Shadowmarch

probably… no, Erivor in his seahorse chariot.” She tried to smile. “After all, Puzzle isn’t as diverting as he used to be—I think I’m beginning to feel too sorry for him I thought it would do the two of us good to have someone new to make fun of. Which reminds me, Puzzle came to me when I was leaving your room earlier today. Told me that on the night Kendrick was killed, he saw Gailon in the hallway.”

Barrick frowned. He seemed not just sleepy but a little dazed. “Kendrick saw Gailon… ?”

“No, Puzzle saw Gailon.” She quickly repeated what the old jester had told her.

“He has heard that Gailon has disappeared,” Barrick said dismissively. “That is all. He wishes to be remembered as denouncing him if it turns out that Gailon is a traitor.”

“I don’t know. Puzzle never bothered with politicking before.”

“Because Father was here to protect him.” Barrick’s expression suddenly changed into something vague, distant. “Do you like him?”

“Who?”

“The poet. He is handsome. He speaks well.”

“Handsome? I suppose, in a prettified sort of way. He has an absurd beard. But that is certainly not why I said he could…” She realized she had been led astray again. “Barrick, I don’t want to waste any more breath on that callow fool. If you dislike the poet so much, give him some money and send him away, I don’t care. I’m convinced he’s nothing to do with the greater matter. Which is what we’re going to talk about.”

“I don’t want to.” He spoke with all the dolefulness that he had made his art. Briony wondered if other siblings felt this way, sometimes loving and hating at the exact same moment. Or was it only twins, so close that it often seemed she had to wait for Barrick to breathe before she could get air into her own lungs?

“You will talk. You almost killed that potboy Why, Barrick?” When he didn’t reply, she leaned across the bed and clutched his arm. “Zoria preserve us, this is me! Me! Briony! Kendrick is dead, Father is gone—we only have each other.”

He looked at her from beneath his lashes like a frightened child. “You don’t really want to know. You just want me to behave well. You just hate it that I embarrassed you in front of Brone and… and that poet.”

She blew out breath in exasperation. “That’s not true. You are my brother. You’re . . you’re nearly the other half of me.” She found his eye and held it, but it was like trying to keep a skittish animal from bolting. “Look at me, Barrick. You know that’s not what happened. The potboy said something about… about dreams. About your dreams. Then you tried to throttle him.”

“He had no right to talk about me that way.” “ What way, Barrick?”

He pulled the blankets even tighter, still deciding. “You said you read the letter from Father again,” he said at last. “Did you notice anything interesting?”

“About the Autarch? I already told you…”

“No, not about the Autarch. Did you notice anything interesting in it about me?”

She stopped, confused. “Anything… no. No. He sent you his love. He said to tell you his health had been good.” He shook his head. His face was grim, as though he were stepping out onto some narrow prominence, trying not to look down at a great distance opening before him. “You don’t understand.”

“How can I? Talk to me! Tell me what has you so upset.You tried to kill an innocent man… !”

“Innocent? That potboy’s no man, he’s a demon. He saw into my dreams, Briony. He spoke about them in front of you and Brone and that mongrel quill-carver!” Despite the chill, Barrick had a thin sheen of sweat on his forehead. “He is probably talking about them still to anyone who’ll listen. He knows. He knows!” He turned and rammed his face against the cushion. His shoulders heaved.

“Knows what?” She grabbed at his arm with both hands and shook him. “Barrick, what have you done?” He turned, eyes damp, red-rimmed. “Done? Nothing. Not yet.”

“I can’t make any sense of this at all.” She combed a tangle of damp red hair back offhis brow with her fingers. “Just talk.Whatever is -wrong, you’re still my brother. I’ll still love you.”

He let out a snort of disbelief but the storm had passed. He let his head fall back on the cushion and stared up at the timbered ceiling. “I’ll tell you what Father’s letter said. ‘Tell Barrick that he should be glad for me. Although I am a captive, my health has actually been much better this last half year. I almost think it has done me good to get away from the damp northern airs.’ That’s what he wrote.”

Briony shook her head. “What, do you think he means that he is happier being away from us—from you? He is jesting, Barrick. Trying to make light of a terrible situation…”

“No. No, he’s not. Because you don’t know what he’s talking about and I do.” The fire in him had died down. He closed his eyes. “Do you remember the nights when Father couldn’t sleep? When he would go to the Tower of Summer and sit up all night with his books?” She nodded. The first few times Olin’s ability to slip away had been the cause of much alarm around the residence, until his family and the guards had learned to look for him in his library in the tower. The king had returned each time from these midnight excursions with an embarrassed air, as if he had been found in drunken sleep on the throne-room floor. Briony had always believed that it was thoughts of his dead wife that tormented him so badly on those nights that he could not sleep: he always spoke of their mother Meriel as though he had loved her very much, even though the marriage had originally been arranged by his father, King Ustin, when Olin and Meriel, the daughter of a powerful Brennish duke, were both very young. Everyone in the household knew that her death had been a hard, hard blow for him.

“And you remember that he would always bar the door?”

“Of course “ Locked out, the guards had only been able to rouse the king by banging on the door until he came to open it, blinking like an owl and wiping at sleepy eyes. “I… I think he cried. He didn’t want anyone to see him weeping. Over our mother.”

Barrick showed a strange, tight-lipped smile. “Weeping? Maybe. But not over our mother.” “What… what do you mean?”

He glanced up at the ceiling and took a few deep breaths, as though he were not merely standing on some high, lonely place but preparing to jump. “I… I went there one night. I had a nightmare. I think I must even have been walking in my sleep—it might have been the first time—because I woke up outside his chamber and I was very frightened and I wanted him to . to tell me things would be all right I went in and he wasn’t there, even though his servants were all there, sleeping I knew he must be in his library So I went out of the residence by that back chapel door so the guards wouldn’t stop me. It was near Midsummer, I think—I only remember it was warm and it felt so strange being out in the courtyard in my nightshirt and bare feet. I felt like I could go anywhere—-just walk where I wanted to, even walk to another country, as though the moon would stay up and bright as long as the journey would take, and that when I woke up there, I would be a different person.” He shook his head. “It was a full moon, very big I remember that, too.”

“How long ago was this?”

“The year that part of the roof fell off Wolfstooth. And the cook with the skinny arms died and we weren’t allowed to go in the kitchen all spring.”

“Ten years ago. You mean the year… the year you hurt your arm.”

He nodded slowly. She could sense that he was balancing something, trying to decide. She tried to sit quietly, but her heart was beating fast and she was unexpectedly frightened.

“The downstairs door was locked, but the key was still in the other side and he hadn’t turned the lock all the way. It popped open when I wiggled the latch, then I went up the steps all the way to the library. There were no guards at the tower, no one there at all. I didn’t think it was strange while it was happening—the whole night seemed like a dream, not just that—but I should have wondered why he’d sent them away, or slipped away from them, just to be by himself. But I wouldn’t have wondered long. When I reached the door, I could… hear him.”

“Was he crying?”

Barrick took a moment to answer. “Crying, yes. Making all kinds of noises, although I could barely hear them through the door. Laughing, it almost sounded like. Talking. At first I thought he was having an argument with someone, then I thought perhaps he was asleep and having a nightmare, just like the one that had woken me up. So I knocked on the door. Quietly at first, but the noises on the other side just went on. So I banged on it with my fists and shouted, ‘Father, wake up!’Then he opened the door.” For a moment it seemed Barrick would continue, but instead his shoulders heaved and he took in a ragged gasp of air. He was sobbing.

“Barrick, what is it? What happened?” She climbed up onto the bed and wrapped her arms around him. His