by Sarah Remy
Some things, Everin knew, were worse than death. He did not think twice. Sword in hand he wheeled and ran, plunging into the crowd, knocking unwary bystanders aside. Shouts and catcalls followed him off the road and into the nearest camp. He hopped a sleeping warrior, trod upon the cook fire, scattering sparks, and dashed on. From the sounds behind him, Drem was in fierce pursuit. In normal circumstances the sidhe would be far swifter. Everin could only hope the encompassing forest of steel and iron would deplete Drem’s vigor.
The tent city was a maze, and Everin meant to use that muddle to his advantage. The night was a riot of sounds and smells. He pushed through one group of lodges to the next, and then the next. A sleeping camel rose upright out of the dancing shadows near a back road, startling him badly. He glanced over his shoulder as he ran. The camel hissed and spat, and struggled to break free of its tether: Drem was still too close.
Stars blinked in the desert sky. The rose-red glow on the horizon pulsed. His left arm was turning to pins and needles. The sound of his boots pounding on sand seemed too loud in his ears. He’d run from sidhe pursuit more times than he cared to remember in trying to escape the barrows. He’d never been fast enough. In the end, his strength always ran out.
A thrush called in the night, from mere steps behind. Everin recognized the whistle for what it was: Drem’s sense of dark humor. Just as no thrush lived high on Skerrit’s Pass, so also were the birds nonexistent in the desert. Everin leapt behind a tinker’s cart, shoving it over into the road before he ran on. The tinker screamed outrage as her wares crashed onto the sand. Everin took advantage of the distraction to duck between a pyramid of stacked hay and a lodge tent. Puffing, he set his back to the stack, flexed his left hand as he listened for pursuit. A pony, hobbled near the hay, regarded him with suspicion.
Everin crouched, making himself as inconspicuous as possible. There was no purpose in moving on toward the sidhe gate any longer. He needed to get back up and over the mountains with word of the elder’s interference. To do that, he needed to lose Drem. Alone in the dark, weary to the point of hysteria, and surrounded by enemies, escape seemed an impossible and frightening task. Drem, like all its kin, was bred for the hunt.
Everin reached for Myron’s flask to ease his nerves, found it gone, and remembered that Drem sipped from it last. He choked back a snort of hysteria. The pony rolled an eye in his direction, clearly unimpressed. Everin sighed and sheathed his sword. A naked blade would draw notice, and he intended to blend in. He wrapped his veil around his face, rubbed the tension from his neck, glanced at the stars in the sky for orientation, and then stepped briskly out from behind the haystack and back onto the busy road, heading west.
None of the sand snakes paid him any attention at all. They were busy with talk of war and famine. He was one kilted warrior amidst many. The moon’s silver face ripened, outshining every torch. In the night the desert was a place of beauty and promise, every man and woman united in survival. Almost, he was Erastos again, Nicanor’s finest champion, a wolf running wild on the dunes. Almost, addled and sleep deprived, he believed he’d never left.
Almost, he made it to the western edge of the encampment. The mountains were again within sight; he could smell sage broom. He thought to hide himself in the wash, hole up in a gulley, and sleep. Relief made him lengthen his stride.
A thrush called from the road behind. Everin stumbled. He broke into a trot, pushing past a throng of opion befuddled, bare-chested men busy howling at the stars. The thrush called again, this time from the road ahead. Another answered. And a fourth, east and west and just behind. He stopped and drew his sword, surrounded and baffled by the trap.
Drem fell on him from above, as though from the moon itself, knocking Everin to the ground, pressing his face into the sand. Everin bucked, but when he inhaled, he breathed grit, and Drem, for all its child-sized frame, was heavier than it looked. He was pinned.
It had traded spear for dirk. It pressed the blade to Everin’s pulse point and leaned close. “You’ll be glad of me,” it said into his ear, just as it had promised on Skerrit’s Pass. Then it sat up and whistled. Everin lifted his head off the ground to better see his downfall.
The bare-chested men were not so opion addled as they appeared. Nor Pelagius a love-sick fool in truth. They surrounded Everin where he lay, spears and scimitars shining, Pelagius at their head. He squatted near Everin.
“I have a message for you, little king,” he said in the language of deep barrows and dark places. “The dullahan says your debt has come due.”
They hoisted Everin onto his feet and took his sword and bound his hands behind his back with braided leather rope. When he struggled, Pelagius backhanded him twice across his face. Everin tasted blood. Dizzy, defeated, he stumbled ahead of their brutal encouragement. His captors surrounded him in a tight circle, using sword point and muscle mass to disperse curious spectators. Hardened warriors scattered before Pelagius’s terse threats.
Everin looked for Drem but did see not his erstwhile companion anywhere.
Pelagius and his men marched him toward the rose-gold glow in the east. As they grew close to the gate, lodges became sparse. The encampments they did pass were lavish, tightly guarded by watchful warriors with ready swords. There was less noise; the energy of the common camp did not extend to this more private sanctum.
They rounded a corner and night turned to day. Here the torches were unlit, campfires banked low. Moonlight was nonexistent, subsumed by ruddy light. The world blushed. Everin lifted his chin and looked.
The gray stone arch was not a thing that belonged in the desert, between blazing skies and white sands, at the mercy of scraping winds. Impossibly green moss dripped in verdant swathes from its filigreed curvature, and down along two proud columns. Lush grass grew in an emerald sweep around its base. Blooming flowers scented the air; pink-budded saplings sprouted in the gate’s shadow.
The saplings, the red-flushed flowers, and the emerald grass were not native to arid places. They were not, as far as Everin could tell, a flatland species, nor even coastal. He was certain he had never seen their like before.
“This way,” ordered Pelagius, shoving Everin in the direction of a solitary lodge erected within striking distance of the gate. More armed warriors patrolled the camp perimeter. They carried scimitars and spears, bow and arrow. They took care not to step too close to the unnatural, flowering oasis. The rose-gold star within the gate turned their yellow eyes orange.
Pelagius propelled Everin into the lodge. Everin tripped on an edge of sisal carpet and went down. His bound hands were useless to break his fall. He landed on his shoulder and rolled onto his stomach, again facedown. There he lay still, a mouse hoping to elude the notice of a hungry hawk. It did him no good.
“Well done, Pelagius. Free his hands. He’s beyond any chance for escape, and I wish to see what time outside the mounds has done to his face.”
Everin knew that voice, he knew the lilting music of it. He smelled musty scales and dusty feathers and the odor of wet, fertile soil. Because he was not a better man, he cowered, curling in upon himself, hunching his shoulders.
It did him no good.
Pelagius was not gentle. He scraped Everin’s flesh as he severed the leather rope. Then he grabbed him by the hair and hauled him up to kneeling. He grasped Everin’s chin in unkind fingers, forced his gaze upward. “Crom Dubh wishes to see your face, mortal.”
He seemed an ordinary man, to have the entire desert at his beck and call. Of average size, and average comeliness, his expression unreadable. He wore a snakeskin vest and wolf’s pelt around his shoulders. There were many black feathers sewn onto his sleeves and kilt. His feet were bare of sandals, his dark hair pulled off a high brow into a loose tail.
He’d been standing near a brazier, warming his hands over opion smoke and sage broom incense. He crossed sisal carpets without a sound, his movements sinuous and wrong, contrary as flourishing pink flowers in dry desert.
Everin hear
d invisible pinions dragging on sisal. Crom Dubh bent to better see Everin’s face. A mediocre man with a mediocre smile, he huffed bland amusement.
“Little king,” the dullahan said sweetly, his breath hot on Everin’s brow. “Faolan is dead. Your debt to him is discharged. But you and I still have a score to settle. Stand.”
Slowly, Everin found his feet. Pelagius’s steel bit between his shoulder blades, a reminder. He stared blankly around the lodge, waiting for relief or sorrow and feeling neither. Faolan had been captor first, friend much later. He couldn’t remember a time before the aes si’s interference in his life. It seemed impossible Faolan was gone, but the dullahan did not tell lies.
He glimpsed Drem standing alone against the tent wall. The sidhe’s shock made Desma’s mouth tremble. When Drem saw Everin looking, it glanced away.
“You did not know? You did not feel the geis lift when he died? Ah, I see from your expression you did not. He was kind to you,” the dullahan guessed. “You are an interesting plaything. Faolan enjoyed a tragedy. An infant princeling, traded by his mother to the Tuath Dé in return for her royal husband’s life. The rightful heir to the mortal throne exiled forever beneath the earth because his progenitor loved him less. I imagine you suffered, knowing that. Faolan was attracted to human suffering, a moth to flame.”
The dullahan stretched. It should have filled the tent to bursting. Its shadow did, darkening sisal carpet with an impression of wings spread and a coiled, lashing tail. Everin saw the shadow and Crom Dubh with his unremarkable smile, and his mind boggled. It was as if, he thought, the shadow cast the man.
“Human suffering is of no interest to me,” the dullahan confessed. “Nor kindness. But I will be fair, so long as you fulfill your obligation.”
Everin ground out, “What is it you want of me, monster?”
Pelagius hit him again for his disdain. “He is Crom Dubh. Show respect.”
“That one,” the dullahan said, regarding Pelagius fondly, “I caught the very night I left you on the mountain top. Tending his family’s camels in the foothills. He was just a child, then. I recognized his ambition. No royal princeling, Pelagius, but he and his family have grown to be very useful. They appreciate malice and I reward each handsomely for his efforts. Almost, Pelagius’s tribe is as useful to me as my lesser sidhe. Of a certain, they are more resourceful.”
Everin did not respond. It crossed his mind then that he might be wise in provoking his own death. Pelagius, he suspected, would be easily incensed. And it would not be a terrible end, so long as the sand snake knew how to use his blade.
Don’t, said the dullahan, silver bells in his skull. I will only bring you back, as many times as it takes. A painful process, a waste of time, and we both know you would not be unchanged. Die on the battlefield, if you like, but not until I’m done with you.
“On the battlefield,” repeated Everin. His head swam. He wondered what Pelagius would do if he fainted.
“You did well for yourself after I left.” The dullahan padded across the lodge to the brazier. He spread blunt-fingered hands, warming them over the coals. “Erastos, desert wolf, hero of the dunes. Your enemies, I’m told, did indeed fall beneath your blade, easily as sidhe before iron.”
The point of Pelagius’s sword twitched against Everin’s spine.
“When you vanished from the dunes, Nicanor mourned you as a lost brother,” the dullahan mused. “And wept again when I told him just this evening that you were returned to us, alive and hardy, in the hour of our victory. He rejoices that you will lead the charge beside him with the rest of my heroes. These desert people are a courageous sort, but not unlike my lesser sidhe, they need incentive to take on a difficult task. The gate has been a task more difficult than most. Almost, it would be easier to convince them to move an army over the mountains than to convince one warrior to cross that threshold.”
“It’s the camels, Crom Dubh,” Pelagius said with the air of a man who had explained this shame one too many times. “The camels will not go near it. In the desert, a man relies on his camel more so even than his sword.”
The dullahan stretched again. Invisible pinions scraped. “No matter,” he said. “We will make a show of it, and they will be convinced, from behind and ahead. It will not take much. They desperately want to believe. They’ve been so long without—” The dullahan blinked over the brazier at Drem.
“Hope,” Drem offered quietly.
“So long without hope they’re willing to follow anyone to greener fields.”
“You want me to lead an army against my own people.”
“The flatlanders were never your people. It was the desert you ran to when I flew you from the barrows. One last thing,” the dullahan said, as if in afterthought. “Drem tells me Faolan taught you the ways of the tunnels beneath flatland fields and villages. I expect you can recall those youthful lessons. I trust you will make use of them for my benefit.”
Chapter 15
“Here,” said Mal, leaning over the old barrow map. He traced a finger along lines newly added to Andrew’s original drawing. “And here. All of them, sealed. Avani and Russel took care of the entrances Andrew marked. I’ve closed twenty-seven more since, from Whitcomb to beneath the red wood and all the way again to the Maiden Cliffs.” He met Renault’s eye across the table. “The ones I’ve found, Majesty. I cannot guess how many I’ve missed.”
Baldebert frowned over Mal’s shoulder at the age-stained scroll. “It’s a rabbit warren. How could you let it get so bad?”
“Let it?” Renault pressed his fingers together against his mouth. He regarded Baldebert bitterly. “They’ve been a long time underground, Admiral. I do not think anyone supposed they would survive their exile, much less prosper. In truth, we believed them extinct, old stories to frighten children in the dark.”
“But will the sealed gates hold?” Orat demanded. He frowned at the map. Behind him in the oriel Tillion leaned on his staff and peered down through the panes at the street below, uninterested in the afternoon’s proceedings.
Mal wished fervently that the new Masterhealer did not feel the need to bring his favorite lap dog to every parley. Tillion’s presence did nothing to soothe already frayed tempers in the room.
“The gates will hold,” he promised. “Avani and I have made sure of it.”
“That one—” Orat shook his head “—belongs close at hand where she can protect His Majesty, not gadding about the battlefield like some green infantryman all afire for her first kill.”
“Not her first,” murmured Tillion from his place near the windows. “The armswoman was her first. Lady Avani came to temple after, and lit three candles in Lane’s honor. She thought I didn’t see her grieve. She thought I didn’t see her at all.”
Mal knew he could murder Brother Tillion on the spot and not feel inclined to light even a single candle. He cleared his throat.
“The gates that we have found will hold,” he continued evenly. “But those that we have not? The palace, at least, is safe—we have made a thorough study of the catacombs beneath. I believe Wilhaiim, too, is shut tight against infestation. But outside our walls? Under the fields, beneath the villages, as far even as the coast—I will guarantee there are barrows not yet unearthed. If they have indeed found a way under the mountain, there is no telling from whence they might erupt.”
“I had not thought to regret Faolan’s loss,” admitted Renault. “But he, at least, might have been convinced to our side, if only for the sake of peace. Surely the barrowmen do not want their warrens overrun with sand snakes any more than we want them in our fields.”
“The other one.” Baldebert glanced up from the map. “The beekeeper. Mayhap she could be of some help?” He tilted his head subtly in Mal’s direction.
“Gone,” replied Mal. “Her tent at the Fair, the hovel she called home, all cleaned out. If she’s astute she’ll have hidden herself well away until this mess blows over.”
“‘Mess,’” quoted Orat in disbelief.
“By all reports we are outnumbered five to one. Our allies have come up short—” he curled a lip in Baldebert’s direction “—and we cannot trust the ground not open beneath us and spit out the enemy at our feet. This is not a mess. This is a disaster. By the good god, what are we to do?”
“Pray,” suggested Wilhaiim’s king, resigned. He rose from behind the table, rolling up the map. “Or is that not the advice you’ve always given me?”
“In matters of state, certainly,” Orat choked out. Almost, Mal felt sorry for the man. “And in time of sickness or drought. But this—we are facing certain slaughter—we are unequipped—”
“My new armsmaster will be distributing what reserve we have in the armory to the able-bodied,” replied Renault. “If you hurry you may find yourself in possession of a sturdy sword.”
“We are healers,” Orat protested but stopped short beneath his king’s cool stare. “You are quite correct, Majesty,” he amended hastily. “Needs must.”
“Needs must,” agreed Tillion, peering thoughtfully in Mal’s direction. “God will rise to the occasion and forgive us expediency. Or so one hopes.”
Mal, catching the telltale signs of fury beneath Renault’s dismissive gesture, did not think Wilhaiim’s throne would ever forgive the temple for Brother Paul’s contrivance.
“I think you dislike those two more than I,” Renault said once the doors had closed behind the two theists.
Startled, Mal focused again on his king. “Orat is harmless. He served you well once and will do so again, assuming he finds his feet. It’s Tillion I distrust.”
Renault chuckled as he resumed his throne. “I’ve grown used to his preaching outside my windows. He’s too fond of hyperbole but I appreciate his devotion to the cause.” He accepted a goblet of ale from his newest page. The lass, dignified despite a preponderance of freckles and scabs on her knees beneath her thin hose, openly sized Mal up from beneath long lashes. He appreciated her hubris.
“Hello, Parsnip.”
