She was sitting close to him, not speaking, but clearly more comfortable near the man she sometimes imagined was her father. “You said they would not let you go home,” he said to her quietly. “What do you mean?”
She shook her head, wide-eyed. “Oh, I can see the road! I tried to tell them, but they wouldn’t listen. The one who looks like our old bull pup said he knew where to go and that I should keep my mouth shut.” She slid closer to him. “But you will let me go home. I know you will.”
Vansen almost laughed at the girl’s description—the jowly Southstead did indeed look more than a little like a bulldog—but what she had said was important. She found her way out of shadow once, he thought, before we found her. He patted her on the head, carefully disengaged his hand from hers—she had a good, tight grip on it—and stood up. “I’ll take first watch,” he announced. “The rest of you play drop-stones or whatever you wish to settle your turns. Tomorrow you follow a new leader.”
Southstead did not look happy, but he grinned anyway. “As you wish, Captain, o’ course. But you and Dyer did no better than us.”
“I’m not going to be leading,” he said. “She will.”
Despite the grumbling of the men, after the little troop had been up and following Willow through the gray forest for a few hours Vansen actually saw the moon for the first time since they had fallen into shadow. It was only a glimpse when some unfelt wind in the heights scattered the mists for a moment, and he was a little disturbed to think it might be the middle of the night when his body had been telling him it was day, but he still regarded it as a good sign. The girl seemed certain of where she was going, walking on ahead of them in her tattered white dress like a ghost leading travelers to the place of its murder.
Perhaps it was hunger—the younger the man, Vansen had learned during his time as a guard captain, the more they thought about food—but somewhere during what everyone except Mesiya’s pale orb believed was the afternoon, Dawley suddenly stopped in his tracks.
“There’s something in that thicket,” he whispered to Vansen, who was closest to him. He took his bow off his shoulder and pulled out one of the two arrows he had saved from the collapse of their mission and the disappearance of the horses and packs. “If it’s a deer, Captain, I’m going to shoot it. I don’t care if it’s the King of Elfland in disguise, I’ll eat it anyway.”
Vansen laid a hand on the young soldier’s arm as he nocked the arrow, squeezed the arm hard. “But what if it’s Adcock or one of the other guards wandering lost, maybe wounded?” Dawley slowly lowered the bow. “Good. Take Dyer and Balk and see if you can move in quietly.”
While Vansen and Southstead and the young woman watched in silence, the men closed in on the thicket. Dawley abruptly dove into the deepest part of the undergrowth and Balk clambered in after him. The leaves were rattling, and both Dawley and Balk were shouting to each other.
“There! It’s running there!” “It’s a cat!”
“No, it’s a bloody ape! But it’s fast!”
Dyer waded in last and the three converged. The branches thrashed furiously, then Dyer straightened up with something the size of a small child struggling in his arms.Vansen and the others hurried forward. “Perin’s Balls!” swore Vansen. “Don’t get scratched, Collum.What is it?”
The whining, scratchy cries of the thing as it fought helplessly against the much larger Dyer were disturbing enough, but hearing it suddenly speak the Common Tongue was terrifying. “Let go me!” it shrilled.
Startled, Dyer almost did let it go, but then he squeezed until it subsided. The guardsman was breathing hard, his eyes wide with fear, but he was holding the thing tightly now. Vansen could understand why the others mistook it for an ape or a cat. It was vaguely man-shaped, but long of arm and short of leg, and was furred all over in shades of gray and brown and black. The face was like a demon-mask that children wore on holidays, although this demon seemed to be as frightened as they were.
“What are you?” Vansen asked.
“Something cursed,” said Southstead, his voice cracking.
The thing stared at the guardsman with what looked like contempt, then turned its gaze onVansen.The bright yellow eyes had no white and only. thin black sideways slits for pupils, like a goat’s. “Goblin, am I,” it rasped. “Under-Three-Waters tribe.You dead men, all.”
“Dead men?”Vansen repressed a superstitious shiver.
“She bring white fire. She burn all you houses until only black stones.” It made a strange hissing, spitting sound. “Wasted, my leg, old and bent. Fell behind. Never I see the beauty of her when she ends you.” “Kill it!” Southstead demanded through clenched teeth.
Vansen held out a hand to still him. “It was following the army of the Twilght People. Perhaps it is one of them—it’s certainly their subject. It can tell us things.” He looked around, trying to think of what they could use to bind the creature, which was struggling again in Dyer’s grasp.
“Never,” the thing said, the words raw and strangely-shaped. “Never help sunlanders!” A moment later it squirmed abruptly and violently, contorting itself m such a way that it seemed to have no backbone, and sank its teeth into Collum Dyer’s arm. He screamed in pain and surprise and dropped the thing to the ground. It scrambled away from them, but one of its legs was clearly lame and dragged behind it. Before Vansen could even open his mouth to shout, young Dawley took two steps and caught up to it, then smashed it to the ground with his bow. A moment later Dyer was there as well, holding his bloody arm against his body as he began to kick the writhing shape. Southstead caught up to them with his sword out and his mouth full of angry curses. The other two stepped back as he began hacking and hacking. All three men were making sounds like dogs baying, howls of terror and rage.
By the time Vansen reached them the goblin was long dead, a bloody tangle of meat and fur on the mossy forest floor, its lantern eyes already going dull.
Barrick still refused to see her, but Briony was determined. Her brothers outbursts and anger had been bad enough before, but now he was truly frightening her. He had always been prickly and private, but this strangeness about the potboy was something else again.
She leaned down close to the wide-eyed page, who had his back against the prince’s chamber door as though he meant to defend it with his ten-year-old life. “Tell my brother that I will be back to speak with him after the evening meal. Tell him we unll speak.”
As she walked away, she heard the page hurriedly open the door and then almost slam it closed behind him, as though he had just escaped from the cage of a lioness.
Are there people here who fear me as much as they fear Brone? As they fear Barrick’s moods? It was an odd thought. She had never conceived of herself as frightening, although she knew she was not always patient with what she deemed foolishness or dithering.
Zoria, virgin warrior, Zona of the cunning hands, give me the strength to be gentle. The prayer reminded her of that fool of a poet, and her sudden whim. Why had she decided to keep such a creature around? Just to annoy Barrick and the lord constable? Or because she truly did enjoy even such ridiculous flattery’.
Her mind muddled with these thoughts, she walked down the long hall beneath the portraits of her ancestors living and dead, her father and her grandfather Ustm and her great-grandfather, the third Anglin, without really seeing them. Even the picture of Queen Lily, scourge of the Gray Companies and the most famous woman in the history of the March Kingdoms, could not hold her attention today, although there were other times when she would stand for hours looking at the handsome, dark-haired woman who had held the realm together in one of its bleakest hours, wondering what it would be like to make such a mark on the world. But today, although the familiar sight of her other clansmen and clanswomen had not moved her, the picture of Sanasu, Kellick Eddon’s queen, caught her eye.