“Three of them silkins,” he hissed in Barrick’s ear. “Just beyond trees there.” He indicated the direction with his beak. “Don’t look!”
“Curse them, they’ve found a friend.” But he did his best not to let it frighten him. Half a dozen or more had come at him the last time and he had beaten them away—three would never be enough to overcome Barrick Eddon, master of the silk-slitting spear! Still, where there were three there could soon be more…
When will we get out of this gods-cursed forest? I cannot stand another day of this. But the memory of the long stretch of treetops beyond the Cursed Hill was fresh: Barrick knew they would not be under open sky anytime soon.
Skurn had flown a little distance ahead to hunt for a relatively safe place to spend the night. Barrick was getting hungrier by the moment. He had eaten little in the past few days but berries and a few bird’s eggs drunk raw straight from the shell. Meat and a fire to cook it on seemed a fabulous luxury, something he could scarcely recall.
All princes should spend a year lost behind the Shadowline, he decided. It would teach them to value what they have. By the gods, would it teach them!
A movement in the near distance startled him. He looked up and saw something white vanish behind a tree, then glimpsed another pale smear moving a little deeper in the forest. Closer than they were before, he realized. Maybe they think we’ve stopped because I’m hurt. He picked up a rock and began to ostentatiously sharpen the point of his broken spear for the benef it of any observers. He had wrapped a piece of cloth torn from his sleeve around the handle to make it easier to hold, but he still wished mightily for a sword or at least a proper knife.
Skurn came fluttering down out of the trees, beating his wings as he settled to the ground near Barrick’s feet. “Four of them,” he gasped. “Oh, wings be smarting, us flew so fast to tell. Four, and carrying a net.”
“I saw them,” Barrick said quietly, gesturing with his thumb. “Over there.”
“Over there? No, these be yon, just ahead. If you see’d some too, they be others.”
Barrick made the sign of the Three as he sprang up. “Bastard things! They’re trying to surround us.” The helplessness he had felt in the woods at the edge of Kolkan’s Field came over him like a sudden chill, that moment when he and his companions realized that the fairies had tricked them—that the Twilight People were not on the run, but had doubled back and were coming in from every side. The shrieks of terror from the men around Barrick as they had gone from hunters to hunted in a single breath would never leave him so long as he lived. “Go!”
He ran forward, angling away from where the raven said the four silkins were waiting with a net, but also away from those he had seen. A moment later Skurn flapped past him. “Many behind us!” the bird shouted.
Barrick took a look back. Half a dozen of the silk-wrapped creatures were scuttling along branches or speeding along the forest floor with that weird, hopping gait of theirs, half-insect, half-ape.
He turned back just in time to see another pair loom up before him out of the shadows between two gnarled old trees, spinning something like a fishing net. Barrick only had a moment to throw himself to one side—he felt the sticky edge of one of the strands drag at his arm for a moment as it brushed his skin. Skurn had to bank up sharply to avoid the net and disappeared into the upper branches.
More pale shapes glided between the trees, circling toward him. The uneven ground was treacherous so Barrick had to keep an eye on where he was running, but he thought he could count a dozen or more in just his brief surveillance. The creatures were trying to form a moving wall in front of him, falling back more slowly at the sides than before him: within a few moments he would be surrounded.
“No!” he shouted, and skidded to a halt, grabbing at a tree branch to keep from tumbling. For a moment his feet actually left the ground and the weight on his bad arm sent a bolt of fire through his elbow and shoulder all the way to his neck. Four or five more silkins he hadn’t even spotted were clambering down from the trees—another dozen steps and he would have run right into them. “Go back, bird!” Barrick shouted, hoping Skurn could hear him, then he turned tail and ran back the way he had came, back up the slope. It was steeper than he remembered and he was running out of directions—time to start thinking about fighting. “If you can choose nothing else,” Shaso had always said, “pick the spot to make your stand. Do not let your enemy dictate it to you.”
Shaso. For a moment grief and loss and even terror swept through him, not just at the thought of dying in the forest, but at the realization of how many things he would never know, never resolve, never understand.
Maybe when you die, you learn everything. Or maybe you learn nothing.
“Not that way!” Skurn was flying beside him, doing his best not to run into anything as he followed Barrick through the trees. “That way be Cursed Hill! Mind what the Tine Fay said!”
Barrick stumbled on a root but caught himself, kept clambering uphill. Well, why not? Hadn’t the bird said that even the silkins did not go there? And if he had to make a stand, what better place could he find than in the open air, with one of those rock outcroppings at his back?
“Master!” called Skurn desperately as Barrick dug even harder up the slope. The raven fluttered down and crouched on a stone just ahead of him. “Master, it be death to climb that hill!”
“Do what you want,” he told the bird. “I’m going this way.”
“Don’t want to leave you, but us will die for certain there!”
A moment later the ground had angled up so steeply that Barrick almost had to go down on all fours. He snatched at low-lying branches to pull himself ahead. He could hear the silkins rattling through the branches behind him and the growing murmur of their strange hunting song. “Go on! Fly, you fool bird!” he gasped. “If it’s my time, I’m at least going to die in the open.”
“Krah!” the bird croaked in frustration. “Be all Sunlanders such… such stubborn, pisshead idiots?” But he didn’t wait for an answer. Instead Skurn unfolded his wings, flew up into the sky, and was gone.
7. The King’s Table
“Kyros the Soterian cites as further evidence of the sacrilegious nature of the fairies’ beliefs how closely their version of the Theomachy seems to follow the Xandian Heresy, portraying the Trigon as the enemies of mankind and the defeated gods Zmeos Whitefire and his siblings as mankind’s benefactors…”
“I am grieved and angry to hear aboutthis terrible thing, Highness,” said Finn Teodoros. “This murder of your servant!
Even in my captivity I have heard little else.”
“It is far worse for the family of Talia, the little girl who died.” Briony gave him a sad smile. “ ‘Highness’—it is strange to hear you call me that, Finn.”
“Well, it must have been stranger for you during all that time you traveled with us, being called ‘Boy’ or ‘Tim.’ ” He laughed. “Zoria in hiding, indeed!”