And even the people she had met on the road while she was traveling in disguise had seemed little different than the nobles of the Southmarch or Tessian court except in richness of clothing and sophistication of manners. Certainly her own brother Barrick always said that the lords and ladies of Southmarch were only perfumed peasants-wouldn't the opposite be just as true, then, that the peasants themselves were only unbathed nobles…?

"You have gone silent, my lady," said Eneas with a worried look on his fine face. "I have been too free with talk of rough matters."

"No," she said. "No, not at all, Prince Eneas. I am just thinking about the things you've said."

As they rode into the southeastern corner of Silverside, Briony discovered she could barely recognize her own country, her father's and grandfather's kingdom. There was little evidence out here of the siege of Southmarch, or in fact any trace of the fairy army at all-the Qar had passed far to the east when they marched down from beyond the Shadowline-but even in this relatively undisturbed spot, it felt as though Briony and the Syannese had arrived in the middle of an icy winter instead of a fairly mild spring. Fields lay fallow, and those that had been planted were barely half-seeded, as though there had not been enough people to do the work. In other places entire villages lay deserted, clusters of empty cottages like the nests of birds after fledgling season.

"The not knowing, that's what it is." The weary innkeeper was closing up his roadside hostel in the Argas River Valley and was only too happy to sell most of what he had left to the prince's moving town. "First we were feared the Twilight People were coming this way-people said the fairies were burning all the towns north of the Syannese border. They never came, but people came through from the east, running away-people whose towns were burned up, and they had terrible tales to tell.