The next morning Barish said he felt secure enough about the men to tell them at least some of the truth. He addressed them, twenty or so at a time, in the practice yard, telling them to be on the lookout for poisonous crystals and report any suspicious activity. Aside from a little muttering, the men took it well enough. The blowup we’d been afraid of didn’t happen. No Barish follower began conniving against Himaggery; no Himaggery man started fulminating against Barish. We took a deep breath, figuratively speaking, and began to plan countermeasures.
Himaggery had heard from me everything that Jinian or I knew about the shadow, and Mavin had undoubtedly told him long since what she knew. He did not tell me what he planned—as was probably wise. The fewer who knew the better—but I knew he and Barish had some plan to use against the shadow.
Thus it was with a quite unwarranted feeling of security that I answered a knock at my door late that evening to find Sylbie in tears. “Oh, Peter, Bryan’s gone and I can’t find him anywhere.”
I tisked and there-there’d, thinking the baby had turned into a gorbling haunt and would be back as soon as he got hungry enough, but Sylbie said no. “He wasn’t hungry, or tired, or wet. He just toddled off. I went in to get a hot cup of tea—we were sitting in the garden near the gatehouse enjoying the evening—and when I came out he was gone. Oh, Peter, do come help find him.”
So I hemmed and hawed and put on a cloak against the evening chill and pulled my boots back on and went yawning off beside her, never for a moment thinking that the baby was into anything more serious than an infant’s exploration. We searched the garden, then Sylbie put her hand on my shoulder, saying, “What’s that?”
At first I heard nothing, then a far-off whine, like a lost cat. I Shifted bat ears inconspicuously, glad of the darkness, and heard it again. It was coming from a drainage ditch that wound back under the wall to let the water from the distant Porridge Pot hot spring warm this end of the garden. It was a low, narrow ditch about Bryan’s size but certainly not Sylbie’s or mine. She started to cry, and I told her firmly to go inside.
“I’ll get him,” I said. She said something strange about coming with me. “You can’t,” I said in a no-nonsense voice. “You won’t fit in there.”
At which point her mouth pursed the way it did whenever she had to think of my being a Shifter, and she turned and walked off toward the gatehouse. I remember thinking at that moment that when I returned later with Bryan, I wanted to check the locks on the gate. There were parapets with watchmen on both the buttresses. Anyone approaching the gate would be seen long before he came close. Still, I remember thinking of it even as I slithered down into eel shape and entered the ditch.
The thin whine came intermittently, strangely echoing. I wondered how the boy could have come this far. The water was uncomfortably warm, not really hot but not at all pleasant, and the ditch reeked of chemicals. Then I saw light ahead and realized he must have actually come out beneath the wall. Remarkable. Quite remarkable.
Once out from under the wall, the ditch ran through a swale of low bushes, and I took my own shape to slog through this morass, following the sound, very close now.
I had no idea where the smoke came from, or the chanting, or the strange lights that seemed to go off inside my head. I tried to Shift and couldn’t, tried to move and couldn’t, tried to speak and couldn’t. From behind me on the parapets I heard a guard shouting something that seemed senseless at the time: “Lady Sylbie, Lady Sylbie, do not leave the Demesne!” A sentinel’s horn went tara-tara-tara whoop-whoop-whoop, as it does to raise the alarm. A voice was chanting something about the dark betraying and the blood holding fast. The last thought I had before everything went very dark and quiet was that we had looked in all the wrong places for the real spy.
I woke in a tent. The canvas flapped in a night wind, and little gusts of smoke came to my nose like warning signals. I lay quiet, not letting anyone know I was conscious, trying very hard to Shift the nails of my hand to claws. The hands were tied behind me. I didn’t need to see them to know that the Shift wasn’t happening. Some geas had been laid on me, some preventive enchantment or binding spell. There was a low, bubbling noise in the place, and it was some time before I realized it was Sylbie’s voice.
“You’re sure he won’t ever Shift again,” she was saying. “You promised me he’d never be able to Shift again.”
The voice that answered was amused, sinister. It was the Witch, Huldra. “Oh, I assure you, girl. He’ll not Shift again.”
“And you promised he’d not see that Jinian anymore. Just me. Just me and Bryan.” Her voice was a little petulant, more than a little confused. “I’m sure he’ll not see Jinian ever again.” My heart almost stopped as the sense of the words came through. This was the Witch Huldra telling the absolute, literal truth. What had Jinian called the technique? Truth spelling! Twisting what the listener wanted to hear so that one could promise in words without promising in fact. Truth spelling. That was what had occupied Sylbie’s time on the road, why she had been so late in arriving at the Bright Demesne. She had been truth spelled into betraying me!
Now a new voice, Dedrina,
