“We will make camp. There is much to decide.”
Only days ago, in an ordinary world where the sun came up and the sun went down, Barrick Eddon knew he would have looked on the fairy Gyir as something hideously alien, but somehow he had come to know Gyir the Storm Lantern as well as he knew any other person, even those of his own family.
Except for Briony, of course — Briony, his other half… Barrick did his best to push the thought of her away. If he was to survive he must harden himself, he had decided, cast even the most precious of those beads of memory behind him. He couldn’t let himself be weak as other men were weak — like Vansen the guard captain, still living in the old ways and as out of place here (or anywhere in the new world that was coming) as a bear sitting at a table with a bowl and spoon. Barrick knew that Vansen had saved the disgusting, corpse-eating raven mostly because it spoke his mortal speech, as if being able to mumble that outdated tongue was anything other than a mark of irrelevance.
The bird Skurn had many vile habits, and seemed to reveal a new one every few moments. Only an hour had passed since they had made camp and already the creature had defiled it, not even leaving the vicinity to defecate but instead simply pausing beside the campfire and discharging a spatter as wet and foul-smelling as the goose turds that had made it such a hazard to walk beside the pond in the royal residence back home. Now the disgusting old bird was crouched only a few steps from Barrick, noisily finishing off a baby rat he had found in a nest in the wet undergrowth, the tail danging from his mouth as he chewed the hindquarters. A moment later the whole of it, tail following to the very end, slid down his throat and disappeared.
Skurn belched. Barrick scowled.
Do not waste your fires on anger,Gyir told him.Especially on one such as that. You will have need of every spark, cousin.The words were simply there, as though whispered inside his skull. There was no sound, no quirks of speech as with regular talk, but the words had a shape and a feeling that Barrick could tell, even without comparison, made them Gyir’s and no one else’s.
Cousin? Why do you call me that? Because we share something. What? What could we share?
The love of our lady, and loyalty to her. She saved you as she saved me. Saved me from…And then the fairy’s words trailed off, or changed, so that they felt like words no longer, but rather a sensation of cracking thunder and a rain as heavy and terrifying as a flight of arrows.
“Highness,” said Vansen suddenly, his speaking voice as harsh as a frog’s croak after the taut musicality of Gyir’s soundless words. “I think we need to listen to what the bird says…”
“Listen!” snarled Barrick. “Listen! It is you who cannot listen!” How could the man continue to scrape and bray like that when he could have wordsandsilence, music and stillness, both the plucked string and the expectant pause before the lute sounded? But perhaps the guardsman couldn’t. Perhaps Barrick was being unfair. He himself had been touched by the Dark Lady — poor, earnest Ferras Vansen had not. “I apologize, Captain,” he said, and was pleased by his own magnanimity. No wonder he had been chosen from the crowded, mad battlefield, singled out like the oracle Iaris, who of all men had been given the words of Perin to bear back to humanity. “What is it that…that squawking gore-crow has to say?”
“Cannot go this way,” the raven said. “The High One with no food-hole, the caulbearer,heknows it. These be Jack Chain’s lands now, since the queen sleeps and the King has grown so old. Us that care for our life don’t go there.”
“He’s talking about Northmarch, Highness,” Vansen said. “It seems to belong to some enemy — some dangerous person.”
“I am not stupid, Vansen. I understood that.” Barrick scowled. At this moment, the captain reminded him more than he would wish of Shaso: the old man, too, had always been judging him, always underestimating him, speaking words that sounded full of reason to the ear but made him sting with shame. Well, half a year in the stronghold had no doubt made Shaso dan-Heza a little less proud and scornful.
A twinge of shame, a distant thing but still painful, made him want to think about something else. Shaso had brought his doom on himself, hadn’t he? Nothing to do with Barrick.
“I am sorry, Highness,” Vansen said, and bowed, the first time he had done that since they had crossed over the Shadowline. “I have overstepped.”
“Oh, stop.” Barrick’s mood had gone sour. He turned to Gyir, tried to form the words in his head so the other could understand him. It was so easy when the faceless man spoke to him first — like a flying dream, no labor, just the leap and then the freedom of the air.What is this creature talking about? Is it true?
I do not know. I have not traveled here, in this part of…Here another idea floated past that seemed to have no words, a jumble of formless shapes that somehow spiraled inward like snailshells.Except when the army went to war, but none would have dared to attack us in that force. Still, there are many here behind the Mantle that do not love…Again there was a picture rather than a word, this one a paradoxical image of black towers and shining light. Only after it had ceased to glow in his head did Barrick perceive the words that went with it.Qul-na-Qar.
What is that? Is that you, your people?
That is the place we have made the heart of our…Here an idea that seemed to mean not so much “rule” or “kingdom” as “story.”That is where the Knowing make their home. Those Qar who know what was lost, and what sleeps.
Barrick shook his head — too many ideas he could not understand were floating through his mind, although he had finally come to understand one of Gyir’s idea-sounds,Qar,meant “people like myself”—those Barrick still thought of in the back of his mind as “fairy folk.” Still, even the clearest of Gyir’s ideas were as slippery as live fish.I need to know if what this unpleasant bird says is important,Barrick said.The…the Lady…has given you a charge, that you told me. You must do what she asked.Although he had no idea of Gyir’s task, he knew as well as he knew that his bones were inside his body that what the dark woman wanted must be done.
I am not allowed to delay, it is true. My errand is too vital. Still, it is hard to believe that one of our enemies has grown so strong here, an enemy that was thought dead. If it is true, I fear my luck — the luck of all the People, perhaps — has turned for ill. We are far from my home and in dangerous lands. I am wounded, perhaps crippled forever, your companion has my sword, and I have no horse.
Gyir’s thoughts were heavy and fearful in a way that Barrick had not felt before. That alone was enough to make the prince really frightened for the first time since the giant’s war club had swung up high above him and his old life had come to an end.
“I don’t know what that fairy’s done to you, Highness, what kind of spell he’s put on you, but I’m not giving him back his sword. He may pretend friendship, but he’ll likely kill us if we give him a chance. Don’t you remember what he and his kind did to the men of Southmarch at Kolkan’s Field? Don’t you remember Tyne Aldritch, crushed into…into bloody suet?”
The prince stared at him. “We will talk more of this,” Barrick said, and mounted his horse. The faceless man Gyir, with an agility that Vansen carefully noted — he was recovering very swiftly indeed from wounds that would have killed an ordinary man — swung himself up behind the prince.