Shadowmarch

which made Chert’s already wretched position even more so.

“But I’m afraid to lose so much time—if the boy’s down there, it’s been hours already. It’s a dangerous place, Beetledown. Strange, too. I… I’m very frightened for him.”

“So?” The Rooftopper frowned in puzzlement, then gradually his tiny brows unkinked, although the understanding obviously brought him no happiness. “Tha wants to take me down with.”

“I can’t think of anything else to do, any other way to track him—there are many paths, many ways. I’m sorry. But I won’t take you against your will.”

“Th’art much the bigger of us twain.”

“That doesn’t matter. I won’t take you against your will.”

Beetledown’s frown returned. “Tha said ‘twas a sacred place—banned to outliers.”

“That’s why I said I had a difficult decision. But I’ve decided I’d rather break the law and take you into the Mysteries than leave my boy alone down there any longer than I have to—if you’ll go. Besides, the boy himself is no Funderling, so the law’s already fair cracked and riven, as we say.”

The little man sighed, a minuscule noise like the squeak of a worried mouse. “My queen bade me give ‘ee help with nose and otherwise. Can Beetledown the Bowman do less than un’s mistress bids un?”

“The Earth Elders bring you and all your people good luck,” said Chert, relieved. “You are as brave as you keep saying you are.”

“That be the solemn truth.”

* * *

Their paths intersected at the doorway of the armory. Vansen had his arms full of polishing cloths, which he was borrowing, since they had run out in the guards’ hall, and he almost did not see her—in fact, almost knocked her over. Astonishingly, she seemed to be alone. She was dressed in a simple long shirt and breeches like a man’s, and Ferras Vansen was so surprised to see the face that had been in his mind’s eye all day that for a long moment he simply couldn’t believe it was true.

“M—My lady,” he said at last. “Highness. Here—you must not do that. It is not fitting.”

Princess Briony had been picking up his dropped cloths, her face wearing a pleasantly distracted expression that was almost insulting—it was obvious that she did not recognize him outside of the formal setting of an audience or council chamber. Her features abruptly changed and tightened, eyebrows lifting in a formal gesture of polite surprise. “Captain Vansen,” she said coolly. He had a brief glimpse of her guards—two of his own men— hurrying toward them across the armory courtyard, as if their own captain might be a threat to the princess.

“Your pardon, please, Highness.” He did his best to get out of her way, a gesture made difficult not only by the fact that she was holding the handle of the door, but because he was full-laden and she was not. He only managed it by clumsily dropping a few of the cloths again as he backed into the armory. He hid his terrible embarrassment by bending to pick them up.

Gods save me! Even when we meet almost as equals, alone in the armory doorway, I immediately turn myself into a bumbling peasant.

A second, equally unpleasant thought suggested that maybe this was just as well. After all, the sooner you get over this stupidity the better, a more sensible part of himself pointed out. If shame alone will do that, then shame is a good thing.

He glanced up at her face, saw the mixture of amusement and annoyance moving there. He had managed to block her way again. But I will never get over it, he thought, and in that painful, radiant instant he couldn’t imagine knowing anything with more certainty, not his love of his family, not his duty to the guards or to the all-seeing gods themselves.

Princess Briony suddenly seemed to realize she was smiling at his discomfiture; the transition of her features back to bland watchfulness was astonishingly swift and more than a little saddening. Such a lively face, he thought. But over the past weeks she had been slowly, purposefully turning it into something else —the marble mask of a portrait bust, something that might stand for decades in one of the castle’s dusty halls. “Do you need any help, Captain Vansen?” She nodded to her two hurrying protectors. “One of these guards could help you carry those things.”

She would lend him one of his own guardsmen to help him carry a few pieces of cloth. Was it real malice, or just girlish snippishness? “No, Highness, I can manage. Thank you.” He bent a knee and bowed a little, careful not to drop his burden again. She took the hint and moved from the doorway so that he could escape, although he had to glare her two panting guards back out of the way first. He was so relieved to escape her overwhelming presence that it was all he could do, after a final turn and bow, to walk rather than run away.

“Captain Vansen?”

He winced, then wheeled to face her again. “Yes, Highness?”

“I do not approve of my brother appointing himself head of this… expedition.You know that.” “It seemed clear, Highness.”

“But he is my brother, and I love him. I have already…” Oddly, she smiled, but it was clear she was also fighting tears. “I have already lost one brother. Barrick is the only one I have left to me.”

He swallowed. “Highness, your brother’s death was…”

She raised her hand, at another time he might have thought she was being imperious. “Enough I do not say it to to blame you again. I just…” She turned away for a moment so she could dab at her eyes with the long sleeve of her man’s shirt as though the tears were little enemies that had to be swiftly and brutally eradicated. “I am asking you, Captain Vansen, to remember that Barrick Eddon is not just a prince, not just a member of the ruling family. He is my brother, my my twin I am terrified that something might happen to him.”

Ferras was moved. Even the guardsmen, a pair of young louts who Vansen knew well and did not think could muster the finer feelings of a shoat between them, were nervous now, unsettled by the openness of the princess regent’s grief. “I will do my best, Highness,” he told her. “Please believe that… I will… I will treat him as though he were my own brother.”

Immediately upon saying it he reahzed that he had been foolish again— had insinuated that under ordinary circumstances he would give more care to his own family than to his lord and master, the prince regent. This seemed a particularly dangerous thing to say considering that one prince regent had already died while he, Vansen, was the officer of record.

I am truly an idiot, he thought. Blinded by my feelings I have spoken to the mistress of the kingdom as though she were a crofter’s daughter from the next farm over.

To his surprise, though, there were tears in Briony’s eyes again. “Thank you, Captain Vansen,” was all she said.

* * *

She had looked forward all morning to stealing a little time for practice, been desperate for the release of swinging the heavy wooden sword, but now that the time had finally come, it only made her feel clumsy and tired.

It is that man Vansen. He always unsettled her, made her angry and disturbed—- just seeing him reminded her of Kendrick, of that terrible night. And now it seemed he might be standing by to watch another of her brothers die, for none of her arguments could make Barrick change his mind. But was it Vansen’s fault, or was it only some terrible joke of the gods that he should be attached to so much of her misery?

Nothing made sense. She let the sword drop into the sawdust of the practice ring. One of the guards moved forward to pick it up but she waved him off. Nothing made sense. She was miserable.

Sister Utta. She had scarcely had time for her tutor lately, and Briony suddenly realized how much she missed the older woman’s calming presence. She snatched up a cloth to wipe her hands, then stamped her feet to shake off the sawdust before setting out for Utta’s apartments, guards scuttling after her like chickens behind a gram-scattering farmwife. She had crossed the courtyard and was just walking into the long, narrow Lesser Hall when for the second time in an hour she nearly knocked over a young man. It was not Vansen this time, but the young poet—well, the so-called poet, she could not help thinking— Matty Tinwright. He reacted with elaborately pleased surprise, but by the care he had put into his hair and clothes, his swift breathing, and his position just inside the doorway, she rather thought he had been watching her come across the courtyard from one of the windows and then had hurried down the hall to manufacture this “accidental” meeting.