(Shadowmarch #2) Shadowplay (16 page)

He took a deep breath to try to slow his beating heart. Perhaps it was only Chaven’s own servants after all. Perhaps…

“I promise you, Lord Tolly, there is nothing else here of value at all.”
The reedy voice wafted down the stairwell, close enough to keep Chert stock-still, holding the last breath he took as if it must last him forever. To his horror, he saw Chaven’s eyes go wide with that mindless, inexplicable rage he had shown earlier, even saw the physician make a twitching move toward the staircase itself. Chert shot out his hand and clung as if his fingers were curled on scaffolding while he dangled over a deadly drop.

The other’s voice was lazy, but with a suggestion somehow that it could turn cruel as quick as an adder’s strike.
“Is that true, brother, or are there things here that you think might not be of value to me, but which you might quite like for yourself?”

Confused, Chert guessed that Hendon Tolly and his brother, the new Duke of Summerfield, stood in the hallway above them. He could not understand the expression of heedless fury on Chaven’s face. Earth Elders, didn’t he realize that the Tollys owned not just the castle now but had become the unquestioned rulers of all Southmarch? That with a word these men could have Chaven and Chert skinned in Market Square in front of a whooping, applauding crowd?

“I tell you, Lord, you already have the one piece of true value. I promise that eventually I will winkle out its secrets, but at the moment there is something missing, some element I have not discovered, and it is not in this house…”
The man’s thin voice suddenly grew sharp, high-pitched.
“Ah, keep that away from me!”

“It is only a cat,”
said the one he had called Lord Tolly.

“I hate the things. They are tools of Zmeos. There, it runs away. Good.”
When he spoke again his voice had regained its earlier calm.
“As I said, there is nothing in this house that will solve the puzzle—I swear that to you, my lord.”

“But you will solve it,”
the other said.
“You will.”

Fear was in the first one’s voice again, not well hidden.
“Of course, Lord. Have I not served you well and faithfully for years?”

“I suppose you have. Come, let us lock this place up and you can go back to your necromancy.”

“I think it would be more accurate to call it captromancy, my lord.”
The speaker had recovered his nerve a bit. Chert was beginning to think he had guessed wrong—that one of these was a Tolly, but not both.
“Necromancers raise the dead. It is captromancers who use mirrors in their art.”

“Perhaps a little of both, then, eh?”
said his master jauntily as their voices dwindled.
“Ah, what a fascinating world we are making…!”

When the two were gone and the house was silent Chert could finally breathe freely, and found he was trembling all over, as if he had narrowly avoided a fatal tumble. “Who were those two men?”

“Hendon Tolly, to give one of the dogs a name,” the physician snarled. “The other is the vilest traitor who ever lived—an even filthier cur than Hendon—a man who I thought was my friend, but who has been the Tollys’ lapdog all along, it seems. If I had his throat in my hands…”

“What are you talking about?”

“Talking about? He has stolen my dearest possession!” Chaven’s eyes were still wide, and it occurred to Chert it was not too late for the royal physician to go dashing out into Southmarch Keep and get them both killed. He grabbed Chaven’s robe again.

“What? What did he steal? Who was that?”

Chaven shook his head, tears welling in his eyes again. “No. I cannot tell you. I am shamed by my weakness.” He turned to stare at Chert, desperate, imploring. “Tolly called him brother because the man who helped him pillage my secrets is one of the brothers of the Eastmarch Academy. Okros, Brother Okros—a man who I have trusted as if he were my own family.”

Chert had never seen the physician so helpless, so defeated, so…empty.

Chaven put his head on his arms, sagged as if he would never rise again. “Oh, by all the gods, I should have known! Growing to manhood in a family like mine, I should have known that trust is for fools and weaklings.”

“Are you mad?” Teloni could not have been more astonished if her younger sister had suggested jumping off the harbor wall into the ocean. “He is a prisoner! And he is a man!”

“But look at him—he is always here and he seems so sad.” Pelaya Akuanis had seen the prisoner a half-dozen times, and always the older man sat on the stone bench as quietly as if he listened to music, but of course there was no music, only the noises of birds and the distant boom and shush of the sea. “I am going to talk to him.”

“The guards won’t let you,” one of the other girls warned, but Pelaya ignored her. She got up and smoothed her dress before walking across the garden toward the bench. Two of the guards stood, but after looking at her carefully one guard leaned back against the wall again; the other moved exactly one step closer to the bearded man they were guarding, which was apparently the solution to some odd little inner mechanics of responsibility. Then the two guards resumed their whispered conversation. Pelaya wished she looked more like the dangerous type who might free a prisoner, but the guards had judged her correctly—talking to him with her friends and the man’s guards around her on all sides was quite enough of an adventure, however she might like to act otherwise.

As she reached him the man looked up at her, his face so empty of emotion that she was positive she could have been a beetle or a leaf for all he cared. She suddenly realized she had nothing to say. Pelaya would have turned and walked away again except that she could not bear to see Teloni give her one of those amused, superior looks.

She swayed a little, trying to think of how to begin, and he only watched her. For a moment the garden seemed very silent. He was at least her father’s age, perhaps older, with long reddish-brown hair and beard, both shot with gray and a few curling wisps of pure white. Even as she examined him he was surveying her in turn, and his calm gaze unnerved her. “Who are you?” she said, blurting it out so that it sounded like a challenge. She could feel the blood rising in her cheeks and had to fight hard once more against the urge to flee.

“Ah, my good young mistress, but it is you who approached me,” he said sternly. He sounded serious, and his face looked serious too, but something in the way he spoke made her think he might be mocking her. “You must name yourself. Have you never been told any stories, have you read no books on polite discourse? Names are important, you see. However, once given, they can never be taken back.” He spoke the Hierosoline tongue with a strange accent, harsh but somehow musical.

“But I think I know yours,” she said. “You are King Olin of Southmarch.”

“Ah, you are only half right.” He frowned, as though thinking hard about his words, then nodded slowly. “It seems that, in fairness, you must tell me half of your name.”

“Pelaya!” her sister called, a strangled moan of embarrassment.

“Ah,” said the prisoner. “And now I have received my due, will you, nill you.”

“That wasn’t fair. She told you.”

“I was not aware we were involved in a contest. Hmmm—interesting.” Something moved across his lips, fleeting as a shadow—a smile? “As I said, names are very important things. Very well, I will do my best to guess the other name without help from any of the bystanders. Pelaya, are you? A fair name. It means ‘ocean.’”

“I know.” She took a step back. “You are playing for time. You cannot guess.”

“Ah, but I can. Let me consider what I know already.” He stroked his beard, the very picture of a philosopher from the Sacred Trigon Academy. “You are here, that is the first thing to be pondered. Not everyone is allowed into this inner garden—I myself have only recently been granted the privilege. You are well dressed, in silk and a fine lace collar, so I feel rather certain you are not one of the pastry-makers gathering mint or a chambermaid on your way to air the linens. If you
are
either of those you are shirking your chores most unconscionably, but to me you do not have the face of a true idler.”

She laughed despite herself. He was talking nonsense, she knew, amusing himself and her, but also there was more to it. He was showing her how he would think about things if he truly meant to solve a problem. “So, we must assume you are one of the ladies of the castle, and in fact I see that you have brought with you a formidable retinue.” He gestured to Teloni and the others, who watched her with wide eyes, as though Pelaya had clambered down into a wolf’s den. “One of them addressed you by first name, which suggests a familiarity a lady might show to one of her maids or other friends, but since there is a sameness to your features—yours are a bit finer, more delicate, but I hope you will keep that as our secret—I would guess that the two of you are related. Sisters?”

She looked at him sternly. She was not going to be so easily tricked into helping him.

“Well, then I will declare it so for the sake of my argument. Sisters. Now, I know well that my captor, the lord protector, has no declared offspring. Some might say he was the better for that—they can be difficult creatures, children—but I am not one of them. However much I pity his childlessness, though, I cannot make him your father, no matter how I puzzle the facts, so I must look elsewhere. Of his chief ministers, some are too dark or too pale of skin, some too old, and some too much inclined otherwise to be the fathers of handsome young women like your sister and yourself, so I must narrow my guesses to those whom I know to have children. I have been here more than half a year, so I have learned a little.” He smiled. “In fact, I see now that your companions are waving for you in earnest, and I must cut to the bone of the matter before they drag you away. My best guess is that your father is this castle’s steward, Count Perivos Akuanis, and that you are his younger daughter, while the dark-haired girl there is his older daughter, Teloni.”

She glared at him. “You knew it all along.”

“No, I must sincerely protest that I did not, although it has become clear to me as we talked. I think I may have seen you once with your father, but I have only now remembered.”

“I’m not certain I believe you.”

“I would not lie to a young woman named after the sea. The sea god is my family’s patron, and the sea itself has become very precious to me these days. From one corner of my room in the tower, if I bend down just so, I can see it at the edge of a window. Of such things are hearts made strong enough to last.” He tipped his head, almost a bow. “And, the truth is, you remind me of my own daughter, who also has a weakness for old dogs and useless strays, although I think you are a few years younger.” Now his face became a little strange, as though a sudden pain had bitten at him but he was determined not to show it. “But children change so quickly—here and then gone. Everything changes.” For a moment whatever pained him seemed to take his breath away. It was a long time before he spoke again. “And how many years have you, Lady Pelaya?”

“I am twelve. I will be married next year or the year after, they say, after my sister Teloni is married.”

“I wish you much happiness, now and later. Your friends look as though they are about to call for the lord protector to come rescue you. Perhaps you should go.”

She began to turn, then stopped. “When I said you were King Olin of Southmarch, why did you say I was only half right? Isn’t that who you are? Everyone knows about you.”

“I am Olin of Southmarch, but no man is king when he is another man’s prisoner.” Even the sad, tired smile did not make an appearance this time. “Go on, young Pelaya of the Ocean. The others are waiting. The grace of Zoria on you—it has been a pleasure to speak with you.”

Leaving the courtyard garden, the other girls surrounded Pelaya as though she were a deserter being dragged back to justice. She stole one look back but the man was staring at nothing again—watching clouds, perhaps, or the endless procession of waves in the strait: there was little else he could see from the high-walled garden.

“You should not have spoken to him,” Teloni said. “He is a prisoner—a foreigner! Father will be furious.”

“Yes.” Pelaya felt sad, but also different—strange, as though she had learned something talking to the prisoner, something that had changed her, although she could not imagine what that might be. “Yes, I expect he will.”

B
ARRICK EDDON WOKE UP in the grip of utter terror, feeling as though his heart might crack like an egg. He could smell something burning, but the world was cold and astonishingly dark. For long moments he had no idea of where he was. Out of doors, yes—the rustle and creak of trees in the wind was unmistakable…

He was behind the Shadowline, of course.

Barrick felt as though he had just awakened from a long, bizarre dream—a feeling he knew all too well—but the waking was not much more reassuring than the dream. The endless twilight of these lands had actually ended, but only because the sky had turned black—and not just night-dark, but empty of stars, too, as though some angry god had thrown a cloak over all of creation. Had it not been for the last of the coals still glowing in the stone fire circle, the darkness would have been complete. And that terrible, acrid smell…

Smoke. Gyir said it was the smoke from some huge fire, filling the sky, killing the light.
Barrick’s eyes had stung for most of a day, he remembered now, and they had been forced to stop riding because he and Vansen the guard captain had trouble breathing.

Barrick crawled to the fire and poked the embers. Vansen was asleep with his mouth open, wearing his arming-cap against the chill. Why was the man still here? Why hadn’t he turned and ridden back to Southmarch as any sane person would have done? Instead, here he lay beside his new friend, that ugly, splotch-feathered raven (which was sleeping too, apparently, its head under its wing). Barrick disliked the raven intensely, although he could not say why.

When he looked at Gyir Barrick’s heart sped again, even as his stomach seemed to twist inside him. By all the gods, the fairy was a horror! He dimly remembered a feeling of friendship, of
kinship
even, between himself and this faceless abomination that had led an army of other monsters into the lands of real people, to burn and to kill. How could such madness be? And now he was virtually this creature’s prisoner, being led toward the gods only knew what kind of horrible fate!

Barrick looked to the place the horses stood, mostly in shadow, Vansen’s slumbering mount and the restless bulk of the Twilight horse which had somehow become Barrick’s own, although he did not remember it happening.
I could be in the saddle and riding away in an instant,
he realized. Should he wake Vansen? Did he dare risk the time? Barrick’s hand slid across the ground until it closed on the pommel of his falchion. Even better: he could have the long, sharp edge on the Gyir-reature’s throat just as quickly.

But even as the fingers of Barrick’s good hand closed around the corded hilt, Gyir’s eyes flickered open and fixed on him just as if the fairy-man had smelled something of the prince’s murderous thoughts. Gyir stared hard and knowingly at him for a moment, his pupils round and black in the dim light, but then he closed his eyes again as if to say,
Do what you will.

Barrick hesitated. The loathing itself now seemed alien, just another unlikely feeling to grip him.
My blood, my thoughts—they turn and change like the wind!
He had always been moody and had often feared for his sanity, but now he felt a terror that he might lose his very self.
Father said own malady was better once he left the castle. For a while mine seemed the same, but now it is back and stronger than ever.

Barrick tried to order his thoughts as his father had taught him, and could not help wishing he had spent more time listening and less sulking when the king spoke. He was trapped in a place where errors could kill him. How could he decide what was real and what was not? Only hours before he had thought of the faceless man as an ally, perhaps even a friend. Moments ago he had seemed an utter monster instead. Was Gyir really such a threat, or was he simply a warrior who served a foreign master?

Not master—mistress,
Barrick reminded himself. And suddenly, as though everything had been tilting and threatening to tumble because of a single missing support, he saw the warrior-woman again in his mind’s eye and his thoughts grew more stable. Gyir the Storm Lantern was not a monster, but not his friend, either. Barrick could not afford to trust so much. The Qar woman, the Lady Yasammez, had held him with her bottomless stare and had told him amazing things, although he could remember very few of them now. What had she said that had sent him so boldly across the Shadowline? Or had it been something else, not ideas but a spell to enslave him?
She told me of great lands I had never seen, the lands of the People, as she called them—of mountains taller than the clouds, and the black sea, and forests older than Time, and…and…

But there had been more, and it was the
more
that he knew had been important.
She said she was sending me as a…a gift?
A gift? How could he be a gift, unless the Qar ate humans?
She sent me to…Saqri,
he remembered,
that was the name
. Someone of importance and power named Saqri, who had been sleeping but would awaken soon into a world that had moved farther into defeat. Whatever
that
might mean. Like any dream, it had begun to fade. Except for the fairy-woman’s eyes, her predatory eyes, watchful and knowing, bright as a hunting hawk’s, but with ageless depths—what he might have imagined the eyes of a goddess to look like, when he had still believed in such things.

But if I don’t believe in the gods and their stories,
he asked himself,
then what is all this around me? What has happened to me if I haven’t been god-struck like the ones in the old stories, like Iaris and Zakkas and the rest of the oracles? Like Soteros who flew up to the palace of Perin on top of Mount Xandos and saw the gods in their home?

Barrick realized that he had found, if not answers, a kind of peace with his predicament. Reasoning in the way his father would have had helped him. He looked at Gyir now and saw something fearful but not terrifying, a creature both like and unlike himself. They had spoken with their minds and hearts. He had felt the faceless Qar’s angers and joys as he talked about his homeland and about the war with the humans, and had almost felt he understood him—surely that could not all have been lies. Could someone be both a bitter enemy and a friend?

Barrick felt sleep stealing over him again and let his eyes fall shut. Whether they were friends or enemies, as long as the Qar woman’s enchantment drove Barrick on he and the Gyir the Storm Lantern must at least be allies. He had to trust in that much or he would go mad for certain.

With a last few flicks of his spur Ferras Vansen finished currying his horse, then bent to strap the spur back on. The one good thing about this cursed, soggy weather was that the beast seemed to pick up few brambles, although its tail was a knotted mess. He paused, eyeing the strange dark steed that had carried Prince Barrick away from the battle. The fairy-horse looked back at him, the eyes a single, milky gleam. The creature seemed unnaturally aware, its calm not that of indifference but of superiority. Vansen sniffed and turned away, shamed to be feeling such resentment toward a dumb brute.

“Gyir says the horse’s name is Dragonfly.”

Barrick’s words made Vansen jump. He had not realized the prince was so close. “He told you that?”

“Of course. Just because you can’t hear him doesn’t mean he’s not speaking.”

Ferras Vansen did not doubt that the fairy-man spoke without words—he had felt a bit of it himself—but admitting it seemed the first step on a journey he did not wish to begin. “Dragonfly, then. As you wish.”

“He belonged to someone named Four Sunsets—at least that’s what Gyir says the name meant.” Barrick frowned, trying to get things right. There were moments when, the subject of his conversation aside, he seemed like any ordinary lad of his age. “Four Sunsets was killed in the battle. The battle with…our folk.” Barrick smiled tightly with relief: he had got it right.

Chilled, Vansen could not help wondering what it was he had been tempted to say instead.
Does he have to struggle to remember he’s not one of them?
He shook his head. This was the puzzle the gods had set for him—he could only pray for strength and do his best. “Well, he is a fine enough horse, I suppose, for what he is—which is a fairy-bred monster.”

“Faster than anything we’ll ever ride again,” said Barrick, still boyish. “Gyir says they are raised in great fields called the Meadows of the Moon.”

“Don’t know how they would know of the moon or anything else in the sky,” said Vansen, looking up. “And it’s got worse now, the sky’s so dark with smoke.” Their progress had been slowed to a walk—they led their horses now more often than they rode them. Vansen had hated the eternal twilight but he longed for it now. It seemed, however, that he was fated to realize such things only after it was too late.

Skurn hopped into the road to smash a snail against a stone embedded in the mud. The raven pulled out his meal and swallowed it down, then turned his dark, shiny eye on Vansen. “Shall us ride, then, Master?” Skurn shot an uneasy look at Barrick, who was staring at the raven with his usual disdain. “If us hasn’t spoken out of turn, like.”

“You seem in good cheer,” Vansen said, still not quite accustomed to talking with a bird

“Broke us’s fast most lovesomely this morning with a dead frog what had just begun to swell…”

Vansen waved his hand to forestall the description. “Yes, but I thought you were afraid of where we were going. Why have you changed?”

Skurn bobbed his head. “Because we go away, now, not toward, Master. This new road leads us away from Northmarch and Jack Chain’s lands. ’Twas all us ever wanted.”

Vansen felt a little better to hear that. If it had not been for the continual dreary, ashy rain, the lightless sky, and the fact that he knew he’d be spending another day’s thankless journey surrounded by madmen and monsters out of dire legend, finishing with a bed on the cold, lumpy ground and a few bitter roots to gnaw, he might have been cheerful, too.

It was almost impossible to choose Skurn’s single most annoying trait, but certainly high on the pile was the fact that unless something had terrified the bird into silence, he talked incessantly. Relieved by their new direction, the raven yammered on throughout the day, loudly at first, then more quietly after Vansen threatened to drag him on a rope behind the horse, naming trees and bushes and sharing other obscure bits of woodlore, and going on at great length about the wonderful things to eat that could be found on all sides—an urpsome subject that Vansen throttled shortly after being told how lovely it was to guzzle baby birds whole out of a nest.

“Can you not just stop?” he snarled at last. “Close your beak and just sit silently, for the Trigon’s sake, and let me think.”

“But us can’t sit quiet, Master.” Skurn squatted, holding his beak in the air in a way Vansen had learned was meant to suggest he was suffering—either that or he was fouling the saddle, one of his other charming traits. “You see, it is riding on this horse that has us so squirmsome, and when us talks not, us squirms more and the horse takes it ill. You have seen him startle up, have you not?”

Vansen had. Twice today already, Skurn had done something to make the horse balk and almost throw them. Vansen couldn’t blame his mount: Skurn had trouble holding on, and when he lost his balance he sank in his talons, and if he happened to be off the saddle and on the horse’s neck at the time, no matter.

Skyfather Perin, I beg you to save me,
Vansen prayed.
Save me from everything you have given me. I doubt I am strong enough, great lord.
Aloud he said, “Then tell me something more useful than how to catch and eat yon hairy spiders, for I will not be doing that even if starvation has me in its grip.”

“Shall us tell tha one story, then? To make time slip more easy, eh?”

“Tell me about the one you called Crooked, or this Jack Chain you are so frightened of. What is he? And the others, Night Men and suchlike.”

“Ah, no, Master, no. No talk of Jack, not so close still to his lands, nor of Night Men—too shiversome. But us can tell you a little of the one us called Crooked. Those are mighty stories, and all know them—even my folk, from nestlings to high-bough weavers. Shall us speak on that?”

“I suppose so. But not too loudly, and try to sit still. I don’t want to find myself in a ditch with my horse running away into the forest.”

“Well, then.” Skurn nodded his head, closed his tiny eyes, rocked slowly against the saddle horn.