by Tad Williams
“Shaso,” said Briony heavily.
“The same. He fought the Autarch and lost—well, in truth he fought against this Autarch’s father. Then, later, he fought your own father and lost. Even if Shaso were not in all likelihood your brother’s murderer, I do not know how much use his advice would be—almost anyone can advise on how to lose battles.”
“That is not fair,” Briony responded. “No one has beaten Xis—not yet. So no one can give any better advice, can they?”
“True enough. And that is why we are speaking now,just you two and I. I fear the threat from the south more than I do any fairies on our doorstep.” Brone reached into his pocket and pulled out a pile of creased papers. “You should read this. It is your fathers letter to your brother. He mentions the Autarch’s growing power.”
Briony stared at him. “You have the letter!”
“I have only just discovered it.” Brone handed her the papers. “There is a page missing. What is gone seems of little import—talk about maintaining the castle and its defenses—but I cannot be sure. Perhaps you will notice something I did not.”
“You had no right to read that!” Barrick cried. “No right! That was a private letter from our father!”
The lord constable shrugged. “These days, we cannot afford privacy. I needed to see if there was anything in it that might speak of immediate danger—it has been missing for some time, after all.”
“No right,” Barrick said bitterly. Was it his imagination, or was Brone looking at him oddly? Had there been something in it that had made the Count of Landsend suspect Barrick’s secret?
Briony looked up from the letter. “You said you found it. Where? And how do you know there is a page missing?”
“The letter was in a pile of documents Nynor left for me in my workroom, but he says he knew nothing of it and I think I believe him. I believe someone crept in and slipped it among the other papers on my table, perhaps because they wanted to make it look as though Nynor or myself had taken it in the first place—perhaps even implicate us in . . .” He frowned. “I also read it because I wondered if it had something to do with your brother’s death, of course.”
“The missing page . . . ?”
He leaned over and shuffled through the pages with his thick forefinger. “There.”
“This page ends with Father talking about the fortifications of the inner keep . . .” Briony squinted, turning between the two pages of the letter. “And the next page he is finishing up, asking us to have all those things done. You are right, there is something missing. ‘Tell Brone to remember the drains.’ What does that mean?”
“Waterways. Some of the gates on the lagoons are old. He was worried that they might be vulnerable in a siege.”
“He was worrying about a siege?” Briony said. “Why?”
“Your father is a man who always wishes to be prepared. For anything.”
“For some reason, I don’t believe you, Lord Brone. About that, anyway.”
“You wrong me, Highness, I assure you.” The lord constable seemed almost uninterested, too tired to fight.
Barrick, his worst alarm past, was also beginning to feel lethargic. What good all this posturing and imagining? What difference in what their imprisoned father might have written, or what it might have meant? Whoever killed Kendrick had ended the prince regent’s life in the midst of all the power of Southmarch, such as it was. If it was the Autarch, who has already conquered an entire continent and now begins to gulp at this one as well, bite by bite, how can a tiny kingdom like ours hope to save itself? Only distance had protected them so far, and that would not be a bulwark forever. “So one way or other, there is a traitor in our midst,” said Barrick.
“The person who had the letter may have no connection to Prince Kendrick’s death, Highness.”
“There is another question,” Briony said. “Why return it at all? With a page missing, it is as much as proclaiming that someone else has read a letter from the king to the prince regent. Why make that known?”
Avin Brone nodded. “Just so, my lady. Now, if you will pardon me, I will ask you to take the letter with you. You may think of some suitable punishment for my reading it as well, if you choose. I am old and tired and I still must find someplace to sleep tonight—I doubt Brother Okros will let me move Rule out of my bed. If you wish to talk to me about what it says, send for me in the morning and I will come at once.” Brone swayed a little; with his great size, he looked like a mountain about to topple and Barrick could not help taking a step backward. “We are come on grave times, Highnesses. I am not the only one relying on you two, for all your youth. Please remember that, Prince Barrick and Princess Briony, and be careful of what you say and to whom.”
Courtesy was the victim of exhaustion. He let them find their own way out.
*
It was not proving easy to make a fire. The forest was damp and there was little deadfall. Ferras Vansen eyed the small pile of gathered wood in the center of their ring of stones and could not help a longing look at the great branches stretching overhead. They had no ax, but surely an hour’s sweaty work with their swords and he and Collum Dyer might have all the wood they wanted. But the trees seemed almost to be watching, waiting tor some such desecration he could hear whispers that seemed more than the wind We will make do, he decided, with deadfall.
Collum was working hard at the pyramid of sticks with his flint. The noise of the steel striking echoed out through the clearing like the sound of hammers deep in the earth. Vansen couldn’t help but think of all the stories of his youth, of the Others who lurked in the shadowy woods and in caves and burrowed in the cold ground.
“Done it.” Dyer leaned forward to blow on the smoldering curls of red, puffing until pale flames grew. The mists had cleared a little around them, revealing sky beyond the distant crowns of the trees, a sprinkling of stars in a deep velvety darkness. There was no sign of the moon.
“What time of the clock is it, do you think?” Dyer asked as he sat up. The fire was burning by itself now, but it remained small and sickly, shot through with odd colors, greens and blues. “We have been here for hours and it is still evening.”
“No, it’s a bit darker.” Vansen raised his hands before the fire, it gave off only a little heat.
“I can’t wait for bloody daylight.” Dyer chewed on a piece of dried meat. “I can’t wait.”
“You may not get it.” Vansen sighed and sat back. A wind he couldn’t feel made the tops of the trees wave overhead. The campfire, weak as it was, seemed a kind of a wound in the misty, twilit clearing. He couldn’t help feeling the forest wished to heal that breach, to grow back over it, swallowing the flames and the two men, scabbing the injury over with moss and damp and quiet darkness. “I do not think it is ever full daylight here.”
“The sky is above us,” said Dyer firmly, but there was a brittle sound to his voice. “That means the sun will be there when day comes, even if we can’t see it. Not all the mists in the world can change that.”
Vansen said nothing to this Collum Dyer, veteran of many campaigns, dealer and risker of death, was as frightened as a child. Vansen, an elder brother in his own family, knew you did not argue with a frightened child about small matters until the danger had passed.
Small matters Like never seeing the sun again.
“I will take first watch tonight,” he said aloud.
“We must keep calling for the others. “ Dyer rose and walked to the edge of the clearing, cupping his hands “Halloooo! Adcock! Southstead! Halloooo!”
Ferras Vansen couldn’t help flinching at the noise, which was quickly swallowed by the trees. His every instinct told him to stay quiet, to move slowly, not to attract attention. Like a mouse on a tabletop, he thought, and was bitterly amused. Don’t want to wake anyone. “I think by now the others must have made camp,” he said. “And if shouting were enough, they would have found us hours ago.”
Dyer came back and sat by the fire. “They will find us. Th
ey are looking for us. Even Southstead, although you might doubt it, Captain. The royal guard won’t walk away while two of their number are lost.”
Vansen nodded, but he was thinking something quite different. He suspected that somewhere the rest of the guards and poor Raemon Beck and the mad girl were just as lost and frightened as he and Dyer. He hoped they had the sense to stay put and not to wander. He was beginmng to understand a little of what happened to the girl, and even to the madman in his own childhood village who had come back from beyond the Shadowline.
“Try to sleep, Collum. I’ll take first watch.”
At first he thought it merely a continuation of the strange dreams that had seeped into his increasingly desperate attempts to stay awake. It was not full night-dark—he sensed it would never be fully dark because the mists were shot through with the glow of the moon, which had at last appeared in the sky above the trees, round and pale as the top of a polished skull—but it was definitely the dog-end of night. He should have woken Dyer hours ago. He had fallen asleep, a dangerous thing to do in such a strange place, leaving the camp unguarded. Or was he asleep still? It seemed so, because even the wind seemed to be quietly singing, a wordless chant, rising and falling.
Something was moving in the trees along the edge of the clearing.
His breath caught. Vansen fumbled for his sword, reached out with his other hand to wake Collum Dyer, but his companion was gone from the spot where he had lain sleeping only a short while earlier. Vansen had only a few heartbeats to absorb the terror of that discovery, then the movement at the clearing’s rim became a white-shrouded, hooded figure, as strangely translucent as a distillation of mists. It seemed to be a woman, or at least it had a woman’s shape, and for a moment he was filled with the unlikely hope that the girl Willow had gone sleep-wandering from the guards’ camp, that the rest of the company were somewhere nearby after all and Dyer had been right. But the hairs rising on the back of his neck proved it was a lie even before he saw that the figure’s feet did not touch the earth below her faintly shimmering gown.
“Mortal man.“ The voice was in his head, behind his eyes, not in his ears. He could not say whether it was old or young or even male or female. “You do not belong here.“ He tried to speak but couldn’t. He could see little more of her face than pallid light and faint shadows, as though it were hidden behind many veils of glimmering fabric. All that was truly visible were her eyes, huge and black and not at all human. “The old laws are ended,” the specter told him. The world seemed to have collapsed into a single dark tunnel with the luminous, vague face at the other end. “There are no riddles left to solve. There are no tasks by which favors can be won. All is moving toward an ending. The shadow-voices that once cried against it have gone silent in the House of the People.”
The figure moved nearer. Vansen could feel his heart thundering in his breast, beating so hard that it seemed it must shake him to pieces, but yet he could not by choice move a single muscle. A gauzy hand reached out, touched his hair, almost seemed to pass through him, cool and yet prickly along his cheek like sparks from a campfire settling on damp skin.
“I knew one like you once.” Some tone was in the voice that he almost recognized, but in the end the emotion was too strange to grasp. “Long he stayed with me until his own sun had worn away. In the end he could not remain.” As the face loomed closer it seemed charged with moonlight. Vansen wanted to close his eyes but could not. For a brief instant he thought he could see her clearly, although what or who he was seeing he couldn’t entirely understand—a beauty like the edge of a knife, black eyes that were somehow full of light like the night sky full of stars, an infinitely sad smile—yet during that moment it also felt as though a chilly hand had tightened on his heart, squeezing it into an awkward shape from which it would never completely recover. He was gripped as though by death itself but death was fair, so very fair. Ferras Vansen’s soul leaped toward the dark eyes, toward the stars of her gaze, like a salmon climbing a mountain rill, not caring whether death was at the end of it.
“Do not look for the sun, mortal.” He thought there was something like pity in the words and he was dashed. He didn’t want pity—he wanted to be loved. He wanted only to die being loved by this creature of vapor and moonlight. “The sun will not come to you here. Neither can the shadows be trusted to tell you anything but lies. Look instead to the moss on the trees. The roots of the trees are in the earth, and they know where the sun is, always, even in this land where his brother is the only lord.”
And then she was gone and the clearing was empty except for the quiet hiss of wind in the leaves. Vansen sat up gasping, heart still stuttering. Had it been a dream? If so, part of it had proved true, anyway—there was no sign of Dyer. Vansen looked around, dazed at first, but with increasing fear. The fire was all but out, little glowing worms of red writhing in the blackness inside the stone circle.
Something crackled behind him and he leaped up, fumbling at the hilt of his sword. A figure staggered into the clearing.
“Dyer!” Vansen lowered his blade.
Collum Dyer shook his head. “Gone.” The soldier’s voice was mournful. “I could not catch up to . . .” Now he seemed to see Vansen truly for the first time and his face twisted into a mask of secrecy. For an instant Ferras Vansen thought he could read the other man’s clear thoughts, see him decide not to share his own vision.
“Are you well?” Vansen demanded. “Where were you?”
Dyer made his way slowly back to the fire. He would not meet his captain’s eye. “Well enough. Had . . . a dream, I suppose. Woke up wandering.” He eased himself down and covered himself with his cloak and wouldn’t talk anymore.
Vansen lay down, too. One of them should keep watch, he knew, but he felt as though he had been touched by something wild and strong, and was somehow certain that touch would keep other things of this place at bay . . . for this night anyway.
He was as tired as if he had run for miles. He fell asleep quickly beneath the trees and the strange stars.
Ferras Vansen woke to the same dim gray light—a little more milky, perhaps, but nothing like morning. The wind was still talking wordlessly. Collum Dyer had slept like a dead man, but he awakened like a sick child, full of moans and sullen looks.
The words of the midnight visitant, whether ghost or dream, were still in Vansen’s head. He allowed Dyer time only to empty his bladder, waiting impatiently in the saddle while the soldier did up the strings of his breeches.
“Can’t we even light a fire?” Dyer asked. “Just to warm my hands. It’s so bloody cold.”
“No. By time we make one, we will be tired again, and then we will sleep. We will never get away. We will stay here while this forest swirls around us like an ocean and drowns us.” He did not know exactly what he meant, but he felt it unquestionably to be true. “We must ride while we can, before the place sucks away all our resolve.”
Dyer looked at him strangely. “You sound as though you know a great deal about this country.”
“As much as I need to.” He didn’t like the accusing tone in the man’s voice, but didn’t want to be pulled into an argument. “Enough to know I do not wish to end up like that girl-child Willow, wandering mad in the woods.”
“And how will we find our way out again? We searched for hours We’re lost.”
“I was raised on the edge of these woods, or at least something like them.” He suddenly wondered whether they were even in the world he knew, or wandering in a place more distant than the land of the gods. It was a harrowing thought. What had the phantom said? “Even in this land where his brother is the only lord.” Whose brother? The sun’s? But the moon was a goddess, surely—white-breasted Mesiya, great Perin’s sister.
It was too much to think about Vansen forced himself back to what was before them now, the hope of escape. It was hard to think, though—the voice of the wind was ever-present and insinuating, urging sleep and surrender. “The moss will grow thickest on the sou
thern side of the trees,” he said. “If we continue south long enough, surely we will find our way back into wholesome lands again.”
“Leaving this place behind,” Dyer said quietly, thoughtfully. It was strange, but to Vansen he sounded almost unwilling, a notion that sent a pulse of fear chasing up the guard captain’s backbone.
The morning, or at least the stretch of hours after waking, slid by quickly. There was moss everywhere, on almost every tree, deep woolly green patches. If it grew more thickly on one side than another, it was a minute difference, after a while, Vansen began to doubt his own ability to distinguish. Still, he had no other plan and he was growing increasingly frightened. They had lost the road in a thicket of black-leaved trees too thick to pass and they had not found it again. He had not seen a single thing that looked familiar. It was hard not to feel that the forest was continuing to grow around him, that its borders were stretching outward faster than he and Dyer could ride, and that not only wouldn’t they find their way out again, the shadow-forest would soon cover everything he had ever known, like wine from an upended jug spreading across a tabletop.