(Shadowmarch #1) Shadowmarch (88 page)

But I’d never see Barrick again, or Father.
Her arm was shaking badly. She lowered the blade until the tip clicked against the table leg.
And one of the bloody Tollys would wind up as regent until Anissa’s child is born—if they let it live.

“Get out of my sight,” she said to Hendon Tolly, then turned her eye on the rest of the table, the rows of pale, gaping faces, some still with lumps of gravied meat congealing in their fingers, arrested halfway from plate to mouth. “All of you.
All of you!
”

But it was Briony herself who slammed the sword back into its sheath and then turned and stalked out of the Great Hall, scattering servants as she went. She managed to wait until the door fell shut behind her before letting the flood of angry tears overwhelm her.

33

The Pale Things

I
T WAS A GRIM THING TO STAND at the Northmarch crossroad where he had stood only the month before and see the hills now smothered by dark vines and nodding, bruise-colored flowers. The soldiers whispered among themselves and scuffed their feet like restless cattle, but it was a far more disturbing sight for Ferras Vansen. He had seen such vegetation before, but forty miles or more to the west. It had spread far in a short time.

“Where are those scouts?” asked Earl Tyne for the fifth or sixth time in an hour. He slapped his gloved hands together as though the day were bitterly cold, though the sun had not yet set and the wind was mild for Ondekamene. The war leader had dumped his helmet on the ground like an empty bucket and pushed back his arming cap; his coarse, gray-shot hair stood up in tufts. He stared out at the strange sheen of the meadows and the black blossoms moving in the breeze like the heads of children watching them silently from the deep grass. “They should have been back by now.”

“Doiney and the others are good men, my lord.” Vansen looked across at the resting soldiers. At any other time after such a long halt they would have gone straying off into the grass like untended sheep, but instead they stood uncomfortably where they had stopped, as if prisoned by the edges of the road. These sons of farmers and shop-keepers wanted no part of the thorny vines or the unnatural, oily-looking flowers.

“You said you’ve seen this before, Vansen.”

“Yes, Lord Aldritch. With my troop, in the north of Silverside. Just a little while before . . . before things began to go wrong.”

“Well, blood of the gods, keep your mouth shut about that, will you?” Tyne scowled. “This lot are all about ready to turn tail and run all the way back to Southmarch.” He glared at a shaven-headed mantis making an elaborate show of wafting a bowl of incense around in the middle of the crossroad, moaning and singing as he went about his task of banishing evil spirits. Many of the men watched this spectacle with obvious unease. “I’m going to have that priest’s head off,” the Earl of Blueshore growled, almost to himself.

“I think this lot will be all right when the time comes, my lord. Many of them have fought on the Brenland borders or against the Kertish hill bandits. It’s the waiting that’s hard on them.”

Tyne took a drink from his saddle-cup and looked at the guard captain for a long, considering moment. “It’s hard on all of us—that’s the cursed thing. Bad enough waiting for the enemy to show themselves when you know you’re fighting mortal men. What are they supposed to make of all this . . . ?” He waved his hand at the poisoned hills.

Ferras Vansen was glad the earl didn’t really expect an answer.

“Ah,” the older man said suddenly, with real relief in his voice. “There they are.” He squinted. “It is them, isn’t it?”

“Yes, lord.” Vansen also felt the tightness in his chest loosen a bit. The sentries had been expected back at noon and the sun was on the hilltops now. “They are riding fast.”

“They look as though they have something to say, don’t they?” Tyne turned and stared back at the line of soldiers on the road. It had been a full day or more since they had encountered the last refugees from Candlerstown, and although the tales were terrible, almost unbelievable, their presence had at least proved that men could cross these hills in safety. But since they had passed the last of those stragglers, the army of Southmarch had traveled through empty, near-silent lands, and now a stir was moving through the ranks at the sight of the distant scouts. Behind the soldiers the first row of drovers, anticipating that the train would soon move out again, began whipping back the oxen who had strayed a little distance from the road to graze. “Ride out to them, bring them straight through to me,” commanded Tyne. “I think under that tree, there, just a short way up the hill. That will let us talk away from sharp ears.”

“Perhaps we should set the men to making camp, lord,” Vansen suggested. “It is getting late to ride much farther and it will occupy them.”

“A good idea, but let’s hear what the scouts say first.” The earl turned to his squire. “Tell Rorick and Mayne and Sivney Fiddicks to join me on the hill there. The young prince, too, of course—wouldn’t do to leave him out. Oh, and Brenhall—he’s probably under a tree somewhere, sleeping off his noon meal.”

Vansen barely heard the last of this as the earl’s other squire helped him into the saddle, then he spurred away to meet the scouts.

 

“But how many
are
they, curse it?” Tyne tugged at his mustache and looked as though he would like to slap Gar Doiney. “How many times must I ask?”

“I’m sorry, your lordship.” The scout’s voice was dry and cracked, as if he didn’t use it much. “I’ve heard you, sire, it’s just hard to answer, like. With mist and such we can only just tell they’re camped on the hilltop and in the trees. We rode around the long way for a better look—that’s why we’re so long back.” He shook his head. The scar between Doiney’s eye and mouth that pulled up his lip and made him seem to smirk had gotten him into trouble before now, and Vansen guessed it might have had something to do with the man’s choice of a usually solitary profession—but Vansen felt sure that even in his anger Tyne couldn’t fail to mark the skittish look on the scout’s weathered, bony face. Even a hardened, taciturn campaigner like Doiney was disturbed by this unknown, unnatural enemy. “Come back with us, sire—there must be an hour still of light. You’ll see. It’s hard to make out anything. But there are hundreds there, thousands perhaps.”

Tyne waved his hand. “It’s only that it is dangerous to have to guess. At least we know
where
they are.”

“And you are certain there are no more of them anywhere else?” young Prince Barrick asked. He had joined the circle on the hillside, the nobles standing close together to provide each other some protection from the stiffening wind. The prince looked interested—almost too interested, Vansen thought, as if he had forgotten that the men unrolling their bedrolls would soon have to cross swords with this interesting phenomenon, that some of them would almost certainly die. It was hard for Vansen not to feel a little resentment on behalf of Dab Dawley and all the other soldiers not much older than the prince who would not be surrounded and protected as Barrick would be, to make certain their experience of battle didn’t become too dangerous.

But who is it asked me to take care of the lad, to protect him? Was it the prince himself ? No, it was his sister. Perhaps I do him a disservice.
Vansen was unsure again: sometimes Barrick Eddon seemed a mere boy, younger even than his years, petulant and anxious; at other moments he seemed a hundred years old, far beyond anything so mundane as fear of death.

“If Your Highness means perhaps it is a token force to draw us, with the rest in ambush,” said Doiney, awkward and uncomfortable at speaking to royalty, “then I say anything is possible, your good Highness, but if they have another force squirreled away, they are either so small they are hiding under the clovers or they are floating on a cloud in the sky, like, or whatever it is they say fairy folk do. Because of the morning mist we did not mark the ones on the hill until our way back, and we rode far across these lands on both sides of the Settland Road and up the far reaches of the old Northmarch way as well, across all kinds of ground.” He stopped, clearly trying to think it all through, to make sure that he had said what he meant to say. Vansen had never heard so many words out of the man in all the years he had known him. “Meaning to say, Highness, by your pardon, there are none others we can see for miles beyond except for those as are nearly on top of us.”

“What do they look like?” asked Rorick, his voice a little too gruffly ordinary to be quite believable.

“Hard to tell,” Doiney told him. “Apologies, your lordship, but it’s that cursed mist and those trees. But we could see some of them in what looked like good, plain armor, not much different than you or me, and there were horses and tents and . . . and all you’d expect. But there were other shapes too, in the trees . . .” He trailed off, made the pass-evil. “Shapes that didn’t seem right at all, what we saw of them.”

Tyne stepped backward until the tree was almost against his spine. He peered out into the distance, although the wooded high place the Twilight People seemed to have chosen as their camp was blocked from view by the intervening hills. “First things first, then,” he said. “Vansen, we need a string of pickets across the hills behind them and some miles down both roads, changed often enough that they won’t start to see shapes in the night that aren’t there, but do see the ones that truly are. They must keep ears open, too. If there is some other force coming—if it
is
a trap—we must know about it before they arrive. And let’s have the rest start making camp.” Tyne’s sergeant ran down the hill to give the orders.

Vansen leaned over and had a few quick words with Gar Doiney as the nobles talked quietly among themselves. “. . . But the others that Muchmore took out have been back since noontime,” Vansen finished, “so tell him it’s them I want out, and you get your fellows something to drink and eat.”

Doiney nodded, then bowed to the nobles and made a clumsy, unaccustomed leg for the prince before he swung himself back onto his horse again. He cantered back toward his little troop of horsemen, visibly relieved to escape the councils of the great.

Vansen stared at the blossoming campfires. They were a reassuring sight against the descending twilight and he decided that Earl Tyne was a thoughtful commander: it was doubtful the enemy was ignorant of their arrival, and the fires would give the men much-needed heart’s ease through a long, worrisome night.

“So what do we do, then, Lord Aldritch?” asked the prince. “Do you think they will stand and fight?”

“If they won’t, then we have learned something useful,” Tyne told him. “But do not doubt that I fear a trap as much as you do, Highness, although I suspect we may be overthinking. Still, if they break and run we should not follow them, in case they mean to lead us into the place we have heard about, beyond the Shadowline where everyone runs mad.”

“Almost everyone. Not our Captain Vansen.” It was hard to tell how Prince Barrick meant it, as compliment or gibe.

Vansen broke the short silence. “If my experience is to be of use, then I must remind everyone that my men and I had no idea we were crossing over into . . . into those lands . . . so I think Earl Tyne speaks wisely. If we best them, even if we seem to break them, still we should go slowly and carefully.”

Barrick Eddon stared at him for a moment, gave a sober nod, then looked around at the others and realized they were all watching him. “What, do you wait for me? I’m not a general, not even a soldier yet. I’ve said that and I mean it. Aldritch, you and the others must decide.”

The Earl of Blueshore cleared his throat. “Well, Highness, then I say we must be alert and on guard all this evening, and double the usual sentries—and that is not counting your pickets, Vansen. If these shadow folk do not stir, then in the morning when the light comes back, we will go up and test their strength. I do not think any of us much wants to go against them in these unfamiliar fields when the sun is setting.”

There were nods and a few grunts of agreement, but otherwise nobody said anything. There was no need.

Chert had been up and down the shore of the quicksilver sea a hundred times, it seemed, calling and calling until he was quite dizzy, with no reply except echoes. He had discovered no hint of a way across the liquid metal, no bridge, no mooring post, and—as best he could tell in the inconstant, flickering light—no boat on the shore at the far side. He had discovered one thing, though: somewhere in the blue-and-rose-shot darkness above his head some sort of cleft must open to the distant surface, a rock chimney of sorts where the fumes could disperse into the air above Brenn’s Bay. Chert knew enough about quicksilver to know that if this were the true stuff, unaired, he likely would be not just light-headed but dead or dying.