Shadowplay

sleeping and the clouds are coming along the ground.”

“He’s frightened!” said Opal. Chert had to hold her back, wondering even as he did so whether it was the right thing to do. “Let go of me, old man—can’t you hear him? Flint! Flint, I’m here!”

“I assure you, good Mistress Opal, he cannot hear you.” Something odd and hard had entered Chaven’s voice—a tone Chert hadn’t heard from him before. “My master Kaspar Dyelos taught this working to me and I learned it well. I assure you, he hears no voice but mine.”

“But he’s frightened!”

“Then you must be quiet and let me speak to him,” Chaven said. “Boy, listen to me.”

“The trees!” Flint said, his voice rising. “The trees are... moving. They have fingers. They’re all around the house, and the clouds are all around too!”

“You are safe,” the physician said. “You are safe, boy. Nothing you can see can hurt you.”

“I don’t want to go out. Ma said not to! But the door’s open and the clouds are in the house...!”

“Boy...”

Flint’s desperate words came out in little bursts, as though he were running hard. “Not...the...don’t want...” He was swaying on the bench now, boneless as a doll, his head rolling on his neck as though someone were shaking him by the shoulders. “The eyes are all staring! Where’s my ma? Where’s the sky?” He was weeping now. “Where’s my house?”

“Stop this!” Opal shrieked. “You’re hurting him with your horrible spell!”

“I assure you,” Chaven said, a little breathless himself, “that while he may be remembering things that frightened him, he’s in no danger...”

Flint suddenly went rigid on the bench. “He’s not in the stone anymore,” he said in a harsh whisper, throat as tight as if someone squeezed it in strong hands. “He’s not just in the stone—he’s...in...me! ” The child fell silent, still stiff as a post.

“We are done now, boy,” Chaven said after a long moment of stunned silence. “Come back to your home. Come back here, to the candle, and the mirror, come back to Opal and Chert...”

Flint stood up so suddenly that he tipped the heavy bench over. It crashed onto Chaven’s foot and the physician hopped back on one leg, cursing unintelligibly, then fell over.

“No!” Flint shouted, and his voice filled the small room, rattled from the stone walls. “The queen’s heart! The queen’s heart! It’s a hole, and he’s crawling through it...!”

And then he went limp and fell to the floor like a puppet with its strings cut.

“He only sleeps.” Chaven spoke gently, an unspoken apology behind the words, but Opal was having nothing of it; the look on her face could have crumbled limestone. She angrily waved Chaven and her husband from the sleeping room so she could continue dabbing the boy’s forehead with a wet cloth, as if the mere fact of their presence would compromise her healing abilities—or, as Chert thought more likely, as though the very sight of two such useless men made her feel ill.

“I do not know what happened,” Chaven said to Chert as they turned the bench right-side-up and sat on it. Chert poured them both a mug of mossbrew out of a jug. “Never before...” He frowned. “Something has been done to that boy. Behind the Shadowline, perhaps.”

Chert laughed, but it was not one of the pleasant kind. “We did not need any mirror-magic to know that.”

“Yes, yes, but there is more here than I ever thought. You heard him. He did not merely wander across the Shadowline—he was taken. Something strange was done to him there, I have no doubt.”

Chert thought of the boy as he had found him just days before, lying at the foot of the Shining Man at the very center of the Funderling Mysteries, with the little mirror clutched in his fingers. And then that terrifying fairy- woman had taken the mirror from Chert in turn. What was it all about? Was she the queen the boy was shouting about? He had said something about a hole, and Chert could see how a heart with a hole in it might describe her.

“I don’t understand,” Chaven said. “Not any of it. But I cannot help feeling that I need to.”

“Well enough.” Chert stood, wincing at the ache in his knees. “Me, I have more pressing things to worry about, like where we are going to go and how we are going to find something to eat without anyone noticing you.” “What are you talking about?” Chaven asked.

“Because not only isn’t Opal going to feed us today,” Chert told him, “I think it’s pretty plain that you and I will be a lot healthier if we’re not sitting here when she comes out.”

“Ah,” said the physician, and hastily drained his mug. “Yes, I see what you mean. Let us be going.”

16. Night Fires

Pale Daughter told her father Thunder that she had seen a handsome lord dressed all in pearly armor, with hair like moonlight on snow, and that her heart now rode with him. Thunder knew that it was his half brother Silvergleam, one of the children of Breeze, and forbade her to go out of the house again. The music between father and daughter lost its purest note. The sky above the god’s house filled with clouds.

—from One Hundred Considerations, out of the Qar’s Book of Regret

After so many centuries, it was hard for Yasammez to accustom herself to true daylight again. Even this shy, cloud-blanketed winter sun seemed to blaze into her eyes from the moment it rose until it slid down behind the hills. She disliked it, but also felt a sort of wonder: had it really been like this once, walking in these southern lands, moving beneath Whitefire’s orb every day in light so bright that it turned shadows into stark black stripes? She could scarcely remember it.

She had taken the mortals’ city, but it was meaningless without the castle—worse than meaningless, because time was against her. Yasammez had prepared herself for fire and blood, for her own long-forestalled death, for meaningless victory or the finality of defeat, but she could never have prepared herself for this...waiting. The dragging stalemate was beginning to feel as though it might last until the unfamiliar sun burned out and the world went dark. She cursed the Pact of the Glass and her own foolishness for agreeing—she should never have let her hands be tied. Even if it worked, it would buy the one she loved only a few more moons of life and make the eventual loss even more heartbreaking.

As usual, the traitor was waiting for her on the steps outside the great hall she had taken for her own, a market hall or court where the mortals had once performed the meaningless routines of their short, busy lives. The one the sunlanders had called Gil-the-potboy looked up as she approached and smiled his slow, sad smile. His face, so human now she could scarcely recognize what he had once been, seemed as unmoving and opaque as dough.

“Good morning, my lady,” he said. “Will you kill me today?” “Did you have other plans, Kayyin?”

Something that the King had done to him still prevented her speaking to him mind to mind, so they had fallen back on the court speech of Qul-na-Qar, the common tongue of a hundred different kinds of folk. Yasammez, never one to waste even silent words, could not help feeling that here was another way that blind Ynnir was thwarting her, robbing her mind of rest.

Kayyin rose to follow her inside, hands hidden in his robe. Two of the guards looked at her, waiting for her to order this strange creature kept out, but she made no gesture as he trailed her through the door.

“I do not wish to speak to you today,” she warned him. “Then I will not speak, my lady.”

Their footsteps echoed through the hall. Other than two or three of her silent, dark-clad servants waiting in the gallery above, the tall, wood-timbered room was empty. Yasammez preferred it so. Her army had the whole of a city in which to nest. This place was hers, which made the presence of the traitor even more galling.

Yasammez the Porcupine curled herself into her hard, highbacked chair. Her unwelcome guest seated himself crosslegged at her feet. One of her servants from Shehen appeared as if stepping out of nowhere, and waited until Yasammez flicked her fingers in dismissal. She wanted nothing. Nothing was what she had. She had been outmaneuvered and now she was paying the price.