“It is not your turn to speak, Briony,” he rasped. Something moved behind his eyes—despair? Anger? Surrender? “And this is not the place to discuss this matter.”
“She can’t!” Barrick shouted. The courtiers were talking loudly now, surprised and titillated. Some echoed Briony’s own refusal, but not many. “I won’t let you!”
“You are not the prince regent,” Kendrick declared. “Father is gone. Until he comes back, I am your father. Both of you.”
He meant to do it. Briony was certain. He was going to sell her to the bandit prince, the cruel mercenary Ludis, to reduce the ransom and keep the nobles happy. The ceiling of the great throne room and its tiled pictures of the gods seemed to swirl and drop down upon her in a cloud of dizzying colors. She turned and staggered through the murmuring, leering crowd, ignoring Barrick’s worried cries and Kendrick’s shouts, then slapped away Shaso’s restraining hand and shoved her way out the great doors, already weeping so hard that the sky and the castle stones ran together and blurred.
5. Songs of the Moon and Stars
THE LOUD VOICE:
In a snail shell house
Beneath a root, where the sapphire lies
The clouds lean close, listening
Young Flint didn’t seem very taken with the turnip porridge, even though it was sweetened with honey.
“You don’t need to finish,” he said. “We’re going out, you and I.” The boy looked at him, neither interested nor disinterested. “Where?” “The castle—the inner keep.”
A strange expression flitted across the child’s face but he only rose easily from the low stool and trotted out the door before Chert had gathered up his own things. Although he had only come down Wedge Road for the first time the night before, the boy turned unhesitatingly to the left. Chert was impressed with his memory. “You’d be right if we were going up, lad, but we’re not. We’re taking Funderling roads.” The boy looked at him questioningly. “Going through the tunnels. It’s faster for the way we’re going. Besides, last night I wanted to show you a bit of what was above ground—now you get to see a bit more of what’s down here.”
They strolled down to the bottom of Wedge Road, then along Beetle Way to Ore Street, which was wide and busy, full of carts and teams of diggers and cutters on their way to various tasks, many leaving on long journeys to distant cities that would keep them away for half a year or more, since the work of the Funderlings of Southmarch was held in high regard nearly everywhere in Eion. There was much to watch in the orderly spoked wheel of streets at the center of Funderling Town, peddlers bringing produce down from the markets in the city above, honers and polishers crying their trades, and tribes of children on their way to guild schools, and Flint was wide-eyed. The day- lanterns were lit everywhere, and in a few places raw autumn sunlight streamed down through holes in the great roof, turning the streets golden, although all in all the day outside looked mostly dark.
Chert saw many folk he knew, and most called out greetings. A few saluted young Flint as well, even by name, although others looked at the boy with suspicion or barely-masked dislike. At first, Chert was astonished that anyone knew the boy’s new name, but then realized Opal had been talking with the other women. News traveled fast in the close confines of Funderling Town.
“Most times we’d turn here,” he said, gesturing at the place near the Gravelers Meeting Hall where the ordered ring of roads began to become a little less ordered and Ore Street forked into two thoroughfares, one level, one slanting downward, “but the way we’re going all the tunnels aren’t finished yet, so we’re making a stop at the Salt Pool first. When we get there you have to be quiet and you can’t cut up.”
The boy was busy looking at the chiseled facades of the houses, each one portraying a complicated web of family history (not all of the histories strictly true) and did not ask what the Salt Pool might be. They walked for a quarter of an hour down Lower Ore Street until they reached the rough, largely undecorated rock that marked the edge of town. Chert led the boy past men and a few women idling by the roadside—most waiting by the entrances to the Pool in hopes of catching a day’s work somewhere—and through a surprisingly modest door set in a wall of raw stone, into the glowing cavern.
The Pool itself was a sort of lake beneath the ground; it filled the greater part of the immense natural cave. It was salt water, an arm of the ocean that reached all the way into the stone on which the castle stood, and was the reason that even in the dimmest recesses of their hidden town the Funderlings always knew when the tides were high or low. The run of the lake was rough, the stones sharp and spiky, and the dozens of other Funderlings who were already there moved carefully. It would have been the work of a few weeks at the most to make the cavern and its rocky shore as orderly as the middle of town, but even the most improvement-mad of Chert’s people had never seriously considered it. The Salt Pool was one of the centers of earliest Funderling legend—one of their oldest stories told how the god the big folk called Kernios, who the Funderlings in their own secret language named “Lord of the Hot Wet Stone,” created their race right there on the Salt Pool’s shores in the Days of Cooling.
Chert did not explain any of this to the boy. He was not certain how long the child would stay with them and the Funderlings were cautious with outsiders; it was far too early even to consider teaching him any of the Mysteries.
The boy scrambled across the uneven, rocky floor like a spider, and he was already waiting, watchful features turned yellow-green by the light from the pool, when Chert reached the shore. Chert had only just taken off his pack and set it down by the boy’s feet when a tiny, crooked-legged figure appeared from a jumble of large stones, wiping its beard as it swallowed the last bite of something.
“Is that you, Chert? My eyes are tired today.” The little man who stood before them only reached Chert’s waist. The boy stared down at the newcomer with unhidden surprise.
“It is me, indeed, Boulder.” Now the boy looked at Chert, as surprised by the name as by the stranger’s size. “And this is Flint. He’s staying with us.” He shrugged. “That was Opal’s idea.”
The little fellow peered up at the boy and laughed. “I suppose there’s a tale there. Are you in too much of a hurry to tell it to me today?”
“Afraid so, but I’ll owe it to you.” “Two, then?”
“Yes, thank you.” He took a copper chip out of his pocket and gave it to the tiny man, who put it in the pouch of his wet breeches.
“Back in three drips,” said Boulder, then scampered back down the rocky beach toward the water, almost as nimble as the boy despite his bent legs and his many years.
Chert saw Flint staring after him.”That’s the first thing you have to learn about our folk, boy. We’re not dwarfs. We are meant to be this size. There are big folk who are small—not children like you, but just small—and those are dwarfs. And there are Funderlings who are small compared to
“Boulder… ?”
“His parents named him that, hoping it would make him grow. Some tweak him about it, but seldom more than once. He is a good man but he has a sharp tongue.”
“Where did he go?”
“He is diving. There’s a kind of stone that grows in the Salt Pool, a stone that is made by a little animal, like a snail makes a shell for itself, called
Before he could finish explaining, Boulder was standing before them, holding a chunk of the glowing stuff in each hand; even though it was starting to darken after having been taken from the water, the light was still so
