The Rose of Sarifal (33 page)

“Mother,” admonished Prince Araithe. He also was unaffected, because this demonstration was for him.

Full of anger and distress, Lukas watched the queen hesitate at the collar of her sister’s shirt then find the hidden buttons and undo them one by one, whispering all the time, “Let’s see what you have under there. Ooh, gooseflesh. Is my hand cold? Now tell me, do they have baths on Moray Island? Or I suppose when you lie down with your wolves, you can expect some fleas—my son, are you listening? If you feel some itching down below, you’ll get no sympathy from me. No soothing liniment. You’ll have to work on that yourself. Look here, an undershirt. She’s playing hard to get. Look at her bosom, do you like that? So pert and fresh. It’s because she’s never borne a child.”

She’s going to strip her bare, Lukas realized. She’s going to strip her naked in the middle of a crowd of
strangers. Frustrated, he tried to raise his hand. With his utmost strength, he turned his head to look at Amaranth, and saw that she was staring not at her tormentor, but at him, her cheeks on fire, a pleading look that animated every feature of her beautiful face. And so he did not allow his eyes to shift from hers, as he listened to the leShay queen continue her repetitive litany: waist and hips too narrow, unsightly and disgusting hair, thighs too bony and muscular—don’t you see?

Lukas did not see.

“Mother,” said Prince Araithe, his voice petulant and sharp, and Lukas tried to guess its tone. Certainly there was no pity in it. As Gaspar-shen had tried to analyze a glass of wine without tasting it, so the ranger followed the music of the prince’s voice, until he knew the melody: irritation. Hurt pride. And that was all.

And so suddenly, with the force of a blow, Lukas understood what they were talking about, the mother and the son. And Amaranth also understood. He’d seen her weep on several occasions, and now he waited for the tears to form, and overflow her eyelids, and drip down her motionless cheeks—she was too horrified for that.

“Mother, stop.” The prince was humiliated to see his property displayed like this, ruined for him.

“No, my son. This is how it must be. Look where my hand is. Over her womb. Oh, but I will twist her up inside. I have the power to do that. I can make her worse than barren. She will breed monsters. You have not seen such monsters yet.”

Lady Ordalf had gone too far. Enraged, the prince struck at her with his golden hand, knocked her to her knees, cutting her cheek so that the amber blood flowed out. He reached down, grabbed hold of her right hand and dragged the ring from it, threw it off into the shadows, and at that moment everybody staggered free. But nothing could be the same. The musicians rose to their feet, kicked over their stools, threw down their fiddles and guitars—they knew they’d be punished for what they had seen. The drow priestesses cowered in the entrance to the cave, then disappeared inside. By the time Lukas reached Amaranth she had covered herself, but when he tried to touch her and comfort her, she struck at him wildly—stupid, he thought. Stupid, stupid. Eleuthra Davos was with him, and Gaspar-shen.

“Come,” Lukas said, and led them out of the circle of torchlight. Lady Ordalf had collapsed onto the grass, and now her son knelt over her, sobbing, his golden fist clenched. Lukas imagined they might have a few minutes, and he led the way out of the clearing, into the dark, sticky forest of evergreens. “This way,” he said, not knowing where to go. “Come this way.”

Not wanting, for sentimental reasons, to leave the shape in which she’d last seen the daemonfey, Eleuthra held out as long as she could. These were the lips that he had kissed. When the red wolf with the black mark had come into the clearing, she had climbed down
into her bestial self to goad him, to signal her regret, if only for a moment—he was disgusting to her, after all. But when the Savage had wrestled with the wolf in the pool, had slit his stomach and dyed the water red just at the moment the gate began to swirl, she felt he had penetrated with his knife the wolfish part of her, cut her to the heart. In Callidyrr, in her druidic studies and devotions she’d discovered her animal nature, had rejoiced in it for years, but at a cost. Two creatures in one body—how could she expect to feel unmixed emotions? One part hated what the other part loved.

So as she squatted listening to the music in the clearing, she had resolved to hold onto her human shape, for the sake of the music, the dancing, the fine clothes, the wine, and the memory of the daemonfey. But like an addict she had become more nervous and distracted as the moments passed, particularly as the knot that tied Lady Amaranth to her family grew more twisted and strained, and finally burst apart. She had found herself scratching her armpits and rubbing her lips, itching beneath her uncured wolf skin until she could scarcely tolerate her own humanity. And so when the ranger brought them in under the trees, she found herself subsiding gratefully into her lupine form, a drunkard forgetting her own promise of sobriety, happy to see the bright colors grow dim, at the same time that the darkness brightened. She leaped away into the night forest, and immediately forgot the lover she had left to die.

Forgot him even though, as her senses sharpened, she caught the stink of other fey and realized the danger
they were in. Doubtless the ranger knew it also: These pines and fir trees had kept down the undergrowth, and they could make good time along the woodland paths, over a turf of silver needles that deadened their footsteps. But among the heavy tree trunks she could see the fugitive shadows of other creatures, fell denizens of Winterglen, who had gathered in around the citadel to listen to the music, the human music the fey loved, because it spoke of transience to eternal creatures, and passion to the passionless. And so they had come like moths to a flame, night hags and feygrove chokers.

But the music was over now. Released from its power, they looked about themselves, their anger and their spite redoubled, because they’d been forgotten for a little while. Caught and released, now they looked to enslave others. And as the druid, the genasi, the princess, and the ranger made what speed they could, they picked up stragglers behind them, and on either side, and now in front. Where the largest trees were choked with vines, long sinewy arms with three-fingered hands reached down to snatch at them. The ranger had lost his bow in the gate but had retained his sword. He and the genasi slashed at them while Eleuthra hung back. A dusk unicorn, blood flanked and grotesque, loomed out of the shadow and she swiped at it with her claws, while all around them she heard yelps of pain out of the howling hags that shambled toward them through the trees, their hands held out, their bodies stinking of rot.

The ranger didn’t know where he was going. How could he know? His only thought was to bring the girl
away. But now Eleuthra wondered if in the minutes that had already passed since they had left the clearing, Prince Araithe had forgotten his distractions and was weaving a spell out of Citadel Umbra, a web of Feywild creatures to disarm them and bring them back. She leaped after the unicorn, chased it away. But beyond it, back they way they’d come, she saw the moving shadows of a pack of hounds, saw their yellow eyes as if reflected in a fire. Had the princess lit her beacon again? That would have been foolish. No, the light was from elsewhere, up ahead. She turned and ran back to the others, who had paused in a boggy open space, where the pines gave out into the softer, deciduous trees. There in the middle burned a bonfire, which had not been there even a minute before, and around it turned, as if following the steps of some simple dance, a circle of figures—eladrin, the druid guessed at first. That would have been a welcome sight, and doubtless that was what had drawn Lukas out of the trees. But then she saw him raise his sword, and saw also the faces of the graceful creatures illuminated in the firelight—fey lingerers, knights and ladies who, zombielike, refused to die. Still animated by hate, or malice, or thoughts of vengeance against those who had stolen their enormous lives away, they had gathered near their living brethren, a pack of ruined ghosts. Only in the darkness did their skull-like features retain even a shadow of their beauty, and now the darkness had fled. Bowing and turning, they circled forward, clad in moldy, slimy armor, though their swords were bright.

“Shit,” said Lukas. “Fall back.”

In her wolf’s shape, complicated human speech was hard to care about, hard to listen to, hard to understand. But she could handle “shit, fall back.” So where? Behind them were the chokers and the hags and the hounds now spreading out around them, weaving back and forth among the trees. Eleuthra wondered if this was still her fight, and what would happen if she slunk away into the trees, protected by her beast’s shape—no. These were the daemonfey’s friends, and she would fight for them. She’d left him to die facing Malar the Beastlord.

They hung together in a knot, the four of them. But now others were converging out of the shadows: drow soldiers. And to Eleuthra’s astonishment they cut and hacked through the whimpering fey. A choker, its arm severed, howled from a bole of vines. The lingerers, undaunted, still moved forward, but Eleuthra could see there was some magic with the drow, a warlock or other conjurer. Snarling, his lips drawn back, she could feel the electric thrill of magic in her heavy teeth. The bonfire snuffed out as if the gods had pissed on it, and in the stinking smoke she could see a drow captain in black armor, the same one from the clearing at the citadel, his white sword burning with a lambent flame. Lukas was with him, and the fire-striped genasi, and she also bounded forward, seizing a dead knight by the arm, dragging him down into the mud, trying to kill him once again. Above them, lightning flashed out of a cloudless sky, and it began to rain.

The drow’s ears were full of iron rings. His white hair was fastened behind his neck with an iron pin in the shape of a crab. His voice was high and soft and unpleasant, a sound like the rushing of the wind. “Come,” he whispered. “Come with me.”

There were seven drow soldiers, and also one of the priestesses or handmaidens of Lolth, the first one who had spoken to them in the temple of the Spider Queen—Amaka, she had called herself. Her eyes were wide with fright, but she ran with them under the trees, barefoot, her pretty white dress stained and ruined, the red cord missing from around her waist. The drow captain led them onward, still away from the citadel, and once again into the pine forest. In time Eleuthra could see they followed a stone road that had risen out of the accumulated needles. Now there was a low stone wall on either side, and a series of carved bas-reliefs. Still they hurried, and the wall rose higher, and Eleuthra realized it was because the road was sinking, a tunnel now, as the wall closed over their heads.

There was a light up ahead, a thin light spilling from a doorway, which the captain pulled open to reveal a guardroom lit by a smoldering brazier, and a couple of astonished guards. He swore at them, pulled them from their chairs, chased them out into the tunnel to wait with the rest of the drow, while he brought Lukas and the others into the room. His sword was still drawn, still smeared and smoking with the slimy yellow blood of the lingerers.

He threw it across the stone floor, wiped his fingers, then turned to look at them, his lips drawn back to show
his filed teeth, his dark face simmering with suppressed rage. “Wearily, wearily,” he whispered, scarcely out of breath, “we would think it best for you to die, all die, all of you, die in the darkness, except for one of you, except for her, that one, dead in the swamp, red blood on my blade, except for that one, except for you.” He extended his long black arm, black hand, black forefinger, and stretched it out toward Lady Amaranth, and did not let it drop.

Eleuthra sat down on her haunches, licked her teeth, and let her tongue protrude. She let the sense of the drow’s words flow over her, and focused instead on the sharpened black nail that reached out toward the princess’s face. She swallowed, and let her tongue slide out again between her teeth.

But Lady Amaranth flinched as if from a blow. Though he had intervened to help her and had brought her here, had rescued her, partly, from her sister’s hate, still the malevolence in his red eyes was hard for her to tolerate. As in the clearing below Citadel Umbra, she felt powerless to move, and the fingernail, as it descended from her face, seemed once again to uncover her and leave her bare.