So they picked their way painfully across the miles. After the first hour, she knew that the Boy was hurting but chose to ignore it. The next hour, it was not something she could ignore, so she fought it, insisting to him and to herself that it was all in his head. But as the third hour rolled around, she was nearly carrying him. She was strong, but he was so tall and gangly that she could scarcely keep him upright.
And as the fourth hour drew near, she knew they were not going to reach the edge of Arpiar. Palace Var had disappeared, yes, but gray plain stretched to the horizon all around, endless and horrible. The sun was setting in a grim red glare to the west, and it seemed to Varvare that it was a flaming eye, watching them as they struggled.
The Boy collapsed. His feet stumbled on each other, and he fell headlong, pulling her down with him. She crawled out from underneath him and took his face between her hands, patting his cheeks. But his skin was pale as death and hot to her touch. There would be no waking him.
She turned her gaze up to the darkening sky, wanting to curse but too overwhelmed to form the words. She should leave him. She would make much better time without him. Unburdened, it might be possible to reach the edge of Arpiar.
“No,” she whispered, touching his burning face again. “I won’t let any harm come to him!”
“Too late for that, princess.”
Varvare blinked, and goblins stepped from Vahe’s enchanted Paths, surrounding her. She should have screamed, should have leapt to her feet and run. But instead, she sat unmoving and watched them closing in. She could feel nothing, neither fear nor disappointment.
“He’s harmed beyond help now,” said the goblin standing in front of her. “You might as well hand him over. And while we’re on the subject . . .” He knelt down and grabbed Varvare’s hands. His claws were long and black, and he made no effort to retract them. She felt their sharpness cutting even her own stony skin as he bound her wrists with a thick cord.
Varvare stared into the goblin’s wide white eyes, and her face was such that even his ugly heart nearly broke at the sight. “Sorry, princess,” he growled, tightening the cord.
One last time, the voice called to her across the unending expanse of Arpiar’s plain.
Beloved, call for him.
Varvare bowed her head and whispered, “Leo. I need you. Come to me.”
His heart beating just as fast as it had when he fled the unicorn, Lionheart turned and found that he stood near the Old Bridge. How had he missed it before? Quickly he approached it and stood looking across to the forest beyond. He hesitated, and his hands holding the twisted sword shook. What if this wasn’t right? What if, as Oeric said, he ended up lost somewhere in Faerie, unable to get back? What if—
The call came.
A voice crying out his name across many leagues.
Lionheart felt it tugging at his heart, pulling him almost against his will across the old plank bridge. He staggered forward, closing his eyes, trying not to see the forest but to follow only that faint thread of voice as it pulled and faded and faded some more. Then it was gone.
Lionheart opened his eyes.
Gray stretched around him. No forest, no hill, no bridge, not even a sky, it seemed, for it blended in so perfectly with the gray of the plain on which he stood. Nothing rose to break the monotony, not as far as his eyes could see in any direction save one. Just to his right stood a host of goblins, armed to the teeth.
And in the middle of them knelt Rose Red, her ugly face staring in opened-mouthed wonder right at him.
“Leo!” she cried.
The goblins turned. He looked at them; they looked at him. Then everything exploded in sudden motion. He was running, but everywhere he turned were goblins, their rocky hides blending almost perfectly into the gray of the plain. Leering faces filled his vision, white eyes on craggy, awful faces. One of them grabbed him by the shirt front, knocking away his sword, though he did not release his grip on the hilt. The monster lifted him right off his feet and dragged him up to its foul and stinking face.
“What is this?” the goblin cried, spitting in Lionheart’s eye. “A mortal beast has crossed our boundaries!”
“Smash him!”
“Bite his fingers!”
“Break him!”
“Bruise him!”
The goblin shook Lionheart like a terrier shakes a rat, but still he clung to the twisted sword, as though clutching a last anchor in a storm. The goblins took no notice of it. And the one that held him by his shirt roared to the others, “We must take this morsel to our king. Vahe will know just what to do with a little manling such as he!”
The others burst into terrible laughter, and the sight of their faces was enough to make a man ill. Lionheart caught one last glimpse of Rose Red before he was gagged and flung over the shoulder of the largest goblin in the party to be borne like a sack of flour over the bleak landscape of Arpiar.
At least he was in, he thought. And he’d found Rose Red.
Then he stopped trying to think.
1
Oeric pounded through the forest, careful to keep to the Prince’s Path. Never in all the generations of his search had he walked pathless in the Wood, and he would not begin now. Especially not with the unicorn somewhere on the hill.
But the Path did not lead him back to the bridge. Instead, it wound first down the hill, then up again, and he could not see where it would take him for the thickness of the trees. When at last he came to clear ground, he found himself at the crest of Goldstone Hill, facing the ruins of Carrun Corgar.
The once high tower had been built in the early days of Vahe’s power, and therefore it had been strong, solid, not spun from enchantments. By building it, Vahe had grafted this whole part of the Wood onto Arpiar, making it a part of his demesne. Then he had linked Arpiar to that small portion of the Near World, an invisible parasite clutching that hill.
The destruction of Carrun Corgar had shaken the hillside and the Wood Between, wrenching the Near World free once more. And now its wreck lay here at the top of the hill, where Oeric shuddered at the sight.
Memories of long captivity, his and others’, flooded his mind, and he turned away. Yet the Prince’s Path clearly indicated that he should walk among those crumbled stones. “Please,” he growled, squeezing the hilt of his knife so hard that it almost broke. “Please, don’t make me walk that way again. I’ve left the past behind. I am ready to face my future, Prince, even if it means my death. Show me the way into Arpiar and let me confront Vahe one last time!”
But the Path did not waver.
Slowly, Oeric followed it. The sun vanished from the sky, and the shadows of the ruins spread like night across the hilltop. Oeric walked trembling into that darkness. He closed his eyes as he went, and in his mind the walls of Carrun Corgar rose up about him: the long, windowless stair, the cells empty but waiting for prisoners. Though he stood with his feet firmly upon the Path, in his memory he climbed that stair.
“Please,” Oeric whispered again as his memory self at last neared the top and stood once more at the final door. “Please, don’t make me walk that way.”
Still, the Path remained true.
In his mind, Oeric put out a hand and pushed open the door. On hesitant feet he stepped out onto the parapet from which one could gaze into the Near World or the Far without crossing into either.
The night was cold. He remembered that. Cold and moonless. No light illuminated that dark place save that which shone from Life-in-Death’s white eyes.
He saw her again, standing before his beloved, who was crumpled at her feet. His memory self cried out, and Life-in-Death turned to him and laughed.
“You are no better than your brother. Goblin. Outcast. You are Vahe.”
“I am Vahe,” Oeric whispered.
“Take what you want. I will give it all to you,” said the Lady of Dreams.
Oeric’s eyes flew open. The memory vanished, and he stood amid the cold ruins. But Life-in-Death remained before him, and s
he was as real as the trees and stones.
“You always were mine.”
He shook his head.
“I’ll show you the way in. Follow me, as you should have long ages ago. Do you think I would make you wait five hundred years before seeing your beloved’s face again? Do you think I would leave you wandering forever, without rest?”
Oeric raised the knife in his hand.
“Nameless one, you were always mine. Come back to me and see how I will realize your dreams.”
“I have a name,” the knight said.
He slashed at her heart.
She screamed and vanished in a vapor, and with her went the darkness, dropping like torn rags. In the glare of sudden sunlight, Oeric stood face-to-face with the Prince.
He dropped to his knees. “My Prince!” he cried. “Forgive me. Her temptations are so strong. I . . .”
The Prince placed a hand on his head. “Oeric,” he said, “I know your heart. Your faith does me honor.”
Then he raised up the knight, and though Oeric towered over the Prince by a good head, he trembled as the Prince’s eyes searched his face. “Follow me now, my brother. The time is very near.”
The next moment, Oeric stood alone upon the hill, blinking as one waking from a dream. Then he turned and strode back down, making for the Old Bridge with all speed.
All was gray around him: the faces, the land, the voices, the very ringing in his ears was the gray of loathing and distress. Each step the goblin took jolted a rock-hard shoulder into Lionheart’s stomach so that he thought he must be sick, and the other goblins swarmed around, leering and awful and gray.
Then the colors changed.
At first he thought he must be passing out, so explosive were the hues that rushed in as he was carried deeper into Arpiar. Vivid green swirled beneath the goblins’ feet; turquoise blue shot across the sky. And his nose was overwhelmed with the scent of roses, an unfamiliar scent that went right to his head with potent sweetness.
The faces changed next. The leering and jeering did not stop but became all the more horrible as the hideous features melted away behind fine bones, smooth complexions, dark-lashed eyes. Male and female, they grabbed at his face, snatched at his clothes, poked and prodded him with their elegant, tapering fingers, every malicious laugh flashing perfect white teeth. They were the most beautiful people he had ever seen, more beautiful even than he had imaged Faerie beings could be. He closed his eyes, unable to bear the sight, and so Lionheart passed into Palace Var without seeing its graceful proportions rising up against the dreamlike landscape.
King Vahe waited in his assembly hall with the one-horned beast at his side. It had flown to him with word of his returning daughter and the Boy, and also warning of the captured intruder.
Vahe had paled. “Gargron?” he demanded, his voice catching in fear.
But no, it was just a mortal creature. Once or twice over the last five hundred years, unwary mortals had stumbled too near the boundaries of Arpiar, and the goblins near the edges would call them in to be toyed with and discarded like so many new baubles. This one could be no more impressive than they.
Varvare and the Boy were prodded before the others. The Boy had recovered his natural color as he neared his enslaver, the fire in his veins and the pain in his injured hand dulling into nothing. The goblins were gentler with him, unwilling to damage Vahe’s prized host body, and he smiled inanely at them and at Vahe. His gaze caught with fear as it passed over the unicorn, then faded into passive forgetfulness as the unicorn slid behind invisible veils. By the time he reached the king, the Boy was as cheerful as a kitten.
But Varvare refused to wear the veils.
“Your face shames me,” Vahe snarled as the princess’s captors dragged her before him. “Why do you insist on this ugly mask?”
She fixed him with her moon-like gaze. When she spoke, her fangs flashed. “I’ll choose an ugly truth over your pretty lies any day.”
Vahe stepped forward and grabbed her face in one large hand. His fingers were white and delicately veined, the nails polished like mirrors. They squeezed against her forehead and temples, the thumb pressing into her chin. She cried out at the pressure, wrenching against his hold but unable to free herself.
“Leave her alone!”
The voice was feeble, yet Vahe turned. He did not release his hold on Varvare’s face, but he felt her body stiffen at the sound of the weak voice. “What have you got there, Kud?” he demanded of the goblin carrying the mortal slung over his shoulder.
The goblin, whose features were as finely chiseled as those of a demigod, tossed Lionheart in a heap at Vahe’s feet before all the assembled courtiers of Var. “A manling, my king. He crossed the bridge.”
“Did you call him in?”
“By the cat’s eyes, my king, I swear we did not. He wandered in all on his own as far as we can guess.”
“I think not,” Vahe said. “No one breaches my borders.” He gave Varvare’s face a last cruel twist, and she screamed. Then he let her fall, and when she raised her head again, she was beautiful and despairing. “No one breaches my borders,” Vahe repeated, “unless called.”
He approached the manling, who still lay in a heap, and prodded him with a foot, grimacing as he did so as though he’d stepped in something disgusting. “Is it dead?”
“Not so much,” Lionheart gasped, opening one eye. “If you please, Your Majesty.”
“Not yet, at least,” Vahe said, drawing back quickly. “Who are you, and what brings you to my realm? Especially just now, when my hour is come so near.”
Lionheart pushed himself upright. He still clung to the twisted sword, surprised that no one had taken it from him. Either they did not see it, or they simply thought it too poor and ridiculous an item to be worth confiscating. But he tightened his grip upon the hilt and felt some extra strength as he gazed up into the unbearably beautiful face of the goblin king.
He turned to find Rose Red. She must be near, he knew, for he’d heard her cry of pain. But where, among all these beautiful faces, was his ugly friend?
Then he saw her.
His eyes widened as their gazes met. She knelt on the marble floor where Vahe had dropped her, her arms wrapped around her body, and he knew beyond doubt that it was she, except that he had seen this face of hers before only in a dream. Her skin was golden and smooth, her eyes large and silver with delicate black brows, and her hair was as long and thick as a river of midnight. But it was Rose Red, he knew as surely as he knew his own name. Rose Red, who had befriended a snobby little boy in the mountains. Rose Red, who had rescued him when he got lost in the Wood Between on a moonless night, who had served him when others fled, who had trusted him to care for her as she had always cared for him.
Rose Red, whom he had promised to protect and then betrayed.
She stared without expression, showing neither surprise nor fear, nor hope, nor anger. Then her mouth opened, and she whispered his name.
He glimpsed her for no more than a moment, but in Faerie a moment can be forever, and it seemed an eternity before Lionheart dragged his gaze back to Vahe’s scowl looming over him.
“My . . . my name,” he stammered, attempting a winning smile, “is Leonard the Lightning Tongue. I am a humble jester.”
Someone snorted. Someone else laughed. “A jester indeed,” the goblins muttered and mocked. This little beast wearing only his nightshirt—they’d taken the fine green jacket—and a grubby pair of trousers? This somber-eyed mortal who looked as though he hadn’t smiled in a century or more? “Sing us a funny song, then!” someone shouted from the crowd, and the heckling boiled up until it filled the assembly room and even the marble statues writhed in mockery on their pedestals.
Vahe did not laugh. As he gazed down on the self-proclaimed clown, he kept trying to see something just beyond the edge of his vision—a danger that he could not quite identify. He wanted, very badly in fact, to cut the mortal’s head off then and there and send it rolling down the
aisle for his goblins to chase like so many dogs after a ball. But somehow he dared not.
“Well,” he said, and when he spoke the crowds immediately hushed. “You hear your audience’s request. Will you entertain us, jester?”
Lionheart got to his feet, shaking so hard that he was uncertain he’d be able to stand upright. He knew that behind the lovely faces surrounding him were monsters, and the knowledge that they were there but he was unable to see them made them all the more terrifying. They were laughing at him already, every last one of them. Laughing because he was so pathetic standing there among them with all his flimsy mortality on display.
He looked down at the twisted sword in his hand and almost felt like laughing himself. What did he think he was doing, barging into this goblin kingdom, the land that wasn’t supposed to exist beyond his nursemaid’s stories, with nothing but a bit of warped steel and a hatful of arrogance? Did he expect to storm the ramparts alone, burst through Vahe’s defenses, carry off the princess, and be home in time for tea?
No, that wasn’t it at all. He expected to die.
Lionheart raised his gaze and met Rose Red’s, and her face was unnaturally still, more still and unreadable than the faces of the marble statues above him.
This must be it, then, he thought. This must be the moment when I die. When I open my mouth and say something stupid, and the king cuts me open like a holiday pudding. But my death will spare her somehow. Bebo promised.
So he opened his mouth and said something stupid:
“I blessed your name, O you who sit
Enthroned beyond the Highlands.
I blessed your name and sang in answer
To the song you gave.
“Beside the Final Water flowing,
My brow in silver bound,
Moonblood (Tales of Goldstone Wood Book #3) Page 29