“What...what do you mean?”
“Never mind. It is not your fault. I could have wished you would have made a busybody of yourself somewhere else, though.” Barrick lifted his knees up to his chin and wrapped his arms around them.
“Do you know why I followed you, Highness?” The bleak surroundings seemed to be getting into Vansen’s blood and his thoughts like a cold fog. Soon I shall be as mournful and mad as this prince. “Because your sister asked me—no, begged me to do so. She begged me to keep you safe.”
Now Barrick showed fire again. “What, does she think I am helpless? A child?”
“No. She loves you, Prince Barrick, whether you love yourself or not.” He swallowed. “And you are all she has left, I suppose.”
“What do you know of it—a mere soldier?” Barrick looked as though he wanted to hit him, despite the shackles on his arms. Gyir, sitting a few paces away, turned to watch them.
“Nothing, Highness. I know nothing of what it is like to be a prince, or to suffer because of it. But I do know what it is like to lose a father and others of my blood. Of five other children in our family, I have only two sisters left now, and my mother and father both are years in the grave. I have lost friends among the guard as well, one of them swallowed by a demon-beast in these lands the first time I came here. I know enough about it to say that sometimes carelessness with your own life is selfishness.”
Barrick seemed startled now, both angry and darkly amused. “Are you calling me selfish?”
“At your age, Highness, you would be odd if you were not. But I saw your sister before we rode out, saw her face as she begged me to keep you safe and told me what it would mean to her if she lost you too. You call me ‘a mere soldier,’ Prince Barrick, but I would be the lowest sort of villain indeed if I did not urge you to take care of yourself, if only for her sake. That is no burden, from where I see it—it is a mighty and honorable charge.”
Barrick was silent for a long moment, anger and amusement both gone, absorbed into one of his inscrutable, cold-faced stares. “You care for her,” he said suddenly. “Don’t you, Vansen? Tell me the truth.”
Ferras realized that even here in the dark heart of the Twilight Lands, on the way to what was almost certain death, he was blushing. “Of course I do, Highness. She is... you are both my sovereigns.”
“Back home I could have you whipped for avoiding my question like that, Vansen. If I asked you whether we were being invaded, would you say, “Well, we’ll have more guests than we usually do at this time of the year?”
Vansen gaped, then laughed despite himself, something he had not done for so long that it was almost painful. Gyir twisted his featureless face in a way that might almost have been a frown, then turned away from them. “But, Highness, even...even if it were so, how could I speak of such a thing? Your sister!” He felt his own face grow stern. “But I can tell you this—I would give my life for her without hesitation.”
“Ah.” Barrick looked up. “They are going to feed us, it seems.”
“Pardon?”
The prince gestured with his good arm. “See, they are carrying around some kind of bucket. I’m sure it will be something rare and splendid.” He scowled and suddenly seemed little more than a youth of fourteen or fifteen summers again. “You realize, of course, that there isn’t a chance in the world it will ever come to anything?”
“What?”
“Stop pretending to be stupid, Captain. You know what I mean.”
Vansen took a breath. “Of course I do.”
“You like lost causes, don’t you? And thankless favors? I saw you help that disgusting bird to escape, as well.” Barrick smiled at him. It was quite nearly kind. “I see I’m not the only one who has learned to live with hopelessness. It makes an unsatisfying fare, doesn’t it? But after a while, you begin to take a sort of pride in it.” He looked up again. “And speaking of unsatisfying fare, here come our hosts.”
Two Longskulls stood over them, appearing to Vansen like nothing so much as gigantic grasshoppers, although there was something weirdly doglike about them, too. Their legs were similar to men’s, but the back of the foot and the heel were long and did not touch the ground, so that they perched on the front of their feet like upright rats. The eyes sunk deep in their loaf-shaped, bony heads did not exactly glisten with intelligence, but it was obvious they were not mere beasts, either. One made a little honking, gabbling noise and ladled something out of the bucket the other was holding. It pointed at Vansen’s hands, then honked again.
I am living in a world of firelight tales, Vansen thought suddenly, remembering his father’s old sea stories and his mother’s accounts of the fairies that lived in the hills. We are captives in some unhappy child’s dream.
He held out his arms, showing the guards his shackles. “I cannot hold anything,” he said. The Longskull merely turned the ladle upside down and let the mass of cold pottage drop into his hands. It did the same for Barrick, then moved on to the next group.
In the end, he found he could eat only by bracing the heavy shackles on the ground, then crouching over his own outstretched hands, lapping up the tasteless vegetable pulp like a dog eating from a bowl.
When all the prisoners had been fed the watery pottage, the Longskull guards returned to the fire to eat their own food, which had been roasting on spits. Vansen could not see what they ate, but when the prisoners were hauled to their feet a short time later and set to marching again, he noticed the Longskulls hanging some empty shackles back on the massive wagon that held the slavers’ simple belongings, and where they swung, clinking, as the wagon began to roll.
If Barrick had thought the Twilight Lands oppressive before, every miserable step of the forced march now seemed to take him into deeper and deeper gloom. It wasn’t simply that the pall of smoke they thought they had escaped grew thicker above them with every step, turning the land dark as midnight and making breathing a misery, or even the dull horror of their predicament. No something even beyond these things was afflicting him, although Barrick could not say exactly what it was. Every step they took, even when they reached an old road and the going became easier, seemed to plunge them deeper into a queer malevolence he could feel in his very bones.
He asked Gyir about it. The fairy-warrior, who seemed almost as despondent as his companions, said, Yes, I feel it, even despite the blindness my wounds have caused, but I do not know what causes it. Jikuyin is the source of some of it—but not all.
Barrick was struck by a thought. Will this blindness of yours get better? Will the illness or whatever it is leave you?
I do not know. It has never before happened to me. Gyir made a sign with his long, graceful fingers that Barrick did not recognize. In any case, I truthfully do not think we will live long enough to find out.
Why are we prisoners? Is Jikuyin at war with your king? Only in that he does not bow to him. Only in that Jikuyin is old and cruel and our king is less cruel. But we are prisoners, I think, only because we were captured. Look at those around us... He gestured to the slow-stepping band of prisoners on either side and stretching before and behind them farther than Barrick could throw a stone. We may be rare things here, Gyir told him in his wordless way, but these others are as common as the trees and stones. No, we are all being taken to the same place, but the more I consider, the less I think it is because we were singled out. He opened his eyes wide, something Barrick had come to recognize as a sign of determination. But I think these creatures’ master will take notice of us when he sees us. If nothing else, he will wonder what mortals are doing again in his lands.