(Shadowmarch #1) Shadowmarch (6 page)

“Slipping back from the edge a wee bit, then coming up to it again, like the tide,” he whispered. “Like something breathing in and out. That is why we find things here, when the line has drifted back toward the shadowlands.” He could feel a heaviness to the air unusual even for this haunted place, a heightened watchfulness: it made him feel reluctant even to speak. “But from the moment two centuries ago when the Twilight People first conjured it up, it’s never moved any closer to us, Opal. Until now.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s come
forward
.” He didn’t want to believe it but he had spent as much time in these hills as anyone. “Like floodwaters coming over the banks. At least a dozen paces ahead of where I’ve ever seen it.”

“Is that all?”

“Is that all? Woman, the Twilight People made that line to keep men out of the shadowlands. No one crosses it and returns, not that I’ve ever heard of. And before today, it hasn’t moved an inch closer to the castle in two hundred years!” He was breathless, dizzy with it. “I have to tell someone.”

“You? Why should you be the one to get tangled up with this, old man? Aren’t there big-folk guards that watch the Shadowline?”

He waved his hands in exasperation. “Yes, and you saw them when we went past their post-house, although they didn’t see us, or didn’t care. They might as well be guarding the moon! They pay no heed to anything, and the task is given to the youngest and greenest of the soldiers. Nothing has changed on this foggy border in so long they don’t even believe anything
could
change.” He shook his head, suddenly troubled by a low noise at the edge of his hearing, a tremble of air. Distant thunder? “I can barely believe it myself, and I have walked these hills for years.” The dim rumbling was growing louder and Chert finally realized it wasn’t thunder. “Fissure and fracture!” he swore. “Those are horses coming toward us!”

“The hunt?” she asked. The damp hillside and close-leaning trees seemed capable of hiding anything. “You said the hunt was out today.”

“It’s not coming from that direction—and they would never come so far this direction, so near to . . .” His heart stumbled in his chest. “Gods of raw earth—it’s coming from the shadowlands!”

He grabbed his wife’s hand and yanked her stumbling along the hill away from the misty boundary, short legs digging, feet slipping on the wet grass as they scrambled for the shelter of the trees. The noise of hooves seemed impossibly loud now, as though it were right on top of the staggering Funderlings.

Chert and Opal reached the trees and threw themselves down into the scratching underbrush. Chert grabbed his wife close and peered out at the hillside as four riders erupted from the mist and reined in their stamping white mounts. The animals, tall and lean and not quite like any horses Chert had ever seen, blinked as though unused to even such occluded sunlight. He could not see the faces of the riders, who wore hooded cloaks that at first seemed dark gray or even black, but which had the flickering sheen of an oily puddle, yet they too seemed startled by the brightness of this new place. A tongue of mist curled about the horses’ feet, as though their shadowy land would not entirely let them go.

One of the riders slowly turned toward the trees where the two Funderlings lay hidden, a glint of eyes in the depths of the shadowed hood the only indication it was not empty. For a long moment the rider only stared, or perhaps listened, and although Chert’s every fiber told him to leap to his feet and run, he lay as still as he could, clutching Opal so tightly that he could feel her silently struggling to break his painful grip.

At last the hooded figure turned away. One of its fellows lifted something from the back of its saddle and dropped it to the ground. The riders lingered for a moment longer, staring across the valley at the distant towers of Southmarch Castle. Then, without a sound, they wheeled and rode their ghostwhite horses back into the ragged wall of mist.

Chert still waited a dozen frightened heartbeats before he let go of his wife.

“You’ve crushed my innards, you old fool,” she moaned, climbing up onto hands and knees. “Who was it? I couldn’t see.”

“I . . . I don’t know.” It had happened so quickly that it almost seemed a dream. He got up, feeling the ache of their clumsy, panicked flight begin to throb in all his joints. “They just rode out, then turned around and rode back . . .” He stopped, staring at the dark bundle the riders had dropped. It was moving.

“Chert, where are you going?”

He didn’t intend to touch it, of course—no Funderling was such a fool, to snatch up something that even those beyond the Shadowline did not want. As he moved closer, he could not help noticing that the large sack was making small, frightened noises.

“There’s something in it,” he called to Opal.

“There’s something in lots of things,” she said, coming grimly after him. “But not much between your ears. Leave it alone and come away, you. No good can come of it.”

“It’s . . . it’s alive.” A thought had come into his head. It was a goblin, or some other magical creature banished from the lands beyond. Goblins were wish-granters, that was what the old tales said. And if he freed it, would it not give those wishes to him? A new shawl . . . ? Opal could have a queen’s closet full of clothes if she wished. Or the goblin might lead him to a vein of firegold and the masters of the Funderling guilds would soon be coming to Chert’s house with caps in hands, begging his assistance. Even his own so-proud brother . . .

The sack thrashed and tipped over. Something inside it snarled.

Of course,
he thought,
there could be a reason they took it across the Shadowline and tossed it away like bones on a midden. It could be something extremely unpleasant.

An even stranger sound came from the sack.

“Oh, Chert.” His wife’s voice was now quite different. “There’s a child in there! Listen—it’s crying!”

He still did not move. Everyone knew there were sprites and bogles even on this side of the Shadowline that could mimic the voices of loved ones in order to lure travelers off the path to certain doom. Why expect better of something that actually came from inside the twilight country?

“Aren’t you going to do anything?”

“Do what? Any kind of demon could be in there, woman.”

“That’s no demon, that’s a child—and if you’re too frightened to let it out, Chert of the Blue Quartz, I will.”

He knew that tone all too well. He muttered a prayer to the gods of deep places, then advanced on the sack as though it were a coiled viper, stepping carefully so that in its thrashing it would not roll against him and, perhaps, bite. The sack was held shut with a knot of some gray rope. He touched it carefully and found the cord slippery as polished soapstone.

“Hurry up, old man!”

He glared at her, then began cautiously to unpick the knot, wishing he had brought something with him sharper than his old knife, dulled by digging out stones. Despite the cool, foggy air, sweat had beaded on his forehead by the time he was able to tease the knot apart. The sack had lain still and silent for some time. He wondered, half hoping it was so, whether the thing inside might have suffocated.

“What’s in there?” his wife called, but before he had time to explain that he hadn’t even opened the cursed thing, something shot out of the heavy sack like a stone from the mouth of a culverin and knocked him onto his back.

Chert tried to shout, but the thing had his neck gripped in clammy hands and was trying to bite his chest through his thick jerkin. He was so busy fighting for his life that he couldn’t even make out the shape of his attacker until a third body entered the fray and dragged the clutching, strangling monstrosity off him and they all tumbled into a pile.

“Are you . . . hurt . . . ?” Opal gasped.

“Where is that thing?” Chert rolled over into a sitting position. The sack’s contents were crouching a short distance away, staring at him with squinting blue eyes. It was a slender-limbed boy, a child of perhaps five or six years, sweaty and disheveled, with deathly pale skin and hair that was almost white, as though he had been inside the sack for years.

Opal sat up. “A child! I told you.” She looked at the boy for a moment. “One of the big folk, poor thing.”

“Poor thing, indeed!” Chert gently touched the scraped places on his neck and cheeks. “The little beast tried to murder me.”

“Oh, be still. You startled him, that’s all.” She held out her hand toward the boy. “Come here—I won’t hurt you. What’s your name, child?” When the boy did not reply, she fumbled in the wide pockets of her dress and withdrew a heel of brown bread. “Are you hungry?”

From the fierce glint in his eye, the boy was clearly very interested, but he still did not move toward her. Opal leaned forward and set the bread on the grass. He looked at it and her, then snatched the bread up, sniffed it, and crammed it into his mouth, scarcely bothering to chew before swallowing. Finished, the boy looked at Opal with fierce expectancy. She laughed in a worried way and felt in her pocket until she located a few pieces of dried fruit, which she also set on the grass. They disappeared even faster than the bread.

“What’s your name?” she asked the boy. “Where are you from?”

Searching his teeth with his tongue for any fragments of food that might have escaped him, he only looked at her.

“Dumb, it seems,” said Chert. “Or at least he doesn’t speak our . . .”

“Where is this?” the boy asked.

“Where . . . what do you mean?” said Chert, startled.

“Where is this . . . ?” The boy swept his arm in a circle, taking in the trees, the grassy hillside, the fogbound forest. “This . . . place. Where are we?” He sounded older than his age somehow, but younger, too, as though speaking were a new thing to him.

“We are on the edge of Southmarch—called Shadowmarch by some, because of this Shadowline.” Chert gestured toward the misty boundary, then swung himself around to point in the opposite direction. “The castle is over there.”

“Shadow . . . line?” The boy squinted. “Castle?”

“He needs more food.” Opal’s words had the sound of an inarguable decision rendered. “And sleep. You can see he’s nearly falling over.”

“Which means what?” But Chert already saw the shape of it and did not like it much at all.

“Which means we take him home, of course.” Opal stood, brushing the loose grass from her dress. “We feed him.”

“But . . . but he must belong to someone! To one of the big-folk families!”

“And they tied him in a sack and left him here?” Opal laughed scornfully. “Then they are likely not pining for his return.”

“But he came . . . he came from . . .” Chert looked at the boy, who was sucking his fingers and examining the landscape. He lowered his voice. “He came from the
other side.
”

“He’s here now,” Opal said. “Look at him. Do you really think he’s some unnatural thing? He’s a little boy who wandered into the twilight and was tossed out again. Surely we, of all people, should know better than to believe everything that has to do with the Shadowline is wicked. Does this mean you plan to throw back the gems you’ve found here, too? No, he probably comes from some other place along the boundary—somewhere leagues and leagues away! Should we leave him here to starve?” She patted her thigh, then beckoned. “Come along with us, child. We’ll take you home and feed you properly.”

Before Chert could make further objection Opal set off, stumping back along the hillside toward the distant castle, the hem of her old dress trailing in the wet grass. The boy paused only to glance at Chert—a look the little man first thought was threatening, then decided might be as much fear as bravado—before following after her.

“No good will come of it,” Chert said, but quietly, already resigned through long experiece to whatever complex doom the gods had planned for him. In any case, better some angry gods than an angry Opal. He didn’t have to share a small house with the gods, who had their own vast and hidden places. He sighed and fell into step behind his wife and the boy.

The wyvern had been brought to bay in another copse of trees, a dense circle of rowans carpeted with bracken. Even through the milling ring of hounds, wild with excitement but still cautious enough to keep their distance, perhaps put off by the unusual smell or strange slithering movements of their quarry, Briony could see the length of the thing as it moved restlessly from one side of the copse to the other, its bright scales glimmering in the shadows like a brushfire.

“Cowardly beasts, dogs,” said Barrick. “They are fifty to one but still hold back.”

“They are not cowards!” Briony resisted the urge to push him off his horse. He was looking even more drawn and pale, and had tucked his left arm inside his cloak as though to protect it from chill, though the afternoon air was still sun-warmed. “The scent is strange to them!”

Barrick frowned. “There are too many things coming across the Shadowline these days. Just back in the spring there were those birds with the iron beaks that killed a shepherd at Landsend. And the dead giant in Daler’s Troth . . .”