Barrick was beginning to feel a chill now, as if fever was rolling through him. “Wrong with me? Are you talking about me?”
You, your father, and anyone else who has ever carried the painful, confusing legacy of the Fireflower as it burns in human veins. Yes, my child, I am talking about you. You are a descendant of my daughter, Sanasu, and the blood runs strong in you. In a way, you are my grandson.
Barrick stared at him. His heart was pounding so swiftly that he felt dizzy. “I’m… one of the Twilight People?”
No, you are less than that… and also more. You have the blood of the Highest in you, but to this hour it has brought you only sorrow. Now, however, it might make you the last hope of our ancient people—but only if you make a great sacrifice. You can let me pass the Fireflower itself along to you.
Barrick could not make sense of it. He stared. The king’s calm face looked just as it had looked an hour earlier, before he had said these things which turned all the world upside down. “You… you want to give this Fireflower to ... to me? ”
To keep the queen alive a little longer, I will need to lend her my last strength. If I can pass the Fireflower along to you—and it may not be possible—that legacy at least will survive. But even if you survive it, Barrick Eddon, you will never be remotely the same again.
“But if you do that, what… what will happen to you?”
For the first time in a long while, Ynnir smiled—a thin, weary tightening of the lips. Oh, child, of course I will die.
35. Rings, Clubs, and Knives
“The fairies killed in the great battle at Coldgray Moor were buried in a common grave. Although the local inhabitants shun the place and claim it is haunted by the vengeful spirits of dead Qar, and I was unable to locate the grave precisely, the general area is now a beautiful, flowering meadow.”
They had to stop at the outskirts of Ugenion because the Royal Highway was blocked by a funeral procession bound for the temple in the city. It was clearly a rich man’s leavetaking: four horses pulled a wagon bearing the black-draped coffin, and so many mourners followed it that Briony climbed out of the wagon and joined the other players by the roadside.
“But who has died?” Briony asked one of the mourners at the back of the procession, a woman carrying a long willow branch.
“Our good baron, Lord Favoros,” the woman told her. “Not before his time—he had threescore years and more—but he lost his son to the autarch’s cannibals and so he leaves a sickly wife and too young an heir, may the Brothers bless his line.” She made the sign of the Three.
Briony found herself doing the same thing as she turned away.
“I have never heard of him,” she told Finn Teodoros quietly as they stood watching the mourners file past. “But from the sorrow I see on these people’s faces, he must have been a good man.”
“Either that or you see sorrow because they have lost a known quantity for an unknown, in very uncertain times.” Finn shrugged. “Still, I suspect you are right. I do not see too many herring-weepers in the crowd.”
“Herring-weepers?” The picture it made in Briony’s thoughts made her laugh. “What in the name of goodness are those?”
“Those who will walk in a funeral parade and cry loudly for a copper crab or two, or who can be hired in a group for a single silver herring. It would be a much-loved man indeed whose family did not have to hire at least a few herring-weepers.”
They watched the end of the line as it moved slowly past, the children bearing candles, the wagons carrying bread, wine, and dried fish for the temple where the body would lie in state and the priests would pray night and day to ensure the deceased’s rapid progress to heaven. When the last mourners had passed and the last interested onlookers had trailed after the slow parade, Briony and Finn climbed back into the wagon. Dowan Birch snapped the horses’ reins and the wagon rolled up to the city gates with the rest of Makewell’s Men following close behind.
Once they had negotiated a small but adequate bribe with the guards in the gatehouse they were allowed into Ugenion. They followed the funeral as it wound up the hilly main road toward the temple at the center of the town.
“He was a wealthy man, too, from the look of all this,” said Finn as they had their first look at the entire procession spread out on the road before them. “But I have heard no word of funeral games, which is usual here even after the deaths of lesser men. Perhaps it is the fear of what is happening in the north.”
“And the south,” said Briony sadly. “Poor Hierosol.” The jolting of the wagon sent her away from the window to sit on the floor. Where was her father this moment? Alive? A prisoner, still? If Hierosol collapsed, would the autarch be willing to ransom him? And what difference would that make if neither she nor Barrick had access to the Southmarch treasury?
Could it really be true that her twin had come back to Southmarch? That alone would make something good out of the darkest spring Briony Eddon had ever known.
“You look solemn, Princess,” said Finn. “As if you knew the poor soul who is being carried to the temple.”
“I’m just… it’s all so uncertain. Everything. What will I do when I get to Southmarch? What if the fairies have already taken the castle?”
Finn turned away from the window. “Then things will be very different from when we left. You cannot try to outthink the Qar, my lady, because they are not like men. Please indulge me in believing this one thing to be true—I know a little of them, after all.”
“Why? Did you… did you write a play about them?” She tried to make it a light remark, but her sadness and bitterness spilled through. “About their charming elfin magic and how they use it to kidnap and murder innocent folk?”
Finn raised his eyebrows. “I have of course used the Twilight folk as characters in my plays, and in many different ways. If I have erred in portraying them, I suspect it was on the side of making them more mysterious and fearful than they are, rather than using them as quaint purveyors of magic rings and reassuring rewarders of blockheaded virgins. But in fact, I gained my knowledge of them in a very odd and unusual way for a playwright—I studied them.”
“What do you mean?
“What I have said, Highness. No disrespect, but perhaps you would rather rest a little rather than talk. You seem to me a bit out of sorts.”
She closed her eyes and tried to calm the anger that was bubbling in her, but she was not entirely successful. “I’m sorry, Finn. Don’t go. I have good reason to be angry, though and so would you. Leaving out all of my innocent subjects they have harmed, my brother—my own twin!—is missing or dead and it is those creatures’ fault. And they also took someone ...” She hesitated, then wondered what she would have said about Vansen. “Someone I considered a friend. Like my brother, he never came back from Kolkan’s Field. So I am not disposed to hear much good of these Qar.”
“Fear not—I said I studied them, Highness, not that I became one. Lord Brone set me to finding out all that I could about the Peaceful Ones, as they are euphemistically termed. Paid me well for my work, too—more than I’ve made for any of my plays so far, whether they had fairies in them or not.”
She laughed a little in spite of herself. “Tell me, then, Finn. What do you know about them?”
“I know that I do not understand them, Princess Briony. I also know that they have some great interest in Southmarch, but not why that is so.”