Shadowmarch

shadows and tricks of the light, perhaps, but there were enough real bodies and enough pale, hating faces that he had no time to consider anything except staying alive.

Half a dozen men of Barrick’s party were left of the original dozen, although some of the others had merely become lost among the trees Vansen was one of those remaining and he leaned close to Barrick and asked quietly, “Are you well, Highness?”

Barrick could only nod. He was gasping for breath and there were cuts and scratches on his hands and no doubt elsewhere, but he thought he had killed at least one of the fairy folk—a face that came toward him down a shadowy tree branch, and which he had split with a startled swing of his blade—and he did not seem to have any major wounds. The forest was mostly empty here, although the fearful sounds of the Twilight folk were still loud, and unnatural shapes still flitted between the distant trees.

“I think I hearTyne this way,” Vansen said, then spurred across the clearing. Barrick and the others followed him, all struggling for breath, their necks prickling, not certain when the next attack would come. Barrick felt as though he was peering down one of Chaven’s optical tubes, that everything around him had been bent except for that at which he stared. All his blood seemed to be rushing through his head while his body was coldly numb, hard and unfeeling as iron. It was a strange, terrifying, exhilarating feeling.

Ferras Vansen suddenly reined up beside a patch of deep brush and struck downward with his sword, then swung out of the saddle and began hacking away at something unseen. He was shouting, and although the guard captain’s words couldn’t be heard over the shrilling of fairy voices, there was a wild look of disgust and fear on his face that cut through Barrick’s numbness, clutched at the pit of his stomach. He spurred forward with the others just as a great number of the keening fairies all went silent at the same moment Unearthly voices still sounded, but only from the other side of the hilltop.

Vansen stood upright, his killing finished, his blade dripping with blood and something else translucent as tree sap. His face was a mask of horror. Barrick dismounted awkwardly and made his way to the captain’s side.

He was standing in the midst of what might almost have been a huge nest hidden in the undergrowth, trampled and exposed now, with bodies and body parts piled at his feet, glistening with blood and other fluids. The things lying there, Barrick could see after a moment of confusion at the unusual forms, were naked and mostly manlike, pale as maggots. Those whose heads he could see had huge swollen throat pouches, like frogs. Their dead eyes were solid black, rapidly losing luster.

“What are they?” someone asked.

“Horrible,” someone else said, and it was true.

“The things that made the noises,” Vansen told them. “Listen.” And for a moment they all heeded the silence. “What… what does it mean?” Barrick asked. “Why?”

“Because we have been tricked,” said Vansen. Beneath the spatters of blood, his face was almost as pale as the grotesque shapes at his feet. “Only a few waited for us on this hilltop—a few soldiers to cross blades with us, a few deceiving shapes, a few of these making the noise of hundreds.”

“Gods! An ambush, after all?” Barrick looked around, expecting to see dozens more of the strange faces appear in the branches over their heads, grinning savagely.

“Worse,” said Vansen. “Worse. Because they have held us here and stolen a day from us with a very few while the rest of their army rode on around us.”

“Rode on… ?”

“Yes. Toward Southmarch.”

34. In a Marrinswalk Field

SWEETNESS OF FLOWERS:

She cannot stop or cry out

She cannot grow

Her bones are in the stream

—from The Bonefall Oracles

It had been a bad night, a night of little sleep. Briony had been up since an hour before dawn with such anger running through her that she could scarcely sit still—anger at Hendon Tolly, of course, but also at herself for her foolish loss of control, at Barrick for not being with her, at everything.

And I stood there, waving a sword at him in front of everyone, and they all knew he could not lift a finger against me —his ruler, and a woman at that. A… girl. And they all knew he didn’t need to, either, because he’d already won. What a fool I must have looked!

For a long moment it was all she could do to stay seated at the writing desk—she was itching with embarrassment despite being the only person awake in the room. She wanted to run, to lose herself somewhere in the great castle until everyone forgot what happened. But of course, nobody would forget and she couldn’t run away. She was an Eddon. She was the princess regent. They would be talking about last night’s dinner for years.

There was nothing to do but go on. Nothing. Briony picked up her pen, dipped it into the inkwell, and continued her letter to her father.

“I have not heard from you since Kendrick’s death, and as I said, I can only pray that you received my letter telling you of that terrible day, that this which I write now is not the first you have heard of it. I miss him, dear Father, I miss my big brother very much. Because he was the oldest, he was always certain he was right, and of course that was vexing at times, but I honestly think he tried every day to do right. He wanted to be you, of course, that is why. Even before he became the regent, he held himself like a man who will rule one day, who concerns himself with the needs of the least of his subjects as well as the demands of his most powerful allies.

“But, of course, that is what everyone else will remember about him. What I will always remember about our dear Kendrick was the way he would fume and scowl when Barrick and I teased him, but at last would give in and laugh as hard as any of us. Why is it that you and Kendrick could both do that, that you could see your own foolishness and admit it, even laugh about it, but Barrick and I cannot?

“There is more, certainly, that…”

She stopped. A memory of Kendrick pretending to be angry at her while struggling to hide a smile had suddenly come back with such power that for a moment she could only sit and weep silently. Rose Trelling stirred in her bed on the opposite side of the room, murmured something, then fell back to sleep. Anazona, Briony’s youngest maid, scarcely ten years old, was snoring like an ancient dog on her little pallet on the floor. It was strange to be awake in the midst of all these sleepers—like being a ghost.

She went back and scratched out part of the last sentence, changed it to read, “… that Kendrick could do that and you can do it, too,” because she realized she had put the king, her father, into the past again as though he were dead instead of only imprisoned. The gods willing, it is nothing but a false fear! Still, the whole thing seemed a hopeless exercise. How could she tell him what truly was happening without making him frantic with worry? How could she describe any of it, the terrifying Twilight People, the Tollys’ flirtation with the Autarch, the seemingly unending stream of dreadful tidings? How could she tell her father how frightened she was for Barrick without breaking Olin’s heart?

She put the pen back down and read over what she had written. The greatest problem, of course, was that she couldn’t speak about what was troubling her most—her twin’s terrible story. Since Barrick had told her, it had stayed in the middle of her like a swallowed stone, a great, indigestible lump. Some days the heaviness of it made it hard for her to walk, to talk, even to think. She hoped that by hearing it she had lightened her brother’s load, because he had certainly burdened her. How could such a thing be true? But if it was not true, how was it possible that Barrick, her twin, could be such a liar? And if it was true, how could she possibly write to her father as though nothing had changed, as though she was the same loving daughter in the same, unchanged world?