Shadowmarch

Their enemy was just outside the door, too cautious to force it open without knowing what Shaso might be planning. “I will be happy to roast you alive in there,” Hendon Tolly shouted. He sounded breathless and no longer quite so cheerful. Briony hoped his burns were agonizing. “It will suit our little tale just as well.” Something creaked.”Help me!” Shaso whispered, voice ragged with pain.

Briony took a step, stumbled and fell to her knees. She found him by touch, found the heavy wooden thing in his bony hands.

“Lift!”

She did, grunting with the strain. A slowly widening triangle of light spilling across the straw-covered cell floor showed that Hendon Tolly and his guards had decided to risk the door and were cautiously opening it, but Briony and Shaso had managed to get the trapdoor in the bottom of the cell open as well. She was astounded to discover there was such a thing, but this was no time for questions. At Shaso’s mute gesture she slid into the trap and found the ladder, then stopped to hold it open so Shaso could clamber down above her without losing his balance, but she was not much heartened: the pit seemed as hopeless a hiding place as the cell, however deep it might go. Shaso let the door fall down behind them, covering them in blackness. She heard something scrape and realized he was slamming shut a hidden bolt. A moment later Tolly and his men were pounding on the trapdoor in a rage, the sounds echoing like thunder in the narrow pit.

“Crawl,” Shaso said when they reached the bottom of the shaft. “You will be able to stand soon.” “By the gods—what is this?”

He shoved her hard. “Go! This is the stronghold of the castle, girl. The place of last resort in a siege. Don’t you think there would be some secret way out if the worst came to the worst?”

“It has come,” she said, then decided to save her breath for crawling.

In only a few moments Shaso’s promise was fulfilled: the narrow space widened until Briony couldn’t feel the walls or ceiling. “Where does this go?”

“It lets out by the Spring Tower’s water gate.”

“We must find Avin Brone We must alert the rest of the guards!”

“No!” He grabbed at her leg. In the darkness, it was as though she had been clutched by some root-fingered monster. Shaso’s words came slowly as he fought for breath. “I do not trust Brone. In any case, we do not know where he is. If Tolly’s men find us, they will kill you immediately. They can always explain later that I had taken you hostage, that your death was an accident.”

“No one will believe that!”

“Perhaps not, in the light of tomorrow’s day, but what good would that do you tonight? Or me, as I am hacked to death in front of an angry crowd? Curse it, Briony Eddon, there is no time for this! We must get out We must…” He paused to gasp for breath. It was terrifying to hear him so weak What if he died? What would she do then? “You can stand now,” he said at last. “Take my hand. There is a place we can go.”

“What is this tunnel? How did you know about it?”

“I am the master of arms.” He groaned in pain as he stood. “It is my task to know of such things Avin Brone knows, too. That is why he had me imprisoned in a different cell.”

“Then why weren’t Barrick and I told?”

Shaso sighed, a mixture of regret and clench-jawed pain. “You should have been. Take my hand.”

The journey seemed to last the better part of an hour, through damp stone corridors and treacherous narrows that seemed httle more than holes dug through hard dirt, before they reached a small stone room that smelled of tidal mud and bird droppings. It had a high, slit window that bled moonlight, and for the first time since they entered the trapdoor she could see Shaso dan-Heza s bony, weary face.

“We are in a storage room by the water gate,” he said, panting. She had actually heard him whimpering as he crawled, a sound so bizarrely unexpected that it had frightened her nearly as much as anything else she had experienced on this mad and dreadful night. Shaso showing pain, almost weeping! She could only imagine how dire his circumstances must truly be. “The Summerfield folk will be combing the castle. Others may be looking for you, too, but we can trust no one.”

“Surely…”

“Listen to me, girl! It is plain now how long and how carefully the Tollys have been preparing, waiting for a moment like this. Even if we reached Brone, even if he proves loyal, who can know whether his guards are the same? We must get you away from here.”

“Where? If there is so much danger, where can we go?”

“First things first, Briony.” He was shaking, trembling with the cold. “The only safe way to leave the castle is by water.”

“But the Twilight People are in the city just on the other side!”

He shook his head. “Then we will go another way. Across the bay and then southward down the coast. There are places in Helmingsea… I have prepared…”

“You… you thought something like this might happen?”

For the first time the old man laughed. It was a hard sound to hear, and quickly became a racking cough that was no more pleasant. “It is my task, Briony,” he said when he could speak again. “My sworn task. To think of anything that might happen—anything —and then prepare for it.”

Even with his body crippled and his life hanging by a thread, she thought she could hear a proud stubbornness in his words. It made her angry despite everything. “Shaso, why didn’t you tell me the truth about Kendrick?”

He shook his head. “Later. If we survive.” He got slowly and awkwardly to his feet and held out a hand. She shook it off and levered herself upright, conscious for the first time of how weary she was too, how badly all of her ached.

“Silent, now,” he said. “Stay in the shadows.”

The alleyway outside the storage room was empty, although they could hear sentries talking on top of the wall and a fire burned in the guardhouse beside the water gate. There had never been a night like this! Winter festival being celebrated in the castle while terrible enemies were encamped just across the water, her stepmother’s maid changing into a demon—it seemed that anything, absolutely any horrible, ghastly, impossible thing could happen tonight, and she wondered if she could entirely trust Shaso’s judgment. He was always so stiff- backed, so certain of his own Tightness, but who could judge properly on such a night? What if he was wrong? Should she give up her throne without a fight, run away just for fear of Hendon Tolly? If she called to the guards, wouldn’t they come to her in a heartbeat, their princess regent—wouldn’t they hunt down Tolly like the murdering dog that he was?

But what if, as Shaso feared, they did not? What if they were secretly Tolly’s men, already suborned with lies or gold?

Briony tried to imagine what her father would do, how he would think Stay alive, he would have told her, she knew that. If you are alive, you make all that Tolly say; a he. But if someone puts an arrow in you, then the people have no choice but to believe him, because Summerfield Court is the most powerful part of the kingdom outside Southmarch, and they have blood ties to the throne.

Shaso was leading her along the back rows near Skimmer’s Lagoon, she suddenly realized. She had hardly ever been to this part of the castle, its narrow streets full of ramshackle Skimmer houses, the quays jostling with the strangely shaped boats that seemed to house at least as many of the water folk as did the more conventional dwellings that loomed beside the docks. It seemed oddly quiet for Winter’s Eve, although she realized then that the hour must now be approaching midnight; the streets were almost deserted, some lights in high windows and a few snatches of faint music the only signs that people even lived here. She could hear the tied-up boats bumping against the piers and the occasional sleepily questioning call of a water bird.

“Where are we going?” she whispered as they waited in the shadows to cross one of the larger streets. The dwellings were crammed so close together and leaned so alarmingly overhead that it seemed more like a hornet’s nest than any human place. Shaso looked up and down, then waved for her to follow.

“Here,” he said. “This is the house of Turley, the headman.”

“Turley?” she whispered. It took her a moment to remember why the name was familiar. “I met him!”

Shaso did not reply, but knocked on the oval door; it was a strange pattern of sounds he made, too studied to be accidental. A few moments later the door opened just a slice and two wide eyes peered out. “I need to speak