The Red Queen

by Isobelle Carmody

  Darga offered to mark out a scent trail that the ridgeback would have no trouble following, but I insisted that we wait for them. I was determined to speak to Rasial when she returned and try to convince her to stop Gavyn wandering off. It would be a mistake to rage at her and utterly pointless to scold Gavyn, but I was determined to deliver a calm and pointed lecture about being a member of an expedition.

  The leaf pouch took the edge off the headache, but it did not abate entirely and I wondered crossly how it was that my body could heal me from near death injuries and yet be unable to get rid of a simple headache.

  Restless, I lifted the sleeping Maruman gently from my lap onto my pack and walked back slowly to look up at the bluff we had climbed to inspect the Observatory. Once again the clouds had closed over, turning the red of dusk to a rusty brown, making it hard to see the building as much more than a white shape. But I could visualize it in my mind’s eye very clearly. Odd how, from below, it did not look near as high, and yet I could remember vividly the dizzy terror I had felt looking down from it. But in the end the danger had come from a deceptively easy-looking mound of stone and rubble at its hem. There was a lesson in that, I thought. I looked up, wondering if the stone really had been a bridge, as Swallow had speculated. Then I shuddered, recollecting that this had been the very question in my mind when I had stumbled.

  I heard a step behind me and turned to see Dameon approaching. I did not wonder how the empath knew where I was. He had always been able to map the world by the emotions of people around him. I took a step toward him and stubbed my toe hard enough to make my eyes water. Dameon winced at my muttered curse and when he came to me, he gently drew my hand through his elbow. I was surprised at the hard muscles I could feel in his arm. Truly his journey to the Westland and his riding lessons had hardened him.

  “How is it that you are blind but I am clumsy?” I demanded with mock ire.

  He smiled. “The difference is that I cannot rely on seeing things,” Dameon said, “so I must be aware at all times and keep a constant sense of the people and obstacles around me.”

  “But how does any of that help when you are in a place where people are moving?” I could not help but ask. “I have known you to look at me across a crowded room and know me for who I am.”

  Dameon grinned. “My dearest Elspeth, you emanate emotions as loudly as Matthew. And people’s emotions have what I can only describe as a flavor, which is unique. So I can … taste you in your emotions. There is no better way to describe it,” he added, with his usual grimace of frustration at the limitations of a language that did not encompass more than the five senses ordinary unTalents possessed. Then he shrugged. “When you enter a chamber I am in, my senses know it as if cymbals had been struck.”

  “Speaking of Matthew, have you had any dreams of him lately?” I asked.

  The empath nodded slowly. “Only snatches of things that might or might not have been true dreams. You?”

  On impulse, I told him that some of my dreams of Matthew had felt less like true dreams than actual communications.

  Dameon looked astonished, as well he might. “Do you mean to say that you spoke to him?”

  “I spoke and he reacted as if he had heard me, and once he said my name. Another time I told him that we were bringing Dragon to the Red Land and bade him wait there and prepare. But these encounters were completely random—neither Matthew nor I sought them, but we were both on the dreamtrails. It is my guess that Matthew was deeply unconscious because he was ill and fevered or maybe wounded in some way. As I told you a little while back, a person’s spirit-form can drift from its body when it is ill, and I think such drifting spirit-forms are naturally drawn to the dreamtrails. In truth, I think that is how true dreams come to us. But being an unconsciously created spirit-form, Matthew’s had little self-control, so our meeting was brief and ended abruptly and he may well have woken and dismissed it as a fever dream.”

  Dameon shook his head incredulously. “I did not think it possible to make contact over such a distance and over sea besides.”

  “The only way it could happen is if we were both touching on the dreamtrails,” I reminded him.

  Analivia suddenly gave a shout and pointed toward the pass. I turned and saw Rasial’s white form coming through the weeping stone arch, Gavyn a shadow beside her. I ought to have felt relieved, but a terrible pain was pressing at my temples.

  “What is wrong?” Dameon asked.

  I did not answer him, for I had just realized the headache that had been troubling me was the pressure that always welled up before a premonition. I seldom experienced them, but now as I looked at the dog and the boy, pain filled my head till it seemed it must burst. I seemed to hear a woman screaming, and a feeling of danger and terror swept over me.

  “What has happened?” I beastspoke Rasial. Gavyn followed the ridgeback until she had come to me and stopped, but even as the enormous canine fixed me with her cold, pale eyes, the boy wandered away humming softly and tunelessly under his breath.

  “What has happened?” I asked again.

  “Let the boy show you,” Rasial sent, and to my amazement, she simply carried me with her into Gavyn’s mind, which I discovered overlapped the dog’s mind even more intimately than Maruman’s overlapped mine. Indeed, there were places where I could locate no boundary.

  I found myself enveloped by a memory that arose from the overlap in their minds.

  It was night, and a figure was standing atop a crag of stone looking down into a shadowy, flat-bottomed crevice where two people walked, one behind the other. For a moment I was so astonished at the figure that I hardly noticed the people below, for it was the same scarlet-winged wolfman spirit that had saved me from the Destroyer when I was dreamtraveling and that, if Straaka was right, had summoned me to the high spirit realm where he had waited with a message from the merged spirits of the oldOnes.

  Dazedly, I wondered if what I was seeing was not a memory but a vision Gavyn had experienced. Or perhaps the spirit-form had entered the boy’s sleeping spirit, but to what end?

  The wolfman began to leap with singular grace along the sharp crags, flapping his scarlet wings just enough to keep himself in the air when the gap was wide. He seemed utterly unaware of me, and his attention was so strongly focused on the people in the canyon below that I was compelled to look down, too. A tall, powerfully built man was walking behind a smaller man.

  I found myself drifting closer to the pair, and suddenly I saw with horror that the man held a rope, the other end of which was fastened around the smaller man’s neck. The wind gave a great sighing gust and a flag of hair fluttered back from the smaller figure, whom I realized was a girl. Overhead the clouds shifted and moonlight speared down into the ravine to illuminate the girl’s face.

  It was Dragon.

  Her beauty was unmistakable, despite the fact that her face was a mottled mass of bruising and filth. I was so shocked by the sight of her that I would have lost my connection to the dream or vision had not Rasial’s grip on me been so steadfast.

  Dragon was so bedraggled and filthy that she might still have been the feral child I had lured from the Beforetime ruins on the west coast and brought back to Obernewtyn. But the torn and tattered rags she wore revealed all too clearly that she was a child no longer. She turned to look back at her captor, and her expression twisted into a grimace of terror and loathing so extreme that she looked half mad.

  The man gave the rope a vicious jerk and Dragon was wrenched backward so hard that she lost her footing. She fell and rolled until the rope around her neck brought her to a brutal halt. She would likely have been throttled if she had not been walking with one hand hooked through the loop under her chin. This told me that the man had wrenched her like that often enough that she had learned to protect herself.

  Rage choked me at the thought that anyone would dare to treat her so. But questions clamored in me, too. Who was the man, and how had she fallen into his hands? And why had they come to the
high mountains? The terrain was so familiar that I was certain we had passed through that very ravine.

  The man stopped and watched as Dragon struggled painfully to her feet. I could see fresh blood on her knee glistening black in the moonlight. He shook the rope impatiently and Dragon turned and went on, now limping. I kept my eyes on the man as they began to walk again, waiting for the moon to show me his face. When it did, I did not recognize it, but he seemed to be wearing a tattered rebel band around his upper arm. The colors would have told me who his chieftain was, if I could have made them out, yet surely he must be one of Malik’s men. Not all of them had been captured after the fall of Vos and Malik in Saithwold. Or maybe he was one of the men allied with Jude, who had escaped capture during the rout at Sawlney.

  But how could Dragon have been taken when she could so easily have defended herself with her powerful coercive ability? Even if she had been taken by surprise initially, she could later have used it to free herself. And why had the man brought her into the mountains? It must have something to do with me, for it was simply too great a coincidence to believe that he had brought her to the mountains by chance.

  The man caught my full attention again when he suddenly took two staggering steps forward and slapped Dragon hard enough that her head rocked on her shoulders. Was he drunk? I wondered, trembling with impotent rage.

  “What is it? What is happening?” Swallow asked, shaking me and dragging me from Gavyn’s mind so roughly that I retched.

  Seeing their drawn and anxious faces, I bit back a snarl and mustered my will to steady myself before explaining that Gavyn had seen Dragon being herded roughly through the mountains as the captive of an unknown man.

  “Saw her when?” Swallow asked, glancing at the boy, who was picking at a scab on his knee, oblivious to our exchange.

  “I think he saw her in a true dream,” I said. “And I recognized the terrain. They were not far from the Valley of the Skylake.”

  “Do you speak of the girl who is the true queen of the Red Land?” Analivia asked incredulously.

  I nodded. “It was night in the vision but from the glimpse I got of the moon, I’d say he was there a two or threeday ago, which means they will be a good deal closer by now.”

  “Closer … you think they are following us?” Dameon asked.

  “Let us say that I do not believe it is a coincidence that he has brought her into the mountains,” I said.

  “The man must be a gifted tracker if he has been following our trail in these stony heights,” Ahmedri said, his eyes narrowing.

  “I don’t know what he is, but Dragon is his captive and he has clearly beaten her,” I said, nauseated at the thought of the other abuses she might have endured.

  “What can he possibly mean by bringing her after us?” Swallow asked.

  “The only thing I can think of is that Dragon heard the same voice that brought the rest of you here and was on her way up when the man waylaid her. He could have forced the knowledge of her intentions from her. But why he would then bring her after me is a mystery. Unless he is one of Malik’s people and hungers for vengeance.”

  “A long, hard road to walk for it, and most Landfolk would die rather than come up into these mountains,” Analivia said. “But is it not rather a leap to imagine Dragon was sent after you just because her captor brought her to the mountains?”

  “You said yourself that she was to go with the ships to the Red Land,” Dameon agreed.

  “I suggest we go back, capture this man, and discover what he is up to from his own mouth,” Swallow said. “Elspeth, was he definitely alone except for Dragon? Did you see if he was armed?”

  I hesitated but decided not to muddy the matter by speaking of the wolfman spirit-form. “I saw no weapons but I do not doubt he carries at least one knife and probably a sword.”

  “We have to rescue this girl,” Analivia told him grimly. “Swallow and Ahmedri and I will go. I can throw a knife very accurately from a distance. You must stay here to greet the wolves and explain why we must delay, Elspeth.”

  “Better for all to wait here,” Rasial sent.

  Analivia began to speak but I made a brusque gesture to silence her as I asked the dog, “Why do you say so?”

  “The funaga-li has a blade,” Rasial sent. “He knows how to use it and he will kill the girl if he feels threatened. Better if he comes upon you here and believes he has surprised you. If he thinks he is master of us all, you can distract him and get MornirDragon away. Then I will tear his throat out.”

  “You are certain he will not kill her before he gets here?” I asked, more startled by the white dog’s ability to read the man’s mind than her readiness to kill. It would not be the first time she had killed a man, after all.

  Rasial answered, “The funaga-li uses/needs MornirDragon to bring him to us.”

  Atthis must have told her how to find me, I thought. “Does Gavyn have any feeling of how long ago MornirDragon was in the canyon?” I asked, trying to gauge how far behind us the pair were.

  “We slept and roamed in spirit-form. We saw MornirDragon. We remembered her from the barud. Sometimes, when first she came, the boy romped with her. We did not like it that the funaga-li had leashed her. We wanted to find them in my flesh and attack the man, but when we looked into the spirit of her captor, we saw what he meant to do to the girl if he was threatened.”

  We looked into his spirit, I thought in reeling wonder. Then abruptly I understood. “You are the spirit-form of the wolfman. You and Gavyn together! You saw MornirDragon and her captor with your spirit-eyes. But how is this possible?”

  Rasial looked into my eyes. “When I first saw the funaga cub, I smelled/saw that his spirit was/is not properly attached to his flesh. Sometimes the link between flesh and spirit is damaged in a birthing that is too long or too hard. I did not know that the cub had lain down to sleep by me when I flew in spirit to the high realms where the bond between flesh and spirit thins. I wanted to sever the link and be free of my flesh and the life I had lived within it. I did not know the boy’s spirit followed. He saw me fading, and not understanding that I desired death, he sensed my danger and cleaved to me. Our spirits fused. They can never be truly separate again.”

  “You told me once that you came to Obernewtyn to die,” I sent.

  I sensed a ripple of bleak laughter in the dog’s mind. “You remember that well. So I did. When I was whelped, my father dreamed that even as a funaga stole my life, I would take his. I thought that meant that I would die even as I killed the funaga killing me. That would have been better than what came to pass, for it is najulk to merge spirits with another, even if the pair be mated or cub and dam; they may be linked, but to merge is to cease to be one. It means that neither of us will ever have a mate, for we cannot be separated now, even in death. If one dies, the other will die, too.”

  Najulk meant “unnatural” or “wrong,” I knew. “That is why Gavyn has become the way he is?”

  “Now he sees with spirit-eyes as beasts do, even when he wakes, but because he is funaga, this prevents him from seeing the world of the flesh clearly. When we sleep and fly, the boy is very strong and he dominates the merge. That is why our spirit-form is male.”

  “That is why the wolves react as they do to you, isn’t it?” I realized.

  “They scent the unnature/wrongness of najulk in us,” Rasial said. “All beasts sense it and shun us.”

  “Maruman does not shun you, or the horses,” I sent. “Nor Darga.”

  “The feline is najulk, and the rest accept him, so they accept us/me, because we serve your quest. They believe there is a purpose in our najulkit,” Rasial sent.

  Guessing that she was referring to the distortions in Maruman’s mind, which were certainly unnatural, I sent, “Maybe they are right, for I suspect the oldOnes could not have reached you to send you to rescue me if you were not as you are.” All at once it hit me that this was the reason Atthis had summoned Rasial. Not because of her or the boy, but because o
f their joined spirit. I suddenly remembered something my mother had once told me: There is a reason for all things that happen, even if we do not understand what it is.

  “Merged as we are, we can fly higher than those who live can usually fly in spirit,” Rasial sent, and it seemed there was a thread of wary wonder in her mindvoice, as if she was beginning to see that what she had considered an aberration might have a purpose.

  “Elspeth?” Swallow prompted with a hint of impatience.

  I collected myself with a start and turned to the others. “Rasial tells us to wait here. She says that the man is using Dragon to find us. That means Atthis must have told her to come after me.”

  “Who is Atthis?” Analivia asked.

  I shook my head impatiently. “Listen to me. Rasial says that the man has a knife and that he will use it if he feels even slightly threatened. She said it will be safer for Dragon if we wait here and let them come to us and believe they have surprised us. I think she is right.”

  “Can you coerce him?” Swallow asked.

  Rasial, seeing the echo of the exchange in my mind, sent that this would not be possible. “You cannot coerce him, ElspethInnle. There is a mist of madness in him.”

  “Elspeth?” Swallow prompted again.

  “Rasial is saying I can’t. I think it is because he has taint poisoning. We will do as she suggests and let him come to us. We must prepare a trap.”

  Swallow nodded, as did Dameon and Ahmedri, but Analivia stood up decisively. “It is getting dark. Let’s make it easy for him to find us by lighting a fire. A big one!”

  It was decided that Swallow and I would wait by the fire with Darga and Ahmedri concealed close by. Since we had all come separately or in twos or threes to the mountains, we reasoned that there should be more than one of us waiting in case the man had seen tracks, and since he would be expecting to see me, I must be one of them. Analivia volunteered to go back along the trail and hide in a small cave she remembered noticing on the way up, just beneath the saddle. It would give her an unobstructed view of the long ridgeline leading to the pass, without any risk of being seen. I could farseek her regularly and when she told me that she could see Dragon and the man, Ahmedri and Darga would have plenty of time to conceal themselves. Dameon was to go with Maruman and the horses down to the remnant of the road below the plateau, where they could not be seen from above.