by Sarah Remy
One quarter of the way down the mountain, on a relatively level outcrop Everin recognized by an old rock formation in the shape of a broken arch, they stopped to rest. The place on Everin’s ribs where Drem’s spear had left a bruise, and on his thigh where Drem’s foot had left another, ached fiercely. His knees and ankles, no longer so spry as when he’d first attempted the ascent some thirty years earlier, protested the sharp incline. And his voice, capricious in the aftermath of his cut throat, had retreated to a grating whisper. Every time it failed him for longer than a short while, he worried it was gone for good, in spite of Faolan’s restorative magics.
He was not a vain man, but he thought he would not like to live the rest of his life so silenced. And he cursed himself for a coward.
An indolent stream trickled alongside the trail before falling beneath the arch to unseen depths below. While Drem refilled their water skins, Everin changed out of flatlander tunic and trousers and into purloined desert kit. The kilt fit him as it was supposed to, hanging low on his hips and falling in pleats to just past his knees. He had to loosen the laces in the vest, and the snakeskin chafed uncomfortably along his ribs, but it would do. He tied on the dead man’s sandals and slung the scimitar in its embroidered sheath over one shoulder.
Down below, the tribes were alive in the night, campfires twinkling, the far-off sound of many voices rising and falling with the wind. The air was warming as they dropped out of the pass, although not by much. The desert, viciously hot during the day, cooled rapidly after sunset. Everin paused to stand still and listen; when the wind ebbed, bush crickets sang from the dubious shelter of scrub and rock. He could hear the stream splashing down along the cliff face, the scratch of something small, likely a squirrel, crossing sand ahead of them on the trail, and the warble of waking goatsucker birds.
“The moon will show its face soon,” Drem said. “I would like to be on the ground before there is enough light to shoot us off the cliff face.”
Everin grunted. Anticipation made the hair stand up on his forearms. The promise of white sand again beneath his feet after so long a time woke a song in his heart to rival the stirring night birds.
Drem, who could come and go unnoticed in daylight, was an adroit guide. The lesser sidhe never strayed more than four steps ahead of Everin on the path, and often reached out to direct him around a rough spot in the ground or away from a precipitous edge. Drem’s fingers were cold on Everin’s wrist and did not linger long. It did not speak; it did not need to. Everin’s body recalled an endless eventide spent in sidhe barrows, the ways and means of living in a twilight world, often with only a sidhe guard to lead him safely from place to place under the earth.
He was not afraid. Drem would not let him fall. Drem could not let him fall, any more than Drem’s kin could have let him wander at will in the hidden kingdom.
Halfway down the mountain, the moon rising in the east, they hit a patch of loose sand. Drem leapt straight into the air as the ground slid beneath their feet. Everin managed to keep his balance, but only by the skin of his teeth. The sand became a small torrent, ankle deep, and he could not seem to find purchase beneath. Swearing, he slipped inexorably forward down the cliff face. There was just enough light now to see where the ground was, but not ahead to where it was not. He plunged his spear point-first into the mountain to one side of the sliding earth. The spear stuck. Everin clutched the haft. His feet went out from under him.
“Don’t let go,” Drem advised helpfully. The sidhe clung spiderlike to the sheer rock face above Everin’s head. Everin lay on his back as the sand hissed around him, a landed fish in a rushing river, the muscles in his arms straining. “You neglected to mention the way down was snared.”
Everin waited until the avalanche had passed them by before responding. “It wasn’t last I walked it.” There was sand in his mouth, between his teeth, in his ears and hair, in his eyes, and in places beneath his kilt he preferred not to think of. Slowly, he let go of the spear and sat up. The ground, thankfully, stayed steady beneath his arse. “Why would it be? Tinkers and traders come this way regularly.”
Drem dropped off the wall. It dusted sand from Everin’s head and shoulders, then helped him stand. “Someone’s been telling the tinkers and traders where not to tread, I think.” It wiggled Everin’s spear out of the mountain, avoiding the steel tip. “Hand on my shoulder, now. The rest of the way, you step where I step.”
They moved at a slug’s pace after, both testing the ground ahead with spear point as they descended. The horizon brightened to gray. The moon was a silver orb over the desert, blotting stars above and campfires below. The trail gentled as the mountain became less steep. Everin glimpsed the foothills not far ahead. The stream, having followed them most of the way down the peak, dried up. They edged past the remains of a tinker’s cart, smashed to pieces, buried in sand. Dragged off an overhead bluff, Everin realized, by the same sand trap that had tried to spit him off the cliff. A skeleton lay on its back nearby, picked-over bones shining in the moonlight.
“Bad luck,” said Drem, deadpan, and it inched on.
The wind picked up as they left the heights, blowing sand in spirals around their knees and, on the occasional angry gust, into their faces. Everin tied the sand snake’s veil over his nose and mouth, and low over his eyebrows for protection. His hands still knew the way of the complicated knots.
“At least,” he said, “the wind will prevent their shooting, if they’re so unwise as to leave their tents in this weather for two strangers on a mountaintop. We are two against ten thousand, and as apt to fall prey to snares as the tinker.” Drem’s head was bowed against the flying grit; Desma’s strong shoulders rounded in defiance, blue feathers fluttering in dark hair. “Be grateful it is night and cool. In the heat of day, I’d fear sandstorm.”
“Sand, sun, heat,” replied Drem, droll, “scorpions. I fear them each equally.” The lesser sidhe’s self-mockery looked out of place on Desma’s stern features.
The foothills were more extensive than they appeared, and a longer climb than Everin had let himself recall. He remembered the dangerous descent down the cliff face as being the worst of it, but in truth it was the gradual unfurling down to the desert floor that made him regret Skerrit’s Pass. The moon set and the horizon turned orange with incipient dawn. They lost the path in scrub and blowing sand. Where the mountain met lowlands the ground was a series of jagged ribs, a march of shallow canyons one after another until, at last, fissures lengthened into desert. The tribes called the foothills Shoat’s Wash, for the wild pigs that ran there in the summer season. During the winter rains the Wash often flooded and was unsafe for habitation, but when the weather was fine, the canyons were busy with huntsmen in search of boar.
Everin doubted there were boar enough in all the desert, let alone Shoat’s Wash, to feed the army squatting nearby. He could hear camp sounds clearly now—shouts and laughter, the call of camels disturbed by the rising sun, the rattle of teakettles and feed buckets. The canyons obscured much of the desert floor, but the wind blew rising smoke overhead, and with it the stink of many people living in close quarters: sewage, sweat, smoked meat, animals, and the too-sweet perfume of opion gum smoked in pipes.
“Riders,” said Drem suddenly. “Coming up the hills.”
Everin saw only crag and low-lying brush, but he didn’t doubt the sidhe’s exceptional senses. They ducked into a gulley behind a large growth of sage broom plant. Little more than a trench scraped into the earth by repetitive flooding, the deep crack was one of many along the wash. An acacia tree shaded the depression. Dawn had not yet reached the bottom of the trench through its twisted branches. They lay on their bellies in blue shadows, breath held. Everin felt the beat of hooves through the sandstone and up into his teeth, a growing thunder.
The riders passed in a sprint, ponies held back from a gallop to a fast trot, kicking up a shower of sand and pebble. It was not a small company: fifteen sand snakes wrapped against the wind, veils and kilts
trailing, indistinguishable from one another. They charged up the foothills toward the cliff face, contesting the rising sun. Two long-legged, slender hunting dogs ranged in the rear. Their handler, horseless, jogged at the end of leather leashes. The leashes, like the warriors, were decorated with trophy feathers. Strips of fabric shrouded the dogs’ eyes from grit; they relied on their sensitive noses and their handler’s whistled commands for navigation. Although not blind in truth, the dogs were trained up from pups to hunt as if they were.
The company passed quickly. The dogs did not. They stopped abruptly, curly tails waving in excitement. They snuffed the ground, weaving from side to side along the trail, chasing scent. When they drifted inexorably toward Everin and Drem and the shaded gulley, Everin knew the game was up. Many a desert scoundrel had been brought to justice by a sand lord’s well-trained coursing pair.
The dogs paused on the other side of the sage broom, noses pointed at the gulley. Their tails stilled. They grumbled, but without conviction. Drem growled back. The dogs jumped away, tails pressed between their long legs. Their handler tugged on their leashes, whistling them on up the mountain, sparing little thought for what might lie beneath the acacia tree. Dogs sent to hunt down a man would not be distressed upon finding his scent and were expected to react with caution in the presence of scorpion, serpent, or fox. Their handlers would have no experience with the nervous aversion most animals displayed when confronted with sidhe.
You’ll be glad of me, Drem had said. Twice in a span of hours that prediction had proven sound.
When the sound of hoofbeats faded and the dogs were well out of sight, Drem stirred, sitting up out of the sand. The veil over Desma’s mouth puffed outward on a sigh.
“They seem overly concerned with two strangers on a mountain,” it said, borrowed yellow eyes glinting. “What now?”
Everin heaved himself out of the gulley. They had been walking a full night. He was weary. Where his body didn’t hurt, it itched from sand. Anticipation had left him. It was occurring to him that they were unlikely to reach the sidhe gate without the need for bloodshed. The possibility that they would reach the gate intact seemed less certain than it had at sunset. He felt his age as he had not since his last days living with the Tuath Dé.
“The ponies are a puzzle,” he worried. “They haven’t made sense from the beginning. Coastal stock, ridden by an inland people who would eat a horse before wasting water on its upkeep. The ponies make no sense to me at all.”
Disturbed by their presence, a dust-colored serpent slithered around acacia roots. Drem blinked, and took it through the head with the point of its spear, exactly as Everin had taught the sidhe and its kin, Bail, days earlier. The serpent was dead before Drem plucked its body from the blade. Drem brushed cloth from its mouth and neatly bit off the snake’s head. Juices ran down Desma’s chin. It chewed vigorously, then ran a startlingly blunt human tongue over Desma’s even teeth, cleaning away bits of meat.
“Skald’s balls,” Everin groaned.
Ignoring Everin’s tired revulsion, Drem snapped down the serpent in three more bites, then wiped sticky hands on its kilt. “What now?” it repeated.
To Everin’s embarrassment, his stomach grumbled hollow protest. Raw serpent was no better than raw fish, but they’d not eaten since they’d fried lake trout in the tinker’s hollow, and his gut cared only that it was empty. It didn’t escape his notice that Drem had, this time, neglected to share.
“We continue on,” Everin replied grimly. “But as sand snakes, desert warriors in truth, no more dodging, no more hiding. Which means you cannot be Desma. Not if Desma is recognizable.” He stalked Drem, circling once around the sidhe, and then again, brows lowered. “Wrap your face again, all but your eyes. I’ll do the same. No one will question covered faces, not in this wind.” He demonstrated, winding the veil across the crown of his head and then three times over his face, securing it at the back of his neck and tucking the ends into the sleeves of his vest. “The feathers have to go.” Using his belt knife, he cut the plumage from Desma’s tangled hair. The matted locks and pinions felt tangible under his fingers, but each time he severed a dark strand from Drem’s head, feather and hair disintegrated in his hand, an illusion broken.
“Also the tattoos.” Everin frowned at the family marks on Desma’s arms, belly, and thighs, wondering if they, too, could be scrubbed away like so much smoke. “Even more than the feathers, they signify household and rank.”
“Touch my flesh with your iron and I will cut off your hand for the offense.” The thrice-wrapped veil did little to muffle Drem’s swift animosity.
“Sidhe justice,” Everin agreed. “I have not forgotten Desma’s broken hands. But I have a better idea, and one that does not require retribution.” Sitting on his heels in the sand, he used his blade to scar the acacia, cutting through bark and into soft wood to the viscous brown sap within. He scooped a thimbleful of the gummy substance onto his palm, added sand, and spat twice into the mixture before blending it rapidly with the tip of one finger. The end result was a satisfying, sticky potion slightly darker than desert dust.
“Acacia gum,” Everin explained. “One hundred uses. A potter I knew used it in his glaze. Cover the marks.” Everin scooped the mess into Drem’s hand. “I’ll make more.”
They worked quickly, wary of interruption. Drem painted Everin’s glaze over the tattoos on Desma’s dark skin. Everin daubed the stain where the sidhe could not reach. It was a temporary solution, and left Drem looking begrimed and displeased, but it did the job, obscuring Desma’s markings completely.
“If it itches,” Everin cautioned, smearing more of the gum on his own skin to match, “leave it be. They will not question an unwashed traveler—when one is away from home, water is for drinking.”
“They?”
“The first tent we come to, that I deem safe to approach.” Everin hefted the steel-tipped desert spear. “This is your weapon now. We are not sidhe and flatlander, we are two weary scouts looking for shelter from the sun before we make report to our lord. Speak little; let me ask and answer questions.”
Drem accepted the spear. Faolan’s illusion shivered briefly in the proximity of steel, but held. Everin did not dare wonder if it would continue to endure amongst a forest of similar weapons. Drem, too, would suffer. Iron sickness was an inescapable curse, an affliction that brought even the strongest sidhe elders to their knees.
“We won’t tarry,” Everin said. “Gather what information we can and then back over the mountain.”
Drem smiled, twisting Desma’s mouth into an enthusiastic leer. “And mayhap,” it said, “some amusement in between.”
Chapter 10
Mal sprawled in the chair behind his desk, eyes closed, head tilted toward the open windows, and walked with Avani as she tossed her most precious possessions into the old journey bag she had carried all the way from Stonehill. A jug of good red wine sat on his desk next to a fine silver goblet. The goblet was empty. The jug was mostly so.
The aftertaste of drink lingered on his tongue, and on Avani’s, although if she were as tipsy as Mal—and he thought she might be—it was his fault, for she had consumed nothing but spring water from the goblet near her loom.
Running solves nothing, he said, as she spun about her chambers, wadding her favorite salwar and slippers into a tidy ball for packing. I never took you for craven.
I am not craven. She didn’t want him in her head, but Mal thought they had moved beyond the point where they could force each other out, and he was selfishly glad of it. I am not running. I’m leaving. While I still can; while I still recognize right from wrong.
She was thinking of violation as she stuffed her medicinal kit into her bag. Mal’s wine-addled stomach rolled.
I am no rapist. The force of his indignation made them both flinch. He took a deep breath. I thought . . . I know . . . you wanted that as much as I. It had been a long time in coming. Longer, mayhap, then they wanted to admit.
She di
dn’t pretend not to understand. Avani strived toward honesty, even when she was livid. She stood in the middle of her chamber, a length of silk hanging between her fingers. She closed her eyes and they were alone in the darkness behind her lids.
You and I, yes, she granted him. But the woman—Desma—had no choice in the matter. Nor the sidhe. You turned them inside out, took everything they had, and left them in pieces. It was evil.
It was necessary. He did not understand her renewed distaste even as it became his own. Not understanding made him surly. Her repugnance became his self-revulsion. I thought you had come to realize, while I was away, when you worked in my place. We are born to serve the throne.
You’ve been telling yourself that, have you, since your father sent you away for setting Selkirk’s temple afire? Wilhaiim needs you, so Wilhaiim comes first, no matter the consequences. You’re so desperate to be needed, Mal, you can’t see past the empty hole in your heart. Damn your father for that. He ruined you before you were even begun.
Deep water didn’t turn you mad, you were born an abomination. His self-revulsion became her condemnation. They were caught together in a ring of acrimony, unable to escape, unable to separate themselves from the tangle of Mal’s regrets.
Mal snarled. The wine jug crashed from his desk to the floor. Several chambers away, Avani yanked too hard on Kate’s strand of rubies and the string broke, sending raw stones showering over her feet.
Avani sucked in air, let it out again. “The wine doesn’t help,” she said out loud to the empty room.
If he were less drunk, he thought he could get around those last standing walls, have every final piece of her for his own. If he were sober, he knew he could make her give up those final pieces willingly.
“Shit.” He opened his eyes, saw the rough surface of his desk instead of Avani’s cozy bedchamber. “I am not . . .” That.
Is there any way to end this, this thing we’ve woven between us?