i
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.
— from One Hundred Considerations out of the Qar's Book of Regret
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, con¬sidering 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, half-singing 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 hap¬pening-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 mat¬ters 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 commis¬sioned 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 no¬bles gathered in the banquet hall, as if making a list of who would serve the lbllys well and who would not. The objects of his gaze looked almost uni¬formly discomforted.
Looking at this cold, powerful man, Matt Tinwright felt sick at his stom¬ach. What am I thinking, meddling in the Tollys' affairs? I am far out of my depth-they could kill me in an instant! Remembering how certain he had been only a few days ago that he would be executed, he almost lost his place in the poem. He had to swallow down this sudden fright and force himself back into his words, spreading his arms as he declaimed,
"… But those three treacherous siblings, theft-bred,
Plotted long Perin's heritage to steal
When Sveros, fearsome sire of all, was dead.
'Til then, they'd follow meekly at the heel
And by soft words and smiles their lies conceal
While Zmeos, their chief banked his envious fires…"
A few courtiers shifted restlessly. Matt Tinwright, sliding back and forth between terror of death and the nearly equal terror of having his work ridiculed, could not help wondering if he had made the beginning of the poem too long. After all, every child raised in the Trigonate faith heard the tale of the three brothers and their infamous step-siblings at almost every religious festival. But Hendon Tolly wanted legitimacy, and so he had wanted as much in the poem as possible about the selfless purity of Madi Surazem and the perfidy of old Sveros, Lord of Twilight-the better to prop his own family's claim to virtue, Tinwright supposed.
He did feel a little ashamed to be trumpeting the self-serving nonsense of such a serpent as Hendon Tolly, but he consoled himself with the thought that no one in Southmarch would ever actually believe such things: Olin Eddon had been one of the best-loved kings in memory, a bold war¬rior in his youth, fair and wise in his age. He was no Sveros.
Also, Tinwright was a poet, and he told himself that poets could not fight the powers of the world, at least not with anything but words-and even with words, they had to be careful. We worshipers of the Harmonies are
easy to kill, he thought. 'The hoi polloi might weep after we ore gone, when they realize what they've lost, hut that does us no good if we're already dead.
In any case, only Hendon Tolly appeared to be following the words with anything more than perfunctory interest. Now that his brother Caradon was no longer surveying the crowd, and had turned to stare disinterestedly at the banquet hall hangings, the rest of the courtiers were free to watch the duke and whisper behind their hands. Almost all of them had been out in the cold wind that morning when Caradon Tolly and his entourage had disembarked from their ship and paraded into Southmarch at the head of four pentecounts of fully armed men wearing the Tolly's boar and spears on their shields. Something in the soldiers' grim faces had made it clear to even the most heedless castle-folk that the Tollys were not just making a show, but making a claim.
As Tinwright declaimed the verses in which the Trigon brothers finally defeated their ferocious father, Caradon continued to tap his fingers ab¬sently and stare at nothing, but his brother Hendon leaned forward, eyes unnaturally bright and a smile playing across his lips. By contrast, Elan M'Cory seemed to shrink deeper and deeper into herself, so that even though Tinwright could see her eyes, they seemed as cold and lifeless as one of the eerie pictures in the portrait hall, the dead nobility that watched upstart poets with disapproving gazes. Matt Tinwright s longing and dread were too great to look at her for more than a moment.