by Tad Williams
“Across the Shadowline?” Avin Brone appeared surprised by the idea. “You would send men across the Shadowline?”
“Not you,” she said scornfully. “Have no fear.”
The lord constable stood. “There is no need to insult me, Princess.” They were the only two standing. Their eyes met over the heads of the others.
“Again, you have showed me hasty, Lord Brone,” Briony said after a moment’s silence, each word crisp as the sound of a small bell being struck. “Despite the trickery you have used today to put on this little show, you do not deserve as much anger as I have shown. I apologize.”
He made a stiff little bow. “Accepted, of course, Highness. With thanks, although you do me too much honor.”
“I will go,” said Gailon suddenly. He rose, too, his face flushed as though with drink. “I will lead a troop to the spot. I will find these bandits—and I wager my good name that they will prove to be no more than that. But whatever they are, I will bring back them or their corpses to answer for the crime.”
Vansen saw Briony exchange a look with her brother that the captain of the royal guard could not interpret. “No,” said Barrick.
“What?” The duke turned on the prince in anger. Gailon Tolly seemed to have lost his usual composure. Vansen’s muscles tensed as he watched. “You cannot go yourself, Barrick! You are sick, crippled! And your sister may think she is a man, but the gods know she is not! I demand the honor of leading this troop!”
“But that is just the issue, Cousin,” said Briony, speaking with cold care. “It is not an honor. And whoever goes must go with an open heart, not with an intent to prove himself right.”
“But… !”
She turned her back on him and her gaze swept down the row of nobles at the table, Tyne and Rorick and many others, before it lit on Ferras Vansen where he stood behind the crumpled, sobbing form of the merchant Raemon Beck. For a moment her gaze met his and Vansen thought he saw a little smile flicker across her lips. It was not a kind smile. “You, Captain. You have failed to prevent my brother’s murder and you have failed to find a reason that explains why Lord Shaso, one of our family’s most loyal retainers, should have performed that murder. Perhaps you will be able to fulfill this new charge more successfully.”
He couldn’t look at her any longer. Staring at his boots, he said, “Yes, Highness. I will accept the charge.”
“No!” Gailon was out of his seat again, so angry that for a worrying moment Ferras thought the duke actually meant to attack the prince and princess.Vansen was not the only one—the nobles on either side of Gailon Tolly snatched at his arms but failed to hold him. Brone’s hand dropped to the hilt of his sword, but the lord constable was almost as far away as the guard captain and much slower.
Gods! Ferras took a stumbling step forward. Too late, still too late, I have failed again! But Summerfield only turned and stalked away from the great table toward the far door of the council chamber. When he turned in the doorway, the young duke’s face was composed again, almost frightemngly so.
“I see I am not needed here, either in this council or in this castle. With your permission, Prince Barrick, Princess Briony, I will return to my own lands where there may be something of use I can do.” Gailon Tolly had asked their leave, but he did not wait to receive it before departing the chamber. His bootheels banged away down the corridor.
Briony turned toVansen again, as though Gailon had never been in the room. “You will take as many men as you and the lord constable think fit to assemble, Captain.You will take this man, too…” she gestured at Beck, “and go to the place his caravan was attacked. From there, send back messengers to tell us what you find, and if you can pursue the robbers, pursue them.”
Raemon Beck realized what was being said. “Don’t send me back, Highness!” he shrieked, scrabbling across the floor toward the prince and princess. “The gods’ mercy, not there! Put me in irons, as you promised, rather than send me to that place.”
Barrick pulled his foot back -when the man would have grabbed it.
“How else will we know that the spot is the correct one?” Princess Briony asked gently. “If every trace is gone, as you have said? Your fellows may be alive. Would you steal away even the slim chance of rescuing them?” She turned to the table full of slack-mouthed councillors, a row of bewildered masks like the chorus of some antique mummer’s play. “The rest of you may go, but you are sworn to secrecy about this attack. He who speaks a word about it joins Shaso in the stronghold. Chaven, you and Lord Brone come with my brother and myself to the chapel. Rorick andTyne, come to us in an hour, please. Captain Vansen, you will leave tomorrow at dawn.”
After she was gone and the chamber was all but empty, Vansen and two of his guardsmen helped the weeping Raemon Beck up from the floor.
“The princess does not take well to begging,” Ferras Vansen told the young merchant as they led him toward the door. The guard captain’s own thoughts were slow and numbed as fish at the bottom of a frozen stream. “Her older brother was killed—did you know that? But we will do our best to take care of you. For now, let us find you some wine and a bed. That’s the best any of us will get tonight… or for some time to come, I think.”
14. Whitefire
STORM MUSIC:
This tale is told on the headlands
The great one comes up from the deeps
His eye is a shrouded pearl, his voice the ocean wind
—from The Bonefall Oracles
Barrick’s first thought was that the man looked like a chained beast, both frightening and pitiable, like the bear brought to the castle during the last Pennsday feast and made to dance in the throne room. All the courtiers had laughed—he had even laughed himself to see its clumsy antics and hear its snort of irritation, so like a man’s, when its trainer flicked its bandy legs with a whip. Only Briony had been angry.
But she always worries more about animals than people. If I had been one of the dogs, she would never have left my side while I was ill.
His father had not laughed either, he suddenly remembered. For on that Pennsday they had all still been together, Olin here in Southmarch, Kendrick alive, everything as it should be. Now all had changed, and since the fever even his own thoughts had become strange and untrustworthy.
He forced himself to concentrate, staring at Shaso with what he hoped was the proper expression of a ruling prince to a traitorous vassal. Despite the ankle-chain half hidden by the straw on the floor of the stronghold, its far end socketed into the stone wall, the Tuani man looked less like a bear than a captured lion.
You could never make a lion dance on its chain.
“There should be guards,” said Avin Brone. “It is not safe…”
“You are here with us,” Briony replied sweetly. “You are a famous fighter, Lord Constable.” “So is Lord Shaso, with all respect.”
“But he is chained and you are not. And he is not armed.”
Shaso stirred. Barrick had always found it hard to think of him as anything but ageless, but now the man’s years showed in his slack skin and gray-whiskered cheeks. He had been given clean clothes, but they were poor and threadbare. Except for the muscles that still rippled in his forearms and the back that had not yet learned to bend, this old man might have been a street beggar in Hierosol or one of the other southern cities. “I will not hurt you,” he growled. “I am not fallen so low.”
Barrick fought down a gust of anger. “Is that what you told our brother before you killed him?”
The prisoner stared. His dark face seemed lightened, as though a layer of fine dust had sifted down onto him from the surrounding stones, or as if his time in the sunless depths had leached out some of his color. “I did not kill your brother, Prince Barrick.”
“Then what happened?” Briony took a step forward, stopping before Brone was compelled to grab at her arm. “I would like to believe you. What happened?”
“I have told Brone already. When I left Kendrick, he was alive.
” “But your dagger was bloodied, Shaso. We found it in your room.” The old Tuani warrior shrugged.” It was not the prince’s blood.”
“Whose was it?” Briony took another step closer, which made even Barrick uncomfortable—she was within the compass of the old man’s chain now, and all three of his visitors knew his cat-quickness. “Just tell me that.”
Shaso looked at her for a moment, then his mouth curved in what might be called a smile, except that there was no jot of mirth in it, nothing of happiness at all. “My own. The blood is my own.”
Barrick’s rage flared up again. “He’s telling a shadow-tale, Briony—I know you want to believe him, but don’t let yourself be fooled! He was with Kendrick. Our brother and two other men were killed, and the wounds were curved like his dagger, which we found covered in blood. He cannot even tell a good lie.”
Briony was silent for a moment. “Barrick’s right,” she said at last. “You ask us to believe much that seems unbelievable.”
“I ask nothing. It does not matter to me.” But even Shaso’s own hands betrayed him, Barrick thought—they sat in his lap like harmless things, but the dark fingers were working, clenching and unclenching.
“It does not matter to you that my brother is dead?” Now Briony could not keep her own voice calm. “That Kendrick has been murdered? He was good to you, Shaso.We have all been good to you.”
“Oh, yes, you have been good to me, you Eddons.” He moved a little and the chain clinked. Avin Brone stepped up beside Briony. “Your father defeated me on the battlefield and spared my life. He is a good man. And then he brought me home like a dog he had found in the road and made me into his servant. A very good man.”
“You are worse than a dog, you ungrateful creature!” shouted Barrick. This was a different Shaso, sullen and self-pitying, but still his tormentor, still the one who so many times had made him feel less than whole. “You have never been treated like a servant! He made you a lord! He gave you land, a house, a position of honor!”
“And in that way he was cruelest of all.” The frighteningly empty smile returned, a pale gash in the dark face. “As my old life slid away from me like a boat drifting from the bank, he gave me a new life, rich in wealth and honor. I could not even hate him. And later on, it is true, I myself played the slave master—I sold my own freedom. But just because of the two of us I was the worse traitor, that does not mean I have forgiven him.”
“He admits he is a traitor!” Barrick moved forward to tug at Briony’s arm, but she resisted him. “Come! He admits he hates our family. We have heard enough.” He didn’t want to be in the shadowy stronghold any longer, separated from the sun and air by yards of stone, caught in this place that stank of misery. He suddenly feared that Shaso held secrets more terrible than any blade, more devastating even than murder. He wanted the old man to stop talking.
Briony waited a moment before she spoke. “I don’t understand everything you say, but I do know that if you feel any loyalty to our family at all, even a tainted loyalty, then you must tell us the truth. If it is your blood, how did it get there?”
Shaso slowly lifted his arms. The crisscross slashes had mostly healed. “I cut myself.” “Why?”
He only shook his head.
“More likely he was wounded by the guards or Kendrick,” Barrick pointed out. “While they defended their lives.”
“Was there blood on their weapons?” his sister asked. “I cannot remember.” All this talk of blood had made Briony go quite pale. The Barrick of half a year ago, he knew, would have said something to distract her, to make it easier to discuss these dreadful things, but now he was hollowed, his insides burned black.
“Your brother had no weapon,” answered Avin Brone, “which makes his killing even more cowardly. The guards were covered all over with blood from their own wounds, so it was impossible to tell if their blades had been bloodied before they died.”
“You still have explained nothing,” Briony told the old man. “If you want us to believe that, tell us why you cut yourself. What did you and Kendrick speak of, that led to such a strange thing?”
The master of arms shook his head. “That is between me and him. It will die with me.”
“Those may not be idle words, Lord Shaso,” said Avin Brone. “As you know, we have not kept the headsman as well employed in King Olin’s day as in his father’s, but his blade is still sharp.”
The master of arms turned his red-rimmed eyes first on Barrick, then Briony. “If you want my head, then take it. I am tired of living.”
“The gods damn your stubbornness!” Briony cried. “Would you rather die than tell us what happened? What obscure point of honor have you caught on, Shaso? If there is something that will save your life, then for the sake of all the gods, tell me!”
“I have told you the truth—I did not murder your brother I would not have harmed him even if he had put his own blade to my throat, because I swore to protect your father and his household.”
“Wouldn’t have harmed him?” Barrick was feeling tired and sick again—even his anger had become only a distant storm. “Strange words— you have knocked me down and beaten me often enough. My bruises haven’t healed from the last time.”
“That was not to harm you, Prince Barrick.” The old man’s words had a sharp, cold edge. “That was an attempt to make you a man.”
Now Barrick was the one who stepped toward the master of arms, hand upraised Shaso did not move, but even before Avin Brone reached him, Barrick had stopped. He had remembered the courtiers who pelted the dancing bear with cherry-stones and crusts of bread, and how he had laughed to see the chained creature snapping at the missiles in annoyance.
“If you are the murderer of our brother,” he said, “as I think you are, then you will receive your punishment soon enough. Lord Brone is right— Southmarch still has a headsman.”
Shaso flapped his hand dismissively, His chin sank to his chest as though he was too weary to keep his head up any longer.
“That is your last word?” Briony asked. “That you did not harm Kendrick, that the blood on your knife was your own, but you won’t tell us how it happened?”
The old man did not look up. “That is my last word.”
As he followed Briony out the door, Barrick wondered if such a mad story could possibly be true. But if it was, then truth itself was not trustworthy, for there was no other explanation for Kendrick’s death, no one else suspected but Shaso. Take that away and all was shadow, as treacherous and inconstant as the worst of his own fever-dreams.
He must be the murderer, Barrick told himself If not, reason itself tottered.
* * *
Ferras Vansen studied the line of men as though they were suddenly discovered family—as, in a way, they were. They would be living together for weeks or months, travehng into the wild places, and even family did not breed any greater closeness than a company of soldiers—or in some cases, any greater contempt. They were only half a pentecount all together—any greater number would have excited too much attention—and their little troop was dwarfed not only by Wolfstooth Spire looming just above them, but by the empty expanses of the barracks’ reviewing yard. Vansen had chosen to take seven mounted men including himself, and a dozen-and-a-half foot soldiers, a pair of them new recruits who were little more than farmboys, to watch after the donkey-cart. In order to make things easier for his lieutenant Jem Tallow, who would command the castle guard in his absence and needed able, levelheaded men,Vansen had deliberately chosen his troop so that more than half were young and inexperienced. There were fewer than ten of these men that Vansen really trusted in a fight he hoped it would be enough.
Raemon Beck had been given a horse and a sword, both of which he handled like what he was, a merchant’s nephew Vansen had considered armoring the young man as well, but his own experiences in the bandit campaign of three years earlier had taught him that one unused to heavy gear would eventually make things hard for the others, even on horseback. He w
ould keep the youth nearby, with himself and old hand Collum Dyer watching over him, that would be the young man’s best armor.
“Don’t look so grim,” he told Beck. “Your caravan was caught unaware, and only the gods know the quality of the fighting men who were with you. Now you’re with half a pentecount of hardy Southmarch Guard, many of them blooded in Krace and against the last of the Gray Companies. They won’t run from shadows.”
“Then they are fools.” Beck was pale and his mouth trembled a little when he spoke, but he had gained composure since his audience with the prince and princess. “They have not seen these shadows. They have not seen the devils that live in them.”
Vansen shrugged. He was not himself entirely happy about their mission; he had spoken largely to cheer the young merchant. FerrasVansen was a child of Daler’s Troth, and had grown up only a short distance from the haunted ruins of old Westmarch—on days the south wind blew back the mists, the broken shell of its keep could sometimes be seen from the highest hilltops. He and his people knew better than to speak contemptuously, as the Duke of Summerfield had, about the Shadowlme and what lay beyond that cloudy border. But like the rest of his people, a fierce and generally standoffish community of hillside farmers and herders, he was also keenly aware that his family’s land was a holding that had been only a few generations in the hands of mortals. The dale folk had long had a sense that there were forces waiting beyond the Shadowline to take back those lands, as well as an equally fierce and stubborn determination not to let that happen.
A messenger from Lord Brone trotted into the reviewing yard. Vansen called the troop to order. The horses stamped restlessly, waiting, and the donkey cropped dry grass from between the cobbles. The morning was already far advanced, but there was nothing to do but wait. Already the long shadow cast by Wolfstooth Spire was beginning to shrink back into itself.
She came at last, a slender shape in mourning black accompanied by two female attendants and the great bulk of the lord constable who, if he was not becoming the king, did seem to be changing into something like the father of the prince and princess, assuming a kind of ceremonial precedence over all the business of the Eddon family despite the comparative lowliness of his title. He was rich, though, with vast holdings of lands, and able enough that he had risen higher in the royal family’s favor than any of their closer kinsmen Vansen wondered if it could be this rather than anything else that had sent young Gailon of Summerfield home to his family’s dukedom—the knowledge that Lord Brone had sealed off the avenues of approach to the royal twins, leaving Gailon with a superior claim by right of blood, but inferior access.