by Tad Williams
The wind was in the other direction or he would have smelled the body a long time before he reached the threshold. It was high summer, and as he pushed open the ill-fitting door the stench leaped out and clawed at his nose and eyes, sending him stumbling back, gagging and wiping away tears. Still holding the jug, generations of crofter thrift preventing him from spilling a drop of milk no matter the circumstances, Ferras paused a few steps from the house, uncertain what to do. He had smelled death before: he knew well enough now why they had not seen the old woman lately. Still, with the first shock lessened, he felt a powerful tug, a wondering, a needing to know.
He pinched his nose and stepped into the doorway. A little daylight spilled past him through the door, but the hut had only one window and it was shuttered, so it took him a moment to see anything but darkness.
She was dead, but she was alive.
No, not alive, not truly, but the thing that lay in the center of the rush-strewn dirt floor—facedown, he realized after staring for long moments, as though she had tried to crawl toward the doorway—was rippling with movement. Flies, beetles, and countless other crawling things he could not identify covered her entirely, a person-shaped mass of glinting, wriggling life; other than a few wisps of white hair, there was scarcely anything to see of the old woman’s body. It was horrifying, and yet in a way weirdly exciting as well; although he was ever after ashamed of the feeling, the memory would stay with him forever. All that life feeding off one death.
In the dim light, the old woman seemed to be dressed in glittering black armor, something like the “caparison of light” he had heard the priest speak of on festival day, the raiment in which dead heroes would be dressed when they went to meet the gods . . .
“What is it, Captain? Are you ill? What’s happened?”
Vansen shook his head, unable to answer Collum Dyer’s question.
It had been a strange day already, full of weird discoveries. The patches of bright-blooming meadow flowers they had found along the roadside had been strange enough, months out of season, bending nearly sideways in brisk autumn winds they were never meant to suffer. Then there had been the deserted village a few miles back where Vansen and the others had left the road to water the horses—a very small village, admittedly, the kind that sometimes emptied when a plague struck the livestock or the only well ran dry, but it had clearly been recently occupied. Ferras Vansen had stood in the midst of those empty houses holding a carved wooden toy he had found, a charmingly well-made horse that no child would willingly leave behind, growing increasingly certain that something disturbing was at work all across this quiet land. Now, as he stared out at the scene before them, there was no longer any doubt in his mind that the village and the unseasonal flowers were something more than happenstance.
Unlike the village, the valley before them was very much alive, but in a way more like the dead widow woman than Vansen would have liked. Its colors were . . . wrong. It was hard to say why at first—the trees had brown trunks and green leaves, the grass was yellowed but not beyond what seemed natural for this time of the year, before the heavy rains came—but there was definitely something amiss, some mischief of light that at first glance he had thought a freak of the low clouds. It was a cold, gray day, but he felt sure that alone could not make the valley’s colors seem so bruised, so . . . oily.
As the company tramped down into the valley itself, Vansen could see that although the trees and meadowed hillsides did indeed seem to have taken on an unnatural hue, much of the strangeness was because of a single kind of plant, a brambly creeper that seemed to be choking out the other vegetation, which had made its way almost everywhere along the valley, even down to the edge of the broad Settland Road. Its leaves were so dark as to be almost black, but the color was nowhere near that simple: on close inspection he saw shades of purple and deep blue and even deeper slate gray, colors that almost seemed to move; the leaves gleamed like grapeskin after a rain and the coiling vines seemed quietly fearsome, like sleeping snakes. A chill breeze ruffled the plants, but he almost fancied they were moving more than the soft wind should warrant, that they had a tremor of independent life like the horrid carpet of insects in the crofter-woman’s house
The vines also had thorns, nasty spikes half the length of his finger, but the strangest thing of all were the flowers, big velvety cabbage-shaped blossoms as night-dark as the robe of a priest of Kernios. The valley seemed to be choking in black roses.
“What is all this?” Dyer asked again from a tight throat. “Never seen anything like.”
“Nor have I. Beck, do you recognize this?”
The face of the merchant’s nephew was quite pale, but also oddly resigned, as though he were seeing something in the waking world that had long come to him in evil dreams. Still, he shook his head. “No. When we . . . where they came . . . there was nothing out of the ordinary. Only the mist I told you of, the long reach of mist.”
“There’s a house up there in the hill,” Vansen said. “A cottage. Should we go look to see if someone’s there?”
“Those vines are all over it.” Collum Dyer had not made many jokes today; he sounded like it might be a while until he made any more. “There’s no one left inside. That other village had emptied without any cause we could see, so who would stay around and wait for this mucky stuff to crawl over them? No point looking—they’re gone.”
That had been his thought, too. Ferras Vansen was secretly relieved. He had not been anxious to wade toward a deserted house through these vines that sighed and rippled in the wind.
“You’re right,” he told his lieutenant. “We ride on, then, since we will not make camp here, I think.”
Dyer nodded. He, too, was happy to keep traveling. Raemon Beck had his eyes closed and seemed to be praying. They passed through the valley without speaking, looking to all sides as though riding through wild, foreign lands instead of following the familiar road to Settland. The hills leaned close and the huge flowers bounced gently beneath the wind’s unseeable fingers, leaves rubbing, so that it almost seemed like Vansen and his men were surrounded by whispering watchers.
To the relief of Ferras Vansen and the rest of the company, the tangle of black vines did not extend beyond the valley, although the woods beside the hilly road remained unusually quiet.
What could happen to scare even the birds away? Vansen wondered. The same things that took the caravan? Or am I only making worries? Perhaps whatever plague emptied that village has scattered the animals and birds, too. Wild things know much we have forgotten.
The lowering skies and his own mood had made an ordinary hill-road look almost otherworldly. He couldn’t help wondering what this land had been like before settlers. The Twilight People—if the stories are true, they were here for long, long centuries before our ancestors arrived. What did they do here? What did they think when they first saw us, the rude tribes that would have come across the water or up from the south? Did they fear us?
Of course, he realized, the shadow folk would have been right to fear the new creatures. Because those creatures would soon take their land from them.
All this place belonged to them once. It was a thought that had first come to him in childhood, on a day when through inattention he found himself a long way from home as the light began to fail in the fastness of the hills. There had been a stillness to the dales both frightening and magical, a change in the light, as though the sky itself had taken a breath and was holding it for a short while before blowing out the candle of the sun, and the dark world of a hundred fireside stories had risen up in his mind like smoke. All this was theirs—the other people. The Old Ones.
And what if now they want it back? he thought. The court physician had said the Shadowline was moving. What if this was more than the matter of a single plundered caravan? What if the Twilight People, like an eldest son returned from the wars to find his young brothers spoiling his inheritance, had decided to take all these lands back?
And, if so, what
of us? Pushed out . . . or simply destroyed?
Two of Vansen’s men found her while they were out picking up deadfall for the evening’s campfire. It was a tribute to the mood they were all in that although she was young and might even have been passing pretty under the dirt, there were few rough jests. They held her arms as they brought her to him, although she did not seem interested in escaping. No fear showed in her dark-eyed face, only blankness alternating with moments of confusion and what almost seemed like flashes of secretive amusement.
“Wandering,” one of her captors told Vansen. “Just looking up at the sky and the trees.”
“She’s talking nonsense,” the other man said. “Do you think she’s taken an injury? Or is it the fever?” He suddenly looked nervous, let go of the girl and stared at his hands as though some sign of plague might be seen there like a stain. There had been rumors about the sickness that had made its way into Southmarch, the fever that attacked Prince Barrick, though it spared his life, but which also killed several old people and more than one small child in the town.
“Leave her with me.” Vansen led the girl in the ragged peasant smock a little way back from the fire, but not so far that the men wouldn’t be able to see him. He wasn’t so much worried about what they might think of his motives as he was concerned with what they were all feeling, the sensation of being lost in a strange place instead of camping beside a familiar road in the March Kingdoms on the northern edge of Silverside.
The girl looked like she had been living out-of-doors for some time. Her matted hair and the grime on her face and hands made it hard to tell how old she was: she could have been anything from a child just reaching womanhood to someone almost his own age.
“What is your name?”
She gave him a calculating look from behind the tangle of her hair, like a merchant who had been offered a ridiculously low price but suspected that bargaining might produce something better. “Puffkin,” she said at last.
“Puffkin!” He let out a startled laugh. “What kind of name is that?”
“A good name for a cat, sir,” she told him. “And she was always good, until the weather changed, my Puffkin.” She had the local accent, not that different from what Vansen grew up with. “Best mouser in the kingdom, till the weather changed. Sweet as soup.”
Vansen shook his head. “But what is your name?”
The girl’s hands were in her lap, tugging at loose threads in her wool smock. “I used to be frightened of the thunder,” she murmured. “When I was a little one . . .”
“Are you hungry?”
She was shaking now, suddenly, as though beset by fever. “But why are their eyes so bright?” She moaned a little. “They sing of friendship but they have eyes like fire!”
It was no use talking to her. He wrapped his cloak around her shoulders, then went to the fire, dipped up soup with his horn cup, and brought it back. She held it carefully and seemed to enjoy the warmth, but did not appear to understand what to do with it. Vansen took it from her hands and held it to her mouth, giving her little sips until she at last took it herself.
It was good to be able to do a small kindness, he realized as he watched her swallowing. She held out the cup for more and he smiled and went to get some. It was good to be able to take care of someone. For the first time in a disturbing day, and although all the mysteries were growing deeper rather than otherwise, he was almost content.
The clouds had passed, moving east. Another armada of them waited above the ocean, ready to sweep in, but for the moment much of Southmarch Castle’s inner keep was in thin, bright sunlight. Barrick found a spot where there was no shade at all. Soaking up warmth, he felt like a lizard who had just crawled out of a dark, damp crevice. The sunlight was glorious, and for the first time in days a stranger would have realized that the keep’s great towers, newly washed by rain, were all different colors, from the old soot-colored stones of Wolfstooth Spire to the green-copper roof of the Tower of Spring, Autumn’s white-and-red tiles, Summer’s hammered-gold ornamentation, Winter’s gray stone and black wrought iron. They might have been part of some titanic bouquet.
Briony was still indoors, finishing up her day’s lessons with Sister Utta. Barrick could not quite understand what more there was to learn when you were already a regent of the land—it was not as though, like a chandler’s apprentice or a squire, you could aspire to bettering yourself, could you? Except for continued training in combat and tactics of war, he had finished his own formal education and couldn’t imagine why he might need more. He could read and write (if not quite as fluently as Briony). He could ride and hawk and hunt as well as his mangled arm allowed, and identify the heraldic emblems of at least a hundred different families—which, as old Steffans Nynor, the castellan, had once told him, was very important in a war so that one could decide who would be the best opponent to capture for ransom. He knew a great deal about his own family, starting with Anglin the Great, a reasonable amount of the history of the March Kingdoms, a few things about the rest of the nations of Eion, and enough of the tales of the Trigon and the other gods that he could make sense of the things Father Timoid said, when he bothered to pay attention.
He didn’t know everything, of course: watching Briony preside over the law courts, full of opinions and concerns about things that seemed to him to matter very little, made him feel almost an outsider. His sister sometimes stopped the day’s proceedings for as much as an hour to argue with the various clerks over a fine point of fairness that she deemed important, leaving dozens of petitioners pushed back to the next day’s docket and grumbling. “Better justice delayed than denied,” was her defense of this foolishness.
He wondered if half a year ago he would have been the same—not with law, of course, which he had always found boring in the extreme, but in ferreting out the truth behind the attack on the caravan, or even trying to make certain of Shaso’s guilt. In the early days of Kendrick’s regency Barrick had entertained ideas about what he would do if he were in his brother’s place, all the things he would do better. Now he was in his brother’s place, but most days, after another night of haunted sleep, he could scarcely find the resolve to walk out into the courtyard and sit in the sun.
It was the dreams, of course, and the weight of his awful secrets, that held him back—not to mention the fever that had nearly killed him. Surely anyone could understand that? He had almost died, but sometimes it seemed that no one would have minded much if he had. Even Briony . . .
No, he told himself. That’s a wicked voice. That’s not true. And that was another problem: somehow the fever had not entirely gone. He had walked in his sleep and suffered with bad dreams as long as he could remember, even before the night that had changed everything for the worse. Once or twice in his childhood he had even been found outside the residence in the morning, shivering and confused. But now almost every single night his ragged sleep was alive with creeping things, with shadowy hands and bright eyes, and even when he was awake, they didn’t entirely leave him. And the dreams seemed to get into his head and speak to him as well, telling him things that he usually did not believe, and certainly did not want to believe—that everyone around him was false, that they were whispering behind his back, that the castle was full of enemies in disguise who had slowly usurped those he knew and were only waiting until their numbers were so great as to be undefeatable before . . . before . . .
Before doing what? He sat up, suddenly quivering in every muscle. Perhaps it’s all real! Despite the unbroken sunlight, the stone warming beneath his thighs so that he could feel its pleasant heat through his woolen hose, he had to fold his arms across his chest until the trembling passed. It was the residue of his illness, of course, nothing more, and so were the strange thoughts, the voices that plagued him. Briony was still Briony, his beloved, inseparable other half, and the people and things around him were unchanged. It was only the fever. He was certain of that. Nearly certain.
Distracted by such thoughts, he neverth
eless recognized the young woman by her walk before anything else. Although her figure, displayed in a sea-green dress, was still desperately alluring, she seemed to have lost weight. Her face was thinner than he remembered, but the swaying of her hips was unchanged.
He stood as she reached the center of the courtyard where she noticed him for the first time, blinked, stopped for a moment. “Prince Barrick?” She put her hand to her mouth when she realized she had not made a curtsy and quickly remedied the omission.
“Hello, Selia.” His stepmother’s maid was an awkward distance away, several yards: too far for an ordinary conversation. He wished she would come toward him. Perhaps she was afraid to approach, to intrude on his private thoughts. “Please, come join me for a moment. The sun is lovely today, isn’t it?” There, he thought with some satisfaction. Surely the famous bard Gregor of Syan himself could not have spoken more delicately to a lady.
“If Your Highness is certain . . .” She approached slowly, like a deer ready to leap at any noise. The new thinness of her face made her eyes seem even larger, and he could see that under the powder they were shadowed. For the first time, Barrick remembered what Chaven said about her.
“You have been ill. You had what I had.”
She looked at him. “I had fever, yes? But certain that Your Highness was more ill than me.”
He waved his hand in the manner of true nobility: comparisons were unworthy. He was pleased with this gesture, too, and the girl also seemed impressed. “How are you feeling now?”
