Starflower (9 page)

“Dragon's teeth and ears and snout,” the poet swore. “I should
know
better than this.”

With a groan, he got to his feet, lifting the girl in his arms. She was not tall, and her mortality made her light. He slung her over his shoulder, and her long hair trailed down his back.

“I'll not visit the Tiger,” said the poet as he set off through the forest. “But ChuMana . . . well, the serpent owes me a favor. Never thought I'd collect that debt for the benefit of a mortal creature!”

He left the River behind, its waters churning with frustration and fury. He did not see the Hound watching from the deepest shadows across the water.

I
N
THE
S
WAMP
OF
C
HU
M
ANA
countless columns rose from the murky waters. Straight and elegant, built of white marble, they were taller than most trees. One might imagine they had grown up from the ground itself, sprouted from randomly scattered seeds, for there was no rhyme or reason to their placement. They supported nothing. No roof, no arches, no platforms high above. The sky was heavy with iron-gray clouds, always threatening rain, though rarely offering it. Perhaps the columns supported the sky. They certainly reached high enough, save for those few that had crumbled and lay half submerged in swamp water. The weight of the sky must have been too much for these.

All about the marble block bases of each column—carved with elegant depictions of young women in scanty clothing and young men in laurel wreaths—brown water slurped and scrag-grass grew in unsightly clumps.

And the very air vibrated to the voices of a thousand and more frogs.

ChuMana draped herself along one of the fallen columns. She might have been sunning but for the lack of sun. Her face was neither relaxed
nor severe, neither satisfied nor discontent. It was a complete blank. She listened without interest to the songs of the frogs, all mournful and hectic with a smattering of sullen
“Graaaup
s
!”
thrown in for emphasis.

ChuMana was mistress of this demesne, and she understood every word of the songs being croaked around her. Frogs have limited interests (there were a few toads scattered about too, whose interests were more limited still). They tended to harp on the same theme:

“Kiss me.
Graaaup!
Kiss me.
Graaaup!
”

It was a bit monotonous. Yet ChuMana's mental state remained tranquil. As life was, so it should remain. Consistency was the chief end of all aims—a steady, forever sameness.

Thunder rumbled overhead, threatening yet unlikely to follow through with its threat. ChuMana did not smile, nor did she frown. She merely slid a little farther along her column, stretching herself out to a glorious extent. The nearest frogs shuddered and ceased singing when this movement caught their blinking, bulbous eyes. But they quickly forgot what they'd seen and resumed their song: “Kiss me.
Graaup!
”

No one, ChuMana thought, had a collection to rival hers.

The thought had scarcely passed the innermost recesses of her mind—so deep inside that it was more a warm vagueness than actual thought—when the shudder came.

It was a shudder like an earthquake through the air. Someone pushed at the threads of enchantment that every Faerie queen spins on the borders of her demesne. Whoever pushed, pushed hard. ChuMana slowly raised her head and focused her lidless eyes on the direction from which this assault came. Her movements were as gentle as marsh weeds waving underwater.

Another push. Another shudder.

Then she heard it, on the edge of her lands. Someone called in a voice that burst like sunlight into the gloom. “Oi! ChuMana, m'dear! Are you about, then?”

“Viper's bite!”

Her equilibrium shattered. The sameness broke into shivering pieces. Muscles beneath ChuMana's skin quivered as, in a single, fluid movement, she slipped from her column and submerged herself in the swamp murk. She swam with uncommon grace, gliding her great bulk between
scrag-grass, hillock, and column bases while innumerable frogs fled before her, still singing after kisses. She followed the shuddering that shook her enchantments with every inward step the intruder took.

She knew who it was.

She herself had given him entrance to her world long ago. Memories flooded back, unwanted visions that had no place in this heavy, languorous place of dampness and forlorn song.

How his singing had charmed her! She should have let him taste her poison, but instead, she had fallen for his song, the little devil! And when he left her demesne, oh, how she had sighed for his return! Monster. Bewitcher. What a fool she had been to leave the safety of her swamp and pursue him into the wild Wood.

The water was black before her eyes, but she followed her nose and that sixth sense of magic that led her unquestioningly forward. The Mistress of the Swamp hissed out curses as she swam. Then she smelled that familiar scent. A scent associated with bindings, with slavery.

The poet. Her savior.

Eanrin stood up to his knees in mud, cursing the heavy sky above him. Whenever he tried to step on what appeared to be a patch of solid ground, it turned out to be no more than an illusion, and he sank once more, oozing mud slurping at his sandals and soaking the edge of his cloak, all this while burdened with the weight of the mortal girl slung over his shoulder. Her long hair trailed down his back, the endmost tendrils collecting swamp refuse behind him.

“Sweet ChuMana!” Eanrin called, unaware of the serpent's proximity. “Do be nice and come greet your old friend!” He swore again, lifting one foot and shaking it, then obliged to put it back in the water before he could lift and shake the other. What a muck he was becoming!

“ChuMana, Lumé smite you, do come out. I have no wish to venture any farther into your demesne; no more than you wish to have me! But you owe me, and you know it. Don't think you can thwart the laws of Faerie. I've come to demand my dues, and I won't leave until I've seen—
mrrrreeeowl
!”

ChuMana rose from the reeds like the sinuous growth of a black, limbless tree, startling the poet so that he almost dropped his burden.
Her head emerged first, her eyes bright and unblinking. Mud fell from her scales, blobbing into the pool about her, and still her great neck stretched higher and higher. Her scarlet underbelly flashed redder even than the poet's grimy cloak.

At last she reached her full size, towering over Eanrin. Her tongue flickered once. Then a tall, slender woman in a black robe stood before the poet. The front panel of her robe was embroidered in rich red threads, and her eyes were like two rubies. She was strange and horrible to look upon, for she was so tall and thin. But strangest of all, she had no arms.

“Poet of Rudiobus
,
” she hissed. She slowly lowered her chin to her chest, her long neck bending gracefully. Her gaze never shifted from Eanrin's face. “Many years have I wondered when you would return to claim your rights.”

“Yes, well.” Eanrin gave a shrug and the sweetest of smiles. He dared not bow for fear of dropping the girl. “I hadn't intended to make it so soon. But I was thinking to myself today, ‘See here, it's been some time now since you laid eyes on that sweet ChuMana, hasn't it?' And then I asked myself, ‘Why not stop in for a chat and inquire after—'”

“Still that wandering tongue of yours, charmer!” ChuMana's long body swayed gently, as though moved by some soft breeze. “I fell for your pretty words once, and once is enough!”

Eanrin met her red gaze with his own steady stare. “Charmer, eh? You misrepresent me to all those present.” He swept the hand that did not hold the mortal girl to indicate the hundreds of frogs peeping out from the weeds and rushes. “Why should you say such harsh things, m'dear? Can you possibly have forgotten that little run-in with the Roc?”

The memory crashed back upon the serpent's conscious mind, images she had long tried to forget: a form like a mountain hovering in the air; wings like thunderclouds; talons like lightning.

“You tricked me!” Her whole body swayed now, rocked by some internal force. A grotesque vision, for without arms for balance, she should have toppled into the pool. Yet her lithe body undulated with perfect, unnatural grace. “You sang your pretty songs and entranced me!”

“I'm a bard. We bards were born to sing. As I recall, you asked me my business, and I told you.”

“You led me from the safety of my realm!”

“You followed without my invitation.”

“You lured me into the Karayan Plains, where the great Roc hunts and where there is no cover for one such as I!” A shudder ran up her body, and she flickered between snake and woman form. When the shudder passed, she stood as a woman again, though her flickering tongue was forked. “You knew what would be my fate.”

“Oh, I wouldn't say that,” said the poet with a disinterested shrug. “The Rocs are odd ones, and you never know what they might want to bring home to their nestlings. And it was your own fool fault, you must admit, for crossing into Arpiar. Vartera was sure to be upset.”

“Vartera?” The serpent hissed and showed long fangs between her womanly lips. “It was never Vartera's doing! It was yours. Yours, poet!”

“It was my doing that you're still alive,” said he. “I saved you from the bird, and at great risk to my own limbs, I might add. And . . . well, a fellow hates to bring it up, but you know the law as well as I.” His eyes glinted. Despite the misery of that damp land and the burden of the mortal girl slung across his shoulder, he was enjoying himself. It was not often that he found himself holding the upper hand to a Faerie queen. And such a queen as ChuMana, no less!

He watched how she coiled and churned, losing her womanly semblance to that of a snake flashing her red underbelly as though to ward off some danger. Eanrin leapt back for fear of getting lashed by the sharp scales at her tail's end. He staggered and almost dropped the mortal girl but managed to brace himself at the last.

Everything in ChuMana wanted to devour the poet. Her jaw swung open and shut in its urge to unhinge and swallow him whole. But the laws of Faerie were unbreakable, and she owed him a favor. Whether by trickery or fair dealing, he had saved her life, and she was at his beck and call until such a time as she might repay him.

Finally she regained her woman's form, her head bowed so that she need not look at her enemy. Her long tongue flickered again. “I am in your debt,” she said.

“Yes, you are,” said Eanrin, grinning. He could feel the dampness of
the land seeping into his bones. “And as it happens, I need a tiny little favor from you.”

“Name your price,” said the snake. “I can refuse you nothing.”

“Well, all I really need for the moment is one small part of your collection.”

ChuMana gazed at her intruder, the rubies of her eyes flickering with thought. Then, like water falling, she slipped from her upright stance down into the slime of her realm. Once more a serpent, she circled the poet, sometimes sliding over tufts of dirt, otherwise half under water. Her bulk was thicker than Eanrin's waist, and her length greater than a fallen pine. Eanrin swallowed, his heart racing in his throat. He wasn't used to being afraid. He should not fear ChuMana now, bound as she was by the laws of the worlds as every Faerie queen or king must be. Yet this inarguable fact failed to ease his mind.

At last ChuMana said, “What do you need of my collection?”

“Just to borrow one, that is all,” said Eanrin. “This girl here”—he lifted his shoulder to indicate the mortal—“has had a bit of trouble, as it were, with the River. Fallen asleep, you see? She needs a prince to wake her.”

The serpent's head rose from the water. “And you wish to borrow one of mine?”

“Any will do. It's only for the kiss, you understand,” said Eanrin. Though he trembled under that cold gaze, he met it eye for eye and never ceased to smile. “You cannot possibly refuse such a small request. Not after our history, ChuMana! Not after—”

“Cease your talk!” ChuMana stood once more as a woman, her eyes flashing, her tongue flickering like lightning in and out between her teeth. “I will loan you one prince. But I will not give him up!”

“Oh, quite so,” said Eanrin. “The
last
thing I need on my hands is a mortal prince as well as this princess! Let them rescue themselves, I always say. Makes for better epics. But just this once . . . you know how it is. Every rule needs to be bent now and then to test its mettle.”

“Very well,” said the Mistress of the Swamp. Then she knelt in the water, her eyes scanning the murk. Suddenly the frogs stopped singing. Dead silence hovered as heavy as the black-clouded sky.

Though her form remained that of a woman, from somewhere several
yards away, the end of a serpent's tail moved. It darted out. There was a splash, then a loud,
“Graaaaaup!”

The tail emerged, holding, wrapped in its coils, an enormous bullfrog. It boasted the most mournful face ever seen on one of its kind, its great back legs kicking, its eyes rolling skyward with heavy resignation.

Eanrin nodded, satisfied. As gently as he could, he slid the mortal girl from his shoulder, kneeling so he could support her across his knee. He hated putting her in that swamp water, but she was already so dirty it could hardly matter. He took the offered bullfrog from ChuMana. Turning it until its bulging eyes were level with his, he addressed it sternly:

“Now, you know your part. Kiss the girl like you mean it, and we'll all be better off, understand?”

“Graup,”
it said without enthusiasm. With a nod, Eanrin twitched the frog and its dangling limbs about and pressed its mouth to the mortal girl's lips.