Free (Shadowmarch #2) Shadowplay by Tad Williams Page B

bunched the homespun skirt Ena had given her around her thighs and helped the Skimmer girl guide the hull up onto the wet sand. The wind was stingingly cold, the saltgrass and beach heather along the dunes rippling as if in imitation of the shallow wavelets frothing on the bay.
    “Where are we?” she asked.
    Shaso wrung water out of his saggy clothes. Just as Briony had been clothed in Ena’s spares, he wore one of Turley’s baggy, salt-bleached shirts and a pair of the Skimmer’s plain, knee-length breeches. As he surveyed the surrounding hills, his leathery, wrinkled face gaunt from his long imprisonment, Shaso dan-Heza looked like some ancient spirit dressed in a child’s castoff clothing. “Somewhere not far from Kinemarket, I’d say, about three or four days’ walk from Oscastle.”
    “Kinemarket is that way.” Ena pointed east. “On the far side of these hills, south of the coast road. You could be there before the sun lifts over the top.”
    “Only if we start walking,” said Shaso.
    “What on earth will we do in Kinemarket?” Briony had never been there, but knew it was a small town with a yearly fair that paid a decent amount of revenue to the throne. She also dimly remembered that some river passed through it or near it. In any case, it might as well have been named Tiny or Unimportant as far as she was concerned just now. “There’s nothing there!”
    “Except food—and we will need some of that, don’t you think?” said Shaso. “We cannot travel without eating and I am not so well-honed in my skills that I can trap or kill dinner for us. Not until I mend a bit and find my legs, anyway.”
    “Where are we going after that?”
    “Toward Oscastle.”
    “Why?”
    “Enough questions.” He gave her a look that would have made most people quail, but Briony was not so easily put off.
    “You said you would make the choices, and I agreed. I never said that I wouldn’t ask why, and you never said you wouldn’t answer.”
    He growled under his breath. “Try your questions again when the road is under our feet.” He turned to Ena. “Give your father my thanks, girl.”
    “Her father didn’t row us.” Briony was still shamed that she had argued with the young woman about landing at M’Helan’s Rock. “I owe you a kindness,” she told the girl with as much queenly graciousness as she could muster. “I won’t forget.”
    “I’m sure you won’t, Lady.” Ena made a swift and not very reverent courtesy.
    Well, she’s seen me sleeping, drooling spittle down my chin. I suppose it would be a bit much to expect her to treat me like Zoria the Fair. Still, Briony wasn’t entirely certain she was going to like being a princess without a throne or a castle or any of the privileges that, while she had been quick to scorn them, she had grown rather used to. “Thanks, in any case.”
    “Good luck to you both, Lady, Lord.” Ena took a step, then stopped and turned around. “Holy Diver lift me, I almost forgot—Father would have had me skinned, stretched, and smoked!” She pulled a small sack out of a pocket in her voluminous skirt and handed it to Shaso. “There are some coins to help you get on with your journey, Lord.” She looked at Briony with what almost seemed pity. “Buy the princess a proper meal, perhaps.”
    Before Briony or Shaso could say anything, the Skimmer girl scooted the wooden rowboat back down the wet sand and into the water, then waded with it out into the cove. She swung herself onto the bench as gracefully as a trick rider vaulting onto a horse; a heartbeat or two later the oars were in the water and the boat was moving outward against the wind, bobbing on each line of coursing waves.
    Briony stood watching as the girl and her boat disappeared. She suddenly felt very lonely and very weary.
    “A reliable thing about villages, or cities for that matter,” said Shaso sourly, “is that they will not walk to us .” He pointed across the dunes to the hills and their