Hero (18 page)

“For humans,” Betwixt interjected.

“A mile or so down and you’d be boiled alive.”

“The witch would have her stew,” said Saturday.

Threatening to put Jack in her cauldron was one of the witch’s favorite pastimes. “Woodcutter bouillabaisse,” said Peregrine. “Quite the delicacy. Now, if you walk back this way, there’s sort of a path down to—” But she had already removed her clothes.

The soiled rags lay in a puddle at her feet. Above them stood a statue of uninterrupted golden skin, save for that thin blue-green bracelet at her wrist. She was built like a man, her incredible upper body tapering down to a small waist, thin hips, and strong legs that went on for miles, but there were subtle curves there, if one knew to look for them. Her unfortunately matted hair—short in the back and long in the front—did not mar the perfection that was her body. Peregrine was fit and lithe himself, but he was nothing compared to this monument of womanhood now framed by equally giant and exquisite crystals. She raised her arms straight out to the sides, revealing little in the way of breasts, and in one fluid motion dove neatly from the boulder into the clear crystal water beneath them.

She took his breath away. His visions of this woman instantly morphed from enjoyable and innocent to absolutely torturous. He needed to concentrate on something else, quickly, before he completely embarrassed himself.

“Impressive,” said Betwixt.

It all happened so fast that by the time it occurred to Peregrine to look away, she was already gone. He averted his gaze anyway, and busied himself by picking up her filthy clothing with as few fingers as possible and tossing it down to the water’s edge. He took his time retrieving the sack from the cart that contained the fresh change of clothes he’d brought for her, as well as a hairbrush for her lank locks and a horse brush with which to clean her clothes. If they were beyond saving he’d chuck them in the privy cave. As his talents at fabric restoration had grown, he’d found few things in these caves beyond saving.

He carried all these items back to the water’s edge, keeping his head down to watch his footing, and then tended to the washing. He glanced up only to make sure she had surfaced again, even though her intake of breath echoed in the crystal chamber and gave her away.

“If you swim gently along the edges of the pool, you’ll find a yellowish sediment on some of the ledges. Rub it into your skin and hair—it’s nothing like soap and smells a bit like rotten eggs, but you’ll find it does a fair job of tackling the grime.” Peregrine addressed the stains on her shirt instead of the dirty blond head bobbing in the water not ten feet from him. He did not raise his voice; the echo carried his words adequately.

“Aren’t you coming in?” She asked the question in her normal voice, too strong for this chamber, but the tone was lighter than it had been. Peregrine could tell she felt better, and he was glad. “The water is lovely,” she said, more softly this time. Almost sweetly. “And that skirt looks warm.”

Right now, his skin felt hotter than the sun. No, Peregrine had absolutely no intention of going into that water. No, indeed. Not tonight. And never in her presence. “I’m fine, thank you,” he replied. “You enjoy it. I brought a brush for your hair, if you want it.” Without taking his eyes off the clothes, he nudged the wood-handled brush closer to the water’s edge.

“What’s the matter with you?” asked Saturday.

Peregrine dunked her soiled clothes in the water again, sprinkled them with sediment, and attacked them with the horse brush. Dirty clothes. Must get them clean. Very dirty. Whenever she was finished, they would unload the moss and pick ingredients for a stew. Didn’t need to unload the sacks tonight—that chore could wait for another day. Peregrine dunked the clothes again. Very dirty clothes.

“Hello?” said Saturday.

“What? Nothing,” said Peregrine. “I’m fine.”

Betwixt choked back a laugh, or a hairball. Either way, Peregrine continued ignoring his traitorous friend. He could blame his flushed cheeks on the fumes wafting off Saturday’s dirty clothes. The clothes she didn’t happen to be wearing.

“Come, now. You act like you’ve never seen a girl without her clothes on before.”

“I haven’t, actually.” Peregrine said the words under his breath, but they reverberated throughout the crystal chamber regardless. He braced himself for the raucous laughter he felt sure would follow from his companions, but none came.

“Seriously?” Saturday asked.

Peregrine soaked the clothes again and wrung them out. “Serious as a night without stars.” From what he could tell, what looked like dirt on the shirt and trousers was only stains now.

“Don’t you have any siblings?” He could tell by the sound of her voice and the slap of small waves that she had drifted closer to where he was sitting. She would choose the moment when he was at his most uncomfortable to ask him about his life.

Betwixt continued to subtly hack up hairballs. Peregrine wished fleas upon him. “My father suffered from a forgetting sickness,” he explained. “My mother felt it unwise to have more children. I was promised to a girl named Elodie of Cassot when she was a small child, but I never saw her again after that.”

“Forgetting sickness? I’ve never seen such a thing,” said Saturday.

“And I hope you never do. It is a living death, where a man’s mind dies, yet his body lives on.”

“That’s horrible.”

“You have no idea. We began to notice it, my mother and I, in the summer of my seventh year. He forgot small things at first, like phrases and appointments. Over the next few years he began to forget his past, and then his present. He forgot about Starburn—he could no longer leave his bedchamber because every room was strange to him. Finally, he forgot how to speak altogether. Mother dedicated her life to him, long after every memory he had of her was gone. I tried to be a son for as long as I had a father who remembered me.”

“How long did he last?” asked Saturday. “His body, I mean.”

“Too long,” answered Peregrine. “Long enough for me to hope he would die and put us all at peace. A terrible, selfish thing for a son to wish on his father.”

“But a sensible one. I assume his body finally complied?”

Peregrine laid the clothes out to dry. “It did. My mother followed him soon after.” He leaned back against the jagged crystal rocks and looked at her. She idly rubbed sediment in her hair while he talked. The fabric bracelet at her wrist looked dry as a bone.

He forced himself to remain calm while he handed her the brush for her hair; he was amazed his pounding heartbeat didn’t echo in the chamber louder than his voice. “I took my horse and escaped directly after the funeral, so eager was I to finally get away from that prison and on with a life of my own. I left Starburn in the hands of Hadris, my father’s—my—steward.”

“And you trusted this Hadris?”

“Enough to leave him in charge of the only world I ever knew,” said Peregrine. “Leila met me on the road from Starburn. She pretended to be a fairy granting me a wish.” He took up his long black and blue locks and shrugged with both hands full of hair. “I hate this stuff, but I can’t cut it. The curse won’t let me.”

“What did you wish?” asked Saturday.

“To live a long and fruitful life until I lost my mind—”

“—or any other major organ,” added Betwixt.

“Thought I was quite the clever young man for that bit,” said Peregrine. “In hindsight, I probably deserved what Leila did to me. It was rash to leave like that, and not at all honorable. My father would have been ashamed.”

“What?” Saturday gritted her teeth and growled at the ceiling. “Oh, you are a complete fool. I have half a mind to throw this brush at you.” What she did instead was worse: she lifted herself out of the pool.

Peregrine closed his eyes, thought about solemn things, and listened for the telltale sounds of her dressing.

“If I were your father, I would have wondered why you didn’t run away sooner. Do you honestly think he would have been happy knowing that he’d trapped his wife and son for so long? Would you wish the same upon your son? Or upon anyone for that matter?”

“No,” said Peregrine.

“You went straight from Starburn to this mountain, from one prison to another. No one deserves to be cursed, Peregrine, least of all you. You can open your eyes now.”

He was blushing again, but this time he wasn’t sure if it was from her presence or her words. He’d said as much to himself over the years, but like anything said too often, it had lost the weight of its reason over time.

“And yet I was cursed with you,” he said. “I don’t regret that one bit.” Now that she was clean, the urge to touch her again was overwhelming. He wanted to bury his face in her hair and make sure all the stench was gone.

“My family would likely disagree with you.” Dressed, though still damp, she’d finished with her hair, also still damp, and now stared at the small wooden brush in her large hands. “My sister gave me a brush like this once,” she said softly. “May I keep it?”

Because the request had been so genuinely polite, it caught him off-guard. “Yes,” he said, with probably more enthusiasm than he meant to reveal. She tucked the wooden handle inside her belt with its empty scabbard. She
did
look at him then and yanked his silver-blue lock of hair, just like a schoolboy.

“Maiden fair, oh, maiden fair,

What clever mischief do you dare?”

Her singing voice was not lovely, but it wasn’t meant to be. Peregrine responded to her schoolyard teasing by mimicking one of the scowls she loved so much and he was rewarded with an actual smile. He dared to hope a laugh might follow it, but the blinding light erased all thoughts from his mind.

The crystals in the cavern were glowing.

Saturday and Peregrine both raised an arm to shield their eyes from the glare. Peregrine heard more than saw Betwixt fly down and land with soft cat feet on the crystal boulder above them. “Look,” he said.

They lowered their arms. Peregrine no longer needed to squint at the crystals surrounding them. The harsh light was gone, as was any trace of torchlight or water’s reflection. What shone now from every flat surface they could see was the face of a skinny young girl.

This girl also tried to hide her beauty beneath formless boy’s clothes, but unlike Saturday the girl in the crystals would never be able to hide her porcelain skin, the curve of her full red lips, or her hair, thick and black as the night. Her large eyes were as blue as the twilight sky and just as full of mystery. Her dark brows, like thin raven’s wings, furrowed in concentration or determination. She seemed to be climbing a rope into the heavens, surrounded by the billowing gray sails of a ship.

As quickly as it had appeared, the scene in the crystals vanished. The shattered speckles of torchlight returned to their places scattered about the cavern as if they’d never left.

Nothing broke the silence for a while but ripples in the clear water.

“Did you recognize that girl?” he asked Saturday.

“I think that was my sister’s cabin boy,” she answered. “I only ever caught a glimpse of her, so I can’t be sure. But it looked like Thursday’s ship.”

Thursday the Pirate Queen—Peregrine remembered Jack’s stories well. There was sure to be a certain amount of mischief on that ship, and this girl was doubtless the only maiden aboard. Peregrine tried to wrap his mind around the inadvertent spell Saturday had cast.

“You were too humble with regard to the extent of your god powers,” he said.

“I did that?” she asked softly.

“Yes,” said Betwixt. “You did.”

So everything Cwyn had told them in the armory was correct, though Peregrine hadn’t thought he’d be witnessing an example so soon. “You can work a magic mirror.”

“I guess?” Saturday replied with little emotion. “I mean, I don’t know. My eldest sister can. Does. Whatever. I don’t have any magic.”

For someone so strong, she was excessively hard on herself. Beauty and godstuff may not have been the fey powers she wanted, but they were powers she possessed, and it was foolish of her to eschew them.

“Cwyn said you could control magic,” Peregrine reminded her, “not that you created it.”

“There is no need to create magic here,” said Betwixt. “Magic permeates the walls around us. You appear to siphon it far more easily than the lorelei can manage.”

Saturday remained defiant. “But I don’t know anything about magic.”

“You don’t have to know about it to wield it,” said Peregrine.

“Still, it’s a good idea to know about it so you don’t get anyone killed,” said Betwixt.

She threw up her hands. “How can you say that, while you look to me to lead you to your death?”

“I still have hope,” said Betwixt. “I believe in heroes.”

“What about you?” Saturday asked Peregrine. “You don’t believe we’ll survive the dragon, do you?”

She would value his honesty more than pretty words. “I don’t. But our lives don’t end here. There is still a spell to stop and a witch to kill and a dragon to wake, and I plan on doing all that next to the woman I love.”

He did not expect smiles and shouts of jubilation at his statement, which was good, for he did not receive them. Saturday’s brow furrowed. “You love me?”

Once more, he thought it best to be honest. There wasn’t time left to play games. “The gods have sent me dreams my whole life of a wild young woman with golden hair and bright eyes. I have always been in love with her. I had thought she was Elodie. Turns out, she was you.” He made no move to touch her.

“But what about Elodie? What about your betrothal?”

The last thing Peregrine wanted was for Saturday to think he was not an honorable man. “Elodie is a girl I never knew from a fate I was never meant to have,” he said. “True to Leila’s curse, I have experienced a long and fruitful life on this mountain. We may die up here in the next few moments, but I want to live those moments with purpose, filling them with as much as I possibly can. Don’t you?”

“Yes,” she answered, and he was pleased to see that her eyes were bright again. He hoped the last things he saw before his death were those eyes.