The lock twitched in my fingertips and fell open. Before I could cry my triumph, the pain swept me from palm to head and though I fought it with all my power it was no contest. The barbs embedded in me from birth choked me down, stole my voice and, as the door swung open in the still dark, my consciousness.
My first awareness was of a small tongue licking my fingers and a furry muzzle pressed against my cheek, tickling my ear with its whiskers. I hissed and lifted my head. One of the Black Pearls adjusted my glasses on my nose, withdrew the chain of my necklace from around my chafed wrists, and hung it around my neck.
I focused on her with difficulty. “Nine?”
“You dripped onto our cages,” she said. Seven stopped lapping at my hand and straightened beside her, and the two of them regarded me with their lambent turquoise eyes.
“Ah, God,” I said. “Help me, please.”
They braced my shoulders and between the three of us I wiggled out of my cage and half-fell, half-landed on the ground on my knees. My wrists gave before they could take my full weight, and the two caught me.
“Sorry,” I managed.
They said nothing, only helped me rise and steadied me as I swayed. My lapse had been horribly long, for night had fallen, and at the sight my heart sped in terror. Had it been enough time for Thameis to have summoned his kin? They had not come for me, but I couldn’t imagine it being long now. I squinted at the sky, but nothing in my life had prepared me to be a navigator or a fieldsman: the stars were another language I had never learned to read, and staring at their stubborn enigma I couldn’t guess how long it would be before the sun rose. I was only conscious of a hunted, desperate feeling. And yet... I looked back at the cages of the rest of the Black Pearls, at the cages scattered all around the complex.
“You can’t free us all,” Nine said. “It is generous of you to think of it.”
“Am I so obvious then?”
She shrugged, a lithe movement of her narrow black shoulders.
“Where now, Master?” Seven asked.
I began to tell them that they should run, escape, be free... and realized the futility of it. They were as ill-equipped to jaunt into the wilderness as I was. Kelu might have managed it and perhaps even enjoyed her brief existence as a rogue on the fringes of elven society, but these two reminded me more of Almond: not precisely docile, but not ready to be catapulted into the uncertainties of complete independence. In time perhaps... but until then, I would have to care for them. “Help me to that building,” I said, nodding toward the central one. “We need to fetch the Fount and leave before we are discovered.”
“The Fount,” Seven said, eyes wide.
“The very same,” I said and started that way.
This was when I discovered that my sense of the magic of the world had not become quiescent during my faint. Hobbling along on the genets’ shoulders, I shuddered at its caress, and how it grew thick with brambles and thorns the closer we drew to Amhric’s prison. Great gorged veins of it sprouted from beneath the building, breaking the pattern of the earth beneath us; so strong was this foul wrongness that I grew dizzy as we approached. How I made it down that hall I will never recall, only that as we reached the door I thought of the king and collected myself for the effort to come.
The genets stopped on the threshold, leaving me to stagger to the bed on my own... to grasp that gaunt and colorless shoulder and whisper, “Amhric. Wake up.”
His lashes fluttered. As I watched, the warmth flooded him, igniting the fire beneath his skin and licking him in gold and copper and auburn. I shivered with inexplicable emotion, some nameless longing, and perhaps he sensed it and that was why he engulfed me in a swift embrace, bringing me into his aura of gossamer autumn.
“We have to go,” I said. “I’ve been discovered. It’s only luck that I made it here at all.”
“All right,” he said. “O my brother... wait a moment.”
“There’s not a moment to waste,” I began, but he touched a finger to my mouth. I fell silent.
“From the earth through me to you,” he murmured. “For that you have great need.” He touched two fingers to my brow; his forehead came to rest there, beside them. And as I drew breath to ask the tide of light and life rushed into me and chased the worst of the weakness away. With it came a sense of the world as a great and beautiful pattern, a harmony expressed in waves and pools of cold and warmth, forever moving in an elegant pas de deux indescribable in its liquescence. I choked back a sound, certain it was too intimate to be uttered in company.
He lifted his head and asked, hushed, “Better?”
“Yes,” I said, hoarse. “Thank you.” Clearing my throat I said, “Now, hasten, please.”
He nodded and slipped off the bed, turning toward the door... and there he halted as if struck. As he and the genets met one another’s eyes I knew this moment was passing with the swiftness of my racing heart and yet it seemed as if we were all paralyzed.
At length I said, “The genets made with your magic. These are Nine and Seven of the Black Pearl line.”
“I knew what they did,” Amhric said. “Oh, but they never let me see...!” He opened his arms, and swift as shadows moved by wind, the two were in them, licking his face and wiggling their tails and purring.
“Enough,” I said. “Back down the corridor.”
They parted from him as if my word was law and fled into the dark. I watched them go, then glanced at the king. “I would have thought that it would discomfit you.”
“What Suleris did and does is vile,” he said. “But I could no more blame the genets for their makers’ acts than I could blame rain for falling.” Then he stepped toward the corridor.
And I, obeying some instinct older than stories, held out a hand. “I go first.”
He paused, then inclined his head, and so we went: the genets before us, the king behind me, and all the compound still asleep... but not, I thought, for long. Nevertheless I could not suppress another glance over my shoulder at the cages.
“Could you...?”
He shook his head. “No. The uses of my magic are proscribed heavily by the king-gifts. But I can channel what is left of our shared energy and you may undo the enchantments, if you wish—”
“I can’t,” I said. “It would incapacitate me.”
“Then we will come back,” Amhric said. “And make this right.”
I nodded and led him out of the compound and into the field. When he stumbled I lunged for him, and my own movement set us both to tottering. I grimaced as we swayed. “Fine pair we are. I don’t suppose magic could make us run faster.”
“It could,” he said. “If I were well enough to wreak something so vast. But they have left me very little by way of resources.”
“I don’t understand how magic can do that and not open the locks...”
“I will explain it, when we have more leisure. You need to know.”
“I imagine I do,” I said and sighed as we trudged up the hill toward the tree where I’d last met the genets. “In the mean... hold a heartbeat.”
He stopped, and I took my pendant in my hand. Blood had caked the chain and the tassel was a ruin, but the steel pedigree remained unchanged. Without allowing myself any time to brace against it, I tore into my wrist again and resumed walking.
“At least tell me if it is customary for the elves to solve everything with blood,” I said, wearied.
“Once upon a time we carried glass knives specifically for the purpose you just put your name to, for glass is sacred and has meaning particular to us,” Amhric said. “Those were brighter days, when our blood meant more to the world.”
“How long ago was that?”
His smile was nostalgia and regret both. “Long enough for us to still die a natural death.” He glanced at my wrist. “To what purpose was that particular offering?”
“I am summoning our ride,” I said. “But we should hurry. They will find us.”
He nodded and fell silent, and together
we made what time we could across the grass, the Black Pearls ranging before us like uneasy scouts. As we traveled he remained much the same but I deteriorated; my limbs consumed the bright flush of energy he’d gifted me and left me brittle and clumsy. We had not been fleeing long before it was his hands steadying mine as we crossed a dark stream, his shoulder braced beneath my arm as we forged uphill, his steady gaze that slowed my erratic breathing and reminded me to remain calm.
“How long before they come for us, I wonder?” I asked.
“Suleris owns Kesína,” Amhric said. “It may be we won’t see them at all in the countryside; they’ll have someone waiting for us at the port.”
“Then I suppose we won’t be going to the port,” I said, determined.
“Someone comes!” Seven exclaimed.
“Something...” Nine amended.
The dark disgorged the drake’s sleek body and ember eyes.
“Ah, thank God,” I said, stumbling forward to grab its reins. It pressed its head against me and huffed across my chest, then lifted its chin and stared, narrow-eyed, at king and genets. On its back, Kelu said, “You could have given us a little warning.”
“I didn’t have the chance,” I said. “Thameis found me out.”
“Oh!” Almond said. “You brought cousins!”
“What were you thinking?” Kelu asked, irritated. “The drake can’t carry two elves and four genets!”
“Then some of us will have to walk,” I said. To Amhric, “Get on.”
“Oh don’t be stupid,” Kelu said, sliding off the back of the drake as the king put his foot in the stirrup and hauled himself into the saddle. “The two of you get on the drake, the rest of us will jog alongside. Don’t pretend that you could possibly keep up. You can’t even stand straight.”
Every word fell like a blow, but she was correct. I looked up at Amhric, who offered me his hand.
“Come,” he said, voice gentle. “They are healthy and uninjured, we are neither. It is no shame.”
With a sigh, I clasped his wrist and let him pull me up behind him. “Fine. But we need to get him a horse and then we can all ride.”
“Which way?” Kelu asked.
“The direction opposite the port,” I said. “And as fast as possible.” I called to mind the map from Thameis’s study. “If we have to build a raft and pole it to the next island, we’ll do it... it would be safer than heading where they expect us to go.”
“North then,” Amhric said, turning the drake’s head.
“North,” I agreed.
We rode unmolested for the balance of the night and all of the morning, halting only to allow the genets an opportunity to rest. I had expected more conversation between them, or even some vying for dominance as with animal packs, but either they were more human in that regard or they communicated the necessary information intangibly, because they arranged themselves in formation around the drake and never spoke an unnecessary word. For the initial hours I concentrated on our destination; when we halted I dismounted and paced a halting circle to return some circulation to my recalcitrant limbs. But by the afternoon I had no discipline left to work past the growing pain; it was all I could do to cling to the back of the drake and endure, and so to that endeavor I devoted all my remaining powers.
“We should stop,” Amhric said after the distant purple mountains eclipsed the setting sun. “Eat, rest.”
Kelu glanced off the path. “There’s a farm near here we can borrow a horse from later.”
Amhric nodded and guided the drake to a fold in the earth overhung with trees and surrounded in brush. As the genets scattered, he dismounted and held up a hand. I didn’t bother to object, though when his aid proved inadequate to the task of keeping me from collapsing into the trench I did flush. The drake stretched its neck down so it could nuzzle me as I fought tears of frustration, and so trapped in that mire of self-loathing and helplessness was I that I barely felt the king arranging me so I was sitting with my back to the wall of the trench. A few moments later he draped me with the drake’s damp but warm saddle blanket. I curled up under it, shaking, and wished with desperate abandon for anything to make this weakness end. How naïve I’d seemed in Evertrue, turning up my nose at Stirley’s drugs! The memory of the bleakness that had driven me to try to separate myself from this life returned, seductive. There was not enough poppy in the world to return me to normal... and what cause had I to think that a sorcerer of Sedetnet’s obvious amorality would ever keep his word? If I could even bring myself to buy my life from him with Amhric’s.
I hid my face in my shoulder and strangled my bitter tears, choking on them until my throat grew raw and the world around me darkened and my body tightened its thorned embrace around me. My thoughts broke apart, bled into black places, left me blind and screaming in that smothered silence.
Small and gentle hands lit then on my shoulders, turned me, gathered me against a warm side. Around me the softness of fur and musk settled and curled, pushing back some of the pain.
“I c-can’t do this anymore,” I whispered. “I can’t.”
“Take a breath,” he whispered.
“I can’t, it’s not worth it,” I said. “There’s nothing left. There’s no way out.”
“Just breathe,” he said, his voice a low vibration beneath my face where I huddled against him. “Just for a little while longer.”
I didn’t know if I could, but I had no energy to protest, could only lie against him and leak my hopelessness and tremble. I saw only the abyss in my own mind, heard nothing but his voice and the howl of negation in my heart, felt nothing but the nauseating pain of the magic killing me from the bone out. My attention focused on these things with the single-minded intensity of a predator: there was nothing else. No world. No life. No reason.
And then that focus drifted. It caught on the chirp of a frog and grew diffuse, rising enough to hear the melody of a thousand frogs, singing in the vespertine dark. I could smell the distant perfume of grape vines; the air had grown soft with moisture. The pressure at my back and against my hips and thighs, soft and hot and tickling... that was comprised of the pelts of breathing genets, coiled into little balls of fluff and musk. And against my side—
—the sense of the world, of the pattern—
“It’s you,” I murmured, my voice ragged.
“I thought you should look out a little,” he said. When I tried to rise, he tightened his grip on my shoulder. “No. Not yet. The communion needs touch, the more touch the better.”
“Communion?” I knew I should feel alarm, but I couldn’t. I had been firmly seated in the world, on this soil beneath these trees cradled in the cup of these genets and this elf. I could not move: I had become part of everything, and everything flowed through me unobstructed. There was no violence in it. No pain. Only a vast tranquility.
“There are an assortment of magical gifts,” Amhric said. His hand relaxed when I ceased to pull against it. “Only two will be strong enough to bring forth a king and prince, but all of them are necessary in a generation for the king and his helpmeets to serve as stewards to the land and its people. Thus the communion.”
“This thing you’re sharing with me, then,” I said, hesitant.
“Is actually yours,” he replied. “But you have no access to it, or to any of your gifts. So in a very peculiar form of communion, I am giving back to you what you cannot touch yourself, but what I can sense.”
“This is... this is beyond my admittedly under-developed understanding of magic.”
“I have a great deal to explain to you, if you were raised on the mainland without knowledge of your heritage,” he said. “But it can wait. Breathe. Rest. You are too near the end of your strength. I don’t want to lose you.”
I glanced up at the wedge of his jaw and cheek and the single eye I could see from where I rested. “Why?”
“Why?” he asked, bemused.
“Why do you care?” I asked. “You barely know me. I barely know you.” I made a
noise. “I can’t explain any of it. I have no lost love for kings. Quite the contrary.”
“And brothers?” he asked with a trace of humor.
“I didn’t even know I had one until very recently!”
He laughed. “And you were raised among humans. You don’t understand, then, how rare and precious it is to have kin.”
I said, “Ah... the lack of fertility.”
“Yes.”
“So you care because—”
He smiled at me. “Does it matter?”
I fell silent, wondering. Did it? “I like my world to make sense.”
“And it doesn’t make sense that two brothers, united after growing to adulthood in isolation, should know and love one another on sight?” he asked with gentle humor.
“Only in folklore,” I said.
“So truth is different in stories than it is in reality.”
I began to speak and fell silent.
“It is only another pattern,” he said.
“And that—” I halted as the hum in my head changed tenor, vibrated, grew angry. Someone had stepped into my sphere of feeling, distant but ranging closer, impinging on my sense of the world. “Someone’s followed us.”
Amhric set a hand on my shoulder and the blossom of that sense of the world wilted, leaving me with only my body’s poor faculties to gather the evidence of reality. “Quietly,” he murmured. “We are so dim to magic’s eyes that he may pass us entirely.”
I nodded and hunkered into the shadows of the ditch. Around us the lamp-like eyes of the genets had opened, but they remained still.
Without the magic I did not know how far our pursuer was, nor how long we should wait. I thought with longing of the staff hooked to the drake’s saddle; in the future, if there was a future, I would sleep with it at my side. Not that I knew what to do with a staff—flash of Kemses in motion, stained silver hair sweeping in a wave around his hips as he impaled one of his opponents by the ruddy light of the bonfire—but it was better than having no weapon to hand at all. If I survived... if there was a future, I would ask Kemses to teach me.
An Heir to Thorns and Steel Page 30