Gaspar-shen’s tiny lips were incapable of smiling. But the energy lines under his skin glowed in unusual colors—peach and cherry-red—when he was talking horseshit, like now. No one knew what kind of government they had in Chasolné. The town was just a word, too far away to have a meaning.
“In order to travel there,” the genasi murmured, “it would be best to have a boat.”
“Yes,” sighed Lukas. “It would be best to have a boat.”
“In Chasolné there was a process in which a piece of hollow chocolate or else sometimes in other recipes a piece of wood was set on fire and then entirely submerged in brine. In both cases it is called a ‘Sphinx.’ ”
“It sounds delicious.”
“It is not. No one thinks so. Especially not me.” And then after a moment: “This wave that came last night was a beautiful thing. A very, very beautiful thing. Now it is gone.”
In the years Lukas had known him, this was as close as his friend had come to a reproach. “We will find the others,” Lukas said. “Then we will return to Gwynneth Island, to Caer Corwell.” Like many people who take on the role of leader, he was at his most definitive when he was most unsure.
“And … the Lady Amaranth?” said Gaspar-shen.
A voice came from behind them: “What about her?” The lady, hair still wet and disheveled, was climbing down a slope of gravel from the keep, surrounded by a pack of wolves. She smiled at Gaspar-shen, but didn’t even glance at Captain Lukas, perched on the fallen chunk of cornice. “These are my sisters,” she explained. “Daughters of the great Deucala, who took me in when I was starving—and my brother also.” She indicated a burly, reddish male, who slunk down to lift his leg against the stone gatepost. “For years he’s been living beyond our walls, bringing news to us.” Now that her kingdom was destroyed, she sounded more like a queen or a ruler than she had before. “This is Lightfoot and this is Bay,” she said, introducing two of the four females. They all looked identical to Lukas, especially when they snarled at him in greeting, and raised the frosted hackles between their shoulder blades.
“Captain,” Amaranth continued, “I wanted to thank you for your bravery first of all.” She stared at Gaspar-shen as she said this, while Lukas examined the soil between his boots. Still he was aware of the play of colors through his friend’s energy lines, the plum color that suggested his discomfort.
“I have spoken to the wolves,” said Amaranth. “I told them about something I saw last night in the middle of the earthquake when the walls came down. I saw someone who told me something—I will go with you to Karador. That’s where I was young, and as the youngest of my family, I have a power there. I will speak to my half sister, and she will release your friend from prison as she promised you. I do not believe she would ever harm me, and my sister’s son will also welcome me home. If it is necessary, he will intercede, if for some reason I cannot understand I have offended her. He was kind to me when I was young, when he would put me on his knee and kiss me, and tell me that he loved me. And I would play with his gray hair, and marvel that he was my nephew. But surely that will give me power over him, the power to do good. I believe my country needs me to make peace—a final peace between the Ffolk, the Northlanders, and the fey. Nor can I accomplish that from here, where I have become an irritant. Captain, I am at your service, and I will help you if you help me. With my sister and my nephew I have a bond of blood that cannot be broken, and I will reward you—all of you.”
All this was to Gaspar-shen. “How much?” he said, which Lukas thought was a kind of a joke, though it was hard to tell. If he was right, then it was a joke that flew straight over Lady Amaranth, who looked up at the genasi, after her bold and noble peroration, with a confused expression on her face.
“I want my friend to negotiate for me,” Lukas said. After the carnage and uncertainty of the night before, the day had turned out bright, a warm sun and a blue sky streaked with horse-tail clouds. He looked up at Amaranth, wondering briefly if he should have stood when she approached, and that was why she wouldn’t talk to him—a breach of protocol. But he was tired and filthy, and he hadn’t slept. He had laid his sword upright against the stones, and he reached for it as he rose to his feet. The wolves sniffed at him and growled. Amaranth didn’t look at him. She glanced away and blushed. Because her skin was so pale, he could see the color move over her cheeks.
“I’m depending on you,” she murmured, which touched him.
Later, when he’d made his preparations to depart, he knocked on the door of her room in the old keep, where she was talking to the wolves. At Caer Moray he had seen many lycanthropes whose human guise and form might have been close enough to fool him if the light were bad, or if he hadn’t been paying attention, or if he hadn’t already known the truth. Performing human tasks, huddled in their homespun clothes—these wolves weren’t like that. They had made no effort to be something they were not. For one thing, they were naked, covered with hair, and their body language, also, was more bestial than human, the way they scratched themselves, sniffed and licked at each other, wrinkled their noses, and bared their gleaming teeth. Lukas wondered if they knew how to sweat, because their mouths were always open, their tongues extended, their lips damp.
Even when the genasi wasn’t with him, at first it was hard for Amaranth to look at him. Lukas assumed this was because of what had happened on the ramparts when Malar the Beastlord hammered on the gate. He resolved not to speak of it, even though it was hard to see her without remembering that he had touched her, kissed her on her eyes and cheeks and lips, not long ago. But he was sure that Bay and Lightfoot and the rest would rip him into little pieces if he mentioned anything like that. He wondered if they could even smell his thoughts on the subject, the suspicious way they looked at him and licked their teeth.
“Lady,” he said, “I will do what you request. But I must ask you to consider: You have two families of wolves, but these are like lambs compared to your family on Gwynneth Island.”
At these words the lycanthropes surrounded him in a rough circle. One of them, the largest female, had stared at her until she dropped her eyes.
“You escaped here with your life,” he said. “Nothing has changed in ten years. I will return to Caer Corwell for my friend’s sake. But after that I could take you somewhere else, to Alaron, perhaps.”
She looked at him for the first time that day, in the light. “The fey must go where the fey are wanted,” she said. “Where they are … tolerated. You are not the only one who has a duty to perform.”
She glanced out the window and continued, “I will leave this place to the daughters of Deucala. But Coal will come with us.” She indicated the male lycanthrope who squatted in a corner of the room. “Our way is neither land nor sea nor air. Captain, I understand we must search for your friends first of all. I know you are loyal to your friends—I honor that. Captain—” she looked back at him from the window, a streak of light across her face—“will you be my friend?”
“You were the one who told me about these things,” the Savage said. He held the ruby in his palm. “Now you blame me for taking them.”
“You’re a liar.”
But it was true. It was the wolf who had gone up on her hind legs to push the stone lid from the sarcophagus. But maybe the druid in her human shape couldn’t remember what the wolf had thought or done. Maybe she moved back and forth between two separate consciousnesses. Or else maybe that was what she pretended, for reasons of her own. Maybe even her hatred of him was a pretense. What had he done, that she should hate him so? He’d saved her life, after all. Maybe that’s what she couldn’t forgive.
Or else maybe it was in her nature to hate him for himself, regardless of what he said or did, the same way that it was in his nature to care for her, not for any reason. She stood above him with the sunlight behind her head, her body poised as if to leap at him, to strike him or else scratch him with her nails. She raised the king’s thighbone onto her shoulder. It was carved and i
ncised with letters, but also broken and gnawed, as if in her wolf’s shape she had cracked it to suck out the ancient marrow. Her dark hair, blue eyes, chapped lips and cheeks. He squeezed the ruby in his palm and felt the thrill of it, felt also the heaviness of the gold circlet around his neck, the throbbing in his forearm where the dragon had bit him. His head ached, and he felt sick, lovesick, he thought—he hadn’t felt this way for many, many years. He had forgotten the sensation, the feeling of being separate from yourself, the feeling also of being simultaneously powerful and weak, clever and stupid, good and bad. Best of all, there was no reason to hide himself from this woman. He could be himself, because she knew the worst about him. Perhaps soon he would tell her his real name.
“What do you see?” he asked.
She glowered down at him. “They are preparing for the hunt. The dogs go first and then the pigs. The rest will follow. Malar the Beastlord …”
As she spoke, the Savage found himself not so much listening to her as watching the scene that she described as if through her eyes. Or as if the world around him—the rocks, the dry ravine, the little fire of twigs, the gorse bushes, the mossy freshet with a single trickle of water—all had disappeared, or else receded into the background of something else, a vision that lingered halfway between reality and illusion, like painted images on a transparent screen—images that moved.
He saw the boy Kip standing erect between two collapsed stone pillars, the black kitten in his hands. He raised it up above the pack, who swerved and turned around his boots. The little shifter grinned and licked his lips, his animal nature evident in his hooked nails and wicked teeth, more evident than the Savage had ever seen. And his hair, which previously had ranged from white to calico, depending on his mood, was dark now, black as the kitten who hung suspended from its nape. With a sudden gesture he dashed it onto the rocks so that it disappeared into the swirl of beasts—it was so vivid, the Savage cried out.
But this was surely what love was, this ability to communicate, to see something through your beloved’s senses. How long had it been since he’d felt this way? Forty, fifty years? When Eleuthra’s mother was a little girl, perhaps, he had known someone in Baldur’s Gate, a girl with squinting eyes whose face he could now scarcely bring to mind. But he had felt … in tune with her, in harmony. Like now.
He replaced the jewel in his pocket. “I’m the one he’s searching for,” he said, getting to his feet, rubbing the grease from his hands, the squirrel queasy in his stomach. “You could go free. Run away to safety under his nose. North of here. Down to the coast.” In her beast’s shape, he thought. And he would let her go, because he loved her.
She wrinkled her nose. “I want to be there for the kill,” she said. “When the dogs rip you apart.”
He shuddered, and a thrill went through him. She didn’t mean it. How could she mean it? The night before she had curled up next to him, and he’d felt the warmth of her hairy body. When he woke in the middle of the night, he’d found new scratches on his shoulders and his ribs.
“You ought to save yourself,” he persisted. “Run down to the Northlander villages. They will take you in.”
She looked at him as if he were insane. “I’ll stay with you,” she said. “They’ll track you with my scent.”
What was this buzzing in his head? Was this love? It had been so long. These human women had so much juice in them. Not like the long-lived fey. When she was close to him he felt the heat rise from her body, invigorating him, making him crazy. Now she came down from the boulders above him and stood in front of him, close enough so he could feel her breath and smell her smell, which even in this body had the partial stink of a wild animal. She reached out and touched him underneath his arm, the angry cicatrices where the doctors had maimed him, and yet left traces of his nature that could not ever be expunged. If he were a man, a human creature like her, a Ffolk warrior, or else a rich man in Caer Callidyrr, would she love him then? The Savage didn’t think so.
“I’ll follow you,” she sneered.
Where? But he knew. And he imagined she must know too, that her reluctance or ignorance was for show, because if he had a vision of the place and a sense of how to get there, where could it come from, if not from her? He was a stranger here. But she had run through every forest dale and mountain valley on Moray Island, or else seen them from the air through some druidic process he didn’t understand. But now, in his mind’s eye, he could see a place, a pool of water in a narrow wood, a grove of beech trees with silver trunks and copper-colored leaves turning over all at once as the wind caught them. And there was something in the water, a reflection that was different from the pattern of branches that spread over the surface, perhaps because of the soft breeze, or perhaps because there was something submerged there, some relic or portal of a simpler time before the Spellplague had altered the secret pathways of the world.
Had he dreamed about the place? If so, had the dream come from her, because she had slept with her head against his breast? In the middle of the night she had regained her human shape, and he had embraced her, and she had resisted after her own fashion, and then stopped resisting, and then scratched him on his shoulders.
She turned her face to him. So close, she was. His hands were slick with squirrel grease. He felt the bulge of the jewel in his pocket. His body was wracked with a dozen new sores and wounds. His head ached, and yet still he kept, as if in the center of his skull, the vision of the little pool in the beech grove.
“You must know the place,” he said, his voice a dry croak. And when she said nothing he went on, “Tell me. Were there ever … fey creatures—drow or fomorians, dwarves or elves, or any monsters from the Underdark—here on Moray Island?”
He watched her teeth, the tip of her tongue, when she replied, “They annihilated them. One by one. Hunted them down. Scoured the land. Cleansed it. After the Spellplague. One hundred years, almost. Good riddance.”
“Where?” he said.
She laughed. “You tell me. You’re the one with the … telkiira in his pocket. You’re the one who stole it. The … loregem. Has it made you … stupid yet? I think it would kill me if I touched it. Has it told you want you wanted?”
“It told me,” he said. And he bent down to kiss her, only she slapped his face away.
Ten hours later, Malar the Beastlord paused in the same spot where the Savage and Eleuthra had camped. He examined the cold remnants of the fire. Almost on a whim he had maintained his human body, now the worse for wear. His feet were broken and bloody from the stones, his hands and arms ripped and pierced from following his pack of hunters through the brambles. They hadn’t stopped since he had put them on the trail.
Jumping over a fallen tree, he had cut his leg to the bone, which caused him no pain. The boy, though, was in agony, which gave the Beastlord a distracted kind of pleasure. Like all gods he was a simple creature, intent on his own gratification, on revenge on the world that had imprisoned him. That it had been Kip who’d freed him, he neither understood nor cared.
The boy was a prisoner inside his own body, as Malar had been inside his tomb, aware of time, able to feel, yet helpless. Occasionally, as he ran, Malar could hear the grunts and screams that came unbidden to his own lips—he loved the sound of them. He loved the sight of his bloody footprints and handprints on the bare rocks. Cut and mauled in a dozen places, he squatted down and inhaled the fragrance of the campsite, which told him everything he needed. The pack was around him, tongues lolling out, panting or else lapping at the water from the little spring.
The quarry had turned. They were headed to the fens.
But he wanted to move faster. The boy was falling apart. He could proceed no longer. His small bones would break. With all his mind the boy prayed and begged for a relief to his suffering. He had started up above, below Scourtop, at the moment the pack had fallen on Chauntea’s priestess. When the dogs had pulled her body back and forth between them, and her joints had first given way, when her red arm and clutc
hing hand had been separated from her shoulder, then he had started his prayer, a small, weak noise. Malar lived in the landscape of the beating heart, the pumping lungs, the wheezing bowels; he did not listen to prayers. He had no interest in what was happening in the boy’s brain. But in time he found himself annoyed as the words, by dint of repetition, finally impressed themselves on his divine consciousness—“Oh, my Mother, my Mother, my dear Mother …” A prayer to Chauntea, the great whore who had birthed the entire world. Or perhaps the priestess had been the boy’s actual or adopted mother. Who could understand these human things? But hour after hour the boy had rasped out variations of the same words, squeezed them out through his bleeding lips, his broken teeth. At the same time liquid had poured out of his eyes, obscuring the god’s sight—it was enough. Time to make an end.
He let the prayer rise up. Because of the boy’s pain it had become meaningless, a garbled shriek. But Malar had a command of his own. His hunters were in their simplest beast shape, but they could respond to human words. He called them back from the trail at the bottom of the ravine, where they were eager to set out again. In time, my beauties, in time. But first—
They moved around him in a circle. A person standing up above, or a bird flying overhead, would have seen a terrible thing: a child, hurt beyond endurance, disappearing beneath the pack of wolves. Presently they drew back in a froth of red. The body, mauled past recognition, twitching still. Somehow, the corpse seemed larger than the child had been, as if clay or marl from the blood-saturated ground had coated it, or as if the wolves had added something of their own saliva and energy, without subtracting anything. And the corpse started to move, to split apart, revealing the larger animal underneath, the oily black pelt, the heavy claws. It ripped at what was left of the boy’s shredded skin.
“Follow the signs,” said Lady Amaranth as she bent over the path. “That’s what she said.”
The Rose of Sarifal Page 18
