by Tad Williams
Earl Tyne’s cheeks were still flushed, but he seemed relieved. “I thank you, Highness. I will do my best to fulfill your trust.”
“I’m sure you will. So here is your first duty. We must assume this danger is real. We have a few hundred guards in the castle—not enough for anything except perhaps to resist a siege, and if it comes to that, it will mean we have abandoned the outer city. How quickly can we muster a proper army?”
Aldritch frowned. “We can have my Blueshoremen and Brone’s Landsenders here in days, perhaps a week. With fast riders on the Westmarch Road we might be able to draw a few companies from Daler’s Troth soon after, if we can get around this fairy army. Any levies from Marrinswalk and Helmingsea and the outliers like Silverside and Kertewall will take longer—at the very least two tennights, more likely we won’t see them for a month.” His frown became a scowl—Tyne had never been one to mask his thoughts. “A cursed shame, this whole bloody business with Gailon Tolly and his brothers, because our largest and best-trained muster always comes from Summerfield.”
“I will treat with that,” Briony said. “What seems important to me is that we meet this shadow-army, if it is truly moving on Southmarch as the guard captain fears, at least once outside the city walls.”
“With unready troops?” Tyne protested. “Most of what we will turn up here under such haste will be local musters, especially after all these years without war—perhaps only one real fighting man for every dozen who have never swung anything sharper than a hoe.”
“We must test their strength—and ours,” Briony said firmly. “We know nothing of such an enemy. And if they draw a siege around us, we will have trouble getting any more help at all from the farther marches. We will have to rely on ships to bring men as well as supplies, which will make for an even longer wait for the landbound musters.” She turned to Avin Brone. “What do you think?”
He nodded, pulling gently and meditatively on his beard. “I agree we cannot simply wait until this enemy arrives. But we do not know for certain that is what they plan. Perhaps they will harry the outlying marches first. Perhaps they seek only to expand a distance across the Shadowline, then sit on what they have won.”
“It doesn’t seem anything to count on,” said Briony. “If they have brought an entire army across the Shadowline, it seems unlikely they did it merely to burn a few fields and barns.” She almost couldn’t believe she was talking about this so calmly. People were going to die. The country had been largely at peace for her entire lifetime and the Twilight People had not stirred out of their shadows for generations. How had this fallen to her?
Brone sighed. “I agree that we must begin the muster immediately, Highness. The rest we can discuss with the other nobles later today.”
“Go, then, Tyne, and begin it,” she said. “I may be asking an impossibility, but let your messengers go out with as much secrecy as they can and take their messages straight to the local lords and mayors without stopping to discuss it in the taverns. Tell them that if anyone hears of their errand before the one to whom they are sent, they will spend the next year chained in the stronghold next to Shaso.”
“That will not keep everyone quiet,” Tyne argued. “Some will risk shackles to warn their own families.”
“No, but it will help. And we will not give the messengers any information that they do not need.” She summoned a young page from outside the chapel door. He came in as hesitantly as a cat walking on a wet floor. “Call Nynor,” she told him, and when he was gone she said, “I will send out letters under my seal.”
“Very good,” said the Earl of Blueshore. “Then they will not be able to argue they did not understand the importance or that the messenger did not tell them straightly what was needed.”
“You two go and see to it, please, and the arrangements for this evening’s council as well. Send in Vansen as you go.”
Brone gave her the raised eyebrow once more. “Do not be too hard on him, Highness, please. He is a good man.”
“I will deal with him as he deserves,” she promised.
Chert had managed by a certain stealthiness to make his way home through the back streets of Funderling Town without having to explain why a finger-sized man was riding on his shoulder. He could not, of course, avoid giving an explanation to everyone . . .
“Have you found him?” Opal demanded, then her reddened eyes opened wide as she saw Beetledown. “Earth Elders! What . . . what is that?”
“He’s a ‘who,’ really,” her husband told her. “As for Flint, no luck. Not yet.”
The little man stood up on Chert’s shoulder and doffed his ratskin hat before making a small bow. “Beetledown the Bowman, I hight, tallsome lady. Chief one of the Gutter-Scouts, directed by Her Sinuous Majesty, Queen Upsteeplebat, to help find your lost boy.”
“He’s here to help.” Chert was tired and didn’t have much hope left—in fact, the whole thing struck him as a bit ridiculous. Opal, however, was seeing a Rooftopper for the first time and for a moment seemed almost able to forget the terrible errand that had brought this newcomer to their home.
“Look at him! He’s perfect!” She reached out a hand, as if he were a toy to be played with, but remembered her manners. “Oh! My name is Opal and you are welcome in our house. Would you like something to drink or eat? I’m afraid I don’t know much about . . . about Rooftoppers.”
“Nay, Mistress, not this moment, but I thank ’ee.” He pulled at Chert’s earlobe. “It seems best tha put me down. Smell is a tricksy thing. Fades like stars at sunrise.”
“He’s going to sniff Flint’s shirt,” Chert explained. It seemed to need some additional clarification, but he couldn’t summon any.
Opal, however, seemed to find it all perfectly straightforward. “Let me carry you. I haven’t swept the floors today and I’m ashamed.” She reached out a hand and Beetledown climbed onto it. “Did your queen really send you? What is she like? Is she old or young? Is she beautiful?”
“Brave as a daw and fearful handsome,” said Beetledown with real feeling. “Hair soft as the velvet pelt of a weanling mouse.” He coughed to cover his embarrassment. “We are her special legion, we Gutter-Scouts. The queen’s eyes and ears. A great honor it gives to us.”
“Then we’re honored she wishes to help us,” said Opal as she carried the tiny man toward Flint’s bed. Chert was bemused to see how much better his wife did this sort of thing than he did. “Do you need anything?”
“Is yon great tent of faircloth un’s garment? Put me down, please ’ee, Mistress, and I will scent what I can.” He scrambled across the folds, then dropped to his hands and knees and pressed his face against the sleeve. He worked his way up to the shoulder, sniffing as he went like a dog. At last he climbed to his feet and closed his eyes, stood silent for a moment. “I think I have it,” he said. “Easier it gives itself to me because I have scented the boy upon the rooftop and un has un’s own peculiar tang.” He opened his eyes, looked at Opal and Chert, then shuffled his feet a little on the sleeve. “No wish am I having to shame ’ee, but to me un smells nothing like tha twain.”
Chert almost laughed. “There is no shame. He is not our blood-child. We found him and took him in.”
Beetledown nodded wisely. “Found him in some strange place, thinks I. True?”
“Yes,” said Opal a little worriedly. “How did you know?”
“Un smells of Farther Rooftops.” Beetledown turned to Chert. “Is it tha who will carry me now?”
“Carry . . . ?”
“On the track. Too much of un’s scent there is here. Go where there is moving air, we must—even in these dank-some caves there must be such a place, methinks.”
Carefully, Chert lifted the little man back up onto his shoulder. He was tired in heart and body, but certainly it was better to be doing something than simply waiting. “Are you coming?” he asked his wife.
“Then who would be here if he comes home?” said Opal indignantly, as though the boy had merely gone to r
ace sowbugs with the neighbor children and would be back any time. “You go, Chert Blue Quartz, and you let this fellow do all the sniffing he has to do. You find that boy.” She turned to look at Beetledown and performed a strange, stiff courtesy, holding her apron up at the hem. She even smiled at him, although she clearly didn’t find it easy, which reminded Chert that he was not the only one who was bone-weary with sleeplessness and dread. “We thank you and your queen,” she said.
He gave Opal a kiss before leaving, wondering how many days it had been since he had remembered to do that. He couldn’t help glancing back as he opened the door, but he wished he hadn’t. In the middle of the room, his wife was rubbing her hands together and looking at the walls as though searching for something. Now that there was no longer a guest in the house, her face had gone slack with grief—it was a stranger’s face, and an old stranger at that. For the first time he could remember, Chert could no longer quite make out the lovely young girl he had courted.
Captain Ferras Vansen came back into the chapel like a condemned prisoner walking bravely to the gallows. His expression, Briony thought, was a little like the idealized face of Perin in the fresco above the door which showed the mighty god giving to his brother Erivor the dominion over the rivers and seas. On the sky god the face was frozen in a mask of hard masculine beauty; Vansen, although not an unhandsome man, simply looked frozen.
He kneeled before her, head down. His hair was now almost dry, curling at the ends. She felt something almost like tenderness toward him, touched by the vulnerability of his bent neck. He looked up and she felt caught in some indiscretion, had to fight down a surge of warm anger.
“May I speak, Highness?”
“You may.”
“Whatever you think of me, Princess Briony, I ask you again not to bear ill will toward the men who traveled with me. They are good soldiers tested by things that none of us have seen and felt before. Punish me as you will, but not them, I beg of you.”
“You truly are a bit arrogant, aren’t you, Captain Vansen?”
His eyes widened. “Highness?”
“You assume that you have done some great wrong for which you must be punished. You seem to think that, like Kupilas the Lifegiver, your crime is so great that you must be staked on the hillside as an example, to be picked at by the ravens for eternity. Yet, as far as I can see, you have only proved to be a soldier who has muddled a commission.”
“But your brother’s death . . .”
“It’s true, I haven’t forgiven you for your failures that night. But neither am I so foolish as to think someone else would have prevented it.” She paused, gave him a hard stare. “Do you think I’m foolish, Captain Vansen?”
“No, Highness . . . !”
“Good. Then we have a starting point. I don’t think I’m foolish either. Now let us move to more important matters. Are you mad, Captain Vansen?”
He was startled and she almost felt ashamed of herself, but these were times when she could not bend, could not be too kind and thus seem weak. There could be no whispering among the castle’s defenders that they would fail because a woman ruled them. “Am I . . . ?”
“I asked if you are mad, Captain Vansen. Are your wits damaged? It seems a simple enough question.”
“No, Princess. No, Highness, I do not think so.”
“Then unless you are a liar or a traitor—fear not, I won’t ask you to deny those possibilities as well, we don’t have the time—what you have seen is real. Our danger is real. So let us talk about why your arrogant wish to be important enough to be punished will not be satisfied.”
“My lady . . . ?”
“Silence. I didn’t ask you a question. Captain Vansen, from what you’ve told me, it seems that not everyone is the same when it comes to this fairy-magic. You said that some of the men were bewildered, even bewitched, and that others were not. You were one of those who were not. True?”
“Or at least very little, Highness, as far as I could tell.” He was looking at her with something like surprised respect. She liked the respect. She did not like the surprise.
“Then I would be a fool to throw a soldier who seemed armored against such charms and snares into chains at a time when we may need that talent far more than strong arms or even stout hearts . . . would I not?”
“I . . . I take your point, Highness.”
“Here is another question. Did you see any reason, any differences in those affected, that might explain why some of you were overwhelmed by the Shadowline magic and some were not?”
“No, Highness. One of my most trusted and sensible men, Collum Dyer, was swept away into a dream very quickly, but a man who is for all purposes his opposite was not touched and, in fact, made it home with me.”
“So we have no way to know who has the weakness until it is revealed.” She frowned, biting her lip. Vansen watched her, clearly masking deeper feelings, but this time more effectively. She wondered briefly what he was hiding from her. Irritation? Fear? “Despite what you think of him, this fellow you mentioned who was not overcome by the fairy-magic must be given a role in preparing to fight this strange enemy. He and all the others who were not poisoned by this strange dreaming. He and your other survivors must all be made captains.”
“Mickael Southstead a captain?” Vansen was chagrined.
“Unless he is the lowest, vilest criminal ever born, his clear head will be worth more to us than if Anglin the Great himself were to come back from the heavens to lead us, then fall into a bewildered nightmare. As we have agreed, Vansen, I am no fool, and I don’t think you are one either. Can you not see this?”
He bowed his head again briefly. “I can, Highness. You are right.”
“Very kind of you to say so, Captain. We do not know where we will be fighting. It could be we will meet them in the hills of Daler’s Troth in an attempt to keep them away from the cities. It could just as easily happen that we cannot stop them until they reach the walls of Southmarch itself. You are the only ones who have seen the enemy and returned to tell of it. You must help us prepare for them in any way you can imagine. I am not happy about it, Vansen, but I need you just as much as I need Brone and Nynor and Tyne Aldritch. The matter of my brother’s murder and your failure is not closed, but until better times I will push it from my mind, and so will you. It could be that if you serve me well . . . if you serve Southmarch well . . . then what is in the ledger of that night can be scraped away, or at least inked over.”
“I will do all that you ask, Highness.” This new expression was hard to unriddle, both elevated and miserable, so that for a moment he appeared to have stepped down from a different fresco altogether.
You are a strange man, Ferras Vansen, she thought. Maybe I was wrong to think you are the sort that has no secrets. “Go, then. Gather those who came back with you. See that they are fed and rested, but in no circumstance let them leave. I will speak to them myself tomorrow morning.”
“Yes, Highness.” He rose, but hesitated. “Princess Briony . . . ?”
“Speak.”
“There is a young woman, too—I believe I told you.”
A cold irritation crept over her. “What about her? We cannot let her go either, even if she is mad and suffering. I regret it. Make her comfortable.” She narrowed her eyes. “Do you have some feelings for her?”
“No!” He flushed: she was certain she had touched a nerve. That made her grow even more chill, although she did not know why. “No, Highness. Responsibility, perhaps—she is like a child and she trusts me. But although she seemed just as lost in the Shadowline dream as Dyer and the others, she also found a way out again for us. She seems to be in some middle ground between the two . . .”
“We have no time or patience to try to make sense out of some unfortunate young woman. If the magic took her and confused her, she is no use to us. Make her comfortable. Bring me the others tomorrow at ten of the clock.”
Vansen bowed and went out, looking not exactly like one reprieved, but pe
rhaps like one who had found out the gallows makers were all ill with a bad fever.
She sat for a long time after he was gone, her thoughts an unsettled swirl. She had only an hour or so before she had to meet with the nobles and make a plan of war. She would have liked to go to Utta—she missed the Zorian sister’s wisdom and calm—but she knew there was a more important visit she had to make. Whatever complicated feelings she might have and whatever terrors might be punishing him, she did not wish to go to this evening’s council without her twin.
The Scourge of the Shivering Plain stood on a hillside at the edge of the line of trees, looking down on the valley and the town that bestrode the river at its bottom. The sun had vanished behind the top of the hills and lamps were already being lit all along the dark valley, even though evening was still an hour away.
Yasammez turned and reached out with her thoughts, feeling back toward the Shadowline. The mantle of shadow, the web of careful, ancient enchantments that had trailed behind her for days like a cape of mists, the vast, mortal-bewildering essence of the Qar heartland that had hidden and protected her marching army, had now stretched to its limits and was beginning to thin. She knew that it would reach no farther into these fields, that where she went from now on she must do beneath the bright sun or the unclouded stars. That was why she waited for night.
The Seal of War glowed on her chest like a coal. Its weight was both comforting and terrifying. For year upon long year she had waited for this hour to come. Whatever befell would have much to do with her decisions in the days ahead, and she would have had it no other way. Still, many would die, and many of them would be her own kind. Like almost all warriors, no matter how fierce, it was not easy for her to see her own killed, whatever the need.
She turned and walked back up the hillside. Although her armor was covered in long spines and the trees grew close together here, she made no sound.
In the woods along the hilltop her army had gathered. With the mantle’s weakening their bright eyes glittered in the gathering dark like a sky full of stars as they watched her pass. No fires had been lit. Later, when she had a better idea of what she faced, had learned something of the mettle of her sunlander enemies, Lady Porcupine might find it useful to let them see her army’s fires burning on the hills and plains, let them count the blazes with chilling blood—but not tonight. Tonight the People would come down on their foes like lightning from a cloudless sky.
