When Collum Dyer finally woke, he also seemed to have awakened from the evil fancy that had gripped his mind. He looked around him, blinking slowly, and then moaned. “By Perin’s Hammer, when will day come in this cursed place?”
“This is as much day as you’ll see until we are in our own lands again,” Vansen told him. “You should know that by now.”
“How long have we been here?” Dyer looked down at his hands as though they should belong to someone else. “I feel ill. Where are the others?”
“Don’t you remember?” He told the guardsman all that had happened, what they had seen. Dyer looked at him mistrustfully.
“I remember none of that. Why would I say such things?”
“I don’t know. Because this place sends people mad. Come—if you’re feeling like yourself again, let’s get moving.”
They walked, but even the small idea that Vansen had of which direction might lead them back across the Shadowline toward mortal lands quickly failed. As the day wore away, with Dyer cursing fate and Vansen biting back his own anger at his companion—he hadn’t had the luxury of being mad for two days, and had suffered this endless, defeating landscape the whole time Collum Dyer had been babbling about the glories of the Twilight folk—it began to seem that not only would they have to sleep in the forest again, they might never find their way out. They were hopelessly lost and almost out of food and drink. Vansen did not trust the water in this land’s quiet streams, but it seemed they soon must drink it or die.
Somewhere in the timeless and arbitrary middle of their day, Vansen spotted a group of figures traveling away from them, struggling along a ridgetop at what looked like half a mile’s distance. He and Dyer were down in a small canyon, hidden by trees, and at first his strong impulse was to hide until these creatures were gone. But something about the stockiest of the climbing shapes snagged his attention; after a moment, attention turned to incredulous delight.
“By all the gods, I swear that must be Mickael Southstead! I would know his walk anywhere, like he had a barrel between his legs.”
Dyer squinted. “You’re right. Bless him—who would ever have thought I’d be happy to see that old whoreson!”
Energies renewed by hope, they ran until they no longer had the breath for it, then continued the climb up the steep hillside at a slower pace. Dyer wanted to shout—he was terrified that they would lose their comrades again—but Vansen did not want to make any more noise than was necessary it already seemed as though the very land was disapprovingly aware of them.
They reached the top of the ridge at last, staggering up onto the crest and stopping to gasp for breath. When they straightened up, they could see the others just a few hundred yards ahead along the ridgetop, still laboring forward, unaware of Vansen and Dyer. This joyful sight was undercut slightly by the view from the crest. The forest stretched as far as they could see on all sides with no landmark more recognizable than a few hilltops like the one on which they stood, jutting up at irregular intervals from the mists that blanketed the shadow-country like islands in the Vuttish archipelago surrounded by the cold northern sea.
Vansen was still winded, but Dyer sprinted ahead. Now that they were so close, Vansen could see that there were only four other survivors, and that one of them was the girl Willow. His heart lifted—the idea that he had brought the poor, tortured creature back to the place that had affected her so badly the first time had been troubling him in his more lucid moments—but only a little. Far more troubling was the rest of his missing guardsmen. Until now he had been able to convince himself that the rest of the troop was together and looking for them. Now he had to admit the problem was not simply that Vansen and Dyer had got themselves lost, but rather that Ferras Vansen, a captain of the royal guard, had lost most of his men.
The princess was right, he thought bitterly as he started after Dyer. I am not to be trusted with the safety of her family. And I should not have been trusted with the lives of these men, either.
Dyer had caught them and embraced Mikael Southstead though he had never liked him much. As Dyer threw his arms around the other two soldiers—Balk and Dawley, it appeared—Southstead turned to Ferras Vansen with a self-satisfied grin. “There you are, Captain We knew we’d find you.”
Vansen was vastly relieved to see even this small portion of his men alive, but was not quite certain he agreed with Southstead’s idea of who had found whom. “I am pleased to see you well,” he told Southstead, then clapped the man on the shoulder. It was a little awkward, but he wanted no embraces.
“Father?” the girl said to him. She looked more ragged than the others, her dress torn and muddy, and her face had lost the cheer it had possessed even in madness. He had a terrible notion of what might have happened in his absence, but also knew that there was nothing he could do about it, nothing. He beckoned her toward him.
“I am not your father, Willow,” he told her gently. “But I am happy to see you. I am Ferras Vansen, the captain of these men.”
“They wouldn’t let me go home, Father,” she said. “I wanted to, but they wouldn’t let me.”
Vansen couldn’t help shuddering, but when he turned back to the others all he said was, “We will make camp, but not here. Let us move down into the valley where we’re not so easy to see.”
Between them, Vansen and the remains of his troop scraped together enough biscuit and dried meat for a meager meal, but that was the last of their provisions gone and their waterskms were also nearly empty Soon they would have to drink from the shadow-streams and perhaps eat shadow-food as well. He had already had difficulty restraining Dyer from eating berries and fruit while they traveled, some of which looked quite familiar and wholesome, so how much more difficult would it be now that he had five of them to watch?
It quickly became apparent that Southstead and the others had experienced some of the same things as Vansen and Dyer, but not all, the Shadowline had crept over them while they slept, and the rest of the men and the merchant Beck apparently went mad much as Dyer had done, disappearing with the horses and leaving Southstead, Dawley, Balk, and the girl Willow stranded on foot. But Southstead and his company had not seen the host of the Twilight People on the march, and with the return of his wits Collum Dyer did not truly remember it either, leaving Vansen as the lone witness. He fancied that the others looked at him strangely when he spoke of it, as though he might have invented it all. “What would they be doing, Captain?” young Dawley asked. “I mean, going to war? With whom?”
“With us,” Vansen said, trying to keep his temper. “With our kind. Which is why we must hope we can get back to Southmarch with the news before that army of unnatural things gets there.”
It also quickly became clear that despite his claim of finding Vansen, Southstead and the other two guardsmen had been completely lost, wandering hopelessly, although Southstead claimed he would have found his way out of the woods, “given a proper chance.” The fact that these three guardsmen, none of whom Vansen thought of as very clever, had not been driven mad by the magic of the shadow-forest made him a little more uncertain about his own resistance. There seemed to be no reason for who was completely overcome and who was only buffeted by the strangeness of the place. More disturbing, resistance did not seem to give them the ability to find their way out again, but Dyer in his former madness had seemed certain he knew which way to go.
As the men argued about who would stand watch, Vansen suddenly had an idea: although he still feared his men had mistreated the girl Willow, perhaps even raped her, he realized he might in his anger have misunderstood something she was trying to tell him.