by Tad Williams
Of course she did. She could do nothing else. Now that Pigeon was gone she owed her life to no one. If she died trying to escape—well, that still would be better than what awaited her when she was given back to the autarch, of that Qinnitan had no doubt.
She reached into Vo’s cloak again and found the bottle, pinching it carefully between finger and thumb to draw it out. For a moment she hesitated. If she drank it herself, all her problems would be over—at least all problems that troubled the living. The darkness inside the small glass container called to her, a sleep from which she would never have to awake—so tempting . . . ! But the memory of the young man named Barrick, her dream-friend, tugged at her. Had he really turned his back on her? Or had something happened to him—did he need her help? If she ended her life she would never know.
Decided, Qinnitan pulled out the glass stopper, sent up a prayer to the golden bees of Nushash that she had tended for so long, then upended the bottle over Vo’s mouth.
She was almost undone by the thickness of the physic, which did not splash out like water but rather oozed like pomegranate syrup: it had barely begun to drip when he started to struggle. Still, she managed to pour at least a small spoonful into the back of his throat before he came awake and broke free from her, coughing and sputtering. He knocked the bottle from her hands and it skittered down the deck, but Qinnitan did not care. She must have given him dozens of times his normal portion—surely that would be enough to kill him.
She did not wait to find out, of course. Vilas and his dull, cruel sons were on the boat, the older of the two boys minding the tiller while the other two slept. In a moment even that dullard would notice the struggle. She dashed to the low rail and threw herself over it on the landward side. When the first shock of the cold water had passed, she rose to the surface and began to swim as best she could toward the dark, distant shore. When she had gone a little way she turned to look back toward the boat. She saw something dark go over the side and make a pale splash in the moon-lit water. Her heart flopped in her chest. Was Vo coming after her? Could it be that even a mouthful of poison hadn’t killed him?
Perhaps he stumbled and fell over the side, she told herself as she quickly started splashing toward the shore again. Maybe he’s already drowned.
Only a long stone’s throw from the fishing boat Qinnitan was already cold and exhausted—at times it even seemed the water was pushing her away from the shore, as though Efiyal, the wicked old god of the ocean, was doing his best to defeat her.
I won’t . . . she thought, although she wasn’t quite sure what she was resisting and she was finding it hard to think. Death? The gods? Daikonas Vo? I won’t!
She fought on, struggling and thrashing so that she knew they must be able to see her from the boat, but the boat did not come after her. Did that mean Vo was dead? Or that they felt sure she was beyond rescue?
It didn’t matter. She could do nothing but what she was doing.
Water stung her eyes and threatened to fill her mouth. The moon hung above her like a giant eye, rippling as her head sunk beneath the water each time and then rose again. Her legs were like stone, dragging her down no matter how hard she kicked them against the grip of the ocean. And now the weariness seeping through her, which only a short while earlier had burned in her veins and lungs like fire, had begun to turn into something else—a killing cold that spread inch by inch until at last she could no longer feel her limbs, did not know up or down, living or drowning, whether it was the moon itself that hung above her or its reflection in the mirroring deeps . . .
Qinnitan’s feet touched sand and smooth rocks, then lost them again. A few more jerking lunges and the shore was beneath her again, this time for good. Her feet touched the bottom and the water was only at her neck . . . then her breasts . . . then her waist.
When she could no longer feel the water Qinnitan dropped onto the wet stones of the beach and followed the moon up into darkness.
Qinnitan woke up shivering under a bone-white moon. She could see no sign of Vo or his boat, but she felt terribly exposed on the beach and the wind was cold and strong. She squeezed as much water as she could out of her sopping dress, then slowly began to make her way toward the hills, her bare feet so cold she scarcely noticed the sharp stones on which she trod.
Partway up the hill she found herself in a sea of long grasses that leaned this way and that in the wind, whispering like anxious children. Qinnitan was too tired to walk any farther. She got down on her knees and crawled a little, thinking in her exhausted, dreaming way that she was somehow tunneling to safety, that she would reach a place where no one could see her. Finally she let herself sink down into the deep, grassy murmur until she could no longer feel the burn of the wind and then the world escaped her again.
“I wish you had not cut off your hair, Princess,” said Eneas as he helped her pull the mail shirt down over her head. “Although in truth such a mannish look will match more nearly with your current garb.”
“People will do strange things when they are fleeing for their lives.”
The prince colored. “Of course, my lady, I did not mean ...”
Briony changed the subject. “This is very light—much lighter than I would have expected.” In truth, the armor did not feel a great deal less comfortable than one of the formal dresses she had worn at court, let alone the stomacher and starched collar and layer upon layer of petticoats that she had been forced to wear beneath the dresses. The mail hung comfortably over a padded undershirt and dangled to almost her knees, but was slit on either side to make riding easier.
“Yes.” The prince was pleased she had noticed. It was one of his more endearing qualities, Briony couldn’t help feeling, that he was always happy when she showed interest in arms and armor—or at least more interest than other women would. “As I told you, it is modeled on the Tuani and Mihanni, fast desert riders like your teacher Shaso commanded. No longer can slow-moving knights trample an enemy at will. What the longbow made difficult during our grandfathers’ day, guns will soon make impossible. Even the strongest armor can stop a rifle ball only from a distance, but it leaves its wearer ungainly on a horse, and helpless when he falls ...” He colored again. “I am talking on and on. Let me help you with your surcoat.” Eneas and his page slid the garment over her as she held out her arms, then Eneas stepped away, perhaps out of a sense of propriety, while the young page tied up the sides.
“There,” said the prince. “Now you are a proper Temple Dog!”
Briony laughed. “And honored to be one, even if only for show. But is it truly necessary this soon?”
“Southmarch is a long way, Princess, and the north is unsettled and dangerous. Lawlessness has followed in the wake of the fairy army. Those bandits that Captain Linas and his men killed are by no means the only ones, and there are many others who do not love my father or Syan, even within our own borders.”
“But surely no one will attack a troop this size!”
“I do not doubt you are right. But that does not mean someone might not fire on us from cover with a bow or a gun.” He held out a helmet with a drape of mail at the neck. “And so you will wear this, too, Princess.”
“May I at least wait to put it on until we leave the tent?”
He smiled at last. Briony had to acknowledge that Eneas was really quite good to look at, with his big open face and strong jaw. “Of course, my lady. But then you may not take it off again until we reach Southmarch. No, nor even then.”
The prince had ordered his men to prepare for the journey north as he and Briony and his private guard rode back to where the players were still being held in uneasy custody by Syannese soldiers.
“Again we are rescued from a most unpleasant fate, thanks to you, Princess,” said Finn Teodoros.
“A fate that wouldn’t have threatened you were it not for me,” she said. “I’ll do what I can to make it up to you all. How do the others fare?”
“As you would guess,” Finn told her. “Mournin
g Dowan Birch’s death, of course. We all loved him, but I think Estir loved him more than the rest of us realized.”
Briony sighed. “Poor Dowan. He was always so kind to me. If I ever have my throne again I will build a theater and name it in his honor.”
“That would be kind, but I would not mention it yet, while the wound is so new.” Finn shook his head. “I cannot tell you how my heart sank when they took you away, Highness—yet here you are! There is something epic in your adventures, I cannot help feeling, and I suspect I have only heard half of them from you.”
“Teodoros may praise you to the heavens,” said a voice behind her, “but don’t expect it from me.”
Briony turned to find Estir Makewell staring up at her, eyes red and hair draggled.
“Estir, I am so sorry . . .”
“Are you?” The woman seemed sunk into herself, but taut, like an animal poised to spring. “Truly? Then why didn’t you ask to pay your respects to Dowan when you first came back?”
“I meant to . . .”
“Of course.” Estir grabbed Briony’s arm hard enough that it felt like a kind of assault. “Come, then. Come and see him.”
“Estir ...” said Finn Teodoros in a warning tone.
“No, I’ll go,” Briony told him. “Of course I’ll go.”
She allowed the woman to drag her across the road and back a few steps toward the beginnings of the forest where they had been waylaid. The tall man’s body lay on the ground, his face and chest covered in one of the bright costume cloaks he had worn as the god Volios.
“Here,” said Estir. “This is what I have left of him.” She twitched back the covering, revealing Dowan’s long face, fish-belly pale. She had closed his eyes and tied his jaw shut with a length of cloth, but despite the soothing words people always said, the kind giant did not look anything like he was sleeping. He looked like a mere object now, broken and useless.
Like poor Kendrick, she thought. One moment the blood was making a blush in his cheeks, the next moment it was only a drying splash on the floor. We are nothing when the life is gone from us. Our bodies are nothing.
“Are you weeping? ” Estir demanded. “Are you weeping for my Dowan? You have some nerve, princess or not. You have the pride of the gods if you can weep for him when it was you who brought this on him.” She pointed at the giant’s awful, empty face. “Look at him! Look! He was all I had! He was going to marry me when we had a little money! Now he’s . . . he’s only ...” She swayed and then sank down to her knees, hitching and sobbing. “Kernios lead you s–safely and take you in, dear D–D–Dowan . . .”
Briony reached down to touch her shoulder; Estir knocked her hand away. “Don’t! The others can fawn over you but this was your fault! You never cared for us at all.”
“Estir,” said Finn as he hurried to Briony’s side, “you’re being foolish. The princess had nothing to do with this ...”
“She had everything to do with this,” Estir Makewell snapped. “But no one else will say anything to her because she’s a gods-cursed royal! What do I care? My lover is dead—the last chance I had! The last ...” She fell forward again, sobbing as she lay her head on the corpse’s chest. “Dowan . . . !”
“Come away, Princess,” said Finn. “None of the rest blame you.”
But Briony could not help noticing that none of the others had come to welcome her back, either—that Nevin Hewney and Pedder Makewell and the rest had watched from a distance, as though a spell had transformed her into something new and a little frightening.
“I will see that he has a good burial in Layandros,” she told Finn. Briony looked to where Prince Eneas waited with his men, deliberately staying at a distance so that she could have this reunion with what he supposed—what she herself had supposed—were her friends. “That’s the least I can do.”
“I say again, do not blame yourself, Princess. The roads are bad these days and we have spent much of our lives traveling. This might have happened whether we journeyed with you or not.”
“But you were traveling with me, Finn, and I didn’t give you any choice about it. Without me, Dowan could have stayed behind—could have gone off to tend a farm with Estir.”
“And caught the plague, or been gored by his own bull. I’m not certain I believe in the gods, but Fate is something else.” Finn shook his head. “Our deaths will find us, Princess—mine, yours, Estir Makewell’s—whether we hide from them or not. Dowan’s found him here, that’s all.”
She could not speak for a long moment. The weight of all she had lost and all she had failed to do felt as though it were pressing down on her so heavily she could barely breathe.
“Th–thank you,” she said at last. “You are a good man, Finn Teodoros. I regret involving any of you in my troubles.”
Now it was the playwright’s turn to fall silent, but it seemed a silence of consideration rather than emotion. “Come a little way aside with me before you leave us, Princess Briony,” he said at last.
They retreated back across the road until they stood a goodly distance from Eneas and his soldiers but still in sight, and far enough from the grieving Estir Makewell that Briony could breathe again.
“If there is something you want, ask me,” said Briony. “Dear Finn, you are one of the few people in this world who has done me nothing but kindness.” She could not forget the imperiousness she had shown him earlier—it made her wince to think of how she had threatened him with her rank. “You will be my historian, as I said, but I hope you’ll also still be my friend.”
For the first time since she had met him he seemed at a loss for words, but once again it seemed something other than raw feelings that kept him silent. At last he shook his head as if to throw off some nagging annoyance. “I must speak to you, Princess.”
“You puzzle me, Master Teodoros. Aren’t we speaking?”
“I mean in honesty. True honesty.” He swallowed. “You have suffered much for your people and risked even more, Highness. Listen to me now. Those whom you consider your friends and allies—well, some of them are not friends. Not at all.”
Dawet had said much the same to her on that day so long ago, back in Southmarch. That felt like another world. “What do you mean? I do not mean to mock you, but I can scarcely think of anyone who hasn’t betrayed my family’s trust—the Tollys, Hesper of Jellon, King Enander ...”
“No, I mean someone closer to you.” His usual air of amused cynicism was quite gone. “You know that I have long served Avin Brone, both as a scholar and as a spy.”
“Yes, and someday I will ask you to tell me what you can of those days, those tasks. Brone himself said that I was too trusting, that I needed to find my own spies and informants, but I confess I know little of the game ...”
Teodoros raised his hand, then thought better of displaying impatience to a princess. “Forgive me, Highness, but it is Brone himself I am talking about.”
It took a moment before she understood him. “Brone? Are you saying that Avin Brone is a traitor?”
His round face was full of pain. “This is difficult, my lady. Lord Brone has never been anything but just and fair with me, Highness, and neither has he ever said anything to me that suggested he was less than loyal to you . . . but he left me alone in his retiring room once, when one of his other spies was brought in unexpectedly from the South Road, wounded by an arrow ...”
“Rule. His name was Rule,” Briony said. “Merciful Zoria, I remember that night. I was there in Brone’s chambers.”
“And I was in a room nearby where the count does his business.” Finn glanced around to make sure they were still out of everyone’s earshot. “I am . . . I am a curious man, to tell you something that will not surprise you. By Zosim the Many-Faced, it is not my fault—I am a writer! I had never been left alone among Lord Brone’s things before, and . . . well, I must confess that I took the chance to look at some of his papers. Some of them were things I could not make much sense of—maps of places I didn’t know, lists of
names—and others were simply reports about doings in Summerf ield, Hierosol, Jellon, and other places, obviously reports from his many spies. But at the bottom of a pile in his writing desk I found a vellum cover with the Eddon blazon upon it, but without a seal to keep it closed.”
“You know you should not have even touched such a thing,” said Briony. “You could have been executed for that if someone caught you reading it.” She said it almost lightly, but in truth she spoke only because she was stalling; she did not want to hear what he would say next.
“As I said, Princess, I am a writer, and as all know, that is another name for a fool. I stepped to the doorway to listen for anyone coming and then unfolded the cover. Inside was a list of people—those that I recognized were trusted agents of Lord Brone—who, at a certain time and at a certain signal, would kill or imprison the members of the royal family. There were also plans for consolidating power afterward and keeping the people pacified. And the scheme was in Brone’s handwriting. I know it as well as my own.”
“What . . . ?” She could not believe what she was hearing. “Are you telling me that Brone plans to murder us?”
Finn Teodoros looked miserable. “It could be that I am wrong, Highness. It could be that it was another report—some conspiracy that he had uncovered, and perhaps even thwarted, copied over in his own hand. Or something entirely different. I would not want to declare the count guilty on what I saw alone and have his death on my conscience. But I swear it was as I tell you, Princess. He had made a list in his own hand that looked very much like a plan of betrayal and assassination—a plan to seize the throne of Southmarch. I wish it were not so, but that is what I saw.”
The clearing beside the road suddenly seemed as unstable as the deck of a ship. For a moment Briony feared it would spin away from beneath her and she would faint. “Why . . . why do you tell me this now, Finn?”