Exiles
,
If, as many of the Deep Voices believe, the darkness is just as much a
something as is the light, then which came first after Nothingthe dark or the light?
The songs of the oldest voices claim that without a listener there can be no
first word: the darkness was until the light became. The lonely Void gave
birth to the Light of love, and afterward they made all that would bethe good and bad, the living and unliving, the found and lost.
— from One Hundred Considerations, out of the Qar's Book of Regret
IT WAS A TERRIBLE DREAM. The young poet Matt Tinwright was declaiming a funeral ode for Barrick, full of high-flown nonsense about the loving arms of Kernios and the warm embrace of the earth, but Briony watched in horror as her twin brother's casket rocked and shook. Something inside was struggling to escape, and the old jester Puzzle was doing his best to hold down the lid, clinging with all the strength of his scrawny arms as the lid creaked and the box shuddered beneath him.
Let him out, she wanted to cry, but could not-the veil she wore was SO tight that words could not pass her lips. His arm, his poor crippled arm! How it must pain him, her poor dead Barrick, having to struggle like that in such a confined place.
Others at the funeral, courtiers and royal guards, helped the jester hold the lid down, then together they hustled the box out of the chapel. Briony hurried after them, but instead of the grass and sun of the graveyard, the chapel doorway led directly downward into a warren of dark stone tunnels. Tangled in her cumbersome mourning garments, she could not keep up with the hurrying mourners and quickly lost sight of them; soon all she could hear were the muffled gasps of her twin, the coffined prisoner, the beloved corpse-but even those noises were growing fainter and fainter and fainter..
Briony sat up, heart fluttering in her chest, and discovered herself in a chilly darkness pierced by the bright, distant eyes of stars. The boat rocked under her, the oars creaking quietly in their locks as the Skimmer girl Ena slipped them in and out of the water with the smooth delicacy of an otter sporting in a quiet cove.
Only a dream! Zoria be praised! Barrick is still alive, then-I would know it if he wasn't, I'm sure of it. But although the rest of the terrible fancy had melted like fog, the rasping of labored breath hadn't. She turned to find Shaso dan-Heza slumped over in the boat behind her, eyes closed, teeth clenched so that they gleamed with reflected starlight in his shadowed face. Air scraped slowly in and out; the old Tuani warrior sounded near death.
"Shaso? Can you talk to me?" When he did not reply, Briony grabbed at the thin, hard shoulder of the Skimmer girl. "He's ill, curse you! Can't you hear him?"
"Of course I can hear him, my lady." The girl's voice was surprisingly hard. "Do you think I am deaf?"
"Do something! He's dying!"
"What do you want me to do, Princess Briony? I cleaned and bound his wounds before we left my father's house, and gave him good tangle-herb for physick, but he is still fevered. He needs rest and a warm fire, and even then it may not do him any good."
"Then we need to get ashore! How far to the Marrinswalk coast?"
"Half the night more, my lady, at the best. That is why I have turned back."
"Turned back? Have you lost your mind? We are fleeing assassins! The castle is held by my enemies now."
"Yes, enemies who will hear you if you shout too loudly, my lady."
Briony could barely make out the face beneath the hooded cloak, but she didn't need to see to know she was being mocked. Still, Ena was right in at least one thing: "All right, I'll talk more quietly-and you will speak to the point! What are you doing? We cannot go to the castle. Shaso will
die there more surely than if we were to push him into the water this mo¬ment. And I'll be killed, too."
"I know, my lady. I did not say I was going to take you back to the cas¬tle, I only said I had turned back. We need shelter and a fire as soon as pos¬sible. 1 am taking you to a place in the bay to the east of the castle-Skean Egye- Var my people call it-'Erivor's Shoulder' in your tongue."
"Erivor's Shoulder? There is no such place…!"
"There is, and there is a house upon it-your family's house."
"There is no such place!" For a moment Briony, faced with Shaso dying in her arms, was so full of rage and terror that she almost hit the girl. Then she suddenly understood. "M'Helan's Rock! You mean the lodge on M'Helan's Rock."
"Yes. And there it is." The Skimmer girl stilled her oars and pointed at a dark bulk on the near horizon. "Praise the Deep Ones, it looks empty."
"It ought to be-we did not use it this summer, with Father away and all else that has happened. Can you land there?"
"Yes, if you'll let me think about what I am doing, my lady. The currents are sharp at this hour of the night, just before morning."
Briony fell into anxious silence while the Skimmer girl, moving her oars as deftly as if they were an extension of her own arms, directed the pitch¬ing boat in a maddeningly slow circle around the island, searching for the inlet between the rocks.
Always before Briony had come to the island on the royal barge, stand¬ing at the rail far above the water as the king's sailors leaped smartly from place to place to make sure the passage would be smooth, and so she had never realized just how difficult a landing it was. Now, with the rocks loom¬ing over her head like giants and the waves lifting and dropping Ena's little craft as though it were a bit of froth in a sloshing bucket, she found herself hanging on in silent dread, one hand clamped on the railing, the other clutching a fold of the thick, plain shirt the Skimmers had given Shaso, doing her best to keep the old man upright.
Just as it seemed the Skimmer girl had misjudged the rocks, that their boat must be shattered like bird bones in a wolf's jaws, the oars dug hard into the dark water and they slid past a barnacled stone so closely that Briony had to snatch back her hand to save her fingers. The wooden hull scraped ever so briefly, just enough to send a single thrill of vibration through the tiny boat, and then they were past and into the comparatively quiet inlet.
"You did it!"
Ena nodded, studiously calm as she rowed them across the inlet to the floating dock shackled to the rock wall. Just a few yards away, on the ocean side, the waves thumped and roared like a thwarted predator, but here the swell was gentled. When the boat was tied, they dragged Shaso's limp weight out of the boat and managed to haul him up the short ladder and onto the salt-crusted dock where they had to let him drop.
Ena slumped down into a crouch beside Shaso's limp form. "I must rest… just for a bit…" she said, her head sagging.
Briony thought about how hard and how long the Skimmer girl had worked, rowing for hours to get them away from the castle to the safety of this inlet. "I've been ungrateful and rude," she told the girl. "Please forgive me. Without your help, Shaso and I both would have been dead long ago."
Ena said nothing, but nodded. It was possible that, in the depths of her hooded cloak she might have smiled a little, but the night was too dark for Briony to be sure.
"While you two rest, I'm going to go up to the lodge and see what I can find. Stay here." Briony draped her own cloak over Shaso, then climbed the stairway cut into the stone of the inlet wall. It was wide, and even though the worn steps were slippery with spray and the dewy mists of night, it was so familiar that she could have climbed it in her sleep. For the first time she began to feel hopeful. She knew this place well and she knew its comforts. She had been resigned to spending her first exiled night in a cave on a Marrinswalk beach, or sleeping in the undergrowth on the lee side of a sea-cliff-at least here she would find a bed.
The lodge on M'Helan's Rock had been built for one of Briony's an¬cestors, Ealga Flaxen-Hair, by her husband King Aduan-a love-tribute some said; a sort of prison others claimed. Whatever the truth, it was only fading family gossip now, the principals dead for a hundred years or more. In Briony's childhood the Eddons had spent at least a tennight on the is¬land each summer, and sometimes much longer than that. Her father Olin had liked the seclusion and quiet of the place, and that he could keep a much smaller court there, often bringing only Avin Brone for counsel, a dozen or so servants, and a skeleton force of guards. As children, Briony and Barrick had discovered a slender, difficult hillside path down to a sea-meadow (as many other royal offspring had doubtless done before them) and had loved having a place where they could often spend an entire af¬ternoon on their own, without guards or any other adults at all. To children who spent nearly every moment of their lives surrounded by servants and soldiers and courtiers, the sea-meadow was a paradise and the summer lodge a place of almost entirely happy memories.
Briony found it very strange to be walking up the front steps alone under the stars. The familiar house, which should be spilling welcoming light from each window, was so deep in darkness she could scarcely make out its shape against the sky. As with so much else this year, and especially these last weeks, here was another treasured part of her life turned higgle-piggle, another memory stolen and mishandled by the Eddon family's enemies.
The memory of Hendon Tolly's mocking face came to her with a stab of cold fury, his amusement at her helplessness as he told her how he was going to steal her family's throne. You may not be the only one responsible for what's happened to our family, you Summerfield scum, but you're the one I know, the one I can reach. In that moment she felt as chill and hard as the stones of the bay. Not tonight-but someday. And when that day comes, I'll take the heart out of you the way you've taken mine. Only yours won't be beating when I'm done.
She did not bother with the massive front door, knowing it would be locked, but walked around to the kitchen, which had a bad bolt that could be wiggled loose. As expected, a few good thumps and the door swung open, but it was shockingly dark inside. Briony had never been in the place at night without at least a few lamps glowing, but now it was as lightless as a cave, and for a terrified moment she could not make herself enter. Only the thought of Shaso lying on the chilly dock, suffering, perhaps dying, fi¬nally forced her through the open doorway.
Locked in a cell for months, and it was my fault-mine and Barrick's. She frowned. Yes, and a bit of blame on his own cursed stiff neck as well…
She managed to find her way by touch to the kitchen fireplace, although not without a few unpleasant encounters with cobwebs. Things skittered in the darkness around her-just mice, she promised herself. After some searching, and many more cobwebs, she located the leather-wrapped flint and fire-iron in its niche in the stone chimney with a handful of oil-soaked firestarters beside it. After a little work Briony struck a spark, and soon a small blaze caught in the firestarters, which gave her the courage to knock over a spidery pile of logs and throw on a few of the smaller branches so the fire could begin growing into something useful. She considered setting a fire in the main hall fireplace as well. The thought made her ache with the memory of her lost father, who had always insisted on lighting that lire as his own personal task, but she knew it would be foolish to show light at
the front of the house, on the side facing Southmarch Castle. Briony doubted anyone would see it without looking through a spyglass, even from the castle walls, but if there were any night that Hendon Tolly and his men might be on the walls doing just that, it would be tonight. The kitchen would be refuge enough.
The front of the summer house was still darkly unfamiliar as she went back down the steep path, but the knowledge that a fire now burned in the kitchen made it a friendlier place, and this time she had a shuttered lantern in her hand so she could see where she was putting her feet.
So, we've lived through the first day-unless someone saw the boat and they're coming after us. Startled by the thought, she looked toward the castle, but al¬though she saw a few lights moving on the walls, there was no obvious sign of pursuit by water. And if someone came to search M'Helan's Rock be¬fore she and Shaso could depart? Well, she knew the island and its hiding places better than almost anyone else. But, what am I doing? she asked her¬self. I shouldn't tempt the gods by even thinking such things…
Shaso was able to walk a little, but the two young women had to do most of the work getting him up the stairway; it was a mark of how weak he was, how close to utter collapse, that he did not protest.
When they reached the lodge Briony found blankets to wrap around the old man, then sat him in a corner near the kitchen fireplace, propped on cushions she had pilfered from the over-furnished sitting room known as the Queen's Withdrawing Chamber. The girl Ena had already begun to search through the few odds and ends left in the cupboards in hopes of adding to the food she had brought from her house beside Skimmer's La¬goon, but Briony knew the pantries would be empty. Supper would be dried fish again.
Dried fish was a great deal better than starvation, she reminded herself, but since Briony Eddon had never in her life come anywhere near starv¬ing, that was a purely academic sort of comfort.
After having been fed the first mouthful or two of fish broth, Shaso made it very clear he was going to feed himself. Although still too weary and ill to speak, he managed to get enough soup into his stomach that Briony felt confident for the first time that the old man would survive the night. Now she could feel her own exhaustion pulling at her. She pushed her bowl aside and stared at it, fighting to keep her head upright.
"You,are tired, Highness,"said Ena. Briony could not easily read the girl's expressions, but she thought she saw kindness there, and a surprising, calm strength. It made her feel a little ashamed of her own frailty. "Go and find a bed. I will look after Shaso-na until he falls asleep."
"But you are tired yourself. You rowed that boat all night!"
"It is something I was raised to do, like swimming and mending nets. I have worked harder-and for less cause."
Briony stared at the girl for a moment, at the huge, round dark eyes and the naked brow shiny as soapstone. Was she pretty? It was too hard to say, too many things about her were unusual, but looking at the intelligent gaze and strong, regular features, Briony guessed that among her own kind Ena might be considered pretty indeed.
"Very well," she said, surrendering at last. "You are most kind. I'll take a candle and leave you the lamp. We have bedding in the chest in the hall- I'll leave some out for you and for Shaso."
"He will sleep where he is, I think," said Ena quietly, perhaps to spare Shaso the shame of being talked about like a child. "He should be com¬fortable enough."
"When this is over and the Tollys are rotting on the gibbet, the Eddons will not forget their friends." The Skimmer girl showed no emotion at this, so Briony tried to make herself clear. "You and your father will be rewarded."
Now Ena definitely did smile, even looked as though she might be sti¬fling laughter, which confounded Briony utterly, but she only said, "Thank you, Highness. It is my honor to do what I can."
Puzzled, but too weary to think about it, Briony felt her way to the nearest bedchamber, turned over the dusty bedcover, then stretched out. It was only as sleep dragged her down that she remembered this room had been the one that Kendrick had used.
Come back, then, she told her dead brother, dizzy with exhaustion. Come back and haunt me, dear, dear Kendrick-J miss you so…!
But the sleep into which she fell, tumbling slowly downward like a feather in a well, was impenetrably dark, empty of both dreams and ghosts.
The island was surrounded by fog, but dawn still brought enough light to make the lodge on M'Helan's Rock a familiar place once more-light that slipped in through the high windows and filled the great hall with a blue-gray glow as soft as the sheen on a pearl and made the statues of the holy onirai in their wall-niches look as if they were stirring into life. Even
the kitchen again seemed to be the homely place Briony remembered. Things that she had been too exhausted to notice the night before, the tang of the air, the lonely cries of shearwaters and gulls, the heavy furniture scuffed by generations of Eddon children creating imaginary riding-caravans or fortresses, now made her insides twist with sorrow and longing.
Gone. Every one of them. Barrick, Father, Kendrick. She felt her eyes brim with tears and wiped them angrily. But Barrick and Father are alive-they must be. Don't be a stupid girl. Not gone, just… somewhere else.
Crouched in the heather at the front of the lodge, she stared long and hard back at the castle. A few torches seemed to be moving on the bay at the base of the castle walls-search boats checking the inlets and caves along the shore of Midlan's Mount-but none of them seemed to have ventured any farther from Southmarch. Briony felt a gleam of hope. If she herself had forgotten the summer house, there was a chance the Tollys wouldn't remember until she and Shaso were long gone.
Back in the kitchen she dutifully ate her fish soup, enlivened this time by wild rosemary which Ena had found thriving in the masterless, over¬grown garden. Briony could not be certain when she would eat again, and she reminded herself that even fish soup was noble if it would give her the strength to survive so that one day she could drive something sharp through Hendon Tolly's heart.
Shaso was eating too, if not much more skillfully or swiftly than the night before. Still, his ashen pallor had improved a little and his breathing did not hiss like a fireplace bellows. But most important of all, though his eyes still lay sunken in dark-ringed flesh (which Briony thought gave him the look of an oniron like Iaris or Zakkas the Ragged or some other sun-scorched, wilderness-maddened prophet from The Book of the Trigon), his gaze was bright and intent again-that of the Shaso she knew.
"We can go nowhere today." He took one last swallow before lowering the empty bowl. "We cannot risk it."
"But surely the fog will hide us…?"
His look had much of the old Shaso in it, equal parts irritation at being disputed and disappointment that she had not thought things through completely. "Perhaps here, upon the bay, Princess. But what about when we make land in the late afternoon, with the mist burned away? Even if we are not seen by enemies, do you think the local fishermen there would be likely to forget the unusual pair they saw landing?" He shook his head. "We are exiles, Highness. Everything that has gone before will mean nothing if
you give yourself away to your enemies. If you are captured, Hendon Tolly will not put you on trial or lock you away in the stronghold lo be.a rallying flag for those loyal to the Eddons. No, he will kill you and no one will ever see your body. He will not mind a few rumors of you among the people as long as he knows that you are safely dead."
Briony thought of Hendon's grinning face and her hands twitched. "We should have stripped his family of their titles and lands long ago. We should have executed the whole traitorous lot."
"When? When did they reveal their treachery before it was too late? And Gailon, although I did not like him, was apparently an honorable ser¬vant of your family's crown-if Hendon has told the truth in this one thing, at least. As for Caradon, we also know only what Hendon says of him, so his wickedness is as much in question as Gallon's goodness. The world is strange, Briony, and it will only become stranger in the days ahead."
She looked at his leathery, stern face and was filled with shame that she had been such a fool, to have taken so little care with the most precious of her family's possessions. What must he think, her old teacher? What must he think of her and her twin, who had all but given away the Eddons' throne?
As if he understood her thoughts, Shaso shook his head. "What hap¬pened in the past remains in the past. What is before us-that is every¬thing. Will you put your trust in me? Will you do just as I say, and only what I say?"
Despite all her mistakes and self-disgust, she could not help bristling. "I am not a fool, Shaso. I am not a child any longer."
For a moment his expression softened. "No. You are a fine young woman, Briony Eddon, and you have a good heart. But this is not the time for good hearts. This is the hour for suspicion and treachery and murder, and I have much experience of all those things. I ask you to put your trust in me."
"Of course I trust you-what do you mean?"
"That you will do nothing without asking me. We are exiles, with a price on our heads. As I said, all that came before-your crown, your fam¬ily's history-will mean nothing if we are captured. You must swear not to act without my permission, no matter how small or unimportant the act seems. Remember, I kept my oath to your brother Kendrick even when it might have cost my life." He stopped and took a deep breath, coughed,1
little. "It still might. So I want you to swear the same to me." He fixed her with his dark eyes. This time it was not the imperious stare of old, the teacher's stare-there was actually something pleading in it.
"You shame me when you remind me what you did for my family, Shaso. And you don't take credit for your own stubbornness. But yes, I hear you, and yes, I understand. I'll listen to what you say. I'll do what you think is best."
"Always? No matter how you may doubt me? No matter how angry I make you by not explaining my every thought?"
A quiet hiss startled Briony, until she realized it was the girl Ena, laugh¬ing quietly as she scrubbed out the soup pot. It was humiliating, but it would be more shameful still to continue arguing like a child. "Very well. I swear on the green blood of Erivor, my family's patron. Is that good enough?"
"You should be careful when you make oaths on Egye-var, Highness," said Ena cheerfully, "especially here in the middle of the waters. He hears."
"What are you talking about? If I swear to Erivor, I mean it." She turned to Shaso. "Are you satisfied now?"
He smiled, but it was only a grim flash of teeth, an old predator's reflex. "I will not be satisfied with anything until Hendon Tolly is dead and who¬ever arranged Kendrick's death has joined him. But I accept your promise." He winced as he straightened his legs. Briony looked away: even though the Skimmer girl had bandaged the worst sores from the shackles, he was still covered with ugly scrapes and bruises and his limbs were disturbingly thin. "Now, tell me what has happened-everything you can remember. Little news was brought to me in my cell, and I could make small sense out of what you told me last night."
Briony proceeded as best she could, although it was difficult to summon up all that had happened in the months Shaso dan-Heza had been locked in the stronghold, let alone make a sensible tale of it. She told him of Bar-rick's fever and of Avin Brone's spy who claimed to have seen agents of the Autarch of Xis in the Tolly's great house at Summerfield Court. She told him about the caravan apparently attacked by the fairies, of Guard Captain Vansen's expedition and what happened to them, and of the advancing army of the Twilight People that had apparently invaded and secured the mainland city of Southmarch across Brenn's Bay, leaving only the castle free. She even told him of the strange potboy Gil and his dreams, or at least what little about them she could remember.
Although the Skimmer girl had shown no other signs of paying atten-tion to the bizarre catalogue of events, when she heard CHI's pronounce¬ments about Barrick, Ena put down her washing and sat up straight. "Porcupine's eye? He said to beware the Porcupine's eye?"
"Yes, what of it?"
"The Porcupine-woman is one of the most ill-named of all the Old Ones," Ena said seriously. "She is death's companion."
"What does that mean?" Briony asked. "And how would you know?"
The secretive smile stretched the girl's wide mouth again, but her eyes did not meet Briony's. "Even on Skimmer's Lagoon, we know some im¬portant things."
"Enough," said Shaso angrily. "I will sleep today-I do not like being a burden. When the sun goes down, we will leave. Girl," he said to Ena, "take us to the Marrinswalk coast and then your service will be over."
"As long as you eat something else before we leave," Ena told him. "More soup-you barely touched what I gave you. I promised my father I would keep you safe, and if you collapse again he will be angry"
Shaso looked at her as if she might be mocking him. She stared back, unfraid. "Then I will eat," he said at last.
Briony spent much of the afternoon staring out at the bay, fearful of see¬ing boats coming toward the island. When she got too cold at last, she went in and warmed herself at the fire.
On her way back to her sentinel perch in the heather, she walked through the lodge-a place that once, because of its small size, had been more familiar to her than Southmarch Castle itself. Even in daylight it now seemed as strange as everything else because of the way the world had changed, all the things which had been so familiar and ordinary trans¬formed in a single night.
Right here, in this room, is where Father told us the story about Hiliometes and the manticore. A tennight ago she would have sworn she could never forget the smallest detail of what it had felt like to huddle in the blankets on their father's bed and hear the tale of the demigod's great battle for the first time, yet here she was in the very chamber and suddenly it all seemed vague. Had Kendrick been with them, or had he gone to bed, intent on going out early in the morning with old Nynor to catch fish? Had there been a fire, or had it been one of those rare, truly hot summer nights on M'Helan's Rock when the servants were told to leave all but the kitchen fire unlit? She couldn't re
member anything but the story, now, and their father's exaggeratedly solemn, bearded face as he spoke. Would she forget that one day, too? Would all her past vanish this way, bit by bit, like tracks in the dirt pelted by rain?
Briony was startled by a wriggle of movement at the edge of her vi¬sion-something moving quickly along the skirting board. A mouse? She moved toward the corner and startled something out from behind a table leg, but before she had a chance to see what it was it had vanished again behind a hanging. It seemed strangely upright for a mouse-could it be a bird, trapped in the house? But birds hopped, didn't they? She pulled back the wall hanging, strangely apprehensive, but found nothing unusual.
A mouse, she thought. Climbed up the back of the tapestry and it's back in the roof by now. Poor thing was probably startled half to death to have someone walk into this room-the place has been empty for more than a year.
She wondered if she dared open the shuttered doors of King Olin's bed¬room balcony. She itched to look back at the castle, half-afraid that it too would have become insubstantial, but caution won out. She made her way back through the room, the bed naked of blankets, a thin powdering of dust on every surface, as if it were the tomb of some ancient prophet where no one dared touch anything. In an ordinary year the doors would have been thrown wide to air the room as the servants bustled through, sweeping and cleaning. There would have been fresh flowers in the vase on the writing desk (only yellow ragwort if it was late in the season) and water in the washing jug. Instead, her father was trapped in a room somewhere that was probably smaller than this-maybe a bleak cell like the hole in which Shaso had been imprisoned. Did Olin have a window to look out, a view-or only dark walls and fading memories of his home?
It did not bear thinking about. So many things these days did not bear thinking about.
"I thought you said he had barely eaten," Briony said, nodding toward Shaso. She held out the sack. "The dried fish is gone. Was it you? There were three pieces left when I saw last."
Ena looked in the sack, then smiled. "I think we have made a gift."
"A gift? What do you mean? To whom?"
"To the small folk-the Air Lord's children."
Briony shook her head in irritation. "Made a gift to the rats and mice, more likely. I think I just saw one." She did not hold with such silly old tales-it was what the cooks and maids said every time something went
missing: "Oh, it must have been the little folk, Highness. 'The Old Ones nuist've look' it. " Briony had a sudden pang, knowing what Barrick would have said about such an idea, the familiar mockery that would have tinged his voice. She missed him so fiercely that tears welled in her eyes.
A moment later she had to admit the irony of it: she was mourning her brother, who would have poured scorn on the idea of "the small folk"… because he was off fighting the fairies. "It doesn't matter, I suppose," she said to Ena. "Surely we will find something to eat in Marrinswalk."
Ena nodded. "And perhaps the small folk will bring us luck in return for the food-perhaps they will call on Pyarin Ky'vos to lend us fair winds. They are his favorites after all, just as my folk belong to Egye-Var."
Briony shook her head in doubt, then caught herself. Who was she, who had fought against a murderous demon and barely survived, to make light of what others said about the gods? She herself, although she prayed care¬fully and sincerely to Zoria every day, had never believed Heaven to be as active in people's lives as others seemed to think-but at the moment she and her family needed all the help they could find. "You remind me, Ena. We must make an offering at the Erivor shrine before we go."
"Yes, my lady. That is right and good."
So the girl approved, did she? How kind of her! Briony grimaced, but turned away so the girl did not see. She realized for the first time that she missed being the princess regent. At least people didn't openly treat you like you were a child or a complete fool-out of fear, if nothing else! "Let's get Shaso down to the boat, first."
"I'll walk, curse it." The old man roused himself from his drowsing nap. "Is the sun down yet?"
"Soon enough." He looked better, Briony thought, but he was still frighteningly thin and clearly very weak. He was old, older by many years than her father-she sometimes forgot that, fooled by his strength and sharpness of mind. Would he recover, or would his time in the stronghold leave him a cripple? She sighed. "Let's get on with things. It's a long way to the Marrinswalk coast, isn't it?"
Shaso nodded slowly. "It will take all the night, and perhaps some of the morning."
Ena laughed. "If Pyarin Ky'vos sends even a small, kind wind, I will have you on shore before dawn."
"And then where?" Briony knew better than to doubt this strong-armed girl, at least about rowing a boat. "Should we not consider Blueshoro? I
know Tyne's wife well. She would shelter us, I'm certain-she's a good woman, if overly fond of clothes and chatter. Surely that would be safer than Marrinswalk, where…"
Shaso growled, a deep, warning sound that might have issued from a cave. "Did you or did you not promise to do as I say?"
"Yes, I promised, but…"
"Then we go to Marrinswalk. I have my reasons, Highness. None of the nobility can shield you. If we force the ToUys' hand, Duke Caradon will bring the Summerfield troops to Blueshore and throw down Aldritch Stead-they will never be able to hold off the Tollys with Tyne and all his men gone to this battle you tell me of. They will announce you were a false claimant-some serving girl I forced to play the part of the missing princess regent-and that the real Briony is already long dead. Do you see?"
"I suppose…"
"Do not suppose. At this moment, strength is all and the Tollys hold the whip hand. You must do what I ask and not waste time arguing. We may soon find ourselves in straits where hesitation or childish stubbornness will kill us."
"So. Marrinswalk, then." Briony stood, struggling to hold down her anger. Calm, she told herself. You made a promise-besides, remember the fool¬ishness with Hendon. You cannot afford your temper right now. You are the last of the Eddons. Suddenly frightened, she corrected herself. The last of the Eddons in Southmarch. But of course, even that wasn't true-there were no true Ed¬dons left in Southmarch anymore, only Anissa and her baby, if the child had survived his first, terrible night.
"I will attend to the sea god's shrine," she said, speaking as carefully as she could, putting on the mask of queenly distance she had supposed left behind with the rest of the life that had been stolen from her. "Help Lord dan-Heza down to the boat, Ena. I will meet you there."
She walked out of the kitchen without looking back.