(Shadowmarch #1) Shadowmarch Read Online Free PDF

he wanted to get. He stared, first at the ground, then at a familiar stand of white oak trees now half smothered by mist and faint as wandering spirits. For the first time he could remember, the unnatural murk had actually advanced past their trunks. The hairs on the back of Chert’s neck rose. “It has moved! ”
    “But it’s always moving. You said so.”
    “Slipping back from the edge a wee bit, then coming up to it again, like the tide,” he whispered. “Like something breathing in and out. That is why we find things here, when the line has drifted back toward the shadowlands.” He could feel a heaviness to the air unusual even for this haunted place, a heightened watchfulness: it made him feel reluctant even to speak. “But from the moment two centuries ago when the Twilight People first conjured it up, it’s never moved any closer to us, Opal. Until now.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “It’s come forward .” He didn’t want to believe it but he had spent as much time in these hills as anyone. “Like floodwaters coming over the banks. At least a dozen paces ahead of where I’ve ever seen it.”
    “Is that all?”
    “Is that all? Woman, the Twilight People made that line to keep men out of the shadowlands. No one crosses it and returns, not that I’ve ever heard of. And before today, it hasn’t moved an inch closer to the castle in two hundred years!” He was breathless, dizzy with it. “I have to tell someone.”
    “You? Why should you be the one to get tangled up with this, old man? Aren’t there big-folk guards that watch the Shadowline?”
    He waved his hands in exasperation. “Yes, and you saw them when we went past their post-house, although they didn’t see us, or didn’t care. They might as well be guarding the moon! They pay no heed to anything, and the task is given to the youngest and greenest of the soldiers. Nothing has changed on this foggy border in so long they don’t even believe anything could change.” He shook his head, suddenly troubled by a low noise at the edge of his hearing, a tremble of air. Distant thunder? “I can barely believe it myself, and I have walked these hills for years.” The dim rumbling was growing louder and Chert finally realized it wasn’t thunder. “Fissure and fracture!” he swore. “Those are horses coming toward us!”
    “The hunt?” she asked. The damp hillside and close-leaning trees seemed capable of hiding anything. “You said the hunt was out today.”
    “It’s not coming from that direction—and they would never come so far this direction, so near to . . .” His heart stumbled in his chest. “Gods of raw earth—it’s coming from the shadowlands!”
    He grabbed his wife’s hand and yanked her stumbling along the hill away from the misty boundary, short legs digging, feet slipping on the wet grass as they scrambled for the shelter of the trees. The noise of hooves seemed impossibly loud now, as though it were right on top of the staggering Funderlings.
    Chert and Opal reached the trees and threw themselves down into the scratching underbrush. Chert grabbed his wife close and peered out at the hillside as four riders erupted from the mist and reined in their stamping white mounts. The animals, tall and lean and not quite like any horses Chert had ever seen, blinked as though unused to even such occluded sunlight. He could not see the faces of the riders, who wore hooded cloaks that at first seemed dark gray or even black, but which had the flickering sheen of an oily puddle, yet they too seemed startled by the brightness of this new place. A tongue of mist curled about the horses’ feet, as though their shadowy land would not entirely let them go.
    One of the riders slowly turned toward the trees where the two Funderlings lay hidden, a glint of eyes in the depths of the shadowed hood the only indication it was not empty. For a long moment the rider only stared, or perhaps listened, and although Chert’s every fiber told him to