Once they had negotiated a small but adequate bribe with the guards in the gatehouse they were allowed into Ugenion. They followed the funeral as it wound up the hilly main road toward the temple at the center of the town.
“He was a wealthy man, too, from the look of all this,” said Finn as they had their first look at the entire procession spread out on the road before them. “But I have heard no word of funeral games, which is usual here even after the deaths of lesser men. Perhaps it is the fear of what is happening in the north.”
“And the south,” said Briony sadly. “Poor Hierosol.” The jolting of the wagon sent her away from the window to sit on the floor. Where was her father this moment? Alive? A prisoner, still? If Hierosol collapsed, would the autarch be willing to ransom him? And what difference would that make if neither she nor Barrick had access to the Southmarch treasury?
Could it really be true that her twin had come back to Southmarch? That alone would make something good out of the darkest spring Briony Eddon had ever known.
“You look solemn, Princess,” said Finn. “As if you knew the poor soul who is being carried to the temple.”
“I’m just . . . it’s all so uncertain. Everything. What will I do when I get to Southmarch? What if the fairies have already taken the castle?”
Finn turned away from the window. “Then things will be very different from when we left. You cannot try to outthink the Qar, my lady, because they are not like men. Please indulge me in believing this one thing to be true—I know a little of them, after all.”
“Why? Did you . . . did you write a play about them?” She tried to make it a light remark, but her sadness and bitterness spilled through. “About their charming elfin magic and how they use it to kidnap and murder innocent folk?”
Finn raised his eyebrows. “I have of course used the Twilight folk as characters in my plays, and in many different ways. If I have erred in portraying them, I suspect it was on the side of making them more mysterious and fearful than they are, rather than using them as quaint purveyors of magic rings and reassuring rewarders of blockheaded virgins. But in fact, I gained my knowledge of them in a very odd and unusual way for a playwright—I studied them.”
“What do you mean?
“What I have said, Highness. No disrespect, but perhaps you would rather rest a little rather than talk. You seem to me a bit out of sorts.”
She closed her eyes and tried to calm the anger that was bubbling in her, but she was not entirely successful. “I’m sorry, Finn. Don’t go. I have good reason to be angry, though and so would you. Leaving out all of my innocent subjects they have harmed, my brother—my own twin!—is missing or dead and it is those creatures’ fault. And they also took someone ...” She hesitated, then wondered what she would have said about Vansen. “Someone I considered a friend. Like my brother, he never came back from Kolkan’s Field. So I am not disposed to hear much good of these Qar.”
“Fear not—I said I studied them, Highness, not that I became one. Lord Brone set me to finding out all that I could about the Peaceful Ones, as they are euphemistically termed. Paid me well for my work, too—more than I’ve made for any of my plays so far, whether they had fairies in them or not.”
She laughed a little in spite of herself. “Tell me, then, Finn. What do you know about them?”
“I know that I do not understand them, Princess Briony. I also know that they have some great interest in Southmarch, but not why that is so.”
“Because it stands in their way, does it not? Anglin, the founder of our line, was given the castle to be the first bastion against the Twilight People’s return. We have held that a sacred trust ever since.”
“And where did they first attack this time, Highness?”
She remembered pathetic young Raemon Beck. “Somewhere on the road to Settland. They destroyed a trader’s caravan.”
“And if that was where they began, why would they then travel a hundred leagues east from there to attack Southmarch? They could have gone west to Settland, a much weaker target, or if they wanted spoils they could have headed south into the Esterian Valley, full of fat merchant towns far from King Enander’s protection. The northern end of that valley is twice as far from Tessis as the place they took the caravan is from Southmarch.”
“What are you saying, Finn?”
“That what they have done makes little sense but for two possibilities. They came against us for revenge, pure and simple, or there is some other advantage they see to conquering Southmarch—and not the entire country, but only the castle itself. They destroyed everything they encountered on their march toward your family’s stronghold, but they left Daler’s Troth, Kertewall, and Silverside untouched.”
“But why?” It was a moan: Briony did not need any new mysteries. As it was, she struggled just to live day to day with so many unanswered questions about her nearest and dearest. “Why do they bear us such hatred?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know, Highness.”
“Then find out. That is your calling from now on.”
The fat playwright looked startled. “Princess . . . ?”
“If my father does not return—Zoria grant mercy that he does, but if he does not—then I must have help. I must understand the things my father and even my oldest brother spent years learning. It is obvious that the Qar will be one of the things I must try to understand. I know of no one else who knows even as much as you do, Finn. Are you my subject? ”
“Princess Briony, of course I honor you and your family ...”
“Are you my subject?”
He blinked once, twice, taken aback by her ferocity. “Certainly I am, Highness. I am a loyal Marchman and you are the king’s daughter.”
“Yes, and until something changes, I am the Princess Regent. Remember, Finn, I count you a friend, but we cannot have things both ways. I cannot ever go back to being ‘Tim’ again. I will never be a mere player, even if for this moment I hide among you. My people need me, and I will do whatever I must to serve them . . . and to lead them.”
His smile was weak. “Of course, Highness. I shall count myself honored indeed to be the Royal . . . what shall we call it? Historian?”
“You shall be
a
Royal Historian, Teodoros, that is certain.” She was satisfied to see him wince, not because she disliked the round man, but because she needed him to understand how things stood now. “Whether there are others will depend on how well you do your job.”
The wagon rolled to a halt and Briony heard raised voices. Worried, she patted at her knives, which she had taken to carrying in a bundle in her sleeve. A fair amount of time passed and still they sat unmoving; at last, Estir Makewell stuck her head inside the wagon.
“Why have we stopped?” Finn asked.
“Pedder and Hewney are talking to a reeve and two or three bully-boys,” she said. “It seems the king’s guards have been here twice in the last tennight, asking questions about certain travelers ...” she cast a worried look at Briony, “ . . . and so the reeves are stopping all the strangers they meet and asking their business, where they have been, and suchlike.”
“Shall I come out?” asked Finn.
“You can, but I think my brother is managing fairly. Still, they may ask to look into the wagon. What will we say if they ask to see inside?”
“Let them, of course,” Briony said. “Finn, give me your knife so I don’t have to unwrap mine.”
Both Estir and the playwright goggled at her.
“Oh, come! I’m not going to fight the reeves with it! I’m going to cut off my hair again.” She took a hank in her hand and sadly examined it. “Just when it was beginning to look as it used to. But such vanity is of no help. I played the boy before, I will do it again.”
By the time a red-faced man stuck his head into the wagon, Briony was wearing one of Pilney’s old shepherd outfits, squatting on the floor at the feet of Finn Teodoros and mending the strap of one of the playwright’s shoes.
“Who are you,” said the reeve to Finn, “and why do you ride when the owner walks?”
“I might as well ask, who are you, sir?”
“I am Puntar, the king’s reeve—you can ask any man hereabouts.” He squinted at Briony for a moment, then let his eyes rove around the crowded wagon stuffed with costumes, taking in the wooden props and hats hanging from every open place. “Players . . . ?”
“Of a sort,” said Finn quickly. “But if my friend told you he was the owner, he was lying—drunk, most likely.” He gave Estir Makewell a stern glance before she could utter any outraged defense of her brother. “Poor man. He owned this enterprise once, but long ago gambled it away. Lucky for him that I kept him on when I bought it.”
“And who are you?” the reeve demanded.
“Why, Brother Doros of the Order of the Oracle Sembla, at your service.”
“You are a priest? Traveling with
women?
”
For a moment Finn faltered, but then he saw that the reeve was pointing at Estir Makewell, not Briony. “Oh,
her
. She is a cook and seamstress. Don’t worry for her somewhat shopworn virtue, sir. The brothers are a pious, sympathetic lot—if you don’t believe me, ask the bearded one we call Nevin to tell you something about the dreadful martyrdom of Oni Pouta, raped over and over by Kracian barbarians. The man weeps as he describes it, so carefully has he studied this and other lessons the gods give us.”
The reeve now looked thoroughly confused. “But what . . . what are all these costumes? How can you be priests and yet be players?”
“We are not players, not truly,” Finn said. “We are in truth on a pilgrimage to Blueshore in the north, but it is the work of our order to put on shows for the unwashed, acting out pious lessons from the lives of the oracles and the
Book of the Trigon
so that the unlettered can understand what might otherwise be too subtle for them. Would you like to see us portray the flaying of Zakkas? He screams most beautifully, then is saved by a winged avatar of the gods ...”
But the reeve was already making his excuses. Estir Makewell led him back out of the wagon, pausing to glare back at Finn before she went down the steep, tiny stairs.
“Did you make all that up?” Briony asked quietly when he was gone. “I have never heard such nonsense!”
“Then, like the oracles themselves, I was speaking with the tongues of the gods,” said Finn in a self-satisfied manner, “because as you can see, he is gone and we are safe. Now, let us find a place to stop tonight and discover what pleasure this city has to offer.”
“They are in mourning for their baron here,” Briony pointed out.
“All the more reason, you will discover as you grow older, to celebrate the fact that the rest of us are alive.”
It was not always possible for the players to convince local authorities that they were pilgrims on their way to Blueshore. In the larger towns they sometimes got out the juggling tools and let Hewney and Finn deploy the troop’s collection of rings and clubs to earn a few coppers while the others gathered up local gossip and news of bigger events. Hewney was quite nimble when he was sober, but fat Finn was a revelation, able to juggle even torches and knives without harm.
“Where did you learn to do that?” Briony asked him.
“I was not always as you see me now, Highness,” her royal historian said with a sniff. “I have been on the road since I was small. I have made my living in ways honest and . . . not so much. Most of my juggling I had from my first master, Bingulou the Kracian—he was the best I have ever seen. Men used to go straight to church after watching him, certain that the gods had granted a miracle ...”
Two things they heard again and again wherever they stopped, in every town or city of the Esterian Valley: that the Syannese soldiers had not given up looking for them, and that strange things were going on in the north. Many of those they questioned, especially the traders and religious mendicants who traveled there frequently, spoke of a sort of darkness that seemed to have settled over the March Kingdoms—not just the weather, although to all it seemed grayer and cloudier than the season warranted, but a darkness of the heart as well. The roads were empty, the travelers said, and the fairs and markets that were always such an important part of the year were poorly attended if they were held at all. City dwellers were reluctant to travel, and those country folk who could do so had moved into the cities for safety, or at least huddled now in the shadows of their walls.
At the same time, though, not even those who had been there most recently, such as a tinker they met north of Doros Kallida, could describe exactly what was happening. Everyone agreed that the Twilight People had come down out of the mist-shrouded north, just as they had two centuries before, and had destroyed Candlerstown and several other cities as they moved on Southmarch. But the siege that had begun before Briony left home seemed to have been prosecuted for most of the time since in a most strangely offhand manner, with the fairies camped almost peaceably outside the walls for months, and no fighting at all between shadowlanders and men.
But more recently that had changed, the tinker told them, or so he had heard from other travelers he had met farther north. Sometime in the last few tennights the siege had resumed, this time in earnest, and the reports were horrendous and frightening, almost impossible to credit—giant tree-creatures pulling down the walls of Southmarch, the outer keep in flames, demon-things slaughtering the defenders and raping and murdering helpless citizens.
“By now it must surely be over, may the gods help them,” the man said piously, making the sign of the Three. “There can be nothing left.”
Briony was so miserable after hearing the tinker’s words that she could scarcely speak for the rest of the day.
“These are only traveler’s tales, Highness,” Finn told her. “Do not take them to heart. Listen to a historian, one who searches such tales for truth—the first reports, especially if they are passed by people who were not there, are always far more grisly and exaggerated than what has actually happened.”