When he reached the alley behind the tavern Tinwright made his way up the hill to the base of the looming wall, then inched his way along the top of the berm toward the abandoned guardpost. To his surprise, he found that at least a dozen other locals had apparently had the same idea. One of them, a grim-faced young man wearing a leather apron, even leaned down to help Tinwright up the broken steps so that he could join them.
They had an unimpeded view of the north end of mainland Southmarch. Most of the activity, though, seemed to be happening at the mainland city’s nearest end, on the beach beside the remains of the ruined causeway. The murk Matt Tinwright had seen earlier had spread and he could see glimmers in its depths, flashes of light that looked less like the flicker of flames than the steady glow of smelted metal. But what he had thought were pillars of weirdly frozen black smoke were not smoke at all.
Monstrous black trees had sprouted from of the murk, their branches like gnarled fingers, as though a dozen giant hands reached out of the mist toward the city walls on the far side of the narrow stretch of bay. The clawlike limbs were bent almost sideways, clearly growing out over the water and toward the castle where Tinwright and the others watched in stunned, frightened silence.
“What are those gods-cursed things?” someone asked at last. A young man who should have been too old to cry began to do it anyway, deep, wracking noises like a consumptive cough.
“No,” was all Matt Tinwright could say as he stared across the water. The things, the trees or whatever they were, had doubled or even tripled in size since he’d seen them from the residence window. But nothing in the world grew that fast! “It can’t be true.” But it was true, of course.
No one spoke after that, except to pray.
The fog was unsettling enough—it came from everywhere and nowhere, making the world outside their prison as daunting as the dim, lifeless fields surrounding the great castle of Kernios in the tales Utta had been told as a girl—but it was the noises that made her most uncomfortable: deep groans and creaks shivered her bones, as though some vast ship a thousand times bigger than any human vessel was sailing past their window, mere inches away but invisible behind the thick, cold mist.
“What is that dreadful sound?” Utta began to pace again. “Have they built some kind of—what are those things called… siege engines? One of those monstrous towers to bring against castle walls? But why would the fairies be pushing it back and forth along the beach all night? The noise gave me such terrible dreams!” In one, her family, years lost to her, had stood at the rail of a long, gray boat begging her to come aboard and join them, but even in the dream Utta had known from the dullness of their eyes that they were all dead, that they were inviting her to join them in a voyage to the underworld. She had woken up with her heart beating so swiftly that for a moment she had feared she was truly dying.
“Sister, you are sending me mad with your walking back and forth!” Merolanna complained. When they had first been prisoned in this abandoned merchant’s house facing Brenn’s Bay the older woman had spent days cleaning, as though each fleck of dust she wiped away lifted them a little farther beyond the power of the fairies and their dark mistress. But the opposite was true, of course: the more the duchess cleaned, the harder it was to ignore the fact that when the tidying was done they would still be prisoners. And now that the place was as neat as Merolanna could make it the older woman seemed to have fallen into a torpor of misery. She scarcely got out of the chair most days, although she seemed to have strength enough to complain about Utta pacing or making what Merolanna considered to be an undue amount of noise.
Blessed Zoria give us both strength, Utta prayed. It is our predicament that makes us pick at each other this way.
Not only had they so far avoided execution, but they had been housed in a spacious building with three floors and had been given the materials to make quite acceptable meals. Still, there was no doubt they were prisoners: two silent guards, strange and threatening as demons out of a temple carving, stood always outside the door. Another waited on the roof, as Utta had discovered one day to her horror when she had decided to take advantage of a little sun to lay out some clothes to dry. The unnatural creature had jumped down onto the balcony as she emerged with a bundle of damp things clutched to her breast, frightening her so badly she had thought she would fall down dead.
This fairy had been different than the other guards—less like a man and more like some kind of shaved ape or smooth lizard, with claws protruding through the ends of his gloved fingers, a misshapen nose and mouth like a dog’s muzzle, and amber eyes that had no pupil. The fairy guard had grunted so angrily and waved his leaf-shaped knife at her so vigorously that Utta had not even bothered to show him the harmless chore she had planned, but instead had simply scuttled back inside.
What do these creatures think we are going to do? she had wondered that day as she staggered back down the stairs to the main living chamber. Leap from the balcony and fly away? And would he have killed me to stop me doing so?
She felt uncomfortably certain he would have.
“Why do they hold us?” Utta demanded as the unsettling noises continued. “If that woman in black hates our kind so much—their queen or whatever she is—why doesn’t she simply kill us and have done with it?”
Merolanna made the sign of the Three on her bosom. “Don’t say such things! Perhaps she intends to ransom us. Ordinarily I would say no, never, but I would give much to be back in my own bed, and to see little Eilis and the others. I am frightened, Sister.”
Utta was frightened too, but she didn’t think they were being saved for ransom. What could the bloodthirsty Qar possibly want in trade for a dowager duchess and a Zorian nun?
Somebody knocked on the doorway of the main chamber, then the door swung open. It was the strange half fairy, half man who called himself Kayyin.
“What do you want?” Merolanna sounded angry, but Utta knew it was a cover for her fear at this unexpected arrival. “Does your mistress want to be sure we’re suffering? Tell her the house could be draftier—but only just.”
He smiled, one of the few expressions that made him look almost entirely human. “At least she cares enough to imprison you. She thinks so little of me that I am allowed to run free, like a lizard on the wall.”
“What is going on out there, Kayyin?” Utta asked him. “There have been the most terrible noises all morning but we can’t see anything except this fog.”
Kayyin shrugged. “Do you truly want to see? It is a grim thing. This is a grim time.”
“What do you mean? Yes, we want to see!”
“Come,” he said with the air of one surrendering to folly. “I will show you.”
They followed his silky progress up the stairs and out onto the balcony on the highest floor, which Utta had shunned ever since the reptilian guard had driven her away. The fog still billowed here, but from this height they could see how low it hung, like a down comforter thrown haphazardly onto a bed. The creaking noises seemed even louder here, and for a moment Utta was so taken by the view—the great cloud of mist, and beyond it the bay and the distant towers of Southmarch Castle, her unreachable home—that she forgot about the monstrous guard. Then he swung down from the roof above them and dropped onto the balcony.
Merolanna shrieked in surprise and terror and might have fallen to the ground had Utta not supported her. The guard waved his wide short sword and snarled—it was hard to tell if he spoke a strange language or simply made threatening noises. His teeth were as long and sharp as a wolf ’s.