by Tad Williams
Gone. Every one of them. Barrick, Father, Kendrick. She felt her eyes brim with tears and wiped them angrily. But Barrick and Father are alive—they must be. Don’t be a stupid girl. Not gone, just…somewhere else.
Crouched in the heather at the front of the lodge, she stared long and hard back at the castle. A few torches seemed to be moving on the bay at the base of the castle walls—search boats checking the inlets and caves along the shore of Midlan’s Mount—but none of them seemed to have ventured any farther from Southmarch. Briony felt a gleam of hope. If she herself had forgotten the summer house, there was a chance the Tollys wouldn’t remember until she and Shaso were long gone.
Back in the kitchen she dutifully ate her fish soup, enlivened this time by wild rosemary which Ena had found thriving in the masterless, overgrown garden. Briony could not be certain when she would eat again, and she reminded herself that even fish soup was noble if it would give her the strength to survive so that one day she could drive something sharp through Hendon Tolly’s heart.
Shaso was eating too, if not much more skillfully or swiftly than the night before. Still, his ashen pallor had improved a little and his breathing did not hiss like a fireplace bellows. But most important of all, though his eyes still lay sunken in dark-ringed flesh (which Briony thought gave him the look of an oniron like Iaris or Zakkas the Ragged or some other sun-corched, wilderness-maddened prophet from The Book of the Trigon), his gaze was bright and intent again—that of the Shaso she knew.
“We can go nowhere today.” He took one last swallow before lowering the empty bowl. “We cannot risk it.”
“But surely the fog will hide us…?”
His look had much of the old Shaso in it, equal parts irritation at being disputed and disappointment that she had not thought things through completely. “Perhaps here, upon the bay, Princess. But what about when we make land in the late afternoon, with the mist burned away? Even if we are not seen by enemies, do you think the local fishermen there would be likely to forget the unusual pair they saw landing?” He shook his head. “We are exiles, Highness. Everything that has gone before will mean nothing if you give yourself away to your enemies. If you are captured, Hendon Tolly will not put you on trial or lock you away in the stronghold to be a rallying flag for those loyal to the Eddons. No, he will kill you and no one will ever see your body. He will not mind a few rumors of you among the people as long as he knows that you are safely dead.”
Briony thought of Hendon’s grinning face and her hands twitched. “We should have stripped his family of their titles and lands long ago. We should have executed the whole traitorous lot.”
“When? When did they reveal their treachery before it was too late? And Gailon, although I did not like him, was apparently an honorable servant of your family’s crown—if Hendon has told the truth in this one thing, at least. As for Caradon, we also know only what Hendon says of him, so his wickedness is as much in question as Gailon’s goodness. The world is strange, Briony, and it will only become stranger in the days ahead.”
She looked at his leathery, stern face and was filled with shame that she had been such a fool, to have taken so little care with the most precious of her family’s possessions. What must he think, her old teacher? What must he think of her and her twin, who had all but given away the Eddons’ throne?
As if he understood her thoughts, Shaso shook his head. “What happened in the past remains in the past. What is before us—that is everything. Will you put your trust in me? Will you do just as I say, and only what I say?”
Despite all her mistakes and self-disgust, she could not help bristling. “I am not a fool, Shaso. I am not a child any longer.”
For a moment his expression softened. “No. You are a fine young woman, Briony Eddon, and you have a good heart. But this is not the time for good hearts. This is the hour for suspicion and treachery and murder, and I have much experience of all those things. I ask you to put your trust in me.”
“Of course I trust you—what do you mean?”
“That you will do nothing without asking me. We are exiles, with a price on our heads. As I said, all that came before—your crown, your family’s history—will mean nothing if we are captured. You must swear not to act without my permission, no matter how small or unimportant the act seems. Remember, I kept my oath to your brother Kendrick even when it might have cost my life.” He stopped and took a deep breath, coughed a little. “It still might. So I want you to swear the same to me.” He fixed her with his dark eyes. This time it was not the imperious stare of old, the teacher’s stare—there was actually something pleading in it.
“You shame me when you remind me what you did for my family, Shaso. And you don’t take credit for your own stubbornness. But yes, I hear you, and yes, I understand. I’ll listen to what you say. I’ll do what you think is best.”
“Always? No matter how you may doubt me? No matter how angry I make you by not explaining my every thought?”
A quiet hiss startled Briony, until she realized it was the girl Ena, laughing quietly as she scrubbed out the soup pot. It was humiliating, but it would be more shameful still to continue arguing like a child. “Very well. I swear on the green blood of Erivor, my family’s patron. Is that good enough?”
“You should be careful when you make oaths on Egye-var, Highness,” said Ena cheerfully, “especially here in the middle of the waters. He hears.”
“What are you talking about? If I swear to Erivor, I mean it.” She turned to Shaso. “Are you satisfied now?”
He smiled, but it was only a grim flash of teeth, an old predator’s reflex. “I will not be satisfied with anything until Hendon Tolly is dead and whoever arranged Kendrick’s death has joined him. But I accept your promise.” He winced as he straightened his legs. Briony looked away: even though the Skimmer girl had bandaged the worst sores from the shackles, he was still covered with ugly scrapes and bruises and his limbs were disturbingly thin. “Now, tell me what has happened—everything you can remember. Little news was brought to me in my cell, and I could make small sense out of what you told me last night.”
Briony proceeded as best she could, although it was difficult to summon up all that had happened in the months Shaso dan-Heza had been locked in the stronghold, let alone make a sensible tale of it. She told him of Barrick’s fever and of Avin Brone’s spy who claimed to have seen agents of the Autarch of Xis in the Tolly’s great house at Summerfield Court. She told him about the caravan apparently attacked by the fairies, of Guard Captain Vansen’s expedition and what happened to them, and of the advancing army of the Twilight People that had apparently invaded and secured the mainland city of Southmarch across Brenn’s Bay, leaving only the castle free. She even told him of the strange potboy Gil and his dreams, or at least what little about them she could remember.
Although the Skimmer girl had shown no other signs of paying attention to the bizarre catalogue of events, when she heard Gil’s pronouncements about Barrick, Ena put down her washing and sat up straight. “Porcupine’s eye? He said to beware the Porcupine’s eye?”
“Yes, what of it?”
“The Porcupine-woman is one of the most ill-named of all the Old Ones,” Ena said seriously. “She is death’s companion.”
“What does that mean?” Briony asked. “And how would you know?”
The secretive smile stretched the girl’s wide mouth again, but her eyes did not meet Briony’s. “Even on Skimmer’s Lagoon, we know some important things.”
“Enough,” said Shaso angrily. “I will sleep today—I do not like being a burden. When the sun goes down, we will leave. Girl,” he said to Ena, “take us to the Marrinswalk coast and then your service will be over.”
“As long as you eat something else before we leave,” Ena told him. “More soup—you barely touched what I gave you. I promised my father I would keep you safe, and if you collapse again he will be angry.”
Shaso looked at her as if she might be mocking him. She stare
d back, unfraid. “Then I will eat,” he said at last.
Briony spent much of the afternoon staring out at the bay, fearful of seeing boats coming toward the island. When she got too cold at last, she went in and warmed herself at the fire.
On her way back to her sentinel perch in the heather, she walked through the lodge—a place that once, because of its small size, had been more familiar to her than Southmarch Castle itself. Even in daylight it now seemed as strange as everything else because of the way the world had changed, all the things which had been so familiar and ordinary transformed in a single night.
Right here, in this room, is where Father told us the story about Hiliometes and the manticore. A tennight ago she would have sworn she could never forget the smallest detail of what it had felt like to huddle in the blankets on their father’s bed and hear the tale of the demigod’s great battle for the first time, yet here she was in the very chamber and suddenly it all seemed vague. Had Kendrick been with them, or had he gone to bed, intent on going out early in the morning with old Nynor to catch fish? Had there been a fire, or had it been one of those rare, truly hot summer nights on M’Helan’s Rock when the servants were told to leave all but the kitchen fire unlit? She couldn’t remember anything but the story, now, and their father’s exaggeratedly solemn, bearded face as he spoke. Would she forget that one day, too? Would all her past vanish this way, bit by bit, like tracks in the dirt pelted by rain?
Briony was startled by a wriggle of movement at the edge of her vision—something moving quickly along the skirting board. A mouse? She moved toward the corner and startled something out from behind a table leg, but before she had a chance to see what it was it had vanished again behind a hanging. It seemed strangely upright for a mouse—could it be a bird, trapped in the house? But birds hopped, didn’t they? She pulled back the wall hanging, strangely apprehensive, but found nothing unusual.
A mouse, she thought. Climbed up the back of the tapestry and it’s back in the roof by now. Poor thing was probably startled half to death to have someone walk into this room—the place has been empty for more than a year.
She wondered if she dared open the shuttered doors of King Olin’s bedroom balcony. She itched to look back at the castle, half-afraid that it too would have become insubstantial, but caution won out. She made her way back through the room, the bed naked of blankets, a thin powdering of dust on every surface, as if it were the tomb of some ancient prophet where no one dared touch anything. In an ordinary year the doors would have been thrown wide to air the room as the servants bustled through, sweeping and cleaning. There would have been fresh flowers in the vase on the writing desk (only yellow ragwort if it was late in the season) and water in the washing jug. Instead, her father was trapped in a room somewhere that was probably smaller than this—maybe a bleak cell like the hole in which Shaso had been imprisoned. Did Olin have a window to look out, a view—or only dark walls and fading memories of his home?
It did not bear thinking about. So many things these days did not bear thinking about.
“I thought you said he had barely eaten,” Briony said, nodding toward Shaso. She held out the sack. “The dried fish is gone. Was it you? There were three pieces left when I saw last.”
Ena looked in the sack, then smiled. “I think we have made a gift.”
“A gift? What do you mean? To whom?”
“To the small folk—the Air Lord’s children.”
Briony shook her head in irritation. “Made a gift to the rats and mice, more likely. I think I just saw one.” She did not hold with such silly old tales—it was what the cooks and maids said every time something went missing: “Oh, it must have been the little folk, Highness. The Old Ones must’ve took it.” Briony had a sudden pang, knowing what Barrick would have said about such an idea, the familiar mockery that would have tinged his voice. She missed him so fiercely that tears welled in her eyes.
A moment later she had to admit the irony of it: she was mourning her brother, who would have poured scorn on the idea of “the small folk”…because he was off fighting the fairies. “It doesn’t matter, I suppose,” she said to Ena. “Surely we will find something to eat in Marrinswalk.”
Ena nodded. “And perhaps the small folk will bring us luck in return for the food—perhaps they will call on Pyarin Ky’vos to lend us fair winds. They are his favorites after all, just as my folk belong to Egye-Var.”
Briony shook her head in doubt, then caught herself. Who was she, who had fought against a murderous demon and barely survived, to make light of what others said about the gods? She herself, although she prayed carefully and sincerely to Zoria every day, had never believed Heaven to be as active in people’s lives as others seemed to think—but at the moment she and her family needed all the help they could find. “You remind me, Ena. We must make an offering at the Erivor shrine before we go.”
“Yes, my lady. That is right and good.”
So the girl approved, did she? How kind of her! Briony grimaced, but turned away so the girl did not see. She realized for the first time that she missed being the princess regent. At least people didn’t openly treat you like you were a child or a complete fool—out of fear, if nothing else! “Let’s get Shaso down to the boat, first.”
“I’ll walk, curse it.” The old man roused himself from his drowsing nap. “Is the sun down yet?”
“Soon enough.” He looked better, Briony thought, but he was still frighteningly thin and clearly very weak. He was old, older by many years than her father—she sometimes forgot that, fooled by his strength and sharpness of mind. Would he recover, or would his time in the stronghold leave him a cripple? She sighed. “Let’s get on with things. It’s a long way to the Marrinswalk coast, isn’t it?”
Shaso nodded slowly. “It will take all the night, and perhaps some of the morning.”
Ena laughed. “If Pyarin Ky’vos sends even a small, kind wind, I will have you on shore before dawn.”
“And then where?” Briony knew better than to doubt this strong-armed girl, at least about rowing a boat. “Should we not consider Blueshore? I know Tyne’s wife well. She would shelter us, I’m certain—she’s a good woman, if overly fond of clothes and chatter. Surely that would be safer than Marrinswalk, where…”
Shaso growled, a deep, warning sound that might have issued from a cave. “Did you or did you not promise to do as I say?”
“Yes, I promised, but…”
“Then we go to Marrinswalk. I have my reasons, Highness. None of the nobility can shield you. If we force the Tollys’ hand, Duke Caradon will bring the Summerfield troops to Blueshore and throw down Aldritch Stead—they will never be able to hold off the Tollys with Tyne and all his men gone to this battle you tell me of. They will announce you were a false claimant—some serving girl I forced to play the part of the missing princess regent—and that the real Briony is already long dead. Do you see?”
“I suppose…”
“Do not suppose. At this moment, strength is all and the Tollys hold the whip hand. You must do what I ask and not waste time arguing. We may soon find ourselves in straits where hesitation or childish stubbornness will kill us.”
“So. Marrinswalk, then.” Briony stood, struggling to hold down her anger. Calm, she told herself. You made a promise—besides, remember the foolishness with Hendon. You cannot afford your temper right now. You are the last of the Eddons. Suddenly frightened, she corrected herself. The last of the Eddons in Southmarch. But of course, even that wasn’t true—there were no true Eddons left in Southmarch anymore, only Anissa and her baby, if the child had survived his first, terrible night.
“I will attend to the sea god’s shrine,” she said, speaking as carefully as she could, putting on the mask of queenly distance she had supposed left behind with the rest of the life that had been stolen from her. “Help Lord dan-Heza down to the boat, Ena. I will meet you there.”
She walked out of the kitchen without looking back.
2
&n
bsp; Drowning
In the beginning the heavens were only darkness, but Zo came and pushed the darkness away. When it was gone all that was left behind was Sva, the daughter of the dark. Zo found her comely, and together they set out to rule over everything, and make all right.
—from The Beginnings of Things
The Book of the Trigon
DESPITE THE RAIN hissing down all around, spattering on the mossy rocks and drizzling from the branches of the trees that leaned over them like disapproving old men, the boy made no effort to cover himself. As raindrops bounced from his forehead and ran down his face, he barely blinked. Watching him made Ferras Vansen feel more lonely than ever.
What am I doing here? No power of the gods or earth should have been able to lure me back to this mad place. But shame and desire, commingled in a most devastating way, had clearly been more powerful than any gods, because here he was behind the Shadowline again, lost in an unholy forest of crescent-leaved trees and vines sagging with heavy, dripping black blossoms, terrified that if he did lose the boy he would bring even more pain to the Eddons—and more important, to Barrick’s sister, Princess Briony.
Hidden lightning glowed above them and thunder rumbled as the cold torrent grew stronger. Vansen scowled. This storm was too much, he decided: even if it meant another pitched battle with the unresponsive prince, they dared not go any farther today. If they were not struck by lightning or a deathly fever, their horses would surely stumble blindly off a crag and they would die that way—even Barrick’s strange, dark fairy-horse was showing signs of distress, and Vansen’s own mount was within moments of balking completely. No sane person would travel unknown roads in weather like this.