The Rose of Sarifal (6 page)

Back in the cockpit, the golden elf was complaining. “It’s not true. I left home when I was scarcely grown. Sometimes you forget that I’m a fey.”

Lukas laughed. “You’re the one who forgets it,” which was true. The Savage had a taste for human women.
On Alaron he had seduced the wife of a high official, convinced her to rob her husband, which was the reason they found themselves in their current predicament. A bad situation, which Lukas had swapped out several times for a worse one. Moray was cursed—didn’t everyone know it? Perhaps, but they didn’t know the particulars. Lukas considered whether to tell them what kind of danger they faced. He’d want to know if his last hours had come, if their positions were reversed. On the other hand, why steal the surprise? The knowledge wouldn’t change anything. He still had to weigh the certainty of Suka’s death against the likelihood of theirs. Nothing had changed. He had no choice. It was too bad about the boat.

And it was possible they knew the risk as well as he, and this was the way they had chosen to confront it, this light, inconsequential talk about gold and travel. In which case it would be impolite to smother that with weighty and depressing subjects—death, say, or dismemberment. Surely they could guess why he had packed the skiff, which now bobbed in their wake, with food and weapons in the hidden, watertight containers below the bulwarks. Only rumors, Kip had said, talking about Moray. The elf hadn’t demanded what they were.

To distract them, Lukas asked a question to which he’d guessed the answer: “Why do you think Lady Ordalf wants her sister dead?”

The Savage shrugged, answered immediately: “She is in danger, for all her power. Because we didn’t find Captain Rurik, it doesn’t mean he doesn’t exist. The
human population of the island hates her—that doesn’t matter, perhaps. But now the fey hate her too, the elves and the eladrin. I have heard that Karador is empty, and many of the eladrin have moved to the vale of Synnoria, where they are free from her. They will not protect her if the Ffolk rise up.”

“She has lived too long,” Lukas added. “Most of the fey were born under her reign.”

“How is that possible?” asked Kip. “Isn’t she one of them?”

“Yes and no,” said Lukas. “She’s a leShay. The eladrin live three hundred years; she lives forever, almost. There’s just one leShay family in Sarifal, and they grow sicker and more paranoid in every generation. Imagine if you had to live in your father’s house for a thousand years, live with your brothers and sisters for a thousand years or longer. They cling to each other, and they hate each other, too. Amaranth is by far the youngest, and her mother married out of the family. Polluted the pure blood. Broke the code. Ordalf is her half sister, remember.” He put the tiller over and turned west.

Up at the bowsprit, the genasi watched the headland fall away. Above him the sail luffed, and then spread wide. With the wind behind them, it was as if the sea grew still.

Motionless, he watched the crew scurry along the decks, and the sails rose around him and the ship
shuddered forward. Then he looked down into the water once again. These human tasks were not for him, a creature of the chaos. He took no pleasure from hard work. He shared none of Lukas’s joy in making things or changing the direction of events. Those were the consolations of a mediocre spirit, which did not share, as he did, a pure connection to the elements and the water of the world. Now already he could feel the ship find the deeper water of the straits, the deep blue current that flowed from pole to pole, and manifested itself in him, now, here. A cloud of spray rose up around him shining blue and green where it touched his body. Through it, as the droplets fell into the sea again, he could perceive in some instinctive part of his mind, the contours of the rocky channel as the ship plowed the deep, opening up a furrow that led into the sunken sun.

In time the sky grew dark and then shone black and moonless, pricked with stars. Gaspar-shen lay on his back, staring upward. They’d passed the midpoint of the channel, and now he felt the Moray shelf under the ship’s keel, as gentle and benign as Gwynneth had been rocky and abrupt. Then something else, a groaning in the deep.

He flopped over onto his stomach, surprised to see they’d come so far. The rest of the crew had retreated to the cockpit, where they crouched over the binnacle under the lantern. They had no need for sounding with him in the bow, feeling the water’s depth, the soft sand bottom. But still he was surprised to see the coast of Moray, a black smudge against a paler black, and a fire burning on the hill.

He imagined the others saw it too, and imagined also the thrill it gave them, the anticipation of some powerful enemy. But under the water there was something greater, a force that issued from the serene inlet perhaps two miles in front of them, the stream that drained the swamp.

Aft, Lukas stood, his hand on the tiller. Gwynneth was behind them now. Turning to look back, he saw a lighted beacon on the bluffs above the strait, a bright blue fire marking the way they’d come, someone signaling to someone, which surprised him and troubled him. But it was too late now to worry—soon they’d have to take in sail. He pictured in his mind the map of Moray he’d once seen, complete with soundings, a mariner’s chart almost two hundred years old, prepared when there were still Northlander settlements along this coast.

He saw it in his mind’s eye, examined the contours. Two minutes more and he’d have to come about, turn northward once again. He felt almost disappointed. Was it possible the fire nagas of Moray were some foolish myth? No, he’d met a Captain Blau in Callidyrr, who’d sworn he’d seen a ship burn to the waterline and then sink with all hands while an enormous serpent with a human head nosed among the wreckage, looking for survivors. Blau had been drunk when he told him; of course he’d been drunk! Why bother to stay sober after such a sight, no matter how long ago?

So it was almost with relief that he felt something grinding in the timbers underfoot. “Hey,” he called, and saw the genasi standing in the bow, holding onto the shroud, pointing up ahead.

And when the sky erupted into flame, revealing a serpent with his head ten feet above the bows, Lukas had time to realize that the old stories were wrong about one powerful detail—there was nothing human or humanoid about the snake’s triangular, flat head. Blau had lied about that, reciting with horror how a snake with an old man’s bearded face had held one sailor by the feet while another with the head of an old woman had seized hold of his neck, like a married couple fighting over a muffin, pulling it apart until the jam flowed out.

What a pile of shit that turned out to be, Lukas thought, just as Gaspar-shen dived into the water and the foresails burst into flame. Lukas put over the tiller and hauled on the main sheet, but already the boat felt sluggish and unresponsive, and he wondered if she’d been damaged below the waterline.

“Take the helm,” he told Marikke, and as the boat shuddered and yawed he leaped onto the gunwale, barefoot, his longbow in his hand. The Savage stood beside him with his sword outstretched, the blade glowing with red fire. He was muttering and cursing, and Lukas could feel a prickling in the air, as the sword sucked down energy for a strike.

Now the boat was well alight, and with his arrow nocked, and with the naga’s grotesque head weaving and turning not forty feet away, he paused. Almost
overwhelming in its intensity, he felt the sudden, harsh joy of losing everything, of letting go the garbage and detritus of his life. For years he had sailed the
Sphinx
over the Trackless Sea. She carried all he owned. Not seven months before he had finally paid her off. Fine—good riddance—with this one shaft he would remake himself clean and new. Below him he could hear Marikke’s prayer, and he let fly. Guided by Chauntea and his own skill, the arrow pierced under the creature’s chin, lodged in the thinnest part of its neck where the scales were weakest. At the same time a crooked branch of fire burst from the golden elf’s sword. The air stunk of lightning.

The
Sphinx
had turned into the wind, all lines loose, all sails flapping. “Bring up the skiff,” Lukas said. The shifter pulled it close, where it bobbed in the chop.

Another naga lifted its head above the water. Lukas loosed another arrow and saw it bounce off the creature’s eye ridge. Bad shot—it was difficult to keep his balance with the boat rocking back and forth. He had locked his elbow around one of the main stays and worked his bare toes under a cleat, but even so it was hard to avoid pitching overboard. He saw the creature turn its head, saw its yellow eye brighten as it found the skiff—Kip had pulled it alongside, and Marikke was climbing into it. Above Lukas’s head, the topsails were on fire. Below his feet, the bow had slid into the waves.

Another shot—this one lodged in the creature’s nose. It turned to look at him. Enraged, it left the skiff alone, and as its jaws opened and its forked tongue slipped out, Lukas imagined that perhaps he could see something
human in its face, not in form so much in its baffled, malign expression. The ridges over its nose were like eyebrows—he could see that now. The nose itself was blobby and big. He sent arrow after arrow into it. While the others climbed into the skiff, Kip stepping lightly, trying at all costs to avoid the spray. The Savage caught Lukas’s eye, then shouted something that was lost in the flapping sails. He clambered aboard, and Marikke pushed down the daggerboard, raised the little lateen sail, and the skiff was away. It was better like this. Lukas himself would swim for it. He slid his last arrow into the creature’s mouth at a range of ten yards, then threw his longbow overboard.

Burning debris rained down on him. He could feel the heat on his cheeks, and knew the water would be cold. Nevertheless, he stripped out of his green wool jerkin, and when his head was free again he found himself looking into the face of another naga, just risen from the deep, its head hanging as if suspended a few feet above him. From this angle he could see its coarse, flat, wicked features lit with fire, and perhaps a smile. The water sluiced from its neck. One ear dripped with seaweed.

Mesmerized by fire, even fire of their own making, the nagas would watch the boat until it sank, and they could turn away. By that time, Lukas hoped, the skiff would have found its way onto the other side of a narrow spit of land that stretched out from the coast, would have made landfall. Gaspar-shen, he hoped, would have already found it, would have guided them inshore.

Now the skiff was a hundred yards away, almost out of sight beyond the circle of firelight and the clouds of smoke. Stupidly, Marikke had brought it around to pick him up instead of racing straight for the beach. Lukas could swim this distance, had done it before. Already they’d drifted in enough for him to see the pale line of breakers as they fell on the sand spit. At the limit of his hearing, now that the sails were down, he could hear their rhythmic roar. He could see fire that way, too, torches or flares that spread out in a line as he watched. He waved the skiff off, pointing southward down the beach, and dived.

The problem with his crew was that even in the best of times, any kind of direct order was worse than useless, even if it was disguised as a suggestion. And in this case, already, he had spoken only of possibilities: This might happen, and so you might have to. Even now, when everything was unspooling as he had predicted in his worst imaginings, still it was possible to misunderstand, or to ignore what was best. And of course none of them had spoken about the nagas.