Shadowmarch s-1

by Tad Williams

  There was no sign of Conary, the proprietor. The potboy, Gil—boy in name only, since he looked to be at least a decade older than Tinwright—sat on a stool behind the plank, guarding the barrels. He had an odd, distracted look on his face at the moment, but he was no bright spark at the best of times. He had already been at the Quiller’s Mint when Tinwright had first arrived, and in all that time had never said anything remotely interesting.

  “Ale,” the poet demanded. “I must have ale quickly. My stomach is like a storm at sea—only the sunshine that is pent in the brewer’s hop can quiet this tempest.” He leaned on the counter, belched sourly. “Do you hear? Thunder!”

  Gil did not smile, although he was usually polite enough about Tinwright s jokes in his quiet way. After a little more fumbling than usual, he slid a tankard across the plank. The potboy was blinking like an owl in daylight and seemed even more befuddled than usual; Tinwright was delighted to notice that he did not demand payment. Conary no longer gave his lodger even a sniff without coin in hand, and was threatening to evict him from the tiny closet-room at one edge of the top floor as well. Unwilling to risk losing this windfall, Tinwright was preparing to retreat with the tankard to his room before the potboy realized what he had done, and was heartbroken to hear Gil say, “You are a poet… ?”

  It was too far to the stairs to pretend he had not heard. He turned, an excuse ready on his lips. “I mean, you can write, can’t you?” the thin-faced man asked him. “You have a good hand?”

  Tinwright scowled. “Like an angel using his own quill to dip ink. A great lady once told me that my ode to her would be just as beautiful and useful -were the words to be assembled in a completely different order.”

  “I wish you to help me write a letter. Will you do that?” Gil saw Tinwright’s hesitation. “I will pay you money. Would this be enough?” He extended his hand. Nestled in the palm like a droplet of raw sunshine was a gold dolphin. Tinwright gaped and almost dropped his tankard. He had always imagined Gil to be a little simpleminded, with his staring and his silences, but this was idiocy like a gift from the gods. Zosim had heard a simple poet’s prayers, it seemed, and they had reached the god on a generous morning.

  “Of course,” he said briskly. “I would be happy to help you. I will take that…” he plucked the coin out of the potboy’s hand, “and you will come up to my room when Conary has come back.” He drained the tankard in a long, greedy swallow and handed it to Gil. “Here—I will save you having to carry it down later.”

  Gil nodded, his face still as expressionless as a fish lying in a dockside stall. Tinwright hurried up the stairs, half certain that when he reached his room beneath the sloping ceiling the dolphin would be gone, vanished like a fairy-gift, but when he opened his fist it was still there. For the first time a suspicion flared within him and he bit at the coin, but it had the soft solidity of the true stuff. Not that Tinwright had found many chances to bite on gold during his twenty years of life.

  Gil stood just inside the door with his arms at his sides.

  He truly is more strange than usual, Tinwright thought, but it’s brought me nothing but good. He couldn’t help wondering if Gil had any other little tasks that might need Matty Tinwright’s help—-mending his shirt, perhaps, or helping him off with his boots. If he has more dolphins, I’ll be proud to call him employer, be he ever so stupid. A thought came to him for the first time. But where would a potboy come by gold like this? Killed someone? Well, let us just hope it was somebody who won’t be missed…

  At last, Gil spoke. “I want to send a letter. Write the words I say. Make them proper if they need changing.”

  “Of course, my good fellow.” Tinwright took up his writing board, one of the few things left he had not been forced to pawn, and sharpened the quill with an old knife stolen from Conary’s kitchen. With this gold, he realized, I will be able to get my bone-handled penknife back. Hah! I will be able to buy one with an ivory handle! “I do not know greetings such as would go on a letter. You write them.” “Splendid. And who is the letter for?”

  “Prince Barrick and Princess Briony.”

  Tinwright dropped his quill. “What? The prince and princess?”

  “Yes.” Gil looked at him with his head tilted to one side, more the expression of a dog or a bird than a person. “Can you not write this?”

  “Of course,” Matty Tinwright said hurriedly. “Without doubt. As long as it is nothing treasonous.” But he was worried. Perhaps he had been too quick to give thanks to Zosim, who after all was a very capricious sort of godling.

  “Good.You are kind,Tinwright. I write to tell them important matters. Write this, the things I will say.” He took a breath. His eyes were almost closed, as though he were remembering rather than inventing. “Tell the prince and princess of Southmarch that I must speak to them. That I can tell them important things that are true.”

  Tinwright breathed a sigh of relief as he began an elaborate greeting, since it was clear the letter would be nothing but the self-important ram-blings of an unlettered peasant that the royal twins would doubtless never even see— ”To the noble and most honorable Barrick and Briony,” he wrote, “Prince and Princess Regent of Southmarch, from their humble servant…” But what is your name? Your full name?”

  “Gil.”

  “Have you no other name? As mine is not just Matthias, but Matthias Tinwright?”

  The potboy looked at the poet with such incomprehension that Tinwright could only shrug. “… From their humble servant, Gil,” he wrote. “Potboy at the inn known as…”

  “Tell them that the threats they face are worse than they know. That war threatens. And to show them I know the things I speak of, I will tell them what happened to the Prince of Settland’s daughter and her blue dower-stone, and why the merchant’s nephew was spared. You must use just the words I will tell you.”

  Tinwright nodded, writing happily as Gil stuttered out his message. He had earned a magnificent wage for the simplest of tasks. No one would take this dream-born nonsense seriously, least of all the royal family.

  When he had finished he gave the potboy the letter and bade him goodbye—Gil was going to take it himself to the great keep and give it to the prince and princess, he said, although Tinwright knew the poor fool would get no farther than an amused or irritated guardsman at the Raven’s Gate. As the potboy’s descending footfalls sounded on the stairs, Tinwright lay back on his bed to think of all the ways he would spend his money. His head no longer ached. Life had suddenly become very good.

  Gil did not return to the Quiller’s Mint that afternoon. Tinwright was arrested by the royal guard an hour before sunset, with ink stains on his fingers and his gold still unspent.

  22. A Royal Appointment

  WITHOUT NAMES:

  Hard as stone beneath the ground

  Buzzing like wasps

  Twining like roots, like serpents

  —from The Bonefall Oracles

  At least, Matty Tinwright reflected, they hadn’t put him in chains, but nothing else about the experience had been very pleasant at all. He had almost pissed himself when the guards arrived at the Mint to arrest him. Then, seeing the castle’s stronghold for the first time, smelling the dank, ancient stones and the various scents of miserable, confined humanity, he had nearly done it again. It was one thing to write couplets about the sufferings of Penkal’s Silas in the fortress of the cruel Yellow Knight, but the actuality of a dungeon was far more unsettling than he had imagined.

  He let out a sigh, then worried that it might sound like a complaint. He didn’t want these very large guards with their big, callused hands and scowling faces to be angry with him. Two of them were sitting on a low bench talking while a third stood only a few yards away on his other side, pike in hand. This was the one who was making him most uncomfortable, he kept looking at Tinwright as though he was hoping the prisoner would make an attempt to escape so he could spit him like broiled hare on a sharpened stick.

  But the
poet wasn’t going to move. His mind was fixed on passivity like a compass needle pointing north. If the bloody castle suddenly fell down, I’d still sit right here on the floor. That evil-eyed whoreson’s getting no excuse from Matty Tinwright.

  From where he sat he could see the potboy Gil slouching on the floor on the far side of the guards’ table. Tinwright hoped it was a good sign that there were three guards between Gil and the door and only one for him, that it meant they thought Gil was the true miscreant. Not that the potboy looked any more likely than the poet to attempt escape. His thin face was blank and he stared at an empty spot on the opposite wall as though he were someone’s befuddled grandfather left at the market by accident.

  The guard who had been giving Tinwright unpleasant looks took a few steps toward him, mail clinking, until he stood just over him. The man carefully—but not too carefully—lodged the point of his pike in the cracks of the stone floor only inches from Tinwright’s groin If this had been an important occasion, or at least the nicer sort of important occasion, it would unquestionably have been crimping Matty’s codpiece.

  “I saw you in the Badger’s Boots,” the guard said. Painfully conscious of the pike planted between his thighs like a conqueror’s flag, Tinwright was momentarily bewildered, thinking that he had been accused of stealing the footwear of some guard-troop mascot. “Did you hear me, little man?"

  Suddenly, his wits began to work again. The man was talking about a tavern by the Basilisk Gate that Tinwright had visited a few times, usually in the bibulous company of the playwright Nevin Hewney. “No, sir, you mistake me,” he said with all the honesty he could feign. “I have never passed the door I am a partisan of the Quiller’s Mint in Squeakstep Alley. A fellow like yourself would not know the Mint, of course—it is a low; low place.”

  The guard smirked. He was young, but already with a sizable belly on him and a doughy, unpleasant face. “You took my woman away from me. Told her she would enjoy being with a clever fox like you more than the pig who was squiring her.”

  “I’m sure you’re wrong, good sir.”

  “You said she had breasts like fine white cake and an arse like a pomegranate.”

  “No, a peach, surely,” said Tinwright, remembering how drunk he had been that night and horrified to think he might have employed a simile as clumsily unlovely as “pomegranate.” A moment later he clapped a hand over his mouth in horror, but it was too late. His unruly tongue had betrayed him again.

  The guard favored him with a gap-toothed grin that the poet felt sure did not have much to do with concern for his well-being or appreciation for an adept bit of flirtation. The guard leaned close and reached out with his thick fingers, then took Tinwright’s nose and twisted it, hanging on until the poet let out a terrified squeak of pain. The guard bent until his cheese-stinking maw was only a finger’s breadth away, which meant there was one small benefit of Tinwright’s nose being at this moment so agonizingly crimped shut. “If the lord constable doesn’t want your head off—and if he does, I’ll be first in line for the chore—then I’ll be over to see you at Quiller’s Mint, and soon. I’ll cut some bits off you,”—he gave the nose another twist for emphasis,”—and then we’ll see how the ladies like you.”

  The door to the stronghold rattled open. The guard let go of Tinwright’s snout and straightened up, but not before giving it a last cruel tweak. Tinwright was left with tears welling in his eyes and a feeling like someone had set fire to the center of his face.

  “Perin’s smallclothes, is the swindler crying?” a voice boomed from just above him. “Are there no true men left in this kingdom who are not soldiers? Are all the rest just pimps and coney-catchers and womanish weepers like this one?” The vast shape of Lord Constable Avin Brone loomed over him, his beard a gray-black thundercloud. “Are you grizzling because of your crimes against the crown, man? That may help you with the Trigonate priests, but not with me.”

  Tinwright blinked away the tears. “No, my lord, sire, I am guilty of nothing.” “Then why are you blubbing?”

  Somehow Tinwright did not think it would be a good idea to mention what the guard had done. That might turn the beating the man intended to give him into something more likely to prove fatal. “I… I have a catarrh, sire. It strikes me like this, sometime. This damp air…” He waved his hand to indicate the surroundings, but then had another moment of panic. “Not that I have any complaint against the place, sire. I have been excellently well treated.” He was babbling now. Tinwright had never seen Brone from closer than a stone’s throw: the fellow looked as though he could crush a poet’s skull with one meaty hand. “The walls are very sturdy, my lord, the floor well-made.”

  “I suspect someone struck you,” said the lord constable. “If you don’t shut your mouth now, I will probably do it again myself.” He turned to one of the royal guards who had risen from the bench. “I’m taking both prisoners.” He waved to one of the pair of soldiers whom he had left waiting by the stronghold door; both wore the livery of Landsend, Brone’s own fiefdom. “Fetch this pair along,” he told his man. “Beat them if you have to.”

  The stronghold guard looked a little surprised. “Do… are the prince and princess… ?” “Of course they know,” Brone growled. “Who do you think has bid me bring them out?” “Ah. Yes. Very good, my lord.”

  Tinwright scrambled to his feet. He was determined to go without trouble. He did not want to be hurt anymore, and he certainly did not want the huge and frightening lord constable to get any angrier.

  Despite his terror,Tinwright couldn’t help but be surprised when Brone and the two soldiers took them a long, winding way through the back of the great hall and at last into a small but beautifully appointed chapel. One look at the paintings on the wall told him that it must be the Erivor Chapel itself, dedicated to the Eddons’ patron sea god, one of the most famous rooms in all of Southmarch. The decor seemed appropriate in a way, because Gil the potboy had walked all the way there as slowly and distractedly as if he were in water over his head. Tinwright was puzzled to be in such a place, but felt a little better: surely they would not just kill him outright, if for no other reason than fear of getting blood on the celebrated wall frescoes.

  Unless they strangle me. Didn’t they used to strangle traitors? His heart raced. Traitors! But this is mad —I am no traitor! I only wrote the letter because that criminal Gil blinded me, a poor poet, with his ill-gotten gold!

  By the time Avin Brone was seated on a long bench that had been set near the altar, Tinwright was almost crying again.

  “Quiet,” Brone said. “My lord, I… I…”

  “Shut your mouth, fool. Do not think that because I have sat down I will not get up and hit you. The pleasure will be worth the exertion.”

  Tinwright subsided immediately. The fists sucking out of the man’s lace cuffs were the size of festival loaves. The poet stole a look at Gil, who not only did not seem frightened, but actually seemed mostly unaware of what was going on around him. Curse you and your gold! Matty Tinwright wanted to scream at him. You are like some poison-elf out of a story, bringing bad luck to everyone.

  Figuring the best way to keep himself out of trouble would be to squeeze shut his eyes and mouth and pray to the god of poets and drunkards (even though the answer to his last prayer seemed to have led him to the doorstep of a traitor’s cell), he was not aware for a moment that newcomers had entered the room. It was the girl’s voice that startled his eyes open. “These two?”

  “Yes, Highness.” Brone pointed at Gil. “This is the one who made the claims. The other says he only wrote it for him, although I have my doubts—you can see which one looks more likely to have put the other up to mischief.”

  Tinwright had a strong desire to shriek out his innocence, but he was slowly learning how to behave in a situation where he had no power. A half dozen new people had entered the chapel. Four of them were royal guards, who had established themselves near the door and were exchanging mildly contemptuous glances with
the lord constable’s red-and-gold-clad Land-senders; the other two, he was astonished to recognize, were King Olin’s surviving children, Princess Briony and Prince Barrick.

  “Why here?” the fair-haired princess asked.Tinwright had to look twice to make sure she was the one speaking. She was pretty enough in a tall, bony sort of way—Matty Tinwright liked his women soft, pale, and round-edged as a summer cloud—but her hair was loose and she was dressed very strangely in a riding skirt and hose and a long bluejacket like a man’s. Her wan, red-ringleted brother was all in black. Tinwright had heard of the prince’s perpetual mourning attire, but it was quite astounding to see Barrick Eddon so close, as though he were just another drinker in the Mint— to see both of the young regents here in front of him, as close and as real as could be, as though Tinwright himself were a court favorite they had come to visit. A fantasy about it warmed him for a flickering instant. Ah, what bliss that would be, to have royal patrons… !

  “We are here because it is private,” Brone said.

  “But you said they were only trying to trick us into giving them money for false information.” Tinwright suddenly lost interest in patronage and how the prince and princess were dressed. In fact, he was having great difficulty swallowing: it felt as though a hedgehog had crawled into his throat If they decided that he was guilty of trying to defraud the royal family, they might very well have his head, at the least, he would be banished to one of the smaller islands or sent to work the fields until he was old, until even a tinker’s skinny wife would not slip him a copper for his charming speech (and more physical attentions.) Trying to swindle the royal family! He pressed his legs tightly together so as not to piss himself in front of the Eddon twins.

  “I said that’s what I suspected,” Brone replied, patiently ignoring the prince’s quarrelsome tone. “But if either or both of them actually do know something, I thought it would be better we found out here instead of in front of the entire court.”