by Tad Williams
“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 swords-man 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.”
“Doiney and the others are good men, my lord.” Vansen looked across at the resting soldiers. At any other time a
fter 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 shop-keepers 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 Candlerstown, 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 through 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.”
“A good idea, but let’s hear what the scouts say first.” The earl turned to his squire. “Tell Rorick and Mayne and Sivney Fiddicks to join me on the hill there. The young prince, too, of course—wouldn’t do to leave him out. Oh, and Brenhall—he’s probably under a tree somewhere, sleeping off his noon meal.”
Vansen barely heard the last of this as the earl’s other squire helped him into the saddle, then he spurred away to meet the scouts.
“But how many are they, curse it?” Tyne tugged at his mustache and looked as though he would like to slap Gar Doiney. “How many times must I ask?”
“I’m sorry, your lordship.” The scout’s voice was dry and cracked, as if he didn’t use it much. “I’ve heard you, sire, it’s just hard to answer, like. With mist and such we can only just tell they’re camped on the hilltop and in the trees. We rode around the long way for a better look—that’s why we’re so long back.” He shook his head. The scar between Doiney’s eye and mouth that pulled up his lip and made him seem to smirk had gotten him into trouble before now, and Vansen guessed it might have had something to do with the man’s choice of a usually solitary profession—but Vansen felt sure that even in his anger Tyne couldn’t fail to mark the skittish look on the scout’s weathered, bony face. Even a hardened, taciturn campaigner like Doiney was disturbed by this unknown, unnatural enemy. “Come back with us, sire—there must be an hour still of light. You’ll see. It’s hard to make out anything. But there are hundreds there, thousands perhaps.”
Tyne waved his hand. “It’s only that it is dangerous to have to guess. At least we know where they are.”
“And you are certain there are no more of them anywhere else?” young Prince Barrick asked. He had joined the circle on the hillside, the nobles standing close together to provide each other some protection from the stiffening wind. The prince looked interested—almost too interested, Vansen thought, as if he had forgotten that the men unrolling their bedrolls would soon have to cross swords with this interesting phenomenon, that some of them would almost certainly die. It was hard for Vansen not to feel a little resentment on behalf of Dab Dawley and all the other soldiers not much older than the prince who would not be surrounded and protected as Barrick would be, to make certain their experience of battle didn’t become too dangerous.
But who is it asked me to take care of the lad, to protect him? Was it the prince himself ? No, it was his sister. Perhaps I do him a disservice. Vansen was unsure again: sometimes Barrick Eddon seemed a mere boy, younger even than his years, petulant and anxious; at other moments he seemed a hundred years old, far beyond anything so mundane as fear of death.
“If Your Highness means perhaps it is a token force to draw us, with the rest in ambush,” said Doiney, awkward and uncomfortable at speaking to royalty, “then I say anything is possible, your good Highness, but if they have another force squirreled away, they are either so small they are hiding under the clovers or they are floating on a cloud in the sky, like, or whatever it is they say fairy folk do. Because of the morning mist we did not mark the ones on the hill until our way back, and we rode far across these lands on both sides of the Settland Road and up the far reaches of the old Northmarch way as well, across all kinds of ground.” He stopped, clearly trying to think it all through, to make sure that he had said what he meant to say. Vansen had never heard so many words out of the man in all the years he had known him. “Meaning to say, Highness, by your pardon, there are none others we can see for miles beyond except for those as are nearly on top of us.”
“What do they look like?” asked Rorick, his voice a little too gruffly ordinary to be quite believable.
“Hard to tell,” Doiney told him. “Apologies, your lordship, but it’s that cursed mist and those trees. But we could see some of them in what looked like good, plain armor, not much different than you or me, and there were horses and tents and . . . and all you’d expect. But there were other shapes too, in the trees . . .” He trailed off, made the pass-evil. “Shapes that didn’t seem right at all, what we saw of them.”
Tyne stepped backward until the tree was almost against his spine. He peered out into the distance, although the wooded high place the Twilight People seemed to have chosen as their camp was blocked from view by the intervening hills. “First things first, then,” he said. “Vansen, we need a string of pickets across the hills behind them and some miles down both roads, changed often enough that they won’t start to see shapes in the night that aren’t there, but do see the ones that truly are. They must keep ears open, too. If there is some other force coming—if it is a trap—we must know about it before they arrive. And let’s have the rest start making camp.” Tyne’s sergeant ran down the hill to give the orders.
Vansen leaned over and had a few quick words with Gar Doiney as the nobles talked quietly among themselves. “. . . But the others that Muchmore took out have been back since noontime,” Vansen finished, “so tell him it’s them I want out, and you get your fellows something to drink and eat.”
Doiney nodded, then bowed to the nobles and made a clumsy, unaccustomed leg for the
prince before he swung himself back onto his horse again. He cantered back toward his little troop of horsemen, visibly relieved to escape the councils of the great.
Vansen stared at the blossoming campfires. They were a reassuring sight against the descending twilight and he decided that Earl Tyne was a thoughtful commander: it was doubtful the enemy was ignorant of their arrival, and the fires would give the men much-needed heart’s ease through a long, worrisome night.
“So what do we do, then, Lord Aldritch?” asked the prince. “Do you think they will stand and fight?”
“If they won’t, then we have learned something useful,” Tyne told him. “But do not doubt that I fear a trap as much as you do, Highness, although I suspect we may be overthinking. Still, if they break and run we should not follow them, in case they mean to lead us into the place we have heard about, beyond the Shadowline where everyone runs mad.”
“Almost everyone. Not our Captain Vansen.” It was hard to tell how Prince Barrick meant it, as compliment or gibe.
Vansen broke the short silence. “If my experience is to be of use, then I must remind everyone that my men and I had no idea we were crossing over into . . . into those lands . . . so I think Earl Tyne speaks wisely. If we best them, even if we seem to break them, still we should go slowly and carefully.”
Barrick Eddon stared at him for a moment, gave a sober nod, then looked around at the others and realized they were all watching him. “What, do you wait for me? I’m not a general, not even a soldier yet. I’ve said that and I mean it. Aldritch, you and the others must decide.”
The Earl of Blueshore cleared his throat. “Well, Highness, then I say we must be alert and on guard all this evening, and double the usual sentries—and that is not counting your pickets, Vansen. If these shadow folk do not stir, then in the morning when the light comes back, we will go up and test their strength. I do not think any of us much wants to go against them in these unfamiliar fields when the sun is setting.”