Shadowmarch

insult you with what may seem like old superstitions, but it is hard to explain illness without also explaining how the elements within us correspond to the elements without—in our earth and in our firmament.” He rubbed his head wearily. “So I will only say that his blood is too heated because the elements are out of balance. Normally the elements of earth and water already inside him would serve to keep that balance, just as stones ring a blaze and water extinguishes it when necessary. But he is all fire and air at the moment, gusting and burning.”

Gusting and burning. She looked down in horror at Barrick’s dear face, so contorted now and so oblivious. Oh, merciful Zoria, please don’t take him from me. Don’t leave me alone in this haunted place. Please.

“Many have already survived this fever, Princess,” said little Brother Okros. “We have had news of it from southern travelers in prior days. It has already been in Syan and Jellon for months.”

“Perhaps it came in with the ship from Hierosol,” Chaven suggested. He had tugged the page boy away and was examining Barrick again, smelling his breath. Briony’s twin was a little quieter, but he still murmured worriedly in his sleep, his face sparkling with sweat.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. It was the bleak and ruthless will of the gods, the dark wings she had felt spreading above them all. It was her every dire premonition coming true. “It doesn’t matter where it came from. Just tell me this—how many die from it and how many live?”

“We hate to make pronouncements of that type, my lady,” began the academy physician. Chaven frowned at him. “At least half have survived. Unless they were babies or old folk.”

“Half?” She was on the verge of shrieking again. She closed her eyes and felt the world spinning around her. All had gone mad. All had gone completely mad. “And what is the treatment?”

“Open windows,” Okros said promptly .“Dirt from the temple of Kernios beneath the head and foot of his bed. And wrap him in wet cloths—water from Envor’s temple basins would be particularly good, and we must make prayers to Erivor, of course, since he is your family’s special patron. All this will serve to soothe the influence of fire and air.”

“There are also herbs that might help.” As Chaven rubbed at his forehead again, considering, Briony noticed for the first time that the court physician looked dreadful. His features were pale and sagging, and he carried circles dark as bruises beneath his eyes. “Willow bark. And tea made from elder flowers might also help bring down the fever.

“We should bleed him as well,” added Okros, glad to be talking about something meaningful. “A bit less blood will ease his suffering.”

Briony nudged Chaven to one side, none too gently, and with an immense rustling of skirts sank down beside her brother. These clothes keep me trussed like a troublesome horse, she thought as she struggled to find a comfortable position. Or a captured thief. It hurts even to bend.

Her brother’s eyes were mere slits, but his pupils darted about between the lids.

“Barrick? It’s me, Briony. Oh, please, can’t you hear me?” She touched his cheek then took his hand, despite its warmth, it was damp as something found in a rock pool. “I won’t leave you.”

“You must leave him, my lady,” said a new voice Briony looked up to see Avin Brone standing in the doorway, filling it with his bulk. “I beg your pardon, but the truth must be told. There is much to do. Tomorrow we bury the prince regent. Tomorrow someone must take up the scepter so that the people can see an Eddon still sits the throne. If Prince Barrick is too ill, then it must be you. And I have other news for you as well.”

She felt a weird little thrill So the only person I can absolutely trust not to send me to Ludis, she realized, will be on that throne. For a moment she had an image of all the things she might do, all the petty wrongs she could reverse. Then she looked down at Barrick again and the idea of what she might accomplish seemed pointless. “How many are sick with this?” she asked Chaven.

“How many have the fever now?” He looked at the physician from the academy. “A few hundred in the town, perhaps. Is that right, Okros? And a dozen or so in the castle. Three of the kitchen servants, I think. Your stepmother’s maid and two of Barrick’s own pages.” He patted the head of the little boy who held the wet cloth. “Those are the ones I knew about when your brother began to sicken.”

“Anissa’s maid? But how is Anissa herself?” “Your stepmother is well and so is the baby she carries.” “And none of those who came with that man Dawet have the fever?” Chaven shook his head.

“Strange it should be brought on their ship and yet none of them should sicken.”

“Yes, but fever is a strange thing,” said this pale, battered-looking Chaven—a man who almost seemed a stranger to her. She found herself wondering for perhaps the first time ever in her life what he did when he was by himself, “what life and thoughts he kept secret from others, as everyone did. “It can touch one and leave another standing just beside him unharmed.”

“Like murder,” she said.

Briony was almost the only one in the room who did not make the sign to ward away evil after she had spoken. Even Barrick groaned in his fevered sleep.

* * *

He had run until he was beyond the immediate reach of the faceless shapes, the whisperers, but he knew they were still somewhere behind him, flowing through the honeycombed rooms, sniffing for him like dogs. He was in a wing of the castle he didn’t know, chamber after chamber of dusty, unfamiliar objects flung around without order or care. A broken orrery stood on a table, metal arms bent so that they protruded in all directions like the quills of some spiky creature Carpets and tapestries were draped across each other, bunched and crumpled at the edges, even spread onto the timbered celling so that it was somehow difficult to tell which way was up, and they were beginning to curl with the rising heat.

He stopped. Someone—or something—was calling his name. “Barrick! Where are you?”

He realized with a spasm of terror that it was not only the shadow-men who were looking for him, the men of smoke and blood, but something else as well. Something dark and tall and singular. Something that had been hunting him a long, long time.

His swift walk became a run. Moments later it became a wild, headlong dash. Still his own name floated to him like a lonely echo from one benighted mountaintop to another, or like the cry of some lost soul stranded upon the moon.

“Bamck? Come back!”

He was in a long corridor open on one side, he realized, sprinting through a gallery that dropped away next to him, a dizzying plunge to the stone flags just a misstep away. All the castle must be afire now—here the tapestries were burning at the bottom edges, flames beginning to lick their way up the stylized hunting scenes and representations of adventuring gods and ancient kings seated in glory.

“Barrick?”

He pulled up, heart speeding. The flames were climbing higher, the gallery filling with black smoke. He could feel a baking heat all down his right side that hurt his skin. He wanted to run, but something was moving in the smoke ahead of him, something stained red and orange by leaping firelight.

“I am angry. Very angry.”

Barrick’s heart felt as though it might crack his breastbone. The shape trudged out of the murk, smoke dripping down its length like water, fire curling in the dark beard.

“You shouldn’t run from me, boy “ His father’s stare was dull and empty, cloudy as the eyes of a dead fish in a bucket. “Shouldn’t run. It makes me angry with you.”

* * *

For all her discontent with her clothing, Briony was glad for once that Moina and Rose had laced her so tightly, glad that her embroidered stomacher was stiff as armor. It seemed to be all that held her upright on her battered wooden chair—the chair that at least for this mad moment had become the throne of all the March Kingdoms.

Did anyone else feel the same as she did? Did everyone? Were all these castle folk in their ornate finery no more than confused souls hiding inside costumes, as the hard shells of snails protected the helpless, naked things that lived within them?

“He says what?” She was frightened again, even if she forced herself not to show it. She fought hard to keep her eyes on the lord constable, not to let her glance dart into the shadows in anxious search for the assassins and traitors who had seemed all around her in the terrible hour of Kendrick’s death, but