In her mind she prayed to Chauntea without ceasing, begging her to reduce the pain in her wrists and strip away the living tissue also, reduce her proud flesh. This was a piece of ritual abasement with a metaphorical meaning. Tonight, Marikke meant it in cold seriousness—smaller, made little, she could slide herself free from the intolerable manacles, the intolerable pain in her shoulders as she swung and dangled back and forth. “Free me from the bonds of care,” she prayed, meaning the words literally for the first time in her life—a tiny slip, her wrists greased with sweat.
Below her she could see the Savage’s demonic form rise to the surface of his skin, as his eyes took on an unholy reddish flush, as his pupils narrowed into vertical slits.
Marikke prayed:
Earthmother, let my outward form reflect my inner misery. Squeeze me of excess. Make me little, as I have no desire to be great.
The sweat dripped from her fingers. In a moment, in her despair, she found herself sufficiently diminished to feel the grip of her iron bonds soften for an instant—Chauntea had heard her. Below, the Savage struggled with the angel. The red sword rang against the white one, and the air trembled with the force of the electric charge. Momentarily revealed, the golden elf’s fiendish nature was now obscured in the storm of battle, which had taken on an elemental quality. Under her, a devil raised his sword against an angel of vengeance, and which side was she on? The devil, the daemonfey, surely he fought for her, to free her and Kip from their imprisonment on the altar of the Beastlord. Surely he had climbed down this winding tunnel to release her from the pit of death, swung his blade against the army of her enemies, whose smoking and disemboweled corpses lay around him—the rest of the lycanthropes had pulled back against the walls to watch the red sword press against the white one. Marikke could see their eyes shining in the circles of conflicting light, and some of the awestruck lycanthropes had laid their heads down on their paws.
How could the Savage have hid himself from her for so long and so successfully? With what intolerable and astonishing effort of will had he kept that cast of red out of his green eyes, kept that pretty elf delicacy in his hands and movement? Even when he was asleep his fingers had not relaxed into claws, and spines of bone had not protruded from his skin—she had seen him aboard the Sphinx, wrapped in slumber and his black robe. Even now, when the angel’s wings shone above him, an effect more of light and shadow than of flesh, there was no trace of competing bat wings, no sign of a scaly or barbed tail protruding from his trousers. Was it possible she was mistaken? No, but she had seen his demon’s eyes when the light of the angel’s sword crossed his face, and she had recognized in his terrible beauty the wide forehead and high cheekbones of House Dlardrageth itself. And surely it was no ordinary elf that could press Malar’s avenging angel down against the stone table, hammering and pounding the red sword against the white.
Her hands aching, her arms insensible, Marikke prayed:
Great Mother, help me to choose wisely—
Better yet, you make the choice.
Finally it was as if the goddess had acquiesced, had bowed her head, and Marikke’s tightly folded palms slipped through the manacles, and she was falling, just at the moment when Argon Bael parried the red sword and flung it upward in a last desperate attempt. The Savage staggered back, his sword point flailing wide. But before the angel could leap on his advantage, Marikke had tumbled onto his back. She felt the burning, shining skin. She had fallen perhaps twenty feet onto his back, which was enough to knock him to his knees, while at the same time she heard the goddess’s voice—the same impertinent little girl whom she had seen in her distorted recollection of the guildhall in Callidyrr, as if through a shard of broken glass, a little girl in a green dress who spoke into her ear as she rolled, stunned, from the angel’s back and slid down to the floor: “Malar doesn’t need him.”
The Savage stood above them. The red blade hammered home. The white one flickered and went out. Extinguished suddenly, it left the cavern rinsed in darkness, except for the guttering red flame along the blade of the demon elf. The torches were all out. Some of the lycanthropes were whimpering, other screaming softly in the sweating air. Marikke rolled onto her side.
She had fallen away from the table and lay on the greasy floor. Her arms were hot and numb. Raising her head, she saw a glow on the stone tabletop, a sphere of radiance. She imagined the black bulk of the unconscious god, and Kip’s discarded body, while at the same time she listened to the voice in her ear, the muddy little urchin from the slums of Alaron.
“Good and bad, evil and kind,” the girl lectured primly. “They’re just words in the Common tongue. Maybe they mean something to you. But I can’t be described that way. I am bigger than you can imagine. We all are—we that you call gods. If we create, then we destroy. If we destroy, then we create. Look—Great Malar lives.”
Marikke didn’t turn her head. Instead she saw clearly in her mind’s eye the little girl with her tangled hair, freckled face, chapped lips, snot-caked nose, stained teeth. At the same time she was looking at the daemonfey who leaned wearily upon his sword above the body of his defeated enemy. His face was lit with a reflected radiance. He bowed his head, then lifted one hand as if in supplication.
All around the table, the lycanthropes had pressed their cheeks against the agate tiles of the cavern floor. Tense and immobile at the same time, they showed in their various postures the submissive urgency of beasts. From time to time Marikke could hear a little whimper of excitement, quickly suppressed. Something was rising from the surface of the stone tabletop. She had seen images of Malar in the pantheon of gods, an enormous panther with red eyes, and claws as long as swords. But Marikke, as she turned her head, already knew she wouldn’t see anything like that. Instead she saw Kip, the little cat-shifter, standing with his legs apart, his flesh transfigured as if lit from within, a tiny smile on his lips, and a black kitten struggling in his hands.
THE CLIMBING ROSE
IN THE OLD HUMAN CAPITAL OF CAER MORAY, LUKAS moved among the beasts. During the battle on the ridgetop an orc had cut him in the side and broken three ribs. His life had never been in danger, and he was healing. The previous night he had slept on an actual straw mattress on an actual bed, and in the afternoon he toured the battlements.
He leaned forward on his elbows on the old stones, looking out over the sea of Moonshae with its white-capped waves. A fresh wind blew from the north. Lady Amaranth stood beside him, dressed in a gray wool cape—the day was pretty, though the air was cold. In places, arrows of sunlight split the clouds and struck the dark water underneath, making it tremble and glisten.
“Thank you,” said Lukas, finally. “You saved our lives, my friend and me.”
“Captain, we have you to thank. Without you, we would have come too late. Those women would have died.”
She meant the Northlanders. The orcs had raided and burned a settlement along the coast, poor fishermen and crofters growing potatoes in the stony soil. They had killed the men and children, and stolen the women. Idly, briefly, Lukas wondered if it was merciful to salvage the lives of people who had lost so much. But life is always precious and the mind can heal. He knew this from experience. Besides, it didn’t matter. Stupid evil—like those orcs—must always be confronted and attacked if the world was to continue turning.
Amaranth glanced at him. “You must forgive me,” she said, “if I don’t know what to say. I have lived for a long time alone among my people, separate from my own kind. And I thought there were things I understood. You are a … man, isn’t that so? A human male?”
“Last I checked.”
She did not smile. “I determined this as I was tending you, the night before last. It came as a surprise. You must forgive me, but my life has been … sheltered in some ways, and there is much I do not understand. I must ask you—why did you attack those creatures at such risk to yourselves?”
“The orcs? I hate them.”
She nodded as if satisfied. “It wa
s from hatred. And if you had chased them away, despite the odds, and found those women still alive, what would you have done?”
Lukas shrugged. “I hadn’t gotten that far.”
“Because you were blind from hatred. I see that. So you would have taken them for yourselves. Mated with them.”
Startled, Lukas turned to face her. “I don’t think you understand. These women, they aren’t my concern. I was glad to help them. But I have friends who are in danger, and I blame myself. I was stupid to bring them to this island, stupid not to follow them, stupid to have lost them. Even now, if I felt I could run, and if my friend wasn’t so hurt, I would be after them.”
Amaranth looked puzzled. Her brow furrowed, and she rubbed her nose. “Your friend—I think I am the stupid one,” she said. “If you didn’t want the women, why did you attack the orcs? Oh, blind hatred, I think you said …”
Like all eladrin she was beautiful, an impossible, mournful beauty. Because they lived so long, even young they had no springtime in them, no sense of freshness or urgency. When Lukas was an old man she would look like this. For hundreds of years after his death, she would look like this, her skin clean as paper, her red hair blowing around her face. A leShay, or half a leShay, there was no telling how long she’d live. What would it feel like to be at the beginning of such a journey?
“I ask you,” she said, “because it’s hard not to imagine from what you say, that these instincts that drive you are in some way … valuable. Friendship. Loyalty. Sacrifice. Even guilt and self-doubt. And yet you are a … man.”
Suddenly bored, Lukas turned away. “Stick to the blind hatred,” he murmured. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I want to see someone.” He had left Gaspar-shen at noon, his head bound up, asleep.
“But I do not excuse you,” said Lady Amaranth. “You do not have my permission to leave me.”
She had turned around with him, and now they stood with their backs to the sea, looking down over one of the courtyards toward the base of the ruined keep. Below them the lycanthropes worked among the tumbled stones, sorting them and shaping them. As far as Lukas could tell, the curtain walls were complete. But these interiors needed some work. Caer Moray had been sacked during the Spellplague, and then abandoned for a hundred years.
Amaranth made a delicate gesture with her fingers. “These are my … people,” she said. “We keep no male animals inside the gates, no bulls or rams. Instead we have … ewes, and mares, and bitches. Lots of bitches,” she murmured, and Lukas studied her face, to see if she was aware that what she said might be considered funny—that Suka, for example, would have laughed. But there was no hint of humor in her face. In a moment, Lukas found his heart go out to her, because how could it be otherwise? For ten years, since she was nine years old, she had lived on Moray Island, alone among the humorless beasts.
She had told him some of the story the first night, as they descended through the thick woods toward the coast. And of course Lady Ordalf, her sister, had already given him the bones of it in Corwell; how traitors had stolen her away and packed her onto a hippogriff somewhere in the highlands above Myrloch Vale; how the hippogriff’s rider, wounded, had taken her off course and fallen into the sea; how she had come to Moray, alone and defenseless. Even the first night after the battle, walking along the forest path in the rain, suffering with his shattered ribs and bleeding side, leaning on a broken spear, Lukas had regretted the judgments he had come to earlier, when he had imagined some kind of collusion between the sisters—it was not like that. If this girl had been lonely in her isolation here, at least she had not been ruined by the fey.
The lycanthropes had wooden stretchers that they used to carry the genasi and the women they had rescued from the orcs. Tireless, they had hurried on ahead, while Lukas and Amaranth stumbled behind. As they came down the long, winding paths through the wet trees, as finally they could see the lights of Caer Moray in the distance, the eladrin told him what she had discovered or concluded. “She saved my life. Mistress Valeanne. She and the dragonborn, and those riders, they gave their lives to save me. Since then I have brooded on the source of the danger—who it was that was trying to kill me, a nine-year-old child. Who would send a company of drow from Myrloch Vale? Surely such a thing could not have happened without the permission or consent of the leShays—my sister or perhaps Prince Araithe, her son? But perhaps there is something I don’t understand. If I could see them again, or talk to them, then I would ask them face to face.”
Lightning flashed above them. Rain dripped down her neck. She had bound her red hair underneath her leather cap. Earlier that night, as he felt her fingers probing his side, examining his ribs, Lukas had rejected the idea that he would ever do her harm, return her dead or living to her sister’s mercy, whatever the consequences—the girl had saved his life.
Now, at Caer Moray, looking down from the walls over the courtyard, Lukas said, “I want Gaspar-shen to see me when he wakes up. I don’t want him to be alone.”
Amaranth smiled, a wistful expression on his face. “Yet I have been alone all this time,” she said. “No friends. You are friends with this creature, is it not so?”
He shrugged. Many things sound stupid when you say them out loud.
“And what is he … a genasi, is that what you said? From far away?”
“From the deserts of Calimshan. And yet he has a water-soul, from Abeir. Always he was looking for the sea. The Moonshaes were more welcoming than home.”
“And … how did you meet?”
“In Alaron. I had a boat called the Sphinx. We ran cargo between Callidyrr and Snowdown, for the Amnians.”
“Yet he has a different nature than yourself.”
“We manage.”
He stared at her, fascinated. He knew what she was asking. He wondered how she would phrase it. “We also have a different nature,” she said. “You and me.”
“Is that because I am a human being?” he asked. “Or because I am a man?”
And then immediately he felt bad, when he saw the hopelessness in her face—he wasn’t used to these concessions from the fey. Lady Ordalf wouldn’t have considered asking him for friendship, any more than she’d have considered asking a fruit fly or a caterpillar or a bee. But then he had to remind himself that this girl was only nineteen years old, younger than he was, and that she’d led a life that made her simultaneously more innocent and more mature—descending to this island like a blazing star, a child alighting from the back of a hippogriff amid a circle of worshiping lycanthropes. Would he have survived as well, if he were nine years old?
“If you are a sailor,” she faltered, “perhaps then you could bring me home. My sister …”
She stopped, unable to continue. Because this desire was so different from the one she had previously expressed, it must be, Lukas thought, a sign of terrible desperation—she must know and must be told, he thought, that there was no home for her on Gwynneth Island as long as Lady Ordalf was alive.
And so he told her that the Sphinx was at the bottom of Kork Bay. And he told her why he had come to Moray Island. He told her about Suka, a prisoner in Caer Corwell, and he found some comfort in telling her, because the little gnome was never distant from his thoughts.
He stopped when he saw the tears on her cheeks. “And is my sister … well?” she asked.
For an answer he left her. He limped along the battlements, a pain in his side. It hurt to breathe. When he reached the signal tower he ducked his head inside, then climbed the wooden stairs down to the genasi’s room.
He was being tended by one of the bitches, as Amaranth had called them, a soft-faced, long-eyed young woman with a ridge of fur combed back into her homespun cowl. She carried an empty chamber pot. “When can we leave?” Lukas asked, but she said nothing. Not all of them could talk.
Gaspar-shen lay immobile, his head bandaged and his eyes shut. But Lukas could tell he was awake—he didn’t sleep much, and when he did, he dived down deep into the bottom of the soundless sea.
The energy lines that ran over his body throbbed and burned and took on a distinctive amber hue, made a circling pattern over his greenish skin. Today he was very pale.
Lukas sat down on a stool by his head. These artifacts—the stool, the bed, the curtains in the window—were cunning and well made in a workshop of quick-fingered lycanthropes. Amaranth had shown it to him earlier, set up in the keep’s enormous banquet hall, a bewildering assortment of spinning wheels, belching forges, and turning lathes, manned—that wasn’t the right word, Lukas thought—in shifts.
He touched his friend’s right shoulder and felt the tiny electric hum. Lukas was frustrated and out of sorts, consumed with regret. If only he hadn’t consented to Lord Aldon Kendrick’s wild goose chase. The procurator on Alaron must have recognized his desperation and recklessness—a crew of losers whom nobody would miss.
And when Lady Ordalf betrayed them to the lycanthropes, if only he had managed to keep the crew together. Now they were spread over the island of Moray, with only the golden elf’s sword to protect Marikke and the boy. And if only he had not allowed himself to be distracted by the orcs. Then Gaspar-shen would not be lying here, and he would be days closer to rectifying all this.
The Rose of Sarifal Page 10
