by Tad Williams
The young prince didn’t even look. Vansen nudged his horse closer still, until it was rubbing shoulders with Barrick’s mount, then reached across and grabbed at the prince’s arm, remembering only too late that it was the wounded one, the crippled one.
Crippled or whole, it seemed to make little difference. Barrick snatched his arm away but still did not turn to look at Vansen, although he did speak for the first time.
“Go away.”
There was something odd in his voice, a sleepwalker’s distance; the boy’s refusal to turn his head began to seem more like madness than contempt. Vansen grabbed him again, harder now, and the prince jabbed at him with his elbow, trying to wriggle free. The horses bumped against each other and whinnied, uncertain whether this was war or something else. Vansen ducked a lashing fist, then wrapped his arms around the prince and pulled Barrick toward him. Barrick’s feet caught in the stirrups and he fell, taking the guard captain with him.Vansen avoided being kicked by the horses, but the ground seemed to rise up and hit him like a huge fist. For long moments he could only lie on his back, wheezing.
The horses had trotted on a little way and stopped. When Vansen at last sat up, still not able to fill his lungs completely, he saw to his dismay that Barrick was already on his feet and limping toward his large black horse where it cropped at the meadow grass, half-hidden by mist although it stood only a few dozen yards away. The prince was holding his side as though it hurt him badly, but showed no sign of letting it stop him.Vansen struggled upright and ran after him, but he was weary and battered from the day’s fighting and the fall; Prince Barrick had almost reached his horse by the time Vansen caught him.
“Your Highness, I cannot let you go there! Not into that land!”
In reply, Barrick pulled his dagger from his belt and took a clumsy swipe at Vansen without even looking at him.Vansen stumbled back in surprise, tripped, fell. The prince showed no urge to follow up on his advantage; he turned and caught his horse again, which had skipped away in nervousness at their struggle. Just as Barrick got his fingers under the belly strap to hold the horse and began to search for the stirrup with his foot, Vansen reached him again.
This time he was expecting the knife and was able to twist it out of the prince’s fingers. The boy let out a small grunt of pain, but still seemed to care little about Ferras Vansen himself; he simply turned again to clamber up onto his saddle. Vansen grabbed him around the waist and pulled him backward so that they both crashed to the ground This time he shoved his helmeted head against the boy’s cloaked back and held on. Barrick gasped with pain and his struggles became increasingly desperate, his arms and legs thrashing as wildly as those of a drowning swimmer. As it became apparent that Vansen was the stronger, that the boy couldn’t reach the older man’s eyes or vitals with his hooking fingers, Barrick writhed more and more madly. The low moan he had been making as they rolled on the ground rose to a shriek, a horrible raw noise that dug intoVansen’s ears like a sharp stick, and the prince began to fling his arms and legs about, kicking, thrashing. Vansen could only hold tight. He felt a little like a father, but of a child who was very ill. An insane child.
How will I ever get him back to Southmarch? he wondered. Barrick’s shrieking grew increasingly ragged but did not stop or even slacken.Vansen started to crawl, trying to drag the boy along the ground toward his horse. I will have to tie him up. But with what? And how will I sneak him past the shadow folk?
Barrick’s struggles became even wilder, something Vansen would not have thought possible. He could pull the prince no farther, and had to stop a few yards from the horses, holding the boy wrapped in his arms and legs as Barrick went on screeching as monotonously as a broken-hinged gate fanning in the wind.
At last it was too much. Vansen’s own limbs were achingly weary, the boy’s cries so heartrendingly terrible, he began to believe he was somehow crippling the young prince’s mind. He let him go, watched as the boy stopped shrieking, got to his feet, swaying—it was a blessed relief to have the silence come rushing back—and staggered toward his horse, which waited with unnatural calm.
Vansen got to his feet and stumbled after him. “Where are you going, Highness? Don’t you know you are traveling into the land of shadows?”
Barrick climbed into the saddle, slipping, struggling, clearly almost as weary as Vansen. He sat up, holding his side again. “I . . . I know.” His tone was hollow, miserable.
“Then why, Highness?” When there was no reply, Vansen raised his voice. “Barrick! Listen to me! Why are you doing this? Why are you riding into the shadowlands?”
The boy hesitated, fumbling for the reins. The black horse, Vansen noticed for the first time, had strange, amber-yellow eyes. Vansen reached out, gently this time, and touched the prince’s arm. Barrick actually looked toward him for a moment, although his eyes did not quite touch Ferras Vansen’s. “I don’t know why. I don’t know!”
“Come back with me.That way there’s nothing but danger.” But Vansen knew there was danger behind them as well, madness and death. Hadn’t he first thought Barrick was fleeing the horrors of the battle? “Come back with me to Southmarch.Your sister will be afraid for you. Princess Briony will be afraid.”
For an instant it seemed that he might have touched something in the prince regent: Barrick sighed, sagged a little in his saddle. Then the instant passed. “No. I am . . . called.”
“Called to what?”
The boy shook his head slowly, the gesture of a doomed, lost man. Vansen had seen such a face once before, eyes so empty and distraught. It had been a man of the dales, a distant relation of Ferras Vansen’s mother, who had found himself caught up in a border dispute between two large clans and had seen his wife and children slaughtered before his eyes. That man had worn just such a look when he came to say his farewells before going out to find his family’s killers, knowing that no one would either accompany or avenge him, that his own death was inevitable.
Vansen shivered.
Barrick abruptly spurred his horse northward. Vansen ran to his own mount and spurred to catch him until they were riding side by side.
“Please, Highness, I ask you one last time. Will you not turn back to your family, your kingdom? Your sister Briony?”
Barrick only shook his head, bis eyes once more gazing into nothingness.
“Then you will force me to follow you into this terrible place that I barely escaped the first time. Is that what you want, Highness, for me to follow you into death? Because my oath will not allow me to let you go alone.” Vansen could see her now in his mind’s eye, her lovely face and poorly hidden fear, as well as the bravery that was all the more striking because of it. Now I pay back for your older brother’s life, Briony. Now I pay for dead Kendrick’s with my own. But of course, she would likely never know.
For a moment, just a moment, a little of the true Barrick seemed to rise to his eyes, as if someone trapped in a burning house came scrambling to the window to shout for help. “Into death?” he murmured. “Perhaps. But perhaps not.” He let his eyes fall closed, then slowly opened them again. “There are stranger things than death, Captain Vansen—stranger and older. Did you know that?"
There was nothing to say. Exhausted in body and spirit, Vansen could only follow the mad young prince into the shadowy hills.
*
Briony had never thought of Southmarch Castle as something oppressive or frightening—it had been her home for all her life, after all—but as they moved quietly on foot along the edge of the lagoon, the keep with its tall towers and lighted windows seemed to loom over her like a crowned skull.
The whole night seemed a fantasy, a perverse one in which serving girls were transformed into monsters and princesses had to go disguised through their own domains in Skimmer clothes that stank of fish.
Ena led them through the dank, narrow streets to a dock on the southern lagoon where the keep’s huge outer wall shadowed Fitters Row, but they did not get into a boat Instead, she took them
through a weathered door that opened right into the wide wall of stone which defended the castle from the bay. The rough-hewn passage inside led to a stairwell that wound upward into the cliff wall for some twenty or thirty paces, then down again for quite a few more steps, where Briony was astonished to discover herself beside another tiny lagoon, this one entirely surrounded by a rock cave that was lit by lanterns perched here and there along the shore. This must be hidden inside the seawall, she marveled Two Skimmer men sat cross-legged on the stony shore guarding a dozen or so small boats, but they were on their feet before Briony and her companions ever left the stairs. They both carried nasty-looking hooked blades on long poles and did not lower the weapons until Ena had spoken to them in a guttural undertone.
Did the Skimmers truly have their own tongue, then? Briony had heard many say that couldn’t be true. She realized that she had learned very little about these people who lived inside her own castle. And a hidden lagoon! “Did you know about this place?” she asked Shaso.
“I have never seen it,” he said, which didn’t quite answer the question. She didn’t press him further, though; he was barely able to stand upright as it was.
Ena appeared to have successfully explained her mission to the Skimmer sentries. She directed Shaso and Briony into a long, slender rowboat, then climbed in after them and rowed them out onto the tiny lagoon toward a low, apparently natural opening in the far rock wall that must have been invisible under water for at least half of every day. The oars moved easily in the girl’s strong, long-fingered hands. In only a short while the little boat slipped out onto the gentle swell of the bay, with the cloudy, vast sky overhead and the night winds blowing.
“Why have I never heard of that lagoon?” Briony was cramped on the seat, her feet perched on the sack Ena and her father had provided that contained mostly dried fish and skin bags full of water. She looked back. “What if someone should invade the castle through that hole in the seawall?”
“It is only there for a little part of the day.” The Skimmer girl smiled an oddly shy, wide-mouthed smile. “When the tide begins to come back up, we must take the boats out of the water and leave the cavern. There are other guards, too—guards you did not see.”
Briony could only shake her head. It was clear that there was much she had yet to learn about her own home.
After a stretch of quiet, the motion of the little boat and the quiet repetitive creaking as Ena plied the oars began to lull her. Sleep was very tempting, but she was not ready to surrender yet. “Shaso? Shaso.”
He made a grunting sound.
“You told me you would explain what happened. Why you did not tell me the truth.”
He groaned, but very quietly. “Is this my punishment, then?”
“If you want to think of it that way.” She reached out and squeezed his arm, felt where the hard muscle had begun to devour itself during his dark, malnourished weeks in the stronghold cell. “I promise I will let you sleep soon. Just tell me what happened . . . that night.”
Shaso spoke slowly, stopping often to get his breath. “He called me in, your brother Kendrick. He had just been visited by Gailon Tolly. If that jackal Hendon told the truth in this one thing, anyway, Gailon must have been arguing against the Autarch’s offer, not for it. I thought he was the one who brought it, but it seems I was wrong. In any case, your brother told me what he intended to do—to abandon your father’s belief that all the nations of Eion must be defended. Kendrick thought that he could convince the other monarchs to let the Autarch take Hierosol, and that m return the Autarch would release your father.
“Leaving aside whether or not it was honorable, I thought it a foolish gamble. We drank wine and we argued. We argued a long time, Kendrick and I, and bitterly. I told him that he was a fool to bargain with such a creature, especially a creature of such growing power—that I would sooner kill myself than let him do this to his kingdom. All my life I have watched the monarchs of Xis at work, Briony. I saw Tuan and a dozen other nations in Xand dragged in chains before the Falcon Throne, and it is said this Autarch is the worst of his whole mad line. But Kendrick was certain that the only way to withstand the Autarch in the long run was to have your father Olin lead a defensive coalition of northern nations—to give up Hierosol and the other decadent southern cities. A demon’s bargain, I called it—the kind that only the demon can win. Eventually, in drunken anger and despair and what I must admit was disgust as well, I. . . I left him. I passed Anissa’s maid in the hall—summoned by Kendrick, I assumed. She was pretty and had a saucy eye, so I thought little of it.”
A thought caught at Briony Kendrick said, “Isss . .” He could not remember the girl’s name. He was calling her “Anissa’s maid” or “servant” as he . . as he died. It was too dreadful to think on long, and she did not want to be distracted. “You say you simply left, Shaso. But when we found you, we were covered in blood!”
“As we disputed, as I raged against his foolishness, I . . turned my knife on myself. I told him . . . Oh, Briony, girl, I hate that these were the last words . . . the last words I spoke with him.” For a long moment it seemed that he wouldn’t continue. When he did, the rasp in his voice was harsher than before. “I told your brother I would cut my own arms from my body, the arms that had so long served his father, before letting them serve such a treacherous son. That I would stab myself in the heart. I was drunk—very drunk by then, and very angry. I could not bear facing Dawet dan-Faar across the table that night without wine and I had already had several cups before I went to your brother’s room. I have cursed myself for it in the darkness of that cell many times. Kendrick tried to wrestle the knife away from me. He was furious that I would argue with him, that I did not merely doubt his strategy but denounced it and him. We fought for the knife and I was cut again. Him, too, I think, but only a little. At last I came back to my right mind. He sent me away, making me swear on my debt to your father that I would not speak of what had happened no matter how much I disagreed with him.
“To tell you truth, even after you freed me, I would never have spoken of what he planned, poor Kendrick, the dishonor of bargaining with the bloody Autarch . . .”Again Shaso had to stop. Briony would have felt sorry for him but the newness of the betrayal was too much—Shaso’s for keeping stubbornly silent and her brother’s for thinking he knew more than their father, for thinking himself a king before he had gained the wisdom, for supposing he could manipulate a great and powerful enemy. “I . . . returned to my rooms,” Shaso went on. “I drank a great deal more wine, trying to make it all go away. When you came for me, I thought that Kendrick was still angry with me for insulting him, perhaps even that I had been too drunk and had hurt him in our scuffling, that I would be locked up for insulting him—made a slave again, after all these years. It only became clear to me later what had happened.”
“But, you fool, why didn’t you tell us?”
“What could I say? I gave my oath to your brother before he died that I would not speak of what had happened in that room. I was ashamed for myself and for him. And at first, before I understood the truth, my honor was outraged that you should come for me like a criminal, simply because I had disagreed with the prince regent. But when I learned what had happened, I told you that I hadn’t killed him, and that was the truth.” He trembled a little under her hand, which still touched his arm. “What does a man have if he gives up the bond of his word? He is worse than dead. Had Hen-don Tolly not told you what your brother planned, I would be silent still.”
Briony sat back, looking up at the jutting shadow of the castle. She was shiveringly cold and weary, still terrified by the night’s events. Somewhere in that darkened keep, she knew, armed men were searching for her and Shaso. “So where do we go?”
“South,” he said after a while. He sounded like he had fallen asleep for a few moments.
“But after that? After we land? Do you have allies in mind?” South, she thought. Where Father is being held prisoner. “My brother,” she
said out loud. “I . . . I’m afraid for him, Shaso.”
“Whatever happened, he did what he thought was best. His soul is at rest, Briony.”
For a moment her heart was startled up into her throat. Barrick? Did Shaso know something about him that she did not? Then she understood.
“I didn’t mean Kendrick. Yes, he did his best, the gods bless him and keep him. No, I mean Barrick.” It was hard to find the strength even to speak: the long day had finally caught up to her. Tears made the dark geometries of the keep even more blurry. “I miss him. I am afraid . . . I’m afraid something bad has happened.”
Shaso had nothing to say, but patted her arm awkwardly.
The boat slipped on, the oars moving steadily beneath Ena’s skillful hands. Briony felt like Zona in the famous tale, fleeing her home in the middle of the night. What was it Tinwright had written about that— overwritten, to be honest? “Clear-eyed, lion-hearted, her mmd turned toward the day when her honor will again be proclaimed . . .” But the goddess Zoria had been escaping from an enemy and fleeing back to her father’s house. Briony was leaving her home behind, perhaps forever. And Zoria was an immortal.