(Shadowmarch #2) Shadowplay (12 page)

Dan-Mozan shook his head. “I cannot answer you, my lord. All I can tell you is what I hear, and the whisper is that Sulepis has been assembling a fleet with great speed, as though something has happened which has pushed forward his plans.” He turned to Briony, almost apologetically. “We all know that the Xixians have desired greater conquest on Eion, and that taking Hierosol would let them control all the Osteian Sea and the southern oceans on either side.”

Briony waved away all this detail, angry and intent. “The autarch plans to attack Hierosol? Where my father is?”

“Rumors, only,” said Dan-Mozan. “Do not let yourself be too alarmed, Princess. It is probably only these uncertain times, which tend to set tongues wagging even when there is nothing useful to say.”

“We must go and get my father,” she told Shaso. “If we take ship now we could be there before spring!”

He scowled and shook his head. “You will forgive me for being blunt, Highness, but that is foolishness. What could we do there? Join him in captivity, that is all. No, in fact you would be married by force to Drakava and I would go to the gibbet. There are many in Hierosol who wish me dead, not least of which is my onetime pupil, Dawet.”

“But if the autarch is coming…!”

“If the autarch is coming to Eion, then we have many problems, and your father is only one of them.”

“Please, please, honored guests!” Effir dan-Mozan lifted his hands and clapped. “Have more
gawa,
and we have some very nice almond pastries as well. Do not let yourself be frightened, Princess. These are the merest whispers, as I said, and likely not true.”

“I’m
not
frightened. I’m angry.” But she fell into an unhappy silence as Dan-Mozan’s nephew Talibo returned and served more food and hot drinks. Briony looked at her hands, which she was having trouble keeping decorously still: if the youth was staring at her again, she was not going to give him the satisfaction of noticing.

Shaso, though, watched with a calculating eye as the young man went out again. “Do you think your nephew might have some spare garments he could lend us?” Shaso asked suddenly.

“Garments?” Dan-Mozan raised an eyebrow.

“Rough ones, not fine cloth. Suitable for some hard labor.”

“I do not understand.”

“He looks as though clothing of his might fit the princess. We can roll up the cuffs and sleeves.” He turned to Briony. “We will put that anger of yours to some good work this afternoon.”

“But surely you will come,” Puzzle said. “I asked for you, Matty—I told them you were a poet, a very gifted poet.”

Ordinarily, the chance to perform at table for the masters of Southmarch would have been the first and last thing solicited in Matt Tinwright’s nightly prayers (if he had been the sort of person to pray) but for some reason, he was not so certain he wanted to be known by the Tollys and their friends at court, both old and new. The past tennight things had seemed to change, as though the dark clouds that these days always clung to the city across the bay had drifted over the castle as well.

Perhaps I am too sensitive,
he told himself.
My poet’s nature. The Tollys have done nothing but good in an ill time, surely.
Still, he had begun to hear tales from the kitchen workers and some of the other servitors with whom he shared quarters in the back of the residence that made him uneasy—tales of people disappearing and others being badly beaten or even executed for minor mistakes. One of the kitchen potboys had seen a young page’s fingers cut off at the table by Tolly’s lieutenant Berkan Hood for spilling a cup of wine, and Tinwright knew it was true because he had seen the poor lad being tended in a bed with a bandage over his bloody stumps.

“I…I am not certain I am ready to perform for them myself,” he told Puzzle. “But I will help you. A new song, perhaps?”

“Aye, truly? Something I could dedicate to Lord Tolly…?” As Puzzle paused to consider this and its possible results, Tinwright noticed movement on the wall of the Inner Keep where it passed around Wolfstooth Spire, a short arrow’s flight from the residence garden where he and Puzzle had met to share some cooking wine that Puzzle had filched from the lesser buttery. For a moment he thought it was a phantom, a transparent thing of dark mists, but then he realized that the woman walking atop the wall was wearing veils and a net shawl over her black dress and he knew at once who it was.

“We will talk later, yes?” he said to Puzzle, giving the jester a clap on the back that almost knocked the old man over. “There is something I need to do.”

Tinwright ran across the garden, dodging wandering sheep and goats as though in some village festival game. He knew Puzzle must be staring at his sudden retreat as though he were mad, but if this was madness it was the sweetest kind, the sort that a man could catch and never wish to lose.

He slowed near the armory and wiped the perspiration from his forehead with a sleeve, then straightened his breeches and hose. It was strange: he felt almost a little shamefaced, as though he were betraying his patroness Briony Eddon, but he shrugged the feeling away. Just because he did not wish to recite his poems before the whole of the Tolly contingent did not mean that he had no ambitions whatsoever.

He walked around the base of Wolfstooth Spire and made his way up its outer staircase, so that when he reached the wall he should seem to be encountering her by accident. He was gratified to see she had not continued on, which would have necessitated him trying to hide the fact of walking swiftly after her to catch up. She was leaning on the high top of the outer wall, peering out through a crenellation across the Outer Keep, her weeds fluttering about her.

When he thought he was close enough to be heard above the fluting of the wind, he cleared his throat. “Oh! Your pardon, Lady. I did not know anyone else was walking on the walls. It is something I like to do—to think, to feel the air.” He hoped that sounded sufficiently poetic. The truth was, it was cold and damp here at the edge of the Inner Keep with the bay churning just below them. Were it not for her, he would much rather be under roof and by a fire, with a cup full of something to warm his guts.

She turned toward him and brushed back the veil to stare with cool, gray eyes. Her skin would be pale at the best of times, but here, on this dank, overcast day, with her black clothes and hat, her face almost disappeared except for her eyes and fever-red mouth. “Who are you?”

He suppressed an exultant shout. She had asked his name! “Matthias Tinwright, my lady.” He made his best bow and prepared to kiss her hand, but it did not emerge from the dark folds of her cloak. “A humble poet. I was bard to Princess Briony.” He realized phrasing things that way might seem disloyal, not to mention suggesting he was out of work. “I
am
bard to Princess Briony,” he said, putting on his best, most pious aspect. “Because, with the mercy of Zoria and the Three, she will come back to us.”

An expression he could not read passed across Elan M’Cory’s face as she turned slowly back to the view. Why did she wear those widow’s clothes, when he knew for a fact—he had pursued the question carefully—that she was not married? Was it truly in mourning for Gailon Tolly? They had not even been betrothed, or so at least the servants said. Many of them thought her a little mad, but Tinwright didn’t care. One view of her with her hair hanging copper-brown against her white neck, her large, sad eyes watching nothing as the rest laughed and gibed at one of Puzzle’s entertainments, and he had been smitten.

He hesitated, unsure of whether to go or not.

“A poet,” she said suddenly. “Truly?”

He suppressed a boast and thus surprised himself. “I have long called myself so. Sometimes I doubt my skills.”

She turned again and looked at him with a little more interest. “But surely this is a poet’s world, Master…”

“Tinwright.”

“Master Tinwright. Surely this your time of glory. Legends of the old days walk beneath the sun. Men are killed and no one can say why. Ghosts walk the battlements.” She smiled, but it was not pleasant to see. Tinwright took a step back. “Do you know, I have even heard that mariners have lately returned with tales of a new continent in the west beyond the Smoking Islands, a great, unexplored land full of savages and gold. Think of it! Perhaps there are places where life still runs strong, where people are full of hope.”

“Why should that not be true of this place, Lady Elan? Are we truly so weak and hopeless?”

She laughed, a small sound like scissors cutting string. “This place? Our world is old, Master Tinwright. Old and palsied—doddering, and even the young ones gasping in their cots. The end is coming soon, don’t you think?”

While he was considering what to say to this strange assertion, he heard noises and looked up to see two young women hurrying along the battlements toward them, slipping a little on the wet stones in their haste. He recognized them as Princess Briony’s ladies-in-waiting—the yellow-haired one was Rose or some other such flower name. They looked at Tinwright suspiciously as they approached, and for the first time he wished he was wearing better clothes. Oddly, it had not occurred to him during his conversation with Elan M’Cory.

“Lady Elan,” the dark one cried, “you should not be walking here by yourself! Not after what happened to the princess!’

She laughed. “What, you think someone will climb the wall of the Inner Keep and steal me away? I can promise you, I have nothing to offer any kidnapper.”

Ah, but you are wrong,
thought Tinwright: if Briony Eddon was the bright morning sun, Elan M’Cory was the sullen, alluring moon.
In truth,
he thought, his mind as always leaping to the tropes of myth and story,
the goddess Mesiya must look much like this, so pale and mysterious, she who walks the night sky with her retinue of clouds.

He remembered then that Mesiya was the wife of Erivor and mother of the Eddon family line, or so it was claimed, her wolf their battle-standard. How quickly these poetic thoughts grew muddled…

“Come with us,” the two ladies-in-waiting were saying, tugging gently at the black-clad Elan’s arms. “It is damp here—you will catch your death.”

“Ho!” a voice cried from below, lazy and cheerful. “There you are.”

“Never fear,” Elan M’Cory said, but so quietly that only Tinwright heard her. “It has caught me instead.”

Hendon Tolly stood at the base of the wall on the Inner Keep side, a small crowd of guardsmen in Tolly livery standing near him but at a respectful distance. “Come down, good lady. I have been looking for you.”

“Surely you should go and lie down instead,” said yellow-haired Rose, almost whispering. “Let us take care of you, Lady Elan.”

“No, if my brother-in-law calls me, I must go.” She turned to Tinwright. “It has been good speaking with you, Master Poet. If you think of any answer to my question, I shall be interested to know. It seems to me that things move more quickly toward an ending every day.”

“I am waiting, my lady!” Hendon Tolly seemed full of rich humor, as though at a joke only he understood. “I have things I wish to show you.”

She turned and walked behind the ladies, heading back toward the steps that Tinwright had climbed and the waiting master of Southmarch. Just before she reached them, when Tolly had looked away to talk to his guards, she turned back toward Tinwright for a brief moment. He thought she might nod or give some other sign of farewell, but she only looked at him with an expression as bizarrely full of mixed shame and excitement as a dog who has been caught gorging on the last of the family’s dinner, who knows he will be fiercely beaten but cannot even run.

Matt Tinwright would see that face again and again in nightmares.

Briony wriggled, trying to ease herself. The scarf she had borrowed from one of Idite’s daughters bound her breasts securely, but left an uncomfortable knot in the center of her back.

“Do the clothes fit?” Shaso had put on something similar to the loose homespun garments that one of the servants had brought to Briony. The pants were long; she had rolled them so they would not drag on the floor and trip her, but she was pleased to find that the rough shirt, though large, was not so big as to hinder her movements.

“Well enough, I suppose,” she said. “Why am I wearing them?”

“Because you are going to learn something new.” He was holding a bundle wrapped in oiled cloth, which he tucked under his arm, then led her down the hall and out to the courtyard. The rain had stopped but the sky was still heavy with dark clouds and the stones of the courtyard were wet. He gestured for her to sit down on the edge of the stone planter that housed the courtyard’s lone quince tree, bare now except for the last few shriveled fruits the birds had not taken. “That should be dry.”

“What am I going to learn?”

He scowled. “The first thing you must learn, like all Eddons, is to be patient. You are better at it than your brother—but not much.” He raised his hand. “No, do not think of him. I shouldn’t have spoken of him. We must pray that he is safe.”

She nodded, willing her eyes to stay dry.
Poor Barrick! Zoria, watch over his every moment. Put your shield above him, wherever he is.

“I would not have chosen to teach you swordplay, had you not wished it and your father not have given in to your whim.” Shaso held up his hand again. “Remember—patience! But I have, and you have learned to fight well, for a woman. It is not the nature of women to fight, after all.”

Again she started to speak, but she knew the look in the old man’s eyes and did not have the strength for another argument. She closed her mouth.

“But whatever happens in the days to come, I think you will not be carrying a sword. You will not need one here, and if we leave this place we will go in secret.” He placed his bundle down on the ground beside him, put his hand in and pulled out a wooden dowel that was only a little shorter than Briony’s forearm. “I have taught you something of how to use a poniard, but primarily how to use it in combination with a sword. So now I am going to teach you how a Tuani fights
without
a sword. Stand up.” He took the dowel in his fist. “Pretend this is a knife. Protect yourself.”