Shadowmarch

The same things that took the caravan? Or am I only making worries? Perhaps whatever plague emptied that village has scattered the animals and birds, too. Wild things know much we have forgotten.

The lowering skies and his own mood had made an ordinary hill-road look almost otherworldly. He couldn’t help wondering what this land had been like before settlers. The Twilight People — if the stories are true, they were here for long, long centuries before our ancestors arrived. What did they do here? What did they think when they first saw us, the rude tribes that would have come across the water or up from the south? Did they fear us?

Of course, he realized, the shadow folk would have been right to fear the new creatures. Because those creatures would soon take their land from them.

All this place belonged to them once. It was a thought that had first come to him in childhood, on a day when through inattention he found himself a long way from home as the light began to fail in the fastness of the hills. There had been a stillness to the dales both frightening and magical, a change in the light, as though the sky itself had taken a breath and was holding it for a short while before blowing out the candle of the sun, and the dark world of a hundred fireside stories had risen up in his mind like smoke. All this was theirs —the other people. Tlte Old Ones.

And what if now they want it back? he thought. The court physician had said the Shadowline was moving. What if this was more than the matter of a single plundered caravan? What if the Twilight People, like an eldest son returned from the wars to find his young brothers spoiling his inheritance, had decided to take all these lands back?

And, if so, what of us? Pushed out… or simply destroyed?

Two of Vansen’s men found her while they were out picking up deadfall for the evening’s campfire. It was a tribute to the mood they were all in that although she was young and might even have been passing pretty under the dirt, there were few rough jests. They held her arms as they brought her to him, although she did not seem interested in escaping. No fear showed in her dark-eyed face, only blankness alternating with moments of confusion and what almost seemed like flashes of secretive amusement.

“Wandering,” one of her captors told Vansen. “Just looking up at the sky and the trees.”

“She’s talking nonsense,” the other man said. “Do you think she’s taken an injury? Or is it the fever?” He suddenly looked nervous, let go of the girl and stared at his hands as though some sign of plague might be seen there like a stain. There had been rumors about the sickness that had made its way into Southmarch, the fever that attacked Prince Barrick, though it spared his life, but which also killed several old people and more than one small child in the town.

“Leave her with me.” Vansen led the girl in the ragged peasant smock a little way back from the fire, but not so far that the men wouldn’t be able to see him. He wasn’t so much worried about what they might think of his motives as he was concerned with what they were all feeling, the sensation of being lost in a strange place instead of camping beside a familiar road in the March Kingdoms on the northern edge of Silverside.

The girl looked like she had been living out-of-doors for some time. Her matted hair and the grime on her face and hands made it hard to tell how old she was: she could have been anything from a child just reaching womanhood to someone almost his own age.

“What is your name?”

She gave him a calculating look from behind the tangle of her hair, like a merchant who had been offered a ridiculously low price but suspected that bargaining might produce something better. “Puffkin,” she said at last.

“Pufflun!” He let out a startled laugh. “What kind of name is that?”

“A good name for a cat, sir,” she told him. “And she was always good, until the weather changed, my Pufflan.” She had the local accent, not that different from what Vansen grew up with. “Best mouser in the kingdom, till the weather changed. Sweet as soup.”

Vansen shook his head. “But what is your name?”

The girl’s hands were in her lap, tugging at loose threads in her wool smock. “I used to be frightened of the thunder,” she murmured. “When I was a little one…”

“Are you hungry?”

She was shaking now, suddenly, as though beset by fever. “But why are their eyes so bright?” She moaned a little. “They sing of friendship but they have eyes like fire!”

It was no use talking to her. He wrapped his cloak around her shoulders, then went to the fire, dipped up soup with his horn cup, and brought it back. She held it carefully and seemed to enjoy the warmth, but did not appear to understand what to do with it. Vansen took it from her hands and held it to her mouth, giving her little sips until she at last took it herself.

It was good to be able to do a small kindness, he realized as he watched her swallowing. She held out the cup for more and he smiled and went to get some. It was good to be able to take care of someone. For the first time in a disturbing day, and although all the mysteries were growing deeper rather than otherwise, he was almost content.

* * *

The clouds had passed, moving east. Another armada of them waited above the ocean, ready to sweep in, but for the moment much of Southmarch Castle s inner keep was in thin, bright sunlight. Barrick found a spot where there was no shade at all. Soaking up warmth, he felt like a lizard who had just crawled out of a dark, damp crevice.The sunlight was glorious, and for the first time in days a stranger would have realized that the keep’s great towers, newly washed by rain, were all different colors, from the old soot-colored stones of Wolfstooth Spire to the green-copper roof of the Tower of Spring, Autumn s white-and-red tiles, Summer’s hammered-gold ornamentation, Winter’s gray stone and black wrought iron. They might have been part of some titanic bouquet.

Briony was still indoors, finishing up her day’s lessons with Sister Utta. Barrick could not quite understand what more there was to learn when you were already a regent of the land—it was not as though, like a chandler’s apprentice or a squire, you could aspire to bettering yourself, could you? Except for continued training in combat and tactics of war, he had finished his own formal education and couldn’t imagine why he might need more. He could read and write (if not quite as fluently as Briony.) He could ride and hawk and hunt as well as his mangled arm allowed, and identify the heraldic emblems of at least a hundred different families— which, as old Steffans Nynor, the castellan, had once told him, was very important in a war so that one could decide who would be the best opponent to capture for ransom. He knew a great deal about his own family, starting with Anglin the Great, a reasonable amount of the history of the March Kingdoms, a few things about the rest of the nations of Eion, and enough of the tales of the Trigon and the other gods that he could make sense of the things Father Timoid said, when he bothered to pay attention.

He didn’t know everything, of course watching Briony preside over the law courts, full of opinions and concerns about things that seemed to him to matter very little, made him feel almost an outsider. His sister sometimes stopped the day’s proceedings for as much as an hour to argue with the various clerks over a fine point of fairness that she deemed important, leaving dozens of petitioners pushed back to the next day’s docket and grumbling. “Better justice delayed than denied,” was her defense of this foolishness.

He wondered if half a year ago he would have been the same—not with law, of course, which he had always found boring in the extreme, but in ferreting out the truth behind the attack on the caravan, or even trying to make certain of Shaso’s guilt In the early days of Kendrick’s regency Barrick had entertained ideas about what he would do if he were in his brother’s place, all the things he would do better Now he was in his brother’s place, but most days, after another night of haunted sleep, he could scarcely find the resolve to walk out into the courtyard and sit in the sun.

It was the dreams, of course, and the weight of his awful secrets, that held him back—not to mention the fever that had nearly killed him. Surely anyone could understand that? He had almost died, but sometimes it seemed that no one would have minded much if he had. Even Briony.

No, he told himself. That’s a wicked voice. That’s not true. And that was another problem: somehow the fever had not entirely gone. He had walked in his sleep and suffered with bad dreams as long as he could remember, even before the night that had changed everything for the worse. Once or twice in his childhood he had even been found outside the residence in the morning, shivering and confused. But now almost every single night his ragged sleep was alive with creeping things, with shadowy