The Rose of Sarifal (15 page)

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.

And yet, what could he have done differently? He could not even bear to think about Suka in her cell.

Methodically, the genasi licked around the rim of his circular mouth. His breath whistled through the slits of his nose. “In Callidyrr,” he said in his light, airless voice, “I was at the bar of a little restaurant in Centipede Street. They had a cake with something they called sea-foam icing. It was made from caramelized sugar and vanilla, combined in a double boiler …” His voice trailed away.

“Is that all?” asked Lukas. Then in a moment: “What were the other ingredients?”

The genasi frowned, a fluctuation of his hairless brows. “Egg whites and cold water and maize sirop. Beat it for seven minutes. It whips up so delightfully, like little waves. The burnt sugar is the light at sunset over the surface of the water.”

“What was the spicing of the batter?”

“I don’t remember.”

Behind him in the doorway, Lukas heard a little gasp. He turned his head and saw Lady Amaranth standing there.

The wolf-woman pulled away the blanket from the bottom of the bed, revealing one of the genasi’s shining legs.

“They grow so fast,” said Amaranth. “One year, two, and they are fully grown. Ten years—most of them—and they are old. Many have died since I first came
here. Not from violence—they turn gray, sleep all the time, curl up on their mats, indistinguishable from beasts. Is it possible that I could live here for another hundred years? For them, how many generations will have passed?”

She was talking about the lycanthropes. “I have tried to leave,” she said, “but they won’t let me. I spoke to a fisherman in the Northlander settlements. But at night the rats attacked his boat and sunk it at the dock. So then I built a boat myself—I had it built. I wouldn’t step in it myself—they wouldn’t let me. I sent my friend the pig, the cleverest of all of them. They are very rare, the pigs, special and rare. My friend—I’d given her a name. I sent her with a message to my sister, begging her. But I wonder if her crew mutinied, or else she forgot—they are forgetful. I haven’t heard.

“I have waited,” continued Lady Amaranth. “But time has no meaning here. I have so much, and they have so little.”

S
UKA’S
E
SCAPE

B
UT IN
C
AER
C
ORWELL, TIME WAS OF THE ESSENCE
. A
T
least Suka thought so; she was eager to be gone. The others were obviously more patient. Suka had discovered after many recitations of
Oh, Father Dear
that Marabaldia had been imprisoned close to ten years. She had made line after line of little scratches in the sallow bricks, in time-honored fashion, as if counting the days indicated some sort of action or commitment. Suka was amazed. After a tenday she was ready to jump out of her skin. She hung from the bars, performed mental puzzles, logical and arithmetical, made endless circuits of her cell, invented conversations with imaginary people, rehearsed variations of what she’d do to Lukas when she saw him again (The cold shoulder? The swift kick in the crotch?). The pig-woman lay motionless, a sow in a sty, wallowing in the filth of her despair (and in actual filth, too), gnawing on the discarded carrots and radishes of regret, scratching the fleas of self-indulgence—Suka could draw out these metaphors forever, in her frantic and myriad attempts to keep her mind alive.

Poke was the sow’s name, bestowed on her by the ginger slut of Moray, as Suka privately referred to Lady Amaranth, most unfairly, as she herself would have conceded. Like the ritual inking of the tattoos, Suka imagined, these naming ceremonies were a solemn occasion, perhaps some absurd version of a knight’s investiture: rows of lycanthropes in their white shifts, all holding candles, and the ginger slut intoning variations of “Arise now, Poke, and bear your name with honor. Arise now, Prod, and you, Bat-shit.”

Poke didn’t move, didn’t turn her head, only followed Suka’s endless gyrations from the corners of her eyes. Only at night in the darkness did she come alive, during “story time,” as the gnome referred to it, or the hundred and one tales of Lady Amaranth, her virtue and her beauty. Fine, thought Suka. Whatever—eladrin were wicked hot. Cold and hot. It was a well-known fact, part of what made them so creepy and grotesque and horrible and bad. They were slutty and sterile at the same time. Everybody wanted to have sex with them and nobody could.

Poke had built a boat to please her, to carry a message to her sister, and the boat had sunk immediately, burned by the nagas, while Poke had drifted in the water, cold and miserable, hour after hour …

“Wait,” said Suka. “Hold your horses. That’s not what you said before.”

Poke, who never liked to be interrupted in these orgies of self-punishment, opened her eyes. Suka could see them glittering in the darkness. “I mean,” she said,
“the other night, the first night you told us this whole damn same exact sad story, you said you had come here with a letter for the Claw. Captain Rurik. From Lady Amaranth.”

“That’s right,” said Marabaldia in her soft, sweet voice. “I remember that too.”

“Lady Amaranth has no deviousness,” amended Poke. “She knows nothing of any rebellion. She trusts her sister from the time she was a little girl. It is I, since I have been here, who have changed the direction of her mission, now I know the truth …”

Poke’s speech, absurdly formal and yet punctuated with little grunts, always made the gnome smile. And she was interested in this: The pig-woman had showed more gumption than she would have guessed. Although if the ginger slut of Moray was really on the level, whether in her dealings with Lady Ordalf or on any other subject, then she was different from any other eladrin in the history of Faerûn, because the rest of them were unequivocally as bent as corkscrews.

“Tell me,” said Poke, “do you believe in Captain Rurik? Do you believe that such a man exists? Or is he …?”

Suka reassured her, though to tell the truth she didn’t particularly believe in him. But (who was she kidding?) it wasn’t as if she wasn’t brimming with fey blood, and hadn’t her own store of deviousness. So sue me, she thought, while at the same time she imagined she could use this part of the conversation to reveal her plan, how when the Ffolk wardens removed the last bar that
separated the gnome from the fomorian, then they could use Marabaldia’s evil eye to freeze them in their tracks—or something. Suka didn’t know enough about the eye to have got much farther in her thinking, although she had some questions: Could you turn it off, or was it always on? If it was always on, did fomorians get involved in idiotic situations where they froze or disabled each other without wanting to, a husband and wife, say, over the dinner table or in bed, or else children playing in a nursery? Over the past days Suka had amused herself by inventing various scenarios, none of which were useful now. She didn’t mention them to Marabaldia, especially since the fomorian seemed suddenly shy around the subject, which was obviously a private thing. “Of course we can control it,” she’d protested.

“It’s a weapon you carry all the time,” Suka said now, her curiosity overcoming, for the moment, any sense of diplomacy. “I mean, even a swordmage,” she said, thinking of the Savage, “puts the damn thing down when he goes to the privy—” an unfortunate image, and Suka suddenly regretted it. Marabaldia was nothing if not modest, and had a good deal of trouble with the waste buckets and water buckets the Ffolk left for them, always waiting until darkness, when Suka, from the other side of the cell, could hear her nervously slopping around. Not wanting to embarrass her, the gnome always feigned sleep. One night Marabaldia had even washed her clothes.