Shadowmarch

of your people, you Rooftoppers want to make common cause with the big folk? Why?”

“Because although we have lived hidden in your shadows for long years, Old Night is a shadow that will cover all, and none of us will find our way out again.” The royal mask seemed to slip a little; for the first time, Chert could see the fear she had hidden. “It is coming, Chert of Blue Quartz. We would have guessed in any case, but the truth has been directly spoken to us by the Lord of the Peak…” Watching her speak so gravely, so carefully, Chert did not doubt that she was an able ruler Despite her size, he could not help finding her very admirable. “The storm that we have feared since before my grandmother’s grandmother’s day is coming,” said Queen Upsteeplebat. “It will be here soon.”

* * *

“May the gods protect us,” murmured Raemon Beck, but the young man didn’t sound as though he believed that they would Ferras Vansen stared in silence at the valley spread before them. It disturbed him, too, but it took a moment for him to understand why it seemed so particularly frightening. Then he remembered the old woman’s house and what he had found there. He had been only eight or nine years old that day, already nearing a man’s height but thin as a bowstave. He had thought himself very brave, of course.

Ferras’ mother was concerned about the widow who lived on the next farm, perhaps because with her own husband so short of breath these days and barely able to get out of bed she had been anticipating her own upcoming widowhood. She at least had children, though, the old neighbor had none. Now they had not seen her for several days and her goats were wandering across the green but summer-dry hills. Fearing the old woman might have become too ill to take care of herself his mother sent Ferras, her eldest, across the dale to look in on her with a jug of milk and a small loaf.

He recognized something in the silence of the place while he was still yards away, but without quite understanding what he sensed. The little wooden house was a familiar place — Ferras had been there several times with his sisters, bringing the old woman a baked festival sweet or some flowers from his mother. The old woman had never had much to say, but she always seemed happy to see the children and would always press some gift on them in return, although what she had to spare was seldom anything more than a shiny wooden bead from a necklace that had lost its string or a bit of dried fruit from one of the stubby trees in her dooryard. But now some new element was present and young Ferras felt the hairs on his arms and neck rise and tingle.

The wind was in the other direction or he would have smelled the body a long time before he reached the threshold. It was high summer, and as he pushed open the ill-fitting door the stench leaped out and clawed at his nose and eyes, sending him stumbling back, gagging and wiping away tears. Still holding the jug, generations of crofter thrift preventing him from spilling a drop of milk no matter the circumstances, Ferras paused a few steps from the house, uncertain what to do. He had smelled death before he knew well enough now why they had not seen the old woman lately. Still, with the first shock lessened, he felt a powerful tug, a wondering, a needing to know.

He pinched his nose and stepped into the doorway. A little daylight spilled past him through the door, but the hut had only one window and it was shuttered, so it took him a moment to see anything but darkness.

She was dead, but she was alive.

No, not alive, not truly, but the thing that lay in the center of the rush-strewn dirt floor—facedown, he realized after staring for long moments, as though she had tried to crawl toward the doorway—was rippling with movement. Flies, beetles, and countless other crawling things he could not identify covered her entirely, a person- shaped mass of glinting, wriggling life, other than a few wisps of white hair, there was scarcely anything to see of the old woman’s body. It was horrifying, and yet in a way weirdly exciting as well, although he was ever after ashamed of the feeling, the memory would stay with him forever. All that life feeding off one death.

In the dim light, the old woman seemed to be dressed in glittering black armor, something like the “caparison of light” he had heard the priest speak of on festival day, the raiment in which dead heroes would be dressed when they went to meet the gods.

“What is it, Captain? Are you ill? What’s happened?” Vansen shook his head, unable to answer Collum Dyer’s question. It had been a strange day already, full of weird discoveries. The patches of bright-blooming meadow flowers they had found along the roadside had been strange enough, months out of season, bending nearly sideways in brisk autumn winds they were never meant to suffer. Then there had been the deserted village a few miles back where Vansen and the others had left the road to water the horses—a very small village, admittedly, the kind that sometimes emptied when a plague struck the livestock or the only well ran dry, but it had clearly been recently occupied. Ferras Vansen had stood in the midst of those empty houses holding a carved wooden toy he had found, a charmingly well-made horse that no child would willingly leave behind, growing increasingly certain that something disturbing was at work all across this quiet land. Now, as he stared out at the scene before them, there was no longer any doubt in his mind that the village and the unseasonal flowers were something more than happenstance.

Unlike the village, the valley before them was very much alive, but in a way more like the dead widow woman than Vansen would have liked. Its colors were… wrong. It was hard to say why at first—the trees had brown trunks and green leaves, the grass was yellowed but not beyond what seemed natural for this time of the year, before the heavy rains came—but there was definitely something amiss, some mischief of light that at first glance he had thought a freak of the low clouds. It was a cold, gray day, but he felt sure that alone could not make the valley’s colors seem so bruised, so … oily.

As the company tramped down into the valley itself, Vansen could see that although the trees and meadowed hillsides did indeed seem to have taken on an unnatural hue, much of the strangeness was because of a single kind of plant, a brambly creeper that seemed to be choking out the other vegetation, which had made its way almost everywhere along the valley, even down to the edge of the broad Settland Road. Its leaves were so dark as to be almost black, but the color was nowhere near that simple: on close inspection he saw shades of purple and deep blue and even deeper slate gray, colors that almost seemed to move; the leaves gleamed like grape-skin after a rain and the coiling vines seemed quietly fearsome, like sleeping snakes. A chill breeze ruffled the plants, but he almost fancied they were moving more than the soft wind should warrant, that they had a tremor of independent life like the horrid carpet of insects in the crofter-wo man’s house.

The vines also had thorns, nasty spikes half the length of his finger, but the strangest thing of all were the flowers, big velvety cabbage-shaped blossoms as night-dark as the robe of a priest of Kernios.The valley seemed to be choking in black roses.

“What is all this?” Dyer asked again from a tight throat. “Never seen anything like.” “Nor have I. Beck, do you recognize this?”

The face of the merchant s nephew was quite pale, but also oddly resigned, as though he were seeing something in the waking world that had long come to him in evil dreams. Still, he shook his head. “No. When we… where they came… there was nothing out of the ordinary. Only the mist I told you of, the long reach of mist.”

“There’s a house up there in the hill,” Vansen said. “A cottage. Should we go look to see if someone’s there?”

“Those vines are all over it.” Collum Dyer had not made many jokes today; he sounded like it might be a while until he made any more. “There’s no one left inside. That other village had emptied without any cause we could see, so who would stay around and wait for this mucky stuff to crawl over them? No point looking—they’re gone.”

That had been his thought, too. Ferras Vansen was secretly relieved. He had not been anxious to wade toward a deserted house through these vines that sighed and rippled in the wind.

“You’re right,” he told his lieutenant. “We ride on, then, since we will not make camp here, I think.” Dyer nodded. He, too, was happy to keep traveling. Raemon Beck had his eyes closed and seemed to be praying. They passed through the valley without speaking, looking to all sides as though riding through wild, foreign lands instead of following the familiar road to Settland.The hills leaned close and the huge flowers bounced gently beneath the wind’s unseeable fingers, leaves rubbing, so that it almost seemed like Vansen and his men were surrounded by whispering watchers.

To the relief of Ferras Vansen and the rest of the company, the tangle of black vines did not extend beyond the valley, although the woods beside the hilly road remained unusually quiet.

What could happen to scare even the birds away? Vansen wondered.