by Tad Williams
Within a few breaths she was asleep.
She woke for just a few short moments. Above her head bare feet thumped on the planks and voices rose, shouting instructions and singing songs of the hard sea life as the sailors of the Morning Star qfKirous prepared to journey to Hierosol.
39. Winter’s Eve
DANCING FOR WINTER:
Dust, dust, ice, ice
She wears the bones for eyes
She waits until the singing stops
—from The Bonefall Oracles
Puzzle was in surprisingly fine voice, a slight quaver the only thing to betray the passage of so many years. Otherwise, Briony might have thought time had turned tail, that she was again a little girl sitting on her father’s lap, the wind plucking in angry frustration at the roofs outside while they all sat safe and warm in the great dining hall.
But those days were gone, she reminded herself. Nothing would bring them back. And if Tyne had really lost the battle, it could be that soon no one alive would even remember those times.
Puzzle strummed his lute, continuing with the long, sad story of Prince Caylor and the Ever- Wounded Maid.
“… Then did he first glimpse her, the bleeding maid:”
The old jester crooned, telling of the knight’s entrance into the Siege of Always-Winter.
“He thought her sore hurt, e’en dead, and his noble heart.
Did quail with woe to think that such a bloom must fade. Before e’er it had been tasted by kiss, or figured by art; But then opened she her eyes, and, as she saw him there, Smiled, though her beauteous face was wan and sad— A pearl dtsplay’d upon the cushion of her golden hair—
And he thought no empress of the south could match the loveliness she had. Then Caylor’s heart flew like an unhooded hawk, straight to her breast, Although the troubled knight did not know whether he were curst or blest.”
She had to admit she was surprised, not so much to find that Puzzle could still sing, but by the grace of Matty Tinwright’s words. The young poet sat at the end of one of the front tables, near Puzzle’s stool, looking as though he knew he had actually done something worthwhile.
It was certainly a change from his dreadful, lugubrious paeans of praise to her, his comparisons of her to a virgin deity, full of aching stretches for rhymes—there were not many things that rhymed with “Zoria,” “merciful,” or “goddess,” after all. She was impressed and even pleased. She had given Tinwright a commission as much to irritate Barrick and amuse herself as anything else, but perhaps he would eventually prove a true poet after all.
Unless, she suddenly thought, he has stolen the whole thing from some obscure source. No, it was Winter’s Eve. She would be charitable. She would even say something nice to him, although nothing so fulsome as to fetch him puppy-dogging after her all evening.
“Thus, mstanter, Caylor pledged himself her slave, Declared that by her token whole worlds would he throw down, Yet she only shook her fair head and a reproachful look him gave, And raised her hands, white arms reaching from bloody-sleeved gown. Then said she, ‘Good knight, worlds shall not woo me, nor words, But only and you free me from this wound that steals my life Shall I be yours.
One year gone I spurned haughty Raven, Prince of Birds, And he did my breast pierce with his terrible slow knife All of the physick of my father’s court cannot staunch or even slow. The wound that dire blade to me gave, nor stop this crimson flow.’ ”
Briony even smiled at Puzzle, who barely noticed. He was enjoying this moment of attention so much that he seemed to forget it was the royal family to whom he owed his position, not the courtiers, who considered the old man a rather tiresome jest. Still, he was the center of all eyes, or should have been, and he clearly reveled in it.
The rest of the assembled nobility seemed strange to Briony. Conversation was awkward, many whispering, others speaking too loudly, even after an evening’s indulgence. The Tollys and their allies had made it clear they considered the feast as an insult to Gailon’s memory and had not appeared. Thus, there had been even more drinking than would be expected on Winter’s Eve, mulled wine being sluiced down throats as though many of those present expected the worst and expected it soon—for gossip about the possible fate of Southmarch’s army had sped through the castle all evening, tales of terror and defeat flying to every corner like little white moths rushing out of a long-closed wardrobe. Briony herself had needed to soothe Rose and Moina, both in tears, who were certain that they would be ravished by monsters.
Yes, and they were certain that Dawet and his Hierosol men would ravish them as well, Briony thought sourly. On that night. And precious little help they were to me or anyone else…
She shied away from any more thoughts of Kendrick’s death, let her mind instead hold the memory of Dawet dan-Faar. Surrounded by red-flushed, drunken faces, she found herself longing for his company. Not in a romantic way—she looked around as though even the thought might have been obvious to those around her, but the nobles were busy licking suet pudding from their fingers and calling for more wine. No, it would have been a pleasure simply because of the quickness of his wit. There was no blurnness in Dawet, who seemed always sharp as a knife. She doubted he drank at all, and felt certain that even if he did, few had ever seen him the worse for it…
Oh, by all the gods, what will we do? How will we save ourselves? It had been gnawing at her since she received Brone’s news and she couldn’t keep it at bay any longer. She couldn’t even bear to consider that anything might have happened to Barrick, but had to accept the possibility that Tyne Aldritch and his army had failed. What then? How could she and her nobles plan for a siege against such a mysterious force?
Thoughts turning round and round between those who were missing— she could not have imagined a Winter’s Eve so friendless, so bereft of family— and the malevolent creatures who seemed now to be separated from her beloved Southmarch Castle only by the narrow protection of the bay, Briony suddenly remembered that she had promised she would see her stepmother Anissa tonight Her first inclination was to send a servant to make her apologies, but as she looked around the room, at the sickly, over-cheerful faces of those who were still upright, at the ruin of the meal scattered down the tables, bones and shreds of skin and puddles of red wine like the remnants of some dreadful battle, she decided that she could think of nothing better than to walk for a time in the night air, and that a visit to her bedbound stepmother, who was only days away from giving birth at most, would be the most acceptable excuse.
Although it took some doing, she even managed to create in herself a small amount of sympathy for Anissa If Briony felt so helpless, with the reins of the kingdom in her hands, how much worse must it feel to her stepmother, big with child and forced to sift through the conflicting rumors that flittered into her tower?
A smattering of lazy applause and a few drunken cheers caught her attention the song had ended. Briony was a little shamed to realize she had missed most of it.
“Very fine,” she said out loud, and clapped her hands. “Well sung, good Puzzle. One of the best entertainments we have had for many a year.”
The aged man beamed.
“Serve him,” she directed one of the pages, “for such splendid singing must be thirsty work.” “I will not take all credit, Highness,” Puzzle said as he held out his hand for the cup. “I was assisted.”
“By Master Tinwnght, yes You told us. And to him I also say, well done, sir You have breathed new life into an old and beloved tale “ She tried to remember how the story of the Ever-Wounded Maid ended, hoping that Tinwright had not adopted some modern approach to the finish that she hadn’t heard, which would make it embarrassingly clear that her mind had wandered. “Like Caylor, you have found the song that heals the Raven Prince’s dreadful deed.”
She seemed to have got it right. Tinwright looked as though he wished he could throw himself before her and become her footstool.
Yes, but he won’t be able to find a rhyme for that eith
er, she thought. It was hard to break old habits.
She stood with a rustling of underskirts and said, “I must go now and take the tidings of the new season to my stepmother, Queen Anissa.” Those who could still do so levered themselves upright as well. “Please, sit yourselves down. The feast is not ended. Servants, keep the wine flowing until I return, so our guests may celebrate the warmth that the Orphan brought back. Remember, there is no season so dark that it does not see the sun come again.”
Gods protect me, she thought as she swished toward the door in her great hooped skirt, I’m beginning to talk like one of Tinwright’s characters.
Heryn Millward, the young soldier from Suttler’s Wall, was one of the two guards accompanying her tonight; the other was a slightly older fellow, dark-stubbled and taciturn. She remembered to wish them both good tidings for this night and tomorrow’s holy day—the courtesy acted as a sort of hedge against being impatient at how slowly they walked, encumbered by armor and halberds.
She had just crossed the outer courtyard and had almost reached Anissa’s residence in the Tower of Spring when a figure stepped out of the shadows in front of her. Her heart slithered up into her throat and she only recognized the apparition one thin moment before young Millward shoved the spiked head of his halberd into the intruder’s guts.
“Stop, guard!” she cried.”Chaven? Merciful Zoria, what are you doing? You could have been killed! And where have you been?”
The physician looked startled and even shamefaced as he stared down at the sharp spike wavering in front of his belly. When he lifted his gaze to Briony’s, she saw that he was pale and puffy, blue-circled beneath the eyes, and that he had not put a razor to his beard for days. “My apologies for frightening you, Princess,” he said. “Although it would have been worse for me than for you, it seems.”
As great a relief as it was to see him, she was not prepared to forget her anger. “Where have you been? Merciful Zona, do you know how many times in these latest days I wanted desperately to talk to you? You have always been our adviser as well as our doctor. Where did you go?”
“That is a long story, Highness, and not one for a cold and windy courtyard, but I will tell you all the tale soon.”
“We are at war, Chaven! The Twilight People are on our doorstep and you simply disappeared.” She felt her eyes fill with tears and wiped angrily with her sleeve. “Barrick is gone, too, fighting those creatures. And there are worse things, things you do not know. May all the gods confound you, Chaven, where have you been?”
He shook his head slowly. “I deserve that curse, but largely because I have been foolish. I have been hard at work trying to solve a dire riddle— more than one, to be honest—and it all has taken longer than I guessed it would.Yes, I know about the Twilight People, and about Barrick. I was absent from the court, but not from gossip, which travels everywhere.”
She threw her hands up in exasperation. “Riddles—there are already too many riddles! In any case, I am going now to see my stepmother. I must do that before we can talk.”
“Yes, I know that, too. And I think I should accompany you.” “She is close to her time.”
“And that is another reason I should come.”
She waved at the guards to lower their weapons. “Come along, then. I will drink a posset with her, then we will go.” “It may not be so swift, Highness,” Chaven suggested.
Briony did not have the patience on this long, woeful night to try to work out what he meant.
* * *
There seemed no proper way, Chert reflected, to prepare yourself to die, but it also seemed as though this was the second or third time in the last few days he had been forced to try. “I don’t want to,” he said quietly. The armored, yellow-eyed shapes looked down at him without a glimmer of emotion, their spear points a ring of dull gleams in the grayish light, but the strange man beside him stirred.
“Of course not,” Gil said. “All that live cling to life. Even, I think, my people.”
Chert bowed his head, thinking of Opal and the boy, how little all this meant, how foolish and unnatural it was compared to his life with them. There was a rising patter that for a moment he felt certain was his own racing heart. Then he recognized the sound and looked up, not in hope, but instead almost in annoyance that the horrible waiting would continue.
The man, if it was a man, rode one of the largest horses Chert had ever seen: the top of his own head would barely reach its knees. The rider was large, too, but not freakishly so, dressed in armor that looked a bit like polished tortoiseshell, gray and brown-blue. A sword dangled at the newcomer’s side; under his arm he carried a helmet in the shape of an animal’s skull, some unrecognizable creature with long fangs.
But it was his face that was the strangest part. For a moment Chert thought the tall rider was wearing a mask of ivory, for other than the ruby-red eyes beneath the pale brow the stranger had no face, only a slight vertical ridge where a nose might be and a smooth expanse of white down to the chin. It was only when he caught a glimpse of the white neck working beneath that chin as the stranger looked Gil up and down that Chert was convinced once and for all that the stranger was not wearing a mask but his own actual flesh.
“His name is Gyir the Storm Lantern,” Gil announced suddenly. “He says we are to follow him.” Chert laughed, a broken sound even to his own ears. If he had not gone mad, then Gil had—or the world had. “Says? He has no mouth!”
“He speaks. Perhaps it is only that I feel his words inside me. Do you not hear him?”
“No.” Chert was weary, as exhausted as if seeping minerals had soaked his bones and changed them to heavy rock. When the faceless rider turned back toward the city and the guards prodded Chert with their spears, he marched ahead of them, but despite the sharp pikes at his back he did not have the will or the strength to move swiftly.
* * *
The Square of Three Gods had been draped all around with dark-colored cloths, so that even in the light of many torches the buildings hid behind veils of shadow. She was waiting for them in a chair before the temple steps, a plain, high-backed chair out of some merchant’s house that she invested with the terrible dignity of a throne.
She was as tall as Gyir but both more and less ordinary to look at; she was beautiful in a weird, drawn-out way, the planes of her brown face and her bright eyes just a bit beyond human from most angles, then—when she cocked her head to listen to some sound Chert could not hear, or to look over the square, surveying her legions who sat patiently on the ground— she abruptly seemed too extreme to pass for a person even at a distance, like something seen through deep water or thick clear crystal.
She was dressed as for war in a suit of black plate armor covered almost everywhere, but most heavily on the back and shoulders, with shockingly long spines, so that from a distance it was hard to make out her shape at all. Now that he was kneeling before her, it was clear to Chert that she had two arms and two legs and a slender, womanly figure, but even when he finally gathered the courage to look up at her, it was hard to look very long There was something in her, some blunt, terrifying power, that pushed his eyes away after only a few moments.
Yasammez, Gil had called her as he made a sleepwalker’s obeisance. His onetime mistress, he had said before. He had not spoken to her again since he knelt and saluted her, nor she to him.
The tall woman with the thickly coiling black hair now lifted a gauntleted hand and said something in the unfamiliar tongue, her voice deep as a man’s but with its own slow music. Chert felt all the hairs on his neck rise at once. This is all a nightmare, a part of him shrilled, trying to explain what could not be, but that part was buried deep and he could barely hear it. A nightmare You will wake up soon.
“She wants the mirror,” Gil said, getting to his feet.
The idea of resisting never even occurred to him Chert fumbled out the circle of bone and silvered crystal, held it out. The woman did not take it from him, instead, Gil plucked it from Chert’s pal
m and passed it to her with another bow. She held it up to catch the torchlight and for a moment the Funderling thought he saw a look of anger or something much like it flick across her spare, stony face. She spoke again, a long disquisition of clicks and murmurs.
“She says she will honor her part of the Pact and send the glass to Qul-na-Qar, and that for the moment there will be no more killing of mortals unless the People are forced to defend themselves.” Gil listened as she spoke again, then he replied, more swiftly and ably now, in that same tongue.
“She speaks to me as though I am the king himself,” Gil said quietly to Chert. “She says that by the success of this deed, I have won a short truce for the mortals I told her that the king speaks through me, but only from a distance, that I am not him.”
King? Distance? Chert had not the slightest idea what any of this signified. The oppressive strangeness was so thick it made him want to weep, but there was also some stubborn thing in him like the rock that was in his people’s names and hearts, a residue of spirit that did not want to show fear before these beautiful, savage creatures.
The woman Yasammez extended her arm, the mirror in her long, long fingers. The faceless creature called Gyir the Storm Lantern strode forward and took it from her No words were exchanged, at least none that Chert could hear Gyir made a bow as he put it into the purse at his waist, then drew his fingers across his eyes in a ritual manner before mounting his great gray horse.
“She bids him take it swiftly and carefully to the blind one in Qul-na-Qar,” Gil explained, as though he could understand silent commands as well as spoken ones. “She says if anything happens to the queen in the glass, then she,Yasammez, will make all the earth weep blood.”
Chert only shook his head. He was having trouble paying attention to any of what was happening now. It was all too much.
Gyir swung up into the saddle and jabbed at the horse’s flanks with his spurs. The beast’s hooves dug into the earth of Temple Square and then rider and mount sped off, vanishing from sight so quickly that they might have been marionettes suddenly yanked from the stage.
