“Let us go, then.”
The summons was no Tolly trickery. Avin Brone was waiting for her in the wide room on the third floor, a public room once when the Tower of Winter was a residence, although it was now largely given over to storage. “Highness,” he said, “thank you. Please come with me.”
Masking her irritation, she directed her guards to wait and allowed him to lead her out to the chilly air of the balcony. She looked down and saw a handkerchief with a heel of bread and a few crumbs of cheese on it lying on the boards at her feet. At first she thought Brone himself had carelessly dropped it, but the bread was sodden and gray as though it had lain there a day or two.
“Have you brought me to see where some spy has snuck into the Tower of Winter and dropped his midday meal?” Brone looked at her for a moment, uncomprehending, then glanced down at the bread on the kerchief and frowned. “That? I care not for that— some workman or guard shirking, nothing more. No, Highness, it is something more fearful I brought you here to see.” He pointed out across the rooftops of the castle, out to the narrow sleeve of Brenn’s Bay and the city beyond. The city was covered in mist, so that only the temple towers and the roofs of the tallest buildings were visible through the murk—a cloak of fog or low-lying cloud that extended out across the fields and downs beyond the city so that most of the land on this side of the hills was invisible. But as she stared at this gloomy though largely unsurprising sight, Briony saw a few bright spots deep in the fog, as though torches and even some bonfires burned there.
“What is it, Lord Brone? I confess I can’t make out much.” “Do you see the fires, Highness?'
“Yes, I think so What of it?”
“The city is empty, Highness, the people gone.”
“Not completely, as seems apparent. A few brave or foolish souls have stayed behind.” She should have been afraid for them, but she had come almost to the end of her ability to feel for others, the suffering of displaced and frightened people had now become so universal.
“I might guess the same,” Brone said, “had not this message come this morning.” He pulled a tiny curl of parchment from his purse, held it out to her.
Briony squinted at it for a moment. “It is from Tyne, it says, although I would never think him to write such a small and careful hand.”
“Written by one of his servants, no doubt, but it is indeed from Tyne, Highness Read it, please.” Before she had digested more than a few lines she felt the hair on the back of her neck rise. “Merciful Zoria!” It was scarcely a whisper, although she felt like screaming it. “What is he saying? That they have been tricked? That the Twilight People have crept past them and are coming down on the castle even now?” She read on, felt a little relieved. “But he says they are going to catch them up—that we must be ready to ride out in support.” She fought down a rising wash of terror. “Oh, my poor Barrick. It says nothing of him!”
“It says at the end to tell you he is safe—or was when this was written.” Brone looked very grim, bristle- bearded and lowering like one of the hoary old gods thrown down by Perin, Thane of Lightnings.
“What do you mean— ‘when this was written’?”
“He sent it yester-morning, Highness I have only just received it, although from what he says of the spot where they were deceived, it cannot be much more than a score of miles outside the city.”
“Then how could they have not caught up to them yet… ?” But she was beginning to guess at the terrifying truth.
“The sentries heard noises last evening and into the night, noises they thought came from madmen left behind in the town—clashes of weapons, groans, screams, strange singing and shouting—but faint, as though from behind the city’s closed doors . . or from far away, in the fields on the city’s far side.”
“What does that mean? Do you think that Barrick and the others have already caught the Twilight People?' “I think perhaps they have caught up with them, Highness. Briony. And I think perhaps they have failed.” “Failed . . ?” She couldn’t make sense of the word. It was a common one, but suddenly it had become cryptic, meaningless.
“Tyne writes of the fog of madness that surrounds the fairy folk. What is that covering the city below? Have you seen a mist like that before, even m winter, that was still forming at midday? And who is lighting fires there?'
Briony wanted to argue with him, to come up with reasons the old man must be wrong, answers that would explain all he had said and more, but for some reason she could not. A cold horror had stolen over her and she could only stare out at the mostly invisible city—separated from the place where she stood by nothing except less than half a mile of water—and the fires that burned in that gray mist like the eyes of animals watching a forest camp.
Barrick… she thought. But he must be… he cannot be…
“Highness?” said Brone. “We should go down now. If the siege is about to begin in earnest, we must…” He stopped when he saw the tears on her cheek. “Highness?”
She dabbed at her face with the back of her sleeve. The brocade was rough as lizard skin. “He will be well,” she said as though Brone had asked her. “We will send out our men. We will cut the fairies down like rats. We will kill them all and bring our brave soldiers back.”
“Highness…”
“Enough, Brone.” She tried to pull on the mask of stone—
“Banquet?”
“After all Nynor’s trouble, the people must eat and be merry.” Tears drying now, she did her best to smile, but it felt more like a snarl and she did not try too hard to amend it. “As he said, it may be the last joy for some time, so it would be a shame to waste all those puddings.”
The first gleam of dawn should have come as a relief, but it did not. They had held their ground and they were still alive, but there was no one else in sight or earshot with whom they could join forces. They were lost like shipwrecked mariners.
Ferras Vansen and a few men—Gar Doiney and two other scouts, along with the knight Mayne Calough of Kertewall and his squire, had held this high place since middle-night, an outcrop of stone in the middle of the field, not much bigger than a small farmhouse—held it mostly, Vansen guessed, because it was on the fringes of the battle and of little strategic value. Not that strategic value meant much anymore. Vansen had known for hours with a certainty as straightforward as a mortal wound that the fight was over and they had lost.
He was angry with himself, although he still believed he had been right to insist they catch the fairy folk outside the city. It had proved almost impossible to overcome the Twilight People without the superiority of numbers—or even apparent superiority, since everything to do with the fairy folk was slippery and hard to calculate. Already Vansen was plotting in the lulls between fighting what to do next time, how to take the advantage of surprise and concealment away from the shadow-people and their weird magicks, but all the time he had been doing it he knew that there might be no next time, that more than this battle might have been lost. With Tyne Aldritch dead, all was in disarray, and Tyne’s second-in-command, the stolid, unimaginative Droy of Eastlake would not have been able to salvage things even if he had lived. In fact, it had been Droy’s pig-headedness that had made the loss so desperate. By the time he had arrived with the weary foot troops, their torches making a fiery snake along the downs as they hurried to support the mounted knights, Vansen had sent one of the scouts to him to tell him that it was useless now, that Tyne had fallen and the best thing Droy’s foot soldiers could do was to try to flank the Twilight folk and beat them to the deserted city, or, failing that, to fall back into the hills so that his army might eventually be able to provide the other half of a pincer with Brone’s defensive force. Instead, the Count of Eastlake had ignored Vansen’s message as the cowardly advice of a commoner, a jumped-up sentry in Droy Nikomede’s estimation, and had plunged his weary soldiers into battle. Within moments, half of them had become completely disoriented by the mists and the strange noises and shadows—Lord Nikomede and the others had learned nothing from the first fight, it seemed—and had been cut down by archers they could not even see. Their own arrows seemed to do as much damage to the survivors among Tyne’s knights as to the enemy.
