Shadowmarch

standing, her chair tumbled over behind her. Brone grabbed for her arm—she almost struck him for trying—but he could not stop her. Her sword hissed from the scabbard.

“If you think my clothes amusing,” she said through teeth clenched so hard her jaw would ache later, “perhaps you will find my blade amusing, too.”

“Princess!” hissed Sisel, shocked, but he was not such a fool as to grab at someone with a naked blade quivering in her hand, woman or no.

Hendon Tolly stood up slowly, pleased and not doing much about hiding it. His hand dropped to his own hilt and caressed it briefly, his eyes all the time fixed on hers. “Amusing indeed,” he said, “but of course I could not raise my hand against the princess regent, even for such diverting sport. Perhaps we could have a test with children’s weapons sometime, so that no one takes harm.”

Her heart was thundering now. She was tempted to charge him, to force him to unsheathe, no matter the result, if only to wipe that mocking satisfaction from his lean face. She did not even care that he was a well-known swordsman and she was simply the pupil of another famous blade, a pupil who had scarcely practiced since the summer and could not hope to equal Tolly even on her very best day. It would almost be worth it to force him to kill her in self-defense. Nobody would be laughing then, and all her cares would be over.

But I’d never see Barrick again, or Father. Her arm was shaking badly. She lowered the blade until the tip clicked against the table leg. And one of the bloody Tollys would wind up as regent until Anissa’s child is born —if they let it live.

“Get out of my sight,” she said to Hendon Tolly, then turned her eye on the rest of the table, the rows of pale, gaping faces, some still with lumps of gravied meat congealing in their fingers, arrested halfway from plate to mouth. “All of you. All of you!”

But it was Briony herself who slammed the sword back into its sheath and then turned and stalked out of the Great Hall, scattering servants as she went. She managed to wait until the door fell shut behind her before letting the flood of angry tears overwhelm her.

33. The Pale Things

STAR ON THE SHIELD:

All the ancestors are singing

The stones are piled one on another in wet grass

Two newborn calves wait trembling

—from The Bonefall Oracles

It was a grim thing to stand at the Northmarch crossroad where he had stood only the month before and see the hills now smothered by dark vines and nodding, bruise-colored flowers. The soldiers whispered among themselves and scuffed their feet like restless cattle, but it was a far more disturbing sight for Ferras Vansen. He had seen such vegetation before, but forty miles or more to the west. It had spread far in a short time.

“Where are those scouts?” asked Earl Tyne for the fifth or sixth time in an hour. He slapped his gloved hands together as though the day were bitterly cold, though the sun had not yet set and the wind was mild for Ondekamene. The war leader had dumped his helmet on the ground like an empty bucket and pushed back his arming cap, his coarse, gray-shot hair stood up in tufts. He stared out at the strange sheen of the meadows and the black blossoms moving in the breeze like the heads of children watching them silently from the deep grass. “They should have been back by now.”

“Domey and the others are good men, my lord.” Vansen looked across at the resting soldiers. At any other time after such a long halt they would have gone straying off into the grass like untended sheep, but instead they stood uncomfortably where they had stopped, as if prisoned by the edges of the road. These sons of farmers and shopkeepers wanted no part of the thorny vines or the unnatural, oily-looking flowers.

“You said you’ve seen this before,Vansen.”

“Yes, Lord Aldritch. With my troop, in the north of Silverside. Just a little while before… before things began to go wrong.”

“Well, blood of the gods, keep your mouth shut about that, will you?” Tyne scowled. “This lot are all about ready to turn tail and run all the way back to Southmarch.” He glared at a shaven-headed mantis making an elaborate show of wafting a bowl of incense around in the middle of the crossroad, moaning and singing as he went about his task of banishing evil spirits. Many of the men watched this spectacle with obvious unease. “I’m going to have that priest’s head off,” the Earl of Blueshore growled, almost to himself.

“I think this lot will be all right when the time comes, my lord. Many of them have fought on the Brenland borders or against the Kertish hill bandits. It’s the waiting that’s hard on them.”

Tyne took a drink from his saddle-cup and looked at the guard captain for a long, considering moment. “It’s hard on all of us—that’s the cursed thing. Bad enough waiting for the enemy to show themselves when you know you’re fighting mortal men. What are they supposed to make of all this… ?” He waved his hand at the poisoned hills. Ferras Vansen was glad the earl didn’t really expect an answer.

“Ah,” the older man said suddenly, with real relief in his voice. “There they are.” He squinted. “It is them, isn’t it?” “Yes, lord.” Vansen also felt the tightness in his chest loosen a bit. The sentries had been expected back at noon and the sun was on the hilltops now. “They are riding fast.”

“They look as though they have something to say, don’t they?” Tyne turned and stared back at the line of soldiers on the road. It had been a full day or more since they had encountered the last refugees from Candlers- town, and although the tales were terrible, almost unbelievable, their presence had at least proved that men could cross these hills in safety. But since they had passed the last of those stragglers, the army of Southmarch had traveled through empty, near-silent lands, and now a stir was moving through the ranks at the sight of the distant scouts. Behind the soldiers the first row of drovers, anticipating that the train would soon move out again, began whipping back the oxen who had strayed a little distance from the road to graze. “Ride out to them, bring them straight through to me,” commanded Tyne. “I think under that tree, there, just a short way up the hill.That will let us talk away from sharp ears.”

“Perhaps we should set the men to making camp, lord,” Vansen suggested. “It is getting late to ride much farther and it will occupy them.”

“A good idea, but let’s hear what the scouts say first.” The earl turned to his squire. “Tell Rorick and Mayne and Sivney Fiddicks to join me on the hill there.The young prince, too, of course—wouldn’t do to leave him out Oh, and Brenhall—he’s probably under a tree somewhere, sleeping off his noon meal.”

Vansen barely heard the last of this as the earl’s other squire helped him into the saddle, then he spurred away to meet the scouts.

“But how many are they, curse it?” Tyne tugged at his mustache and looked as though he would like to slap Gar Doiney. “How many times must I ask?”

“I’m sorry, your lordship.” The scout’s voice was dry and cracked, as if he didn’t use it much. “I’ve heard you, sire, it’s just hard to answer, like. With mist and such we can only just tell they’re camped on the hilltop and in the trees. We rode around the long way for a better look—that’s why we’re so long back.” He shook his head. The scar between Doiney’s eye and mouth that pulled up his lip and made him seem to smirk had gotten him into trouble before now, and Vansen guessed it might have had something to do with the man’s choice of a usually solitary profession—but Vansen felt sure that even in his anger Tyne couldn’t fail to mark the skittish look on the scout’s weathered, bony face. Even a hardened, taciturn campaigner like Doiney was disturbed by this unknown, unnatural enemy. “Come back with us, sire—there must be an hour still of light. You’ll see. It’s hard to make out anything. But there are hundreds there, thousands perhaps.”

Tyne waved his hand. “It’s only that it is dangerous to have to guess. At least we know where they are.”

“And you are certain there are no more of them anywhere else?' young Prince Barrick asked. He had joined the circle on the hillside, the nobles standing close together to provide each other some protection from the stiffening wind. The prince looked interested—almost too interested, Vansen thought, as if he had forgotten that the