He shut his eyes and stuffed a pair of fingers in his mouth as he tried to call up the image of her that he had so long clung to, the memory of her as he had first seen her astride a great horse on the road through the woods to Shandisti. But the image would not come. He knew it was lost forever. Once, he had thought her so beautiful, but he had been young then. No, not young, not really. Just naive.
Well, he had finished his quest. He had found the Witch. He had even learned a few of her secrets. Now he would forget her, if he could, turn his back on this whole sorry business. Maybe he could talk Rascal into returning to Osirit for a while. He wanted nothing more than to be away from here, far away. Ispor or Akkadi, this land was no longer his home.
Slowly, he stepped from the shadow. The Witch didn't stir. She lay there, like a bee at the center of a red, red rose. Or a wasp. Innowen walked to the foot of her bed and stared at her.
I loved you,
he whispered, but the words no longer had any meaning for him. What he had loved had never existed, except in his mind.
A sudden flicker of light made him whirl toward the door, afraid he had been discovered. But it was only the draft teasing a lamp flame, nothing more.
It was then, as his eyes moved slowly around the room, that he noticed and remembered the darkened antechamber just beyond the bed. An overwhelming urge to know what waited there possessed him. It was wrong to yield to it, he knew. He should leave now, head for the balcony, out through the courtyard and escape this city and this woman forever. Yet even as he thought those thoughts, he found himself picking up one of the lamps and stealing toward the darkness.
Under the lintel, he paused and lifted his light higher. His sudden intake of breath cracked the silence before he clapped his free hand to his mouth. It was only armor, standing on a rack, in the far corner. Her armor, he realized. It shimmered in the lampglow, blackened, light-weight metal, inlaid with wild traceries of gold and silver, from Mikonos, he was sure, by the workmanship.
He moved closer to examine and admire it. He touched the breastplate delicately. It was small, made to conform to her body. There were her greaves, also, and arm bracers, and a helm beautiful beyond any he had seen, with hinged cheek-guards shaped like birds' wings to mask her eyes and face, and a crest of scarlet plumage. Around it all was thrown a white cloak, and over that hung a leather baldric, which supported a white-lacquered scabbard and a sword with a gleaming ruby pommel stone.
He touched the pommel stone with the tip of one finger, tentatively, as if it might snap at him. The Witch had worn such a ruby around her throat once, on a chain.
His gaze turned upward then, and he held the light still higher. Around the room, about head height, a narrow shelf ran. A chill shivered through him.
There were his dolls, arranged carefully and neatly, the dolls he had collected in his five years of travels, the dolls he had carried with him in a bag across a dozen lands and brought to Parendur, only to forget and leave them behind when the army fled to Whisperstone.
Long ago it seemed, he had thought there was magic in such dolls, as people in many lands believed. In Ispor, farmers stuffed dolls with grain and planted them in their gardens, leaving only the heads to show, believing this made the crops grow better. In Osirit, dolls stuffed with fruit seeds were sometimes hung from the branches of fruit trees in the belief this made the orchards bloom and the fruit taste sweeter. In distant Shaktar, men carved dolls from oak and offered them to the spirits of their vast forests. In faraway Samyrabis, the dusky-skinned?' nobility entombed their dead with hundreds of tiny, intricately carved dolls, believing these would come alive in the underworld and serve the noble's spirit.
This fascination with dolls and magic, he had known from the first, had been inspired by the Witch's idol, that strange god-figure with its pelt of copper spikes. He had sought that idol as fervently as he had sought the Witch herself.
Now he had found it, too.
It stood now on a recently erected wooden pedestal, similar to those in the courtyard, against the antechamber's west wall. He let out a slow breath as he regarded it. Somehow, he had known from the moment he entered this room it would be here, waiting for him.
It bristled with copper nails, some new and gleaming, others green and black with age. The scorches of countless prayer-fires marred and cracked the wooden skin between those nails. A piece of the shoulder seemed burned away entirely. Yet it still possessed a horrible, primitive beauty.
Why,
Innowen wondered silently, unable to voice the question he had so long waited to ask.
Why me?
The tricky lamplight flashed on the copper heads of the nails in its eyes.
Innowen crept closer. No voice answered him, as he had half-expected. The idol was just an idol, no more than a lump of charred wood. He bent over it, peered at it. Then, taking a step back, he looked down at his own legs. Slowly, he slipped a hand up his left thigh.
How?
he wondered, regarding the idol again.
Why?
But the idol gave no sign, no answer, and Innowen felt a rage swell up inside him that he had never suspected. He grabbed the idol by the nails that protruded from the top of its head and jerked backward, intending to hurl it to the floor. It proved heavier than he would have guessed, though. It rocked on its base and settled forward again. Innowen grabbed it a second time. This time he'd use all his strength, and the abomination would tumble.
Instead, he snatched his hand away with a small cry. A sharp pain blossomed in his palm. With a curse, he closed his fist around the wound, but that only intensified the pain. A fine trickle of blood ran out the bottom of his fist. Opening his hand, he brought his light close.
Deep under the skin was a black splinter. But he hadn't even touched the wood, had he? Only the nails! He pressed the wound to his mouth, wincing, and licked at the crimson that showed so clearly in the lines of his palm as he backed away from the idol.
The hurt had brought him to his senses. He retreated to the far end of the antechamber, taking his small light with him until the cursed thing on the pedestal was once more swallowed by the gloom. He felt it there, barely visible, as if it were somehow watching him. He couldn't be sure anymore of what was real and what was just his imagination. He only knew that he had to get out of this damned place.
He cast a final glance at his dolls on the shelf around the antechamber, and a wave of sadness washed over him. He couldn't take all of them, but a few were special to him. Suddenly, he couldn't bear to leave those few in the Witch's possession.
How to carry them, though?
He saw the Witch's armor, and rubbed his chin thoughtfully. Then, snatching off the white cloak, he spread it on the floor. Next, holding his light high, he searched the shelf for the four dolls he meant to take. He reached for the first one, then winced again as he bent his hand around the splinter in his palm. He had to get that out. But it would take a better light than this lamp, and he'd need a sharp knife. If he wasn't careful now, he'd only drive it deeper.
He took down the four dolls and laid them in the center of the cloak. It was a big cloak, he noted, with ample folds, and there was plenty of room left when he gathered up the corners. For a moment, he thought of taking the rest of the dolls.
A better idea occurred to him.
Suddenly, he wanted the Witch to know that he'd been here. He could think of no better way of telling her than by stealing her armor. He set the lamp up on the shelf in the space where one of his dolls had been. Then he collected the various pieces, even her sword, and placed them on the white cloak.
The lamp, he determined, could stay where it was on the shelf. With his good hand, he slung his burden over his shoulder and slunk back into the Witch's bedchamber.
Just as he passed the foot of her grisly bed, with his thoughts on the fresh air and the warm breeze of the balcony, she sat up and peered at him.
"Hello, spirit of dreams," she whispered thickly. The light from her candles and lamps sheened in her glazed eyes.
Innowen glanced from the Witch to the basket of
snowfever
petals. He looked at her again and moved his head slowly from side to side. Her eyes didn't follow. They seemed focused on his chest. He lifted one arm and moved it across the spot where her gaze seemed fixed. She didn't react.
She had called him a spirit—spirit of dreams. Well then, he would take his cue from that and gamble on the strength of the drug in her body. He answered softly, playing the same game with her he had played with the guard.
"The land beyond sleep is sweetest of all—
A thing is never what it seems,
And men are merest dreams,
Pale memories wrapped within a pall."
The corners of her lips lifted in a tiny, delicate smile, a thing that seemed so out of place on her blood-smeared face. To Innowen's surprise, she answered him in verse, whispering, as her head rolled back a little, and her gaze locked with his.
"Dreams are but an alphabet for the language of our lives.
Those who strive and learn to read
Find endless worlds of want and need
That nightly shift and change and thrive."
Her eyes made a languorous blink, and the pink tip of her tongue slipped out to moisten the corners of her mouth. "I want, and I need," she told him in a husky murmur. "I know you."
A chill shivered up Innowen's spine. He was suddenly very aware of the bundle he carried. He forced himself to keep calm, to play the game. "Do you know me, Lady?" he answered quietly. "I am a shadow."
"No," she told him. "You are a dream, my Innocent, a dream from long ago." Her smile faltered and faded, and a look of sadness took its place.
"And I know you, Minowee." It was the first time he had dared to say her name, even in his mind, since Vashni had revealed it. She had been the Witch to him—the Witch of Shanalane. He repeated her name again, silently in his head, and pursed his lips. She would always be the Witch.
"I made you to walk," she said. Her head rolled down until her chin rested on her chest.
"You made me a vampire," he answered without bitterness. "I walk the night and sleep by day."
She looked up at that, but still the glaze filled her eyes. She was deep in the
feverdream.
"Is it true?" she said with a kind of muffled wonderment. She shrugged. "My god was always a perverse god. Look what he has made of me!" Her head gimbaled back to rest between her shoulders. A tinkling little laugh escaped her stretched throat. "Queen of the land," she continued, "mistress of a country where women may not rule." Her head came up, and her gaze locked with his again.
"I should have ruled from the beginning," she snapped suddenly. "I was Koryan's first-born. In many lands, the throne would have passed to me. But because I was a girl-child, my father ordered me exposed to the elements, left on a road to die from the night's cold or a wolf's teeth."
Innowen swallowed. How similar her story was to his own, he thought. Had it not been for the blood that smeared her face, he might have found a measure of sympathy. Instead, he watched her carefully for any sign that the
snowfever
had lost its grip on her. When he spoke, he kept his voice low and soothing. "You didn't die, Minowee."
"No, I didn't," she answered languidly. "My mother employed an old nurse to take me to Mikonos before Koryan's order could be carried out, and there in that island kingdom I was raised and taught things that would make your heart shrivel in your chest." Her smile returned. "1 see your heart, you know." She hesitated, peering at him with strange eyes that glittered briefly like the stars, as he remembered them. "I had almost forgotten you."
Despite himself, he softened somewhat toward her, and he whispered.
"A thousand times I heard you singing in the wind.
Every night when the sun went down and the breezes came,
I listened, and you called my name
While the moon laughed and the owls grinned."
He licked his lips and swallowed again. More than just his legs, she had given him a dream and a purpose. Now it all lay shattered.
Her smile widened before her chin settled to her chest again. "You make nice verse for a spirit," she said in a soft whisper. "Did you know that Koryan killed my mother a few years later?" She raised a blood-covered hand and moved it through the air as if there were something invisible there, which only she could see and touch. "I never knew her face; I was only a newborn, after all." Her expression changed suddenly, turning hard, cruel. "But I can see it sometimes, the deed, the murder, like the struggle of two shadows in a room full of darkness, and I hear her gasps. I feel her die."
Innowen watched as her hands explored the outline of some memory, and as her fingers closed around something and tensed and began to choke. Her face contorted, taking on the expressions of both victim and murderer, flickering between rage and terror.
It was appalling to witness, yet Innowen could not turn away. "Did you kill Koryan for revenge?" he dared to ask in the barest whisper.