“What does that mean? Do you think that Barrick and the others have already caught the Twilight People?" “I think perhaps they have caught up with them, Highness. Briony. And I think perhaps they have failed.” “Failed . . ?” She couldn’t make sense of the word. It was a common one, but suddenly it had become cryptic, meaningless.
“Tyne writes of the fog of madness that surrounds the fairy folk. What is that covering the city below? Have you seen a mist like that before, even m winter, that was still forming at midday? And who is lighting fires there?"
Briony wanted to argue with him, to come up with reasons the old man must be wrong, answers that would explain all he had said and more, but for some reason she could not. A cold horror had stolen over her and she could only stare out at the mostly invisible city—separated from the place where she stood by nothing except less than half a mile of water—and the fires that burned in that gray mist like the eyes of animals watching a forest camp.
Barrick… she thought. But he must be… he cannot be…
“Highness?” said Brone. “We should go down now. If the siege is about to begin in earnest, we must…” He stopped when he saw the tears on her cheek. “Highness?”
She dabbed at her face with the back of her sleeve. The brocade was rough as lizard skin. “He will be well,” she said as though Brone had asked her. “We will send out our men. We will cut the fairies down like rats. We will kill them all and bring our brave soldiers back.”
“Highness…”
“Enough, Brone.” She tried to pull on the mask of stone—the queen’s face, as she thought of it, although she was only a princess still. Perhaps that’s why I can’t do it properly yet, she thought absently. Perhaps that’s why it hurts. Struggling, she spoke more coldly to Lord Brone than she had intended to. “Enough talking. Do what you must to make sure the walls and gates are secure, and prepare troops for a sortie if you are wrong and we do see Tyne come and engage with the enemy. You and I will talk after the banquet.”
“Banquet?”
“After all Nynor’s trouble, the people must eat and be merry.” Tears drying now, she did her best to smile, but it felt more like a snarl and she did not try too hard to amend it. “As he said, it may be the last joy for some time, so it would be a shame to waste all those puddings.”
The first gleam of dawn should have come as a relief, but it did not. They had held their ground and they were still alive, but there was no one else in sight or earshot with whom they could join forces. They were lost like shipwrecked mariners.
Ferras Vansen and a few men—Gar Doiney and two other scouts, along with the knight Mayne Calough of Kertewall and his squire, had held this high place since middle-night, an outcrop of stone in the middle of the field, not much bigger than a small farmhouse—held it mostly, Vansen guessed, because it was on the fringes of the battle and of little strategic value. Not that strategic value meant much anymore. Vansen had known for hours with a certainty as straightforward as a mortal wound that the fight was over and they had lost.
He was angry with himself, although he still believed he had been right to insist they catch the fairy folk outside the city. It had proved almost impossible to overcome the Twilight People without the superiority of numbers—or even apparent superiority, since everything to do with the fairy folk was slippery and hard to calculate. Already Vansen was plotting in the lulls between fighting what to do next time, how to take the advantage of surprise and concealment away from the shadow-people and their weird magicks, but all the time he had been doing it he knew that there might be no next time, that more than this battle might have been lost. With Tyne Aldritch dead, all was in disarray, and Tyne’s second-in-command, the stolid, unimaginative Droy of Eastlake would not have been able to salvage things even if he had lived. In fact, it had been Droy’s pig-headedness that had made the loss so desperate. By the time he had arrived with the weary foot troops, their torches making a fiery snake along the downs as they hurried to support the mounted knights, Vansen had sent one of the scouts to him to tell him that it was useless now, that Tyne had fallen and the best thing Droy’s foot soldiers could do was to try to flank the Twilight folk and beat them to the deserted city, or, failing that, to fall back into the hills so that his army might eventually be able to provide the other half of a pincer with Brone’s defensive force. Instead, the Count of Eastlake had ignored Vansen’s message as the cowardly advice of a commoner, a jumped-up sentry in Droy Nikomede’s estimation, and had plunged his weary soldiers into battle. Within moments, half of them had become completely disoriented by the mists and the strange noises and shadows—Lord Nikomede and the others had learned nothing from the first fight, it seemed—and had been cut down by archers they could not even see. Their own arrows seemed to do as much damage to the survivors among Tyne’s knights as to the enemy.
A disaster. Worse, a mockery. This is how we defended Southmarch —with battle plans out of some player’s comedy, with bravery sacrificed by blockheaded generalship.
Doiney tugged at the hem of Vansen’s surcoat, startling him out of his reverie. “Shadows, Captain. Over there. Coming near, I think.”
Vansen squinted. It was a little easier to see now that the sun was coming back, but not much. The mists were thinner, little more than what would be expected on these meadows at this hour of the day, but they still made the world an eerie and untrustworthy place. Something was indeed moving up the small rise toward the pile of stone they defended, a moving clot of shadowy shapes.
An arrow snapped past. Vansen jumped down from the prominence on which he had been crouching. The horses, herded together into a crack at the base of the outcrop because for the moment they were useless, whinnied in fear. No more arrows came. That was one small solace.
“Up!” Vansen shouted as half a dozen strange figures came charging out of the mist, eyes bright and faces as pale as masks. One ran on all fours like a beast, although he seemed to have been arrested in the middle of some transformation, with stripes of bushy for sprouting unevenly down his back and sides and his face misshapen, as though someone had pushed a human face out from within, making half a muzzle out of nose and mouth Seven hours ago this sort of thing had sickened Ferras Vansen, made him feel lost, as though the world he knew had suddenly fallen away beneath his feet Now it was only another reason to want to kill them, kill them all, these horrid, unnatural creatures that had themselves destroyed so many of his fellows.
“To me!” he shouted and helped Mayne Calough to his feet, the knight’s armor grating against stone as he dragged his aching body erect. “To me! Keep your backs together!”
The bright-eyed things were almost on them now, teeth bared as though they would not waste such sweet work on their swords. As he had at least a dozen times already, Vansen let his deeper thoughts go away so he could concentrate on the business of staying alive a little while longer.
Lord Calough and his squire were dead, or at least the knight was dead and the squire was clearly dying, with a great streaming gash beneath the point of his jaw. The hands with which the youth tried to hold in his own blood were all red, but his face had gone parchment-pale beneath the dirt and the blood was pumping more slowly now. The squire stared off into the misty morning sky, his bubbling prayers slipping down into silence though his lips still moved Vansen wished there was something he could do to help the boy Perhaps, though, this was the most merciful way Who knew what would happen to the rest of them when the shadow folk came again? Only Vansen knew even a little of the way a man’s own thoughts could betray him under the dark magicks of faerie.