Shadowmarch

“But this could have I don’t know, perhaps something in it telling of his real parents. A piece of jewelry with his family name on it, perhaps.” Or a costly heirloom that might help pay for his room and board, Chert could not help thinking.

“It is his,” said Opal again, quietly. She knelt beside the boy and stroked his pale hair and Chert suddenly understood that she didn’t necessarily want to find out the boy’s true name, his parent’s names…

“Well,” he began, looking at the sack, but now his attention was caught by the stone. What he had at first thought was only a sedimentary lump polished by rain or sea, or perhaps even just a weathered piece of pottery, was something much stranger. It was a stone, that seemed clear, but as he stared at it, he realized it was of a kind he had never seen before, nor could he even recognize where it fit in the Family of Stones and Metals. A Funderling not recognizing a stone’s family was something like a dairy farmer stumbling across not just a new breed of cow, but one that could fly.

“Look at this,” he said to Opal. “Can you make anything of it?” “Cloudchip?” she suggested, naming an obscure kind of crystal. “Earth-ice?” He shook his head. “No, it’s neither of those. Flint, where did you find this stone, boy?' “In the garden place. Outside where you were digging.” The boy stuck out his hand. “Give them back.”

Chert glanced from the boy to the bag on a cord, the mysterious, sewn-shut bag. He handed it back to Flint but hung onto the murky crystal. He and Opal would need to talk about this mysterious legacy, but there was no sense worrying about everything at once. “I’m going to take this stone,” he told the child. “Not to keep, but because I’ve never seen anything like it and I want to see if someone can tell me what it is.” He looked at the boy, who stared back expectantly. It took Chert a moment to understand why. “If I may, that is,” he said. “You found it, after all.”

The boy nodded, satisfied. As Chert and Opal went out, Flint rolled onto his back, staring at the ceiling as he squeezed the little leather bag between his fingers.

Opal returned to her clearing up, but Chert only sat, turning the crystal over and over in his hand. It seemed to have an artificial shape, that was the strange thing, a regularity—it appeared to have been chipped out of some larger piece, but there were no fracture-markings, in fact, the edges were quite rounded. And it was definitely, incontrovertibly, something he had not seen before. A dark spot seemed to move in its depths.

It troubled him, and the more he thought about it the more troubled he grew. It seemed like something that could only have come from behind the Shadowline, but if so, what was it doing deep inside Southmarch Castle? And was it coincidence that the boy found it in the cemetery, only a few hundred steps from the chambers where the prince regent was murdered? Or that the boy from beyond the Shadowline had been the one who found it’.

He looked at Opal, who was contentedly darning a hole in the knee of Flint’s breeches. He desperately wanted to ask her opinion, but knew he was going to spend a mostly sleepless night himself and was reluctant to rob her of what might be her last contented slumber for some time. Because a fear was growing inside him.

What was it that Chaven had said? “Do not doubt that if the Shadowline sweeps across us, it will bring with it a dark, dark evil.”

Let Opal at least have this night, he decided Let her be happy this one night.

“You’re quiet, Chert. Are you feeling poorly?' “All is well, my old darling,” he said. “Never fear.”

10. Halls of Fire

INVOCATION:

Here is the kingdom, here are its tears

Two sticks

Nothing is known about any day that is past

—from The Bonefall Oracles

It was always bad in the lands of sleep, but this was worse than the other nights, far worse. The long halls of Southmarch were again full of the shadow-men, the insubstantial but relentless figures who dripped and flowed like black blood, who oozed from the cracks between the stones and then took shape, faceless and whispering. But this night, everywhere they went, flames followed them, blazing up in the wake of their pursuit, until it seemed as though the very air would catch fire.

Everywhere he went more of them appeared, oozing up from beneath the flagstones, clotting as they slid or shuffled after him, solidifying into vague man-shapes. Eyeless, still they stared, and they called mouthlessly after him, noises of both threat and promise. They followed him, many still joined to their brethren in a near-solid mass, and fire came behind them, catching in the tapestries and licking upward toward the ancient ceiling as the faceless men followed his hopeless attempt at flight from room to room, through corridor after corridor.

They killed Kendrick! His heart seemed lopsided in his chest; his lungs burned. Room after room was wreathed in flame, but still the dark men swarmed after him.

They want to kill me, too —kill us all! The air was so hot it scorched his nostrils and crackled in his throat, as though the entire palace had become an oven. These phantoms of soot, shadow, and blood had killed his brother and now they would kill him, too, chase him like a wounded deer and hound him to his death through endless halls of flame…

* * *

“Make him well!”

Chaven stood slowly. At his feet, the page who crouched beside Barrick’s bed dabbed at the prince’s brow with a wet cloth. “It is not so easy, Princess…”

“I don’t care! My brother is burning up with fever!” Briony felt a balance inside her tipping dangerously.”He is in pain!”

Chaven shook his head. “With all respect, I think not so much, Highness. It is one of the boons of fever—it clouds much of the hurt of the illness and lets the mind float free of the body.”

“Float free?” She struggled to control herself but her finger was trembling as she pointed at her writhing, moaning twin. “Look at him! Do you think he is free of anything?”

The other physician, Brother Okros, cleared his throat. “Actually, my lady, we have seen others afflicted this way, but in a few days many have been well again.”

She turned on this small, diffident man who had come from Eastmarch Academy in the mainland town to consult with Chaven. Okros took a step back as though she might hit him, and for a moment she felt a hysterical sense of pleasure at his fear, at the power of her own anger. “Yes? Many? What does that mean? And how long have you all known about this fever-plague?”

“Since the ending of the last festival month, Highness.” There was a slight squeak in his voice. Okros was a priest, but mostly in name only, a teacher of the sciences who had probably seldom set foot in a Trigon temple since his ordainment. “Your brother—your other brother—was informed by the academy when the first groups of sufferers began to come to us. But he…”

“Was killed? Yes.” She took a deep breath, but it did not calm her. “Yes, that might explain why he hasn’t given his time to this issue. Did you plan to wait until everyone else in my family was dead from one thing or another before mentioning this plague to me?'

“Please, Princess,” said Chaven. “Briony Please.”

The use of her name caught her for a moment, made her look at the court physician. She couldn’t quite read the expression on his round face, but it was clear he was trying to tell her something. I am making a fool of myself that is what. She looked around at the servants and guards in Barrick’s room and knew there were more castle folk outside, no doubt with their ears pressed to the door. She blinked against what felt like the beginning of tears. I am frightening everyone.

“It is not a plague, Highness,” Okros said carefully. “Not yet. We have fever seasons like this almost every year. This is simply more severe than most.”

“Just tell me what will happen to my brother.”

“His elements are out of balance,” Chaven explained. “He is full of fire, at least in a sense. I do not want to