by Tad Williams
“What would they be doing, Captain?” young Dawley asked. “I mean, going to war? With whom?”
“With us,” Vansen said, trying to keep his temper. “With our kind. Which is why we must hope we can get back to Southmarch with the news before that army of unnatural things gets there.”
It also quickly became clear that despite his claim of finding Vansen, Southstead and the other two guardsmen had been completely lost, wandering hopelessly, although Southstead claimed he would have found his way out of the woods, “given a proper chance.” The fact that these three guardsmen, none of whom Vansen thought of as very clever, had not been driven mad by the magic of the shadow-forest made him a little more uncertain about his own resistance. There seemed to be no reason for who was completely overcome and who was only buffeted by the strangeness of the place. More disturbing, resistance did not seem to give them the ability to find their way out again, but Dyer in his former madness had seemed certain he knew which way to go.
As the men argued about who would stand watch, Vansen suddenly had an idea: although he still feared his men had mistreated the girl Willow, perhaps even raped her, he realized he might in his anger have misunderstood something she was trying to tell him.
She was sitting close to him, not speaking, but clearly more comfortable near the man she sometimes imagined was her father. “You said they would not let you go home,” he said to her quietly. “What do you mean?”
She shook her head, wide-eyed. “Oh, I can see the road! I tried to tell them, but they wouldn’t listen. The one who looks like our old bull pup said he knew where to go and that I should keep my mouth shut.” She slid closer to him. “But you will let me go home. I know you will.”
Vansen almost laughed at the girl’s description—the jowly Southstead did indeed look more than a little like a bulldog—but what she had said was important. She found her way out of shadow once, he thought, before we found her. He patted her on the head, carefully disengaged his hand from hers—she had a good, tight grip on it—and stood up. “I’ll take first watch,” he announced. “The rest of you play drop-stones or whatever you wish to settle your turns. Tomorrow you follow a new leader.”
Southstead did not look happy, but he grinned anyway. “As you wish, Captain, o’ course. But you and Dyer did no better than us.”
“I’m not going to be leading,” he said. “She will.”
Despite the grumbling of the men, after the little troop had been up and following Willow through the gray forest for a few hours Vansen actually saw the moon for the first time since they had fallen into shadow. It was only a glimpse when some unfelt wind in the heights scattered the mists for a moment, and he was a little disturbed to think it might be the middle of the night when his body had been telling him it was day, but he still regarded it as a good sign. The girl seemed certain of where she was going, walking on ahead of them in her tattered white dress like a ghost leading travelers to the place of its murder.
Perhaps it was hunger—the younger the man, Vansen had learned during his time as a guard captain, the more they thought about food—but somewhere during what everyone except Mesiya’s pale orb believed was the afternoon, Dawley suddenly stopped in his tracks.
“There’s something in that thicket,” he whispered to Vansen, who was closest to him. He took his bow off his shoulder and pulled out one of the two arrows he had saved from the collapse of their mission and the disappearance of the horses and packs. “If it’s a deer, Captain, I’m going to shoot it. I don’t care if it’s the King of Elfland in disguise, I’ll eat it anyway.”
Vansen laid a hand on the young soldier’s arm as he nocked the arrow, squeezed the arm hard. “But what if it’s Adcock or one of the other guards wandering lost, maybe wounded?” Dawley slowly lowered the bow. “Good. Take Dyer and Balk and see if you can move in quietly.”
While Vansen and Southstead and the young woman watched in silence, the men closed in on the thicket. Dawley abruptly dove into the deepest part of the undergrowth and Balk clambered in after him. The leaves were rattling, and both Dawley and Balk were shouting to each other.
“There! It’s running there!”
“It’s a cat!”
“No, it’s a bloody ape! But it’s fast!”
Dyer waded in last and the three converged. The branches thrashed furiously, then Dyer straightened up with something the size of a small child struggling in his arms.Vansen and the others hurried forward.
“Perin’s Balls!” swore Vansen. “Don’t get scratched, Collum.What is it?”
The whining, scratchy cries of the thing as it fought helplessly against the much larger Dyer were disturbing enough, but hearing it suddenly speak the Common Tongue was terrifying. “Let go me!” it shrilled.
Startled, Dyer almost did let it go, but then he squeezed until it subsided. The guardsman was breathing hard, his eyes wide with fear, but he was holding the thing tightly now. Vansen could understand why the others mistook it for an ape or a cat. It was vaguely man-shaped, but long of arm and short of leg, and was furred all over in shades of gray and brown and black. The face was like a demon-mask that children wore on holidays, although this demon seemed to be as frightened as they were.
“What are you?” Vansen asked.
“Something cursed,” said Southstead, his voice cracking.
The thing stared at the guardsman with what looked like contempt, then turned its gaze onVansen.The bright yellow eyes had no white and only. thin black sideways slits for pupils, like a goat’s. “Goblin, am I,” it rasped. “Under-Three-Waters tribe.You dead men, all.”
“Dead men?”Vansen repressed a superstitious shiver.
“She bring white fire. She burn all you houses until only black stones.” It made a strange hissing, spitting sound. “Wasted, my leg, old and bent. Fell behind. Never I see the beauty of her when she ends you.”
“Kill it!” Southstead demanded through clenched teeth.
Vansen held out a hand to still him. “It was following the army of the Twilght People. Perhaps it is one of them—it’s certainly their subject. It can tell us things.” He looked around, trying to think of what they could use to bind the creature, which was struggling again in Dyer’s grasp.
“Never,” the thing said, the words raw and strangely-shaped. “Never help sunlanders!” A moment later it squirmed abruptly and violently, contorting itself m such a way that it seemed to have no backbone, and sank its teeth into Collum Dyer’s arm. He screamed in pain and surprise and dropped the thing to the ground. It scrambled away from them, but one of its legs was clearly lame and dragged behind it. Before Vansen could even open his mouth to shout, young Dawley took two steps and caught up to it, then smashed it to the ground with his bow. A moment later Dyer was there as well, holding his bloody arm against his body as he began to kick the writhing shape. Southstead caught up to them with his sword out and his mouth full of angry curses. The other two stepped back as he began hacking and hacking. All three men were making sounds like dogs baying, howls of terror and rage.
By the time Vansen reached them the goblin was long dead, a bloody tangle of meat and fur on the mossy forest floor, its lantern eyes already going dull.
*
Barrick still refused to see her, but Briony was determined. Her brothers outbursts and anger had been bad enough before, but now he was truly frightening her. He had always been prickly and private, but this strangeness about the potboy was something else again.
She leaned down close to the wide-eyed page, who had his back against the prince’s chamber door as though he meant to defend it with his ten-year-old life. “Tell my brother that I will be back to speak with him after the evening meal. Tell him we unll speak.”
As she walked away, she heard the page hurriedly open the door and then almost slam it closed behind him, as though he had just escaped from the cage of a lioness.
Are there people here who fear me as much as they fear Brone? As they fear Barrick’s moods? It was an odd
thought. She had never conceived of herself as frightening, although she knew she was not always patient with what she deemed foolishness or dithering.
Zoria, virgin warrior, Zona of the cunning hands, give me the strength to be gentle. The prayer reminded her of that fool of a poet, and her sudden whim. Why had she decided to keep such a creature around? Just to annoy Barrick and the lord constable? Or because she truly did enjoy even such ridiculous flattery’
Her mind muddled with these thoughts, she walked down the long hall beneath the portraits of her ancestors living and dead, her father and her grandfather Ustm and her great-grandfather, the third Anglin, without really seeing them. Even the picture of Queen Lily, scourge of the Gray Companies and the most famous woman in the history of the March Kingdoms, could not hold her attention today, although there were other times when she would stand for hours looking at the handsome, dark-haired woman who had held the realm together in one of its bleakest hours, wondering what it would be like to make such a mark on the world. But today, although the familiar sight of her other clansmen and clanswomen had not moved her, the picture of Sanasu, Kellick Eddon’s queen, caught her eye.
It was unusual for Briony to give the portrait more than a glance. What little she knew of Queen Sanasu was dreary, of her painfully long years of mourning after the great King Kellick died, an obsessively silent, solitary widowhood that had made her a phantom to her own court. So detached had Sanasu become in the last half of her life, family stories related, that the business of the kingdom had fallen entirely to her son years before he became king in fact, something that made the responsible Briony loathe the woman without knowing anything more about her. But today, even as absorbed in worries as she was, Briony could not help staring at something in the likeness she had never really noticed before. Sanasu looked very much like Barrick—or rather Barrick, her many-times-great grandson, looked much like Sanasu, which was accentuated by the black mourning garb they both favored. And these days, with his pallor and striking, haunted eyes accentuated by his bout with the fever, Barrick looked more like the long-dead queen than ever.
Briony stood on her toes for a better look, wishing the light in the ancient hall were better. The artist who had made the portrait had no doubt prettified his queen, but even so, the Sanasu in the picture had the almost transparent look of someone very ill, which only made her red hair even more shocking, like a bloody wound. She also seemed astonishingly young for someone who had lost her husband in middle age Her face was odd in other ways, too, although it was hard to say exactly why.
I can see Father’s eyes in her, too, and his coloring. Briony suddenly wished she knew more about great Kellick’s widow. The portrait made Sanasu look mysterious and foreign. Briony couldn’t recall being told anything about where the melancholy queen had come from before marrying Kelhck, but whatever distant land might have spawned her, it had now been part of the family heritage for centuries. Briony was suddenly struck by how the blood of the Eddons, her own blood, was like a great river, with things appearing and disappearing and then appearing again. And not just looks, but moods and habits and ruling passions, too, she thought Queen Sanasu had famously stopped talking to those around her and exiled herself to Wolfstooth Spire, so that she was seen by only a few servants and became all but invisible for the two or three decades before her death Was that what was in store for her moody, beloved Barrick?
That ghastly thought, and the continuing fascination of Sanasu’s white, otherworldly face, had grasped Briony’s interest so firmly that she nearly screamed when the ancient jester Puzzle stepped out of the shadows nearby.
“By the gods, fellow,” she demanded when her heart had slowed again, “what are you doing?You startled me out of my wits, creeping up like that.”
“I am sorry, Princess, very sorry I just I was waiting for you “ He seemed to be considering whether he should get down onto one extremely creaky knee.
Briony reminded herself of her own prayer for Zonan patience. “Don’t apologize, I will live What is it, Puzzle?”
“I . . . it is just . . .” He looked as anxious as Barricks page. “I am told that someone will share my room.”
She took a breath. Patience Kindness. “Is that too much trouble? It was a sudden thought. I’m sure we can find somewhere else to put this newcomer. I thought he might be company for you.”
“A poet?” Puzzle couldn’t seem to grasp the connection. “Well, we will see, Highness. It is possible we will get on. Certainly I do not speak to many people since . . . since your father has gone. And since my friend Robben died. It might be nice to have . . .” He blinked his rheumy eyes. It was possible that her father Olin was the only person on the continent of Eion who had ever found Puzzle amusing, or at least amusing in the way the jester tried to be. What must it be like, she wondered, to be supremely unfitted for your life’s work? Even if she was impatient with him now, Briony couldn’t help regretting the way she and Barrick had teased the bony old fellow all these years.
“If it turns out not to your liking, tell Nynor and he will find the poet some other place. Thinwight, or whatever his name is, is young and should be agreeable. Bad poets need to be agreeable.” She nodded. “Now I have much to do . . .”
“My lady,” the old man said, still having trouble meeting her eyes, “it was not that which I wished to speak about—well, not as much.”
“What else?”
“I have a very great worry, my lady. Something that I have remembered, and that I fear I should have told earlier.” He stopped to swallow. It did not look easy for him. “I think you know I visited your brother on the night of his death. That he called for me after supper and I came to his chamber to entertain him.”
“Brone told me, yes.” She was alert now.
“And that I left before Lord Shaso came.”
“Yes? So? By the gods, Puzzle, don’t make me work it out of you word by word!”
He winced. “It is just . . . your brother, may the gods grant his soul peace, sent me away that night. He was . . not kind. He said that I was not diverting, that I never was—that my tricks and jests only made him feel . . . made him feel even more that life was wretched.”
Kendrick had only told the truth, but she knew he must have been distressed indeed to be rude to old Puzzle Her older brother had always been the most mannerly of the family. “He was unhappy,” she told him. “It was an unhappy night. I am sure those were not his true thoughts. He was worried about me, remember, about the ransom for the king and whether he should send me away.”
The jester shook his head in confusion and defeat. He was bareheaded, but the gesture was so familiar she could almost hear the tinkle of his belled cap. “That is not what I wanted to tell you, Highness. When Lord Brone asked me about that night, I told him what I remembered, but I forgot something. I think it is because I was so disturbed by what Prince Kendrick had said—a hard blow for someone who has devoted his life to the pleasure of the Eddons, you must admit . . .”
“Whatever the reason, what did you forget?” Gods defend me! He certainly does test a person’s patience.
“As I left the residence, I saw Duke Gailon walking toward me. I was in the main hall, so it did not occur to me he might be going to see your older brother and I did not mention it to the lord constable after . . . that terrible event. But I have been thinking and thinking—sometimes I lay awake at night, worrying—and I think now that he was walking the wrong direction to be going to his own chambers. I think he might have been going to see Prince Kendrick.” He bowed his head. “I have been a fool.”
Briony didn’t bother to reassure him. “Let me understand this. You are saying that you saw Gailon Tolly heading toward the residence as you were leaving. And you saw nothing of Shaso?”
“Not that night, but I went straight to my bed from there. Are you very angry, Highness? I am an old man, and sometimes I fear I am becoming a witling . . .”
“Enough. I will have to think about this. Have you t
old anyone else?”
“Only you. I . . . I believed you would .” He shook his head again, unable to say what he believed. “Shall I go to tell the lord constable?”
“No.” She had said it too forcefully. “No, I think for now you should tell no one else. This will be our secret.”
“You will not put me in the stronghold?”
“I suspect that sharing a room with that poet fellow will be punishment enough. You may go, Puzzle.”
Long after the old man had tottered away she remained, standing beneath the pictures of her forebears, thinking.
23
The Summer Tower
SLEEPERS:
Feet of stone, legs of stone
