Tad Williams - Shadowmarch

“Why?”

Chaven shook his head. “I was a fool. Because she was ill before Kendrick died, and ill afterward, I thought the maid truly had the fever that struck Barrick. I see now she was only preparing the ground before time for the weakness that would overcome her after using the kuhkos. I thought the witch must be Anissa and I tried to bluff her I did not guess the stone could work again without much preparation, some kind of intricate charm…”

“No, why did she kill Kendrick? Was she going to kill me as well?”

Chaven stared down at the sodden, scorched mass .He peeled back a corner of the curtain. Briony was startled to see Selia’s ordinary dead face, eyes open, mouth gaping. Whatever spell had gripped the girl had now passed, leaving nothing behind to show what she had been except a smeared residue of grit, dust, and ash on her skin, clotted into a foul mud. “Yes, she would have killed you, perhaps by poison—and Barrick, too, if he’d been with you. Your stepmother did not invite you here, Selia herself did. That is why Anissa seemed so confused. Why did she do it? For whom, I think is the better question, and I have no answer.” He examined his black, blistered hands and said ruefully, “I was so certain it could only be Anissa…”

He looked at Briony and she stared back, both struck with the same thought. “Anissa?” she said. Briony s stepmother was curled on the floor on the far side of the bed in a puddle of water, seemingly oblivious to anything that had happened. The queen was half-delirious with pain, her hands clutching at her belly. “It is coming,” she moaned. “The child. It hurts! Oh, Madi Surazem, save me!”

“Get help,” Chaven told Briony. “I am nearly useless with these burns. Send for the midwife! Quickly!” She hesitated for a moment. Amssa’s wide-eyed look of terror made her feel ill. She remembered her stepmother’s fear as Chaven had all but accused her of murdering her stepson and the feverish feeling grew worse. The Loud Mouse, she and Barrick had called their father’s young wife, teasing, resentful. She would never call this woman names again.

Briony staggered out into the deserted tower with one of the candles, made her way down the stairs and somehow did not fall. At the bottom she forced open the door and found the two guards waiting there They looked her up and down, amazed. She could only guess what she looked like, smeared in ash and blood and worse, but the guards certainly seemed terrified.

There was no time to coddle them or make up stories. “By all the gods, are you both deaf? Did you hear none of that happening inside? People are dead. The queen is about to give birth. One of you go upstairs and help Chaven, the other run to find the midwife Hisolda. I don’t know where she’s gone—Anissa’s maid probably sent her away.” “Sh—she and the other w—w—omen went to the kitchen!” said one of the goggle-eyed guards. “Then go, curse you, go quickly! Fetch her!”

He ran ofe. The other, still looking at her as though Briony was the most frightening sight of his short life, turned and dashed up the stairs into the tower.

I won’t be the worst thing he’s seen for very long. She stood, trembling beneath the naked stars, trying to catch her breath. The sound of people singing floated to her across the empty courtyard.

Winter’s Eve, she remembered, but now it seemed unutterably strange. Everything before the Tower of Spring seemed to have happened in another century. I just want to sleep, she thought. Sleep and forget. Forget that moment when that dark thing had grown out of dust and air and vile magicks, when her old life of certainty, frail as it was, had vanished forever. Forget her stepmother, twitching in pain and fear. We’ve betrayed them all by our foolishness, she thought. Father, Kendrick, Anissa, all of them.

Shaso.

She felt a dreadful stab of shame. Shaso, chained and suffering. She hesitated for a moment—she was so tired, so very tired—but pushed herself away from the wall on which she had been leaning, away from the stones that to her exhausted muscles felt soft and inviting as a bed, and set out hmping toward the stronghold. One wrong would be put right before the dawn of Orphan’s Day, in any case Zoria, merciful Zoria, she begged, if you ever loved me, give me a little more strength!

As Briony left the courtyard and entered the colonnade, she thought she heard footsteps behind her, but when she turned there was no one there, the stone path empty in the moonlight. She hobbled on toward the stronghold and the shackled ghost of her own failure.

The maze garden behind the main hall was full of voices. The guests had left the table and bundled up against the cold to go outdoors—at least those seeking privacy they couldn’t find inside the brightly-lit halls. But how much privacy could there be, especially in full moonlight? It sounded like at least a dozen people were wandering through the maze, laughing and talking, women shushing the men, at least one fellow singing a bawdy old song about Dawtrey Elf-Spelled— something that didn’t seem quite appropriate with the Twilight folk almost standing outside the gates.

Winter was indeed crouching close this Winter’s Eve, the air sharp and the wind picking up. Briony wasn’t cold, but she knew she should be, in fact, she could hardly feel her body at all. She went past the outskirts of the garden as quietly as she could, staying close to the hedge of ancient yew trees, drifting toward the stronghold like a floating spirit in a cloud of her own exhaled breath. She wanted nothing to do with any of the courtiers. It had been all she could do simply to look at them across the dining hall tonight. Now, with the memory of the inhuman thing that had killed Kendrick lodged in her mind like a jagged shard of ice, like the never-healing wound of the maiden in the song, she felt as though she would not be able to look at any of their empty faces again without screaming.

She found her way in through a back door of the hall, but instead of making her way by the usual passages, crossed through one of the small chambers behind the throne room, avoiding the clutch of servants trying to finish up their chores in time for a Winter’s Eve celebration of their own. No guards waited at the top of the stairs down into the stronghold, and when she pushed open the unbarred door at the bottom, she found only one man and his pike sitting through a lonely watch. The guard was at least half asleep he looked up slowly at the noise of the door, rubbing his eyes. She couldn’t even imagine what she must look like in her tattered gown, her face no doubt as streaked with ash and blood as her hands.

“P-Pnncess!” He scrambled up onto his feet, fumbling for the handle of his weapon, which he managed to lift with the wrong end up. It would have been comic were it not all so miserable, the night so ghastly and full of blood and fire and if his stupidly earnest face hadn’t looked so much like Heryn Millward s, the young guard now lying dead in a puddle of his own blood in Anissa’s chamber.

“Where are the keys?"

“Highness?"

“The keys? The keys to Shaso’s cell! Give them to me.” “But…” His eyes were wide.

I truly must look like a demoness. “Don’t make me shout at you, fellow Just give me the keys, then go and find your captain. Who is in charge with Vansen gone?”

The man fumbled the heavy key on its ring down from a peg on the wall. “Tallow,” he said after a moment’s panicky thought. “It’s Jem Tallow, Highness.”