If Briony felt so helpless, with the reins of the kingdom in her hands, how much worse must it feel to her stepmother, big with child and forced to sift through the conflicting rumors that flittered into her tower?
A smattering of lazy applause and a few drunken cheers caught her attention the song had ended. Briony was a little shamed to realize she had missed most of it.
“Very fine,” she said out loud, and clapped her hands. “Well sung, good Puzzle. One of the best entertainments we have had for many a year.”
The aged man beamed.
“Serve him,” she directed one of the pages, “for such splendid singing must be thirsty work.” “I will not take all credit, Highness,” Puzzle said as he held out his hand for the cup. “I was assisted.”
“By Master Tinwnght, yes You told us. And to him I also say, well done, sir You have breathed new life into an old and beloved tale “ She tried to remember how the story of the Ever-Wounded Maid ended, hoping that Tinwright had not adopted some modern approach to the finish that she hadn’t heard, which would make it embarrassingly clear that her mind had wandered. “Like Caylor, you have found the song that heals the Raven Prince’s dreadful deed.”
She seemed to have got it right. Tinwright looked as though he wished he could throw himself before her and become her footstool.
She stood with a rustling of underskirts and said, “I must go now and take the tidings of the new season to my stepmother, Queen Anissa.” Those who could still do so levered themselves upright as well. “Please, sit yourselves down. The feast is not ended. Servants, keep the wine flowing until I return, so our guests may celebrate the warmth that the Orphan brought back. Remember, there is no season so dark that it does not see the sun come again.”
Heryn Millward, the young soldier from Suttler’s Wall, was one of the two guards accompanying her tonight; the other was a slightly older fellow, dark-stubbled and taciturn. She remembered to wish them both good tidings for this night and tomorrow’s holy day—the courtesy acted as a sort of hedge against being impatient at how slowly they walked, encumbered by armor and halberds.
She had just crossed the outer courtyard and had almost reached Anissa’s residence in the Tower of Spring when a figure stepped out of the shadows in front of her. Her heart slithered up into her throat and she only recognized the apparition one thin moment before young Millward shoved the spiked head of his halberd into the intruder’s guts.
“Stop, guard!” she cried.”
The physician looked startled and even shamefaced as he stared down at the sharp spike wavering in front of his belly. When he lifted his gaze to Briony’s, she saw that he was pale and puffy, blue-circled beneath the eyes, and that he had not put a razor to his beard for days. “My apologies for frightening you, Princess,” he said. “Although it would have been worse for me than for you, it seems.”
As great a relief as it was to see him, she was not prepared to forget her anger. “Where have you been? Merciful Zona, do you know how many times in these latest days I wanted desperately to talk to you? You have always been our adviser as well as our doctor. Where did you go?”
“That is a long story, Highness, and not one for a cold and windy courtyard, but I will tell you all the tale soon.”
“We are at war, Chaven! The Twilight People are on our doorstep and you simply disappeared.” She felt her eyes fill with tears and wiped angrily with her sleeve. “Barrick is gone, too, fighting those creatures. And there are worse things, things you do not know. May all the gods confound you, Chaven,
He shook his head slowly. “I deserve that curse, but largely because I have been foolish. I have been hard at work trying to solve a dire riddle— more than one, to be honest—and it all has taken longer than I guessed it would.Yes, I know about the Twilight People, and about Barrick. I was absent from the court, but not from gossip, which travels everywhere.”
She threw her hands up in exasperation. “Riddles—there are already too many riddles! In any case, I am going now to see my stepmother. I must do that before we can talk.”
“Yes, I know that, too. And I think I should accompany you.” “She is close to her time.”
“And that is another reason I should come.”
She waved at the guards to lower their weapons. “Come along, then. I will drink a posset with her, then we will go.” “It may not be so swift, Highness,” Chaven suggested.
Briony did not have the patience on this long, woeful night to try to work out what he meant.
There seemed no proper way, Chert reflected, to prepare yourself to die, but it also seemed as though this was the second or third time in the last few days he had been forced to try. “I don’t want to,” he said quietly. The armored, yellow-eyed shapes looked down at him without a glimmer of emotion, their spear points a ring of dull gleams in the grayish light, but the strange man beside him stirred.
“Of course not,” Gil said. “All that live cling to life. Even, I think, my people.”
Chert bowed his head, thinking of Opal and the boy, how little all this meant, how foolish and unnatural it was compared to his life with them. There was a rising patter that for a moment he felt certain was his own racing heart. Then he recognized the sound and looked up, not in hope, but instead almost in annoyance that the horrible waiting would continue.
The man, if it was a man, rode one of the largest horses Chert had ever seen: the top of his own head would barely reach its knees. The rider was large, too, but not freakishly so, dressed in armor that looked a bit like polished tortoiseshell, gray and brown-blue. A sword dangled at the newcomer’s side; under his arm he carried a helmet in the shape of an animal’s skull, some unrecognizable creature with long fangs.
But it was his face that was the strangest part. For a moment Chert thought the tall rider was wearing a mask of ivory, for other than the ruby-red eyes beneath the pale brow the stranger had no face, only a slight vertical ridge where a nose might be and a smooth expanse of white down to the chin. It was only when he caught a glimpse of the white neck working beneath that chin as the stranger looked Gil up and down that Chert was convinced once and for all that the stranger was not wearing a mask but his own actual flesh.
“His name is Gyir the Storm Lantern,” Gil announced suddenly. “He says we are to follow him.” Chert laughed, a broken sound even to his own ears. If he had not gone mad, then Gil had—or the world had. “Says? He has no mouth!”
“He speaks. Perhaps it is only that I feel his words inside me. Do you not hear him?”
“No.” Chert was weary, as exhausted as if seeping minerals had soaked his bones and changed them to heavy rock. When the faceless rider turned back toward the city and the guards prodded Chert with their spears, he marched ahead of them, but despite the sharp pikes at his back he did not have the will or the strength to move swiftly.
The Square of Three Gods had been draped all around with dark-colored cloths, so that even in the light of many torches the buildings hid behind veils of shadow. She was waiting for them in a chair before the temple steps, a plain, high-backed chair out of some merchant’s house that she invested with the terrible dignity of a throne.
She was as tall as Gyir but both more and less ordinary to look at; she was beautiful in a weird, drawn-out way, the planes of her brown face and her bright eyes just a bit beyond human from most angles, then—when she cocked her head to listen to some sound Chert could not hear, or to look over the square, surveying her legions who sat patiently on the ground— she abruptly seemed too extreme to pass for a person even at a distance, like something seen through deep water or thick clear crystal.
She was dressed as for war in a suit of black plate armor covered almost everywhere, but most heavily on the back and shoulders, with shockingly long spines, so that from a distance it was hard to make out her shape at all. Now that he was kneeling before her, it was clear to Chert that she had two arms and two legs and a slender, womanly figure, but even when he finally gathered the courage to look up at her, it was hard to look very long There
