She came forward across the floor toward the windows, and with one hand she pulled and twisted at a lock of her long hair. “I think you are hiding. I think you are afraid to ask what you must ask.”
Outside in the courtyard, the fountain had overflowed, and water was spilling over the tiles. And the tree, old and stunted, had pushed out some new shoots. Marikke knew what would happen if she stayed. The tree would overflow like the fountain, a chaos of green. Vines and tendrils would force themselves past the shutters and into the room itself. In time, they would pull the stones apart, and the building would collapse.
“I’ll give you a hint. It is my will,” said Chauntea, “that the Beastlord should be free.”
At these words, far away, past the sweating cave beneath the mountain, down deep in the abyss, in a field of wildflowers Kip the shifter, who understood cats, reached down to stroke the fur of the black hunter in the grass. Marikke couldn’t see that far. Wearily, in pain, she opened her eyes, because she heard a new sound that had disturbed the savage music around the table, dispelled it in an eruption of shrieks and screams.
Someone stood between the torches at the entrance to the cave where the tunnel wound down from the surface, a golden elf with a red, flickering sword. An enormous leopard and an enormous wolf had leaped past him into the chamber of the tomb and were ripping into the lycanthropes along the walls, many of them still in the middle of their transformations—the leopard had the snout of a yellow boar caught in his claws, while the wolf had closed his teeth behind a panther’s neck.
SUKA IN PRISON
THAT SAME AFTERNOON FFOLK SLAVES HAD COME INTO the prison at Caer Corwell and had removed two of the interior bars in Suka’s cage, according to the instructions that Lady Ordalf had left as an incentive. In fact all of the bars were bolted rather than welded to the iron ceiling and the iron floor, which convinced the gnome that the leShay queen had used this ploy before. Perhaps during her long lifetime she had discovered that coercion was simpler and more dependable than either loyalty or trust.
One flabby soldier had worked inside the cage while four others kept watch. They had taken one bar of the twenty on either side that separated her from the fomorian and the lycanthrope, whom the jailer had cut to quarter rations in preparation for the feast. The good news was that in her human shape, the lycanthrope would break through a tenday earlier than the bloated giantess—not that Suka was particularly concerned about the danger from that side. Although the pig-woman was more than twice her size, she seemed passive and disconsolate rather than fierce. Besides, the gnome was still armed. She surrendered her most obvious weapons when she was imprisoned, but had retained several others secreted around her body, protected from discovery by a layer of misdirection.
Lately, also, in the darkness, when the lanterns had burned low, Suka had taken the habit of singing to the lycanthrope in her hoarse alto voice to keep her own spirits up and to make some kind of contact, under the general supposition that two females of any race or species would have to have something in common, as long as both wore tattoos.
She sang ballads from the highlands above Myrloch Vale where she’d been born. She sang the songs her father had composed for her, altering the words to popular melodies in order to fit some specific occasion, a naming day, or a broken tooth. Her father had been a drinker, probably still was if he was still alive—she’d left him after her brother died, sick of the tyranny of the leShay. She’d shipped out to Alaron, where eventually she’d met Lukas and the others. Now she was back.
On the fifth night of her captivity the lycanthrope had surprised her by speaking in the Common tongue: “Sing that other one, the one about the girl who died young.”
She was referring to Oh, Father Dear, the only sad song in Suka’s repertoire, a story so melancholy it was almost a joke, or at least her own father had thought so. The girl had died of consumption pretty much at the exact moment when her lover, a bold sea captain whose leg had been blown off in some episode of Northlander skullduggery, arrived at her door.
Suka’s father, in between grimaces and smiles, had always managed to squeeze out tears over this piece of sentimentality—displaced tears, for he was never able to weep at the mess he had made of his own life. And perhaps the lycanthrope, also, could respond to it this way—Suka sang it for her twice in a row, and the second time she found herself inventing, as her father had, new and more preposterous details—the lover, subsequently, had his other leg blown off after he had agreed to marry the girl’s younger sister, who had died of heartstop upon hearing the news, and so on, and so on, and by the end Suka herself was crying also, as her own situation at that moment didn’t seem so good. Lukas was on a fool’s errand on the island of Moray, which presumably was full of lycanthropes less soft hearted than this one.
Oh, father dear, don’t curse and sigh when I am dead and gone, / I’m going to a better place that I will call my own.
Hmm—maybe not. Her father’s sense of the ridiculous was almost his only good quality. But this would have been too much even for him, unless he was really drunk.
Tears in her eyes, she laid her cheek against the bars of the lycanthrope’s cage. She missed her friends, missed Lukas especially, though in many ways he was the most harebrained captain who ever lived, willing to risk all of their lives, endlessly, for trifles. Or else not trifles, exactly, but for his own exaggerated sense of loyalty; to redeem the golden elf out of prison, he had agreed to follow the stupidest mortal in the history of humanity into an obvious trap. And now, for her own sake, Suka had no doubt, he had embarked on a half-baked and utterly unplanned assault on the most star-cursed island in the Moonshaes, in the service of an evil queen who would not hesitate to double-cross him and probably had already. Even so, Suka knew, he would return for her or else die trying. He was an old-fashioned fellow, with a sense of honor and all that. And he had given his word.
Only in a universe where the gods did not exist, he’d once remarked, would mere cleverness or ruthlessness ever find their own reward. Real gods, he imagined, would reward transparency above all things, transparent motives, a transparent heart. And of course so far they had rewarded him, he claimed, if not with riches, then at least with friends.
Remembering him, missing him, the little gnome rubbed her pink hair against the bars. Without even listening to herself she had come to the end of her song. But now she hesitated, first frightened and then amazed, as the lycanthrope’s hand slipped through the gap left by the missing bar, and touched her cheek where the tears had fallen, the sharp edge of her cloven fingers scraping them away.
“Do not be sad,” said the lycanthrope in her low, grunting, distorted voice. “You have nothing to fear from me.”
And then—wonder of wonders—from the other side of the gnome’s cell, where the fomorian giantess was sprawled against the bars, came another voice, also speaking in the Common tongue. “You have nothing to fear. We saw you lay down your life for your friends.” Her voice was soft and even, beautiful, almost. “Now they are starving us for your sake. What are we going to do about that?”
Suka couldn’t think of anything, at least not right away. She thought it was a good idea to change the subject. Misdirection was her skill, and soon the giantess was telling her story, which, as it turned out, was every bit as melancholy as Oh, Father Dear. Her name was Marabaldia, and although Suka mightn’t necessarily have guessed by looking, she was the most beautiful fomorian in the entire Underdark, and certainly on Gwynneth Island. A girl from a powerful family, renowned for her artistic and musical talents, she had convinced her mother to allow her to marry her deserving sweetheart, a boy from a different tribe. The date had been set, and Marabaldia was the happiest girl in her cave or tunnel or whatever—Suka, listening, had to keep reminding herself that everything was happening by torchlight, underground—when fate intervened. Her own father dear, who had abandoned her when she was small—or at least smaller, Suka thought, not willing to believe she had ever been the s
ize of, say, a gnome—now reappeared with a new bridegroom, who was as rich as he was old and ugly—though, again, Suka wondered how anyone could tell, especially in the dark.
But the lovers had run away, and after a series of hair’s breadth escapes had found their way up to the surface, following a seam of some precious, glinting mineral up from the Underdark and into the deepest cellars of Citadel Umbra in Winterglen forest, the palace of Lady Ordalf’s son and heir, the leShay Prince Araithe. Initially welcoming, he had betrayed them like the scum-sucking piece of dragon shit he was, selling Marabaldia’s lover to their pursuers while keeping her hostage for the sake of some scheme she had never known or understood. Araithe had shipped her here, as far away from Umbra as he could manage, where she’d languished in captivity for a long, long time. She imagined the leShay had forgotten all about her.
Hidden by the flickering lamplight, Suka had squirmed and rolled her eyes for the first part of this story. At the beginning it was hard for her to feel much sympathy for someone she had been afraid might rip her arms out of her sockets later in the month, and maybe snack on her dead body. Her father had always told her the fomorians ate people like her, though as the narrative went on, Suka found herself less and less sure. It’s not as if anything else her father had told her had turned out to be true. Perhaps that was just lore left over from when fomorians used to keep gnomes as slaves down in the Feywild. But surely it was just as possible that they ate mushrooms and other nocturnal vegetables, bulging white tubers harvested in the dark. And at the end, when the sense of the story was dissolved in tears, Suka moved to the other side of her cell and sat beside the giantess as she wept, for comfort’s sake.
“And your wedding feast, what was it going to be?” Suka wanted to ask but didn’t, not just because it might be awkward if the giantess had described a roast gnome with a tuber in her mouth, but also because it might be unkind to remind her, when she was crying so hard.
The new gap in the bars was too small for the giantess’s hand, but she could slip hers through, and did, because of a general feeling that it is harder for someone to devour a friend than an enemy. She found herself patting the giantess’s enormous shoulder, picking at the threadbare and ruined brocade of her blue dress, while at the same time examining as best she could the iron and leather headdress Marabaldia wore clasped over her right eye, a simple mechanism as it turned out, though impossible to unlock with her big fingers. For Suka it would be a snap, and immediately she glimpsed the possibility of a plan.
A fomorian’s evil eye is a peculiar thing with a distinctive yellowish cast and unusual properties. Chief among them is the ability to affect the perception and the will of anyone who looked at her, to freeze or slow his thoughts, reflexes, and responses. It was because of this capacity that all those gnomes had been imprisoned and/or (maybe!) eaten, all those years ago. Stupid fomorians, Suka had heard, could barely slow you down. Clever ones could stop you in your tracks. She wondered if this was one of the clever ones. So far it was hard to tell, though Suka had a well-worn prejudice against the females of any race who boasted of their beauty. Particularly if they had purple skin, and warts.
But already she was wondering if, when Marabaldia described her family’s power and influence, instead of boasting she was being tactful and discreet—this sounded more like a dynastic dispute, in which case Prince Araithe’s interest was easier to understand.
“Don’t cry,” Suka said. “Let’s get you out of here.”
Her plan was pretty hazy, and it was already morning, which, again, you couldn’t tell by looking. No windows. But the Ffolk wardens came in with their half bowls of gruel—actual gruel, Suka thought. How exotic. She’d heard of it for years, but never tried it before she was imprisoned here. But now she was lucky enough to eat it twice a day. And the recipe was obviously a success, at least in the cook’s mind, because it never varied: dirty warm water with white blobs in it.
The next night it was the lycanthrope’s turn, after the ceremonial incantation of Oh, Father Dear. The giantess, hesitantly, sang a few verses. And then the pig-woman, lying up against the bars, told her story, which was mostly about the Lady Amaranth, the Rose of Sarifal, who had come to the island of Moray ten years ago. She had fallen from the sky, out of the east, on the back of a wounded hippogriff—a young girl who had blossomed into a queen, and who had changed the lives of every creature who touched her, or even touched the creatures who had touched her, the child of the goddess, the anointed one.
In the darkness, Suka rolled her eyes.
How beautiful she was, standing on the ancient battlements at Caer Moray, her red hair down her back, shining in the morning light—Suka had a low tolerance for this kind of thing. Already she imagined that the Rose of Sarifal was probably a moron or a charlatan, chased out of Gwynneth because of some genetic or moral abnormality that the lycanthrope was too dim to register. But then she remembered that the rest of the girl’s family around here were her half sister the High Lady Ordalf and her nephew, Marabaldia’s friend and mentor Prince Araithe, whose rabid degeneracy was probably hard to beat, even by other members of the same family. So maybe Lady Amaranth wasn’t so bad, and surely it was impressive for a young girl to carve out a kingdom among wild beasts in the wilderness and (apparently) to give everyone tattoos, the first sign of an advanced civilization.
And it was indeed a sophisticated tattoo: a climbing yellow rose along the belly of the beast, inked in several colors under the light yellow fur. Suka studied it in the half light, willing to concede a small amount of admiration until the lycanthrope described her mission, and what she was doing in this place. She, like Aldon Kendrick, had been an emissary to the Winterglen Claw, had built a boat with several others of her kind to sail the straits between Kork Head and Gwynneth and find Captain Rurik and his band of doughty rebels—whatever. Just because you found yourself locked up in faerieland didn’t mean you had to believe in faerie tales. The Ffolk were beaten here. Whipped. Ground down. Nothing left. One glance at the slaves who brought your gruel would tell you that. Hunchbacked, eyes low, dressed in yellow rags, they dragged themselves across the floor.
“What happened to your boat?” she asked the lycanthrope.
“Lost. Lost with all hands.”
Well, that was retarded, Suka thought. The straits were less than ten miles across. It wasn’t exactly the Trackless Sea, where she had sailed with Captain Lukas all the way to Ruathym—suddenly, as she remembered, she found herself swamped by a wave of apprehension and regret. I am so reamed, she thought to herself. But still, if she could unseal the mask of the fomorian, unclose her evil eye …
“How did Lady Amaranth make contact with the Claw of Winterglen?” she whispered in the dark.
MISTAKES
YOU MAKE IT WITH SEPARATED EGG WHITES,” recommended the genasi in his curious, airless voice. “It is called ‘meringue.’ ”
“That’s great.”
“You need a binding agent, though, depending on the weather. Otherwise it is not crisp.”
“I’ll just keep that in mind.”
“A little bit of fat will wreck it. A trace of egg yolk.”
“Duly noted.”
These conversations with Gaspar-shen, who had no sense of humor when it came to pastry, were always a little irritating, Lukas thought, but never more so than in circumstances like these, miles from anywhere.
It wasn’t as if they were starving. They had some biscuits from the wreck of the skiff, and a rabbit Lukas had shot, which he had shaken out of its skin and cooked over the campfire. It was a thin and meatless animal, but it still smelled good as it roasted on its spit. But nothing would ever satisfy you if your head was full of pudding, imaginary or remembered—this was a well-known fact.
Lukas squatted over the fire, warming his hands. It was a chilly afternoon, near sunset on the third day after they had left the wreck of the Sphinx, following the track of the lycanthropes. They had camped in a dry upland hollow among the gorse bus
hes, which gave them shelter from the wind and further shelter if it rained. Lukas thought it might. Impassive, the genasi stood above him. He didn’t feel the cold. “But on a clear day, no binding is necessary—”
“Shut up.”
The genasi stopped talking, as requested. But his complex nasal passages gave out a little whistle of interrogation, and the energy lines gleamed on his bare skin. “Please shut up,” Lukas amended. “It’s just I don’t want to talk about it anymore. I think I’ve made a mistake.”
Again—that small interrogatory noise. Lukas was the tracker, at least on land, which was an alien environment for the genasi. So this was a confession: “I think I’ve gone the wrong way.”
Which was stupid, because the lycanthropes hadn’t required any tracking. A blind man could have followed their sloppy trail. But three nights before, only a couple of hours after the wreck, the trail had divided in the fen, and a portion of them had split away to the west into the mountains. Lukas had chosen to follow what he’d thought was the main trail north. Even at the time he’d known he was rolling the dice.
For the first two days their quarry had traveled fast, trampling the bushes and then, later, spreading out across the heaths. Crossing streams, Lukas could see on the banks the mixed tracks of many different animals, which had convinced him he’d made the right choice. But now, today, he’d seen the main track dwindle as more and more of the lycanthropes had split away in all directions, in ones and twos. Now they were following a group of no more than five or six remaining animals, all wolves.
But in the swamp that first night he had seen hooves as well, heavy prints in the mud, and now he cursed himself. What was the likelihood that these six wolves were carrying the Savage, Marikke, and Kip across their backs? And even if they were, could they have moved as fast as these animals were moving? This trail now was almost a day old.
Tonight would be another cold night, a few hours of restless sleep wrapped in the coat he had taken from the skiff. The genasi would be fine. He didn’t require comfort, was tireless on the trail, would stand watch most of the night—a good companion, apart from the meringues.
The Rose of Sarifal Page 8