by Tad Williams
She glanced down at her hands. “Still a little . . . strange, I think. Like the world is not quite being as it should. Yes? Do you understand me?”
“I do.” Although the nearness of her had narrowed his attention very strongly—he felt that he could see every tiny hair against her neck where they spilled free from the headdress, that he could count each shining dark strand in an instant without even trying—he also felt a little strange, as though he had been too long in the sun. He looked up, suddenly certain that someone was watching from one of the rooftops, as improbable as that seemed, but he saw nothing out of the ordinary.
“Oh! Are you knowing you are well again, Prince Barrick?”
He nodded, took a deep breath. “Yes, I suppose so. Sometimes I feel like that, too. Like the world is not quite what it should be.”
Her face was solemn. “It is frightening to have this feeling, yes? For me, anyway. Your stepmother thinks I am not listening to her, but it is only that sometimes I am . . . made confused.”
“You will feel better,” he said, on absolutely no authority but the wish to say something reassuring to a pretty young woman. “How old are you, Selia?”
“Seventeen years, I have.”
Barrick frowned a little. He wished he were older—surely a girl who might be as much as two years his senior was only interested in him because he was the prince. On the other hand, she did seem content at the moment: anyone might come to the prince regent’s command, but she did not seem in a hurry to leave. Experimentally, he took her hand. She didn’t resist. The skin was surprisingly cool. “Are you sure you are well enough to be out of bed?” he asked. “You have a chill.”
“Oh, yes, but sometimes I am warm, very warm,” she said with a little laugh. “Sometimes I cannot even keep the blankets on me even when the night is cold, and my clothes are too hot when I sleep and I must take them off.” This gave Barrick a picture to think about that promised to make concentration even more difficult. “Your stepmother, she scolds with me very much for badly sleeping.” She looked down and her wide eyes grew wider. “Prince Barrick, you are holding my hand.”
He let go, guiltily sure that she had put up with it only because of his high station. He had always loathed men who use their power to compel women’s surrender, had watched with disapproval as Gailon Tolly and other nobles, and even his own brother, took advantage of serving girls. He remembered now with some pain that only a few months earlier he had started a shouting argument with Kendrick about the treatment of one such, a pretty little lady’s maid named Grenna whom Barrick had admired in silence for months. Kendrick had honestly not been able to understand his younger brother’s anger, had pointed out that unlike some men, he never compelled any woman to do anything by force or threat, that the girl herself had been a willing partner and had accepted several expensive gifts before the dalliance played itself out. Kendrick had also suggested that his younger brother was becoming a prig before his time and that he would do better to concentrate on his own affairs rather than comment on those of his elders.
But you must treat them like birds, had been Barrick’s only confused thought, then and now. You must let them fly or they are not truly yours. But no one had ever been his, so what right did he have to think he knew?
Meanwhile, even though he had let go of her hand, Selia had still not taken the opportunity to escape.
“I did not say that holding me was a bad thing . . .” A smile curled her lips, but she was interrupted by the appearance of someone else at the edge of the courtyard.
“Barrick? Are you out here?”
He had never been less happy to see his sister. Briony, however, was already walking along the cobbled path toward the place where he and Selia were sitting, shading her eyes with her hand. Something was odd about her garb, but he was so frustrated with the mere fact of her arrival that he did not at first understand what it was.
She hesitated as she neared them. “Oh, I’m sorry, Barrick. I didn’t know you were speaking to someone. Selia, isn’t it? Anissa’s maid?”
Selia stood and made a curtsy. “Yes, Highness.”
“And how is our stepmother? We were disappointed not to be able to dine with her.”
“She had disappointment, too, my lady. But she was not feeling well because of the baby that is coming.”
“Well, give her our best and say we look forward to another invitation, that we miss her.”
Barrick had finally realized what was odd: Briony was wearing a riding skirt, split down the middle and far too informal for court functions. “Why are you dressed like that?” he asked her. “Are you going out for a ride?” He devoutly hoped it was true and that she was going right this moment.
“No, but it’s too difficult to explain now. I need to speak with you.”
“I should leave,” said Selia quickly. She cast a shy glance toward Barrick. “I have already left my lady’s errand too long and she will be wondering where I am.”
Barrick wanted to say something but the rout had already been effected; he had been forced into surrender without a blow struck. Selia made another curtsy. “Thank you for your kindly conversation, Prince Barrick. I am happy to see that you are more well now, too.” She moved off, perhaps still not her former self, but with that fine and life-enhancing sway to her walk that Barrick could only watch with immense regret.
She wasn’t angry I held her hand, he thought. Or just putting up with it. At least I don’t think so . . .
“If you can drag your eyes away from her backside for a moment,” Briony said, “you and I have things to talk about.”
“Like what?” he almost shouted.
“Temper, lad.” Her grin flickered a little, then her face grew more serious. “Oh, Barrick, I’m sorry. I didn’t interrupt on purpose.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“See here, I may not approve of a little baggage like that, but I’ve said my piece once already. I love you, you’re my dear, dearest brother and friend, but I’m not going to follow you around trying to make certain you only do what I want.”
He snorted. “Strange, because that’s how it worked out.” For a moment he felt real anger. “And she’s not a little baggage! She’s not. You don’t even know her.”
Briony’s eyes widened. “Fair enough. But I know you and I know what a turtle you are.”
“Turtle?”
“Yes, with your hard shell on the outside. But the reason a turtle has a shell is because he is defenseless on the inside. I fear that someone will get inside your shell—someone I don’t trust to do right by you. That’s all.”
He was oddly touched by her concern but also infuriated. His twin sister thought he was helpless, that he had no defenses. It was as good as calling him simple—or worse, weak. “Just you keep out of my shell, too, Briony. It’s mine, after all.” It came out a bit more harshly than he intended, but he was angry enough to leave it that way.
She stared. It seemed she might say more about this, perhaps apologize again, but the moment passed. “In any case,” she said briskly, “we have other things to talk about. And I’ve come to you about one of them. Father’s letter.”
“We have another letter?” As always, it filled him with both happiness and fear. What will I be like when he returns? A chill passed through him. And what if he doesn’t return? What then? All alone . . .
“No, not another letter—the last one.”
It took him a moment to understand. “You mean the one that came with that envoy from Hierosol, the Tuani fellow. Your . . . friend.”
She didn’t rise to the unpleasant tone. “Yes, that letter. Where is it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Where is it, Barrick? I haven’t read it—have you? I didn’t think so. Nor has Brone, or Nynor, or anyone else as far as I’ve heard. The only person who actually saw it was Kendrick. And now it’s gone.”
“It must be among some of the other things he had in his chamber. Or in his secretary, th
at one with the Erivor carvings on it. Or Nynor has it in with the accounts and doesn’t know it.” His mood darkened. “That, or someone is lying to us.”
“It’s not among Kendrick’s things. I’ve been looking. There are a lot of other matters we’ve got to deal with that are waiting there, but no letter from Father.”
“But what else could have happened to it?”
Briony shook her head fiercely; for a moment he saw the warrior queen she could someday be and was sad to think he might not be around to see it; love, pride, and anger mixed in him, swirled like the clouds blowing in overhead. “Stolen—by his murderer, perhaps,” she said. “Maybe there was something written there that someone didn’t want us to see. In fact, I’m certain of it.”
Barrick felt a wave of dread. Suddenly the darkening courtyard seemed an exposed place, a dangerous place, and he knew why lizards were so quick to slither back into the cracks at any sound—but he realized an instant later that his father’s secret, his own secret, would not be the kind of thing that King Olin would commit to a letter, even a letter to his eldest son. Still, just the brief thought had been terribly disturbing.
“So what do we do?” he asked. The day had gone sour.
“We find that letter. We must.”
She came to him in the middle of the night, climbed under the heavy cloak and pressed herself against him. For a moment he took it as part of his dream and pulled her close, calling her by a name he knew he should not utter even half-asleep, but then he felt her trembling and smelled the smoke and damp in her clothes and he was awake.
“What are you doing?” Vansen tried to sit up, but she clung. “Girl, what do you think you’re doing?”
She pushed her head against his chest. “Cold,” she moaned. “Hold me.”
The fire was nothing but embers now. A few of the horses moved restlessly on their tethers, but none of the other men were stirring. The girl slid her hard, thin little body against him, desperate for comfort, and for a moment his loneliness and fear made the temptation great. But Vansen remembered the frightened-child look, the terror that he had seen peering out of her eyes like a wounded animal driven into a thicket. He pulled free and sat up, then wrapped the cloak around her and tugged her close, using the heavy wool to help pinion her arms. After all, he could only take so much of her blind, needy rubbing before his resolve would crumble like walls made of sand. “You are safe,” he told her. “Don’t fear. You are safe. We are soldiers of the king.”
“Father?” Her voice was hoarse and confused.
“I am not your father. My name is Ferras Vansen. We found you wandering in the forest—do you remember?”
There were tears on her cheeks; he could feel them as she rubbed her face against his neck. “Where is he? Where is my father? And where is Collum?”
For a moment he thought she was talking about Collum Dyer, but it was a common enough name in the March Kingdoms—he supposed it might be a brother or sweet-heart. “I don’t know. What is your name? Do you remember how you came to be walking in the forest?”
“Quiet! They will hear you. At night, when the moon is high, you can only whisper.”
“Who? Who will hear me?”
“Willow, the sheep are gone. That’s what he said. I ran out and the moonlight was so bright, so bright! Like eyes.”
“Willow? Is that your name?”
She burrowed in against his chest, struggling beneath the confining cloak to get as close to him as possible. Her neediness was so startling and pitiable that his few lingering thoughts of lovemaking drained away. She was like a puppy or kitten standing beside its dead mother, nosing at a body gone cold.
What happened to her father, then? And this Collum? “How did you come to be in the forest, Willow? That is your name, isn’t it? How did you come to be in the forest?”
Her blind groping slowed, but more from the exhaustion of fighting against the folds of the heavy cloak, he thought, than from diminishing fear. “But I didn’t,” she said slowly, and lifted her face. In the moonlight the darks of her eyes seemed shrunken, mere pinpoints with white all around. “Don’t you know? The forest came to me. It . . . swallowed me.”
Ferras Vansen had seen such a look before and it stabbed at him like a knife. The old madman back in the village where he had grown up so long ago had worn a stare like that—the old man who had crossed the Shadowline and returned . . .
But we are still miles and miles from where the caravan was taken, he realized. The nodding black flowers, the deserted village . . . By the gods, it is spreading fast.
18
One Guest Less
RABBIT’S MASK:
Day is over, shadows in the nest
Where have the children gone?
All are running, scattering
—from The Bonefall Oracles
THE MAD MUDDLE OF LIFE, Chert thought, was enough to make a person want to lie down on the ground, close his eyes, and become a blindworm. Surely blindworms didn’t have to put up with nonsense like this?
“Mica! Fissure and fracture! have you nothing better to do with your time and mine than argue?”
Hornblende’s nephew looked around for his brother. Both of them could be difficult by themselves, but they were much less willing to put up a fight when they were on their own. “It’s not right, Chert, putting tunnels here. It’s too deep, too close to the Mysteries. If it collapses through to the next level, they’ll be right on top of where they shouldn’t be!”
“It is not your place to decide. The king’s people want this tunnel system made bigger and that’s what we’re going to do. Cinnabar and the other chiefs of the Guild have approved the plans.”
Mica scowled. “They haven’t been here. Most of them haven’t worked raw stone in years, and it’s been even longer since any of them have been here.” He brightened as his brother approached. “Tell him.”
“Tell me what?” Chert took a deep breath. It had been a strange last few days since the bizarre miniature pageant on the castle roof; his head was so full of confusing thoughts and questions he could scarcely keep his mind on his work. That was the problem, of course—Hornblende’s nephews and the rest of the men needed his full supervision. Funderlings always had a difficult time working so close to the royal family’s residence and graves—superstition and resentment were never far away—but this growing proximity to the Funderlings’ own sacred places was even more of a problem. He couldn’t afford to be attending to his work with only half his usual attention.
“That we want to go before the Guild Council,” said Mica’s brother Talc. He was the older and more levelheaded of the two. “We want to be heard.”
“Heard, that’s what you young people always want—to be heard! And what is it you want to be heard about? That you’re feeling mistreated. That you have to work too hard. That what you’re given to do isn’t fair or kind or . . . or something.” Chert took another long breath. “Do you think your uncle or I ever got to ask so many questions? We took the work we were given to do and were grateful for it.” Because his own apprenticeship had been in the last days of the Gray Companies, Chert remembered but did not say—because the big folk were frightened in those years and there had not been much work even for skilled Funderling craftsmen. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, had left their ancestral home under Southmarch in search of labor and had never returned, settling in spots all over the middle and south of Eion where the big folk had previously had to do their own stonework. But during Chert’s own lifetime things had changed: even small cities now built great temples and underground baths, not to mention countless funeral vaults for rich merchants and clerics, and most of the Southmarch Funderlings found themselves in demand right here at home in the March Kingdoms.
Talc shook his head. He was stubborn, but he was also smart—the worst kind of shirker, Chert thought. Or was he a shirker at all? Chert suddenly felt empty and tired, like a rock face with the seam of valuable stone chiseled out of it. Maybe they feel some of the
same things I do. What did the tiny queen say? “Because we of the high places are frightened, and not just for ourselves.” I am frightened myself, but it is because of things I have seen, felt . . .
He did his best to clear his head of all the jibber-jabber. “Very well. I shall ask the Guild to grant you a hearing, if you will get on and finish this day’s work. There is shoring and bracing to do in the new tunnels, if you are not too frightened to work alongside your fellows there.”
Hornblende’s nephews were still grumbling as they walked away, but there was a jauntiness to their step that suggested they secretly felt they had won a victory. It made Chert feel tired all over again.
Thank the Old Ones that Chaven has come back. I will go see him when the men stop to eat. This time, though, I will go in by the front door.
As he made his way through the twisting byways of the inner keep, ignoring the people who felt that it was acceptable to stare at a Funderling simply because he was a Funderling, Chert was grateful that the boy Flint was spending the day with Opal at the market. She had accepted Chert’s astonishing report of meeting the Rooftoppers with a complacency that was almost more dumbfounding than the Rooftoppers themselves.
“Of course there are more things under the stones and stars than we will ever know,” she had told her husband. “The boy is a burning spark—you can just see it! He’ll do wonderful things in this world. And I always believed there truly were Rooftoppers, anyway.”
He wondered now if it had been some kind of intentional ignorance. His wife was a clever woman—surely she couldn’t think this was the ordinary way of life. Was she afraid of what these many new things portended—Flint himself, the Shadowline, this news of fabled creatures hiding in the roofs who talked of coming disaster—and so she covered it all in a blanket of the familiar?
Chert realized he had shared very little of his own fear with Opal. A part of him wanted to continue that way, protecting her, which felt like his rightful duty. Another part realized that such a duty could become very lonely.
