by Tad Williams
But something was different, she saw. He seemed better—he no longer moved like a dying man, draggled and slow—but instead of becoming again the disdainful, unhappy Barrick Eddon she knew nearly as well as herself, he had a bounce in his step that seemed equally foreign, and his eyes as he neared her seemed to burn with a mischievous vigor.
“So someone in our family finally agrees to speak to us.” Barrick did not stop to give her a kiss, did not stop at all, but swept past, still talking swiftly, leading her toward Merolanna’s door as though he had been waiting for Briony, not the other way around. “After our stepmother, I begin to think they fear taking the plague from me.”
“Anissa said she did not feel well herself. She is pregnant, after all.”
“And it came on an hour before we were to dine with her? Perhaps that is all it is Perhaps.”
“You are jumping at shadows.”
He turned to look at her, and again she wondered if the fever had truly left him. Why otherwise this eye bright as a bird’s, this strange air, as though at any moment he might fly into pieces? “Shadows? A strange word to use.” He paused and seemed to find himself a little. “All I’m saying is, why won’t our stepmother talk to us?”
“We will give her a few more days. Then we will make it a command.”
Barrick arched an eyebrow. “Can we do that?”
“We’ll find out.” She reached out and knocked on Merolanna’s door. Ellis, the duchess’ little serving maid, opened it and stood for a long moment stock-still and blinking like a mouse caught on a tabletop. At last she made a courtesy, found her voice. “She’s lying down, Highnesses. She wants me to bring you to her.”
Inside, several older women and a few young ones sat doing needlework. They rose and made their own courtesies to the prince and princess Briony said a few words to each. Barrick nodded his head, but smiled only at those who were young and pretty. He was bouncingly impatient, as though he already wished he had not come.
Merolanna sat up in bed as the serving maid drew the curtain. “Ellis? Bid the other ladies go, please. You, too. I want to be alone with Barrick and Briony.” Their great-aunt did not look ill, Briony thought with some relief, but she did look old and tired. These days Briony was not used to seeing Merolanna without face paint, so it was hard to know for certain whether the changes were real or just the ordinary punishments of time left unhidden, but there was no mistaking the swollen eyes. The duchess had been crying.
“There,” the old woman said when the room was clear. “I cannot abide being listened to.” There was an unusual violence in her voice. She fanned herself. “Some things are not for others to know.”
“How are you, Auntie? We’ve been worried about you.”
She manufactured a smile for Briony. “As well as can be expected, dear one. It’s kind of you to ask.” She turned to Barrick. “And you, boy? How are you feeling?”
Barrick’s smile was almost a smirk. “The grip of old Kernios is a bit more slippery than everyone thinks, it seems.”
Merolanna went quite pale. She brought her hand to her breast as though to keep her heart inside it. “Don’t say such things! Merciful Zoria, Barrick, don’t tempt the gods. Not now, when they have done us so much mischief already.”
Briony was irritated with her brother, not least because it did seem foolish to make such a boast, but she was also puzzled by Merolanna’s reaction, her frightened eyes and trembling hands. All through the time before Kendrick’s funeral their great-aunt had been the strongest pillar of the family and the household. Was it just that her strength had run out?
“I’ll say it again, Auntie.” Briony reached out and took her hand. “We have been worried about you. Are you ill?”
A sad smile. “Not in the sense you mean, dear. No, not like our poor Barrick has been.”
“I’m well now, Auntie.”
“I can see that.” But she looked at him as though she did not entirely believe it. “No, I have just . . had a turn, I suppose. A bad moment. But it frightened me, and made me think I’ve not done right. I’ve spent time, a great deal of time lately, talking to the Hierarch Sisel about it, you know. He’s a very kind man, really. A good listener.”
“But not to Father Timoid?” It seemed odd—usually Merolanna and the Eddon family priest were a conspiracy of two.
“He’s a terrible gossip.”
“That’s never bothered you before.”
Merolanna gave her a flat look, almost as though she spoke to a stranger. “I’ve never had to worry about it before.”
Barrick laughed suddenly, harshly. “What, Auntie? Have you begun a love affair with someone? Or are you plotting to take the crown yourself?”
“Barrick!” Briony almost slapped him. “What a terrible thing to say!”
Merolanna looked at him and shook her head, but to Briony’s eyes the old woman still seemed oddly detached. “A few weeks ago, I would have been after you with a stick, boy. How can you talk like that to me, who raised you almost like a mother?”
“It was a jest!” He folded his arms and leaned against the bedpost, his face a resentful mask. “A jest.”
“What is it, then?” Briony asked. “Something is happening here, Auntie. What is it?”
Merolanna fanned herself. “I’m going mad, that’s all.”
“What are you talking about? You’re not going mad.” But Briony saw Barrick lean forward, his sullenness gone. “Auntie?” she asked.
“Fetch me a cup of wine. That pitcher, there. And not too much water.” When she had the cup in her hand, Merolanna sipped it, then sat up straighter. “Come, sit on the bed, both of you. I cannot bear to have you standing there, looking down on me.” She patted the bed, almost begging. “Please. There. Now listen. And please don’t ask me any questions, not until I finish. Because if you do, I will start crying and then I’ll never stop.”
*
It was finally Godsday, with Lastday to follow; Chert welcomed the days of rest. His bones ached and he had a hot throb in his back that would not go away. He was glad to bid the tennight good-bye for other reasons, too. The prince’s funeral that began it, with its weight of hard work and terrible sadness, had taken much out of him, and the boy’s disappearance that day had frightened him badly.
What is he? Chert wondered. Not just his strangeness, but what is he to us? Is he a son? Will someone, his true parents, come and take him away from us? He looked at Opal, who was sniffing at a row of pots she had set up on the far side of the table. My old woman will be stabbed in the heart if the boy leaves us.
As will I, he realized suddenly. The child had brought life to the house, a life that Chert had never realized was missing until now.
“I don’t think this bilberry jam is much good,” Opal said, “although it cost me three chips. Here, try it.”
Chert scowled. “What am I, a dog? ‘Here, this has gone off, you try it’?”
Opal scowled back. She was better at it than he was. “Old fool—I didn’t say it had gone off, I said I don’t think it’s much good. I’m asking your opinion.You’re certainly quick enough to give it most other times.”
“Very well, pass it here.” He reached out and took the pot, dipped a piece of bread into it, lifted it to his nose. It smelled like nothing more or less than bilberry jam, but it raised a strange thought: if the old stories were true, and there were Funderlings before ever there were big folk, then who grew the vegetables up in the sunlight? Who grew the fruits? Did the Lord of the Hot Wet Stone create us to eat moles and cave crickets with never a bit of fruit, let alone bilberry jam? But if not, where would such things have come from? Did the Funderlings of old have farms under the sun? It seemed strange to think of such a thing, but stranger still to think of a world with no . . .
“Jam, old man. What do you think of the jam?”
Chert shook his head. “What?”
“I take it back—you don’t have the wits to be a fool, old man.You don’t pay enough heed.The jam!”
/> “Oh. It tastes like jam, no more, no less.” He looked around. “Where is the boy?”
“Playing out in front, not that you’d notice if he’d gone off to drown in the Salt Pool.”
“Don’t be cross, Opal. I’m tired. It was an uncomfortable piece of work, that tomb.”
She took the pot of jam. “I’m sorry, old fellow. You do work hard.”
“Give us a kiss, then, and let’s not quarrel.”
Opal had gone off to visit her friend Agate, wife of one of Chert’s cousins, and after checking to make sure the boy Flint was still erecting his complicated miniature fortifications of damp earth and bits of stone outside the front door, Chert poured himself a mug of mossbrew and pulled out the mysterious stone Flint had found. A week or so had not made it any more familiar the cloudy, unusually rounded crystal still matched nothing he had seen or even heard of Chaven was traveling for a few days, visiting the outlying towns with a colleague to check the spread of the disease that had almost killed Prince Barrick, and now Chert was wishing he had spoken with the physician about it before he left. The stone troubled him, although except for the fact that it seemed like something that might have come from behind the Shadowline he couldn’t say why. He had half a dozen other Shadowline stones right here in the house, after all—those which no one had wanted to buy, but which Chert had found too interesting to discard—and had not given any of them a second thought. But this.
I could take it to the Guild, he thought. But he felt strangely certain they would not recognize it either—maybe old High Feldspar would have, a man who had known more stonework and stone-lore than the rest of Funderling Town put together, but Feldspar’s ashes had been returned to the earth three years ago and Chert did not think there were many in the Guild now who knew more than he did himself. Certainly not about Shadowline stones.
“When are you going to the talking and singing place?" a voice said behind him, making Chert jump and slosh his mug. Flint stood in the doorway, hands so dirty it looked like he was wearing dark gloves. As if he had been caught doing something wrong, Chert dumped the weird stone back into his purse and pulled the string.
“Talking and singing place?" He remembered the boy’s reaction his first day in the tomb. “Oh I’m not going to work today, lad, but if you don’t like going there other days, you can stay home with Opal instead. She’d love to . . .”
“I want you to go there. Go now.”
Chert shook his head. “This is a day of rest, lad. Everyone gets their days of rest each tennight, and this is one of mine.”
“But I have to go there.” The child was not angry or upset, merely fixed as a hard-driven wedge. “I want to go to where you work.”
Flint could not or would not explain his sudden interest, but neither would he be talked out of it Chert suddenly wondered if it had something to do with the stone—after all, the boy had claimed he found it out in the temple-yard, near the tomb. “But I can’t work today,” Chert explained. “It’s Godsday—none of the other men will come. And in any case, clattering away with picks and cold chisels would be offensive to the others having their rest.” Both above and below ground, he could not help thinking. He had become a bit leery of working in the tomb, although he still thought of himself as unmoved by big-folk superstition. Still, he would not be sad when the job was finished and he could move on to other tasks in other places.
“Then will you just come with me?" Flint said. “Will you take me there?"
Chert could not help being astonished. The child was ordinarily well-behaved, if a bit strange, but this was the most he had talked in days, and the only time Chert could remember that he had ever asked for anything, let alone asking this way, with the doggedness of an army laying siege.
“You want me to take you to the tomb?”
The boy shook his head. “To the temple-yard. That’s what it’s called, isn’t it? Well, near there.” He frowned, trying to think of something. “Just come.” He held out his hand.
Feeling as though he had entered his own front door and found himself in someone else’s house, Chert rose and followed the boy into the street.
“We won’t go through the Funderling roads,” the boy said matter-of-factly. “I don’t want to go near the talking, singing place.”
“If you’re talking about the Eddon family vault, there aren’t any tunnels from here that go there, or even close to it.”
Flint gave him a look that seemed almost pitying. “It doesn’t matter. We’ll go up on top of the ground.”
“Boy, don’t you understand that my back aches and my feet ache and I just want to sit down?" Chert had barely kept up with the child, who seemed able to walk only for a moment or two before breaking into a sprint, then circling back like a dog anxious to be after the quarry. Chert’s only chance to catch his breath had been at the Raven’s Gate. The guards there were now used to the Funderling man with the adopted big-folk son, but they still found the situation amusing. This one time, Chert was grateful that they made him and the boy wait to pass through while they thought of clever things to say.
Finally, as the two of them walked through the winding ways of the inner keep, heading toward the temple-yard and the family vaults, he grabbed at the boy’s shirt to hold him back—he had already had one experience of how fast the child could disappear.
“Where are we going?”
“Up there.” Flint pointed to the roof of one of the residences. “They’re waiting for me.”
“Waiting for you? Who?” It took a moment to sink in. “Hold a bit—up there? On the roof? I’m not climbing that thing, boy, and neither are you. We have no business up there.”
“They’re waiting for me.” Flint was entirely reasonable and very firm.
“Who?”
“The Old People.”
“No, no, and definitely no. I don’t know why you think . . .” Chert did not get a chance to finish his sentence. He had made the mistake of letting go of Flint’s collar and the boy now bolted off across the temple-yard. “Come back!” Chert cried. It was one of the more useless things he had ever said.
“I’ve never taken the strap to a child . . .” Chert growled, then had to close his mouth as stone-dust and mortar and bits of dried moss pattered down on him from his own handhold. You’ve never had a child to take a strap to, he told himself sourly. His backache was worse than ever, and now his arms and legs felt as though he’d spent the entire morning wielding one of the heavy picks, something he hadn’t done since his youth. And you’ll never take a strap to anyone if you fall and break all your bones, so give attention to what you’re doing Still, he was furious and more than a little startled. He had not known a child could look you in the face like that, then disobey you. Flint had been a child with his own mind and his own secret thoughts since he had come to stay with them, but he had never been troublesome like this.
Chert looked down and wished he hadn’t. It was years since he had been a scaffold man, and there was in any case something different about looking down at the distant ground when the rock ceiling of Funderling Town curved soothingly above your head. Climbing the outside of a building beneath the naked sky, even this wall with its relatively easy handholds, was altogether different and quite dizzying.
Shuddering, he lifted his gaze and looked around, certain that at this very moment a guard had noticed the intruder climbing the residence wall and was nocking an arrow, preparing to spit him like a squirrel. He had seen no one, but how long could that last?
“I’ve never taken the strap to a child, but this time . . .”
When he reached the top at last, it was all he could do to pull himself onto the tiled roof, gasping for air, arms and legs trembling. When he could at last drag himself up into a crouch and look around, he saw Flint only a short distance away, seated just below the crest of the roof with his back against one of the large chimney pots, waiting calmly and expectantly—but not for his adopted father, it appeared, since he was not even looking at him.
Chert wiped the sweat from his face and began to clamber cautiously up the mossy slope toward the boy, cursing with every breath. Heights. He did not like heights. He didn’t really think he liked children either. So what in the name of the Earth Elders was he doing on the roof of Southmarch Castle, chasing this mad boy?
His legs were shaking so badly by the time he reached the chimney that he had to cling to the bricks while he stretched and worked out the cramps. Flint looked at him with the same sober stare he employed in all other places and situations.
“I am angry, boy,” Chert growled. He looked around to see if anyone could see them from an upper window, but the boy had picked a spot where the low roof was blocked by taller parts of the residence, window-less walls that turned this section into a kind of tiled canyon, protected from the view of any of the near towers. In fact, even the top of mighty Wolfs-tooth Spire was barely visible above them, blocked by the overhang of a nearby roof. But Chert still had a strong urge to whisper. “Did you hear me? I said I’m angry . . . !”
