by Jean Rabe
When he had hunted with her two days ago, they had not roamed so far from the others or dallied as long, and she had not chatted with nearly so many animals. Then they had gone straight to the business of getting meat – snaring the fat lizard that didn’t put up much of a fight. Yesterday, they had walked deeper into the swamp, and the elf had paused often before deciding on a large lizard the size of a cayman and stalking it for dinner.
Today was the worst yet. Feril was lingering longer here and there, walking farther away from the others, becoming ever more distracted, talking to birds and frogs. She was happier in one respect, the half-ogre knew. But her behavior worried him.
Time to focus on food, he decided. If Feril was too preoccupied, he would let the task fall entirely on his broad shoulders and let her escape into daydreams for a while. The half-ogre had been collecting handfuls of the fist-sized purple fruit that grew in profusion on the giant silk bay trees. The fruits were sweet and juicy, richly fragrant, and he intended to gather enough for tonight and for breakfast tomorrow. They were safe to eat – he had watched the tiny monkeys pick at the fruit. Groller popped a piece into his mouth and let the juice dribble down his throat and over his lips. The fruit would have to do if he could not find meat. He dropped his gaze to the ground, looking for tracks, hoofed ones preferably. They’d spotted a deer earlier, but it was too far away and had moved away too swiftly. Deer would be delicious – if he could kill one before the Kagonesti decided to befriend it. She wouldn’t kill anything she first conversed with.
Ahead, Feril stopped. Groller glanced up and saw that she was studying a massive boa constrictor. She stood on her tiptoes, nose to nose with the snake, the exact length of which was hidden by the branches of the water hickory in which it was curled. The snake was dark green, the color of the leaves, and its back was spotted with brown diamonds.
“Furl? Furl be careful. Znake’s very big.” The wolf moved to Groller’s side, brushing against his leg, and growled up at the snake. The half-ogre reached for the belaying pin at his waist, his fruit-sticky fingers tugging it free from his belt. “Znake be dinner.” He moved a few steps forward and raised the weapon, saw Feril’s lips moving, the snake flicking its tongue at her. He relaxed a little, pursed his lips. “You’re dalking do the znake,” he said. “Thad means znake iz nod dinner. Good. I dod like znake meat.”
She nodded and motioned him away with her hand.
The snake was talking back, he guessed. He watched for several moments, saw Feril smile, close her eyes, the snake’s tongue flicking out to touch her nose, then he replaced the weapon. “Furl wod led us kill the znake fur dinner,” he told Fury. “Furl made’nother friend.’Kay. I really wand deer.” He moved away, continuing to look for hoofprints.
“Great snake,” Feril hissed softly, “you must be old to be so large. Ancient, most wise.”
“Not so old,” it replied in hisses that the Kagonesti mentally translated into words. “No older than the swamp. But much wiser than the swamp.”
Feril reached a hand up and ran her fingertips over the snake’s head. Its scales were smooth, and her fingers tarried, enjoying the luxurious sensation. The snake flicked its tongue and stared into her sparkling eyes.
“This wasn’t always a swamp,” the elf hissed. “My friends said this was an immense plain. People lived in villages around here.”
“I was born with the swamp.” The snake dropped its head lower. “I belong to the swamp. I know of no place else. I know of no people, save you.”
The Kagonesti held her hands open in front of her face, beckoning with her fingers, and the snake moved down to rest its head on her palms. Its head was heavy and wide, and she ran her thumbs along its jawline. “I belong to a land that’s covered with ice,” Feril told the massive snake. “So cold. A land changed by the white dragon. The land is beautiful in its own way, but not so beautiful as this place.”
“A dragon rules this swamp,” the snake hissed. “The swamp serves her. The swamp is... beautiful.”
“And you? Do you serve her?”
“She made the swamp. She made me. I am hers, as the swamp is hers.”
The Kagonesti closed her eyes again, focused on the feel of the snake in her hands, centered her thoughts until the supple scales filled her senses. “I want to see how she made this swamp,” she said, finally opening her eyes and returning the snake’s gaze. “Would you show me, great one? Show me what you can?”
The constrictor flicked its tongue and dropped more of its body, a thick ribbon of scaly flesh, down to the lowest limb. More than twenty feet long, the elf guessed. She began humming an old elvish tune, the notes soft and quick like the babbling of a brook. As the melody became more intricate, Feril let her senses flow down her arms into her fingers, let her senses edge into the snake’s form and flow over its body like the multitude of supple scales that covered it. In an instant she was looking at herself through the eyes of the snake, staring at the tattoos on her tanned face – the curling oak leaf that symbolized fall, the red lightning bolt across her forehead that represented the speed of the wolves with which she had once run. Then the snake’s gaze shifted, and she was looking beyond her form, staring at the thick broad leaves of a massive gum tree.
The green filled her vision. The color was overwhelming, hypnotizing. It held all her attention and then melted like butter to reveal a sheet of blackness. The blackness came into focus, breathed, became scaly like the snake.
“The dragon,” she heard herself whisper.
“Onysablet,” the snake answered. “The dragon calls herself Onysablet, the Darkness.”
“The Darkness,” Feril repeated.
The blackness shrank, but only barely, so she could just make out the dragon’s features rimmed by the gentle green of what was once the plains. The scents were not so strong and rich, the area not so pleasantly humid. It reminded her of the land in which she had been raised. “Home,” she whispered.
“This swamp could be your home,” the snake said.
The dream image of the black dragon closed its eyes, and the pale green of the plains around the overlord darkened. Feril sensed the dragon becoming one with the land, mastering it, coaxing it, nurturing it like a parent seeing to the development of a child. Trees grew about Sable’s form, raced like running water to cover settlements and farmland. The changes chased away the humans who foolishly thought they could hold onto their homes. The plains’ beasts began to claim the land. They no longer feared the people who had once hunted them, people who were now hunted by the dragon and her minions.
The willows that had once dotted the plains survived. Now they took on gigantic proportions, their roots spreading and their size swallowing up the birches and elms that formerly grew in small copses, the tops forming a dense canopy that became the feeding ground of black birds and passerines. The tips of the willows’ umbrellalike branches kissed the water that pooled on the ground. Feril’s gaze followed the water, which led her to sloughs, basins, and limestone outcroppings.
Saplings sprouted everywhere and became tall trees in the span of a few years. Giants, stretching more than a hundred feet to the sky, should have been ancient trees, but they were only a decade old. And the ground, even the high spots once covered by thick prairie grass, was quickly covered in ferns, greenbriars, and palmettos.
In the Kagonesti’s vision the earth continued to dampen. Thick pools of water became foul fens, the river slowed and became clogged with vines and weeds. Alligators lined its banks. The bay of New Sea, once crystal blue and inviting, took on a gray-green sheen. Then the sheen darkened and grew thick with moss. Plants rose from the bottom of the bay and poked through the surface carpet.
There was no longer any sign of much of the eastern half of the New Sea. There was only this expansive marsh, this extraordinary swamp – warm, primordial, and inviting to the Kagonesti. She allowed her senses to slip further from her body, to become drunk on this place and the vision of its existence. Just for a little while, sh
e told herself.
Clouds of insects gathered and danced across dark, malodorous bogs. From the waters’ edges crawled snakes, small at first. But as they slithered farther from the bog, they grew. Egrets, limpkin, and herons skimmed the surface, larger and more beautiful than Feril had expected. Cricket frogs and mud turtles assembled at the edge, feeding on the insects and growing. The magic of the dragon, which was the magic of the land, enhanced them, nourished them, embraced them. Embraced Feril. The swamp enfolded her as a mother’s arms would comfort a small child.
“The swamp could be my home,” she heard herself whisper. “The beautiful swamp... the swamp.” The words were harder to form. “For just a little while.” Breathing was harder. Her chest was tight, her senses reeling. She didn’t mind; she was merging with this place.
“Furl!” The word intruded into her perfect world. “Furl!”
Groller clawed frantically at the snake, which had slid down the tree and wrapped itself around the Kagonesti. The half-ogre cursed himself for being deaf and unable to hear what was going on, for not being more alert, for not paying closer attention, for thinking the elf was all right. He had strayed, following deer tracks. Fury, snapping at his heels, drew him back to Feril’s predicament.
The elf was not fighting the snake. Instead she lay on the ground, limp in the serpent’s tightening grasp. Its tail was wrapped around her throat, and Groller’s large hands pulled at a coil, so thick he could barely get his fingers all the way around it. But the snake was one giant muscle, stronger than the frantic half-ogre and determined to crush the elf.
Fury growled and barked, repeatedly sinking its teeth into the snake’s flesh. But the serpent was so large that the wolf could not seriously wound it.
Groller tugged the belaying pin free and began thrashing at the snake, moving along the length of it toward Feril, closer to the head of the creature, where Fury continued the attack. The snake’s head rose and bared a row of bony teeth. Groller raised the pin and brought it down hard between the serpent’s eyes. Again and again the half-ogre struck, oblivious to the snake’s hissing, the wolf’s growling, unable to hear the constrictor’s skull crack.
The half-ogre’s arm rose and fell, bashing at the creature long after it was dead. Exhausted, Groller dropped the belaying pin and fell to his knees. He began to unwrap Feril, as he prayed.
“Furl be all ride. Please.” His words were nasal and slurred.
“Furl be’live.”
Her eyes fluttered open. Groller effortlessly picked her up and bore her away from the dead snake. “Furl be all ride,” Groller kept repeating. “Furl be all ride.”
She focused on Groller’s face, upon his knitted brow. Shaking her head to clear her senses, she returned her mind to a world from which Goldmoon and Shaon were absent, a world that had corrupted Dhamon Grimwulf. She dropped her chin to her chest and pointed toward the ground.
“I’m all right, Groller,” she said, knowing he wouldn’t hear her.
He released her, holding her arms until he was certain she could stand. The wolf brushed against her leg with his wet nose, and somehow gave her strength. Feril looked up again and met Groller’s worried gaze, then brought her thumb into her chest, her fingers splayed wide. She waggled them and smiled. It was the gesture for fine. But she didn’t feel fine. Her chest burned, her ribs were sore, and the contentment that she had found in this place was gone.
Groller pointed to the bulging sack resting near the dead snake. “Got dinner,” he said. “Meat. Fruit. Znake. No mer hunting today. No mer talking to znakes.”
She nodded and let him lead her back to Rig and the others.
*
Jasper was disappointed in the food at first, but he found the fruit to his liking and the massive constrictor more palatable than lizard. He devoured enough to fill his stomach, then settled back against a trunk and looked toward the setting sun. He listened to Feril talk about the swamp, of how she had watched it come into being.
The air was filled with Rig’s questions, Groller’s hand signals pantomiming his fight with the snake, and Feril’s replies about her experiences. Fiona worked on preserving the snake-skin. It could be made into excellent belts.
Reaching inside the leather sack, the dwarf let all the competing sounds recede into the background. His fingers brushed aside the big ivory belt buckle Rig had found in the muck and closed instead on the scepter’s handle. He pulled it out into the fading light and admired the jewels dotting the macelike ball. It made his fingers tingle.
Chapter 4
STOLEN THOUGHTS
“The Fist of E’li,” Usha whispered. She paced up and down the hall, passing by the closed door to the sorcerers’ study. She let out a deep breath and finally stopped before a painting, one of a willow birch she’d finished nearly two decades ago. Palin sat beneath the tree, with a very young Ulin between his knees. Usha’s fingers traced the raised paint swirls on the trunk and dropped down to linger on Palin’s face, then rose to touch the weeping leaves that shaded him.
There were trees like this on the island of the Irda, and more like this in the Qualinesti forest – though those willow birches were much larger. She had seen them when she stayed with the elves, when Palin, Feril, and Jasper went after the Fist. Were Feril and Jasper in a similar place now, an overgrown forest corrupted by a dragon?
She closed her eyes and tried, one more time, to remember. The Qualinesti. The forest. The Fist of E’li.
Remember.
*
Usha watched Palin leave, the forest swallowing him, the Kagonesti, and the dwarf, the green filling her vision and making her feel suddenly empty and isolated, somehow frightening her. For several moments all she heard was her own uneasy breathing. She felt in her ears the beating of her heart, and she heard the gentle rustling of the leaves turning in the breeze.
Then the birds in the tall willows around her resumed singing. The chittering of chipmunks, chucks, and ground squirrels reached her, and she sagged against the thick trunk of a shaggybark and took in the myriad sounds of the tropical forest, trying to relax. Had the circumstances been different, or had her husband been with her, she might have enjoyed her surroundings or at the very least appreciated and accepted them. As it was, she couldn’t help but feel uncomfortable, a leery intruder in the elven woods. She couldn’t help but inwardly jump at every snap of a branch.
Usha inhaled deeply, summoning her resolve, and scolded herself for being nervous. She offered a silent prayer to the departed gods that her husband would be successful and would safely return to her, and she also prayed that he would find the ancient scepter, that she would be safe, too, that the elves would realize she and Palin were whom they claimed to be.
Usha wasn’t nearly so confident as she had sounded when she volunteered to be left behind. She wasn’t certain that Palin could find what he was looking for during the brief time frame of a few weeks allowed by the elves. Nor was she entirely certain that the scepter even existed. It might, after all, be nothing more than the figment of a senile scholar’s mind.
But there was something she was certain of: she wasn’t alone. The elves who stopped her and Palin, and who didn’t believe they were really the Majeres, were still nearby.
Though the elves had left the clearing when Palin left, she felt their eyes still boring into her, felt the prickly sensation of being watched. Usha imagined the elven archers, their arrows trained on her. She tried to appear composed and aloof, determined not to give them the satisfaction of knowing that they had successfully unnerved her. She stilled the trembling of her fingers, gazing straight ahead, and didn’t flinch when suddenly words came from behind her.
“Usha.” Her name sounded like a brief puff of wind. It was the female elf’s voice, the leader of the elven band. “Usha Majere, you call yourself.” The tone was sarcastic and sounded like a curse. “The real Usha Majere would not trespass in our woods.” The elf silently stepped into the clearing, brushing by Usha’s side, the bushes moving s
lightly in front of the pair, hinting at the presence of elven archers.
“Who are you?” Usha quietly demanded.
“Your host.”
“What’s your name?”
“Names confer a small sense of power, Usha Majere. I’ll give you no power over me. Create a name for me, if you think you need one. Humans seem to require labels for everything and everyone.”
Usha sighed. “Then I’ll simply not refer to you. I’ll consider you my host, as you wish, nothing more. There’ll be no closeness, no hint of friendship. That, I suppose, is also a measure of power.”
The elf smiled. “You are brave, Usha Majere, whoever you truly are. I will grant you that. You stand up to me. You stayed behind while your dear husband heads toward his doom. But you are also foolish, human, for there is a good chance he will never return, and then I will be forced to decide what to do with you. You cannot stay with us. So just what will I do with you? Leave you for the dragon, perhaps?”
“Palin will succeed, and he will return.” Usha continued to stare straight ahead. “He is who he claims to be, as I am who I claim to be. Palin Majere will find the scepter.”
“The Fist of E’li,” the elf answered. “If he is not Palin Majere, and if he does manage to succeed, we will take the Fist from him.”
So that’s why you let him go, Usha thought to herself, so he could get the Fist for you. “He is Palin,” she repeated aloud. “And he will succeed.”
There, straight ahead near a tall, broad-leafed fern, Usha picked out part of a face, a gently curving pointed ear. The elves weren’t so invisible after all, she thought smugly. Then she pursed her lips. The elf archer had met her gaze. Perhaps he’d wanted to be seen, serving as an implied threat.
