relatively easy handholds, was altogether different and quite dizzying.
Shuddering, he lifted his gaze and looked around, certain that at this very moment a guard had noticed the intruder climbing the residence wall and was nocking an arrow, preparing to spit him like a squirrel. He had seen no one, but how long could that last?
“I’ve never taken the strap to a child, but this time…”
When he reached the top at last, it was all he could do to pull himself onto the tiled roof, gasping for air, arms and legs trembling. When he could at last drag himself up into a crouch and look around, he saw Flint only a short distance away, seated just below the crest of the roof with his back against one of the large chimney pots, waiting calmly and expectantly—but not for his adopted father, it appeared, since he was not even looking at him. Chert wiped the sweat from his face and began to clamber cautiously up the mossy slope toward the boy, cursing with every breath.
His legs were shaking so badly by the time he reached the chimney that he had to cling to the bricks while he stretched and worked out the cramps. Flint looked at him with the same sober stare he employed in all other places and situations.
“I am angry, boy,” Chert growled. He looked around to see if anyone could see them from an upper window, but the boy had picked a spot where the low roof was blocked by taller parts of the residence, window-less walls that turned this section into a kind of tiled canyon, protected from the view of any of the near towers. In fact, even the top of mighty Wolfs-tooth Spire was barely visible above them, blocked by the overhang of a nearby roof. But Chert still had a strong urge to whisper. “Did you hear me? I said I’m angry… !”
Flint turned to him and laid his finger across his lips. “Sssshhh.”
Just before Chert lost his mind entirely, he was distracted by a flicker of movement along the crest of the roof. As he stared in utter astonishment, a figure appeared there. For the first moments he thought the tiny man- shape must be someone standing on the uppermost point of some distant tower, a tower which itself was blocked from his view by the roof on which he and the boy were sitting—what else could explain such a sight? But as the figure began clambering down the roof toward them, moving with surprising grace and speed along the moss-furred spaces between tiles, Chert could no longer pretend the newcomer was anything but a finger-high man. He sucked in air with a strangled wheeze and the little fellow stopped.
“That’s Chert.” Flint explained to the tiny man. “He came with me I live in his house.”
The minuscule fellow began to descend again, faster now, almost swinging from one handhold to another, until he reached Flint. He stood by the boy and peered past him at Chert with—as far as Chert could read in a face the size of a button—a measure of suspicion.
“And tha say un be good, so will I believe ‘ee.” The tiny fellow’s voice was high as the fluting of a songbird, but Chert could make out every word.
“A Rooftopper.” Chert breathed. It was amazingly strange to see an old story standing in front of you, living and breathing and no bigger than a cricket. He had thought the Rooftoppers, if not entirely invented by generations of Funderling mothers and grannies, to be at least so distantly lost in history as to be the same thing. “Fissure and fracture, boy! Where did you find him?'
“Find me?” The little creature stepped toward him, fists cocked on his hips. “What, Beetledown the Bowman but a child’s toy, found and dropped again. “Bested me in fair fight, un did.”
Chert shook his head in confusion, but Beetledown didn’t seem to care Instead, he turned and produced a tiny silver object from the inside of his jerkin and put it to his lips. If it made a noise, it was too quiet or high- reaching for Chert’s old ears, but a moment later an entire crowd of diminutive shapes appeared over the crest of the roof, moving so quickly and silently that for a moment it seemed a small carpet was sliding down the tiles toward them.
There were at least two or three dozen Rooftoppers in the gathering or delegation or whatever it was. Those in the front were mounted on gray mice and carried long spears. Their plate armor looked to be made from nutshells and they wore the painted skulls of birds as helmets, as they pulled up their velvet-furred mounts, they regarded Chert balefully through the eyeholes above the long beaks.
The rest of the group followed on foot, but in their own way they were just as impressive. Although their clothes were almost uniformly of dark colors, and made of fabric too heavy and stiff to drape like the clothes of Funderling and big folk, they had clearly spent much time on these garments—the outfits were intricate in design, and both the men and the women moved with the gravity of people wearing their finest raiment.
But even as the tiny men and women stopped in a respectful semicircle behind the mouse-riders, it became clear that the day’s surprises were not over. The fellow who called himself Beetledown again raised his silver pipe and blew. A moment later an even more bizarre spectacle appeared on the roofline—a fat little man just slightly bigger than Chert’s thumb, riding on the back of a hopping thrush. As the bird made its awkward way down the roof toward the rest of the gathering, Chert saw that the creature’s wings were held fast against its body by the straps of the tall, boxlike covered saddle on its back. The fat man below the awning pulled aggressively on the reins, trying to direct the bird’s track down the tiles, but it seemed to make little difference: the bird went only where it wanted to go.
When the thrush had finally lurched to a halt behind the mice, its rider was dangling halfway out of the saddle, but waved away two of the mouse-riders when they started forward to help him. He righted himself, then clambered down out of the covered seat with surprising mmbleness for his bulk. His climb was hampered a little by his clothes—he wore a fur-collared robe and a shiny chain on his breast. When he reached the tiles, he accepted deep bows from the other Rooftoppers as though they were his due, then stared squintingly at Chert and Flint as he stepped closer to them—but not so close as to advance more than a pace or two beyond the protective line of mouse-riders.
“Is he the king?” Chert asked, but Flint did not reply. The Rooftoppers themselves were watching the tiny fat man with wide-eyed attention as he leaned his entire head forward and… sniffed.
He straightened up, frowning, and then sniffed again, a great intake of air so powerful that Chert could hear it as a thin whistle. The fat man’s frown became a scowl, and he said something in a quick high-pitched voice that Chert couldn’t understand at all, but the other Rooftoppers all gasped and shrank back a few steps, looking up in fear at Chert and Flint as though they had suddenly sprouted fangs and claws.
“What did he say?” asked Chert, caught up in the drama.
Beetledown stepped forward, his face pale but resolute. He bowed. “Sorry, I be, but the Grand and Worthy Nose speaks the tongue of giants not so well as we men of the Gutter-Scouts.” He shook his head gravely. “Even more sorry, I be, but he says tha canst not meet the queen today, because one of tha twain smells very, very wicked indeed.”
“It was long ago—so long ago,” Merolanna told them. “When I first came here from Fael to wed your great- uncle Daman. You do not remember him, of course—he died long before you two were born.”
“His picture is in the long hall,” said Briony. “He looks… very serious.”
“I told you, dear, you may not interrupt. This is difficult enough. But, yes, that is how he looked. He was a serious man, an honorable man, but not… not a kind man. At least, not kind as your father is, or as Daman’s brother the old king was when he was in his cups or otherwise in good cheer.” She sighed. “Don’t take what I say wrongly, children. Your great-uncle was not cruel, and in my way, I came to love him. But that first year, taken from my own family and brought to a country where I scarcely spoke the language, married to a man almost twice my age, I was very sad and frightened and lonely. Then Daman went to war.”
Barrick was finding himself hard-pressed to sit still. He was full of ideas, full of vigor today. He wanted to do things, to make up for the time lost during his illness, not sit here all day listening to his great-aunt’s stories. Merolanna’s earlier talk of madness had caught his attention—almost it had seemed that she was about to confess the same night-visitations that had plagued him, but instead she seemed to be wandering into a story of events so
