Shadowmarch

His twin didn’t seem to be sharing his thought, but gnawed at her lower lip in the way she did when she was worrying about something, a habit carried over from childhood so completely it almost seemed a cherished memento. He followed the line of her sight.The captain of the guard, Vansen, was riding a short distance to the side of them. Barrick felt a touch of jealousy, although he knew it was absurd.

She still hates that one, he thought Loathes him to the point of unfairness, as if it were all his fault Kendrick died. They rode in silence for a long time, so that Barrick was almost drowsing in his saddle when his sister finally spoke, and at first he could make no sense of her words.

“He won’t defend the city.”

“Who? What city?”

“Avin Brone,” she said, as if the name tasted bad. “The rest of South-march, of course, the mainland. He said that the walls are too long and too low on the inland side, and it’s too hard to defend.”

“He’s right How would we do it?” Barrick pointed to the thicket of gabled roofs stretching away down the coastline and outward as far as the base of the hills. He was grateful to be distracted from his own heavy thoughts, but it seemed odd to be talking with his sister about such things—as though they were playing at being adults.

“I don’t know,” she said. “But we can’t possibly get all those people inside the keep…” “The gods save us, no, we bloody well can’t, Briony! You couldn’t get a quarter of them into the castle and have room for them to sit down, let alone feed them all.”

“So we should just abandon them if there’s a siege?”

“We have to hope there won’t be a siege. Because if there is, we’ll have to do more than leave those people to fend for themselves. We’ll have to burn that part of the city down.”

“What? Just to keep the besiegers from getting their hands on the stores there?”

“And the wood, and everything else that we don’t destroy. As it is, you… we… will probably have to stand by while the catapults throw the stones of our own city onto us.”

“You don’t know that, and neither does Avin Brone.” Her anger seemed mostly sadness. “Nobody knows anything! There haven’t been any sieges of proper cities in the Marchlands for half a hundred years—I heard Father talk about it once. Some people say there won’t ever be again because of cannons and bombards and . and all those other things that blow stones and metal balls through the air. There’s no point.”

It annoyed Barrick to be told things about war by his sister. It annoyed him even more that she had clearly been paying more attention than he had. “No point? So what should we do, just surrender?” “That’s not what I meant and you know it.”

The hour wore on as they rode in silence up the coast road into the lower reaches of Landsend. The chill air carried little except the clean tang of the pines and the ever-present smell of the sea.

Briony finally said, “We can’t be certain it will be a siege, Barrick. We don’t even know what these twilight creatures plan—they’re not men, they’re something else Only the gods can guess what they’ll do.”

“We’ll have an idea soon enough. If they’ve marched into Daler’s Troth, we’ll meet people who know something about them and how they fight. We’ll send you back word as soon as we hear anything.”

She turned abruptly to face him. “Oh, Barrick, you will be careful, won’t you? I’m so angry with you, I don’t want you to go.”

He felt himself stiffen. “I’m old enough to decide for myself.”

“But that doesn’t mean it’s right.” She stared, shook her head. “I’m frightened for you. Don’t let’s argue anymore. Just…just don’t do anything foolish, please. No matter what… what dreams you have, what you fear.”

The cold heaviness that had cast a shadow over him all day was abruptly pierced by a shaft of regret and love. He looked at his sister, her so-familiar face—his own face, but seen in a bright mirror, open where he was pinched and hidden, golden and pink where he was angry, bloody-red, and corpse-pale—and wished that things had turned out a different way. For just as he had been struck earlier that day by the powerful certainty that some unstoppable downward slide had begun, so also he couldn’t help feeling deeply, wordlessly, that he and his beloved twin, his best and perhaps only friend, would never again be together in this way.

The certainty hit him now like a blow in the stomach: a gulf would open between them, something wide and deep. Was it death whose cold breath he could almost feel, or something stranger still? Whatever it was, he began to shudder and it quickly became so strong that he could barely stay upright in his saddle. Suddenly he pitched forward, falling down some dark tunnel, flailing away into a nothingness where a cold, knowing presence awaited him…

“Barrick!” He heard her terrified voice as if from the other side of a crowded, noisy room. “Barrick, what’s wrong?”

The roaring in his ears eased a bit. The gray day returned and pushed back the darkness. He was leaning low over his saddle, his head almost on his horse Kettle’s neck. “I’m well enough. Leave me alone.”

A measure of Briony’s fright was that she had seized his crippled arm. He snatched it back and straightened up. No one around them seemed to be staring, but he could tell by the studied way in which they all looking at anything except the prince and his sister that they had only just averted their eyes.

“The gods make a mockery of us,” he said quietly.

His attention distracted by his near-swoon, he had failed to notice that they had arrived at the field. The mustered men were waiting below them in ragged array among the shorn stalks of grain, a thousand or more of the earliest arrivals who had been chivvied into lines by their sergeants, but still did not look much like an army. More men streamed in every day from the provinces, but instead of joining this westbound company most of the newcomers would bolster the defenses of Southmarch itself.

“Don’t say such things about the gods,” Briony pleaded. “Not when you are about to go away. I can’t bear it.”

He looked at her and despite his shame and misery, felt a thump of love for her in his chest. After all, what else did he have in this world? What else did he fear to lose? Nothing. He reached out and patted her hands where they clutched the reins of her horse Snow. “You’re right, strawhead. I’m sorry. And I don’t mean it. I don’t believe the gods are mocking us.”

And he was telling the truth. For in this open place, beneath this low gray sky, Barrick had suddenly decided that he did not believe in the gods at all.

* * *

After clambering all the way down the treacherous paths hidden below the balcony at the end of the Maze —who could have guessed there even were such things as paths going down to the Sea in the Depths? Who used them, the temple brothers?—Chert had finally reached the shore to stand on the rounded stones in a madness of shimmering colors, but he couldn’t find any evidence of how the boy had crossed the silvery sea. He couldn’t help wondering whether he was being punished by the Earth Elders for bringing an outsider down to the sacred Mysteries, for approaching their deep haunts without the proper ceremony. He felt impious just being so close to the Shining Man, which loomed like a mountain at the center of its island. Even here on the shore he could still make little sense of it except for its roughly manlike shape. It wasn’t easy even to see that much the Shining Man’s uneven glow lit the ceiling and reflected from the Sea in the Depths as well, so that all the walls of the huge cavern were painted with smears of wobbly, many-hued light.

But why would the Elders punish me and yet allow the boy to cross? Chert felt a moment of doubt. Perhaps he had not seen Flint at all—perhaps he had been fooled by a bat’s shadow, by his own fatigue, or more likely by the heady, disturbing air of the deepest Mysteries.

Then he saw a movement again on the island, a shadowy silhouette against the glow of the Shining Man that pushed all uncertainty from his mind. “Flint!' he shouted, cupping his hands around his mouth, jumping up and down on the rocky shore. “Flint! It’s me, Chert!”

He fancied that the shadow froze for a moment, but there was no reply to his call and an instant later it vanished in the confusion of pulsing light.

Cursing, he hurried up and down the shore again, but still could find no trace of how the boy had crossed the metallic underground sea. As he stood, muttering in exhausted frustration, he suddenly remembered another small person in his charge, one he had almost completely forgotten in the excitement of seeing what he felt sure was the boy.