by Tad Williams
“A tribute to your astonishing beauty.” He saw her expression and quickly added, “And most importantly, to your wisdom and kindness. Your mercy.” She smiled again, although it still had a nasty little curl to it. “In fact, as I sit here, fortunate enough finally to be within the radiant glow of your presence instead of worshiping you like the distant moon, I see that my central conceit was even more accurate than I had hoped—that you are indeed . . . indeed . . .”
She got tired of waiting. “I am indeed what?”
“The very embodiment of Zoria, warrior goddess and mistress of wisdom.” There. He could only hope that he had guessed correctly, that her odd way of dressing and her solicitation of the goddess’ mercy were not chance occurrences. “When I was young, I often dreamed of Perin’s courageous daughter, but in my dreams I was blinded by her glow—I could never truly imagine the heavenly countenance. Now I know the true face of the goddess. Now I see her born again in Southmarch’s virgin princess.” He suddenly worried he had gone a bit too far: she didn’t look as flattered as he had hoped she would, although she didn’t look angry either. He held his breath.
“Shall I have him beaten before I take him back to that brothel?” Brone asked her.
“To tell the truth,” Briony said, “he . . . amuses me. I have not laughed in days, and just now I almost did. That is a rare gift in these times.” She looked Tinwright up and down. “You wish to be my poet, do you? To tell the world of my virtues?”
He was not sure what was happening, but this was not a moment to be wasted on truth of any sort. “Yes, my lady, my princess, it has always been my greatest dream. Indeed, Highness, your patronage would make me the happiest man on earth, the luckiest poet upon Eion.”
“Patronage?” She raised an eyebrow. “Meaning what? Money?”
“Oh, never, my lady!” In due time, he thought. “No, it would be a boon beyond price if you simply allowed me to observe you—at a distance, of course!—so that I could better construct my poem. It has already been years in the making, Highness, the chief labor of my life, but it has been difficult, composed around a few brief glimpses of you at public festivals. If you favor me with the chance to witness you even from across a crowded room as you bring your wise rule to the fortunate people of Southmarch, that would be a kindness that proves you are truly Zoria reborn.”
“In other words, you want a place to stay.” For the first time there was something like genuine amusement in her smile. “Brone, see if Puzzle can find a place for him. They can share a room—keep each other company.”
“Princess Briony . . . !” Brone was annoyed.
“Now I must talk to my brother. You and I will meet again before sunset, Lord Constable.” She started toward the door, then stopped, looked Tinwright up and down. “Farewell, poet. I’ll be expecting to hear that ode very soon. I’m looking forward to it.”
As he watched her go, Matty Tinwright was not quite sure whether this had been the best day of his life or the worst. He thought it must be the best, but there was a small, sick feeling in his stomach that surely should not be part of the day he had become an appointed poet to the royal court.
At first, it seemed that Collum Dyer would be able to follow the fairy host like a blind man tracking the sun: despite the confusion of the fogbound forest and the serpentine inconstancy of the road, the guard set off in a way that Vansen would have called confident, except that the rest of the man’s demeanor spoke of nothing so humble and human as confidence. In fact, Dyer might have been a sleepwalker, stumbling and murmuring to himself like one of the crazed penitents that had followed the effigies of the god Kernios from town to town during the days of the Great Death.
Quickly, though, it became clear that if Dyer was a blind man following the sun, that sun was setting. Within what seemed no more than an hour they were staggering in circles. So maddening was the forest-maze that Vansen would not even have known that for certain except that Dyer stepped on his own sword belt, which he had lost far back in the day’s march.
Exhausted, devastated, Vansen sank to the ground and crouched with his face in his hands, half expecting that Dyer would go on without him and mostly not caring. Instead, to his surprise, he felt a hand on his shoulder.
“Where are they, Ferras? They were so beautiful.” Despite the dark beard, Collum Dyer looked like nothing so much as a child, his eyes wide, his mouth quivering.
“Gone on,” Vansen said. “Gone on to kill our friends and families.”
“No.” But what he had said troubled Dyer. “No, they bring something, but not death. Didn’t you hear them? They only take back what was already theirs. That is all they want.”
“But there are people living on what was already theirs. People like us.” Vansen only wanted to lie down, to sleep. He felt as though he had been endlessly, endlessly swimming in this ocean of trees with no glimpse of shore. “Do you think the farmers and smallholders will simply get up and move so your Twilight People can have their old lands back? Perhaps we can pull down Southmarch Castle as well, build it again in Jellon or Perikal where it won’t interfere with them.”
“Oh, no,” said Dyer very seriously. “They want the castle back. That’s theirs, too. Didn’t you hear them?”
Vansen closed his eyes but it only made him dizzy. He was lost behind the Shadowline with a madman. “I heard nothing.”
“They were singing! Their voices were so fair . . . !” Now it was Dyer who squeezed his eyes shut. “They sang . . . they sang . . .” The child-face sagged again as though he might burst into tears. “I can’t remember! I can’t remember what they sang.”
That was the first good thing Vansen had heard in hours. Perhaps Dyer’s wits were returning. But why am I not mad, too? he wondered.
Then again, how do I know I’m not?
“Come,” said the guardsman, pulling at his arm. “They are going away from us.”
“We can’t catch them. We’re lost again.” Vansen pushed down his anger. Whatever the reason that Collum Dyer’s wits were clouded and his own were not, or at least not as badly, it was not Dyer’s fault. “We do have to get out of here, but not to follow the Twilight People off to war.” A few tattered scraps of duty seemed to be all that held him together. He clutched them tight. “We have to tell the princess about this . . . and the prince. We have to tell Avin Brone.”
“Yes.” Collum nodded. “They will be happy.”
Vansen groaned quietly and set about looking for enough damp sticks to try to make a fire. “Somehow I don’t think so.”
After a succession of terrible dreams in which he was pursued by faceless men through endless mist-cloaked gardens and unlit halls, Ferras Vansen gave up on sleep. He warmed his hands beside the fire and fretted over their dismal circumstances, but he was exhausted and without useful ideas: all he could do was stare out at the endless trees and try to keep from screaming in despair. A child of the countryside, he had never imagined he could grow to hate something as familiar as a forest, as common as mere trees, but of course nothing here was mere anything. Outwardly familiar—he had seen oak and beech, rowan and birch and alder, and in the high places many kinds of evergreen—the dripping trees of this damp shadow-forest seemed to have a brooding life to them, a silence both purposeful and powerful. If he half-closed his eyes, he could almost imagine he was surrounded by ancient priests and priestesses robed in gray and green, tall and stately and not very kindly disposed toward his intrusion into their sacred precincts.
When Collum Dyer finally woke, he also seemed to have awakened from the evil fancy that had gripped his mind. He looked around him, blinking slowly, and then moaned. “By Perin’s Hammer, when will day come in this cursed place?”
“This is as much day as you’ll see until we are in our own lands again,” Vansen told him. “You should know that by now.”
“How long have we been here?” Dyer looked down at his hands as though they should belong to someone else. “I feel ill. Where are the others?”
“Don�
�t you remember?” He told the guardsman all that had happened, what they had seen. Dyer looked at him mistrustfully.
“I remember none of that. Why would I say such things?”
“I don’t know. Because this place sends people mad. Come—if you’re feeling like yourself again, let’s get moving.”
They walked, but even the small idea that Vansen had of which direction might lead them back across the Shadowline toward mortal lands quickly failed. As the day wore away, with Dyer cursing fate and Vansen biting back his own anger at his companion—he hadn’t had the luxury of being mad for two days, and had suffered this endless, defeating landscape the whole time Collum Dyer had been babbling about the glories of the Twilight folk—it began to seem that not only would they have to sleep in the forest again, they might never find their way out. They were hopelessly lost and almost out of food and drink. Vansen did not trust the water in this land’s quiet streams, but it seemed they soon must drink it or die.
Somewhere in the timeless and arbitrary middle of their day, Vansen spotted a group of figures traveling away from them, struggling along a ridgetop at what looked like half a mile’s distance. He and Dyer were down in a small canyon, hidden by trees, and at first his strong impulse was to hide until these creatures were gone. But something about the stockiest of the climbing shapes snagged his attention; after a moment, attention turned to incredulous delight.
“By all the gods, I swear that must be Mickael Southstead! I would know his walk anywhere, like he had a barrel between his legs.”
Dyer squinted. “You’re right. Bless him—who would ever have thought I’d be happy to see that old whoreson!”
Energies renewed by hope, they ran until they no longer had the breath for it, then continued the climb up the steep hillside at a slower pace. Dyer wanted to shout—he was terrified that they would lose their comrades again—but Vansen did not want to make any more noise than was necessary: it already seemed as though the very land was disapprovingly aware of them.
They reached the top of the ridge at last, staggering up onto the crest and stopping to gasp for breath. When they straightened up, they could see the others just a few hundred yards ahead along the ridgetop, still laboring forward, unaware of Vansen and Dyer. This joyful sight was undercut slightly by the view from the crest. The forest stretched as far as they could see on all sides with no landmark more recognizable than a few hilltops like the one on which they stood, jutting up at irregular intervals from the mists that blanketed the shadow-country like islands in the Vuttish archipelago surrounded by the cold northern sea.
Vansen was still winded, but Dyer sprinted ahead. Now that they were so close, Vansen could see that there were only four other survivors, and that one of them was the girl Willow. His heart lifted—the idea that he had brought the poor, tortured creature back to the place that had affected her so badly the first time had been troubling him in his more lucid moments—but only a little. Far more troubling was the rest of his missing guardsmen. Until now he had been able to convince himself that the rest of the troop was together and looking for them. Now he had to admit the problem was not simply that Vansen and Dyer had got themselves lost, but rather that Ferras Vansen, a captain of the royal guard, had lost most of his men.
The princess was right, he thought bitterly as he started after Dyer. I am not to be trusted with the safety of her family. And I should not have been trusted with the lives of these men, either.
Dyer had caught them and embraced Mikael Southstead though he had never liked him much. As Dyer threw his arms around the other two soldiers—Balk and Dawley, it appeared—Southstead turned to Ferras Vansen with a self-satisfied grin. “There you are, Captain. We knew we’d find you.”
Vansen was vastly relieved to see even this small portion of his men alive, but was not quite certain he agreed with Southstead’s idea of who had found whom. “I am pleased to see you well,” he told Southstead, then clapped the man on the shoulder. It was a little awkward, but he wanted no embraces.
“Father?” the girl said to him. She looked more ragged than the others, her dress torn and muddy, and her face had lost the cheer it had possessed even in madness. He had a terrible notion of what might have happened in his absence, but also knew that there was nothing he could do about it, nothing. He beckoned her toward him.
“I am not your father, Willow,” he told her gently. “But I am happy to see you. I am Ferras Vansen, the captain of these men.”
“They wouldn’t let me go home, Father,” she said. “I wanted to, but they wouldn’t let me.”
Vansen couldn’t help shuddering, but when he turned back to the others all he said was, “We will make camp, but not here. Let us move down into the valley where we’re not so easy to see.”
Between them, Vansen and the remains of his troop scraped together enough biscuit and dried meat for a meager meal, but that was the last of their provisions gone and their waterskins were also nearly empty. Soon they would have to drink from the shadow-streams and perhaps eat shadow-food as well. He had already had difficulty restraining Dyer from eating berries and fruit while they traveled, some of which looked quite familiar and wholesome, so how much more difficult would it be now that he had five of them to watch?
It quickly became apparent that Southstead and the others had experienced some of the same things as Vansen and Dyer, but not all; the Shadowline had crept over them while they slept, and the rest of the men and the merchant Beck apparently went mad much as Dyer had done, disappearing with the horses and leaving Southstead, Dawley, Balk, and the girl Willow stranded on foot. But Southstead and his company had not seen the host of the Twilight People on the march, and with the return of his wits Collum Dyer did not truly remember it either, leaving Vansen as the lone witness. He fancied that the others looked at him strangely when he spoke of it, as though he might have invented it all.
“What would they be doing, Captain?” young Dawley asked. “I mean, going to war? With whom?”
“With us,” Vansen said, trying to keep his temper. “With our kind. Which is why we must hope we can get back to Southmarch with the news before that army of unnatural things gets there.”
It also quickly became clear that despite his claim of finding Vansen, Southstead and the other two guardsmen had been completely lost, wandering hopelessly, although Southstead claimed he would have found his way out of the woods, “given a proper chance.” The fact that these three guardsmen, none of whom Vansen thought of as very clever, had not been driven mad by the magic of the shadow-forest made him a little more uncertain about his own resistance. There seemed to be no reason for who was completely overcome and who was only buffeted by the strangeness of the place. More disturbing, resistance did not seem to give them the ability to find their way out again, but Dyer in his former madness had seemed certain he knew which way to go.
As the men argued about who would stand watch, Vansen suddenly had an idea: although he still feared his men had mistreated the girl Willow, perhaps even raped her, he realized he might in his anger have misunderstood something she was trying to tell him.
She was sitting close to him, not speaking, but clearly more comfortable near the man she sometimes imagined was her father. “You said they would not let you go home,” he said to her quietly. “What do you mean?”
She shook her head, wide-eyed. “Oh, I can see the road! I tried to tell them, but they wouldn’t listen. The one who looks like our old bull pup said he knew where to go and that I should keep my mouth shut.” She slid closer to him. “But you will let me go home. I know you will.”
Vansen almost laughed at the girl’s description—the jowly Southstead did indeed look more than a little like a bulldog—but what she had said was important. She found her way out of shadow once, he thought, before we found her. He patted her on the head, carefully disengaged his hand from hers—she had a good, tight grip on it—and stood up. “I’ll take first watch,” he announced. “The rest of you play drop-stones
or whatever you wish to settle your turns. Tomorrow you follow a new leader.”
Southstead did not look happy, but he grinned anyway. “As you wish, Captain, o’ course. But you and Dyer did no better than us.”
“I’m not going to be leading,” he said. “She will.”
Despite the grumbling of the men, after the little troop had been up and following Willow through the gray forest for a few hours Vansen actually saw the moon for the first time since they had fallen into shadow. It was only a glimpse when some unfelt wind in the heights scattered the mists for a moment, and he was a little disturbed to think it might be the middle of the night when his body had been telling him it was day, but he still regarded it as a good sign. The girl seemed certain of where she was going, walking on ahead of them in her tattered white dress like a ghost leading travelers to the place of its murder.
Perhaps it was hunger—the younger the man, Vansen had learned during his time as a guard captain, the more they thought about food—but somewhere during what everyone except Mesiya’s pale orb believed was the afternoon, Dawley suddenly stopped in his tracks.
“There’s something in that thicket,” he whispered to Vansen, who was closest to him. He took his bow off his shoulder and pulled out one of the two arrows he had saved from the collapse of their mission and the disappearance of the horses and packs. “If it’s a deer, Captain, I’m going to shoot it. I don’t care if it’s the King of Elfland in disguise, I’ll eat it anyway.”
Vansen laid a hand on the young soldier’s arm as he nocked the arrow, squeezed the arm hard. “But what if it’s Adcock or one of the other guards wandering lost, maybe wounded?” Dawley slowly lowered the bow. “Good. Take Dyer and Balk and see if you can move in quietly.”
While Vansen and Southstead and the young woman watched in silence, the men closed in on the thicket. Dawley abruptly dove into the deepest part of the undergrowth and Balk clambered in after him. The leaves were rattling, and both Dawley and Balk were shouting to each other.
