(Shadowmarch #1) Shadowmarch (98 page)

“So what would you suggest?” Barrick suddenly didn’t want to hear it. It seemed obvious it would not be anything comfortable, with a fire and a meal at the end of it, and sleep to help ease his aching arm. “Go ahead, Vansen, tell. And may the gods curse us all for fools for having got ourselves in this situation in the first place!”

Several of the nobles were startled by this into making the sign against evil.

“Do not speak so, Highness,” said the Earl of Blueshore, scowling. “Do not bring the anger of the gods down on us. I will tell that to even you. Take my head for it if you wish.”

“No, Tyne, I was wrong. I apologize.”

“It is not me who needs an apology, my prince.”

“Don’t worry, it’s not you the gods will punish either.” Barrick turned away from Tyne’s surprised look. “Speak, Captain. Tell us your plan.”

Vansen took a ragged breath; it was clear that he was as exhausted as everyone else. A cut on his jaw had reopened; a trickle of blood crawled down his neck like a tiny red snake. “We must ride, all of us. We must leave the men on foot to come as fast as they can. Otherwise, we will never catch the shadow folk. Who knows if even the water will stop them? Not me, and certainly not Earl Rorick, begging my lords’ pardon. Who knows if even the walls of the keep will keep them out? We must catch the shadow folk and force them to turn and fight us, try to hold them until the rest of our force catches up—there’ll be no shame in retreating once we first touch them and punish them, especially with full dark only a few hours ahead. But if we wait until tomorrow’s daylight, they will have already reached Southmarch. We mounted men must nip at them like a pack of dogs, then scamper away, then strike again so they can’t ignore us. We must stop them and turn them until the men on foot arrive.”

“But what about Brone and his troops?” asked Tyne. “This seems madness when we have a garrison that can come out to support us.”

“Let them, then!” said Vansen. “Send our messengers, those with wings and those without. But I cannot say this strongly enough, my lords—if we let them reach the city before us, I fear that we’ll regret it.”

Tyne looked a question at Barrick, who felt more than a little queasy in his stomach. He had known he would not like hearing what Vansen had to say, but it was too late now: he had heard it and he had recognized the dire truth in it. It was all he could do to nod his head.

 

Kettle stumbled in a rabbit hole and Barrick almost flew out of the saddle at full gallop, but he wrapped his hand in the horse’s mane and held on until he could get himself straightened up again. He was momentarily grateful that he was not carrying a lance as many of the other riders were, that his crippled arm didn’t permit it, since he would surely have lost it or, worse, let it slip down point-first as the horse fought for balance, likely knocking himself out of the saddle. Then he remembered that a man without a lance couldn’t keep an enemy any farther away than the tip of his falchion.

They would have let me stay behind. They all told me not to come.
The words seemed to bounce in his head like loose stones in a bucket. The horses thundered down the slope, riders able to do nothing more at such speed than lean forward and hang on. The fog that only moments before had been sailing past in tendrils like individual flags was now growing thicker; great white billows of it flew up before Barrick, as if serving maids were shaking out the castle linens. He seemed to be moving through a world that was half green grass and dying winter sunlight, half gray emptiness where he was alone but for the distant sound of horses and armor and the occasional shout of his fellows, sun and fog turning the world alternately light and dark like a swinging door.

He reentered the world of light for a few brief moments, then plunged again into swirling mists. Men rode on either side of him, but he could not see their shields or crests well enough to recognize them. The one on his left suddenly stood in his stirrups. Something protruded from the joint of the rider’s chest and right shoulder like a long-stemmed black flower, then the man fell backward, spinning heels over head, and his horse veered away into the mist—mist that did not clear but seemed to grow ever thicker.

Vansen was wrong,
was all Barrick had time to think,
it is night already.

He turned to shout to the man on his other side, but as he looked for him something snapped past his face, so close he could feel it brush his nose. The pale man riding on his right had tipped his visor back; his black eyes were huge and had no whites. Even as Barrick stared, the man . . . the creature . . . whatever he was, nocked another arrow. Barrick knew he couldn’t outrun it or duck swiftly enough, so he yanked with his good hand on the reins and sent Kettle sideways into his attacker’s mount. There was a thump of contact as the bowstaff slapped against Barrick’s face. The arrow vanished harmlessly up into the air. Barrick still had not had a chance to draw his falchion, but he managed to pull Kettle away again just as his enemy lunged at him, leaving the manlike creature hanging, his hands wrapped around Barrick’s saddle strap, his feet still locked in his own stirrups as his horse galloped alongside Kettle. Despite the pulling and bumping of the horses, Barrick’s enemy was slapping at his leg for what looked like a knife sheathed there.

Shouting in disgust and fear, Barrick kicked at the unprotected face over and over. The helmet flew off, revealing streaming silvery hair. The creature, despite all this, continued to pull himself nearer until the two horses were only a yard apart. Barrick finally dragged his falchion out of its scabbard and shoved it artlessly at the man’s face, then hacked at the clawing white hands wrapped around his saddle strap until suddenly their grip dissolved in blood and the face with its staring black eyes fell away—a flash of his armor as he tumbled into the grass, then nothing. The riderless horse continued on for a few dozen paces, then turned and vanished through the fog.

Barrick reined up and sat for a long moment, gasping for breath, fearing that his jittering heart might crack like a newborn chick bursting its shell. Men screeched hoarsely somewhere in the fog to his right, and though he was terrified, Barrick realized it was better to be moving than to sit waiting for something to come down on him out of the roil of mist.

They would have left me behind. I could have stayed behind.

He spurred toward the shouting.

 

Tyne of Blueshore and a dozen other knights and nobles had found each other, and Barrick had found them. The enemy was thick around them, but not endless. There were moments between one spate of fighting and the next, sometimes long enough for Barrick to catch his breath and even drink from his waterskin. He was holding his own despite being forced to fight with only one hand, and he found himself embarrassingly grateful for his old nemesis, Shaso, who had worked him so mercilessly all those years.

Once or twice the fog cleared so that he could see knots of combat all over the downs. Those instants when the mists rolled back and they could actually see something like a wholesome, natural twilight dragged a cheer from even the weariest of the fighters around Barrick, his own voice as loud as any. They had held their own against the first attack of the Twilight People. Barrick felt something almost like hope. If they could reach some of their fellows, they could begin to make an organized resistance, to make a real stand or, as Vansen had suggested—only hours ago, but it felt like years—then withdraw and try to lure the shadow folk after them.

The fairies didn’t seem to be as many as they had feared, but they were terrible foes. Their strangeness even more than their ferocity made them so. Most were man-sized and man-shaped, armored and carrying weapons of odd shapes and hues, but a few were twice the size of any mortal, massive things with patches of mangy fur and thick, sagging tortoise skin, powerful but slow. Barrick had already seen one of these monstrosities brought down by three mounted men with lances, and he had shouted with joy as the giant fell and lay shuddering in its own slow-oozing black blood. The fairy army contained swarms of small creatures with ruddy hair and faces almost as narrow as foxes’ muzzles, too, and others not much larger than apes who were covered all over with some dark, tangled fur so that they appeared faceless except for the staring gleam of their eyes. Some of the enemies seemed to carry their own blankets of mist, so that even in the moments of clear light they were dim and hard to see as a reflection in a muddy pond, and the thrusts of lances and swords never quite seemed to strike them straight. Wolves accompanied them, too, silently swift and horrible in their intelligence. They had already pulled down several of the horses by tearing at legs and unprotected bellies until the beasts stumbled and fell.

“That way!” Tyne shouted. The war leader’s helmet was battered and his sword was bloodied and notched, but his voice was still strong. Men moved to him without hesitation as he spurred his horse toward one of the clumps of fighting, a fog-shrouded mass of bodies and flashing metal—Mayne Calough and a company of Silverside nobles, perhaps three or four dozen mounted men all together, hard-pressed by at least that many foes. Tyne clearly planned to bring the two groups together with an eye toward mounting a coordinated defense, and Barrick was only too happy to follow. He had spent most of the last hour floating in a kind of singing silence, hearing but not recognizing the sounds of combat, terror, and pain all around him, lost in red-shot mists, but now the mists were beginning to clear—at least those in his head, even if the fogs that blew across the hillside showed no sign of doing the same.

As something like ordinary thought returned, he realized that he wanted only to get out of this ghastly murk any way he could. He didn’t want to kill anymore, not even monsters like these. He didn’t want to make anyone proud of him. He didn’t care what anyone thought.

War is a lie.
The disjointed words did not quite form in his head, but they were there all the same, like broken pieces of an object whose original shape could still be recognized.
Because no one ever would. Terrible. If they knew, no one ever. Never.

Tyne was at the front of their small company, and reached the cluster of men on the hillside just in time to rein up in surprise as something huge burst through the rank of knights, flinging aside heavy, armored men and horses like a drunkard batting away a cloud of bees. Tyne had only a moment to raise his sword in a gesture of helpless defiance before the leathery giant brought down its great cudgel of stone and wood on him with such force that Tyne’s horse was smashed to the ground with its back broken and its legs fractured and splayed. Nothing was left of Tyne Aldritch, the Earl of Blueshore, but a headless jelly in a wreckage of crushed armor.

It was so sudden, so horrid, that Barrick could only gape as Kettle shied and stutter-stepped. The Silversiders scattered from the giant, mounted men running down those who had lost their horses, all of them leaping past the prince, a few shouting at him to turn, to ride for his life. The giant thing lumbered toward him, the massive club whistling back and forth as it came, dispatching those who couldn’t force their way past their fellows to escape, knocking them to pieces. One of the fleeing knights lost control of his horse and the beast slammed into Kettle and forced Barrick’s mount sideways. This time Barrick did not catch its mane before he fell. The wet ground drove the breath out of him so powerfully that for a moment he thought it was the giant’s club that had struck him, but the fiery stab of pain in his arm told him otherwise: he was still alive and there was worse to come. He rolled over and scrabbled along the ground to stay out of the way as his black horse tried to right itself, but it only bought him a moment.

Better if Kettle had kicked my brains out . . . Better than this . . .

The monstrous thing stood over him now, pouched eyes squinting from a face as bristly and wrinkled as the hind end of a wild boar. It was so huge it seemed to block the light, but there was almost no light left anywhere now, it seemed, anywhere in the world. It prodded him with the cudgel, shoving him a yard across the ground, and seemed surprised and pleased to discover he was still alive. He could feel his rib crack as the giant poked him again, then it raised its club high. The great weapon hung above him like a quivering outcrop of mountain about to break loose and tumble down to earth.

Barrick closed his eyes.

Briony.

Father.

I wish . . .

37

The Dark City

E
VEN WITHOUT THE shadow-mantle it had been dark on this battlefield hours before the true night that was now falling—the Mist Children had made sure of that. As Yasammez rode, she saw the murk they had created as a shade, a hue that only dimly stained her vision, but she guessed that to the sunlanders the Mist Children’s work must seem like something else entirely. Like blindness. Like despair.

All around her the struggle continued, a chaos of blood and fog and the clash of metal on metal, but nothing was hidden from Lady Porcupine. It had been a near thing—the decision of the mortals to ride her down in the open had been a clever one and she guessed there must be at least a few real commanders among them—but the sunlanders had suffered by having to leave behind their foot soldiers, and although they had fought bravely and surprisingly well, the tide had now turned against them.

The first step,
she thought
—but just barely. And the Year-Turning Day almost upon us. The king has lost. There can be no question but that it must be done my way from now on.

She had blooded Whitefire today, but Yasammez did not lust after combat for its own sake—her anger was too refined, too pure, to need expressing in that fashion. She left the rest to Gyir and her other attendants and spurred her black horse up to a place where she could better see the sunlanders’ city and especially the castle that crouched on its mound of stone across the water—the old hill, the sacred, terrible place, soon to belong to the People once more. She considered how her eremites would cause the Bridge of Thorns to grow above the water, how her troops would cross through its sheltering branches and come to the castle walls. Many would be lost in the assault, but she had been thrifty of her army so far and it would be the last great sacrifice in this part of the world. First, though, they would invest the castle’s front garden, the deserted sunlander city on the mainland. Her troops and followers would rest and tend their wounded, then they would dance and sing their victories, the first over their enemy for centuries. Those parts of the city they did not need would burn, and the sight of those fires would steal the castle dwellers’ sleep for their last nights of life, as though Yasammez herself had reached out and bent their dreams into nightmare shapes.