Shadowheart (121 page)

“Oh, yes,” he said, his eyes shining. “I have so many ideas—it will be the best thing I ever did! I was miserable because . . . because of a woman . . . but now I know why. I was meant to do this!”

He was still burbling as Vansen helped the three of them out the door. “Help them down the stairs!” Vansen shouted to a page. “We do not want the princess’ guests breaking their necks. And tell the coachman to take them back to their inn.”

“Oh, gods,” groaned Hewney, waking up. “Not the Quiller’s Mint! I’d rather sleep in the gutter.”

Ferras Vansen came back in a little unsteadily and threw his arms around Briony. She kissed him, but she was preoccupied and he could tell.

“What were you talking with that fool of a poet about?”

“The gods,” she said. “And whether or not earthly life is only a sort of play.”

“I’m glad I missed it, then,” he said. “I never had the wit for such things. Now come to bed, my beautiful Briony, and let me love you a while before we both have to get into costume and go back to playing our own parts once more.”

—from “A Child’s Book of the Orphan, and His Life and Death and Reward in Heaven”, written by Matthias Tinwright and presented to His Highness Prince Olin Alessandros on the occasion of his first birthday.

 

 

 

T
HE MORNING DAWNED BRIGHT and much hotter than the day before. Barrick could smell the sap beginning to move in the pines and firs, the slow sweetness that ran through their veins as the Fireflower did in his. The Qar had traveled through the night, but slowly; now that Saqri had died, there was no need to go faster than what the many wounded could comfortably manage.

Duke Kaske of the Unforgiven brought the reports from the scouts: the road ahead was all but empty for several leagues. “But after that there are several mortal villages, and then a walled city with towers,” Kaske said. His almond-shaped eyes were drawn up ever so slightly at their outer edges, which Barrick knew meant that the corpse-pale fairy was fighting with strong emotions. “We did not pass this way when Yasammez led us. We have not come against it before.”

Barrick nodded. He leaned down to pat the neck of his horse, then drew back on the reins so that the black charger pulled up with anxious, skittering feet; even the horses didn’t like this place and longed for the dark meadows of home. “Stop here,” he called out, then repeated it again without spoken words. The procession behind him slowed and began to split into smaller pieces, horses and other steeds taken down the small slope to water, some of the Changing tribe joining them in four-footed form, which made the other animals restive. “Don’t worry, Kaske, we’ll go around it. There is no dishonor in that.”

But the Unforgiven, a terrifying and fearless warrior, was still troubled. “But you know these mortals. We can avoid them now, but someday they will come into our lands. With the death of Yasammez the Mantle will vanish. How can we keep them out?” The skin of his face pulled ever so slightly tighter. “The Mantle—gone!”

“What do you care?” Barrick asked him. “You and your folk live in the snowy hills. Surely you will be grateful to see the sun again.”

Kaske shook his head. “It . . . it will be strange. Everything will be strange now.”

Barrick spread his fingers—
Tale of Years
—and said, “Yes, it will.”

 

You are there!
Barrick’s heart, which for two days had felt like Kaske’s mountain home, an icy stone beneath freezing gray skies, now suddenly was drenched with sunshine.
You came back to me! Oh, praise the Book, you came back. I feared . . . I feared . . .

I was frightened, too
, she said. Her thoughts, the voice, it was hers, blessedly hers . . . but so weak!
The Fireflower women—the mothers and grandmothers, they are so stern, so . . . beautiful and terrible . . . ! I thought they would sweep me away likeaflooding river . . .

Know him? He is my son, grandfather, my husband,
Qinnitan said, still a little dreamy and confused.
I know what Saqri knew, and what all who came before her knew . . . !

You.
He felt it come from her like a caress.
The thought that we would be separated again if I could not find a way to live with it. I have had too much of that, Barrick Eddon.
Her thoughts twisted a little, took a tone of amusement and wonder.
And you are King Olin’s son—of course! To think that all that time I didn’t know . . . !
As she said it, he could see his father plainly, but it was a different Olin who faced him, the man Qinnitan had known, a kind, brave man unshadowed by rage, who valued his own life far lower than that of any innocent.

Tell me about him
, Barrick said.
Stay with me as long as you can and tell me what I missed all those years that the shadows fell between my father and me . . .

 

When she grew weary and her words began to slow, he stopped her, kissed her with a word and a thought, and let her go. Only when she had slipped down into sleep and he could no longer feel her did he let the sadness he had been holding at bay so long wash over him. He looked at the couch on which Qinnitan’s small, slender body lay, in a wagon pulled by two patient nightsteeds. What if they never had more than this? Ynnir and Saqri had lived that way for centuries. That was some solace, anyway. Barrick doubted he would live so long.

He stood for a long time gazing back across the hills. The gleam in the distance was the tilted windvane on top of Wolfstooth Spire’s shattered roof; the rest of the castle was invisible below the intervening hills. It was strange to be looking back on his old home. The last time he had stood in such a place he had wondered whether he would ever see it again, and this time was no different.

As he stared, he felt something strange happening all around him, a sudden warmth and a feeling of the air being pulled in many directions at once. Then something snapped like a large branch breaking and the space immediately in front of Barrick’s face was full of flapping blackness. Without thinking, he reached out and grabbed the dark shape. It was feathery and fat and smelled like carrion.

“Don’t hurt us!” it croaked. “Us be a bird of artfullest power—a wishing raven! Spare us and us’ll grant you all manner of wishery, that you’ll see!”

Barrick stared in astonishment. “Skurn? Is that you?”

The bird slowed its thrashing, turning its desperately shiny black eye on him. “Mought be. Then again, it equal-like moughtn’t.”

“Don’t you remember me?”

“Well, doubtless that you look like the Barrick lad I helped so many times. But us has seen many a few others nearly as much like him since us first went through that darksome gate out of Sleep ...”

“Where have you been, Skurn? You never reached Qul-na-Qar—I didn’t see you after we escaped from the city of Sleep! And I never saw Raemon Beck again.”

“Us hasn’t seen that one either, though in our travels, us has seen a few creatures that were Beck-ish. Thanks mightily for telling where you’ve been—but not much help when us needed it, was it?” The bird fluttered up out of Barrick’s open hand and onto a branch just a little overhead. “Been flapping in and out of some dreadful places since then. Some nice ones, too, to say fair, but still strange as down on a toad.” He preened himself a bit. “Rather grand, our adventures have doubtless been, you and us. No doubt some fairy bard will want to make a tune of it all, with clever words to show how dangerous our fates narrowly was.”

Barrick almost smiled, but was not going to be so easily lulled. “You talk more than you ever did, bird.”

“It goes to show the gods live and the world be still full of miracles, as our mam used to say when us were scarce out the egg.”

“And I suppose you’ll want to go with me.”

“Nay, don’t think thyself so grand!” The bird looked up as if in search of some even higher perch more suitable to his stature. “Any bargain us made is long past. No need for us to follow all draggity-tail and call anyone master.”

“Who said anything about calling someone master?” Barrick turned and called to Kaske and Sunset Pearl that it was time to gather up their people and return to the road. “I just thought you might like to keep company with me for a while. I’m more or less the king of the fairies now. Did you know?”

“King of the fairies?” Skurn hopped down the branch and looked him up and down carefully. “Them Qar must have lost a lot of their important folk somewhere.” The bird made a harsh spitting noise. “Must be scraping the barrel now, us means.”

 

Barrick looked down at Skurn bouncing on the front of the saddle. The raven’s head was settled deep in his fluffed up collar of black-and-white-spotted feathers.
Yes. He’s actually not as bad as he seems.

Look,
he said.
The Twilight Lands. I can see them in the distance . . . and I can see the stars, too!

What do you mean?

The Mantle. The cloud of separation and protection that hung over this place so long. It’s gone. Nothing left now but wisps like fog.
He sighed, dazzled by the painful brightness of the stars in the night sky.
Ah, if you could only see this land of ours!

She went quiet then, but it was a companionable silence, both of them close despite their terrible separation.

My love?
he asked sometime later.
Qinnitan, my heart, are you still awake?

She stirred.
I drifted.

I miss the House of the People,
she said,
though I have never seen it with my own eyes. Is it as beautiful as my memories?

Of course,
she said, then a moment later:
Barrick, I can feel the moon. Is it bright?

He took a deep breath, in part to ease the rush of feeling. Even his thoughts were muddled, stumbling.
You do too . . . ? I thought I would be . . . I thought I would never . . .

I know
, she told him, and for just a moment he could feel her as if she were beside him, as if they again held each other in the dark dreamland.
Talk to me, Barrick.
It was close, as intimate as a whisper.
Tell me everything. I know everything the Fireflower knows, but the Fireflower knows scarcely anything about you. At least scarcely anything of the sort of things a lover wants to know.

I will,
he said.
And the first thing you must know about me is that I am not an ordinary person . . .

He could feel her amusement.
Of course you aren’t! As you told that foul bird, you are a mortal who became monarch of the fairies . . . !

T
HE MORNING SUN had pulled itself up above the eastern horizon, and the sky was brightening. Despite the paucity of clouds, a low rumble filled the air, beginning so low that it disturbed only a few slumbering creatures deep in the earth, but then rising until it made the slender branches of the birch trees quiver. Birds burst squawking from their upper reaches and a deer sprinted across the Coast Road.

The rumble grew until it sounded much like thunder, then the air seized, roiled, and cracked like a drover’s whip. Something fell out of the nothingness onto brown Southmarch earth still wet with dew.

For long moments Raemon Beck, merchant’s son, husband, and father, only lay facedown in the middle of the road, frightened by yet another forced, lightning-flash journey from one nowhere to another. At last, when the rumble of his arrival had subsided, he worked up the courage to lift his head. A moment later, he clambered up onto his feet, staring in astonishment to the southeast. There, across a short distance of green bay, stood the familiar towers of Southmarch Castle—some a little the worse for wear, scarred by fire and cannonballs, but unquestionably and recognizably the four cardinal towers and the even taller black-and-white prominence of Wolfstooth Spire.