by Tad Williams
“Clearly we must at least keep the potboy until we find the secret of his knowledge,” Brone said, giving the poet a spark of hope. Perhaps they would let him go! “Not to mention discovering how he got his hands on that gold dolphin he gave to this so-called poet. I suppose I can find a place for the potboy in the guard room—he’ll be under many eyes there. But I am not sure we want this other one gossiping in the taverns about what he’s seen.” Brone frowned. “I imagine you won’t simply let me kill him.” Suddenly breathless, Tinwright could only hope it was meant as a joke. He was relieved when the princess shook her head. “Too bad,” Brone told her, “because there is little need for his shiftless sort, and Southmarch already has armies of them.”
“I don’t care what you do with the one who wrote the letter.” Briony was staring fixedly at Gil; Tinwright had an inexplicable twinge of jealousy. “I doubt he has anything to do with this matter—the potboy cannot write and needed someone to do it. Send the poet back home and tell him we’ll cut his head off if he whispers a word. I need to think.”
Tinwright had suffered a series of glum realizations. If he went back to the Quiller’s Mint, he would soon be getting that promised visit from the guard whose woman he apparently stole; not only would he be brutally beaten, but it would be for something he couldn’t even remember—drinking with Hewney nearly always ended in oblivion. He could only hope the wench had been pretty although, looking at the guard, he rather doubted it. But since the lord constable had confiscated his gold dolphin, he couldn’t afford to move elsewhere. There was no well-heeled lady in his life at the moment to take him in, only Brigid who lived at the Mint. And the cold weather had come. It would be a bad time to live in the streets.
Tinwright was now feeling extremely sorry for himself. For a moment he considered concocting a story of his own to make himself more useful and important, pretending that he shared some of the potboy’s strange knowledge, but one look at the massive Brone convinced him of the folly of that. For some reason, Gil actually did know things he shouldn’t, but Tinwright could summon no such weaponry, even in bluff. He contemplated the distracted princess and an idea struck him so abruptly that he couldn’t help wondering if Zosim was trying to make up for the fickle cruelty of his other gift. He dropped to his knees on the floor.
“My lady,” he said in his most sincere voice, the one that had kept him in food and drink since he first ran away from home, “Highness, may I beg a favor? It is far too much and I am far too lowly, but I beg you at least to hear me.
She looked at him. That was a first step, at least. “What?”
“I am a poet, Princess—a humble one, one whose gifts have not always been rewarded, but those who know me will tell you of my quality.” She was losing interest so he hurried ahead. “I came here in fear and trepidation. My attempt to do a kindness for my simple friend the potboy has caused you and your brother pain. I am devastated.”
She smiled sourly. “If you tell anyone about this, you certainly will be devastated.”
“Please, only hear me, Highness. Only hear your humble servant. Your attention to the cares of the land have doubtless prevented you from knowing of the panegyric I am writing about you.” That, and the fact that he had been writing no such thing before this moment.
“Panegyric?"
“A tribute to your astonishing beauty.” He saw her expression and quickly added, “And most importantly, to your wisdom and kindness. Your mercy.” She smiled again, although it still had a nasty little curl to it. “In fact, as I sit here, fortunate enough finally to be within the radiant glow of your presence instead of worshiping you like the distant moon, I see that my central conceit was even more accurate than I had hoped—that you are indeed . . . indeed.
She got tired of waiting. “I am indeed what?”
“The very embodiment of Zoria, warrior goddess and mistress of wisdom.” There. He could only hope that he had guessed correctly, that her odd way of dressing and her solicitation of the goddess’ mercy were not chance occurrences. “When I was young, I often dreamed of Perin’s courageous daughter, but in my dreams I was blinded by her glow—I could never truly imagine the heavenly countenance. Now I know the true face of the goddess. Now I see her born again in Southmarch’s virgin princess.” He suddenly worried he had gone a bit too far: she didn’t look as flattered as he had hoped she would, although she didn’t look angry either. He held his breath.
“Shall I have him beaten before I take him back to that brothel?” Brone asked her.
“To tell the truth,” Briony said, “he . . . amuses me. I have not laughed in days, and just now I almost did. That is a rare gift in these times.” She looked Tinwright up and down. “You wish to be my poet, do you? To tell the world of my virtues?”
He was not sure what was happening, but this was not a moment to be wasted on truth of any sort. “Yes, my lady, my princess, it has always been my greatest dream. Indeed, Highness, your patronage would make me the happiest man on earth, the luckiest poet upon Eion.”
“Patronage?” She raised an eyebrow. “Meaning what? Money?"
“Oh, never, my lady!” In due time, he thought. “No, it would be a boon beyond price if you simply allowed me to observe you—at a distance, of course!—so that I could better construct my poem. It has already been years in the making, Highness, the chief labor of my life, but it has been difficult, composed around a few brief glimpses of you at public festivals. If you favor me with the chance to witness you even from across a crowded room as you bring your wise rule to the fortunate people of Southmarch, that would be a kindness that proves you are truly Zoria reborn.”
“In other words, you want a place to stay.” For the first time there was something like genuine amusement in her smile. “Brone, see if Puzzle can find a place for him. They can share a room—keep each other company.”
“Princess Briony . . . !” Brone was annoyed.
“Now I must talk to my brother. You and I will meet again before sunset, Lord Constable.” She started toward the door, then stopped, looked Tinwnght up and down. “Farewell, poet. I’ll be expecting to hear that ode very soon. I’m looking forward to it.”
As he watched her go, Matty Tinwnght was not quite sure whether this had been the best day of his life or the worst. He thought it must be the best, but there was a small, sick feeling m his stomach that surely should not be part of the day he had become an appointed poet to the royal court.
*
At first, it seemed that Collum Dyer would be able to follow the fairy host like a blind man tracking the sun despite the confusion of the fogbound forest and the serpentine inconstancy of the road, the guard set off in a way that Vansen would have called confident, except that the rest of the man’s demeanor spoke of nothing so humble and human as confidence. In fact, Dyer might have been a sleepwalker, stumbling and murmuring to himself like one of the crazed penitents that had followed the effigies of the god Kermos from town to town during the days of the Great Death.
Quickly, though, it became clear that if Dyer was a blind man following the sun, that sun was setting. Within what seemed no more than an hour they were staggering in circles. So maddening was the forest-maze that Vansen would not even have known that for certain except that Dyer stepped on his own sword belt, which he had lost far back in the day’s march.
Exhausted, devastated,Vansen sank to the ground and crouched with his face in his hands, half expecting that Dyer would go on without him and mostly not caring Instead, to his surprise, he felt a hand on his shoulder.
“Where are they, Ferras? They were so beautiful.” Despite the dark beard, Collum Dyer looked like nothing so much as a child, his eyes wide, his mouth quivering.
“Gone on,” Vansen said. “Gone on to kill our friends and families.”
“No.” But what he had said troubled Dyer. “No, they bring something, but not death. Didn’t you hear them? They only take back what was already theirs. That is all they want.”
“But
there are people living on what was already theirs. People like us.” Vansen only wanted to lie down, to sleep. He felt as though he had been endlessly, endlessly swimming in this ocean of trees with no glimpse of shore. “Do you think the farmers and smallholders will simply get up and move so your Twilight People can have their old lands back? Perhaps we can pull down Southmarch Castle as well, build it again in Jellon or Perikal where it won’t interfere with them.”
“Oh, no,” said Dyer very seriously. “They want the castle back. That’s theirs, too. Didn’t you hear them?”
Vansen closed his eyes but it only made him dizzy. He was lost behind the Shadowline with a madman. “I heard nothing.”
“They were singing! Their voices were so fair . . . ?" Now it was Dyer who squeezed his eyes shut. “They sang . . . they sang . . .” The child-face sagged again as though he might burst into tears. “I can’t remember! I can’t remember what they sang.”
That was the first good thing Vansen had heard in hours. Perhaps Dyer’s wits were returning. But why am I not mad, too? he wondered.
Then again, how do I know I’m not?
“Come,” said the guardsman, pulling at his arm. “They are going away from us.”
“We can’t catch them. We’re lost again.” Vansen pushed down his anger. Whatever the reason that Collum Dyer’s wits were clouded and his own were not, or at least not as badly, it was not Dyer’s fault. “We do have to get out of here, but not to follow the Twilight People off to war.” A few tattered scraps of duty seemed to be all that held him together. He clutched them tight. “We have to tell the princess about this . . . and the prince. We have to tell Avin Brone.”
“Yes.” Collum nodded. “They will be happy.”
Vansen groaned quietly and set about looking for enough damp sticks to try to make a fire. “Somehow I don’t think so.”
After a succession of terrible dreams in which he was pursued by faceless men through endless mist-cloaked gardens and unlit halls, FerrasVansen gave up on sleep. He warmed his hands beside the fire and fretted over their dismal circumstances, but he was exhausted and without useful ideas: all he could do was stare out at the endless trees and try to keep from screaming in despair. A child of the countryside, he had never imagined he could grow to hate something as familiar as a forest, as common as mere trees, but of course nothing here was mere anything. Outwardly familiar—he had seen oak and beech, rowan and birch and alder, and in the high places many kinds of evergreen—the dripping trees of this damp shadow-forest seemed to have a brooding life to them, a silence both purposeful and powerful. If he half-closed his eyes, he could almost imagine he was surrounded by ancient priests and priestesses robed in gray and green, tall and stately and not very kindly disposed toward his intrusion into their sacred precincts.
When Collum Dyer finally woke, he also seemed to have awakened from the evil fancy that had gripped his mind. He looked around him, blinking slowly, and then moaned. “By Perin’s Hammer, when will day come in this cursed place?”
“This is as much day as you’ll see until we are in our own lands again,” Vansen told him. “You should know that by now.”
“How long have we been here?” Dyer looked down at his hands as though they should belong to someone else. “I feel ill. Where are the others?”
“Don’t you remember?” He told the guardsman all that had happened, what they had seen. Dyer looked at him mistrustfully.
“I remember none of that. Why would I say such things?”
“I don’t know. Because this place sends people mad. Come—if you’re feeling like yourself again, let’s get moving.”
They walked, but even the small idea that Vansen had of which direction might lead them back across the Shadowline toward mortal lands quickly failed. As the day wore away, with Dyer cursing fate and Vansen biting back his own anger at his companion—he hadn’t had the luxury of being mad for two days, and had suffered this endless, defeating landscape the whole time Collum Dyer had been babbling about the glories of the Twilight folk—it began to seem that not only would they have to sleep in the forest again, they might never find their way out. They were hopelessly lost and almost out of food and drink. Vansen did not trust the water in this land’s quiet streams, but it seemed they soon must drink it or die.
Somewhere in the timeless and arbitrary middle of their day, Vansen spotted a group of figures traveling away from them, struggling along a ridgetop at what looked like half a mile’s distance. He and Dyer were down in a small canyon, hidden by trees, and at first his strong impulse was to hide until these creatures were gone. But something about the stockiest of the climbing shapes snagged his attention; after a moment, attention turned to incredulous delight.
“By all the gods, I swear that must be Mickael Southstead! I would know his walk anywhere, like he had a barrel between his legs.”
Dyer squinted. “You’re right. Bless him—who would ever have thought I’d be happy to see that old whoreson!”
Energies renewed by hope, they ran until they no longer had the breath for it, then continued the climb up the steep hillside at a slower pace. Dyer wanted to shout—he was terrified that they would lose their comrades again—but Vansen did not want to make any more noise than was necessary it already seemed as though the very land was disapprovingly aware of them.
They reached the top of the ridge at last, staggering up onto the crest and stopping to gasp for breath. When they straightened up, they could see the others just a few hundred yards ahead along the ridgetop, still laboring forward, unaware of Vansen and Dyer. This joyful sight was undercut slightly by the view from the crest. The forest stretched as far as they could see on all sides with no landmark more recognizable than a few hilltops like the one on which they stood, jutting up at irregular intervals from the mists that blanketed the shadow-country like islands in the Vuttish archipelago surrounded by the cold northern sea.
Vansen was still winded, but Dyer sprinted ahead. Now that they were so close, Vansen could see that there were only four other survivors, and that one of them was the girl Willow. His heart lifted—the idea that he had brought the poor, tortured creature back to the place that had affected her so badly the first time had been troubling him in his more lucid moments—but only a little. Far more troubling was the rest of his missing guardsmen. Until now he had been able to convince himself that the rest of the troop was together and looking for them. Now he had to admit the problem was not simply that Vansen and Dyer had got themselves lost, but rather that Ferras Vansen, a captain of the royal guard, had lost most of his men.
The princess was right, he thought bitterly as he started after Dyer. I am not to be trusted with the safety of her family. And I should not have been trusted with the lives of these men, either.
Dyer had caught them and embraced Mikael Southstead though he had never liked him much. As Dyer threw his arms around the other two soldiers—Balk and Dawley, it appeared—Southstead turned to Ferras Vansen with a self-satisfied grin. “There you are, Captain We knew we’d find you.”
Vansen was vastly relieved to see even this small portion of his men alive, but was not quite certain he agreed with Southstead’s idea of who had found whom. “I am pleased to see you well,” he told Southstead, then clapped the man on the shoulder. It was a little awkward, but he wanted no embraces.
“Father?” the girl said to him. She looked more ragged than the others, her dress torn and muddy, and her face had lost the cheer it had possessed even in madness. He had a terrible notion of what might have happened in his absence, but also knew that there was nothing he could do about it, nothing. He beckoned her toward him.
“I am not your father, Willow,” he told her gently. “But I am happy to see you. I am Ferras Vansen, the captain of these men.”
“They wouldn’t let me go home, Father,” she said. “I wanted to, but they wouldn’t let me.”
Vansen couldn’t help shuddering, but when he turned back to the others all he said was, “W
e will make camp, but not here. Let us move down into the valley where we’re not so easy to see.”
Between them, Vansen and the remains of his troop scraped together enough biscuit and dried meat for a meager meal, but that was the last of their provisions gone and their waterskms were also nearly empty Soon they would have to drink from the shadow-streams and perhaps eat shadow-food as well. He had already had difficulty restraining Dyer from eating berries and fruit while they traveled, some of which looked quite familiar and wholesome, so how much more difficult would it be now that he had five of them to watch?
It quickly became apparent that Southstead and the others had experienced some of the same things as Vansen and Dyer, but not all, the Shadowline had crept over them while they slept, and the rest of the men and the merchant Beck apparently went mad much as Dyer had done, disappearing with the horses and leaving Southstead, Dawley, Balk, and the girl Willow stranded on foot. But Southstead and his company had not seen the host of the Twilight People on the march, and with the return of his wits Collum Dyer did not truly remember it either, leaving Vansen as the lone witness. He fancied that the others looked at him strangely when he spoke of it, as though he might have invented it all.