(Shadowmarch #1) Shadowmarch (9 page)

The boy shook his head again.

As they made their way down from the hilly farmlands into the mainland town, they found wide Market Road lined with people, almost entirely big folk. For a moment Chert wondered why so many people had come out of their houses and shops to stare curiously at two Funderlings and a ragged, white-haired boy, then realized that the royal family’s hunting party must have passed just ahead of them. The crowd was beginning to disperse now, the hawkers desperately reducing the prices of their chestnuts and fried breads, fighting over the few remaining customers. He heard murmurs about the size of something the hunters had caught and paraded past, and other descriptions—scales? teeth?—that made little sense unless they had been hunting something other than deer. The people seemed a little dispirited, even unhappy. Chert hoped the princess and her sullen brother were safe—he had thought she had kind eyes. But if something had happened to them, he reasoned, surely folk would be talking about it.

It took the best part of the fading afternoon to make their way through the city to the shore, but they arrived at the near end of the causeway with a little time to spare before the rising tide would turn Midlan’s Mount back into an island.

The causeway between the shore and the castle on the Mount was little more than a broad road of piled stones, most of which would vanish under the high tide, but the place where it met the docks outside the castle gate had been built up by generations of fishermen and peddlers until what hung over the water there was nearly a small town in itself, a sort of permanent fairground on the wind-lashed doorstep of Midlan’s Mount. As the Funderling, his wife, and their new guest trudged across the piers and wooden platforms filled with flimsy, close-leaning buildings whose floors stood only a few cubits above the reach of high tide, dodging wagons and heavily laden foot-peddlers hurrying to cross back over the causeway before nightfall, Chert looked out through a crack between two rickety shops, across the mouth of Brenn’s Bay to the ocean. Despite the last of the bright afternoon sun there were clouds spread thick and dark along the horizon, and Chert suddenly remembered the shocking thing that the arrival of the riders and the mysterious boy had driven from his mind.

The Shadowline! Someone must be told that it’s moved.
He would have liked to think that the king’s family up in the castle already knew, that they had taken all the facts into careful consideration and decided that it meant nothing, that all was still well, but he couldn’t quite make himself believe it.

Someone must be told.
The thought of going up to the castle himself was daunting, although he had been inside the keep several times as part of Funderling work gangs, and had even led a few, working directly with Lord Nynor, the castellan—or with his factor, in any case. But to go by himself, as though he were a man of importance . . .

But if the big folk do not know, someone must tell them. And perhaps there will even be some reward in it—enough to buy Opal that new shawl, if nothing else. Or at least to pay for what this young creature will eat when Opal gets him home.

He regarded the boy for a moment, horrified by the sudden realization that Opal might very well intend to keep him. A childless woman, he thought, was as unpredictable as a loose seam in a bed of sandstone.

Hold now, one thing at a time.
Chert watched the clouds hurrying across the ocean, their black expanse making the mighty towers suddenly seem fragile, delicate as pastry. Someone needed to tell the king’s people about the Shadowline, there was no arguing it.
If I go to the Guild, there will be days of argument, then Cinnabar or puffed-up Young Pyrite will be appointed messenger and I will get no reward.

Nor will you get the punishment if you’re wrong,
he reminded himself.

For some reason he again saw before his mind’s eye the young princess and her brother, Briony’s frightened gaze when she thought she had run him down, the prince’s face as troubled and impersonal as the sky out beyond the Mount, and he felt a sudden warmth that almost, if it had not been so ridiculous, felt like loyalty.

They need to know,
he decided, and suddenly the idea of what might be coming closer behind that line of moving darkness pushed anything so abstract as the good graces of the royal family from his mind. There was another way to pass the news, and he would use it.
Everyone needs to know.

Although his horse was dead, left behind for three servants to bury on the hillside where the wyvern had died, Prince Kendrick himself had suffered little more than bruises and a few burns from the creature’s venomous froth. Of all the company he was the only one who seemed in good cheer as they made their way back toward the castle, the huge corpse of the wyvern coiled on an open wagon for the amazement of the populace. Market Road was crowded with people, hundreds and hundreds waiting to see the prince regent and his hunting party. Hawkers, tumblers, musicians, and pickpockets had turned out too, hoping to earn a few small coins out of the spontaneous street fair, but Briony thought most of the people seemed glum and worried. Not much money was changing hands, and those nearest the road watched the nobles go by with hungry eyes, saying little, although a few called out cheers and blessings to the royal family, especially on behalf of the absent King Olin. Kendrick had been splashed in blood from head to foot; even after he had washed and then rubbed himself with rags and soothing leaves, much of him was still stained a deep red. Despite the itch where the wyvern’s spittle burned him, he made it a point to wave and smile to the citizens crowded in the shadows of the tall houses along the Market Road, showing them that the blood was not his own.

Briony felt as though she, too, were covered with some painful substance she could not shake off. Her twin Barrick was so miserable about his clumsy failure even to raise his spear properly that he had not spoken a word to her or anyone else on the ride home. Earl Tyne and others were whispering among themselves, no doubt unhappy that the foreigner Shaso had stolen their sport by killing the wyvern with an arrow. Tyne Aldritch was one of that school of nobles who believed that archery was a practice fit only for peasants and poachers, an activity whose primary result was to steal the glory from mounted knights in war. Only because the master of arms might have saved the lives of the young prince and princess was the hunters’ unhappiness muttered instead of proclaimed aloud.

And more than a dozen of the dogs, including sweet Dado, a brachet who in her first months of life had slept in Briony’s bed, lay cold and still on the leafy hillside beside Kendrick’s horse, waiting to be buried in the same pit.

I wish we’d never come.
She looked up to the pall of clouds in the northeastern sky. It was as though some foreboding thing hung over the whole day, a crow’s wing, an owl’s shadow. She would go home and light a candle at Zoria’s altar, ask the virgin goddess to send the Eddons her healing grace.
I wish they’d just gone out and killed that creature with arrows in the first place. Then Dado would be alive. Then Barrick wouldn’t be trying so hard not to cry that his face has turned to stone.

“Why the grim look, little sister?” Kendrick demanded. “It is a beautiful day and summer has not entirely left us yet.” He laughed. “Look at the clothes I have ruined! My best riding jacket. Merolanna will skin me.”

Briony managed a tiny smile. It was true—she could already hear what their great-aunt would have to say, and not just about the jacket. Merolanna had a tongue that everyone in the castle, except perhaps Shaso, feared, and Briony would have given odds that the old Tuani only hid his terror better than others did. “I just . . . I don’t know.” She looked around to make sure that her black-clad twin was still a few dozen paces behind them. “I fear for Barrick,” she said quietly. “He is so angry of late. Today has only made it worse.”

Kendrick scratched his scalp, smearing himself anew with drying blood. “He needs toughening, little sister. People lose hands, legs, but they continue with their lives, thanking the gods they have not suffered worse. It does no good for him to be always brooding over his injuries. And he spends too much time with Shaso—the stiffest neck and coldest heart in all the marchlands.”

Briony shook her head. Kendrick had never understood Barrick, although that had not kept him from loving his younger brother. And he didn’t understand Shaso very well either, although the old man was indeed stiff and stubborn. “It’s more than that . . .”

She was interrupted by Gailon Tolly riding back down the road toward them, followed by his personal retinue, the Summerfield boar on their green-and-gold livery brighter than the dull sky. “Highness! A ship has come in from the south!”

Briony’s chest tightened. “Oh, Kendrick, do you think it’s something about Father?”

The Duke of Summerfield looked at her tolerantly, as though she might have been his own young and slightly sheltered sister. “It is a carrack—the
Podensis
out of Hierosol,” he told the prince regent, “and it is said there is an envoy on board sent from Ludis with news of King Olin.”

Without realizing it, Briony had reached out and grabbed at Kendrick’s red-smeared arm. Her horse bumped flanks with her brother’s mount. “Pray all heaven, he is not hurt, is he?” she asked Gailon, unable to keep the terror from her voice. The cold shadow she had felt all day seemed to draw closer. “The king is well?”

Summerfield nodded. “I am told the man says your father continues unharmed, and that he brings a letter from him, among other things.”

“Oh, the gods are good,” Briony murmured.

Kendrick frowned. “But why has Ludis sent this envoy? That bandit who calls himself Protector of Hierosol can’t think we have found all the ransom for the king yet. A hundred thousand gold dolphins! It will take us at least the rest of the year to raise it—we have dragged every last copper out of the temples and merchant houses, and the peasants are already groaning under the new taxes.”

“Peasants always groan, my lord,” said Gailon. “They are as lazy as old donkeys—they must be whipped to work.”

“Perhaps the envoy from Hierosol saw all these nobles in their fine clothes, out hunting,” Barrick suggested sourly. None of them had noticed him riding closer. “Perhaps he has decided that if we can afford such expensive amusements, we must have found the money.”

The Duke of Summerfield looked at Barrick with in-comprehension. Kendrick rolled his eyes, but otherwise ignored his younger brother’s gibe, saying, “It must be something important that brings him. Nobody sails all the way from Hierosol to carry a letter from a prisoner, even a royal prisoner.”

The duke shrugged. “The envoy asks for an audience tomorrow.” He looked around and spotted Shaso riding some distance back, but lowered his voice anyway. “And another thing. He is as black as a crow.”

“What has Shaso’s skin to do with anything?” Kendrick demanded, irritated.

“No, the envoy, Highness. The envoy from Hierosol.”

Kendrick frowned. “That is a strange thing.”

“The whole of it is strange,” said Gailon of Summerfield. “Or so I hear.”

If the nameless boy had seemed disturbed by his first glimpse of the castle, he appeared positively terrified by the Basilisk Gate in the castle’s massive outwall. Chert, who had been in and out of it so many times he had lost count, allowed himself to see it now with a stranger’s eyes. The granite facing four times a man’s height—and many more times Chert’s own small stature—was carved in the likeness of a glowering reptilian creature whose twining coils surmounted the top of the gate and looped down on either side. The monster’s head jutted out above the vast oak-and-iron doors, its staring eyes and toothy mouth dressed with thin slabs of gemstone and ivory, its scales edged with gold. In the Funderling guilds, if not among the big folk, it was common knowledge that the gate had been here far longer than the human inhabitants.