And what of Ferras Vansen? Was he as shy as he seemed? She could not forget the way he always avoided her eyes. Was she imagining the man’s feelings for her? But there had been moments—bright, fierce moments when their eyes had met and she was certain something had passed between them. At the time she had not really understood, but she did not think she was wrong. She had grown since then and felt more certain of her own ideas. The problem was, she was not completely certain how she felt about Vansen, and was even less certain that it was appropriate for her to think of him at all. He was a commoner, was he not? They could have no future.
Which brought her back again in a weary circle to Eneas, who deserved better. He had made it very clear that he cared for her and would make an eminently sensible match. Why, then, she wondered as she looked at him, tall, handsome, at ease with all that was manly and appropriate, did she find herself less than overwhelmed?
Every unmarried woman in Tessis would laugh me to scorn if they knew, she thought. And then trample me into the dust in their hurry to reach him.
Eneas had certainly told the truth when he said his men were trained to move quickly: ten pentecount of foot soldiers and over a hundred well-armored knights, with grooms and other servants making nearly a thousand men altogether, managed some days to travel as far as ten leagues. But even after all that riding, the work of the Temple Dogs was nowhere near finished. Making camp brought with it dozens of other chores. The men were organized ten to a tent-group in the old Hierosoline manner, each group of ten responsible for their own cooking and for contributing sentries, as well as digging their own section of the defensive ditch around the perimeter of the camp, which they did every night, whether they stopped near a tiny Syannese village, beside the walls of a large town, or, as now, in the nearly empty wilderness between settlements.
Briony didn’t understand, but Eneas explained. “If I take pity and allow them to go a night without digging the ditch and then nothing bad happens, they will come to think it unnecessary and chafe at the work. Better to make it as familiar as breathing—is that not true, Miron?”
“Yes, Highness,” said his earnest lieutenant. “The Duke of Veryon was caught unawares at Potmis Bridge and nearly his entire army was routed and destroyed.”
Briony wasn’t terribly familiar with Syannese military history but she understood the point.
The men also had to bake their own bread, draw water, and choose lots for the order of sentry duty, all before bedding down for the night. With such long days full of duty and precious little in the way of diversion in this part of the north, it was a credit to Eneas and his generalship that the men looked fit and morale was generally good.
So why am I such a fool? Briony thought. Why can I not love a man like Eneas? And is love even necessary? Father didn’t know Mother before the marriage was arranged, but although she died when we were born he still mourns her.
Thus it was that the Syannese troop quickly made its way north from the border of Syan and through the corner of Silverside, crossing far to the west of the trade city of Onsilpia’s Veil and into Southmarch itself. It was a part of the country that Briony did not know well, iron and copper and coal country, as her father had taught her, centered around mines in the high hills and sheep country to the west, grass downs where domestic animals far outnumbered the people and whose farmers and herdsmen provided wool to much of the north. Now, though, it looked as though a great wind had come and blown the people themselves away, leaving behind houses, barns, byres, and fields that had gone to weeds. The Qar themselves, in their march down from the Shadowline, had passed at least a league or two to the west, but the effect of their passage seemed to have emptied the land like a plague.
The saddest and most telling example of the exodus was a doll made of straw, a fine piece of craft Briony spotted by the side of the road. It seemed so forlorn there, in the middle of a desolate stretch of rocky meadow that she dismounted and picked it up.
One of the doll’s wooden button eyes was missing, and it was discolored from the rains that had swept through in previous days, but otherwise it was unharmed. It had clearly been someone’s treasure, dressed in a cleverly made gown and hat, hair of golden thread—a fine court lady in miniature. Only a family in a desperate hurry would have dropped such a thing and not come back to search for it, and Briony could easily imagine the little girl who was doubtless still crying herself to sleep at night over her loss.
As spring days passed, they made their way up through Southmarch toward the Settland Road, which would lead them almost due east to the shores of Brenn’s Bay. By the end of the first tennight in Hexamene they had reached Candlerstown, the site of the first attack by the fairy folk on the cities of men. There was little of the town left to see—the walls had been torn down in dozens of places, almost with what seemed like careless malice, as a child might kick down something a rival had built before hurrying home for supper. But the blackened ruins of the houses, softened only slightly by the grasses that had begun to grow up through what had once been well-tended streets to cover the charred wreckage in a fragile net of green, spoke of a malice that was far from careless. By the time they had left the ruins of Candlerstown behind, Briony was shivering as though from a winter chill. The Syannese soldiers, for whom the Qar to this point had been largely abstract, were also wide-eyed and troubled, and even Eneas could not entirely mask his unease.
“These fairy creatures are monsters,” he said as they made camp that night, well out of sight of the blackened, lifeless city. “Worse than monsters.”
“Worse than monsters, yes, but only because they are as clever as we are—maybe more so.” She thought of the tale the merchant Raemon Beck had told her, how the creatures had appeared almost from nowhere. “Don’t underestimate them, Eneas. They’re not beasts.”
Over the next two days they crossed eastward through the Dale country. They made early camp one evening in a river valley to give the soldiers a chance to bathe, and also because the narrow outlet from this valley to the next made Eneas cautious: the narrow pass seemed a very good place for an ambush, leaving them largely defenseless against anyone who might be lurking above the road with arrows or even stones.
The first set of scouts came back in a hurry, excitement plain in the way they rode, and the Temple Dogs’ sergeants—called “penteneries,” also in the old Hierosoline manner—had all they could do to keep the men who were setting up camp working in an orderly fashion.
“Fighting, sir,” Miron reported when he had taken the scouts’ reports. “At the far end of the next valley there’s a hill town with good-sized walls, but there’s not much left of it. Looks like the fairies tore it down. But if they did, they’re still there and they’re fighting with ordinary men right on the valley road!”
“Kleaswell Market,” Briony said, heart beating fast. She had thought she was ready to meet the Qar face-to-face, but suddenly she was not so sure. “That’s the name of the town. People come from all over this part of Southmarch for the holiday market. I mean, they used to come ...”
“How many of each?” Eneas demanded.
Miron thought hard. “Seems as though neither force is as large as ours, Highness, although it’s hard to be certain—by the time the scouts got far enough up the valley to see the town, it was getting near dark and they didn’t want to risk going closer and being noticed by the goblins. You said they can see a long way.”
“Very well. There is nothing we can do tonight. Put the sentries on quiet watch, and we will move out in the watch before dawn—that way we have a chance of getting close before the sun is above the hills.”