“I should think, child,” he said, regarding the pickaxe and pushing just one of those bushy eyebrows up, “that running about with a thing like that, breaking down doors no less, will get your ears boxed by Mistress Kettle straightaway.”
Pernie could only stare at him, pickaxe still on high and her little mouth open wide.
Just then Altin came up from behind her, catching her in that moment of perplexity and snatching the pickaxe out of her slick, bloody hand.
“Sweet Mercy, but I thought she was going to strike us all down with this thing,” Altin declared. Then he paused, blinking several times at what might be an apparition, before he, like Pernie, began to realize who it was standing there. He staggered back a step, nearly dropping the pickaxe to the floor. “Tidalwrath’s teeth. It can’t be!”
“Well, it can, boy, and no thanks to the lot of you leaving me out there in that infernal windstorm. It blew me back to spirits straightaway, but you never came back. I thought the worst had happened after you were gone so long. And when you finally did send me back to my windowsill, you didn’t come let me out, so again I was sure you’d met some horrible fate. A long time to worry.”
Altin’s mouth, like Pernie’s, fell open, the two of them a pair of seeming dullards.
Tytamon saw it, watching Altin closely for several long moments. He harrumphed, then twitched his thin lips around. “You did know what you were doing when you left me up there, didn’t you?” Tytamon asked. “Bringing me up there into all that wind? That was the point, to speed it up, yes?”
“I …,” Altin began, but had nothing else to add.
“Well, I’ll be. An accident, then.” He turned and resumed what he’d presumably been doing before Pernie came barging in, which was getting to the window to check the decanter with the spinning palm-frond stopper. “Well, that would explain why you let me sit so long.” He turned back. “How long?” he asked. “How long was I gone?”
“Nearly a year you were up there,” Altin managed to stammer at last. “But you’ve been dead—or, well, presumed so—for a year and a half. A little more. But I did not know you were—that we had … put you up there on Red Fire.”
“Hmm. I think the breeze coming off the mountain would have had me back by now anyway.”
“But how?”
“A bit of elven gratitude, my boy. Long ago. Right after Duador. The High Seat called me ‘the one human worth saving if such a disaster should ever befall the world again.’ I admit it was vanity that allowed me to agree. And fear, of course. We all fear death from time to time.”
Pernie watched the old man watching Altin, not daring to turn around. She understood what had happened, though. She realized she actually understood it better than Master Altin did. He’d never been to the forbidden cove before. It all made perfect sense now.
And while confusion distracted him, she could slip away.
Two words and she was gone, as far down the stairwell as she could get, and, with four more casts, she was at the bottom again.
She recast her illusion and snuck out of the castle proper, heading straight for the armory. There were other weapons there.
The door was locked. It never had been before.
Easy enough, however. She’d been in there a thousand times. She knew it was dangerous to teleport without looking—her throbbing hand was proof of it—but she had to take a chance.
She appeared just inside the door, in one piece, unmerged with anything else.
As if to remind her just how much of a chance she’d taken, her hand throbbed. She looked down at it. It hurt terribly, but she didn’t care. But she did see that it was still bleeding a steady stream. There was already a pool nearly the size of a silver piece on the floor beside her foot.
By the time she realized that Master Altin and Tytamon would see the blood trail leading here to the armory, that they would see the blood dripping right out of her onto the ground, ruining her illusion, Master Altin was standing there. “Pernie, stop at once. I demand it. You are not going to harm Orli, do you understand? I won’t allow it. I don’t know what’s got into you, but I won’t stand another moment of this. There are places where bad wizards and magical lunatics go, and there are no ways out of them, elf tricks or not. Do you hear me?”
Pernie muttered the teleport and was back in the courtyard again. Where Master Tytamon grabbed her by the scruff. His sticklike fingers, gnarled and ancient as they were, were strong and powerful, and he lifted her right up off her feet. She made to speak the teleport again, but he clapped his other hand over her mouth, pressing his thumb and middle finger into her cheeks, pushing the soft flesh between her teeth.
“Enough!” he shouted, and there was something terrible and compelling in the sound of it, something thunderous that reached right inside of her. She could not explain it, but she knew she couldn’t disagree. It was as if he’d cast a spell on her. She was stunned into compliance by the raw force of that command.
Altin appeared beside him even as the command was rebounding off the high cliffs of Mount Pernolde, in whose shadow Calico Castle dwelled.
“She’s lost her mind,” Altin said. “She needs to be taken to Goffa House in Hast.”
Tytamon studied her then, looking into her face like she might have done were she looking into the face of some bug she’d found, some inexplicable little creature with too many eyes or curious pinching mandibles, some
thing
.
She could see it then, see it in Tytamon’s eyes, sure. And worse, far worse, she could see it in Master Altin’s too. It was a look very far from love. Nothing like the way he looked at Orli Pewter.
Pernie realized in that moment that she had made a terrible mistake. He was looking at her like she had looked at Knot. Like the lady elf that Djoveeve fell in love with must have looked at her.
Thinking of Djoveeve made her realize another mistake: she’d gotten caught. Djoveeve said the Sava’an’Lansom must never be caught. Seawind had said it many times too. It was practically the definition of the term.
And here she was, caught. Tytamon looking at her like a bug. Altin looking at her like a bug. Some stupid creature to be stepped on or smashed with an old book.
He’d never love her now.
“Pernie,” Tytamon said. “If I put you down, are you going to tell us what is driving you to such things? No magic, now. Just the truth.”
She wanted to cast another teleport. She was sure she could get outside the castle wall. Run off into the woods and hide. She’d get another chance at Orli Pewter some other day. She really hated her now. She’d ruined everything. Everything.
But she couldn’t cast the spell. She tried to. She started the words, but she couldn’t speak them. They wouldn’t come out.
“I’ve trumped your magic, girl,” said Master Tytamon, looking very grizzled and severe. “You won’t cast that spell for ten minutes at least. Perhaps even a week, for all I know, as I’ve never cast it on a child. And if you try too hard, too soon, you’ll get it halfway out and hurt yourself. So be a smart girl and don’t try for at least five days.”
Pernie growled at him, her brows lowering slowly, deliberately, like that first considered placement of the executioner’s axe before the killing swing. She aimed her hatred at him for a time.
“By the gods, look at that,” Tytamon said. “Have you ever seen such a thing?”
“I’m not sure what the elves have done to her,” Altin said, “but they’ve certainly begun sharpening her into a nasty little knife. By the gods, it’s rather unsettling.”
She heard him talking about her as if she wasn’t even there, and the tears burned in her eyes. She tried to stop them. She didn’t want Master Altin to see her cry. He might not ever love her now, but she didn’t want him to think she was weak.
Tytamon saw the first of those tears as they began to run, and he set her gently back on the ground. “Go get Kettle,” he said to Altin, then he knelt down next to her and looked her in the eyes. “This is the girl without the elves inside.”
Pernie watched Master Altin go; he went so quickly and obediently it made the anger burn even worse. She didn’t want his pity, and she didn’t want to see Kettle looking at her like they had. Like an insect.
“Come now, Pernie. It’s okay.” He made to pull her into a hug, thinking to console her, but she pulled away. She looked down at her feet instead. She fidgeted with her hands, fumbled with the cords of the sling she’d tied around her waist. She reached for her hair, curled a strand around her finger, fussing with it. “Well, at least talk to me, child,” he said. “What is it?” She pulled the mint leaf from behind her ear as he repeated the question a second time, even more gently than the last.
She looked past him, saw Kettle coming out into the courtyard. She could already hear the mutters and admonitions of the woman’s worry shaping up.
She looked back to Tytamon and shook her head, blinking dry her eyes as the last tear fell to the flagstones, splashing unseen into the pool of blood she was standing in. “What is it?” he asked yet again. And then she was gone, the tearing of a leaf quite beyond the scope of even the great Tytamon’s compulsion spell.
Chapter 53
P
ernie appeared in the cave that had been her home for over a year, the one that was her only home now. There was no one around, the room empty but for the table-topped boulder, the coral seats around it, and her spear, which someone had brought back and leaned against the wall. She snatched it up and went out, calling for Knot telepathically. He arrived in a matter of minutes, flowing like a short, silvery river over rocks and roots as he swept in on his silent feet.
She jumped on him and stooped long enough to snatch the length of rope, winding it around her wrist reflexively. She set him off at full speed, the two of them rushing through the jungle like a demon breeze. They arrived atop the cliff that overlooked the manatees, and Knot hadn’t even come to a complete stop when she leapt over the edge, using his momentum to sail out over the rocks. She was already falling before she looked to see if the sargosaganti were there. They were.
She didn’t know whether it had been ten minutes since Tytamon had stolen her ability to cast the spell, and she didn’t care. She spoke the words anyway.
She landed barely fifteen steps from the head of the great bull that dominated the group, and she took three sprinting steps toward him before casting her teleport a second time. She hadn’t bothered looking into the mana to see if the great beast’s horn was about to be cast at her.
It was. The horn flew through the empty space where she had been as she reappeared closer to her prey. She vanished a second time just before the monster’s second horn was whistling through the space, the snap of air when she vanished the only thing that the horn encountered as it flew.
The sargosagantis’ natural defenses had it teleporting out to sea just as Pernie reappeared, falling toward the water, ten feet above the surface, ten spans beyond the edge of the surf. Her spear was already on its way. Not headed for where the creature was, but for where she knew it would be.
Sure enough, the sargosagantis reappeared right where her spear was. It appeared around her spear, in the same place, like her hand and Altin’s robe had. And it was not in the same place she’d stabbed into the creature’s back. Not this time. Her spear was in the same place as its brain. Aimed by instinct.
The momentum the sargosagantis had taken with it when it teleported was still with it when it reappeared, and it carried it forward anyway, despite the fact that it was in that instant dead. Its great bulk sliced through the water for another hundred spans, slowing like some fleshy sailing ship that’s lost its wind.
Pernie landed upon it with her teleport, near the bubbling scar she’d made in its thick, blubbery hide the day she’d tried to ride it not so long ago. She looked down at it with contempt. That time had been failure, but not this time. She looked back toward the beach, at the surf that was drifting farther and farther away as the sargosagantis drifted away, the momentum of its last teleport already nearly arrested by the incoming waves. She let go a breath that felt as if she’d been holding it for an entire day.
She’d finally ridden the king of the sargosaganti, and this time he did not get away.
When she returned to the cave, it was well after dark, but the long shadows and golden flickers coming from the mouth of the cave proved that she would not be alone inside. Upon entering, she saw that Djoveeve sat with her feet up on the central boulder, and Seawind sat across from her taking a turn at some sort of elven game. Both looked up at her as she came in.
“You’ve come back,” observed Djoveeve needlessly. “And you killed the sargosagantis king.”
“He’s not a king. He’s just a big, stupid animal like all the rest.”
“You were told the elves consider them sacred.”
“The elves are stupid too.”
Seawind smiled. “Then you have passed your test.”
“I already passed my test. That’s why you sent me home.”
“Sending you home was the test.”
Pernie frowned at that, looking from the elf to Djoveeve, who had raised one eyebrow and the better part of one cheek. The old woman nodded that it was true. Pernie didn’t care anymore.
“I want to learn how to kill Orli Pewter,” she said.