(Shadowmarch #1) Shadowmarch (34 page)

“I am saying nothing except that your brother, too, has seen the world he knows turned upside down. And so have all the people of the country. It has not been just a few days of change, Princess Briony. A year ago at the autumn harvest your father was on the throne and the gods seemed happy. Now all has changed. Remember that! There is a dark, cold winter coming—there is already snow in the high hills. People will huddle around their fires and listen to the wind whistling in the thatch and wonder what is coming next. Their king is imprisoned. The king’s heir is dead—murdered, and no one can say why. Do you think during those dark, cold nights they will be saying, ‘Thanks to the gods that we have two children on the throne now who are not afraid to turn all the old ways upside down!’ ”

Briony stared at the Zorian Sister’s beautiful, austere face.
What I would not give to look like her,
Briony thought.
Wise, so wise and calm—no one would doubt me then! Instead I look like a milkmaid most of the time, red-faced and sweaty
. “I came to you for advice, didn’t I?” she said.

Utta made a graceful little shrug. “You came for your lesson.”

“Thank you, Sister. I will think about what you’ve said.”

They had scarcely gone back to reading Clemon’s
The History of Eion and Its Nations
when someone knocked quietly at the door.

“Princess Briony?” called Rose Trelling from the corridor. “Highness? It is nearly time for you to see your council.”

Briony got up and gave Utta a kiss on her cool cheek before going out to her waiting maids. There wasn’t room for them to walk three abreast in the narrow passageway so Rose and Moina dropped behind her; Briony could hear the sides of their skirts brushing the walls.

Moina Hartsbrook cleared her throat. “That man . . . says he would be honored if he could find you in the garden again tomorrow.”

Briony couldn’t help but smile at the girl’s disapproving tone. “By ‘that man’ you mean Lord Dawet?”

“Yes, Highness.” They all walked on in silence for a while, but Briony could sense Moina trying to work up the courage to speak again. “Princess,” she said at last, “forgive me, but why do you see him? He is an enemy of the kingdom.”

“And so are many foreign envoys. Count Evander of Syan and the old wheezing fellow from Sessio who smells like horse dung—you don’t think those are our friends, do you? Surely you remember that fat pig Angelos, the envoy from Jellon, who smiled at me every day and fawned over Kendrick, until we woke up one morning and found that his master King Hesper had sold Father to Hierosol. I would have killed Angelos myself if he hadn’t already made the excuse of a hunting trip and slipped away back to Jellon. But until we catch them doing something wrong, we put up with them. That’s called statecraft.”

“But . . . but is that really why you talk to him?” Moina was being stubborn; she ignored Rose’s elbow bumping her ribs. “Just for . . . statecraft?”

“Are you asking if I spend time with him because I find him handsome?”

Moina blushed and looked down. Briony’s other attendant was also having trouble meeting her eyes. “I don’t like him either,” Rose confessed.

“I’m not planning to marry him, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

“Highness!” Her ladies-in-waiting were shocked. “Of course not!”

“Yes, he is handsome. But he is almost my father’s age, don’t forget. I’m interested in what he has to say about the many places he has seen, the southern continent where he was born and its deserts, or old Hierosol with all its ruins. I have not had much chance to see other places, you know.” Her maids looked at her with the expressions of young women who associated journeying in foreign lands with little beside hardship and possible ravishment. She knew they would never understand her longing to learn of things beyond this damp, dark old castle. “But I am even more interested in what Dawet has to say about Shaso, of course. Who, you may remember, is in chains because he seems to have killed my brother. Is it acceptable to the two of you, that I should try to understand the reasons why Prince Kendrick was murdered?”

Rose and Moina were both caught up in sputtering apologies, but Briony knew she had not been entirely honest: there was more to her feelings about Dawet than simply admiration for his wide experience, although she was not exactly sure what those feelings were. She was no mere girl, she told herself, to fawn over a lovesome face, but something about the man truly had caught her attention and she considered him more than she should, wondered what he thought both of her and her court.

He would have carried me off to Ludis without a second thought
, she reminded herself.
That is the kind of man he is. If Kendrick had announced it a day earlier, I would be halfway to Hierosol by now, on my way to meet my new husband, the Lord Protector.

It suddenly occurred to her that since she felt certain Kendrick had in the end decided to give her to Ludis for the greater good of Southmarch, the prince regent’s death had occurred at the last possible moment to prevent that from happening. The idea was so obvious and so surprising that she stopped in the middle of the hallway and her two ladies bumped into her from behind. It took a moment before they were all sorted out and moving again, but now Briony wished she did not have to go to the council chamber. This strange new thought made everything look different, as a cloud passing in front of the sun turned a bright day into sudden twilight.

But who would be so anxious to stop Kendrick sending me away? And where would Shaso fit into such a conspiracy?
Or had it been arranged not to keep Briony herself in Southmarch, but by someone who wished to take the throne?
But even if it was someone in the family with a blood-claim, someone like Gailon Tolly or Rorick, there are still two better claims ahead of any of them—Barrick’s and mine. They would have to kill us, too.

No, there are more than two claims ahead of both Gailon and Rorick
, Briony remembered.
There are three. There is also the child in Anissa’s belly.

And, of course, that infant would be the heir to the throne if he or she was born brotherless and sisterless into the world.

Anissa?
Briony suddenly did not want to think about such things anymore. She had never much cared for her stepmother, but surely no woman would murder an entire innocent family for the sake of an unborn child—a child who might not even live! Surely not. But it was disturbingly hard to clear away such suspicions once they had begun to take root. Wasn’t Anissa’s family in Devonis related in some way to King Hesper of Jellon, the one who sold Briony’s father to Hierosol in the first place?

Gailon, Rorick Longarren, her father’s wife—she could not think of any of them now without suspicion.
This is what murder does,
she realized. She had reached the door of the council chamber and now waited to be announced. Barrick was slouched in one of the two tall chairs at the head of the table, arms folded tightly across his chest as though he were cold, the face framed in the collar of black fur even more pale than usual.
It does not make one phantom only—it makes hundreds.

Once these halls were full of people I knew, even though I might not have liked them all. Now the house is crowded with demons and ghosts.

Wait and I will call for you,
the message from Avin Brone commanded. Even without the Eddon wolf and stars and Brone’s own sigil both stamped in wax at the bottom, the lord constable’s thick, black pen strokes would have been unmistakable.

Ferras Vansen waited in his dress cloak just inside the doorway to the council chamber between two of his guardsmen. Two more guards waited out in the hall with the man they would present to the councillors. The council room, known as the Oak Chamber for the massive wooden table at its center, was an old room that had once been the castle treasury in the dangerous days of the marauding Gray Companies, a large but windowless space with only two doors, nested in the maze of corridors behind the throne hall. The captain of the royal guard had never much liked the stark, stony room: it was the kind of place built for last stands, for the dreadful heroics of defeat and disaster.

The guard captain had been furious at first that Lord Brone should treat their news so offhandedly, ordering it held until the end of a long council session full of far more trivial matters, but as first one hour passed, then another, Vansen had come to believe he understood Brone’s thinking. Many days had passed since Prince Kendrick’s death—a killing still unexplained as far as most of the people of Southmarch were concerned, even if the murderer himself had been captured. The business of the land had been almost uniformly ignored since then, and many things had already waited in pressing need of answer before the prince regent died. If Vansen had been allowed to present his own news first, it was possible that none of this other business would have had its audience.

So he waited—but it was not easy.

He let his eye rove across the dozen noblemen who made up today’s council, playing a game of anticipating an attack on the royal twins first by this one, then by that, and trying to decide how he would counter it. The nobles looked bored, Vansen thought. They didn’t seem to realize that after the recent events boredom was a privilege, perhaps even a luxury no one could afford.

Ferras also thought young Prince Barrick still appeared very ill, although perhaps the boy was just careworn. Whatever the cause, Barrick was certainly not paying the closest attention to the business of the kingdom. As case after case came up before them—the rents on royal lands in need of attention, official embassies of grief and support from Talleno, Sessio, and Perikal to be heard, important property disputes that had come up from the assize courts or the temple courts needing a final decision—the young prince barely seemed to attend the speakers. In most cases he simply waited for Briony to speak, then nodded his head in agreement, all the while rubbing the crippled arm that he held in his lap like a pet dog. Only a question from Lord Nynor the castellan seemed to awaken the boy from his lethargy at last and kindle a light in his eye: Nynor wanted to know how much longer the Hierosoline envoy Dawet dan-Faar would be with them, since the household purse had made allotment for only a fortnight’s stay. But although he was clearly interested, Barrick became, if anything, even more silent and unmoving as Briony answered the question. The princess said that they could not of course hurry a reply to the man who held her father’s safety in his hands, especially at so troubled a time. She seemed almost as distracted as her brother. Ferras Vansen thought that Barrick did not seem to like her answer much, but the prince made no spoken objection and Nynor was left to go grumbling off to rearrange the household finances.

The princess and her brother dispatched several dozen such questions over the course of two hours. The gathered nobles of the council offered suggestions, and on some occasions dissenting opinions as well, but mostly they seemed to be watching the twins at their new task—watching them and judging them. Gailon of Summerfield made none of his usual objections, and in fact seemed to be as absorbed by his own thoughts as the prince and princess were by theirs. When the subject of the envoy Dawet came up, it seemed Gailon might say something, but the moment passed and the handsome duke resumed picking at the leg of the council table with a small ceremonial dagger, barely hiding what was obviously some great frustration, although Ferras Vansen had no idea what its cause might be. For the first time Vansen could see Summerfield’s duke for what he really was, despite all his power and wealth: a man younger than Vansen himself, and one with less training in silence and patience as well.

It must have been hard for him with that drunken blowhard of a father.
Nobody outside Summerfield Court missed old Duke Lindon very much, and Vansen couldn’t help guessing that there probably weren’t many people in his duchy who missed him either.

The afternoon wore on, bringing nothing more interesting than reports of a sharp increase in the number of strange creatures that seemed to be coming from across the Shadowline. Something with spines and teeth had badly injured some children near Redtree, and a man had been killed by a goat with black horns and no eyes, which the locals had promptly captured, killed, and burned, but most of the reports were of creatures that seemed harmless despite their strangeness, many of them crippled or dying, as though they had not been prepared for the world on this side of the unseen barrier.

At last even the novelty of these tales began to fade. Some of the council members began to ignore the proceedings and talk openly among themselves despite sharp looks from Brone. Vansen was intrigued to see that the lord constable seemed also to have taken up the role of first minister, a position unfilled since the old Duke of Summerfield’s death a year earlier. He wondered if this was part of the reason for the young duke’s disgruntlement.