"It is a long tale, and as full of madness as anything you have heard about fairy armies…"
Opal stood abruptly as a noise came from behind them. Flint, pale and bleary-eyed, stood in the doorway. "What are you doing out of bed?" she demanded.
The boy looked at her, his face chillingly dull. With all the things that
had been strange or even frightening about him before, Chert could not help thinking, this lifeless, disinterested look was worse by far. "Thirsty."
"I'll bring you in water, child. You are not ready to be out of bed yet, so soon after the fever has passed." She gave Chert and Chaven a significant glance. "Keep your voices down," she told them.
Chert had barely begun to describe the bizarre events of Winter's Eve when Opal returned from getting Flint back into bed, so he started again. His tale, which would have been an incredible one coming from the mouth of someone recently returned from exotic foreign lands, let alone the fa¬miliar precincts of Southmarch, would have been impossible to believe had it not been Chaven himself speaking, a man Chert knew to be not just honest, but rigorously careful about what he knew and did not know, about what could be proved or only surmised. "Built on bedrock," as Chert's father had always said of someone trustworthy, "not on sand, sliding this way and that with every shrug of the Elders."
"So do you think that this Tolly villain had something to do with the southern witch, Selia?" Chert asked. "With the death of poor Prince Kendrick and the attack on the princess?" From his one brief meeting with her, Chert had a proprietorial fondness for Briony Eddon, and already loathed Hendon Tolly and his entire family with an unquenchable hatred.
"I can't say, but the snatches of conversation I heard from him and his guards made them sound just as surprised as me. But their treachery to the royal family cannot be questioned, nor their desire to murder me, a witness of what really happened."
"They truly would have killed you?" asked Opal.
"Definitely, had I remained to be killed," Chaven said with a pained smile. "As I hid from them in the Tower of Spring, I heard Hendon Tolly telling his minions that I was by no means to survive my capture-that he would reward the man who finished me."
"Elders!" breathed Opal. "The castle's in the hands of bandits and mur¬derers!"
"For the moment, certainly. Without Princess Briony or her brother, I see no way to change things." All the talking had tired the physician; he seemed barely able to keep his head up.
"We must get you to one of the powerful lords," Chert said. "Someone still loyal to the king, who will protect you until your story is told."
"Who is left? Tyne Aldritch is dead in Kolkan's Field, Nynor retreated
to his country house in fear," Chaven said flatly. "And Avin Brone seems to have made his own peace with the Tollys. I trust no one." He shook his head as if it were a heavy stone he had carried too long. "And worst of all, the Tollys have taken my house, my splendid observatory!"
"But why would they do that? Do they think you're still hiding there?"
"No. They want something, and I fear I know what. They are tearing things apart-I could hear them through the walls from my tunnel hiding-places-searching. Searching…"
"Why? For what?"
Chaven groaned. "Even if I am right about what they seek, I am not cer¬tain why they want it-but I am frightened, Chert. There is more afoot here and in the world outside than simply a struggle for the throne of the March Kingdoms."
Chert suddenly realized that Chaven did not know the story of his own adventures, about the inexplicable events surrounding the boy in the other room. "There is more," he said suddenly. "Now you must rest, but later I will tell you of our own experiences. I met the Twilight folk. And the boy got into the Mysteries."
"What? Tell me now!"
"Let the poor man sleep." Opal sounded weary, too, or perhaps just weighed down again with unhappiness. "He is weak as a weanling."
"Thank you…" Chaven said, barely able to form words. "But… I must hear this tale… immediately. I said once that I feared what the moving of the Shadowline might mean. But now I think I feared… too little." His head sagged, nodded. "Too little…" he sighed,"… and too… late…" Within a few breaths he was asleep, leaving Chert and Opal to stare at each other, eyes wide with apprehension and confusion.
4
The Hada~d'in~Mozan
The greatest offspring of Void and Light was Daystar, and by his
shining all was better known and the songs had new shapes. And in
this new light Daystar found Bird Mother and together they engendered
many things, children, and music, and ideas.
But all beginnings contain their own endings.
When the Song of All was much older, Daystar lost his own song and
went away into the sky to sing only of the sun. Bird Mother did not die,
though her grief was mighty, but instead she birthed a great egg, and from
it the beautiful twins Breeze and Moisture came forth to scatter the seeds of
living thought, to bring the earth sustenance and fruitfulness.
— from One Hundred Considerations out of the Qar's Book of Regret
A
STORM SWEPT IN from the ocean in the wake of the setting sun, but although cold rain pelted them and the little boat pitched until Briony felt quite ill, the air was actually warmer than it had been on their first trip across Brenn's Bay. It was still, however, a chilly, mis¬erable jouney
Winter, Briony thought ruefully. Only a fool would lose her throne and be forced to run for her life in this fatal season. The Tollys won't need to kill me-/ // probably drown myself or simply freeze. She was even more worried about Shaso soaking in the cold rain so soon after his fever had broken, but as
usual the old man showed less evidence of discomfort than a stone statue, That was reassuring, at least: if he was well enough for his stiff-necked pride to rule him, he had unquestionably improved.
By comparison, the Skimmer girl Ena seemed neither to be made mis¬erable by the storm nor to bear it bravely-in fact, she hardly seemed to notice it. Her hood was back and she rowed with the ease and careless¬ness of someone steering a punt through the gentle waters of a summer¬time lake. They owed this Skimmer girl much, Briony knew: without her knowledge of the bay and its tides they would have had little hope of escape.
J shall reward her well. Of course, just now the daughter of Southmarch's royal family had nothing to give.
The worst of the storm soon passed, though the high waves lingered. The monotony of the trip, the continuous pattering of rain on Briony's hooded cloak and the rocking of the swells, kept dropping her into a dreamy near-sleep and a fantasy of the day when she would ride back into Southmarch, greeted with joy by her people and… and who else? Barrick was gone and she could not think too much about his absence just yet: it was as though she had sustained a dreadful wound and dared not look at it until it had been tended, for fear she would faint away and die by the road¬side without reaching help. But who else was left? Her father was still a prisoner in far-off Hierosol. Her stepmother Anissa, although perhaps not an enemy if her servant's murderous treachery had been nothing to do with her, was still not really a friend, and certainly no mother. What other peo¬ple did Briony treasure, or even care about? Avin Brone? He was too stern, too guarded. Who else?
For some reason, the guard captain Ferras Vansen came to her mind- but that was nonsense! What was he to her, with his ordinary face and his ordinary brown hair and his posture so carefully correct it almost seemed like a kind of swagger? If she recognized now that he had not been as guilty in the death of her older brother as she had once felt, he was still nothing to her-a common soldier, a functionary, a man who no doubt thought lit¬tle beyond the barracks and the tavern, and likely spent what spare time he had putting his hands up the dresses of tavern wenches.