Shadowheart (56 page)

Briony thought she had plumbed the depths of surprise during this year of impossible strangeness, but she had not expected to wake up to find a man smaller than the stub of last night’s candle standing beside her head. She gasped and sat up. She closed her eyes and opened them again, but the tiny man was no dream.

“I am searching the leader of this lot,” he called up to her. “I carry important news for un.” He bowed to her. “Beetledown the Bowman am I. Beest tha the princess Briony, good Olin’s daughter?”

A hundred different responses came to her lips, but what came out at last was a startled giggle. “Merciful Zoria,” she said. “I am. What are
you
?”

“Telled tha oncet already.” She could see his little face frown in irritation, then suddenly go wide-eyed. “Oh, beg pardon, Majestic Highness! Forgive us our rough scout’s manner.”

Briony really didn’t think she could still be sleeping, but couldn’t help wondering whether she might have lost her wits somewhere. “You said you’re . . . Beetledown?” She shook her head. “But what
are
you, Beetledown?” The first light of dawn was creeping past the flap of her tent. She could hear men moving outside, the sound of the day beginning, and could smell the fires that had only recently been lit. In the midst of everything else the smell of burning wood made her stomach twitch with hunger.

“I’ll take you to Prince Eneas,” she said at last. “These are his men. But I’d better carry you.” She stared at him. “How did you get here? Did you simply . . . drop out of the sky?”

His smile was no bigger than an eyelash, but still quite charming. “After a manner of saying . . . yes, mum. I came as a courier. My feathersteed waits on a branch.”

“Your what where? Feathersteed . . . ?”

He looked at her in surprise. “My bird, Your Heightsome Majesty.” He was worried now that she might be making fun of him. “I prefer to fly a flittermouse, in truth, but with the sun up, I left ’em to their sleep and came by pigeon.”

 

“I can promise no more,” the tiny man told Prince Eneas and his captains. Beetledown was doing his best to stand still in the platform of Briony’s outstretched hand, but every time he shifted his balance it made her palm tickle. “Just that my queen and the queen of the Fay both say to you and your soldiers that if you come to look on the autarch’s camp you might see something that will interest you. They advise to come in force.”

“
Might
see something?” Lord Helkis looked at the little man with disgust and something that might have been fear. “Are we so foolish that we are meant to fall for a trap like this? Simply march out to be destroyed on the word of some magical creatures out of a story? This . . . roof rat?”

“Rooftopper,” said Beetledown with affronted dignity. “Your kind know my kind well enough, tall man—used to put out bowls of milk and pieces of bread for us, to ask our favor and blessings on the house.”

“The night-elves of your nurse’s stories have come to visit us, Miron!” The prince was laughing, but more at his angry lieutenant than at the tiny messenger. “Perhaps you should look to your shoes to see if any of them need mending.”

But Lord Helkis was not to be so easily convinced. “Do you not understand, Highness? These are Blue Caps. Speak of the old tales? They are creatures of the twilight, the shadows. We cannot trust them.”

“If you remember,” Briony pointed out, “that is who this small gentlemen and his friends are fighting. Would we make the same mistake again, attacking allies and helping enemies?”

The tiny man looked puzzled by this. Briony quietly explained what had happened.

“Those must have been Akutrir’s lot,” he told her. “Lady Porcupine sent them out, but they had not returned when I left,” he said. “We did not know you had found each other.”

Eneas scowled; he had heard. “We shall speak more of
that
shame later. For now, we must hear all of what your mistress has to say. Queen Saqri, is it? Is she the one who has terrified the north—the dark lady?”

Beetledown shook his head. “Nay, but un’s that Lady Porcupine’s daughter—or granddaughter . . . I am not certain. But dark lady has stepped down and Saqri commands the Qar now, and says that if tha hurry toward the mainland city of Southmarch on the bay shore tha might see something of interest.” He turned toward Briony. “You, too, Princess, although the queen didn’t speak or send ’ee any message. By the Peak, tha and thy family have been away a long time!”

She nodded. “We have.”

“What else can you tell us?” demanded Eneas. “What exactly will we find on the shore of Brenn’s Bay, besides a vast camp of Xixian soldiers?”

Beetledown moved a little, trying to keep his balance on Briony’s unsteady hand. “I do not know for my personal self, Prince. I tell ’ee only what was given to me to tell—I know nought else. But Queen Saqri sent this message knowing tha wert here when none of the rest of us knew, so I think tha would do well to listen.”

Lord Helkis snorted. “A mannekin no bigger than a whisker bids us trust his fairy-mistress. How could that possibly have an unhappy ending?”

“Your mockery is duly noted, Helkis.” Eneas frowned at him. “It does not help me decide what to do next.”

“Ah, tha minds me of another part of my message,” said little Beetledown. “Tha should be on top of the hills above the bay by sundown.”

It was only after Barrick had defended himself through a dozen struggles and bloodied his sword several times—first on a fallen Xixian who tried to stab him from the ground, next on another southern soldier surprised to have missed his spear thrust, who did not get a chance to thrust again—that he tumbled out of his exalted state and began to feel like an ordinary mortal prince again. The Qar were now pushing back the autarch’s men without much resistance, so he let the battle eddy past him while he leaned against the wall and tried to get air back into his burning lungs. Every muscle in his body throbbed. He remembered every moment of what had happened, but at the same time it seemed so distant that it might have happened to someone else.

Even when I can subdue them, the Fireflower voices are too strong for me to silence for long.
But Ynnir’s words had given him an idea, a first taste of how it might feel to harness the Fireflower like a battle charger and put all that strength to work.

What can I become
, he wondered.
What will I become? I understand the speech of the fairies
, he thought.
My crippled arm is healed. There is nothing of the old Barrick left. It has all been burned clean away.

 

If Hammerfoot was protecting him, it was in a very distant sort of way. The jut-browed giant was currently somewhere in the middle of the autarch’s men, roaring as he used a soldier from the Sanian hills as a club until he could pick up his ax again, which had become stuck in the shattered carcass of a supply wagon. Barrick’s safety did not appear to be uppermost in his mind.

Barrick reached again for the trick of thought that would allow him to muffle the voices and dim the shadows that the Fireflower made in his thoughts—a trick like squinting inside his own head. It was hard to hold it, easy to be distracted, and he knew it would avail him nothing if he were pushed to his limits.

Let it move through you,
Ynnir’s quiet voice told him.
You cannot make it happen. You cannot make it anything. It is.

The Xixians were fighting desperately now, retreating back up the wide tunnel but grudging every step, and even without the benefit of a hundred Qar kings and warriors Barrick would have known why. Many thousand of the autarch’s men were camped just above. These troops had undoubtedly sent messengers for reinforcements already. But didn’t these fools wonder why? Did they not question why the Qar would attack such a large army and in such a strange way—from beneath?

A huge, one-eyed man with a beard crashed through the Qar just in front of Barrick. The attacker thrust a spear all the way through a slender, pale-skinned Qar warrior so that the creature dangled like a broken puppet, then knocked aside two more with his hide-covered shield before immediately turning on Barrick, who tangled his sword with one of the other Qar’s blades and lost it as he tried to spin out of the way. The one-eyed man’s spear snapped out and missed Barrick’s gut only by the width of a finger or two. The tip scratched its way up the chestplate before slipping past his helmet. Barrick brought his shield up in time to repel a second thrust, but the Xixian giant swung his own shield, big and heavy as a door, and knocked Barrick onto his back.

The Xixian giant grinned as he stood over him, showing teeth and also the places teeth were not. He kicked Barrick’s shield out of the way, almost wrenching his arm out of its socket, then lifted his spear up over Barrick’s chest.

Things changed so abruptly that for a moment Barrick couldn’t tell what was different. Only when blood fountained out of the ruin of the man’s neck and splashed down onto him did Barrick realize that the giant’s head was gone. Someone had cut it off—no, knocked it off and sent it flying as a child might decapitate a daisy with a stick.

“Time to get up, young master,” growled Hammerfoot. “You will miss seeing the Elementals at work, otherwise.” The massive lower lip jutted like a granite cliff as he looked Barrick up and down where he lay. “You are covered with blood. Well done.”

“Most of it just sprayed on me when you took his head off.” Barrick got up slowly, aching as though he had fallen down two flights of stairs. “But I thank you.”

Hammerfoot nodded and licked at the red smeared on his fingers. His eyes glinted deep in the black pits on either side of his flat nose. “It was my pleasure.”

Briony could not fail to be impressed. All of the Syannese nobles had been given a chance to speak their hearts. Many had felt it was too soon to be going anywhere near the autarch’s legions, that it must almost certainly be a trap, however bizarre its methods. Then, when they all had finished, Eneas gave his decision; they would ride. After that they had readied themselves for battle as calmly as if they had not argued against it.

“Nothing can be harmed by listening,
” her father had always said, and here was proof: the prince’s soldiers, especially the sons of proud old Syannese families, wished to be heard. Briony decided there was nothing for a good king (or queen) to fear in letting their subjects speak and even object to the ruler’s desire as long as they would join in wholeheartedly afterward, as the Temple Dogs were doing despite not winning the point. Briony sometimes felt that despite all the wisdom her father had shared with her, she had learned more about governing people in the days since she had left Southmarch Castle than in all the years she had lived as a princess of the ruling family.

 

The sun was just past noon and they were already high up into the coastal hills, making good time. The day was warm and dry, the dust rising around the horses’ hooves, and the larks were singing. It seemed unthinkable to Briony that so fair a world could have so much dread in it.

“Tomorrow is Midsummer’s Eve,” she told Eneas as they watered the horses. “My father said the autarch planned to raise a god. What do you think he meant? What will happen two days from now? The autarch must believe in it, at least. He hasn’t even conquered Hierosol, yet he left his siege and sailed all this way.”

Eneas was listening to her, but he was also watching every rider who went by, every foot soldier. The prince of Syan had been born to command men, she decided, in a way her father had not been, for all his virtues. Some things about the task of leadership had always filled Olin with dismay or sadness. Kendrick had often teased that, “Father is too kind to be king. He should be in a cave out in the Kracian hills with the other hermits and oracles.” Barrick had never thought this was funny, though the idea had sent Briony and Kendrick into gales of laughter, but only now did she understand why.
How could that man I spoke to in the dark be the same monster Barrick hates and fears? How was it that after all the years of kindness their father had shown him, her twin only remembered his moments of cruelty, his madness . . . ?