The Rose of Sarifal (24 page)

Marabaldia scarcely let him finish. “Tell me why he held me prisoner. And what is his interest in my friend,” she said, meaning Poke, who sat forward on
her stool, her clumsy hands in her lap, her yellow hair over her face.

Suka noticed that Mindarion answered only the second question. “He wants to find the Lady Amaranth,” he said. “His—aunt, if you’d like to call her that. The last of the leShays.”

“His mother wants to find her too,” offered Suka.

Rurik and Mindarion glanced at each other. “Yes, I suppose she does,” continued the eladrin. “But for different reasons. Her sister wants her dead. But her nephew wants her to bear his child.”

Yuck, Suka thought. Nobody spoke.

“To understand this, you have to understand the leShays,” murmured Rurik, his voice low and hoarse. “They are old, older than him.” He gestured toward the eladrin with his chin. “They are the root of all the fey, a long, skinny, endless little root, and they hoard their blood like gold. They don’t share it. Ordalf’s mother is dead now after many thousands of years. Princess Callia—Araithe murdered her, or had her murdered, a terrible crime. Because she bred outside the family after his grandfather died. He wanted Amaranth to be his daughter and his heir. When she wasn’t—well, you see.”

Not exactly, Suka thought. Still no one spoke.

“Let me try to make it clearer,” ventured Mindarion. “At one time there were several strands of the leShay, which they braided together in the Feywild. Now here, just the one. And they’ve had difficulties … stillborn babies, monstrous births, deformities that they’ve had strangled in their cradles. They are not … fertile. The
last one was High Lady Ordalf’s child, born ten years ago and lived just a few days. It was following his death that the princess disappeared. Lady Ordalf herself nearly died from the delivery.”

“And the father?” Suka asked.

“Can’t you guess?” Rurik asked. “There’s only the one. Ordalf’s father is long gone, and she never had a brother.”

“And … Araithe’s father?”

Captain Rurik examined his big hands. Mindarion spoke: “…  was the same as his grandfather. The leShays can’t remember their own childhoods. Their own histories mean nothing to them. These generational differences mean nothing—how could they, in a lifetime that stretches back before the first Ffolk came to Gwynneth Island? The emotions that they have, the feelings for one another, none of that can make any sense to us. The only thing to remember is that it is only the youngest who inherits. Always the youngest. High Lady Ordalf hates her sister because their mother married out of the leShays—my brother, actually, a Llewyrr knight of Synnoria, a simple eladrin, and a good man. Araithe hunted him down and killed him, and killed the princess too, his own grandmother, when she spurned him. He wanted her for himself, wanted to marry her, if it helps you to think of it that way. And now he wants her younger daughter, too. He’s already had the older one.”

Nobody wanted to hear any more of this, Suka guessed. No one had a question to ask. But Mindarion
continued with his answers: “Prince Araithe must have discovered that his mother had traced the Lady Amaranth to Moray Island. And he knew she would try to destroy her, because of her jealousy. She wants her own daughter. She wants to try again. But the prince is sick of her. They are not … fertile together. That’s why he came to find you,” he said, meaning Poke.

Then he nodded toward Marabaldia. And when no one said anything, he continued, “And why he kept you hostage all these years. Is it not obvious? The eladrin are deserting him. There are a few thousand left in Karador, but more are leaving every day, joining us in Synnoria, in the mountains. He and his mother have an army of Ffolk slaves, and other creatures in their service. But if the Underdark rose against him, the fomorians and the rest … You have no love for the drow.”

“We have no love for the drow,” the giantess repeated, blinking her great eye.

Mindarion turned his head away from her and said, “The fey are not like Northlanders, like men and women. We are too old to fight for causes, for freedom or what is right. We have no interest in such things.” He smiled ruefully. “Prince Araithe is a tyrant, it is true. But we have not known happiness since we were young. We need someone to fight for, one of our kind. And so you must tell me …” He looked toward Poke, and Suka watched the ridges of his nostrils curl, as if he caught a faint, unpleasant odor. “Is it true? Is Lady Amaranth, my brother’s daughter, still living? Captain Rurik will send his boats to Moray Island.”

Dutifully, as if by rote, the lycanthrope recited a version of the story Suka had already heard too many times when they were prisoners, after ceremonial incantations of
Oh, Father Dear
, how a wounded hippogriff had come down like a winged star, had alighted on the beach near Caer Moray, and how the helpless child on its back had been taken in and nurtured by a she-wolf, Deucala, as Amaranth had subsequently named her, the great matriarch of the northern shores, dead now. How the lost princess had grown up under her tutelage, and in time had brought incomparable gifts to the Northlander tribes, had liberated the Black Blood and the females of all species …

Suka stopped listening, and watched instead the play of emotions on Captain Rurik’s face. She wondered why it was so damned important to him to find Mindarion’s lost niece and put her on the crystal throne in Karador. Surely he didn’t need to hear this semimythic affirmation to send a boat to Moray, if that was what he wanted—he wasn’t a fey, stuck at home forever, endlessly and mournfully circling the drain. He was a man, quick-thinking and resolute, like all his kind (well, most of them—some of them, at any rate) and now he turned his big rough face toward her, frowning, as if he guessed what she thought.

Breaking eye contact, she looked up at the sky. The stars shone brightly. Actually, not so brightly, because of a new mist that had settled over the dell, small wisps of duller darkness that writhed and curled between her and the new moon. The evening wind had brought it,
and brought also a strange smell. She stood up, rubbing her shoulders in the sudden chill. Captain Rurik cursed, kicked over his stool, reached for his axe, and the drow were upon them.

Not as many, perhaps. A small crew. Enough to overcome the sentinels that Rurik had posted down below. As Suka drew her knife, she looked up at the ridge on the far side of the dell, where it rose into the wooded hills. The drow captain was there, illuminated in the soft blue light, the wind in her long white hair, a curious smile on her beautiful face as she raised her sword. In her other hand she carried a throwing spear, and Suka watched her cast it into the middle of the dell, into the glowing fire. As it fell, it also erupted into flame then exploded, scattering the radiance, extinguishing all light. And then they were caught in the noisome graveyard smell and the swirling black mist that seemed to stick to their skin, drawing them together even as they moved to defend themselves.

Great, Suka thought, a drow magician, a priestess of disgusting Lolth, a darkwalker from the web between the worlds. But Mindarion also had some kind of power. A small new light had risen up from his clasped hands, a battle between elements that transcended the cold struggle underneath, a struggle that itself seemed less like a battle between mortal creatures than like something supernatural—the air was thick and hard to breathe, and so cold that it hurt the lungs. The horses screamed and bolted, staggering away into the trees, some with their manes alight. And the men and the eladrin found
themselves pressed together and constrained into the bottom of the dell, fighting enemies that seemed in one moment to be creatures of flesh and blood, and in the next made of smoke or spirit. Near Suka, an eladrin knight was down, his breast hacked to pieces, a hulking figure looming over him. But when she slashed at it her knife divided only air from darkness, mist from light. Men cursed—guttural oaths in the Northlander tongue. Above their heads Mindarion’s light had made a glowing roof or shelter, against which the burning shafts of the darkwalker—Suka could see her prowling the perimeter—crashed in explosive spasms, weakening it slowly until finally it caved and foundered, leaving them defenseless against the concussive blast. Suka crouched down with her arms around her head. Looking up, she caught a vague impression of Princess Marabaldia standing over her, bar upraised. Then one final explosion and she staggered and fell, knocking the gnome cold between her feet.

W
OLVES

T
HE
S
AVAGE WOKE AT DAWN, CURLED UP ALONE AT THE
bottom of a ravine. For two days he had run from the stone city below Scourtop. During the day and while he was moving, he had not felt the cold, the loss of his shirt. During the night the wolf had kept him warm in the shelter of whatever small trees or bushes they could find. But last night it had rained, and he woke up with his teeth chattering.

He had flint and steel and he made a fire. After half an hour Eleuthra returned, the king’s thighbone in her hand. She threw down a brace of fat red squirrels, which the Savage cut apart with his new sword. Its blade, astonishingly sharp, was slightly curved, forged in many layers of tempered, folded steel. A line of runes was etched into the edge, a geometric pattern whose meaning was forever lost.

Similar runes decorated the king’s thighbone. The druid threw it carelessly into the rocks. She was dressed in her wolf skin and at that moment, in the dawn light, the Savage found her intolerably beautiful—dark hair,
high cheekbones, dark eyebrows, dark blue eyes. He imagined his awareness of her beauty had increased since he’d first seen her, doubled hour by hour. And he wondered if this feeling was connected to a change in the way she’d treated him since they’d left the crypt, with her ever-increasing anger.

She stood above him, a faraway look in her eyes. “I was on the mountaintop.” She gestured vaguely. “I was in the thunderclouds. I looked behind us at Malar’s temple where the stones are wet with blood. They divided the priestess’s body between the altar stones and burned the offerings. The Beastlord has come out to smell the morning air. He is sniffing at our trail.”

She raised both hands to her hair and stretched her elbows back, a gesture he found painful, because it displayed her body’s shape. “He hates you because of the creature you killed. And he hates you because of what you stole—because of your greed. Only gold has value to you. Only things, because you live so long. How could you have any feelings for another mortal creature? I hate you too,” she said, unnecessarily.

The pain in his forearm, where the dragon had bitten him, had abated. But he was afraid he had absorbed some kind of poison, something that made him lightheaded, weak. He had no strength to muster any kind of illusion, to mask the red slits in the centers of his eyes, to alter his complexion or else blunt his teeth. He had no strength to argue with her. He bent over the squirrel meat, cutting it into chunks.

“I was in the clouds,” she said again. “I saw a storm over Caer Moray, and then it moved off to the south and east. I felt the earth turn over and the battlements fall. Across the straits I saw a storm over Gwynneth Island and the fey. Nature itself rises up, and the Earthmother. In my lifetime I’ll see Karador sink into the lake and all the tunnels drowned. All of you will drown like maggots. Your bodies will rise to the surface of the water.”

He stared at her, chewing the raw meat. There was no reason to cook it, no reason to pretend. He rubbed his cold hands together and then, as if he wanted to prove her right, he brought out the king’s treasure piece by piece from his pockets, fingering the gold as if to warm himself. Already he had wound one of the rings into his yellow hair, and slipped some of the others onto his fingers and thumbs. The inner and outer surfaces were thick with meaningless runes. The metal was soft enough to take a fingerprint if you squeezed hard.

The circlet from the king’s brow he slipped over his ears and down onto his shoulders. The druid was right: The gold was a source of comfort, though maybe not in the way she thought. It felt warm to him, warmer than the sunshine that now broke through the clouds. And the jewels—he held the demon-eye ruby in his hand and felt the thrill of it against his palm, an electric charge.

“I thought you were different,” she goaded him. She put her hands on her hips and drew the wolf skin up above her knees. “The goddess help me, I thought so.”

All boys are used to this: The more she hated him, the more he wanted her. But it had been a long time
since he’d felt so young. He closed his eyes, ashamed of his response to her, and brought the jewel up to his lips.

“Malar will hunt you down,” she said. “The goddess help me, he will hunt the both of us.”