Now it was the small woman who laughed. “Well, from now on they’ll have to call you Big Molly. But you’ll have to find another pitch, dear. This is my spot. See that? That’s the beer tent, over there, and they gamble there, too. They’ll come and throw in a copper and rub my head to keep the dice rolling.”
Briony had an idea. “Can you walk?”
“Good as you!” Little Molly was indignant. “Just not fast. Legs are too short, and . . . and I’m a bit lame.”
“Then come with me and I’ll give you . . .” she thought about what she had brought with her,” . . . say, five coppers. How’s that?”
Now the Funderling woman looked suspicious. “What do you want from me? And where did you get so much money?”
So much money! Briony almost wept. Little Molly, despite her cheeky attitude, was very thin and pale, as if she had not eaten well in some time. “Never you mind. Just come with me—I’m tired of those soldiers standing so close.”
The Funderling lifted herself to her feet and together they walked down the main track. The little woman went gingerly, as though she were showing Briony how it truly looked to have fragile, weak legs. “Broke them when I was little and they never healed right,” she explained. “That’s why everyone mistakes me for a dwarf.”
“What else can you tell me about the camp?” Briony asked. “Are all the men here or in the middle of Southmarch city? How long have they been firing on the castle?”
“A tennight, more or less,” Little Molly said. “But they were here for days before that.” She looked around, although at the moment they were in the open and more or less on their own. “They say that the autarch, he met with that Linden Tolly fellow in secret, face-to-face. Some sort of deal they were making, but it fell apart. Then the cannons started firing.” She shrugged. “Do you know what you want to know yet? I need to sit for a bit.”
“Sit, then.” Briony crouched down beside her. Across the bay, the last daylight had lit the top of Wolfstooth Spire as though it were a candle. “I have heard tales that the autarch is holding King Olin prisoner.”
“Oh, we’ve all heard that. Don’t know if it’s true. Why would he? What would the southerners want with our king?”
Yes, what indeed?
Briony wondered.
And we might also ask what game Hendon Tolly is playing—does he want to ransom my father for some reason of his own?
“So you don’t know anything about where the king might be kept if they had him?”
Little Molly gave her a hard look. “You ask some strange questions for a beggar-girl. Where’s my coppers? I won’t say another word until you give them to me, not another word . . . !”
Briony produced a silver coin from the purse hidden under her ragged clothes. “Here. That’s worth a dozen crabs at least. Now answer the question, please. Where might King Olin be?” Even as she spoke, she heard a strange, blatting horn call rise above the camp, a signal for evening prayer or else an alarm call—perhaps even the alarm about Eneas’ attack. Time was slipping away. “Tell me!”
Little Molly looked around in worried surprise; Briony could hear some of the men shouting to each other. Many others were hurrying in all directions across the camp, perhaps to get weapons or armor they had left in their tents. Eneas had made good his word. Now it was up to her.
“How would I know such a thing?” the little woman moaned. “Who are you? Why do you want to know such things?”
“You would not believe me if I told you, Molly, but I have given you what I promised—now earn it. Where would they keep an important prisoner?”
“But I don’t know! The mayor’s house in town, maybe. They used to keep prisoners there, I’ve heard, although maybe that’s when the goblins were here. Oh, and the Xixies have built a great pen on the city green for something—animals, everyone thinks. I heard some of the traders talking about it who brought in the metal—twenty wagonloads of iron bars just to make it! Can you imagine?”
Briony rose to her feet. “Keep the silver, Little Molly. May Zoria bless you.”
She left the Funderling woman looking after her in astonishment.
The fast-darkening evening was alive now with figures rushing past, with torches waving nearby and in the distance, and men’s loud, excited voices. She prayed that Eneas and his men would do as they said, striking only long enough to force the garrison to call for reinforcements before they fled back over the hills. The autarch’s troops would never follow them in the dark, and with luck would not send more than a token force to search for them the next day, assuming them to be local bandits or a surprise counterstrike by Hendon Tolly.
What was the purpose of Tolly’s parley with the autarch, if that had been more than just gossip—simply the southern monarch demanding the city’s surrender? But Hendon would never attend such a humiliation in person. Had he been trying to ransom Olin for some purpose of his own? A chill ran through her. What if the autarch no longer held her father? What if he was in Hendon Tolly’s hands now?
Briony had followed the track now all the way to Market Road, where the farmhouses and open land gave way to the true city. Buildings were packed in side by side here and the streets were narrow, which made avoiding soldiers more difficult, but evening had fallen and the encampment’s torches were too infrequently spaced to shed much light, which made her disguise better.
Even here, where the soldiers did not seem to be responding directly to the alarm horn, Briony could hear urgency in the voices of the passing men. Some leaned out of upper windows and called to Briony in Xixian; a few even came down to the doors and beckoned her in, but she only waved her hand in thanks and limped along as fast as she dared. Long-legged Dowan Birch had taught her how to keep her sinews loose even as she held a demanding pose which would otherwise quickly exhaust her, so she could continue this awkward, halting gait for a while more, but the constant ache of it was beginning to weary her badly.
She hurried over Grasshill Bridge and past the burned husk of a temple. When she was almost to the green Briony stepped off the main road, doing her best to make sure she wasn’t followed. Even in ordinary times the streets around Shoremarket after dark were a haunt of thieves and worse. She made her way a little distance south of the square, then onto the green, walking slowly toward the torches. Their light made the wide thing seem to glow, a sickly pale light like a mushroom crouching at night in the undergrowth.
The tent was a hundred paces across but only a dozen high at the center, guyed by dozens of ropes, a vast, peaked expanse of white that took up much of the center of the green where the city’s sheep had always been grazed. Torches blazed all around it, and several solders guarded not only its front entrance but the sides and doubtless the back as well. Briony was a little relieved to see there wasn’t much light beyond the ring of torches. As long as she kept a good distance away, she wouldn’t be seen while she tried to decide what to do.
She moved as quickly as she could along the edge of the green, staying in the shadows of trees or in the doorways of empty houses, of which there were more than a few. As she had feared, there were guard posts on each side, but the distance between them was large and the corners of the tent kept them from seeing each other. Shaso would have scoffed at whoever set out the sentries, she decided. The fool had made sure a spy would only have to avoid the eyes of one sentry post when approaching the building, which made the guards vulnerable to misdirection, among other things.
Briony did not need misdirection, though, because even as she watched from behind a well at one end of the green, a group of armored horsemen rode past with a great drumroll of hooves and clanging of weapons on shields, headed no doubt toward Millwheel Road and the besieged garrison—reinforcements. The jaws of the trap would close on Eneas soon if he didn’t put space between his company and this pack of hounds.
Merciful Zoria, help them find their way out in time!
Eneas was a good man—a wonderful, brave man. She cared for him, she had to admit, more than she sometimes realized. A thought struck her.
And help me, too, sweet goddess, please!
She had almost forgotten to pray for herself. She wondered if Zoria could be bribed and decided it couldn’t hurt to try.
If the Eddons regain the throne, I will build you a beautiful temple, Mistress!
As the reinforcing Xixians thundered by the men at the tent’s nearest guard post stepped out to watch them. Realizing that she would never have a better moment, Briony ran down the length of the green, waiting until the reinforcing troops had almost passed the tent. Then, with the guards now facing almost completely away from the nearest corner of the great tent, she broke from the trees along the edge and sprinted across the green, head held so low she had to fight against stumbling all the way. But perhaps Zoria had decided to accept her offered bargain. No one raised an alarm, and a few long moments later Briony was crouched near the corner of the tent where the light from the torches was dim, breathing far harder than she should have been just from running. She was terrified, but did not have enough time to consider that fact: she scrabbled at the bottom of the tent and found, as she had hoped, that there were bars beneath. She slid herself under the heavy fabric of the tent until she was squeezed between the canvas and the cold iron bars like a bed warmer slid between coverlet and mattress. There were some small lights at the far end of the tent, but it was otherwise dark beyond the bars, and the air stank of unwashed bodies so badly that Briony, who had been living among soldiers, still nearly squeezed herself back out of the tent again, despite the risk of being spotted.
As her breathing and the tripping of her heart slowed, Briony heard a sound very close by, a woman or a child quietly weeping. A moment later her breath caught at what sounded like murmured words in her own tongue. What prisoners were these? Was it some kind of brothel of captured Marchlander women? For a moment she entertained a feverish fantasy of waiting for the autarch here and stabbing him when he came to ravish another victim, but she knew even as the anger burned through her that it was a foolish and useless idea—the kind of scene that Nevin Hewney would have written after drinking too much.
“Who’s that crying?” she asked quietly. “Can you understand me?”
The weeping abruptly stopped.
“Where are you from?” she asked. She had given herself away now; she couldn’t turn back. If only it wasn’t so wretchedly dark! She had no idea how this prison tent might be set out—was it one big cage? Or were many separate cells grouped here under the ghostly tent? “Won’t anyone answer me?”
“Frightened,” a small voice told her from somewhere nearby. “Want to go home.”
“What’s your name?” she asked. “Why are you here?”
“Men took us. We’n been doin’ nought wrong. Came into village and took us, uns did.”
“Where did they take you from?”
“Mam?” said another voice, slightly older. “Did you come for us? Will you take us out from here?”
Zoria’s heart! Why had the autarch stolen Brennish children? “And you’re all prisoners?” Her heart seemed clenched like a fist. “Are there any grown-ups in here? An older man?” Would they know who her father was? “A king?”
“No king,” the small voice said, sniffling again. “Just us littl’uns.”
Before she could ask more questions, a sudden light flared on the other side of the pitch-black tent: someone had pulled back the flap and now stood in the opening with a torch. Briony crouched. More torches, more silhouetted figures—then the light dazzled her, and she had to look away. Briony stayed very still until she heard voices and the clang of an iron door opening and closing on the other side of the huge structure. The torches withdrew and the flap dropped, leaving the interior of the great tent pitch black again. Could the guards be looking for her?
“Can anyone else tell me if they know anything about why you’re prisoners, or whether the king of the Marchlands is one of the prisoners?”
When there was no reply Briony began to make her slow way around the exterior of the cage, still beneath the tent. She had to cross one doorway, but to her relief the flap was down and, judging by the voices of the guards, none of them were even looking back at the tent they were guarding. At last she reached the place where she judged the torches had been, the main entrance, but stopped short of the doorway.
She took a breath, but there was no sense hesitating, nor did she have the time—the guards might be coming back any moment. “Hello? Who’s here? Can anyone hear me?”
The voice, when it came, made her skin prickle all over. “What . . . ? Meriel? ”
“Praise Zoria! Father, is that you?” She pushed herself as close to the bars as she could. It was all she could do not to shout. “Father? It’s me! Oh, the gods are kind! Father!”
Suddenly, she could feel his presence. His hand came through the bars and found her face, which was already wet with tears. “By all the gods . . . ! Briony? Is that truly you?” Olin’s voice was hoarse, but it was undeniably his voice. “This is a miracle beyond belief! I was almost asleep . . . I thought . . . your voice; I thought it was your mother. Am I truly awake?”
“Yes, Father, yes! It’s me!” She clutched at him—he was so thin! Still, it was really her father, after all that time, clearly and plainly
him
. “I never thought I’d see you again!” She laughed through her tears. “I mean . . . I still can’t see you . . . !”
He was also laughing. “Are you well? What are you doing here? Gods, child, this makes no sense at all! Are you here by yourself?”
“I heard the autarch was holding you. I came to . . .” She couldn’t bear to waste time talking about it. “It’s a long story. But we have to get you out of here!”
“No, it is you who must get away from here, my lamb. They will be back soon to return me to my usual prison. They only put me here because someone attacked an outpost, and Vash feared it might be an attempt to rescue me. The autarch is out of the camp this evening and his minister is terrified something might go wrong while he’s away.”