up onto his saddle. Vansen grabbed him around the waist and pulled him backward so that they both crashed to the ground This time he shoved his helmeted head against the boy’s cloaked back and held on. Barrick gasped with pain and his struggles became increasingly desperate, his arms and legs thrashing as wildly as those of a drowning swimmer. As it became apparent that Vansen was the stronger, that the boy couldn’t reach the older man’s eyes or vitals with his hooking fingers, Barrick writhed more and more madly. The low moan he had been making as they rolled on the ground rose to a shriek, a horrible raw noise that dug intoVansen’s ears like a sharp stick, and the prince began to fling his arms and legs about, kicking, thrashing. Vansen could only hold tight. He felt a little like a father, but of a child who was very ill. An insane child.
Barrick’s struggles became even wilder, something Vansen would not have thought possible. He could pull the prince no farther, and had to stop a few yards from the horses, holding the boy wrapped in his arms and legs as Barrick went on screeching as monotonously as a broken-hinged gate fanning in the wind.
At last it was too much. Vansen’s own limbs were achingly weary, the boy’s cries so heartrendingly terrible, he began to believe he was somehow crippling the young prince’s mind. He let him go, watched as the boy stopped shrieking, got to his feet, swaying—it was a blessed relief to have the silence come rushing back—and staggered toward his horse, which waited with unnatural calm.
Vansen got to his feet and stumbled after him. “Where are you going, Highness? Don’t you know you are traveling into the land of shadows?”
Barrick climbed into the saddle, slipping, struggling, clearly almost as weary as Vansen. He sat up, holding his side again. “I… I know.” His tone was hollow, miserable.
“Then why, Highness?” When there was no reply, Vansen raised his voice. “Barrick! Listen to me! Why are you doing this? Why are you riding into the shadowlands?”
The boy hesitated, fumbling for the reins. The black horse, Vansen noticed for the first time, had strange, amber-yellow eyes. Vansen reached out, gently this time, and touched the prince’s arm. Barrick actually looked toward him for a moment, although his eyes did not quite touch Ferras Vansen’s. “I don’t know why.
“Come back with me.That way there’s nothing but danger.” But Vansen knew there was danger behind them as well, madness and death. Hadn’t he first thought Barrick was fleeing the horrors of the battle? “Come back with me to Southmarch.Your sister will be afraid for you. Princess Briony will be afraid.”
For an instant it seemed that he might have touched something in the prince regent: Barrick sighed, sagged a little in his saddle. Then the instant passed. “No. I am… called.”
“Called to what?”
The boy shook his head slowly, the gesture of a doomed, lost man. Vansen had seen such a face once before, eyes so empty and distraught. It had been a man of the dales, a distant relation of Ferras Vansen’s mother, who had found himself caught up in a border dispute between two large clans and had seen his wife and children slaughtered before his eyes. That man had worn just such a look when he came to say his farewells before going out to find his family’s killers, knowing that no one would either accompany or avenge him, that his own death was inevitable. Vansen shivered.
Barrick abruptly spurred his horse northward. Vansen ran to his own mount and spurred to catch him until they were riding side by side.
“Please, Highness, I ask you one last time. Will you not turn back to your family, your kingdom? Your sister Briony?” Barrick only shook his head, bis eyes once more gazing into nothingness.
“Then you will force me to follow you into this terrible place that I barely escaped the first time. Is that what you want, Highness, for me to follow you into death? Because my oath will not allow me to let you go alone.” Vansen could see her now in his mind’s eye, her lovely face and poorly hidden fear, as well as the bravery that was all the more striking because of it.
For a moment, just a moment, a little of the true Barrick seemed to rise to his eyes, as if someone trapped in a burning house came scrambling to the window to shout for help. “Into death?” he murmured. “Perhaps. But perhaps not.” He let his eyes fall closed, then slowly opened them again. “There are stranger things than death, Captain Vansen—stranger and older. Did you know that?'
There was nothing to say. Exhausted in body and spirit, Vansen could only follow the mad young prince into the shadowy hills.
Briony had never thought of Southmarch Castle as something oppressive or frightening—it had been her home for all her life, after all—but as they moved quietly on foot along the edge of the lagoon, the keep with its tall towers and lighted windows seemed to loom over her like a crowned skull.
The whole night seemed a fantasy, a perverse one in which serving girls were transformed into monsters and princesses had to go disguised through their own domains in Skimmer clothes that stank of fish.
Ena led them through the dank, narrow streets to a dock on the southern lagoon where the keep’s huge outer wall shadowed Fitters Row, but they did not get into a boat Instead, she took them through a weathered door that opened right into the wide wall of stone which defended the castle from the bay. The rough-hewn passage inside led to a stairwell that wound upward into the cliff wall for some twenty or thirty paces, then down again for quite a few more steps, where Briony was astonished to discover herself beside another tiny lagoon, this one entirely surrounded by a rock cave that was lit by lanterns perched here and there along the shore.
Did the Skimmers truly have their own tongue, then? Briony had heard many say that couldn’t be true. She realized that she had learned very little about these people who lived inside her own castle. And a hidden lagoon! “Did you know about this place?” she asked Shaso.
“I have never seen it,” he said, which didn’t quite answer the question. She didn’t press him further, though; he was barely able to stand upright as it was.
Ena appeared to have successfully explained her mission to the Skimmer sentries. She directed Shaso and Briony into a long, slender rowboat, then climbed in after them and rowed them out onto the tiny lagoon toward a low, apparently natural opening in the far rock wall that must have been invisible under water for at least half of every day. The oars moved easily in the girl’s strong, long-fingered hands. In only a short while the little boat slipped out onto the gentle swell of the bay, with the cloudy, vast sky overhead and the night winds blowing.
“Why have I never heard of that lagoon?” Briony was cramped on the seat, her feet perched on the sack Ena and her father had provided that contained mostly dried fish and skin bags full of water. She looked back. “What if someone should invade the castle through that hole in the seawall?”
“It is only there for a little part of the day.” The Skimmer girl smiled an oddly shy, wide-mouthed smile. “When the tide begins to come back up, we must take the boats out of the water and leave the cavern. There are other guards, too—guards you did not see.”
Briony could only shake her head. It was clear that there was much she had yet to learn about her own home.
After a stretch of quiet, the motion of the little boat and the quiet repetitive creaking as Ena plied the oars began to lull her. Sleep was very tempting, but she was not ready to surrender yet. “Shaso? Shaso.”
He made a grunting sound.
“You told me you would explain what happened. Why you did not tell me the truth.” He groaned, but very quietly. “Is this my punishment, then?”
“If you want to think of it that way.” She reached out and squeezed his arm, felt where the hard muscle had begun to devour itself during his dark, malnourished weeks in the stronghold cell. “I promise I will let you sleep soon. Just tell me what happened… that night.”
Shaso spoke slowly, stopping often to get his breath. “He called me in, your brother Kendrick. He had just