little baggage! She’s not.You don’t even know her.”
Briony’s eyes widened. “Fair enough. But I know you and I know what a turtle you are.” “Turtle?”
“Yes, with your hard shell on the outside. But the reason a turtle has a shell is because he is defenseless on the inside. I fear that someone will get inside your shell—someone I don’t trust to do right by you. That’s all.”
He was oddly touched by her concern but also infuriated. His twin sister thought he was helpless, that he had no defenses. It was as good as calling him simple—or worse, weak. “Just you keep out of my shell, too, Briony. It’s mine, after all.” It came out a bit more harshly than he intended, but he was angry enough to leave it that way.
She stared. It seemed she might say more about this, perhaps apologize again, but the moment passed. “In any case,” she said briskly, “we have other things to talk about. And I’ve come to you about one of them. Father’s letter.”
“We have another letter?” As always, it filled him with both happiness and fear.
“No, not another letter—the last one.”
It took him a moment to understand. “You mean the one that came with that envoy from Hierosol, the Tuani fellow. Your… friend.”
She didn’t rise to the unpleasant tone. “Yes, that letter. Where is it?” “What do you mean?”
“Where is it, Barrick? I haven’t read it—have you? I didn’t think so. Nor has Brone, or Nynor, or anyone else as far as I’ve heard. The only person who actually saw it was Kendrick. And now it’s gone.”
“It must be among some of the other things he had in his chamber. Or in his secretary, that one with the Envor carvings on it. Or Nynor has it in with the accounts and doesn’t know it.” His mood darkened. “That, or someone is lying to us.”
“It’s not among Kendrick’s things. I’ve been looking. There are a lot of other matters we’ve got to deal with that are waiting there, but no letter from Father.”
“But what else could have happened to it?”
Briony shook her head fiercely; for a moment he saw the warrior queen she could someday be and was sad to think he might not be around to see it; love, pride, and anger mixed in him, swirled like the clouds blowing in overhead. “Stolen—by his murderer, perhaps,” she said. “Maybe there was something written there that someone didn’t want us to see. In fact, I’m certain of it.”
Barrick felt a wave of dread. Suddenly the darkening courtyard seemed an exposed place, a dangerous place, and he knew why lizards were so quick to slither back into the cracks at any sound—but he realized an instant later that his father’s secret, his own secret, would not be the kind of thing that King Olin would commit to a letter, even a letter to his eldest son. Still,just the brief thought had been terribly disturbing.
“So what do we do?” he asked. The day had gone sour. “We find that letter. We must.”
She came to him in the middle of the night, climbed under the heavy cloak and pressed herself against him. For a moment he took it as part of his dream and pulled her close, calling her by a name he knew he should not utter even half-asleep, but then he felt her trembling and smelled the smoke and damp in her clothes and he was awake. “What are you doing?” Vansen tried to sit up, but she clung. “Girl, what do you think you’re doing?” She pushed her head against his chest. “Cold,” she moaned. “Hold me.”
The fire was nothing but embers now. A few of the horses moved restlessly on their tethers, but none of the other men were stirring. The girl slid her hard, thin little body against him, desperate for comfort, and for a moment his loneliness and fear made the temptation great. But Vansen remembered the frightened-child look, the terror that he had seen peering out of her eyes like a wounded animal driven into a thicket. He pulled free and sat up, then wrapped the cloak around her and tugged her close, using the heavy wool to help pinion her arms. After all, he could only take so much of her blind, needy rubbing before his resolve would crumble like walls made of sand. “You are safe,” he told her. “Don’t fear You are safe. We are soldiers of the king.”
“Father?” Her voice was hoarse and confused.
“I am not your father. My name is Ferras Vansen. We found you wandering in the forest—do you remember?”
There were tears on her cheeks; he could feel them as she rubbed her face against his neck. “Where is he? Where is my father? And where is Collum?”
For a moment he thought she was talking about Collum Dyer, but it was a common enough name in the March Kingdoms—he supposed it might be a brother or sweetheart. “I don’t know. What is your name? Do you remember how you came to be walking in the forest?”
“Quiet! They will hear you. At night, when the moon is high, you can only whisper.” “Who? Who will hear me?”
“Willow, the sheep are gone. That’s what he said. I ran out and the moonlight was so bright, so bright! Like eyes.” “Willow? Is that your name?'
She burrowed in against his chest, struggling beneath the confining cloak to get as close to him as possible Her neediness was so startling and pitiable that his few lingering thoughts of lovemaking drained away. She was like a puppy or kitten standing beside its dead mother, nosing at a body gone cold.
Her blind groping slowed, but more from the exhaustion of fighting against the folds of the heavy cloak, he thought, than from diminishing fear. “But I didn’t,” she said slowly, and lifted her face In the moonlight the darks of her eyes seemed shrunken, mere pinpoints with white all around. “Don’t you know? The forest came to me. It… swallowed me.”
FerrasVansen had seen such a look before and it stabbed at him like a knife. The old madman back in the village where he had grown up so long ago had worn a stare like that—the old man who had crossed the Shadowline and returned.
18. One Guest Less
RABBITS MASK:
Day is over, shadows in the nest
Where have the children gone?
All are running, scattering
The mad muddle of life, Chert thought, was enough to make a person want to lie down on the ground, close his eyes, and become a blindworm Surely blindworms didn’t have to put up with nonsense like this?
“Mica? Fissure and fracture, have you nothing better to do with your time and mine than argue?”
Hornblende’s nephew looked around for his brother. Both of them could be difficult by themselves, but they were much less willing to put up a fight when they were on their own. “It’s not right, Chert, putting tunnels here. It’s too deep, too close to the Mysteries. If it collapses through to the next level, they’ll be right on top of where they shouldn’t be!”
“It is not your place to decide. The king’s people want this tunnel system made bigger and that’s what we’re going to do. Cinnabar and the other chiefs of the Guild have approved the plans.”
Mica scowled. “They haven’t been here. Most of them haven’t worked raw stone in years, and it’s been even longer since any of them have been here.” He brightened as his brother approached. “Tell him.”
“Tell me what?” Chert took a deep breath. It had been a strange last few days since the bizarre miniature pageant on the castle roof; his head was so full of confusing thoughts and questions he could scarcely keep his
