The Rose of Sarifal (forgotten realms:moonshae isles)

by Paulina Claiborne

  She remembered how the angel s sword had divided light from darkness. When you are well enough to run, she said, they ll chase you from here.

  Among Malar s worshipers, the High Hunt was their only sacrament, a day and a night or sometimes longer, and a clean kill at the end. In celebration of Malar s rising, Marikke decided, this was to be the Savage s fate, and the druid s also she felt pity for her sake. As for the daemonfey, good riddance, because of the lies he d told. I think tomorrow morning you ll be strong enough to give them sport, she said.

  I came for you, he whispered. I risked my life for you, to save you from the beasts. You and the boy. That s why I am here. She too, he said, meaning the druid.

  Marikke felt tears in her eyes. This was not how this was supposed to be. She was not supposed to feel anything. What did he want from her? Would he like it better if she killed them now, cut their throats with the Beastlord s knife, as he had demanded? Tell me what you are, she said.

  You know what I am.

  She could hear his tortured, shallow breath. Each inflation of his lungs brought pressure to his wound. Let her go free, he said, meaning Eleuthra, the druid. I was the one who brought down Malar s angel, stopped his mouth with dust. I will lead you a good hunt, I promise. He smiled. His teeth were different now, in a way she couldn t quite identify.

  Don t cry, he said after a moment.

  Everything you do, you must have courage.

  Her tears and her weakness were not for him but for herself. Malar would not forgive her. For a moment she caught a glimpse of the golden elf that she remembered on Lukas s crew, from the first days on Alaron when she had come on board, his smiles and jokes just slightly out of sequence with the rest of them, as if he always had to translate what they said into a different language and then back again before he spoke. Don t cry, he said again.

  She looked away from him, up into the crude stone dome. She felt the tears well up. Tell me what you are, she repeated.

  You have guessed, he said. I am a pilgrim from House Dlardrageth in Cormanthor. You guessed that much. I took refuge in Alaron.

  In the indirect light she couldn t see the scales on the surface of his skin, so fine and delicate they were.

  My mother died in childbirth, because of what I was. He broke off. She didn t look at him. Then:

  Free me. She could hear the clank of the chain as he shook it in frustration. Free her, at least. You would have died, strung up in the roof of Malar s tomb. Didn t you see the other skeletons, the sacrifices, hanging up there above the altar stones? A hundred years of uselessness. But it was the angel whom Malar wanted. That was a sacrifice worthy of him. That was blood worth spilling, and it was I who spilled it. Now we are quits. The girl has done nothing wrong.

  The gods don t care about right and wrong, said Marikke, remembering what Chauntea, the most generous of all of them, had told her in the cave. Only men and women care.

  That s your excuse, now? His voice came tortured, slow. And isn t that what you are? A woman?

  But she was thinking about the daemonfey and his relations with the wives and daughters of the rich men of Alaron. Before, she had been disgusted to hear of these liaisons, had thought of them as predatory, compulsive, and immoral, evidence of the deep scorn that the fey, in their hearts core, always felt for human beings. But now she realized there was something worse, that the Savage had betrayed these women, put their lives in danger for what reason? A mix of carelessness and aggression. How many of them now had fiends or half fiends growing under their hearts, ready to slice out through their wombs, as the Savage had murdered his own mother? Tears in her eyes, she left him and crawled out though the mouth of the barrow into the open day.

  In pain, the Savage tried to shift his body. His hands were manacled in front of him, the chain looped around the druid s body. Moving, he disturbed her and she moaned a little. Looking down, he saw her eyes were open.

  What did your father do to you? she whispered.

  He found he didn t want to tell her. Chained to her, his weight partially on top of her, he was suddenly embarrassed. My father was in prison for a long time, he said. Then he was set free. This was in Ascalhorn, near the high forest. He was a warrior, scion of a noble house. A royal house. He fought against the armies of Seiveril Miritar. But he was defeated and driven from his family s ancient citadel. His cousins were gathering for another assault. But he had lost his heart, and he didn t want to fight anymore.

  In fact he d scarcely known his father. He didn t know why his father had done the things he d done. He knew he had fought with Sarya Dlardrageth in the great war. Then he was gone to the Sword Coast, to Baldur s Gate, where he lived secretly. Whether he d been banished or had run away, the Savage never knew.

  And what did he do to you?

  How could he have lived among humans, the Savage thought, unless he had done to himself what he had done to his only child, maimed himself, thrown away his own power? But the Savage didn t know anything about that, or about the person who had been his mother. He had been raised by servants, trained in the warrior s way. He found he didn t want to talk about it.

  But he felt the druid s hands move over his back and down his spine. Marikke had made no effort to be gentle, and had hurt him and healed him at the same time. But these hands were different, tentative and soft. He imagined Eleuthra was trying to comfort him. But the pressure of her fingers caused a pain that was not physical.

  I hate the fey, she said, close to his ear.

  I ve always hated them. So I hate you, even though you didn t fight like one of them. You fought like one of us.

  Almost like a man, she explained, and she touched him lower down. Gwynneth Island was a paradise until your people came.

  This corresponded to no reading of history that the Savage had ever heard. Before the fey had come to Myrloch, the people of the island had slaved in penury, scratching out a living so the House of Kendrick could live in splendor, as they still did in Alaron. Northlanders and Ffolk had squabbled over trifles, constantly at war, hacking each other to pieces in their stony glens.

  But whatever. He felt her fingers on his leg. And he imagined the two women, Marikke and the druid, between them were bringing back his strength, making him whole. Grateful, he turned toward her, and found her staring up at him with blue-black eyes.

  There s something here, she said.

  Something old. She wrinkled her nose. The stink from your body masks it. Makes it hard to find. She stuck out her long tongue. You don t think these chains can hold me? she asked. Nothing can. Because it disgusts me to touch you. To be so close to you. Don t look at me. Don t move.

  He closed his eyes. He could hear her breath, smell it, feel it on his face. That was how he became aware of her transformation, the sweet smell of her turning rank and acrid as she turned. He felt the wolf hide that had covered them retract across his body. Once, in Callidyrr, he had shared the bed of a rich merchant s wife, and as she slept she had pulled the blanket from him inch by inch, leaving him exposed and prickling with cold, as now. She had known what he was. Anyone who d seen him naked could not help but know.

  But now the beast was struggling against him, scratching with her claws, frustrated by the bonds meant to hold a human woman. The wolf struggled free.

  The lycanthropes were insufficient at anything that required care or sustained attention. Chaining people up, guarding prisoners, imagining contingencies, were not their strengths. Marikke could easily have predicted the druid would transform herself. That she did not take precautions, the Savage thought, reflected her ambivalence. And perhaps Kip didn t care if he went free. In a good hunt, the quarry needed time to run and hide. The longer the time, the more uncertain the outcome, the richer the sacrament, the happier the kill.

  Go, he said.

  She stood above him now, her great paws on his chest, and she bent down to lick his face. Her breath was thick and foul. Tentative as a woman, weak from loss of blood, she seemed stronger as a beast. Sh
e yawned, and shook her heavy shoulders, hurting him.

  Go, he repeated.

  But she leaned down and took the chain between her teeth. She worried it, and dragged his hands forward until he saw the manacles were loose around his wrists. The rusted ironwork had come loose when she freed herself. She pulled him forward, and where Marikke had sat he saw a knife on the ground, a knife of hammered steel with a blade like a beech leaf. The healer must have dropped it. The blade was strong enough to break apart the rusted links.

  The wolf was sniffing around the base of one of the stone caskets when he sat up. Aching, he rubbed his hands. She d climbed up on her hind legs, pressing at the lid of the casket, scratching at the seal. Wearily, he got to his feet and looked where she wanted. The stone lid came to a peaked ridge in the center and was carved with geometric designs. He thumped on it a few times, wondering why she was interested. Whimpering, she made him continue, obliged him to put his strength against the stone, which yielded a little bit.

  The wolf licked at the seal, an indented circle in the lid s end. Unwolflike, she pressed the pads of both her paws into the carved circle, bracing herself with her hind legs. The lid yielded inch by inch until a black gap appeared, thick with dusty webs. Unconvinced, the Savage paused, because he could not guess what kind of disease or charm might lurk inside this box, now disturbed, perhaps, for the first time. The lycanthropes would have had no interest. And perhaps the Northlanders who had once lived in this part of the mountains had known something he didn t know, enough to keep away from here.

  As for the druid, why hadn t she said something about this? Maybe the wolf wanted something the woman didn t want, was afraid even to ask for. Now she dipped her paw into the gap and hooked up a wad of cobwebbed filth while the Savage peered in, looking for movement.

  There was none. The light shifted, and he found himself staring down into a nest of bones. The casket had no bottom, was just a stone frame laid over the uneven ground. And he suspected immediately that he was looking down into the lair of some strange animal or worm, and that the webs Eleuthra had broken through did not belong to anything so ordinary as a spider. But in the chalky, churned-up earth he could see a dark hole leading down, a burrow or a sett with entrances and exits in some other place. The hole was lined with filth, and the air was foul and rank. When he bent over the casket he could taste it in his mouth. Lukas could recognize any animal by just its smell, but the Savage had never been a hunter. He had a high stomach and was easily disgusted. The servants who had raised him in Baldur s Gate had kept bees. He had often seen them slide the lids away, and now this casket seemed to him a nightmare version of a beehive. He wondered why the druid was so insistent, why even now she was yelping and whining, still up on her hind legs, and why he himself was fascinated, as if, like an augur, he was trying to decipher the meaning of the bleached, gnawed rubble of bones that filled up the majority of the stone casket, the bones of many animals mixed together.

  But there was something else. The light shifted again. The Savage, now that he was not bothering to alter, for appearance s sake, the pupils of his eyes, was able to see better even in murky darkness. He caught a glimpse of something shining there in the litter of bones at the hole s mouth. He loved gold, not just for the sake of the luxuries you could buy with it, but for its own soft, heavy, lustrous sake. He had always had gold. His father had left him gold, but now the lycanthropes had stolen it not just the bag of thalers under his armpit, but his personal trinkets also. Why would Eleuthra change her mind about him if he could only stand before her bare-chested and unadorned, like a beggar or a slave? No wonder she hated him. Perhaps she understood this, which was why she whimpered with her ears pulled back, and scratched at the stones.

  He expanded the demon centers to his eyes, opened the red slits. Knowing the risk to be unacceptable, yet goaded by his own cupidity and the whimpering expectations of the wolf, he leaned over the casket and plunged his arm over the side, while at the same time the dry bones under his hand erupted into movement and the dragon flew up a creature the size of a house cat, who fixed his jaws into the Savage s wrist. Another one ascended into the low dome, flapping its scaly wings around his head as he pulled back, before it found the long, low entrance to the barrow and disappeared.

  But the Savage had grabbed hold of the treasure and wouldn t let it go, a circlet of gold, and more gold glinted underneath. Lips curled in disgust, he held up his wrist with the creature suspended from it, wings momentarily still. The wolf ripped and snapped at it until it also fluttered up into the dome. Hissing, spitting venom, it dived at the Savage s eyes and ripped at his naked shoulders when he ducked his head. Then it also was gone out of the tunnel s mouth.

  Happy now? the Savage snarled.

  The Moonshaes were full of stunted, miniature versions of fell species from the mainland. These dragons had ripped the skin loose from his forearm. He leaned into the casket again and pulled out a shred of silken winding cloth, rainbow patterned, faded, yet curiously intact. The reptiles had built their nest in an old tomb, and though they had added to the pile of bones over the years, the Savage could distinguish the remains of the original occupant. Cursing, he bound his forearm in the winding cloth, wondering where Marikke had gone to. The bitch had betrayed him, but maybe he needed her now, her healing arts.

  Satisfied? he spat out, even though it was obvious the wolf was no such thing. She was still on her hind legs, scratching at the casket s stone lid, until he reached down and brought up the other objects in the trove, a mixture, he thought, of a king s funeral regalia and whatever treasure the dragons had been able to amass gold coins, rings, and jewels. And a long steel sword, wrapped in rotting cloth. He snatched the circlet from the bone temples of the king s enormous and distorted skull. When he raised it up over his own head, it dropped down immediately around his neck.

  There was a small part of his heart that was overjoyed with the sight of these treasures, whatever the cost or consequences, whatever his predicament. He had felt naked these past hours since the lycanthropes had stripped his gold away, more naked than the loss of his shirt had made him feel. A ring, made for the littlest of the king s eight fingers, a vestigial spur of unjointed bone, fitted on his thumb. Another ring, ornamented with geometric patterns, he could use to gather his yellow hair behind the nape of his neck.

  He filled the pockets of his trousers. There were jewels, too, some cut and faceted, some not. One of them, a smooth sphere, gleamed like a demon s eye.

  He looked at the druid, who cocked her head. What? he said, this is what you want, isn t it?

  But she was still anxious and unhappy, until he reached down for the king s thighbone. She had lost her own totem stick, and perhaps this would help her, he thought. And as soon as she had it in her jaws, she dropped to her four paws and ran out through the burrow s entrance in the light of the setting sun.

  Marikke watched her from the door of a ruined building. She had seen the dragons fly up into the amber light a few minutes before. Now she watched the wolf stop and lower her muzzle to the ground, the bone in her jaws, a raised ridge of hair between her shoulder blades as she picked through the piles of lycanthropes in their most bestial shapes, asleep or else regarding her blearily, having forgotten what they were there for, or what it meant to be a prisoner. The Beastlord, after all, had given them no commands, and Marikke s had been ambiguous. She watched the wolf lope down one of the streets of the ruined town.

  After a few more minutes she watched the Savage staggering after, the king s sword awkwardly perched under his arm. He held his bandaged arm. His shoulders, too, were scratched and bleeding.

  She watched them disappear among the rocks. Then, raising her head high, combing her hair back from her face between her fingers, she walked back to the stone porch below the mountain. Once there, she turned again into the sunset, sniffing the air, admiring the light. The torches flared behind her in the tunnel s entrance, and all the twisting way down to the Beastlord s lair. She ma
de her prayers as she descended, murmuring the names of the Earthmother not in supplication but in farewell. Since her last encounter with the goddess, she had decided to put her faith in the hearts of mortal creatures. Because how was it possible to know the truth? Perhaps we fool ourselves by worshiping Chauntea and despising Malar, and Talos, and Bane, and Asmodeus, the entire pantheon of blood and evil fury. Chauntea is generous and loving, we might tell ourselves, the source of all good things. But if there was only one god with many aspects, and if her purposes could not be understood by mortal creatures, any more than a dog could hope to understand Marikke, then it was best to trust in people after all. Why would Chauntea permit Malar to roam free?

  No, she would put her trust in Kip, the shifter boy who loved her, because she had saved him from starvation and death, and given him a home in the world. Surely there was enough of him left inside his own body and his own heart for him to remember her, perhaps to pardon her. She would not run with the others. Knowing her as he did, the Beastlord would find her in an hour. There would be no High Hunt for her.

  Now she was in the slimy, agate-floored cavern once again. The torches burned up bright. Kip sat on the surface of his table, and he turned his calico head and smiled as she approached. Her heart rose up to see him smile.

  Did you do what I asked? he said, his voice light and musical, just as she remembered. Surely there was something of him left.

  He had the black kitten on his lap, and he played with it.

  Oh, Kip, she said at once. Forgive me. I was preparing for the hunt. I had them all locked up in one of those old crypts on the mountain. But the chains were all rusted and they broke free. We ll have to go quick. But the trail is clear.

  A pucker appeared between the boy s clear brows. Hunt? There s no hunt. That s not what I asked.

  What do you mean? I didn t understand