The Rose of Sarifal (29 page)

Amaranth drew her arrow to her ear. Loyalties split, Lukas hesitated, and her bowstring sang. His face twisted with rage, the Savage ducked his head, and the arrow passed over his shoulder. At the same time, Lukas saw another woman on the shore, kneeling as if out of breath, dressed only in a brindled wolf skin. She rose to her feet, holding a strange, curved sword. Gaspar-shen had drawn his, and the blade glowed with emerald fire. But she paid no attention. She stood on the grass bank, and as another black stone showed its glowing sigil, and then another farther along the circle of the shore, she
cried out, “I hate what you have made me do. I hate the feeling of your hands. Your taste is bitter in my mouth.”

As she spoke, the entire surface of the water started to turn in a counterclockwise direction. Touched by the wolf’s blood, the six stones came alight. The Savage stood up to his shins in the little pool. At any moment he expected to see the water clear, the opaque surface open, and the other side of the portal reveal itself, the circle of lamps on a stone floor, perhaps, in a temple of the gods—anywhere but here. He didn’t have the ears of a wolf, but even he could hear the baying of the hounds, the hunt approaching through the marsh. The afternoon light slanted down through the beech trees, and among the silver trunks he could see his friends Lukas and the genasi. He almost didn’t recognize them, not because they’d changed, but because he had. His eyes saw differently, the sound of his voice was foreign to him, and the pain in his shoulders and down his back was hard to tolerate. His chest and hands were greasy with the wolf’s blood. He looked up into the eyes of a pale eladrin maiden with red hair, a bow in her hand, a second arrow pulled back to her ear, a tattooed line of thorns below her jaw—he knew who she was, the Lady Amaranth, the Rose of Sarifal. Lukas had found her, and if he could keep her from shooting him, then together they would bring her back to Caer Corwell as her sister had demanded, and they would unlock the gnome
from her cage, and accomplish good, pure, right things to change the world, and perhaps save the lady also, and depose or destroy the leShay queen, who had hurt the mortal realm for far, far, far too long. The Savage’s thought branched into the future like a sudden bolt of lightning, breaking it apart—there were kingdoms to be saved or overturned. There was a treasure to be won. Eleuthra stood above him with his sword in her hands, the king’s sword he had taken from the tomb. With his new eyes he couldn’t read the expression on her face. The world, the light, seemed tinged with blood. With his new ears he couldn’t understand what she was saying. The lycanthropes came running up the slope under the trees, and the eladrin girl had turned her arrow that way, had shot one of the slavering great brutes. Lukas had drawn his sword, and the genasi, also, was hacking at the wolves—why wouldn’t the water clear? The sigils were alight. The circle was made. His friends had turned away from him and only Eleuthra was left, the Ffolk druid, King Kendrick’s spy, who stepped down from the bank into the water, an unreadable expression on her face. No—she was bringing his sword to him. But why had she raised it above her head as if to cut him down? The pain in his head could not be tolerated, the buzzing in his ears. The dogs were barking, and now there were new beasts among the trees, and then Great Malar himself came up the slope in his panther shape, his black shoulders mangy and streaked with scabs. Still joined to his haunches were the dry and withered remnants of the boy Kip, attached like remnants of a skin that a serpent
was sloughing off. A boneless hand hung down between his legs. The god rose up on his hind legs, transforming as they watched. Lukas, Amaranth, and Gaspar-shen had stumbled down into the water now, still black as ink—why wouldn’t it clear? The lamps were lit. Eleuthra had come to him, whether to kill him or stand with him, he couldn’t tell. As the god towered above them, losing his panther shape and metamorphosing instead into an enormous bear, the girl came to embrace him, kiss him, while at the last moment he wrested the sword from her, kicked aside the floating body of the dead wolf, and pushed her down into the bloody water. And with the king’s sword in his hand he left the turning circle to do battle, Bishtek Dlardrageth the Savage. He climbed up out of the water to do battle with the god. The loregem was already lost. He wrenched the gold circlet from his neck and threw it into the pool, and his headache was immediately gone.

P
OKE
I
S
D
EAD

S
UKA RODE UNCOMFORTABLY ON
C
APTAIN
Rurik’s saddlebow as they plodded along the highland trail into the mountains. She was making conversation. “Lord Mindarion says he will not fight for causes, none of the eladrin will. But they’ll fight for Lady Amaranth. I wonder what you think about that.”

The grim captain smiled, showing the livid scar that bisected his lips, and the steel teeth under it. “I like you,” he said. “And I don’t think you’re stupid. I don’t think I have to tell you what I think.”

“If I were you,” the gnome continued. “I’m guessing I wouldn’t trade two pounds of dog shit for the lost princess of the leShays.”

Rurik appeared to consider this. “Two pounds of dog shit are worth less than one,” he objected. “But I take your point. Who wants a tyrant to live forever? The Kendricks are bad enough, and they die every fifty years or so. Quicker, if you let them.”

“Or if you make them.”

Rurik scratched his beard. He stared moodily up ahead, at the back of the horse in front of them. “Treacherous fey,” he said. “Why should I tell you anything? But you know what I’m talking about. You left this place and came to live with us, with men and women. Why was that?

“I wanted a change. You can keep your women, though.”

“Exactly.” Rurik gestured with his chin at the back of the eladrin knight in front of them, a beautiful creature, the scales of his armor shining like a fish’s belly. “Nothing changes here. No one builds anything or makes anything or does anything new. You need people for that. The Ffolk on Gwynneth Island, their lives are the same as when Karador rose out of the lake, the same wooden plows, the same boats, the same charcoal stoves, because of the fey. Everything’s preserved in amber for them, because they live so long.

“You need some urgency,” he murmured after a pause. “Break a few skulls. Die, a little bit. Nobody dies in this stupid country. That’s why no one really lives.”

“How philosophical.” In fact, he was full of shit. By being sarcastic, Suka tried to hide the depth of her disagreement, a type of misdirection that came easily to her. Out of a kind of inner perversity, she told herself she didn’t believe in gods. Ah, gods, she thought. Plenty of people die on Gwynneth Island—too many. Not twenty hours before, Borgol the cyclops had died defending his mistress. Then the drow had attacked them in their forest dell, and Rurik had lost six of his Northlanders and three of the eladrin. And Poke the pig had gone
down, shattered by the darkwalker’s cold spear, though she was not dead yet. Marabaldia had her on a stretcher, a canvas sling over two cut saplings. She pulled the front of it herself between her enormous purple fists, while pairs of the remaining Northlanders took turns behind her, staggering under the weight.

They had left the dell while it was still dark, fearing attack at any moment, but the drow were gone. Mindarion’s explosion had spread outward, and as they came down the slope into the thicker woods they had seen many fallen trees, struck down by the blast, and the corpses of several of their enemies. Suka had been knocked unconscious, but the rest, cowering together, had escaped the full force of the detonation. Later, climbing gingerly among the tree trunks, before they’d found the trail again, she had looked for the drow captain, hoping to find her dead or dying, but no dice. Once she had even left the others, because she had caught sight of something in the half darkness, a plume of white that could have been the darkwalker’s hair, and she imagined slipping the knife into her throat and turning it—she knew the creature would not beg. What she found was a family of owlbears, slaughtered for no reason—ungainly, irritable, dangerous beasts, but even so, they did not have to die like that, the young cubs cut apart for sport.

Knife in hand, Suka had rejoined the others. She was thinking about Poke the lycanthrope, slowly and with every twist of the crude stretcher losing a small bit of her humanity, or at least her human shape. Dead, no one
would know she had not always been a pig. Not that there was anything wrong with that. Intelligent, moral, clean (when given the choice), loyal creatures, pigs were, or so Suka had always heard.

When at dawn they reached the trail that would lead them north into the highlands, she accepted Rurik’s offer to ride with him near the head of their little column. Now, sick of his heartlessness, she asked him to dismount then slipped down from his boot while it was still in the stirrup, and ran back down the line. Marabaldia was there. Marabaldia would understand. Marabaldia knew that life was precious. She had refused all attempts to abandon the lycanthrope in order to save time, or at the very least to leave her to others and ride on ahead.

Suka found her at the back of the company. Steadfastly she blundered up the trail, her iron bar slung behind her back, her massive shoulders hunched—Poke probably weighed close to three hundred pounds, more now than when they started, as she gathered mass out of the air. But the princess wasn’t even breathing hard.

“Little friend,” she said when she saw Suka, “I used to feel such pity for myself during the years when I was in chains. But then bright Selûne, goddess of our sex, granted me a companion in my time of trial, this noble pig to share my loneliness and make it disappear. I, who had lost everything, now found myself rich again, and when you came, rich beyond measure—”

This sentiment, touching in itself, reminded the gnome also of something Lukas, the only other absolute
romantic she’d ever met, had once said. Suka burst into tears, partly for memory’s sake.

Marabaldia released the stretcher’s crude legs, still with their leaves and branches, kicked them solid, and laid down her burden so she could embrace the gnome, whose head scarcely reached her waist. She bent down over her, so that Suka had an impression less of receiving a hug than of entering a safe, warm house. She looked up and again encountered the fomorian’s right eye, as if it were a framed picture or a mirror in that house, or else a doorway or (heck, why not?) a porthole into a little tiny upstairs room, where a miniature version of Lukas sat at a table watching her, a smile on his funny-looking face, handsome enough for a human, but please. Did it say something about her that she didn’t know a single member of her own race?

Sobs redoubled, she put her arms around Marabaldia’s enormous neck, and together they turned to look at Poke, who lay unconscious, smeared with blood. Suka reached to run her hand along the rose tattoo, and they both took hold of her hands, one on each side, stroking her cramped, sharp, cloven palms. In time Marabaldia took up her burden again, but Suka stayed alongside, holding Poke’s hand until it had entirely transformed, hardened, and grown cold.

By that time it was afternoon, and they had crossed the ridge. To the west Suka could see the land slope down toward Myrloch and the lake, and the fens surrounding it. To the east a thick mist hid the pass into Synnoria and the vale of the Llewyrr. Northward, straight ahead
rose the Cambro Mountains, shattered pinnacles of granite streaked with glaciers and high chains of lakes. Underneath, the rock was full of holes, shafts and caverns dug by generations of miners, now abandoned. They climbed through valleys full of the heaped tailings below worm-eaten cliffs, red hills of the exhausted ore.

They were approaching the stronghold of Harrowfast, a fortified enclave in the mountains, built by dwarves, now overtaken by the fey on the marches of Synnoria. Here were the entrances into a world of caves and mining tunnels, now mostly disused. But over the course of generations, two miles down beneath the ridge of peaks, the fomorians and their slaves had dug a roadway all the way to Cambrent Gap, and then a spur to Citadel Umbra in Winterglen, an immense tunnel through the dark. The entrance to that road approached the surface near to where they were, a narrow chasm on the eastern side, where the wide black walls were covered with eroded reliefs, carved figures from the ancient times, gods and goddesses, kings and queens. Emissaries waited for them near a massive stone gateway leading down into the dark, a company of cyclopses dressed in burnished armor, carrying long lances with pennants hanging from the crossbars, flags as black as night, embroidered with the sign of the red torch clasped in a purple hand, now snapping and rattling in the fresh breeze. Captain Rurik and the eladrin had reached the place already on their horses, but when Marabaldia saw the flags she laid the stretcher down for the last time, and after combing her hair back between her fingers,
pulled out her iron bar and marched forward, the grimace on her face transforming as she saw a fomorian warrior standing by himself. Suka, beside her, saw a look of indecision pass over Marabaldia’s big face, and then a new determination. Marabaldia recognized this man. And another, and another, as the great giants rose out of the shadows of the rocks.