“Yes, it matters.” Vansen knew he was replying to words not spoken and perhaps not even intended, but at this moment he did not care: in the land of the mad, a land of talking animals and faceless fairies, madness was the only sane creed. “He talks like my mother’s father, although that means nothing to you. I have not heard speech like that since I was a child.” Vansen realized that he ached for conversation—ordinary talk, not the elliptical mysteries of spellbound Prince Barrick, each answer bringing only more questions. In fact, he realized, he was so lonely that he would accept comradeship even from a bird.
But it wouldn’t do to make that clear just yet—even a bird could be suspect in these treacherous, magical lands. “So why shouldn’t we kill you?” Vansen asked the struggling raven. “What were you doing in our camp, poking around? Tell, or I will let him slit your throat.”
“Nay!” It was half shriek, half croak, a despairing sound that made Vansen almost feel ashamed of himself. “Mean no harm, us! Just hungry!”
“Gyir says he smells of those creatures,” Barrick offered, “—the ones who attacked him and killed his horse. ‘Followers,’ they’re called.”
“Not us, Masters!” The raven struggled, but despite its size, it was help less as a sparrow in the fairy-warrior’s hands. “Was just following the
Followers, like. Can’t fly much now, us—pins be all a-draggled.” It carefully eased one of its wings free, and this time Gyir allowed it. More than a lew shiny black feathers were certainly missing. “Went to eat summat a few seasons gone by, but that summat be’nt quite dead yet,” the raven explained, bobbing its head. “Tore us upwise and downwise.”
“And the smell of those . . . Followers?”
“Us can’t stay high or fly long like us did oncet. Have to follow close, go from branch to branch, like. Followers have a powerful stink.” It ruffled its parti-colored feathers with its beak. “Can’t smell it, usself. Poor Skurn is old now—so old!”
“Skurn? Is that what you’re called?”
“Aye, or was. Us were handsome then, when that were our name.” He poked his beak toward Gyir. “His folk drove all the sunlanders out from Northmarch. Life were good then, for a little while, in the fighting—dead ‘uns every which side! But then sunlanders were gone and poor Skurn was leaved behind to shift as us could when twilight come down.” The beak opened to let out a mournful sigh, but the shiny eyes looked to Vansen with calculating hope, like a child searching for the first light of forgiveness.
He had no stomach to kill the thing.”Let the bird go,” he said. Nothing happened. Gyir was not looking at him but at Barrick. “Please, Highness. Let it go.”
Barrick frowned, then sighed. “I suppose.” He waved his hand at Gyir, still showing a remnant of the royal manner even here beneath the dripping trees. “Let it go free.”
As soon as the blade was withdrawn the bird rolled to its feet and took a few hopping steps, quite nimble for all its professed age. It flapped its wings as though surprised and pleased to find it still had them. “Oh, thank you, Masters, thank you! Skurn will serve you, do everything you ask us, find all best hiding places, rotting dead ‘uns, birds’ nests, even where the fish go scumbling down in the muddy bottom! And eat so little, us? Never will you know us is even here.”
“What is he talking about?” Vansen said crossly. He had expected it to bolt for the undergrowth or fly away, but the bird had distracted him and he had forgotten to watch where Gyir hid the knife; now the Twilight man’s hand was empty again.
“You saved him, Captain.” Amusement rippled coldly across Barrick’s face. Suddenly he seemed a boy no longer, but more like an old man—ageless. “The raven’s yours. It seems you’ll finally taste the pleasures of being lord and master.”
“Lord and master,” said the raven, beginning to clean the mud from his malted feathers with his long black beak. He bobbed his head eagerly. “Yes, you tolk are Masters of Skurn, now. Us will do you only good.”
The forest track they followed seemed to have once been a road: only flimsy saplings and undergrowth grew on it, while the larger trees—most with sharp, silvery-black leaves that made Vansen think of them as “dagger trees”—formed a bower overhead, so that the horses paced almost as easily as they might have on the Settland Road or some other thoroughfare in mortal lands. If the going was easier, though, it was not a peaceful ride; Vansen had begun to wonder whether saving the wheezing raven might not have been his second-worst decision of recent days, exceeded only by the choice to follow Barrick across the Shadowline. Reprieved from death, Skurn could not stop talking, and although occasionally he said something interesting or even useful, Vansen was beginning to feel things would have been better if he had let Gyir the Storm Lantern spit the creature.
“... The other ones, Followers and whatnot, are pure wild these days.” Skurn bobbed his head, moving continuously from one side to the other off the base of the horse’s neck like a cat trying to find the warmest place to sleep. It was a mark of how the last days had hardened Vansen’s mount that it paid little attention to the creeping thing between its shoulders, only whinnying from time to time when the indignity became too much. “Scarce speak any language, and of course no sunlander tongue, unlikes us-self. There, Master, don’t ever eat that ‘un, nor touch it. Will turn your in-sides to glass. And that other, yes, th’un with yellow berries. No, not pizen, but makes a fine stew with coney or water rat. Us’d have a lovely bit of that now, jump atter chance, us would. Knows you that soon you be crossing into Jack Chain’s land? You’ll turn, o’course. Foul, his lot. No love for the High Ones and wouldn’t lift a hand but for their own stummicks or to shed some blood. They like blood, Jack’s lot. Oh, there’s a bit of the old wall. Look up high. A fine place for eggs ...”
The nonstop chatter had begun to blend into one continuous rattle, like someone snoring across the room, but the bulwark of ruined stone caught Vansen’s attention. It rose from a thicket of thorns, its top looming far above his head, and was sheathed in vines that flowered a dull blood red, the thick, heart-shaped leaves bouncing with the weight of raindrops.
“What did you say this was?”
“This old wall, Master? Us didn’t, although us is pleased to name it if that be your wish. A place called Ealingsbarrow oncet in thy speech, if our re-membering be not too full of holes—a town of your folk.”
Vansen reined up. The crumbling golden stones looked as though they had been abandoned far more than two centuries ago: even the best-preserved sections were as pitted and porous as honeycomb. In many places trees had grown right through the substance of the wall and their roots were pulling out even more stones, like young cuckoos ousting other birdlings from a nest. The forest and the incessant damp were taking the wall apart as efficiently as a gang of workmen, tumbling the huge stones back to earth and wearing them away as though they were nothing more than wet sand, steadily removing this last trace that mortal men had once lived here.
“Why have we stopped?” asked Barrick. The prince had ridden beside Gyir all morning, and Vansen could not escape the idea that the two of them were ‘conversing wordlessly, that the faceless man was instructing the prince just as Vansen had once been instructed by his old captain Donal Murroy
“To look at this wall, Highness. The bird says it is part of a town named Ealingsbarrow. Northmarch must be only half a day’s ride away or so.” Vansen shook his head, still amazed. The old, cursed name of Northmarch reminded him that what had happened there and here in Ealingsbarrow might soon happen to all the mortal cities of the north—to Southmarch itself. “It is hard to believe, isn’t it?”
Barrick only shrugged. “They did not belong here. No mortals did, building without permission. It is no wonder it came to this.”
Vansen could only stare as the prince turned and rode forward again. Gyir, riding behind him, looked back a few moments longer, his featureless face as inscrutable as ever.
“Burned blue in the night for six nights when it fell, this place,” said Skur
n. “Like old star had fallen down into the forest. The keeper of the War-Stone gave it to the Whispering Mothers, you see.”
Vansen was shivering as they left the last wall of Ealingsbarrow behind them. He did not know what the raven meant and he was fairly certain he was better off that way.
The rain began to abate in what Vansen estimated was the late afternoon, although as always he got no glimpse of sun or moon in the murky sky to confirm a guess about time. He had fed the hungry raven out of the last of his own stores, and had nibbled in a desultory way himself on some stale bread and a finger’s width of dried meat, but hee was feeling the grip of hunger in a way he hadn’t before. Since the prince seemed to have be-come a little less strange and distracted, and since a full day had passed without any sign of the monstrous, faceless Twilight man Gyir trying to kill them all, Vansen’s fearfulness had abated a little, but the respite only served to make him more aware of his other problems. The possibility of starving was one of them, although not the biggest.
/ am completely ruled by something I cannot change or understand, he thought. Worse even than if these fairy-folk had made me a prisoner. At least then I would expect to be helpless. But this—this is worse by far! Home is behind us, there is no reason to go on into this place of madness, and yet on we go, and it seems I can do nothing to stop it.
“We cannot follow this road any farther, Master,” said Skurn suddenly. His beak tugged at Vansen’s sleeve. “Cannot, Master.”
“What? Why?”
“The Northmarch Road, this is, and now I smell Northmarch too close. I told you we were coming near Jack Chain’s land.” The bird’s eyes were blinking rapidly. He fidgeted on the horse’s neck, almost comically frightened. “The bad is all on it, these days.”
Northmarch Road! Of course, Vansen thought, no wonder they had found this so much easier a track than others they had followed. He could see nothing beneath his feet but undergrowth and grass and dead leaves, but still the hairs on the back of his neck stirred. Knowing the road was beneath him and had been for hours was like discovering he had been standing on a grave. Still, a part of him was loath to give up such ease of travel. “It has a fearful name, but surely it has been empty now for ages.”
“You don’t understand, good Master.” Skurn flapped his wings in disquiet. “These lands be not empty. They be Jack Chain’s and you will lose your life at least an’ he catches you.”
Vansen relayed the raven’s words to Barrick. The prince paused for a moment, as though listening to something that silent Gyir might be telling him, then at last slowly nodded his head.
“We will make camp. There is much to decide.”
Only days ago, in an ordinary world where the sun came up and the snn went down, Barrick Eddon knew he would have looked on the fairy Gyir as something hideously alien, but somehow he had come to know Gyir the Storm Lantern as well as he knew any other person, even those of his own family.
Except for Briony, of course—Briony, his other half. . . Barrick did his best to push the thought of her away. If he was to survive he must harden himself, he had decided, cast even the most precious of those beads of memory behind him. He couldn’t let himself be weak as other men were weak—like Vansen the guard captain, still living in the old ways and as out of place here (or anywhere in the new world that was coming) as a bear sitting at a table with a bowl and spoon. Barrick knew that Vansen had saved the disgusting, corpse-eating raven mostly because it spoke his mortal speech, as if being able to mumble that outdated tongue was anything other than a mark of irrelevance.
The bird Skurn had many vile habits, and seemed to reveal a new one every few moments. Only an hour had passed since they had made camp and already the creature had defiled it, not even leaving the vicinity to defecate but instead simply pausing beside the campfire and discharging a spatter as wet and foul-smelling as the goose turds that had made it such a hazard to walk beside the pond in the royal residence back home. Now the disgusting old bird was crouched only a few steps from Barrick, noisily finishing off a baby rat he had found in a nest in the wet undergrowth, the tail danging from his mouth as he chewed the hindquarters. A moment later the whole of it, tail following to the very end, slid down his throat and disappeared.
Skurn belched. Barrick scowled.
Do not waste your fires on anger, Gyir told him. Especially on one such as that. You will have need of every spark, cousin. The words were simply there, as though whispered inside his skull. There was no sound, no quirks of speech as with regular talk, but the words had a shape and a feeling that Barrick could tell, even without comparison, made them Gyir’s and no one else’s.
Cousin? Why do you call me that?
Because we share something.
What? What could we share?
The love of our lady, and loyalty to her. She saved you as she saved me. Saved me from . . . And then the fairy’s words trailed off, or changed, so that they felt like words no longer, but rather a sensation of cracking thunder and a rain as heavy and terrifying as a flight of arrows.
“Highness,” said Vansen suddenly, his speaking voice as harsh as a frog’s croak after the taut musicality of Gyir’s soundless words.”I think we need to listen to what the bird says .. .”
“listen!” snarled Barrick. “Listen! It is you who cannot listen!” How could the man continue to scrape and bray like that when he could have words and silence, music and stillness, both the plucked string and the expectant pause before the lute sounded? But perhaps the guardsman couldn’t. Perhaps Barrick was being unfair. He himself had been touched by the Dark Lady—poor, earnest Ferras Vansen had not. “I apologize, Captain,” he said, and was pleased by his own magnanimity. No wonder he had been chosen from the crowded, mad battlefield, singled out like the oracle Iaris, who of all men had been given the words of Perin to bear back to humanity. “What is it that ... that squawking gore-crow has to say?”
“Cannot go this way,” the raven said. “The High One with no food-hole, the caulbearer, he knows it. These be Jack Chain’s lands now, since the queen sleeps and the King has grown so old. Us that care for our life don’t go there.”
“He’s talking about Northmarch, Highness,” Vansen said. “It seems to belong to some enemy—some dangerous person.”
“I am not stupid, Vansen. I understood that.” Barrick scowled. At this moment, the captain reminded him more than he would wish of Shaso: the old man, too, had always been judging him, always underestimating him, speaking words that sounded full of reason to the ear but made him sting with shame. Well, half a year in the stronghold had no doubt made Shaso dan-Heza a little less proud and scornful.
A twinge of shame, a distant thing but still painful, made him want to think about something else. Shaso had brought his doom on himself, hadn’t he? Nothing to do with Barrick.
“I am sorry, Highness,” Vansen said, and bowed, the first time he had done that since they had crossed over the Shadowline.”I have overstepped.”
“Oh, stop.” Barrick’s mood had gone sour. He turned to Gyir, tried to form the words in his head so the other could understand him. It was so easy when the faceless man spoke to him first—like a flying dream, no labor, just the leap and then the freedom of the air. What is this creature talking about? Is it true?
I do not know. I have not traveled here, in this part of. . . Here another idea floated past that seemed to have no words, a jumble of formless shapes that somehow spiraled inward like snailshells. Except when the army went to war, but none would have dared to attack us in that force. Still, there are many here he-hind the Mantle that do not love . . . Again there was a picture rather than a word, this one a paradoxical image of black towers and shining light. Only after it had ceased to glow in his head did Barrick perceive the words that went with it. Qul-na-Qar.
What is that? Is that you, your people?
That is the place we have made the heart of our . . . Here an idea that seemed to mean not so much “rule” or “kingdom” as “story.”
That is where the Knowing make their home. Those Qar who know what was lost, and what sleeps.
Barrick shook his head—too many ideas he could not understand were floating through his mind, although he had finally come to understand one of Gyir’s idea-sounds, Qar, meant “people like myself”—those Barrick still thought of in the back of his mind as “fairy folk.” Still, even the clearest of Gyir’s ideas were as slippery as live fish. / need to know if what this unpleasant bird says is important, Barrick said. The . . . the Lady . . . has given you a charge, that you told me. You must do what she asked. Although he had no idea of Gyir’s task, he knew as well as he knew that his bones were inside his body that what the dark woman wanted must be done.
/ am not allowed to delay, it is true. My errand is too vital. Still, it is hard to believe that one of our enemies has grown so strong here, an enemy that was thought dead. If it is true, I fear my luck—the luck of all the People, perhaps—has turned for ill. We are far from my home and in dangerous lands. I am wounded, perhaps crippled forever, your companion has my sword, and I have no horse.
Gyir’s thoughts were heavy and fearful in a way that Barrick had not felt before. That alone was enough to make the prince really frightened for the first time since the giant’s war club had swung up high above him and his old life had come to an end.