The Rose of Sarifal (29 page)

P
OKE
I
S
D
EAD

S
UKA RODE UNCOMFORTABLY ON
C
APTAIN
Rurik’s saddlebow as they plodded along the highland trail into the mountains. She was making conversation. “Lord Mindarion says he will not fight for causes, none of the eladrin will. But they’ll fight for Lady Amaranth. I wonder what you think about that.”

The grim captain smiled, showing the livid scar that bisected his lips, and the steel teeth under it. “I like you,” he said. “And I don’t think you’re stupid. I don’t think I have to tell you what I think.”

“If I were you,” the gnome continued. “I’m guessing I wouldn’t trade two pounds of dog shit for the lost princess of the leShays.”

Rurik appeared to consider this. “Two pounds of dog shit are worth less than one,” he objected. “But I take your point. Who wants a tyrant to live forever? The Kendricks are bad enough, and they die every fifty years or so. Quicker, if you let them.”

“Or if you make them.”

Rurik scratched his beard. He stared moodily up ahead, at the back of the horse in front of them. “Treacherous fey,” he said. “Why should I tell you anything? But you know what I’m talking about. You left this place and came to live with us, with men and women. Why was that?

“I wanted a change. You can keep your women, though.”

“Exactly.” Rurik gestured with his chin at the back of the eladrin knight in front of them, a beautiful creature, the scales of his armor shining like a fish’s belly. “Nothing changes here. No one builds anything or makes anything or does anything new. You need people for that. The Ffolk on Gwynneth Island, their lives are the same as when Karador rose out of the lake, the same wooden plows, the same boats, the same charcoal stoves, because of the fey. Everything’s preserved in amber for them, because they live so long.

“You need some urgency,” he murmured after a pause. “Break a few skulls. Die, a little bit. Nobody dies in this stupid country. That’s why no one really lives.”

“How philosophical.” In fact, he was full of shit. By being sarcastic, Suka tried to hide the depth of her disagreement, a type of misdirection that came easily to her. Out of a kind of inner perversity, she told herself she didn’t believe in gods. Ah, gods, she thought. Plenty of people die on Gwynneth Island—too many. Not twenty hours before, Borgol the cyclops had died defending his mistress. Then the drow had attacked them in their forest dell, and Rurik had lost six of his Northlanders and three of the eladrin. And Poke the pig had gone
down, shattered by the darkwalker’s cold spear, though she was not dead yet. Marabaldia had her on a stretcher, a canvas sling over two cut saplings. She pulled the front of it herself between her enormous purple fists, while pairs of the remaining Northlanders took turns behind her, staggering under the weight.

They had left the dell while it was still dark, fearing attack at any moment, but the drow were gone. Mindarion’s explosion had spread outward, and as they came down the slope into the thicker woods they had seen many fallen trees, struck down by the blast, and the corpses of several of their enemies. Suka had been knocked unconscious, but the rest, cowering together, had escaped the full force of the detonation. Later, climbing gingerly among the tree trunks, before they’d found the trail again, she had looked for the drow captain, hoping to find her dead or dying, but no dice. Once she had even left the others, because she had caught sight of something in the half darkness, a plume of white that could have been the darkwalker’s hair, and she imagined slipping the knife into her throat and turning it—she knew the creature would not beg. What she found was a family of owlbears, slaughtered for no reason—ungainly, irritable, dangerous beasts, but even so, they did not have to die like that, the young cubs cut apart for sport.

Knife in hand, Suka had rejoined the others. She was thinking about Poke the lycanthrope, slowly and with every twist of the crude stretcher losing a small bit of her humanity, or at least her human shape. Dead, no one
would know she had not always been a pig. Not that there was anything wrong with that. Intelligent, moral, clean (when given the choice), loyal creatures, pigs were, or so Suka had always heard.

When at dawn they reached the trail that would lead them north into the highlands, she accepted Rurik’s offer to ride with him near the head of their little column. Now, sick of his heartlessness, she asked him to dismount then slipped down from his boot while it was still in the stirrup, and ran back down the line. Marabaldia was there. Marabaldia would understand. Marabaldia knew that life was precious. She had refused all attempts to abandon the lycanthrope in order to save time, or at the very least to leave her to others and ride on ahead.

Suka found her at the back of the company. Steadfastly she blundered up the trail, her iron bar slung behind her back, her massive shoulders hunched—Poke probably weighed close to three hundred pounds, more now than when they started, as she gathered mass out of the air. But the princess wasn’t even breathing hard.

“Little friend,” she said when she saw Suka, “I used to feel such pity for myself during the years when I was in chains. But then bright Selûne, goddess of our sex, granted me a companion in my time of trial, this noble pig to share my loneliness and make it disappear. I, who had lost everything, now found myself rich again, and when you came, rich beyond measure—”

This sentiment, touching in itself, reminded the gnome also of something Lukas, the only other absolute
romantic she’d ever met, had once said. Suka burst into tears, partly for memory’s sake.

Marabaldia released the stretcher’s crude legs, still with their leaves and branches, kicked them solid, and laid down her burden so she could embrace the gnome, whose head scarcely reached her waist. She bent down over her, so that Suka had an impression less of receiving a hug than of entering a safe, warm house. She looked up and again encountered the fomorian’s right eye, as if it were a framed picture or a mirror in that house, or else a doorway or (heck, why not?) a porthole into a little tiny upstairs room, where a miniature version of Lukas sat at a table watching her, a smile on his funny-looking face, handsome enough for a human, but please. Did it say something about her that she didn’t know a single member of her own race?

Sobs redoubled, she put her arms around Marabaldia’s enormous neck, and together they turned to look at Poke, who lay unconscious, smeared with blood. Suka reached to run her hand along the rose tattoo, and they both took hold of her hands, one on each side, stroking her cramped, sharp, cloven palms. In time Marabaldia took up her burden again, but Suka stayed alongside, holding Poke’s hand until it had entirely transformed, hardened, and grown cold.

By that time it was afternoon, and they had crossed the ridge. To the west Suka could see the land slope down toward Myrloch and the lake, and the fens surrounding it. To the east a thick mist hid the pass into Synnoria and the vale of the Llewyrr. Northward, straight ahead
rose the Cambro Mountains, shattered pinnacles of granite streaked with glaciers and high chains of lakes. Underneath, the rock was full of holes, shafts and caverns dug by generations of miners, now abandoned. They climbed through valleys full of the heaped tailings below worm-eaten cliffs, red hills of the exhausted ore.

They were approaching the stronghold of Harrowfast, a fortified enclave in the mountains, built by dwarves, now overtaken by the fey on the marches of Synnoria. Here were the entrances into a world of caves and mining tunnels, now mostly disused. But over the course of generations, two miles down beneath the ridge of peaks, the fomorians and their slaves had dug a roadway all the way to Cambrent Gap, and then a spur to Citadel Umbra in Winterglen, an immense tunnel through the dark. The entrance to that road approached the surface near to where they were, a narrow chasm on the eastern side, where the wide black walls were covered with eroded reliefs, carved figures from the ancient times, gods and goddesses, kings and queens. Emissaries waited for them near a massive stone gateway leading down into the dark, a company of cyclopses dressed in burnished armor, carrying long lances with pennants hanging from the crossbars, flags as black as night, embroidered with the sign of the red torch clasped in a purple hand, now snapping and rattling in the fresh breeze. Captain Rurik and the eladrin had reached the place already on their horses, but when Marabaldia saw the flags she laid the stretcher down for the last time, and after combing her hair back between her fingers,
pulled out her iron bar and marched forward, the grimace on her face transforming as she saw a fomorian warrior standing by himself. Suka, beside her, saw a look of indecision pass over Marabaldia’s big face, and then a new determination. Marabaldia recognized this man. And another, and another, as the great giants rose out of the shadows of the rocks.

The cyclopses had started with a wailing cry that was half random howling and half music—Suka could hear traces of a wavering melody and traces of harmony, also, between the high voices and the low. Now they settled to their knees, prostrating themselves just as Borgol had in the prison at Caer Corwell; they closed their eyes and pressed their foreheads into the stones. The fomorians bowed low, except for one, a giant of what was for them, Suka estimated, middle height, and the only one of them not wearing armor, or grasping clubs or battle-axes. He was a handsome fellow, Suka thought—astonished at herself for making these distinctions between members of a race of grotesque and tyrannical barbarians—with his black hair in a braid, and his eyes almost the same size, the right one slightly larger, of course, and shining now as if it itself were a source of light. Marabaldia gasped. She reached down to take Suka’s hand between her forefinger and thumb, which the gnome squeezed reassuringly—she knew who this was. Against all hope and reason, just as the world had turned irrevocably into shit, here was a gift from bright Selûne’s hands, a bridegroom who had waited ten years for his bride. Hurt and made brittle by the lycanthrope’s slow death,
Suka found herself, again, on a thin edge of tears, yet happy this time to see her friend walk forward into the circle of bowing, prostrating giants, and this one fellow in the midst of them, smiling now, dressed in his long, rich, fur-lined robes.

Because maybe there was hope for all of them, and Suka’s friends were also still alive, and she would see them again on a bright, clear day like this, when the wind was in her face. Thinking somehow this was a gift for her as well, she stepped forward with the princess, reaching up to hold her hand, as if she were (she imagined later) a servant or a slave. She didn’t think about that now. She looked up at her friend’s shining face. Marabaldia was too shy to speak. Ughoth (that was the fellow’s name, Suka subsequently learned) held his hand out, but she did not take it. She’d been staring at the ground, but now she looked up, and Suka saw a beam as if of light or comprehension pass between their eyes—she didn’t have to talk. Everything, Suka imagined, was now revealed, or at least everything important. The rest were just details.

Ughoth cleared his throat—a grunting, burbling, disgusting noise—and said, “Madam, I have the unfortunate duty of telling you your royal father has now passed away, and my father too has joined him in the Deep Wilds, friends now where they were enemies. Because of this my circumstances are now changed, and I am able to welcome you—no, I rejoice to welcome you home, to … my home. I know I must not presume now on past intimacies, so I am here to offer you my
service in whatever decision you must undertake. I must tell you—all of us, all of your subjects have never given up hope. But I especially have waited for you, picturing in my eye some version of a moment just like this, though always a pale shadow of reality, and with no understanding of the happiness I feel at this moment, and my joy and relief in your safety …” et cetera, et cetera, Suka thought, slightly startled at the personal, private tone his speech had taken at the end (“intimacies,” she thought—that’s one word for it), especially in this public space. But he had lowered his voice, and maybe no one else could hear except for her, Suka guessed—but what was she? Chopped liver? Ugh. She didn’t even want to think about that. But she imagined she was probably beneath the level of his notice—quite literally, as it happened, because his head was six or seven feet above her own.

But Marabaldia was aware of her, at least enough to be embarrassed. She turned her face away from him, her eye shining like a star. “We will talk about these things together,” she said, brushing his fingers with her own. “When we are alone.” She made a gesture, and the cyclopses rose to their feet, and the rest of the fomorians ceased from bowing. “I have brought up from the plain the bodies of my friends, slain in my service, human and fey—there, you can see the horses. When we have laid them to rest, there will be time to speak.”

And then more like this, ceremonial talk that tended to obscure feeling as a cloud did the moon. Other assorted dignitaries now stepped forward, and all
privacy was lost. Representatives of the various factions made preliminary speeches, here in the stone agora of Harrowfast, among the snapping banners.