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A Wyvern Hunt

The belling of the hounds is already growing faint in the hollows when he finally pulls up. His horse is restive, anxious to return to the hunt, but Barrick Eddon yanks hard on the reins to keep the mare dancing in place. His pale face seems almost translucent with weariness, his eyes fever-bright. "Go on," he tells his sister. "You can still catch them."

Briony shakes her head. "I'm not leaving you by yourself. Rest if you need to, then we'll go on together."

He scowls as only a boy of fifteen years can scowl, the expression of a scholar among *beep*s, a noble among mudfooted peasants. "I don't need to rest, you strawhead. I just don't want the bother."

"You are a dreadful liar," she says gently. Twins, they are bound to each other in ways close as lovers' ways.

"And no one can kill a dragon with a spear, anyway."

"It isn't a dragon, it's a wyvern — much smaller. Shaso says you can kill one with just a good clop on the head."

"What do either you or Shaso know about wyverns?" he asks crossly. "They don't come stumping across the hills every day. They're not bloody cows."

Briony thinks it a bad sign that he is rubbing his crippled arm without even trying to hide it from her. "No, but the Master of the Hunt asked Chaven before we set out, remember? And Shaso says we had one in Grandfather's day — it killed three sheep at a steading in Landsend."

"Three whole sheep! Heavens, what a monster!"

The crying of the hounds rises in pitch, and now both horses are taking nervous little steps. Someone winds a horn; its moan is smothered by the intervening trees.

"They've seen something." She feels a sudden pang. "Oh! What if it hurts the dogs?"

Barrick shakes his head in disgust, then brushes a curl of dark red hair out of his eyes. "The dogs?"

But now Briony is frightened — she has raised two of the hounds, Rack and Dado, from puppyhood, and in some ways they are more real to this king's daughter than most people. "Oh, come, Barrick! I'll ride slowly, but I won't leave you here."

His mocking smile vanishes. "Even with only one hand on the reins, I can outride you any hour."

"Then do it!" she laughs, spurring down the slope. She is doing her best to poke him out of his fury, but she knows that cold blank mask too well. Only time and perhaps the excitement of the chase will breathe life back into it.

She looks back up the hillside and is relieved to see that Barrick is following, a thin shadow atop the gray horse, dressed as though he were in mourning. But her twin dresses that way every day.

Oh, please, Barrick, sweet angry Barrick, don't fall in love with Death. Her own extravagant thought surprises her — poetical sentiment usually makes Briony feel like she has an itch she can't scratch — and as she turns back in distraction she nearly runs down a small figure scrambling out of her way through the long grass. Her heart thumping in her breast, she brings Snow to rein and jumps down, certain she has almost killed some crofter's child.

"Are you hurt?"

It is a little man with gray hair who stands up, no higher than the belly-strap of her saddle — a Funderling. He doffs his shapeless felt hat and makes a little bow. "Quite well, my lady. Kind of you to ask."

"I didn't see you . . ."

"Not many do, Mistress." He smiles. "And I should also . . ."

Barrick rattles past with hardly a look at Briony or her almost-victim. Despite his best efforts he is favoring the arm and his seat is dangerously bad. She scrambles back onto Snow, making a muddle of her riding skirt.

"Forgive me," she says to the little man, then bends low over the horse's neck and spurs after her brother.

* * *

The Funderling helps his wife to her feet. "I was going to introduce you to the princess."

"Don't be daft." She brushes burrs out of her thick skirt. "We're just lucky that horse of hers didn't crush us into pudding."

"Still, it might be your only chance to meet one of the royal family." He shakes his head in mock-sadness. "Our last opportunity to better ourselves, my good Opal."

She squints, refusing to smile. "Better for us would mean enough coppers to buy new boots for you and a winter shawl for me. Then we could go to meetings without looking like beggars' children."

"It's been a long time since we've looked like children of any sort, my old darling." He plucks another burr out of her gray-streaked hair.

"And it will be a longer time yet until I have my shawl if we don't get on with ourselves." But she is the one who lingers, looking almost wi*beep*lly along the trampled track through the long grass. "Was that really the princess? Where do you suppose they were going in such a hurry?"

"Following the hunt. Didn't you hear the horns? Ta-ra, ta-ra! The gentry are out chasing some poor creature across the hills today."

She sniffs, recovering herself. "I don't pay attention to such, and if you're wise, neither will you. Don't meddle with the big folk without need and don't draw their attention, as my father always said. No good will come of it. Now let's get on with our work, old man. I don't want to be wandering around near the edge of Shadow when darkness comes."

Chert shakes his head, serious again. "Nor do I."

* * *

The harriers and sight hounds seem reluctant to enter the stand of trees, although their hesitation does not make them any quieter: the clamor is atrocious, and even the keenest of the hunters seem content to wait a short distance up the hill until the dogs have driven their quarry out into the open. The lure of the hunt for most has little to do with the quarry anyway, even so unusual a prize as this. Several dozen lords and ladies and many times that number of servitors swarm along the hillside, the gentlefolk laughing and talking and admiring — or pretending to admire — each others' horses and clothes, the soldiers and servants plodding along behind or driving oxcarts stacked high with food and drink and tableware and even the folded pavilions in which the company earlier took their morning meal. Others lead spare horses: it is not unusual during a particularly exciting hunt for a horse to collapse with a broken leg or burst heart, and none of the hunters could bear to miss the kill and have to ride home on a wagon just because of a dead horse. Beside the churls and higher servants stride men-at-arms carrying pikes or halberds, grooms, houndsmen, even a few priests — those of lesser status must walk, like the soldiers — even Puzzle, the king's old jester, who is playing a rather unconvincing hunting air on hi*beep*e as he struggles to remain seated on a saddled donkey. In fact, the quiet hills below the Shadowline now contain an entire small town on the move. Briony, who had enjoyed the moment's escape and the quiet that came with it, cannot help wondering what a hunt must be like in the huge and showy courts of Syan or Jellon.

She does not have long to think about it. Shaso dan-Heza rides out from the main body to meet Barrick and Briony as they come down the crest. The master of arms is the only member of the gentry who actually seems dressed to kill something, wearing not the finery most nobles don for the hunt but his old black leather cuirass that is only a few shades darker than his skin. His huge war bow bumps at his saddle, bent and strung as though he expects attack at any moment. To Briony, the master of arms and her sullen brother Barrick look like a pair of thunderheads drifting toward each other, and she braces herself for the lightning. It is not long in coming.

"Where have you been?" demands Shaso. "Why did you leave your guards behind?"

Briony hastens to take the blame. "We did not mean to be away so long. We were just talking, and Snow was hobbling a little . . ."

The old Tuani warrior ignores her, fixing his hard gaze on Barrick. Shaso seems angrier than he should, as though they had done more than simply wander away from the press of humanity for a short while. Surely he cannot think they are in danger here, only a few miles from the castle in the country the Eddon family has ruled for generations? "I saw you turn from the hunt and ride off, boy," he says. "What were you thinking?"

Barrick shrugs, but there are spots of color high on his cheeks. "What affair is it of yours?"

The dark man flinches and his hand curls. For a frightening moment Briony thinks he might actually hit Barrick. He has dealt the boy many clouts over the years, but always in the course of instruction, the legitmate blows of combat; to strike one of the royal family in public would be something else entirely. Shaso is not well-liked — many of the nobles openly declare that it is not fitting a blackskinned southerner, a former prisoner of war, should hold such high estate. He has been untouchable as long as Briony's father has ruled, but she wonders whether Shaso's titles, or even Shaso himself, will survive this bleak time of King Olin's absence . . .

As if thoughts like these had passed through his own head, Shaso lowers his hand, then stares for a long moment before speaking. "You are a prince of Southmarch, boy," he says, brusque but quiet. "When you risk your life without need it is not me you are harming."

Barrick stares back defiantly but the old man's words cool some of the heat of his anger. Briony knows Barrick will not apologize, but there will not be a fight, either.

The excited barking of the dogs has risen in pitch. Their brother Kendrick is beckoning them down to where he is engaged in conversation with Gailon Tolly, the young duke of Summerfield. Briony rides down the hill toward him with Barrick just behind her. Shaso gives them a few paces start before following.

Gailon of Summerfield — only a half-dozen years senior to Barrick and Briony, but with a stiff formality that she knows masks his dislike of some of her family's broader eccentricities — removes his green velvet hat and bows to them. "Princess Briony, Prince Barrick. We were concerned for your wellbeing, cousins."

Kendrick seems in a surprisingly good mood considering the burdens of regency on his young shoulders during his father's absence. Unlike King Olin, he is capable of forgetting his troubles long enough to enjoy a hunt or a pageant. Already his jacket of Sessian finecloth is unbuttoned, his red-gold hair in a careless tangle. "So there you are," he calls. "Gailon is right, I was worried about you two — it's especially not like Briony to miss the excitement." He glances at Barrick's funereal garb and widens his eyes. "Has the Procession of Penance come early this year?"

"Oh, yes, I apologize for my dress," Barrick growls. "How terribly tasteless of me to dress this way, as though our father were being held prisoner somewhere. But wait — our father is a prisoner. Fancy that."

Kendrick winces and looks inquiringly at Briony, who makes a face that says, He's having one of his difficult days. The prince regent turns to his brother and asks, "Would you rather go back?"

"No!" Barrick shakes his head violently, but then manages to summon an unconvincing smile. "No. Everyone worries about me too much. I don't mean to be rude, truly. My arm just hurts a bit. Sometimes."

"He is a brave youth," says the duke without even the tiniest hint of mockery, but it still makes Briony bristle like one of her beloved dogs. Last year Gailon Tolly offered to marry her. He is handsome enough in a broad-faced way, and his holdings are second only to Southmarch itself in size, but she is glad that her father had been in no hurry to find her a husband. She has a feeling that Duke Gailon of Summerfield would not be as tolerant to his wife as King Olin is to his daughter — that he would do his best to prevent Briony riding to the hunt in a split skirt, straddling her horse like a man.

The dogs are yapping even more shrilly now, and a stir runs through the hunting party gathered on the hill. Briony turns to see a movement in the trees below, a flash of red and gold like autumn leaves carried on a swift stream, then something bursts out of the undergrowth and into the open, a large serpentine shape that is fully visible for the space of five or six heartbeats before it finds high grass and vanishes again. The dogs are already swarming after it in a frenzy.

"Gods!" says Briony in sudden fear. "It's huge!" She turns accusingly to Shaso. "I thought you said you could kill one of them with a good clop on the head."

Even the master of arms looks startled. "The other one . . . it was smaller."

Kendrick shakes his head. "That thing is ten cubits or I'm a skimmer." He shouts to one of the beaters, "Bring up the boar spears!", then spurs down the hill with Gailon of Summerfield racing beside him and the other nobles hurrying to find their places close to the young prince regent.

"But . . . !" Briony falls silent. She has no idea what she meant to say — why else were they here if not to hunt and kill a wyvern? — but she suddenly feels certain that Kendrick will be in danger if he gets too close. Since when are you a witching-woman? she asks herself, but the thought is strangely potent, the crystallization of something that has been troubling her all day like a shadow seen from the corner of the eye. Perhaps it is not Barrick who is seeking Death, perhaps rather the grim god is hunting them all.

She shakes her head to throw off the swift chill of fear. Silly thoughts, Briony. Evil thoughts. It must be Barrick's sorrowing talk of their father that has done it. Surely there is no harm in a day like this, lit by such a bold autumn sun? The whole hunt is riding in Kendrick's wake, the horses thundering down the hill after the hounds, the beaters and servants running along behind, shouting excitedly, and she suddenly wants to be out in front with Kendrick and the other nobles, running ahead of all shadows and worries.

I won't hang back like a little girl, she thinks. Like a lady. I want to see a wyvern.

And what if I'm the one who kills it? Well, why not?

In any case, her brothers both need looking after. "Come on, Barrick," she says. "If we don't go now we'll miss it all."

* * *

"Her name's Briony, isn't it?" Opal says suddenly.

Chert hides a smile. "Are we talking about big folk? I thought we weren't supposed to meddle with that sort."

"Don't mock. I don't like it here. Even though the sun's overhead it seems dark. And the grass is so wet! It makes me feel all fluttery."

"Sorry, my dear. I don't like it much here either, but along the edge is where the interesting things are. Every time it draws back a little there's something new. Do you remember that Edri's Egg crystal, the one big as a fist? I found it just sitting in the grass, like something washed up on a beach."

"It's not natural."

"Of course it's not natural. Nothing about the Shadowline is natural. But you said you wanted to come today, and here you are." He looks up to the line of mist running along the grassy hills, denser in the hollows, but still thick as eiderdown along the hilltops. "We're almost there."

"So you say," she grunts wearily. Chert feels a pang of shame at how he teases her, his good old wife. She can be tart, but so can an apple, and none the less wholesome for it. "Yes, her name's Briony."

"And that other one, dressed in black. That's the other brother?"

"I think so, but I've never seem him so close. They're not much for public show, that family. The old king Ustin, those children's grandfather, he was one for festivals and parades, do you remember?"

Opal does not seem interested in reminiscence. "He seemed sad, the boy."

"Well, his father's being held for a ransom the kingdom can't afford and the boy's got himself a gammy arm. Reasons enough, perhaps."

"What happened to him? The boy?"

Chert waves his hand as though he were not the type to pass along idle gossip, but it is only for show, of course. "I've heard it said a horse fell on him. But Old Pyrite claims that his father threw him down the stairs."

"King Olin?" Hearing the tone of indignation, Chert almost smiles again. For one who claims not to care about the doings of big folk, Opal has some definite opinions about them. "He would never do such a thing!"

"It seems far-fetched," Chert admits. "And the gods know that Old Pyrite will say almost anything when he's had enough mossbrew. . ." He stops, frowning. It is always hard to tell, here along the edge where distances are tricky at the best of times, but there is definitely something wrong.

"What is it?"

"It's moved," Chert says slowly. They are only a few dozen paces away from the boundary now — quite as close as he wants to get. He stares, first at the ground, then at a stand of white oak trees half-smothered by mist, faint as wandering spirits. The hairs on the back of his neck rise. "It's moved."

"But it's always moving. You said so."

"Slipping back from the edge a wee bit, then coming up to it again, like the tide," he whispers. "Like something breathing in and out." He can feel a heaviness to the air unusual even for this haunted place, a heightened watchfulness: it makes him feel reluctant even to speak. "But it's never moved any closer. Until now."

"What do you mean?"

"It's come forward." He doesn't want to believe it but he has spent as much time in these hills as anyone. "A dozen paces ahead of where I've ever seen it."

"Is that all?"

"Is that all? Woman, that line hasn't moved an inch closer to the castle in two hundred years . . . !" The dim rumbling that he has heard for several moments is growing louder, and Chert has just realized it isn't thunder. "Fissure and fracture!" he swears. "Those are horses coming toward us!"

"The hunt?" she asks. The damp hillside and close-leaning trees seem capable of hiding anything. "You said the hunt was out today."

"It's not coming from that direction." He suddenly realizes what he's saying and his heart stumbles in his chest. "Gods of raw earth — it's coming from the Shadow!"

He grabs his wife's hand and yanks her stumbling along the hill away from the misty boundary, their short legs digging, feet slipping on the wet grass as they scramble for the safety of the trees. The noise of hooves seems impossibly loud, as though it is right on top of the staggering Funderlings.

Chert and Opal reach the trees and throw themselves down into the scratching underbrush. Chert grabs his wife close and peers out at the hillside as four riders erupt from the mist and rein in their stamping white mounts. The animals, not quite like any horses Chert has ever seen, blink as though unused to sunlight. He cannot see the riders, who wear hooded cloaks that at first seem black, but which have the flickering sheen of an oily puddle, but they too seem startled by the brightness. As they look around, a tongue of mist curls about their horses' feet, as though their shadowy land will not entirely let them go.

One of the riders slowly turns toward the trees where the two Funderlings lie hidden. For a long moment the invisible face is tilted toward them, staring perhaps, or just listening, and although his every fiber tells Chert to leap to his feet and run, he lies as still as he can, clutching Opal so tightly that he can feel her silently struggling to break his painful grip.

The hooded figure turns away. One of its fellows takes something from the back of its saddle and drops it to the ground. The riders linger for a moment, staring across the valley at the distant towers of Southmarch Castle, then without a sound they wheel and ride their white horses back into the ragged wall of mist. Chert lets go of his wife.

"You've broken my bones, you old fool," she moans, climbing up onto hands and knees. "Who was it? I couldn't see."

"I . . . I don't know." It happened so quickly that it almost seems a dream. Chert gets up, feeling the ache of the panicked run begin to throb in all his joints. "They just rode out, then turned around and rode back . . ." He stops, staring at the dark bundle the riders dropped. It is moving.

"Chert, where are you going?"

He doesn't intend to touch it — no Funderling is such a fool, to snatch up something that even those beyond the Shadowline do not want. As he moves closer he cannot help noticing that the object is a large sack which is making small, frightened noises.

"There's something in it," he calls to Opal.

"There's something in lots of things," she says, coming grimly after him. "But not much between your ears. Leave it alone and come away, you. No good can come of it."

"It's . . . it's alive." A thought has come into his head. It is a goblin, or some other magical creature banished from the lands beyond. Goblins are wish-granters, that's what the old tales say. And if he frees it, would it not give those wishes to him? A new shawl? Opal can have a queen's closet full of clothes if she wishes. Or the goblin could lead him to a vein of firegold and the masters of the Funderling guilds will soon be coming to Chert's house with caps in hands, begging his assistance. Even his own so-proud brother . . .

The sack thrashes and tips over. Something inside it snarls.

Of course, he thinks, there could be a reason they took it across the Shadowline and tossed it away like offal on a midden. It could be something extremely unpleasant.

An even stranger sound comes from the sack.

"Oh, Chert," his wife says, and now her voice is quite different. "There's a child in there! It's crying!"

He still does not move. Everyone knows there are sprites and bogles enough on this side of the Shadowline which can mimic the voices of loved ones in order to lure travelers off the path to certain doom. Why expect anything better of something that actually comes from the twilight country itself?

"Aren't you going to do anything?"

"Do what? Any kind of demon could be in there, woman."

"That's no demon, that's a child — and if you're too frightened to let it out, Chert of the Blue Quartz, I will."

He knows that tone all too well. He mutters a prayer to the gods of deep places, then advances on the sack as though it were a coiled viper, stepping carefully so that in its thrashing it will not roll against him and, perhaps, bite. The sack is held closed with a knot of some gray rope. He touches it carefully and finds the cord slippery as wet smooth stone.

"Hurry up!" Opal calls.

He glares at her, then begins cautiously to unpick the knot, wishing he had brought something with him sharper than his old knife, dulled by the scraping at and digging out of many stones. Despite the cool, foggy air, sweat has beaded on his forehead by the time he is able to tease the knot apart. The sack has lain still and silent for some time. He wonders, half-hoping it is so, whether the thing inside has suffocated.

"What's in there?" his wife calls, but before he has time to tell her he hasn't even opened the cursed thing, something shoots out of the loosened neck of the heavy sack like a stone out of the mouth of a culverin and knocks him onto his back.

Chert tries to shout, but the thing has his neck gripped in clammy hands and is trying to bite his chest through his thick jerkin. He is so busy trying to fight it off that he can't even make out the shape of his attacker until a third body enters the fray and drags the clutching, strangling monstrosity off him. They all tumble into a pile.

"Are you . . . hurt . . . ?" Opal gasps.

"Where is the blasted thing?" Chert rolls over into a sitting position. The sack's contents are crouching a short distance away, staring at him with mistru*beep*lly squinting blue eyes. It is a boy, a child of perhaps six or seven years, sweaty and dissheveled, with deathly pale skin and hair that is almost white, as though he has been in the sack for years.

Opal sits up. "A child! I told you." She looks at the boy for a moment. "One of the big folk, poor thing."

"Poor thing!" Chert gently touches the scraped places on his neck and cheeks. "The little beast tried to murder me."

"Oh, be still. You startled him, that's all." She holds out her hand toward the boy. "Come here — I won't hurt you. What's your name, child?" When the boy does not reply, she fumbles in the wide pockets of her dress and withdraws a heel of brown bread. "Are you hungry?"

From the fierce glint in his eye, the boy is very interested, but he still does not move toward them. Opal leans forward and sets the bread on the grass. He looks at it and her, then — with a movement as swift as the viper Chert had earlier imagined — snatches the bread up, sniffs it, and crams it into his mouth, scarcely bothering to chew before swallowing. Finished, the boy looks at Opal with fierce expectancy. She laughs worriedly and feels in her pocket until she locates a few pieces of dried fruit, which she also sets on the grass. These disappear even faster than the bread.

"What's your name?" she asks the boy. "Where are you from?"

Searching his teeth with his tongue for any fragments of food that might have escaped him, he only looks at her.

"Dumb, it seems," says Chert. "Or at least he doesn't speak our . . ."

"Where is this?" the boy asks.

"Where . . . what do you mean?" Chert asks, startled.

"Where is this . . ." — the boy sweeps his arm in a circle, taking in the trees, the grassy hillside, the fogbound forest. "This . . . place? Where are we?" He sounds older than his age somehow, but younger too, as though speaking is a new thing to him.

"We are on the edge of Southmarch — called Shadowmarch by some, because of the Shadowline." Chert gestures toward the misty boundary, then swings himself around to point in the opposite direction. "The castle is over there."

"Shadow . . . line?" The boy squints. "Castle?"

"He needs more food." Opal's words have the sound of an inarguable decision rendered. "And sleep. You can see he's weary to the bone."

"Which means . . . what?" But Chert already sees the shape of it and does not like it much.

"Which means we take him home, of course." Opal stands, brushing the loose grass from her dress. "We feed him."

"But . . . but he must belong to someone! To one of the bigfolk families!"

"And they tied him in a sack and left him here?" Opal laughs scornfully. "Then they are likely not pining for his return."

"But he came . . . he came from . . ." Chert looks at the boy, who is sucking his fingers and examining the landscape. He lowers his voice. "He came from the other side."

"He's here now," Opal says. "Look at him — do you really think he's some unnatural thing? He's a little boy who wandered into the twilight and was tossed out again. Surely we of all people should know better than to believe everything that has to do with the Shadowline is wicked. He probably comes from some other place along the boundary — somewhere leagues and leagues away! Shall we leave him here to starve?" She pats her thigh, then beckons. "Come with us, child. We'll take you home and feed you properly."

Before Chert can make further objection Opal sets off, stumping back along the hillside toward the distant castle, the hem of her old dress trailing in the wet grass. The boy pauses only to glance at Chert — a look the little man first thinks is threatening, then decides might be as much fear as bravado — before following after her.

"No good will come of it," Chert says, but quietly, already resigned through long experiece to whatever complex doom the gods have planned for him. In any case, better angry gods than an angry Opal. He doesn't have to share a small house with the gods, who have their own high and vasty places. He sighs and falls into step behind his wife and the boy.

* * *

The wyvern has been brought to bay in another copse of trees, a dense circle of rowans carpeted with bracken. Even through the milling ring of dogs, wild with excitement but still cautious enough to keep their distance, perhaps put off by the unusual smell or strange slithering movements of their quarry, Briony can see the length of the thing as it moves restlessly from one side of the copse to the other, its bright scales glimmering in the shadows like a brushfire.

"Cowardly beasts," says Barrick. "They are fifty to one."

"They are not cowards!" Briony resists the urge to push him off his horse. He is looking even more drawn and pale, and has tucked his left arm inside his cloak as though to protect if from chill, though the afternoon air is still sunwarmed. "The scent is strange to them!"

Barrick frowns. "There are too many things coming across the Shadowline these days. Just back in the spring there were those birds with the iron beaks that killed a shepherd. And the dead giant they found at Daler's Troth . . ."

The thing in the copse rears up, hissing loudly. The hounds start away, whining and yipping, and several of the beaters shout in terror and scuttle back from the ring of trees. Briony can still see only a little of the beast as it slips in and out through the gray rowan trunks and tangled undergrowth. It seems to have a head narrow as a seahorse's, and as it hisses again she glimpses a mouth full of spiny teeth.

It almost seems frightened, she thinks, but that does not make sense. It is a monster, an unnatural thing: there can be nothing in its dark mind but malevolence.

"Enough!" cries Kendrick, who is holding his frightened horse steady near the edge of the copse. "Bring me my spear!"

A page runs up to him, little face wan with fear, looking determinedly at anything except the hissing shape only a few paces away. The page is in such terrified haste to hand over the spear and escape that he almost lets the long, gold-chased shaft with its crosshaft and its heavy iron head fall to the ground as the prince reaches for it. Kendrick catches it, then kicks out at the retreating boy in irritation.

Others of the hunting party are calling for spears as well. With the kill so close the dozen immaculately coiffed and dressed women who have accompanied the hunt, most riding decorously on side-saddles, a few even carried in litters — their awkward progress has slowed everyone else quite a bit, to Briony's disgust — take the opportunity to withdraw to a nearby hillock where they can watch the end from a safe distance. Briony sees that Rose and Moina, two of her ladies-in-waiting, have spread a blanket for her between them on the hillside and are waiting expectantly. Old Puzzle the jester is restringing hi*beep*e, biding his time until he can see what food the ladies might have in their hamper. Briony scowls and waves at one of the beaters as he staggers past with several of the heavy spears in his arms. "Give me one of those."

"What are you doing?" Barrick himself cannot easily handle the long spears with only one arm, and has not bothered to call for one. "You can't go near that creature. Kendrick won't let you."

"Kendrick has quite enough to think about. Oh, gods curse it." She scowls. Gailon of Summerfield has seen and is spurring toward them.

"My lady! Princess!" He leans out as if to take the spear from her, and only realizes at the last moment that he would be overstepping himself. "You will hurt yourself."

She manages to control her voice, but barely. "I do know which end points outward."

"But this is not fitting for a lady . . . and especially with such a fearsome beast . . . !"

"Then you must make sure and kill it first," she says, a bit more gently but no more sweetly. "Because if it reaches me, it will get no farther."

Barrick groans, then calls the bearer back and takes a spear for himself, clutching it awkwardly under one arm while still holding the reins.

"And what are you doing?" she demands.

"If you're going to be a fool, someone has to protect you."

Duke Gailon looks at them both, then shakes his head and rides off toward Kendrick and the hounds.

"I don't think he's very happy with us," Briony says cheerfully. From somewhere back along the hillside, she hears the master of arms shout her name, then her brother's. "And Shaso won't be either. Let's go."

They spur forward. The dogs, surrounded now by a ring of men with spears, are beginning to find their courage again. Several of the lymers dart into the copse to snap at the swift-moving, reddish shape. Briony sees the long neck move, quick as a whipcrack, and one of the dogs yelps in terror as it is caught in the long jaws.

"Oh, hurry!" she says, miserable but also strangely excited.

The dogs swarm into the copse in numbers, a flood of low shapes swirling in the dappled light beneath the trees, barking in frightened excitement. There are more squeals of pain, but then a strange, creaking bellow from the wyvern as one of the dogs gets its teeth into a sensitive spot. The barking suddenly rises fiercely in pitch as the beast fights its way through the pack, trying to escape the confinement of the trees. It crushes at least one of the hounds and tears out the innards of several others, shaking a victim so hard that blood flies everywhere like red rain. It bursts out of the leaves and the moving shadows into the clear afternoon sunlight, and for the first time Briony can see it whole.

It is mostly serpentine body, a great tube of muscle covered with glimmering red and gold scales, with a single pair of sturdy legs two cubits below the narrow head. A sort of ruff of bone and skin has flared out behind the skull, stretching even wider now as the thing rises up on those legs, head swaying higher than a man's as it strikes toward Kendrick and the two other humans closest to it. It has come on them too quickly for the men to dismount and use the long boar-spears properly. Kendrick waits until the strike has missed, then digs at the creature's face with his spear. The wyvern hisses and sideslips the blow, but as it does so one of the other men — Briony thinks it might be Tyne, the hunting-mad earl of Blueshore — drives his spearhead into the thing's ribs just behind its shoulders. The wyvern contorts its neck to snap at the shaft in helpless rage. Kendrick seizes the opportunity to drive his own spear into the thing's throat, then spurs his horse forward so that he can use its force to pin the wyvern against the ground. The spear slides in through a sluice of red-black blood until the crosshaft meant to keep a boar from forcing its way up the shaft stops it. Kendrick's horse rears in alarm at the thing's agonized, furious hiss, but the prince stands in his stirrups and leans his weight on the spear, determined to keep the thing staked to the earth.

The dogs swarm forward again; the other members of the hunt begin to close in too, all anxious to be in at the kill. But the wyvern is not beaten.

In a sudden, explosive movement the thing coils itself around the spear, stretching its neck a surprising distance to bite at Kendrick's gloved hand. The prince's horse rears again and he almost loses his grip on the spear entirely. With the pressure lessened, the monster's tail writhes out and wraps around the horse's legs. The black gelding nickers in terror. For a brief moment they are all tangled together like some fantastical scene from an ancient tapestry, everything so strange that Briony cannot quite believe it is truly happening. Then the wyvern tightens itself around the legs of Kendrick's horse, crushing bones in a drumroll of frighteningly loud cracks, and the prince and his mount collapse downward into a maul of red-gold coils.

As Barrick and Briony stare in horror from twenty paces away, Summerfield and Blueshore both begin to jab wildly at the agitated monster and its prey. Other nobles hurry forward, shouting in fear. With the crush of eager dogs, the writhing loops of the injured wyvern's long body and the thrashing of the mortally injured horse, it's impossible to see what is happening on the ground. Briony is dizzy and sick.

Something comes up suddenly out of the long grass, speeding toward her like the figurehead of a Vuttish longboat cutting the water — the head of the wyvern as it makes a desperate lunge at escape, still dragging Kendrick's spear in its neck. It darts first to one side, then to the other, hemmed in by terrified horses and downstabbing spears, then plunges through an opening in the ring of hunters, straight at Briony and Barrick.

It rises up before them, black eye glittering, and sways back and forth like an adder as it measures them. As if in a dream, Briony lifts her spear. The thing hisses and rears higher. She tries to track the moving head, keeping the point always between it and her, but its looping motions are quick and fluidly deceptive. A moment later Barrick's spear slips from his clumsy, one-handed grasp and bangs sideways into Briony, knocking her own weapon from her hands.

The wyvern's narrow jaws spread wide, dripping with bloody froth. The head lunges forward, then suddenly snaps to one side as though yanked by a string.

Its strike has come so close that when she undresses that night Briony will find that the thing's caustic spittle has burned holes in her deerhide jerkin, as though someone has held the garment over the flames of a dozen tiny candles.

The wyvern lies on the ground, an arrow jutting from its eye, little shudders rippling down its long neck as it dies. Briony drops her spear and Barrick's clattering to the ground, then turns to see Shaso riding toward them, his war bow still in his hand. He looks down at the dead beast before lifting his angry stare to the royal twins.

"Cursed, foolish children," he says.

hey nice rp u got in here!

may you mind to continue please?

Proper Blue Quartz

The boy has stopped to stare at the castle's jutting towers atop the heights of the Mount, still distant across the causeway. Wolfstooth Spire looms above them all, scratching the belly of the sky. They are on the hill road now, winding down through wide farmlands to the edge of the city that fills the shoreline.

"What is that place?" the boy asks, almost a whisper.

"Southmarch," Chert tells him. "Shadowmarch, some call it. 'The Beacon of the Marches', if you like poetry."

The boy shakes his head, but whether because he doesn't like poetry or for some other reason isn't clear. "Big," he says.

"Hurry up, you two," Opal calls back over her shoulder.

"She's right — we still have a long walk."

The boy still hesitates. Chert lays his hand on the boy's arm. The child seems strangely reluctant, as though the towers themselves are something menacing, but he allows himself to be urged forward. "There's nothing to be afraid of," Chert says. "Not as long as you're with us. But don't wander off."

The boy shakes his head again.

As they make their way into the city they find that Market Road is lined with people. For a strange moment, Chert wonders why so many people have come out of their houses and shops to stare curiously at two Funderlings and a ragged, white-haired boy, then realizes that the royal family's hunting party has passed through the middle of town just ahead of them. The crowd is beginning to disperse, the hawkers desperately reducing the prices of their chestnuts and fried breads, fighting over the few customers. He hears murmurs about the size of something the hunters have caught and paraded past, and other descriptions — scales? Teeth? — that make little sense unless they were hunting something other than deer. The people seem a little dispirited, even unhappy. He hopes the princess and her sullen brother are safe — he thought she had kind eyes. But if something had happened to them, surely folk would be talking about something other than their strange quarry.

As they trudge across the broad causeway, only a few cubits above the high tide, dodging wagons and heavily laden foot-peddlers, Chert looks out across the mouth of Brenn's Bay to the ocean. Despite the last of the bright afternoon sun there are clouds spread thick and dark along the horizon, and he suddenly remembers the shocking thing that the arrival of the riders and the mysterious boy had driven from his mind.

The Shadowline! Someone must be told. He would like to think that the king's family up in the castle already know, that they have taken all the facts into careful consideration and decided that it means nothing, that all is still well, but he cannot quite make himself believe it.

Someone must be told. The thought of going up to the castle himself is daunting, although he has been inside several times as part of Funderling work gangs, and has even led one there himself, working directly with Lord Nynor, the castellan — or with his secretary, in any case. But to go by himself, as though he were a man of importance . . .

But if they do not know, someone must tell them. And perhaps there will even be some reward in it — enough to buy Opal a new shawl, if nothing else. Or at least to pay for what this creature will eat when Opal gets him home.

He regards the boy for a moment, horrified by the sudden realization that Opal may very well intend to keep him. A childless woman, he thinks, is as unpredictable as a loose seam in a bed of sandstone.

Hold now, one thing at a time. Chert watches the clouds hurrying across the ocean, their black expanse making the mighty towers suddenly seem fragile, delicate as pastry. Someone must tell the king's people about the Shadowline. If I go to the Guild, there will be days of argument, then Cinnabar or puffed-up Young Pyrite will appoint himself messenger and I will get no reward.

Nor will you get the punishment if you're wrong, he reminds himself.

For some reason he again sees before his mind's eye the young princess and her brother, Briony's frightened gaze when she thought she had hurt him, the prince's face as troubled and impersonal as the sky out beyond the Mount, and feels a sudden warmth that almost, if it was not so ridiculous, feels like loyalty.

They need to know, he decides, and suddenly the idea of what might be coming closer behind that line of moving darkness pushes anything so abstract as the good graces of the royal family from his mind. There is another way to pass the news, and he will use it. Everyone needs to know.

* * *

Although his horse is dead, left behind for three footmen to bury on the hillside where the wyvern died, Prince Kendrick has suffered little more than bruises and a few burns from the creature's venomous froth. Of all the company he is the only one who seems in good cheer as they make their way back toward the castle, the corpse of the wyvern coiled on a wagon for the amazement of the populace. Market Road is crowded with people, hundreds and hundreds waiting to see the prince regent and his hunting party. Hawkers, tumblers, musicians and pickpockets have turned out too, hoping to earn a few small coins out of the spontaneous street fair, but the people seem glum and worried. Not much money is changing hands, and those nearest the road watch the nobles go by with hungry eyes, saying little, although a few call out cheers and blessings to the royal family, especially on behalf of the absent King Olin. Kendrick has been splashed in blood from head to foot; even after he has rubbed himself with rags and leaves, much of him is still stained a deep red. Despite the itch of his skin where the wyvern's spittle has burned him, he makes it a point to wave and smile to the citizens crowded in the shadows of the tall houses along the Market Road, showing them that the blood is not his own.

Briony feels as though she too were covered with some caustic, sticky substance. Her twin Barrick is so miserable about his own clumsy failure even to raise his spear properly that he has not spoken a word to her or anyone on the ride home. Earl Tyne and others are whispering among themselves, unhappy that the foreigner Shaso stole their sport by killing the wyvern with an arrow — Tyne is one of that school of nobles who believes that archery is a practice fit only for peasants and poachers, an activity whose primary result is to steal the glory from mounted knights in war. Only because the master of arms may have saved the lives of the young prince and princess is their unhappiness muttered instead of proclaimed aloud.

And more than a dozen of the dogs, including sweet Dado, a brachet who in her first months of life had slept in Briony's bed, are lying cold and still back on the hill beside Kendrick's horse, waiting to be buried.

I wish we'd never come. She looks up to the pall of clouds in the northern sky. It is as though some foreboding thing hangs over the whole day, a crow's wing, an owl's shadow. I wish they'd just gone out and killed the creature with arrows in the first place. Then Dado would be alive. Then Barrick wouldn't be trying so hard not to cry that his face has turned to stone.

"Why the grim look, little sister?" Kendrick demands. "It is a beautiful day and summer has not entirely left us yet." He laughs. "Look at the clothes I have ruined! My best riding jacket. Merolanna will skin me."

Briony manages a tiny smile. It's true — she can hear already what their aunt will have to say, and not just about the jacket. Merolanna has a tongue that everyone in the castle except perhaps Shaso fears, and Briony would give odds that the old Tuani only hides his terror better than the others. "I just . . . I don't know." She looks around to make sure that her black-clad twin is still a few dozen paces behind them. "I fear for Barrick," she says quietly. "He is so angry of late. Today has only made it worse."

Kendrick scratches his scalp, smearing himself anew with drying blood. "He needs toughening. People lose hands, legs, but they continue with their lives, thanking the gods they have not suffered worse. It does no good for him to be always brooding over his injuries. And he spends too much time with Shaso — the stiffest neck and coldest heart in all the Marchlands."

Briony shakes her head. Kendrick has never understood Barrick, although that does not keep him from loving his younger brother. And he does not understand Shaso very well either, although the old man is indeed stiff and stubborn. "It's more than that . . ."

She is interrupted by Gailon of Summerfield riding back down the road toward them. "Highness! A ship has come in from the south!"

Briony's chest tightens. "Father? Oh, Kendrick, do you think it's something about Father?"

The Duke of Summerfield looks at her tolerantly, as though she might be his own young and slightly sheltered sister. "It is a carrack — the Podensis out of Hierosol," he tells the prince regent, "and it is said there is an envoy on board sent from Ludis with news of King Olin."

Without realizing it, Briony has reached out and grabbed at Kendrick's red-smeared arm. Her horse bumps flanks with her brother's mount. "Pray all heaven, he is not hurt, is he?" she asks the duke, unable to keep the terror from her voice. The cold shadow she has felt all day seems to draw closer. "The king is well?"

Summerfield nods. "I am told the man says your father continues unharmed, and that he brings a letter from him, among other things."

"Thank the gods," Briony murmurs.

Kendrick frowns. "But why has Ludis sent this envoy? That bandit who calls himself Protector of Hierosol can't think we have raised the ransom yet, can he? A hundred thousand gold dolphins! It will take us at least the rest of the year — we have dragged every last copper out of the temples and churches, and the peasants are already groaning under the new taxes."

"Peasants always groan," says Gailon. "They are as lazy as old donkeys — they must be whipped to work."

"Perhaps the envoy from Hierosol saw all these nobles in their fine clothes, out hunting," Barrick suggests sourly. None of them have noticed him riding closer. "Perhaps he has decided we must have found the money if we can afford such expensive amusements."

The duke of Summerfield looks at Barrick with incomprehension. Kendrick rolls his eyes, but otherwise ignores his younger brother's jibe. "It must be something important that brings him. Nobody sails all the way from Hierosol to carry a letter from a prisoner, even a royal prisoner."

The duke shrugs. "The envoy asks for an audience tomorrow." He looks around and spots Shaso riding some distance back, but lowers his voice anyway. "He is as black as a crow."

"What has Shaso's skin to do with anything . . . ?" Kendrick demands, irritated.

"No, the envoy, Highness. The envoy from Hierosol."

Kendrick frowns. "That is a strange thing."

"The whole thing is strange," says Gailon of Summerfield. "Or so I hear."

* * *

If the nameless boy seemed disturbed by his first glimpse of the castle known as Shadowmarch, he appears positively terrified by the Basilisk Gate. Chert, who has been in and out of it so many times he has lost count, allows himself to see it now with a stranger's eyes. The white stone facing four times a man's height — and many more times Chert's own small stature — is carved in the likeness of a glowering reptilian creature whose twining coils surmount the top of the gate and loop down on either side. The monster's head juts out above the vast oak and iron doors, its staring eye and toothy mouth dressed with thin slabs of gemstone and ivory, its scales edged with gold. In the Funderling guilds, if not among the big folk, it is common knowledge that the gate has been here longer than the human inhabitants.

"The monster is not alive," he tells the child gently. "Not even real. It is only a carving."

The boy looks at him, and Chert thinks that what is in his eyes seems deeper and stranger than mere terror.

"I . . . I do not like to see it," the child says.

"Then close your eyes while we walk through, otherwise we will not be able to reach our house. That is where the food is."

The boy squints up at the lowering worm for a moment through his pale lashes, then closes his eyes tight.

"Come on, you two!" Opal calls. "It will be dark soon."

Chert leads the boy under the gate. Guards in high-crested helmets and black tabards watch curiously, unused to the sight of a human child being led by Funderlings. But if these tall men wearing the Eddons' silver wolf-emblem are concerned by this oddity, they are not concerned enough to lift their halberds and move out of the last warm rays of the sun.

The princess and her party have already reached their destination. As the Funderlings and their new ward reach Market Square, Chert can see all the way to the bottom of the walls around the central hill, the lights there numerous as fireflies on a midsummer evening. The inner keep's gate is open and dozens of servants with torches have come out to meet the returning hunters, to take the horses and equipment and guide the nobles to warm meals and warm beds.

"Who rules here?" asks the boy. It seems a strange sort of question, and now it is Chert who hesitates.

"In this country? Do you mean in name? Or in truth?"

The boy frowns — the meaning is chopped too fine for him. "Who rules in that house?"

It still seems a strange thing for a child to ask, but Chert has experienced far stranger things today. "King Olin, but he is not here. He is a prisoner in the south." It has been almost half a year now since Olin left on his journey to urge the small kingdoms and principalities across the heartland of Eion to make a federation. He had hoped to unite them against the growing menace of the Autarch, the god-king now reaching out from his empire on the southern continent to snap up territories along the lower coast of Eion like a spider snaring flies, but instead Olin has been delivered by the treachery of the king of Jellon into the hands of the Protector of Hierosol, an adventurer who has made himself master of that ancient city. But Chert scarcely understands all the details himself — it is too much to try to explain to a small, hungry child. "His oldest son Kendrick is the prince regent. That means he is the ruler while his father is gone. The king has two younger children, too — a son and daughter."

A gleam comes to the boy's eye, a light behind a curtain. "Merolanna?"

"Merolanna?" Chert stares as if the child has slapped him. "You have heard of the duchess? You must be from somewhere near here. Where are you from, child? Can you remember now?"

But the small white-haired boy only looks back at him silently.

"Yes, there is a Merolanna, but she is the king's aunt. Kendrick's younger brother and sister are named Barrick and Briony. And the king's wife is carrying another child as well."

The strange gleam in the boy's eyes fades.

"He knows of Duchess Merolanna," Chert tells Opal. "He must be from these parts."

She rolls her eyes. "He'll probably remember a lot more when he gets a meal and some sleep. Or were you planning to stand in the street all night talking of things you know nothing about?"

Chert snorts, but waves the boy forward.

More people are streaming out of the castle now than are going in, as the inhabitants of the city whose work brings them onto the Mount return home at the end of the day. Chert and Opal have a hard time forcing their way against a tide of much larger people. Opal leads them out of Market Square and into the quieter back streets behind the southern waterway and its docks, one of two large moorings inside the castle walls. The pilings are carved and painted, but the colors are dull in the dying light. Boats full of half-naked skimmers are unloading the day's catch on several of the smaller docks. The air is full of their moaning songs.

"Aren't they cold?" the boy asks. With the sun now behind the hills, chill winds are beginning to run across the waterway, sending white-tipped wavelets against the pilings.

"They're skimmers," Chert tells him. "They don't get cold."

"Why not?"

Chert shrugs. "The same reason a Funderling can pick something up off the ground faster than you can. We're small. They have thick skins. The gods just wanted it that way."

"They look strange."

"They are strange, I suppose. They keep to themselves. Some of them, it's said, never step farther onto dry land than the end of a loading dock. Webbed feet like a duck, too — well, a bit between the toes." He smiles. "But there are odder folk around here. Don't they have such things where you come from?"

The boy only looks at him, his expression distant and troubled.

They are quickly out of the back alleys of Skimmer's Lagoon and into the neighborhoods of the big folk who also work along the watercourse. The light is failing quickly now and although there are torches in the squares and even a few important people being led by lantern-bearers, most of the muddy streets are lit only by candlelight and firelight leaking from soon-to-be-shuttered windows. The big folk are happy to build their ramshackle buildings one on top of the other, ladders and scaffolding thick as hedgehog bristles, so that they almost choke off the narrow streets. The stench is dreadful.

Still, this whole place has good bones, Chert cannot help thinking, strong and healthy stone, living rock going right down into the Mount. It would be a pleasure to scrape away all this ugly wood. We Funderlings would have this place looking as it should in a trice.

Looking as it once did . . . He pushes away the odd thought — where would all these big folk go, for one thing?

Chert and Opal lead the boy down the narrow, sloping length of Stonecutter's Way and through the arched gate at the bottom, leading him out from beneath the evening sky and into the stony depths of Funderling Town.

This time Chert is not surprised when the boy stops to stare in awe. Even those big folk who do not particularly trust or like the small folk agree that the great ceiling over Funderling Town is a marvel. Stretching a hundred cubits above the small people's town square and continuing above all their mazy, lamplit streets, the ceiling is a primordial forest carved in every perfect detail out of the dark bedrock of the mount. At the outer edges of Funderling Town, closest to the surface, spaces have even been cut between the branches so that true sky shines through, or when night falls (as it is falling even now), the first evening stars can be seen sparkling through the gaps in the stone. Each twig, each leaf has been carved with exquisite care, centuries of painstaking work in all, one of the chief marvels of the northern world. Birds feathered in mother-of-pearl and crystal seem as though they might burst into song at any moment. Vines of green malachite twine up the pillar-trunks, and on some low branches there are even gem-glazed fruits hanging from stems of improbably slender stone.

The boy whispers something that Chert cannot quite hear. "It is wonderful, yes," the little man says. "But you can look all you want tomorrow. Let us catch up with Opal, otherwise she will teach you how a tongue can be sharper than any chisel."

They follow his wife down the narrow streets, each house carved back into the stone, the plain facades giving little indication of the splendid interiors that lie behind, the careful, loving labor of generations. At each turning or crossing oil lamps glow on the walls inside bubbles of stone thin as blisters. None of the lights are bright, but they are so numerous that all night long the ways of Funderling Town seem to tremble on the cusp of dawn.

Although Chert himself is a man of some influence, their house at the end of Wedge Road is modest, only four rooms all told, its walls but shallowly decorated. Chert has a moment of shame, thinking of the Blue Quartz family manor and its wonderful great room covered with deeply-incised scenes of Funderling history. Opal, for all her occasional spikiness of tongue, has never made him feel bad that the two of them should live in such a modest dwelling while her sisters-in-law are queening it in a fine house. Still, Chert could no more have stayed in the place, subservient to his brother Nodule — or "Magister Blue Quartz", as he now styles himself — than he could jump to the moon. And since his brother has three strong sons, there is no longer even a question of him inheriting it should his brother die first.

"I am happy here, you old fool," Opal says quietly. She has seen him staring at the walls. "At least I will be if you go and clear your tools off the table so we may eat like decent people."

"Come, boy," he tells the little stranger, making his voice loud and jovial to cover the fierce, sudden love he feels for his wife. "Opal is like a rockfall — if you disregard her first quiet rumblings, you will regret it later on."

He watches the boy wipe dust from the pitted table with a cloth, moving it around more than actually cleaning it. "Do you remember your name yet?" he asks.

The boy shakes his head.

"Well, we must call you something — Pebble?" He shouts to Opal, who is stirring a pot of soup over the fire, "Shall we call him Pebble?" It is a common name for fourth or fifth boys, when dynastic claims are not so important and parental interest is waning.

"Don't be foolish. He shall have a proper Blue Quartz family name," she says. "We will call him Flint. That will be one in the eye for your brother."

Chert cannot help smiling, although he is not entirely happy about the idea of naming the child as though they are adopting him as their heir. But the thought of how his self-important brother will feel on learning that Chert and Opal have brought in a human child and given it miserly old Uncle Flint's name is indeed more than a little pleasing.

"Flint, then," he says, ruffling the boy's fair hair. "For as long as you stay with us, anyway."

* * *

Waves lap quietly at the pilings. A few seabirds bicker sleepily. A plaintive, twisting melody floats up from one of the sleeping-barges, a chorus of high voices singing an old song of moonlight on open sea, but otherwise Skimmers' Lagoon is quiet.

Far away, the sentries on the wall call out the midnight watch and their voices echo thinly across the water.

Even as the sound fades, a light gleams at the end of one of the docks. It burns for a moment, then goes dark, then burns again. It is a shuttered lantern, and since its beam is pointed out across the dark width of the lagoon, no one within the castle or on the walls seems to mark it.

But the light does not go entirely unobserved. A small, black-painted skiff slides silently and almost invisibly across the misty lagoon and stops at the end of the dock. The lantern-bearer, outline obscured by a heavy cloak, crouches and whispers in a language seldom spoken in Southmarch. The shadowy boatman answers just as quietly in the same language, then hands something up to the one who has been waiting for almost an hour on the cold pier — a small object that disappears immediately into the pockets of the dark cloak.

Without another word, the boatman turns his little craft and vanishes back into the fogs that blanket the dark lagoon.

The figure on the dock extinguishes the lantern and turns back toward the castle, moving carefully from shadow to shadow as though it carried something very precious or very dangerous.

A Surprising Proposal

Puzzle looks sadly at the dove which he has just produced from his sleeve. Its head is cocked at a very unnatural angle; in fact, it seems to be dead. "My apologies, Highness." A frown creases the jester's gaunt face like a crumpled kerchief. A few people are laughing nastily near the back of the throne room, and one of the noblewomen makes a small and somewhat theatrical noise of grief for the mangled dove. "The trick worked most wonderfully when I was practicing earlier. Perhaps I need to find a bird of hardier constitution."

Barrick rolls his eyes and snorts, but his older brother is more of a diplomat. Puzzle is an old favorite of their father's. "An accident, good Puzzle. Doubtless you will solve it with further study."

"And a few dozen more dead birds," whispers Barrick. His sister frowns.

"But I still owe your highness the day's debt of entertainment." The old man carefully tucks the dove into the breast of his checkered outfit.

"Well, we know what he's having for supper," Barrick tells Briony, who shushes him.

"I will find some other pleasantries to amuse you," Puzzle continues, with only a brief wounded look at the whispering twins. "Or perhaps one of my other renowned antics? I have not juggled flaming brands for you for some time — not since the unfortunate accident with the Syannese tapestry. I have reduced the number of torches, so the trick is much safer now . . ."

"No need," Kendrick says gently. "No need. You have entertained us long enough — now the business of the court waits."

Puzzle nods his head sadly, then bows and backs away from the throne toward the rear of the room, putting one long leg behind the other as though he is doing something he has had to practice even more carefully than the dove trick. Barrick cannot help noticing how much the man looks like a grasshopper in motley. The assembled courtiers laugh and whisper behind their hands.

We're all fools here, Barrick thinks. His dark mood, alleviated a little by watching Puzzle's fumbling, comes sweeping back. Most of us are just better at it than he is. Even at the best of times he finds it hard to sit on the hard chairs. Despite the open windows high above, the throne room air is thick with the smell of incense and dust and other people — too many other people. He turns to watch his brother, conferring with the castellan Nynor, making a joke that sets Summerfield and the other nobles laughing and makes old Nynor blush and stammer. Look at Kendrick, pretending like he's Father. But even Father was pretending — he hated all this. In fact, King Olin had never liked either Gailon of Summerfield or his pious, well-fed father, the old duke.

Maybe Father wanted to be taken prisoner, just to get away from it all . . .

The bizarre thought does not have time to form properly, because Briony elbows him in the ribs.

"Stop it!" he snarls, and leans to the other side of his chair. She is always trying to make him smile, to force him to enjoy himself. Why can't anyone else see the trouble they are in — not just the family, but all of Southmarch? Is he the only one who understands how bad things are?

"Kendrick wants us," she says.

Barrick allows himself to be pulled toward his elder brother's chair — not the true throne, which has been covered with velvet cloth and not used since Olin left, but the second-best chair which previously stood at the head of the great dining table. They gently elbow their way past a few courtiers anxious to snatch this moment with the prince regent. Barrick's arm is throbbing. He wishes he was out on the hillside again, riding by himself, far from these people. He hates them all, loathes everyone in the castle . . . except, he must admit even to himself, his sister and brother . . . and perhaps Chaven . . .

"Lord Nynor tells me that the envoy from Hierosol will not be with us until almost the noon hour," Kendrick announces as they approach.

"He said he was unwell after his voyage." The castellan looks worried, as always; the tip of his beard has been chewed short — a truly disgusting habit, in Barrick's opinion. "But one of the servants told me that he saw this envoy talking to Shaso earlier this morning. Arguing, if the lazy fellow is to be trusted, which he is not, necessarily."

"That sounds ominous, Highness," suggests the Duke of Summerfield.

Kendrick sighs. "They are both, from appearance, anyway, from the same southern lands," he says patiently. "Shaso sees few of his own kind here in the cold north. They might have much to talk about."

"And argue about, Highness?" Summerfield asks.

"The man is a servant of our father's captor," Kendrick points out. "That's reason enough for Shaso to argue with the man, is it not?" He turns to the twins. "I know how little you both care for standing around, so you may go and I'll send for you when this fellow from Hierosol finally graces us with his attendance." He speaks lightly, but Barrick can see that he is not very happy with the envoy's tardiness. Kendrick is beginning to develop a monarchical impatience.

"Ah, Highness, I almost forgot." Nynor snaps his fingers and one of his servants scuttles forward with a leather bag. "He gave me the letters he bears from your father and the so-called Lord Protector."

"Father's letter?" Briony is excited. "Read it to us!"

Kendrick has already broken the seal, the Eddon wolf in deep red wax, and is squinting at the words. He shakes his head. "Later, Briony."

"But Kendrick . . . !" There is real anguish in her voice.

"Enough." Her older brother looks distracted, but his voice says there will be no arguing. Barrick can feel the strain in Briony's abrupt silence.

"What's all that rumpus?" asks Summerfield a moment later, looking around. Something is happening at the other end of the throne room, a stir among the courtiers.

"Look," Briony whispers to her twin. "It's Anissa's maid."

It is indeed, and Barrick's sister is not the only one whispering. Now that the twins' stepmother is close to giving birth, she seldom comes out of her suite of rooms in the Tower of Spring. Selia, her maid, has become Queen Anissa's eyes around the great castle. As eyes go, even Barrick has to admit they are a most impressive pair.

"See her flounce." Briony does not hide her disgust. "She walks like she's got a rash on her backside and she wants to scratch it on something."

"Please, Briony," says the prince regent, but although the duke of Summerfield looks dismayed by her rude remark, Kendrick is mostly amused. Still, he has been distracted from the letter and is watching the maid's approach as carefully as anyone else.

Selia is young but well-rounded. She wears her black hair piled high in the manner of the women of Devonis, the land of her and her mistress' birth, but although she keeps her long-lashed eyes downcast, there is little of the shy peasant girl about her. Barrick watches her walk with a kind of painful greed, but the maid, when she looks up, seems to see only Barrick's older brother.

Of course, Barrick thinks. Just like all the rest of them . . .

"If it please you, Highness," she says, making a courtesy before the prince regent. She has been only a season in the Marches, and still speaks with a thick Devonisian accent. "My mistress, your stepmother, sends her fond regarding and asks leave for consult the royal physician."

"Is she unwell again?" Kendrick truly is a kind man. Although none of them much like their father's second wife, even Barrick believes his brother's concern is genuine.

"Some discomforting, Highness, yes."

"Of course, we will have the physician attend our stepmother at once. Will you carry the message to him yourself?"

Selia colors prettily. "I do not know this place so well yet."

Briony makes a noise of irritation, but Barrick speaks up. "I'll take her, Kendrick."

"Oh, that's too much trouble for the poor girl," Briony says loudly, "going all the way across to Chaven's rooms. Let her go back to assist our suffering stepmother. Barrick and I will go."

Barrick looks at his twin in fury, and for a moment regrets putting her on the list of people he does not despise. "I can do it myself."

"Go, the both of you, and argue somewhere else." Kendrick waves his hand. "Let me read these letters. Tell Chaven to go at once. You are both excused attendance until the noon hour."

Listen to him — he really does think he's king. Even accompanying the lovely Selia cannot redeem Barrick's mood, but he still takes care to make sure that his bad arm, wrapped in the folds of his cloak, is on her opposite side as they go out of the throne room into the light of a gray autumn morning, down the steps into Temple Square. Four palace guards who had been finishing a morning meal hurry to fall into step behind them, still chewing.

Barrick catches the girl's eye for a moment and she smiles shyly at him. He almost turns to make sure she is not looking over his shoulder at someone else.

"Thank you for this so very kindness. You are Prince Barrick, yes?"

"Yes," answers his twin. "He is."

"And Princess Briony, you." The girl smiles a little more carefully, but if she is startled by the growl in Briony's voice she does not show it. "Both of you, so very kind. I go from here to the queen. You are certain I do not go with you?"

"Yes," says Barrick's sister. "We are certain."

The girl makes another courtesy and starts off across the square. Barrick watches her walk.

"Ow!" he says. "Don't push."

"Your eyes are going to fall out of your head." Briony hurries her stride and turns into the long street that winds along the wall of the inner keep. The people who see the twins move respectfully out of their way, but it is a crowded, busy street full of wagons and loud arguments, and many do not even notice them, or at least do not appear to do so. The guards exchange a look among themselves, then move a few paces closer to their charges. The twins, used to constant attention, ignore them.

"You're rude," Barrick tells his sister. "You act like a commoner."

"Speaking of common," Briony replies, "all you men are alike. Any girl who bats her eyes and swings her hips when she walks into the room turns you all into drooling apes."

"Some girls like to have men look at them." Barrick's anger has congealed into a cold unhappiness. What does it matter? What woman will fall in love with him, anyway? He will find a wife, of course, even one who will pretend to revere him — he is a prince, after all — but it will be a polite lie.

I will never know, he thinks. Not as long as I am of this family. I will never know what anyone truly thinks of me, what they think of the crippled prince. Because who would ever dare to mock the king's son to his face?

"Some girls like to have men look at them? How would you know?" Briony has turned her face from him now, which means she is truly angry. "Some men are just horrid, the way they stare."

"You think that about all of them." Barrick knows he should stop, but he feels distant and miserable. "You hate all men — Father said he couldn't imagine finding someone you would agree to marry who would also agree to put up with your hard-headedness and your mannish tricks."

There is a sharp intake of breath, then a deathly silence. Now she is not speaking to him, either. Barrick feels a pang, but tells himself it was Briony who interfered first. Still, when she does not speak for half a hundred more steps, he begins to be worried. They are too close, the pair of them, and although both are fierce by nature, wounding the other is like wounding themselves. Their word-combats almost always move to swift bloodletting, then an embrace before the wounds have even stopped seeping.

"I'm sorry," he says, although it does not sound much like an apology. "Why should you care what Summerfield and Blueshore and those other fools think, anyway? They are useless, all of them, liars and bullies. I wish that war with the Autarch would come and they would all be burned away like a field of grass."

"That's a terrible thing to say!" Briony snaps, but there is color in her cheeks again instead of the dreadful, shocked paleness of a moment before. He wonders if some of her peevishness is disappointment over having to wait for their father's letter.

"So? I don't care about any of them," he says. "But I shouldn't have told you what Father said. He meant it as a joke."

"It is no joke to me." Briony is still angry, but he can tell that the worst of the fight is over. "Oh, Barrick," she says abruptly, "you will meet hordes of women who want to make eyes at you. You're a prince – even a bastard child from you would be a prize. You don't know how some girls are, how they think, what they'll do . . ."

Her twin is surprised by the frightened sincerity in her voice. So she is trying to protect him from voracious women. He is pained but almost amused. She doesn't seem to have noticed that the fairer sex are having no trouble resisting me so far . . .

They have reached the bottom of the small hill on which Chaven's observatory-tower is set, its base nestled into the wall of the inner keep, its top looming above everything else in the castle except the four cardinal towers and the master of all, Wolfstooth Spire. As they climb the steps that spiral up the hillside they put distance between themselves and the guards in their heavy armor.

"Hoy!" Barrick calls down to the laboring soldiers. "What if there were murderers waiting for us at the top of the hill?"

"Don't be cruel," says Briony, but she is stifling a giggle.

* * *

Chaven stands in a pool of light beneath the great observatory roof, which is open to the sky, although the clouds above are dark and a few solitary drops of rain spatter the stone floors. His assistant, a tall, sullen young man, stands waiting by a complicated apparatus of ropes and wooden cranks. The physician is kneeling over a large wooden case lined with velvet that appears to contain a row of serving-plates of different sizes. At the sound of their footsteps Chaven looks up.

He is small and round, with large, capable hands. The twins have often joked about the unpredictability of Fate, since tall, rawboned Puzzle, with his gloomy, absorbed manner, would have made a much better royal astrologer and physician, and the mercurial, dexterous Chaven seems perfectly formed to be a court jester.

But of course, Chaven is also very, very clever — when he can be bothered.

"Yes?" he says impatiently, glancing in their direction. "Do you seek someone?"

The twins have had this before. "It's us, Chaven," Briony tells him.

A smile lights his face. "Your highnesses! Apologies — I am much absorbed with something I have just received, tools that will help me examine a star or a mote of dust with equal facility . . ." He carefully lifts one of the plates, which proves to be made of solid glass, transparent as water. "Say what you wish about the unpleasantness of its governor, there are none in all the rest of Eion who can make a lens like the grinders of Hierosol." His mobile face darkens. "I am sorry — that was thoughtless, with the king a prisoner there."

Briony is kneeling beside the case. She reaches a tentative hand toward one of the circles of glass, which gleams in an angled beam of sunlight. "We have received something from this ship as well, a letter from our father, but Kendrick has not let us read it yet . . ."

"Please, my lady!" Chaven says quickly, loudly. "Do not touch them! Even the smallest flaw can spoil their utility . . ."

Briony snatches her hand back and catches it on the clasp of the wooden case. She grunts and lifts her finger. A drop of red grows on it, dribbles down toward her palm.

"Terrible! I am sorry. It is my fault for startling you." Chaven fusses in the pockets of his capacious robe, producing a handful of black cubes, a curved glass pipe, a fistful of feathers, and at last a kerchief that looks like it has been used to polish old brass.

Briony glances at it, thanks him as she takes it, then unobtrusively pockets the dirty kerchief and sucks the blood from her finger instead.

"So you have received no news yet?" the physician asks.

"The envoy is not to see Kendrick until noon." Barrick feels angry again, out of sorts. The sight of blood on his sister's hand troubles him. "Meanwhile, we are running an errand. Our stepmother wishes to see you, and Kendrick sent us deliver the message."

"Ah." Chaven looks around as though wondering where his kerchief has got to, then shuts the lenses back in their case. "Then I will go now. Will you come with me? I wish to hear about the wyvern hunt. Your brother has promised me the carcass for examination and dissection, but I have not received it yet. I hear he has already given the best parts of it away as trophies." He is already bustling toward the door as he calls back over his shoulder, "Shut the roof, Toby. I have changed my mind — I think it will be too cloudy tonight for observation, in any case."

With a look of pure, weary despair, the young man begins turning the huge crank. Slowly, inch by inch, with a noise like the death-groan of some mythological beast, the great ceiling begins to close.

Outside, the twins' four heavily-armored guards have reached the observatory door and have just stopped to catch their breath when the trio appears and hurries past them down the stairs, bound for the Tower of Spring.

* * *

A girl of no more than six years old opens the door to Anissa's chambers in the tower, makes a courtesy, then steps out of the way. The room is surprisingly bright. Dozens of candles burn in front of a shrine to Madi Surazem, goddess of childbirth, and in each corner of the room new sheaves of wheat stand in pots to encourage the blessing of fruitful Erilo. Several women sit or stand around the great bed like cockindrills in a one of the moats of Xis. An older woman, with the sourly practical appearance of a midwife or hedge-witch takes one look at Barrick and says, "He can't come in here. This is a place for women."

Before Barrick can do more than bristle, his stepmother pulls aside the bed's curtains and peers out. Her hair is down, and she wears a voluminous white nightdress. "Who is it? Is it the doctor? Of course he can come to me."

"But it is the young prince as well, my lady," the old woman says.

"Barrick?" She pronounces it bah-reek. "Why are you such a fool, woman? I am respectably dressed. I am not giving birth today." She lets out a sigh and collapses back out of sight.

By the time Chaven and the twins have crossed the open floor to the bed, the curtains are open again, tied up by the maid Selia, who gives Barrick a quick smile, then catches sight of Briony and changes it to a respectful nod for both of them. Anissa is propped upright on many pillows. Two tiny growling dogs tug at a piece of cloth between her slippered feet. She does not wear her usual pale face-paint, and so looks almost ruddy with health. Barrick, who unlike Briony has not even tried to like his stepmother, is certain they have been sent on a pointless errand whose real purpose is only to relieve Anissa's boredom.

"Children," she says to them, fanning herself. "It is kind of you to come. I am so ill, I see no one these days." Barrick can feel Briony's tiny flinch at being called a child by this woman. In fact, seeing her with her dark hair loose, and without her usual paint, he is surprised by how young their stepmother looks. She is only five or six years older than Kendrick, after all. She is pretty, too, in a fussy sort of way, although Barrick thinks her nose a little too long for true beauty.

She does not compare to her maid, he thinks, sneaking a glance, but Selia is looking solicitously at her mistress.

"You are feeling poorly, my queen?" asks Chaven.

"Pains in my stomach," Anissa says. "Oh, I cannot tell you." Although she is small-boned and still slender even this close to giving birth, she has a certain knack for dominating a room. Briony sometimes calls her the Loud Mouse.

"And have you been faithfully taking the elixir I have made up for you?"

She waves her hand. "That? It binds up my insides. Can I say this, or is it impolite? My bowels have not moved for days."

Barrick has had enough of the secrets of the sickbed for one day. He bows to his stepmother, then backs toward the door and waits there. Anissa holds Briony for a moment with impatient questions about the lack of news from the Hierosoline envoy, then his twin at last makes a courtesy and edges away to join him. Together they watch Chaven kindly and quickly examine the queen, asking questions in such a normal tone of voice that it almost escape's Barrick's notice that the little round doctor is folding back her eyelid or sniffing her breath while doing so. The other women in the room have gone back to their stitching and conversation, excepting the old midwife, who watches the physician's activities with a fiercely proprietorial jealousy, and the maid Selia, who holds Anissa's hand and listens as though everything her mistress says is pure wisdom.

"Your highnesses?" Despite the fact that he has one hand down the back of the queen's nightdress, Chaven has managed to take the small clock he wears on a chain out of the pocket of his robe. He holds it up for them to see. "Noon is fast approaching."

It is a long way back across the inner keep. Barrick and Briony make excuses, then hurry out of the Tower of Spring. Their guards, who have been gossiping with the queen's warders, wearily push themselves away from the tower wall and trot after them.

* * *

The crowd gathered in the huge Hall of the March Kings — only the Eddon family, perhaps because the castle is their home as well as their seat of power, call it "the throne room" — looks a much more serious group than the morning's disorganized rout. Briony again feels a clutch of worry. It looks like the castle is on war-footing: half a pentecount of guardsmen are arranged around the great room, not slouching and talking quietly among themselves like the twins' bodyguard, but rigidly erect and silent. Avin Brone of Landsend, the castle's lord constable, is one of the many nobles who have appeared for the audience, and even in the midst of conversation with the court ladies or gentlemen, his eye is always roving to his troop, looking for sagging shoulders, bent knees, or a mouth moving in whispered conversation with a comrade.

Gailon of Summerfield is there, as well as most of the rest of the King's Council — Nynor the castellan, the twins' cousin Rorick, Earl of Daler's Troth, Count Tyne, and a dozen others, all wearing their best clothes.

Briony feels a flame of indignation. This ambassador comes from the man who has kidnapped my father. What are we doing, dressing up for him as though he were some honored visitor? But when she whispers this thought to Barrick, he only shrugs.

"As you well know, it is for display. Here is our power, our nobility," he says sourly. "It is like letting the roosters strut before the cockfight."

She looks at her brother's all-black garb and bites back a remark. And they say we women are consumed with our appearances! It is hard to imagine a woman wearing the equivalent of the outrageous codpieces that Earl Rorick and some of the courtiers sport — massive protrusions spangled with gems and intricate stitching. Trying to imagine what the women's equivalent would be threatens to set her laughing out loud, but it is not a pleasant feeling. The fear that has been gnawing at her all morning makes her feel that such a laugh, once started, would not stop — that she might end having to be carried from the room, laughing and weeping together.

She looks around the massive hall, lit mostly by candles even at mid-day. The dark tapestries on every wall, figured with scenes of dead ancestors and dead times, make her feel close and hot, as though they were heavy blankets draped over her. Beyond the high windows she sees only the surrounding towers and an occasional, blessed chink of cool sky. Why, she thinks, in a castle surrounded by the water should there be nowhere in this great hall that a person can look out on the sea? Briony feels suddenly out of breath. Gods, why can't it all start?

As if the heavenly powers have taken pity on her, a murmur rises from the crowd near the doorway as a small company of unfamiliar knights take up stations on either side of the entrance.

When the figure comes through the door, she has a moment of bewilderment, wondering Why is everyone making such a fuss for Shaso? Then she remembers what Summerfield has said. As the envoy comes closer to the dais and Kendrick's makeshift throne, which he has set in front of his father's grander seat, she can see that this dark-skinned man is much younger than the master of arms. He is handsome, too, or Briony thinks he is, but she finds herself suddenly uncertain of how to judge one so different. His skin is darker than Shaso's, his long, tightly-curled hair is tied behind his head, and he is tall and thin where the Master of Arms is stocky. He moves with a compact, self-assured grace, the cut of his black hose and slashed gray doublet as stylish as that of any Syannese court favorite. The knights of Hierosol who follow him along the open space where the courtiers have moved out of his path seem like clanking, pale-skinned puppets by comparison.

At the last moment, when it seems to the entire room as though the envoy means to do the unthinkable, to walk up onto the very dais where the prince-regent sits, the slender man stops. One of the foreign knights steps forward, clears his throat.

"May it please your highness, I present Lord Dawet dan-Faar, envoy of Ludis Drakava, Lord Protector of Hiersol and the Kracian Territories."

"Ludis may be Protector of Hierosol," Kendrick says slowly, "but he is also master of forced hospitality — of which my father is a recipient."

Dawet nods once, smiles. His voice is like a big cat rumbling when it has no need yet to roar. "Yes, the Lord Protector is a famous host. Very few of his guests leave Hierosol unchanged."

There is a stir in the crowd at this calculated threat, but also a sort of grudging admiration for the envoy, even surprise to find this dark-skinned southerner so clearly capable of holding his own. Briony finds her dread mingling with disgust at the courtiers. These people have lived with Shaso for years, and she is angry on the old man's behalf. The folk of Southmarch may not like their master of arms, but they know he is wise, and well-spoken when he takes the trouble. Do they still believe all the darker races are savages?

The envoy Dawet starts to say something else, then stops, his attention drawn to the great doors. As if Briony's thoughts had summoned him, Shaso stands there in his leather armor, his face set in an expressionless mask. "Ah," Dawet says, "I had hoped to see my old teacher again. Greetings, Mordiya Shaso."

The crowd whispers again. Briony looks at Barrick, but he is just as confused as she is. What can the dark man's words mean?

"You have business," Kendrick says impatiently. "When you are finished, we will all have time to talk, even to remake old friendships, if friendships they are. Since I have not said so yet, let it be known to all that Lord Dawet is under the protection of the March King's Seal, and while he is engaged on his peaceful mission here, none may harm or threaten him." His face is grim. He has done only what civility requires. "Now, sir, speak."

Kendrick did not smile, but Dawet does, examining the glowering faces around him with a look of quiet contentment, as though everything he could wish is assembled in this one chamber. His eyes pass across Briony then stop and return to her. She shivers. His smile widens. Did she not know him, she might find it intriguing, even pleasing, but now it is like the touch of the dark wing she had imagined the day before, the shadow hovering over them all.

The envoy's long silence, his unashamed assessment, makes her feel like she is naked in the center of the room. "What of our father?" she says out loud, her voice rough when she wishes it could be calm and assured. "Is he well? I hope for your master's sake he is in good health."

"Briony!" Barrick is embarrassed — ashamed, perhaps, that she should speak out this way. But she is not one to be gawked at like a horse for sale. She is a king's daughter.

Dawet gives a little bow. "My lady. Yes, your father is well, and in fact I have brought a letter from him to his family. Perhaps the prince regent has not shown it to you yet . . . ?"

"Get on with it." Kendrick sounds oddly defensive. Something is going on, Briony knows, but she cannot make out what it is.

"If he has read it, Prince Kendrick will perhaps have some inkling of what brings me here. There is, of course, the matter of the ransom."

"We were given a year," protests Gailon of Summerfield angrily. Kendrick does not look at him, although the duke too has spoken out of turn.

"Yes, but my master, Ludis, has decided to offer you another proposition, one to your advantage. The Lord Protector of Hierosol is a good man, whatever you may think of him, a wise man. He understands that we all have a common enemy, and thus should be seeking ways to draw our two countries together as twin bulwarks against the threat of the greedy lord of Xis, rather than squabbling over reparations."

"Reparations?" Kendrick says, struggling to keep his voice level. "Call it what it is, sir. Ransom. Ransom for an innocent man — a king! — kidnapped while he was trying to do just what you claim to want, organize a league against the Autarch."

Dawet gives a sinuous shrug. "Words can separate us or bring us together, so I will not quibble with you. There are more important issues, and I am here to present you with the Lord Protector's new and generous offer."

Kendrick nods. "Continue." The prince-regent's face is as empty as Shaso's, who is still watching from the far end of the throne room.

"The Lord Protector will reduce the ransom to twenty thousand gold dolphins — a fifth of what was asked and what you agreed to. In return he asks only something that will cost you little, and will be of benefit to you as well as to us."

The courtiers are murmuring now, trying to make sense of what is going on. Some of them, especially those whose peasantry has grown restive under the taxes for the king's ransom, even have hope in their faces. By contrast, Kendrick looks ashy.

"Damn you, speak your piece," he says at last — a croak.

Lord Dawet displays an expression of carefully constructed surprise. He looks like a warrior, Briony thinks, but he plays the scene like a mummer. He is enjoying this. But her older brother is not, and seeing him so pale and unhappy sets her heart beating swiftly. Kendrick looks like a man trapped in an evil dream. "Very well," Dawet says. "In return for reducing the ransom for King Olin's return, Ludis Drakava, Lord Protector of Hierosol, will accept Princess Briony of Southmarch in marriage."

Suddenly, she is the one who is tumbling into nightmare. Faces turn toward her like a field of meadowsweet following the sun, pale faces, startled faces, calculating faces. She hears Barrick gasp beside her, feels his good hand clutch at her arm, but she is already pulling away. Her ears are roaring, the whispers of the assembled court suddenly as loud as thunder.

"No!" she cries out, taking a step toward the envoy. "Never!" She turns to Kendrick, suddenly understanding his chilled, miserable mask. "I will never do it!"

"It is not your turn to speak, Briony," he rasps. There is something moving behind his eyes — despair? Anger? Surrender? "And this is not the place to discuss this matter."

"She can't!" Barrick shouts. The courtiers are talking loudly now, surprised and titillated. Some echo Briony's own refusal, but not many. "I won't let you!"

"You are not the prince regent," Kendrick declares. "Father is gone. Until he comes back, I am your father. Both of you."

He means to do it. Briony is certain. He is going to sell her to the bandit prince, the cruel mercenary Ludis, to reduce the ransom and keep the nobles happy. The ceiling of the great throne room and its tiled pictures of the gods seems to swirl and drop down upon her in a cloud of whirling colors. Feeling that she is about to faint, she turns and staggers through the murmuring, leering crowd, ignoring Barrick's worried cries and Kendrick's shouts. She slaps away Shaso's restraining hand and shoves her way through the great doors, already weeping so hard that the sky and the castle stones run together and blur.

damn is good!

keep it up !

Songs of the Moon and Stars

Young Flint doesn't seem very taken with the turnip porridge, even though it is sweetened with honey. Well, Chert thinks, perhaps it's a mistake to expect one of the big folk to be feel the same way about root vegetables as we do. Since Opal has gone off to the vent of warm subterranean air behind Old Quarry Square to air the clothes she has washed, he takes pity on the lad and removes the bowl.

"You don't need to finish," he says. "We're going out, you and I."

The boy looks at him, neither interested nor disinterested. "Where?"

"The castle — the inner keep."

Something moves across the child's face but he only rises easily from the low stool and trots out the door before Chert has gathered up his own things. Although he has only come down Wedge Road for the first time the night before, the boy turns unhesitatingly to the left. Chert is impressed with his memory. "You'd be right if we were going up, lad, but we're not. We're taking Funderling roads." The boy looks at him questioningly. "Going through the tunnels. It's faster for the way we're going. Besides, last night I wanted to show you a bit of what was aboveground — now you get to see a bit more of what's down here."

They stroll down to the bottom of Wedge Road then along Beetle Way to Ore Street, which is wide and busy, full of carts and teams of diggers and cutters on their way to various tasks, peddlers bringing produce down from the markets in the castle above, honers and polishers crying their trades, and tribes of children on their way to guild schools. The day-lanterns are lit everywhere, and in a few places raw autumn sunlight streams down through holes in the great roof, turning the streets golden.

Chert sees many folk he knows, and most call out greetings. A few salute young Flint as well, even by name, although others look at the boy with suspicion or barely-masked dislike. At first Chert is astonished that anyone knows the boy's new name, but then realizes Opal has been talking with the other women. News travels fast in the close confines of Funderling Town.

"Most times we'd turn here," he says, gesturing at the place near the Gravelers Meeting Hall where Ore Street forks into two thoroughfares, one level, one slanting downward, "but the way we're going all the tunnels aren't finished yet, so we're making a stop at the Salt Pool first."

The boy is busy looking at the chiseled facades of the houses, each one portraying a complicated web of family history (not all of the histories strictly true) and does not ask what the Salt Pool might be. They walk for a quarter of an hour down Lower Ore Street until they reach the rough, largely undecorated rock at the edge of town. Chert leads the boy past men and a few women idling by the roadside — most waiting by the entrances to the Pool in hopes of catching on for a day's work somewhere – and through a surprisingly modest door set in a wall of raw stone, into the glowing cavern.

The pool itself is a sort of lake beneath the ground; it fills the greater part of the immense natural cave. It is saltwater, an arm of the ocean that reaches all the way into the stone on which the castle stands, and is the reason that even in the dimmest recesses of their hidden town the Funderlings always know when the tides are high or low. The rim of the lake is rough, the stones sharp and spiky, and the dozens of other Funderlings who are already there move carefully. It would be the work of a few weeks at the most to make the cavern and its rocky shore as orderly as a garden, but even the most improvement-mad of Chert's people have never seriously considered it. The Salt Pool is one of the places of earliest Funderling legend — one of their oldest stories tells how the god Kernios, who the Funderlings in their own secret language call "Lord of the Hot Wet Stone", created their race right here on the Salt Pool's shores in the Days of Cooling.

Chert does not try to describe any of this to the boy. He is not certain how long the child will stay with them; it is far too early to begin teaching him any of the Mysteries.

The boy scrambles across the uneven, rocky floor like a spider; he is already waiting, watchful features turned yellow-green by the light from the pool, when Chert reaches the shore. Chert has only just taken off his pack when a tiny, crooked-legged figure appears from a jumble of large stones, wiping its beard as it swallows the last bite of something.

"Is that you, Chert? My eyes are tired today." The little man who stands before them only reaches Chert's waist. The boy stares down at this newcomer with unhidden surprise.

"It is me, indeed, Boulder." Now the boy looks at Chert, as surprised by the name as by the stranger's size. "And this is Flint. He's staying with us." He shrugs. "That was Opal's idea."

The little figure peers up at the boy and laughs. "I suppose there's a tale there. Are you in too much of a hurry to tell it to me today?"

"Afraid so, but I'll owe it to you."

"Two, then?"

"Yes, thank you." He takes a copper chip out of his pocket and gives it to the tiny man, who puts it in the pouch of his wet breeches.

"Back in three drips," says Boulder, then scampers back down the rocky beach toward the water, almost as nimble as the boy despite his bent legs and his many years.

Chert sees Flint staring after him. "That's the first thing you have to learn about our folk, boy. We're not dwarfs. We are meant to be this size. There are big folk who are small — not children like you, but just small — and those are dwarfs. And there are Funderlings who are small compared to their fellows, too, and Boulder is one of those."

"Boulder . . .?"

"His parents named him that, hoping it would make him grow. Some tweak him about it, but seldom more than once. He is a good man, but he has a sharp tongue."

"Where did he go?"

"He is diving. There's a kind of stone that grows in the salt pool, a stone that is made by a little animal, like a snail makes a shell for itself, called coral. The coral that grows in the Salt Pool makes its own light . . ."

Before he has finished explaining, Boulder is standing before them, holding a chunk of the glowing stuff in each hand, the light so bright that Chert can see the veins in the little man's fingers. "These have just kindled," he says with satisfaction. "They should last you all day, maybe even longer."

"We won't need them such a time, but my thanks." Chert takes out two pieces of hollow horn from his pack, both polished to glassy thinness, and drops a piece of coral into each, then fills them with a bit of salt water from Boulder's bucket to keep the little animals inside the stony stuff alive.

"Don't you want reflecting-bowls?" asks Boulder.

Chert shakes his head. "We won't be working, only traveling. I just want us to be able to see each other." He caps both hollow horns with bone plugs, then takes a fitted leather hood out of his bag, ties it onto Flint's head, and puts one of the glowing cups of seawater and coral into the little harness on the front of the hood above the boy's eyes. He does the same for himself, then they bid Boulder farewell and make their way back across the cavern of the Salt Pool. The boy moves in erratic circles, watching the light from his brow cast odd shadows as he goes scrambling from stone to stone.

* * *

Although the road is braced and paved, it is so far out along the network of tunnels that it has no name yet. The boy, only named himself the night before, does not seem to mind.

"Where are we?"

"Now? Under the Raven's Gate, more or less — that's the entrance into the inner keep — but passing away from it and along the line of the inner keep wall. I think the last new road we crossed, Greenstone or whatever they're calling it now, climbs up and lets out quite close to the gate."

"Then we're going past . . . past . . ." The boy thinks for a moment. "Past the bottom of the tower with the leaf on top of it."

Chert stops, surprised. The boy has not only remembered a small detail from the previous afternoon's walk, but has calculated the distances and directions, too. "How can you know that?"

Little Flint shrugs, the keen intelligence suddenly hidden behind the gray eyes again like a deer moving from a patch of sunlight into shadow.

Chert shakes his head. "You're right, though, we're passing underneath the Tower of Autumn — although not right under it. We don't go directly under the inner keep. None of the Funderling roads do. It's . . . forbidden."

The boy sucks on his lip, thinking again. "By the king?"

Chert is certainly not going to delve straight into the deep end of the Mysteries, but something in him does not want to lie to the child. "Yes, certainly, the king is part of it. They do not want us to tunnel under the heart of the castle in case the outer keep, and Funderling Town, shoud be overrun in a siege."

"But there's another reason." It is not a question, but a disconcertingly calm assertion.

Chert can only shrug. "There is seldom only one reason for anything in this world."

He leads the boy upward through a series of increasingly haphazard diggings. Their ultimate destination is inside the inner keep, and the fact that they can actually reach it from the tunnels of Funderling Town is a secret that only Chert of all his people knows — or at least he believes that is the case. His own knowledge is the result of a favor done long ago, and although it is conceivable someone might use this route as a way of going under the wall of the inner keep and attacking the castle itself, he can't imagine anyone not of Funderling blood and upbringing finding their way through the maze of half-finished tunnels and raw scrapes.

But what about the boy? he thinks suddenly. He's already shown he has a fine memory. But surely even those clever, hooded eyes could not remember every twist and turn, the dozens of switchbacks, the crossings honeycombed with dozens of false trails that would lead anyone but Chert down endless empty passages and, if they were lucky enough not to be lost in the maze forever, eventually funnel them back into the main roads of Funderling Town.

Still, can he really risk the secret route with this child, of whom he knows so little? He stares at the boy laboring along beside him in the sickly coral-light, putting one foot in front of the other without a word of complaint. Despite the child's weird origins, he can sense nothing bad in him. Besides, if he changes his mind now, he will not only have wasted much of the day, he will have to present himself at the Raven's Gate and try to talk his way past the guards and into the inner keep that way. He does not think they are likely to let him in, even if he tells them who he is going to see. And if he tells them the substance of his errand, it will be all over the castle by nightfall, causing fear and wild stories.

It is too much to consider, too complicated, and the need to make known what he has seen at the Shadowline is too great. He will have to trust his own good sense, his luck.

It is only as they turn down the last passage and into the final tunnel that he remembers that "Chert's luck" — at least within his own Blue Quartz family — is another way of saying "no luck at all."

* * *

The boy stares at the door. It is a rather surprising thing to find at the end of half a league of tunnels that are little more than hasty burrows, the kind of crude excavation that Funderling children get up to before they are old enough to be apprenticed to one of the guilds. But this door is a beautiful thing, if such can be said of a mere door, hewn of dark hardwoods that gleam in the light of the coral-stones, its hinges of heavy iron overlaid with filigree patterns in bronze. For who? Chert knows of no one else beside himself that ever uses this door, and this is only his third time in ten years.

The door has no latch and no handle, at least on this side.

Chert reaches up and pulls at a braided cord that hangs through a hole in the door. Whatever bell it rings is much too far away to hear, so Chert pulls it again just to make certain. They wait for what seems a long time — Chert is just about to tug the cord a third time — before the door swings inward.

"Ah, is it Master Blue Quartz?" The round man's eyebrows rise. "And a friend, I see."

"Sorry to trouble you, sir." Chert is suddenly uncomfortable — why did he think it would be a good idea to bring the boy with him? Surely he could simply have described him. "This boy is . . . well, he's staying with us. And he's . . . he's part of what I wanted to talk to you about. Something important." He is uncomfortable now, not because Chaven's expression is unkind, but because he had forgotten how sharp the physician's eyes are — like the boy's but with nothing hidden, a fierce, fierce cleverness that is always watching.

"Well, then we must step inside where we can talk comfortably. I am sorry to have kept you waiting, but I had to send away the lad who works for me before I came. I do not share the secret of these tunnels lightly." Chaven smiles, but Chert wonders if what the physician is politely not saying is, Even if some others do.

He leads them down a series of empty corridors, damp and windowless because they are below the ground floor chambers, set directly into the foundations of the observatory.

"I told you the truth," Chert whispers to the boy. "About not digging under the inner keep, that is. You see, we've just crossed under its walls, but not until we were inside this man's house, as it were. Our end of the tunnel stops outside the inner keep."

The boy looks at him as though the Funderling has claimed he can juggle fish while whistling, and even Chert is not sure why he felt compelled to point out this distinction. What loyalty can the boy have to the royal family? Or to Chert himself, for that matter?

Chaven leads them up several flights of stairs until they reach a small, carpeted room. Jars and wooden chests are stacked along the walls and on shelves, as though the room is as much a pantry as a retiring room. The windows are covered with tapestries whose night-sky colors are livened by winking gems in the shapes of constellations.

The physician is more fit than he appears: of the three of them, Chert alone is winded by the climb. "Can I offer you something to eat or drink?" Chaven asks. "It might take me a moment to fetch. I've sent Toby off on an errand and I'd just as soon not tell any of the servants there's a guest here who didn't come in through any of the doors — at least any of the doors they know about. . ."

Chert waves away the offer. "I would love to drink with you in a civilized way, sir, but I think I had better get right to the seam, as it were. Is the boy all right, looking around?"

Flint is moving slowly around the room, observing but not handling the various articles standing against the wall, mostly lidded vessels of glass and polished brass.

"I think so," Chaven says, "but perhaps I should withold my judgement until you tell me what exactly brings you here — and him with you."

Chert describes what he saw the day before in the hills north of the castle. The physician listens, asking few questions, and when the little man has finished he does not speak for a long time. Flint has finished examining the room and now sits on the floor, looking up at the tapestries and their twining patterns of stars.

"I am not surprised," Chaven says at last. "I had . . . heard things. Seen things. But it is still fearful news."

"What does it mean?"

The physician shakes his head. "I can't say. But the Shadowline has not moved in centuries, and now it is moving again. I have to think that it will keep moving unless something stops it, and what would that be?" He rises, rubbing his hands together.

"Keep moving . . .?"

"Until it has swept across Southmarch — perhaps all of Eion. Until the land is plunged back into shadow and Old Night." The physician frowns at his hands, then turns back to Flint. His voice is matter-of-fact, but his eyes belie it. "I suppose I had better have a look at the boy."

* * *

Moina and Rose and her other ladies, despite all their kind words and questions, cannot stop Briony's weeping. She is angry with herself, but it is as though she has fallen down a deep hole: she is beyond the reach of any of them.

Barrick pounds at the chamber door, demanding that she speak to him. He sounds angry and frightened, but although it feels as if she is casting off a part of her own body, she lets Rose send him away. He is a man — what does he know of how she feels? No one will sell him to the highest bidder like a market-pig.

Eighty thousand dolphins discounted for my sake, she thinks bitterly. A great deal of gold — most of a king's ransom, in fact. I should be proud to command such a high price. She throws a pillow against the wall and knocks over an oil lamp. The ladies squeal as they rush to stamp out the flames, but Briony does not care if the entire castle burns to the ground.

"What goes on here?" Treacherous Rose has opened the door, but it is not Barrick who has come in, only Briony's great-aunt, the dowager duchess Merolanna, sniffing. Her eyes widen as she sees Moina smothering the last of the flames and she turns on Briony. "What are you doing, child, trying to kill us all?"

Briony wants to say yes, she is, but another fit of weeping overcomes her. As the other ladies try to fan the smoke out the open door, Merolanna comes to the bed and carefully sits her substantial but carefully groomed self down on it, puts her arms around the princess.

"I have heard," she says, patting Briony's back. "Do not be so afraid — your brother may refuse. And even if he doesn't, it isn't the worst thing in the world. When I first came here to wed your father's uncle, years and years and years ago, I was as frightened as you are."

"Ludis is a m-monster!" Briony struggles to stop sobbing. "A murderer! The bandit who kidnapped our father! I would rather marry . . . marry anyone — even old Puzzle — before allowing someone like that . . ." It is no use. She is weeping again.

"Now, child," Merolanna says, but clearly can think of nothing else to say.

* * *

Merolanna has gone, and Briony's ladies-in-waiting keep their distance, as though their mistress has some illness which may spread — and indeed she does, Briony thinks, because unhappiness is ambitious.

A messenger is at the door, the third in an hour. She has returned no message to her older brother, and could think of nothing sufficiently cutting to send back to Gailon, Duke of Summerfield.

"It's from Sister Utta, my lady," Moina says. "She sends to ask why you have not come to her today, and if you are well."

"She must be the only one in the castle who doesn't know," says Rose, almost laughing that anyone can be so remote from the day's events. A look at Briony's tearstained face and she quickly sobers. "We'll tell her you can't come . . ."

Briony sits up. She has forgotten her tutor entirely, but suddenly wants nothing more than to see the Vuttish woman's calm face, hear her measured voice. "I will go to her."

"But, Princess . . ."

"I will go!" As she struggles into a wrap, the ladies-in-waiting hurry to pull on their own shoes and cloaks. "I am going by myself," Briony tells them sourly. "I have guards. Don't you think that's enough to keep me from running away?"

Rose and Moina stare at her in hurt surprise, but Briony is already striding out the door.

* * *

Utta is one of the Sisters of Zoria, priestesses of the goddess of learning. Zoria once was the most powerful of goddesses, mistress of a thousand temples and an equal of even her divine father Perin, but now her followers have been reduced to advising the Trigon on petty domestic policy and teaching highborn girl-children how to read, write, and — although it is not deemed strictly necessary in most noble families — to think.

Utta herself is almost as old as Merolanna, but where Briony's great-aunt is a royal barge, elaborately painted and decorated, the Vuttish woman is spare as a fast sailing-ship, tall and thin, with gray hair cropped almost to her scalp. She is sewing when Briony arrives, and her pale blue eyes open wide when the girl immediately bursts into tears, but although her questions are sympathetic and she listens carefully to the answers, the priestess of Zoria is not the type to put her arms around even her most important pupil.

When Briony has finished the story, Utta nods her head slowly. "As you say, our lot is hard. In this life we women are handed from one man to another, and can only hope that the one we come to at last is a kind steward of our liberties."

"But no man owns you." Briony has recovered herself a little. There is something about Utta, the unassuming strength of an old tree on a windy mountainside, that always calms her. "You do what you want, without a husband or a master."

Sister Utta smiles sadly. "I do not think you would wish to give up all I have given up to become so, Princess. And how can you say I have no master? Should your father — or now your brother — decide to send me away or even kill me, I would be trudging down Market Road within an hour, or hanging from one of the mileposts."

"It's not fair! And I won't do it."

Utta nods again, as if she is truly considering what Briony says. "When it comes to it, no woman can be turned against her own soul unless she wills it. But perhaps it is too early for you to be worrying. You do not know yet what your brother will say."

"Oh, I do," says Briony bitterly. "The council — in fact, almost all the nobles — have been complaining for months about the price of Father's ransom, and they have also been telling Kendrick that I should be married off to some rich southern princeling to help pay for it. Then when he resists them, they whisper behind their hands that he is not old enough yet to rule the March Kingdoms. Here is a chance for him to stop their moaning in an instant. I'd do it, if I were him."

"But you are not Kendrick, and you have not yet heard his decision." Now she does an unusual thing, leans out and for a moment takes Briony's hand. "However, I will not say your worries are baseless. What I hear of Ludis Drakava is not encouraging."

"I won't do it! I won't. It is all so unfair — the clothes they want me to wear, the things they want me to say and do . . . and now this! I hate being a woman. It's a curse." Briony looks up suddenly. "I could become a priestess, like you! If I became a Sister of Zoria, my virginity would be sacred, wouldn't it?"

"And permanent." Utta's smile is sad. "I am not certain you could join the sisterhood against your brother's wishes, anyway. But is it not too early to be thinking of such things?"

Briony has a sudden recollection of the envoy Dawet dan-Faar, of eyes proud and leopard-fierce. He does not seem the type to stand around for weeks waiting for a defeated enemy to agree to the terms of surrender. "I don't think I have much time – until tomorrow, perhaps. Oh, Sister, what will I do?"

"Talk to your brother, the prince regent. Tell him how you feel — I believe he is a good man, like your father. If there seems no other way . . . well, perhaps there is advice I might give you then, even assistance." For a moment, Utta's long, strong face looks troubled. "But not yet." She sits up straight. "We have an hour left before the evening meal, Princess. Shall we spend it usefully? Learning may perhaps keep your mind off your sorrows, at least for a little while."

"I suppose." Briony has cried so much she feels limp, boneless. The room is quite dark, with only one candle lit. Most of the light in the spare apartment comes from the window: a bright oblong climbs steadily higher on the wall as the sun drops toward its evening harbor. For some reason, even in this deepest and most miserable of holes, she still feels as though the shadowy wings beat above her, that there is some threat as yet undiscovered.

"Teach me something," she says heavily. "What else do I have left?"

* * *

Finished examining the boy, Chaven reaches into his pockets and produces a disc of glass pent in a brass handle. Flint takes it from him and looks through it, first staring up at the flickering lamp, then moving it close to the wall so he can examine the grain of stone in the spaces between the tapestries.

Maybe he'll make a Funderling yet, thinks Chert.

The boy turns to him, smiling, one eye goggling hugely behind the glass. Chert laughs despite himself. At the moment, Flint seems to be no more than he appears, a child of six or seven summers.

Chaven thinks so, too. "I find nothing unusual about him," the physician says quietly as they watch the boy playing with the enlarging-glass. "No extra fingers, toes, or mysterious marks. His breath is sweet — for a child who seems to have eaten spiced turnips today, that is — and his eyes are clear. Everything about him seems ordinary. This all proves nothing, but unless some other mysterious trait shows itself, I must for the moment assume he is what your wife guessed him to be — some mortal child who wandered beyond the Shadowline and, instead of wandering back again as some do, met the riders you saw and was carried out instead." Chaven frowned. "You say he has little memory of who he is. Those who happen across often return with their wits clouded."

"It seems that way," Chert admits. He should be relieved, especially since the child will be sharing their house for at least the present, but he cannot rid himself of a nagging feeling that there is something more to be discovered. "But why, if the Shadowline is moving, would the . . . the Quiet People oh-so-kindly carry a mortal child across the line? It seems more likely they would slit his throat like a rabbit and leave him in the foggy forest somewhere."

Chaven shrugs. "I have no answer, my friend. Even when they were slaughtering mortals at Coldgray Moor, the Twilight People did things that no one could understand. In the last months of the war, one company of soldiers from Fael moving camp by midnight stumbled onto a fairy-feast, but instead of slaughtering them — they were far outnumbered — the Qar only fed them and led them into drunken revels. Some of the soldiers even claimed they mated with fairy-women that night."

"The . . . Qar?"

"Their old name." Chaven waves his hand. "I have spent much of my life studying them, and still know little more than when I began. They can be unexpectedly kind to mortals, even generous, but do not doubt that if the Shadowline sweeps across us, it will bring with it a dark, dark evil."

Chert shudders. "I have spent too much time on its borders to doubt that for a moment." He watches the boy for a moment. "Will you tell the prince regent and his family that the line has moved?"

"I expect I will have to. But first I must think on all this, so that I can go to them with some proposal. Otherwise, decisions will be made in fear and ignorance, and those seldom lead to happy result." Chaven rises from his stool and pats his bunched robe until it hangs straight again. "Now I must get back to my work, not least of which will be thinking about the news you've brought me."

As Chert leads Flint to the door, the boy turns back. "Where is the owl?" he asks Chaven.

The physician freezes for a moment, then smiles. "What do you mean, lad? There is no owl here, nor ever has been one, as far as I know."

"There was," Flint says stubbornly. "A white one."

Chaven shakes his head kindly as he holds the door, but Chert thinks he looks a little discomposed.

* * *

After checking to make sure none of his servants are in sight, the physician lets Chert and the boy out through the observatory-tower's front door. For reasons he does not quite know himself, Chert has decided to go back aboveground, out through the Raven's Gate. The guard will have changed at mid-day and there should be no reason for those on duty now to doubt that their predecessors questioned Chert closely before letting him and his young charge into the inner keep.

"What did you mean about the owl?" Chert asks as they make their way down the steps.

"What owl?"

"You asked that man where the owl was, the owl that had been in his room."

Flint shrugs. His legs are longer than Chert's, and he does not need to look down at the steps, so he is watching the afternoon sky. "I don't know." He frowns, staring at something above him. The morning's clouds have passed. Chert can see nothing but a sliver of moon white as a seashell, hanging in the blue sky. "He had stars on his walls."

Chert recalls the tapestries covered with jeweled constellations. "He did, yes."

"The Leaf, the Singers, the White Root — I know a song about them." He thinks, his frown deepening. "I can't remember it."

"The Leaf . . .?" Chert is puzzled. "The White Root? What are you talking about?"

"The stars — don't you know their names?" Flint has reached the cobblestones at the base of the steps and is walking faster, so that Chert, still letting himself carefully down the tall steps, can barely make out what he says. "There's the Honeycomb and the Waterfall . . . but I can't remember the rest." He stops and turns. His face beneath the shock of almost white hair is full of sad confusion, so that he looks like a little old man. "I can't remember."

Chert catches up to him, out of breath and troubled. "I've never heard those names before. The Honeycomb? Where did you learn that, boy?"

Flint is walking again. "I used to know a song about the stars. I know one about the moon, too." He hums, a snatch of melody that Chert can barely make out, but whose mournful sweetness makes the hairs lift on the back of his neck. "I can't remember the words," Flint says. "But they tell about how the moon came down to find the arrows he had shot at the stars . . ."

"But the moon's a woman — isn't that what all you big folk believe?" A moment of sour amusement at his own words — the boy is his own height, even a little shorter — does not puncture his confusion. "Mesiya, the moon-goddess?"

Flint laughs with a child's pure enjoyment at the foolishness of adults. "No, he's the sun's little brother. Everyone knows that."

He skips ahead, enjoying the excitement of a street full of people and interesting sights, so that Chert has to hurry to catch up with him again, certain that something has just happened — something important. But he cannot for the life of him imagine what it might be.

Blood Ties

She does not make her dwelling in Qul-na-Qar, although she has long claim to a place of honor there, by her blood and her deeds — and by deeds of blood as well. Instead she makes her home on a high ridgetop in the mountains called Reheq-s'lai, which means Wanderwind, or something close to it. Her house, although large enough to cover most of the ridge, is a dull thing from most angles, as is the lady herself. Only when the sunlight is in the right quarter and a watcher's face turned just so can crystal and skystone be seen gleaming among the dark wall-stones. The house cuts deep into the rock, with many rooms below the light of day and a profusion of tunnels extending beyond them like the roots of an old, old tree. The windows are always shuttered, or seem that way. Her servants are silent and she seldom has visitors.

Some of the younger Qar, who have heard of her madness for privacy but of course have never seen her, call her Lady Porcupine. Others who know her better cannot help shuddering at the accidental truth of the name — they have seen how in moments of fury a nimbus of prickly shadow flickers about her, a shroud of phantom thorns.

Her granted name is Yasammez, but few know it. Fewer still speak to her. Her true name is known to only one living.

The lady's high house is called Shehen, which means "Weeping." Because it is a s'a-Qar word, it means other things, too — it carries the intimation of an unexpected ending, and a suggestion of the scent of the plant that in the Sunlight Lands is called myrtle — but more than anything else, it means "Weeping".

* * *

She stands in her garden of low, dark plants and tall gray rocks whose twisted shapes are like terrified dreamers and looks out over her steep lands. The wind is fierce, as ever, wrapping her cloak tightly around her, blowing her hair loose from the bone pins that hold it, but it is not strong enough to disperse the mist lurking in the ravines which gouge the hillside below like claw-scratches. Still, it blows loudly enough that even if any of her pale servants were standing beside her, they would not be able to hear the very ancient song Lady Yasammez is humming, nor would they even believe their mistress might do such a thing.

A voice speaks in her ear and the old song abruptly stops. She does not turn because she knows the voice comes from no one in the stark garden or high house. Secretive, angry, and silent as she is, Yasammez knows this voice almost better than she knows her own the only voice that ever calls her by her true name.

It calls that name again now.

"I hear, o my heart," says Lady Porcupine, speaking without words.

"I must know."

"It has already begun," the mistress of the ridgetop house replies, but it stabs her to hear such disquiet in the thoughts of her beloved, her great ruler, the single star in her dark, cold sky. This is the time for wills to become stony. "All has been put into motion. As you wished. As you commanded."

"There is no turning back, then."

It almost seems a question, but Yasammez knows it cannot be. "No turning back," she agrees.

"So, then. In the full raveling of time we will see what new pages will be written in the Book."

"We shall." She yearns to say more, to ask why this sudden semblance of weakness in the one who is not just her ruler but her teacher as well, but the words do not come; she cannot form the question even in the silence of shared thought. Words have never been friends to Yasammez; in this, they are like almost everything else beneath the moon or sun.

"Farewell, then. We will speak again soon. You have my gratitude."

Then Lady Porcupine is alone again with the wind and her thoughts, her strange, bitter thoughts, in the garden of the house called Weeping.

* * *

The longer, heavier sword skims off Barrick's falchion and crashes down against the small buckler on his left arm. A lightning-bolt of pain leaps through his shoulder. He cries out, sags to one knee, and only just manages to throw his blade up in time to deflect the second blow. He climbs to his feet and stands, gasping for breath. The air is full of sawdust. He can barely hold even his own slender sword upright.

"Stop." He steps back, letting the falchion sag, but instead of lowering his own longer sword, Shaso suddenly lunges forward, the point of his blade jabbing down at Barrick's ankles. Caught by surprise, the prince hesitates for an instant before jumping to avoid the thrust. It is a mistake: as he lands awkwardly, the old man has already turned his sword around so he clutches the blade in his gauntlets. He thumps Barrick hard in the chest with the long sword's pommel, forcing out the rest of the boy's air. Gasping, the prince takes one step backward and collapses. For a moment black clouds close in. When he can see again, Shaso is standing over him.

"Curse you!" Barrick wheezes. He kicks out at the old man's leg, but Shaso steps neatly away. "I said stop!"

"Because your arm was tired? Is that what you will do in battle? Cry mercy because you fight only with one hand and it has wearied?" Shaso makes a noise of disgust and turns his back on him. It is all Barrick can do not to scramble to his feet at this display of contempt and skull the old Tuani with the padded falchion.

But it is not only his remaining shreds of civility and honor that stop him, or even his exhaustion. Even in his rage, Barrick doubts he would actually land the blow.

He gets up slowly instead and pulls off the buckler and gauntlets so he can rub his arm. Although his injury has curled his left hand into something like a bird's claw and his forearm is thin as a child's, after countless painful hours lifting the iron-headed weights called poises Barrick has strengthened the sinews of his upper arm and shoulder enough that he can use the buckler effectively. But — and he hates to admit it, and certainly would not do so aloud — Shaso is right: he is still not strong enough, not even in the good arm which must wield his only blade, since even a dagger is too much for his crippled fingers.

As he pulls on the deerskin glove he wears to hide his twisted hand, Barrick is still furious. "Does it make you feel strong," he shouts, "beating a man who can only fight one-armed?"

The armorers, who today have the comparatively quiet task of cutting new leather straps at the huge bench along the room's south wall, look up, but only for a moment — they are used to such things. Barrick has no doubt they all think him a spoiled child. He flushes, slams down his gauntlets.

Shaso, who is unstitching his padded practice-vest, flicks a glance over his shoulder. "I am not beating you, boy. I am teaching you."

They have been out of balance all day. Even as a way to spend the tedious, stretching hours until his brother convenes the council, this has been a mistake. Briony would have made it something civil, even enjoyable, but Briony is not here.

Barrick lowers himself to the ground and begins removing his leg-pads. He stares at Shaso's back, irritated by the old man's graceful, unhurried movements. Who is he, to be so calm when everything is falling apart? Barrick wants to sting the master of arms somehow.

"Why did he call you teacher?"

Shaso's fingers slow but he does not turn. "What?"

"You know. The envoy from Hierosol — that man Dawet. Why did he call you teacher? And he called you something else — 'Mor-ja". What does that mean?"

Shaso shrugs off the vest. His thin undershirt is soaked with sweat, so that every muscle on his broad, brown back is apparent. Barrick has seen this so many times. Even in his anger, he feels something like love for the old Tuani — a love for the known and familiar, however unsatisfying.

What if Briony really leaves? he thinks suddenly. What if Kendrick really sends her to Hierosol to marry Ludis? I will never see her again. His outrage that a bandit should demand his sister in marriage, and that his brother should even consider it, suddenly chills into a simpler and far more devastating thought — Southmarch castle empty of Briony.

"I have been asked to answer that for the council," Shaso says slowly. Overwhelmed by his bleak vision, Barrick is confused: he has momentarily forgotten his own question. "You will hear what I say there. I do not want to speak of it twice." He drops the vest to the floor and walks away from it. Barrick cannot help staring. Shaso is usually not only meticulous in the care of his weapons and equipment, but sharp-tongued to any who are not — Barrick most definitely included. The master of arms sets the long sword in the rack without oiling it or even taking off the padding, takes his shirt from a hook, and walks out of the armory without another word.

Barrick has long felt that of all the heedless folk in Southmarch, he is the only one who understands how truly bad things have become, who sees the deceptions and cruelties others miss or deliberately ignore, who senses the growing danger to his family and their kingdom. Now that proof is blossoming before him he wishes he could make it all go away — that he could turn and run headlong back into his own childhood.

* * *

After supper Chert's belly is full but his head is unsettled. Opal is fussing happily over Flint, measuring the boy with a knotted string while he squirms. She has used the few copper chips she had put aside for a new cooking-pot to buy some cloth, since she plans to make a new shirt for the child.

"Don't look at me that way," she says. "I wasn't the one who took him out and let him rip and dirty this one so badly."

Chert shakes his head. It is not paying for the boy's new shirt that concerns him.

The bell for the front door rings, a couple of short tugs on the cord. Opal hands the boy her measuring string and goes to answer it. Chert hears her say, "Oh, my — come in, please."

Her eyebrows are up when she returns trailed by Cinnabar, a handsome, big-boned Funderling, the leader of the important Quicksilver family.

Chert rises. "Magister, you do me an honor. Will you sit down?"

Cinnabar nods, grunts as he seats himself. Although he is younger than Chert by some dozen years, his muscled bulk is already turning to fat. His mind is still lean, though; Chert respects the man's wit.

"Can we offer you something, Magister?" Opal asks. "Beer? Some blueroot tea?" She is both excited and worried, trying to catch her husband's eye, but he will not be distracted.

"Tea will do me well, Mistress, thank you."

Flint has gone stock-still on the floor beside Opal's stool, watching the newcomer like a cat spying an unfamiliar dog. Chert knows he should wait until the tea is served, but his curiosity is strong. "Your family is well?"

Cinnabar snorts. "Greedy as blindshrews, but that's nothing new. It strikes me you've had an addition yourself."

"His name is Flint." Chert feels sure this is the point of the visit. "He's one of the big folk."

"Yes, I can see that. And of course I've heard much about him already — it's all over town."

"Is there a problem that he stays with us? He has no memory of his real name or parents."

Opal bustles into the room with a tray, the best teapot, and four cups. Her smile is a little too bright as she pours for the magister first. Chert can see that she is frightened.

Fissure and fracture, is she so attached to the boy already?

Cinnabar blows on the cup nestled in his big hands. "As long as he breaks none of the laws of Funderling Town, you could guest a badger for all it matters to me." He turns his keen eyes on Opal. "But people do talk, and they are slow to welcome change. Still, I suppose it is too late to reveal this secret more delicately."

"It is no secret!" says Opal, a little sharply.

"Obviously." Cinnabar sighs. "It is your affair. That's not why I'm here tonight."

Now Chert is puzzled. He watches Cinnabar snuffle at his tea. The man is not only head of his own family, but he is one of the most powerful men in the Guild of Stonecutters. Chert can only be patient.

"That is good, Mistress," Cinnabar says at last. "My own lady, she will re-use the roots over and over until it is like drinking rainwater." He looks from her expectant, worried face to Chert's and smiles. It cracks his broad, heavy-jawed face into little wrinkles, like a hammerblow on slate. "Ah, I am tormenting you, but do not mean to. There's nothing ill in this visit, that's a promise. I need your help, Chert."

"You do?"

"Aye. You know we're cutting in the bedrock of the inner keep? Tricky work. The king's family want to expand the vaults and stitch together various of their buildings with tunnels."

"I've heard, of course. That's old Hornblende in charge, isn't it? He's a good man."

"Was in charge. He's quit. Says it's because of his back, but I have my doubts, though he is of an age." Cinnabar nods slowly. "That's why I need your help, Chert."

He shakes his head, confused. "What ...?"

"I want you to chief the job. It's a careful matter, as you know — digging under the castle. I don't need to say more, do I? I hear the men are skittish, which may have something to do with Hornblende's wanting nothing more of it."

Chert is stunned. There are at least a dozen other Funderlings with the experience to take Hornblende's place, all more senior or more important than he is, including one of his own brothers. "Why me?"

"Because you have sense. Because I need someone I can trust as chief over this task. You've worked with the big folk before and made out well." He flicks a glance at Opal, who has finished her tea and is again measuring the child, although Chert knows she is listening to every word. "We can speak more of it later, if you tell me you will do it."

How can he say no? "Of course, Magister. It's an honor."

"Good. Very good." Cinnabar rises, not without a small noise of effort. "Here, give me your hand on it. Come to me tomorrow and I'll give you the plans and your list of men." He turns to Opal. "Thanking you for your hospitality, Mistress Opal."

Her smile is genuine now. "Our pleasure, Magister."

He does not leave, but takes a step forward and stands over Flint. "What do you say, boy?" he asks, mock-stern. "Do you like stone?"

The child regards him carefully. "Which kind?"

Cinnabar laughs. "Well questioned! Ah, Master Chert, perhaps he has the making of a Funderling at that, if he grows not too big for the tunnels." He is still chuckling as Chert lets him out.

"Such wonderful news!" says Opal when he returns. Her eyes are shining. "Your family will regret their snubs now."

"Perhaps." Chert is glad, of course, but he knows old Hornblende for a level-headed fellow. Is there a reason he has given up such a prestigious post? Could there be something of a poisoned offering about it? Chert is not used to kindnesses, although he knows no reason to mistrust Cinnabar, who has a reputation for fair-dealing.

"Little Flint has brought us good luck," Opal purrs. "He will have a shirt, and I will have that winter shawl, and you, my husband — you must have a new pair of boots. You cannot go walking through the big folk's castle in those miserable old things."

"Let's not spend silver we haven't seen yet," he says, but mildly. He may be a little uncertain about this surprising good fortune, but it is good to see Opal so happy.

"And you would have left the boy there," she says, almost giddy. "Left our luck sitting in the grass!"

"Luck is a strange thing," Chert reminds her, "and there is much digging before the entire vein is uncovered." He sits down to finish his tea.

* * *

Kendrick has convened the council in the castle's Chapel of Erivor, dedicated to the sea god who has always been the Eddon family's special protector. Though the room is small, generations of the prince regent's family have been named and married there. Echoes drift back from the high, tiled ceiling. Chairs have been brought and set in a circle beside the low stone altar.

"It is the only place in this castle we can close the door and find any privacy," Kendrick explains. "Anything important said in the throne room or the Oak Chamber will be spread across Southmarch before the speaker has finished."

Barrick moves uncomfortably in the hard, high-backed chair. He has been chewing willow bark since supper, but his crippled arm still aches miserably from Shaso's blows. He darts a sour look at the master of arms, but Shaso's face is a mask, his eyes fixed on the frescoes which, with so many lamps lit, gleam daytime-bright, as though the birth and triumph of Erivor is the most interesting thing he has ever seen. Barrick has not attended many of these councils: he and Briony have only been invited since their father's departure, and this is his first without her. He cannot shake off the feeling that a part of him is gone, as though he has woken up to find he has only one leg.

Kendrick is listening to Gailon of Summerfield, who sits on his left and talks quietly in his ear. Sisel, Hierarch of Southmarch, has been given the position of honor on the prince regent's other hand. The hierarch, a slender, active man of sixty or so, is the leading priest of the Marchlands, and although in some things he must act as the hand of the Trigonarch, he is also the first northerner to hold the position, so he is unusually loyal to the Eddons. The Trigon was unhappy that Barrick's father Olin chose to elevate one of the local priests over their own choice, but neither Syan nor the Trigon itself wield as much power in the north as they once did.

Ranged around the table are many of the other leading nobles of the realm, Blueshore's Tyne, Nynor the castellan, the constable Avin Brone, Barrick's dandified cousin Rorick, who is earl of Daler's Troth (strangely matched with those dour, plainspeaking folk, Barrick has always felt) and a half-dozen more. Shaso is at the table's far end, with a space between him and the nearest nobles on either side: Barrick thinks he looks a bit like a prisoner in the dock.

"Your argument should be made to all," Kendrick tells Gailon. The others, who have been talking quietly among themselves, turn their attention to the head of the table.

Gailon pauses. A bit of a flush creeps up his neck and onto his handsome face. Other than Barrick and the prince regent, he is the youngest man at the gathering. "I simply said that I think we would be making a mistake to so easily give the princess to Ludis Drakava. We all want nothing more than to have our King Olin back, but even if Ludis honors the bargain and delivers him without treachery, what then? Olin, may the gods long preserve him, will grow old one day and die. Much can happen before that day, and only the blind Fates know all, but one thing is certain — when our liege is gone, Ludis and his heirs will have a perpetual claim on the throne of the March Kings."

And his claim will be a better one than yours, Barrick thinks, which is your real objection. Still, he is heartened to discover he has an ally, even one he cares for as little as he does Gailon.

"Easy enough for you to say, Summerfield," growls the Earl of Blueshore, "with all your share of the ransom gathered already. What of the rest of us? We would be fools not to take up Ludis' bargain."

"Fools?" Barrick sits straight. "We are fools if we don't sell my sister?"

"Enough," says Kendrick heavily. "We will come back to this question later. First there are more pressing matters. Can Ludis and his envoy even be trusted? Obviously, if we were to agree to this offering, we could not allow my sister to leave our protection until the king was released and safe."

Barrick is squirming now, almost breathless with fury — he would never have believed that Kendrick could talk so carelessly of giving his own sister to a bandit — but the prince regent has spoken with another purpose.

"In fact," he continues, "we know little about Ludis, except by reputation, and less of his envoy. Shaso, perhaps you can make us wiser about this man Dawet dan-Faar, since you seem to know him."

His question settles on the master of arms as softly as a silken noose. Shaso stirs. "Yes," he says heavily. "I know him. We are ... cousins."

This sets the table muttering. "Then you should not be seated in this council, sir," says Earl Rorick loudly. He is dressed in the very latest fashion, the slashes in his deep purple doublet a blazing yellow. He turns to the prince regent, bright and self-sure as a courting bird. "This is shameful. How many councils have we held, speaking though we did not know it for the benefit not only of the Marchlands, but Hierosol as well?"

At last, Shaso seems to pay attention. Like an old lion woken from sleep, he blinks and leans forward. One hand has fallen to his side, close to the hilt of his dagger. "Are you calling me a traitor, my lord?"

Rorick's returned look is haughty, but Barrick sees that the earl's cheeks are pale. "You never told us you were this man's cousin."

"Why should I?" Shaso stares at him for a moment, then sags back, his energy spent. "He was of no importance to any of you before he arrived here. I myself did not know he had taken service with Ludis until the day he arrived. Last I had heard of him, he led his own free company, robbing and burning across Krace and the south."

"What else do you know of him?" Kendrick asks, not particularly kindly.

Shaso closes his eyes for a moment. "He was the fourth son of the old king of Tuan. I taught him and his brothers, just as I have taught the children of this family. He was in many ways the best of them, but in more ways the worst — swift and strong and clever, but with the heart of a desert jackal, looking only for what would advantage himself. Twenty years ago, when I was captured by your father in the Battle of Hierosol, I thought that I would never see him or any of the rest of my family again."

"So how does this Dawet come to be serving Ludis Drakava?"

"I do not know. I heard that Dawet had been exiled from Tuan because of ... because of a crime he had committed." Shaso's face is hard and blank. "His bad ways had continued and worsened, and at last he despoiled a young woman of good family and even his father would no longer protect him. Exiled, he joined a mercenary company and rose to lead it. He did not fight for his father or Tuan when our country was conquered by the Autarch. Nor did I, for that matter, since I had already been brought here."

"A complicated story," says the hierarch Sisel. "Your pardon, but you ask us to take much on faith, Lord Shaso. How is it that you heard of his doings after your exile here?"

Shaso looks at him but says nothing.

"See," Rorick proclaims. "He hides something."

"These are foul times," says Kendrick, "that we should all be so mistrustful. But the hierarch's question is a fair one. How do you come to know of what happened to him after you left Tuan?"

Shaso's expression becomes even more lifeless. "Ten years ago, I had a letter from my wife, the gods rest her. It was the last she sent me before she died."

"And she used this letter to tell you the tale of one of what must have been many students?"

The old man places his dark hands flat on his knees, looks at them carefully, as though he has never seen such unusual things before. "The girl he ruined was my youngest daughter. Afterward, in her grief, she went to the temple and became a priestess of the Great Mother. When she died from a fever two years later, my wife wrote to tell me. She also told me something of Dawet, full of grief that such a man should live and prosper when our daughter was dead."

Silence reigns for long moments in the small chapel.

"I ... I am sorry to hear it, Shaso," Kendrick says at last. "And doubly sorry to make you think of it again."

"I have thought of nothing else since I first heard the name of Hierosol's envoy," he says. Barrick has seen Shaso do this before — go away to somewhere deep inside himself, like the master of a besieged castle. "Were he not under the March King's seal, one of the two of us would already be dead."

Like all the rest, Kendrick is shaken. It takes him a moment to speak. "This ... this speaks badly of the envoy, of course. Does it also mean his offer is not to be trusted?"

Hierarch Sisel clears his throat. "I for one think the offer is honest, although the messenger be not. Like many bandit-lords, Ludis is desperate to make himself a true monarch — already he has petitioned the Trigon to recognize him as Hierosol's king. It would be to his advantage to link himself to one of the existing noble houses. Syan and Jellon will not do it — Hierosol is too close to them, and they deem him too ambitious. Thus, I suspect, his mind has turned to Southmarch." He frowns, thinking. "It could even be he planned this all along, and is the reason he took King Olin."

"He wanted the ransom to begin to pinch before he offered us this other bargain?" asks a baron from Marrinswalk, shaking his head. "Very crafty."

"All this talk of why and what happened does not change the facts," snaps Tyne of Blueshore. "He has the king. We do not. He wants the king's daughter. Do we give her to him?"

"Do you agree with the hierarch, Shaso?" Kendrick looks at the master of arms keenly. He has never felt Briony's loyalty to the old Tuani, but he does not share Barrick's grudges, either. "Is the offer to be trusted?"

Shaso speaks reluctantly. "I think it genuine, yes. But the earl of Blueshore has reminded us of the true question here."

"And what do you think?" Kendrick prods him.

"It is not for me to say." The old man's eyes are hooded. "She is not my sister. The king is not my father."

"The final decision will be mine, of course. But I wish to hear counsel first, and you were always one of my father's most trusted counselors."

Even Barrick cannot help but notice that Kendrick has called him his father's trusted counselor, not his own. Shaso's face becomes even more stony at this slight, but he speaks carefully. "I think it a bad idea."

"Again, one who does not suffer makes an easy choice," says Tyne. "You have no ransom to raise, no tithe of crops to deliver. What does it matter to you whether the rest of us are crippled by this?"

Shaso does not answer Blueshore, but Gailon the duke of Summerfield does. "Can you see no farther than the boundaries of your own smallholdings?" he demands. "Do you think you alone suffer hardship? If we do not give the princess to Ludis, as I think we should not, we all must still share the burden of the greatest hardship — the king's absence!"

"What does our father say?" Barrick asks suddenly. The whole gathering has been like a bad dream, a confusion of voices and faces. He still cannot believe his brother is giving the Lord Protector's suit any consideration at all. "You read his letter, Kendrick — it must have said something about this."

His brother nods but does not meet Barrick's eye. "He did, but in few words, as though he did not take it seriously. He called it a foolish offer." Kendrick blinks, suddenly weary. "Does this help us to decide? You know that Father would never allow himself to be bartered for anyone, even the lowest pig-farmer. He has always put his ideals above all else." There is a note of bitterness, now. "And you know he dotes on Briony, and has since she was in swaddling clothes. You have complained of it often enough, Barrick."

"But he's right! She is our sister!"

"And we Eddons are the rulers of Southmarch. Even Father has always put those responsibilities above his own desires. Who do you think is more important to our people, our father or sister?"

"The people love Briony!"

"Yes, they do. Her absence would sadden them, but it would not make them fearful, not as they have been fearful since the king has been gone. A kingdom without its monarch is like a man without a heart. Better Father were dead, the gods preserve him and us, than simply gone."

There is a silence around the table at this near-treason, but Barrick knows that his brother is right — the king's absence has been a kind of living death for Southmarch. And now, for the first time, Barrick can see the strain beneath what he sometimes thinks of as his brother's guileless features, the immense worry and exhaustion. He can only wonder what other things Kendrick has been hiding from him.

The other nobles take up the argument. It quickly becomes apparent that Shaso and Gailon are the minority, that Tyne and Rorick and even the terse constable Lord Avin think that since one day Briony will be married off for political gain anyway, her maidenhead might as well be bartered for something as valuable as restoring King Olin. However, few beside Tyne are honest enough to admit that part of the plan's appeal is that it will spare them many golden dolphins as well.

Tempers fray and the discussion becomes loud. At one point, Avin Brone threatens to strike Rorick, although both are arguing in favor of the same position. Kendrick holds his hands up and demands quiet.

"It is late and I have not made up my mind yet. I must think and then sleep on it tonight. Prince Barrick is right in one thing, especially — this is my sister, and I will do nothing lightly that will so greatly affect her. Tomorrow I will announce my decision."

He stands; the others rise and bid him goodnight, although ill-will is still in the air. Barrick is dissatisfied with many things, but he does not for a moment envy his older brother, who must like a cattle-herder's dog nip at the heels of these vexatious bulls to keep them moving together.

"I want to talk to you," he tells Kendrick as his brother leaves the chapel. The prince regent's guards have already formed a silent wall behind him.

"Not tonight, Barrick. I know where you stand. I still have much to do before I sleep."

"But ... but, Kendrick, she's our sister! She is terrified — I went to her chambers and heard her weeping ...!"

"Enough!" the prince regent almost shouts. "By Perin's hammer, can't you leave me alone? Unless you have some magical solution to this problem, all I want from you tonight is silence." Despite his fury, Kendrick seems on the verge of weeping himself. He waves his hand. "No more."

Stunned, Barrick can only stand and watch his brother walk back toward his chambers. When Kendrick stumbles, one of the guards kindly reaches out a hand to steady him.

* * *

"That's enough, Briony. I cannot tell you more — not yet. I still must think and talk on this entire matter. You are my sister and I love you, but I must be the ruler here while our father is gone. Go to bed."

Remembering Kendrick's words, thinking back on the whole terrible day, she lies sleepless in the dark — although, judging by the sounds, her ladies are not having the same problem: as always, pretty little Rose is snoring like an old dog. Briony has managed to drowse for a little while, but a terrible dream awakened her, in which Ludis — who in truth she has never seen; all she knows about him is that he is near her father's age — was an ancient thing of cobwebs, dust and bones, pursuing her through a trackless gray forest. She has not been able to sleep since.

What hour is it? she wonders. She has not heard the midnight bell yet, but surely it cannot be far away. I must be the only one in the castle still awake.

In other times such a thought would be more exciting than troubling, but now it is only testament to the terrible fate hanging over her like a headsman's ax.

Has Kendrick decided?

When she saw him in his chambers during the evening, he had given away nothing of his thoughts. She wept, which makes her angry with herself now. She also begged him not to marry her to Ludis, then apologized for her selfishness. But Kendrick must know I want Father back as much as anyone does!

Her older brother had been distant and preoccupied the whole time she was in his chamber, but took her hand when they parted and kissed her cheek, something he rarely does. In fact, the memory of that kiss chills her now more than his preoccupation. She feels certain that he was kissing her good-bye.

Pain is wearying. Perpetual fear becomes numbness. For a little while Briony's mind wanders and she imagines all the things that could happen. Somehow her father could escape and Ludis will have no claim on the Eddons. Or she could find that the Lord Protector is a slandered man, that truly he is handsome and kind. Or that he is worse than the tales, in which case she will have no choice but to kill him in his sleep, then kill herself. She lives so many lives in that hour, both grim and fanciful, that at last she slips into a dream without knowing it — a kinder one this time, the twins playing at hide-and-seek with Kendrick when they were all young — and sleeps through the midnight bell. But she does not sleep through the shriek that comes just a short while later.

Briony sits upright in bed, half-certain she has dreamed. Nearby young Rose squirms in her sleep, lost in some nightmare of her own.

"The black man ...!" the girl moans.

Briony hears it again — a terrified wail, growing louder. Moina is awake now, too. Something bangs hard on the chamber door and Briony almost falls out of her bed in fright.

"The Autarch!" Moina squeals, plucking at the charm she wears about her neck. "Come to kill us all in our beds ...!"

"It is only one of the guards," Briony says harshly, trying to convince herself as well. "Go and take off the bolt."

"No, Princess! They'll ravish us!"

Briony wraps her blanket around her and stumbles to the door. Her heart flutters as she calls out to know who is outside. The voice is not one of the guards, but it is familiar: it is Briony's great-aunt Merolanna who flaps into the room as the door opens, crying, "Gods preserve us! Gods preserve us!", her nightdress askew, her long gray hair down on her shoulders.

"Why is everyone shouting?" Briony asks, fighting against growing fear. "Is it a fire?"

Merolanna stumbles to a halt, panting and peering shortsightedly. "Briony, is that you? Is it? Oh, praise the gods, I thought they had taken you all."

The old woman's words run through her like icy water. Now she can see that the duchess is weeping. "What are you talking about?"

"Your brother — your poor brother ..."

The chill freezes her heart. "Barrick!" she cries, and shoves past Merolanna. There are no guards outside, but the passage is full of disembodied sounds, wails and distant shouting. She hesitates, then turns back for her dagger and pulls it from beneath her mattress. Her two ladies-in-waiting huddle behind Merolanna, using the sobbing old woman as a wall against any invaders that might come.

The halls of the residence are in chaos. People drift confusedly in the near-darkness, calling questions or babbling religious oaths, all in pale nightclothes, so that the passages seem filled with ghosts. Nynor the castellan stands in the middle of the shield hall wearing a ridiculous sleeping cap, his beard tied up in a strange little bag. He calls out orders but no one is listening to him. The scene is all the more dreamlike because no one stops Briony or even speaks to her. Everyone seems to be going in the wrong direction.

She reaches the hall outside Barrick's chamber but finds it deserted, her brother's door closed. She has only a moment to wonder at this before something grabs her arm and she lets out a small, choked shriek. When she sees whose wide-eyed face is beside her, she grabs at him and pulls him close. "Oh, oh, I thought you ... Merolanna said ..."

Barrick's red hair is dissheveled still from bed, wild as a gale-blown haystack. "I saw you go past." He seems like one dragged from sleep but still dreaming. "Come. No, perhaps you shouldn't ..."

"What?" Her relief vanishes as swiftly as it came. "Barrick, what in the names of the gods is going on?"

He leads her around the corner into the main hall of the residence. The corridor is full, and guards armed with halberds are pushing servants and others back from the door of Kendrick's chambers. She suddenly realizes her misunderstanding.

"Merciful Zoria," she whispers.

Now she can see in the light of the torches that Barrick's face is twisted in a kind of wide-eyed terror, his lips trembling. He takes her hand and pulls her through the crowd, which shrinks back from them as though the twins might carry some plague. Several of the women are weeping, faces as grotesque as festival masks.

The guards kneeling around the body glance up at the twins' approach, and for a moment do not seem to recognize them. Then Ferras Vansen, the captain of the royal guard, stands, his long-jawed face full of dreadful pity, and roughly pulls one of the crouching soldiers out of the way. The room is full of terrible smells, slaughterhouse smells. They have turned Kendrick onto his back. His face gleams red in the torchlight.

There is so much blood that for a fleeting instant she can tell herself it is someone else, that this horror has been visited on some near-stranger, but Barrick's despairing gasp destroys the flimsy hope.

Her dagger falls from her hand and clinks onto the flags. Her knees sag and she half-falls, then crawls toward her older brother like a blind animal, tangling herself for a moment with one of the guards as he mumbles a prayer. Kendrick's face twitches. One blood-slicked hand opens and closes.

"He is alive!" Briony screams. "Where is Chaven? Has someone sent for him?" She tries to lift him, but he is too wet, too heavy. Barrick is pulling her back and she strikes at her twin. "Let me go! He's alive!"

"He can't be." Barrick too is in some other world, his voice confused and distant. "Just look at him ..."

Kendrick's mouth works again and Briony almost climbs on top of him, so desperate is she to hear him speak, to know that he is still her brother, that life is in him. She searches for his wounds so she can stop them up but the whole front of him is soaking wet, his shirt in tatters, the skin beneath it just as ragged.

"Don't die," she says in his ear. His eyes roll; he is trying to find her. His mouth opens.

"... Isss ..." A sibilant whisper that only Briony can hear.

"Don't leave us, oh, dear dear Kendrick, don't." She kisses his bloody cheek. He lets out a whimper of pain, then curls as slowly as a leaf on hot coals until he is lying on his side, bent double. He kicks, whimpers again, then the life is out of him.

Barrick is still pulling at her, but he is weeping too — Everyone is crying, Briony thinks, the whole world is crying. Dimly, as though it is happening in another country, she can hear people shouting down the corridor, "The prince is dead! The prince has been murdered!"

The guard-captain Vansen is trying to lift her away from Kendrick. She turns and slaps at him, grabs at the man's heavy tunic and tries to pull him down, so full of fury she can barely think.

"How did this happen?" she shrieks, her thoughts as red and slippery as her hands. "Where were you? Where were his guards? You are traitors, murderers!"

For a moment Vansen holds her at arm's length, then his face convulses with grief and he releases his grip. Briony scrambles to her feet, strikes hard at his shoulders and face. Ferras Vansen does nothing more to defend himself than lower his head until Barrick pulls her off.

"Look!" her brother says, pointing. "Look there, Briony!"

Her eyes blurred with tears, she does not at first understand what she is seeing — two stained lumps of shadow on the floor beside the prince regent's bed. Then she sees the Eddon wolf on the slashed tunic of one of the figures and the pool of blood a shiny blackness beneath them both, and understands that Kendrick's guards, too, are dead.

asty!!!! goooood!!!!

<3