by Tad Williams
“Bide with us here a while longer.” She folded her tiny hands together. “It is a pity, but the Grand and Worthy Nose is not well—a sort of ague. This often happens when the sun shines for the first time after the winter rains begin. Most pathetic he becomes, eyes red and his wonderful nose red, too. Otherwise I would send him with you. Perhaps in a few days, when the indisposition has passed . . .”
Chert was not exactly heartened to think that his hope of finding the boy might rest on the fat and fussy Nose, but it was something, at least, something. He tried to look grateful.
“Your Majesty, if a humble Gutter-Scout can speak . . .” said Beetledown.
The queen was amused. “Humble? I do not think that word describes you well, my good servant.”
Chert imagined that the little man was blushing, but the face was too small and too distant to be certain. “I wish only to serve ’ee, Majesty, and that’s skin to sky. Sometimes, it is true, I find it hard to keep quiet when I must listen to the boasting of tumblers and other pillocks who are not fit to serve you. And perhaps tha wilst deem me boastful again when I say that after the Nose, some do reckon that Beetledown the Bowman has the finest nostrils in all Southmarch Above.”
“I have heard that said, yes,” said the queen, smiling. Beetledown seemed hard-pressed not to leap in the air and cheer for himself at her admission. “Does that mean you are offering your services to Chert of Blue Quartz?”
“Fair is what it seems, Majesty. The boy bested me and then gave me quarter, fairly as tha might please. I reckon that un has my debt, as ’twere. Perhaps Beetledown can help bring him back safe in un’s skin.”
“Very well. You are so commissioned. Go with Chert of Blue Quartz and carry out your duties. Farewell, good Funderling.” She tapped with her stick at the white rat’s ribs; the animal chittered, then turned and began to move back up the roof. Her guards hurried after her.
“Thank you, Queen Upsteeplebat!” Chert called, although he was not really sure how much help he was going to get from a man the size of a peapod. Her hand went up as the rat disappeared over the roofcrest, but even small queens did not wave good-bye, so he imagined it must have been an acknowledgment of his gratitude. He turned to Beetledown, with whom he was now alone on the rooftop. “So . . . what should we do?”
“Take me to something of the boy’s,” suggested the little man. “Let me get my fill of un’s scent.”
“We’ve got his other shirt and his bed, so I suppose I should take you home. Do you want to ride down on my shoulder?”
Beetledown gave him an unfathomable look. “Seen ’ee climb, I have. Beetledown will make un’s own way and meet up at bottom.”
Not surprisingly, the Gutter-Scout was already waiting on the ground by the time Chert set his feet on the cobbles once more. The morning sun was high behind the clouds—perhaps an hour remained until noon. Chert was tired and hungry and not very happy. “Do you want to walk?” he asked, trying to be considerate of the Rooftopper’s feelings.
“Oh, aye, if we had three days for wandering,” Beetledown replied a bit snappishly. “Said tha hast shoulder for riding. Ride, I will.”
Chert put his hand down and let the little man climb into it. It was an oddly ticklish feeling. As he put Beetledown on his shoulder, he imagined for the first time what a vast expanse even this small cobbled courtyard must seem to a man of such small size. “Have you been on the ground much?”
“Proper bottom ground? Aye, oncet or twice or more,” Beetledown said. “Not one of your stay-at-homes am I. Not afraid of rat or hawk or nowt but cats is Beetledown the Bowman, if I have my good bow to hand.” He brandished the small, slender curve of wood, but when he spoke again, he sounded a little less confident. “Be there cats in your house?”
“Scarcely a one in all Funderling Town. The dragons eat them.”
“Having sport, th’art,” said the little man with dignity. Chert suddenly felt ashamed. The tiny fellow might be a bit boastful, he might not think much of Chert’s climbing, but he was offering his help out of a sense of obligation, entering a world of monstrous giants. Chert tried to imagine what that would feel like and decided that Beetledown was entitled to a little swagger.
“I apologize. There are cats in Funderling Town but none in my house. My wife doesn’t like them much.”
“Walk on, then,” said the Rooftopper. “It has been a century or more since any Gutter-Scout has been to the deep places and today Beetledown the Bowman will go where no other dares.”
“No other Rooftopper, you mean,” said Chert as he started across the temple-yard toward the gate. “After all, we Funderlings go there rather often.”
“Where is your brother? Prince Barrick should be here.” Avin Brone could not sound more disapproving if Briony had informed him that she planned to hand over governance of the March Kingdoms to an assembly of landless yokels.
“He is ill, Lord Brone. He would be here if he could.”
“But he is the co-regent . . .”
“He is ill. Do you doubt me?”
The lord constable had learned that despite the differences in their size, age, and sex, he could not outstare her. He tangled his fingers in his beard and muttered something. She was sensible enough not to inquire what he had said.
“Hendon Tolly is causing trouble already,” said Tyne Aldritch of Blueshore, one of the few nobles she had asked to join her to hear the news from the west. Aldritch was terse, especially with her, often to the point of near-rudeness, but she believed it was a symptom of basic honesty. Evidence over the years supported this conclusion, although she knew she might still be wrong—none of the people of the innermost circles around the throne were as guileless or straightforward as they seemed. Briony had learned that at a young age. Who could afford to be? Briony had ancestors in the Portrait Hall who had killed more of their own nobles than they had slain enemies on the battlefield.
“And what is my charming cousin Hendon up to?” She nodded as another, only slightly more beloved relative joined the council, Rorick Longarren. The apparent invasion seemed to be on the borders of his Daler’s Troth fiefdom, one of the few things that could lure him away from dicing and drinking. He took his place at the table and yawned behind his hand.
“Tolly showed up with his little court of complainers just as you left the throne room,” Tyne Aldritch told her, “and was talking loudly about how sometimes people try to avoid those they have wronged.”
Briony took a deep breath. “I thank you, Earl Tyne. I would be surprised if he was not talking against me—against us, I mean, Prince Barrick and myself. The Tollys are admirable allies in time of war but cursedly difficult in peacetime.”
“But is this still peacetime?” the Earl of Blueshore asked with heavy significance.
She sighed. “That is what we hope to find out. Lord Brone, where is your guard captain?”
“He insisted on bathing before being brought to you.”
Briony snorted. “I had doubts about his competence, but I didn’t take him for a fop. Is a bath more important than news of an attack on Southmarch?”
“To be fair, Highness,” said Brone, “they rode almost without stopping for three days to get here and he has already written everything down while he waited for me to come to him from the throne room.” Brone lifted a handful of parchment. “He felt it would be discourteous to appear before you in torn and dirty clothes.”
Briony stared at the parchment covered with neat letters. “He can write?”
“Yes, Highness.”
“I was told he was born in the country—a crofter’s son or something like. So where did he learn to write?” For some reason this did not fit the picture in her head of Vansen the guard captain, the man who had stood close-mouthed and emotionless while her brother lay dead in his own blood a few yards away, the fellow who had let her strike at him as though he were a statue of unfeeling stone. “Can he read, too?”
“I imagine so, Highness,” Brone said. “But here
he comes. You may ask him yourself.”
His hair was still wet and he had put on not a dress tunic and armor but simple clothes that she suspected by their fit were not even his own, but she was still irritated. “Captain Vansen. Your news must be terrible indeed that you would make the princess regent wait for it.”
He looked surprised, even shocked. “I am sorry, Highness. I was told that you would be in the throne room until after midday and could not see me until then. I gave my news to Lord Brone’s man and then . . .” He seemed suddenly to realize he was perilously close to arguing with his monarch; he dropped to one knee. “I beg your pardon, Highness. Clearly the mistake is mine. Please do not let your anger at me cloud your feelings toward my men, who have suffered much and done so bravely to bring this news back to Southmarch.”
He is too honorable by half, she thought. He had a good chin, she had to admit—a proud chin. Perhaps he was one of those men like the famous King Brenn, so in love with honor that it ate him up with pride. She didn’t like the suggestion that she needed permission to be angry at someone, even permission given by the someone in question. She decided she would teach this crafty—and no doubt ambitious—young soldier a lesson by not being angry at all.
Besides, she thought, if what Brone says is true, we do have more important things to talk about. “We will speak of this some other time, Captain Vansen,” she said. “Tell us your news.”
By the time he had finished, Briony felt as if she had stepped into one of the stories the maids used to tell when she was a child.
“You saw this . . . this fairy army?”
Vansen nodded. “Yes, Highness. Not very well, as I’ve said. It was . . .” He hesitated. “It was strange there.”
“By the gods!” cried Rorick, who had just divined the reason for his own presence, “they are coming down onto my land! They must be invading Daler’s Troth even as we speak—someone must stop them!”
Briony had not particularly wanted him present, but since it was near his fiefdom, and his bride-to-be had been kidnapped with the convoy, she could not think of a reason to keep him out of the council. Still, she found it telling that he had not mentioned the Settish prince’s daughter once. “Yes, it sounds that way, Cousin Rorick,” she said. “You will, no doubt, want to ride out as soon as you can to muster and lead your people.” She kept her tone equable, but to her surprise she saw a small reaction from Vansen, not a smile—the matters at hand were too serious—but a recognition by him that she didn’t think Rorick was likely to follow this selfless course.
Ah, but Vansen is a dalesman, isn’t he? And not as dull as I supposed him, either.
She turned her attention back to her cousin Rorick, who was not even trying to hide his fear. “Ride there?” he stammered. “Into the gods alone know what kind of terrors?”
“Longarren is right about one thing—he can do nothing alone,” said Tyne of Blueshore. “We must strike them quickly, though, whatever we do. We must throw them back. If the Twilight People are truly come across the Shadowline, we must remind them of why they retreated there in the past—make them see they will pay with blood for every yard of trespass . . .”
“Still, these are your lands we are talking about, Rorick,” Briony pointed out, “and your people. They do not see much of you as it is. Will you not lead them?”
“But lead them to what, Highness?” Surprisingly, it was Brone who spoke up: as a general rule, he did not think much of her cousin Rorick. “We know nothing so far. We have sent out a small party and only a few of them have come back—I think it would be a mistake for Lord Longarren or anyone else to ride off to battle without due care. What if we make a stand against these invaders and the same thing happens—the madness, the confusion—but this time to an entire army? Fear will run riot and the Twilight People will be here in these halls before spring. That conquest will not be anything like the Syannese Empire either, I suspect. These creatures will want more than tribute. What did Vansen say that his little monstrosity told him? That she—whoever that might be—will burn all our houses down to black stones.”
The enormity of it struck her now; her contemptuous prodding of Rorick suddenly seemed petty. Unless Vansen was completely mad, they were soon to be at war, and not with any human foe. As if the threat of the Autarch, Kendrick’s death, and their father’s imprisonment had not been enough! Briony looked at the guard captain and, much as she might wish it, could not believe he was telling anything other than the truth. What she had been taking for dullness or priggish honor might instead be a kind of unvarnished simplicity, something she had difficulty recognizing because of where she sat. It could be that here was a man who did not know how to scheme, who would suffocate in the daily intriguing of the castle’s inner chambers like an oak trying to grow beneath the strangling vines of the Xandian jungles.
I doubt he can even keep a secret. “Vansen,” she said suddenly. “Where are those you brought back?”
“The guardsmen are waiting to return to their families. There is the girl, too . . .”
“They are not to go home, any of them, or to mix with others. Open talk of this must not be permitted or we will be struggling with our own fearful people long before we ever cross swords with this fairy army.” She turned to the lord constable, who was already dispatching one of the guards to relay her order. “Who else needs to know?”
Brone looked around the chapel. “The defense of the castle and city is my task, and I thank Perin Skyfather that he put it in my head to do the repairs on the curtain wall and the water-gate last summer. We need Nynor, of course, and all his factors—we cannot put an army on foot without him. And Count Gallibert, the chancellor, because we will need gold as well as steel to protect this place. But, Highness, we cannot put an army on foot at all without everyone learning of it . . .”
“No, but we can do as much as we can before we must make it general knowledge.” She looked at Ferras Vansen, who seemed uncomfortable. “You have a thought, Captain?”
“If you will pardon me, Highness, my men have suffered a great deal and they will be unhappy to be confined to the keep . . .”
“Are you questioning my decision?”
“No, Highness. But I would prefer to explain it to them myself.”
“Ah.” She considered. “Not yet. I haven’t finished with you.”
He looked as though he might say more, but didn’t. Briony was briefly grateful for the power of the regency, for the prestige of being an Eddon; she didn’t want to waste time explaining her every thought just now. In fact, she was feeling a certain pleasure, even in the midst of her great distress at what was happening and what must happen in the days ahead, to know that she was the one who must make decisions, that the nobles must listen to her no matter what they would prefer.
Pray Zoria I make the right decisions. “Bring Nynor and the chancellor and any other nobles that must know. This evening, here. It will be a war council—but do not call it so within the hearing of anyone who will not be joining us.”
“And those bloody-minded Tollys?” asked Tyne. “Hendon will still be the brother of a powerful duke whether Gailon is alive or dead, and the Tollys cannot be ignored in this.”
“No, of course not, but for the moment they will be.” However, she knew she must not be foolish. “But perhaps you could tell Hendon Tolly that I will see him later—that we will talk privately before the evening meal. That courtesy I can give him.”
Rorick excused himself—to down a cup of wine as quickly as possible, Briony guessed. As Avin Brone and Tyne Aldritch fell into a discussion of which of the other nobles must be present at so important a council, Briony rose to stretch her legs. Vansen, thinking she was leaving the room, went down on one knee.
“No, Captain, I am not done with you yet, as I said.” It was a strange, almost giddy feeling, the power that was in her now. For a moment she thought of Barrick and was stabbed by pity and sadness, but also impatience. I must give him the chance to be present for thi
s, she reminded herself. It is his due. But she wondered at her own thoughts, because it was indeed his due she was thinking of, not her own needs: she was not certain she actually wanted him to be involved, and she was disturbed by that realization. “You will wait outside until I have finished with the others, Vansen.”
He bowed his head, then rose and walked out. Brone looked at him, then at Briony, one eyebrow raised inquiringly.
“Before you go, good Aldritch . . .” she said to Tyne, ignoring the lord constable.
He turned toward her, not sure what was coming. “Yes, Highness?”
Briony examined the earl’s familiar face, the squint of suspicion, the scar beneath his eye. There was another jagged white line on his forehead only partly hidden beneath his graying hair—a fall while hunting. He was a good man but a rigid one, a man who saw almost all change as trouble. She sensed she was about to make the first of a long series of not entirely happy choices. “With Shaso imprisoned, you and Lord Brone have taken up most of his duties between you, my lord Aldritch.”
“I have done my best, Highness,” he said, a little angry color coming to his cheeks. “But this attack from behind the Shadowline, if it is true, could not have been foreseen . . .”
“I know. And I know . . . that is, my brother and I know . . . that you have done what you could in a difficult time. Now it seems the times will become more difficult still.” She was aware that she was changing, that she had begun to speak less like Briony and more like a queen, or at least a princess regent. Is this what happens? Is true royalty like some wasting illness that makes you grow farther and farther from everyone even while you remain in their midst? “I wish you to continue, and in fact to become the castle’s master of arms.” She looked quickly to Brone, not for his approval, but to see how he reacted. He, in turn, was looking at Tyne; if he disagreed or agreed with her decision he gave no sign.
