The Rose of Sarifal

by Paulina Claiborne

  “I have no choice,” she said, meaning she would follow whatever trace or rumor she could find of Captain Lukas and the rest, to Citadel Umbra now. Perhaps Marabaldia would help her.

  Rurik shrugged. “Or else they will do nothing at all,” he said, still talking about the knights of Synnoria. He was no longer interested in her. She looked out over the surface of the clouds.

  South and east, about a mile away, a winged shadow made its turn, a bird, she thought. It skimmed toward them like a skipping stone, diving sometimes into the first layer of the clouds. As it approached, Suka wondered vaguely if perhaps it was much larger than a bird, much farther away. Her mind was on other things. It wasn’t until she heard a sharp profanity from Rurik that she turned and saw the creature had shot up from underneath the clouds and now hovered above them, a wyvern—pale belly, whiplike tail, night wings, long snatching jaws. It drove them back along the narrow causeway into the deserted stone piazza. Everyone was at supper in the great hall, where the Ffolk slaves were playing music. Incongruously, Suka heard a piece of it, a little wisp of delicate cadences, just as the beast rose to dive at them again. On the exposed stones of the courtyard, flickering with lantern light, they were sitting ducks. The wyvern, neck outstretched, rounded a stone column and dived toward them, screaming its harsh, airless cry.

  “This way,” said Rurik. A narrow gate led to the side, and a stone staircase covered with moss and crumbling with age. It was different from the shaped blocks of the dwarf ramparts; shoddy, broken steps that nevertheless led quickly down, first through an almost vertical cascade of granite boulders, then through a landscape of clinging vines and rhododendron trees, their pink flowers wet with mist, which soon drenched Suka as she labored down, pausing finally under the knotted trunks of the cloud forest, while the baffled reptile screamed overhead.

  “What is this place?” breathed Suka, though she knew. The mist beaded on her skin. The air smelled sweet, a cloying fragrance. Fireflies the size of Suka’s fist blundered through the canopy, each one followed by a trail of glowing mirror-moths. “Oh—shit.”

  “Just the border,” Rurik whispered. They stood in the middle of the leaf-meal path, which wound away southward into the thicker woods. “We’re here for a minute, and then we’ll climb back up,” he said, as if for someone else’s benefit—it was too late. Three eladrin stepped out of the trees, blocking their way back. They were dressed in silver caps and silver-scale armor, and they carried swords. The long, straight blades glowed in the shadow.

  “Slaves,” said one, his voice melodious, and full of gentle melancholy. “I am Lord Talos-claere. You have come into the land of Synnoria. Who is your master? Does he follow you? Or has he gone ahead?”

  “We came by accident,” murmured Rurik. “We’ll be going now, if you stand aside.”

  “Alas,” said Talos–claere, his voice genuinely sorrowful. “I cannot allow it. Our land is tainted now. These things take but a moment, a single misstep to insult and corrupt the spirits of this wood. As you walked under the sacred trees, we heard them crying out. How can you make amends? It is not possible. Not for such as you. Not through words or deeds. I am so sorry. It is not possible.”

  Captain Rurik stood, feet spread, grinding his teeth from side to side, a murderous expression on his face. The livid scar bisected his lips. “How, then?”

  He should tell them who he was, Suka thought. He should say he is Mindarion’s friend, in negotiation with Lord Askepel, that all this was a misunderstanding. But then she realized he had no desire to make excuses for himself.

  “My lords,” he said, “from what you say, and from your stern demeanor, I can only assume my life is forfeit, because as you say my foul breath has polluted this holy air, and my disgusting footsteps have polluted this sacred ground, just as surely as if I had defecated onto Corellon Larethian’s shining hair, or pissed into his open mouth, or wiped my arse upon his beard. If we have inadvertently strayed across your border a few yards so as to save our worthless lives—it is no excuse. Whatever I must give, I give it gladly. Perhaps my blood will offer some small recompense.” He held out his empty hands.

  Talos-claere blinked. “The speech of your people is vulgar and uncouth,” he said. “What’s done is done. The harmony of this forest, the fabric of this threatened space you have both touched and marred. I honor you for your self-sacrifice, but I fear it will not accomplish what we hope.” He stepped forward, his handsome face empty of expression, and if he were capable of hearing any irony or sarcasm in Rurik’s words, he showed no sign. Just as soon try to decipher the jokes of a dog, or a frog on a lily pad, Suka imagined, though even a child could tell when a dog was growling or might spring, or that Captain Rurik, frustrated over the failure of his hopes, was going to kill them if he could, these strange, apologetic, contemptuous, glittering fey.

  As guests of the council, they had had to give up their weapons at the door. But Suka, as was her custom, had retained several small knives that she kept secreted around her body. One of these, now, she grasped behind her back.

  “Your blood will pollute our glade the more,” continued Talos-claere. “If you had come properly with your master, under his protection, then perhaps I could have overlooked your crime. But come. It is nothing. I only mean to mark you, to cut my mark into your cheek, so all men might recognize what you have done. Then I will lead you to the signal oak to send a message to your lord, so as to reclaim his errant property. He also will be punished, because of the freedom he has granted you. What is his name?”

  He had sheathed his sword, but had his own knife out, a long, slender, curving blade. He beckoned with his other hand, and his fingernails also, Suka noticed, were long and curved. He had no chance. He pointed south along the leaf-meal path, and Suka imagined a place of ritual punishment among the smooth silver trunks of the aspens, their leaves trembling in sympathy, although she felt no wind. She imagined a glade among the trees, and wildflowers winking in the soft grass, and a spring of fresh, laughing water, coiling over an ancient block of stone that was itself carved with runes of (doubtless) mystic but inscrutable significance—he had no chance. Rurik also had kept a hidden blade, and as he passed the eladrin lord he gave a little cry, and stumbled against him. Horrified by his polluting touch, Talos-claere pulled back. A shadow of suspicion clouded his beautiful face, and he looked down to see the knife inserted upward through the scales of his armor and pressed in to the hilt. Puzzled, he turned away, his hand drifting downward as if to stem the trickle of his golden blood. In the meantime Rurik had seized hold of his sword and dragged it from its scabbard, and when the second lord—slowly, delicately—moved to confront him, Rurik stabbed him through the groin then dragged the blade upward into his belly. The third, Suka cut down from behind.

  They left the lords subsiding there, expressions of astonishment disturbing their faces as they sank to their knees. They found the path upward, and Rurik threw the smoking sword among the rocks. “It hurts,” he said in explanation as they climbed up through the mist of the cloud forest. “Some kind of an electric charge.” Then they stood panting, out of breath. “Ah, that feels good,” he said. “I had forgotten. I hate killing a man, but the fey, it’s like stealing from the rich.” His eyes glittered with excitement, and Suka watched a flush appear along his weathered cheeks. “You’ve taken all they were and all they’ll be. A hundred thousand days apiece—as much as an entire company of men. Time’s wasted—I’ve changed my plans. I’m gone tonight. Give them my regrets,” he said, as they clambered up through the boulders to the gate.

  Above the clouds the sky was dark, the sun had set, the wyvern had flown away. The lamps burned bright in their suspended lanterns. Suka saw no need to remind the captain she was also a fey, and would still be able to bear children when his bones were ash. “Are you coming with me?” he asked, wiping the blood from his hands. “I’m for the coast. Me and my crew. We’ll ride through the night.”

  She shook her head.

 
“That’s good. Suit yourself. There’ll be some consequences here. Blame me.”

  She intended to, if it came to that. She shrugged, and shook her head. He turned, then stiff-walked over the open stones, still rubbing his hands.

  Night had fallen, and there were stars. Hunching her shoulders against the chill, hands in her pockets, Suka found again the entrance to the council hall. Torchlight cascaded through the open door. She paused at the cloakroom, washed her hands and face in the stone basin, and peered into the glass. She poked her tongue out at herself, flexed the dog’s head tattoo, and scraped her teeth against the silver stud. She relieved herself in one of the stone stalls, left the cloakroom, and walked down the steps of the hall to where the dignitaries were still milling around, Marabaldia and Prince Ughoth among them. Hands in her pockets, pretending a casualness she didn’t feel, the gnome sidled up to her stone seat, and peered up at her broad, beaming face. “What’s going on?”

  “I have news of your friends at Citadel Umbra,” Marabaldia told her. “I mean the man I saw with you at Caer Corwell, when they locked you up.”

  Suka breathed deep. “That’s good,” she said. “But I don’t want to talk about it now.”

  UNQUIET DREAMS

  THEY HAD GONE ON FOR HOURS, FOLLOWING THE DROW priestess Amaka until Lukas called a halt. Chilled, they lay down to rest in a dark cavern half a mile below the surface, and huddled together for warmth.

  Or else that’s what they should have done. Instead, each lay apart with his or her own thoughts. Gaspar-shen was the most comfortable because he did not feel the cold. He lay on his back, his scimitar beside him, the energy lines throbbing blue and green across his chest. This is what he dreamed:

  He had dived down deep below the surface of a black sea. Stroking through the inky dark, for a long time it made no difference if his eyes were open or shut. The water had a soft, creamy feel, such as he had felt in various southern seas, diving down into the pearl beds of Alamir, for example, through crusts of water always and ever more sweet, and differing from each other also in the minute fluctuations of texture and temperature. But in his dream, as the water thickened around him, he saw deep below him a slash of light, a red fire burning at the bottom of the sea, like a vent or fissure to the center of Toril, though the water was still cool and getting colder. But when he reached that place he felt the world invert, and instead of descending he was now swimming up into the light, until he burst onto the surface in a shock of red spray and foam. And there was the light all around him, because he found himself in the harbor of a great city on fire, as perhaps Caer Corwell or Caer Moray had burned in the old days, the barges set alight, the ships on fire at their docks, the air full of soot and smoke and sparks. In his dream he imagined the burning streets, the wooden houses on fire, and in the street of the pastry chefs the long bazaar with its canvas roofs blistering upward, and all the delicacies ruined, the marzipan melting, and the candied orange dripping from the charred tabletops into the gutters.

  Amaka sat near him, hugging her knees and weeping. In an alcove cut and shaped in the living rock, Lukas and Amaranth lay side by side, not touching. Before they had lain down, Lukas had imagined a moment of privacy, in the tender space of which he could have leaned toward her and reminded her of the battlements at Caer Moray, when they had stood together above the gate and watched Malar the Beastlord shamble toward them down the causeway. That night he had kissed her, and she had responded to his kiss, but if she remembered it she gave no sign.

  She was not thinking of that night. She turned onto her back. “Why did he let us go?” she asked, meaning the drow captain.

  Lukas rolled onto his stomach, laid his cheek against the dry, cold sand. “It’s because you weaken any side you’re on,” he said, choosing his words. “Here, at Umbra, you divide Lady Ordalf and Prince Araithe, because they want you for different purposes. And you make their enemies strong, because they seek to free you. If the knights of Synnoria march on Karador, if they hope to succeed, it is because they’ve promised Captain Rurik they will put an end to the leShay, and to human slavery on Gwynneth Island, in Sarifal. But Rurik will not fight for you.

  “Lady,” he continued, “This is your home, but there is nothing for you here. I will protect you if I can, but you must find a way to help yourself. What is it you desire, here?”

  To Amaranth, his language and his voice sounded stilted and unreal. And what the drow captain had told her, that she should travel south through the Cambro Mountains, and meet the knights of Llewyrr, and fight with them against her sister and her nephew (if it made sense to call him that) for the sake of the Yellow Rose of Sarifal—none of that sounded real either. But if not that, what then? Nothing was real in this underground cavern, where at the limit of her senses she could hear the drop of water upon stone. She had sacrificed her brother Coal, she had abandoned Moray to the Beastlord, and for what?

  But at the same time that, full of despair, she asked herself this question, she remembered standing in the open glade below the tower while her sister and her nephew fought over her like dogs over a bone—the exhilaration she had felt. On Moray Island the wolves and pigs had grown old and left her. And Lukas would grow old and leave her, in the blink of an eye. And even the elves and eladrin of Winterglen and Karador would grow old and frail and leave her. Only her family would be left, the ageless leShay, as permanent as the rocks and stones of Faerûn, speaking a language of emotion no one else, perhaps, could understand. What had her sister said? She had sent Captain Lukas to Moray to bring back not her, not Amaranth, but something spherical, part of the whole. What could that be, if not some magic essence of herself, her own inviolable soul, caught as if in an alchemist’s orb, as she had heard described by her professors when she was a child in the crystal city, in the lake? And perhaps her sister, tearing Amaranth’s clothes away, only meant to remind her that the small moralities of men were not for her. And perhaps that was a hard lesson, unnatural, yet she must learn it if she truly hoped to find her path.

  Farther away down the tunnel, beneath an outcropping of quartz, Eleuthra lay in her wolf’s shape at first, comfortable and warm. But as she dreamed, she regained her humanity, and her wolf’s skin pulled away from her until she shivered and rubbed her naked arms. In her dream she saw the daemonfey above her, not stunted and maimed as when she had last seen him, but in his glory, his high-arched, sharp-spined leather wings curling above him, his fat tail hanging down between his legs, his skin shining and golden, his eyes black and red. Fire and blood in the black pool.

  Come to me, he said, his voice rich and commanding and seeming to come from somewhere inside her—she was looking at his ridged black lips, and they didn’t move.

  She woke with the image in her mind. But how could she go to him? He was dead. He had died saving the lives of his companions. Miserable, she let herself sink down again into her beast’s body. Curling her spine into a circle, laying her face onto her thigh, she tried to discover a little warmth and comfort, and chase after a beast’s furtive dreams, run them down like prey. But they eluded her, scattered away, and even the one she succeeded in cornering turned on her at the last, desperate, its eyes black and red.

  Lukas sat up, stretched his arms, rubbed the crick out of his neck, and buckled on his sword. “We must go,” he said. He had no doubt the leShay would chase them for Amaranth’s sake, and if they could not use the drow, then they would use others to come after them, Ffolk slaves or else the fey.

  “Show us the way,” he said. Shivering, Amaka got to her feet. Little was left of the thoughtless, delighted girl who had roused them in the temple of Lolth the evening before. She scratched her arms and sniffed at the black air.

  “Bring us south through Cambro to the surface,” he said. “Once out of Winterglen you can leave us and go back. Three days and you’ll be home. Is there food along the way?”

  “There is food,” she said, her eyes wide and nervous.

  The others had roused themselves. Lady
Amaranth held up her lamp, and by its light they could see the walls of the cavern rise above them, the smooth, shaped blocks of stone, quarried by dwarves in the old days. Over time, some of the masonry had fallen, and rivulets of water had stained the limestone face and carved it into copper, bronze, and mud-colored stripes, tinged now in the blue glow.

  Lukas watched Gaspar-shen returning to the circle of light, the energy lines snaking over his chest and shoulders—he had gone to relieve himself in a corner of the wall. The wolf arched her back and thrust out her forelegs. She curled her lips and growled softly as the genasi swaggered up. “Yes, Captain?”

  “You’ll take the leShay princess southeast to the far coast, to Kingsbay. From there to Snowdown across the straits, and then to Alaron. The druid will go with you. She is an emissary of the king.”

  “And you?”

  “I’ll leave you at the sacred grove. I’ll go find the gnome at Corwell, if I can.”

  Gaspar-shen wrinkled his forehead. If he’d had eyebrows, he would have drawn them together. From long exposure to human beings, he had begun to mimic their expressions. He was not happy, clearly.

  He said: “On the island of Xxiphu, in the Sea of Fallen Stars, they make a pastry in the shape of a bug. The wings are spun sugar. But inside, if you split the mille-feuille thorax, there is nothing but a nauseating greenish goo.”

  Lukas turned his head. He watched Lady Amaranth push the red hair from her face. “I don’t want to hear it. You’ll do as I say.”

  They had miles to argue, and had best be started. He turned to the drow priestess. “Bring us to the gap. To Cambrent Gap.”