The Rose of Sarifal (2 page)

D
O NOT SPEAK TO ANYONE,” SAID
M
ISTRESS
V
ALEANNE
.
“If someone asks you, then just smile and nod your head. It is a beautiful night, and we are out for a ride by the lakeshore to Crane Point. It is natural for us to be here. No explanation is necessary.”

“But I thought we should wait for my sister,” said Amaranth. “Didn’t she tell us not to—”

“Yes—please, my lady,” said Valeanne. “She will meet us where we are going. In the interval, try to remember that since your mother’s death, you do not know who is your friend.”

“But—”

“Hush,” said Valeanne.

They had left the water-citadel of Karador before first light. Now finally, at sunset, they had climbed out of the woods of Myrloch Vale and into higher, sparser country; six dragonborn soldiers on their enormous mounts, and two eladrin, one a child.

“I’m tired,” complained Amaranth. “I don’t understand why I have to hide. When will we be there?”

They had changed horses at Glenraugh and taken something to eat away from the company. Now the mounts were weary again, as they left the trees and came up the path between the lakes, Ulls and Innes, one black water, one green. A guard post was there, the source of Valeanne’s concern. It stood at the terminus of an old wall left over from human times. Grass grew on its battlements, and the gate had tumbled down. But the torches were lit, a line of intermittent lanterns that stretched from one shore to the other.

“I don’t understand,” protested Amaranth. “Why did we have to leave, the last night of midsummer? Didn’t they need me for the anointing? I was going to be an aunt again, a real aunt this time. Nana had laid out a pretty dress and my new shoes. Now we’ve spent all day like this, when I could have been having fun. You lied to me—my sister isn’t here. No one is here. I hate this place—where are we? I hate you,” she added as an afterthought.

“Gods give me strength,” murmured Valeanne. The sun was setting in a blaze of crimson light. She squinted up at the bare hillside on the other side of Ulls, where a larger beacon had flared to life.

“Madam,” rumbled Shamasar, the captain of the dragonborn. He pointed with his scaly finger toward the lighted door and windows of the ruined guard tower. “Look at them—a company at least. Someone is expecting us. If we’re to reach the steeple of the hippogriffs—”

It was as he said. There were soldiers at the guard tower, more than necessary or usual at this lonely outpost.

“If we go back,” said Shamasar, “we can retreat into the woods again and pass along the far shore by the crags. We can reach the steeple from the other side.”

“No,” said Amaranth. “I’m not going anywhere. I refuse.” She was a red-haired girl, dark-eyed, small for her nine years.

A horn sounded up ahead, a single, plaintive, menacing note. Valeanne stamped her horse in a half-circle and reached out for the child’s reins. “You’re right,” she said. “There’s too many. We have to—”

Below them, behind them, the trees closed in over the trail. But now there were lights down there too, flickering among the branches, fey lights in many colors. “Shit,” she said. “We are betrayed. My lady, hide your face. Pay no attention—”

But it was too late. Amaranth had pulled her pony free and spurred it up the slope, toward where the black shadows of the soldiers massed by the gate. More stumbled down the hillside, dark silhouettes against the fiery clouds. Amaranth pulled the hood back from her face and shook her red hair free. “Sirs,” she said, calling out to the approaching soldiers. “I’ve missed the entire midsummer festival because of these idiots. It’s not fair. I’m hungry and I want to go home.”

The wind shifted, and the pony shied in terror from the harsh scent. These were no eladrin or elf guards, Valeanne saw as they approached. In the half-light, she could see their black faces and white hair.

“Drow,” said Shamasar. He yanked on the bridle of his dragonspawn mount. The creature turned its
wicked beak and raised one clawed foot from the stones. Shamasar drew his sword. “Haroon, Gesh,” he shouted. “Fall back.”

They were caught. Below them, among the ash and linden trees, more of the drow had massed along the path, bold in the failing light, shaking their spears. Among them and farther back, Valeanne could see larger creatures from the Underdark, come up from Myrloch—cyclops guardsmen in steel armor, their axes as tall as men, their single eyes shining yellow.

Above her, up the slope, a drow soldier scampered through the rocks, snarling and gesticulating, her skin and armor black, her hair as white as ash. Her nose and the ridges of her eyes were pierced with iron rings. She laughed and showed her sharpened teeth, and reached for the pony’s head. But Lady Amaranth stood on her stirrups, and with her riding whip she struck the drow across the face.

“Ugly!” she said, which was untrue. The drow were beautiful, elves of the black night, eladrin of the shadows.

What alliance had brought them out of their bottomless cities and into Myrloch Vale? What had Lady Ordalf promised them, that they did her bidding? One of them had climbed to the top of a boulder above Valeanne, a drow priestess of the Spider Queen, and out of her, as if conjured from her hands, webs and tendrils of a fog of darkness spread into the air, obscuring the new stars.

Valeanne pulled a crossbow from its scabbard and shot a quarrel through the drow’s chest. Then she
spurred upward beside Amaranth as the dragonborn divided ranks, three behind them to block the way, three to ride with them up the slope. The ones behind, Valeanne knew she could depend on them not to run, turn, flinch, take a single step backward, or do anything except die fighting, even against these odds—twenty, thirty to one, it looked like. Already Valeanne could hear the hawking, whistling grunts as the two males, Haroon and Gesh, drew air into their bodies through the gills behind their cheeks, distending the sacs of poison or burning acid that would soon spray from their jaws to turn the slope below them into a cyclone of fire. In the middle, the female—Valeanne hadn’t known her name—had freed her mount’s barbed head. She sat easy in the saddle, a bastard sword in either hand, ignoring the arrows that had begun to fall. She raised her head, and for a moment Valeanne could hear the bitter, skirling, hissing death-chant of her race, before it was lost among the screaming drow. But even after that the words, unspoken, hung above them, the quatrain that begins,
“Fire of black heaven, high beacon of the morning star, / lit with my last breath, I will not disappoint you …”

“Madam,” said Shamasar, polite as always. He had ridden up ahead, his greatsword in one hand, a hammer in the other. Valeanne watched, awestruck, as his mount reared onto its hind legs, while at the same time Shamasar unfurled the scaly wings from behind his back. Stretching high above him, twenty feet from tip to tip, the wings provided balance as he goaded his mount forward step by step. Cowed, the drow fell back,
while at the same time the remaining two dragonborn cantered up away from the path, while Valeanne and Amaranth fell in behind them.

Now the whole slope was lit with fire. Dry blue lightning flashed above their heads. They rode through the boulders until the land evened out, the long lake on their right hand, the guard tower on their left.

Ordinarily it is a mistake to divide a weaker force, but the dragonborn weren’t ordinary soldiers. The three who held the trail up from the woods had spread apart to block the entire vale, from Innes lakeshore to the cliffs below Ulls Peak, a space of a mile and a half. They had bathed the slopes with poison and cold fire, and when Valeanne looked back, she could see not one of their enemies had gotten through. Ahead, Shamasar kept their flank while they cantered over the dry turf toward Ulls. There the black water had receded from the shore, leaving a strip of sand where they could race the horses.

They were headed for Crane Point, a spit of land that stretched into the lake where the royal house of Sarifal had kept a hunting lodge. The court had come to hunt elk in the month of Leaf-fall, ever since the leShay Queen Ordalf had brought the fey to Gwynneth Island a hundred years before. Then the high towers of Karador had risen from the Feywild through the clear waters of Lake Myr, and the human kingdom had fallen.

Most of their works had fallen with them. Always the eladrin preferred temporary structures. The lodge at Crane Point was less a building than a stable for the horses, and an open field where enslaved Ffolk and
Northlanders, bred for docility, would build and then dismantle the high pavilions while their masters drank and gathered and played music by the shore, admiring the flights of rainbow crane around the base of Corwell’s Steeple, all that remained of the old citadel.

“Hush, my lady. Don’t cry. Don’t be afraid. Your horse is wounded and cannot run. Climb up behind me.”

“I’m not crying. Flower needs a rest, that’s all.”

In every battle there are strange pockets of quiet and nothingness. Valeanne and Amaranth had fallen into one of them by the small, black, lapping water of the lake. Above them played the dragonfire, and arcs of soundless lightning from the east. Shamasar had kept the drow at bay while Lady Amaranth dismounted. Staring with fright, lame and hurt from the drow arrows, the pony spread his front legs and refused to budge, while Amaranth held his cheek.

The pony lowered his head. Soon he would settle and lie down while the numbing poison did its work. There was a cold wind off the water, which Valeanne knew was not quite natural to the time or place, and carried with it the faint whiff of carrion. She knew the drow priestess she had killed was not the only one among these dark elves, and the wind would soon catch them in a black, cold net of fog. Already, smokelike clouds drifted above them as Valeanne brought her horse around.

“Why did they hurt Flower?” asked Amaranth, as if all this strength and fury had been unleashed to kill a single pony. Valeanne turned in the saddle to study the summit of the steeple at Crane Point, looking for the
fire—there it was, the signal. It gleamed through the black clouds that spread like a miasma over the water, a product of drow conjuring.

“There’s the hippogriff,” rumbled one of the remaining dragonborn, a female. “Madam, we must go.”

“But I won’t leave Flower,” protested Amaranth as Valeanne spurred close, stretching out her hand.

“Lady, we spoke of this. This is not safe for you. Mistress Tiana has arranged a sanctuary on Snowdown at the court of Erliza Daressin, just for half a month, until this has blown over.”

She was lying, and the child saw it in her face. Amaranth locked her arms around the pony’s neck and would not budge. But then there was no more time for gentleness and persuasion, because the battle had claimed them once again. It swirled up from behind them, where the fey had overwhelmed the guards. A company of drow, armed with spears and shields, came up the slope, with worse creatures on their flank. Captain Shamasar was there, and he cantered back slowly, then turned his mount to face them once again—a half-dozen enormous spiders, as big as horses. But from each of their bloated thoraxes protruded the body of a drow, her chest and arms and head, a grotesque spider-centaur. Two of them crouched low, and as Valeanne watched they launched themselves through the air, each fanning the air with two short fireblades.

Burning arrows struck around them. “Madam …” insisted the nearer dragonborn. She walked her mount away from them, down toward the lakeshore.

But Amaranth wouldn’t turn her head to look. “I hate you. I won’t go.”

Shamasar cut one of the driders from the air. But the other was on top of him, and by the light of its burning sword Valeanne could see the stumps of the arrows that protruded from the captain’s armor. Sighing, she raised her crossbow and shot Flower through the brain, six inches beyond the child’s hands—the beast was perishing in any case. With its last strength it reared away, breaking Amaranth’s hold, while at the same time Valeanne reached and grabbed the girl by the arm, pulling her up across the horse’s neck while she bit and fought. Valeanne dropped the crossbow and spurred forward with the two remaining guards. A second drider was down. But now the rest of the dark elves had reached Captain Shamasar and pulled him from his mount. Valeanne bent over her saddlebow. She clasped her hand over the child’s mouth. “Some day you will understand,” Valeanne murmured into her ear. “I’ll save your life if it kills me—I gave my promise to your mother. You disgusting little pig-shit bastard daughter of a fool, are you still too young to see the difference between good and wrong?”

Sometimes, though, the difference is unclear. Amaranth bit down on her finger, and even through the glove Valeanne could feel the little teeth. They were galloping along the lakeshore, the dragonborn up ahead. Valeanne watched the dragonborn raise her head and call out to the hippogriff in a word of flame that burst open the night, a gout of fire from her scaly jaws.

There was a stone platform at the steeple’s top, a hundred feet above the lake. In times past there’d been a temple there, an altar to the moon. That’s where the hippogriffs waited to take them to Snowdown and safety—that much was true. The plan had been so simple. Out of season, there was no one here.

Coming back had been the lie, as the girl must have understood. They’d been betrayed. The plan had been to take a cup of mulled wine at the guardhouse then ride out to Crane Point to see the pair of wild griffons nesting in the steeple at the promontory’s tip, a sight not seen here in a generation. In the evening the hippogriffs would come. But now they had to catch them on the run. If their plans were known, then there’d be soldiers at Crane Point. Sure enough, a flare went up from the lakeshore a mile and a half ahead, illuminating the high stone ruin of the steeple, the broken arches and the gaping perch about halfway up, where the hippogriffs’ wild cousins had made their giant nest. Above them at the platform of the moon, the winged mounts took to the air, trying to escape the sudden light and the bombardment that would follow it, a missile of green fire and a crack of thunder—too late. One of the noble beasts erupted into flame, its feathered wings alight, and Valeanne could hear it screaming as it fell into the lake, obscured at the final instant in a cloud of steam.