(Shadowmarch #1) Shadowmarch (49 page)

Dawet raised an eyebrow. “Is that the message you wish me to give him, Princess Briony?”

“It is.”

He nodded his head slowly. “And do I take this to mean that I am no longer a prisoner? That my escort and I are free to go back to Hierosol?”

“Do you doubt my word?”

“No, Highness. But sometimes things happen beyond the echo of a prince’s voice.”

“Avin Brone, the lord constable, knows my wishes . . . our wishes. He will return your men’s arms. Your ship is prepared already, I think.”

“Your castellan was kind enough to arrange that no harm should come to it, and that I could keep on it a small crew to see that things stayed in order.” Dawet grinned. “I confess that although I will in many ways regret leaving, it is good to know I will have my freedom again, even though you will be one guest the less.”

“Guest, indeed. Whatever you believe, Lord Dawet, I do not think you can say we treated you much like a prisoner.”

“Oh, a valued prisoner, at the worst,” he said. “But that is small solace to one who has spent years of his life living on horseback, never sleeping in the same place twice.” He stirred. “Do I have leave to go and begin the preparations?”

“Of course. You will want to sail before the weather turns for good.” She was oddly disappointed, but knew this was happening as it must. He and his Hierosoline company were a distraction in the castle; they attracted rumor and hostility as honey drew flies. Yes, he was a very distracting presence, this Dawet dan-Faar. Now that Brone had convinced her and Barrick beyond doubt that there was no way the envoy or his company could have been materially involved in her brother’s murder, it made no sense to keep them and feed them through the long winter.

He bowed, took a few steps backward, then stopped. “May I speak frankly, Highness? Princess Briony?”

“Of course.”

He glanced at the guards and her ladies-in-waiting, then came back and sat on the bench beside her. This close, he smelled of leather and some sweet hair oil. Briony saw Rose and Moina exchange a look. “I will take you at your word, Mistress, and hope you have played me fairly,” he said quietly. “Listen carefully to me, please.

“I am glad you did not accept the suit of my lord Ludis. I think you would not have found life at his court very enjoyable—mostly, I suspect my master’s interests and amusements would not have been to your taste. But I hope someday you can see the southlands, Princess, and perhaps even Xand . . . or at least those parts of it not choking under the Autarch’s control. There are beauties you cannot imagine, green seas and high mountains red as a maiden’s blush, and broad jungles full of animals you can scarcely imagine. And the deserts—you will remember I told you something of the silent, stark deserts. You may become a great queen someday, but you have seen little of the world, and that seems to me a shame.”

Briony was stung. “I have been to Settland and Brenland and . . . and Fael.” She had been only a child of five when her father took her to visit Merolanna’s relatives—she remembered little except a great black horse given to her father by Fael’s lord as a present, and of standing on a balcony above the sea watching otters at play in the water below.

Dawet smirked—there was nothing else to call it. “Forgive me if I do not count Settland and Brenland among the gods’ greatest triumphs, my lady.” Abruptly the smile dropped away. “And my wish for you to see more of the world is in part an idle and selfish wish . . . because I wish I could be the one to show these things to you.” He lifted a long, brown hand. “Please, say nothing. You told me I could speak honestly. And there is more I would tell you.” His voice dropped all the way to a whisper. “You are in danger, my lady, and it is closer to you than you think. I cannot believe that Shaso is the one who killed your brother, but I cannot prove he did not either. However I
can
tell you, and tell you from knowledge, that one who is much closer to you than me means you ill. Murderously ill.” He held her gaze for a long moment; Briony felt lost, as though she were in an evil falling dream. “Trust no one.”

“Why would you say such a thing?” she whispered harshly when she had found her voice again. “Why should I believe that you, the servant of Ludis Drakava, are not merely trying to stir unhappiness between me and those I trust?”

The smile returned one last time, with an odd twist to it. “Ah, the life I have led means I deserve that many times over. Still, I do not ask you to act on my words, Princess Briony, only to consider them—to remember them. It could be that the day will come when we can sit together once more and you can tell me whether I wished you ill this day . . . or well.” He stood, donning his guise of easiness again like a cloak. “I hope you will be more suitably dressed, of course.” He took her hand in a most ostentatious manner, brushed his lips upon it. Everyone else in the room was staring openly. “I thank you and your brother for your generous hospitality, Princess, and I grieve for your loss. I will give your message to my master in Hierosol.”

He bowed and left the cabinet.

“I am quite sick of watching the two of you murmur,” Briony growled at her ladies-in-waiting. She didn’t quite know what she was feeling, but it was not pleasant. “Go away. I want to be by myself for a while. I want to think.”

By day the dark-haired girl Willow came back to herself a little, although in some ways she seemed so childish that Ferras Vansen wondered if her problems were solely caused by having crossed the Shadowline—perhaps, he thought, she had already been a bit simpleminded. Whatever the case, under the small bit of sun that leaked through the clouds she became the most cheerful of the generally silent company, riding in front of Vansen and chattering about her family and neighbors like a small child being taken to the market fair.

“ . . . She is so little, but she is the most stubborn of the lot. She will push the other goats away from the food—even the biggest of her brothers!”

Collum Dyer listened to her babble with a sour expression on his face. “Better you than me, Captain.”

Ferras shrugged. “I am happy she is talking. Perhaps after a while she will say something that we will thank Perin Cloudwalker we learned.”

“Perhaps. But, as I said, better you than me.”

In truth, Ferras Vansen was almost glad of the distraction. The land through which they passed was less obviously strange than the previous two days’ stretch of road, deserted and a bit gloomy but otherwise about what he would have expected as they neared the halfway point of the journey, and thus not particularly interesting. With the largest cities of Settland and the March Kingdoms several days’ ride away in either direction, these lands had emptied in the years since the second war with the Twlight People, leaving only crofters and woodsmen of various sorts and the occasional farmer. The few small cities like Candlerstown and Faneshill had grown up south of the Settland Road, well away from the Shadowline. (These towns were also too far out of the way to be worth visiting this trip, a fact much mourned by Dyer and the rest of Vansen’s men.) Winters were also milder closer to the water to the east or west: few felt the need to live out here in such dramatic solitude. The Settland Road passed through low hills and scrub that were even more undistinguished than the lands where Ferras had spent his childhood.

They could see the line again now, just a few miles away to the north, or at least they could see the breakfront of mist that marked it. It was wearying to ride hour after hour with it hovering so close, hard not to think of it as a malevolent thing watching them and waiting for an opportunity to do harm, but Ferras was much happier knowing where it was, able to see that there was still a crisp delineation between his side and the other.

Willow had moved from goats to the topic of her father and swine, and was explaining what her sire had to say about letting the hogs scavenge for mast—for the “oak corns” as she called them. Vansen, who had spent most of the last ten years of his life trying to forget about raising hogs and sheep, leaned over and asked her, “And what of Collum? Your brother?”

Either his guess was correct or she was madder than he supposed. “He would rather pick rushes than follow the pigs. He is a quiet one, our Collum. Only ten winters. Such dreams he has!”

“And where is he now?” He was trying to discover if there was any sense or meaning behind some of the things she had said.

Her look turned sad, even frightened, and he was almost sorry he’d asked. “In the middle of the night, he went. The moon called him, he said. I tried to go, too—he is just a little one!—but our father, he grabbed me and would not let me through the door.” As if the subject caused her pain, she began talking again about cutting the rushes for rush candles, another activity Vansen knew only too well.

It would not have taken much calling by the moon or anything else to make me run away,
Vansen thought.
But somehow I do not think this girl’s brother has gone to the city to make his fortune.

 

Late afternoon, with the sun falling fast, Vansen decided to make camp. The road had led them through the low, sparsely covered hills all day, but they were about to pass through a patch of forested ground. The stand of trees before them was not a place he wanted to wander in the growing dark.

“Look!” shouted one of the men. “A deer—a buck!”

“We’ll have fresh meat,” another cried.

Ferras Vansen looked up to see the creature standing just inside the shadows at the edge of the trees, half a hundred steps away. It was large and healthy, with an impressive spread of antler, but seemed otherwise quite ordinary. Still, something about the way it looked at them, even as a few of the men were nocking arrows, made him uneasy.

“Don’t shoot,” he said. One of the soldiers raised his bow and aimed. “Don’t!” At Vansen’s shout, even though it had been looking straight at them, the stag for the first time seemed to understand its peril. It turned and with two long leaps vanished into the cover of the trees.

“I could have had him,” snarled the bowman, the old campaigner Southstead whose grumbling ways had been the reason Vansen brought him instead of leaving him home to gossip and spread dissatisfaction among the rest of the guardsmen.

“We do not know what is natural here and what is not.” Ferras was careful to keep anger out of his voice. “You saw the flowers.You have seen the empty houses.We have enough to eat in our packs and saddlebags to keep us alive. Kill nothing that does not threaten you—do you all hear me?”

“What,” demanded Southstead, “do you think it might be another girl, magicked into a deer?” He turned to the other guards with a loud, angry laugh. “He’s already got one—that’s just greedy, that is.”

Vansen realized that the man was frightened by this journey through lands grown strange.
As are we all,
he told himself,
but that makes such talk all the more dangerous.
“If you think you know better than me how to lead this company, Mickael Southstead, then say so to me, not to them.”

Southstead’s smile faltered. He licked his lips. “I meant only a jest, sir.”

“Well, then. Let us leave it at that and make camp. Jests will be more welcome over a fire.”

When the flames were rising and the girl Willow was warming her hands, Collum Dyer made his way to Vansen’s side. “You’ll have to keep an eye on our Micka, Captain,” he said quietly. “Too many years of too much wine has curdled his heart and brains, but I had not thought him so far gone as to mock his captain. He never would have dared it in Murroy’s day.”

“He’ll still do well enough if there’s something to do.” Vansen frowned. “Raemon Beck, come here.”

The young merchant, who had spent most of the journey like a man caught in a nightmare from which he couldn’t awaken, slowly made his way toward Vansen and Dyer.

“Are you an honorable man, Beck?”

He looked at Ferras Vansen in surprise. “Why, yes, I am.”

“Yes,
Captain,
” grunted Dyer.

Vansen raised his hand: it didn’t matter. “Good. Then I want you to be the girl’s companion. She will ride with you. Trying to get sense from her is like sifting a thousandweight of chaff for every grain of wheat, anyway, and you may recognize better than I can if she says something useful.”

“Me?”

“Because you are the only one here who has been through something like what I believe she has seen and heard and felt.” Ferras looked over to where the men were gathering more deadfall for the fire. “Also, to be frank, it is better if the men are angry with you than angry with me.”

Beck did not look too pleased at this, but Collum Dyer was standing right beside him, cleaning his dirty fingernails with a very long dagger, so he only scowled and said, “But I am a married man!”

“Then treat her as you would want your wife treated if she were found wandering ill and confused beside the road. And if she says anything that you think might be useful, anything at all, tell me at once.”