(Shadowmarch #1) Shadowmarch (31 page)

Briony stood, naked and cold from the bath, looking down at her own pale limbs and hating the weakness of her womanhood.

If I were a man,
she thought,
then Summerfield and Lord Brone and the others would not seize at my every word. They would not think me weak. Even if I had a withered arm like Barrick’s, they would fear my anger. But because of the accident of my birth, of my sex, I am suspect.

The room was chill and she was trembling.
Oh, Father, how could you leave us?
She closed her eyes and for a moment she became a child again, shivering while the nurses bustled around her, drying her small body with flannels, the great house full of familiar sounds.
Where does time go when it is used up?
she wondered.
Is it like the sound of voices that echo and echo in a long hallway, growing smaller and smaller until they’re too faint to hear? Is there an echo somewhere of that time when we were all together—Kendrick alive, Father here, Barrick well?

But even if there were, it would only be a dying echo, populated by ghosts.

She raised her arms. “Dress me,” she told Moina and Rose.

The thought of her father, the sudden urge to see him, or at least to hear his voice, had reminded her of something: where was his letter, the one Dawet dan-Faar had brought from Hierosol? Perhaps it was with some of Kendrick’s other effects—she had not had a chance to look through them all yet. But her father’s letter was not like other papers: she not only needed to see it, she wanted to, desperately. She would look for it after the funeral. Kendrick’s funeral.

The horror of what lay ahead made her knees weak, but she straightened, held herself firm. She would not show her ladies how fearful she was, how helpless and hopeless.

Rose and Moina were strangely quiet. Briony wondered if they were as overwhelmed as she was, or merely respecting her mood and the dread weight of the day. And what did it matter? Death made its own respect, one way or another.

They slipped on her chemise, working a little to pull it into place over her damp skin. The petticoat tied at the back with points; she was still barefoot and it pooled around her feet. Rose pulled the laces too tight as she tied the corset and Briony grunted but did not ask her to loosen it. She had learned that these formal clothes served a purpose: like a soldier’s armor, they gave an outward semblance of strength even when the body inside was weak.

But I don’t want to be weak! I want to be strong, like a man, for the family and for our people.
But what did that mean? There were many kinds of strength, the bearlike power of someone like Avin Brone or the more subtle force Kendrick had possessed: her older brother had once thrown one of the bigger guards so hard in a wrestling match that the man had to be carried away. Thinking of him made her breath hitch.
He was so alive—he can’t be gone. How can a single night change the world?

But there were other kinds of strength, too, she thought as Moina and Rose helped her into the black silk dress stiff with black brocade and delicate silver-and-gold filigree.
Father almost never raises his voice, and I have never seen him strike a blow in anger, but only fools ever called him weak. And why are only men thought strong? Who has held this family together in the past days? Not me, may Zoria forgive me.
It had not been Barrick either, or even the lord constable. No, it had been Briony’s great-aunt Merolanna, stern and set as the Mount itself, who had ordered life and made a little sense of death.

Rose and Moina were busy as bees around a dark flower, unbending and spreading the ruffled cuffs of Briony’s dress, trimming a loose thread from the hem and then slipping on her shoes, one of them bracing her so she could lift her foot while the other guided the black slipper into place. For a moment she was filled with love for these girls. They, too, were being brave, she decided. Men’s wars happened far away and they proved their courage in front of armies of other men. Women’s wars were more subtle things and were witnessed mostly by others of their sex. Her ladies-in-waiting and all the other women in the castle were waging a battle against chaos, struggling to lend sense to a world that seemed to have lost it.

She did not like what the world had forced upon her, but today, Briony decided, she was still proud to be what she was.

When they had finished with her shoes, the ladies-in-waiting draped her in a cloak of heavy black velvet that her father had given her but which she had never worn. She sat on a high stool, or rather leaned, half standing, so that Rose could bring out her jewelry and Moina and one of the younger maids could begin to arrange her hair.

“Don’t bother with all that,” she told Moina, but gently. Her lady-in-waiting stopped, the curling iron already in her hands. “I will wear a headdress—the one with silver stitching.”

With as much ceremony as a mantis producing a shrine’s sacred object, Rose set the jewel casket on a cushion and opened the lid. She pulled out the largest necklace, a heavy chain of gold with pendant ruby, a gift from Briony’s father to the mother she had scarcely known.

“Not that,” Briony said. “Not today. There—the hart and nothing else.”

Rose lifted the slender silver necklace, confusion showing on her face. The leaping-deer pendant was a small and insignificant piece and seemed out of keeping with the heavy majesty of her other garments.

“Kendrick gave it to me. A birthday gift.”

Rose’s eyes filled as she draped it around her mistress’ neck. Briony tried to wipe the girl’s tears away, but the sleeves of her gown were too stiff, her cloak too massive. “Curse it, don’t you dare start that. You’ll have me going, too.”

“Cry if you want to, my lady,” Moina said, sniffling. “We haven’t begun your face yet.”

Briony laughed a little despite herself. The wretched sleeves would not let her wipe her own eyes either, so she could only sit helplessly until Rose brought a kerchief to blot her dry again.

Her hair pulled back and knotted at the back of her head, she sat as patiently as she could while the two ladies-in-waiting begin to daub things on her cheeks and eyelids. She hated face paint, but today was not an ordinary day. The people—her people—had already seen her cry. Today they had to see her strong and dry-eyed, her face a mask of composure. And it was a distraction for Rose and Moina, as well, this unusual liberty: they were laughing again as they brushed rouge onto her cheeks, despite their still-damp eyes.

When they had finished, they lowered the gabled headdress onto her head and fastened it with pins, then spread its black velvet fall onto her shoulders and down her back. Briony felt solid and unbending. “The guards will have to come and carry me—I swear I cannot move an inch. Bring me a glass.”

Moina blew her nose while Rose hurried to find the looking glass. The other maids formed into a respectful half circle around her, whispering, impressed. Briony regarded herself, all in black from head to foot with only a glint of silver at her brow and breast.

“I look like Siveda the moon-maiden. Like the Goddess of Night.”

“You look splendid, Your Highness,” said Rose, suddenly all formality.

“I look like a ship under full sail. Big as the world.” Briony sighed and her breath caught. “Oh, gods, come and help me get up. I have to bury my brother.”

A boy was clinging high on the wall on the outside of the chapel building, but even in this time of fear, when murderous enemies might still be at large, no one in Southmarch Castle seemed to have noticed him. At the moment he was crouching in the corner of a vast window frame, the colored glass surrounding him like the background of a painting. Although the chapel was full of people, if anyone inside had taken note of the shadow at the bottom of the great window they had decided it was only grime or a drift of leaves.

A group of servants hurried up the path from the graveyard toward the doorway that led to the inner keep, still carrying the baskets they had brought down an hour before but with only a few petals now remaining in the bottoms; the rest had been scattered inside the tomb and along the winding path through the cemetery. The boy did not look down at them, and they were all far too intent on their just-finished tasks and their whispered conversations to look up.

Something above the boy’s head caught his attention. A butterfly, a big one, all yellow and black, lit on the edge of the roof and sat there with its wings beating as slowly as a tranquil heart. It was late in the season for butterflies.

He found the edge of the window with his stubby, dirty fingers and pulled himself up until he was standing beside one edge of the leaded glass window. Anyone watching from the inside would now have seen the drift of leaves suddenly become a vertical column, but no sound came to him from behind the glass except the continuing low hum of a chorus singing the “Lay of Kernios,” longest and most expansive of the funeral songs. A moment later the column was gone and the window was unshadowed again.

Flint pulled himself up onto one of the protruding carvings that decorated the outside wall of the chapel, then moved sideways like a spider to another before climbing up to a higher one. Within a matter of moments, even as a gate on the far side of the graveyard closed behind the basket-carrying servants and their voices fell away, he was onto the roof.

The chapel rooftop was a great angled field of slate with spiral chimneys protruding every few yards like trees. Moss and even living tufts of long grass poked up between the slate, and the autumn wind had piled great drifts of leaves against the chimneys like red-and-brown snow. Many other rooftops were visible from this spot, plateaus almost touching each other in jostling profusion, but most of the towered inner keep still stretched far above his head on all sides, the forest of chimneys rendered in giant size.

Flint seemed to care about none of these things. At first he only lay on his belly and stared at the place where the butterfly sat near the roof’s summit, fanning its wings indolently. Then the boy began to crawl upward, digging his feet into the eruptions of moss and lifted slate, until he was within arm’s reach of the creature. His hand stretched and the butterfly suddenly sensed him, tumbled over the edge, and was gone, but the boy did not stop. His fingers closed on something quite different and he plucked it out of the grass and brought it close to his face.

It was an arrow, small as a darning needle. He squinted. It was fletched with tiny crests of the same yellow and black as the butterfly’s wings.

For long moments the boy lay silently, motionlessly, staring at the arrow. Someone watching might have thought he had fallen asleep with his eyes open, so complete was his stillness, but the watcher would have been wrong. He abruptly rolled and scrambled across the rooftop to the nearest chimney, fast as a striking snake, and thrust with his hand first at one spot, then another, grabbing after something that fled through the little forest of grass around the base of the bricks.

His hand closed and suddenly he was still again. He pulled back his fist, holding it close to his body as he sat down with the chimney against his back. When he opened his hand, the thing huddling there did not move until he poked it gently with his finger.

The little man who now rolled over and crouched in Flint’s palm was not much taller than that finger. The man’s skin seemed sooty-dark, although it was hard to say how much of that was truly skin and how much was dirt. His eyes were wide, little pinpricks of white in the shadow of the boy’s hand. He tried to leap free, but Flint curled his fingers into a cage and the little man crouched again, defeated. He was clothed in rags and bits of gray pelt. He wore soft boots and had a coil of coarse thread looped over his shoulder, a quiver of arrows on his back.

Flint bent and picked something out of the grass. It was a bow, strung so fine that the cord could barely be seen. Flint looked at it for a moment, then set it on his palm beside the little man. The captive looked from the bow toward his captor, then picked it up. He passed the bow slowly from hand to hand with a kind of wonder, as though it had become something totally different since he touched it last. Flint stared at him, unsmiling, brow furrowed.

The little man gulped air. “Hurt me not, master, I beg ’ee,” he fluted, something like hope in his eyes where before there had been only terror. “Tha hast me fair, skin to sky. Grant thy wish, I will. All know a Rooftopper will keep un’s word.”

Flint frowned, then set the little man down on the slate. The prisoner got to his feet, hesitated, took a few steps, then stopped again. Flint didn’t move. His little face screwed up in confusion, the tiny man at last turned away and began scrambling up the moss paths between the slates, heading for the roofcrest with his bow dangling in his hand. Every few steps he looked back over his shoulder, as though expecting his apparent freedom to prove only a cruel game, but by the time he reached the top, the boy still had not moved.