saved the lives of the young prince and princess was the hunters’ unhappiness muttered instead of proclaimed aloud.
And more than a dozen of the dogs, including sweet Dado, a brachet who in her first months of life had slept in Briony s bed, lay cold and still on the leafy hillside beside Kendrick’s horse, waiting to be buried in the same pit.
“Why the grim look, little sister?” Kendrick demanded. “It is a beautiful day and summer has not entirely left us yet.” He laughed. “Look at the clothes I have ruined! My best riding jacket. Merolanna will skin me.”
Briony managed a tiny smile. It was true—she could already hear what their great-aunt would have to say, and not just about the jacket. Merolanna had a tongue that everyone in the castle, except perhaps Shaso, feared, and Briony would have given odds that the old Tuani only hid his terror better than others did. “I just… I don’t know.” She looked around to make sure that her black-clad twin was still a few dozen paces behind them. “I fear for Barrick,” she said quietly. “He is so angry of late. Today has only made it worse.”
Kendrick scratched his scalp, smearing himself anew with drying blood. “He needs toughening, little sister. People lose hands, legs, but they continue with their lives, thanking the gods they have not suffered worse. It does no good for him to be always brooding over his injuries. And he spends too much time with Shaso—the stiffest neck and coldest heart in all the marchlands.”
Briony shook her head. Kendrick had never understood Barrick, although that had not kept him from loving his younger brother. And he didn’t understand Shaso very well either, although the old man was indeed stiff and stubborn. “It’s more than that…”
She was interrupted by Gailon Tolly riding back down the road toward them, followed by his personal retinue, the Summerfield boar on their green-and-gold livery brighter than the dull sky. “Highness! A ship has come in from the south!”
Briony’s chest tightened. “Oh, Kendrick, do you think it’s something about Father?” The Duke of Summerfield looked at her tolerantly, as though she might have been his own young and slightly sheltered sister. “It is a carrack—the
Without realizing it, Briony had reached out and grabbed at Kendrick’s red-smeared arm. Her horse bumped flanks with her brother’s mount. “Pray all heaven, he is not hurt, is he?” she asked Gailon, unable to keep the terror from her voice. The cold shadow she had felt all day seemed to draw closer. “The king is well?”
Summerfield nodded. “I am told the man says your father continues unharmed, and that he brings a letter from him, among other things.”
“Oh, the gods are good,” Briony murmured.
Kendrick frowned. “But why has Ludis sent this envoy? That bandit who calls himself Protector of Hierosol can’t think we have found all the ransom for the king yet. A hundred thousand gold dolphins! It will take us at least the rest of the year to raise it—we have dragged every last copper out of the temples and merchant houses, and the peasants are already groaning under the new taxes.”
“Peasants always groan, my lord,” said Gailon. “They are as lazy as old donkeys—they must be whipped to work.”
“Perhaps the envoy from Hierosol saw all these nobles in their fine clothes, out hunting,” Barrick suggested sourly. None of them had noticed him riding closer. “Perhaps he has decided that if we can afford such expensive amusements, we must have found the money.”
The Duke of Summerfield looked at Barrick with incomprehension Kendrick rolled his eyes, but otherwise ignored his younger brother’s gibe, saying, “It must be something important that brings him. Nobody sails all the way from Hierosol to carry a letter from a prisoner, even a royal prisoner.”
The duke shrugged. “The envoy asks for an audience tomorrow.” He looked around and spotted Shaso riding some distance back, but lowered his voice anyway. “And another thing. He is as black as a crow.” “What has Shaso’s skin to do with anything?” Kendrick demanded, irritated. “No, the envoy, Highness. The envoy from Hierosol.”
Kendrick frowned. “That is a strange thing.”
“The whole of it is strange,” said Gailon of Summerfield. “Or so I hear.”
If the nameless boy had seemed disturbed by his first glimpse of the castle, he appeared positively terrified by the Basilisk Gate in the castle’s massive outwall. Chert, who had been in and out of it so many times he had lost count, allowed himself to see it now with a stranger’s eyes. The granite facing four times a man’s height—and many more times Chert’s own small stature—was carved in the likeness of a glowering reptilian creature whose twining coils surmounted the top of the gate and looped down on either side. The monster’s head jutted out above the vast oak-and-iron doors, its staring eyes and toothy mouth dressed with thin slabs of gemstone and ivory, its scales edged with gold. In the Funderling guilds, if not among the big folk, it was common knowledge that the gate had been here far longer than the human inhabitants.
“That monster is not alive,” he told the child gently. “Not even real. It is only chiseled stone.”
The boy looked at him, and Chert thought that something in his expression seemed deeper and stranger than mere terror.
“I … I do not like to see it,” he said.
“Then close your eyes while we walk through, otherwise we will not be able to reach our house. That is where the food is.”
The boy squinted up at the lowering worm for a moment through his pale lashes, then shut his eyes tight. “Come on, you two!” Opal called. “It will be dark soon.”
Chert led the boy under the gate. Guards in high-crested helmets and black tabards watched curiously, unused to the sight of a human child being led by Funderlings. But if these tall men wearing the Eddons’ silver wolf-and-stars emblem were concerned by the oddity, they were not concerned enough to lift their halberds and move out of the last warm rays of the sun.
The princess and her party had already reached their destination. As the Funderlings and their new ward reached arcade-fenced Market Square in front of the great Trigon temple, Chert could see all the way to the new wall at the base of the central hill, where the lights of the inner keep were as numerous as fireflies on a midsummer evening. The keep’s Raven’s Gate was open and dozens of servants with torches had come out from the residence to meet the returning hunters, to take the horses and equipment and guide the nobles to hot meals and warm beds.
“Who rules here?' asked the boy.
It seemed an odd sort of question, and now it was Chert who hesitated. “In this country? Do you mean in name? Or in truth?”
The boy frowned—the meaning was chopped too fine for him. “Who rules in that big house?”
It still seemed a strange thing for a child to ask, but Chert had experienced far stranger today. “King Olin, but he is not here. He is a prisoner in the south.” Almost half a year had passed since Olin had left on his journey to urge the small kingdoms and principalities across the heartland of Eion to make federation against Xis. He had hoped to unite them against the growing menace of the Autarch, the god-king who was reaching out from his empire on the southern continent of Xand to snap up territories along the lower coast of Eion like a spider snaring flies, but instead Olin had been delivered by the treachery of his rival Hesper, King of Jellon, into the hands of the Protector of Hierosol, an adventurer named Ludis Drakava who was now master of that ancient city. But Chert scarcely understood all the details himself. It was far too much to try to explain to a small, hungry child. “The king’s oldest son Kendrick is the prince regent. That means he is the ruler while his father is gone. The king has two younger children, too—a son and daughter.”
A gleam came to the boy’s eyes, a light behind a curtain. “Merolanna?'
“Merolanna?” Chert stared as if the child had slapped him. “You have heard of the duchess? You must be from somewhere near here. Where are you from, child? Can you remember now?”
