Flames rippled across the top of the gate and in the narrow slits in the towers on either side as men with torches ran in and out. One of the Basilisk Gate’s huge bells began to ring out an alarm, then fell silent again almost immediately, as though the bell ringer had met a sudden, violent end. Torches began appearing along nearby sections of the wall as the struggle at the main gate caught the attention of the other guard posts.
“Form up!” Eneas told his men. “Shields up—the arrows may begin flying any moment!”
Briony was only too happy to lift her shield over her head, although it was not long before her arms were aching so badly she would almost have preferred being shot. A few arrows did come sailing down, but more or less randomly, and not from atop the gate itself, as though a few scared soldiers on the walls were merely firing out into the darkness.
At last silence fell, then the great gate creaked open; Eneas held his men back when they would have surged through. The portcullis shuddered and rose, and a handful of figures with torches stepped into the cobbled opening, a space wide enough for a dozen men to ride through.
“Is it truly you, Prince Eneas?” one of the torchbearers asked, taking a limping step forward and holding up his torch, which rippled as the breeze from the bay whipped through the open gate.
“It is. Do I know you?” Eneas strode forward. Briony hurried to stay with him—his confidence, at that moment, seemed better protection than any Syannese shield.
“No, sire. You wouldn’t. But we true Southmarchers are happy to see you. Was it you burned the Xixy ships?”
A crowd of guardsmen quickly surrounded Eneas and his men, but to Briony’s relief the mood was more festive than combative. Several dozen were climbing down from the nearest guardhouses to see what was happening, but most of the fighting was already over. At least a dozen men sat sullenly on the ground with their backs to the wall, being guarded by men with spears. Half a dozen more lay nearby and did not need to be watched, as their contorted limbs and the blood on their tabards made clear.
The soldier who had spoken saw Eneas and his men looking at the dead. “They were Tolly’s men, those scum. One of them tried to ring the bells. The rest would have been off to warn the Protector and his bullyboys—they’ve all gone to ground in the royal residence. What is happening, Sire? Have you come to chase the damned Summerfielders out? May the gods bless you if you have, Highness.” He peered out past Eneas and the others, squinting as if he could make out what was happening on the far shore. “What about that autarch? What happened to his ships?”
“These are long stories,” Eneas said. “And my men will need food and drink and a place to sleep.”
“Of course, Prince Eneas ...” the leader began, but then Briony stepped out of the shadow of the wall and into the torchlight.
“I will not enter my own home in secret,” she said. “You men have done more than open the gates for the Syannese—you’ve let the Eddons back in as well.” She pulled off her helmet and hoped they could still recognize her with her hair cut short.
The men around her heard a woman’s voice and turned, staring. The leader, the man with the limp, lowered himself to one knee. “Praise the Three,” he said. “It’s King Olin’s daughter.”
Murmuring, the other men, who had been gathering around her, began to get down on their knees.
“Do not bow,” she said. “Look at me—please don’t bow! I don’t want to make my presence known yet. Not until we learn how things fare here and decide what to do next.” She would have preferred that they had remembered her name as well as her father’s, but the hope and even happiness on the faces of most of the men she could see was reward enough. “All of you who can hear me, come now. Let no one leave. Set some men to watch the gate again while you others follow Prince Eneas and me.”
“The inner keep is Hendon Tolly’s armed camp, Highness,” one of the guards said. “You’re safe here in the outer keep, but most of Tolly’s supporters are with him in the residence. They have at least as many men as your Syannese, Princess, and they also hold many of our women and children.”
“All the more reason that we should move slowly and not make a great parade,” Briony said. “Take us to a place where our soldiers can rest.”
Several of the Southmarch guards let out a cheer, but the others silenced them. The limping man who had welcomed them looked up at Briony.
“Is it truly you, Princess?” he asked.
“It is. And my father is alive, too. The Eddons have not given up their throne—or their people.”
“And will it all be well, then? Things will be well again?”
She looked at him and suddenly the weight of who she was, and what she still had to do pressed against her like a great stone on her chest, so that for a moment she could not speak. “That is beyond my power to say,” she managed at last. “But I will do everything I can to make it so.”
Something about seeing his sister still troubled Barrick, although he could not say exactly what that something was. It was not emotion—at least not the sort of confused, ill-defined feelings that had been so common in him before the gift of the Fireflower—but it made it hard to concentrate on what Saqri was saying about Lady Yasammez.
“… So she will meet us in the Great Delve.”
“But I don’t understand. Why didn’t Yasammez come up with us to fight the Xixians? She lives for war!”
Saqri’s thoughts had something of both unhappiness and anger in them, but those she chose to express were straightforward. “I imagine she wished to see what I would do with the command and the Seal. Perhaps she had matters of her own to deal with as well.”
“Like what?” A swirl of Fireflower memories tantalized him but he was learning how to do what Ynnir had taught him; to simply be and let them swim around him like fish.
“Dissension among her close advisers, I suspect. You know about the disagreement between Yasammez and my husband. What you may not know, or may not have been able to sift from what the Fireflower has given you, is that the distinctions are not so simple as to be divided into two camps only.”
“Tell me.” But what he said was closer to “Bring me to your thought.” He found that in his own head he was now using Qar ideas nearly as frequently as his native tongue.
“From the first, great Yasammez warned that we should sweep the mortals from the land before it was too late. But her great age and long experience have changed her, and her hatred of your kind is no longer as deadly as it once was. However, there are still many others of our people, some of the wilder folk, Tricksters and Elementals, who would happily see your kind vanish from the earth forever. ...”
“But then why did Yasammez send me to King Ynnir?” Barrick asked. “Does that mean she’s changed her mind about my people somehow? Or that she thought keeping me alive could… could help the Qar?”
Saqri let him feel a blank, cloudy thought, another kind of shrug. “I do not know. I have tried to sense her mind on this but she keeps it hidden, even from me.” And now she let him feel a little of the pain that caused her. “So much has changed. Once Yasammez was more to me than my own mother ...”
She did not finish the thought, and Barrick did not press for it. Too much hurt and confusion was there, things he could not understand, feelings so naked and private in a being of such immense composure that he did not want to go farther.
“So we face our final hours, Barrick,” Saqri finished at last, “and all that was once certain has become uncertain. Except for defeat. That, as always, is the end of all our stories.”