Shadowmarch

moaned. “The child. It hurts! Oh, Madi Surazem, save me!”

“Get help,” Chaven told Briony. “I am nearly useless with these burns. Send for the midwife! Quickly!” She hesitated for a moment. Amssa’s wide-eyed look of terror made her feel ill. She remembered her stepmother’s fear as Chaven had all but accused her of murdering her stepson and the feverish feeling grew worse. The Loud Mouse, she and Barrick had called their father’s young wife, teasing, resentful. She would never call this woman names again.

Briony staggered out into the deserted tower with one of the candles, made her way down the stairs and somehow did not fall. At the bottom she forced open the door and found the two guards waiting there They looked her up and down, amazed. She could only guess what she looked like, smeared in ash and blood and worse, but the guards certainly seemed terrified.

There was no time to coddle them or make up stories. “By all the gods, are you both deaf? Did you hear none of that happening inside? People are dead. The queen is about to give birth. One of you go upstairs and help Chaven, the other run to find the midwife Hisolda. I don’t know where she’s gone— Anissa’s maid probably sent her away.” “Sh—she and the other w—w—omen went to the kitchen!” said one of the goggle-eyed guards. “Then go, curse you, go quickly! Fetch her!”

He ran ofe. The other, still looking at her as though Briony was the most frightening sight of his short life, turned and dashed up the stairs into the tower.

I won’t be the worst thing he’s seen for very long. She stood, trembling beneath the naked stars, trying to catch her breath. The sound of people singing floated to her across the empty courtyard.

Winter’s Eve, she remembered, but now it seemed unutterably strange. Everything before the Tower of Spring seemed to have happened in another century. I just want to sleep, she thought. Sleep and forget. Forget that moment when that dark thing had grown out of dust and air and vile magicks, when her old life of certainty, frail as it was, had vanished forever. Forget her stepmother, twitching in pain and fear. We’ve betrayed them all by our foolishness, she thought. Father, Kendrick, Anissa, all of them.

Shaso.

She felt a dreadful stab of shame. Shaso, chained and suffering. She hesitated for a moment—she was so tired, so very tired—but pushed herself away from the wall on which she had been leaning, away from the stones that to her exhausted muscles felt soft and inviting as a bed, and set out hmping toward the stronghold. One wrong would be put right before the dawn of Orphan’s Day, in any case Zoria, merciful Zoria, she begged, if you ever loved me, give me a little more strength!

As Briony left the courtyard and entered the colonnade, she thought she heard footsteps behind her, but when she turned there was no one there, the stone path empty in the moonlight. She hobbled on toward the stronghold and the shackled ghost of her own failure.

40. Zoria’s Flight

HEART OF A QUEEN:

Nothing grows from quiet

A pile of cut turves, a wooden box

Carved with the shapes of birds

—from The Bonefall Oracles

The maze garden behind the main hall was full of voices. The guests had left the table and bundled up against the cold to go outdoors—at least those seeking privacy they couldn’t find inside the brightly-lit halls. But how much privacy could there be, especially in full moonlight? It sounded like at least a dozen people were wandering through the maze, laughing and talking, women shushing the men, at least one    fellow    singing  a bawdy    old  song about    Dawtrey Elf-Spelled— something that didn’t seem quite appropriate with the Twilight folk almost standing outside the gates.

Winter was indeed crouching close this Winter’s Eve, the air sharp and the wind picking up. Briony wasn’t cold, but she knew she should be, in fact, she could hardly feel her body at all. She went past the outskirts of the garden as quietly as she could, staying close to the hedge of ancient yew trees, drifting toward the stronghold like a floating spirit in a cloud of her own exhaled breath. She wanted nothing to do with any of the courtiers. It had been all she could do simply to look at them across the dining hall tonight. Now, with the memory of the inhuman thing that had killed Kendrick lodged in her mind like a jagged shard of ice, like the never-healing wound of the maiden in the song, she felt as though she would not be able to look at any of their empty faces again without screaming.

She found her way in through a back door of the hall, but instead of making her way by the usual passages, crossed through one of the small chambers behind the throne room, avoiding the clutch of servants trying to finish up their chores in time for a Winter’s Eve celebration of their own. No guards waited at the top of the stairs down into the stronghold, and when she pushed open the unbarred door at the bottom, she found only one man and his pike sitting through a lonely watch. The guard was at least half asleep he looked up slowly at the noise of the door, rubbing his eyes. She couldn’t even imagine what she must look like in her tattered gown, her face no doubt as streaked with ash and blood as her hands.

“P-Pnncess!” He scrambled up onto his feet, fumbling for the handle of his weapon, which he managed to lift with the wrong end up. It would have been comic were it not all so miserable, the night so ghastly and full of blood and fire and if his stupidly earnest face hadn’t looked so much like Heryn Millward s, the young guard now lying dead in a puddle of his own blood in Anissa’s chamber.

“Where are the keys?'

“Highness?'

“The keys? The keys to Shaso’s cell! Give them to me.” “But…” His eyes were wide.

I truly must look like a demoness. “Don’t make me shout at you, fellow Just give me the keys, then go and find your captain. Who is in charge with Vansen gone?”

The man fumbled the heavy key on its ring down from a peg on the wall. “Tallow,” he said after a moment’s panicky thought. “It’s Jem Tallow, Highness.”

“Then go get him. If he’s asleep, wake him up, although I can’t imagine why he would be asleep on Winter’s Eve.” But could it truly still be the same night? It had to be, but the thought was unmanageably strange. “Tell him to bring soldiers and meet me here. Tell him the princess regent needs him now.” Until she knew why the witch- maid Selia had done what she did, until she found whether the southern girl had allies in the murder of Kendrick, no one must sleep. “But…”

“By all the gods, now!”

The man dropped the keys in his alarm. Briony cursed in a very unladylike way and bent and snatched them from the floor. The guard hesitated for only a moment, then threw open the door and scuttled up the stairs.

The lock on the cell was stiff and hard to turn, but with both hands she managed to twist the key and at last the door groaned open. The shape huddled on the floor at the back of the cell did not move, did not even look up.

He’s dead! Her heart, already so weary, sped again and for a moment the darkness of the damp, cold room threatened to swallow her up. “Shaso! Shaso, it’s me, Briony! The gods forgive us for what we’ve done!”

She ran to his side and tugged at him, relieved to hear the rasp of breath but horrified by how thin the old man had become. He began to stir. “Briony . . ?”

“We were wrong. Forgive us—forgive me Kendrick…” She helped him sit upright. He smelled dreadful and she couldn’t help taking a step back. “I know who killed Kendrick.”

He shook his head. It was dark in the cell, the single brazier outside not enough to illuminate even such a