by Tad Williams
As the chicken carcasses were carried away, and the huge half-bullock sweating in its own juices was carted in, surrounded by what to Briony’s taste was an overly festive array of peacocks roasted and then dressed again in their own feathers, the dogs barked excitedly and snuffled in the rushes for dropped bones. She reached down and scratched a furry head, glad somebody here was deservedly happy, anyway.
“The work on the fortifications is largely done,” Brone told her quietly. “But the strongest walls will not hold if the hearts inside are weak. The nobles are restive. Several have gone already, preferring to take their chances in their own homes, or even to take to the sea lanes if things seem to go badly.”
“I know.” She had granted enough spurious requests in the last days, thin excuses that she felt certain she could pull to tatters m an instant if she chose. “Let them go, Lord Brone. Those are not the folk we’ll want at our sides if things do grow worse rather than merely seem bad, as they do now.” She glanced at Hendon Tolly and his sister-in-law Elan, halfway down the table but in a different world, surrounded by admirers like Durstin Crowel, the Baron of Graylock, all but the girl laughing broadly at one of Tolly’s jokes. “In truth, it’s too bad they do not all leave. Southmarch might be harder to defend, but the waiting would be more pleasant.”
“But that is just the thing . . .” Brone leaned back and waited for one of the squires to drop a slice of beef onto his trencher. “For every fainthearted noble that rides off south or sets sail to the east,” he said when the youth had moved on, “a retinue of men-at-arms goes with him, and we can scarcely afford to lose a one of them.”
Briony waved her hand: what could she do? One could not compel love, she had decided, especially not for the child when it was the father who had earned it. All the faces that had come before her, mouthing reasons why they were urgently needed on the family lands or promising to return with a fresh muster of troops had begun to look as distant and dead as the likenesses in the portrait hall. But she would remember them, if one day the sun shone on Southmarch again. She would recall who left and she would most certainly recall who stayed, and she would punish and reward them accordingly. She owed that to her father and Kendrick, now that they were helpless to protect this place both had loved so much.
She was startled to realize that she had been thinking about her father again as though he were dead. She made the sign of pass-evil, something she had scarcely done since childhood when she learned it from one of her nursemaids. He is well, she told herself. I will write him another letter tonight, send it out with a courier on a ship going south. She felt a wash of shame. I have told him nothing of this coming war, if that is what it is, and only the barest details of Kendrick’s death. But was this the sort of news to send to a man imprisoned, that his kingdom stood threatened, and so strangely? Even prisoned in Hierosol, he would have heard about Kendrick, and of Shaso s imprisonment, whether or not he had received her last letter—was that not heartache enough? She suddenly missed her father so badly she found it hard to breathe. Barrick, too. She wished her twin were beside her now, that they could escape together later to discuss all these yawning, greasy-mouthed courtiers, Lady Comfrey M’Neel with her hair already half-undone after drinking too much wine, fat Lord Bratchard who saw himself against all evidence as a wit and a ladies’ man, who used to paw Briony’s hair and face when she was small and tell her what a pretty young woman she was growing to be.
I hope that if this castle falls, the Twilight People take the lot of them and march them off to Vansen’s foggy shadowlands with chains around their necks.
It was a stunningly uncharitable thought, and ignored the many kind and good hearts around her, but at this moment the shout of conversation and clanking of cups and knives seemed little better than the clamor of the barnyard, and these people, for all their finery, little better than pigs shoving to reach the trough.
Hierarch Sisel was trying to say something to her, but at that moment a loud bray of laughter from handsome, stupid Durstin Crowel pricked at her like a needle and she flinched. The Baron of Graylock was roaring at something that Hendon Tolly had said, laughing so hard that he choked on his wine and sprayed some on his ruff and down his front, occasioning fresh laughter from the others around him. The author of the remark met her eye, his lips drawn in a satisfied smile. She knew, or felt certain she did, who was the butt of Hendon Tolly’s jest.
“Lord Tolly,” she called, “like Erilo putting a blessing on the grape harvest, it seems you are bringing much-needed mirth to our table tonight, when otherwise people might be sitting quiet and thoughtful, wondering what the gods have in store for us.”
Beside her Brone cleared his throat and on the other side the hierarch tried his remark again, some innocuous comment about how all the fortification work had made him think about some additions to the temple, but she was paying neither of them any attention. She and Hendon Tolly had locked eyes. She was waiting for his reply, and now others were, too: a few dogs beneath the table were growling and playing tug-o-war with a bone, but otherwise the room had grown remarkably still.
“It is a credit to your hospitality, Princess Briony, that you provide us many diversions. You have given us so many interesting things to think about that I had almost forgotten that I am mourning the loss of my brother, Duke Gailon.”
“Yes, we have all been saddened by Gailon’s disappearance,” she said, ignoring another warning cough from Avin Brone. “It was especially a blow because his departure from this house followed so soon after the death of my own brother.”
A palpable unease had fallen over the table. Even Crowel, who had been ready to laugh, sat with his mouth open, surprised.
“We are all unhappy,” Avin Brone said loudly. “To have lost two such noble men so close together . . . well, we can only pray that Lord Tolly’s brother comes back to us safe.”
Tolly raised an eyebrow and smiled a little, content to wait and see which way she would take this—whether she would acknowledge Brone s offered flag of truce. His self-confidence was itself an insult.” Briony found it maddening that he should feel so secure as to bandy words with the reigning princess in her own hall, at her own table, and then leave it to her to grasp for peace if she wished.
She did not wish. Not tonight.
“Yes, certainly many people hope that Gailon Tolly appears again after such a mysterious disappearance. My brother Kendrick, though, will not be coming back, not in this circle of the world.”
The Tolly eyebrow climbed yet higher. It was a strangeness she could not get used to, that he was both so much like and unlike his brother. She had never liked Gailon Tolly, had found him dour and self-righteous and even a little dim, but his younger brother had a smell of sulfur about him, a dark glint of something deep and more than a little mad. “Is Her Highness suggesting that my brother—my brother the duke, the head of a family that has served Southmarch for centuries—might have had something to do with the death of the prince regent?"
“Here now!” said Hierarch Sisel, and though it trembled, his voice was surprisingly strong. He had spoken even before Brone, a demonstration of his dismay. “This is a terrible thing to suggest or even to think, and may the gods forgive us all for such talk when our soldiers are riding into danger.”
“Well said,” growled Avin Brone. There were a few nods around the table as the nobles of better—or at least fainter—heart reacted with relief to the puncturing of the growing tension. “No one here suspects Duke Gailon of anything and we all pray for his safe return. The guilty man is chained in the stronghold even as we speak, and we have found not the slightest suggestion that he had any confederates.”
But Briony was suddenly remembering old Puzzle’s strange report of Gailon’s visit to Kendrick’s chamber, as well as Brone’s own revelation that his spy had seen agents he thought were the Autarch’s at Summerfield Court. She kept her mouth shut, but she did not move her eyes from Hendon Tolly’s stony stare.
Let it
go, Briony, she told herself. This is pointless. No, worse than pointless.
His lips quirked. He was enjoying the moment.
“Of course Lord Brone is right,” she said aloud. It was like swallowing a bitter remedy. “The Summerfields are always welcome here—we are family, after all, heirs of Anglin himself and Kellick Eddon. After the cares of the day, I was merely curious to hear the joke that those around you found so cheering.”
Hendon Tolly’s smile did not falter, but it definitely grew smaller and his eyes narrowed a little as he considered. “It was nothing, Princess,” he said at last. “A bit of drollery I do not even remember it now.”
Lord Brone was murmuring at her ear again, trying to get her attention. Briony was weary. It was time to let it go—let it all go. There were problems enough, the gods knew, without allowing this man under her skin. She nodded, letting him have a more or less graceful retreat, but now Durstin Crowel tugged drunkenly at Tolly’s arm.
“You remember it, Hendon,” he said “It was very droll indeed. About . . .” he affected a whisper the entire table could hear, “. . . Prince Barrick.”
Something grabbed at Briony s heart. A low groan escaped from the lord constable. “Ah,” she said. “Was it? Then I really think you should share it.”
Tolly gave the Baron of Graylock a look of contempt, then turned back to her. He took a swallow of wine; when he was finished, his face was composed again, but she could still see that strange light dancing in his eye— not drunkenness, but something more permanent. “Very well,” he said. “Since both my friend and my princess insist. I was much taken with your raiment, Briony—your clothes.”
She felt herself grow stiff and cold-masked as a statue. He had deliberately left out her title, as though they were both children again and he was taunting her, the mere girl who wanted to play with her betters. “Yes? I am glad it impresses you, Hendon. These are warlike times so I thought that a more warlike garb might be in order.”
“Yes, of course.” He inclined his head a little. “Of course. Well, all I was wondering is, if you are wearing that . . .” he made a disdainful gesture, “does it mean that Prince Barrick is riding to battle in a dress?”
The shocked murmur and the few startled gasps of laughter had scarcely begun when Briony found herself standing, her chair tumbled over behind her. Brone grabbed for her arm—she almost struck him for trying—but he could not stop her. Her sword hissed from the scabbard.
“If you think my clothes amusing,” she said through teeth clenched so hard her jaw would ache later, “perhaps you will find my blade amusing, too.”
“Princess!” hissed Sisel, shocked, but he was not such a fool as to grab at someone with a naked blade quivering in her hand, woman or no.
Hendon Tolly stood up slowly, pleased and not doing much about hiding it. His hand dropped to his own hilt and caressed it briefly, his eyes all the time fixed on hers. “Amusing indeed,” he said, “but of course I could not raise my hand against the princess regent, even for such diverting sport. Perhaps we could have a test with children’s weapons sometime, so that no one takes harm.”
Her heart was thundering now. She was tempted to charge him, to force him to unsheathe, no matter the result, if only to wipe that mocking satisfaction from his lean face. She did not even care that he was a well-known swordsman and she was simply the pupil of another famous blade, a pupil who had scarcely practiced since the summer and could not hope to equal Tolly even on her very best day. It would almost be worth it to force him to kill her in self-defense. Nobody would be laughing then, and all her cares would be over.
But I’d never see Barrick again, or Father. Her arm was shaking badly. She lowered the blade until the tip clicked against the table leg. And one of the bloody Tollys would wind up as regent until Anissa’s child is born—if they let it live.
“Get out of my sight,” she said to Hendon Tolly, then turned her eye on the rest of the table, the rows of pale, gaping faces, some still with lumps of gravied meat congealing in their fingers, arrested halfway from plate to mouth. “All of you. All of you!”
But it was Briony herself who slammed the sword back into its sheath and then turned and stalked out of the Great Hall, scattering servants as she went. She managed to wait until the door fell shut behind her before letting the flood of angry tears overwhelm her.
33
The Pale Things
STAR ON THE SHIELD:
All the ancestors are singing
The stones are piled one on another in wet grass
Two newborn calves wait trembling
—from The Bonefall Oracles
It was a grim thing to stand at the Northmarch crossroad where he had stood only the month before and see the hills now smothered by dark vines and nodding, bruise-colored flowers. The soldiers whispered among themselves and scuffed their feet like restless cattle, but it was a far more disturbing sight for Ferras Vansen. He had seen such vegetation before, but forty miles or more to the west. It had spread far in a short time.
“Where are those scouts?” asked Earl Tyne for the fifth or sixth time in an hour. He slapped his gloved hands together as though the day were bitterly cold, though the sun had not yet set and the wind was mild for Ondekamene. The war leader had dumped his helmet on the ground like an empty bucket and pushed back his arming cap, his coarse, gray-shot hair stood up in tufts. He stared out at the strange sheen of the meadows and the black blossoms moving in the breeze like the heads of children watching them silently from the deep grass. “They should have been back by now.”
“Domey and the others are good men, my lord.” Vansen looked across at the resting soldiers. At any other time after such a long halt they would have gone straying off into the grass like untended sheep, but instead they stood uncomfortably where they had stopped, as if prisoned by the edges of the road. These sons of farmers and shopkeepers wanted no part of the thorny vines or the unnatural, oily-looking flowers.
“You said you’ve seen this before,Vansen.”
“Yes, Lord Aldritch. With my troop, in the north of Silverside. Just a little while before . . . before things began to go wrong.”
“Well, blood of the gods, keep your mouth shut about that, will you?” Tyne scowled. “This lot are all about ready to turn tail and run all the way back to Southmarch.” He glared at a shaven-headed mantis making an elaborate show of wafting a bowl of incense around in the middle of the crossroad, moaning and singing as he went about his task of banishing evil spirits. Many of the men watched this spectacle with obvious unease. “I’m going to have that priest’s head off,” the Earl of Blueshore growled, almost to himself.
“I think this lot will be all right when the time comes, my lord. Many of them have fought on the Brenland borders or against the Kertish hill bandits. It’s the waiting that’s hard on them.”
Tyne took a drink from his saddle-cup and looked at the guard captain for a long, considering moment. “It’s hard on all of us—that’s the cursed thing. Bad enough waiting for the enemy to show themselves when you know you’re fighting mortal men. What are they supposed to make of all this . . . ?” He waved his hand at the poisoned hills.
Ferras Vansen was glad the earl didn’t really expect an answer.
“Ah,” the older man said suddenly, with real relief in his voice. “There they are.” He squinted. “It is them, isn’t it?”
“Yes, lord.” Vansen also felt the tightness in his chest loosen a bit. The sentries had been expected back at noon and the sun was on the hilltops now. “They are riding fast.”
“They look as though they have something to say, don’t they?” Tyne turned and stared back at the line of soldiers on the road. It had been a full day or more since they had encountered the last refugees from Candlers-town, and although the tales were terrible, almost unbelievable, their presence had at least proved that men could cross these hills in safety. But since they had passed the last of those stragglers, the army of Southmarch had traveled throug
h empty, near-silent lands, and now a stir was moving through the ranks at the sight of the distant scouts. Behind the soldiers the first row of drovers, anticipating that the train would soon move out again, began whipping back the oxen who had strayed a little distance from the road to graze. “Ride out to them, bring them straight through to me,” commanded Tyne. “I think under that tree, there, just a short way up the hill.That will let us talk away from sharp ears.”
“Perhaps we should set the men to making camp, lord,” Vansen suggested. “It is getting late to ride much farther and it will occupy them.”