be caught and imprisoned in some goatyard village in the middle of nowhere?
Still, within a few days the gnawing of her empty stomach began to overwhelm her. She had never been hungry for more than a short time in all her life and was painfully surprised to discover how it conquered everything else, drove out all other thoughts. Her cough was getting worse as well, wracking her body until she felt dizzy. Sometimes she stumbled and fell in the middle of the road for no reason other than weakness. She knew she could not go on much longer without becoming either a beggar or a thief. She decided she would rather risk the first— people didn’t get hanged for begging.
The first place she approached in search of alms, a steading on the outskirts of a nameless village along the Karalsway, the market road that wound south from the Coast Road, proved unsympathetic to beggars: before she could speak to the wild-haired man standing in the doorway of the cottage he stepped aside and let out a huge brindle dog. The creature ran at her like the Raging Beast that had fought Hiliometes, and Briony only just barely got back over the steading’s low wall before it caught her in its slavering jaws. As it was, she tore her lifesaving wool cloak on a stone, an injury which seemed as painful to her as if it had been her own flesh. She retreated into the woods, still sick and sore and hungry, and although she disliked herself for doing it, she wept.
She tried again with a little more success on the far side of the village—but not because of the qualities of godly mercy the mantis-priests liked to talk about so solemnly. The householder who owned this particular shambles of a cottage happened to be gone for the day, and although there was little of use inside the empty, smoke-darkened room but a bed made of leaves stuffed in a rough cloth sack, with a single threadbare blanket, she found an iron bowl half-full of cold pottage sitting underneath the table with a wooden plate set on top of it. She devoured it eagerly, and it was not until she had finished it—her stomach so full it seemed hung on her rather than connected to her—that she realized she had stolen, and stolen from one of her poorer subjects at that. For a moment, in an agony of guilt possible only because she had momentarily sated her hunger, she considered waiting until the cottage’s owner returned and offering to make restitution, but quickly realized that other than her clothes, her Yisti knives, and her virginity—none of which she was willing to give up—she had nothing to offer. Still, she felt bad enough that she discarded her earlier plan of stealing the blanket as well, and stumbled dry-eyed but miserable out into the dying light of afternoon and a sparkle of lightly falling snow.
The days since Shaso’s death turned into first one tennight, then another, and Briony crept west, stealing enough to stay alive when she could, almost always from those least able to protect what they had. Shame and hunger dogged her, whipsawing her back and forth, one growing less as the other grew greater. Her wounds and sore jaw had mostly healed, but her cough had become a constant thing, painful and frighteningly deep. And as things became harder for her, as hunger and illness made her thoughts difficult, the two other alternatives, surrender or death, began to seem more attractive.
Briony stared blearily at the bridge, at the dark, sluggish river and the empty lands on either side. The sky was like a bed of slates.
In her breathless exhaustion she had wandered far south down the Karalsway, still uncertain whether she should go to Hierosol or Syan, but knowing in her heart that in her present condition she would reach neither. The villages became more scarce the farther south she went—she had been chased out of the last one two days ago by a group of drunken men who hadn’t liked her look and had called her a plague-carrier—and there would be even fewer settlements in the empty lands between here and the Syannese border. She was beginning to feel truly desperate.
All through her childhood Briony had been prepared for a life of importance, but what had she truly learned? Nothing useful. She did not know how to start a fire on her own. She might have managed with a flint and iron, but she had spent the last coppers Shaso had given her on bread and cheese before realizing warmth would come to be even more important to her than filling her stomach. She did not know how to hunt or trap either, or which if any of the plants that grew wild might be eaten without poisoning her—things that even the most ignorant crofter’s son could easily manage. Instead, her tutors had taught her how to sing, and sew, and read, but the books she had been given were filled with romantic poetry, or useless knowledge about the great gods and their adventures, with parables of gentle Zoria and her blameless suffering.
She stood now in a nearly empty land, staring miserably at the bridge over the muddy Elusine. Learning about suffering was useless—experience came easily enough. Learning how
Briony could recall just enough of her brother’s lessons and things her father had told her to know that the territory on the other side of the Elusine was named the Weeping Moors. These marshy, treacherous lands stretched almost all the way south to the lakes of upper Syan, the mud cold and black, with no shelter from the vicious, freezing winds and gusting snows. She had wandered this far almost without thinking, and now she had nowhere to go but back to the towns she had already haunted with so little luck, or east to the Tollys’ home in Summerfield, or southward along this dwindling road through the fens, then around the lakes and over the mountains to distant Syan and even more distant Hierosol, praying to strike lucky in whatever human habitations she might stumble across in the great, empty waterlands ahead.
Briony sank to a crouch. For the moment, she could see nothing but the reeds that surrounded her, the windblown stalks rubbing and whispering. She coughed and spat. The gobbet was tinged with red. It was pointless even to think about Syan—she would never survive a journey across the moors and mountains to reach it.
“Silverside” began sounding over and over in her thoughts as soothing as the word “heaven.”
But as the dull morning wore away and she still sat exhausted beside the bridge and the muddy, gurgling Elusine, she still could not make a decision. Singing about Silverside to herself was all well and good, but she was even more likely to die in the trees trying to get there than out on the open wrack of the Weeping Moors. The Whitewood was the second greatest forest in all of Eion, and in its depths lived wolves and bears and perhaps even some of the stranger creatures out of legend. After all, if the fairy folk could come down out of the misty north to invade the March Kingdoms, it stood to reason that goblins and ghouls could still be found in the depths of the Whitewood, just as the stories all told. No, it would be better to stay away from the almost certain death of either marsh or forest, to turn back instead and continue to haunt the fringes of Marrinswalk villages like a lost child. Better to stay where she was and pray for a miracle than to plunge into the forest and certain doom. Yes, she decided wearily, that made more sense. She would turn back.
It was very strange, then, that as the sun slipped down the sky toward evening Briony found herself wandering through the dense trees of the Whitewood, with the road and the bridge lost somewhere behind her and no real memory of how she had come there.
She lurched a few more steps toward a place where the trees seemed farther apart, where the branches would not pull at her. Already her cloak was in tatters.
Something had caught at the boyish trousers she wore. Brambles. She pulled herself free, only vaguely noticing new scratches on hands already crisscrossed with bloody little lines. Thank all the gods the cold was making her fingers numb! She wept to realize she had forgotten again which direction she had set herself to walk.
“Cloudy-eyed, line-handed,” she named herself, mangling the famous story—and not entirely on purpose. She tried to laugh but could only make a ragged hooting noise. Barrick would think that was funny, she decided. He hated learning those stories.
But it was about
