The Xixian broke the silence, his face now as hard as copper and shiny with the blood of his anger. “You swore that you had the Godstone. You lied to me—to me! I lowered myself to come here and speak to you… !” His yellow eyes seemed to glint and spark, as if Sulepis was burning inside, as if at any moment he might burst into flame. Tinwright could barely look at him. “Only good fortune allows you to live another day in freedom instead of as fodder for my torturers—but that will change!” He rose. Tolly’s guards stared at him, determination and sheer terror battling on their faces, but the autarch only waited for his own guards to open the doors, then followed them out, so confident of his safety that he didn’t even look back.
When the southerners were gone, the lord protector of Southmarch fell back in his chair.
“We are all dead men,” said Hendon Tolly.
As they were trudging down the stone steps to the dock, Matt Tinwright looked back and saw a movement in the nearest window of the lodge. He decided it must be a trick of the light. Hendon Tolly and the guards were in front of him, making their way to the boats with the slow, dispirited air of a funeral party, and the autarch and his men had already left M’Helan’s Rock—Tinwright could see their boat in the distance, heading toward the waiting Xixian fleet. Who else could still be in the lodge?
Tinwright did not work up the courage to speak until they were halfway back around Midlan’s Mount with the castle’s sea gate in sight. “Lord Tolly, I did not understand. What happened there? I don’t understand any of what we have just seen and heard.”
“We have had… a setback,” Tolly admitted at last. He looked down at the box the autarch had given him, which sat on the deck of the small boat, then abruptly bent and picked it up and flung it out over the dark green water of the bay. It landed with a small splash. “But we will find our way again,” he said, his voice rising in triumph as if he had not just tossed his own brother’s severed head overboard. “Because Sulepis does not possess this Godstone either!”
Tinwright could only stare at Hendon Tolly in uncomprehending horror. Suddenly his rhymes about nobles and gods seemed naïve beyond belief. If this was how the rich and privileged behaved, how much worse must the gods themselves be? If he were ever fortunate enough to be able to write verses again, Matt Tinwright decided, he would tell the truth. He would write poems that would describe both the beauty and the true horror of existence. He would write the truth and shock the world!
“But what could it be?” Hendon Tolly was still talking to himself; in an instant, he had gone from glee to fury. “Godstone? What is this cursed Godstone? Okros never mentioned it, may the demons of Kernios gnaw his scrawny hide.” He shook his head, face even paler than usual in his fury. “I could have been killed here!” He turned suddenly to Tinwright. “When the pagan bastard sent his messengers to me and asked me if I had the ‘last piece,’ I thought he meant Chaven’s mirror. I bargained, but all the time I was mistaken—I was wagering with nothing in my purse! I could have been killed!” Tolly shouted this as though the universe could offer no greater tragedy—which, Tinwright reflected, Tolly undoubtedly believed. Men like him could not conceive of a world without themselves at the center of it. Matt Tinwright had been reminded since childhood that he would scarcely be missed.
Away in the distance behind them, halfway between their boat and M’Helan’s Rock, the wooden chest was still bobbing on the surface. Tolly finally noticed it.
“So the Tolly family fortunes come down to this, brother,” he called to the box. “Gailon rots in the earth, you will feed the fishes, and I will stake everything on a final roll of the dice.” His eyes were again fever-bright. “The autarch is overconfident. He does not realize the virgin goddess waits for me—that she wants me to be the one who frees her! All else is trickery. Who knows if the southerner even believes his own lies? But I know what I know.” The worry had left his face. Tolly looked toward the walls of Southmarch, which rose above them now as the little boat neared the sea gate. “Destiny has not carried me so high only to let me fall.”
Tinwright thought that might be the most frightening thing he had yet heard.
11. Two Prisoners
“Although the boy was too small to be chained to the rowers’ benches, he was worked in hard service for the ship’s cruel master.”
“I’m sorry,” Brionytoldhim. “I don’t understand. What do you mean, we were wrong?”
“It is… it is just ...” Prince Eneas’ face bore a strange expression, one she had never seen before. He had been so busy after the battle she had not seen him for half the day—he was still wearing all his armor except for his helm. “It would be easier for you simply to come with me,” he said at last.
He led her to a stockade built in the middle of the Temple Dogs’ camp, with a roof of stitched skins stretched across one end for shade and to keep out the occasional rains that swept down out of the surrounding hills. To her surprise, all the prisoners in the enclosure were ordinary humans, some of them the very mercenary soldiers that the Temple Dogs had rescued only that morning.
“Where are the fairies?” she asked Eneas. “Did none of them live?”
“Wait.” His face was still unusually grim. At an order from the prince one of the prisoners was led out of the newly built stockade. He was a big man, tall but stocky, with the full, untrimmed beard she associated with the Kracian plains. From his battered armor, he seemed to be one of the mercenaries that had guarded the merchant caravan.
“Tell us everything you said before so this lady can hear it,” Eneas ordered him.
“Again?” The man did not seem very frightened to be a prisoner.
“Yes, again, dog.” Eneas was upset, that was clear—but why?
The man grinned without mirth. “As you wish.” He looked Briony up and down with less than perfect respect, but did not let his gaze linger long. “I am Volofon of Ikarta. I am an officer of these men. Our leader was Benaridas, but he is dead.” He looked at Eneas as though it were his fault somehow. “The fairies murdered him.”
“Why are these men prisoners?” Briony asked.
“Wait.” Eneas turned to the big mercenary. “Tell us again how you come to be in this land.”
The man shrugged. “We were hired. Some of us do not have rich fathers and uncles. We must make our own way in this world.”
“You address the prince of Syan!” snarled Lord Helkis. “Show respect, man, if you value your head.”
Volofon looked intrigued for the first time. “A prince? So Syan, too, is sniffing for what scraps may be collected here in the north?”
Helkis snatched at the hilt of his sword but Eneas reached out and touched his arm. “Enough, Miron.” The prince turned his attention back to Volofon. “You are making no friends. A man in a cage should perhaps think more carefully before speaking. Who hired you?”
“A group of Hierosoline merchants. Many of them are dead now, but more than a few are stuck in here with us honorable soldiers.” The mercenary pointed to a crouching figure on the far side of the stockade, a middle-aged man who had been watching everything carefully while pretending not to do so. “There’s one—Dard the Jar. He was the supply chief for all the caravan. Ask him your questions.”