, in the trees…” He trailed off, made the pass-evil. “Shapes that didn’t seem right at all, what we saw of them.”

Tyne stepped backward until the tree was almost against his spine. He peered out into the distance, although the wooded high place the Twilight People seemed to have chosen as their camp was blocked from view by the intervening hills. “First things first, then,” he said. “Vansen, we need a string of pickets across the hills behind them and some miles down both roads, changed often enough that they won’t start to see shapes in the night that aren’t there, but do see the ones that truly are. They must keep ears open, too. If there is some other force coming—if it is a trap—we must know about it before they arrive. And let’s have the rest start making camp.” Tyne’s sergeant ran down the hill to give the orders.

Vansen leaned over and had a few quick words with Gar Domey as the nobles talked quietly among themselves. “But the others that Muchmore took out have been back since noontime,” Vansen finished, “so tell him it’s them I want out, and you get your fellows something to drink and eat.”

Doiney nodded, then bowed to the nobles and made a clumsy, unaccustomed leg for the prince before he swung himself back onto his horse again. He cantered back toward his little troop of horsemen, visibly relieved to escape the councils of the great.

Vansen stared at the blossoming campfires. They were a reassuring sight against the descending twilight and he decided that Earl Tyne was a thoughtful commander it was doubtful the enemy was ignorant of their arrival, and the fires would give the men much-needed heart’s ease through a long, worrisome night.

“So what do we do, then, Lord Aldritch?” asked the prince. “Do you think they will they stand and fight?" “If they won’t, then we have learned something useful,” Tyne told him. “But do not doubt that I fear a trap as much as you do, Highness, although I suspect we may be overthinking. Still, if they break and run we should not follow them, in case they mean to lead us into the place we have heard about, beyond the Shadowline where everyone runs mad.”

“Almost everyone. Not our Captain Vansen.” It was hard to tell how Prince Barrick meant it, as compliment or gibe. Vansen broke the short silence. “If my experience is to be of use, then I must remind everyone that my men and I had no idea we were crossing over into into those lands so I think Earl Tyne speaks wisely If we best them, even if we seem to break them, still we should go slowly and carefully.”

Barrick Eddon stared at him for a moment, gave a sober nod, then looked around at the others and realized they were all watching him. “What, do you wait for me? I’m not a general, not even a soldier yet. I’ve said that and I mean it. Aldritch, you and the others must decide.”

The Earl of Blueshore cleared his throat. “Well, Highness, then I say we must be alert and on guard all this evening, and double the usual sentries— and that is not counting your pickets, Vansen. If these shadow folk do not stir, then in the morning when the light comes back, we will go up and test their strength. I do not think any of us much wants to go against them in these unfamiliar fields when the sun is setting.”

There were nods and a few grunts of agreement, but otherwise nobody said anything. There was no need.

Chert had been up and down the shore of the quicksilver sea a hundred times, it seemed, calling and calling until he was quite dizzy, with no reply except echoes. He had discovered no hint of a way across the liquid metal, no bridge, no mooring post, and—as best he could tell in the inconstant, flickering light—no boat on the shore at the far side. He had discovered one thing, though somewhere in the blue-and-rose-shot darkness above his head some sort of cleft must open to the distant surface, a rock chimney of sorts where the fumes could disperse into the air above Brenn’s Bay. Chert knew enough about quicksilver to know that if this were the true stuff, unaired, he likely would be not just light-headed but dead or dying.

He wondered if that could be the answer to the puzzle—could the boy have somehow come down onto the island from above? But what had Beetledown been following if it hadn’t been Flint’s scent? And how could the boy have gotten down from such a height? The rock face on the side of the silver sea—the side Chert couldn’t reach—was distant from the island, at least as far from it as the side where he stood. He had a momentary, fanciful vision of the child somehow drifting down like a mote of dust or a bit of mushroom spore, but that was ridiculous. Flint might have come from behind the Shadowline, he might be a good climber, but he had given no sign whatsoever of being able to fly.

Still, Chert walked back to the slope below the jut of stone balcony where he himself had entered and stared up the jagged face, scouting with his eye up the deer track—the ghost-deer track as he now had to think of it— wondering if there was some other way across from near the Maze itself, some high path made invisible by a trick of the light. Sighing—a sigh that the thick, hot air quickly turned into a wheeze and then a cough—he clambered back up the slope.

He paused on the balcony of the Maze, peering out at the weird glow of the Shining Man that filled the great cavern without fully illuminating it, then took out his remaining chunk of lantern-coral to make his way back through the Maze. He was glad he had reclaimed it and did not have to traverse the labyrinth in darkness again—it had been too much like his age-ceremony, too much like that sense of helplessness when he had been forced to march without touching any of his peers, following the voice of an acolyte he could not see, a voice made strange and inhuman by the dark and the echoes. But this time he would have light . .

How did Flint get through the Maze, then? It was a question he should have asked before, and Chert was again angry with himself. Did Flint go to the Salt Pool first for a piece of Boulder’s wares? Somehow Chert didn’t believe it—the little man would have said something. But how could the child have made his way through the Maze in utter blackness otherwise?

For that matter, how did he find his way around down here at all? It was a mystery to rival the strangest parts of the tale of Kermos and his fabulous battles.

Chert paused for a short rest, wondering what time of day it was now, since even his Funderling sense of how time passed in the skyless depths had been compromised by this place, then slowly made his way back through the twisting Maze. He emerged into the soft, warm light of Emberstone Reach without having discovered a single hint of how the boy might have made his way across the Sea in the Depths, or even any sign of Flint’s passage at all. Chert turned and began to make his weary way through the Maze again, more and more certain he would never know what had happened to the boy, but this time, in his exhaustion, he took a wrong turning and found himself in a section of the labyrinth he had not entered before. He could tell because it felt different beneath his feet, and he realized for the first time that the route between the Reach and the feature called the Balcony had been worn low in the middle over the centuries by the shuffling passage of innumerable feet. He also abruptly understood at least one of the ways that the acolytes made their way through the Maze in darkness. Now he found himself in a part of it where the floor stones were smoothly level, as if no one had ever walked on them before.

He fought down a moment of panic. Even if he was lost, surely he would be no worse off here than wandering the shore of the quicksilver sea. The temple brothers, if they came, were the guardians of the Maze. They should know its every corner.

Still, he could not forget his own proverbial bad luck. They should, yes. But perhaps they don’t.

Chert did his best to retrace his steps, but he had been distracted when he chose the wrong path and couldn’t remember how long he had walked or how many times he had turned before realizing his mistake Chert held his glowing chunk of coral up to the slate walls, seeking some sort of clue, but although they were covered with the same indecipherable carvings as the Maze’s more familiar reaches—vast, wall-wide figures with huge eyes and contorted limbs, as well as curls and dots of what looked like writing but in no script he had seen anywhere else—it was all too much the same from wall to wall and room to room to help him find his way.

Still, I’ve seen what not many other than the Metamorphic Brothers can have seen, he thought, recalling his journey through blackness in his coming-of-age ceremony What does it all mean? Can the brothers read it?

The face and words of Brother Nickel came back to him suddenly—the odd look in the man’s eyes as he told of their elder, Grandfather Sulphur, and his dreams that “An hour is coming when Old Night will reach out that our days of freedom are over.” Chert shivered despite the thick heat of the place. Here in the depths, wandering beneath the eyes of these supernatural beings, it was easy to feel the breath of Old Night on the back of his neck.

He turned sharply, suddenly convinced that something was following him, but the corridor behind him was empty. I am making it worse, he thought. I should stop and wait until the temple brothers come.

And if the light from his coral finally died while he waited’ Darkness had never frightened Chert before, but now it was a dreadful thought.

He turned another corner and found himself in a dead-end facing three stone walls. Vast faces carved on those walls stared down at him so that he felt like a child surrounded by angry parents. He let out a little gasp of surprise and heard it echo and fade, but before he stopped walking he could hear something else as well, a hollowness in his footfalls, an echo that had not been there before. It confused him—for a moment he thought someone else was in the Maze with him—but then he crouched down and held the gleaming coral close. He stared at the scratches on the stone flags, then rapped on them with his knuckle. The sound was unquestionably different.

Chert pried at the edge of one of the stones and to his astonishment it rose a little in his hands, shuddering as it slid out of its collar of ancient mortar. Then, as he strained and heaved, it was not just one that rose, but four stones together. He got the fingers of both hands under it and, growling and moaning with the strain, lifted the whole mass like the cover of a cistern and slid it rasping to one side. The conjoined stones made a rough square less than a big-one’s yard across and were no thicker than the width of Chert’s closed fist. Beneath the spot where they had lain was darkness.

A little heat and a stronger smell of the quicksilver sea floated up from the opening Chert leaned over and poked the coral light into it Stairs, steep stairs, wound down and away before vanishing in the depths. He sat up, rubbing his head Was this what the boy had found? Or was it merely some other part of the Mysteries, a path that would lead him to a worse fate even than being stranded in darkness in the Maze’.

It’s not like I’ve anything better to do, he told himself. And if the Elders are angry with me well, surely this won’t make it any worse.

He had heard better arguments, but he carefully let himself down through the opening, then squatted on one of the lower steps to look as far down the crude little stairwell as he could, just in case the whole thing might come to a sudden end a few yards deeper and fall away beneath his feet, pitching him down into some abyss. Although the tunnel looked far less carefully finished in its construction than the rest of the Maze, it still seemed solid Funderling work and there were no sudden drops in view. As he cautiously inched down a few more steps, he looked up and saw that a slot had been cut into the bottom of one of the four stones that covered the hole, a handhold to drag the coverback into place from below.

Not very likely I’ll be doing that, he thought, but he wondered how Flint could have managed to do it if he had descended these stairs. The boy was wiry, but was he that strong?

All this thinking gave Chert another idea and he crawled back out of the hole. He untied the shirt he had been wearing around his waist since he had got it back from Beetledown—it was far too hot down here for him to have felt any need of it—and tossed it out to the mouth of the dead-end so that someone in the passage would be able to see it without turning the corner.

With the stone cover off the opening, I couldn’t give the temple brothers a better idea of where I’ve gone if I wrote them a letter.

Feeling a little heartened despite his worries over what might be waiting in this narrow place, Chert Blue Quartz began to make his way down the stairs.

Either the quicksilver vapors were truly much stronger here or something else about the downward passage was . . . Strange… because Chert was finding it hard to keep his mind on the very important task of not falling down the narrow steps.

The stairwell was largely featureless! every few dozen steps he passed a string of symbols that might have been a single, enlarged word, rendered in the same stylized writing he had seen above, but there were no faces on these walls, no figures Still, he couldn’t escape the idea that things were moving around him, and that the failing light of his coral was being reflected back at him somehow from the bare walls as though it bounced off something less opaque than mere stone, as though the stairwell burrowed down not through the castle’s well-known limestone, but some huge, murky crystal. The dimensions of the place seemed to change, too, swelling and contracting even as he continued his trudge downward. For a time he couldn’t make sense anymore of how he had found his way here, and he became gripped by the dreadful certainty that he was descending the living stone throat of the Shining Man, being swallowed down into the heart of the Mysteries. Then the sensation passed, replaced by flickers of light all around him like the sparks that danced on the inside of closed eyelids. Wordless whispers swam up the stairwell, a dull and distant rush like waves crashing on a shore, and superstitious terror gripped him again.

This is not my place Only the temple brothers should be here, and perhaps even they do not know about this tunnel‘

Flint, he reminded himself, trying to fight off the panic that had him huddling on a step, hugging himself in exhausted terror. Remember the boy. That small, fiercely solemn face, the arms thin as Opal’s broom handle, the white-gold hair that would never he flat, and stood up like iron-flower crystals despite Opal’s best work with the brush. And Opal herself, of course—if Chert couldn’t bring the boy back to her, she would be crushed. Something inside her would die.

He forced himself to his feet and began descending again. One step. It all starts with one step, then another. Then another.

No, the Shadowline, he thought bleanly, it all started that day beside the Shadowline… But even as the memory came into his head with a sudden bizarre clarity—the forested hillside, the noise of hooves, the smell of the damp soil under his nose—as if a door had been opened and the past had crashed in, like a noisy guest into a quiet room, he put his foot down onto the next step and discovered something was very wrong Chert stumbled, flailed, and shrieked; then, with his heart pounding so hard it seemed it might cannon through the cage of his ribs, he realized that the wrong thing was not a deadly chasm beneath his feet but the opposite, a floor—not too much distance but too little. He had reached an end to what had seemed an endless downward spiral of steps.

He raised the chunk of coral and peered around, but if the world had suddenly gone from vertical to horizontal, it had not changed in many other ways- before him lay more corridor hewed through the same featureless stone. He was having trouble seeing clearly, but the passage extended as far as the light reached and probably much farther than that.

Beneath even the Sea in the Depths ? If so, there might be an end to the journey at some point—he had half feared that he might simply continue down into the earth for days and weeks, perhaps at last to arrive at the black tourmaline doors of Kernios’ own subterranean palace, doors that were famously guarded by Immon the Gatekeeper. It was a place Chert definitely did not wish to see while still alive, even if much of the original tale had been distorted by the big folk. The Funderling version was even more frightening. He tried to remember the distance across the quicksilver sea but the unstable light had confused him. Never having been any closer, he could only guess now in the most formless kind of way. He shrugged and took a deep breath.The hot, sour air did not seem to clear his thoughts. He staggered down the corridor.

“The deeps are no more like the town than the sky is like the ground, lad.”

It was his father’s voice in his head now, strangely Big Nodule (unlike his firstborn son, Chert’s brother, who was the current magister, his father would never have let himself be called anything so pretentious as “Nodule the Elder”) had been lamed by a rockfall in the early part of Olin’s reign, and had spent the last years of his life moving between his bed and his chair before the fire, but during Chert’s boyhood he had still been vigorous. Of all his sons, Chert had been the one most like him— ”the boy loves stone for stone’s sake,” Big Nodule had often proclaimed to his cronies at the guildhall—and he had taken Chert for long walks through the unfinished works outside Funderling Town, and even a few times to some of the hills above-ground or along the edge of Brenn’s Bay, pointing out the way limestone came to light where the rainwater washed away the earth, or the trapped centuries that were pressed in a sandstone bank above the waves like dried flowers in a noble lady’s book.

“A man who knows stone and its ways is as good as any man, big ‘un or Funderling, prince or kern, and he’ll never lack for things to do and think about.” That had been another of the old fellow’s favorite sayings.

Chert was astonished to find that he was walking blind, not because his toral lamp had finally died, but because he was weeping.

Hold on, you, he told himself. That man strapped you raw with his tie-rope for stealing a few sugarcap mushrooms out of Widow Rocksalt’s garden. When he finally died, your mother didn’t last even a year after, not because she missed him so much but because he’d worked her so in those last years that she was just bone-tired and couldn’t go on any longer.

Still, the tears wouldn’t stop. He found it hard to walk. His mothers face was before him now, too, the heavy-lidded eyes that could seem either beautifully dignified or painfully distant, the mouth that turned down at any hint of what she deemed an unnecessary fuss. He remembered Lapis Blue Quartz’s nimble, work-gnarled hands as she made a yarn doll for one of her grandchildren, her fingers always busy, always doing something. He couldn’t think of a time when she had been awake and those hands were not occupied.

“And what is this now?” He could hear her as clearly as if she stood beside him, her voice sour but not without humor. “What noise is this? Fissure and fracture, it sounds like someone’s skinning a live mole in here.”

Chert had to stop for a while to get his breath, and when he started again, it was hard just to keep walking. The walls, unbroken now even by the occasional glyph, featureless as a rabbit scrape, squeezed in on him as though they meant to catch him and hold him until the world changed. He could again imagine himself in the belly of the Shining Man, being digested and changed, becoming something hard like crystal, immobile and eternal, but with his thoughts still alive in the center of it, battering hopelessly to get out like a fly beneath an overturned cup.

And now, as though the deep places that contained him suddenly went through some sort of paroxysm, he could feel the sensation of power, the presence that he thought was the Shining Man, shift and grow less diffuse, more localized it was something he sensed as powerfully as he could know down from up with his eyes closed—the presence was no longer smother-mgly all around him, but instead had taken on a very definite location, up and ahead of him. Instead of giving him a goal, the power of it became something that pushed against him like a strong, constant wind, as though he and it were two chunks of lodestone repelling each other. Chert put his head down, eyes still prismed with weeping, and forced himself to take step after agonizing step.

What is this place? What does it all mean? He tried to remember the words of the temple brothers at his coming-of-age ceremony, the ritual tale of the Lord of the Hot Wet Stone, but it came back only as a jumble of sonorous words that buzzed in his head almost without meaning, in pictures that were smeared like wet paint. The earth was a broken thing, the voices murmured and roared, a new thing, the lights in the sky so bright and the face of the world yet so dark, the battle to take this place away from older, cruder gods a thing not of days or weeks but of aeons, throwing mountains up where no mountains had stood, tearing the face of creation so that the water rushed in and made great, steaming seas.

“In the Days when there were no Days,” the oldest of the temple brothers had chanted, beginning the initiation ceremony, and Chert and the other celebrants had only moaned, their heads full of waking dreams that painted the dark around them, their stomachs sour from the k’hamao they had been given to drink after fasting and purifying themselves for two days before the being taken down into the Mysteries In the Days when there were no Days.

But what now? What was this? The tunnel had somehow been yanked upright like a length of string. It rose above him into the shadowy distance. Somehow Chert found himself on stairs again, but this time he was climbing, not descending, his head chaotic with ideas, with visions that were not quite visible, with the endless roar oe. The Lord of the Hot Wet Stone battling his foes, a roar that made the very roots of the world quiver Chert felt that roar in his bones now, felt it beginning to rattle him to pieces, to crumble him like the sandstone cliffs his father had shown him, falling to the relentless waves. Soon there would be no more Chert, only fragments, crumbled smaller and smaller until they became dust, then the dust would scatter and waft away and spread into all the dark places even the stars had never reached…

When his thoughts at last came back to him, when the dreams finally began to shred and disperse like wind-tormented clouds, Chert couldn’t make sense of what he saw; in fact, he wondered if he hadn’t merely passed into some different and only slightly less hectic realm of madness. He was standing at the foot of a mountain, a great jut of dark stone, a massive shadow in the thin, dim light that seemed to come from all directions and none—but how could there be such a thing, a mountain inside a mountain? Nevertheless, there it was, a monstrous black lump rising a hundred times his own height or more; he stood at its foot like an ant gazing up at a man.

Oh, Elders save me, it’s the gate, the black gate. I have climbed all the way down to Kermos . . and lmmon —Noszh-la himself —is going to find me wanting and chew me in those terrible, stony teeth . ‘

Something flickered like lightning inside the vast black shape that loomed above him. A moment later a mad radiance began to leak out from every part of it, but strongest in the center, where it formed the rough shape of a man. A shining man.

Chert stared in horrified fascination, but also with a growing sense of relief. He was standing right at its feet. He had crossed under the Sea in the Depths.

Still, he had never imagined what it would be like to stand before it. The rock seemed half translucent, half solid black basalt, and the light that streamed out bent as it came and broke into more colors than surely could be contained in a rainbow—so many colors and all moving so strangely! He had to narrow his eyes until they were almost shut and still it made him dizzy, made his head waver and his stomach lurch. He collapsed to his knees on the stony shore of the island. The heart of the blazing, coruscating brilliance did indeed have the shape of a person, although the stone—semi-translucent as volcanic glass, and the very inconstancy of the lights made it hard to discern Still, it almost seemed to move, to writhe within the rock as though racked with nightmares, or as though it sought escape.

At last Chert could not look at it even through squinting eyes and so he lowered his face. He crouched on all fours like a dog, feeling as though he would be sick, and it was then, as the glare faded, that he saw the boy lying stretched out on the gravel slope a few yards above him.

“Flint!” His voice flew out—he could almost see the echoes spreading and chasing each other, growing smaller like ripples. He scrambled up the loose stones. The boy was curled on his side but almost facedown, one arm reaching upslope as though offering a gift to the gleaming giant. Chert saw something flat and shiny in the boy’s hand as he turned him over, noted distractedly that it was the mirror that he and Opal had discovered in the boy’s cherished bag, the child’s one possession, but then the sight of Flint’s face, pale as bone beneath the dark dust, eyes half open but sightless, drove all other thoughts from his mind.

He would not wake, no matter how Chert shook him. At last the Funderling dragged the boy up and pulled him to his chest, then pressed the cold cheek tight against his neck and shouted for help as though there were people around to hear him—as though Chert Blue Quartz were not the last living creature in the whole of the cosmos.

The sky had lightened a shade, but still no birds were singing Barrick’s heart hurried, fast as a dragonfly’s wings, until he found it hard to get his breath. The quiet sounds of the camp rising were all around him. He wondered if any of the others had managed to sleep.

He tested the saddle straps once more, loosened and then retightened one even though it did not need tightening His black horse, Kettle— named to irritate Kendrick as much as anything else, who had believed in noble names for noble steeds—whickered in irritation.

Barrick watched Ferras Vansen, the guard captain, going from one smoldering fire to another, talking to the men, and found himself irritated by the man’s calm attention to duty Slept like an innocent child, no doubt. He didn’t really know what to think about Vansen, but didn’t much want to trust him No one could truly be quite that honest and forthright—years in the Southmarch court had taught Barrick that. The guard captain was playing some deeper game—perhaps the innocent one of craving advancement, perhaps something more subtle Why else would he be watching Barrick so closely? Because he was, there was no doubt of that, Vansen’s eyes were on him every time Barrick turned around. Whatever the case, the man bore watching Briony might have forgiven him his derelictions, but his sister’s angers were always quicker to cool. Barrick Eddon was not so easily mollified.

A hand touched his shoulder and he jumped, which made Kettle prance in place, snorting nervously. “Sorry, lad,” said Tyne Aldritch. “I mean, your pardon, Highness I didn’t mean to startle you.” “You didn’t… I mean…”

The Earl of Blueshore stepped back. His breath smelled of wine, although he showed no signs of having drunk more than he should. Barrick remembered the stream winding down through the thorny black vines and couldn’t really blame the man for not wanting to drink from it. “Of course,” Tyne said. “It’s only that I was remembering the night before my first battle. Did you sleep?”

“Yes,” Barrick lied. What he really needed to do now, he realized, was piss. Tyne had almost frightened the water out of him.

“I was reminded of when I went as my uncles squire to Olway Coomb. Dimakos Heavyhand was one of the last chieftains of the Gray Companies, and he and his men had come into Marrinswalk, burning and looting. Your father was down in Hierosol with most of the hardened Southmarch fighters, but those remaining made common cause with the Marrinswalk men and such others as we could gather, then met the raiders in the valley. Dimakos had come there first and had the high ground, although we were the larger force.” Tyne smiled a hard smile. “My uncle Laylin saw that I was fearful about the battle to come and brought me to the questioning of a prisoner, a scout from Heavyhand’s company we had captured. The man would say nothing of use no matter the persuasion, I will give him that, and when it became certain we would get nothing more from him, my uncle slit the man’s throat and rubbed the hot blood on my face. ‘There,’ he told me ‘Well-blooded is well-begun.’ Nor would he let me wash it off until we rode. It itched so that that I scarcely thought of anything else until I struck my first blow in anger.” Tyne laughed quietly. “Harsh, but my uncle was one of the old men, the hard men, and that was their way. Be glad we do not live in such times although perhaps we will miss his like before long, if the gods are unkind.” He made the sign of the Three, then clapped Barrick on the back so that the prince almost lost control of his bladder once more. “Fear not, lad. You will do your father proud. We will send these Twilight folk back to their boggart hills with something to think about.”

Was that supposed to make me feel better? Barrick wondered as Tyne walked away, but he couldn’t worry about it long, as he was already fumbling with the laces of his smallclothes.

Expecting little in the way of siege play, they had brought only a small contingent of Funderling miners, but these were also serving as gunnery men. Barrick tried to sit still in the saddle as the tiny shapes in leather hoods and cloaks, their eyes insectlike behind thick spectacles of smoked crystal, aimed the bombards up the hillside. Although he was armored, Barrick was not going in the first waves of mounted men, not least because he could only carry a light sword instead of a lance, he should have been angry at the coddling but found he was grateful. Dawn was just touching the edge of the eastern sky. The clumps of shadow were becoming bushes and trees again, and although the forest at the top of the hill was still shrouded in mist, beneath the lightening sky it did not look quite so fearsome and mysterious. In fact, everything was equally strange to Barrick’s eye just now, befogged forest and mortal army; even though he was in the midst of it, he felt as though he looked down on the scene from some high window, perhaps from Wolfstooth Spire.

Still, he held his breath as fire was touched to the train and the guns began to speak, barking like bronze dogs and spewing stone balls toward the trees on the hilltop. The first shots fell short, bouncing up the slope and vanishing into the leafy cover, but the Funderlings raised the bombards and let fly again, this time the round stones crashed into the center of the hill-crest, tearing away branches and knocking down trees. When the roaring stopped, there was only silence for a moment as Barrick and the others peered through the drifting smoke. A wailing cry went up from the hilltop, and at first he felt a fierce, relieved joy—they had killed most of them, they must have! Then he heard the note of defiant triumph in the inhuman voices. It sounded like there were hundreds of them, perhaps thousands.

Tyne had waited impatiently for the barrage to finish. He had already made it clear that he believed cannons were for siegework, nothing else, but he had bent to the wishes of Ivar Brenhill and the other more progressive war barons. Now he lowered the visor on his helmet and waved his arm. The first row of archers let fly, then crouched as the second row filled the air with their own arrows. Tyne waved again and with a shout that was almost as daunting as the cry from the hilltop, the first wave of pikemen dashed up the slope, pike shafts waving and clacking like a denuded version of the forest above, the wielders sped by the knowledge that the mounted men behind them would ride down any stragglers. A flight of arrows whistled toward them from the heights, strangely few but terribly accurate. A dozen men were down already, at least one of them a knight: his horse was dying beside him, legs thrashing as the other mounted men surged past.

Long, confused moments of noise and smoke passed before Barrick and the men around him spurred their own horses up the hill, time enough for the first wave of foot soldiers to reach the top and plunge into the trees. He heard shouts, excited cries, even a few screams, but over everything he heard the unnatural voices of the enemy—keening noises like seabirds, like the howls of wolves and the barks of foxes, but with words buried in them to make the strange sounds even more terrible.

“Briony…” he murmured, but even he could not hear the name.

Some of the first wave of soldiers came reeling back, bloodied and shrieking. The fairies had built a wall of thorns. The mounted men behind them pushed on, some wielding axes, hacking their way in and killing many of the wall’s defenders. Arrows were snapping out of the trees at them, but still strangely few, and Barrick could almost feel the mounting concern of Tyne and the other war leaders—was it an ambush, after all? But the hillsides and meadows all around were still empty for this moment, the forested crest seemed the angry heart of the world, an island of noise and struggle surrounded by stillness.

“They break out!” someone called in a throttled, high-pitched voice— Barrick thought it might be his cousin Rorick On the hilltop a knot of men had been forced backward out of the trees, fighting hand-to-hand with a group of howling, white-haired warriors. At the center of the defenders a hugely tall figure stood in his stirrups, slashing with what even from a great distance seemed a bizarre, misshapen blade. The defender was tall, with snowy hair flo’wing free in the wind like a woman’s, and Barrick thought for a moment he must be an old man, but a glimpse of his face showed youthful features, and skin stretched tight over bones sharp enough to cut leather. The Twilight man struck down one of Tyne’s soldiers, then another, spinning the blade in the second man’s guts like a peasant churning butter. One of the mounted nobles spurred toward him, lance lowered, and the white-haired fairy or elf or whatever kind of creature he was knocked the weapon aside before closing with his attacker. Barrick lost sight of them behind a clump of trees as he neared the crest, then the forest was all around him and the men with whom he rode, mist puffing up from their horses’ hooves.

“Forward!” someone else shouted. “But stay together!” Barrick was surprised to realize it was Vansen, that the man had found his way to them through the trees and the mayhem, but he did not have long to contemplate it. A figure suddenly sprang up from the undergrowth—no, two figures, three!—and Barrick had to strike away a hand clawing at his bridle. The sound of many voices echoed through the trees, as many unnatural as natural, and in the cloudy, slanting light a thousand weird shapes loomed between the trunks—shadows and tricks of the light, perhaps, but there were enough real bodies and enough pale, hating faces that he had no time to consider anything except staying alive.

Half a dozen men of Barrick’s party were left of the original dozen, although some of the others had merely become lost among the trees Vansen was one of those remaining and he leaned close to Barrick and asked quietly, “Are you well, Highness?”

Barrick could only nod. He was gasping for breath and there were cuts and scratches on his hands and no doubt elsewhere, but he thought he had killed at least one of the fairy folk—a face that came toward him down a shadowy tree branch, and which he had split with a startled swing of his blade—and he did not seem to have any major wounds. The forest was mostly empty here, although the fearful sounds of the Twilight folk were still loud, and unnatural shapes still flitted between the distant trees.

“I think I hearTyne this way,” Vansen said, then spurred across the clearing. Barrick and the others followed him, all struggling for breath, their necks prickling, not certain when the next attack would come. Barrick felt as though he was peering down one of Chaven’s optical tubes, that everything around him had been bent except for that at which he stared. All his blood seemed to be rushing through his head while his body was coldly numb, hard and unfeeling as iron. It was a strange, terrifying, exhilarating feeling.

Ferras Vansen suddenly reined up beside a patch of deep brush and struck downward with his sword, then swung out of the saddle and began hacking away at something unseen. He was shouting, and although the guard captain’s words couldn’t be heard over the shrilling of fairy voices, there was a wild look of disgust and fear on his face that cut through Barrick’s numbness, clutched at the pit of his stomach. He spurred forward with the others just as a great number of the keening fairies all went silent at the same moment Unearthly voices still sounded, but only from the other side of the hilltop.

Vansen stood upright, his killing finished, his blade dripping with blood and something else translucent as tree sap. His face was a mask of horror. Barrick dismounted awkwardly and made his way to the captain’s side.

He was standing in the midst of what might almost have been a huge nest hidden in the undergrowth, trampled and exposed now, with bodies and body parts piled at his feet, glistening with blood and other fluids. The things lying there, Barrick could see after a moment of confusion at the unusual forms, were naked and mostly manlike, pale as maggots. Those whose heads he could see had huge swollen throat pouches, like frogs. Their dead eyes were solid black, rapidly losing luster.

“What are they?” someone asked.

“Horrible,” someone else said, and it was true.

“The things that made the noises,” Vansen told them. “Listen.” And for a moment they all heeded the silence. “What… what does it mean?” Barrick asked. “Why?”

“Because we have been tricked,” said Vansen. Beneath the spatters of blood, his face was almost as pale as the grotesque shapes at his feet. “Only a few waited for us on this hilltop—a few soldiers to cross blades with us, a few deceiving shapes, a few of these making the noise of hundreds.”

“Gods! An ambush, after all?” Barrick looked around, expecting to see dozens more of the strange faces appear in the branches over their heads, grinning savagely.

“Worse,” said Vansen. “Worse. Because they have held us here and stolen a day from us with a very few while the rest of their army rode on around us.”

“Rode on… ?”

“Yes. Toward Southmarch.”

34. In a Marrinswalk Field

It had been a bad night, a night of little sleep. Briony had been up since an hour before dawn with such anger running through her that she could scarcely sit still—anger at Hendon Tolly, of course, but also at herself for her foolish loss of control, at Barrick for not being with her, at everything.

And I stood there, waving a sword at him in front of everyone, and they all knew he could not lift a finger against me —his ruler, and a woman at that. A… girl. And they all knew he didn’t need to, either, because he’d already won. What a fool I must have looked!

For a long moment it was all she could do to stay seated at the writing desk—she was itching with embarrassment despite being the only person awake in the room. She wanted to run, to lose herself somewhere in the great castle until everyone forgot what happened. But of course, nobody would forget and she couldn’t run away. She was an Eddon. She was the princess regent. They would be talking about last night’s dinner for years.

There was nothing to do but go on. Nothing. Briony picked up her pen, dipped it into the inkwell, and continued her letter to her father.

“I have not heard from you since Kendrick’s death, and as I said, I can only pray that you received my letter telling you of that terrible day, that this which I write now is not the first you have heard of it. I miss him, dear Father, I miss my big brother very much. Because he was the oldest, he was always certain he was right, and of course that was vexing at times, but I honestly think he tried every day to do right. He wanted to be you, of course, that is why. Even before he became the regent, he held himself like a man who will rule one day, who concerns himself with the needs of the least of his subjects as well as the demands of his most powerful allies.

“But, of course, that is what everyone else will remember about him. What I will always remember about our dear Kendrick was the way he would fume and scowl when Barrick and I teased him, but at last would give in and laugh as hard as any of us. Why is it that you and Kendrick could both do that, that you could see your own foolishness and admit it, even laugh about it, but Barrick and I cannot?

“There is more, certainly, that…”

She stopped. A memory of Kendrick pretending to be angry at her while struggling to hide a smile had suddenly come back with such power that for a moment she could only sit and weep silently. Rose Trelling stirred in her bed on the opposite side of the room, murmured something, then fell back to sleep. Anazona, Briony’s youngest maid, scarcely ten years old, was snoring like an ancient dog on her little pallet on the floor. It was strange to be awake in the midst of all these sleepers—like being a ghost.

She went back and scratched out part of the last sentence, changed it to read, “… that Kendrick could do that and you can do it, too,” because she realized she had put the king, her father, into the past again as though he were dead instead of only imprisoned. The gods willing, it is nothing but a false fear! Still, the whole thing seemed a hopeless exercise. How could she tell him what truly was happening without making him frantic with worry? How could she describe any of it, the terrifying Twilight People, the Tollys’ flirtation with the Autarch, the seemingly unending stream of dreadful tidings? How could she tell her father how frightened she was for Barrick without breaking Olin’s heart?

She put the pen back down and read over what she had written. The greatest problem, of course, was that she couldn’t speak about what was troubling her most—her twin’s terrible story. Since Barrick had told her, it had stayed in the middle of her like a swallowed stone, a great, indigestible lump. Some days the heaviness of it made it hard for her to walk, to talk, even to think. She hoped that by hearing it she had lightened her brother’s load, because he had certainly burdened her. How could such a thing be true? But if it was not true, how was it possible that Barrick, her twin, could be such a liar? And if it was true, how could she possibly write to her father as though nothing had changed, as though she was the same loving daughter in the same, unchanged world?

Either Barrick is the world’s greatest liar… or Father is… It was pointless. She had thought she could write to him, but she couldn’t.

Briony was holding the last of the burning parchment to the candle when someone knocked at the door. She immediately dropped the ashes and stub of paper into the candleholder, as though she had been caught doing something wicked. “Who is there?”

“It’s Lord Brone, Your Highness,” said one of her guards through the door. “He wishes…” “Oh, Perin’s bloody red beard, I can tell her myself,” growled the lord constable. “Let me come in, please, Princess. I have urgent business.”

Even this early, with the sky outside still quite dark, Avin Brone was dressed for the daylight hours, although he looked to have accomplished it in a hasty manner. He stared around the room as though searching for enemies but saw only slumbering women.

“We must speak m private,” he told her.

“They are all deep sleepers, but if you fear for their modesty, we can step into the hallway…”

“No. This is not to be discussed in front of the guards. Not yet.” He looked around the bedchamber once more. “Ah, well,” he said at last. “We must speak quietly, then.”

She gestured for him to sit down at the writing desk, but she herself remained standing. Something in his manner had alarmed her; she felt an almost animal urge toward flight. Although Brone seemed his ordinary dour, distracted self, she could sense something deeper was wrong, and she began to wonder how long it would take the guards to respond if she called out for them. Almost without thinking about it, she took a step back from the lord constable, then another; then, a little ashamed, she turned the movement into a search for a thicker wrap. She was conscious for the first time in an hour that her slippers were thin and her feet were cold.

“Gailon Tolly has been found.”

“Where?”

“In a Marrinswalk field In a ditch, to be more precise, covered over with branches.”

“What?” For a moment she had a mad vision of Gailon in a kind of hiding-hole, playing a child’s game. Then she understood. “Oh, merciful Zona, in a ditch’ Is he… ?”

“Dead, yes. Oh, most assuredly dead—along with the men who rode beside him. Half a dozen in all, thrown together into a hasty grave, if you can even call it such.”

She was stunned. “But… how… ?” Briony forced herself to think more carefully. “What happened? Who found him?”

“One of the last musters out of south Marrinswalk, four or five pentecounts, I don’t recall. They came in late last night, an hour or so after the last bell, hurrying to bring in their news. They had been coming up the Silverside Road outside Oscastle and saw a great number of ravens and other birds swarming in a field. When their leader took them closer they saw something shining. It was a buckle.”

Briony s knees suddenly felt weak; she had to take a step to steady herself. Brone came up out of the chair quickly and guided her to it in his stead. “But . how?” she asked. “Who did this? Bandits? Surely the fairy folk have not moved so far south?” Gailon Tolly, dead. Handsome, self-satsified Gailon. She hadn’t liked him, but she had never wanted… never imagined . .

“I can’t say, Princess. Bandits seem the most likely explanation—almost all their money and jewelry had been taken. Horses, too. There are more than a few such bands who range the border between Silverside and Marrinswalk and call theWhitewood their home. The thieves missed a brooch, though, and one of the Marrinswalk men brought it in. That is our only advantage—the discoverers do not know yet whose bodies they found, which has given me enough time to tell you first, before it spreads all through the castle.” He extended his broad fist and uncurled the fingers. A round brooch with a thick pin covered much of his palm, the kind worn at the neck of a riding cloak. The silver was still streaked with mud, but the humped shoulders and horned head of the bull were impossible to mistake.

Briony forced herself to swallow. She felt as though she would be ill. “That’s his. I’ve seen him wear it.” “Or at least it’s one of the Tolly family brooches. But I think we must assume one of the corpses is Gailon.”

“Where are they?” she asked at last, staring at the muddied silver circle as though it were an actual piece of bone. “The bodies?”

“They have been taken to a temple in Oscastle. Until they got there, the soldiers who found them thought the dead were local men, but no one in Oscastle had any idea who they could be. The mantis in that town thought he recognized one corpse as being Gailon Tolly, however, and being a wise man, he put his fears in a letter and entrusted it to the captain of the Marrinswalk pentecounts for secrecy. Still, the rest of the muster are already telling their story to anyone here who will listen. It is only hours at the most until Hendon Tolly hears of it, and he will have no trouble deciding who these mysterious dead really are.”

“Merciful Zonal. As it was, he all but accused us of murdering Gailon— he will trumpet it from the walls now!”

“Yes, and you did not help things with your foolishness at dinner. Go ahead and throw me in the stronghold, but it must be said.”

She waved her hand. The sour taste in her mouth had worsened. “Yes, yes, and I agree, and now you’ve said it. But what do we do? What do we do when Hendon starts up again, claiming I’ve had his brother killed?” “Perhaps he won’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“Perhaps he won’t. Perhaps it wasn’t bandits, or even these Twilight folk. Maybe it was the Tollys’ southern friends.”

It took her a moment. “The Autarch? Are you suggesting the Autarch would reach all the way into the March Kingdoms to murder one of his allies—one of his only allies, as far as we know?”

“Perhaps they didn’t become allies. Perhaps the Tollys turned him down.”

If what Brone told me in the first place was even true, she reminded herself. Briony put her hands to her head. Now that Barrick was gone, she could fully trust no one. “What a dreadful tangle! I can’t make sense of it—I have to think. Perhaps you’re right, but that still doesn’t help us any. Unless Hendon Tolly also suspects the Autarch’s hand and decides he can’t afford to make too much of a fuss…” She took a long, shuddering breath, trying to calm stomach and spirit. “I only know that it will make matters worse at a time when I believed such a thing wasn’t possible.” As Briony spoke, she picked up the inkwell and moved it back into the drawer, carefully put away the blotter, then the sealing wax.

“What are you doing?” asked Brone. For the first time she noticed the dark, circles under his eyes, the weariness on his pouchy face. He had probably not slept more than an hour or two.

“Just clearing things away. I was going to write a letter to someone, but it’s become clear that there’s not much point to it.” She paused. “Dead— Zoria preserve us! Poor Gailon. I never thought I’d say that.

For a moment she thought Avin Brone was shaking her chair for some reason—that he was angry and had been hiding it—but then she realized he was several steps away and swaying unsteadily too In fact, it seemed the whole world was shaking. A bench hopped on the floor like a skittish horse One of her jewelry chests jittered offa table and smashed on the flagstones. Across the room, Moina sat up and stared around. Wearily. By the time the trembling stopped little Anazona was awake too, frightened and crying loudly. Even heavy-sleeping Rose seemed to have been shaken almost to wakefulness.

“Just a tremor of the earth,” the lord constable said, frowning at his sluggard niece, who had only yawned and turned over, but his leathery face had gone pale. “I felt one like it when I was a boy. It is over now.”

Briony’s heart was beating very fast. “Is it, Lord Brone? Or is it that the world is approaching its end?" “I must say that I have never known it so discomforted in my lifetime,” he admitted.

The Lord of the Hot Wet Stone had no face, or at least no face that Chert could see, only a murky, red-shot blackness between his gigantic shoulders and his shining crown Big as a mountain, he looked down from his throne but said nothing. The only sound in his immense throne room was the low groan of great stones shifting, the roots of the world still alive and unsettled even all these aeons after the Days of Cooling.

At last Chert could take no more. “Please, Grandfather, do not punish me!”

The groaning continued, but the mighty figure said nothing.

“I meant no harm I trespassed, but I meant no harm!”

The murk regarded him. A hand as vast as a wall slowly lifted and spread above him —a benediction? A curse? Or did his god simply mean to crush him like a fly? The groaning stopped for a moment, then began again, and for the first time Chert began to hear something like words in it, a dim, gnashing cadence.

He is speaking to me, Chert realized But it is too slow, too deep, for me to hear!

Too slow too deep. The light was flickering now, the massive shape hard to see. Too deep. He couldn’t understand the words His god was speaking to him, but he couldn’t make sense of what was being said. “Tell me!” he shouted as the darkness closed in “Tell me so that I can understand…! “ But his god had no comprehensible tale to tell.

He woke up shivering from the oppressive dream—if dream it had truly been. For a moment he couldn’t remember what place he was in, but the boy’s body pressed against him brought it back. Shivering, Chert was shivering—no, shaking all over.

So cold he thought, but realized a moment later that the air was actually hot, hot enough to suck the sweat off his skin. Nevertheless an unpleasant chill was on him, an icy, bone-deep discomfort, nor could he stop shaking. Also, and far more frightening, the voice of the god still rumbled in his ears.

No, it was the earth itself growling—one of the tremors his people called a Wakeful Elder, unusual but not exceptional Chert himself was not trembling—the ground beneath him was moving. He darted a fearful glance up at the Shining Man, in size and threatening juxtaposition so much like the god in his dream, but where earlier it had flashed and smoldered it had now gone strangely dark at its center, only a few glimmers moving beneath the surface of the crystalline stone like silvery fish in a pool.

The ground shuddered again, then the groaning died and the greater movement stopped. For another heartbeat or two he could hear the hiss of the beach stones around him as they continued to slide, to find new arrangements, then everything was silent once more.

Flint whimpered Chert, who had been certain he held a dead child, almost dropped him in surprise, then his heart leaped with unexpected joy and a new terror. “Lad! Talk to me! It’s me, Chert!”

But the boy was still again, his skin still clammy-cold beneath the dirt and dust.

The tunnel. I must carry him back.

He tried to stand, but it was too much effort—he couldn’t even rise to his knees while holding the boy. He set Flint down as gently as he could and then clambered up to stand unsteadily over him. The boy was his own height, weighed almost as much as Chert did there was only one way to carry him, and that was to get the boy’s entire weight up onto his shoulders, as it was said that Silas of Perikal—or was it one of the other heroes of the big folk’s tales?—had carried a young bullock every day, so that as the bullock grew into its maturity, Silas also grew more and more powerful, eventually to become the mightiest knight of his age.

Or was, that Hihometes the Kraaan? Chert wondered bleanly as he squatted beside the senseless child. Absently, he pulled the mirror out of the child’s grasp—the boy’s grip was fierce, even in near-death—and put it in his own pouch. It felt like nothing special, no heavier or lighter than it did before, no warmer, no cooler. Yes, it was the Kraaan. No, wait, Hihometes was a demigod —he needed no training to lift great weights. Chert could never keep all the stories of the big-folk heroes straight. So many of them, killing monsters and saving maidens, and they all seemed more or less the same.

He hauled the top of Flint’s body up onto his shoulder, then grabbed him around the thighs and lifted until the side of the boy’s belly was against his neck. Grunting, cursing under his breath, yet all the time able to watch his own ludicrous travails as though he were two people at the same time, Chert slowly rose to his feet with the boy’s legs dangling in front and his head dangling down behind. For a moment he was full of the glory of having accomplished the near-impossible, then he took a step and felt his legs already trembling with the exertion, his back knotting at the weight it must bear. Worse, he remembered that he did not know where he had come up out of the tunnel and onto the island. Chert knew he should put the boy down and search instead of trying to carry his weight any farther than necessary, but he also knew that if he did that, he would never manage to lift him again.

It was hard to be certain in the dim light which were footprints and which only shadowed valleys in the piles of smooth stones, but he turned his back to the darkened Shining Man and did the best he could. At the beginning each step was very hard, by the time he had staggered fifty yards and still had not found the tunnel mouth, each step was a sweating, wheezing agony.

Lie down and wait for help, a voice in his head instructed him.

Lie down and die, suggested another as he missed his footing and almost tumbled, almost dropped the helpless child.

The gods help those who help themselves, he thought, and then I hate the gods Why should the Elders torture me in this way? Why should they use the boy to hurt me and to hurt Opal?

Another step. Gasping, he almost fell. One more step. But what can you know about what the gods want? Who are you, little man?

I am Chert of the Blue Quartz clan. I know stone. I do my work. I take care… I take care of my… my own…

But then he did stumble, and fell, and lay panting on the stones with the boy on top of him. When he tried to make himself move again he could not because something dark was covering him, closing his eyes, stealing his wits.

He came up out of exhausted sleep to find himself face to face with horror.

Something was touching his chin and his cheek: a small but ghastly, malformed mask stared down on him from only a short distance away, flare -nostnled, fang-toothed, with leathery black skin. Chert squeaked—he had the breath for nothing more—and tried to beat away the looming, blurry monstrosity, but he was lying on his belly and something was pinning his arms.

“Demon!” he moaned, struggling. The thing retreated, or its horrid face did, but he could still feel something scratching at his neck.

“Not pretty, mayhap,” a voice said, “but un’s carried me well. Seems sour t’name un so.”

Chert stopped fighting, astonished, wondering if he had lost his wits again or was wandering in the tunnels of dream. “Beetledown?”

“Aye.” A moment later the little man clambered down Chert’s shoulder and into his view. “Why can’t I move? And what was that thing?”

“For movin’, well, it’s thy boy lying athwart ‘ee hampering thy arms. That thing, as tha says, well… a flittermouse, I calls it. Rode it back here, did I.”

“A flit… A bat?”

“Aye, likely.” Something dark leaped past Chert’s face. “There un goes,” said Beetledown a little sadly. “Gone now, afeared because tha would try to roll over un.” He shook his head. “Testing and fidgeting, thy flittermouse may be, but a treat to ride once going along proper.”

“You rode a bat?”

“How else to get over yon evil-smelling silver water?”

Chert slid out from under Flint, letting the boy down onto the stony beach as gently as he could. “How fares thy boy?” asked Beetledown.

“Alive, but I don’t know anything more. I have to get him away, but I can’t carry him.” He wanted to laugh and cry. “Good as it is to see you, you won’t be much help there. And now you’ve lost your bat, so you’re stuck here, too.” It seemed impossibly sad. Chert sat on the loose stones, staring out across the Sea in the Depths.

“Mayhap if tha tell how tha came here, yon temple fellows who followed me can come across and help carry thy boy.”

“Temple fellows… ?” He looked up.There were shapes on the far side of the quicksilver sea, small dark forms moving atop the great balcony of stone. Chert’s heart sped. “Oh, Beetledown, you brought them! The Elders bless you, you brought them!” He cupped his hands around his mouth, tried to shout, coughed, then tried again. “Hoy! Nickel! Is that you?”

The temple brothers voice came down to him, faint but echoing with urgency. “In the name of the Elders, how did you get across?”

Chert started to reply, then stopped. When he did speak, he couldn’t keep the astonishment out of his voice, for surely it was the Metamorphic Brothers’ own tunnel he had used. “Do you mean—do you mean to say you don’t know… ?”

There were more surprises—Chert even managed to surprise himself. Despite being grateful to his rescuers, not to mention having been raised in the lifetime habit of trained respect toward their order, when he finally stumbled back into the temple, he answered all the brothers’ questions about his journey and the Shining Man as truthfully as he could but volunteered nothing about the mirror or Flint’s unusual origins.

If I tell them anything about where the boy comes from, they won’t let him leave. He felt certain of that, although he was not sure why. The brothers were concerned, of course, and even a little angry about the boy’s incursion into the Mysteries, but not inordinately so. He knew that his reticence was selfish, perhaps even foolishly dangerous, but Opal was waiting for him back on Wedge Road, and she must be frightened now not just for the boy but for her husband as well. He couldn’t bear to think of going back to her only to tell her the boy was being held prisoner in the temple.

For their own part, the brothers brought him no farther into the temple than the outer chamber, the great room of natural stone that the people of Funderling Town were allowed to see on a few of the highest holy days. Even Chert’s carefully shaped version of the tale was enough to make them examine the boy very carefully while they made a fruitless attempt at waking him. Flint had no visible wounds, no lumps or bruises anywhere on his pale skin, but nothing they did could raise him from his deep sleep. Even wrinkled, wild-eyed old Grandfather Sulfur, whose prophetic dreams had apparently contained Rooftoppers and a disturbance at the Sea in the Depths, came in on the arms of two acolytes to examine Flint, which made Chert as nervous as walking on a slope of loose tailings, but the ancient fellow went away again shaking his hairless head, saying that he saw and felt nothing special about the boy. At last Brother Nickel told Chert, “We can do nothing more for him. Take him home.”

Chert finished his cup of water. He had drunk a bucket’s worth in the last hours, he felt sure, every drop a splendor. “I cannot carry him myself.”

“We will send a brother who can help you take him in a litter.”

“Methinks I will ride on that, friend Chert,” said Beetledown in his tiny, high-pitched voice. “Better than thy pocket, being less whiffsome, beg thy pardon, and better than yon old flittermouse, which tended to the bony.”

Nickel stared at the Rooftopper with superstitious distrust, as though he were a talking animal, but went off to make arrangements.

Chert let a young acolyte named Antimony, moonfaced and broad-shouldered, take the front of the litter while he took the back. A silent crowd of temple brothers watched them go. Tired as he was, Chert was quite content to let someone else find the way and pick the best spots. He looked down at Flint, pale and motionless but oddly peaceful, and even through his fear for the boy he felt a new rush of gratitude to Beetledown and to the Metamorphic Brothers: at least he was bringing a living child, however ill, back to Opal.

“You really rode a bat?” he asked Beetledown who, to lessen the chance of being accidentally crushed, was riding on the top edge of the litter near Flint’s head.

“A Gutter-Scout am I. All animals we master to perform our duty.” The tiny man coughed, then grinned. “And yon rat fellow was so piddling slow I could have outrun him my ownself.”

“All I can say is thank you.”

“Uns be useful words, so no need to apologize on them.” “You’ve been very kind to us.”

“All for honor of queen and Rooftops.” He made a little salute. “And I have found thy stone world not so dull as I thought. Could tha only bring a little more wind, rain, and sunlight down into these holes, I would come again to make a visit.”

Chert smiled wearily. “I’ll mention that to the Guild.”

The shaking of the earth had frightened almost everyone in the castle, but there was not too much damage Some crockery had fallen and shattered in the keep’s huge kitchen and a serving maid had been terrified into apoplexy when an ancient suit of royal armor in the Privy Gallery shook off its stand and collapsed to the floor in front of her, but otherwise the toll had been light Still, even without the news from Marnnswalk and the tremor, it would have been a hectic morning Briony was kept busy until after the noon bell, mostly working with Nynor and Brone to sort the movement and housing of the incoming troops as well as many of the folk from the city outside the castle walls. The keep seemed crowded to bursting with people and animals and the time had almost come when no more could be accommodated.

She stole a part of an hour to eat a meal with her great-aunt, but it was not much reliee. The dowager duchess was consumed with fear for Barrick just as Briony was, and had also been waiting to question the princess regent—and in several cases, argue with her—about the disposition of various nobles and their families within the inner keep When their voices rose, Merolanna’s little maid Ellis watched with wide, frightened eyes, as if at any moment something horrible could happen in this unexpected and unsteady new world.

Almost staggeringly tired, and with a long afternoon still stretching in front of her, Briony walked back to the throne room from Merolanna’s chambers through the Portrait Hall, for once her guards didn’t have to hurry to keep pace. Although she had seen the pictures of her ancestors in their finery many times, so often that she scarcely glanced at them most days, today it was easy to imagine that they were looking down on her with disapproval, that Queen Lily’s kind eyes were full of disappointment, that even the portrait of mournful Queen Sanasu looked more desolate than usual.

It had only been a matter of a few months since Kendrick had been murdered, Briony told herself, and far less than a year since her father himself had last sat on the throne, yet what had happened? The kingdom was tottering, and that was more than just a fancy, as had been proved today most emphatically. It was difficult not to believe the trembling earth was the anger of the gods made manifest, a warning from heaven. Briony knew she could not escape a heavy share of blame: she and Barrick hated to be called children, but what else had they been? They had let what was given to them to protect fall from their fingers, left it out to rot like a discarded toy. Like the body of a murdered man in a field.

So grim were her thoughts that when the black-clad figure stepped out of a side corridor her first unsurprised assumption was that one of her dead ancestors, perhaps Sanasu herself, restless and discontented, had come to point a finger of shame at her. It was unsurprising, though, that in such times her guards’ first thoughts were more practical they clattered to a stop around her and leveled their pikes at the veiled woman.

“Is that you, Princess?” the figure whispered as she pulled back her veil.

The superstitious prickle on Briony s skin subsided, but only a little, as she recognized the face. “Elan? Elan M’Cory?”

The Tolly sister-in-law nodded. Her young face wore the mark of a terrible grief—a grief that Briony recognized, as powerful as that which had seized her after her brother’s death. “Gailon is dead,” the girl said.

Briony waved the guards back. For a moment she thought about saying the politic thing it was early yet to be certain, after all. Nobody had seen the body who had known Gailon well. But the look of misery in the girl’s gray eyes—eyes that were nevertheless bone-dry—touched her in that place of understanding, of shared sorrows. “Yes. Or at least it seems so.”

Elan smiled, a strange, grim little tug at the corners of her mouth, as though she had been confirmed in something larger and longer-lived than just a fear for Gailon Tolly’s life—reassured in some bleak view of all existence, perhaps. “I knew it. I have known it for days.” The eyes fixed Briony again. “I loved him, of course. But he had no interest in me.” “I’m sorry . .”

“Perhaps it is better this way. Now I can mourn him for the right reasons I have one more question. You must tell me the truth.”

Briony blinked. Who was this girl? “I must answer only to my father, the king, Lady Elan. And to the gods, of course. But go to—ask your question.”

“Did you kill him, Briony Eddon? Did you have it done?"

It was shocking to be asked so directly. She realized, in the split-instant between hearing and answering, that she had become used to deference— more used to it than she had known. “No, of course I didn’t. The gods know that Gailon and I did not agree on everything, but I would never. She stopped to catch her breath, to consider what she was saying and doing. Standing a couple of yards away against the wall, the guards were trying to hide their fascination. After a moment she decided it was too late for anything m this particular case except the truth. “In fact, and you may hold this against me as you wish, Elan M’Cory, Gailon wanted to marry me—but I didn’t want to marry him.” “I know that.” But she sounded coldly satisfied. “For his ambition.”

“I do not doubt you are right. But that was not enough to endear him to me.The gods may bear witness that I’ll have no husband who thinks he can tell me where to go, what to say, how to…” She stopped herself again. What was it about this girl that had made her say so much more than she intended? “Enough. I did not kill him, if he is truly dead. We do not know who did.”

Elan nodded. She pulled her veil back over her face. “Neither you nor any other woman will have him now.” For the first time there was a muffled noise that might be a sob. “I wish you heaven’s mercy,” she said quietly, then turned and walked away without a courtesy or farewell.

It was indeed a very long afternoon, and as the news of the murdered men found in Marnnswalk began to circulate, along with speculation about their identities, the day threatened to stretch without end. The news impinged directly on Briony only slightly in her royal duties—questions and quiet asides from Brone, a perfunctory meeting with the hedge-baron in command of the Marnnswalk muster who was enjoying his moment of fame and attention, and an expanded set of concerns from Nynor, who had to decide whether to house these particular Marnnswalk troops with all the others brought in to garrison the castle or try to keep them separate—but she also saw speculation in the faces of almost everyone who passed through the throne room. As if things had not been bad enough after her outburst at Hendon Tolly! It was so grueling that the appearance of Queen Anissa’s maid was almost a relief.

“Selia, isn’t it?” With Barrick gone it was hard to hold onto her resentment toward the young woman. “Tell me, how is my stepmother?”

“Well enough, Highness, with the baby so close, but she has concern not to see you.”

Briony’s head hurt and she had trouble making sense out of the girl’s foreign diction. “She wants me to stay away?”

Selia colored very prettily. Like all else she did, it seemed an affront to any woman who wanted to do something other than make men sigh—or at least so it felt to Briony, whose dislike of the maid was already returning. “No, no,” the young woman said. “I do not speak so well. She wishes very much to have talk with you before the baby comes.”

“I am quite busy, as my stepmother knows…”

The young woman leaned forward and spoke quietly; Brone and Nynor worked harder to pretend they were not listening. “She fears you are angry with her. This is bad for the baby, for the birth, she thinks. She was too ill for talking with you before, and now your brother has gone, the poor Barrick.” Selia looked genuinely sad, which only made Briony less sympathetic.

That’s my brother you’ve set your cap on, girl. Aloud, she said,”I will do my best.” “She asks that you come and take a cup of wine with her on Winter’s Eve.”

Sweet Zona, that’s only a few days away, Briony realized. Where has the year gone? “I will do my best to come to her soon Tell her I wish her only well.”

“I will, Princess.” The young woman dropped a graceful courtesy and withdrew. Briony caught Brone and Nynor watching the maid as she walked away and was disgusted that even old men should still be such lechers. She tried to keep it off her face as they all returned to work, but not as hard as she might have.

The day’s business dragged on, as what seemed like almost every living soul in the castle came before her with a complaint or a worry or a request, with problems ranging from the crucial to the ridiculous. What she didn’t see was Hendon Tolly, nor—after her meeting in the Portrait Hall with his sister-in-law—any sign whatsoever of the Tollys or their faction.

“They are doubtless trying to decide what this discovery means,” Brone told her in a quiet aside. “I am told they were out and about as usual this morning, but when they heard the news, they beat a retreat back into their rooms.”

“I suppose it makes sense. But why did we put the Tollys and Durstin Crowel and the other troublemakers all so close together?”

“Because Crowel requested it some time back, Highness,” said Nynor. “At the end of the summer he told me he would be hosting an entertainment with the Tollys during the Orphan’s Day celebrations. I thought at the time he simply meant Duke Gailon and his entourage.”

Briony frowned. “Does that mean they were planning something even then?”

Avin Brone grunted. “I don’t trust the Tollys, but let us not pretend they’re the worst of our problems.”

Old Nynor shook his head. “It is possible they had some scheme, Highness, but it is also possible that all they were planning was a banquet. And, speaking of which, Princess, we must make some arrangements about the feasting.”

For a moment she didn’t understand what he was talking about. “Feasting? Do you mean for Orphan’s Day? Are you mad? We are at war!”

“All the more reason “ Steffans Nynor could be stubborn, and had not been castellan so many years without developing ideas of his own. Briony was irritated and tempted simply to say no and dismiss him, but thought of what her father would say—something like, If you are going to give men tasks to do, then once they have proved themselves, you should let them get on without you standing over them There is no point giving responsibility without trust.

“Why, then, do you think we should do this?"

“Because these are holy days in which we praise the gods and demigods, and we need their help now more than ever. That is one reason.”

“Yes, but we can perform the sacrifices and the rituals without the feasting and merrymaking.”

“Why else do people need merrymaking, Highness, if not to take some of the thorns out of life?" The old man rapidly blinked his watery eyes, but his gaze was sharp and demanding. “Forgive me if I speak out of turn, Princess Briony, but it seems that what a city under siege most needs is courage. Also to be reminded what it is fighting to protect. A little happiness, a little ordinary life, is a powerful aid to both those things.”

She saw the wisdom in what he said, but a part of her couldn’t help feeling it would be a sham, that falsity was worse than misery.

Avin Brone seemed able to hear those thoughts as if they had been spoken. “People will not forget the true dangers, Highness. I think Nynor is right. A muted festivity perhaps—we do not want to seem to be celebrating too grandly in the shadow of war, and most especially in the shadow of Gailon’s murder—and your brother’s death, too, of course—but neither do we want to make this winter any more dreary than necessity dictates.”

“Very well, a quiet celebration it will be.”

Nynor nodded, then bowed and withdrew. He looked pleased, almost grateful, and for an unpleasant moment Briony wondered if the castellan had some other agenda, if he had manipulated her for some secret, selfish purpose.

And so it goes, she thought. I cannot do even the simplest thing without doubt anymore, without fear, without suspicion. How could Father live this way all those years? It must have been a little better in more peaceful days, but still…

Curse these times.

Before they reached the populous areas, Beetledown announced that he was taking his leave. He dismissed Chert’s worried questions. “I’ll find my way, sure. Naught else, these caves seem full of slow, stupid rat-folk. I’ll go home mounted proud, tha will see.”

He was too tired to do more than thank the Rooftopper again. After all they had shared, it was a hasty and strangely muted parting, but Chert didn’t have long to consider it.

In the midst of such strange times their little procession was not the oddest thing the people of Funderling Town had heard of, but it was certainly one of the odder things they had actually seen: by the time Chert reached his house with Flint and the acolyte he was surrounded by a ragtag parade of children and more than a few adults. He did his best to ignore their questions and fondly mocking comments. He had no idea what time it was, or even what day. The young temple brother Antimony at the front end of the litter told him it was Skyday, fourth chime. Chert was astonished to realize that he had been almost three days in the lower depths.

Poor Opal! She must be cracked with worry.

The news had run ahead on child feet; a crowd of neighbors waited at the mouth of Wedge Road to join the throng. The tale had reached his own house as well: Opal ran out before he had even reached the dooryard, her face a confusion of joy and terror.

He tried not to be upset that the first thing she did was throw her arms around the senseless boy, even though it nearly upset the litter. He was even wearier than he had realized, and could only struggle to hold his end up and shake his head in silent dismissal of his neighbors’ questions. Burly Antimony helped clear a path to the door.

“He isn’t dead,” Opal said, kneeling beside the boy. “Tell me that he isn’t dead.” “He’s alive, just… sleeping.”

“Praise the Elders—but he’s so cold!”

“He needs your nursing, dear wife.” Chert slumped onto a bench.

She paused, then suddenly rushed to him and put her arms around his neck, kissed his cheeks. “Oh, I’m so glad you’re not dead either, you old fool. Disappearing for days! I’ve been fretting over you, too, you know.”

“I’ve been fretting over me as well, my girl. Go on, now. I’ll tell you all this strange story later.” Antimony helped Opal move the boy to his bed, then turned down her distracted offer of food or drink and went out instead to placate the waiting crowd with some unspecific answers. Chert suspected the acolyte didn’t find this too dreadful a chore. From what he knew, the temple brothers, especially the younger ones, didn’t get much chance to come up to Funderling Town the market trips and other such opportunities for distraction and temptation were reserved for the older, more trustworthy brothers.

He could hear Opal in the bedroom, crooning over the boy as she took off his dirty rags, cleaning him and checking for injuries just as the Metamorphic Brothers had done. Chert didn’t think fresh smallclothes would be the thing that woke the boy, but he knew very well his wife needed to do something.

Chert looked up at a rustling noise, aware for the first time that he was not alone in the room. A very young woman, one of the big folk, sat on their long bench in the shadows against the wall, staring back at him with an air of patient detachment. Her dark hair was gathered untidily and she wore a dress that did not quite fit her thin frame. Chert had never seen her before, could thmk of no reason on or under the earth why someone like her should be in his house, even on a day of such bizarre branchings and cross-tunnels.

“Who are you?”

Opal came out of the back room with a look close to embarrassment on her face. “I forgot to tell you, what with the boy and all. She came about the second chime or so and she’s been waiting ever since. Said she must speak to you, only to you. I… I thought it might be something to do with Flint…”

The young woman stirred on the bench. She seemed almost half-asleep. “You are Chert of the Blue Quartz?” “Yes. Who are you?”

“My name is Willow, but I am nothing.” She stood up; her head almost touched the ceiling. She extended a hand. “Come. I have been sent to bring you to my master.”

35. The Silken Cord

His the great hand closed around her, she felt it ringing like a crystal, a deep, shuddering vibration that had nothing to do with her, but which ran through that monstrous hand like a blood pulse, as if she were bound to a temple bell big as a mountain. The impossibly vast shape lifted her and although she could not see its face—it stood in the center of some kind of fog, light-shot but still deeply shadowed, as if a lightning storm raged inside the earth— she could see the greater darkness that was its mouth as it brought her nearer, nearer…

She shrieked, or tried to, but there was only silence in that damp, empty place, silence and mist and the dark maw that grew ever larger, spreading above her like a rolling thundercloud. The titanic thing was going to swallow her, she knew, and she was frightened almost to death… but it was also somehow exciting too, like the shrieking, terrified childhood joy of being whirled in the air by her father or wrestling with her brothers until she was pinned and helpless…

Qinnitan awakened wet with perspiration, heart galloping. Her wits were utterly jangled and her skin twitched as though she lay in the middle of one of the great hives in the temple covered in a slow-buzzing blanket of sacred bees. She felt used by something—by her dream, perhaps—even defiled, and yet as her heart slowed a languid warmth began to spread through her limbs, a feeling almost of pleasure, or at least of release.

Qinnitan slumped back in her bed, breathing shallowly, overwhelmed Her hand strayed down to her breasts and she discovered the tips had grown achingly hard beneath the fabric of her nightdress. She sat up again, shocked and disturbed. The idea of that dark, all-swallowing mouth still hung over her thoughts as it had hung over her dream. She leaped to her feet and went to the washing tub. The water had been sitting since the previous night and was quite cold, but instead of calling for the servants to bring her hot water, she squatted in it gladly and pulled her nightdress up to her neck, then splashed herself all over until she began to shiver. She sank down into the shallow bath, still trembling, and put her chin on her knees, letting the water wick up the linen nightdress until it clung to her like a clammy second skin.

The rest of the day was quieter and more mundane, although the torments of the endlessly droning prayers and the drinking of the Sun’s Blood were as bad as ever If Panhyssir or the autarch were trying to kill her with that potion, they were taking a ridiculously long time about it, she had to admit, but whatever they intended, they were certainly making her miserable.

Just after Qinnitan’s evening meal the hairdressing servant came to dye her red streak—her witch streak, as her childhood friends had named it— which was beginning to show at the roots again- Luian and the other Favored had decreed within days of her arrival that such a mongrel mark had no place on one of the autarch’s queens. The hairdresser also dried her hair and arranged it into a pleasing style, on the one-in-a-thousand chance the autarch should finally call for her that very evening Qinnitan tried to sit quietly, this hairdresser had a way of poking you with a hairpin—and then apologizing profusely, of course—when you moved too much.

I doubt she pulls that trick with Arimone.

But Qinnitan didn’t like thinking about the Paramount Wife Since the day Qinnitan had gone to her palace, there had been no further invitations and no outward sign of hostility, but it was not hard to see the way those wives and wives-to-be who considered themselves friends of the Evening Star watched Qinnitan and made clear their dislike of her Well, they might think themselves friends of the great woman, but she doubted Arimone looked on them the same way; Qinnitan felt sure there was little room for friends or equals of any kind in the world of the Paramount Wife.

The hairdresser was finishing up just as the soldiers on the walls outside began to call out the old ritual words for the sunset change of the guard— “Hawks return! To the glove! To the glove!” Qinnitan, reasonably certain that the autarch was not going to break his nearly year-long habit and summon her tonight, was looking forward to an hour or two of time to herself before sleep and whatever unsettling dreams might come with it. She thought she might say her evening orisons, then read. One of the other brides, youngest daughter of the king of some tiny desert land on the southern edge of Xis, had loaned her a beautifully illustrated book of poetry by the famous Baz’u Jev Qinnitan had read some of it and enjoyed it very much—his descriptions of sheepherders in the and mountains who lived so close to the sky they called themselves “Cloud People” spoke of a freedom and simplicity that seemed achingly attractive to her. The young desert princess seemed quite nice, really, and Qinnitan entertained a hope that one day they might become friends, since they were two of the youngest in the Seclusion This did not mean she had abandoned all sense, of course. She never touched the book without wearing gloves. The tale of a Paramount Wife from a century or so before who had dispatched a rival by having poison painted on the edges of a book’s pages was one of the first cautionary stories Qinnitan had heard upon coming to her new home.

That tale spoke much of the Seclusion, not just the murderousness of the place, but the fact that the older wife had been willing to wait weeks or even months for the autarch’s new favorite to cut her finger in such a way that the poison could enter when she turned the pages. Whatever men might say about women and their reputed fickleness, the Seclusion was a place of immense patience and subtlety, especially when the stakes were high. And what stakes could be higher than to be certain it was your own child who would one day sit on the throne of the most powerful empire in the world between the seas’

Gloves or no, Qinnitan was looking forward to a little time with the epic simplicity of Baz’u Jev, so it was disappointing—and, as always in the Seclusion, a little frightening—when a messenger came just as the hairdresser was leaving.

She was startled to recognize the mute boy who had come into her room not a fortnight before. He was wearing a loose tunic tonight, so she could not see how his wound had healed, although he seemed perfectly well. He would hardly meet her eyes as he handed her the roll of parchment, but although that saddened her, it was not as though she was surprised that he didn’t want to be her friend; she had almost stabbed him to death with a dressing pin, after all.

Strangely, the message was not tied or sealed in any way, although she could tell from the strong violet perfume that the paper was Luian’s. She waited until the hairdresser had gone out into the passageway before unrolling it. The letters had been made in a great hurry. It read:

Come now.

There was nothing else.

Qinnitan did her best to be calm Perhaps this was just an example of Luian in a bad mood They had spoken only occasionally in the last weeks, and had taken tea together in their old way just once, an awkward occasion in which the subject of Jeddin was in the air the entire time but never acknowledged. The two of them had labored through a conversation of what should have been interesting gossip, but which had instead seemed like wearying labor. Yes, it was unusual for Luian to write in this hurried, informal way, but it might be evidence of some great swing of feeling—after all, Favored Luian was prone to moments of heightened emotion that might have come out of a folktale, or even from a book of love poetry Perhaps she planned to shame Qinnitan for being a bad friend. Perhaps she planned a weeping renunciation of her own rights to Jeddin—if even Luian could be that self-deceiving. Or perhaps she just wished them to be on good terms again.

All the same, Qinnitan found herself following the mute boy across the Seclusion with a heavy, untrusting heart.

Qinnitan was shocked to find a huge, ugly man weeping in Luian’s bed. Several heartbeats passed before she realized it was Luian herself she was seeing, a Luian without face paint or wig or elaborate dress, wearing only a simple white nightgown damp with tears and sweat.

“Qinnitan, Qinnitan! Praise to the gods, you’re here.” Luian threw her arms wide. Qinnitan could not help staring. It really had been Dudon under that paint, after all—the lumpy, self-absorbed boy who had walked up and down the streets muttering the Nushash prayers. Qinnitan had known it, of course, but until now she had not really seen it. “Why do you shy away from me?” Luian’s face was red and mottled, wet with tears. “Do you hate me?”

“No!” But she could not bring herself to enter that embrace, not from fastidiousness so much as the sudden fear of swimming too close to someone who might be drowning and dangerous. “No, I don’t hate you, Luian, of course not. You’ve been very kind to me. What’s wrong?”

It was a wail that just avoided turning into a scream. “Jeddin has been arrested!”

Qinnitan, for the second time that day, felt as though her body was no longer her own. This time it seemed to have become a statue of cold stone in which her thoughts were trapped. She could not speak.

“It is all so unfair!” Luian snuffled and tried to cover her face with her sleeve. “What… what are you talking about?” she finally managed.

“He has been arrested! It is the talk of the Seclusion, as you would know if you came out to eat the evening meal instead of sitting in your ch—chambers like a h—hermit.” She wept a little more, as though at Qinnitan’s unsocial behavior.

“Just tell me what happened.”

“I don’t know. He’s b—been arrested. His lieutenant has been made chief of the Leopards, at least for now. It’s Vash’s doing, that horrid old man. He’s always hated our Jin…”

“For the love of the gods, Luian, what are we to do?” Qinnitan’s mind was already racing, but in a weary, defeated way, as if she were a runner at the end of a long chase instead of just at the beginning.

Luian sobered a little, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. “We must not lose our heads. Of course, we must not lose our heads We must stay calm.” She took a deep breath. “It is possible he has done something that has nothing to do with us… but even if they suspect the worst, he will never tell. Not Jeddin! That is why I called you here, to make you swear to say nothing, not even if they tell you he has confessed. Don’t speak a word—they will be lying! Our Jin will never say a word to Pinimmon Vash, not even… not even if they…” She burst out weeping again.

“They would torture him? Kill him? For sneaking into the Seclusion?”

“Oh, yes, perhaps.” Luian flapped her hands in agitation. “But that is not the worst of it.” She suddenly realized the mute boy was still standing in the doorway, waiting for further orders and she waved him away with angry gestures.

“What is not the worst of it? Are you saying he has done worse things than proclaiming his love for one of the autarch’s wives? Than smuggling himself into the Seclusion where whole-bodied men are killed on sight? By the Bees, what other crimes did he have time to accomplish?”

Luian stared at her for a moment, or rather this familiar yet unfamiliar man who talked like Luian stared, and then burst into tears again. “He wished to… to… to depose the Golden One. The autarch!”

In the first lurch, Qinnitan thought her heart might never beat again. She could speak only in a strangled whisper, which was perhaps just as well. “He… was going to kill the autarch?”

“No, no!” Luian looked aghast. “No, he would never raise his hand against the Golden One. He has sworn an oath!” She shook her head at Qmnitan’s foolishness. “No, he was going to kill the scotarch, Prusas the Cripple. Then the autarch would fall and… and somehow, Jeddm thought, he would be able to take you for his own.”

Qinnitan could only back away, waving her arms in front of her as though to keep away some approaching beast. “The fool! The fool!”

“But he will never tell—he will never speak a word of it!” Luian was up on her knees now, arms spread again, begging Qinnitan to come back and be enfolded. “He is so brave, our Jin, so brave . . !”

“Why did you help him? Why did you let him put your life and . . and my life at risk?” Qinnitan was shaking, full of rage and terror. She wanted to run at Luian and beat that doughy, wet face with her fists. “How could you do that?”

“Because I loved him.” Luian fell back against the cushions. “My Jin. I would even help him to have you. I would do anything he asked.” She looked up, her eyes red-nmmed, but she was smiling. “You understand about love. You are a woman. You were born a woman. You understand.”

Qinnitan turned and ran out the doorway.

Luian called after her, “Say nothing! He will never say a word, our Jin will never…”

Qinnitan reached the corridor, her thoughts tumbling like pearls from a broken necklace. Was Luian right? Would Jeddm’s warrior code keep him silent even under torture?

But it’s not fair! I didn’t do anything! I sent him away!

She heard footsteps then—not the sandaled thump of the Seclusion’s guards, men big as oxen, but not the whispering slide of barefooted women either. She hesitated, but decided she did not want to be seen so close to Luian’s rooms. It would make it seem as though they had something to hide, meeting in the very hour of Jeddin’s arrest. If Luian was right, that Jeddin could hold his secrets even under torture, the best hope was that all should seem normal, blameless.

Qinnitan stepped back into a shadowy cross-passage just before the approaching figure turned the corner into the main hallway, she silently thanked all the gods there was no lamp in the wall niche. She looked for somewhere to hide, but could only draw back close against a tapestry that hung on the wall. If whoever was passing gave anything more than the quickest glance, they would see her.

She flattened herself and turned her head away, knowing that the magic of eyes invariably drew the attention of others, especially unwanted attention. Whoever it was stalked by without slowing. Qinnitan let out a silent sigh of relief. She crept to the edge of the cross-passage and saw a short, stocky shape turn into Luian’s chambers. It took her a moment to realize who had just passed.

From the room, Luian let out a shriek of startled fright. Qinnitan could not help taking a few instinctive steps toward one who had been her friend and was now in danger, then her better judgment stopped her.

Tanyssa’s voice was hoarse, as though the gardener herself was a bit frightened, too, but there was also a note of triumph in it. “Favored Luian of the Royal Seclusion, I am here as the hand of God. You have betrayed your sacred trust. You have betrayed the Master of the Great Tent.”

“Wh-what are you talking about?”

“There is no argument,” said the gardener. “The Golden One has put his seal on it.”

Luian’s squeal of alarm suddenly turned into a loud grunting, a noise so horrid that for the first moments Qinnitan couldn’t even imagine it coming from a person.

“You… are for… the worms.” Tanyssa, breathing hard, spoke in almost ordinary tones now—Qinnitan could barely hear her, although she stood trembling only a pace or two from Luian’s doorway—but there was clear hatred in the voice. “You fat, meddling bitch.” The grunting turned to a choking hiss, then Qinnitan heard only the drumlike thumping of flesh on the stone, heels or hands beating helplessly until they too fell silent.

Her bones turned to leaden bars by terror, Qinnitan could scarcely move. She stumbled to the shadowed cross-corridor and looked back to see the hangings on Luian’s door billow outward. Her head was pounding. She pushed her face against the wall, burrowed into the space where the tapestry hung a little away from the cool stone, and prayed. The footsteps went past more slowly this time, so slowly that it was all Qinnitan could do to keep her face turned into the wall, to stand unmoving. Whether because of the darkness of the passageway or because her mind was taken up with what she had just done, the gardener who was also an executioner did not pause or even slow but walked on down the corridor. Qinnitan listened until she could no longer hear the footfalls.

She wanted to weep, but she felt as though some terrible cold fire had swept through her and evaporated every tear. Even her mouth was parched. Where could she go? What could she do?

She stood in the passageway only a few moments, stepping from foot to foot in an agony of indecision. Was Luian only the first of Tanyssa’s tasks? Was she even now on her way to Qinnitan’s chamber?

I can’t go back there. But where can I go? Where can I hide? She thought for a moment of the little room off the Scented Garden that Jeddin had used for their assignation, then realized with a lurch of fear that such a place must now be infamous to the autarch’s lieutenants. In fact, there was nowhere she could hide, nowhere at all. They will turn the whole palace over like a jewelry box to shake me out.

The only faint hope she had was to get out of the Seclusion. But how? How in the name of the Hive could she hope to get out past guards who would undoubtedly be looking for her?

Jeddin’s seal ring! She reached into her sleeve and found it and its chain, still in the secret pocket she had sewn there. A premonition—that, and the knowledge that there was no privacy for anyone within the Seclusion—had kept her from leaving it hidden in her chamber. But what good will it do me? Even if by some tiny chance they are not looking to execute me, too, even if my name has been kept from them, trying to pass the gate with a forged message from Jeddin would catch their attention for sure.

Now the tears finally came, hot tears of helplessness that burned against her cheeks. Could she believe that Jeddin had given up Luian but had kept silent about Qinnitan herself? No. The chance was so small as to be invisible.

You can’t stand here weeping! she told herself. Stupid girl! Get out of the hallway! Hide! But where could she go? She was in the middle of the autarch’s own palace and now she was his enemy. The most powerful man in the world wanted her dead, and that death was not likely to be either quick or painless.

Poison, the terror of the Seclusion, suddenly seemed a blessing. If she had possessed any, Qinnitan would have drunk it then.

36. At the Giant’s Feet

“I am impressed,” Tinwright said as he looked down from their high perch and across the choppy water. The narrow reach of Brenn’s Bay between the castle and the mainland city teemed with small watercraft, strange in such unsettled weather but not surprising in such an unsettled time: now that the causeway had been dismantled all those who would travel between city and keep had to do so by boat, braving the high, whitecapped waves. “I did not think anyone but the royal household were allowed into the Towers of the Seasons.”

“I am part of the royal household.” Puzzle drew himself up to his full height, but couldn’t stay unbent very long; after a moment he rounded his shoulders and let his head nod forward again. “I am the king’s jester, you know. And when Olin comes back, I will be in good odor once more.”

If such a day ever comes. Matty Tinwright couldn’t help feeling sorry for the old fellow who had lost favor, but he knew he would be no different. When the royal family reached out to touch you, it was like air to a drowning man—anyone with a bit of ambition would tread water forever in hopes of continuing to breathe that air, scorning any other.

And look at me, he thought then. Look how far I have come since I tasted that air —how high! It was far more than poetic metaphor. He stood on a balcony of the Tower of Winter with nearly all of Southmarch below him, only the black stones of Wolfstooth Spire looming at his back like a stern parent. A month ago I was in the mire. He watched the overloaded boats being pushed back from the Winterside water gate by soldiers, heard the faint sound of people pleading, children crying.I would have been begging for sanctuary like the rest of them. Instead, I am assured my place. I am fed and housed by the Eddons —by the word of Princess Briony herself. Ah, the gods, and most specially Zosim, Patron of Poets, have smiled on me.

Still, he couldn’t help wishing the gods would do something about the war that had brought so many frightened souls into the castle that Tin-wright now found himself sharing his bed in shifts again, just as in his days at the Quiller’s Mint. For a moment he felt a twinge of real fear.

It could not be that the gods have some plan to trick me, could it? That they have brought me to this high estate only to let me die at the hands of warlocks and fames… ? He shook his head. The gloomy day had put foul thoughts in his mind. Briony Eddon herself elevated me, defends me. She recognizes my art and has brought me under her mantle. And everyone knows this castle will never be taken by siege —the ocean will defend it just as the princess regent protects me.

Dark thoughts banished,Tinwright took a long swallow of the wine and then passed the heavy jug to Puzzle, who had to hold it with both hands, trembling with the effort as he lifted it to his lips. The thin jester swayed a little, like a sapling.

“It’s a good thing you’re holding that,” Tinwnght told him. “The wind is growing fierce.”

“Good, that.” The old man wiped his lips. “Wine, I mean. Warms a man up. Now, sir, I did not call you up here merely to admire the view, although it is very fine. I need your help.”

Tinwright raised an eyebrow. “My help?”

“You are a poet, sir, are you not? Winter’s Eve is almost upon us. There will be a feast, of course. I must entertain the princess regent and the others. The good old duchess will be there.” He smiled for a moment, lost in some memory. “She likes my jests. And the other great and good—all will be gathered together. I must have something special for them.”

Tinwright was watching the bay again. A small boat had capsized; a family was in the choppy water. It all seemed very distant, but still Tinwright was glad to see that a number of other boats, mostly Skimmer crafts, were moving toward the place. A Skimmer man, one long arm still holding the tiller of his tiny sailboat, reached out and pulled what looked like a small child out of the gray-green water. “Sorry,” Tinwright said. “I don’t understand.”

“A song, man, a song!”The intensity in the jester’s voice was such that Matty Tinwright turned away from the rescue. Puzzle’s lined face seemed lit from within, full of glee. “You must write something clever!”

How much wine has the old fellow drunk? “You want me to write a song for you?”

Puzzle shook his head. “I will write the tune. I was much known for it in my younger days. For my voice, too.” His face sagged. “Never grow old. Do you hear me? Never grow old.”

In truth, Tinwright could not quite imagine such a thing, although he knew it lay in the distance somewhere, just as he had been told there was another continent far to the south, a place he had never seen and thought of not at all except to borrow the occasional metaphor set there—”dusky and sweet as a Xandian grape”—that he had heard used by other poets. Old age was like that to him as well. “What kind of song do you wish to sing?”

“Nothing to make people laugh.These are not the times for levity.” The old man nodded, as if being unfunny was for him a careful decision instead of the helpless tragedy of his life’s work. “Something heroic and light-hearted. Some tale of Silas or one of the other Lander’s Hall knights might do. Perhaps. The Ever-Wounded Maid —that takes place at a Winter’s Eve feast, after all.”

Tinwright considered it. There was no obvious value in the favor: Puzzle, despite his reminiscences, was no closer to the heart of power in Southmarch these days than Tinwright himself. Then again, what if the king did return? Odder things had happened.

Also—and it took Tinwright a moment to understand this, so unusual was the impulse—he liked the old man and would enjoy doing him a favor. After all, the gods knew that Puzzle had not been blessed with the natural gifts of art, as Matt Tinwright had in his own calling.

“Very well,” he said. “But you have not given me much time.”

Puzzle beamed. “You are a stout fellow, Tinwright. Truly, you are a friend. It need not be overlong—the attention of the court tends to wander by the time the meal is over and they have been well into the wine. Ah, thank you. This calls for another drink.” He heaved up the jug for a healthy swallow, then passed it to Tinwright, who almost dropped it, his attention again on the water.

“The Skimmers have saved that family,” he noted. “May the gods bite other gods, look at them! Half-naked in this cold? I will never understand Skimmers. They must have blubberous hide like a seal.”

“It is cold,”said Puzzle. “We should go down.” He squinted into the distance. “Look, you cannot even see Landsend for the fog. And it has come down out of the hills, too, and all across the downs. It will cover the city soon.” He wrapped his thin arms around himself. “Shadow-weather, we used to call it.” He turned suddenly to Tinwnght. “You do not think it has anything to do with the Twilight People, do you?"

Tinwright looked at the thick mists crawling down from the tops of the nearby hills, combs of white that mirrored the wind-slapped waves of the bay. “This is a spit of land between the bay and the ocean. There are always fogs here.”

“Perhaps.” Puzzle nodded. “Yes, of course, you are right. We older folk, when the cold gets into our bones, it makes us think of.” He wiped his eyes the wind had made them water. “Let us go down. There will be a fire in the kitchen and we can finish the jug and talk about my Winter’s Eve song.”

“Who is your master?" Chert asked.

The girl Willow suddenly looked shy, the first thing she had done that seemed in keeping with her age and appearance. “I do not know his name… but I know his voice.”

He shook his head. “Look, child, I don’t know you or what brings you here. It could be that at some other time I would go with you, if only to find out what sort of strangeness this is, but I have just returned from a journey beneath the earth that would make the Lord of that would make Kernios himself fall down and nap for a week. Our boy is in the other room, sick, perhaps dying. My wife has been terrified for us both. I cannot go with you to see your master, especially when you cannot even name him.”

For a long moment she faced him, narrow face solemn, as though the words he had spoken had not yet reached her ears. Her heavy-lidded eyes fell shut. When she opened them, she said, “Do you have the mirror?"

“The what?”

“The mirror. My master says that if you cannot come yourself, you must send the mirror with me.” She reached out her hand, guileless and direct as a girl half her age demanding a sweet. Even in his startlement, Chert couldn’t help wondering about her. She was tall even for one of the big folk, and pretty enough, but even though she was washed and her frock was clean, if plain, there was something offhand and bedraggled about her, as though she had dressed herself in the dark.

“Your master wants the mirror?" Without thought Chert put his hand into the pocket of his tattered, sweat-stained shirt, closed it on the smooth, cool thing. Too late he realized he had given away that he had it, but the girl was not even looking at him. She stood, palm still extended, staring into the middle distance as though looking right through the wall of the house.

“He says that each moment that goes by brings Old Night closer,” she said.

Chert was startled to hear Chaven’s words, Chaven’s terrible warning, coming from the mouth of this moonstruck child. He groaned.

“I must tell my wife,” he said at last.

Few folk were still on the streets of Funderling Town now that the lamps had been lowered for evening, but those who were out watched Chert with surprise. Most had already heard about the bizarre little parade that had signaled his return from the depths, but even that could not have prepared them for this sight Chert Blue Quartz, only just finished one set of-wild adventures, glumly following one of the big folk back out of town as though walking to his own execution. And in truth, his thoughts were nearly that heavy.

Opal didn’t even shout, he thought as he followed the girl toward the town gates. I could have borne it if she had shouted at me, called me names. I can scarcely believe I am going out again myself. But to see her turn her back on me, with nothing more than, “You do what you must.” Is it the child? Has she found something she cares for more than me?

Or perhaps she’s just like you, old fool, a part of him suggested. Perhaps with the boy so still and deathly she’s got enough under her pick that she doesn’t have time for something she doesn’t understand. Not that you understand it either.

Music drifted out of the guildhall as he passed, the voices of men and boys lifted in song. The men’s choir was practicing for year’s end, the timeless songs of their people shared between them like a meal. Schist the chorister would be pacing back and forth, listening, frowning, absently wagging one hand to show the rhythm. For the singers all was ordinary tonight, even the threat of war and tales of Cherts weird adventures largely a diversion. The Funderlings outlasted wars, or at least they always had builders, diggers, miners, they were too valuable to kill and too hard to eatth in their serpentine retreats even if someone wished to kill them We stone folk stay close to the ground, his father used to say. The view ts not so proud, but we’re harder to knock down.

Would they outlast Old Night, too, if it came?

Why has my life been broken into pieces ? Chert wondered. Why have I been singled out?

To his growing amazement, the girl led him into the very heart of the castle. A crush of people surrounded the Raven’s Gate, guards arguing with a variety of petitioners, but one of them recognized her and let her through, although he cast a mistrustful eye over Chert before allowing the Funderling to follow her into the inner keep. Willow did not speak to anyone, but led him through open spaces, gardens, and covered walkways until even his fine sense of direction was confused. The sun had set and the air was bitingly cold Chert was glad that he had brought his warm coat, although it had been hard to believe he would need it when he left, so much was he still remembering the heat of the depths. It made him a little sad that Opal had not reminded him to take it as she usually did, but he told himself that even his all-seeing, all-knowing wife couldn’t remember everything, especially in the midst of such a strange day.

As he finally pulled on the coat, Willow led him through a gate and into an arbored garden lit by a few torches in stands Chert did not know what garden it was, and he certainly didn’t recognize the man waiting on a low bench. He had half-suspected he would find Chaven on the other side of this mysterious summons and it was hard to fight a feeling of disappointment bordering on real fear to discover this stranger instead.

The man turned his face toward them as they approached, his eyes seemed as disturbingly incurious as the girl’s. He was almost Chaven’s opposite, younger than the physician and much thinner, with hair close-cropped in an awkward way that looked as if he had done it himself with a knife, and without looking.

Perhaps that’s why he needs the mirror, Chert thought, but he was not amusing anyone today, least of all himself. “You sent for me,” he said aloud, as firmly as he could manage. “As though you were my master and not just the girl’s. But you are not, so tell me your business.”

“Did you bring the mirror?” The man’s voice was slow and quiet.

“You will answer my questions first. Who are you and what do you want?”

“Who am I?” The stranger said it slowly, as though it were an unexpected question. “Here, in this place, I am called Gil. I think I have another name… but I cannot remember it.”

Chert felt a quiver of panic move down his backbone. The man had the detachment of the mad, as calm as Chert’s old grandfather had been in his last years, sitting beside the fire in his house like a lizard in the sun, barely moving at all from unseen dawn to day’s end.

“I don’t know what that nonsense means, but I know you have called me out of my home at a time when my family has great need of me. I will ask you again—what do you want?”

“To prevent the destruction of two races. To put off the finality of the Great Defeat a little longer, even if it cannot forever be averted.” The one named Gil nodded slowly, as if he only now understood his own words. For the first time, he smiled—a thin, ghostly thing. “Is that not enough?”

“I have no idea what you mean, what these things are you speak about.” Chert wanted badly to turn around and walk, even run, until stone was above him once more. Clouds hung overhead, night clouds so thick that he couldn’t see the moon or stars, but it was still nothing like being in his own place, among his own people and his own homely things.

“Neither do I,” said Gil. “But I am given to understand a little, and that little is this—you must give me the mirror. Then your work is done.”

Chert almost clutched at the mirror again, even though neither the strange man nor the girl looked like much of a threat to take it away from him. Still, they were twice his height… Just let them try, he thought Just let them try to get the thing my son almost died for . And then he realized for the first time what he had been thinking in a wordless way for some time; the mirror was the answer. The mirror was what had taken Flint down into the depths of the Mysteries, and what had almost killed him. “No, I will not give you the mirror—if I even had such a thing.” “You have it,” Gil said mildly. “I can feel it. And it is not yours to keep.” “It is my son’s!”

Gil shook his head. “I think not, although that is somewhat dark to me. But it doesn’t matter. You have it now. If you give it to me, you may go home and never think of it again.”

“I will not give it to you.”

“Then you must come with me,” the strange man said. “The hour is almost upon us. The mirror must be carried to her. It will not prevent Old Night and the destruction of all, but it may gain a little time.”

“What does this mean? What are you talking about? Carried to her? Who in the name of the Earth Elders is ‘her’?”

“She is called Yasammez,” the stranger told him. “She is one of the oldest. She is death, and she has been loosed on your kind at last.”

The afternoon sun was beginning to settle behind the hills. From where they sat on a rocky hilltop prominence, looking southeast toward the castle, although it was still too far away to see, the grass was a damp, rich green and the sky was marbled with sunlight and cloud. In all ways it would have seemed a crisp, cool day at the turning of winter had it not been for the clot of fog rolling across the land below them, obscuring all but the highest slopes of the downs as it reached toward Southmarch.

“It must be them,” said Tyne Aldritch, and spat. “You said that it came down from the Shadowline,Vansen, a fog like that. You said they traveled under it like a cloak.”

The captain of the guard stirred. His face was pinched, worried. “That is what the merchant’s nephew told us, the one whose caravan was attacked. When my men and I stumbled across the boundary, there was no fog. But, yes, I think it’s likely our enemies are in that murk.”

Barrick was finding it hard to do anything at this moment except stay upright in his saddle They had driven the army far and fast already today, and even though he was mounted, he was astonishingly weary and his bad arm ached as though someone had pushed a dagger between the bones of his wrist Not for the first time today he wished he had kept his mouth closed and stayed at home.

But if we don’t stop them, it will only be a different sort of death for those who remained behind in Southmarch. All during the day today the memory of the pale faces of the shadow-things, the dead but still terrifying eyes, had troubled him. He had not eaten. He could not imagine putting anything in his stomach except water.

“Are our scouts fast enough to beat them to the city?” asked Lord Fiddicks. “If we can get Brone’s garrison out, we can catch them as between hammer and anvil.”

“Our scouts might, but I think we should not trust to them alone,” said Earl Tyne. “Ah, but we have pigeons, don’t we? We will send messages that way. A bird will go faster than any man, especially if that man is riding a tired horse.”

Ferras Vansen cleared his throat. Oddly, he looked at Barrick for permission to speak. Despite his weariness and misery, Barrick was amused that the world of title and privilege should still exist after the morning’s debacle, but he nodded.

“It is just…” Vansen began. “My lords, it seems to me that we cannot wait.”

Tyne growled in irritation. “You would make the gods weep, man, you take so long to speak your mind. What do you mean?”

“If we go at this pace, we will not overtake them. They are mostly on foot, as are we, but their troops seem to move swiftly. If they can march at night, they will reach the mainland city by morning.”

“Good,” said Rorick. He had sustained only a few small cuts in the fighting—Barrick had noticed that he had not been one of the first into the thick of things—but wore his bandages with a prideful flair. “Then we will trap them against the bay. Fairies do not like water, everyone knows. When Brone comes out against them, we will tear them to pieces.”

Vansen shook his head. “I beg your pardon, my lord, but I fear that idea. I think we must try to stop them on the downs, in the farmlands outside the city.”

The other nobles made mocking noises—some even quietly called Vansen a fool, although he ignored their words. Even Tyne Aldritch seemed annoyed and turned to send his squire for wine. Barrick saw foot soldiers stealing the chance to sit or even he down while the nobles argued on the hilltop; he realized that the men had been walking all day with armor and weapons, and were at least as aching and dispirited as he was, but perhaps twice as tired.

“Yes, tell us what you mean, Captain Vansen,” Barrick said out loud. “Why shouldn’t we wait and catch them between our two forces?”

Vansen nodded at him like a tutor pleased by his pupil, which made Barrick regret taking the man’s side. “Because there are too many unknowns,” the guard captain said. “What if we cannot get a message through to the lord constable?”

“Then he will come out when he sees the fighting,” said Rorick. “Really, that is a foolish fear. This is a waste of time. What is this man doing here?”

“He is here because until today, he was the only one of us who had met the enemy,” said Tyne; his irritation was obviously not confined to Vansen alone. “And while not all of us can say the same, he acquitted himself bravely this morning as well.”

Rorick flushed, covering it by sending his own squire for wine.

“Just say what you are thinking, Captain.” Barrick wondered how he had suddenly become Vansen’s protector.

“First, as we have seen, strange things happen around the Twilight People. Can a pigeon find its way through or around that murk? Possibly. Will Brone be able to see what happens as the fog comes down and covers the coast and the city—will he know we are fighting for our lives just a half mile away? It seems obvious, but believe me, things in those shadows are not always what they seem, as I learned to my regret You’ve seen a little of that now, too, all of you.

“More importantly, what happens when our enemy reaches the city along the shore? Will they stand and fight us on open ground? Or will they disappear instead into the streets and alleyways, into the sewers and cellars and deserted buildings? How will we fight them then? We will be muddled, confused—you all remember that wood on the hilltop, fighting against a tenth of the numbers of this force. Would you give them a thousand more places to hide? It will be as though their army had grown tenfold again.”

“But the city is largely empty,” said one of the other nobles, puzzled. “The people have been taken inside the castle walls or have fled south.”

“What of it?” asked Vansen.

“If they move into the city,” Rorick said scornfully, “then we will put fire to it We will burn them out. What better way to deal with unnatural creatures?"

“Forgive me, my lord,” said Vansen, although he didn’t look as if he wanted or expected forgiveness, “but that is spoken as only a man who owns several castles can speak. Thousands of people make their homes there! And the city and its farms keeps Southmarch Castle alive.”

“I have had enough of this peasants insults,” Rorick said, pawing at the hilt of his sword. “He must be punished.”

“You have the right to challenge him, Longarren,” Tyne pointed out, “but I will not punish a man for speaking as Vansen has spoken.”

Rorick looked from Tyne Aldritch to Vansen. He appeared notably reluctant to pull his sword from its sheath. At last he tugged on his horse’s reins and turned and rode down the hill His squire, who had just returned with his saddle-cup, hurried after him.

“Continue, Captain,” said Tyne.

“Thank you, my lords.” Vansen turned to Barrick, his face grim. “Leaving aside what my liege lord Earl Rorick thinks, Highness, do not forget that they seem to be at least as many as we are. And even if we would sacrifice many men in close fighting and then put the torch to the greatest city in the March Kingdoms, what makes us think that we could burn that city without hindrance? Having met this enemy twice, I think it is madness to suppose them such children. They plan! They are patient! And we do not know the half yet of what they can do.”

“So what would you suggest?” Barrick suddenly didn’t want to hear it. It seemed obvious it would not be anything comfortable, with a fire and a meal at the end of it, and sleep to help ease his aching arm. “Go ahead, Vansen, tell. And may the gods curse us all for fools for having got ourselves in this situation in the first place!”

Several of the nobles were startled by this into making the sign against evil.

“Do not speak so, Highness,” said the Earl of Blueshore, scowling. “Do not bring the anger of the gods down on us. I will tell that to even you. Take my head for it if you wish.”

“No, Tyne, I was wrong I apologize.”

“It is not me who needs an apology, my prince.”

“Don’t worry, it’s not you the gods will punish either.” Barrick turned away from Tyne’s surprised look. “Speak, Captain. Tell us your plan.”

Vansen took a ragged breath; it was clear that he was as exhausted as everyone else. A cut on his jaw had reopened; a trickle of blood crawled down his neck like a tiny red snake. “We must ride, all of us. We must leave the men on foot to come as fast as they can Otherwise, we will never catch the shadow folk. Who knows if even the water will stop them? Not me, and certainly not Earl Rorick, begging my lords’ pardon. Who knows if even the walls of the keep will keep them out? We must catch the shadow folk and force them to turn and fight us, try to hold them until the rest of our force catches up—there’ll be no shame in retreating once we first touch them and punish them, especially with full dark only a few hours ahead. But if we wait until tomorrow’s daylight, they will have already reached Southmarch We mounted men must nip at them like a pack of dogs then scamper away, then strike again so they can’t ignore us. We must stop them and turn them until the men on foot arrive.”

“But what about Brone and his troops?” asked Tyne. “This seems madness when we have a garrison that can come out to support us.”

“Let them, then!” said Vansen. “Send our messengers, those with wings and those without. But I cannot say this strongly enough, my lords—if we let them reach the city before us, I fear that we’ll regret it.”

Tyne looked a question at Barrick, who felt more than a little queasy in his stomach. He had known he would not like hearing what Vansen had to say, but it was too late now he had heard it and he had recognized the dire truth in it. It was all he could do to nod his head.

Kettle stumbled in a rabbit hole and Barrick almost flew out of the saddle at full gallop, but he wrapped his hand in the horse’s mane and held on until he could get himself straightened up again. He was momentarily grateful that he was not carrying a lance as many of the other riders were, that his crippled arm didn’t permit it, since he would surely have lost it or, worse, let it slip down point-first as the horse fought for balance, likely knocking himself out of the saddle. Then he remembered that a man without a lance couldn’t keep an enemy any farther away than the tip of his falchion.

They would have let me stay behind. They all told me not to come. The words seemed to bounce in his head like loose stones in a bucket. The horses thundered down the slope, riders able to do nothing more at such speed than lean forward and hang on. The fog that only moments before had been sailing past in tendrils like individual flags was now growing thicker, great white billows of it flew up before Barrick, as if serving maids were shaking out the castle linens. He seemed to be moving through a world that was half green grass and dying winter sunlight, half gray emptiness where he was alone but for the distant sound of horses and armor and the occasional shout of his fellows, sun and fog turning the world alternately light and dark like a swinging door.

He reentered the world of light for a few brief moments, then plunged again into swirling mists Men rode on either side of him, but he could not see their shields or crests well enough to recognize them. The one on his left suddenly stood in his stirrups Something protruded from the joint of the rider’s chest and right shoulder like a long-stemmed black flower, then the man fell backward, spinning heels over head, and his horse veered away into the mist—mist that did not clear but seemed to grow ever thicker.

Vansen was wrong, was all Barrick had time to think, it is night already.

He turned to shout to the man on his other side, but as he looked for him something snapped past his face, so close he could feel it brush his nose. The pale man riding on his right had tipped his visor back, his black eyes were huge and had no whites. Even as Barrick stared, the man the creature whatever he was, nocked another arrow. Barrick knew he couldn’t outrun it or duck swiftly enough, so he yanked with his good hand on the reins and sent Kettle sideways into his attacker’s mount. There was a thump of contact as the bowstaff slapped against Barrick’s face. The arrow vanished harmlessly up into the air. Barrick still had not had a chance to draw his falchion, but he managed to pull Kettle away again just as his enemy lunged at him, leaving the manlike creature hanging, his hands wrapped around Barrick’s saddle strap, his feet still locked in his own stirrups as his horse galloped alongside Kettle. Despite the pulling and bumping of the horses, Barrick’s enemy was slapping at his leg for what looked like a knife sheathed there.

Shouting in disgust and fear, Barrick kicked at the unprotected face over and over. The helmet flew off, revealing streaming silvery hair. The creature, despite all this, continued to pull himself nearer until the two horses were only a yard apart. Barrick finally dragged his falchion out of its scabbard and shoved it artlessly at the man’s face, then hacked at the clawing white hands wrapped around his saddle strap until suddenly their grip dissolved in blood and the face with its staring black eyes fell away—a flash of his armor as he tumbled into the grass, then nothing. The riderless horse continued on for a few dozen paces, then turned and vanished through the fog.

Barrick reined up and sat for a long moment, gasping for breath, fearing that his jittering heart might crack like a newborn chick bursting its shell Men screeched hoarsely somewhere in the fog to his right, and though he was terrified, Barrick realized it was better to be moving than to sit waiting for something to come down on him out of the roil of mist.

They would have left me behind. I could have stayed behind.

He spurred toward the shouting.

Tyne of Blueshore and a dozen other knights and nobles had found each other, and Barrick had found them. The enemy was thick around them, but not endless. There were moments between one spate of fighting and the next, sometimes long enough for Barrick to catch his breath and even drink from his waterskin. He was holding his own despite being forced to fight with only one hand, and he found himself embarrassingly grateful for his old nemesis, Shaso, who had worked him so mercilessly all those years.

Once or twice the fog cleared so that he could see knots of combat all over the downs. Those instants when the mists rolled back and they could actually see something like a wholesome, natural twilight dragged a cheer from even the weariest of the fighters around Barrick, his own voice as loud as any. They had held their own against the first attack of the Twilight People. Barrick felt something almost like hope. If they could reach some of their fellows, they could begin to make an organized resistance, to make a real stand or, as Vansen had suggested—only hours ago, but it felt like years—then withdraw and try to lure the shadow folk after them.

The fairies didn’t seem to be as many as they had feared, but they were terrible foes. Their strangeness even more than their ferocity made them so. Most were man-sized and man-shaped, armored and carrying weapons of odd shapes and hues, but a few were twice the size of any mortal, massive things with patches of mangy fur and thick, sagging tortoise skin, powerful but slow. Barrick had already seen one of these monstrosities brought down by three mounted men with lances, and he had shouted with joy as the giant fell and lay shuddering in its own slow-oozing black blood. The fairy army contained swarms of small creatures with ruddy hair and faces almost as narrow as foxes’ muzzles, too, and others not much larger than apes who were covered all over with some dark, tangled fur so that they appeared faceless except for the staring gleam of their eyes Some of the enemies seemed to carry their own blankets of mist, so that even in the moments of clear light they were dim and hard to see as a reflection in a muddy pond, and the thrusts of lances and swords never quite seemed to strike them straight. Wolves accompanied them, too, silently swift and horrible in their intelligence. They had already pulled down several of the horses by tearing at legs and unprotected bellies until the beasts stumbled and fell.

“That way!” Tyne shouted.The war leader’s helmet was battered and his sword was bloodied and notched, but his voice was still strong Men moved to him without hesitation as he spurred his horse toward one of the clumps of fighting, a fog-shrouded mass of bodies and flashing metal—Mayne Calough and a company of Silverside nobles, perhaps three or four dozen mounted men all together, hard-pressed by at least that many foes. Tyne clearly planned to bring the two groups together with an eye toward mounting a coordinated defense, and Barrick was only too happy to follow. He had spent most of the last hour floating in a kind of singing silence, hearing but not recognizing the sounds of combat, terror, and pam all around him, lost in red-shot mists, but now the mists were beginning to clear—at least those in his head, even if the fogs that blew across the hillside showed no sign of doing the same.

As something like ordinary thought returned, he realized that he wanted only to get out of this ghastly murk any way he could. He didn’t want to kill anymore, not even monsters like these. He didn’t want to make anyone proud of him. He didn’t care what anyone thought.

War is a he. The disjointed words did not quite form in his head, but they were there all the same, like broken pieces of an object whose original shape could still be recognized. Because no one ever would. Terrible. If they knew, no one ever. Never.

Tyne was at the front of their small company, and reached the cluster of men on the hillside just in time to rein up in surprise as something huge burst through the rank of knights, flinging aside heavy, armored men and horses like a drunkard batting away a cloud of bees Tyne had only a moment to raise his sword in a gesture of helpless defiance before the leathery giant brought down its great cudgel of stone and wood on him with such force that Tyne’s horse was smashed to the ground with its back broken and its legs fractured and splayed Nothing was left of Tyne Aldritch, the Earl of Blueshore, but a headless jelly in a wreckage of crushed armor.

It was so sudden, so horrid, that Barrick could only gape as Kettle shied and stutter-stepped. The Silversiders scattered from the giant, mounted men running down those who had lost their horses, all of them leaping past the prince, a few shouting at him to turn, to ride for his life. The giant thing lumbered toward him, the massive club whistling back and forth as it came, dispatching those who couldn’t force their way past their fellows to escape, knocking them to pieces One of the fleeing knights lost control of his horse and the beast slammed into Kettle and forced Barrick’s mount sideways. This time Barrick did not catch its mane before he fell. The wet ground drove the breath out of him so powerfully that for a moment he thought it was the giant’s club that had struck him, but the fiery stab of pain in his arm told him otherwise he was still alive and there was worse to come. He rolled over and scrabbled along the ground to stay out of the way as his black horse tried to right itself, but it only bought him a moment.

Better if Kettle had kicked my brains out… Better than this.

The monstrous thing stood over him now, pouched eyes squinting from a face as bristly and wrinkled as the hind end of a wild boar. It was so huge it seemed to block the light, but there was almost no light left anywhere now, it seemed, anywhere in the world. It prodded him with the cudgel, shoving him a yard across the ground, and seemed surprised and pleased to discover he was still alive. He could feel his rib crack as the giant poked him again, then it raised its club high. The great weapon hung above him like a quivering outcrop of mountain about to break loose and tumble down to earth.

Barrick closed his eyes.

Briony.

Father. I wish…

37. The Dark City

Even without the shadow-mantle it had been dark on this battlefield hours before the true night that was now falling—the Mist Children had made sure of that. As Yasammez rode, she saw the murk they had created as a shade, a hue that only dimly stained her vision, but she guessed that to the sunlanders the Mist Children’s work must seem like something else entirely. Like blindness. Like despair.

All around her the struggle continued, a chaos of blood and fog and the clash of metal on metal, but nothing was hidden from Lady Porcupine. It had been a near thing—the decision of the mortals to ride her down in the open had been a clever one and she guessed there must be at least a few real commanders among them—but the sunlanders had suffered by having to leave behind their foot soldiers, and although they had fought bravely and surprisingly well, the tide had now turned against them.

The first step, she thought—but just barely. And the Year-Turning Day almost upon us. The king has lost There can be no question but that it must be done my way jrom now on.

She had blooded Whitefire today, but Yasammez did not lust after combat for its own sake—her anger was too refined, too pure, to need expressing in that fashion. She left the rest to Gyir and her other attendants and spurred her black horse up to a place where she could better see the sunlanders’ city and especially the castle that crouched on its mound of stone across the water—the old hill, the sacred, terrible place, soon to belong to the People once more. She considered how her eremites would cause the Bridge of Thorns to grow above the water, how her troops would cross through its sheltering branches and come to the castle walls. Many would be lost in the assault, but she had been thrifty of her army so far and it would be the last great sacrifice in this part of the world. First, though, they would invest the castle s front garden, the deserted sunlander city on the mainland. Her troops and followers would rest and tend their wounded, then they would dance and sing their victories, the first over their enemy for centuries Those parts of the city they did not need would burn, and the sight of those fires would steal the casde dwellers’ sleep for their last nights of life, as though Yasammez herself had reached out and bent their dreams into nightmare shapes.

Her horse stepped nimbly over the corpses of mortals and Qar Warriors of both armies still beat at each other in small knots across the damp downs. Screams filled the air, along with howls of many of the Changing tribe and the buzzing songs of the Elementals, which to the mortals no doubt sounded even more frightening than the other sounds. In the midst of this confusion her attention lit briefly on one of the giant servitors of Firstdeeps. The creature had killed several mortals despite his own streaming wounds, and was about to dispatch another who lay on the ground at his feet, a youth whom the giant was prodding with his club like a cat playing with a stunned mouse. She was about to turn away when something in the boy’s features and dress arrested her. The giant lifted his dripping cudgel.

“Stop.”

The servitor had never heard her voice, but he knew his mistress. He paused, the great weapon barely trembling, although it had to weigh as much as the trunk of a good-sized tree. The boy looked up as she rode toward him, his eyes bleary, face bloodlessly white. Yasammez was wearing her featureless helm and knew she must look as grotesque to his frightened eyes as the giant itself, her black armor bristling with spikes, Whitefire gleaming in her hand like one of the moon’s rays turned to stone. She lifted her helmet, stared at the momentarily reprieved prisoner. The boy’s eyes, which at first had been empty of anything but terror and a sort of resignation, opened even wider.

Yasammez looked at him. He looked back at her. His jaw worked, but he could not speak.

She extended her hand, spreading her fingers. His surprised, frightened eyes closed and he fell back on the wet grass, limp and senseless.

The Winter’s Eve pageant and its attendant temple rituals had commenced early in the morning, and even though it was not yet noon, already Briony had begun mightily to regret letting Nynor talk her into holding these most unfestive festivities. Rather than such familiar events reassuring everyone as the castellan had suggested, bringing the entire court together merely allowed rumor to travel faster and farther than ever it would have Rose and Moina had told her that although none would admit it in public, many of the nobles seemed half-inclined to believe theTollys’ assertion that Briony and Barrick had ordered Gailon killed. The fact that Hendon and the rest of the Tolly supporters had kept themselves away from the gathering only made it worse, made it seem that Briony was cruelly celebrating during their time of mourning.

Where are all those we have supported —where are those whose loyalty we’ve earned time and again ? Do they forget what my father did for them, what Kendrick did, what Barrick and I have tried to do even in our short time?

Staring at the people crowded into the great garden, which with its border of tents put up for the pageant had somewhat the look of a military camp, she couldn’t help but believe that those she saw whispering were speaking against her. She knew she dared say nothing herself—to deny such gossip was to give it even more force—and it maddened her.

“I would like to see them all horsewhipped, every disloyal one of them,” she muttered. “What, Highness?” asked Nynor.

“Nothing. Even on this chilly day, I am stifling in this costume.” She flicked at the confining dress of the Winter Queen that Anissa had worn the year before, the vast white hooped skirt and rock-hard stomacher, all covered with pearly beads like frozen dewdrops. On such short notice even half a dozen seamstresses had not been able to alter it enough to make it fit Briony s larger frame in a comfortable way. “Is it not time yet for me to finish this foolish pageant? I want to eat.”

“The ceremony is almost over, Highness.” Skilled courtier that he was, Nynor tried to sound apologetic, but he clearly disapproved of her complaints. “In a moment you will… ah! There, now go and take what the boy offers. Do you know your speech?”

She rolled her eyes. “Such as it is.” She swept across the yard and stood while little Idrin, Gowan of Helmingsea’s youngest son, handed her a sprig of mistletoe and a posy of dried meadowsweet as he lisped his ceremonial lines about the returning of the sun and the days of bloom to come. He was an attractive child, but his nose was running in a most unflattering way, after she had already clutched it, Briony realized to her dismay that the mistletoe was sticky.

“Yes, good Orphan,” she told the boy, struggling to hold the gifts as she surreptitiously wiped her fingers with her kerchief. “Because of your sacrifice, I will allow the Summer Queen to return and take her throne at the far end of the year. Go now to the gods and be rewarded.”

Little Idrin lay down and died with a great deal of kicking and groaning, but this year the crowd—perhaps superstitious in these days of bad news—was not amused by such antics. They clapped politely, but continued to murmur after the applause had died and the smallest scion of Helm-mgsea arose from death and returned to his mother’s side, his shepherds costume now furred with wet grass.

Briony had just finished dismissing the court so that they might have a rest and a chance to change clothes before the feast began when she noticed Havemore, Avin Brone’s factor, who was standing and waiting for her in a way meant to be both unobtrusive and compelling. She sighed. It was the functionaries of busy men who were usually the most insufferable in their self-esteem.

“What does your master want?” she asked him, letting a little more of her anger show than she had meant to. “He was supposed to be here. If I can stomach such things, he can certainly make an appearance.”

“Begging your pardon, Highness,” said Havemore without meeting her eyes, “but Lord Brone wishes to speak to you. Urgently, he says. He humbly requests you to come to the Winter Tower as quickly as your Highness’ convenience will allow.”

She was immediately suspicious. She didn’t know Havemore all that well. He came from Brone’s wealthy fiefdom in Landsend and was known to be ambitious. Could this be some trick to get her alone—some scheme of the Tollys for which they had enlisted the lord constable’s servitor? But even they would not dare anything in the light of day. Briony decided she was letting mistrust get the better of her—she would have her guards with her, after all. It was not the first time Brone had summoned her rather than the other way around. Still, it was irritating and she wondered if the lord constable did not need a reminder about who was the regent and who was not. “I will come,” she said. “But tell him he must wait until I get this outlandish costume off and something more sensible on.”

“What is your name?” she asked the young guard who had insisted on walking before her into the Tower of Winter. It had occurred to her that she knew less about these men who guarded her life than she knew about her horse or her dogs, despite the fact that she had been seeing some of the faces for years.

“Heryn, Princess Briony. Heryn Millward.”

“And where do you come from?”

“Suttler’s Wall, Highness. Just north of Blueshore lands, on the Sandy.” “And who is your lord?”

He flushed. “You, Highness. We Wall folk owe our fealty direct to Southmarch and the Eddons.” He seemed unsure, perhaps feared he had spoken too much. Certainly the other three guards who had stepped into the antechamber were looking at him as though they were going to make him regret his volubility in the guardroom later. “Most of the royal guards are from Suttler’s Wall or Redtree or one of the other Eddon holdings.”

It only made sense. “But your captain,Vansen, he is not an Eddon vassal by birth.” “No, Highness. He’s a dalesman, is Captain Vansen . . but he’s steadfast loyal, Ma’am.” The sergeant stepped forward. “Is he troubling you, Highness?”

“No, not at all. I asked him a question, he answered.” She looked at the rawboned sergeant, who seemed nervous and irritated. He does not like having a girl my age on the throne, she realized. He’d like to tell me to be quiet and hurry up —that I am keeping that wise old man Brone waiting, not to mention giving this guardsman thoughts above his station. For once she was more wearily amused by this sort of thing than angered. There were bigger foes and fears just now, after all. “Let us go, then.”

The summons was no Tolly trickery. Avin Brone was waiting for her in the wide room on the third floor, a public room once when the Tower of Winter was a residence, although it was now largely given over to storage. “Highness,” he said, “thank you. Please come with me.”

Masking her irritation, she directed her guards to wait and allowed him to lead her out to the chilly air of the balcony. She looked down and saw a handkerchief with a heel of bread and a few crumbs of cheese on it lying on the boards at her feet. At first she thought Brone himself had carelessly dropped it, but the bread was sodden and gray as though it had lain there a day or two.

“Have you brought me to see where some spy has snuck into the Tower of Winter and dropped his midday meal?” Brone looked at her for a moment, uncomprehending, then glanced down at the bread on the kerchief and frowned. “That? I care not for that— some workman or guard shirking, nothing more. No, Highness, it is something more fearful I brought you here to see.” He pointed out across the rooftops of the castle, out to the narrow sleeve of Brenn’s Bay and the city beyond. The city was covered in mist, so that only the temple towers and the roofs of the tallest buildings were visible through the murk—a cloak of fog or low-lying cloud that extended out across the fields and downs beyond the city so that most of the land on this side of the hills was invisible. But as she stared at this gloomy though largely unsurprising sight, Briony saw a few bright spots deep in the fog, as though torches and even some bonfires burned there.

“What is it, Lord Brone? I confess I can’t make out much.” “Do you see the fires, Highness?"

“Yes, I think so What of it?”

“The city is empty, Highness, the people gone.”

“Not completely, as seems apparent. A few brave or foolish souls have stayed behind.” She should have been afraid for them, but she had come almost to the end of her ability to feel for others, the suffering of displaced and frightened people had now become so universal.

“I might guess the same,” Brone said, “had not this message come this morning.” He pulled a tiny curl of parchment from his purse, held it out to her.

Briony squinted at it for a moment. “It is from Tyne, it says, although I would never think him to write such a small and careful hand.”

“Written by one of his servants, no doubt, but it is indeed from Tyne, Highness Read it, please.” Before she had digested more than a few lines she felt the hair on the back of her neck rise. “Merciful Zoria!” It was scarcely a whisper, although she felt like screaming it. “What is he saying? That they have been tricked? That the Twilight People have crept past them and are coming down on the castle even now?” She read on, felt a little relieved. “But he says they are going to catch them up—that we must be ready to ride out in support.” She fought down a rising wash of terror. “Oh, my poor Barrick. It says nothing of him!”

“It says at the end to tell you he is safe—or was when this was written.” Brone looked very grim, bristle-bearded and lowering like one of the hoary old gods thrown down by Perin, Thane of Lightnings.

“What do you mean— ‘when this was written’?”

“He sent it yester-morning, Highness I have only just received it, although from what he says of the spot where they were deceived, it cannot be much more than a score of miles outside the city.”

“Then how could they have not caught up to them yet… ?” But she was beginning to guess at the terrifying truth.

“The sentries heard noises last evening and into the night, noises they thought came from madmen left behind in the town—clashes of weapons, groans, screams, strange singing and shouting—but faint, as though from behind the city’s closed doors . . or from far away, in the fields on the city’s far side.”

“What does that mean? Do you think that Barrick and the others have already caught the Twilight People?" “I think perhaps they have caught up with them, Highness. Briony. And I think perhaps they have failed.” “Failed . . ?” She couldn’t make sense of the word. It was a common one, but suddenly it had become cryptic, meaningless.

“Tyne writes of the fog of madness that surrounds the fairy folk. What is that covering the city below? Have you seen a mist like that before, even m winter, that was still forming at midday? And who is lighting fires there?"

Briony wanted to argue with him, to come up with reasons the old man must be wrong, answers that would explain all he had said and more, but for some reason she could not. A cold horror had stolen over her and she could only stare out at the mostly invisible city—separated from the place where she stood by nothing except less than half a mile of water—and the fires that burned in that gray mist like the eyes of animals watching a forest camp.

Barrick… she thought. But he must be… he cannot be…

“Highness?” said Brone. “We should go down now. If the siege is about to begin in earnest, we must…” He stopped when he saw the tears on her cheek. “Highness?”

She dabbed at her face with the back of her sleeve. The brocade was rough as lizard skin. “He will be well,” she said as though Brone had asked her. “We will send out our men. We will cut the fairies down like rats. We will kill them all and bring our brave soldiers back.”

“Highness…”

“Enough, Brone.” She tried to pull on the mask of stone—the queen’s face, as she thought of it, although she was only a princess still. Perhaps that’s why I can’t do it properly yet, she thought absently. Perhaps that’s why it hurts. Struggling, she spoke more coldly to Lord Brone than she had intended to. “Enough talking. Do what you must to make sure the walls and gates are secure, and prepare troops for a sortie if you are wrong and we do see Tyne come and engage with the enemy. You and I will talk after the banquet.”

“Banquet?”

“After all Nynor’s trouble, the people must eat and be merry.” Tears drying now, she did her best to smile, but it felt more like a snarl and she did not try too hard to amend it. “As he said, it may be the last joy for some time, so it would be a shame to waste all those puddings.”

The first gleam of dawn should have come as a relief, but it did not. They had held their ground and they were still alive, but there was no one else in sight or earshot with whom they could join forces. They were lost like shipwrecked mariners.

Ferras Vansen and a few men—Gar Doiney and two other scouts, along with the knight Mayne Calough of Kertewall and his squire, had held this high place since middle-night, an outcrop of stone in the middle of the field, not much bigger than a small farmhouse—held it mostly, Vansen guessed, because it was on the fringes of the battle and of little strategic value. Not that strategic value meant much anymore. Vansen had known for hours with a certainty as straightforward as a mortal wound that the fight was over and they had lost.

He was angry with himself, although he still believed he had been right to insist they catch the fairy folk outside the city. It had proved almost impossible to overcome the Twilight People without the superiority of numbers—or even apparent superiority, since everything to do with the fairy folk was slippery and hard to calculate. Already Vansen was plotting in the lulls between fighting what to do next time, how to take the advantage of surprise and concealment away from the shadow-people and their weird magicks, but all the time he had been doing it he knew that there might be no next time, that more than this battle might have been lost. With Tyne Aldritch dead, all was in disarray, and Tyne’s second-in-command, the stolid, unimaginative Droy of Eastlake would not have been able to salvage things even if he had lived. In fact, it had been Droy’s pig-headedness that had made the loss so desperate. By the time he had arrived with the weary foot troops, their torches making a fiery snake along the downs as they hurried to support the mounted knights, Vansen had sent one of the scouts to him to tell him that it was useless now, that Tyne had fallen and the best thing Droy’s foot soldiers could do was to try to flank the Twilight folk and beat them to the deserted city, or, failing that, to fall back into the hills so that his army might eventually be able to provide the other half of a pincer with Brone’s defensive force. Instead, the Count of Eastlake had ignored Vansen’s message as the cowardly advice of a commoner, a jumped-up sentry in Droy Nikomede’s estimation, and had plunged his weary soldiers into battle. Within moments, half of them had become completely disoriented by the mists and the strange noises and shadows—Lord Nikomede and the others had learned nothing from the first fight, it seemed—and had been cut down by archers they could not even see. Their own arrows seemed to do as much damage to the survivors among Tyne’s knights as to the enemy.

A disaster. Worse, a mockery. This is how we defended Southmarch —with battle plans out of some player’s comedy, with bravery sacrificed by blockheaded generalship.

Doiney tugged at the hem of Vansen’s surcoat, startling him out of his reverie. “Shadows, Captain. Over there. Coming near, I think.”

Vansen squinted. It was a little easier to see now that the sun was coming back, but not much. The mists were thinner, little more than what would be expected on these meadows at this hour of the day, but they still made the world an eerie and untrustworthy place. Something was indeed moving up the small rise toward the pile of stone they defended, a moving clot of shadowy shapes.

An arrow snapped past. Vansen jumped down from the prominence on which he had been crouching. The horses, herded together into a crack at the base of the outcrop because for the moment they were useless, whinnied in fear. No more arrows came. That was one small solace.

“Up!” Vansen shouted as half a dozen strange figures came charging out of the mist, eyes bright and faces as pale as masks. One ran on all fours like a beast, although he seemed to have been arrested in the middle of some transformation, with stripes of bushy for sprouting unevenly down his back and sides and his face misshapen, as though someone had pushed a human face out from within, making half a muzzle out of nose and mouth Seven hours ago this sort of thing had sickened Ferras Vansen, made him feel lost, as though the world he knew had suddenly fallen away beneath his feet Now it was only another reason to want to kill them, kill them all, these horrid, unnatural creatures that had themselves destroyed so many of his fellows.

“To me!” he shouted and helped Mayne Calough to his feet, the knight’s armor grating against stone as he dragged his aching body erect. “To me! Keep your backs together!”

The bright-eyed things were almost on them now, teeth bared as though they would not waste such sweet work on their swords. As he had at least a dozen times already, Vansen let his deeper thoughts go away so he could concentrate on the business of staying alive a little while longer.

Lord Calough and his squire were dead, or at least the knight was dead and the squire was clearly dying, with a great streaming gash beneath the point of his jaw. The hands with which the youth tried to hold in his own blood were all red, but his face had gone parchment-pale beneath the dirt and the blood was pumping more slowly now. The squire stared off into the misty morning sky, his bubbling prayers slipping down into silence though his lips still moved Vansen wished there was something he could do to help the boy Perhaps, though, this was the most merciful way Who knew what would happen to the rest of them when the shadow folk came again? Only Vansen knew even a little of the way a man’s own thoughts could betray him under the dark magicks of faerie.

Calough lay on top of the milk-skinned warrior he had destroyed—a woman, although Vansen thought that meant no less honor, for the fairy women fought like demons, too—but the knight’s own breastplate had been torn open like a bite taken from an apple and his guts were out Three fairy corpses had rolled down the rock and lay tumbled together at its base in the meadow. The other attackers had retreated into the murk, but only to get reinforcements.Vansen felt sure. It had been hours since he had seen any other mortals Something was going on to the east of their outcrop, where the mist still lay thick on the ground, but the discord of music and screams didn’t sound like any kind of fighting he knew.

It sounded like the fairies were singing sweetly-sour temple harmonies as they killed the wounded, that was what it sounded like.

“Get down, Captain,” Doiney whispered from his perch behind some rocks at the crown of the outcrop. “They still have arrows left and they’re probably gathering up those they’ve already shot, too. You’ll get a shaft in the eye.”

FerrasVansen was about to take this good advice when he saw something moving across the sloping meadow, not coming toward them but passing from left to right in front of them. It was a mounted man, or at least a mounted creature of some sort, a dark figure on a black horse. Vansen crouched, but despite the superstitious fear that surprised him into shivers—he had thought there was nothing left in him that was still alive enough to be frightened—he couldn’t take his eyes off the apparition that sailed past them through the swirling ground fog. Fear turned to astonishment as the figure moved into a shaft of weak sunlight and he could see it clearly.

“By Perin Skyhammer, it is the prince himself Barrick! Prince Barrick, stop!” Too late Vansen realized that he had just directed the attention of any ransomers to the greatest prize on the field, but the shadow folk had not seemed very interested in keeping any of their mortal enemies alive, no matter their station.

“Get down!” Doiney yanked at his leg, but Vansen paid no attention. The mysterious figure that looked so much like the prince sailed by on a black horse, passing scarcely a dozen yards from where Vansen watched, stunned. He shouted again, but Barrick Eddon or his supernatural double did not even turn to look at him. The familiar face was distant, distracted, eyes fixed firmly on the northwestern hills despite the intervening mists.

“By all the gods and their mothers,” said Vansen, “he’s riding in the wrong direction—straight toward the Shadowline.” He remembered Briony and his promise to her, but Doiney was tugging at him again, reminding him that he had other duties as well. “It’s the prince,” he told the leader of the scouts. “He’s riding away to the west. He must be confused—he’s heading straight for the shadowlands. Come with me, we have to catch him.”

“It’s just a will-o’-the-wisp,” said Doiney, mouth stretched in a panicky scowl. “A fairy trick. There are men here somewhere who need our help, and if there aren’t, we need to go east, try to get back to the keep.”

“I can’t. I promised.” Vansen scrambled down the rock to where his horse was hidden. “Come with me, Gar I don’t want to leave you here.”

Doiney and one of the other scouts, who had poked his head up now to see what was happening, both shook their heads, wide-eyed Doiney made the pass-evil. “No.You’ll be killed or worse. We need your sword, Captain. Stay with us.”

He could only bear to look at their weary, frightened faces for a moment. “I can’t.” But which vow was more important, the one he had made to the princess, or the one he had made to old Donal Murroy when he had sworn to make the royal guard his own family and himself those guardsmen’s dutiful father? He had little hope that the scouts would find the other survivors, but at least they had a chance of making a run toward the east, although he knew their chances were considerably lessened without him: he was the best swordsman among them and the only one in full armor.

He hesitated once more, but Briony Eddon’s face was in his thoughts, shaming him, haunting him like a ghost. “I can’t,” he said at last, and led his horse out onto the foggy grass. He swung up into the saddle then spurred away. Barrick, or the thing that looked like him, had disappeared, but the marks of the horse’s hoofprints were still fresh.

“Don’t leave us, Captain!” cried one of the scouts, but Vansen was headed northwest and couldn’t turn back. He wished he could put his hands over his ears.

“But why?” Opal could barely hold back the tears, but her anger made it a little easier. “Have you lost your wits? First you go off with that girl, then this? Why should you go outside the castle gates with a stranger? And now, of all times?” She gestured at Flint. The child was silent on the bed, only the faintest motion of his narrow chest showing that he lived. “He’s so ill!”

“I do not think he is ill, my dear one, I think he is exhausted. He will be well again, I promise you.” But Chert didn’t know whether he actually believed that. He was tired himself, very tired, having snatched only a few hours’ sleep after returning from the keep above. “The boy is the reason I have to go—the boy and you. I wish you could see this Gil fellow. I don’t want to believe him, dear Opal, but I do.” He lifted the nnrror and examined it again. Hard to believe so much madness could surround such a small, unexceptional object. “Terrible things hang in the balance, he says. I wish you could see him, then you would understand why I believe him.”

“But why can’t I see him? Why can’t he come here?”

“I’m not sure,” he had to admit. “He said he couldn’t come too close to the Shining Man. That is why the boy went instead.”

“But it’s all mad!” Opal’s anger seemed to have won. “Who is this person? How does he know Flint? Why would he send our son to do such a dangerous thing, and by what right? And what does one of the big folk know about the Mysteries, anyway?”

Chert flinched a little under the volley of questions. “I don’t know, but he’s more than just one of the big folk.” Gil’s calm, empty stare had remained in his thoughts. “There’s something wrong with him, I think, but it’s hard to explain. He’s just…” Chert shook his head. That was his problem. He had spent much of the last days in places where words meant little or nothing, but Opal had not. It saddened him, felt like a breach between them. He hoped he would survive this strange time so that he could patch it up again. He missed his good wife even though she was standing right in front of him. “I must do this, Opal.”

“So you say. Then what are you doing here at all, you cruel, stubborn old blindmole? Do you think you’re doing me a kindness, coming back to tell me you’re off to risk your life again after you’ve just returned? Worrying me to death with these mad stories?”

“Yes,” he said. “Not a kindness, but I couldn’t go away again without telling you why.” He walked across the bedroom and picked up his pack. “And I wanted some tools, also. Just in case.” He didn’t tell her that what he really wanted was his chipping knife, sharp-honed and the closest thing to a weapon they had in the house other than Opal’s cookware. He couldn’t quite imagine asking her for her best carving knife—it seemed as though that might be the last blow on a quivery rockface.

Opal had stamped out to the front room, fighting tears again. Chert kneeled beside the boy. He felt his cool forehead and looked again to make sure Flints chest was still moving. He kissed him on the cheek and said quietly,”I love you, lad.” It was the first time he had said it aloud, or even admitted it.

He kissed Opal, too, although she could barely force herself to hold still for it, and quickly turned her face away, but not before he tasted her tears on his lips.

“I’ll come back, old girl.”

“Yes,” she said bitterly. “You probably will.”

But as he went out the door, he heard her add quietly, “You’d better.”

Chert made a few wrong turns on his way back, since this time he didn’t have the girl Willow to guide him. The big folk dashing here and there around the castle seemed even more distracted than might seem warranted with siege preparations still going on, and at first he thought it a little strange that no one bothered to question a lone Funderling wandering through the grounds. Then he remembered that today was Winter’s Eve, the day before Orphan’s Day, one of the most important holidays on the big folks’ calendar. Despite the fear of war they seemed to be preparing for a feast and other entertainments: Chert saw more than a few groups of courtiers in costumes even more elaborate than usual, and a trio of young girls that seemed to be dressed as geese or ducks.

The man named Gil was sitting as still as a statue in a patch of weak morning sunlight in the garden when Chert found the place at last. Chert couldn’t help wondering if the stranger had waited on that bench all the night long, ignoring winter chill and the soaking dew.

Gil looked at him as if hours had not passed, as if they had only left off their conversation moments earlier. “Now we will go,” he said, and stood, showing no stiffness. Indeed, he was weirdly graceful, displaying such economy of movement that what at first sight appeared slow and awkward soon began to seem more subtle, movement without wasted effort, so that even his most mundane acts might have been the carefully planned steps of an elaborate dance.

“Hold a moment.” Chert glanced around, but the garden seemed to be one of the few spots in the castle empty of people preparing for either siege or feast. “We can’t just walk out the Basilisk Gate, you know. The castle is at war. The guards won’t let us. Not to mention that the causeway is down. You say we must reach the city on the other side—we would have to find a boat and the bay is dangerous today. Some say a storm is coming.” Gil regarded him. “What does this mean?”

Chert let out a snort of exasperation. “It means you haven’t thought this part out very carefully, is what it means. We’ll have to find some other way. You can’t fly, can you? I didn’t think so. Then you’ll have to come back with me to Funderling Town. There are tunnels—old roads, secret roads— that lead under the bay. They’re not used much anymore even by us. We can go that way, or at least it’s worth a try.”

Gil continued to look at him, then sat down. “I cannot go down into Funderling Town, as you call it. It is too close to the deep places—to the thing you call the Shining Man. I… I cannot go there.”

“Then we have hit bedrock with no tools.” Chert wished again that Chaven had not vanished. Cryptic strangers and magical mirrors! The Mysteries coming to life! The portly physician would have had something useful to say—he always did…”Ah,” Chert said.”Ah.Wait a moment.” He considered. “The girl told me you have been living in the castle stronghold. That is beneath the ground.”

Gil nodded his head slowly. “That is not so deep, I think. I feel it only a little.”

“I know a way that also does not go too deep, at least not at first. When we are far away from the Shining Man, if that is what you really fear, we can go deeper. Follow me.”

As he led the stranger across the inner keep, certain now for the first time of where he was going, he tried to plan what he would say to Chaven’s housekeeper or to the manservant—what was that suspicious old man’s name? Harry? Could he convince them of some errand so they would allow him to go through the house unsupervised? He didn’t think any of them knew about the tunnel and the door off the cellar hallway.

He was still scheming when they reached the stubby observatory-tower, but the tale he had cobbled together—an important sample of stone Chaven had been testing for him, but which Chert now urgently needed back—was to remain unused. Nobody answered to his knock. The door was bolted, although Chert jiggled it to make sure. A layer of dirt on the threshold had been damped by the mist and drizzle into a muddy film naked of footprints, as though nobody had gone in or out for several days. He shook the handle again but the door was latched tight. It seemed that in Chaven’s long absence the servants had closed up the house.

With sinking heart he began to explain to Gil, but realized that the odd man saw nothing that needed explaining. Chert looked up to the second-floor window and its wooden balcony. Perhaps the shutters there were less securely guarded.

“Can you climb?” he asked. Gil gave him that now-familiar, annoyingly expressionless gaze. “Never mind. I’ll do it.The Elders know I’ve been getting enough practice at it lately.”

It took him a while after he reached the balcony to catch his breath— half a night’s sleep had not been nearly enough and his muscles were quivering with the exertion—but he was pleased to discover that the end of his chipping knife could slide between the shutters and still give him enough leverage to lift the bar on the inside. He went through as quietly as he could, considering he was still wheezing, and paused for a moment in the cluttered room to listen. All around him were the signs of Chaven’s interests and obsessions, books and containers on every surface, caskets and sacks spilling their contents, apothecary chests with the drawers left open as though the physician had made one last hurried search of his belongings before rushing out the door Nothing was too dusty, though, Chert decided that the housekeeper must have given it a good cleaning before she left Still, he stood silent for a long time, feeling like a thief, until he was certain that nothing was stirring anywhere around him. He wondered briefly about the chunk of stone that Flint had brought back—such a long time ago it seemed now’—but to find anything in this hodgepodge would be the work of hours if not days. He hurried down the winding stairs and let Gil in through the front door.

“Follow me,” he told him he couldn’t assume anything was obvious to this strange, fish-eyed fellow Chert led him down through several floors to the bottommost corridor and its featureless hallway, where he was startled almost into a scream by a furry shape that scuttled out of the shadows in front of his feet, but it was only a spotted black-and-gray cat who stopped and gave him a stare as arrogant as Gil’s. It seemed healthy and well-fed. He wondered if it had found the larder and was making a home of the Observatory now that the house was empty.

“Well met,” Gil said as they all stood poised on the stairway. It certainly seemed that he was talking to the cat. The creature did not appear impressed, she showed the two of them her tail as she trotted past them up the stairs.

In the featureless corridor at the bottom of the house Chert heard a noise from behind a small and otherwise unexceptional door that made him stop and snatch at his companion’s arm to halt him as well. In other circumstances Chert would have said someone in that room was moaning, although the voice did not sound much like anything human, but in the deserted house of a man with many arcane interests he was less certain. In fact, he was only sure that he didn’t want anything to do with it, even if it was only the sound of some odd mechanical device of Chaven’s, some tangle of leather hoses and bellows and glass pipes. After a heart-stuttering moment he pulled Gil past the spot and down to the door at the end with the bell hanging beside it. It was a relief to close that door behind them, to be out of the empty house and into the clean but crude Funderling tunnels he knew so well.

“We should be no deeper than the stronghold here,” he whispered to his companion. “Can you stand it?" Gil nodded.

“Good. Follow on, then. We’ve got a long distance to walk.”

Chert did not have either the time or inclination to visit Boulder for any of the glowing coral, so it was with a conventional and very smoky oil lamp throwing huge shadows on the pale, sweating walls of the limestone cavern that he led Gil through the deep places underneath Brenn’s Bay. At other times, Chert thought, it would have been interesting to take this old route from a time when Funderlings had less trust of their larger brethren (for good reason) and wished an escape to be available at all times. The old Exodus Road was largely unused these days, untended in many crumbling places and navigable only with the help of a long rhyme Chert’s father had taught him that marked off the turnings as it wound from the outer reaches of Funderling Town, through dripping caverns beneath the bay and at last to the mainland. The current circumstances robbed the trip of any pleasure for Chert, not to mention his recent memories of having made his way beneath the silvery Sea in the Depths, plagued by nightmare visions every step of the way. This journey was not nearly so difficult, though it was much longer. Only the behavior of his companion made the experience anywhere near as frightening.

Gil, in fact, seemed to be suffering as Chert himself had suffered deep in the Mysteries, beset by things invisible to the Funderling—muttering, even once or twice speaking in an unfamiliar language. It was only after the lean stranger experienced his third or fourth such seizure that Chert finally realized he had seen something like this before.

Flint, down in the Eddon family tomb. The crack in the earth there. Something suddenly occurred to him, something he should have thought of before. Did Flint know —was that why he acted so crosswise in the tomb? Did he know he must one day go down there? Or did it frighten him because it called to him, and it was only a few days ago that the call finally became too strong to resist… ?

As they reached the far side where the paths turned upward again, his odd companion went through yet another change, this time as though a layer of his strangeness had actually been scrubbed away. Gil began to ask questions about where they were and how long it would take them to get to the surface that seemed as though they could have come from the mouth of an ordinary man. Chert couldn’t compass it and didn’t try: far too much of what had happened in these last days he not only didn’t understand, but felt sure he never would.

The underground way reached the surface at last on the mainland, in a bank of seaside cliffs half a mile or so north of where the causeway had stretched. As they made their way out into the daylight, or as much of it as there was on this bleak, misty afternoon, Chert saw the castle they had left behind looming just across the strait, like a toy decorously carved by a giant and set down in the water to wait his return. From this distance Chert couldn’t even see the sentries on the wall. The keep looked deserted, its windows empty as the cliff holes above his head where the shorebirds nested in spring. It was hard to believe there were any living souls at all inside that castle or beneath it.

He tried to shrug off the bleak thought. “We’re on the other side of the water. Where do we go now?” “Into the city. Those tunnels—have I ever been in them before?”

“I don’t know,” said Chert, surprised.”I shouldn’t think so.”

“Very much they remind me of… something. Some place I once knew well.” For the first time Chert could see actual emotion written on the man’s features, in his troubled eyes. “But I cannot summon it to my thoughts.”

Chert could only shrug and start down the beach. Soon the seawalls of the city were looming above them. Only the base of the causeway remained where Market Road reached the shoreline, and the sea was empty into the distance, but a few tethered boats still floated along the quay—their owners taking their chances in the keep, no doubt, hoping one day soon to reclaim them. Otherwise the docks and the waterfront taverns and warehouses were deserted. It was stunningly empty and Chert could not help staring; it looked as though some great wind had come and blown all the people away. Fear stabbed at him anew. It wasn’t just his own life: all the world had turned topside-down.

It was Gil who now took the lead, the Funderling who followed with increasing reluctance. A mist had crept down out of the hills and covered the city so that they could see only a few dozen paces ahead of them even on wide Market Road, the empty buildings on either side seemed more like the silent wrecks of ships lying on the sea bottom than anything whole-some.The damp walls and guttered roofs dripped like the deepest limestone caverns, so that their footsteps seemed to echo away multifold on all sides in a thousand tiny pattering sounds.

Everything was so gloomy and unnatural that when a half dozen dark figures stepped out of the shadows before them it seemed so much like the inevitable ending to a terrible dream that Chert did little more than gasp and stop in his tracks, blood thumping. One of the lean figures stepped forward, leveling a long black spear. His armor was the color of lead, and nothing showed of his face but a bit of bone-white skin and the catlike yellow gleam of the eyes in the slot of his helmet. The point of the spear moved from Chert to Gil and settled there. The apparition said something in a voice full of harshly musical clicking and hissing.

To Chert’s dull astonishment, Gil responded after a moment in a slower version of the same incomprehensible tongue. The gray-armored figure answered back and the exchange went on. Water dripped. The sentries moved up behind their leader, nothing much of them visible but tall shadows and a half circle of burning yellow eyes.

“It seems… we are to be killed,” Gil said at last. He sounded a little sad about this—wistful, perhaps. “I told them we bear an important thing for their mistress, but they do not seem to care. They are victorious, they say. There are no bargains left to be made.”

Chert fought against panic that threatened to clamp his throat, choke him. “What… what does that mean? You said they would want what we have! Why do they want to kill us?”

“You?” Gil actually smiled, a sad twitch at the corners of his mouth. “They say because you are a sunlander, you must die. As for me, it seems I am a deserter and thus also to be executed. She who has conquered—she was my mistress once.” He shook his head slowly. “I did not know that. Given time, it might have helped me understand other things. But it seems that time is what we do not have.” And indeed, as Gil spoke, the semicircle tightened around them. Spear points hovered in front of their bellies, an ample supply for both of them. The only choice was to die standing up or running away.

“Farewell, Chert of Blue Quartz,” his companion said. “I am sorry I brought you here to die instead of leaving you in your tunnels to find your own time and place.”

38. Silent

Qinnitan stood in the corridor outside Luian’s chambers like someone blasted by a demon’s spell, amazed and defeated, waiting for death to come and take her.

When a dozen or so heartbeats had passed, her hopeless terror ebbed, if only a little. She didn’t want to give up, she realized. What if darkness was like sleep, and that huge, terrible… something was waiting for her there as well? Except in death there would be no waking, no escape from that black and gaping mouth…

She slowly shook her head, then slapped at her own cheeks, trying to make herself feel again. If she wanted to live, she would have to escape from the autarch’s own palace, an impossible task under the eyes of all his guards—and not just the guards: soon every servant would be watching for her, too, and everyone else in the Seclusion, royal wives and gardeners and hairdressers and kitchen slaves…

A glimmer of an idea came to her.

She forced herself to move, lurching back down the corridor to step through the hanging into Luian’s chamber. Even knowing what she would find, it was impossible to suppress a groan of horror when she saw the sprawled body in the center of the floor, although the purple face was turned away from her. The strangling cord was so deeply embedded in the Favored’s wattled neck that most of it was invisible. Luian’s murderer had found that thick throat hard going: a muddy bootprint stood out starkly on the middle of the back of Luian’s white nightdress like a religious insignia on the robe of a penitent.

Qinnitan was fighting her roiling stomach when a huge, fresh wave of misery washed through her. “Oh, Luian…!” She had to turn away. If she looked any longer, she would start weeping again and never move until they came for her.

She was rummaging furiously through Luian’s baskets and chests of belongings when she heard a sound behind her. Her hands flew up to protect her neck as she turned, certain she would confront the grinning, dead-eyed face of Tanyssa, but the rustling noise had been made by the mute slave boy, the Silent Favored who had brought her Luian’s message, as he tried to hide himself deeper into the room’s naked corner. She had walked right past him.

“Little idiot! You can’t stay here!” She was about to chase him out the door, then realized she might be throwing away the one thing that could save her life. “Wait! I need some of your clothes. Can you do that? Some breeches like the ones you’re wearing. I’ll need a shirt, too. Do you understand?”

He looked at her with the wide eyes of a trapped animal and she realized he had been even closer to Luian’s killing than she had. Still, she had no time to spare on sympathy.

“Do you understand? I need those clothes, now! Then you can go. Tell no one you were here!” Qinnitan almost laughed at her own fatal foolishness. “Of course you will tell no one—you can’t talk. No matter. Go!”

He hesitated. She grabbed his thin arm and pulled him upright, then gave him a shove. He hurried out of the door, bent so low his hands almost trailed on the floor tiles, as though he were crossing a battlefield where arrows flew.

She turned back to her search and a few moments later found Luian’s stitchery basket. She took out the jewel-handled scissors—a present from the Queen of the Favored, Cusy, and thus hardly ever used—and began to shear off her own long, black hair.

Even after she had taken the pile of clothes and thanked him, the boy would not go. She gave him another push, but this time he resisted her

“You must leave! I know you’re frightened but you can’t let anyone find you here.”

He shook his head, and although terror still filled his eyes, his refusal seemed more than just fear. He pointed at the other room—Qinnitan could see the naked feet through the doorway, as though Luian had merely decided to lie down on the floor for a nap—and then at himself, then at Qinnitan.

“I don’t understand.” She was getting frantic. She had to get out, and quickly. The chances were good that Tanyssa had already checked her room and was now looking for her all through the Seclusion, perhaps raising the alarm. “Just go! Go to Cusy or one of the other important Favored! Run!”

He shook his head again, sharply, and again his finger traveled from the corpse to himself to Luian. He looked at her with imploring eyes, then mimed what she realized after a moment was writing.

“Oh, the sacred Bees! You think they will kill you, too? Because of the letters?” She stared at him, cursing Luian even though it was beyond the laws of charity to besmirch the dead before they had received the judgment of Nushash. Luian had ensnared them all, she and that handsome, foolishly arrogant Jeddin. It was bad enough what the two of them had done to Qinnitan, but to this poor, speechless boy… ! “Right,” she said after a long moment. She remembered what Jeddin was probably going through at this very moment and her anger died like a snuffed candle. “You’ll come with me, then. But first help me get these clothes on and clean away the hair I chopped off. We can’t burn it, since anyone would know that smell, so we’ll have to put it down the privy. And here’s another important thing—we’ll need Luian’s writing box, too.”

The boy immediately proved his worth by leading her out of Luian’s rooms and down a back corridor Qinnitan hadn’t even known existed, skirting the Garden of Queen Sodan entirely, which would be full of wives and servants after the evening meal, especially on a warm night like this one. They encountered only one other person, a Haketani wife or servant, carrying a lamp—it was hard to tell which because Haketani women all wore veiled masks and shunned ostentatious dress. The masked woman went past with no reaction whatsoever, not even a nodded greeting; even in the midst of a desperate escape Qinnitan felt a reflexive irritation until she realized that the woman saw only tw.o slave boys, and no matter what the woman herself might be, they still were beneath her notice.

I should be thanking the Holy Hive instead of grumbling.

The closer they got to the Lily Gate of the Seclusion, the faster her heart beat. Loose hairs were working their way down the back of her neck, making the rough cloth of the boy’s shirt feel even more maddeningly itchy, but that was the least of her problems. Many more people were in the corridors now, servants off to shop for their mistresses, slaves with bundles piled high on heads or on shoulders, some even pulling small carts, a female peddler with a wheeled cage full of parrots, a Favored doctor in an immense, nodding hat arguing with a Favored apothecary on their way to examine the herbs at a local market, and although the presence of each person added to her fretfulness, especially the two or three servants she thought she recognized, she also told herself that the crowding made others less likely to notice two Favored boys, and certainly a lot less likely to wonder whether one of those two boys might be a Bride of the Living God.

Still, it was all Qinnitan could do to stand in the crowd waiting at the alcove on the Seclusion side of the gate when every instinct told her to shove her way through and bolt to freedom—-just let them try to catch her! She did her best to slow her breathing, tried to think of what she would do on the other side. Small fingers curled around her hand and she looked down at the boy. Despite his own wide, fearful eyes, he nodded his head and did his best to smile, as if to tell her that all would be well.

“I don’t know your name,” she whispered. “What is your name?”

His mouth twisted and she felt cruel—how could he tell her? Then he smiled again and lifted his hands. He laced his thumbs together with the fingers held out on either side, then let the fingers flap like… wings.

“Bird?”

He nodded happily. “Your name is Bird?”

He frowned and shook his head, then pointed up to the ribbed ceiling. Here, so close to the gate, the remains of nests still stood in some of the shadowed angles. She could see no birds in any of them. “Nest?” He shook his head again. “A kind of bird? Yes? Sparrow? Thrush? Pigeon?”

He grabbed her hand again and squeezed, nodding vigorously.

“Pigeon? Your name is Pigeon. Thank you for helping me, Pigeon.” She looked up and discovered they had almost reached the front of the line, which narrowed like a bottle’s neck before a trio of large Favored guards. The Lily Gate was only a few paces away, glowing with the lantern lights of the outside world like something magical from a story. Two of the guards were busy looking through a peddler woman’s cart before releasing her back into the city—dwarfed by them, the peddler wore an expression that was so obviously and carefully no expression that it was almost insolent in itself—but the third guard was all too ready to look over Qinnitan and her companion.

“Where are you going… ?” he began, but was interrupted by Pigeon making grunting noises. “Ah, one of the tongueless whelps. Whose business?”

Qinnitan’s stomach lurched. She had worked so hard on her other forged letter that she had completely forgotten she would have to produce some kind of permission to leave the Seclusion as well—slaves, even the relatively select Silent Favored, could not simply wander in and out at will.

An instant before she would have broken and run, the boy reached into his pocket and pulled out a small silvery article the size of a finger and showed it to the guard. Qinnitan’s heart climbed into her mouth. If it was Luian’s seal-stick and the word had already gone out…

“Ah, for old Cusy, is it?" The guard waved his hand. “Don’t want to make the Queen of the Seclusion grumpy, do we?” He stepped aside, glancing with idle but focused curiosity at Qinnitan as though he sensed that something about her was not quite right. She dropped her eyes and silently recited the words of the Bees’ Hymn as Pigeon steered her past the huge guard and in behind the peddler woman, who was just being released, apparently innocent of contraband.

“They say they were lovers once,” one of the guards who had been searching the cart said quietly as he stepped out of the peddler’s way. Qinnitan was startled until she realized he was talking to the other guard.

“Him? And the Evening Star?” asked his companion, equally quiet. “You’re joking.”

“That’s what they say.” The guard’s voice dropped even lower, to a whisper—Qinnitan only heard a little of what he said before the pair of guards had fallen too far behind her. “But even if she cared for him sail, she couldn’t do him any good now. Nothing between the seas can help him . .”

Jeddin? Were they talking about Jeddin?

Qinnitan felt hollowed, scorched, as though all her feelings had been burned away. The world had seemed mad enough, but today it had spun into realms of lunacy she could not have dreamed existed.

It was a warm evening and the streets were crowded. Outside the Seclusion the thoroughfare was full of expensive shops and teahouses—proximity to the great palace was almost infinitely desirable, no matter what the trade—and Qinnitan felt such a sense of relief and joy to be free among the loud and cheerful throng that it almost overcame the horror that still gripped her, but the feeling did not last long. Not only had she seen someone close to her murdered, she had now flouted one of the autarch’s gravest laws. Even if by some strange chance she might have been allowed to live despite Jeddin’s and Luian’s crimes and her connection to them, the moment she had passed that door she had sullied herself. The autarch would have no use whatsoever for a sullied bride of unimportant parents.

I might as well be dead, she thought. A ghost on the desert wind. It was a curious feeling, both empty and exhilarating.

As they wound their way down through the hanging lamps of the market district and closer to the dark waterfront, the crowds became less friendly, the criminal element less cautious, and the menace increasingly tangible. As they passed down an alleyway between two long buildings, the only light that leaked in from a shabby teahouse at one end with its shutters half raised, she realized fatal misfortune was almost as likely to take them here as in the very heart of the autarch’s palace. She would never have come to such a place in her woman’s clothes, but there were many unpleasant folk who would be just as happy with a pair of comely boys— especially those who presumably could not scream for help.

Little Pigeon also sensed the danger—it would have taken someone not just mute but blind and deaf to miss it—and he allowed Qinnitan to hurry him along toward the docks. As they stepped out of yet another narrow, dimly lit alley into Sailmakers’ Row, a wide road whose other end touched the shipyards and the nearest part of the docks, they found a tall shape standing in the road as if waiting for them.

“Hello, wee ones.” The stranger wore sailor’s garb, the pants barely below his knee and a mariner’s cloth wrapped around his head, but his clothes were ragged and his voice shook like a sick man’s. “And what brings you wandering down here at this time of the night? Are you lost?” He took a step toward them. “Let a friendly hand help.”

Qinnitan hesitated for only a moment—he stood between them and their destination, but the autarch’s wrath was behind them and they could not turn back—then she grabbed Pigeon’s hand and started toward the stranger at speed. The boy hesitated only enough to make a slight drag on her hand, then he leaped forward and ran beside her. The man stood, his arms spread but his dark-sunken eyes wide with surprise. When they hit him, he was knocked onto his back. He rolled there for a moment cursing before scrambling to his feet.

“You peasecods, you puppies, I’ll have your innards out!” he shrieked. “I’ll spike you and gut you!” He was up and after them now, and although he was at least a dozen steps behind, when Qinnitan looked back over her shoulder he seemed to be closing the distance rapidly.

“Where are we going?” she gasped, but Pigeon did not know any better than she did, and could only run beside her. The boy was faster than her, she realized, but he paced her, still holding her hand. What did Jeddin’s letter say —a temple, was it? The boat moored across from a temple? But what temple?

They came down out of Sailmakers’ Row and onto the quay, their pursuer’s steps banging on the boards not far behind them. Qinnitan slowed and almost stopped, daunted by the horrible sight of hundreds upon hundreds of masts, of boats lined in their slips for what looked like a mile, all bobbing in turn as gentle waves from the mild night sea ran down the length of the quay. The footsteps grew louder and she began to sprint again.

“Little scallops!” the man panted. He seemed almost at their shoulders and Qinnitan reached for her last strength to stay ahead of him. “I eat little scallops!”

In desperation she began to shout as loud as she could, “Hoy, the Morning Star! Morning Star! Where are you?” until she ran out of breath. There was no reply, although she thought she saw movement on some of the dark ships.

Now they all ran in silence for a moment, the man behind them wheezing but not slowing. “Morning Star!” Qinnitan screamed. “Where are you?"

“Just up a few slips,” someone shouted from one of the boats as they passed.

Qinnitan stumbled but Pigeon held her up. “Morning Star!” she shouted again, or tried, but her voice seemed quiet and strengthless, her legs soft as cushions. She could barely summon breath. “Morning Star!”

“Here!” a voice shouted from a short way ahead. “Who’s there?”

Qinnitan yanked Pigeon up what she hoped was the correct gangplank. The man who had been chasing them stopped, hesitated for a moment, then turned away and took a few staggering steps into the shadows and was gone from sight. Qinnitan leaned on the ship’s rail, gasping as the stars in the sky seemed to drift down and swirl around her like sparks. The masts and rigging were all around her, too, like some kind of forest draped in spiderwebs, but she was able to take in nothing else except burning air.

A rough hand grabbed her arm and straightened her up, thrusting a lantern into her face. “Who are you? You shout as if you want to wake the dead.”

“Is… this… the Morning Star of Kirous?” she gasped.

“It is. Who or what are you?” She thought she could see squinting eyes and a dark beard behind the lantern, but it was hard to face the light.

“We come… from Jeddin.” Then her knees unlocked and the world spun around, the masts whirling like merrymaking dancers as she fell into first gray, then black emptiness.

“We were told to expect you—although dressed as a woman, not as a boy slave,” said Axamis Dorza, captain of the Morning Star. He had brought her to the small ship’s tiny cabin. The boy named Pigeon crouched at Qinni-tan’s feet, silent and wide-eyed. “We were even told that we might need to take you with us on short notice.” Now he waved the forged letter she’d written in Luian’s chamber and closed with Jeddin’s seal. “We were not told we would leave without Lord Jeddin himself on board. What do you know about this?”

She breathed a silent prayer of thanks to the Hive and the sacred protection of her beloved bees: apparently the sailors had not heard of Jeddin’s arrest. Now it was time to use the skills of deceit she had been forced to learn in the Seclusion. “I don’t know, Captain. I only know that Jeddin told me to disguise myself and bring this slave here, and to give you this message.” It was important, she reminded herself, not to know what Jeddin’s purported letter said. “I know nothing else, I’m afraid. I am only glad we found you before that man who was chasing us did whatever he planned to do.” She did her best to sound like a queen, regal and sure of herself.

But I am a queen, aren’t I, at least of a sort? Or I was. But it had never felt that way, not for a moment.

The captain waved away the unimportant detail of their pursuer. “The docks are full of unnatural scum like that, and others even worse, believe me. No, what I do not understand is why we should leave without Lord Jeddin. I ask you again, do you know anything of this?”

She shook her head. “Only that Lordjeddin told me to come to you and go where you carried me, that you and your men would protect me from his enemies.” She took a deep, shuddering breath, glad that she had every excuse for anxiousness. “Please, Captain, tell me what my lord says.”

Axanus Dorza picked up the letter in his thick fingers and squinted. His eyes were so netted in wrinkles that from the nose up he looked to be a great-grandfather’s age, but she guessed he was considerably younger. “It says only,’Take Lady Qinnitan to Hierosol. All other plans must wait. Take her there tonight and I will meet you there.” But meet us where, my lady? Hierosol is only a little smaller than Great Xis! And why cross the ocean to Eion instead of merely shipping to another port down the coast and waiting for him there?”

“I do not know, Captain.” She suddenly felt as if she might tumble to the floor again in exhaustion. “You must do as you see fit. I put myself and my servant in your hands, as my lord Jeddin wished.”

The captain frowned and stared at the seal ring that he held in his other hand. “You have his seal as well as the letter. How can I doubt you? Still, it is strange and the men will be restless when they hear.”

“The palace is an unsettled place just now,” she said with as much quiet meaning as she could muster. “Perhaps your men will be happy to find themselves away from Great Xis for a little while.”

Dorza gave her a hard stare. “Do you say there is trouble in the palace? Is our lord involved somehow?”

She had baited the hook; it would not do to pull at the line too hard. “I have no more to say, Captain. To the wise, a single word is as good as a poem.”

He went out then. Qinnitan fell back on the narrow bed, unable even to find the strength to protest when Pigeon curled up on the hard floor as though he really were her slave. Out of the confusion in her own head, she suddenly heard the oracle Mudry’s voice:

“Remember who you are. And when the cage is opened you must fly. It will not be opened twice.” Was this what the old woman had meant? Qinnitan couldn’t think anymore. She was too weary. I’m flying, Mother Mudry. At least, I’m trying to fly…

Within a few breaths she was asleep.

She woke for just a few short moments. Above her head bare feet thumped on the planks and voices rose, shouting instructions and singing songs of the hard sea life as the sailors of the Morning Star qfKirous prepared to journey to Hierosol.

39. Winter’s Eve

Puzzle was in surprisingly fine voice, a slight quaver the only thing to betray the passage of so many years. Otherwise, Briony might have thought time had turned tail, that she was again a little girl sitting on her father’s lap, the wind plucking in angry frustration at the roofs outside while they all sat safe and warm in the great dining hall.

But those days were gone, she reminded herself. Nothing would bring them back. And if Tyne had really lost the battle, it could be that soon no one alive would even remember those times.

Puzzle strummed his lute, continuing with the long, sad story of Prince Caylor and the Ever- Wounded Maid.

“… Then did he first glimpse her, the bleeding maid:”

The old jester crooned, telling of the knight’s entrance into the Siege of Always-Winter.

“He thought her sore hurt, e’en dead, and his noble heart.

Did quail with woe to think that such a bloom must fade. Before e’er it had been tasted by kiss, or figured by art; But then opened she her eyes, and, as she saw him there, Smiled, though her beauteous face was wan and sad— A pearl dtsplay’d upon the cushion of her golden hair—

And he thought no empress of the south could match the loveliness she had. Then Caylor’s heart flew like an unhooded hawk, straight to her breast, Although the troubled knight did not know whether he were curst or blest.”

She had to admit she was surprised, not so much to find that Puzzle could still sing, but by the grace of Matty Tinwright’s words. The young poet sat at the end of one of the front tables, near Puzzle’s stool, looking as though he knew he had actually done something worthwhile.

It was certainly a change from his dreadful, lugubrious paeans of praise to her, his comparisons of her to a virgin deity, full of aching stretches for rhymes—there were not many things that rhymed with “Zoria,” “merciful,” or “goddess,” after all. She was impressed and even pleased. She had given Tinwright a commission as much to irritate Barrick and amuse herself as anything else, but perhaps he would eventually prove a true poet after all.

Unless, she suddenly thought, he has stolen the whole thing from some obscure source. No, it was Winter’s Eve. She would be charitable. She would even say something nice to him, although nothing so fulsome as to fetch him puppy-dogging after her all evening.

“Thus, mstanter, Caylor pledged himself her slave, Declared that by her token whole worlds would he throw down, Yet she only shook her fair head and a reproachful look him gave, And raised her hands, white arms reaching from bloody-sleeved gown. Then said she, ‘Good knight, worlds shall not woo me, nor words, But only and you free me from this wound that steals my life Shall I be yours.

One year gone I spurned haughty Raven, Prince of Birds, And he did my breast pierce with his terrible slow knife All of the physick of my father’s court cannot staunch or even slow. The wound that dire blade to me gave, nor stop this crimson flow.’ ”

Briony even smiled at Puzzle, who barely noticed. He was enjoying this moment of attention so much that he seemed to forget it was the royal family to whom he owed his position, not the courtiers, who considered the old man a rather tiresome jest. Still, he was the center of all eyes, or should have been, and he clearly reveled in it.

The rest of the assembled nobility seemed strange to Briony. Conversation was awkward, many whispering, others speaking too loudly, even after an evening’s indulgence. The Tollys and their allies had made it clear they considered the feast as an insult to Gailon’s memory and had not appeared. Thus, there had been even more drinking than would be expected on Winter’s Eve, mulled wine being sluiced down throats as though many of those present expected the worst and expected it soon—for gossip about the possible fate of Southmarch’s army had sped through the castle all evening, tales of terror and defeat flying to every corner like little white moths rushing out of a long-closed wardrobe. Briony herself had needed to soothe Rose and Moina, both in tears, who were certain that they would be ravished by monsters.

Yes, and they were certain that Dawet and his Hierosol men would ravish them as well, Briony thought sourly. On that night. And precious little help they were to me or anyone else…

She shied away from any more thoughts of Kendrick’s death, let her mind instead hold the memory of Dawet dan-Faar. Surrounded by red-flushed, drunken faces, she found herself longing for his company. Not in a romantic way—she looked around as though even the thought might have been obvious to those around her, but the nobles were busy licking suet pudding from their fingers and calling for more wine. No, it would have been a pleasure simply because of the quickness of his wit. There was no blurnness in Dawet, who seemed always sharp as a knife. She doubted he drank at all, and felt certain that even if he did, few had ever seen him the worse for it…

Oh, by all the gods, what will we do? How will we save ourselves? It had been gnawing at her since she received Brone’s news and she couldn’t keep it at bay any longer. She couldn’t even bear to consider that anything might have happened to Barrick, but had to accept the possibility that Tyne Aldritch and his army had failed. What then? How could she and her nobles plan for a siege against such a mysterious force?

Thoughts turning round and round between those who were missing— she could not have imagined a Winter’s Eve so friendless, so bereft of family— and the malevolent creatures who seemed now to be separated from her beloved Southmarch Castle only by the narrow protection of the bay, Briony suddenly remembered that she had promised she would see her stepmother Anissa tonight Her first inclination was to send a servant to make her apologies, but as she looked around the room, at the sickly, over-cheerful faces of those who were still upright, at the ruin of the meal scattered down the tables, bones and shreds of skin and puddles of red wine like the remnants of some dreadful battle, she decided that she could think of nothing better than to walk for a time in the night air, and that a visit to her bedbound stepmother, who was only days away from giving birth at most, would be the most acceptable excuse.

Although it took some doing, she even managed to create in herself a small amount of sympathy for Anissa If Briony felt so helpless, with the reins of the kingdom in her hands, how much worse must it feel to her stepmother, big with child and forced to sift through the conflicting rumors that flittered into her tower?

A smattering of lazy applause and a few drunken cheers caught her attention the song had ended. Briony was a little shamed to realize she had missed most of it.

“Very fine,” she said out loud, and clapped her hands. “Well sung, good Puzzle. One of the best entertainments we have had for many a year.”

The aged man beamed.

“Serve him,” she directed one of the pages, “for such splendid singing must be thirsty work.” “I will not take all credit, Highness,” Puzzle said as he held out his hand for the cup. “I was assisted.”

“By Master Tinwnght, yes You told us. And to him I also say, well done, sir You have breathed new life into an old and beloved tale “ She tried to remember how the story of the Ever-Wounded Maid ended, hoping that Tinwright had not adopted some modern approach to the finish that she hadn’t heard, which would make it embarrassingly clear that her mind had wandered. “Like Caylor, you have found the song that heals the Raven Prince’s dreadful deed.”

She seemed to have got it right. Tinwright looked as though he wished he could throw himself before her and become her footstool.

Yes, but he won’t be able to find a rhyme for that either, she thought. It was hard to break old habits.

She stood with a rustling of underskirts and said, “I must go now and take the tidings of the new season to my stepmother, Queen Anissa.” Those who could still do so levered themselves upright as well. “Please, sit yourselves down. The feast is not ended. Servants, keep the wine flowing until I return, so our guests may celebrate the warmth that the Orphan brought back. Remember, there is no season so dark that it does not see the sun come again.”

Gods protect me, she thought as she swished toward the door in her great hooped skirt, I’m beginning to talk like one of Tinwright’s characters.

Heryn Millward, the young soldier from Suttler’s Wall, was one of the two guards accompanying her tonight; the other was a slightly older fellow, dark-stubbled and taciturn. She remembered to wish them both good tidings for this night and tomorrow’s holy day—the courtesy acted as a sort of hedge against being impatient at how slowly they walked, encumbered by armor and halberds.

She had just crossed the outer courtyard and had almost reached Anissa’s residence in the Tower of Spring when a figure stepped out of the shadows in front of her. Her heart slithered up into her throat and she only recognized the apparition one thin moment before young Millward shoved the spiked head of his halberd into the intruder’s guts.

“Stop, guard!” she cried.”Chaven? Merciful Zoria, what are you doing? You could have been killed! And where have you been?”

The physician looked startled and even shamefaced as he stared down at the sharp spike wavering in front of his belly. When he lifted his gaze to Briony’s, she saw that he was pale and puffy, blue-circled beneath the eyes, and that he had not put a razor to his beard for days. “My apologies for frightening you, Princess,” he said. “Although it would have been worse for me than for you, it seems.”

As great a relief as it was to see him, she was not prepared to forget her anger. “Where have you been? Merciful Zona, do you know how many times in these latest days I wanted desperately to talk to you? You have always been our adviser as well as our doctor. Where did you go?”

“That is a long story, Highness, and not one for a cold and windy courtyard, but I will tell you all the tale soon.”

“We are at war, Chaven! The Twilight People are on our doorstep and you simply disappeared.” She felt her eyes fill with tears and wiped angrily with her sleeve. “Barrick is gone, too, fighting those creatures. And there are worse things, things you do not know. May all the gods confound you, Chaven, where have you been?”

He shook his head slowly. “I deserve that curse, but largely because I have been foolish. I have been hard at work trying to solve a dire riddle— more than one, to be honest—and it all has taken longer than I guessed it would.Yes, I know about the Twilight People, and about Barrick. I was absent from the court, but not from gossip, which travels everywhere.”

She threw her hands up in exasperation. “Riddles—there are already too many riddles! In any case, I am going now to see my stepmother. I must do that before we can talk.”

“Yes, I know that, too. And I think I should accompany you.” “She is close to her time.”

“And that is another reason I should come.”

She waved at the guards to lower their weapons. “Come along, then. I will drink a posset with her, then we will go.” “It may not be so swift, Highness,” Chaven suggested.

Briony did not have the patience on this long, woeful night to try to work out what he meant.

There seemed no proper way, Chert reflected, to prepare yourself to die, but it also seemed as though this was the second or third time in the last few days he had been forced to try. “I don’t want to,” he said quietly. The armored, yellow-eyed shapes looked down at him without a glimmer of emotion, their spear points a ring of dull gleams in the grayish light, but the strange man beside him stirred.

“Of course not,” Gil said. “All that live cling to life. Even, I think, my people.”

Chert bowed his head, thinking of Opal and the boy, how little all this meant, how foolish and unnatural it was compared to his life with them. There was a rising patter that for a moment he felt certain was his own racing heart. Then he recognized the sound and looked up, not in hope, but instead almost in annoyance that the horrible waiting would continue.

The man, if it was a man, rode one of the largest horses Chert had ever seen: the top of his own head would barely reach its knees. The rider was large, too, but not freakishly so, dressed in armor that looked a bit like polished tortoiseshell, gray and brown-blue. A sword dangled at the newcomer’s side; under his arm he carried a helmet in the shape of an animal’s skull, some unrecognizable creature with long fangs.

But it was his face that was the strangest part. For a moment Chert thought the tall rider was wearing a mask of ivory, for other than the ruby-red eyes beneath the pale brow the stranger had no face, only a slight vertical ridge where a nose might be and a smooth expanse of white down to the chin. It was only when he caught a glimpse of the white neck working beneath that chin as the stranger looked Gil up and down that Chert was convinced once and for all that the stranger was not wearing a mask but his own actual flesh.

“His name is Gyir the Storm Lantern,” Gil announced suddenly. “He says we are to follow him.” Chert laughed, a broken sound even to his own ears. If he had not gone mad, then Gil had—or the world had. “Says? He has no mouth!”

“He speaks. Perhaps it is only that I feel his words inside me. Do you not hear him?”

“No.” Chert was weary, as exhausted as if seeping minerals had soaked his bones and changed them to heavy rock. When the faceless rider turned back toward the city and the guards prodded Chert with their spears, he marched ahead of them, but despite the sharp pikes at his back he did not have the will or the strength to move swiftly.

The Square of Three Gods had been draped all around with dark-colored cloths, so that even in the light of many torches the buildings hid behind veils of shadow. She was waiting for them in a chair before the temple steps, a plain, high-backed chair out of some merchant’s house that she invested with the terrible dignity of a throne.

She was as tall as Gyir but both more and less ordinary to look at; she was beautiful in a weird, drawn-out way, the planes of her brown face and her bright eyes just a bit beyond human from most angles, then—when she cocked her head to listen to some sound Chert could not hear, or to look over the square, surveying her legions who sat patiently on the ground— she abruptly seemed too extreme to pass for a person even at a distance, like something seen through deep water or thick clear crystal.

She was dressed as for war in a suit of black plate armor covered almost everywhere, but most heavily on the back and shoulders, with shockingly long spines, so that from a distance it was hard to make out her shape at all. Now that he was kneeling before her, it was clear to Chert that she had two arms and two legs and a slender, womanly figure, but even when he finally gathered the courage to look up at her, it was hard to look very long There was something in her, some blunt, terrifying power, that pushed his eyes away after only a few moments.

Yasammez, Gil had called her as he made a sleepwalker’s obeisance. His onetime mistress, he had said before. He had not spoken to her again since he knelt and saluted her, nor she to him.

The tall woman with the thickly coiling black hair now lifted a gauntleted hand and said something in the unfamiliar tongue, her voice deep as a man’s but with its own slow music. Chert felt all the hairs on his neck rise at once. This is all a nightmare, a part of him shrilled, trying to explain what could not be, but that part was buried deep and he could barely hear it. A nightmare You will wake up soon.

“She wants the mirror,” Gil said, getting to his feet.

The idea of resisting never even occurred to him Chert fumbled out the circle of bone and silvered crystal, held it out. The woman did not take it from him, instead, Gil plucked it from Chert’s palm and passed it to her with another bow. She held it up to catch the torchlight and for a moment the Funderling thought he saw a look of anger or something much like it flick across her spare, stony face. She spoke again, a long disquisition of clicks and murmurs.

“She says she will honor her part of the Pact and send the glass to Qul-na-Qar, and that for the moment there will be no more killing of mortals unless the People are forced to defend themselves.” Gil listened as she spoke again, then he replied, more swiftly and ably now, in that same tongue.

“She speaks to me as though I am the king himself,” Gil said quietly to Chert. “She says that by the success of this deed, I have won a short truce for the mortals I told her that the king speaks through me, but only from a distance, that I am not him.”

King? Distance? Chert had not the slightest idea what any of this signified. The oppressive strangeness was so thick it made him want to weep, but there was also some stubborn thing in him like the rock that was in his people’s names and hearts, a residue of spirit that did not want to show fear before these beautiful, savage creatures.

The woman Yasammez extended her arm, the mirror in her long, long fingers. The faceless creature called Gyir the Storm Lantern strode forward and took it from her No words were exchanged, at least none that Chert could hear Gyir made a bow as he put it into the purse at his waist, then drew his fingers across his eyes in a ritual manner before mounting his great gray horse.

“She bids him take it swiftly and carefully to the blind one in Qul-na-Qar,” Gil explained, as though he could understand silent commands as well as spoken ones. “She says if anything happens to the queen in the glass, then she,Yasammez, will make all the earth weep blood.”

Chert only shook his head. He was having trouble paying attention to any of what was happening now. It was all too much.

Gyir swung up into the saddle and jabbed at the horse’s flanks with his spurs. The beast’s hooves dug into the earth of Temple Square and then rider and mount sped off, vanishing from sight so quickly that they might have been marionettes suddenly yanked from the stage.

After a long silence the woman or goddess or female monsterYasammez spoke aloud again, her voice buzzing like a hummingbird’s wings just inches from Chert’s ear. Gil listened silently. The woman looked from him to the Funderling—her eyes seemed to glow before Chert’s reluctant gaze, like twin candle flames in a dark cave, and he had to look away before he was drawn into that empty cavern and lost forever—then Chert’s companion finally spoke.

“I am to stay.” Gil sounded neither happy nor sad, but there was something dead in his voice that had been fractionally more lively before. “You are to go, since there is truce.”

“Truce?” Chert finally located his own voice. “What does that mean?”

“It does not matter.” Gil shook his head. “You mortals did not cause the truce and you cannot change it. But the place called Southmarch will be unharmed.” He paused as Yasammez said something stiff and harsh in her own tongue. “For a little while,” Gil clarified.

And then almost before he knew it, Chert was snatched up by rough hands and set on the saddle of a horse and within moments Market Road and the city began to fly past him on either side. He never saw the armored rider behind him, only the arms stretching past him on either side that held the reins. Like the orphan in the big folk’s most beloved story, he dared not even look back until he was dropped unceremoniously on the beach beside the caves.

Chert knew he should try to remember everything—he knew it was all important, somehow; after all, his son had given everything but his life for that mirror and whatever bargain it might signify—but at the moment all he could imagine doing was crawling down into the nearest tunnel to sleep a little while, so he would have the strength to stagger home to Funderling Town.

Briony led Chaven through the covered walk and out into the open flagstone courtyard in front of the Tower of Spring. The two guards leaning against the great outer door straightened up in wide-eyed surprise when they saw her. She was too annoyed by this errand and how it forced her to wait before learning Chaven’s news to remember to wish this new pair of guards the tidings of the season, but she remembered on the stairs and promised herself she would make amends on the way out.

They mounted to the door of Anissa’s residence and knocked. A long time passed before the door opened a little way. An eye and a sliver of face peered out. “Who is there?”

Briony made an impatient sound. “The princess regent. Am I allowed to come in?”

Anissa’s maid Selia opened the door and stepped back. Briony strode into the residence, her two guards, after a quick survey of the room, took up stations outside the door Selia looked at the princess from beneath her eyelashes, as though ashamed to have kept her out even for a moment, but when she saw Chaven, her eyes grew wide with surprise.

He was certainly a surprise to me, Briony thought I suppose it’s been just as long since they’ve seen him here either. “I’ve come as invited, to have a Winter’s Eve drink with my stepmother,” she told the young woman.

“She is over there.” Selia’s Devonisian accent was a little stronger than Briony remembered, as though being caught off-guard made it harder for the young woman to speak well. The room was dark except for low flames in the fireplace and a few candles, and none of the usual crowd of serving-women or even the midwife appeared to be present. Briony walked to the bed and pulled back the curtains. Her stepmother was sleeping with her mouth open and her hands curled protectively across her belly. Briony gently rubbed her shoulder.

“Anissa. It’s me, Briony. I’ve come to have a drink with you and wish you a good Orphan’s Day.”

Anissa’s eyes fluttered open, but for a moment they didn’t seem to take in much of anything. Then they found her stepdaughter and widened the way Selia’s had when she saw Chaven. “Briony? What are you doing here? Is Barrick with you?”

“No, Anissa,” she said gently. “He has gone with the Earl of Blueshore and the others, don’t you remember?”

The small woman tried to sit up, groaned, then got her elbows planted in the cushions and finally managed to lever herself upright. “Yes, of course, I am still sleepy. This child, it makes me sleep all the time!” She looked Briony up and down, frowned. “But what brings you here, dear girl?”

“You invited me. It’s Winter’s Eve. Don’t you remember?”

“Did I?” She looked around the room. “Where are Hisolda and the others? Selia, why are they not here?” “You sent them away, Mistress. You are still full of sleep, that is all, and you forget.”

But now Anissa noticed Chaven and again she showed surprise. “Doctor? Ah, is it truly you? Why are you here? Is something wrong with the child?”

He joined Briony by the bedside. “No, I don’t believe so,” he said, but with little of his usual good humor. Anissa detected this and her face tightened. “What? What is wrong? You must tell me.”

“I shall,” said Chaven. “If the princess regent will allow me a moment’s indulgence. But first I think she should call in the guards.”

“Guards?” Anissa struggled hard to get out of bed now, her skin pale, voice increasingly shrill. “Why guards? What is going on? Tell me! I am the king’s wife!”

Briony was completely bewildered, but allowed Chaven to move to the door and invite in young Millward and his stubbled comrade, both of whom looked more nervous to be in the queen’s bedroom than if they had faced an armed foe. Selia moved to where her mistress now sat on the edge of the bed, the queen’s pale little feet dangling down without quite reaching the floor. The maid put a protective arm around Anissa’s shoulders and looked defiantly back at Chaven.

“You are giving fright to me,” the queen said, her accent thicker now, too. “Briony, what are you doing here? Why are you treating me so?”

Briony didn’t answer her stepmother, but couldn’t help wondering if she had been too quick to let Chaven have his way. Perhaps he had disappeared because he was deranged. She caught young Millward’s eye and did her best to hold it for a moment, trying to let the guardsman know to watch her, not the physician, while waiting to be told what to do.

“If you are innocent, madam, I will beg your pardon most devoutly. And in no case will I harm you or your unborn child. I wish only to show you something.” Chaven put his hand into his pocket and produced a grayish object about the length of a child’s thumb. Now that he had moved into the light, Briony noticed for the first time that the physician’s clothes were ragged and dirty. She felt another stab of doubt.

Chaven held out the stone and both Anissa and her maid Seha shrank back as though it were the head of some poisonous serpent. “What is it?” Anissa pleaded.

“That is indeed the question,” said Chaven. “A question I have worked hard to answer. It has taken me to some strange places and to some strange folk in recent days, but I think I know. In the south it is called a kulikos. It is a kind of magical stone, most often found on the southern continent, but they occasionally make their way north to Eion—to the sorrow of many.”

“Don’t touch me with it!” Anissa shrieked, and although Briony was puzzled by what the physician was doing, she could not help feeling that her stepmother was reacting too strongly.

Chaven looked at Anissa sternly. “Ah, you know of such things, I see. But if you have done nothing wrong, madam, you have nothing to fear.”

“You are trying to bring a curse for my baby! The king’s child!”

“What is the point of this, Chaven?” Briony demanded. “She is about to give birth, after all. Why are you frightemng her?”

He nodded. “I will tell you, Briony… Highness. One of the workers on your brother’s tomb brought this stone to me because he thought it strange. I thought little of it at the time, I must sadly admit, but there have been many things on my mind since Kendrick’s death. I know I am not the only one.”

Briony glanced at the two women huddled on the edge of the bed. The chamber felt odd, as though a storm hung just above them, making the air prickle. “Go on, get to the point.”

“Something about this thing troubled me, though, and I began to wonder if it might be one of a certain class of objects mentioned in some of my older books. I discovered that the place it had been found was in a direct line between the outside window of a room near Kendrick’s chambers and the Tower of Spring—the tower in which we now find ourselves, a building almost completely given over to the residence of the king’s wife and her household.” “He is talking in madness,” Anissa moaned. “Make him stop, Briony I am getting so frighted.”

The physician looked to her, but Briony’s heart was beating faster now and she wanted to hear the rest. “The windows of those chambers are all high above the ground,” she reminded him. “Brone searched them all. There was no rope left behind.”

“Yes.” The room was warm. Chaven was perspiring, his forehead glinting with sweat in the candlelight. “Which makes it all the stranger that I should find the mark of something having landed in the loose soil at the edge of the garden beneath that window. The marks were deep, so that even though many days had passed, they had not disappeared.”

Briony stared at him. “Wait a moment, Chaven. Are you suggesting that Anissa… a woman carrying a child, the king’s child… jumped out of the upstairs window? All the way to the edge of the garden? That she somehow killed Kendrick and his guards, then jumped down and escaped?” She took a breath, held out a hand as she prepared to have the guards arrest him. “That is truly madness.”

“Yes, make him go away,” Anissa wailed. “Briony, save me!”

“He is frightening my mistress, the queen,” cried Selia. “Why don’t the guards stop him?”

“It is certainly much like madness to believe such a thing, Highness,” Chaven agreed. He seemed very calm for a lunatic. “That is why I think you should hear all my tale before you try to understand. You see, I knew I could not make anyone believe a tale like that—I did not really believe it myself—but I was frightened and intrigued by what I had learned about kulikos stones. I decided I must know more. I went in search of knowledge, and eventually found it, although the price was high.” He paused and wiped at his forehead with his tattered sleeve. “Very high. But what I learned is that in the south of Eion they believe a kulikos stone summons a terrible spirit. So powerful is this ancient dark sorcery, so dreadful, that in many places even possessing one of these stones will earn the bearer death on the instant.”

Listening to such words by flickering candlelight, Briony felt as though she were in some story—not a tale of heroism and heavenly reward like the one Puzzle had just sung at the feast, but something far older and grimmer.

“Why do you say all this foolishness to my mistress when she is not well?” demanded Selia in a shrill voice. “Even if someone has done some bad thing and then run past the tower where she lives, what is that to us? Why do you say that to her?”

The guards standing by the door were murmuring to each other now, confused and a little fearful. Briony knew she couldn’t let it all go on much longer. “State your case, Chaven,” she ordered.

“Very well,” he said. “I have learned that there is something interesting about the murderous kultkos spirit. It is female, always female When it is summoned, it only will inhabit the bodies of women.”

“Madness!” cried Anissa.

“And it is particularly a favorite weapon among the witches of Xand and of the southernmost lands of Eion Lands like Devonis.”

Anissa turned to her stepdaughter, holding out her hands. Briony couldn’t help shrinking back just a little. “Why do you let him say this to me, Briony? Have I not always been kind to you? Because I am from Devonis, I am a witch?”

“It is easy enough to discover,” Chaven said loudly. He thrust the small gray object closer to the king’s wife. “Here is the stone. Look at it. It was tossed aside by the one who employed it to murder the prince regent after she had used it up, but doubtless a little of those dark magicks still remain. Touch it, my lady, and if you have anything to hide, the stone will show that.” He extended his hand, bringing the stone close to her bare arm. Anissa tried to squirm away from it as though it were a hot coal, but couldn’t disentangle herself from the protective embrace of her maid Selia.

“No!” Selia snatched the milky-gray stone out of Chaven’s hand so quickly that as he closed his fingers on nothingness, the girl had already pulled it against her own breast. He stared in surprise. “There is no need for this,” the maid declared, then snapped out something in a language Briony did not recognize—a short, sharp cry like a hawk falling on its prey.

Briony tried to say something, to curse the young woman for interfering, but a change in the air of the room suddenly made it hard to talk, a cold filling and tightening of her ears as though she had dunked her head into the water.

“There is no need for this, or for anything else.” Seha’s voice suddenly seemed to come from a great distance. “I did not drop the stone away as a man drops away a maid when she is a maid no longer. I was weary and it fell from me, and when I was strong enough again to go back and search for it, it was gone.“ The girl’s voice rose, ending on a triumphant cry, harsh, but still muted by the strange squeezing of the air. “No one lets to drop a kuhkos stone, little man! Not by choice!” Selia lifted her hand and put the stone in her mouth.

Her face abruptly blurred and changed, her torchlit skin seeming to shrink away even as something darker unfolded from inside This devouring of light by darkness spread over her in the matter of a few heartbeats, as though someone had tossed a rock into a stream in which the girl was reflected, muddying the surface. The strangling air of the chamber finally began to move, but instead of bringing relief it sped faster and faster, a breeze that became a harsh wind, then a full gale, swirling so swiftly that Briony could feel needle-sharp bits of dust and flecks of stone stinging her skin. The guards shouted in surprise and terror but she could hear them only faintly.

The candles blew out Now only the fire gave light, and even the flames were bending toward the dark shape growing before the bed, the shape that had been the pretty maid Selia. Anissa screamed, a thin, threadlike sound. Briony tried to call to Chaven, but something had knocked the little man to the floor where he lay limply motionless, perhaps even dead. The room was filling with the mingled smells of hot metal and mud and blood—but blood most of all, powerful, heavy, and sour.

Strangely, Briony could still see something of Anissa’s maid in the horror, a thickness at its core that echoed her shape, a gleam of her features m the dark, crude mask, but mostly it was a blur of growth, an inconstant, shadowy thing armored like a crab or spider, but far more irregular and unnatural Jagged-edged plates and lengthening spikes of powdered stone and other hard things grew and solidified even as Briony gaped in astonishment, as if it built itself out of the very dust whirled through the chamber by the rushing air.

A glint of eyes from deep in the dark instability of the face, then the thing lifted an impossibly long hand. Scythelike claws clacked and rasped against each other as it advanced on Briony. She stumbled back, almost boneless with fear, knowing now beyond doubt what had killed her brother Kendrick. She was weaponless, wearing an impossible, ridiculous dress. She was doomed.

Briony grabbed up a heavy candleholder and swung it, but one of the thing’s clawed hands swept it from her grasp with a ringing clash Something rushed past her, a long pole crashed into the thing’s stomach and for a moment it was driven back.

“Run, Highness!” screamed the young guardsman Millward, trying to keep the thing pinioned on the end of his halberd like a boar. “Lew, help me!”

His fellow soldier was slow to come forward, by the time he did take a few timid steps into the blinding storm of grit, the thing had shattered Millward’s halberd like a stick of sugar candy and was free again. It closed with the second guard and dodged his swinging pike. Instead of running, Briony stared, transfixed. Why didn’t the guards draw their swords—who could be fool enough to fight with such long weapons in a small room. The apparition ripped at the second guard’s midsection with a dull flash of talons and he fell back, clutching at his shredded armor, gouting blood black as tar.

The thing now slouched between Briony and the door. Her moment of indecision had left her trapped. She thought she saw something moving behind the monstrous shape—was it Chaven escaping? The young guard Millward had finally drawn his sword, he swiped at the thing but it gave no ground, only let out a rumbling hiss, a sound more like stone scraping on stone than the breath of a living animal, and sank back on itself, its shadowy form became darker and thicker. For a heartbeat Briony thought she could see the maid Selia’s face in it, triumphant and deranged, lips curled back in a silent scream of joy.

The young guardsman leaped forward, shouting with terror even as he hacked at the shapeless thing. For a moment it seemed he might even be hurting it—the monstrosity had shrunk to almost human proportions and the claws spread like pleading hands, the dark face all moaning, toothless mouth. Then the talons darted out almost too quickly to be seen and Heryn Millward sagged and collapsed backward, blood bubbling from the hole of his eye socket, his face a red ruin.

Briony could barely breathe, her heart squeezed in her chest by terror until it was near to bursting. The kuhkos demon moved toward her, edges shifting, nothing quite clear except the gleam of its eyes and the clicking of the long, curved claws as they opened and closed, opened and closed. She stumbled and slid to the floor, fumbling desperately for a stool, anything to keep those terrible knives at bay. Her hand closed on something, but it was only the butt of dead Millward’s halberd, a length of splintered wood. She held it in front of her, knowing it would be no more use than a broomstraw against that strength and those terrible, hooked talons.

Then a blossom of flame rose in the air behind the thing, haloing it for a moment so that it seemed to have taken on a new aspect, no longer a dark, muddy nightmare but a fire demon from the pits of Kernios’ deepest realm. The fire crashed onto its murky head and shoulders in a shower of sparks and tumbling ribbons of flame. The creature let out a rasping howl of surprise that made Briony’s insides quiver as though they had been completely turned to liquid. It turned to lash out at Chaven, who jumped back, dropping the iron fire basket from his smoking, blackened hands, and somehow avoided being torn in half by the sweep of the talons. Flames leaped on the thing’s body and crowned its shapeless head, burning higher and higher until they licked at the ceiling. Stumbling backward, it pulled the curtains from the bed, tangling itself like a bear in a net. The diaphanous cloth sparked and swirled and now the flames were bound to it. The shadow-shape writhed, flapping its clawed hands, and Selia’s face came into view again, this time twisted in a grimace of alarm. It tore at the flaming curtains and they began to fall away; in a moment it would be free again. Cold fury sent Briony forward with both hands wrapped around the broken halberd staff, which she drove as hard as she could into the center of the terrible thing. It was like running into a stone column— Briony flew back from the impact, dizzied—but the ragged hole of the thing’s mouth popped open and something flew out and clattered across the stone floor.

The kulikos beast howled again, this time in true pain and terror, but the air was suddenly full of sparks and flying dust. The wind that had swirled it into being now seemed to be pulling it apart.

Briony tried to get up, but the beast’s grating screech, so loud that it threatened to shake loose the roof timbers, made her stumble and fall again, and so the retaliatory sweep of claws missed her and she lived. The thing that had been Selia threw itself to the floor, moaning as it scrabbled after the lost kulikos stone. The crawling shape was wreathed in flame, but at its core the human and demon essences were in confusion now, flickering and rippling in smoke. It lurched up, hissing triumphantly, but the thing clutched in its taloned hand was only a thimble—perhaps one that had belonged to the maid herself. The shape dropped the silvery thing and took a lurching step backward with a bellow of pain and despair, the Selia-face now a visible mask of agony. Briony’s broken pikestaff shuddered in its chest, the wound a fiery hole. It stumbled back against the bed and the entire canopy finally pulled loose and fell atop it, a blanket of roaring fire. The shadow-shape roared and thrashed as the fire leaped upward, then, with a mewling noise that for the first time had something human in it, fell forward and lay stretched on the floor, twitching in the flames.

In the sudden stillness, Briony felt as though she had been carried away to the moon, to some country from which she could never return to the life she knew. She stared at the thing wrapped in burning curtains, and the fire now smoldering in the carpets. When she was certain it had stopped moving, she picked up a chamber pot and emptied it over the burning shape, dousing the worst of the fire and adding the stench of boding urine to the dreadful odor of fire and blood. As she listlessly began to stamp out the rest of the flames Chaven crawled toward her, his hands blackened, his face stretched in a rictus of pain.

“Don’t,” he said hoarsely. “We shall have no light.”

As absently as if someone else inhabited her body, Briony found a candle and lit it from a bit of flaming bed curtain, then finished the job of putting out the fires. She lit another candle. She was not crying, but she felt as though she should have been.

“Why?”

Chaven shook his head. “I was a fool. Because she was ill before Kendrick died, and ill afterward, I thought the maid truly had the fever that struck Barrick. I see now she was only preparing the ground before time for the weakness that would overcome her after using the kuhkos. I thought the witch must be Anissa and I tried to bluff her I did not guess the stone could work again without much preparation, some kind of intricate charm…”

“No, why did she kill Kendrick? Was she going to kill me as well?”

Chaven stared down at the sodden, scorched mass .He peeled back a corner of the curtain. Briony was startled to see Selia’s ordinary dead face, eyes open, mouth gaping. Whatever spell had gripped the girl had now passed, leaving nothing behind to show what she had been except a smeared residue of grit, dust, and ash on her skin, clotted into a foul mud. “Yes, she would have killed you, perhaps by poison—and Barrick, too, if he’d been with you. Your stepmother did not invite you here, Selia herself did. That is why Anissa seemed so confused. Why did she do it? For whom, I think is the better question, and I have no answer.” He examined his black, blistered hands and said ruefully, “I was so certain it could only be Anissa…”

He looked at Briony and she stared back, both struck with the same thought. “Anissa?” she said. Briony s stepmother was curled on the floor on the far side of the bed in a puddle of water, seemingly oblivious to anything that had happened. The queen was half-delirious with pain, her hands clutching at her belly. “It is coming,” she moaned. “The child. It hurts! Oh, Madi Surazem, save me!”

“Get help,” Chaven told Briony. “I am nearly useless with these burns. Send for the midwife! Quickly!” She hesitated for a moment. Amssa’s wide-eyed look of terror made her feel ill. She remembered her stepmother’s fear as Chaven had all but accused her of murdering her stepson and the feverish feeling grew worse. The Loud Mouse, she and Barrick had called their father’s young wife, teasing, resentful. She would never call this woman names again.

Briony staggered out into the deserted tower with one of the candles, made her way down the stairs and somehow did not fall. At the bottom she forced open the door and found the two guards waiting there They looked her up and down, amazed. She could only guess what she looked like, smeared in ash and blood and worse, but the guards certainly seemed terrified.

There was no time to coddle them or make up stories. “By all the gods, are you both deaf? Did you hear none of that happening inside? People are dead. The queen is about to give birth. One of you go upstairs and help Chaven, the other run to find the midwife Hisolda. I don’t know where she’s gone—Anissa’s maid probably sent her away.” “Sh—she and the other w—w—omen went to the kitchen!” said one of the goggle-eyed guards. “Then go, curse you, go quickly! Fetch her!”

He ran ofe. The other, still looking at her as though Briony was the most frightening sight of his short life, turned and dashed up the stairs into the tower.

I won’t be the worst thing he’s seen for very long. She stood, trembling beneath the naked stars, trying to catch her breath. The sound of people singing floated to her across the empty courtyard.

Winter’s Eve, she remembered, but now it seemed unutterably strange. Everything before the Tower of Spring seemed to have happened in another century. I just want to sleep, she thought. Sleep and forget. Forget that moment when that dark thing had grown out of dust and air and vile magicks, when her old life of certainty, frail as it was, had vanished forever. Forget her stepmother, twitching in pain and fear. We’ve betrayed them all by our foolishness, she thought. Father, Kendrick, Anissa, all of them.

Shaso.

She felt a dreadful stab of shame. Shaso, chained and suffering. She hesitated for a moment—she was so tired, so very tired—but pushed herself away from the wall on which she had been leaning, away from the stones that to her exhausted muscles felt soft and inviting as a bed, and set out hmping toward the stronghold. One wrong would be put right before the dawn of Orphan’s Day, in any case Zoria, merciful Zoria, she begged, if you ever loved me, give me a little more strength!

As Briony left the courtyard and entered the colonnade, she thought she heard footsteps behind her, but when she turned there was no one there, the stone path empty in the moonlight. She hobbled on toward the stronghold and the shackled ghost of her own failure.

40. Zoria’s Flight

The maze garden behind the main hall was full of voices. The guests had left the table and bundled up against the cold to go outdoors—at least those seeking privacy they couldn’t find inside the brightly-lit halls. But how much privacy could there be, especially in full moonlight? It sounded like at least a dozen people were wandering through the maze, laughing and talking, women shushing the men, at least one fellow singing a bawdy old song about Dawtrey Elf-Spelled— something that didn’t seem quite appropriate with the Twilight folk almost standing outside the gates.

Winter was indeed crouching close this Winter’s Eve, the air sharp and the wind picking up. Briony wasn’t cold, but she knew she should be, in fact, she could hardly feel her body at all. She went past the outskirts of the garden as quietly as she could, staying close to the hedge of ancient yew trees, drifting toward the stronghold like a floating spirit in a cloud of her own exhaled breath. She wanted nothing to do with any of the courtiers. It had been all she could do simply to look at them across the dining hall tonight. Now, with the memory of the inhuman thing that had killed Kendrick lodged in her mind like a jagged shard of ice, like the never-healing wound of the maiden in the song, she felt as though she would not be able to look at any of their empty faces again without screaming.

She found her way in through a back door of the hall, but instead of making her way by the usual passages, crossed through one of the small chambers behind the throne room, avoiding the clutch of servants trying to finish up their chores in time for a Winter’s Eve celebration of their own. No guards waited at the top of the stairs down into the stronghold, and when she pushed open the unbarred door at the bottom, she found only one man and his pike sitting through a lonely watch. The guard was at least half asleep he looked up slowly at the noise of the door, rubbing his eyes. She couldn’t even imagine what she must look like in her tattered gown, her face no doubt as streaked with ash and blood as her hands.

“P-Pnncess!” He scrambled up onto his feet, fumbling for the handle of his weapon, which he managed to lift with the wrong end up. It would have been comic were it not all so miserable, the night so ghastly and full of blood and fire and if his stupidly earnest face hadn’t looked so much like Heryn Millward s, the young guard now lying dead in a puddle of his own blood in Anissa’s chamber.

“Where are the keys?"

“Highness?"

“The keys? The keys to Shaso’s cell! Give them to me.” “But…” His eyes were wide.

I truly must look like a demoness. “Don’t make me shout at you, fellow Just give me the keys, then go and find your captain. Who is in charge with Vansen gone?”

The man fumbled the heavy key on its ring down from a peg on the wall. “Tallow,” he said after a moment’s panicky thought. “It’s Jem Tallow, Highness.”

“Then go get him. If he’s asleep, wake him up, although I can’t imagine why he would be asleep on Winter’s Eve.” But could it truly still be the same night? It had to be, but the thought was unmanageably strange. “Tell him to bring soldiers and meet me here. Tell him the princess regent needs him now.” Until she knew why the witch-maid Selia had done what she did, until she found whether the southern girl had allies in the murder of Kendrick, no one must sleep. “But…”

“By all the gods, now!”

The man dropped the keys in his alarm. Briony cursed in a very unladylike way and bent and snatched them from the floor. The guard hesitated for only a moment, then threw open the door and scuttled up the stairs.

The lock on the cell was stiff and hard to turn, but with both hands she managed to twist the key and at last the door groaned open. The shape huddled on the floor at the back of the cell did not move, did not even look up.

He’s dead! Her heart, already so weary, sped again and for a moment the darkness of the damp, cold room threatened to swallow her up. “Shaso! Shaso, it’s me, Briony! The gods forgive us for what we’ve done!”

She ran to his side and tugged at him, relieved to hear the rasp of breath but horrified by how thin the old man had become. He began to stir. “Briony . . ?”

“We were wrong. Forgive us—forgive me Kendrick…” She helped him sit upright. He smelled dreadful and she couldn’t help taking a step back. “I know who killed Kendrick.”

He shook his head. It was dark in the cell, the single brazier outside not enough to illuminate even such a small space. She couldn’t see his eyes. “Killed…”

“Shaso, I know you didn’t do it! It was Selia, Anissa’s maid. She’s . . she’s some kind of witch, a shape-changer. She turned into… oh, merciful Zoria, some… some thing! I saw it!”

“Help me up.” His voice was rough with disuse. “For the love of all the gods, girl, help me up.” She did her best, tugging on his arm as he struggled to get to his feet. She babbled out the night’s story to him, not certain if he could even understand her in his sick and weary state. The chains clanked and he slumped back down, defeated by their weight. “Where are the keys for these?" she asked.

Shaso pointed. “On that board on the wall.” It was taking him a long time to say each word. “I do not know which key fits these shackles. They have scarcely ever been taken off.”

Briony s eyes filled with tears as she hurried to the board. She could see no difference between any of the dozen rings so she brought them all, weight that pulled her arms down straight at her sides as she hurried back to the cell. “Why didn’t you tell me?” She began to fumble through the keys. She had to lean close as she tried each in the lock of his shackles. The old man’s stench reminded her of the thing in Anissa’s chamber, but at least it was a more natural odor. “You didn’t do it, so why didn’t you tell me? What happened between you and Kendrick?”

He was silent. First one, then the second of the shackles opened with a click of sprung iron. She could not help feeling the wet wounds they had made on his wrists as she helped him to stand. He was smeared up and down with blood—but then, so was she.

Shaso wavered, then managed to stand erect. He held out his hands, struggling for balance. “I did tell you that I did not kill your brother. I cannot speak of any more than that,” he said at last.

Briony loosed a small shriek of frustration. “What do you mean? I told you, I know who murdered Kendrick. Don’t you understand? Now you must tell me why you let us imprison you when it wasn’t your fault!”

He shook his head wearily. “My oath prevented me. It still prevents me.” “No,” she said, “I will not allow your stubbornness to…”

The door of the stronghold creaked open and the guard she had dispatched appeared in the doorway. He wore a distracted expression and his hands were pressed against his stomach as though he cradled something small and precious. He took a step into the chamber then stumbled and fell onto his face. In her anger and confusion it took Briony a moment to realize that he was not getting up, another instant to notice the dark pool spreading beneath him.

“Your master of arms is still the perfect knight, isn’t he?" Hendon Tolly stepped out of the stairwell and into the room. He was dressed as though for a funeral, but smiling like a child who had just been given a sweet. “A Xandian savage who would actually die to preserve his honor.” Three more men filed into the room behind him, all wearing the Tollys’ livery, all with drawn swords. “That is what makes my life easy, you know—all these fools willing to die for honor.”

“I have found out who killed my brother,” Briony said, startled and frightened. “I did not believe you had anything to do with it. Why have you killed this guard? And why do you come before me in this threatening way?” She drew herself up to her full height. “Did you have something to do with it?” She didn’t believe she could make Hendon Tolly hesitate about harming the reigning princess, but she might at least cause his minions to have second thoughts.

“Yes, you really might have made a queen in time,” Tolly said. “But you are green, girl-child, green. You have come here without guards. You have left a trail of confusion and bloody deeds behind you all across the castle tonight. The story I will tell will explain it all—but not to your credit.”

“Traitor,” rumbled Shaso. He slumped back against the wall, his strength apparently at an end. “It was… you and your brother who caused all this.”

“Some of it, yes.” Hendon Tolly laughed. “And you, old man, like a drunkard wandering in front of a heavy coach, did not get out of my way. And now you will become the official murderer of the princess as well as of Prince Kendrick.”

“What are you babbling about?” Briony demanded, hoping that Tolly would speak long enough for her to think of something, or for someone to come and save her. “Have you lost your mind?” But no one would come, she knew that. It was why he had stabbed the guard and let him die in front of her, as an illustration of her helplessness. The youngest Tolly was a cat who liked to sport with cornered prey, and this was a quality of sport he had been waiting for his entire life.

“Briony, little Briony.” He shook his head like a doting uncle. “So angry with my brother Gailon because he wanted to marry you and turn you into a respectable woman instead of the headstrong little trollop your father allowed you to be. Such a monster, you thought him. But in truth, he was the only thing that stood between my brother Caradon and I and our plans for Southmarch. Which is why he had to die.”

“You… you killed Gailon?”

“Of course. He opposed our contacts with the Autarch from the first— he even came to argue with Kendrick about it on the night your brother died. Caiadon and I had contacted Kendrick separately, you see, because Gailon would not do it, and we had promised him that the Autarch would help him free your father in return for a few small concessions about the sovereignty of certain southern nations. Kendrick had decided to take up our ally in Xis on his generous offer, you see.”

“My brother would never do that!”

“Ah, but he did, or at least he agreed to do so. His murder ruined what would have been a very useful bargain, at least for Caradon and myself. And for the Autarch, too, I suppose.” He shook his head. “It is still a puzzlement to me—I can make no sense out of this Devonisian servant girl and her place in things at all.”

Briony was about to ask him another question, just to keep him talking— she was far too stunned and terrified at the moment to absorb much of what Hendon Tolly was saying—but he raised his hand to silence her, then nodded at his guards.

“Enough,” he said. “Kill them quickly. We still have to find that miserable little doctor.” “You’ll never get away with it!”

Tolly laughed with genuine pleasure. “Of course we will. You Eddons, you talk of your sacred bond and the love of the people, but the world does not spin that way, however much you would like to believe it so. Your faithful subjects will forget you within months if not days. You see, someone will have to protect Anissa’s newborn child—the last heir. It is a boy, by the by. The midwife is with her even now. Poor Anissa is much confused by the night’s events, but I will explain them to her anon.” He smiled again, mockingly cheerful. “By then you will be dead at Shaso’s hand, a tragic echo of your brother’s fate, and Shaso will be dead by mine, or so everyone will hear. Then once we have found and killed that fat physician, there will be no other story except ours. The Tollys will reluctantly take the infant monarch under their protection. My brother will rule at Summerfield Court and I will rule here—although Caradon doesn’t know that yet.” He actually made a small bow, as though he had done her a service. “You see, that is the secret of history, little Briony—who tells the last story.”

Praise the gods, Chaven has escaped them, she thought. At least for the moment. Her heart was beating so fast it seemed to drive the air out of her lungs. It was little enough to hope for—that sometime after her death, someone at least would know the truth, that the Tollys’ story would not be the only tale of these days.

Hendon Tolly snapped his fingers. The three guards moved forward, pikes out, pushing her back toward Shaso In this last moment she could only think blindly of meaningless things—Barrick frowning over some petty irritation, Sister Utta drawing a careful circle on a scrap of parchment, the radiant smile of Zona in an old book—then a black shape flew past her shoulder and smashed into the face of the nearest guard, who pitched over backward, knocking down one of his fellows. A hand yanked Briony backward, then something bright as a broken sun flew across the room and bounced off the wall, spattering blazing light across the guards and Hendon Tolly, who shouted in pain and surprise as flames sprang up on his heavy black clothes.

Shaso was gasping like a dying man from the effort of throwing first his chain, then the brazier. As he pulled her toward the back of the stronghold, Briony knew they had only postponed death. There was nowhere to go, and the surprise assault had not been enough: already Tolly and his two remaining guards were batting out the flames, although one of the soldiers was screeching in pain.

As she staggered backward, she looked in anguish at the empty rack where the pikes were usually kept, where on any other night but this odd combination of siege and festival some might have been found, then Shaso tugged her into the last cell and slammed the door behind them.

“Hold it closed,” the old man wheezed. “Just for… a moment.”

Their enemy was just outside the door, too cautious to force it open without knowing what Shaso might be planning. “I will be happy to roast you alive in there,” Hendon Tolly shouted. He sounded breathless and no longer quite so cheerful. Briony hoped his burns were agonizing. “It will suit our little tale just as well.” Something creaked.”Help me!” Shaso whispered, voice ragged with pain.

Briony took a step, stumbled and fell to her knees. She found him by touch, found the heavy wooden thing in his bony hands.

“Lift!”

She did, grunting with the strain. A slowly widening triangle of light spilling across the straw-covered cell floor showed that Hendon Tolly and his guards had decided to risk the door and were cautiously opening it, but Briony and Shaso had managed to get the trapdoor in the bottom of the cell open as well. She was astounded to discover there was such a thing, but this was no time for questions. At Shaso’s mute gesture she slid into the trap and found the ladder, then stopped to hold it open so Shaso could clamber down above her without losing his balance, but she was not much heartened: the pit seemed as hopeless a hiding place as the cell, however deep it might go. Shaso let the door fall down behind them, covering them in blackness. She heard something scrape and realized he was slamming shut a hidden bolt. A moment later Tolly and his men were pounding on the trapdoor in a rage, the sounds echoing like thunder in the narrow pit.

“Crawl,” Shaso said when they reached the bottom of the shaft. “You will be able to stand soon.” “By the gods—what is this?”

He shoved her hard. “Go! This is the stronghold of the castle, girl. The place of last resort in a siege. Don’t you think there would be some secret way out if the worst came to the worst?”

“It has come,” she said, then decided to save her breath for crawling.

In only a few moments Shaso’s promise was fulfilled: the narrow space widened until Briony couldn’t feel the walls or ceiling. “Where does this go?”

“It lets out by the Spring Tower’s water gate.”

“We must find Avin Brone We must alert the rest of the guards!”

“No!” He grabbed at her leg. In the darkness, it was as though she had been clutched by some root-fingered monster. Shaso’s words came slowly as he fought for breath. “I do not trust Brone. In any case, we do not know where he is. If Tolly’s men find us, they will kill you immediately. They can always explain later that I had taken you hostage, that your death was an accident.”

“No one will believe that!”

“Perhaps not, in the light of tomorrow’s day, but what good would that do you tonight? Or me, as I am hacked to death in front of an angry crowd? Curse it, Briony Eddon, there is no time for this! We must get out We must…” He paused to gasp for breath. It was terrifying to hear him so weak What if he died? What would she do then? “You can stand now,” he said at last. “Take my hand. There is a place we can go.”

“What is this tunnel? How did you know about it?”

“I am the master of arms.” He groaned in pain as he stood. “It is my task to know of such things Avin Brone knows, too. That is why he had me imprisoned in a different cell.”

“Then why weren’t Barrick and I told?”

Shaso sighed, a mixture of regret and clench-jawed pain. “You should have been. Take my hand.”

The journey seemed to last the better part of an hour, through damp stone corridors and treacherous narrows that seemed httle more than holes dug through hard dirt, before they reached a small stone room that smelled of tidal mud and bird droppings. It had a high, slit window that bled moonlight, and for the first time since they entered the trapdoor she could see Shaso dan-Heza s bony, weary face.

“We are in a storage room by the water gate,” he said, panting. She had actually heard him whimpering as he crawled, a sound so bizarrely unexpected that it had frightened her nearly as much as anything else she had experienced on this mad and dreadful night. Shaso showing pain, almost weeping! She could only imagine how dire his circumstances must truly be. “The Summerfield folk will be combing the castle. Others may be looking for you, too, but we can trust no one.”

“Surely…”

“Listen to me, girl! It is plain now how long and how carefully the Tollys have been preparing, waiting for a moment like this. Even if we reached Brone, even if he proves loyal, who can know whether his guards are the same? We must get you away from here.”

“Where? If there is so much danger, where can we go?”

“First things first, Briony.” He was shaking, trembling with the cold. “The only safe way to leave the castle is by water.”

“But the Twilight People are in the city just on the other side!”

He shook his head. “Then we will go another way. Across the bay and then southward down the coast. There are places in Helmingsea… I have prepared…”

“You… you thought something like this might happen?”

For the first time the old man laughed. It was a hard sound to hear, and quickly became a racking cough that was no more pleasant. “It is my task, Briony,” he said when he could speak again. “My sworn task. To think of anything that might happen—anything —and then prepare for it.”

Even with his body crippled and his life hanging by a thread, she thought she could hear a proud stubbornness in his words. It made her angry despite everything. “Shaso, why didn’t you tell me the truth about Kendrick?”

He shook his head. “Later. If we survive.” He got slowly and awkwardly to his feet and held out a hand. She shook it off and levered herself upright, conscious for the first time of how weary she was too, how badly all of her ached.

“Silent, now,” he said. “Stay in the shadows.”

The alleyway outside the storage room was empty, although they could hear sentries talking on top of the wall and a fire burned in the guardhouse beside the water gate. There had never been a night like this! Winter festival being celebrated in the castle while terrible enemies were encamped just across the water, her stepmother’s maid changing into a demon—it seemed that anything, absolutely any horrible, ghastly, impossible thing could happen tonight, and she wondered if she could entirely trust Shaso’s judgment. He was always so stiff-backed, so certain of his own Tightness, but who could judge properly on such a night? What if he was wrong? Should she give up her throne without a fight, run away just for fear of Hendon Tolly? If she called to the guards, wouldn’t they come to her in a heartbeat, their princess regent—wouldn’t they hunt down Tolly like the murdering dog that he was?

But what if, as Shaso feared, they did not? What if they were secretly Tolly’s men, already suborned with lies or gold?

Briony tried to imagine what her father would do, how he would think Stay alive, he would have told her, she knew that. If you are alive, you make all that Tolly say; a he. But if someone puts an arrow in you, then the people have no choice but to believe him, because Summerfield Court is the most powerful part of the kingdom outside Southmarch, and they have blood ties to the throne.

Shaso was leading her along the back rows near Skimmer’s Lagoon, she suddenly realized. She had hardly ever been to this part of the castle, its narrow streets full of ramshackle Skimmer houses, the quays jostling with the strangely shaped boats that seemed to house at least as many of the water folk as did the more conventional dwellings that loomed beside the docks. It seemed oddly quiet for Winter’s Eve, although she realized then that the hour must now be approaching midnight; the streets were almost deserted, some lights in high windows and a few snatches of faint music the only signs that people even lived here. She could hear the tied-up boats bumping against the piers and the occasional sleepily questioning call of a water bird.

“Where are we going?” she whispered as they waited in the shadows to cross one of the larger streets. The dwellings were crammed so close together and leaned so alarmingly overhead that it seemed more like a hornet’s nest than any human place. Shaso looked up and down, then waved for her to follow.

“Here,” he said. “This is the house of Turley, the headman.”

“Turley?” she whispered. It took her a moment to remember why the name was familiar. “I met him!”

Shaso did not reply, but knocked on the oval door; it was a strange pattern of sounds he made, too studied to be accidental. A few moments later the door opened just a slice and two wide eyes peered out. “I need to speak to your father,” Shaso said. “Now. Let us in.”

The girl stared as though she recognized him but hadn’t expected ever to see him at her door. “Cannot be done, Lord,” she said at last. “It is shoal-moot tonight.”

“I don’t care if it’s the end of the world, child,” the old man growled. “In fact, it is the end of the bloody world. Tell your father that Shaso dan-Heza is here on deadly urgent business.”

The door opened and the girl stepped out of the way. Briony realized she had seen this one before—the girl who, with her lover, saw the mysterious boat come into the lagoon the night before Kendricks’ death. Now she thought she knew what that boat had been carrying, and to whom.

Selia’s cursed witch-stone. If I had only paid more attention to what the Skimmers said…

The Skimmer girl recognized Briony and made a movement that was a sort of unschooled courtesy. “Highness,” she said, but although interested, she did not look overawed. Briony couldn’t remember the girl’s name, so she only nodded back.

The narrow passageway creaked like ships’ timbers as they walked down it. It smelled strongly, almost overpoweringly, of fish and salt and other less identifiable scents. The girl went ahead of them to open the door at the end of the hall. The room beyond was small and cold and the fire was tiny, as though meant more for light than heat. A few candles burned in the room as well, but it still wasn’t bright enough for Briony to be sure how many people sat crammed into the little space. She counted a dozen gleaming bald heads before giving up, but more shapes were crouched in the shadows against the walls. They all seemed to be men and they all turned to look at her with roundly shining, blinking eyes, like frogs on a lily pond.

“Headman Turley,” said Shaso. “I need your help. I need a boatman.The life of the princess is in danger.” A room’s worth of wide, wet stares grew even wider.

The one called Turley muttered to his fellows for a moment before standing. “Honored, Shaso-na,” he said at last in his slow, strangely-accented way, “we are honored, but we are all here sworn to a shoal-moot. We may none of us leave until the night ends or else it be blasphemy. Even were one of us to die, his body would here remain until the sun’s rise.”

“Is blasphemy worse than the death of the Princess of Southmarch, Olin’s daughter? Do you forget what you owe him?”

Turley winced a little, but his smooth face quickly became impassive again. “Still, even so, great Shaso-ma.”

Briony realized that the master of arms had encountered someone as stubborn as Shaso himself and wished the situation allowed her to enjoy the spectacle. “Can’t we wait until dawn?” she asked.

“We dare not try to leave by boat in daylight. And Hendon Tolly will not wait, but will find out soon where the passage we used gives out, and from there it will be short work to think of searching along Skimmer’s Lagoon. Brone, too, if he thinks he is acting to save you, will not hesitate to send men house-to-house.”

“But we want Brone to find us!”

“Perhaps. But again, if only one man be disloyal, an accident could happen—an arrow let fly at me that hits you by mistake, let us say…” The old Tuani warrior shook his head. Briony thought he looked as though he was having trouble standing so long. “Headman, can you not send us to someone else—someone you trust? We need a boatman.”

“I will be their boatman,” announced the Skimmer girl. Briony had not noticed her waiting and listening in the doorway behind them, the voice made her jump. The gathered men seemed to have missed her as well and they muttered in distress and surprise.

“You, Ena?” said her father.

“Me. I am as able with the boat as most men. This is Olin s daughter, after all—we dare not send her away. Who would give her shelter, who would take her where she needs to go? Calkin? Sawney Wander-Eye? There is a reason they are not here at the shoal-moot. No, I will take her.”

Her father hesitated, listening to the discontented murmurs of his fellows as he considered. His skin mottled and his throat-apple bulged as though he would puff out some monstrous sack and give a froggy belch of anger, but instead he swallowed again and shook his head in disgust. Briony knew that gesture, had seen her own father make it many times.

“Yes, Daughter. I see no other choice. You take them. But be you careful, ever so careful!” “I will. She is Olin’s daughter and Shaso-Ma is a shoal-friend.”

“Yes, but also careful for your own sake, you nasty little pickerel.” He opened his arms to her and she stepped to him and gave him a quick, practical hug. “Will you accept this, Shaso-mi?” Turley asked.

“Of course,” said the old man hoarsely.

Ena looked at Shaso carefully for the first time, up and down. “You need some healing, those cuts and burns seen to. But first a tub of good seawater, to take the stink off you.” She turned her heavy-lidded gaze on Briony. The nakedness of her eyebrows made the girl’s eyes seem mysterious and distant, like those of someone who had lived a long time in illness. “You, too, Mistress. Highness, I mean.You will never get that great ragged skirt in the boat, so we must find you something of mine to wear, begging your pardon. But we must be quick about it all. The moon is swimming, but soon she will dive.”

Ferras Vansen caught up to his quarry in the lower reaches of the hills, or at least that was where he thought he was, but he could not be sure. Only a few months ago this had been the border of the Shadowline, an eerie but otherwise ordinary place, but now the hills were shrouded in mist and nearly invisible and all the land down to the bay had become alien.

“Prince Barrick!” The rider didn’t turn but glided on through the streaming mist. For long moments Vansen thought he might be mistaken, that perhaps he was calling to some phantom thrown up by the Shadowline, but as he drew closer and eventually pulled abreast of the black horse he could see the boy’s pale, distracted face. “Barrick! Prince Barrick, it’s me, Vansen. Stop!”

The young prince didn’t even look. Vansen nudged his horse closer still, until it was rubbing shoulders with Barrick’s mount, then reached across and grabbed at the prince’s arm, remembering only too late that it was the wounded one, the crippled one.

Crippled or whole, it seemed to make little difference. Barrick snatched his arm away but still did not turn to look at Vansen, although he did speak for the first time.

“Go away.”

There was something odd in his voice, a sleepwalker’s distance; the boy’s refusal to turn his head began to seem more like madness than contempt. Vansen grabbed him again, harder now, and the prince jabbed at him with his elbow, trying to wriggle free. The horses bumped against each other and whinnied, uncertain whether this was war or something else. Vansen ducked a lashing fist, then wrapped his arms around the prince and pulled Barrick toward him. Barrick’s feet caught in the stirrups and he fell, taking the guard captain with him.Vansen avoided being kicked by the horses, but the ground seemed to rise up and hit him like a huge fist. For long moments he could only lie on his back, wheezing.

The horses had trotted on a little way and stopped. When Vansen at last sat up, still not able to fill his lungs completely, he saw to his dismay that Barrick was already on his feet and limping toward his large black horse where it cropped at the meadow grass, half-hidden by mist although it stood only a few dozen yards away. The prince was holding his side as though it hurt him badly, but showed no sign of letting it stop him.Vansen struggled upright and ran after him, but he was weary and battered from the day’s fighting and the fall; Prince Barrick had almost reached his horse by the time Vansen caught him.

“Your Highness, I cannot let you go there! Not into that land!”

In reply, Barrick pulled his dagger from his belt and took a clumsy swipe at Vansen without even looking at him.Vansen stumbled back in surprise, tripped, fell. The prince showed no urge to follow up on his advantage; he turned and caught his horse again, which had skipped away in nervousness at their struggle. Just as Barrick got his fingers under the belly strap to hold the horse and began to search for the stirrup with his foot, Vansen reached him again.

This time he was expecting the knife and was able to twist it out of the prince’s fingers. The boy let out a small grunt of pain, but still seemed to care little about Ferras Vansen himself; he simply turned again to clamber up onto his saddle. Vansen grabbed him around the waist and pulled him backward so that they both crashed to the ground This time he shoved his helmeted head against the boy’s cloaked back and held on. Barrick gasped with pain and his struggles became increasingly desperate, his arms and legs thrashing as wildly as those of a drowning swimmer. As it became apparent that Vansen was the stronger, that the boy couldn’t reach the older man’s eyes or vitals with his hooking fingers, Barrick writhed more and more madly. The low moan he had been making as they rolled on the ground rose to a shriek, a horrible raw noise that dug intoVansen’s ears like a sharp stick, and the prince began to fling his arms and legs about, kicking, thrashing. Vansen could only hold tight. He felt a little like a father, but of a child who was very ill. An insane child.

How will I ever get him back to Southmarch? he wondered. Barrick’s shrieking grew increasingly ragged but did not stop or even slacken.Vansen started to crawl, trying to drag the boy along the ground toward his horse. I will have to tie him up. But with what? And how will I sneak him past the shadow folk?

Barrick’s struggles became even wilder, something Vansen would not have thought possible. He could pull the prince no farther, and had to stop a few yards from the horses, holding the boy wrapped in his arms and legs as Barrick went on screeching as monotonously as a broken-hinged gate fanning in the wind.

At last it was too much. Vansen’s own limbs were achingly weary, the boy’s cries so heartrendingly terrible, he began to believe he was somehow crippling the young prince’s mind. He let him go, watched as the boy stopped shrieking, got to his feet, swaying—it was a blessed relief to have the silence come rushing back—and staggered toward his horse, which waited with unnatural calm.

Vansen got to his feet and stumbled after him. “Where are you going, Highness? Don’t you know you are traveling into the land of shadows?”

Barrick climbed into the saddle, slipping, struggling, clearly almost as weary as Vansen. He sat up, holding his side again. “I… I know.” His tone was hollow, miserable.

“Then why, Highness?” When there was no reply, Vansen raised his voice. “Barrick! Listen to me! Why are you doing this? Why are you riding into the shadowlands?”

The boy hesitated, fumbling for the reins. The black horse, Vansen noticed for the first time, had strange, amber-yellow eyes. Vansen reached out, gently this time, and touched the prince’s arm. Barrick actually looked toward him for a moment, although his eyes did not quite touch Ferras Vansen’s. “I don’t know why. I don’t know!”

“Come back with me.That way there’s nothing but danger.” But Vansen knew there was danger behind them as well, madness and death. Hadn’t he first thought Barrick was fleeing the horrors of the battle? “Come back with me to Southmarch.Your sister will be afraid for you. Princess Briony will be afraid.”

For an instant it seemed that he might have touched something in the prince regent: Barrick sighed, sagged a little in his saddle. Then the instant passed. “No. I am… called.”

“Called to what?”

The boy shook his head slowly, the gesture of a doomed, lost man. Vansen had seen such a face once before, eyes so empty and distraught. It had been a man of the dales, a distant relation of Ferras Vansen’s mother, who had found himself caught up in a border dispute between two large clans and had seen his wife and children slaughtered before his eyes. That man had worn just such a look when he came to say his farewells before going out to find his family’s killers, knowing that no one would either accompany or avenge him, that his own death was inevitable. Vansen shivered.

Barrick abruptly spurred his horse northward. Vansen ran to his own mount and spurred to catch him until they were riding side by side.

“Please, Highness, I ask you one last time. Will you not turn back to your family, your kingdom? Your sister Briony?” Barrick only shook his head, bis eyes once more gazing into nothingness.

“Then you will force me to follow you into this terrible place that I barely escaped the first time. Is that what you want, Highness, for me to follow you into death? Because my oath will not allow me to let you go alone.” Vansen could see her now in his mind’s eye, her lovely face and poorly hidden fear, as well as the bravery that was all the more striking because of it. Now I pay back for your older brother’s life, Briony. Now I pay for dead Kendrick’s with my own. But of course, she would likely never know.

For a moment, just a moment, a little of the true Barrick seemed to rise to his eyes, as if someone trapped in a burning house came scrambling to the window to shout for help. “Into death?” he murmured. “Perhaps. But perhaps not.” He let his eyes fall closed, then slowly opened them again. “There are stranger things than death, Captain Vansen—stranger and older. Did you know that?"

There was nothing to say. Exhausted in body and spirit, Vansen could only follow the mad young prince into the shadowy hills.

Briony had never thought of Southmarch Castle as something oppressive or frightening—it had been her home for all her life, after all—but as they moved quietly on foot along the edge of the lagoon, the keep with its tall towers and lighted windows seemed to loom over her like a crowned skull.

The whole night seemed a fantasy, a perverse one in which serving girls were transformed into monsters and princesses had to go disguised through their own domains in Skimmer clothes that stank of fish.

Ena led them through the dank, narrow streets to a dock on the southern lagoon where the keep’s huge outer wall shadowed Fitters Row, but they did not get into a boat Instead, she took them through a weathered door that opened right into the wide wall of stone which defended the castle from the bay. The rough-hewn passage inside led to a stairwell that wound upward into the cliff wall for some twenty or thirty paces, then down again for quite a few more steps, where Briony was astonished to discover herself beside another tiny lagoon, this one entirely surrounded by a rock cave that was lit by lanterns perched here and there along the shore. This must be hidden inside the seawall, she marveled Two Skimmer men sat cross-legged on the stony shore guarding a dozen or so small boats, but they were on their feet before Briony and her companions ever left the stairs. They both carried nasty-looking hooked blades on long poles and did not lower the weapons until Ena had spoken to them in a guttural undertone.

Did the Skimmers truly have their own tongue, then? Briony had heard many say that couldn’t be true. She realized that she had learned very little about these people who lived inside her own castle. And a hidden lagoon! “Did you know about this place?” she asked Shaso.

“I have never seen it,” he said, which didn’t quite answer the question. She didn’t press him further, though; he was barely able to stand upright as it was.

Ena appeared to have successfully explained her mission to the Skimmer sentries. She directed Shaso and Briony into a long, slender rowboat, then climbed in after them and rowed them out onto the tiny lagoon toward a low, apparently natural opening in the far rock wall that must have been invisible under water for at least half of every day. The oars moved easily in the girl’s strong, long-fingered hands. In only a short while the little boat slipped out onto the gentle swell of the bay, with the cloudy, vast sky overhead and the night winds blowing.

“Why have I never heard of that lagoon?” Briony was cramped on the seat, her feet perched on the sack Ena and her father had provided that contained mostly dried fish and skin bags full of water. She looked back. “What if someone should invade the castle through that hole in the seawall?”

“It is only there for a little part of the day.” The Skimmer girl smiled an oddly shy, wide-mouthed smile. “When the tide begins to come back up, we must take the boats out of the water and leave the cavern. There are other guards, too—guards you did not see.”

Briony could only shake her head. It was clear that there was much she had yet to learn about her own home.

After a stretch of quiet, the motion of the little boat and the quiet repetitive creaking as Ena plied the oars began to lull her. Sleep was very tempting, but she was not ready to surrender yet. “Shaso? Shaso.”

He made a grunting sound.

“You told me you would explain what happened. Why you did not tell me the truth.” He groaned, but very quietly. “Is this my punishment, then?”

“If you want to think of it that way.” She reached out and squeezed his arm, felt where the hard muscle had begun to devour itself during his dark, malnourished weeks in the stronghold cell. “I promise I will let you sleep soon. Just tell me what happened… that night.”

Shaso spoke slowly, stopping often to get his breath. “He called me in, your brother Kendrick. He had just been visited by Gailon Tolly. If that jackal Hendon told the truth in this one thing, anyway, Gailon must have been arguing against the Autarch’s offer, not for it. I thought he was the one who brought it, but it seems I was wrong. In any case, your brother told me what he intended to do—to abandon your father’s belief that all the nations of Eion must be defended. Kendrick thought that he could convince the other monarchs to let the Autarch take Hierosol, and that m return the Autarch would release your father.

“Leaving aside whether or not it was honorable, I thought it a foolish gamble. We drank wine and we argued. We argued a long time, Kendrick and I, and bitterly. I told him that he was a fool to bargain with such a creature, especially a creature of such growing power—that I would sooner kill myself than let him do this to his kingdom. All my life I have watched the monarchs of Xis at work, Briony. I saw Tuan and a dozen other nations in Xand dragged in chains before the Falcon Throne, and it is said this Autarch is the worst of his whole mad line. But Kendrick was certain that the only way to withstand the Autarch in the long run was to have your father Olin lead a defensive coalition of northern nations—to give up Hierosol and the other decadent southern cities. A demon’s bargain, I called it—the kind that only the demon can win. Eventually, in drunken anger and despair and what I must admit was disgust as well, I… I left him. I passed Anissa’s maid in the hall—summoned by Kendrick, I assumed. She was pretty and had a saucy eye, so I thought little of it.”

A thought caught at Briony Kendrick said, “Isss . .” He could not remember the girl’s name. He was calling her “Anissa’s maid” or “servant” as he . . as he died. It was too dreadful to think on long, and she did not want to be distracted. “You say you simply left, Shaso. But when we found you, we were covered in blood!”

“As we disputed, as I raged against his foolishness, I . . turned my knife on myself. I told him… Oh, Briony, girl, I hate that these were the last words… the last words I spoke with him.” For a long moment it seemed that he wouldn’t continue. When he did, the rasp in his voice was harsher than before. “I told your brother I would cut my own arms from my body, the arms that had so long served his father, before letting them serve such a treacherous son. That I would stab myself in the heart. I was drunk—very drunk by then, and very angry. I could not bear facing Dawet dan-Faar across the table that night without wine and I had already had several cups before I went to your brother’s room. I have cursed myself for it in the darkness of that cell many times. Kendrick tried to wrestle the knife away from me. He was furious that I would argue with him, that I did not merely doubt his strategy but denounced it and him. We fought for the knife and I was cut again. Him, too, I think, but only a little. At last I came back to my right mind. He sent me away, making me swear on my debt to your father that I would not speak of what had happened no matter how much I disagreed with him.

“To tell you truth, even after you freed me, I would never have spoken of what he planned, poor Kendrick, the dishonor of bargaining with the bloody Autarch…”Again Shaso had to stop. Briony would have felt sorry for him but the newness of the betrayal was too much—Shaso’s for keeping stubbornly silent and her brother’s for thinking he knew more than their father, for thinking himself a king before he had gained the wisdom, for supposing he could manipulate a great and powerful enemy. “I… returned to my rooms,” Shaso went on. “I drank a great deal more wine, trying to make it all go away. When you came for me, I thought that Kendrick was still angry with me for insulting him, perhaps even that I had been too drunk and had hurt him in our scuffling, that I would be locked up for insulting him—made a slave again, after all these years. It only became clear to me later what had happened.”

“But, you fool, why didn’t you tell us?”

“What could I say? I gave my oath to your brother before he died that I would not speak of what had happened in that room. I was ashamed for myself and for him. And at first, before I understood the truth, my honor was outraged that you should come for me like a criminal, simply because I had disagreed with the prince regent. But when I learned what had happened, I told you that I hadn’t killed him, and that was the truth.” He trembled a little under her hand, which still touched his arm. “What does a man have if he gives up the bond of his word? He is worse than dead. Had Hen-don Tolly not told you what your brother planned, I would be silent still.”

Briony sat back, looking up at the jutting shadow of the castle. She was shiveringly cold and weary, still terrified by the night’s events. Somewhere in that darkened keep, she knew, armed men were searching for her and Shaso. “So where do we go?”

“South,” he said after a while. He sounded like he had fallen asleep for a few moments. “But after that? After we land? Do you have allies in mind?” South, she thought. Where Father is being held prisoner. “My brother,” she said out loud. “I… I’m afraid for him, Shaso.”

“Whatever happened, he did what he thought was best. His soul is at rest, Briony.”

For a moment her heart was startled up into her throat. Barrick? Did Shaso know something about him that she did not? Then she understood.

“I didn’t mean Kendrick. Yes, he did his best, the gods bless him and keep him. No, I mean Barrick.” It was hard to find the strength even to speak: the long day had finally caught up to her. Tears made the dark geometries of the keep even more blurry. “I miss him. I am afraid… I’m afraid something bad has happened.”

Shaso had nothing to say, but patted her arm awkwardly.

The boat slipped on, the oars moving steadily beneath Ena’s skillful hands. Briony felt like Zona in the famous tale, fleeing her home in the middle of the night. What was it Tinwright had written about that— overwritten, to be honest? “Clear-eyed, lion-hearted, her mmd turned toward the day when her honor will again be proclaimed…” But the goddess Zoria had been escaping from an enemy and fleeing back to her father’s house. Briony was leaving her home behind, perhaps forever. And Zoria was an immortal.

Midlan’s Mount with its walls and towers no longer loomed over them like a stern parent, but was beginning to recede, the bay widening between their little boat and the casde, the forested shore growing closer, a blackness along the southern horizon that blotted the starry sky. Only a few lights burned where she could see them in the castle’s upper reaches, a few in the Tower of Spring, a few lanterns in the guardhouses along the wall and atop the harbor breakwaters. She was filled with an unexpected, aching love for her home. All the things she had taken for granted, even some she had despised, the chilly, ancient halls as complicated as long stories, the portraits of glowering ancestors, the gray trees below her window in the Privy Garden that budded so bravely each cold spring—all had been stolen from her. She wanted it all back.

Shaso was asleep now, but Briony had missed her own chance at healing slumber. For this little while, anyway, she was queerly wakeful, exhausted but full of fretful thoughts. She could only sit and watch as the moon dove down through the sky and the waters of the bay grew wider between her and all of her life until this moment.

The streets of Funderling Town were lit but deserted, so that they had the feehng of unfinished scrapes instead of thoroughfares. Chert, walking like a man who had lately seen too many of the world’s strangest corners, could hear his footsteps echo from the stone walls of his neighbors’ houses as he trudged up Wedge Road and in through his own front door.

Opal heard him in the main room and rushed out from the back of the house, face full of misery and fear. He thought she would demand to know where he had been all these long, long hours, but instead she just grabbed his hand and dragged him toward the bedroom. She was moaning and he suddenly knew the worst had happened: the boy was dead.

To his shock, Flint was not dead but awake and watching. Chert turned to Opal, but she still had the look of someone who had discovered her most prized possession had been stolen.

“Boy?” he asked, kneeling beside him. “How do you feel?”

“Who are you?”

Chert stared at the familiar face, the shock of hair so pale as to be almost white, the huge, watchful eyes. Everything was the same and yet the child also seemed somehow slightly different. “What do you mean, who am I? I’m Chert, and this is Opal.”

“I… I don’t know you.”

“You’re Flint, we’re… we’ve been taking care of you. Don’t you remember?” Slowly, weakly, the boy shook his head. “No, I don’t remember you.”

“Well… if you’re not Flint, who are you?” He waited in a kind of airless terror for the answer. “What’s your name?”

“I said I don’t know!” the boy whined. There was something in him Chert had never seen before, a trapped and frightened animal behind the narrow face. “I don’t know who I am!”

Opal stumbled out into the other room, clutching her throat as though she couldn’t breathe. Chert followed her, but when he tried to put his arms around her, she flailed at him in her misery and he retreated. Since he could think of nothing else to do he came back to the bed and took the boy’s hand; after a moment of trying to pull his fingers free, the boy who looked like Flint relaxed and let him hold it. Helpless and weary, all thought of what had just happened to him outside the city gates swept aside, at least for now, Chert sat this way for an hour, calming a terrified child while his wife cried and cried in the other room.