The Serpent Bride

by Sara Douglas

  And to that Isaiah would not add any more.

  Part Four

  CHAPTER ONE

  Pelemere, the Central Kingdoms

  Ishbel."

  She didn't stir, so deeply asleep that Maximilian's murmur and his soft hand shaking her shoulder could not wake her.

  "Ishbel!"

  She moaned softly, and tried to roll away from his touch.

  Maximilian leaned closer to her, put both hands on her shoulders, half lifted her up, and gave her another,

  more substantial, shake.

  "Ishbel, wake up!" he hissed.

  Her eyes flew open.

  "Shush," he said, his voice low. "It is all right, there is no immediate danger, but we need to leave now."

  He left her sitting, confused and blinking, as he fetched some thick felt and fur clothes from a nearby chest.

  "Here," he said, "put these on. It is freezing outside--there has been a late, bitter snowfall--and we have a fair distance to ride."

  "Maxel? What..."

  He sat down by her side again. "We can't stay here, Ishbel. We barely got out of the great hall today without being tossed in Sirus' dungeons. I don't know what tomorrow will bring, but we can't be here for it. We need to be far away before this palace and city awakes."

  "But..." Ishbel was still so sleepily confused she simply could not think. She'd been exhausted by the time they'd gone to bed last night, and ill both with the baby and the events of the day. She looked about their bedchamber.

  It was still deep night.

  "It is about six hours before dawn, Ishbel," Maximilian said.

  "Where will we go?"

  "I found somewhere on my way to Pelemere. It will do for the time being, but we need to get back to Escator as fast as we can. The Central Kingdoms are far too dangerous for me and for you now. Are you awake? Yes? Good. Now, use the bathroom--the gods alone know when next you'll have the chance--get dressed and we shall leave."

  Maximilian sat on the bed, waiting for Ishbel, thinking that he felt as ill as Ishbel looked.

  It had been an absolutely hellish day.

  They had been lucky to have escaped Sirus' dungeons, and only the fact that no one could find any poison on either Maximilian or Ishbel had saved them.

  Sirus was still convinced, however, that one or the other had murdered Allemorte. Furthermore, he was now absolutely certain that Ishbel was in league with the Outlanders, and that the Outlanders--for whatever reason--were planning further murderous attacks, if not a full-scale invasion, within his kingdom.

  Whatever chance there had been for peace between the Outlands and Pelemere and its neighbors was now completely gone.

  Maximilian rubbed a hand over tired eyes. He'd spent the two hours before he'd woken Ishbel with Garth, Egalion, and Lixel, arranging for them, as well as the Emerald Guard, to melt away into the night in ones and twos and to reassemble at a spot a suitable distance, and in suitable seclusion, from Pelemere.

  Sirus might have his guard on high alert, but the Emerald Guard were almost as attuned to the darkness as Maximilian was himself--they had all come from the Veins--and would be able to slip past Sirus'

  guards without too much trouble. Maximilian thanked whichever gods watched over him that he'd brought only a relatively small retinue from Escator, and not a column of hundreds. That would have been impossible to sneak out of Pelemere.

  Maximilian looked up. Ishbel had returned. Silently Maximilian helped her into the clothes he'd selected:

  thick felt underclothes and shirt, furred trousers, vest and hooded coat, and a heavy cloak.

  Ishbel was a tall woman, but she looked lost beneath all the layers.

  Maximilian tied the cloak around her shoulders. He needed to talk to Ishbel badly, but because of the turmoil of the day they had not yet discussed anything that had happened. Maximilian needed to confront Ishbel about the ring (why hadn't he had the courage to do this weeks ago?), and about why murder seemed to be trailing her every step.

  Did it have anything to do with Elcho Falling? Was this part of the disaster that was eventually going to necessitate Elcho Falling's reawakening?

  But for now, Maximilian felt tired and ill, and Ishbel looked even worse, and they were in mortal danger unless they could leave this palace and this city now.

  Talk would need to wait.

  They had gloves with them, but for the moment they kept their hands free so that Maximilian could hold one of hers in a firm grip, their fingers interlaced. Ishbel thought an observer might think it a result of affection, but in reality Maximilian needed close contact with her so that he could cloak her in his almost supernatural ability to move unseen through the dark.

  Ishbel remembered how he'd managed to stand utterly unobserved in her chamber for hours, watching her. Now she, too, enjoyed the same degree of disguise and it made her wonder about him, about the depths within him she had not yet bothered to plumb and, again, why it might be that the Great Serpent wanted so badly for her to be married to this man.

  Sirus had stationed guards, not directly outside their apartment but at the junction of the corridor that connected their apartment wing with the main part of the palace. This was the only means possible by which to leave their apartments, the windows being far too high from which to jump, and so Sirus had not needed to place guards closer.

  The guards were awake and alert: Sirus had no doubt considered the possibility that Maximilian and Ishbel might try to escape. As they neared the guards, creeping along the wall, Maximilian's hand tightened briefly about Ishbel's, and he pulled her a little closer to him.

  She felt a peculiar sensation creep over her: a heavy chill, oppressive, and yet humid. Ishbel's chest constricted, and she had to struggle to draw in a breath.

  Maximilian stopped, watching her.

  Ishbel struggled for a moment or two--not merely to breathe, but to do so quietly--then felt her chest relax somewhat, and her breath come easier.

  Maximilian felt her relax, and he gave her a small nod and squeezed her hand again.

  Then he led her past the guards.

  Ishbel swore that two of them turned and looked at them directly. One of them blinked, but then he looked away again, while the other guard's eyes slid over them without pausing.

  The cold grew denser, and Ishbel's shoulders sagged with its weight.

  Again Maximilian's hand tightened about hers, but then the next step they were past the guards and about a corner, and, for the moment, were safe.

  For an hour they crept through the palace and then the streets of the city. Ishbel's heart hammered in her chest, not merely with the constant fear of discovery, but also with the weight of Maximilian's oppressive concealment. She yearned for the spaces beyond the city, for any space, for anything that might give her relief from the pressure.

  By the time they neared the city gates Ishbel was stumbling with fatigue. Maximilian had tried to pick her up, but Ishbel resisted. She murmured at him irritably, then blinked. They were standing outside the gates.

  How had that happened?

  "Maxel?"

  "I am almost as weary as you, Ishbel. Come. Not far to go now."

  "Where? Where? Gods, Maxel..."

  "This way." Again he took her by the hand and led her along a path by the city walls, north, then along a path that branched off to the northeast.

  A period of time later--to Ishbel it felt as if half the night had passed, but she was sure Maximilian would claim the distance could have been measured in the space of a few minutes--they entered a small grove of trees.

  A man stepped forward--Egalion.

  "Maximilian! Thank the gods! We'd almost given up hope."

  "We still have a way to go yet, Egalion," Maximilian said. "Do you have the horses?"

  Egalion nodded behind him, and one of the Emerald Guard--Ishbel noted with some rancor that he looked as fresh as if he'd managed an entire night's sleep in a feather bed--led forward two saddled horses.

  Maximilian l
ooked at the horses, then at Ishbel.

  "I'll carry Ishbel with me," Maximilian said to Egalion. "She's too tired to sit a horse by herself."

  Ishbel wanted to protest, but Maximilian was right. She'd fall the instant they left her to balance herself,

  and the next moment Maximilian had mounted one of the horses, and Egalion was lifting her up to him,

  and Ishbel could finally succumb to the cold heaviness and lean against Maximilian, and sleep.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Pelemere, the Central Kingdoms

  Maximilian wanted peace and he wanted quiet, and above all he wanted the opportunity to talk with Ishbel. They had been married some two months, and still she was a complete stranger to him--even more the stranger now, he felt, than when he'd first met her. Events were crowding in, and murders and wars piling up around them. What Maximilian had thought would be a simple business--the procuring of a bride--was now becoming ever more dangerously difficult by the hour.

  He was growing increasingly concerned about the escalating crisis between the Central Kingdoms and the Outlands. This, combined with the vision he'd experienced on the way to seduce Ishbel, solidified in Maximilian's mind the certainty that Elcho Falling was about to wake.

  Ishbel knew far more than she had admitted to him thus far, and Maximilian didn't think he could go on much longer, or farther, without prizing some of that knowledge out of her. She must have some of the answers locked within her. Not all perhaps, but many, certainly. She was of Persimius blood, she'd come from the Mountain at the Edge of the World, and she was somehow intimately connected with Elcho Falling.

  But, oh, what a complicated woman she was! Her refusal to discuss matters that held any discomfort for her frustrated Maximilian beyond measure, yet at the same moment Ishbel endlessly intrigued him. Her reserve challenged him, her reluctantly awakening sexuality inflamed his desire for her, while her secrets angered and discouraged him and added to his ever-growing anxiety about Elcho Falling and what he needed to do about it.

  At the grove of trees, Maximilian had given the Emerald Guard some brief orders, then, as was his wont,

  had turned his horse off in another direction, taking himself and Ishbel northwest. He was heading for one of the isolated woodsman's huts about which Borchard of Kyros had told him.

  An hour after dawn, the new day's light almost lost amid the deepening snowstorm, Maximilian carried Ishbel inside the hut.

  She slept through most of the day, waking only in the very late afternoon when Maximilian kicked open the door and stumbled inside, his arms laden with wood.

  "Maxel? Where are we?"

  "A woodsman's hut deep in a forest northwest of Pelemere." Maximilian dropped the wood onto the heap by the stove, removed his outer clothing, shook it free of snow, then stood before the fire, warming his hands.

  "Why?" she said, swinging her legs over the side of the bed and sitting up.

  "Because we needed to get away from Sirus."

  "And the Emerald Guard? Garth Baxtor? Egalion? Lixel?" She dragged a blanket about her shoulders.

  "They are secreting themselves deeper in the woods."

  "But we're here. By ourselves."

  "Does that bother you?"

  "Maxel...why?"

  "I needed to talk to you without the others about." I need to wrest out into the open some of the secrets crammed into that beautiful head of yours.

  He could see her withdraw, see caution and anxiety shut down her face.

  "And because I wanted time with you alone," Maximilian continued, "just to know you. You are my wife,

  and I your husband, and yet we are strangers to each other."

  "That is not unusual in high marriage, surely."

  He shrugged and moved to a small cupboard, from which he removed some dried provisions. "Hungry?"

  She answered him with her own shrug, which Maximilian chose to interpret as an affirmative, and so he tossed some dried peas and beans and herbs into a pot of water and set it to the stove to simmer. "I am afraid that this king and queen shall have to eat as peasants," he said.

  She gave a small smile at that. "I'm sure that it will be better fare than what Sirus would serve us in his dungeons."

  Maximilian chuckled, cutting thick slices from a loaf of very stale bread and scooping out a portion of their centers so that they could be used as trenchers for the soup.

  Ishbel had wandered over to the stove, still wrapped in a blanket, and was now looking curiously at the soup. "How did you learn to cook?"

  "I often tend for myself." He nodded at the hut's basic interior. "In Ruen I abandon my kingly duties from time to time and spend a few days by myself in a woodsman's hut, similar to this, in the forests to the north of the city."

  "Why? Why the need to be by yourself?"

  "Because I find it impossible to be surrounded by faces all the time. Because I find my own company healing."

  "Then it must be aggravating for you to have me here, now."

  "I could have sent you on with Egalion, but I chose to bring you with me."

  "Ah yes, to interrogate me."

  "Ishbel, sit down at the table with me."

  She hesitated, but finally did as he asked, taking a bench on the opposite side of the table.

  "Ishbel, what do you think about the murders? Evenor, and then Allemorte, yesterday."

  "I don't know anything about them, Maximilian. Why ask me?"

  "I am asking for your thoughts, not for a detailed explanation."

  She gave another small, disinterested shrug, and would not meet his eyes. "I have no thoughts on them. I

  was so isolated in Serpent's Nest that I am naive in the ways of the outside world."

  Naive in the ways of the world. Maximilian really didn't know what to make of that. In many ways she was--that she'd been terribly isolated he had no doubt--but in other ways Ishbel appeared as old as the very land itself.

  "Ishbel," he said gently, "yesterday a man fell dead at our feet, murdered with poison. How did it happen? Who did it?"

  "It wasn't me."

  "I wasn't accusing you, Ishbel, but, oh, murder is starting to follow you. Why?"

  She dropped her eyes, and fiddled with a nonexistent particle on the tabletop.

  "Ishbel?" Maximilian said as gently as he could. "Please..."

  Again, a shrug. "I don't know, Maximilian. I don't."

  He reached over and took her left hand. "Ishbel, all I want to do is to get home safely, with you and with our child. But at the moment I very much fear we're not going to get there, not safely or not ever. I hold you at night, and feel you drifting ever farther away from me. I want a marriage, Ishbel. I want you. I

  want a family. And I want to know why you were the target of that assassin yesterday, not Allemorte."

  Her hand was very cold and still in his, and Maximilian wondered if that coldness and stillness extended all the way to her heart.

  "Perhaps it was Sirus," Ishbel said. "He doesn't like me. He doesn't like any Outlanders."

  "It wasn't Sirus. There was magic involved yesterday, and darkness swirling all about us. When my ring--"

  "I don't want to talk about the ring. Not any ring."

  Maximilian resisted the urge to pick something up and smash it against the wall. Instead, he contented himself with tightening his grip about her hand. "Ishbel, please--"

  "I don't want to talk about the rings!"

  "Well, I do. For all the gods' sakes, Ishbel, there is nothing to be afraid of about two chatty rings!"

  She looked at him then, and Maximilian's heart turned over in his breast. He'd never seen anyone look so lost, or so afraid.

  "I've heard them before," she said, so softly that Maximilian had to lean forward to catch her words, and even then he wasn't sure he'd heard correctly.

  "What? The rings?"

  "The whispers."

  She was trembling now, and Maximilian slid around to her side of the table, sitting beside her on the bench and wrapping h
er in his arms. All his anger of a moment earlier was gone.

  "Tell me," he said, very softly.

  She was silent a long time, and Maximilian did not think she would answer.

  Then, just as he was about to sigh and stand, she began to speak.

  "When I was eight a plague came to my family's house."

  Maximilian said nothing, but tightened his arms about her slightly, settling her more closely against his body, resting his cheek against the top of her head.

  "My family all died within a day. Everyone in the house died, save me."

  "The plague spread fast," Maximilian said.

  "Yes. Too fast. The people of Margalit barricaded the house, refusing to allow me out in case I carried plague with me. They hammered shut all doors and windows, and did not listen to my pleas. I begged,

  over and over, beating at the closed door, but they turned their hearts against me."

  "Oh, Ishbel..."

  "It lasted forever. At least that's how it felt to me. Aziel later told me it was a month. I tried to kill myself.

  I thought that was the only way I'd escape. I rolled in the vileness excreting from my mother's body and...and..."

  "Ishbel...sweetheart..."

  That endearment, combined with the closeness and comfort of his arms and body, broke down Ishbel's final barriers.

  She shuddered, leaning in as close to Maximilian as she could. "One day my mother's corpse began to whisper to me."

  Maximilian stiffened, horrified. "Whispered?"

  "It would not stop, Maxel. I ran all about the house, and it whispered and whispered, and I could not escape it! It spoke with the same voice as did the rings. Maxel..."

  Maximilian could hardly force the words out. "What did the whispers say, Ishbel?"

  "They told me...to...to...prepare, prepare, for the Lord of Elcho Falling shall rise again."

  Maximilian froze. Nothing worked. His heart appeared to have stopped, his brain could not manage a single coherent thought, he could not force his breath in or out of his lungs.

  The Lord of Elcho Falling shall rise again.

  Even though he'd been steeling himself for this moment, the sudden, absolute confirmation of his worst fears threw Maximilian into utter denial.