Shadowrise by Tad Williams Page B

being a man instead of a boy and a fool.”
    She turned and walked briskly away, but only got a few steps before she turned back. Her face had softened a little. “I don’t wish you harm, Matty. You and I had our laughs, and you’re not a bad sort. But you can’t build a house on water. You have to find a place to stand.”
    She left him then. For all his years of chasing the poetic muse, he could not think of a word to say.
     
    “Oh. It’s you.” Her dark eyes seemed to take up half her face. Elan M’Cory was frighteningly thin—she had not eaten a full meal since she had taken the tanglewife’s potion many days ago. “I thought it was that cruel, red-faced woman.”
    Tinwright sighed. “Brigid is not cruel.”
    “Do not defend her just because you have had your way with her. I am not a child—I know how the world is wagged. And she is cruel. She tried to pour soup down my throat. She nearly drowned me.”
    “She was trying to get you to eat. You must eat, Elan.” He sat down on the end of the bed. It was a cheap, frail thing and it creaked under his weight. “Please, my lady, you will make yourself ill . . .”
    “Make myself ill? Who was it that did this to me, I ask you? Who tricked me when I would have ended it all?”
    Tinwright hung his head. She had been like this since she had awakened, furious and argumentative or sad and silent, but always miserable. No wonder Brigid refused to come anymore. He couldn’t blame himself for not wanting to see the woman he loved take her own life, but he certainly could have wished things might have gone better. “I did,” was all he said. It was easier not to argue. As it was, he heard her doleful voice in his head for hours after he left her. He had not been able to write a line in days, and just at a time when he had begun to think he was actually finding his way.
    “All I asked of you was the smallest thing—a gift of kindness.” She closed her eyes and let herself sink back into the cushion. “You say you love me, say it over and over again, but did you bring me what I wanted? A droplet of soul’s peace, that was all I asked. A simple thing.”
    “It is no simple thing to kill someone,” he said. “Even less so when you care for that person as much as I care for you, Lady Elan.”
    She opened her eyes again, and for a moment he thought she would shout at him, but the wildness went out of her face and her eyes filled with tears. “If your love and concern could have saved me, Matt Tinwright, it would have saved me already. But I am damned. I belong to Kernios and his dark country.”
    “No, you do not!” He lifted his hand to thump it down on the bedclothes, then thought better of it. “You were misused by a villainous man. If it were in my power to kill Hendon Tolly, I would, but I am not a swords-man. I am a poet—and sometimes, I think, not much of that, either.”
    If he hoped she would disagree with him he was disappointed. “It is so . . . so hard to be alive,” she said quietly. “A nightmare I cannot wake from. I sometimes think we are all Death’s servants and he only lends us to the temporary service of other masters.”
    He hated when she spoke this way. “But you are safe now, Elan. Hendon Tolly is not even looking for you.”
    A little of the hardness came back to her face. “Oh, Matthias Tinwright, you are a fool! Of course he searches for me. Not because he misses me, or even because he hates me—I could live with that—but because I belonged to him, and he does not let anyone steal from him.”
    “You do not . . .”
    She held up her hand. “Please. It does no good to say such things— you do not know .” Her expression changed again, became altogether more disturbing. There was nothing hard about her now—she looked absolutely defenseless, a soft-bodied thing with its shell torn away. “He has a mirror. He can . . . there are . . . there are things inside it. Things that . . . laugh . . . and . . . and talk. They