The Rose of Sarifal (25 page)

He had flint and steel and he made a fire. After half an hour Eleuthra returned, the king’s thighbone in her hand. She threw down a brace of fat red squirrels, which the Savage cut apart with his new sword. Its blade, astonishingly sharp, was slightly curved, forged in many layers of tempered, folded steel. A line of runes was etched into the edge, a geometric pattern whose meaning was forever lost.

Similar runes decorated the king’s thighbone. The druid threw it carelessly into the rocks. She was dressed in her wolf skin and at that moment, in the dawn light, the Savage found her intolerably beautiful—dark hair,
high cheekbones, dark eyebrows, dark blue eyes. He imagined his awareness of her beauty had increased since he’d first seen her, doubled hour by hour. And he wondered if this feeling was connected to a change in the way she’d treated him since they’d left the crypt, with her ever-increasing anger.

She stood above him, a faraway look in her eyes. “I was on the mountaintop.” She gestured vaguely. “I was in the thunderclouds. I looked behind us at Malar’s temple where the stones are wet with blood. They divided the priestess’s body between the altar stones and burned the offerings. The Beastlord has come out to smell the morning air. He is sniffing at our trail.”

She raised both hands to her hair and stretched her elbows back, a gesture he found painful, because it displayed her body’s shape. “He hates you because of the creature you killed. And he hates you because of what you stole—because of your greed. Only gold has value to you. Only things, because you live so long. How could you have any feelings for another mortal creature? I hate you too,” she said, unnecessarily.

The pain in his forearm, where the dragon had bitten him, had abated. But he was afraid he had absorbed some kind of poison, something that made him lightheaded, weak. He had no strength to muster any kind of illusion, to mask the red slits in the centers of his eyes, to alter his complexion or else blunt his teeth. He had no strength to argue with her. He bent over the squirrel meat, cutting it into chunks.

“I was in the clouds,” she said again. “I saw a storm over Caer Moray, and then it moved off to the south and east. I felt the earth turn over and the battlements fall. Across the straits I saw a storm over Gwynneth Island and the fey. Nature itself rises up, and the Earthmother. In my lifetime I’ll see Karador sink into the lake and all the tunnels drowned. All of you will drown like maggots. Your bodies will rise to the surface of the water.”

He stared at her, chewing the raw meat. There was no reason to cook it, no reason to pretend. He rubbed his cold hands together and then, as if he wanted to prove her right, he brought out the king’s treasure piece by piece from his pockets, fingering the gold as if to warm himself. Already he had wound one of the rings into his yellow hair, and slipped some of the others onto his fingers and thumbs. The inner and outer surfaces were thick with meaningless runes. The metal was soft enough to take a fingerprint if you squeezed hard.

The circlet from the king’s brow he slipped over his ears and down onto his shoulders. The druid was right: The gold was a source of comfort, though maybe not in the way she thought. It felt warm to him, warmer than the sunshine that now broke through the clouds. And the jewels—he held the demon-eye ruby in his hand and felt the thrill of it against his palm, an electric charge.

“I thought you were different,” she goaded him. She put her hands on her hips and drew the wolf skin up above her knees. “The goddess help me, I thought so.”

All boys are used to this: The more she hated him, the more he wanted her. But it had been a long time
since he’d felt so young. He closed his eyes, ashamed of his response to her, and brought the jewel up to his lips.

“Malar will hunt you down,” she said. “The goddess help me, he will hunt the both of us.”

That same morning in Caer Moray, Lukas and Gaspar-shen stood in the ruins of the courtyard. The curtain wall had collapsed into the ditch along the landward side. The Northlander women were gone from the banquet hall, and many of the lycanthropes, male and female, had slunk away into the woods. The ones that were left wandered over the fields, examining the wreckage cast up by the big wave and marking it—stumps, timber, and corpses—with their urine.

“I have heard,” remarked Gaspar-shen, “of a man who owns a shop in Chasolné on the other side of the Shining Sea. He builds a confection made of creamed cheese and marzipan in a bed of puff pastry. He wraps it in silver foil and people eat it on the street. The pastry comes apart under your fingers. There are … pistachios involved.”

“I’d like to eat one of those,” Lukas said. That morning there was nothing to eat in Caer Moray.

“I am not sure about that. But I would like to see the face of the man who could invent such a thing,” continued the genasi. “I would like to walk the streets that smelled of such a thing. I believe we are talking about a town made of wooden houses, with long shaded galleries along the street and slatted blinds against the
sun. The town smells like old dust, and oblique sunlight, and pistachios.”

All this, Lukas thought, meant that his friend was eager to be gone. And he also had spent as much time as he needed in this mournful place, full of carrion. Lycanthropes, dead, were no different from ordinary animals. Overhead, the air was full of crows.

They stood inside the fallen gate. Both had been scratched and bitten in the fight, though their wounds had scabbed over. Hurt and weary, Lukas sank down on broken stone, the remnant of a cornice, now sunk deep into the ground.

“We should find our friends,” he said. “Kip and Marikke, and the swordmage. I had hoped the Beastlord would bring them here. But I think he has many incarnations.”

“And … the gnome?” The genasi’s high, airless voice held no expression.

Lukas said, “Ever since I looked back from Kork Head and saw the signal fire I’ve feared the worst.

“These people are liars,” he continued, meaning the commissar in King Derid’s court who had sent them to Gwynneth Island, and then more particularly the leShay queen.

“They play with us like checkers,” he murmured, his words sounding weak and carping even to himself. When was it ever different between rich and poor, long- and short-lived, strong and frail?

Outside the gate a crow perched on the head of a fallen bull, part of a team that had brought up the ram. The crow pecked at the animal’s eye.

“I have heard,” said Gaspar-shen, “that in Chasolné there were no kings and queens. The citizens elected a guild to administer the town. There was an official to maintain the pistachio supply, and one for marzipan, and one for dough. A person could have had his own shop in the street of filled pastry. Bribes and corruption were unheard of.”

Gaspar-shen’s tiny lips were incapable of smiling. But the energy lines under his skin glowed in unusual colors—peach and cherry-red—when he was talking horseshit, like now. No one knew what kind of government they had in Chasolné. The town was just a word, too far away to have a meaning.

“In order to travel there,” the genasi murmured, “it would be best to have a boat.”

“Yes,” sighed Lukas. “It would be best to have a boat.”

“In Chasolné there was a process in which a piece of hollow chocolate or else sometimes in other recipes a piece of wood was set on fire and then entirely submerged in brine. In both cases it is called a ‘Sphinx.’ ”

“It sounds delicious.”

“It is not. No one thinks so. Especially not me.” And then after a moment: “This wave that came last night was a beautiful thing. A very, very beautiful thing. Now it is gone.”

In the years Lukas had known him, this was as close as his friend had come to a reproach. “We will find the others,” Lukas said. “Then we will return to Gwynneth Island, to Caer Corwell.” Like many people who take on the role of leader, he was at his most definitive when he was most unsure.

“And … the Lady Amaranth?” said Gaspar-shen.

A voice came from behind them: “What about her?” The lady, hair still wet and disheveled, was climbing down a slope of gravel from the keep, surrounded by a pack of wolves. She smiled at Gaspar-shen, but didn’t even glance at Captain Lukas, perched on the fallen chunk of cornice. “These are my sisters,” she explained. “Daughters of the great Deucala, who took me in when I was starving—and my brother also.” She indicated a burly, reddish male, who slunk down to lift his leg against the stone gatepost. “For years he’s been living beyond our walls, bringing news to us.” Now that her kingdom was destroyed, she sounded more like a queen or a ruler than she had before. “This is Lightfoot and this is Bay,” she said, introducing two of the four females. They all looked identical to Lukas, especially when they snarled at him in greeting, and raised the frosted hackles between their shoulder blades.

“Captain,” Amaranth continued, “I wanted to thank you for your bravery first of all.” She stared at Gaspar-shen as she said this, while Lukas examined the soil between his boots. Still he was aware of the play of colors through his friend’s energy lines, the plum color that suggested his discomfort.

“I have spoken to the wolves,” said Amaranth. “I told them about something I saw last night in the middle of the earthquake when the walls came down. I saw someone who told me something—I will go with you to Karador. That’s where I was young, and as the youngest of my family, I have a power there. I will speak to my
half sister, and she will release your friend from prison as she promised you. I do not believe she would ever harm me, and my sister’s son will also welcome me home. If it is necessary, he will intercede, if for some reason I cannot understand I have offended her. He was kind to me when I was young, when he would put me on his knee and kiss me, and tell me that he loved me. And I would play with his gray hair, and marvel that he was my nephew. But surely that will give me power over him, the power to do good. I believe my country needs me to make peace—a final peace between the Ffolk, the Northlanders, and the fey. Nor can I accomplish that from here, where I have become an irritant. Captain, I am at your service, and I will help you if you help me. With my sister and my nephew I have a bond of blood that cannot be broken, and I will reward you—all of you.”

All this was to Gaspar-shen. “How much?” he said, which Lukas thought was a kind of a joke, though it was hard to tell. If he was right, then it was a joke that flew straight over Lady Amaranth, who looked up at the genasi, after her bold and noble peroration, with a confused expression on her face.

“I want my friend to negotiate for me,” Lukas said. After the carnage and uncertainty of the night before, the day had turned out bright, a warm sun and a blue sky streaked with horse-tail clouds. He looked up at Amaranth, wondering briefly if he should have stood when she approached, and that was why she wouldn’t talk to him—a breach of protocol. But he was tired and filthy, and he hadn’t slept. He had laid his sword
upright against the stones, and he reached for it as he rose to his feet. The wolves sniffed at him and growled. Amaranth didn’t look at him. She glanced away and blushed. Because her skin was so pale, he could see the color move over her cheeks.

“I’m depending on you,” she murmured, which touched him.

Later, when he’d made his preparations to depart, he knocked on the door of her room in the old keep, where she was talking to the wolves. At Caer Moray he had seen many lycanthropes whose human guise and form might have been close enough to fool him if the light were bad, or if he hadn’t been paying attention, or if he hadn’t already known the truth. Performing human tasks, huddled in their homespun clothes—these wolves weren’t like that. They had made no effort to be something they were not. For one thing, they were naked, covered with hair, and their body language, also, was more bestial than human, the way they scratched themselves, sniffed and licked at each other, wrinkled their noses, and bared their gleaming teeth. Lukas wondered if they knew how to sweat, because their mouths were always open, their tongues extended, their lips damp.

Even when the genasi wasn’t with him, at first it was hard for Amaranth to look at him. Lukas assumed this was because of what had happened on the ramparts when Malar the Beastlord hammered on the gate. He resolved not to speak of it, even though it was hard to see her without remembering that he had touched her,
kissed her on her eyes and cheeks and lips, not long ago. But he was sure that Bay and Lightfoot and the rest would rip him into little pieces if he mentioned anything like that. He wondered if they could even smell his thoughts on the subject, the suspicious way they looked at him and licked their teeth.

“Lady,” he said, “I will do what you request. But I must ask you to consider: You have two families of wolves, but these are like lambs compared to your family on Gwynneth Island.”

At these words the lycanthropes surrounded him in a rough circle. One of them, the largest female, had stared at her until she dropped her eyes.

“You escaped here with your life,” he said. “Nothing has changed in ten years. I will return to Caer Corwell for my friend’s sake. But after that I could take you somewhere else, to Alaron, perhaps.”