Shadowmarch

I am a fortunate man, he told himself. Heaven has smiled on me, far beyond what I have earned, and I have everything I could want —or nearly so. I must accept these great riches and not ask more, not anger the gods with my greed.

I am a fortunate man and I cannot, even in the foolishness of my secret heart, ever forget that.

3. Proper Blue Quartz

THE BIRD WHO IS A RIDDLE:

Beak of silver, bones of cold iron

Wings of setting sun

Claws that catch only emptiness

—from The Bonefall Oracles

The boy from behind the Shadowline stopped to stare at the castle’s jutting towers. The three of them were on the lower reaches of the hill road now, which wound down through rolling farmlands to the edge of the city on the shoreline. The heights of Midlan’s Mount were still distant across the causeway, Wolfstooth Spire looming above all like a dark claw scratching the belly of the sky. “What is that place?” the child asked, almost in a whisper. “Southmarch Castle,” Chert told him. “At least the part with the towers out on that rock in the middle of the bay— the bit on this side is the rest of the town. Yes, Southmarch… some call it Shadowmarch, did I already say that? On account of it’s so close to the…” He remembered where the boy came from and trailed off. “Or you can call it ‘The Beacon of the Marches,’ if you like poetry.”

The boy shook his head, but whether because he didn’t like poetry or for some other reason wasn’t clear. “Big.” “Hurry up, you two.” Opal had marched ahead. “She’s right—we have a long walk yet.”

The boy still hesitated. Chert laid his hand on the boy’s arm. The child seemed strangely reluctant, as though the distant towers themselves were something menacing, but at last he allowed himself to be urged forward. “There’s nothing to be afraid of, lad,” Chert told him. “Not as long as you’re with us. But don’t wander off.”

The boy shook his head again.

As they made their way down from the hilly farmlands into the mainland town, they found wide Market Road lined with people, almost entirely big folk. For a moment Chert wondered why so many people had come out of their houses and shops to stare curiously at two Funderlings and a ragged, white-haired boy, then realized that the royal family’s hunting party must have passed just ahead of them. The crowd was beginning to disperse now, the hawkers desperately reducing the prices of their chestnuts and fried breads, fighting over the few remaining customers. He heard murmurs about the size of something the hunters had caught and paraded past, and other descriptions—scales? Teeth?—that made little sense unless they had been hunting something other than deer. The people seemed a little dispirited, even unhappy. Chert hoped the princess and her sullen brother were safe—he had thought she had kind eyes. But if something had happened to them, he reasoned, surely folk would be talking about it.

It took the best part of the fading afternoon to make their way through the city to the shore, but they arrived at the near end of the causeway with a little time to spare before the rising tide would turn Midlan’s Mount back into an island.

The causeway between the shore and the castle on the Mount was little more than a broad road of piled stones, most of which would vanish under the high tide, but the place where it met the docks outside the castle gate had been built up by generations of fishermen and peddlers until what hung over the water there was nearly a small town in itself, a sort of permanent fairground on the wind-lashed doorstep of Midlan’s Mount. As the Funderling, his wife, and their new guest trudged across the piers and wooden platforms filled with flimsy, close- leaning buildings whose floors stood only a few cubits above the reach of high tide, dodging wagons and heavily laden foot-peddlers hurrying to cross back over the causeway before nightfall, Chert looked out through a crack between two rickety shops, across the mouth of Brenn’s Bay to the ocean. Despite the last of the bright afternoon sun there were clouds spread thick and dark along the horizon, and Chert suddenly remembered the shocking thing that the arrival of the riders and the mysterious boy had driven from his mind.

The Shadowline! Someone must be told that it’s moved. He would have liked to think that the king’s family up in the castle already knew, that they had taken all the facts into careful consideration and decided that it meant nothing, that all was still well, but he couldn’t quite make himself believe it.

Someone must be told. The thought of going up to the castle himself was daunting, although he had been inside the keep several times as part of Funderling work gangs, and had even led a few, working directly with Lord Nynor, the castellan—or with his factor, in any case. But to go by himself, as though he were a man of importance.

But if the big folk do not know, someone must tell them. And perhaps there will even be some reward in it —enough to buy Opal that new shawl, if nothing else. Or at least to pay for what this young creature will eat when Opal gets him home.

He regarded the boy for a moment, horrified by the sudden realization that Opal might very well intend to keep him. A childless woman, he thought, was as unpredictable as a loose seam in a bed of sandstone.

Hold now, one thing at a time. Chert watched the clouds hurrying across the ocean, their black expanse making the mighty towers suddenly seem fragile, delicate as pastry. Someone needed to tell the king’s people about the Shadowline, there was no arguing it. If I go to the Guild, there will be days of argument, then Cinnabar or puffed-up Young Pyrtte will be appointed messenger and I will get no reward.

Nor will you get the punishment if you’re wrong, he reminded himself.

For some reason he again saw before his mind’s eye the young princess and her brother, Briony’s frightened gaze when she thought she had run him down, the prince s face as troubled and impersonal as the sky out beyond the Mount, and he felt a sudden warmth that almost, if it had not been so ridiculous, felt like loyalty.

They need to know, he decided, and suddenly the idea of what might be coming closer behind that line of moving darkness pushed anything so abstract as the good graces of the royal family from his mind There was another way to pass the news, and he would use it Everyone needs to know.

* * *

Although his horse was dead, left behind for three servants to bury on the hillside where the wyvern had died, Prince Kendrick himself had suffered little more than bruises and a few burns from the creature’s venomous froth. Of all the company he was the only one who seemed in good cheer as they made their way back toward the castle, the huge corpse of the wyvern coiled on an open wagon for the amazement of the populace. Market Road was crowded with people, hundreds and hundreds waiting to see the prince regent and his hunting party. Hawkers, tumblers, musicians, and pickpockets had turned out too, hoping to earn a few small coins out of the spontaneous street fair, but Briony thought most of the people seemed glum and worried. Not much money was changing hands, and those nearest the road watched the nobles go by with hungry eyes, saying little, although a few called out cheers and blessings to the royal family, especially on behalf of the absent King Olin. Kendrick had been splashed in blood from head to foot; even after he had washed and then rubbed himself with rags and soothing leaves, much of him was still stained a deep red. Despite the itch where the wyvern s spittle burned him, he made it a point to wave and smile to the citizens crowded in the shadows of the tall houses along the Market Road, showing them that the blood was not his own.

Briony felt as though she, too, were covered with some painful substance she could not shake off. Her twin Barrick was so miserable about his clumsy failure even to raise his spear properly that he had not spoken a word to her or anyone else on the ride home. Earl Tyne and others were whispering among themselves, no doubt unhappy that the foreigner Shaso had stolen their sport by killing the wyvern with an arrow. Tyne Aldritch was one of that school of nobles who believed that archery was a practice fit only for peasants and poachers, an activity whose primary result was to steal the glory from mounted knights in war. Only because the master of arms might have