(Shadowmarch #2) Shadowplay Read Online Free PDF Page A

her sentinel perch in the heather, she walked through the lodge—a place that once, because of its small size, had been more familiar to her than Southmarch Castle itself. Even in daylight it now seemed as strange as everything else because of the way the world had changed, all the things which had been so familiar and ordinary transformed in a single night.
    Right here, in this room, is where Father told us the story about Hiliometes and the manticore. A tennight ago she would have sworn she could never forget the smallest detail of what it had felt like to huddle in the blankets on their father’s bed and hear the tale of the demigod’s great battle for the first time, yet here she was in the very chamber and suddenly it all seemed vague. Had Kendrick been with them, or had he gone to bed, intent on going out early in the morning with old Nynor to catch fish? Had there been a fire, or had it been one of those rare, truly hot summer nights on M’Helan’s Rock when the servants were told to leave all but the kitchen fire unlit? She couldn’t remember anything but the story, now, and their father’s exaggeratedly solemn, bearded face as he spoke. Would she forget that one day, too? Would all her past vanish this way, bit by bit, like tracks in the dirt pelted by rain?
    Briony was startled by a wriggle of movement at the edge of her vision—something moving quickly along the skirting board. A mouse? She moved toward the corner and startled something out from behind a table leg, but before she had a chance to see what it was it had vanished again behind a hanging. It seemed strangely upright for a mouse—could it be a bird, trapped in the house? But birds hopped, didn’t they? She pulled back the wall hanging, strangely apprehensive, but found nothing unusual.
    A mouse, she thought. Climbed up the back of the tapestry and it’s back in the roof by now. Poor thing was probably startled half to death to have someone walk into this room—the place has been empty for more than a year.
    She wondered if she dared open the shuttered doors of King Olin’s bedroom balcony. She itched to look back at the castle, half-afraid that it too would have become insubstantial, but caution won out. She made her way back through the room, the bed naked of blankets, a thin powdering of dust on every surface, as if it were the tomb of some ancient prophet where no one dared touch anything. In an ordinary year the doors would have been thrown wide to air the room as the servants bustled through, sweeping and cleaning. There would have been fresh flowers in the vase on the writing desk (only yellow ragwort if it was late in the season) and water in the washing jug. Instead, her father was trapped in a room somewhere that was probably smaller than this—maybe a bleak cell like the hole in which Shaso had been imprisoned. Did Olin have a window to look out, a view—or only dark walls and fading memories of his home?
    It did not bear thinking about. So many things these days did not bear thinking about.
     
    “I thought you said he had barely eaten,” Briony said, nodding toward Shaso. She held out the sack. “The dried fish is gone. Was it you? There were three pieces left when I saw last.”
    Ena looked in the sack, then smiled. “I think we have made a gift.”
    “A gift? What do you mean? To whom?”
    “To the small folk—the Air Lord’s children.”
    Briony shook her head in irritation. “Made a gift to the rats and mice, more likely. I think I just saw one.” She did not hold with such silly old tales—it was what the cooks and maids said every time something went missing: “Oh, it must have been the little folk, Highness. The Old Ones must’ve took it.” Briony had a sudden pang, knowing what Barrick would have said about such an idea, the familiar mockery that would have tinged his voice. She missed him so fiercely that tears welled in her eyes.
    A moment later she had to admit the irony of it: she was mourning her