Briony smacked her hand over his mouth so sharply that a less drunken man would have cried out in pain. “Don’t say it! Is the company all here? ”
“I sink tho . . . I mean, I think so. Big Dowan has gone to bed hours ago. I believe I saw Makewell chatting up a local merchant ...” He goggled at her again, as if not sure he wasn’t dreaming. “What are
you
doing here? And dressed . . . like that?”
“I’m not going to talk about it here. Round up Hewney and meet me in your room.”
“Feival?” Teodoros went pale. “Is this true?”
“True? Do you think I would lie? He betrayed me!”
“I’m sorry, Highness, I just wouldn’t have . . . that is . . . by the Trickster, who could have guessed?”
“Any of us, if we’d had any sense.” Nevin Hewney sat up, dripping. He had been dousing his head in a basin of water. “Always had a taste for the better things, our Feival. I said he’d leave us someday for a rich man . . . or even a rich woman. Well, he found one. And he doesn’t even have to swive her.”
“Hewney!” said Teodoros, shocked. “Not in front of the princess.”
Briony rolled her eyes. “None of it is new to me, Finn, just because I went back to being a princess—only my clothes changed.” She laughed sourly. “And look! I’m back in my old clothes again.”
The fat playwright looked miserable. “What will you do now, Highness?”
“What will I do? No, it is what
we
will do—and what we’ll do is leave tonight. Feival has named you all as my spies—said it in front of the king of Syan himself. There may be soldiers on the way here already.”
Hewney grunted. “That little whoreson!”
Finn blinked. “The king’s men?”
“Yes, you great fool, and be grateful I thought of coming to you. This way, at least you have a chance to escape. We’ll make for Southmarch.”
“But how? We have no money, no supplies . . . How will we get out the gates?”
“That remains to be seen.” She took the last of the gold Eneas had loaned her from her pocket—a shiny dolphin—and tossed it to Teodoros, who for all his consternation caught it smoothly. “Take it and get on with things. I’ll wait here while you round up the others. Are they close?”
Finn looked around. “Most of them. Estir’s out somewhere. And tall Dowan went out, too. Bathed and shaved.” He goggled. “I think he might have a woman!”
“I don’t care, Finn, but we need them all back, and quickly.”
“Me, I’m going to get a jug of wine to take with us,” announced Nevin Hewney. “If I’m to die, may the gods forbid it’s sober.”
Finn Teodoros also stood. “May the gods watch over us all,” he said. “It seems the life of a princess is never dull, and almost always dangerous. For once I am glad my veins run thick with peasant blood.”
30
Light atthe Bottom of the Stairs
“The Soterian monk and scholar Kyros believed strongly that the Qar were not things of flesh and blood but instead the unshriven souls of mortal men who lived before the founding of the Trigonate Church. Phayallos disputes this, saying that the fairies, ‘while often monstrous, are clearly living creatures.’”
—from “A Treatise on the Fairy Peoples of Eion and Xand”
E
VEN THE OPEN SKY felt dangerous, but people were gathering again in the little square in front of the Throne hall, setting up stalls, haggling over what someone had discovered in their root cellar or the morning’s meager catch of small fish from the unguarded East Lagoon. Like everyone else, Matt Tinwright kept looking fearfully over his shoulder, but although the massive black trunks of the Twilight People’s thorn bridge still bent above the castle’s outer walls, the immense, bristling shadows throwing much of Market Square into darkness, the fairy folk themselves had truly left the outer keep.
Not left for good, though, Tinwright feared: from atop the walls they could still be seen through the smoke and mist, moving around in their camp on the mainland as though the slaughter of the last few days had never happened.
Nobody trusted this sudden peace because the retreat itself made no sense. The creatures had entirely overrun the castle’s walls, a swarm of horrors like demons out of a temple fresco; despite the best efforts of Avin Brone, Durstin Crowel, and even Hendon Tolly himself, the fairies had utterly routed the humans from the outer keep. Much of Market Square and the great Trigonate temple had been burned—parts of the neighborhood just southwest of the gate wall were still smoldering. The streets of the inner keep were now clogged with human wreckage, those without homes huddling against the walls in tents made from scraps of cloth, untreated wounded lying everywhere, so that it looked as though some great flood had crashed through the Raven Gate and broken against the throne hall, scattering flotsam on all sides. Tinwright had seen sights already this morning that would haunt his sleep for years—children still black with burns, beyond help but still pitifully crying, whole families ill or starving, slumped in a fevered pile outside shuttered houses, warmth and help only a few uncrossable yards away.
But then yesterday, after all this destruction, after bringing such horror to so many, the Twilight People had simply stopped their siege of the inner keep as though hearing a silent call and had begun an orderly retreat. They took nothing, not prisoners, not gold—the ruined but otherwise untouched Trigonate temple was now surrounded by Hendon Tolly’s men to keep out looters—and disappeared back into the mist as though the entire siege had been nothing more than a murderously bad dream.
But whatever the reason, Matt Tinwright, like his fellow Southmarch citizens, had been given some breathing space—he could not afford to spend it wondering about the fairies and their incomprehensible motives. He had a family to provide for now, of sorts: Elan and his mother were staying with Puzzle’s niece in Templeyard, a relatively quiet neighborhood in the southwestern part of the keep, but the pantries were bare and, in a household of women, the task of going out into the city for food had of course fallen to Tinwright. He hadn’t wanted to be the one to do the marketing, but even the narrow streets of Templeyard were so full of refugees he feared to send any of the women out on their own. He was also terrified that his mother, full of self-righteous prattle as always, might say something in public that would give away who the girl she was caring for truly was.
So, as seemed to be his lot these days, he had been left with two bad alternatives, sending his mother out for food or going himself, and had chosen the one that seemed least dangerous.
It was strange, Tinwright thought as he made his way through the unsettled crowds, stepping over the helpless and trying to harden his heart against the pleading of injured men or mothers with hungry children. The soldiers who only a scant day earlier had been fighting on the walls against creatures out of legend were now forced to break up scuffles between hungry Southmarch folk. Just in front of him now two men were wrestling in the mud over a scrawny marrow grown in someone’s window box. For a moment he considered making it the subject of a poem—how different from the usual matters!—but Matt Tinwright was serving so many masters that he had no time even to think these days, let alone write. Still, it was an interesting idea—a poem about people fighting over a vegetable. It certainly said more about the times he lived in than a love poem written for a courtier on the subject of a young woman’s white throat.
He was on his way back from Market Square with a slightly moldy heel of bread rolled in his cloak beside a small onion and his most exciting find, a length of dried eel that had taken most of his shopping money. The eel stews his mother had made were one of the few happy memories of his childhood. Anamesiya Tinwright had only bought eels on the days the boats came back with too many and the prices were low, so the meal had been a treat that would bring both Matt and his father to the table early, hands and faces washed, mouths watering in anticipation.
I should see if I can find some Marashi pepper pods somewhere in this wreckage of a city . . .
he was thinking when he abruptly found himself face to face with Okros, the royal physician, who had just stepped out of the doorway of a chicken butcher’s yard.
“Oh! Good day, my lord,” said Tinwright, startled, his heart suddenly drumming.
Does he know I know him? Have we ever actually spoken, or have I only spied on him?
Okros himself looked, if anything, more startled than the poet. He had something under his cloak—something alive, it quickly became clear. Even as the smaller man tried to step past Tinwright, a bright, desperate eye and yellow beak popped out where Okros was trying to hold the garment closed at his neck. It was a rooster, and quite a handsome one from its brief appearance, with a red comb and shiny black feathers.
Okros barely glanced at Tinwright, as if it might hurt to look someone directly in the eye. “Yes, yes,” he said, “good day.” A moment later he was gone, hurrying back toward the castle as though possessing a chicken might be a crime against the throne.
Perhaps he is afraid of being robbed
, Tinwright thought.
Some people here would kill for a smaller meal than that.
But the whole encounter seemed strange. Surely there were more birds to be found in the castle residence than down here in the ruins of the outer keep—and why should the physician seem so furtive?
As he made his way back up the hill toward the Inner Keep a memory floated just beyond Tinwright’s reach—something from a book he had read, one of his father’s . . .
The love of reading might have been the only gift the old man had given him, he sometimes thought, but it had been a good one: a nearly endless supply of books, mostly borrowed (or perhaps stolen, Matt Tinwright suddenly thought now) from the houses where Kearn Tinwright had been a tutor—Clemon, Phelsas, all the classics, as well as lighter fare like the poetry of Vanderin Uegenios and the plays of the Hierosoline and Syannese masters. Reading Vanderin had inspired young Matt with visions of a courtly life, a career of being admired by fine ladies and rewarded with gold by fine gentlemen. Strange that he should finally be living that life and yet be so cursedly miserable . . .
The thing that had been tickling his memory came to him suddenly—some lines from Meno Strivolis, the Syannese master poet of two centuries earlier:
And took she then the black cockerel
Laid it on the stone, took up her sharp knife
Let out the salt wine that Kernios drinks . . .
That was all—just a morsel from Meno about Vais, the infamous witch-queen of Krace, a few lines which spoke of a black cockerel like the one the physician had been hiding. Nothing else to it—but it
was
odd that Okros should come so far just to buy poultry. Better and fatter birds could be found in the residence henyard, surely . . .
But perhaps not birds of that particular color,
Tinwright thought suddenly. More of the poem had come to him:
Always it is blood that calls the High Ones
From their mountaintops and hidden shadows
From their deep forests and ocean strongholds,
And blood that binds them, so they may be asked
To grant to a soliciting subject
Some gift, or ward ’gainst threatening evil . . .
The fear that had seized him when he bumped into Okros came back to him threefold, so that for a moment Matt Tinwright couldn’t walk straight and had to stop in the middle of the narrow street. People shoved past him with angry words, but he barely heard them.
So it was she spilled the cockerel’s blood
And prayed the ancient Earthlord give to her
Deathly power against her enemies . . .
Could that be the reason? Had Okros walked all the way down from the safety of the residence to the outer keep because he needed a rooster of just the right color for some kind of ritual? Did it have something to do with the mirror Brone wanted to know about?
Full of confused, fearful thoughts, but also afire with excitement that felt a bit like a fever, Matt Tinwright hurried back across the crowded, brawling inner keep.
His mother was predictably furious. “What do you mean you are going out again? I need wood for the fire! It is all well for you to come in here like some petty lordling, calling for eel stew, demanding that I break my back cooking. What devilry are you up to?”
“Thank you, Mother, and a good day to you, too. But I am not going out quite yet.” He bent his head so he could go up the narrow stairwell without dashing out his brains.
Elan was sitting up in the large bed she was sharing with Puzzle’s grand-nieces, working at a bit of embroidery. He was glad to see her stronger, but she still had the haunted look he had hoped to see banished from her face forever.
“My lady, are you alone?”
She smiled grimly. “As you see. The girls are visiting the neighbors’, trying to cozen an extra blanket—their mother and yours are now sleeping on the couch downstairs, if you remember.”
He did. The whispered struggles of the two older women crammed together on the narrow couch like two bad-tempered skeletons in a single coffin were the reason he was back sleeping with Puzzle in the crowded royal residence, unsatisfying as that was. “I saw Brother Okros in the market place. Do you know anything of him?”
Elan gave him a strange look. “What do you mean? I know he is Hendon’s physician. I know he is full of odd ideas ...”
“Like what?”
“About the gods, I think. I never paid much attention when he was at table with us. He would talk on and on about alchemy and the holy oracles. Some of it seemed blasphemous to me ...” She curled her lip. “But blasphemy never bothered Hendon.”
“Does he . . . have you ever heard that he is a magic-worker?”
Elan shook her head. “No, but as I said, I scarcely know him. He and Hendon would often talk late at night, at strange hours, as if Okros were working at some important task for him that could not wait. Hendon once had a man beaten almost to death for interrupting him during an afternoon nap but he never lost his temper with Okros.”