Shadowheart (48 page)

“So you would leave the mortal men of Southmarch—not just my people, but the Funderlings, too—to fight and die while your army sits by and does nothing? That is how you would write the last pages of the Long Defeat? With cowardice and callousness?”

“Grace and cowardice are two different things, child of men.”

“Then let your people fight if they wish to! You can watch gracefully while the rest of us pretend we have a chance.” He was angry now, and the incomprehensible differences of age and experience between them suddenly seemed unimportant. “Saqri came here to fight at your side. I don’t believe she came here to watch others being slaughtered without lifting a finger.”

Yasammez looked different now, like a wounded creature that still might strike. For a long moment she did not look at Barrick at all, but he could feel her anger, cold and strong. When she did rise abruptly to her feet and reached into the chestplate of her armor, he even raised his hand, fearing a thrown dagger. Instead, she drew out something that dangled on a black chain, a light glinting red as molten iron, and held it out to him. Her thoughts were like a roiling thundercloud, but although he could feel her anger and despair, most of it was hidden from him. Something else lurked there, too, something deep and terrifying, but he could not tell what it was.

“Take the Seal of War,” she said. “Take it and give it to Saqri. Keep it yourself if you wish. I care not. If I am no longer fit to judge, then I am no longer fit to command.”

He stared at the dangling glow. “But . . .”

“Take it!”

He did, reaching toward her with as much caution as toward a poisonous serpent. She stared at him as he let the heavy gem rest on his hand, and he swore he saw hatred in her eyes, although he was not entirely certain why.

“Because I am a mortal?” he asked. “Because my family stole the Fireflower?”

She understood him. “All of it,” she said. “And more. Fight if you wish. It will only make the end harder. And what if the cosmos spins a-widdershins and you are victorious? The People are still doomed. The Fireflower will find no more bearers—the royal line of the Qar is dead and only Saqri remains. So go, little mortal, and tell the others how you taunted Lady Porcupine and lived. It will be a pretty tale to while away the hours before death takes us all.”

So fierce was the heat behind her words, so furious her stare that Barrick suddenly could not speak. He turned, the Seal of War dangling from his fist, and stumbled out of the tent.

Briony was not so foolish as to go far from the perimeter of the camp but she could not simply spend the day sitting, as Eneas and his Temple Dogs seemed perfectly content to do. Too much anger and too much frustration were inside her. She had to move.

She found a little hill overlooking the camp and in sight of the sentries, then set off to climb it. The day was gray, but patches of sunny sky slid by overhead, and the way up was just difficult enough to engage her mind. By the time she reached the top about midday, she felt better. Still, she dared not think about her father too much. To have been so close to him after all this time, and then to lose him again . . . !

Prince Eneas and his captains were planning swift, unexpected raids to harry Sulepis’ mainland troops, and to prevent supplies from reaching the autarch’s army. This last was largely pointless as long as the autarch still controlled Brenn’s Bay, but at the very least Eneas meant to make the autarch aware that he had enemies behind him as well as in front of him.

But although Briony didn’t really expect the Syannese prince and his troops to do anything else, she could not escape the bitter idea of her father being taken away into the depths. But why should he be taken down into the tunnels under the castle? What lunacy did the southern king have planned?

Her father had also told her that his old, bad feelings were coming back to him as he returned to the castle. Perhaps that had something to do with why the autarch had brought him here. And gods? Her father had said something about gods, too, and Midsummer’s Night, which was far less than a tennight away.

If only I had a longer time to talk with him. If only I could see him again, embrace him again . . .
The tears were coming back.

Briony pulled out Lisiya’s charm and turned it over and over in her hand, trying to find some kind of peace. So many questions, and none of them likely to be answered soon, or at all. And meanwhile, the sun slid by overhead, in and out of the clouds, on its remorseless passage toward Midsummer’s Day.

 

Despite her climb, she lay awake for a long time that night listening to the soldiers talking and singing quietly and playing dice. The scouts the autarch had sent out to search for the raiders had long since returned to their encampment along Brenn’s Bay, so the men were enjoying the relative security.

Briony was still clutching the charm in her fist.
Please, dear Lisiya,
she prayed,
help me to sleep. I feel like I will go mad if I do not get to sleep tonight!
But when sleep came at last in the deep watches of the night, Briony did not immediately recognize it for what it was....

 

She was walking through what had once been a forest, something deep and green and quiet—but that had been before the fire. Now it was a scorched wasteland, pocked with the blackened remains of trees both standing and fallen, the grasses and undergrowth burned away, even the earth itself blackened. It was hard to tell what time of day it was because of the pall of smoke that lay over her and made the gray, hot sky seem shallow as a bowl. Smaller wisps still rose from the ground, as though the flames had stopped burning only a short while before.

It was as she crunched through the burned stubble that she realized she was still holding Lisiya’s charm tight against her breast.

Briony found the demigoddess at the base of what had been a great silver oak tree, but was now little more than a tortured sculpture made of charcoal. Lisiya was leaning on a staff, frail and gray as a dandelion puff. She looked half her previous size, as though the hot winds had leached all the moisture from her, leaving only skin and bones.

“Somebody is angry at me,” she said with a weary grin.

“Who did this?” Briony asked. The demigoddess looked so delicate that she almost didn’t dare approach her.

“I cannot say. I am being watched.” Lisiya lifted a clawlike hand. “The sky itself listens.”

“Is this because of me?” Briony asked, sinking to her knees on the scorched earth. “Because you helped me?”

“Possibly.” Lisiya shrugged. The demigoddess had previously seemed inexhaustible, but now moved as though she was afraid any effort might snap her brittle bones. “It does not do to speculate, child. The gods are asleep and that makes it hard to understand them, or even to recognize them . . .”

Briony didn’t understand. “Is there something I can do to help you?”

The specter of a smile crept across the gaunt, wrinkled face. “Listen. I will tell you what I can. I am . . . limited, though.” She sagged a little, then pulled herself upright on her staff again. “The hour is coming. It is almost here. The hour when the world we know will end.”

“But . . . do you mean it’s too late?”

“It is too late to turn things back to the way they once were,” Lisiya said. “It is too late for the world that was. What kind of world will come—that you may yet be able to influence.”

“Influence? How?”

“That is not for me to say. But you have only a little time.”

“Do you mean Midsummer Night? My father said . . .”

“Men call it Midsummer, but here in the place of the gods and their dreams, it marks the moment when the sun begins to die. And every year since time itself began, since Rud the Daystar first mounted the firmament, the battle rages. Mortal men celebrate Midsummer as if it is a victory, but it has always been the opposite—the moment when the sun, when light itself, begins to lose its battle. It is an ill-omened day.” She shook her head.

“But what can we do? It’s almost upon us!”

Now the frustration showed on Lisiya’s bony face. “I do not know! I am only a small thing, when it comes to it—a servant, an errandrunner—and I am out of my depths. But I called to you, or you called to me, so there must be something I can give you, some word . . .” The old woman closed her eyes, making Briony wonder what was happening: Lisiya seemed so tired she could barely breathe, swaying in place like a long stalk of grass. At last, she opened her eyes.

“
Omphalos
,” the demigoddess said faintly. “Look for the omphalos, that which connects the past to the womb and the womb to the future—that which is the center of the spinning universe.”

“What does that mean?”

Lisiya waved her clawlike hand. “I have told you what I can!” she said angrily. “Even now my words have attracted attention.”

“But I don’t understand . . . !”

“You must, because there is nothing else I can . . .” She broke off suddenly as red light flickered across the sky, flaring like blood against the gray smoke. “Go,” Lisiya said. “There is nothing more I can do. Farewell, Briony Eddon. If you survive, build me a shrine!”

Briony tried to ask her another question, but thunder was rattling the burned trees and making the parched ground shudder, and the harsh red light seemed to be growing by the moment.

Fire
, Briony realized.
The fire is coming back . . . !

And then the sky exploded with bloody, glaring scarlet, so bright and hot that Briony screamed in terror and woke up panting in her tent in the Syannese camp, her fist pressed hard against her breast. When she opened her hand, she saw the charm was blackened and shriveled as if it had been burned.

Barrick did not speak a word as he walked to Saqri’s tent. Hundreds of eyes watched him crossing the great chamber, and all of them must have seen the blood-red stone dangling from his hand. Others, more familiar with mortals, might have recognized the expression of surprise and growing wonder on his face.

She gave it to me
, he marveled.
I told the oldest, strongest woman in the world that she was wrong, and so she resigned the leadership of the Qar armies.

But was it really as simple and straightforward as that? Something about the exchange still troubled him, although at the moment he was too stunned to ponder it much.

The guards did not lift a hand to stop him as he walked past them into Saqri’s tent. She looked up from a silent conversation with two fairy creatures he did not recognize. Her eyes widened a fraction when she saw what dangled from his hand.

“I felt her, but I did not know what I was feeling,” was all she said. “Is that for me or for you?”

Barrick laughed. It had not even occurred to him that he might keep it himself. He did not understand enough—he might
never
understand enough. “For you. And then you must decide what your people are going to do.”

“We will fight, of course,” she said, reaching out with slim fingers and letting the gem nestle in her hand. “Crooked was my grandfather’s longest grandfather, as we say—the father of the Fireflower. We cannot let him be used by this mad king. If the Long Defeat finally claims our kind, most of us will embrace it, for who would want to live in a world without the beauty of accident?” She stood looking down at the gem for a moment, then carefully lifted the chain over her dark hair and let the Seal of War rest on her white breastplate.

“Call them all from their camps—water children, air children, and all of the People who follow the Seal of War. Tell them we are making last choices now. The end of the Godwar has come.”

 

And so the Qar and their ancient allies, Rooftoppers and Skimmers, came from all the places they had been waiting and met in a great cavern near the Funderling temple, a wide, low-roofed chamber filled with limestone columns. Saqri sat beside a small, shallow pool in the middle of the cavern and all the others ranged themselves around it like the knights of Lander’s famous court, except instead of a table they gathered around a liquid mirror which reflected the lights of their torches and lanterns. Upsteeplebat’s people stood in their miniature lines near Saqri, with headman Turley and his Skimmers beside them. The leaders of the Qar seated themselves around the rest of the pond, their peoples crowded in behind them. Even the chief eremite Aesi’uah, the woman with the dark eyes, was there. Only Yasammez herself was absent. It was strange for Barrick to think of Lady Porcupine wandering alone and bitter somewhere beneath his old home, but he thought he understood her. She was not the type to surrender, but she had done so. She would not want to watch decisions being made without her.