“And you wish to right the wrong.”
“It is not just that.” I swallowed. “I—I want my baby back.”
He must have heard the pang in my voice, but his face did not change. “Yes,” he murmured. “Of course.”
“So will you tell me, Briony, where I might find him?”
“It seems reasonable to suppose,” he said, “that the little one is in the realm of the dead.”
He said that as another person might have said. “He is in Stanehold” or “She has gone to the marketplace”; he spoke as of a place he was familiar with. I sat up eagerly.
“But where is that, Briony? How do I reach it?”
“How does a serpent seek the underworld?” he questioned in return. I bristled, thinking he was trifling with me.
“Don’t riddle me, Bri! I had quite enough of that with Ophid.”
“But I speak of simple fact!” He raised his dark brows slightly. “One enters the Afterworld through the serpent’s burrow.”
“What serpent?”
“Why, the great serpent, to be sure.”
Memory of an immense head, a forked tongue as long as a sword. “In the esker?” I hazarded.
“Nay, Rae. You’ll have to go farther than that.” He was not laughing at me after all. “The greatest of serpents. The Naga.”
“Of course,” I murmured.
“The adder’s tongue feels the way.”
It would be far to the north, at the source. “Is it a cave?” I asked. “A passage?”
“Yes. But you know, Rae, there are dangers. You may not be allowed to return, having once gone down there.”
“I will have to risk it,” I said, and my bravado was not all false; I cared for no danger, those days. I had even risked leaving Arlen.
“You will need gold,” said Briony, “for the water crossing.”
“I have gold enough.”
“And do not eat in those nether regions, not so much as a crust of bread, and most especially not elderberries or any other of the foods of the dead.”
The familiar prohibitions. “I will remember,” I said, and I thought the conversation was done. But I was wrong.
“Rae.…”
What could he want of me?
“Has it gone wrong between you and Arlen?”
“I hope not,” I told him. “I hope he will be waiting for me when I return. I hope there will be—love between us.…” My voice faltered as I wondered how, with the curse that seemed to be on us.
“If not,” said Briony softly, “there is love for you here.”
I stared at him, astonished beyond speaking, and he left his at the table to come over and kneel on the dirt floor beside me. His hard brown face looked as blank as ever, except that maybe there was just a suggestion of pleading in it.
“I loved you from the first day I saw you,” he said, “if what a mandrake conceives by way of devotion is to be called love. I am an unhearted thing, quiet; I can make no great show. But I am constant, Rae.”
I found my tongue, and I am ashamed to say that all I had to offer him was annoyance.
“Half my childhood I wanted love,” I exclaimed, “and now I have found all too much of it, it seems! Lonn, and now you—”
“I am sorry,” he said, and he got up hastily. “I did not mean it to be an onus on you. I only told you because I thought, if you should ever want a shelter, a haven—I would ask nothing of you.”
“I don’t care,” I shouted at him, because what he was saying frightened me. “I shall love Arlen forever. Even if we never touch each other again.”
“I know that love,” Briony said, his voice bleak, and I looked at him where he stood, then hung my head.
For some time there was silence. Finally he went to the hearth and sat down.
“It is a perplexity,” he said in a dry, dispassionate voice, “how I, a mandrake and a dealer in philters for passion, could have let myself be surprised into such an entanglement.” He spoke almost lightly, and I looked at him in growing amazement and something of compunction.
“You could have given me such a philter at any time while I was here, slipped it into my food or drink.”
“What good would it have done?” He shrugged, waving away my reluctant gratitude. “I could only have inspired in you a passion equal to your love for Arlen, nothing more, for there is no greater devotion. You would have been torn, heart torn, between us.”
He had refused to hurt me. “And you saved Arlen’s life,” I said in wonder, “when you could have let him die. You saved him for my sake.”
“Of course.”
“And you bear no grudge against him.”
“Of course not.” He peered at me as if to say, You humans are a skewed and twisted lot. “I like him very much,” he added. “As much as a mandrake can like anyone.”
“Might all men be as honorable as a certain mandrake.” I got up uncertainly, no longer so willing to spend the night beneath his roof. “I should go.”
“Why?” He got up also but did not offer to come near me. “I am, as you say, honorable. You have nothing to fear from me.”
That was true, I felt sure. I could trust him; indeed, I would have trusted him with my very life. I wished I could somehow give him happiness. But I did not love him, could never love one whose eyes did not know how to smile, and I could not feel comfortable in the presence of his pain. Once I left him in the morning, I knew, I would not come near him again.
So I slept by his hearth, slept soundly, and he did not disturb me. And I ate with him in the morning with no fear, and took the provision he gave me with thanks and no thought of spells or entrapments.
“I should come with you,” Briony said. “There will be dangers.”
I am afraid I gave him a rather sharp glance. I wanted no man with me, not even a mandrake; I would not have wanted him before his declaration of devotion, and I wanted him all the less thereafter.
“This is a journey I must make alone,” I told him.
“I dare say. May you survive it, Rae.” He stood back and let me depart. I sent Bucca springing northward, and I did not look back or lift a hand in farewell.
“Remember what I have told you, Rae,” he called after me. I did not respond.
But I thought on the things he had told me from time to time as I rode. Remember his declaration of love, he had meant—or had he meant his dour words of warning? Dangers. Might I survive. It was devoutly to be hoped. I assumed he spoke of the dangers of the passage to the Afterworld, as they were ones I had not faced before—and so perhaps he did. But I had not gone more than half a day’s journey, with my mind far ahead, and never had I been thinking less of the old outworn ghosts of my childhood, when—hoofbeats, the leaves of a coppice stirred, shouts and the clash of weapons to both sides of me, and before I could urge Bucca past his first startled jump I was surrounded by armed men. My father’s men.
And in a stately manner, Rahv himself rode up to confront me.
To my own fleeting bemusement, I did not feel afraid. I was all aflame with anger and chagrin that I had been so meekly taken, but—fear? Too much had happened since I had seen him last, and I had grown beyond fearing him. I considered briefly whether it might not be wise to tremble, cower, grovel, or produce a fit of timely tears, stratagems I had once used to survive with him. But there was no weeping of that sort left in me. I simply stared at him, hard-faced, as he stared at me, he an ill-humored man with a pointed beard, and if I was born of his loins my heart did not know it.
“Callous wench,” he said coldly. “Ill favored, ill-begotten imp—”
“I am your daughter, or so I have been told,” I retorted.
His thin face washed red, then white, with wrath. He forced his horse up to mine and went to thwack me across the face with the leather riding gloves he held in one hand. I eluded the blow, which enraged him, and two of his men reached out to hold me by the arms until he had beaten my cheeks to his satisfaction.
“Wicked!” he sh
outed, “Wanton!”
He was not satisfied, not really, because I had not wept or cried out. Then he spied a glint of precious metal at my neck.
“What is this? Gold?” he cried, and he seized the chain, twisting it until it snapped and came off my neck into his hand. Then he ripped my dress halfway down to my waist, searching for more, and he found them, found them all, and had them, and sat glaring at me with the golden chains dripping from his hand, his humor in no way improved. “Where has a slut like you come by gold?” he demanded.
I sat, wordless and smoldering as before, and in a moment he smiled at me, a parlous discomfiting smile.
“Never mind,” he said. “In a few weeks I will hear you scream clear across the Naga.”
My face must have changed, for his smile grew broader and yet more evil.
“Even so, my very own child. You seem not to fear me any more, brazen one, but you fear the Gwyneda, is it not so? Well, they want you, runaway bride.”
“What—” The question escaped me before I could stop it entirely.
“What do they want you for? What are they going to do with you? Why, the goddess has need of vengeance, Cerilla.” He was gloating, damn him. “On you, faithless one, and also on your precious Arlen. And you will tell the Gwyneda where he is, so that I and my men here may go to fetch him.”
“No,” I whispered.
“Ah, but yes, you will tell them. Believe me, most assuredly you will.”
He had what he wanted. I was afraid now, trembling with fear. He sat for a while and watched me shaking, and then with a smug air he turned to his men.
“Let none of you touch her except to restrain her should she attempt to escape,” he told them. “She belongs to the Gwyneda.”
And in fact there was no opportunity for escape. He saw to that. Even as we rode I was always surrounded.
He himself did not touch me either, throughout that journey, to beat me or humiliate me. He preferred torments of a subtler sort. I was often aware that he watched me with a dark and subdued glee, apparently taking pleasure in the panic of my thoughts. And my thoughts grew more frantic with every rod we traveled toward the river. Who might rescue me? Arlen? Briony? I had left them both behind; I was on my own. Very well, then, how might I escape? A trick, a ruse, a lie? Nothing that I could think of seemed likely to work. My father was far more clever in that way than I.
My father. What sort of man was he, to do this? How could he be so cruel, and yet be kin to me? I was not cruel. Or was I?
The pace was wearing, for my father wanted to reach the Sacred Isle in time for the festival of the summerking. He wanted me to watch a sacred king die, he told me, knowing that it would sicken me. He wanted me to see how merciful the Gwyneda could be, compared to what they intended to do to Arlen. So we rode long, hard days, and as they went by I grew more weary than frightened any more, more weary than angry or hating, and I began to speak to this strange man, Rahv, my father, in merest curiosity.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked him levelly one day as we rode. “Taking me prisoner to the Gwyneda, I mean.”
“So they will take their curse off my land and crops,” he said. He was weary too.
“But there is more to it than that.” There had to be. “It has been a year and a half, and you have not yet starved. Why have you followed me so long?”
He glanced over at me, blinking as if trying to focus his eyes, as if trying to see me clearly. Then he jerked his head up, recalling himself.
“Hold your tongue,” he snapped. “It is not your place to ask me for reasons.” I continued to look at him, and he shook his head as if the look goaded him. “If I ride a horse, shall it not obey me?” he shouted at me. “And if I have a hound, shall it not follow at heel or know the whip? Know your place, woman.”
I had hurt his pride, it seemed, by my disobedience. I might as well have said to the Gwyneda, See, my father is no man, for he does not control me utterly. The ass. And injured pride had made him relentless. Well, let him be relentless.
“You killed my mother,” I said to him. It was scarcely a question, though I had never spoken of her to him before.
He gave me a long stare filled with black hatred, but it was a measuring stare as well. “Why, yes,” he said finally, “I did. She displeased me.”
That last was said most ominously, but I grinned at him—or sneered, rather, showing my teeth in the hateful smile I had lately learned from him. As I was doomed to die anyway, I would displease him as much as I liked. I saw him go white with fury, but he did not lift fist to hit me. He merely spurred his horse away.
We were three days late for the ceremonials of the summerking, to his vexation. All his lordly rivals had gone home, so he could not flaunt me in front of them as he would have liked to do. We merely stood in a cluster on the shore, and the five elders of the Gwyneda came across the dark waters of the Naga to us in five swan boats. In their midst swam a sixth boat of black.
“Very good, Rahv,” said one of the elders to my father in a bored tone, and then to me, in tones quite venomous and not at all bored, “You will come to wish you had never heard of love, girl.”
“I thought you did not speak to seculars,” I replied. A foolish, childish retort, but I had to say something; I would not meekly stand and be threatened. She smiled, though, as if my words had given light to her wrath.
“Rules are for underlings,” she told me. “We who are elders go where we will and speak to whom we like.” Her face moved in soft folds as she spoke. It was wrinkled and graying, with a deadly pallor about it, so that almost she seemed of a piece with her hood and her robe. “Moreover, you are one of us, girl, remember? To your sorrow.” She turned from me with a motion of dismissal and spoke to my lordly father again. “Very good, Rahv, we are well pleased. You may go until we summon you again.”
“On the contrary, good priestess,” he said courteously, “I propose to stay—and listen.”
“As you will.”
They seized me by the arms and put me into the black swan boat, wherein they fettered me by black chains of iron. Confound and curse them, how had they known I was planning to brave the dark waters of the Naga? As I had not been quite desperate enough to do on my first crossing.… Although it was summertime, I sat and shivered as the black swan swam me across to the Sacred Isle, the place of all places where I had wanted never to come again.
In their white robes the Gwyneda lined the shore, silent as snow, watching as I was taken in, still in my black chains. I wondered briefly which one was the youngest, the girl who had lately wed the summerking. Poor child, I could not tell, for they all looked the same.… Then I was brought down to the dungeon, and I had no time to wonder more.
SEVENTEEN
Pain is partly subject to thinking, I discovered. In truth, the pain of what they were doing to me was no worse than the pain of childbirth, except perhaps that it gave less respite. No worse, and I had been glad enough to undergo the pain of childbirth for the sake of the babe—I would not think of the babe. No worse than the pain of childbirth. Only their hatred of me made the difference, the fact that the pain was not merely happening but was being inflicted on me by them, their white hands never soiled, their white robes never ruffled, five prim old women, for they had only to reach out now and then to turn a pin on one of their horrible machines.… Pain is only pain. So it made me scream, my body writhe; no matter. If a kind face had been at hand I would have smiled through my tears. Who cared for the hatred of the Gwyneda? Pain was of no significance.
“Let us have the boot,” one of them said, “as she is a runaway.”
I did not care. Whatever they did to my hands or feet or arms or legs or the muscles of my body did not matter to me. I avoided the thought that they were only just beginning.
“If you tell us where to find Arlen,” said the eldest to me, “this will all stop—for the time.” She had a mole on her face, and out of it grew two thick hairs like horns. I stared at it in blessed detachment
as I shook my head.
“What, no longer so saucy?” she taunted. “You now obey the rule of silence, when it is least needed?”
“I have scarcely been silent,” I told her, for I had screamed myself hoarse already. I had made my father happy, curse him. Curse old mole-face.
My insolence annoyed her, and she scowled. “Where is Arlen?” she cried sharply, as if to surprise an answer out of me.
“I’ll die before I tell you that,” I answered just as sharply. She hissed and spat like a snake, tightened a vise, and I shrieked as the great metal boot squeezed my foot. In a moment the small bones would crack, they would lame me—
A bell rang, a tolling sound, and the Gwyneda got up on the instant and filed out the door. It was dawn, time for them to see to the most high service of the goddess. The eldest of them went last, pausing for a moment at the door to speak to me.
“Pray do not run away,” she said nastily, and she departed. I sat chained to a stone wall with a boot of iron on one foot. The pain of it gradually subsided to a dull ache, but I knew that it was squeezing the life out of a part of me. I wondered when they would return, then tried not to think of that. They would return only to do something worse.
Like the door of my chamber, a year and more before, the door of this torture chamber bore neither lock nor bar. Well, what need, with all the chains? And as I sat, thinking no farther than the next moment, it creaked and opened and a solitary woman in white slipped in. A familiar face, but changed, somehow, older.… Then I recognized her and found the name.
“Erta,” I whispered.
By way of reply she crouched by my feet, unscrewed the vises of the boot and slipped it off. My foot came out of it chalk-white and wrinkled, then went purple and red, and I sat gasping in pain, but Erta took no time for sympathy. From some deep pocket of her robe she drew a tool, a rasp, and in greatest haste she began with it to cut the link that held my chains to the stone. For several moments there were no sounds but the scrape of metal on metal, my breathing, and the grunting noises she made as she labored.
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