“This was once a great road, Highness, just as the bird said,” he called at last, and then wished he hadn’t: the echoes died almost immediately in the thick growth on either side of the road, but even the absence of an echo made the noise seem more stark, more exceptional. He could imagine an entire gallery of shadowy watchers leaning forward to listen. He spurred his horse forward so that he could speak more quietly. “This is the old Northmarch Road , not simply a forest path. If we follow it long enough we will arrive at something—perhaps the raven’s Jack Chain—but it will not be something we’ll like. Can’t you feel that?”
The prince turned his cool stare on him. Barrick’s hair was stuck to his forehead in damp red ringlets. “We know, Captain. We are looking for another road, one that crosses this one. If we ride overland through this tangled forest, we will come to grief.”
“But it is only a short way to Northmarch, and that is where Jack Chain has his hall!” squealed Skurn, hopping up and down, which made Vansen’s horse snort and prance so that he had to tighten his grip on the reins. “Even if we are lucky and One-Eye bes far away, and there be no Night Men about, still Jack-Rovers and Longskulls there be all around here, as well as the Follower-folk who remember not sunlanders nor nothing even of the High Ones! They will capture us, poor old Skurn. They will kill us!”
“They will certainly hear us if we stop to argue every few paces,” Barrick said harshly. “I did not bring you here, Vansen, and I certainly did not bring that...bird. If you wish to find your own way, you may do so.”
“I cannot leave you, Highness.”
“Yes, you can. I have told you to do it but you do not listen. You say you are my liegeman, but you will not obey the simplest order. Go away, Captain Vansen.”
He hung his head, hoping to hide both the shame and rage. “I cannot, Prince Barrick.”
“Then do as you wish. But do it silently.”
They had been riding for what seemed like most of a day when an astonishing thing happened, something that alarmed not only Vansen, but the raven, too, and even Gyir the Storm Lantern.
The sky began to grow dark.
It crept up on them slowly, and at first Ferras Vansen thought it no more than the ceaseless movement of gray cloud overhead, the blanket of mist which thickened and even sometimes thinned without ever diminishing much, and which gave the light of these lands its only real variety. But as he found himself squinting at trees beside the wide road, Vansen suddenly realized he could not doubt the truth any longer.
The twilight was dying. The sky was turning black.
“What’s going on?” Vansen reined up. “Prince Barrick, ask your fairy what this means!”
Gyir was looking up between the trees, but not as though searching for something with his eyes—it was an odd, blind gaze, as though he were smelling rather than staring. “He says it is smoke.”
“What? What does that mean?”
Skurn was clinging to the horse’s neck, beak tucked under a wing, mumbling to himself.
“What does he mean, smoke?” Vansen demanded of the raven. “Smoke from what? Do you know what’s happening here, bird? Why is it getting dark?”
“Crooked’s curse has come at last, must be. Must be!” The black bird moaned and bobbed its head. “If the Night Men catch us or don’t, it matters not. The queen will die and the Great Pig will swallow us all down to blackness!”
He could get nothing more out of him—the raven only croaked in terror. “I do not understand!” Vansen cried. “Where is the smoke coming from? Has the forest caught fire?”
“Gyir says no,” Barrick said slowly, and now even he sounded uneasy. “It is from fire someone has made—he says it stinks of metal and flesh.” The prince turned to look at silent Gyir, whose eyes were little more than red slits in his blank mask of a face. “He says it is the smoke of many small fires...or one very big one.”
7. Chasing the Jackals
Twilight had been jealous from the first of his brother’s gleaming songs, and when Daystar lost the depth of his music and flew away, Twilight climbed into his brother’s place among the Firstborn. He made children with both Breeze and Moisture.
From the womb of Breeze came the brothers Whitefire and Silvergleam, and Judgment their sister. From the womb of Moisture came Thunder, Ocean, and Black Earth, and though their mothers were twinned, from the very first these six children could not find harmony among themselves.
Even the weak morning light seeping in from the high, small windows was enough to tell Briony that she was not in her own paneled chamber in the royal residence. In fact, she was surrounded by white plastered walls and dark-skinned women in loose, soft dresses, all busy making beds or darning clothes, and talking in a quiet, musical language Briony could not understand. For a long moment she could only stare, dumbfounded, wondering what had happened.
The truth did not wait long, though: as she rolled over and sat up, clutching the blanket close around the flimsy nightclothes she had somehow acquired, memories began to leak back.
“Good morning, Bri-oh-nee-zisaya.” Briony turned to find a slender middle-aged woman standing beside the bed. The woman smiled, showing a flash of unusual color. “Did you sleep well?”
Of course. Shaso had brought her to this place in the back alleys of whatever this Marrinswalk town was called... Lander’s something...? They had taken refuge in the house of one of Shaso’s Tuani countrymen, and this was the goldtoothed mistress of the house.
“Yes. Yes, thank you, very well.” Suddenly she felt shy, knowing she had been lying here sleeping, perhaps snoring, while these dark, delicate women worked quietly around her. “Is...I would like to speak to Shaso.” She remembered the reverence with which the women had spoken of him, as though Princess Briony should be his servant instead of the other way around, something that irritated her more than she liked to admit. “Lord Shaso. Can you take me to him?”
“He will know you are waking and will be expecting you,” the older woman said, smiling again. Briony could count half a dozen other women in the large room, and she seemed to recall there had been even more the previous night. “Let us help you dress.”
It all went swiftly and even enjoyably, the women’s talk mostly incomprehensible, a continuous dove-soft murmur that even in the waxing morning light made Briony feel sleepy again. It was so odd, these women and their foreign rooms and ways, their foreign tongue, as if the entire house had been lifted out of the sandy streets of some distant southern city by a mischievous god or goddess and spun through the air to land here in the middle of cold, muddy, winter’s-end Eion. Somebody was definitely on the wrong continent.
The older woman, guessing correctly that Briony had forgotten her name, politely reintroduced herself as Idite.
She didn’t put Briony back into the Skimmer girl’s tattered dress, but clothed her in a beautiful billowing robe of some pale pink fabric so thin she could easily see the light through it, so thin that she had to wear an underdress of a thicker, more clinging white cloth, with sleeves long enough to reach her fingertips. The Tuani women lifted her hair up and pinned it, cooing and giggling at its yellowness, then set a circlet of pearls on her head. Idite brought Briony a mirror, a small, precious thing in the shape of a lotus leaf, so she could see the result of all their work. She found it both charming and disturbing to discover herself so transfigured by a few articles of clothing and jewelry, turned so easily into a soft, pretty creature (yes, she actually looked pretty, even she had to admit it) of the kind she suspected all the men of South-march had always hoped she would become. It was hard not to bristle a bit. But the transformation was an act of kindness, not domination, so she smiled and thanked Idite and the others, then smiled some more as they complimented her at length, haltingly in her own tongue and fluently in their own.