The chapel rooftop was a great angled field of slate with spiral chimneys protruding every few yards like trees Moss and even living tufts of long grass poked up between the slate, and the autumn wind had piled great drifts of leaves against the chimneys like red-and-brown snow Many other rooftops were visible from this spot, plateaus almost touching each other in jostling profusion, but most of the towered inner keep still stretched far above his head on all sides, the forest of chimneys rendered in giant size.
Flint seemed to care about none of these things. At first he only lay on his belly and stared at the place where the butterfly sat near the roof’s summit, fanning its wings indolently. Then the boy began to crawl upward, digging his feet into the eruptions of moss and lifted slate, until he was within arm’s reach of the creature. His hand stretched and the butterfly suddenly sensed him, tumbled over the edge, and was gone, but the boy did not stop. His fingers closed on something quite different and he plucked it out of the grass and brought it close to his face.
It was an arrow, small as a darning needle. He squinted. It was fletched with tiny crests of the same yellow and black as the butterfly’s wings.
For long moments the boy lay silently, motionlessly, staring at the arrow. Someone watching might have thought he had fallen asleep with his eyes open, so complete was his stillness, but the watcher would have been wrong. He abruptly rolled and scrambled across the rooftop to the nearest chimney, fast as a striking snake, and thrust with his hand first at one spot, then another, grabbing after something that fled through the little forest of grass around the base of the bricks.
His hand closed and suddenly he was still again. He pulled back his fist, holding it close to his body as he sat down with the chimney against his back. When he opened his hand, the thing huddling there did not move until he poked it gently with his finger.
The little man who now rolled over and crouched in Flint’s palm was not much taller than that finger. The man’s skin seemed sooty-dark, although it was hard to say how much of that was truly skin and how much was dirt His eyes were wide, httle pinpricks of white in the shadow of the boy’s hand. He tried to leap free, but Flint curled his fingers into a cage and the little man crouched again, defeated. He was clothed in rags and bits of gray pelt. He wore soft boots and had a coil of coarse thread looped over his shoulder, a quiver of arrows on his back.
Flint bent and picked something out of the grass. It was a bow, strung so fine that the cord could barely be seen. Flint looked at it for a moment, then set it on his palm beside the little man. The captive looked from the bow toward his captor, then picked it up. He passed the bow slowly from hand to hand with a kind of wonder, as though it had become something totally different since he touched it last. Flint stared at him, unsmiling, brow furrowed.
The little man gulped air. “Hurt me not, master, I beg ‘ee,” he fluted, something like hope in his eyes where before there had been only terror. “Tha hast me fair, skin to sky. Grant thy wish, I will. All know a Roof-topper will keep un’s word.”
Flint frowned, then set the little man down on the slate. The prisoner got to his feet, hesitated, took a few steps, then stopped again. Flint didn’t move. His little face screwed up in confusion, the tiny man at last turned away and began scrambling up the moss paths between the slates, heading for the roofcrest with his bow dangling in his hand. Every few steps he looked back over his shoulder, as though expecting his apparent freedom to prove only a cruel game, but by the time he reached the top, the boy still had not moved.
“Oh, th’art good, young master,” the tiny man cried, his voice almost inaudible from a yard and a half away. “Beetledown and un’s aftercomers will remember thee. That be promised!” He vanished over the roofcrest.
Flint sat against the chimney until the sun was high above him, until the dim moan of the chorus below had ended, then began his climb back down.
She was grateful for Rose standing beside her with the kerchief, and furious with herself for needing it. It was hard to believe how terrible a varnished wooden box could be. The funeral songs droned on and on, but she was grateful for that, too it gave her a chance to compose herself.
It seemed shameful to carry Kendrick to the tomb in a borrowed coffin, but there had been no time to prepare a proper one. In fact, Nynor had assured her the Funderling craftsmen had done well simply to prepare the tomb. The true coffin with its carved effigy should not be hurried, he said—would she want an imperfect likeness of her brother to gaze out at eternity, as if he were forced to hide behind a crude mask? Kendrick could be moved into the stone coffin when it was finished.
Still, it seemed shameful.
Despite the presence of members of the household like Rose and Moina, a dry-eyed but somber Chaven, and even old Puzzle, hatless and dressed in black-and-gray motley, his hair smoothed across his head in thin strands, the royal family’s bench at the front of the chapel was only half full. Briony’s stepmother Anissa sat a short distance away beside Merolanna, arms folded protectively across her belly Her face was hidden by a black veil, but she sobbed and snuffled loudly. At least we found something that could get her out of bed, was Briony’s bitter thought. She had not seen much of the queen lately. It was as though Anissa had turned the Tower of Spring into a sort of fortress, covering all the windows with heavy cloths and surrounding herself with women as a besieged monarch might surround himself with soldiers. Briony had never entirely warmed to her stepmother, but for the first time she was truly beginning to dislike her. Your husband is imprisoned, woman, and one of his children is murdered. Even with a baby in your belly, surely you have more duties now than just to hide in that nest of yours like a she-crow brooding on her eggs.
The chorus finished at last and Hierarch Sisel, in his finest red-and-silver robes, stood and took his place in front of the coffin to begin the funeral oration. It was the sort of thing Sisel did best, showing why King Olm had chosen him to fill such an important post despite the objections of Sisel’s own superiors back in Syan (who had thought him too lukewarm in his support of the policies of the current trigonarch) and he spoke the familiar words with apparent compassion and sincerity. As the soothing Hiero-sohne litany filled the Erivor Chapel, Briony could almost let herself believe she had found one of those echoes of the past, a remnant of the days she would whisper with her brothers during services, annoying Merolanna and frustrating the old mantis Father Timoid, who knew that the children’s father would never let them be scolded for a crime Olin himself deemed so insignificant.
But I’m not a child now. There is nowhere for me to hide from this moment.
As Sisel began to speak the words of the epitaph, the nobles dutifully repeating the significant phrases, Briony was distracted by a fuss at her elbow. Moina was talking sharply but quietly with a young page. “What does the fellow want?” Briony whispered.
“I come from your brother, Highness,” the child told her.
Held tightly around the middle by her confining garments, Briony did her best to bend toward the boy; it made her breathless. “Barrick?” But of course it had to be Barrick. If her other brother had sent her a message, it would not be carried by a young boy with a dripping nose. “Is he well?”
“He is better. He sends to say that you should not go to the cr… the cr…” The boy was nervous and couldn’t remember the word.