Shadowmarch

armed foe. Selia moved to where her mistress now sat on the edge of the bed, the queen’s pale little feet dangling down without quite reaching the floor. The maid put a protective arm around Anissa’s shoulders and looked defiantly back at Chaven.

“You are giving fright to me,” the queen said, her accent thicker now, too. “Briony, what are you doing here? Why are you treating me so?”

Briony didn’t answer her stepmother, but couldn’t help wondering if she had been too quick to let Chaven have his way. Perhaps he had disappeared because he was deranged. She caught young Millward’s eye and did her best to hold it for a moment, trying to let the guardsman know to watch her, not the physician, while waiting to be told what to do.

“If you are innocent, madam, I will beg your pardon most devoutly. And in no case will I harm you or your unborn child. I wish only to show you something.” Chaven put his hand into his pocket and produced a grayish object about the length of a child’s thumb. Now that he had moved into the light, Briony noticed for the first time that the physician’s clothes were ragged and dirty. She felt another stab of doubt.

Chaven held out the stone and both Anissa and her maid Seha shrank back as though it were the head of some poisonous serpent. “What is it?” Anissa pleaded.

“That is indeed the question,” said Chaven. “A question I have worked hard to answer. It has taken me to some strange places and to some strange folk in recent days, but I think I know. In the south it is called a kulikos. It is a kind of magical stone, most often found on the southern continent, but they occasionally make their way north to Eion—to the sorrow of many.”

“Don’t touch me with it!” Anissa shrieked, and although Briony was puzzled by what the physician was doing, she could not help feeling that her stepmother was reacting too strongly.

Chaven looked at Anissa sternly. “Ah, you know of such things, I see. But if you have done nothing wrong, madam, you have nothing to fear.”

“You are trying to bring a curse for my baby! The king’s child!”

“What is the point of this, Chaven?” Briony demanded. “She is about to give birth, after all. Why are you frightemng her?”

He nodded. “I will tell you, Briony… Highness. One of the workers on your brother’s tomb brought this stone to me because he thought it strange. I thought little of it at the time, I must sadly admit, but there have been many things on my mind since Kendrick’s death. I know I am not the only one.”

Briony glanced at the two women huddled on the edge of the bed. The chamber felt odd, as though a storm hung just above them, making the air prickle. “Go on, get to the point.”

“Something about this thing troubled me, though, and I began to wonder if it might be one of a certain class of objects mentioned in some of my older books. I discovered that the place it had been found was in a direct line between the outside window of a room near Kendrick’s chambers and the Tower of Spring—the tower in which we now find ourselves, a building almost completely given over to the residence of the king’s wife and her household.” “He is talking in madness,” Anissa moaned. “Make him stop, Briony I am getting so frighted.”

The physician looked to her, but Briony’s heart was beating faster now and she wanted to hear the rest. “The windows of those chambers are all high above the ground,” she reminded him. “Brone searched them all. There was no rope left behind.”

“Yes.” The room was warm. Chaven was perspiring, his forehead glinting with sweat in the candlelight. “Which makes it all the stranger that I should find the mark of something having landed in the loose soil at the edge of the garden beneath that window. The marks were deep, so that even though many days had passed, they had not disappeared.”

Briony stared at him. “Wait a moment, Chaven. Are you suggesting that Anissa… a woman carrying a child, the king’s child… jumped out of the upstairs window? All the way to the edge of the garden? That she somehow killed Kendrick and his guards, then jumped down and escaped?” She took a breath, held out a hand as she prepared to have the guards arrest him. “That is truly madness.”

“Yes, make him go away,” Anissa wailed. “Briony, save me!”

“He is frightening my mistress, the queen,” cried Selia. “Why don’t the guards stop him?”

“It is certainly much like madness to believe such a thing, Highness,” Chaven agreed. He seemed very calm for a lunatic. “That is why I think you should hear all my tale before you try to understand. You see, I knew I could not make anyone believe a tale like that—I did not really believe it myself—but I was frightened and intrigued by what I had learned about kulikos stones. I decided I must know more. I went in search of knowledge, and eventually found it, although the price was high.” He paused and wiped at his forehead with his tattered sleeve. “Very high. But what I learned is that in the south of Eion they believe a kulikos stone summons a terrible spirit. So powerful is this ancient dark sorcery, so dreadful, that in many places even possessing one of these stones will earn the bearer death on the instant.”

Listening to such words by flickering candlelight, Briony felt as though she were in some story—not a tale of heroism and heavenly reward like the one Puzzle had just sung at the feast, but something far older and grimmer.

“Why do you say all this foolishness to my mistress when she is not well?” demanded Selia in a shrill voice. “Even if someone has done some bad thing and then run past the tower where she lives, what is that to us? Why do you say that to her?”

The guards standing by the door were murmuring to each other now, confused and a little fearful. Briony knew she couldn’t let it all go on much longer. “State your case, Chaven,” she ordered.

“Very well,” he said. “I have learned that there is something interesting about the murderous kultkos spirit. It is female, always female When it is summoned, it only will inhabit the bodies of women.”

“Madness!” cried Anissa.

“And it is particularly a favorite weapon among the witches of Xand and of the southernmost lands of Eion Lands like Devonis.”

Anissa turned to her stepdaughter, holding out her hands. Briony couldn’t help shrinking back just a little. “Why do you let him say this to me, Briony? Have I not always been kind to you? Because I am from Devonis, I am a witch?”

“It is easy enough to discover,” Chaven said loudly. He thrust the small gray object closer to the king’s wife. “Here is the stone. Look at it. It was tossed aside by the one who employed it to murder the prince regent after she had used it up, but doubtless a little of those dark magicks still remain. Touch it, my lady, and if you have anything to hide, the stone will show that.” He extended his hand, bringing the stone close to her bare arm. Anissa tried to squirm away from it as though it were a hot coal, but couldn’t disentangle herself from the protective embrace of her maid Selia.

“No!” Selia snatched the milky-gray stone out of Chaven’s hand so quickly that as he closed his fingers on nothingness, the girl had already pulled it against her own breast. He stared in surprise. “There is no need for this,” the maid declared, then snapped out something in a language Briony did not recognize—a short, sharp cry like a hawk falling on its prey.

Briony tried to say something, to curse the young woman for interfering, but a change in the air of the room suddenly made it hard to talk, a cold filling and tightening of her ears as though she had dunked her head into the water.

“There is no need for this, or for anything else.” Seha’s voice suddenly seemed to come from a great distance. “I did not drop the stone away as a man drops away a maid when she is a maid no longer. I was weary and it fell from me, and when I was strong enough again to go back and search for it, it was gone.“ The girl’s voice rose, ending on a triumphant cry, harsh, but still muted by the strange squeezing of the air. “No one lets to drop a kuhkos stone, little man! Not by choice!” Selia lifted her hand and put the stone in her mouth.

Her face abruptly blurred and changed, her torchlit skin seeming to shrink away even as something darker unfolded from inside This devouring of light by darkness spread over her in the matter of a few heartbeats, as though someone had tossed a rock into a stream in which the girl was reflected, muddying the surface. The strangling air of the chamber finally began to move, but instead of bringing relief it sped faster and faster, a breeze that became a harsh wind, then a full gale, swirling so swiftly that Briony could feel needle-sharp bits of dust and flecks of stone stinging her skin. The guards shouted in surprise and terror but she could hear them only