Moonblood (Tales of Goldstone Wood Book #3) (29 page)

Eanrin stood to one side, his shoulders hunched.

It was Rose Red.

When he turned, Lionheart felt the sudden icy blast of winter and found that he stood on the wall of the Eldest’s City. Wind howled, and its voice was the voice of an angry mob, shouting for blood. The faces and figures of a hundred people crowded around him, indistinct as phantoms; but Rose Red, kneeling before him, was clearer than memory. She bent under the painful grasp of the phantom that held her, shielded by a black veil.

Then she raised her head, and he saw that she wore no veil. Instead, black hair fell away from her face, and she looked up at him in surprise.

She was beautiful. She was crying.

Darkness closed in around them. The phantoms vanished; the wall and the angry wind fled. Only he and Rose Red remained. Her eyes were wide and silver, quite unlike the horrible white eyes he remembered seeing and yet strangely familiar to him. Her sobbing stopped with a choke when she saw him. The coldness of her gaze hurt. He wanted to speak and struggled for words.

“Rosie,” he said, “I’m going to find you.”

She made no answer.

“I’ll make it right.”

She closed her eyes and turned away. Her hair veiled her from his gaze.

“Please,” he said. “Please, say something.”

Only her mouth remained visible behind her hair. He saw her lips move. No sound came, but he knew what she had said.

“You’re lost.”

Desperation took him, and he reached out to her. But she was miles from him now. How could he make her understand? He wasn’t lost! He knew what he had done; he could look back on his own actions with a steady eye. How could he tell her that, given the choice, he would do it all again? His choices had led to suffering, even to sacrifice. But he had made them with good in his heart.

Hadn’t he?

She was farther from him now, and his hands would never reach her. No one would sympathize with the pain he had experienced, so caught up as they were with the pain he had caused. Why couldn’t they see that he had only wanted the good of his people? Why couldn’t they understand?

Why couldn’t
she
understand?

“I’ll find you!” Lionheart called after her through the haze of dreams. “I’ll find you, and I’ll explain everything!”

Eanrin listened to Imraldera and Oeric sing, and he heard when Imraldera’s voice faltered suddenly with fear. They were losing the mortal.

Then Imraldera, still singing, turned her gaze upon Eanrin. He felt it, though he could not see it. And he remembered days long ago, back when he’d possessed his sight. Days when those black-as-night eyes of hers could ask him anything, and he would do it. That time was long gone, perhaps, but not forgotten. No, he would never forget.

Only two people in all the worlds could command Bard Eanrin: His Master and . . .

Heaving a great sigh, he stepped up beside them and, after only a moment’s hesitation, took Imraldera’s hand and felt the pressure of her fingers squeezing his. Then he placed his other hand on Lionheart’s head. He sang, joining his voice with the other two:

“Beyond the Final Water falling,

The Songs of Spheres recalling.

When all around you is the emptiness of night,

Won’t you return to me?”

Lionheart woke, his eyes flaring wide as he cried out, “I’ll explain everything!”

Oeric, his hand still resting on the young man’s shoulder, answered quietly, “Don’t try.”

2

L
IONHEART CAME PAINFULLY
back to consciousness.

He had drifted in and out of dreamless sleep so many times he’d lost count. Now that the comforting stone around him was gone, waking meant returning to the fiery burn of claw wounds in his shoulder. But each time he woke, the pain was less, and this time when he opened his eyes, stiffness in the muscles bothered him more than anything.

He blinked at the ceiling above him. Then he blinked again when what he had taken for a painted mural of leaves against a blue background stirred in a breeze, the leaves rustling softly. A third blink, and it was a mural once more. Lionheart decided that he wasn’t conscious after all and, groaning, closed his eyes and started to turn over.

“You’re awake.”

The voice that spoke rumbled like falling rock.

“No, I’m not.” But Lionheart attempted another look at the world just in case. He still gazed up at a ceiling of leaves that was sometimes real and sometimes a painting. When he turned his head to the side, he found he wasn’t alone. Seated beside him in the chamber that both was and was not a forest grove was the most enormous person he had ever seen. He was not awkward in his bulk, however, but reclined gracefully in a low chair, his chin supported on one fist and his legs stretched out before him.

He looked startlingly like Rose Red. Only a whole lot bigger.

Lionheart’s head started to throb. He groaned again and decided he might as well go back to sleep, or perhaps just die altogether.

“No, no,” said the stranger in that rumbling voice. “Now you are awake, you should drink something.”

“I told you, I’m not awake,” Lionheart growled.

“I’m afraid you are.”

The next moment, a silver cup was held to Lionheart’s lips. He realized with some surprise that he was parched and accepted the proffered drink gratefully. Only after he had drained the cup dry did he stop to wonder if this was a good idea. There had been plenty of stories in his nursemaid’s repertoire about the dangers of accepting Faerie food from outlandish folk.

Too late now,
he thought as the stranger set the empty cup aside on a nearby table, which was simultaneously a holly bush hung thick with berries. Whatever he had drunk started to flow warmly through Lionheart’s body, easing the burn and the stiffness in his shoulder. He relaxed muscles he had not realized he was tensing and decided that even if he was now caught in a twisted Faerie spell, it was probably worth it for a drink like that.

The stranger turned huge eyes upon him. “Now,” he said, “if you are feeling better, we must talk.”

“What if I’m not feeling better?”

“We must talk anyway.”

Lionheart pushed himself upright in the down-soft bed. His head spun, and pain darted from his shoulder down his arm, but it wasn’t as bad as it might be considering he’d been mauled by a tiger the night before. Or was it a week before? He closed his eyes and tried to shake those thoughts of time away. After all, time didn’t count for much in this world—or place between worlds, for he suspected he was in the Wood once more.

“What do we need to talk about?”

“I am told that you seek Arpiar,” said the ugly stranger.

Lionheart realized with a start that this person who looked so much like Rose Red must indeed come from the same land as she. Given his prior experience with the unsavory Torkom, he wasn’t altogether certain he should trust this person, who was half again taller than the dealer. But he’d already accepted the sweet drink from him, and the stranger was making no signs of suddenly bashing Lionheart over the head with a spiked club or whatever was the usual practice of goblinkind. So Lionheart said, “I am. Where can I find it?”

“If I knew that, I would not be here with you now.” The stranger sat forward, bringing his great white eyes much closer to Lionheart’s face than was comfortable. “I have been seeking the Land of the Veiled People for the last five centuries.”

Lionheart leaned back against the headboard. “Five
centuries
? That’s . . . not encouraging.”

“Five centuries by your count, little mortal,” said the stranger. “Perhaps not so long as the folk of the Far World know it, and scarcely a breath in the Wood Between.” He sighed then, a great, gusty sigh. “That isn’t to say I have not felt the passing years stretching behind me since Arpiar was lost. But I must seek the realm of my birth, and I shall seek it until it is found . . . or until I perish.”

Lionheart gulped, his head still spinning. “Why is it so difficult to find? I mean, I know this world—these worlds—are different from mine. But how can you
lose
an entire kingdom?”

The stranger reclined back in his chair again, relieving Lionheart of some of the intensity of those enormous eyes. “You’ve heard of islands swept away in massive waves, haven’t you?”

Lionheart nodded.

“Arpiar was swept away in a wave of enchantment. Washed beyond discovery. Not destroyed but swallowed whole, five hundred years ago. Soon after Vahe died for the second time.”

“Died for the . . . the
second
time?”

“Surely, mortal, you are not wholly unfamiliar with the ways of Faerie? At the least you must know the tale of the Dragonwitch.”

Lionheart thought back on the old legend, how the Dragon King’s first daughter had been a Faerie queen before her transformation. Heroes had fought her countless times, and twice she had been slain yet come back to flaming life. Only after her third death had she remained in the land of the dead for good.

“But that’s just—” Lionheart stopped himself. What good were arguments for reality in this place? The fantastic was all too real here. “Then the King of Arpiar has three lives as well?”

“Had. As do all the lords of Faerie. Ragniprava, whose hospitality you so recently enjoyed, is another such a one. In rescuing you, I took one of his.”

“You killed the Tiger?”

“One of him, yes.”

“Thanks for that.”

The stranger nodded. “Two lives yet remain to Lord Bright as Fire. Perhaps only one; I can’t say for sure. All other lords, kings, and queens are gifted the same. Iubdan Rudiobus and his fair Bebo. The Mherking under the sea. Lady Nidawi the Everblooming, the serpent ChuMana, Butannaziba Who Walks Before the Night, and hundreds more. All are blessed—or sometimes cursed—with three lives each. When Vahe took his own mother’s third life, that gift passed to him. But he has lost two.”

The stranger’s eyes no longer saw Lionheart as he recounted a history so long ago as to be unimaginable for Lionheart, yet which to him must have seemed but yesterday. “One life he forfeited not far from here, in a tower that once stood at the crest of Goldstone Hill; the second he lost in the Near World. Since that time, no one has glimpsed Vahe beyond the boundaries of Arpiar. And if anyone has passed into that realm, no one has returned. There are some few who have escaped—Torkom the trader, for instance, though we must wonder if he escaped or was sent by Vahe as a spy.

“Besides him, we know for certain of only one other who has slipped through the barriers of Arpiar into the mortal world, and we know that she left against Vahe’s will.”

“Rose Red?” Lionheart hazarded.

But the stranger shook his head. “Queen Anahid, Vahe’s wife. Some twenty years ago or more by the Near World’s count, she escaped her husband’s spells, carrying with her a newborn child. She sought to hide the babe from Vahe for reasons we do not know. What we do know is that, in her desperation, she called upon the Prince of Farthestshore for help.”

Lionheart went suddenly cold all over. “The Prince of Farthestshore?”

“Do you know my Master, the Prince?”

Lionheart’s dream flashed across his mind, and he closed his eyes. “I have met him,” he said quietly. “Some time ago.”

“Not so long, I think,” said the stranger.

Lionheart shuddered and hastily said, “What became of the queen? Vahe’s wife, who ran away. Did she escape?”

“No,” said the stranger. “Though offered safe haven among us, she returned to Arpiar. But the child remained in the Near World, safe as long as she dwelt inside the circle of protection Anahid called down for her, and guarded always by a Knight of Farthestshore.”

His next words, though spoken softly, were as an avalanche in Lionheart’s mind: “It was she whom you call Rose Red.”

At first no thoughts came, only that rushing crumble of a thousand half thoughts that couldn’t take coherent form. The first that resolved into anything he could understand were the words of Ragniprava, smooth as a well-sharpened knife.