Shadowheart (27 page)

But it was not simply the large experiences that had changed her, she realized, it was all the things she had seen in the last year, all the ordinary and extraordinary people she had met, players and thieves and traitors, goblins and Kallikans, as well as the situations she had been forced to endure—hunger, fear, having no roof over her head, and no friends and no money. Briony felt as though the only thing she had in common with her younger self was the name and the place they were born.

It was strange, but it was also exciting. She was writing this new Briony as a pen wrote words on a piece of sanded parchment. What would the pen write next? That was impossible to say. But for the first time in her life, despite the danger that lay ahead and the loss she had already experienced, she was content to wait to find out what the future would bring.

Although, she reminded herself, it was not as though she had much choice about it.

Qinnitan had escaped him again, but only barely.

Daikonas Vo was ill, or badly injured; otherwise, Qinnitan knew she would never have been able to outrun him for even a few moments, let alone stay ahead of him so long. But although the soldier moved as if his bones were all broken and his guts were aflame, he never stopped. Every time she looked back, every time she paused to rest, Vo was still behind her.

Because you couldn’t know what might happen
, she told herself as she struggled gracelessly across the wooded Brennish hills, hungry and exhausted, unable to stop even to tend to her aching, bleeding feet.
Because you wouldn’t know how to kill any man, let alone a soldier like Vo. A monster like Vo.

And that had been the real reason: he terrified her. It had taken all her courage to try to poison him with his own black bottle on the fishing boat, but that had failed. What hope did she have now?

Still, even if she hadn’t managed to poison him completely, something was definitely wrong with him: he looked like a wild creature, and when he drew close enough for her to hear him, he was often moaning and talking to himself.

Even though I didn’t kill him
, she thought with sudden insight,
perhaps too much of what was in that bottle made him very sick. Or perhaps it’s not having the medicine that’s made him this way.

But none of it would matter if he caught her, and even if he didn’t, Qinnitan knew she would starve if she couldn’t get far enough ahead of him to search for food.

 

Qinnitan’s stomach ached with hunger. She was so tired that she could barely keep her legs moving. The ground had become steeper, but every instinct forced her out of the wooded valley and straight up the slope, even though doing so would leave her visible to Vo or anyone else below. By the time she was halfway up, she could hear him crashing up the slope below her. She burst out of thick forest and onto the upper part of the grassy hillside where the trees grew more sparsely and the ground was lumpy with purple-gray shrubs, then stole a look back. Vo saw her and bared his teeth in the mask of dried blood that covered his face. It might have been a grimace of exhaustion, but to Qinnitan it was the snarl of a beast that would not give up until one of them was dead and it terrified her.

As she climbed, she pushed at several large, loose stones to send them rolling down toward him, but even in his terrible state Vo was too agile to be caught that way; each time he waited until the stone had almost reached him, then moved out of its way.

At the top of the hill, Qinnitan saw to her great surprise that a road wound along the base of the hill’s far side, several hundred yards beneath her. Perhaps that meant there was a town somewhere nearby! She scrambled downslope as fast as she could, looking back for Vo but not seeing him; when she reached the flat road, she began to run. She could manage nothing better than a pace she herself would have mocked in her childhood days on Cat’s Eye Street, but at least she knew that every step took her farther from the limping murderer Daikonas Vo.

She alternated between running and walking for what seemed like an hour at least, praying at every bend in the road to find a town or at least a village in front of her but seeing scarcely any sign of habitation at all. She saw old ax-marks on many of the trees and once a tumbled hut that might have belonged to a charcoal burner, but the ruin was deserted and no use to her.

Sundown was almost upon her and Qinnitan was stumbling with weariness when she saw the rider some distance ahead of her on the road. At first she thought it a trick of the lengthening shadows, but as she slowly drew nearer, she could see that it truly was a man on a small horse. Another few hundred steps and she could see that his mount was no horse but a mule, and that the man himself had the shaved head of some kind of Eionian priest.

“Help!” she shouted, one of the few northern words she could remember. “Help! Please!”

The man turned around in surprise and looked back, then reined up and waited for her, shaking his head. “If this be a trick, child, it will go badly for you.” He pulled a gnarled walking-staff from a loop on his saddle and waved it at her. “I will not be ambushed by thieves without making them earn the few coppers in my purse.”

Qinnitan only understood part of what he said. “Help,” she said. “Please. Hungry.”

He was not an old man, but he was not young, either, the skin of his face a net of wrinkles made by sun and wind. After a moment he reached into his bag and produced a heel of bread. “Have this,” he said. “And may Honnos bless your road. Are you on your way to Dunletter? You will not reach it walking tonight.”

She never found out whether he meant to offer her a ride. A crackle in the bushes made the priest look up in time to see Daikonas Vo step out of the trees a little ways behind them, something dark curled in his hand.

“Curse you, child!” the priest said in despair and anger. “You played me false ...!”

Something struck his head with a horrid
crack
and the man tumbled from the donkey’s back, the bloodied stone that had dashed out his brains lying on the road beside him. The donkey took a few skittering steps forward, then began to lope away up the road. Qinnitan did not even look back at Vo, but ran after it and clambered awkwardly onto its back, pressing her face against its hot, bristly neck as she kicked at it its flanks with her feet, trying to make it run harder.

“I will have you, you little bitch . . . !”
Vo shouted hoarsely in the Xixian tongue, frightening the donkey so that it began to trot even faster.
“You will never escape me . . . !”

Qinnitan kicked and kicked again, forcing the donkey to go faster and faster until she was afraid it would bounce her off into the road. All she could do was cling to its neck and pray.

The prince’s Temple Dogs followed the Silver River Road as it wound north-northeast through a half dozen Kertewall valleys, then at last passed over into the western edge of Silverside. The road crossed the river at several points, sometimes on shaky bridges that had to be rebuilt by Eneas’ soldiers to bear the weight of their wagons and heavily laden war-horses, but generally ran beside it. The river was high with spring rains and the water lively, making a counterpoint to the oppressive silence of the empty valleys: Briony found her spirits lifted a little just by the sound of the water and the sight of ordinary spring flowers, although it was impossible to overlook the deserted Kertish towns in which they often grew, or the occasional scenes of devastation, still raw from the Qar’s march through the area half a year ago.

 

One morning, half a tennight after they had fought the Qar, Briony woke up early after a fitful night and sat in the doorway of her tent watching the camp come to life. She missed drinking
gawa
, which had become her habit in Effir dan-Mozan’s house in Landers Port. The smell of woodsmoke from the morning fires reminded her of its bitter, musty taste underneath the honey and cream, and the way it made her feel as it warmed her stomach. She had not drunk any for months: here on the road mornings meant sour wine or water from the Silver River, which at least flowed swiftly enough to be clean and sweet.

If I survive all this
, she told herself,
I will have gawa every morning, with cream from the Dales and heather honey from Settland. And if anyone asks me about such a strange custom, I will tell them, “Oh, I picked it up when I was living with the Tuani ...”

A sudden memory of Shaso blew through her morning’s thoughts like a storm cloud, but before she could do more than note its arrival she saw a stir near Eneas’ tent, which the prince had only recently and reluctantly agreed to take back from her when she had inherited a tent of her own from one of the officers killed at Kleaswell Market. Briony had grown used to the rhythms of a small army on the road: she recognized that the scouts had come back. What she didn’t understand was why their return seemed to have caused such a stir.

“Princess,” said Eneas when she had made her way over, “I am glad you’ve come. Weasel has an interesting tale to tell.”

Weasel, who was nearly as small as a boy and had the dark hair and complexion common to the southern islands below Devonis, did not look like an interested man so much as a worried and unhappy man who was doing his best to hide it. His fellow scouts, who, like him, wore shabby clothes so that together they looked more like a band of poachers than anything military, sat and listened silently as their chief reported.

“Dreadful many of them,” said Weasel. “Thousands, I would guess—ten thousand and perhaps more, and that does not count those who are barracked in the city itself. There are dozens of ships in the Southmarch mainland harbor, everything from cogs to three-masted, square-rigged warships, and several more galleases in the bay. They have besieged the castle—in the time we watched yesterday afternoon and early evening the cannons were firing almost continuously—and have breached the outwall at least twice, from the looks of it, but the defenders have made repairs. The cannons—by Volios Strongarm, what monsters they must be! We could not see them from where we stood, but they flamed like Mount Sarissa and made a sound like the end of the world.”

“And it is the autarch’s army?”

Weasel nodded. “The cursed Xixy falcon is everywhere, Highness. We never thought to see so many—it is like what was said of Hierosol.”

“And the Qar?” Briony asked.

“No sign of them.” The chief scout turned to his men. They nodded their agreement. “Perhaps those we saw were a wing of a retreating army.”

Eneas looked troubled. “Perhaps. But it makes little difference in any case. Ten thousand Xixians!”

“More, if the scouts are not mistaken,” said Lord Helkis. “If they are barracked in the town, perhaps as many as twice that. How many men could be billeted in the mainland town, Princess Briony?”

“Many.” How could Southmarch hope to stand up to so large an army? And if the autarch now controlled Brenn’s Bay, the last source of supply to the castle was closed off as well. “Were they fighting back?” she asked. “The castle folk?”

“Hard to tell, Ma’am.” Weasel couldn’t bring himself to look right at her, but spoke halfway between her and the prince. “We saw a few trails of smoke from the walls but they must have been small-bore guns. Nobody fool enough to be up there making a target of themselves just to shoot a few arrows, that’s certain.”

It was all Briony could manage not to ask questions to which she already knew the answers: if the autarch had so many men and so many weapons, the castle could not hold out for very long. Merolanna, Briony’s own lady’s maids Rose and Moina, Sister Utta, grumpy old Nynor—all of them were in terrible danger.

“We cannot hope to defeat such a force, Prince Eneas,” Helkis said. “The men will follow you anywhere you lead them, but their courage deserves better than a pointless death—even for the honor of ...” he gave Briony a carefully emotionless look,” . . . such a lady.”