Shadowrise s-3

by Tad Williams

  "Why shouldn't I leave you, Finn?" she said. "I broke the king's law by running away-went against his express order. And I am certain the Lady Ananka has been poisoning his ear even more busily ever since. By now, I am probably guilty of the loss of the entire Syannese Empire…"

  "You are certainly the one they are most interested in, my lady," said Finn. "But do not think for a second they are not searching for us, too. Why do you think we've so often made Dowan fold his long legs like a grasshopper and squeeze into the wagon with you? Because he is the easiest of us all for someone to recognize. Even if you were not with us, Princess Briony, they would not let us go. We would be taken, and then… persuaded… to tell all we know of your whereabouts. I doubt any of us would ever see freedom again."

  A sudden misery washed through her, so strong that she could only put her face into her hands. "Merciful Zoria! I am so sorry-I had no right to do this to you all…!"

  "It is too late to change that," said Hewney. "So waste no tears on us. Well, on Makewell, perhaps, who hoped for an easy life buggering orphan boys back in Tessis, but he was outvoted."

  "I will not bother to answer such a ridiculous charge," said Pedder Makewell. "Except to say that my interest in boys is purely defensive, since they are the one thing I can be sure you haven't given the pox to…"

  Finn rolled his eyes as the others laughed. "Gods, you are a crude lot. Have you forgotten that the mistress of all the March Kingdoms is traveling with us?"

  "Too late to worry about her, Finn my old blossom," said Makewell. "She curses like one of us, now. Did you hear what she called Hewney the other night?"

  "And without cause," the playwright said. "I simply stumbled against her in the dark…"

  "Enough!" said Finn. "You all jest because you do not want to talk about what is before us. The Royal Highway is not safe. The king's men are waiting for us outside Layandros, and even if we manage to sneak past them, it is still several days walk to the Syannese border."

  "So what do you propose, Finn? " Briony asked. "You sound as though you have a plan."

  "Not only does she have better manners than the rest of you," the large man said, "she has more wit as well. But I suppose it would be hard not to," he added, glaring at Hewney and Makewell. "In any case, a few miles north of here is a small road which turns east off the highway. It looks like nothing much more than a farmer's track-in fact that is what it is for the first few miles. But after a while it joins another, larger road-nothing as large as what we've been on, but still, a proper road, not just a track-and passes through the edge of the forest. On the far side is a Soterian abbey, so that we will probably only have to spend one night in the woods, then will be welcomed, warmed, and fed in the abbey the next day."

  "Through the edge of the Black River Forest?" said Dowan Birch. It was the first time the giant had spoken.

  "Yes," said the playwright. "Of course."

  "I did not know it stretched so far west, that we could reach it in a day or less." His long face was troubled. "It is not a good place, Finn. It is full of… of bad things."

  "What is he talking about?" demanded Pedder Makewell. "What sort of bad things? Wolves? Bears?"

  But Dowan only shook his head and would not say more.

  "We will be in it scarely a night," said Finn. "We are nearly a dozen and we have weapons and fire. We even have food, so we do not need to forage. We will stay together and all will be well-and more than well. Come, do you really want to chance our luck with the king's soldiers?"

  Several of the others tried to get Birch to explain what he feared, but the big man would not be drawn. At last, for lack of a better plan, they all agreed.

  They reached the fork in the road before the next morning's sun was high in the sky. A few other travelers shared the road with them, mostly local folk, and they all watched with surprised curiosity as the Makewell troop left the main road for the bumpy forest track.

  For several days they had been passing through wilder and wilder country, but now it was suddenly ten times as apparent. The great expanse of the Royal Highway had meant that it passed mostly through open areas, and even when it didn't the very size of it meant the trees on either side were widely separated and offered little impediment to the sun. As soon as they turned east onto Finn's track the oaks and hornbeams suddenly seemed to shoulder in on either side like curious folk coming to see what strangers had entered their lands. Suddenly the sun that had been their companion for most of the journey was absent for long stretches. Gone were the occasional sounds of farmers calling to other travelers on the road, or summoning their straying sheep or cows back from some high place. Other than the noise of the wagon's wheels, the wind in the treetops, and the occasional muted trills of birdsong, the players' new route was all but silent.

  Also, it turned out that Finn had not been entirely correct: the farmer's track, which is what it had looked to be when they left the main road, in places came to seem something much more chancy, more like a track for animals than people, so that the wagon often became stuck and required much work before it could be shifted and set rolling again. They had barely reached the outskirts of the forest when the hidden sun began to dip behind the western horizon and shadows stretched out across the world.

  "I don't like it here," Briony said to Dowan Birch, who walked beside her. Because of the bad road and the absence of other travelers she and the giant had left the wagon and were walking behind it like everyone else, ready to push it out of the next ditch.

  The place reminded her of something she could barely remember, her lost days after Shaso died and Effir dan-Mozan's house burned down. Something about the way the shadows moved, the way the uneven light made the trees themselves seem to be turning slowly after she passed, felt secretive, even malicious. Because of it, she had pulled out the talisman Lisiya had given her and had been wearing it for hours.

  Dowan shrugged. He looked even more gloomy than Briony. "I do not like it myself, but Finn is right. What else can we do?"

  "Why did you say… that there were bad things here?" she asked.

  "I don't know, Highness. Things I heard when I was small." He looked hurt by her smothered laugh. "I was small once, you know."

  "It wasn't just that," she said. "It was that, and… and… and you called me 'Highness.' I mean, look at you!"

  He frowned, but wasn't entirely displeased. "I s'pose there's different kinds of highness, then."

  "Did you grow up somewhere near here? I thought you were born in Southmarch."

  He shook his narrow head. "Closer to Silverside. But we had many travelers coming from the country to the market in Firstford, which was over the river. My father used to shoe their horses, if they had them."

  "How did you come to Southmarch, then?"

  "Mar and Dar took the fever. They died. I went to my uncle, but he was a strange man. Heard voices. Said I was made wrong-I was getting big, then. That the gods took my parents because… I don't remember, truly, but he said it was my fault."

  "That's terrible!"

  Another shrug. "He was the one who wasn't right. His head, you see? The gods gave him nightmares, even in the daytime. But I had to run away or I would have killed him. I traveled with some cattle drovers up to Southmarch and I liked it there. People didn't stare so much." He colored, then looked up. "Can I ask something, Highness?"

  "Certainly."

  "I know we're going to Southmarch. But what are you going to do when we get there? If those Tollys still have the crown, you see? And if the fairies are still there. What will any of us do?"

  "I don't know," she told him. That was the truth.

  Just before dark they stopped and made camp. The players shared the meal with a great deal of boisterous noise, as though nobody wanted to listen too carefully to the sounds of the forest night around them, but what was more unusual was that they did not stay up late. Briony, squeezed in between the warm, reassuring bulks of Dowan and Finn Teodoros, rolled herself tightly in her cloak and cl
utched Lisiya's amulet to her breast.

  A few times, as she floated in the river of dream, she thought she could hear the demigoddess' voice, faint and beseeching, as though Lisiya of the Silver Glade were being pulled away in another direction. Once she thought she saw her: the old woman stood by herself on a barren hilltop, waving at her. At first Briony thought the demigoddess was trying to get her attention, but then she realized that what Lisiya was trying to tell her was "Go away! Go away!"

  She woke, shivering, in the nearly pitch-dark of midnight, with only the faintest light from the campfire embers to show her where she was. Her eyes were wet, but she could not remember anything in her dreams that should have made her cry.

  It could not have been much after the middle of the day, when the sun should have been at its highest and brightest, that the world began to grow dark. A superstitious panic ran through the troop until Nevin Hewney pointed out what the rest of them should have realized immediately.

  "It's a storm," he said. "Clouds covering the sun."

  Despite the thickness of the trees around them, the forest did not seem like a place in which they wanted to weather a bad storm. Makewell's Men and their royal charge did their best to hurry ahead, hoping to reach the abbey, or at least high, dry ground before true darkness fell. The road was wider here, crisscrossed by some other forest tracks, which made Briony feel hopeful for the first time in hours. Surely they must be nearing a place where people lived!

  It was Finn Teodoros, laboring along at her side, who first saw the faces in the woods.

  "Hist," he said quietly. "Briony-Highness. Do not turn, but in a moment look past me on my left. Do you see anything strange?"

  At first she could make nothing out of the complex, meaningless pattern of light on leaves-the graying of the day only made it harder to tell what was light and what was surface-but then she saw a glint of something a little brighter than what was around it. A moment later it resolved itself into a smear of orange fur and a bright black eye. Then it was gone.

  "Sweet Zoria, what was it?" she whispered. "I saw… it looked like a fox. But it was the size of a man!"

  "I do not know, but that was not the only one," Finn said. His usual lightness of tone was gone, his voice tight with fear. He walked forward, carefully looking only straight ahead, and whispered in Hewney's ear, then trotted a few more steps to talk to Pedder Makewell.

  As she watched him, Briony saw another trace of movement in the dim, wavering light, this time on the far edge of the road, ahead of them and slightly to one side. Another strange, beastlike face appeared for a moment from behind a tree, then was gone, although for a moment she could have sworn it rose straight up into the air before it disappeared. Frightened, Briony stumbled and almost fell. Goblins? Fairies? Some outriders of the twilight army that had attacked her home?

  Suddenly beast-men crashed out of the trees on either side, shrieking like demons.

  "To me, to me!" Pedder Makewell bellowed. Briony saw him grab his sister and thrust her behind him, so that the wagon shielded her back. Makewell had a knife, but it was a poor thing, little more than a blade for cutting fruit and sawing over-tough mutton. Still, he held it up as though it was Caylor's Sighing Sword, and for a moment Briony almost loved the man.

  "Together!" Finn Teodoros called. He had the wagon door open and was pulling out what arms they had, many of them little more than props. The beast-men had paused just inside the belt of trees and now were slowly advancing.

  "Throw them down!" shouted the first of the things in a loud, angry voice. "Throw down your weapons or we kill you where you stand." It was with something like relief that Briony saw that he was no magical creature but only wore a half-mask. Several of the masked men had bows, the rest were well armed with spears and axes and even swords.

  "Bandits," said Nevin Hewney in disgust.

  The leader walked toward him, grinning beneath his crude fox face. "Watch your tongue. We are honest men, but what are honest men who cannot work? What are honest men whose lands have been stole by the lords, who know no law but their own?"

  "Is that our fault?" Hewney began, but the bandit chieftain cracked him hard across the face with the back of his hand, knocking the playwright to the ground. Hewney got up, cursing, blood running between his fingers where he held his nose. Dowan Birch held him back.

  "Bone, Hobkin, Col-you watch them," the leader said. "You others, take what they have. And chiefly search that wagon. Go to it, men!" At this his eyes, which had been flicking from one member of the company to another, lighted on Briony and widened. "Hold," he said quietly, but his men were already busily and loudly at work and did not hear him. He walked toward her where she stood beside Finn Teodoros. "What have we here? Young and fair… and passing for a boy?" He leaned toward her, his breath rank. He was missing most of his teeth, which made him seem older than he truly was. The two pegs in his upper jaw protruded below the rim of the fox mask, and for a moment it was all too much for Briony. She drove her knife up at his belly, but he was a man who had been living on the edge of things for a long time: her thrust came as no surprise. He caught her wrist and twisted it hard. To her shame, the pain made her drop the knife immediately.

  The Yisti knife, had the bandit known it, was probably worth more than the rest of the players' possessions combined, but he had chanced onto prize he liked better and she had all his attention. "You are pretty enough in your way, girl," he said, pulling Briony close. "Did you truly fool these yokels? Did they think you a boy? You will be happy to know that Lope the Red is not so easily gulled. You belong to a real man, now."

  "Let her be…" Finn began angrily, but the bandit cuffed him and the playwright fell heavily to the ground and then struggled to rise as Lope the Red shoved at him with his foot.

  Briony stared at the bandit chieftain and suddenly recognized something in him. He was a beast, a thief and a bully, but he was also the strongest and the smartest of these men: if the world continued in the same mad fashion as it had of late, many such men would be rising up from the shadows, and some of them would make kingdoms for themselves.

  This is the truth, she thought. This is the ugly truth of my royal bloodline and every other. Those who can take power take it, then leave it to their children…

  Finished amusing himself with fat Finn, Lope pulled Briony close again. Then, as the bandit chief reached out a dirty hand to feel for her breasts beneath her loose shirt, he suddenly cried out in pain and staggered back a few steps, the knife which he had twisted out of Briony's hand standing quivering from his thigh.

  "Bastard!" said bloody-faced Finn, hauling himself onto his knees. "I meant that for your stones!"

  The rest of the bandits had turned at their chief's shout, and stood staring as he took a staggering step toward the playwright. "Stones? I'll have your stones off, if you even have any, you eunuch jelly." He waved his hand and two more of the bandits hurried forward, overcoming the struggling Finn in a matter of moments and throwing him to the ground, then pinning him there with the weight of their bodies. Lope the Red pulled the knife from his leg with a contemptuous shake of his head.

  "In the meaty part. Ha! You are no fighting man, it's clear." He leaned forward. "I will show you how to use a knife on a man…"

  "No!" shrieked Briony. "Don't hurt him! You can do whatever you want with me!"

  The bandit laughed. "I will do whatever I want with you, trull. But first I will carve this one like a joint of beef…"

  The air hummed and Lope the Red stopped for a moment, then slowly straightened up. He lifted his hand to his face and tried to take off his mask but found he could not: an arrow, feathers still trembling, had pierced his brow just above the eye and nailed it to his skull.

  "I…" he said, then toppled backward like a felled tree.

  "Take them!" someone shouted. A dozen armed men crashed onto the road from out of the trees. Arrows were buzzing in every direction, like furious wasps. One of the men who had pinned Finn to the ground leaped
up in front of Briony only to fall back against her an instant later with three feathered shafts quivering in his chest and guts.

  More arrows snapped past her. Men screamed like frightened children. One of the bandits clutched a tree as if it were his mother; when he fell away he had left it painted broadly with his blood.

  Briony threw herself down on the ground and covered her head with her arms.

  The Syannese soldiers dragged the last of the bandits' bodies onto the pile. "All here, Captain," one of the men-at-arms said. "Best we can tell."

  "And the others?"

  "One dead. The others only have a few small wounds."

  Briony scrambled to her feet. One dead? Estir Makewell was on her knees, sobbing. Briony hurried toward her but one of the soldiers grabbed her arm and held her back.

  Estir turned from the tall man's corpse and pointed in fury at Briony. "It's your fault-your fault! If not for you, none of this would have happened and poor Dowan would be living still!"

  "Dowan? Dowan's dead? But… I didn't…" There was nothing Briony could say. Even the other members of the troop, Estir's brother, Nevin Hewney, even Finn, seemed to stare reproachfully at her from the spot where the guards had rounded them up.

  The soldiers wore Syannese colors but an insignia Briony had never seen-a fierce red hound. Their captain stepped forward and looked her sternly up and down. His beard was long but carefully shaped; a bright white plume adorned his tall helmet. Briony thought he had the look of a man who thought himself quite elegant. "You are Princess Briony Eddon of Southmarch, late of our king's court in Syan?"

  No point in denying it now-she had done enough harm. "I am, yes. What will happen to my friends?"

  "Not for you to think about, Mistress," he said with a grim shake of the head. "We've been looking for you for days and days. Now come with me and don't make trouble. You're being arrested, you are."