Bloody Rose

by Nicholas Eames

  “Good.” She kissed the hard line of his lips. “You may be a slave, dear, but you are still my husband.”

  “Did she say husband?” Brune asked.

  “Did he say queen?” Cura wondered.

  “Queen?” Roderick said, loud enough to draw the Widow’s attention. “Queen of what? And whose husband is he? Would someone please tell me what the frosty hell is going on here?”

  “He’s the Marchlord,” said Tam, who’d put the pieces of the puzzle together and wished she could unsee what they revealed.

  Brune frowned. “The one that died?”

  “The one that died, yes.”

  Cura looked perplexed. “So then she’s—”

  “She’s the Winter Queen.”

  Her bandmates looked at Tam as if she’d suggested they go skinny-dipping in the lake.

  “At least I think she is,” Tam explained hurriedly. Hawkshaw was busy recovering his sword and crossbow, but the Widow was eyeing them with a sly smile on her lips. “Freecloud told me the Winter Queen was really a druin. The Archon’s wife. She … uh, died.” Tam opted to skip the part of the story where Vespian killed their infant daughter. “But the Archon used a sword called Tamarat to bring her back. Only she wasn’t …”

  “Wasn’t what?” pressed Cura.

  “Sane,” Tam whispered. “Anyway, she’s been dead since the Dominion fell, but then Lastleaf used Tamarat to kill himself at Castia, which means …” She trailed off, since it was obvious from their expressions that the others understood where she was going with this.

  “So you’re saying this mousy little witch is really the Frost Mother?” Brune asked.

  “I’m not particularly fond of that name,” said the Widow, all but confirming Tam’s outlandish conjecture. “It makes me feel so old.”

  “I don’t believe it,” said Cura.

  The druin raised her chin, which lent her a chillingly imperious air. “Do you not?”

  Her eyes gleamed cerulean. She whispered something undecipherable, and black smoke curled from between her lips. The corpse of the Simurgling Tam had killed with an arrow stirred to life. Its eyes burned away in wisps of white fire. Whatever subtle magic she’d used to lend Hawkshaw the semblance of life, this creature didn’t seem to warrant it. It shambled to the woman’s side and laid its head at her feet.

  Mirth writhed like a maggot on the Widow’s lips. “And now?” she asked.

  Cura sneered, and Tam hoped to hell she wasn’t about to say anything that might provoke the sorceress into killing them. “Now what? Do I think you’re a goddess?” She feigned a laugh that was too harsh to be credible. “No, I don’t. I think you’re an orc-shit crazy bitch who spent too long alone in her castle with no one but a dead guy and an old turtle for company.” She gestured at Hawkshaw. “I think you’re so totally repulsive that your own husband would rather die than stay married to you.” Cura glanced briefly at Brune. “I bet dogs hate you, too,” she added.

  Tam winced. So much for pleasantries.

  The Widow’s amusement vanished like a silver coin lost to deep water. “Perhaps this will convince you,” she said, and started toward the circle of shattered ice.

  What happened next was, without a doubt, the damndest thing Tam had seen all day.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Lost and Found

  The Widow spoke another string of sibilant words. Dark vapour streamed from her lips into the frigid air.

  They waited. Moments passed. Cura had just opened her mouth to say something snide when a massive claw burst from the lake and grappled the cracked ice. The living corpse of the Simurg boiled up behind it, water sluicing from fur, feather, and scale. Flames like funeral pyres blazed in the cavernous sockets of its eyes. It reared above them, glacial and silent. The feathers on its crest had faded from the brilliant reds of sunrise to the bruised violet of dusk.

  The sight of it drove the band to their knees. Cura swore. Brune muttered a prayer under his breath. “Gods fuck me,” said Roderick, managing the impressive feat of swearing and praying at the same time.

  Tam didn’t say a thing. She couldn’t. Her tongue felt like a stone in her throat, threatening to choke her. A faithless tear slipped from her eye and froze to crystal on her cheek.

  The Widow gazed up at the Dragoneater, her hard features slack with rapture. She was wholly engrossed by her new pet, and it occurred to Tam that she should probably try to kill the woman here and now, except …

  Except you spent your arrows. You have only a knife, and no chance at all of getting near her before Hawkshaw cuts you down or that Simurgling tears you limb from limb.

  Judging by the grim set of their faces, her bandmates were coming to similar conclusions. Tam couldn’t see Rose for the bulk of the Dragoneater, but she and Freecloud had been kneeling in exhaustion when the bard had seen them last. If the Widow decided to kill them now, there was little they could do to stop her.

  Roderick steadied his hat and craned his neck to look up at the Simurg. “She duped us,” he said despairingly. “The contract was never about killing the Dragoneater. It was about controlling it.”

  Before Tam could grasp the implications of why someone would want a world-wrecking monster at their beck and call, the Dragoneater lowered its head and buttressed it against the jagged edge of the ice.

  The undead Simurgling scurried onto its mother’s neck, and Hawkshaw climbed into the shelter of its feather crest before offering a hand to his mistress. The Widow’s limp ears perked a little as she stepped onto the monster’s back. She looked cautiously ecstatic, like a plainswoman at the prow of a seaborne vessel.

  “Exquisite,” she said breathlessly, then called down from her perch. “You will thank Rose for me, won’t you? She really was the perfect woman for the job. So capable, so brave, so hopelessly insecure. I’d have preferred to lure her father here, but this”—the Widow bared her teeth and gestured to the empty landscape around them—“has a certain poetry to it. Gabriel’s beloved daughter, so desperate to prove her worth, left to die in obscurity.”

  “Go fuck yourself,” snapped Cura, which seemed to Tam like an ill-advised thing to say to someone who’d just made a pet of the world’s most fearsome monster. The druin scowled down at them as though Cura and her bandmates were rot-ridden urchins begging alms on her doorstep.

  “Why do you hate Gabriel so much?” Tam blurted, hoping to temper the Widow’s wrath into something less likely to get them all killed.

  “Because”—the druin’s glare was cold enough to snuff a fire—“he killed my son.”

  The Simurg beat its wings, rising on a storm of sleet and swirling feathers that blew Roderick’s hat from his head yet again. The monster climbed ponderously skyward, until it pierced the grey veil above the Brumal Wastes, and was gone.

  “We’re still alive,” breathed Roderick.

  “But now what?” asked Brune. He blinked around them, eyelashes heavy with frost.

  Cura was still watching the sky, her expression bleak. At last she lowered her gaze: to the snow-clad mountains, and the barren tundra stretching away to the north. “Now we die.”

  Something was very wrong with Rose.

  Tam and the others had skirted the rough circle of open water, wary of cracks that could—as Roderick discovered the hard way—split apart and leave one stranded on a slab of submerging ice. Fortunately, the satyr was an excellent jumper, and they’d been sure to give the water a wide berth afterward.

  Rose was lying on her back with her head in Freecloud’s lap. The druin’s ears were slumped like a child sulking over a plate of steamed cabbage.

  “Is she hurt?” Roderick asked. “What happened?”

  But it was obvious the moment Tam laid eyes on Rose what was wrong. Her irises filled the whole of her eyes. Her lips and tongue were black—the latter so swollen it lodged like a lump of coal in her mouth—and dark blood trickled from her nostrils.

  Tam’s stomach turned. She could have stopped Rose from taking th
e Lion’s Leaf earlier, or told Freecloud what she’d seen belowdecks. But she’d decided to trust that Rose knew what she was doing. She’d believed, like a fool, that Fable’s leader placed more value on her life than on defeating the Simurg.

  “She’s going to die,” said Freecloud.

  “I’m fairly certain we’re all going to die,” Roderick was quick to point out.

  The wind was getting stronger, the snow piling up around their ankles, and the sky to the east glowered like a priest when a harlot came to worship.

  There’s a storm coming, Tam surmised. And when it gets here, we’re done for.

  Brune dragged off the fur cloak the satyr had spared him earlier and placed it over Rose.

  “You’ll freeze,” said Freecloud, but the shaman only shrugged.

  Cura pulled the sable fur from her shoulders and draped it across Rose as well. Her teeth rattled as she flashed the druin an assuring grin.

  Tam slipped out of her red leather longcoat before kneeling and laying it carefully over Rose.

  “You needn’t suffer because of her,” said Freecloud. “She wouldn’t want that.” His voice wavered as he spoke, betraying a grief he was loath to reveal even to his closest comrades.

  “But she’s earned it,” said Roderick. He removed his fox-tail hat, then stooped and pulled it snugly over Rose’s head.

  They stood there shivering, grim as mourners at their own funeral. Tam was about to suggest they try carrying Rose into the shelter of the Simurg’s lair when the yethiks attacked.

  The monsters shambled through curtains of blowing snow. They were huge, shaggy brutes with four arms and faces that looked like boiled leather masks. Each was as big as Brune, except their leader, who was curiously smaller than the others, and currently howling something unintelligible as they approached.

  Or not quite unintelligible, since it sounded a lot like …

  “Wait!” Tam shouted, before Brune could sham or Cura summon one of her inked atrocities. “Listen!”

  “Rooooose! Rooooose!”

  Roderick poked his bare head out from behind the shaman. “Rose?” He looked to Freecloud. “Does Rose know any yethiks?”

  “That’s not a yethik,” Tam said. She stepped out in front of the others and hoped she was right about that.

  The figure that slowed to a halt in front of her was thickly bearded and draped in matted fur, but clearly human. His bottom two arms were merely stuffed sackcloth limbs linked by twine threads to the man’s wrists. His face was burned a ruddy red by overexposure to the cold, and his mangy beard was thick with rime. Even still, Tam recognized the Raincrows’ axeman almost immediately.

  “Farager?”

  The man scrutinized her through frosted lashes. “Tam? Tam bloody Hashford?”

  “What are you doing here?” she asked, glancing warily at his apish companions. Unlike him, they were real live yethiks, with jutting brows, fanged underbites, and four arms apiece.

  “We’re here to kill you!” said Farager, but when Tam’s hand strayed to her knife he dragged his stuffed arms skyward in a gesture of surrender. “Ha! I’m kidding, obviously. Gods, you should have seen your face!” He turned and signalled something to the yethiks behind him. They laughed uproariously and jostled one another with their copious elbows. “Actually, we saw you fighting the Dragoneater and figured you could use some help.”

  “You’re too late,” Cura told him. “It’s already dead.”

  “We saw,” said Farager.

  “Well, not exactly dead,” Brune grumbled.

  “We saw that, too.” The axeman squinted, surveying the swathe of gory red ice before looking skyward. “What the heck happened out here?”

  “Rose is sick,” Tam said impatiently. “Dying, maybe. Is there somewhere we can take her? Someplace warm?”

  “There is,” said Farager. He did something curious with his hands, bumping one into another before dragging it toward his chest. “Follow me.”

  The Yethiks lived in a warren of caves accessed via the cleft Hawkshaw had identified as the Simurg’s lair. Tam’s recollection of getting there was hazy. She remembered collapsing in the snow and then being loaded, along with Brune, Cura, and Rose, onto sleds pulled by Farager’s yethik cohorts. She vaguely recalled Roderick complaining about not getting to ride on a sled until their rescuers relented and offered to tow the satyr as well.

  The rest of the journey passed in a series of weary glimpses: a shadowed crevasse of sheer ice; snowflakes glittering against a narrow strip of sky; bones heaped in drifts against stone walls; bestial faces peering into hers; and finally, the warming kiss of a fire.

  Its heat suffused her, enveloped her like a returning tide that carried her out to sea and dragged her down, and down, and down to sleep.

  Tam woke to a gentle prodding on her back. The bard tried to turn over, but a pair of strong hands held her down. She realised she was shirtless, panicked, and wriggled violently in an attempt to seize the knife at her waist.

  “Easy, Tam,” said Freecloud from somewhere nearby. “She’s only trying to help. You’ve been wounded. A sword cut, looks like.”

  A sword? Oh, yeah. Hawkshaw cut me. And kicked me. And tried to shoot me. Twice.

  She felt something warm and tacky being spread over her shoulder blade. A salve, she guessed, wincing as her caretaker kneaded it gently into the wound. After that, a strip of something that crinkled like parchment was pressed onto her back. The salve doubled as an adhesive as it cooled, and the parchment hardened into a glaze over the gash.

  When she was permitted, Tam rolled over and sat up. She found her thick wool tunic and pulled it gingerly over her head. The fire was reduced to a steeple of glowing logs, but the small cave in which she found herself was blessedly warm.

  Cura was asleep on a fur mat beside her. Rose lay a short distance away. There was a clay bowl beside her head. Tam could see black slop glistening within, and more of it staining the stone beneath the bowl. The frontwoman’s face was waxen in the dim light, slick with sweat. Her breath came in rapid bursts, and her fingers twitched around the hilt of imagined swords.

  Freecloud was sitting by her side, toying with that moonstone coin of his. Tam wondered if the druin had slept at all since they’d been rescued.

  Brune and Roderick were nowhere in sight.

  Next to her was a yethik with pale brown fur spotted white like a fawn’s. Freecloud had called it a she, but Tam could see nothing that made her obviously female. Two of her arms were rolling a sheet of stripped bark. A third hand made a curious, open-handed gesture beneath her chin, and then repeated it (or something like it) while her fourth hand was couched in the crook of her arm.

  These aren’t gestures, Tam swiftly realized. They’re language. “Uh, thank you,” she said.

  The yethik repeated her first sign and then shuffled off, walking on the knuckles of her lower hands. The cave was open on one side, accessed by a gently sloping ramp. The space beyond was illuminated by rays of diffuse light that streamed through fractures in the cavern roof. Stalagmites and stalactites bigger than most of Ardburg’s towers pillared the gloom, each of them dotted with darkened alcoves and glowing nooks. She could see shaggy silhouettes in some, sitting or conversing with one another using elaborate hand signals.

  “Can they speak?” Tam wondered aloud.

  “They sign,” answered Freecloud. “And grunt occasionally. Also, for some reason, they laugh at almost everything Farager does. Aside from that they make no sound at all.”

  “I didn’t know that about yethiks,” she said.

  It was hard to make out his expression in the low light of glowing embers, but the druin’s voice was especially sombre. “Neither did I.”

  “Where are the others?”

  “Farager took them to see if they could salvage anything from the skyship. They’ll be returning shortly—I can hear them now.”

  Tam had sometimes wondered if Freecloud’s long ears meant he could hear better than humans, and since
she heard nothing but the hiss of sizzling logs and Cura’s slow breathing, she concluded that yes, he obviously could.

  “Will Rose be okay?” she asked hesitantly.

  “She’ll recover, yes.” Freecloud motioned to the bowl beside her head. “But she won’t linger here. The moment she can walk she’ll insist on heading south. If we’re lucky, the yethiks will know a way through the mountains, but if not”—he swiped a strand of sweat-matted hair from Rose’s forehead—“she will try and go over them. I will follow her, of course. I suppose Cura and Brune will as well.”

  “And me.”

  “And you,” he said, smiling sadly. “We are moths, you and I. And Rose, the flame.” When Tam blinked she saw Cura’s newest inkling in her mind’s eye. Bloody Rose, wreathed in fire. She doubted he’d had the chance to see it while battling the Simurg, but this was Freecloud, and there was very little the swordsman missed.

  “I don’t like our chances of surviving a trek over the Rimeshields in winter. Brune, perhaps, could make it.”

  “We could wait for spring?” Tam suggested.

  “Do you think Rose will wait for the snow to thaw while the Brumal Horde threatens our daughter’s life?”

  Tam shrugged. “Why would she care about Wren’s safety now? We knew weeks ago that the Horde was headed for Agria. She could have rushed home then, right? She could have gone to Coldfire Pass in the first place instead of—”

  “I know,” Freecloud snapped. The druin’s ears were stiff, his eyes so dark they held nothing but the reflected red glow of the fire within. There was an embittered edge to his voice she’d never heard before.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, swallowing. “I’m just the bard. It’s not my place to—”

  “No,” he cut her off again. “You’re right. We should never have gone to Diremarch. We should have refused the Widow’s contract and headed for Coldfire Pass along with everyone else. We should have faced down the Horde instead of chasing after the Simurg, except …”

  “Except,” Tam prompted, when the druin’s silence lingered.