Shadowrise (93 page)

Saqri was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, so powerful and complicated that it hurt him just to look at her: one instant she seemed made of gossamer and cobwebs and dry twigs like a child’s doll from a hundred years gone, so old and fragile that she might fall apart under the gentlest handling, then a moment later she seemed a statue carved of hard, gleaming stone. And her eyes—her eyes, so black and deep! Barrick could not look into them without his head reeling, without feeling as though he would fall and fall without ever touching bottom.

The queen looked back at him, her face as unmoving as a mask, a mask stranger yet more familiar than any face in the world. The smallest curve at the corner of her lips made it seem as though she smiled, but her eyes and his inexplicable memories told him that she did not.

“So this is what is left of my daughter Sanasu’s precious blood?” She spoke aloud as if she could not bear to touch his thoughts. Her voice was without warmth. “This jest, this piece of strange lost material, this is what comes back to me at the end of days?”

He knew he should be angry but he did not have the strength. Just standing before her was too overwhelming. Was it her or the Firef lower that filled his head with colors and noise and heat? “I am what the gods made of me,” was all he could manage.

“The gods!” Saqri let out a short sound that might have been a laugh or a sob, but her face did not change. “What have they ever made for us that did not turn its sharp edge? Even Crooked’s greatest gift has been proved a torment.”

Even the shadows seemed to draw back as if from a terrifying blasphemy. A part of Barrick recognized that what she said was spoken from the depths of an anguish he could not begin to understand. “I am sorry . . . if what I am displeases you, Lady. I didn’t choose to come here and I didn’t choose the blood that runs in my veins. Whatever my ancestors did to you, none of them consulted me.”

She looked at him for a long time with eyes so dark and fierce he could barely sustain her gaze. “Enough,” she said. “Enough of talking. I have a husband to mourn.”

The queen came down from the dais as lightly as if carried on a breeze, her billowing robe barely seeming to touch the ground. As Barrick followed her back down the center of the hall a thousand fairy-queens and a thousand mortal princes surged toward the doorway, reflected in the mirrors on either side. Some of the Barricks even turned to look back at him. Some of the faces were nothing like his, but it was the expressions worn by some of those most like him that he found more disturbing.

They stepped out into the great chamber beyond the door of the Mirror Hall and found it thronged with fairy folk of a hundred different sorts, apparitions that were completely strange to Barrick’s eyes, and yet somehow he recognized them all—
redcaps, tunnel-knockers, trows tall as trees
—and even knew that the place where they were waiting was known as the Chamber of the Winter Banquet
.
As the queen moved past with Barrick just behind her they joined in behind, the weeping women and the small men with animal eyes, the winged shadows and others with faces like unfinished stone, swelling the procession until it filled the corridors and extended back beyond Barrick’s sight, a river of uncanny life.

He followed Saqri through a maze of unknown corridors, but names and ideas seemed to slide across them like a reflection on a still pond—
Sad Piper’s Rest, the Groaning Solar, the place where Caution and Swimming Bird parted.
At last they moved out beneath the open sky, across a garden of stone shapes twisted as though in uneasy sleep where the rain spattered his face and wetted his hair. The sensation was something so old and so recognizable that for a moment the other thoughts fell away and he was simply himself again, the Barrick he had always been, before the Shadowline, before the Dreamers, before Ynnir’s kiss.

What will become of me?
He was not as frightened as he had been earlier, but it was hard not to mourn his losses.
I will never be that person again.

On the other side of the garden—
Beetle’s Wakeful Garden
, his thoughts whispered,
where Rain Servant held the King of Birds and told him how the world would end
—they passed into a vast room, dark except for a small ring of candles on the floor and empty except for those candles and the body that lay on a flat stone at the center of the ring.

Barrick’s eyes filled with tears. He did not need to be told who this was. Now the chorus of whispers in his head served only to fog the clarity of his feelings. The one who lay before him had, in only a single day, become a sort of father to him—no, more than that: Ynnir had shown him nothing but forbearance and kindness.

The queen stood looking down at her husband’s body. The blindfold was gone, Ynnir’s eyes closed as if in sleep. Barrick took a few steps forward and then sank slowly to his knees, unable to carry the weight of the present moment any longer.

Son of the First Stone, the Leaping Stag, Clever Weakling . . .
It was a chorus of whispers like the cooing of pigeons.
Traitor!—no, Crooked’s Own ...!

Look at me,
another voice said, sighing and distant.
So small. So lost in the moment!

Startled, Barrick looked around. “Ynnir? ”The voice had been the king’s, Barrick was certain.
Don’t leave me!
He cast his thought after the king’s thoughts. The other memories, voices, ghosts, those countless shades and rags of understanding that haunted him now, all dispersed before his inquiry, but whatever of the real Ynnir had touched him was gone again.

“Old fool,” the queen said quietly as she stared down at the king’s pale, rigid face. “Beautiful, blind old fool.”

 

The funeral of the Lord of Winds and Thought passed before Barrick’s senses like a swollen, flooding river, the current crowded with objects that had become unrecognizable. In that dark, murmurous room shapes assembled around the king’s body, weeping, singing, sometimes making noises and gestures that Barrick could not connect with any human emotion at all, then after a space they dispersed again. Some of these mourning gestures were as complex as plays or temple rituals and seemed to last hours, while others were no more than a brief fluttering of wings above Ynnir’s silent form. Barrick heard speeches of which he could understand every word, but which nevertheless made no sense to him at all. Other mourners stood beside the king’s body and uttered a single unfamiliar sound that opened up in Barrick’s mind like an entire book, like one of the tales told by Orphan’s Night bards that lasted from sunset until dawn.

And still they came.

Rats, a thousand or more, a living velvet carpet that swirled around Ynnir and then were gone; weeping shadows; men with eyes as red as embers; even a beautiful girl made of broomsticks and cobwebs, who sang for the dead king in a voice like settling straw—all came to say their farewells. As the hours crept by, as wind and rain lashed the rooftops outside and the flames of the lamps guttered in the death chamber, Barrick came to understand, not the full depths of what was being expressed in that room, but something of what it meant to be one of these people. He saw that the procession was more than the individuals and what they had to say, or the movements they made to show their grief. Instead it was a collection of shapes and sounds in time, each separate yet as connected to the whole as letters in a word or words in a story. Time itself was the medium, and somehow—this was only a gleam of understanding, like a tiny fish in a stream, and to grab for it was to see it disappear altogether—somehow the People, the Qar, lived in time in a way Barrick’s mortal kind did not. They were both of it and outside it. They mourned, but they also said,
This is what mourning is, and how it should be. This is the dance and these the steps.
To make either less or more of it would be to lift it out of time, like lifting a fish from the river. The fish would die. The river would be less beautiful. Nothing else would change.

The candles at last flickered out. New tapers were lit, and this itself seemed but another part of the dance, another bend in the river. Barrick let it all flow over him and through him. Sometimes he found himself knowing before someone spoke, or sang, or presented their silent tribute, who they were and what they had brought. Other times he was lost in the strangeness of it all, as when he had been a child and had listened to the wind skirling around the chimneys and under the roof tiles of his home, overwhelmed by suggestions of meaning that he knew he could never grasp, by the eternal mortal frustration of being so small against the uncaring vastness of the night.

 

He surfaced at last out of a darkness full of dwindling song and shadow. The great room was empty. The king’s body was gone. Only the queen remained.

“Where . . . where is he . . . ?”

Saqri was as still as the statue she resembled, gazing at the empty dais. “His husk . . . is being returned. As for the truth of Ynnir . . . he has chosen to give his last strength to wake me, and now he and his ancestors are lost to us forever.”

Barrick could only stand, uncomprehending.

“And so we move a step closer to the end of all things,” she said as she turned toward him, although she barely seemed to see him and spoke as though to herself. “What is your place in it to be, mortal man? What is written in the Book for you? Perhaps you are meant to keep a shadow of our memory alive, so that when we altogether vanish, still a dim, confused recollection might trouble the victors. Do we trouble you? Have you an inkling of what you have destroyed?”

So fierce, so bright—like a fire!
a voice inside him whispered, but Barrick was too angry to pay it any mind.

“I have destroyed nothing,” he told her. “Whatever my great-grandfathers did is nothing of mine—in fact, it has cursed me too! And I did not choose to come here—I was sent by your . . . porcupine woman, Yasammez.” A little of his confusion suddenly fell away, as though someone had wiped a layer of grime from an old, shiny thing. “No, I
did
choose to come here, at least in part. Because Gyir wanted me to. Because the king called me, asked me . . . urged me. I didn’t ask to be born at all, and I certainly didn’t ask to be born with Qar blood burning inside me. It almost drove me mad!”

The expression on the queen’s perfect, eggshell-delicate face did not change, but she was silent for a while.

“She did choose you, didn’t she—my dear one, my love, my ancestor? ” Saqri moved a step closer to him, lifted a hand and brushed his face. “What did she see?” Although she was no taller than Barrick and slender as a reed, it was all he could do not to shrink back from her touch. Her fingers on his brow, like her husband’s kiss, were cool and dry. “Did Yasammez mean only to taunt him? She never cared for my husband—not as I did. She thought he was too lax a protector of the People, that he valued doing what was right over doing what was necessary.”

But they are the same,
something murmured in Barrick’s thoughts. The queen yanked her fingers away from his face as though she had been burned. “What trick is this? ” Her hand shot out again like a striking snake, then flattened with surprising delicacy over his eyes, pressing firmly on the space at the center of his forehead. “What trick . . . ?”

A moment later she staggered back, the first less than perfectly graceful movement he had seen her make. Her eyes widened. “No. It is not possible!”

In this place of ancient knowledge and timeworn ritual, such obvious surprise frightened Barrick. “What? Why are you looking at me that way?”

“He is . . . he is in you! I feel him but I cannot touch him!” Something that now lived inside Barrick was unmoved by her consternation, even amused. “He said he would try to pass the Fireflower to me.”

“No!” She practically shrieked it, although he realized a moment later it was only the difference from her usual measured tone that was so startling. “You are a mortal. You are a whelp of the creatures who raped us . . . murdered us!”

Ynnir? Is that you?
Barrick tried his best to catch at the thought, but it was gone again. He realized that the queen was standing directly before him, her eyes so intent that it almost hurt to face them. She clutched his arm; her grip was astoundingly strong.

“What do you feel? Is he there, my brother . . . my husband? Does he speak inside of you? What of the Forerunners, do you feel them as well?”

“I . . . I don’t know ...” And then Barrick felt it swimming up from the depths and for a moment his limbs, his tongue, his head was not his own.
“We are here, all of us,”
said his mind and his mouth, but Barrick himself was none of it.
“It is not what we expected and many of us are confused . . . many others are lost. Never before has the Fireflower passed like this. It is all different ...”
Then the alien presence fell away and Barrick commanded his own limbs once more—but everything had changed, he knew. Everything was different and it always would be.

The queen continued to stare at him but her eyes now seemed far away. Then she simply folded, her white robes rustling faintly as she slumped to the ground. Shadows coalesced from the corners and hidden places of the great chamber, servitors who had waited silent and unmoving all this time. They surrounded her, then bore her up and carried her away.

Barrick could only stand and watch them go, alone with the tribe of incomprehensible strangers who lived now in his blood and his thoughts.

A’lat—a Xandian priest

Anamesiya Tinwright—Matt Tinwright’s mother

Ananka—from Jellon, first Hesper’s, then Enander’s mistress

Anglin—Connordic chieftain, awarded March Kingdom after Coldgray Moor

Anglin III—king of Southmarch, great-grandfather of Briony and Barrick