The Red Queen

by Isobelle Carmody

  “Did Atthis also show you how I rendered you unconscious to get you away from the soldierguard and how you fell into a coma?” I said. “Do you remember what happened as you slept?”

  She nodded gravely. “Maruman showed me, but later. Atthis only said that I must lead the man to you. I said I feared he would hurt you, too, but she said you would not be alone and that your companions would not allow any harm to come to you or to his sister, who was with you, so I woke and led the man through the mountains as she had bidden me. Then the man hurt me again because he did not like that I told him only this way, then that way. He wanted me to tell him all I knew at once, but Atthis had said he would kill me if I did that. He hurt me so badly that I fainted. I was so glad to escape. I turned myself into a dragon, but this time I couldn’t find Atthis. That is when Maruman came, only he had made himself into a greatcat.” She paused and chewed at her lip for a little before going on with her story.

  “He made me remember that I made a Red Land for myself out of memories so that I could be with my mother again.” She frowned. “You were there and you were trying to help me but it went wrong, and when my mother died, I blamed you.” Her eyes sought mine and she heaved a sigh that seemed to come from the depths of her soul.

  “For a long time I blamed myself, but I do not think either of us was to blame,” I said gently.

  “Maruman told me you had risked yourself to come into the dream and help me remember so that I could be free,” Dragon said. “Then he said I must wake, for now it was you who needed me. He said I must learn to be brave, for I was a queen.”

  “He was right and you are brave,” I said.

  She looked at me. “I went with Kella to Sutrium because I was afraid of you. I … I ran away from the Healing Center because I thought you might come for me. My head hurt terribly all the time and I could hardly think. I went back to the ruins but it was all changed. I crept back to the Land again. I thought I would go to the highlands and try to find Kella. That is when the … the man caught me.”

  “Do not think of him anymore,” I said, for her face was very pale.

  “I try not to, but sometimes when I sleep, I see him looking at me with his terrible mad eyes and I hear him telling me what he will do to hurt me.”

  I was silent a moment, remembering when I had been taken prisoner by the rebel Malik. There were times when I still had nightmares about his threat to drive a knife into my eye. At length I said, “You told me that Atthis and Maruman said I needed you. Did they tell you why?”

  “Atthis said that you sought to prevent another Great White from happening and that this was the purpose of your life,” she said, beginning to look agitated, and all at once she looked more like a child than a young woman. “She told me you needed something that I had to remember about the Red Land but I don’t know what it can be! Do you know what it is?”

  I bit back all the questions I wanted to ask and said soothingly, “We will have time to find out as we travel. For now, rest and know that I am truly glad that you are with me.”

  She gave me a tremulous smile. “I am glad to be with you, too, Elspeth.”

  Soon after, she slept, leaving me to ponder the fact that I did not know what I needed from Dragon any more than she did. Doubtless Atthis would have told me, had she lived, which made me wonder if Maruman’s foray into seliga had something to do with discovering it.

  When the sun hung low in the sky, Ahmedri and Swallow returned with some scanty lichen they had scraped off rocks for the horses, but they had found nothing that humans, canines, or felines would find edible.

  Gavyn did not return until right on dusk with Rasial and the horses, but he had brought another hempen bag of firenuts and two large misshapen purple tubers. Ahmedri pounced on the tubers, saying they grew in Sador and were edible and very nourishing, and where there were two, there would be more. He added that since they would not keep without being pickled or salted, we might as well eat them in a soup, which he promptly set about preparing.

  Seeing how the discovery of the tubers had enlivened the tribesman, I guessed that the find had transformed the desert for him from hostile unknown terrain to merely unfamiliar territory.

  The soup was delicious and very welcome, since none of us but Dragon had eaten since the night before. The fire, too, was a boon, because the night was cold, and it grew very dark after the sun set. Yet when I went to relieve myself at one point, I saw how vividly the fire stood out against all that darkness and I quailed at the thought of the rhenlings seeing it. Later, when I went to the lake to get some water in a bowl, I heard something in the deeper shadows beyond the lake, which was now full of glimmering darkness and stars. My heart beating uneasily, I formed a probe, but there was too much taint around for it to locate anything. I stood still for a long time, straining my ears and eyes, my skin prickling with the feeling that something was watching me.

  When Dameon laid a hand on my arm, I started violently.

  “I am sorry. I felt your fear,” he said. “What is it?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “At least, I feel like there is something out there in the darkness, watching us. It is probably just my imagination.”

  “Not necessarily,” the empath said. “This seems to be the sole source of clean water about and doubtless many small creatures come here to drink, but instead here we are with our noise and our fire.”

  I heaved a sigh and shook my head at my foolishness. “You are probably right. It is some small thirsty thing longing for us to be on our way.”

  We walked back to the fire together and I announced to the others that we would not leave until the moon rose, whether or not the wolves had come. We sat staring into the dying fire and listening to the soft pop and hiss of the firenuts.

  “They will come,” Analivia said suddenly, and rising decisively she moved a few steps away and began to sand-scrub the bowls. She sounded more like her old self and I had no doubt this was the result of her being able to help Dragon. I had noticed true healers were always strengthened by the exercise of their calling.

  “You sound very sure,” Swallow said, moving to help her, the teasing note to his voice suggesting he, too, had noticed the easing of her manner.

  But she gave him a serious look that wiped the smile from his mouth, saying, “The bird would not have sent Elspeth here to die with her quest undone.”

  It was true, I thought, and as if it had been awaiting the thought, the moon rose, waning now but very bright. Under it, the seemingly endless white plain glowed to life and seemed to shimmer. We all gazed at it in silence for a time; then I stood up, less swiftly than Analivia, but no less decisively. The others rose, too, and began to make their final preparations. Dragon was asleep in the travois already, as we had deemed it better for her to travel that way to begin with, but the rest of us were to ride. The horses had insisted and I had concurred, seeing that the first part of the way was largely flat.

  Finally we drank our fill one last time at the lake, which Ahmedri told me he had decided to call Tear of the Moon. He seemed to be seeking my approval and when I told him I liked the name, he smiled and gave a slight bow. I realized as we mounted up and set off east that I had never seen him smile before. It made him look more like his brother, and I wondered whether it would please him to be told so.

  Ahmedri insisted that we split into four groups and travel parallel as we moved east to increase our line of vision once we reached the dunes, because that would heighten our chance of seeing water or vegetation, if it were there. He placed one dog at either end, since their superior sense of smell and vision would allow them to range farther in either direction without losing touch with us, and they could see and scent far beyond their positions to the north and south.

  I had acceded to all of his recommendations at once and bade him divide and dispose us as he would, for why travel with a desert dweller in the desert and ignore his knowledge and skills? Ahmedri accepted leadership smoothly, ordering Darga and Swallow to form the gr
oup that would walk farthest to the north of our line, while Analivia was to walk farthest to the south, with Gavyn and Rasial. In between, Dameon, Faraf, Gahltha, and I were to form one group while Ahmedri, Sendari, Dragon, and Falada would form the other.

  The two days of rest had strengthened my arm, and though it ached from time to time and my chest still hurt when I coughed or exerted myself, the bones had begun to knit. Certainly I felt well enough to walk when the others did.

  Crossing the sandy plain was easy, but once we reached the dunes, dismounted, and separated into our appointed groups, our pace slowed dramatically. The hardest thing was walking over the shifting sands. Ahmedri moved easily, as did Falada, for both had spent their lives in the desert lands, and Dameon and Faraf had spent time enough there, though not together, to have learned how to negotiate the sands. The rest of us floundered.

  I tried hard to emulate Dameon’s light, gliding walk, but my feet seemed to sink deep into the sand at every step. I was soon dripping with sweat and cursing under my breath, knowing that the sweating and the exertion would force me to drink more than we could spare. Our lack of progress made me anxious that the rhenling horde would discover us. Ahmedri had prepared the few double-headed torches that remained, just in case, but we all knew they were unlikely to save us if Rasial could not rouse her soul mate’s interest in the fliers if they appeared. At least the brightness of the moon would keep the creatures at bay until dawn, but I wanted us to be as far away from the graag as possible when the sun set again and darkness fell.

  Once the Blacklands and the Tear of the Moon were lost to sight, all we could see in any direction were pallid dunes that shone bone white where the moonlight touched them and cast blue-black shadows that seemed to have more substance than the dunes themselves. There was not a breath of wind all that long night we walked, keeping mostly to the undulant ridgelines so that we did not have to labor up and down the steep, soft flanks of the dunes. I was forever slithering sideways and having to scramble ignominiously back up to the ridge, clutching at my chest and resisting the urge to accept Gahltha’s offer to carry me.

  It irritated me that I seemed to be the clumsiest of our party, for by the time the moon had set, both Analivia and Swallow had mastered walking on sand and Gavyn seemed from the first to have little difficulty. No doubt growing up in the Westland where there were patches of desert, he had learned to walk over shifting sands.

  My only consolation, and it was a sour one, was that the Land horses and dogs liked toiling through the sand no better than I did, though even they seemed a good deal less awkward.

  By the time we came together at dawn, as we had agreed to do, I was exhausted. None of us had seen or scented anything but sand and one another. We decided to rest for an hour and then continue until the hottest part of the day, when we would take refuge and eat and sleep for several hours under blanket tents Ahmedri promised to help us erect, before going on into the night.

  Once we had eaten and drunk a little, I stretched out on the soft sand, yearning more than anything for a breath of wind. Ahmedri had volunteered to sit watch, saying he was not in the least weary, and Dameon had said he would sit up with the tribesman. I was glad to lie down with a cloth over my face to shade it, for I was weary from the healing process and my unwieldiness in the sand. For a time I drowsed on the edge of sleep, listening to Dameon and the tribesman talking quietly of Sador and of Kasanda; then I drifted into a light and dreamless slumber. My last thought was a brief, fervent prayer that the wolves would find us ere the next night. Then Dameon was shaking me gently saying it was time to go on.

  I felt thick-headed and groggy as I pulled the cloth from my face. There was no sign of the wolves, so we split again into our groups and continued east. I was pleased to find that I seemed to have got the knack of walking on sand, and when a slight breeze began to blow toward us, my spirits lifted.

  We had been walking about an hour when I made my first check, farseeking to find out if Darga had scented anything ahead other than sand. My heart leaped when he responded at once by saying that he had scented wolf. Then Rasial beastspoke me from the south to say that she could smell wolf.

  “Wolf and blood,” she added in her hard, strong mindvoice.

  It was more than an hour later and verging on sunset when Ahmedri spotted several forms lying at the base of a dune, half buried in the sand. All were wolves and all were dead, save for the old she-wolf, Descantra, who was unconscious and badly injured. We had come together as soon as I had relayed the news to the others.

  “It was not the rhenlings,” Ahmedri said as he examined her wounds. “She was mauled by something much bigger. See the claw marks? Judging from the blood around her muzzle, it looks like she fought back. It is not hers.”

  “But why didn’t whatever attacked her eat her and the others?” Swallow asked.

  Ahmedri was examining the ground about the wolves, and now he looked over to me and said, “Something besides the wolves died here, but there is not enough of it left to tell what it was. There are no tracks other than those of the wolves, so I think whatever it was flew.”

  “If the other wolves killed and devoured whatever it was that attacked them, why would they then leave the old she-wolf alive?” I asked. “If she was too badly hurt to walk, Rheagor would have killed her as he did the wolves that were hurt in the graag.”

  Swallow said, “Maybe there was more than one of whatever attacked them, and the pack killed one but were driven off by the rest. They might have thought the old she-wolf was dead.”

  Somehow I doubted the pack leader would leave that to chance, but I only said, “We will know more when she wakes and can tell us what has been happening. In the meantime let us shift Dragon and Maruman over and put her on the travois.”

  “No,” Analivia said. “She is badly hurt and if we move her now, she will die. It is almost dark. Let us stop here and light a fire so that I can treat her.”

  “All right,” I said. “We will make this our main stop for the night. It will give the other wolves a chance to find us if they are scattered.”

  “What if there are more of the beasts that killed the wolves?” Swallow asked.

  “Then we will probably be safer to stop and light a fire,” I said firmly. But when I looked out into the gathering darkness, I found myself remembering the guttural growl we had heard before entering the pipe and the enormous dark thing that I had glimpsed moving over the wall of the canyon and the eerie feeling of being watched when I was at the lake.

  The tribesman showed Swallow and me how to tie ropes to the corners of a blanket and how to use the packs to anchor the other end before angling it so that it would serve as protection against the wind, which had strengthened just enough to lift the sand. It had grown colder, too, and the fire he lit was as welcome for its warmth as for its light. The tribesman boiled a little pot of water so that he and Analivia could tend the she-wolf, and he suggested the rest of us drink sparingly but eat nothing since eating would require us to drink more.

  When he and Analivia had done all they could for the wolf, they said nothing, but I saw by their grim expressions that neither of them had much hope that Descantra would live.

  “She is too badly injured,” the tribesman said in a low voice when I asked him how she fared. “I doubt she will wake ere the end, poor beast.”

  Darga offered to sit with the she-wolf so that he might speak with her if she woke, but I asked Rasial if she and Gavyn would watch over her. Darius had wanted these two close by when he had been trying to heal the twins, and it was my hope that, somehow, they would find a way to help the wolf’s spirit, which would render her flesh more willing to heal. I was determined that she would wake and tell us what had happened to her. I could not believe that we had found her only to see her die.

  The possibility that we would be attacked in these dark hours, either by a horde of rhenlings or by whatever had slain the wolves, was in all of our minds, and no one argued when Swallow suggested we k
eep our swords and knives to hand.

  Analivia’s eyes lit up when I brought out the bow and the quiver of arrows gifted me by the Futuretell guildmistress, thinking they might serve us better if whatever had attacked the wolves had wings. I asked her bluntly if she had any skill with the weapon and she answered with some pride that her mother had been a bowyer before she bonded with Radost and had taught her to make and use the bow. She had more skill at it than anything else, she added.

  Remembering her deadly accuracy with a knife, I handed her the bow and told her it was hers. “My skill is indifferent at best,” I said when she began to protest, but she answered that even a fool could see it was an exquisite and costly thing.

  “Perhaps our lives are more exquisite than a bow,” Swallow said gently, and he closed her hands around it and patted them.

  She looked a little stunned, but she tore her eyes from him and thanked me gruffly, saying she would find a gift of equal value for me. Despite everything, the absurdity of her vow, given where we were and where we were going, lightened my unease.

  I stretched out and dozed without ever falling deeply asleep, for I kept imagining I could hear something moving around in the darkness beyond the reach of the firelight. Finally, I gave up and rose to check on Dragon, who had slept most of the day, though she had woken to drink whenever we stopped. Maruman now lay curled against her chest, and seeing him thus, my heart ached, for despite the fact that he seemed to need no food or water when he went seliga, he was visibly thinner.

  I reached out to stroke him and willed him to return from whatever strange realm he had entered, but he did not stir.

  I shifted my gaze to Dragon, thinking that, despite the fading bruises and cuts and her thinness, she definitely looked older than she had in the mountains. It was as if putting the pieces of herself together had allowed her to grow to her proper age. Before, she had always seemed a child to me, though she had come to Obernewtyn at little less than the age I had been when I arrived in the mountains.