Shadowheart (7 page)

—from “A Child’s Book of the Orphan, and His Life and Death and Reward in Heaven”

 

 

 

B
RIONY THOUGHT THAT TRAVELING with even a small army—and Eneas kept reminding her that his Temple Dogs made an
extremely
small army, scarcely even a battalion—was like living in a movable city, one that had to be taken down every morning and set up again the next evening. Even with a group of men as hardy as the prince’s troops, swift riders who needed little in this spring weather beyond bedrolls and some source of water, they still could travel each day only as far as caution permitted. Few people were on the roads in this strange year, and those who were often had traveled no farther than from one walled town to the next, so information about what lay beyond the Southmarch border was scarce.

Every day took them farther north, winding up King Karal’s Road (named after one of Eneas’ most famous ancestors) out of Syan and through the lands that lay between it and the March Kingdoms, mostly tiny principalities who offered token allegiance to the throne in Tessis or the throne in Southmarch, but which only existed because the long era of peace had allowed them to keep their soldiers at home. Now that the north was in chaos they were less happy and less hospitable than they had been in the past.

They had discovered one such county seat near Tyosbridge. The land’s master, Viscount Kymon, had refused to let Prince Eneas and his men inside the walls, although it would have brought a great deal of money into the pockets of the town merchants. Eneas and his dozen or so officers (with Briony among them) had been invited to spend the night at the viscount’s hall but Eneas had refused, furious at the implication that his men could not be trusted—or worse, that he himself could not be trusted. They had spent the night instead camped outside with the men, something Briony admired greatly as a gesture. Still, a part of her could not help regretting the lost chance at a night on a decent bed. Between sleeping on the ground with the players and the same now with the Syannese soldiers, she had largely forgotten how it felt to sleep on the soft beds of Broadhall Palace, although she remembered very clearly that she had liked it.

The next day Eneas marched his men back onto the Royal Highway. He scarcely glanced up at the viscount’s walled stronghold on the hill, but more than a few of the soldiers gave it a wistful look as it disappeared behind them.

“It’s just as well,” Eneas told Briony and his chief lieutenant, a serious young knight named Miron, Lord Helkis, who treated the prince with the respect normally given to a father, though Eneas was only a few years older. “They would only lose their edge in a city, anyway. Cities are terrible places—full of idlers and thieves and wicked women.”

“Truly?” Briony asked. “That seems a strange thing to say. Don’t your father and the rest of your family live in Tessis, the grandest city in Eion? Don’t you live there yourself?”

Eneas made a sour face. “That is not the same, my lady. I live there because I must, and only when I must, but I prefer to live in camp—or in my hall in the mountains.” His handsome face was serious—a little too serious, Briony thought. “Yes, that is a place you must see, Briony. From the upstairs windows you can see all the way down the valley—not a person in sight but a few shepherds and their flocks in the high meadows.”

“It sounds . . . very pretty. And I’m sure the shepherds like it, too. But is there nothing good to be said about cities—or the royal court?”

He looked at her a little mistrustfully, as though she might be trying to trick him. “You saw what a court is like. You heard them whispering about you. You saw what they did to you, because you are from a quieter, smaller place and not used to their ways.”

Briony raised her eyebrow. Her problem in Tessis had been that she had enemies, one of them the king’s mistress, not necessarily that she was an innocent country girl who did not understand how to protect herself. As if no one had ever tried to kill her until she got to Syan! She wondered if that was part of what Eneas liked about her—that he thought of her as little more than a peasant girl, although one who had a stubborn, forward streak.

“In any case, Highness,” she replied, “some of us like thing things that can be found in cities, and even at court—dancing and music, theater, markets full of things from other places ...” Just talking about it reminded her of the delight she had felt as a young girl when her father showed her some of the more exotic items to be found in Market Square, the stuffed lizard from Talleno that looked like a tiny dragon, the huge skull of a strange, horned animal from somewhere beyond the Xandian desert, even the chest of spices from that continent’s wet, hot jungles, not a one of them familiar except good Marashi pepper, which always made her nose wrinkle. She could still remember the anxious merchant, a little Kracian who had bounced up and down on his heels in front of the king, smiling and spreading his hands as if to say, “All this is mine!” Her father had bought the stuffed lizard, which had sat in her room for years until one of the dogs finally chewed it up.

Eneas was not thinking of the same kind of pleasant memories, to judge by the look on his face. “Cities! I despise them. I beg your pardon, Princess, but you cannot guess the kind of trouble they make for a ruler. The ideas that ordinary people get into their heads when they live in a city! All day long they see their neighbors wearing garments too fancy for their station, or they see nobles acting no better than the peasants themselves, until nobody knows where he belongs or what he is supposed to do. And theaters! Briony, I know you have a sentimental attachment to those players with whom you traveled, but you must know that most theaters are little better than . . . forgive my rough speech, I beg you, but it must be said . . . little better than brothels when it comes to the morals of the players. They parade in front of drunken men—some of the players dressed as women!—and frequently hire themselves out like common prostitutes. Again, I beg your pardon, but the truth must be told.”

Briony tried not to smile. It was true that many of the players were a little loose in their morals—the treacherous Feival Ulosian, for one, had kept a string of wealthy admirers up and down the north of Eion—but she just couldn’t see it with the same indignation Eneas felt. If the prince’s beloved shepherds were so much better behaved, it could only be for lack of human companionship out there on the windy hillsides. Then again, they couldn’t be as chaste as all that—little shepherds had to come from somewhere, didn’t they . . . ?

“And why shouldn’t ordinary people come together at a market or festival?” she said out loud. “Why would the gods have given us festivals if we were not supposed to enjoy them?”

Eneas shook his head. “That’s just it. They didn’t mean for such heedlessness to accompany their celebrations—they couldn’t have! If you had stayed in Tessis longer you would have seen the Great Zosimia, and then you would know the truth. People dancing naked in the streets! Common folk mocking the nobles—and the drunkenness and fornication! Again I beg your pardon, Princess Briony, but it is heartbreaking to see the lawlessness that has become ordinary in the cities. And not just on Great Zosimia but on Gestrimadi, Orphan’s Day, even Kerneia—you need but name it, and you will find another day when the common folk turn their backs on honest toil and think of nothing but wine and dancing!”

As grateful as she was to him, Briony was beginning to think that Eneas was in some ways a bit of an old stick. “But the nobles celebrate all these festival days and more besides. Why shouldn’t the common people have the same privilege? They have the same gods.”

Eneas frowned at her jest. “Of course they do. But it is the duty of the nobles to provide an example. The lower classes are like children—they cannot be allowed to do everything their elders are allowed to do. Would you permit a child to stay up all hours, drinking unwatered wine? Would you let a child go to the theater and see a man dressed up as woman kiss another man?”

Briony wasn’t sure what she thought. She had heard sentiments like the prince’s many times and had generally found herself agreeing—after all, if the common people could truly govern themselves then the gods would not have made kings and queens and priests and judges, would they? But this last year had made her look at things differently. Finn Teodoros, for instance, was one of the wisest people she’d ever met, and yet he was the son of a bricklayer. Nevin Hewney’s father had been a cobbler but Hewney was still acknowledged to be a great playwright, better than dozens of writers from more noble backgrounds. And even the people she had met on the road while she was traveling in disguise had seemed little different than the nobles of the Southmarch or Tessian court except in richness of clothing and sophistication of manners. Certainly her own brother Barrick always said that the lords and ladies of Southmarch were only perfumed peasants—wouldn’t the opposite be just as true, then, that the peasants themselves were only unbathed nobles . . . ?

“You have gone silent, my lady,” said Eneas with a worried look on his fine face. “I have been too free with talk of rough matters.”

“No,” she said. “No, not at all, Prince Eneas. I am just thinking about the things you’ve said.”

 

As they rode into the southeastern corner of Silverside, Briony discovered she could barely recognize her own country, her father’s and grandfather’s kingdom. There was little evidence out here of the siege of Southmarch, or in fact any trace of the fairy army at all—the Qar had passed far to the east when they marched down from beyond the Shadowline—but even in this relatively undisturbed spot, it felt as though Briony and the Syannese had arrived in the middle of an icy winter instead of a fairly mild spring. Fields lay fallow, and those that had been planted were barely half-seeded, as though there had not been enough people to do the work. In other places entire villages lay deserted, clusters of empty cottages like the nests of birds after fledgling season.

“The not knowing, that’s what it is.” The weary innkeeper was closing up his roadside hostel in the Argas River Valley and was only too happy to sell most of what he had left to the prince’s moving town. “First we were feared the Twilight People were coming this way—people said the fairies were burning all the towns north of the Syannese border. They never came, but people came through from the east, running away—people whose towns
were
burned up, and they had terrible tales to tell. That scared away lots of our local folk, right there. After a while, though, hardly anybody using the road did for most of the rest of us. There are still people in these parts, especially the ones up in the hills, or the towns with high walls, but the villages along the road are all but empty.” He shook his head, a man suddenly aged by fear and uncertainty. “And just like that, it all goes. You think it will never change but that’s a lie. Things can change in a day.”

In an hour,
thought Briony.
In a heartbeat.
She was saddened by the innkeeper’s confused, frustrated face, and saddened even more to know it would be a long time if ever before she could give these people any real help.

But here is something that the nobility can offer,
she thought.
In bad times, a king or a queen can be a rock for the waters to crash against, so those less strong are not washed away.

Qinnitan had only been awake a few confused moments when a glimpse of something manlike crawling on the beach drove her up the hills and into the forest. The thick morning fog hid the thing’s full shape, but the look of it frightened her badly: either it was Vo, crippled by the poison, or something demonic, an
affir
out of old nursery tales lurching crablike along the gray northern sands. Qinnitan had no urge to find out which.

She made her way up the hillside, trying to stay on grass to protect her feet but often having to clamber through the thick, scratchy shrubs that covered the slope like blotches on the face of a beggar. After a sizable part of an hour had passed, and she had put the beach far behind her, Qinnitan began to feel the sharp jab of hunger, a pain she welcomed because it came from a problem she might be able to do something about. The larger matter seemed hopeless: she was lost in an unfamiliar land, and even if she had truly escaped her captor and what she had seen on the beach had been only the last wisps of a dream, Qinnitan knew that there was little chance she would survive in the wilds for a tennight without help.

She stopped to rest near the top of the hill, in the middle of a stand of trees with slender white trunks shaded by delicate leaves. Each stand grew a decorous distance from its fellows so that the hilltop glen seemed a gathering of stout Zoaz-priests saluting the dawn. At first she was merely impressed by the number of trees and the profusion of light-shot greenery, so different from the shaded gardens of the Seclusion, but after climbing higher, she reached a place where the trees began to thin and Qinnitan saw the full extent of the woods and the white-capped mountains beyond. She fell to her knees.