Shadowmarch

THE TALE OF YEARS:

Each page turned is a page of fire

The tortoise licks his burned feet

And stares into darkness

—from The Bonefall Oracles

He knew he had to pay attention. Barrick knew that what was happening was terribly important, if hard to believe. He also knew that his sister was expecting him to shoulder some of the burden. He just didn’t know whether he could do it or not.

It was the dreams, his harrowing dreams, wearing him away just as the powerful ocean waves broke down the causeway between Southmarch’s castle and town, so that men had to labor constantly to build it back up again. Sometimes he found it difficult to remember what it felt like simply to be Barrick. There were nights when he woke scratching like a beast at the inside of his chamber door, locked each night by his servants to prevent him from walking in his sleep. Other midnights he came gasping up from nightmares, half certain that he had changed into something else entirely, and could only sit in the dark feeling at first his hands and arms and then, reluctantly, his face, terrified that he might find some dreadful transfiguration had taken place to match those dreams of violence. In many of the dreams he was surrounded by faceless shapes that wanted to imprison him, perhaps even kill him, unless he destroyed them first. Always he woke sweating, breathless with fear that he was becoming some brute beast like a shape-changer out of some old nurse’s tale, and worst of all, that this time the dream creature whose neck had just snapped in his hands would turn out to be a real person he had attacked—someone he knew, perhaps even someone he loved.

In fact, there seemed little separation now between the madness of nightmare and what had been the sanctuary of wakefulness In the dim hours of the previous night he had awakened with a voice in his ear, someone speaking as though they sat right next to him, although the room was silent but for the breath of his slumbering page.

“We do not need the mantle any longer,” it had said—a woman’s voice, commanding, cold. It had not been like something heard in a dream, but had seemed to resound inside the very bones of his skull. He had whimpered at the sound, the nearness of it. “We will sweep down on them like fire. They will fear us in light as well as darkness.”

Prince Barrick?' said a gruff voice.

Someone was trying to get his attention—a real voice, not a midnight dream. He shook his head, trying to make sense.

“Prince Barrick, we know it is an effort for you to be here and we are all grateful for that. Shall I have someone bring you wine?” It was Avin Brone speaking, clumsily trying to let him know he was not paying attention.

“Are you ill again?” Briony asked quietly.

“I am well enough. It is the fever, still I do not sleep well.” He took a breath to clear his head, struggling to remember what the others had been saying. He wanted to show that he was worthy to sit beside his sister. “But why should these fairy-beasts come here and attack us? Why now?'

“We do not know anything for certain, Highness.” That was the quiet one, Vansen, the guard captain. Barrick wasn’t certain what he thought about the man. Briony’s anger with him had been reasonable—letting a reigning prince be killed in his own bedroom was obviously a dereliction of duty, and under old King Ustin the captain’s head would probably have been on a spike above the Basilisk Gate weeks ago—so he was not quite certain why she now seemed to be treating the young soldier like an important adviser. He dimly remembered Briony saying something about it as they made their way to this council, but his head had been pounding from the effort of getting up and getting dressed. “All I can say is that the creature we caught said something about someone leading an army, coming to burn our houses,” Vansen went on. “Strangely, it was a she the goblin said was going to do it. ‘She brings white fire,’ that’s what it told us. ‘Burn all your houses to black stones.’ But perhaps the monster did not speak our tongue well enough Barrick felt a chill trace down his back Vansen’s words were much like his dream, the cold, female voice out of the empty night. He almost said something, but the stony, doubting faces all around made him hold his tongue. The prince is imagining things, they would whisper to each other. His wits are going. He should never have confessed his secrets to Briony. Thank the gods he had not given up all caution and had kept the strangest of them to himself.

“Is there some reason this enemy couldn’t be a woman?” Briony demanded. Barrick could not help noticing changes in his sister: it was as though she had grown bigger, harder, while he grew smaller and more helpless daily. “Didn’t Anglin’s granddaughter Lily lead her people against the Gray Companies? If the Twilight People are somehow led by a woman, does that mean we have no need to be wary of them?”

“No, Highness, of course not.” Vansen flushed easily. Barrick wondered if the man was trying to hide a great anger.

“But the princess raises an important question,” said old Steffans Nynor with surprising matter-of-factness. The castellan seemed to have put aside his fluttery servility in this time of need. Eyes of Heaven, Barrick thought, have I been asleep for a hundred years ? Is everyone turning into something else? For a moment the walls of the chapel seemed to drop away and he was turning, falling. He recovered himself by biting his tongue; as the pain jumped into the back of his mouth he heard Nynor say, “… after all. Perhaps they merely wish to test their strength—a raid or two, then back across the Shadowline.”

“Wishful thinking,” declared Tyne of Blueshore. “Unless Vansen is utterly mistaken, that is no raiding party They are bringing a large army, the kind that will stay in the field until it has accomplished its task.”

“But why me?” said Earl Rorick. “First they steal my bride and her splendid dowry, now they will attack my lands. I have done nothing to offend these creatures!”

“Opportunity, my lord—that seems most likely,” said Vansen. He looked at Rorick with such a calm, measured gaze that Barrick could almost see him weighing the man and finding him to be a short measure. But Vansen is a dalesman, isn’t he? So Rorick is his lord. The idea that a liege lord would not receive the unquestioning respect of all his liegemen was a slightly new one to Barrick, who had spent his childhood so taken with his own cynicism that it had not occurred to him others might also find the ancient order of things to be less than perfect.

“Opportunity?” asked Briony.

“When I was in… when I was behind the Shadowline, Highness,” the captain said, “it was like falling into a fast river, even though I was less troubled than many of my men. But time and even… even the substance of things seemed different from place to place there, in the way… in the way that someone swept down a river might for a moment be pulled down and then be lifted to the surface again, or be caught for a moment in an eddy, then pushed helplessly into the rocks.”

“What are you talking about?” Avin Brone demanded. “You said ‘opportunity?…”

Vansen suddenly realized they were all looking at him. He colored again, lowered his head. “Forgive me, I am but a soldier…”

“Speak.” There was something in his sister’s voice that Barrick had never heard before; again he felt adrift, as though Vansen s river had whirled him far away from his own, familiar life. “You are here precisely because you have seen things the rest of us haven’t, Captain Vansen. Speak.”

“I meant only that… that I wonder why, if they have gathered such an army, they should choose to enter the March Kingdoms at Daler’s Troth. I was born there, so I know it well. There are a few large towns, Dale House and Candlerstown and Hawkshill, but mostly it is hill crofts, a few larger farms, scattered villages. If they mean to come against us, and I believe they do, why should they start so far away? Even if they do not know that my men and I spied them and so they still believe they will surprise us, why should they take the chance that others will flee east with news of their coming and allow us to prepare? If they had come across the Shadowline in the Eastmarch hills, they would have been upon us already and I fear we would not be having this council, unless it was to meet our conquerors.”

“That is treason!” said Rorick. “Who is this lowborn soldier to tell us such things? Are you saying we cannot