(Shadowmarch #1) Shadowmarch

by Tad Williams

  “The dark man . . . !” Briony lifted her head, a sudden feverish light in her eyes. “My maid woke dreaming of a dark man. Where is that villain Dawet? Did he do this? Did he kill . . . my . . . my . . . ?” Her mouth curled, lost shape, then she was weeping again, a raw, heartbreaking sound. She pressed her head against Kendrick’s side.

  “My lady, you must come,” Brone told her, tugging his beard in anxious frustration. “You will have a chance for a proper farewell to the prince, I promise you.”

  “He’s not a prince—he’s my brother!”

  “He was both, Highness.”

  “It’s time to get up, Briony,” Barrick said weakly, as if telling a lie he did not think anyone would believe.

  Avin Brone looked to the guard captain for help. Vansen moved forward, hating what his duty made him do. Brone already had one of the girl’s arms in his broad hands. Vansen took the other, but Briony resisted, glaring at him with such complete hatred that he let her pull away.

  “Princess!” Brone hissed. “Your older brother is dead and you cannot change that. Look around you. Look there!”

  “Leave me alone.”

  “No, gods curse this night, look out the door!”

  Outside the prince regent’s chamber dozens of pale faces hovered silently in the corridors, phantoms of lantern light, the castle’s residents were crowded there, watching in disbelief and horror.

  “You and your brother are the heads of the Eddon family now,” Brone told her in a harsh whisper. “The people need to see you be strong. Your grief should wait until you are private. Can you not stand and be strong for your people?”

  At first she seemed more likely to spit at him than speak, but after a long moment Briony shook her head, then wiped her cheeks and eyes with the back of her hand.

  “You are right, Lord Constable,” she said. “But I will not forgive you for it.”

  “I am not in my post to be either loved or forgiven, Mistress. Come, you are in mourning, but you are still a princess. Let us all get on with what we have to do here.” He offered her his wide arm.

  “No, thank you,” she said. “Barrick?”

  Her twin took an unsteady step toward her. “Are we . . . ?”

  “We will go to the chapel.” Briony Eddon’s face was a mask now, hard and pale as fired white clay. “We will pray for Kendrick there. We will light candles. And if the lord constable and this supposed captain of the guard manage to find the one who killed our brother under their very noses, we will be composed to pass fitting sentence on him.”

  Taking her brother’s arm, she stepped around Ferras Vansen without a look, as though he were a cow or sheep, something too stupid to clear the way of its own volition. As she passed, he could see that her eyes were brimming over again but that she held her head straight. The servants and others in the hall shrank back against the walls to let them pass. Some called out fearful questions, but Briony and her brother walked through them as though they were no more than trees, their voices only the rush of the wind.

  “Eminence, will you go with them?” Avin Brone asked Hierarch Sisel when the twins had passed from earshot. “We need them out of the way so we may do our work, but my heart sinks for them and for the kingdom. Will you go and lead them in prayers, help them to find strength?”

  Sisel nodded and followed the prince and princess. Vansen could not help being impressed at the way his master had dispatched the hierarch—a man of the gods who answered only to the Trigonarch himself in distant Syan—as though he were a lowly groom.

  When they were all gone, Brone scowled and spat. Such disrespect in the prince’s death chamber shocked Vansen, but the lord constable seemed caught up with other things. “At least the Raven’s Gate is closed for the night,” he growled. “But, tomorrow, word of this will move from house to house through the city like a fire, and will be carried to all the lands around, whether we like it or not. We cannot shut out questions or seal in the truth. The young prince and princess will need to show themselves soon or we will have great fear in the people.”

  There is a hole in the kingdom now, Ferras Vansen realized. A terrible hole. This might be the time when a strong man could step in and fill it. What if Avin Brone thought of himself as that sort of man?

  He certainly looked the type. The lord constable was as tall as Vansen, who was not a small fellow, but Brone was almost twice as wide, with a huge bushy beard and shoulders as broad as his substantial belly. In his black cloak—which Ferras suspected he had simply thrown over his night things, then stuffed his feet into boots—the older man looked like a rock on which a ship might founder . . . or on which a great house might be built. And there were others in the kingdom who might also think themselves a good size to wear a crown.

  As the physician Chaven busied himself with the prince’s body, Avin Brone moved to stand over the two slain guardsmen. “This one is Gwatkin, yes? I do not recognize the other.”

  “Caddick—a new fellow.” Ferras frowned. Just days earlier the men had been mocking Caddick Longlegs for never having kissed a girl. Now the youth was new in death as well. “There would have been two more here, but I thought I would rather keep an eye on the end of the keep where the foreigners are lodged.” He swallowed an abrupt surge of bile. “There should have been two more to guard the prince . . .”

  “And have you spoken to those guards yet? By the gods, man, what if they are all dead and the foreigners are now ranging the keep with bloody swords?”

  “I have long since sent a messenger and had one back. One of my best men leads them—Dyer, you know him—and he swears the Hierosoline envoy and his company have not left their rooms.”

  “Ah.” Brone nudged one of the guards’ bodies with his boot toe. “Slashed. A bit fine for swordplay, looks like. But how could a troop of men attack and murder the prince without anyone knowing? And how could something smaller than a troop do such grim work?”

  “I do not know how it could be a troop and go unnoticed, my lord. The corridors were not empty.” Ferras stared at Gwatkin’s wide-eyed face, the jaw hanging open as though death had been more a surprise than anything else. “But the servants did hear something earlier in the evening—arguing, some shouting, but muffled. They could make out no words and did not recognize the voices, but all agreed it did not sound like men fighting for their lives.”

  “Where are the prince’s bodyservants? Where are his pages?”

  “Sent away.” Ferras could not help but smart a little under Brone’s questioning. Did the lord constable think that because Guard Captain Vansen’s father was a farmer, the son had no wit? That he hadn’t thought to see to these things himself ? “The prince himself sent them away. They thought it was because he wanted to be alone, either to think or perhaps to discuss his sister’s fate privately with someone.”

  “Someone?”

  “They do not know, Lord. He was alone when he sent them away. They ended by sleeping in the kitchen with the potboys. It was one of the pages, returning for a religious trinket of some sort, who found the dying prince and raised the alarm.”

  “I will speak to that one, then.” Brone carefully lowered his heavy frame into a squat beside the murdered guardsmen. He pulled at the nearest man’s jerkin. “He is wearing armor.”

  “Most of the blood on him comes from a slashed throat. That is what killed him.”

  “The other, too?”

  “His throat was slashed and bleeding, but that wasn’t what did for him, my lord. Look at his face.”

  Brone squinted at the second body. “What happened to his eye?”

  “Something sharp went through it, my lord. And deep into his skull, too, from what I can see.”

  Avin Brone whistled in surprise and levered himself upright like a bear stumbling out of its cave in spring. “If we cannot find a troop of assassins, then have we but one killer? Our murderer must be a fine fighter, to kill two armored men. And Kendrick is not clumsy with a sword either.” Startled by his own words, Brone
made a pass-evil. “Was not. Did he have a chance to arm himself ?”

  “We have seen no sign of any weapon yet except the guards’.” He thought for a moment. “Perhaps somehow the prince was attacked first. Perhaps he sent these guards out on some errand as he did his other servants, and they returned to find the murderer had already struck.”

  Brone turned to Chaven, who had removed the golden cloth and was probing at the body. The prince regent already looked like a tomb-statue, Ferras thought, cold and white as marble. “Can you guess what killed him?” the lord constable asked.

  The royal physician looked up, his round face troubled. “Oh, yes. No, better to say, I can show you why he died. Come look.”

  Ferras and the lord constable moved to the bedside. Now it was Ferras who helplessly made the pass-evil—a fist around his thumb to keep Kernios the death god from noticing him. He had seen many score of violent deaths since his childhood, but he had not made the gesture for as long as he could remember.

  The prince’s bloodless pallor and yellow hair made him appear disquietingly like his younger sister—Ferras suddenly felt troubled to be looking on his helpless nakedness, although he had often seen Kendrick bathing in the river after a long, dusty hunt. The corpse’s arms were covered with shallow slashes now cleaned of blood—wounds of defense. The blood had been wiped from his chest and stomach as well, but there was no way to prettify these larger wounds, half a dozen straight gashes livid along their edges and deeply, upsettingly red in their depths.

  “Not a sword,” said the lord constable after a moment. He was breathing a little harshly, as if the sight disturbed him more than he let show. “A knife?”

  “Perhaps.” Chaven frowned. “Perhaps a curved one—see how the cuts are wider on one end . . . ?”

  “A curved knife?” Brone’s bushy eyebrows slid up. He looked to Ferras, who felt his heart speed with surprise and fear.

  “I know who has a knife like that,” he said.

  “We all do,” said the lord constable.

  Barrick’s head felt hollow. The rustle of the blanket Briony wore wrapped around her nightdress, the slap of his own feet, the murmur of the people in the corridor, all rolled around his skull like the roar of the ocean in a seashell. He was finding it difficult to believe that what had just happened was real.

  “Prince Barrick,” someone called—one of the pages. “Is he really dead? Is our lord Kendrick really dead?”

  Barrick did not dare speak. Only holding his teeth clenched together kept him from bursting into tears or worse.

  Briony waved the onlookers back and they turned to beseech Hierarch Sisel for news instead, slowing his progress. At the end of the corridor the twins turned toward the Erivor Chapel, but then at the next turning Briony walked swiftly in the wrong direction.

  “No, this way,” Barrick said dully. His poor sister, lost in her own house.

  She shook her head and continued down the corridor, then turned again.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Not to the chapel.” Her voice sounded strangely light, as though nothing unusual had happened, but when she turned toward him a blasted emptiness was in her eyes, a look so unfamiliar that it terrified him. “They’ll only find us there.”

  “What? What do you mean?”

  His sister took his arm and pulled him down another corridor. Only when they reached the old pantry door did he understand. “We haven’t been here for . . . for years.”

  She pulled a stub of candle from the shelf just inside, then turned back to light it from one of the wall sconces. When they pulled the door closed behind them the light on the shelves cast all the familiar shadows that Barrick had once known as well as the shape of his own knuckles.

  “Why didn’t we go to the temple?” he asked. He was half afraid to hear the answer. He had never seen his sister quite like this.

  “Because they’ll find us. Gailon, the hierarch, all that lot. And then they’ll make us do things.” Her face was pale but intent. “Don’t you understand?”

  “Understand what? Kendrick . . . Briony, they killed Kendrick! Someone killed Kendrick.” He wagged his head, trying to make sense. “But who?”

  His sister’s eyes were bright with tears. “It doesn’t matter! I mean, it does, but don’t you see? Don’t you see what’s going to happen? They’re going to make you prince regent, and they’re going to send me to Hierosol to marry Ludis Drakava. They’ll be even more certain to do it now. They’ll be terrified—they’ll do anything to get Father back.”

  “They’re not the only ones.” Barrick could not keep up with Briony, who was thinking so quickly it seemed she had dived into a rushing river and left him on the bank, stuck in mud. Barrick couldn’t think at all. It seemed the nightmares that plagued his sleep had stormed and conquered his waking life as well. Someone had to make things right again. He was astonished to hear himself say it, but at this moment it was true: “I want Father back, too. I want him back.”

  Briony started to say something, but her lip was quivering. She sat down on the dusty floor of the pantry and wrapped her arms around her knees. “Poor . . . K-Kendrick!” She fought back the tears. “He was so cold, Barrick. Even before he . . . before the end. He was shivering.” She made a snuffling noise, pressed her face against her arms.

  Barrick looked up at the pantry ceiling, which undulated like water in the flickering candlelight. He wished he and Briony were on a river together, floating away. “We used to hide from him here when we were little, remember? He used to get so angry when he couldn’t find us. And it worked so many times!”

  “Even after Aunt Merolanna told him, he’d always forget.” She looked up with a crooked smile. “Up and down the halls. ‘Barrick! Briony! I’ll tell Father!’ He would get so angry!”

  For a long moment they fell silent, listening for a phantom echo.

  “What are we going to do, then? I don’t want to be the cursed prince regent.” Barrick considered. “We can run away. If we’re gone, they can’t make me the prince regent and they can’t give you to Ludis.”

  “But who will rule Southmarch?” Briony asked.

  “Let Avin Brone do it. Or that prig Gailon. The gods know he wants to.”

  “All the more reason he shouldn’t. Sister Utta says that people who want power are the first who should be mistrusted with it.”

  “But they’re the only ones who want it.” He crouched beside her. “I don’t want to be prince regent. Besides, why shouldn’t it be you, anyway? You’re older.”

  Even in the very pit of misery, his sister could not help smiling. “You are such a wretched monster, Barrick. That’s the first time you have ever admitted that. And it was only a matter of moments, anyway.”

  Barrick slumped down. He had no smile to give back. A poisonous weariness poured through his limbs, heart, and head like a gray smoke, fogging his thoughts. “I want to die, that’s what I want. Go with Kendrick. Much easier than running away.”

  “Don’t you dare say that!” Briony grabbed his arm and leaned forward until her face was only a handspan from his. “Don’t you dare think about leaving me alone.”

  For a moment he almost told her—gave up the secret he had hidden so long, all those nights of fear and misery . . . But the habit of years could not be so easily broken, even now. “You’re the one who will be leaving me,” he said instead.

  In the middle of the long, dark silence that followed, someone rapped lightly on the pantry door. The twins, startled, looked at each other, eyes wide in the candlelight. The door scraped open.

  Their great-aunt, Duchess Merolanna, stepped in. “I knew you’d be here. You two. Of course you would be.”

  “They sent you after us,” Briony said accusingly.

  “They did—oh, they did. The whole castle is in terror, looking for you. How could you be such wicked children?” But Merolanna was not as angry as she sounded. In fact, she seemed like another sleepwalker. Her pale, wide face, devoid of paint, looked lik
e something dragged out of its burrow and into the sunlight. “Don’t you know the worst thing you could do is to vanish like this, after . . . after . . .”

  A great choking gasp came out of Briony, who crawled to Merolanna and buried her face in the old woman’s voluminous nightdress. “Oh, Auntie ’Lanna, they k-k-killed him! He’s . . . he’s gone!”

  Merolanna reached down and stroked her back, although she was struggling to keep her balance against the girl’s weight on her legs. “I know, dear . . . Yes, our poor, sweet little Kendrick . . .”

  And then the horrible fact of it climbed up Barrick’s backbone and into his head again, a ghastly, overwhelming thing that choked out all light and sense, and he clambered over to Merolanna and wrapped his arms around her waist, forcing her off balance again. She had no choice but to claw at the shelves and let herself fold to the floor of the pantry in a great slipping and bunching of cloth. She held them both with their heads together in her lap, their hair mingling like the waters of two rivers, red and gold, both of them weeping like small children.

  Merolanna was crying again, too. “Oh, my poor ducks,” she said, looking at nothing as tears ran down her wrinkled cheek. “Oh, my poor little chickens, yes. My poor, dear ones . . .”

  Briony had dried her eyes before they reached Avin Brone and the others, and had even let Merolanna fuss her hair back into some kind of order, but she still felt like a prisoner dragged from a cell to face a high justice.

  But although Hierarch Sisel (who Merolanna had told them had walked halfway around the castle looking for them) looked annoyed beneath his appropriately serious and mournful expression, Lord Brone did not tax Barrick and Briony for their waywardness.

  “We have been waiting for you,” he said as the twins approached, staying close to Merolanna for whatever protection she might afford them. “We have grim business still to do tonight, and you are the head of the Eddon family now.”