The Rose of Sarifal (42 page)

But Amaranth couldn’t hear her, wasn’t paying attention. While Lukas bent down to listen, while he squeezed the little gnome’s hands, Amaranth found herself staring up into the round, heavy-featured face of the fomorian, its right eye large and bright. Though in Karador she had heard of these grotesque and misshapen creatures, she had never seen one, and she found herself fascinated by its eye, which reminded her for a wistful instant of the portal that had carried her from Moray, the way the surface of it seemed to swirl in a circle then slide open like the mechanical aperture in her professor’s camera obscura, a device made of beaten copper, which she had last seen when she was a little girl.

And like that morning in Karador long before, she saw many things that had been hidden, or else only vaguely guessed at. She saw the forces of Citadel Umbra gathered around them in a circle, while an army of drow approached from underneath. She saw a trap that would crush all of them and steal her away. She saw the cyclopses struck down, and Lukas tortured to death for the liberties she had granted him. Every detail was clear
to her, as if these things had happened in the past and not some version of the future, and as if she were doomed to play them endlessly in memory. The fey stretched him out in one of their bright chambers, stretched and snipped his body in their delicate machines and made a game of him, and the genasi too. They cocked their heads quizzically, unused to cries of pain.

“My lady, this is the Princess Marabaldia,” said someone else, an old eladrin who had come up through the ranks of cyclopses, leaning on a woman’s arm.

“It is my pleasure to encounter you,” said the monster, her voice beautiful and low, her tone formal and polite. But Amaranth stared into her eye, and in its surface she saw a moving portrait of herself in her nephew’s arms, dancing stiffly and correctly as if in a darkened room. She could see her own back, the line of freckles underneath her shoulder blade, because her back was bare.

Oh, but one day she would be a queen, and the mother of kings and queens. As she watched herself, she heard with part of her mind the peculiar, airless voice of Gaspar-shen, as he came hurrying back. “I saw them,” he said. “Prince Araithe and his people. They have come from Winterglen—eladrin mostly, and a few drow. They are camped in the big cavern, a quarter mile from here. Many hundreds, it looks like. His mother is not with them.”

His voice was high and calm. Marabaldia had laid her spear against the wall. Now she picked it up. “I will be glad to see the prince again,” she said grimly.

“Captain,” said Gaspar-shen, “it is too many. There are warlocks and mages, and more than a hundred knights. Prince Araithe is very strong.”

“We’ve beaten him before,” said Marabaldia.

“That was Poke,” Suka reminded her. “And Poke is dead.”

Lukas felt Amaranth press his hand and then let go. He didn’t know who Poke was. But he felt immensely tired. He remembered the recent fight, the mounds of corpses, and he felt their presence in the darkness around him, beyond the limit of all these glowing eyes. Nor did their spirits reassure him. But the air was stale with their breath, and thick, and hard to breathe.

Gaspar-shen was staring at Amaranth. “We can’t fight them,” he said. “If the prince wants what I think he wants.”

Lukas was too tired to argue. The dead hung close around them. “We have no choice,” he said, bending to pick up his drow saber. An unfamiliar weapon, yet he would make it sing.

“Poke is dead?” asked Lady Amaranth. Slowly, as if unwillingly, she turned to him.

The gnome was looking at her as if she had two heads. “Ah, forgive me,” she said to Marabaldia. “It is the Yellow Rose of Sarifal.”

Amaranth put up her hands. “Let us make an end to all this fighting.”

The cyclopses had focused their regard. She stood in their eyes’ light as if on stage, her shadow stretching out behind her. And because she seemed to Lukas suddenly like an actress on a stage, he made himself aware of every tiny gesture, aware of how she moved her fingers as if caressing the soft breeze, aware also of how the part she played was different from the person she had been not ten minutes before.

“There’s another way,” she said. “Let me speak to my nephew. He’ll grant you safe passage. He’ll do what I say.”

Her red hair hung listless. Her freckled cheeks were chapped and preternaturally pale in that strange light. Her eyes were wide and determined, or else afraid. Later, on board ship, his own gaze fixed deliberately on the horizon, he would remember how she didn’t look at him as she stepped backward into the shadow. He would remember how no one spoke. He would remember how it seemed for a moment as if she had something more to say. But then maybe she thought better of whatever it was. After a moment she turned, and the darkness consumed her. They listened to her soft footsteps receding, and then nothing.

Later, on board ship, Suka would tell Gaspar-shen and him her entire story, and he would tell her everything he knew. But now, they all stared at one another as if they were strangers. After twenty minutes, as they waited, Marabaldia called for a rest, for the first time on the march from Synnoria. She herself did not let go her spear. She sent some of the fomorians up ahead, and
she posted a guard, but the rest of the cyclopses opened their packs and pulled out bottles of water, and loaves of bread, and links of sausages, and sat down or lay down, and they made camp.

H
OME-SCHOOLED IN
K
ANSAS BY
C
HINESE MISSIONARIES
,
Paulina Claiborne has eschewed all subsequent education. Between the prison terms that punctuate her life, she has worked as a cook, a hairdresser, a lifecoach, a toxicologist, a freelance letter-opener, and a private surgeon. She has won several prestigious literary awards, including the Warden’s Special Prize for Model Servitude. She enjoys quilt-making, knife-fighting, and alcohol. For the past few years she has had no fixed address.

EPIC STORIES
UNFORGETTABLE CHARACTERS
UNBEATABLE VALUE
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WELCOME TO THE DESERT WORLD OF ATHAS, A LAND RULED BY A HARSH AND UNFORGIVING CLIMATE, A LAND GOVERNED BY THE ANCIENT AND TYRANNICAL SORCERER KINGS. THIS IS THE LAND OF