“Sit, then.” Briony crouched down beside her. Across the bay, the last daylight had lit the top of Wolfstooth Spire as though it were a candle. “I have heard tales that the autarch is holding King Olin prisoner.”
“Oh, we’ve all heard that. Don’t know if it’s true. Why would he? What would the southerners want with our king?”
Yes, what indeed? Briony wondered. And we might also ask what game Hendon Tolly is playing—does he want to ransom my father for some reason of his own? “So you don’t know anything about where the king might be kept if they had him?”
Little Molly gave her a hard look. “You ask some strange questions for a beggar-girl. Where’s my coppers? I won’t say another word until you give them to me, not another word… !”
Briony produced a silver coin from the purse hidden under her ragged clothes. “Here. That’s worth a dozen crabs at least. Now answer the question, please. Where might King Olin be?” Even as she spoke, she heard a strange, blatting horn call rise above the camp, a signal for evening prayer or else an alarm call—perhaps even the alarm about Eneas’ attack. Time was slipping away. “Tell me!”
Little Molly looked around in worried surprise; Briony could hear some of the men shouting to each other. Many others were hurrying in all directions across the camp, perhaps to get weapons or armor they had left in their tents. Eneas had made good his word. Now it was up to her.
“How would I know such a thing?” the little woman moaned. “Who are you? Why do you want to know such things?”
“You would not believe me if I told you, Molly, but I have given you what I promised—now earn it. Where would they keep an important prisoner?”
“But I don’t know! The mayor’s house in town, maybe. They used to keep prisoners there, I’ve heard, although maybe that’s when the goblins were here. Oh, and the Xixies have built a great pen on the city green for something—animals, everyone thinks. I heard some of the traders talking about it who brought in the metal—twenty wagonloads of iron bars just to make it! Can you imagine?”
Briony rose to her feet. “Keep the silver, Little Molly. May Zoria bless you.”
She left the Funderling woman looking after her in astonishment.
The fast-darkening evening was alive now with figures rushing past, with torches waving nearby and in the distance, and men’s loud, excited voices. She prayed that Eneas and his men would do as they said, striking only long enough to force the garrison to call for reinforcements before they fled back over the hills. The autarch’s troops would never follow them in the dark, and with luck would not send more than a token force to search for them the next day, assuming them to be local bandits or a surprise counterstrike by Hendon Tolly.
What was the purpose of Tolly’s parley with the autarch, if that had been more than just gossip—simply the southern monarch demanding the city’s surrender? But Hendon would never attend such a humiliation in person. Had he been trying to ransom Olin for some purpose of his own? A chill ran through her. What if the autarch no longer held her father? What if he was in Hendon Tolly’s hands now?
Briony had followed the track now all the way to Market Road, where the farmhouses and open land gave way to the true city. Buildings were packed in side by side here and the streets were narrow, which made avoiding soldiers more difficult, but evening had fallen and the encampment’s torches were too infrequently spaced to shed much light, which made her disguise better.
Even here, where the soldiers did not seem to be responding directly to the alarm horn, Briony could hear urgency in the voices of the passing men. Some leaned out of upper windows and called to Briony in Xixian; a few even came down to the doors and beckoned her in, but she only waved her hand in thanks and limped along as fast as she dared. Long-legged Dowan Birch had taught her how to keep her sinews loose even as she held a demanding pose which would otherwise quickly exhaust her, so she could continue this awkward, halting gait for a while more, but the constant ache of it was beginning to weary her badly.
She hurried over Grasshill Bridge and past the burned husk of a temple. When she was almost to the green Briony stepped off the main road, doing her best to make sure she wasn’t followed. Even in ordinary times the streets around Shoremarket after dark were a haunt of thieves and worse. She made her way a little distance south of the square, then onto the green, walking slowly toward the torches. Their light made the wide thing seem to glow, a sickly pale light like a mushroom crouching at night in the undergrowth.
The tent was a hundred paces across but only a dozen high at the center, guyed by dozens of ropes, a vast, peaked expanse of white that took up much of the center of the green where the city’s sheep had always been grazed. Torches blazed all around it, and several solders guarded not only its front entrance but the sides and doubtless the back as well. Briony was a little relieved to see there wasn’t much light beyond the ring of torches. As long as she kept a good distance away, she wouldn’t be seen while she tried to decide what to do.
She moved as quickly as she could along the edge of the green, staying in the shadows of trees or in the doorways of empty houses, of which there were more than a few. As she had feared, there were guard posts on each side, but the distance between them was large and the corners of the tent kept them from seeing each other. Shaso would have scoffed at whoever set out the sentries, she decided. The fool had made sure a spy would only have to avoid the eyes of one sentry post when approaching the building, which made the guards vulnerable to misdirection, among other things.
Briony did not need misdirection, though, because even as she watched from behind a well at one end of the green, a group of armored horsemen rode past with a great drumroll of hooves and clanging of weapons on shields, headed no doubt toward Millwheel Road and the besieged garrison—reinforcements. The jaws of the trap would close on Eneas soon if he didn’t put space between his company and this pack of hounds.
Merciful Zoria, help them find their way out in time! Eneas was a good man—a wonderful, brave man. She cared for him, she had to admit, more than she sometimes realized. A thought struck her. And help me, too, sweet goddess, please! She had almost forgotten to pray for herself. She wondered if Zoria could be bribed and decided it couldn’t hurt to try. If the Eddons regain the throne, I will build you a beautiful temple, Mistress!
As the reinforcing Xixians thundered by the men at the tent’s nearest guard post stepped out to watch them. Realizing that she would never have a better moment, Briony ran down the length of the green, waiting until the reinforcing troops had almost passed the tent. Then, with the guards now facing almost completely away from the nearest corner of the great tent, she broke from the trees along the edge and sprinted across the green, head held so low she had to fight against stumbling all the way. But perhaps Zoria had decided to accept her offered bargain. No one raised an alarm, and a few long moments later Briony was crouched near the corner of the tent where the light from the torches was dim, breathing far harder than she should have been just from running. She was terrified, but did not have enough time to consider that fact: she scrabbled at the bottom of the tent and found, as she had hoped, that there were bars beneath. She slid herself under the heavy fabric of the tent until she was squeezed between the canvas and the cold iron bars like a bed warmer slid between coverlet and mattress. There were some small lights at the far end of the tent, but it was otherwise dark beyond the bars, and the air stank of unwashed bodies so badly that Briony, who had been living among soldiers, still nearly squeezed herself back out of the tent again, despite the risk of being spotted.