Shadowheart

by Tad Williams

  No, she said. Come back. Please sit beside me.

  When he had seated himself, he looked at her more carefully. Saqri seemed almost translucent, like a candle that had become little more than a shell, its wick burned far down inside it. Though he knew her blood was red like his, it was not apparent from the outside just now; she seemed to be something other than flesh, like the petal of a white lily.

  Why did it all happen? he asked at last.

  She did not need to ask him what he meant. It had to, dear manchild. The balance was too precarious to last forever. When Crooked finally died, everything tumbled loose. Now our time is over.

  But why? Even without both halves of the Fireflower, there must be something left for the People! They don’t have to simply lie down and die.

  Almost a smile again. No, they need not lie down and die, Barrick—but our great age of blooming is over. Perhaps something will come after . . . perhaps . . . but I cannot see it. . . .

  She was growing tired, he knew, and he dared not waste her strength. Still, when she was gone, there would not be another person on all the earth who would understand him. Have I told you what I have found?

  Her eyes fluttered but stayed closed. No, tell me, manchild.

  It was just like the time before he knew the full horror of his father’s illness, those days when Olin would move and talk like a man who had spent the previous days unpleasantly drunk. Poor, blighted man. He understood what plagued him less than I do, and I still cannot fathom it all . . . To Saqri he said, I learned from some of the Xixian prisoners that there may still be tribes of the People living in the southern deserts and the hills—the Xixians call them Khau-Yisti. And there are tales of beings who must have some kinship to our People in the islands to the south and west of Xand as well . . .

  He realized that Saqri was not listening anymore—she had fallen back into her deep, deep sleep, a retreat to a place just this side of death. Each time it was harder to draw her out, each time she returned there more quickly. Soon the other half of the Fireflower would be gone forever.

  Ynnir? What shall I do?

  But that voice had also fallen silent.

  “Elan, just speak to me. Surely that is not too much to ask from a man who has loved you as truly as I have?”

  She frowned at him, but not in anger. “You know I care for you, Matt. I will always be grateful that you tried so hard to rescue me from Hendon.”

  “Tried? Did!”

  “Of course. For a time. But things have changed now—you must see that.”

  “See what? That you are throwing me over for a dying man . . . ?”

  She drew back from him. “Gailon won’t die! Back at Summerfield Court, he will have the best physicians. He can’t die! The gods would not let such a miracle occur only to snatch it away!”

  After the past weeks, Matt Tinwright had a different view of what sort of thing the gods would and wouldn’t do, but he knew it was pointless to argue. Elan had loved Gailon Tolly since she was a girl, and now she would be able to nurse the dying man through his last months.

  “There are miracles all around you, Elan,” he said. “I should be dead! I was shot in the heart with a bolt from a crossbow. But the very prayer book I tried to give you stopped the arrow.” He took the small book from his doublet and held it out. Torn parchment flowered from a jagged hole in the cover as big as a silver coin. “Look! My blood is on its back pages! If I hadn’t had it, the arrow would have reached my heart, but instead it merely gouged me. Does that mean nothing to you?”

  “It means that I was right to return it, Master Tinwright. If I had accepted your gift, you would have died.”

  Tinwright slumped. He had barely slept during the nights since Midsummer. Sometimes he thought that if he couldn’t have Elan, his heart would break and he would die, too—sooner than Gailon Tolly, perhaps—and wouldn’t Elan feel sorry then . . . !

  “Come here,” she said, lifting her pale hands. “Let me give you a kiss.” And to his immense sadness, she did—a chaste, sisterly peck on the cheek. “I will never forget you, Matt. I will never forget you, or your sister, or your mother ...”

  “Nobody forgets my mother,” he said bitterly.

  “You could be a better son to her, you know. She only wants what is best for you. ...”

  Tinwright’s aching heart immediately shrank inward a little, nestling deeper in his ribs. He began to say something sour, then realized that he and Elan were not even speaking the same tongue any more. “Best for me? You must think I’m a child.”

  “I think you are a good, kind man.”

  “Which it does not take a poet to understand is the same as saying, ‘I don’t need you any more,’ am I right?”

  “Don’t be angry, please.”

  “Angry?” He stood up and bowed. “Not at all, my lady, not at all. No, I am happy, because I have learned an important thing about love today—and that’s a poet’s proper study, isn’t it—love? Farewell, Elan. I wish you and Gailon very well.”

  But when he looked back from the doorway after this noble, poetic leavetaking, Elan M’Cory wasn’t even watching him leave with eyes full of regret and longing, as he had hoped. She had returned to her stitchery.

  “I saw no sign of him,” Chert reported to Opal as he slumped onto the seat. “I asked all over town, and no one else has, either.”

  Opal could barely muster the strength to look up. “Why did he lie to me? Why did he tell me I would see him again?”

  Chert sat beside her on the bench and wished for the hundredth time that they didn’t have to shelter in his brother’s house, but their own place on Wedge Road was too close to the area where Durstin Crowel and the renegade Tolly supporters held out against capture.

  As if to remind him of all the miseries in his life, Nodule Blue Quartz picked this particular moment to come down the stairs and into the dust parlor that was currently serving as his brother’s and sister-in-law’s place of refuge. “Ah, Chert. Sitting about, I see. Surely you can find some way to pitch in and help—the Elders know, there is plenty to do these days.” He nodded slowly, as if the weight of his responsibilities made even such simple movements difficult. “And someone was here from the guildhall claiming you are wanted upground at the castle.” He laughed, but there was more than a little anger in it. “I imagine someone has simply mistaken you for me, but the fool of a messenger kept saying no, it was you who was wanted, so I suppose you must go and find out.” Nodule nodded to Opal, shouldered on his cloak, and went out the front door.

  Chert had barely heard what his brother said about the summons; he was still chewing over the insult. Pitch in and help? It was he who almost destroyed everything, Chert thought. My own brother. He tried to stop me without even bothering to find out what I was doing.

  Another thought came to him, one that had been there all along but he had been too busy to entertain. I had something to do with all that happened—with things turning out better than they might have otherwise. With the end of that autarch fellow. With us all being alive. For a moment Chert wanted to run after his older brother and skull him with a rock. Me. Not him. But so far most of Funderling Town knew only enough of what had happened to understand that Chert had been instrumental in destroying their most sacred places.

  He was startled out of his reverie by Opal’s hand closing on his arm, a hard squeeze with fingernails in it. “Go to her,” she said.

  “What? Go to whom? Why?”

  Opal’s deep, crippling sadness had fallen away, replaced by a feverish intensity only marginally less worrisome. “To the princess, of course, since you must go up to the castle anyway. You saved her life! She will help us!”

  “Saved her life? Perhaps. But she also saved mine. I told you, it was nothing so simple as ...”

  “Tell her we need her to find our boy! Tell her all Flint did! She cannot turn you down—she owes you!”

  “But, my love, Princess Briony has more than enough to do ...”

  “W
hat could be more important than finding our boy, you old fool? You heard what Antimony said—he saved Beetledown so he could deliver the Astion! And the Qar—Flint did things for the Qar, too, although I never quite understood. But . . . but our boy matters. Tell her that. Flint matters. She must help him!”

  Chert shook his head, though he knew the battle was already lost. “I cannot simply go to Briony Eddon, the princess regent of all the March Kingdoms, and say, ‘You must find our son.’ She will think me mad.”

  “She will think you a father.” Opal had that look, the one she wore when something was agreed upon, even if she was the only one agreeing. “She had a father herself—in fact she has just lost him. She will understand.”

  Chert sighed. The pain of Flint’s absence was terrible, but he felt certain that begging the mistress of all Southmarch for her help wouldn’t change things. If he still lived, Flint would not be found unless he wanted to be found. A new thought chilled him. If they never found Flint, would Opal ever be happy again?

  “Of course I will go to her,” was what he said out loud. “Of course I will, my only darling.”

  Sister Utta came back from her walk along the walls heartened. It was good to see so many people already at the work of rebuilding Southmarch, although she knew a long time would have to pass before the scars of the conflict were even partially hidden. How much longer until people’s hearts had also been mended? That Utta couldn’t say, but she could smell summer in the air and that was good enough for now. The day after the ocean had crashed in and drowned the deepest caverns beneath the castle, black clouds had filled the sky over Southmarch, hurling down rain as if to soak all that was aboveground as well. In the storm’s wake, little sprigs of green had already begun sprouting between the broken stones and out of the gouged, naked mud of the commons.

  As if to underscore this theme of renewal, Merolanna was sitting up in her bed taking soup from one of her maids. The duchess had seemed at death’s door only a few days ago, but today was feeling so much better that Sister Utta had been able to leave the nursing to others and go out of the house for a little while.

  “Utta!” Merolanna pushed away her bowl with a trembling hand and shook her head sternly when the maid offered her more. “I have been asking for you, my dear. I feel as though I have been on a long journey. Tell me all the news, quickly—is it true Hendon Tolly and his bullies are gone?”

  “Tolly is dead by all reports,” Utta said, sitting on the edge of the bed. “But you should lie back and rest. We will have plenty of time to talk later.”

  “Nonsense. At my age?” Merolanna laughed, although her voice was still weak and reedy. “In any case, I have news of my own! I have met my son.”

  “What?” Utta’s heart, so buoyant only a moment before at seeing her friend so much better, suddenly felt cold. Was it still the lingering fever, or was this madness something separate and deeper, something that would not go away even if the dowager duchess regained her health? “You saw him?”

  “Not just saw him, met him! He came to me!” The old woman laughed again, then frowned as the maid dabbed at a spot of soup on her chin. “Stop that, girl. And Utta, don’t frown. I can tell by your face that you think this some feebleness of mine, or else a piece of fever-foolery, but it was neither. He came to my bedside last night after you slept. I saw him and spoke to him. He even remembered his true name, the name only I know . . . Adis.” She looked a little abashed. “I named him for the holy Orphan, yes. But even so, it did not protect him—the fairies stole him anyway.”

  Now Utta wondered if Merolanna had been tricked by some enterprising beggar-child who thought he had found himself a patroness that could strew the way before him with gold. Utta wasn’t certain what she would do if that were the case. “Is he coming here, then? Did you invite him to stay with you?”

  “Of course I did. But he has too much to do. He was very involved in the war against the fairies, you know.” The old woman frowned. “Or was it the war against the southerners? I cannot quite remember. But in either case he has too much to do to stop here with an old woman. But he has scarcely changed since I lost him! Can you imagine!”

  Now Utta felt a real chill. “But, Merolanna, when he was lost . . . that was fifty years ago.”

  “I know. Is it not a strange, miraculous thing?” The dowager duchess sat back among the cushions. “Still, I am happy, and he promised I would see him again. Now tell me everything that has happened while I was ill. I am hungry for more than soup . . . !”

  Barrick looked down at the girl’s face, so familiar and yet so strange. Only a short while earlier, Briony had stood in this same rock chamber, and she too had seemed an inexplicable mixture of the unknowable and the known. Could she really be his twin sister, the one who had sometimes seemed so close that she might have been just another part of himself ? And could Qinnitan, lying here before him lit only by the deathly gleam of a few candles, really be a stranger he had never seen in the flesh until that moment down in the Mysteries?

  Qinnitan? Can you hear me? He emptied his thoughts of everything—Saqri, Briony, all that had happened since the last spring moon began to grow—and tried once more. Qinnitan. It’s Barrick. I need you. I need to speak with you. But he could feel nothing in that distant corner of his thoughts and his heart where she had once lived. Qinnitan!

  He sat beside her. The Fireflower voices, quiescent and drowsy as sun-warmed bees, murmured to him of the Deathwatch Chamber, of quiet, dignified passage to the beyond, but he did not want to hear it. For once, the knowledge of the kings of the Qar meant little: they knew of no precedent for what was happening. Without the two halves of the Fireflower, there would be no Deep Library, and the voices there would drift into isolated madness. Qinnitan would leave him. Saqri would vanish, too. Soon his head would be empty but for the Fireflower. All of them gone, across the river or waiting on its banks to ford those dark waters. Even Ynnir had all but left him and was running in the far fields, soon to pass onto whatever was next as the earthly bloodline ended.

  The idea came to him like a piece of distant music—only another sound at first, but one whose melody at last won out over more random, ordinary noises. Ynnir. The fields. The river . . .

  Barrick sank down into himself, thinking. The candles glowed. After a time some of them had burned so low that they began to flicker and go out, but still he sat beside the motionless form of the dark-haired girl, considering.

  47

  Death of the Eddons

  “ . . . So she took him by the hand but Kernios sent the spirits of the fearsome dead to follow them and harry them . . . Zoria went so swiftly that she dared not even look at the Orphan, and he did not cry out or make a sound ...”

  —from “A Child’s Book of the Orphan, and His Life and Death and Reward in Heaven”

  BRIONY KNEW SHE SHOULD dress properly for the meeting, but it was easier when the time came to go to the duchess’ chambers in her morning robes, with a soft cap on her hair and only one of her ladies to accompany her.

  It’s like being a child again, she thought—but, of course, it was nothing like that at all.

  Utta met her at the door. For a moment the Zorian sister didn’t seem to know what to do, whether to bow to her or embrace her. Briony relieved her of the decision by opening her arms. “Oh, please, Utta, don’t be a stranger! Not after all that’s happened!”

  The old woman smiled and embraced her. Utta was thinner than she had been, as were most of the castle’s residents: the siege had bitten hard in the last months.

  “I am so pleased to see you, Princess,” Utta said. “But like all of us, I grieve for your father.”

  “Of course.” Briony wiped at her eyes and laughed. “It seems every hour I am either doing my best not to cry or trying to look stern and awful, like a true monarch. Ah, but it’s good to see you.”

  “And you, Highness.” Utta looked at her with obvious fondness. Briony was comforted to know that at least a few things hadn’t chang
ed.

  Utta led Briony to her great-aunt’s bedside. Briony had been prepared for the change, but seeing Merolanna still shocked her: only months before, the dowager duchess had been the very picture of a vigorous elderly woman. Now she seemed quite diminished, both eyes and cheeks sunken, as if she had begun to shrink inward on herself like fruit spoiling in a bowl. Still, the old woman’s eyes were bright, and when she saw Briony, she was able to lift herself up onto her elbows.

  “The Three be praised!” she said. “Utta, push these cushions behind me so I can look at my dear Briony properly.” Merolanna shook her head. She wore only a coif instead of her usual wig and elaborate headdress—even her head seemed to have become smaller. “Come and tell me everything. Your poor father! Oh, what dreadful days we have seen here, dreadful days. But things will be better now.”

  Briony was still confounded. It was as if some other player had been brought in to play the part—her great-aunt might have aged ten years since last Winter’s Eve.

  “Of course,” she said out loud. “Of course, Auntie ’Lanna. Things will all be better now.”

  “You look beautiful and strong, my lady,” Rose Trelling told her. Briony’s other companion Moina had been gone from the castle for months, returned to her family’s great house in the east, but Rose had stayed in Southmarch with her uncle Avin Brone and now had taken back her duties as lady-in-waiting with alacrity. She fastened the clasp on the heavy necklace, which lay too brightly against her mistress’ pale skin, like a string of stars.

  “I do not feel much of either,” Briony said, turning to examine herself in the mirror. “Especially today, when I must bury my father.” She thought the huge, stiff dress made her look like a ship under sail, and not a fast brig, either. “A merchant’s carrack,” she said. “Wallowing under a full cargo.”

  “My lady?”