(Shadowmarch #2) Shadowplay (6 page)

Now a few cheers broke out from the heartened crowd, although in the windswept square it did not make a very heroic sound. Still, even Matt Tinwright found himself reassured.

I may not like the man overmuch, but imagine the trouble we would have been in if Hendon Tolly and his soldiers had not been here! There would have been riots and all manner of madness.
Still, he had not slept well ever since hearing about the supernatural creatures on their doorstep, and he noticed that Tolly, for all his confidence, had said nothing about rooting the shadow folk out of the abandoned city.

Hierarch Sisel now came forth to bless the crowd on behalf of the Trigonate gods. As the hierarch intoned the ritual of Perin’s Forgiveness, Lord Tolly—the castle’s new protector—fell into deep conversation with Tirnan Havemore, the new castellan. The king’s old counselor Nynor had retired from his position, and Havemore, who had been Avin Brone’s factor, had been the surprising choice to replace him. Tinwright could not resist looking at the man with envy. To rise so quickly, and to such importance! Brone must have been very pleased with him to give him such honor. But as Avin Brone now watched Tolly and Havemore, Tinwright could not help thinking he did not look either pleased or proud. Tinwright shrugged. There were always intrigues at court. It was the way of the world.

And perhaps there is a place for me there, too,
he thought hopefully,
even without my beloved patroness. Perhaps if I make myself noticed, I too will be lifted up.

Turning, the blessing forgotten, Matty Tinwright began to work his way out through the crowd, thinking of ways his own splendid light might be revealed to those in the new Southmarch who would recognize its gleam.

To her credit, Opal handled the discovery of a bleeding, burned man twice her size sprawling on her floor with no little grace.

“Oh!” she said, peering out from the sleeping room, “What’s this? I’m not dressed. Are you well, Chert?”

“I am well, but this friend is not. He has wounds that need tending…”

“Don’t touch him! I’ll be out in a moment.”

At first Chert thought she feared for her dear husband, that he might take some contagion from their wounded visitor, or that the injured man, in pain and delirium, might lash out like a dying animal. After some consideration, though, he realized that Opal didn’t trust him not to make things worse.

“The boy’s still asleep,” she said as she emerged, still pulling her wrap around herself. “He had another poor night. What’s this, then? Who is this big fellow and why is he here at this hour?”

“It is Chaven, the royal physician. I’ve told you about him. As to why…”

“Crawled.” Chaven’s laugh was dry and painful to hear. “Crawled across the castle in darkness…to here. I need help with my…my wounds. But I cannot stay. You are in danger if I do.”

“Nobody’s in anywhere near as much danger as you, looking at those burns,” Opal said, scowling at the physician’s pitiful, crusted hands. “Hurry, bring me some water and my herb-basket, old man, and be quiet about it. We don’t need the boy underfoot as well.”

Chert did as he was told.

By the time Opal had finished cleaning Chaven’s burns with weak brine, covered them with poultices of moss paste, and begun to bind them with clean cloth, the wounded physician was asleep, his chin bumping against his chest every time she pulled a bandage snug.

Opal stood and looked down at her handiwork. “Is he trustworthy?” she asked quietly.

“He is the best of the big folk I know.”

“That doesn’t answer my question, you old fool.”

Chert couldn’t help smiling. “I’m glad to see the difficulties we’ve been through lately haven’t cost you your talent for endearments, my sweet. Who can say? The whole world up there is topsy-turvy. Up there? We have a child of the big folk living in our own house who plays some part in this war with the fairy folk. Everything has gone mad both upground
and
here.”

“Injured or not, I won’t have the fellow in the house unless you tell me he can be trusted. We have a child to think of.”

Chert sighed. “He is one of the best men I know, ordinary
or
big. And he might understand something of what’s happened to Flint.”

Opal nodded. “Right. He’ll sleep for hours—he drank a whole cup of mossbrew, and he can’t have much blood left to mix it with. We’d best get what sleep we can ourselves.”

“You are a marvel,” he told her as they climbed back under the blanket. “All these years and I still cannot believe my luck.”

“I can’t believe your luck, either.” But she sounded at least a little pleased. Better than that, Chert had seen in her eyes as she tended the doctor’s wounds something he had not seen there since he had brought Flint back home—purpose. It was worth a great deal of risk to see his good wife become something like herself again.

Chaven could barely hold the bread in his hands, but he ate like a dog who had been shut for days in an abandoned cottage. Which, as he began to tell Chert and Opal his story, was not so far from the truth.

“I have been hiding in the tunnels just outside my own house.” He paused to wipe his face with his sleeve, trying to dab away some of the water that had escaped his clumsy handling of the cup. “The secret door, Chert, the one you know—there is a panel that comes out of the wall of the inside hallway and hides the door from prying eyes. I closed that behind me and went to ground in the tunnels like a hunted fox. I managed to bring a water bottle that had gone with me on my last journey, but had no time to find food.”

“Eat more, then,” Chert said, “—but slowly. Why should you be hiding? What has happened to the world up there? We hear stories, and even if they are only half true or less, they are still astonishing and terrifying—the fairy folk defeating our army, the princess and her brother dead or run away…”

“Briony has not run away,” said Chaven, scowling. “I would stake my life on that. In fact, I already have.”

Chert shook his head, lost. “What are you talking about?”

“It is a long tale, and as full of madness as anything you have heard about fairy armies…”

Opal stood abruptly as a noise came from behind them. Flint, pale and bleary-eyed, stood in the doorway. “What are you doing out of bed?” she demanded.

The boy looked at her, his face chillingly dull. With all the things that had been strange or even frightening about him before, Chert could not help thinking, this lifeless, disinterested look was worse by far. “Thirsty.”

“I’ll bring you in water, child. You are not ready to be out of bed yet, so soon after the fever has passed.” She gave Chert and Chaven a significant glance. “Keep your voices down,” she told them.

Chert had barely begun to describe the bizarre events of Winter’s Eve when Opal returned from getting Flint back into bed, so he started again. His tale, which would have been an incredible one coming from the mouth of someone recently returned from exotic foreign lands, let alone the familiar precincts of Southmarch, would have been impossible to believe had it not been Chaven himself speaking, a man Chert knew to be not just honest, but rigorously careful about what he knew and did not know, about what could be proved or only surmised.
“Built on bedrock,”
as Chert’s father had always said of someone trustworthy,
“not on sand, sliding this way and that with every shrug of the Elders.”

“So do you think that this Tolly villain had something to do with the southern witch, Selia?” Chert asked. “With the death of poor Prince Kendrick and the attack on the princess?” From his one brief meeting with her, Chert had a proprietorial fondness for Briony Eddon, and already loathed Hendon Tolly and his entire family with an unquenchable hatred.

“I can’t say, but the snatches of conversation I heard from him and his guards made them sound just as surprised as me. But their treachery to the royal family cannot be questioned, nor their desire to murder me, a witness of what really happened.”

“They truly would have killed you?” asked Opal.

“Definitely, had I remained to be killed,” Chaven said with a pained smile. “As I hid from them in the Tower of Spring, I heard Hendon Tolly telling his minions that I was by no means to survive my capture—that he would reward the man who finished me.”

“Elders!” breathed Opal. “The castle’s in the hands of bandits and murderers!”

“For the moment, certainly. Without Princess Briony or her brother, I see no way to change things.” All the talking had tired the physician; he seemed barely able to keep his head up.

“We must get you to one of the powerful lords,” Chert said. “Someone still loyal to the king, who will protect you until your story is told.”

“Who is left? Tyne Aldritch is dead in Kolkan’s Field, Nynor retreated to his country house in fear,” Chaven said flatly. “And Avin Brone seems to have made his own peace with the Tollys. I trust no one.” He shook his head as if it were a heavy stone he had carried too long. “And worst of all, the Tollys have taken my house, my splendid observatory!”

“But why would they do that? Do they think you’re still hiding there?”

“No. They want something, and I fear I know what. They are tearing things apart—I could hear them through the walls from my tunnel hiding-places—searching.
Searching…
”

“Why? For what?”

Chaven groaned. “Even if I am right about what they seek, I am not certain why they want it—but I am frightened, Chert. There is more afoot here and in the world outside than simply a struggle for the throne of the March Kingdoms.”

Chert suddenly realized that Chaven did not know the story of his own adventures, about the inexplicable events surrounding the boy in the other room. “There is more,” he said suddenly. “Now you must rest, but later I will tell you of our own experiences. I met the Twilight folk. And the boy got into the Mysteries.”

“What? Tell me now!”

“Let the poor man sleep.” Opal sounded weary, too, or perhaps just weighed down again with unhappiness. “He is weak as a weanling.”

“Thank you…” Chaven said, barely able to form words. “But…I must hear this tale…immediately. I said once that I feared what the moving of the Shadowline might mean. But now I think I feared…too little.” His head sagged, nodded. “Too little…” he sighed, “…and too…late…” Within a few breaths he was asleep, leaving Chert and Opal to stare at each other, eyes wide with apprehension and confusion.

A
STORM SWEPT IN from the ocean in the wake of the setting sun, but although cold rain pelted them and the little boat pitched until Briony felt quite ill, the air was actually warmer than it had been on their first trip across Brenn’s Bay. It was still, however, a chilly, miserable jouney.

Winter,
Briony thought ruefully.
Only a fool would lose her throne and be forced to run for her life in this fatal season. The Tollys won’t need to kill me—I’ll probably drown myself, or simply freeze.
She was even more worried about Shaso soaking in the cold rain so soon after his fever had broken, but as usual the old man showed less evidence of discomfort than a stone statue. That was reassuring, at least: if he was well enough for his stiff-necked pride to rule him, he had unquestionably improved.

By comparison, the Skimmer girl Ena seemed neither to be made miserable by the storm nor to bear it bravely—in fact, she hardly seemed to notice it. Her hood was back and she rowed with the ease and carelessness of someone steering a punt through the gentle waters of a summertime lake. They owed this Skimmer girl much, Briony knew: without her knowledge of the bay and its tides they would have had little hope of escape.

I shall reward her well.
Of course, just now the daughter of Southmarch’s royal family had nothing to give.

The worst of the storm soon passed, though the high waves lingered. The monotony of the trip, the continuous pattering of rain on Briony’s hooded cloak and the rocking of the swells, kept dropping her into a dreamy near-sleep and a fantasy of the day when she would ride back into Southmarch, greeted with joy by her people and…and who else? Barrick was gone and she could not think too much about his absence just yet: it was as though she had sustained a dreadful wound and dared not look at it until it had been tended, for fear she would faint away and die by the roadside without reaching help. But who else was left? Her father was still a prisoner in far-off Hierosol. Her stepmother Anissa, although perhaps not an enemy if her servant’s murderous treachery had been nothing to do with her, was still not really a friend, and certainly no mother. What other people did Briony treasure, or even care about? Avin Brone? He was too stern, too guarded. Who else?

For some reason, the guard captain Ferras Vansen came to her mind—but that was nonsense! What was he to her, with his ordinary face and his ordinary brown hair and his posture so carefully correct it almost seemed like a kind of swagger? If she recognized now that he had not been as guilty in the death of her older brother as she had once felt, he was still nothing to her—a common soldier, a functionary, a man who no doubt thought little beyond the barracks and the tavern, and likely spent what spare time he had putting his hands up the dresses of tavern wenches.

Still, it was odd that she should see his thoughtful face just now, that she should think of him so suddenly, and almost fondly…

Merolanna. Of course—dear old Auntie ’Lanna!
Briony’s great-aunt would be there for any triumphant return. But what must she be feeling now? Briony abruptly felt a kind of panic steal over her. Poor Auntie! She must be mad with grief and worry, both twins gone, the whole order of life over-tuned. But Merolanna would persevere, of course. She would hold together for the sake of others, for the sake of the family, even for the sake of Olin’s newborn son, Anissa’s child. Briony pushed away a pang of jealousy. What else should her great-aunt do? She would be protecting the Eddons as best she could.

Oh, Auntie, I will give you such a hug when I come back, it will almost crack your bones! And I’ll kiss your old cheeks pink! You will be so astonished!
The duchess would cry of course—she always did for happy things, scarcely ever for sad.
And you’ll be so proud of me. “You wise girl,” you’ll say to me. “Just what your father would have done. And so brave…!”

Briony nodded and drowsed, thinking about that day to come, so easy to imagine in every way except how it might actually come to pass.

They reached the hilly north Marrinswalk coast just as the rising sun warmed the storm clouds from black to bruised gray, rowing across the empty cove to within a few yards of the shore. Briony bunched the homespun skirt Ena had given her around her thighs and helped the Skimmer girl guide the hull up onto the wet sand. The wind was stingingly cold, the saltgrass and beach heather along the dunes rippling as if in imitation of the shallow wavelets frothing on the bay.

“Where are we?” she asked.

Shaso wrung water out of his saggy clothes. Just as Briony had been clothed in Ena’s spares, he wore one of Turley’s baggy, salt-bleached shirts and a pair of the Skimmer’s plain, knee-length breeches. As he surveyed the surrounding hills, his leathery, wrinkled face gaunt from his long imprisonment, Shaso dan-Heza looked like some ancient spirit dressed in a child’s castoff clothing. “Somewhere not far from Kinemarket, I’d say, about three or four days’ walk from Oscastle.”

“Kinemarket is that way.” Ena pointed east. “On the far side of these hills, south of the coast road. You could be there before the sun lifts over the top.”

“Only if we start walking,” said Shaso.

“What on earth will we do in Kinemarket?” Briony had never been there, but knew it was a small town with a yearly fair that paid a decent amount of revenue to the throne. She also dimly remembered that some river passed through it or near it. In any case, it might as well have been named Tiny or Unimportant as far as she was concerned just now. “There’s nothing there!”

“Except food—and we will need some of that, don’t you think?” said Shaso. “We cannot travel without eating and I am not so well-honed in my skills that I can trap or kill dinner for us. Not until I mend a bit and find my legs, anyway.”

“Where are we going after that?”

“Toward Oscastle.”

“Why?”

“Enough questions.” He gave her a look that would have made most people quail, but Briony was not so easily put off.

“You said you would make the choices, and I agreed. I never said that I wouldn’t ask why, and you never said you wouldn’t answer.”

He growled under his breath. “Try your questions again when the road is under our feet.” He turned to Ena. “Give your father my thanks, girl.”

“Her father didn’t row us.” Briony was still shamed that she had argued with the young woman about landing at M’Helan’s Rock. “I owe you a kindness,” she told the girl with as much queenly graciousness as she could muster. “I won’t forget.”

“I’m sure you won’t, Lady.” Ena made a swift and not very reverent courtesy.

Well, she’s seen me sleeping, drooling spittle down my chin. I suppose it would be a bit much to expect her to treat me like Zoria the Fair.
Still, Briony wasn’t entirely certain she was going to like being a princess without a throne or a castle or any of the privileges that, while she had been quick to scorn them, she had grown rather used to. “Thanks, in any case.”

“Good luck to you both, Lady, Lord.” Ena took a step, then stopped and turned around. “Holy Diver lift me, I almost forgot—Father would have had me skinned, stretched, and smoked!” She pulled a small sack out of a pocket in her voluminous skirt and handed it to Shaso. “There are some coins to help you get on with your journey, Lord.” She looked at Briony with what almost seemed pity. “Buy the princess a proper meal, perhaps.”

Before Briony or Shaso could say anything, the Skimmer girl scooted the wooden rowboat back down the wet sand and into the water, then waded with it out into the cove. She swung herself onto the bench as gracefully as a trick rider vaulting onto a horse; a heartbeat or two later the oars were in the water and the boat was moving outward against the wind, bobbing on each line of coursing waves.

Briony stood watching as the girl and her boat disappeared. She suddenly felt very lonely and very weary.

“A reliable thing about villages, or cities for that matter,” said Shaso sourly, “is that
they
will not walk to
us
.” He pointed across the dunes to the hills and their ragged covering of bushes and low trees. “Shall we begin, or do you have some pressing reason for us to keep standing here until someone notices us?”

She knew she should be grateful his old fire was coming back, but just now she wasn’t.

His vinegary moment seemed to have tired Shaso, too. He kept his head down and didn’t talk as they walked over the cold dunes toward a path that ran along the beginning of the hills.

Briony had at first wished to pursue the question of why they were going to Oscastle, Marrinswalk’s leading city but still a bit of a backwater, and what his plans were when they reached the place, but she found herself just as happy to save her strength for walking. The wind, which had first had been steadily at their backs, now swung around and began to blow full into their faces with stinging force, making every step feel like a climb up steep stairs. The heavy gray clouds hung so low overhead it almost seemed to Briony she could reach up and sink her fingers into them. She was grateful for the thick wool cloaks the Skimmers had given them, but they were still damp with rainwater and Briony’s felt heavy as lead. Her court dresses, for all their discomforts, suddenly did not seem so bad: at least they had been dry and warm.

After perhaps an hour Briony began to see signs of habitation—a few crofters’ huts on hilltops, surrounded by trees. Some had smoke swirling from the holes in their roofs, or even from crooked chimneys, and Briony broke her long silence to ask Shaso if they could not stop at one of them for long enough to get warm again.

He shook his head. “The fewer the people, the greater the danger someone will remember us. Hendon Tolly and his men have no doubt begun to wonder whether we might have left the castle entirely, and soon they will be asking questions in every town along the coast of Brenn’s Bay. We are an unusual pair, a black-skinned man and a white-skinned girl. It is only a matter of time until someone who’s seen us meets one of Hendon’s agents.”

“But we’ll be long gone!”

“We have to hide
somewhere
. Do you really want to tell the Tollys they can stop searching the castle and all the rest of the surrounding lands and concentrate on just one place—like Marrinswalk?”

Thinking of a troop of armed men beating the countryside behind them made Briony shudder and walk faster. “But someone will have to see us eventually. If we go to Oscastle or some other city, I mean. Cities are full of people, after all.”

“Which is our best hope. Perhaps our
only
hope. We are less likely to be noticed somewhere there are many people, Highness—especially where there are people of my race. And that is enough talk for now.”

They followed the track down the edge of a wide valley. When they reached the broad river that meandered at its bottom, Shaso decided that they could at least take time to drink. They also encountered a few more houses, simple things of unmortared stone and loose thatching, but still so scattered that Briony doubted any man could see his neighbor’s cottage even in full daylight with a cloudless sky. A goat bleated from the paddock behind one of them, probably protesting the cold day, and she realized that it was the first homely sound she had heard for hours.

They passed by several small villages as the hours passed but entered none of them, and reached Kinemarket by late morning, crossing over at a place where the river narrowed and some work by the locals had turned a lucky assembly of stones into a bridge. Kinemarket was a good-sized, prosperous town, with the turnip shape of a temple dome visible above its low walls. Shaso decided he should stay hidden in the trees outside town while Briony went to buy food with a coin from the purse Turley had provided—a silver piece with the head of King Enander of Syan, a coin so small that Briony felt sure almost half of its original metal had been shaved off. She was guiltily aware of having once declared that not only should coin-clippers be beaten in the public square, but that those who helped them pass their moneys should suffer the same punishment. It seemed a little different now, when someone else had already done the shaving and she needed the coin to buy food.

“Here—rub a little more dirt on yourself first.” Shaso drew a line of grime on her face. She tried to back away. “Go, then, do it yourself. You’ve a head start on it, anyway, from the morning’s walk.”

She rubbed on a bit more, but as she made her way up the muddy track toward the town gate, hoping to lose herself in the crowd of people going to the market, she began to fear she and Shaso had given too little thought to disguising her identity. Surely even the oft-mended homespun dress and a few smears of dirt on her cheeks would not fool many people! Her face, she realized with a strange sort of pride, must be better known than any other woman’s in the north. Now, though, being recognized could be deadly.

And although she tried not to meet their eyes, the first folk she passed on her way to the gate did look her over slowly and mistrustfully, but she realized after a moment that this man and woman were doing so only because most of the other travelers were dressed and clean for market: Briony was a dirty stranger, not a typical stranger.

“The Three grant you good day,” said the woman. She held her gape-mouthed child tightly, as though Briony might steal it. “And a blessed Orphanstide to you, too.”

“And you.” The greeting startled her—Briony had almost forgotten the holidays, since it had been on Winter’s Eve that her world had fallen completely into pieces. There certainly hadn’t been any new year’s feasting or gifts for her, and now it must be only a tennight or so until Kerneia. How strange, to have lost not just a home but an entire life!

She did not turn to watch the man and woman after they passed, but she knew that they had turned to look at her, doubtless wondering what kind of odd thing she was.

Go ahead and whisper about me, then. You cannot imagine anything near so strange as the truth.

Worried about attracting any kind of attention at all, she decided not to continue to the market, but passed through the gate and briefly into the bustle of the crowd on the main thoroughfare before turning down a narrow side street. She stopped at the first ramshackle house where she saw someone out in front—a woman wrapped in a heavy wool blanket scattering corn on the puddled ground, the chickens bustling about at her feet as though she were their mother hen.