She stared at him, suddenly mistrustful. “I will ask the same of you. Why are you not in Hierosol? Have you left Ludis Drakava’s service?”
He shook his head. “No, my lady, although many wiser than me have already done so...” He looked up and past her, his eyes narrowing. “But what is this?”
The tavern keeper Bedoyas and both Makewells were coming across the tavern yard toward the company, but it was their escort—a dozen guardsmen wearing the crests of city reeves—that had caught Dawet’s eye. For a moment Briony only stared, then realized that she of all of them had the most to lose if captured or arrested for some reason. She eyed the nearest ways out of the yard but it was hopeless: the guards had already surrounded them.
A heavy-faced soldier wearing an officer’s sash across his tunic stepped forward. “You of the players’ company known as Makewell’s Men, you are remanded in arrest to His Majesty the king’s custody.” The captain saw Dawet and scowled. “Ah. You, too, fellow. I was told to look for a southern darkling, and here you are.”
“You would be wise to watch your tongue, sir,” said Dawet with smooth venom, but he made no move to resist.
“Arrested?” Finn Teodoros’ voice had an anxious squeak to it. “Under what charge?”
“Spying, as you well know,” said the captain. “Now you will be introduced to His Majesty’s hospitality, which I think will be a little less to your liking than that of Master Bedoyas. And entertain no thoughts of daring escape, you players— this is no play. I have half a pentecount more of soldiers waiting outside.”
“Spying?” Briony turned to Dawet. “What are they talking about?” she whispered.
“Say nothing,” he told her under his breath. “No matter what happens or what they tell you. They will try to trick you.”
She put her head down and let herself be herded with the others. Estir Makewell and young Pilney were both weeping. Others might have been, but it was hard to tell, because rain had started to fall.
“I’m afraid I cannot go with you,” Dawet said loudly.
Briony turned, thinking he spoke to her. He had drawn himself back against a wall of the courtyard, a knife suddenly twinkling in his gloved fingers. “What are you doing?” she demanded, but Dawet did not even look at her.
“Enough of your nonsense, black,” said the captain. “Were you Hiliometes himself you could not overcome so many.”
“I swear on the fiery head of Zosim Salamandros that you have the wrong man,” said Dawet. One of the guards stepped toward him, but the Tuani man had the blade up and cocked for throwing so quickly the soldier froze as if snake-addled.
The captain sighed. “Swear by the Salamander, do you?” He stared at Dawet dan-Faar like a householder trying to decide whether to buy a lump of expensive meat that was only going in the stew, anyway. “You two, you heard him,” he said, gesturing to a pair of guards standing nearby, short spears at the ready. “Deal with him. I have better things to do than waste any more time here.”
The two heavily-armored men lunged forward and Briony let out a muffled shriek of alarm. Dawet, handicapped by the much shorter reach of his dagger, feinted as if to throw it, then turned, leaped, and scrambled over the courtyard wall. The two guards hesitated only a moment, then hurried out through the yard’s back entrance. A few other soldiers moved as if to follow, but the captain waved them back.
“Those two are canny fellows,” he told his men. “Don’t worry, they will deal with that Xandy fool.”
“Unless the darkling can fly like Strivos himself, you’re right to call him foolish,” the tavernkeeper Bedoyas chuckled. “That alley’s a dead end.” Briony wanted to hit the man in his fat face.
But to her surprise, the guards appeared a moment later without Dawet. They were smiling nervously, as if pleased by their own failure. “He’s gone, sir. Got clean away.”
“He did, did he?” The commander nodded grimly. “We’ll talk about this later.”
The rest of the guards shoved Briony and the other players back into line again and led them out of the inn, marching them toward the stronghold in the great palace at the city’s center. Bad enough to have lost a throne, but now even her humble, counterfeit life as a player was in ruins. Briony’s eyes blurred with tears, though she tried hard to wipe them away. As they crossed the first bridge it seemed she walked through some place even stranger than the capital of a foreign land.
37. Silence
Thunder and his brothers at last found Pale Daughter wandering lost in the wilderness without her name or her memory. His honor satisfied, Thunder did not think any more upon her, but his brother Black Earth was unhappy with his wife, Evening Light, and their music had strayed out of sympathy. He sent her away and took Pale Daughter to be his wife. He gave her a new name, Dawn, that she might not remember what had gone before. She was ever after silent, sitting beside him in the dark chambers beneath the ground, and if she remembered her child Crooked or her husband Silvergleam, she did not say.
While Matt Tinwright paused for breath and mopped his brow, Puzzle played a refrain on the lute. The tune was a little more sprightly than Tinwright would have liked, considering the seriousness of the subject matter, but he had finished his poem so late that the two had found little time to practice.
He nodded to the old jester, ready to begin again. Most of the courtiers, although not all, politely lowered their voices once more.
“At last Surazem came to birthing bed,” Tinwright declaimed, halfsinging in the Syannese style now expected at court entertainments, “As the Four Winds hovered to cool her brow, Her sister, her semblance, stood at her head Dark Onyena, bound by a sacred vow Like oxen traced unwilling to the plow. On high Sarissa her own infant son Lay coldly dead ’neath the pine’s snowy bough Because Sveros cruelly had decreed that none Should midwife one twin but the other one...”
For long moments Tinwright could almost forget what was really happening—that almost no one was listening to the words he declaimed, that the rumble of talk and drunken laughter made it hard for even those few who wanted to hear, and that in any case there were darker, grimmer matters to think about than even the fall of gods—and could revel in the fact that for this moment, at least, he was presenting his verse before the entire royal court of Southmarch. His own verse!
“But now as Perin’s infant head appeared Surazem’s dark twin saw her time, and thieved From out her sister’s belly, blood-besmeared, That essence which the world has so long grieved For Onyena with it three more conceived, Repaying cruelly the death of her own, A fated tapestry which first she weaved As her sister in childbirth’s pain did groan And thus were the seeds of the gods’ war sown...”
One of the few people paying attention was the man who had commissioned the poem, Hendon Tolly himself, who frightened Tinwright in ways he had never even imagined possible. Another was the young woman Elan M’Cory, the object of Tinwright’s own painful affection, to whom he had promised to bring poison tonight.
A strange audience, at best, he admitted to himself.
One of those most obviously not paying attention was Hendon’s brother, the new Duke of Summerfield. Caradon Tolly was more like the dead brother Gailon than like Hendon, jut-jawed and big across the shoulders. His square face reflected little of what went on behind it— Tinwright thought he seemed more statue than man—but he was known to be heavy-handed and ruthless, though perhaps lacking his younger sibling’s flair for cruelty. Just now Duke Caradon was staring openly at the Southmarch nobles gathered in the banquet hall, as if making a list of who would serve the Tollys well and who would not. The objects of his gaze looked almost uniformly discomforted.