by Tad Williams
“Your story is not finished,” said Eneas. “What did the merchants tell you when they hired you and your men?”
“That they had a commission to take a caravan into the far north—to the March Kingdoms—and that they needed protection on the journey. They had to pay through the nose for it, too.” Volofon laughed; half his teeth were gone and the rest were mostly black. “We knew what was going on up here. Fairies and monsters! That’s double-pay work!”
“Were you promised anything else?”
“Whatever we could pry loose along the way. ‘A good chance to make your fortunes in a lawless land,’ the Hierosolines put it.”
“In other words,” Eneas said, “they said you could steal whatever you wanted.”
“That’s another way to put it, yes.” Volofon grinned his unsavory grin once more.
“That is enough,” said Eneas. “I can’t stand to listen to you any longer. Go back to your cage. I will decide what to do with you later.”
The mercenary looked him over for a moment as if considering some kind of challenge to his authority, but only shrugged and sauntered back into the stockade. He called something to the other soldiers who laughed and shouted back at him. Briony hated them all, though she could not have said why. They had the uncaring certainty of boys, but without kindness, and with the brawny bodies of men. They were used to getting what they wanted at the point of a sword, and the fact that what they wanted belonged to other people meant nothing. Thieves and rapists, she thought. And murderers. Hiding behind the name of soldiers.
“I still do not understand, Eneas,” she said aloud. “What . . . ?”
“You must hear the rest,” he said. “You!” he shouted at the man skulking near the far fence. “Dard, if that is your name. Come here!”
The smaller man came up at once, and the difference between him and Volofon could not have been more marked. Dard held out his hands and walked in a supplicating near-crouch, as if trying to make himself as small and harmless-seeming as possible.
“You are Prince Eneas!” he said, smiling and bobbing his head like a witling. “Such an honor! Your fame goes before you!” The merchant turned to Briony. “And this fine young lord is . . . ?”
“Shut your mouth.” Eneas stared at him as though he had crawled out from beneath a muddy rock. “Bring him out here to me.” When the merchant had been dragged outside the fence, the prince said, “Just answer this question, Dard. You hired the mercenaries. Who hired you?”
The man stared at Eneas for a moment, mouth working. “Why . . . why someone who believed a profit was to be made in the north, even in such difficult times, Your Highness. So many caravans have stopped traveling here, and many of the merchant ships were troubled by the Qar—just as we were, it should be said. The same Qar who would have murdered us if you had not come to our rescue . . . !”
“For the last time, merchant, answer only what you are asked.” Eneas shook his head. “I am not a child to be swayed by flattery. Even if you wished to use a land route to bring your goods, why could you not simply have come up through Summerfield or Silverside to Marrinswalk? This is a long, strange way to travel—and through very dangerous country, too. Why hire mercenaries to protect you in such a wicked, lonely place when there are so many more . . . civilized places that would have welcomed your goods?” He held up a hand to silence the merchant, who was already beginning to stammer out justifications. “Because you have a special buyer, do you not? And he is waiting for you at Southmarch.”
“At Southmarch? Who is this buyer?” Briony asked. “Is it Hendon Tolly?”
“A look at the caravan’s cargo manifest will tell you,” the prince said. “Miron?”
The officer lifted a heavy book and began reading: “Sugared wine, hard bread, barrels of iron rings ...”
“Those are military supplies,” Briony said.
“Oh, but we can be more precise than that.” Eneas’ face looked like a sky preparing to explode into thunder and wind and rain. “See. Several thousandweight of grain for bread, hides, pig iron—all reasonable supplies for an army at war which is not certain it can find all it needs by foraging. But here are five hundred barrels of Marashi peppers. Have you ever tasted the things? Foul and hot, fit only for animals—or southerners. In fact, Xixian troops practically live on them, along with dried chickpeas—but look! Here are a thousand sacks of those as well! What a coincidence we find here. This caravan, which you can see by the manifest left Hierosol three months ago or more . . . is carrying supplies that seem to be for a Xixian army.” He turned on the cowering Dard. “But the Autarch of Xis is besieging Hierosol, isn’t he? Why should he be sending supplies here, far to the north? Unless he was expecting to come here ...?”
“Please, Highness, we did not realize . . . !” shouted the merchant. “We were only fulfilling an order!”
“You lie.” Eneas kicked at him, and the man skittered back against the gate of the stockade. “Take him away. I shall decide what to do with the whole noisome crowd later.”
Lord Helkis and the other soldiers shoved the protesting Dard back into the pen.
“But the Qar . . . ?” Briony said.
“I am not certain, but if they were fighting to keep these supplies from the autarch they are no worse than accidental allies. Who knows? But I am angry, Princess Briony, very angry. Because I broke the first rule of the battlefield—to know who you fight and why—we have aided an enemy.”
“Not entirely,” Briony said. “Because whatever else happened, we now have the supplies and the autarch doesn’t.”
The lines on the prince’s brow smoothed a little; after a moment he even smiled. “That is true, Princess. And if the autarch is now besieging your family’s castle, perhaps soon we can do that southern whoreson even greater harm . . . begging my lady’s pardon.”
It was strange traveling through the March Kingdoms again. The thriving market towns mostly stood deserted, and what had once been fertile fields now were overgrown with unfamiliar vines that bore nodding black flowers and leaves as purple as a bruise. They also saw far fewer people than Briony would have expected, but she decided that was because she was traveling with a large troop of soldiers. Syan and Southmarch might have had years and years of peace between them, but after the Qar invasion and the inevitable banditry, the people who still hung on to their homes and livelihoods would not be showing themselves to armed bands, no matter whose insignia they wore.
Even the animals seemed different, she noticed. Most of the domestic livestock were long gone or carefully hidden, but even the deer and squirrels and birds seemed to have lost their fear of humanity. Strangely, though, this did not make them any easier to hunt, so the Syannese troops still had to dine most nights on the food they carried. They had brought their own cattle and sheep, but Eneas insisted these were to be slaughtered only sparingly, since he had no idea what they would find in the way of forage around Southmarch, so mostly the men ate soup and hardbread and whatever few vegetables could be found in the deserted fields. Some of his knights had brought their own, more toothsome fare, but Eneas was a great believer in an army that shared both hardships and windfalls; seeing the expensive pheasants these knights had brought packed in barrels of oil taken out and handed out among the foot soldiers was enough to convince most nobles it wasn’t worth the trouble trying to smuggle in better food for themselves. Briony couldn’t help noticing that for every one of Eneas’ fellow nobles who was cross and out of sorts at the loss of his favorite tidbits, a dozen ordinary soldiers thought the prince little short of a god.
But even the knights who would have preferred to hang onto their delicacies almost revered the prince, Briony was learning. At first she suspected he had arranged the parade of thanks and pledges of loyalty that came to him every time he went among the tents, but she quickly realized it was all genuine. Eneas was simply one of those leaders who shared all hardships and rewards with his troops, and who never forgot that despite the differences in birth—of which Eneas was cert
ainly aware, and about which he could be quite old-fashioned—he acted as though the life of each man-at-arms was no less important than that of one of his most influential knights. Briony couldn’t tell whether the prince was entirely ignorant of his popularity among the rank and file—he seemed to be, but she wondered if he only pretended for the sake of modesty. Watching Eneas among the common soldiers was a sort of primer for princes—and princesses, too, Briony decided.
The strangest thing for Briony about the trip north was not seeing how much the land had changed, but realizing how much she had changed, too. Only half a year had passed since she had fled Southmarch—and just twelve months since her royal father had been taken captive—but she felt she would hardly recognize the Briony Eddon of a year before if she met her. That girl had experienced so little of the world! That Briony had never sat on the throne except while playing games with her brother when the court had finished for the day; today’s Briony had sat on that throne as ruler and had made decisions on matters of commerce and law and even war. That Briony had never been out of the castle without a retinue of guards and ladies in waiting. Today’s Briony had slept in a haymow, or in the dirt underneath a wagon in the rainy forest. The old Briony had studied swordplay for years with the same incomplete attention she had brought to doing sums and reading passages from the Book of the Trigon; the Briony who stood here now had fought for her life and had even killed a man.
But it was not simply the large experiences that had changed her, she realized, it was all the things she had seen in the last year, all the ordinary and extraordinary people she had met, players and thieves and traitors, goblins and Kallikans, as well as the situations she had been forced to endure—hunger, fear, having no roof over her head, and no friends and no money. Briony felt as though the only thing she had in common with her younger self was the name and the place they were born.
It was strange, but it was also exciting. She was writing this new Briony as a pen wrote words on a piece of sanded parchment. What would the pen write next? That was impossible to say. But for the first time in her life, despite the danger that lay ahead and the loss she had already experienced, she was content to wait to find out what the future would bring.
Although, she reminded herself, it was not as though she had much choice about it.
Qinnitan had escaped him again, but only barely.
Daikonas Vo was ill, or badly injured; otherwise, Qinnitan knew she would never have been able to outrun him for even a few moments, let alone stay ahead of him so long. But although the soldier moved as if his bones were all broken and his guts were aflame, he never stopped. Every time she looked back, every time she paused to rest, Vo was still behind her.
Why didn’t I kill him when I had the chance? Why was I such a fool, to let him live?
Because you couldn’t know what might happen, she told herself as she struggled gracelessly across the wooded Brennish hills, hungry and exhausted, unable to stop even to tend to her aching, bleeding feet. Because you wouldn’t know how to kill any man, let alone a soldier like Vo. A monster like Vo.
And that had been the real reason: he terrified her. It had taken all her courage to try to poison him with his own black bottle on the fishing boat, but that had failed. What hope did she have now?
Still, even if she hadn’t managed to poison him completely, something was definitely wrong with him: he looked like a wild creature, and when he drew close enough for her to hear him, he was often moaning and talking to himself.
Even though I didn’t kill him, she thought with sudden insight, perhaps too much of what was in that bottle made him very sick. Or perhaps it’s not having the medicine that’s made him this way.
But none of it would matter if he caught her, and even if he didn’t, Qinnitan knew she would starve if she couldn’t get far enough ahead of him to search for food.
Qinnitan’s stomach ached with hunger. She was so tired that she could barely keep her legs moving. The ground had become steeper, but every instinct forced her out of the wooded valley and straight up the slope, even though doing so would leave her visible to Vo or anyone else below. By the time she was halfway up, she could hear him crashing up the slope below her. She burst out of thick forest and onto the upper part of the grassy hillside where the trees grew more sparsely and the ground was lumpy with purple-gray shrubs, then stole a look back. Vo saw her and bared his teeth in the mask of dried blood that covered his face. It might have been a grimace of exhaustion, but to Qinnitan it was the snarl of a beast that would not give up until one of them was dead and it terrified her.
As she climbed, she pushed at several large, loose stones to send them rolling down toward him, but even in his terrible state Vo was too agile to be caught that way; each time he waited until the stone had almost reached him, then moved out of its way.
At the top of the hill, Qinnitan saw to her great surprise that a road wound along the base of the hill’s far side, several hundred yards beneath her. Perhaps that meant there was a town somewhere nearby! She scrambled downslope as fast as she could, looking back for Vo but not seeing him; when she reached the flat road, she began to run. She could manage nothing better than a pace she herself would have mocked in her childhood days on Cat’s Eye Street, but at least she knew that every step took her farther from the limping murderer Daikonas Vo.
She alternated between running and walking for what seemed like an hour at least, praying at every bend in the road to find a town or at least a village in front of her but seeing scarcely any sign of habitation at all. She saw old ax-marks on many of the trees and once a tumbled hut that might have belonged to a charcoal burner, but the ruin was deserted and no use to her.
Sundown was almost upon her and Qinnitan was stumbling with weariness when she saw the rider some distance ahead of her on the road. At first she thought it a trick of the lengthening shadows, but as she slowly drew nearer, she could see that it truly was a man on a small horse. Another few hundred steps and she could see that his mount was no horse but a mule, and that the man himself had the shaved head of some kind of Eionian priest.
“Help!” she shouted, one of the few northern words she could remember. “Help! Please!”
The man turned around in surprise and looked back, then reined up and waited for her, shaking his head. “If this be a trick, child, it will go badly for you.” He pulled a gnarled walking-staff from a loop on his saddle and waved it at her. “I will not be ambushed by thieves without making them earn the few coppers in my purse.”
Qinnitan only understood part of what he said. “Help,” she said. “Please. Hungry.”
He was not an old man, but he was not young, either, the skin of his face a net of wrinkles made by sun and wind. After a moment he reached into his bag and produced a heel of bread. “Have this,” he said. “And may Honnos bless your road. Are you on your way to Dunletter? You will not reach it walking tonight.”
She never found out whether he meant to offer her a ride. A crackle in the bushes made the priest look up in time to see Daikonas Vo step out of the trees a little ways behind them, something dark curled in his hand.
“Curse you, child!” the priest said in despair and anger. “You played me false ...!”
Something struck his head with a horrid crack and the man tumbled from the donkey’s back, the bloodied stone that had dashed out his brains lying on the road beside him. The donkey took a few skittering steps forward, then began to lope away up the road. Qinnitan did not even look back at Vo, but ran after it and clambered awkwardly onto its back, pressing her face against its hot, bristly neck as she kicked at it its flanks with her feet, trying to make it run harder.
“I will have you, you little bitch . . . !” Vo shouted hoarsely in the Xixian tongue, frightening the donkey so that it began to trot even faster. “You will never escape me . . . !”
Qinnitan kicked and kicked again, forcing the donkey to go faster and faster until she was afraid it would bounce her off into the road. All she
could do was cling to its neck and pray.
The prince’s Temple Dogs followed the Silver River Road as it wound north-northeast through a half dozen Kertewall valleys, then at last passed over into the western edge of Silverside. The road crossed the river at several points, sometimes on shaky bridges that had to be rebuilt by Eneas’ soldiers to bear the weight of their wagons and heavily laden war-horses, but generally ran beside it. The river was high with spring rains and the water lively, making a counterpoint to the oppressive silence of the empty valleys: Briony found her spirits lifted a little just by the sound of the water and the sight of ordinary spring flowers, although it was impossible to overlook the deserted Kertish towns in which they often grew, or the occasional scenes of devastation, still raw from the Qar’s march through the area half a year ago.
One morning, half a tennight after they had fought the Qar, Briony woke up early after a fitful night and sat in the doorway of her tent watching the camp come to life. She missed drinking gawa, which had become her habit in Effir dan-Mozan’s house in Landers Port. The smell of woodsmoke from the morning fires reminded her of its bitter, musty taste underneath the honey and cream, and the way it made her feel as it warmed her stomach. She had not drunk any for months: here on the road mornings meant sour wine or water from the Silver River, which at least flowed swiftly enough to be clean and sweet.
If I survive all this, she told herself, I will have gawa every morning, with cream from the Dales and heather honey from Settland. And if anyone asks me about such a strange custom, I will tell them, “Oh, I picked it up when I was living with the Tuani ...”
A sudden memory of Shaso blew through her morning’s thoughts like a storm cloud, but before she could do more than note its arrival she saw a stir near Eneas’ tent, which the prince had only recently and reluctantly agreed to take back from her when she had inherited a tent of her own from one of the officers killed at Kleaswell Market. Briony had grown used to the rhythms of a small army on the road: she recognized that the scouts had come back. What she didn’t understand was why their return seemed to have caused such a stir.
