(Shadowmarch #2) Shadowplay by Tad Williams

ragged covering of bushes and low trees. “Shall we begin, or do you have some pressing reason for us to keep standing here until someone notices us?”
    She knew she should be grateful his old fire was coming back, but just now she wasn’t.
     
    His vinegary moment seemed to have tired Shaso, too. He kept his head down and didn’t talk as they walked over the cold dunes toward a path that ran along the beginning of the hills.
    Briony had at first wished to pursue the question of why they were going to Oscastle, Marrinswalk’s leading city but still a bit of a backwater, and what his plans were when they reached the place, but she found herself just as happy to save her strength for walking. The wind, which had first had been steadily at their backs, now swung around and began to blow full into their faces with stinging force, making every step feel like a climb up steep stairs. The heavy gray clouds hung so low overhead it almost seemed to Briony she could reach up and sink her fingers into them. She was grateful for the thick wool cloaks the Skimmers had given them, but they were still damp with rainwater and Briony’s felt heavy as lead. Her court dresses, for all their discomforts, suddenly did not seem so bad: at least they had been dry and warm.
    After perhaps an hour Briony began to see signs of habitation—a few crofters’ huts on hilltops, surrounded by trees. Some had smoke swirling from the holes in their roofs, or even from crooked chimneys, and Briony broke her long silence to ask Shaso if they could not stop at one of them for long enough to get warm again.
    He shook his head. “The fewer the people, the greater the danger someone will remember us. Hendon Tolly and his men have no doubt begun to wonder whether we might have left the castle entirely, and soon they will be asking questions in every town along the coast of Brenn’s Bay. We are an unusual pair, a black-skinned man and a white-skinned girl. It is only a matter of time until someone who’s seen us meets one of Hendon’s agents.”
    “But we’ll be long gone!”
    “We have to hide somewhere . Do you really want to tell the Tollys they can stop searching the castle and all the rest of the surrounding lands and concentrate on just one place—like Marrinswalk?”
    Thinking of a troop of armed men beating the countryside behind them made Briony shudder and walk faster. “But someone will have to see us eventually. If we go to Oscastle or some other city, I mean. Cities are full of people, after all.”
    “Which is our best hope. Perhaps our only hope. We are less likely to be noticed somewhere there are many people, Highness—especially where there are people of my race. And that is enough talk for now.”
     
    They followed the track down the edge of a wide valley. When they reached the broad river that meandered at its bottom, Shaso decided that they could at least take time to drink. They also encountered a few more houses, simple things of unmortared stone and loose thatching, but still so scattered that Briony doubted any man could see his neighbor’s cottage even in full daylight with a cloudless sky. A goat bleated from the paddock behind one of them, probably protesting the cold day, and she realized that it was the first homely sound she had heard for hours.
    They passed by several small villages as the hours passed but entered none of them, and reached Kinemarket by late morning, crossing over at a place where the river narrowed and some work by the locals had turned a lucky assembly of stones into a bridge. Kinemarket was a good-sized, prosperous town, with the turnip shape of a temple dome visible above its low walls. Shaso decided he should stay hidden in the trees outside town while Briony went to buy food with a coin from the purse Turley had provided—a silver piece with the head of King Enander of Syan, a coin so small that Briony felt sure almost half of its original metal had been shaved off. She was guiltily aware of