The Rose of Sarifal (8 page)

The boy allowed his thoughts to move and stretch a little bit. “Where are my friends?” he asked without asking.

Another fish on the bank, slit open. “They are here.”

“Where are you taking us?”

“Into Orcskull.”

“Why?”

This one was darker, deeper, an eel slithering away. But he caught it and hauled it up, though it twined around his wrist. “Great Malar says it. Great Malar wants it.”

No sooner had these words, unspoken, risen to the surface, than he caught a glimpse of something lower down, something at the bottom of the pool, a shadow or a shape that waited there, its red eyes glowing in the dark. Kip shuddered, and he felt the wereboar come awake under his body as without moving he slunk away from the inner water and feigned sleep.

Not far away, Marikke lay on her back, her face unquiet, her long hair tangled and caked with mud. Unlike Kip, who craved physical contact even when he was in danger, who was always brushing up against you or else reaching out to touch your arm, she had dragged herself away from the night fire, humping on her elbows and her knees to be alone. This was not because she had any illusions of escape—her wrists and ankles were tied too cruelly for that. It was because she needed space for the goddess to find her and speak to her alone, space to become greater than she was. Now she was dreaming, close to the surface of sleep, because of the pain in her swollen hands. But even so the goddess crept out to her, lightly on the thin edge, and greeted her with the sign of the morning. In Marikke’s dream she had taken an unusual form, a cloud of bees buzzing without sound, and yet retaining the shape of a young girl.

“Daughter, I am afraid,” she said, though she was young enough to be Marikke’s daughter. “The ice is breaking in the mountains, and Great Malar wakes. An angel comes to prepare the way. Swift is his sword, bright is his hair. But it is your choice, what happens next.”

Hurt and cold as she was, Marikke said nothing. “You’re not listening,” said the girl, her mouth drifting and reforming as the bees turned and moved. “You’re not seeing what I see. Oh, it is because you are suffering,” she said, and even in this dreadful bleak
morning Marikke almost had to laugh, because now the goddess was around her like a golden cloud, caressing her without touching her, moving the blood through her body and opening her up. It was a cold, clear dawn in the Month of Melting, and there was frost on the rocks. Back to the east the way they’d come, the sun was rising over the straits.

Always her heart lifted when she came into the mountains. It was a landscape she knew from the time when she herself was a little girl in her father’s stone hut in the Fairheight hills on Alaron, watching the wet clouds chase the rainbows up the valley. The Orcskulls were drier, the chalky ground the color of exposed bones. Still she took comfort in the graceful granite peaks that rose behind her, touched now with dazzling light. Surely the goddess was in all places, and all creatures served her in their own way.

But where was the person who had attacked them on the beach, the mage with the shining sword who had taken the Savage by surprise as he cut the lycanthropes apart?

“Where do you think you’re going?” Harsh and deep, the voice came from behind her. The first day of this journey from the coast, she could scarcely tell the lycanthropes apart, and all their words sounded like grunting and babbling in their distorted mouths. But now she recognized the Common tongue. Now the goddess had blessed her with understanding, which allowed her to twist away from the kick when it came, the clawed foot that caught her in the side and not the
head. The creature rose above her now, a rust-colored old wolf-man, the leader of his pack, his beard grizzled and stained. He reached down with his cruel hand, and with his claws he hooked her by the rope between her wrists, and dragged her down toward the encampment where the fire had burned the night before. There he threw her on her face in the dry dirt.

They were in the ruins of some Northlander stable or sheepcote from the old days, a roofless rectangle of laid stones, collapsed on two sides and the fire pit in the middle. Kip was there with a wereboar squatting over him, an albino giant with a broken tusk, who had forced his cloven hand into the shifter’s hair and pulled back his head. “Where is he?”

The Savage had disappeared during the night. Always this was the lycanthropes’ vulnerability, their long hours of sleepiness after gorged meals and frenzied motion—they spent more hours asleep than awake. Only a few of the cleverest were able to maintain their human shapes during slumber. The previous day they had gotten into camp long before sunset, and most of them had immediately collapsed into an unconsciousness that was expansive rather than profound, their claws twitching in their dreams.

The Savage was gone. The golden elf had slit his bonds, doubtless with some secret dagger he had hidden in his clothes. The two young wolves that had been supposed to guard him lay with their throats cut in a smear of dark blood.

But why hadn’t he freed her where she lay, away from the others? Marikke had never trusted him—how could
you trust him? Everybody, everywhere had learned to hate these elves, arrogant creatures from the wilderness beneath the world, or else, if you wanted to think of it that way, from the mossy grottoes and shifting forests inside ourselves. Their outward splendor buried their black hearts. If one of them claimed to have changed his nature, run away from home, what then? Surely he could change back just as easily. Surely also the many traps he’d laid for human women, as sticky and repulsive as any web …

“Where has he gone?” snarled the albino pig-lord, forcing back the shifter’s head. In his right hand, the creature clutched a knife between his two heavy fingers. Kip whimpered in fear. At these moments of crisis he was at his most human, a thin pale boy with a shock of yellow hair.

Later, with the goddess’s help, stripes of red and brown would appear in it, but at this moment it was almost white, because of his terror. Around them and in the gap of the collapsed wall, Marikke looked into the faces of twenty or thirty creatures whose bestial nature was now paramount, and whose voices now drew tight around them like a noose of sound.

“Oh, sweet Mother,” Marikke prayed. “Not my will, but yours. Even so, a little help might be appreciated …”

One of the wolves, his long back decorated with a ridge of colored mud, lumbered through the gap. His jaws sagged open, and his long tongue protruded into the shifter’s face, while at the same time the pig-lord’s hand had changed into a boar’s cloven foot again and
dropped the knife. But he pressed the sharp edge of his foot into the boy’s neck, while the rest of the animals screamed and gibbered. Marikke closed her eyes, trying to find a place of inner calm, however provisional and momentary, a foundation from which her prayer could rise. The wolf-man stood above her, his clawed foot in the middle of her back. She sought her place of soft tranquility until she found it at the moment when several of the animals cried out in surprise or grunted in dismay, and she opened her eyes to see a man break into the circle, kicking the beasts aside. He seized the wereboar by its tail and dragged it back, twisting it at the same time until the creature flipped onto its side, struggling to right itself, digging its feet into the chalky ground.

“Great Mother,” Marikke prayed. And at first this person did seem like the manifestation of a prayer, because the beasts cringed away from him and were suddenly quiet. And because he himself seemed touched by heaven in the light of the rising sun, wearing clothes so bright they seemed to glow. And his sword when he drew it from the scabbard on his back seemed to burn with reflected light, as the beasts pressed down their heads into the dust or else turned to offer their bellies or their throats.

This was the sword-mage that had defeated the Savage on the beach. Then, in the darkness, Marikke hadn’t seen him clearly. She didn’t much care about the faces of men or women as a rule, and she was suspicious of physical beauty, which she imagined always hid an
inner flaw. Yet to her, suddenly, the mage appeared achingly, painfully lovely, with a loveliness that seemed not decorative only, but seemed to mean something, to symbolize something true and just and right and eternal—that was at first glance. So she was surprised to hear his voice when he spoke, a voice that held none of those same qualities, but was instead as harsh and jarring as an eagle’s scream.

“Brutes,” he cried, “what have I tried to teach you? Patience and discipline. That is what’s required to be a man. You howl and complain of failure, yet turn away from every chance at victory at the first scent of blood. Believe me and have faith. Soon you will hunt again.”

As he spoke he swung his sword, catching one beast after another with the flat of the blade, so that they yelped and scrambled back. One was too slow, a young boar, and the mage turned his wrist suddenly, so that the sword bit. One stroke, and the fleshy head sagged free, and the arteries spurted blood into a puddle. “Take him and prepare his body. Some of you must be hungry after this long run.”

Two of the wolves crept forward and dragged the wereboar away. Marikke knelt in the dirt, hands clasped, eyes averted. Now she was able to examine the mage more closely, and saw new details she had missed in the power of his first impression. There were gaps in his mouth where he had lost teeth. And she could see the lines of his veins and arteries, pulsing blue and red under his transparent skin. And there was some discoloration on his neck, some scaly rash that disappeared into his shirt.

He stepped toward her with the point of his bloody sword held low. He drew the blade between her wrists, freeing her of the cruel ropes, then moved behind her and freed her ankles. Then he did the same to Kip where he lay on his side.

“Rise,” said the mage and then laughed when he could not, his hands and feet as cold and useless as rocks. Terrified, Kip turned onto his back, his hair as white as bleached bone.

The pig-lord, who had recovered some of his human shape and clothes, now shambled forward. “We had an elf,” he grunted. “A golden elf. Yes, a golden elf. He escaped during the night.”

The mage shrugged. “I know him. I do not fear him. I made him prisoner. Let him starve here in the wilderness. These are enough. These two are what I want. Tonight the Black Blood tribes will gather in the dark of the moon. Tonight, standing in our own flesh, we will see the Beastlord roused from slumber, and he will call us by name. He will not turn away from our sacrifice, or despise it. You will see.”

He strode over to Marikke, still on her knees. He bent down beside her, and she could smell his carrion breath. “Our sacrifice,” he repeated. “All of us must give up something. Even me. I recognize a servant of the goddess. My name is Argon Bael. What is yours?”

Marikke told him. This close, she could feel the heat that radiated from him, see the brightness of his skin. She closed her eyes. “Oh, my lady,” she prayed. And as she did so, she recognized the mage. He was
the Beastlord’s angel of vengeance, as Chauntea had described him. Marikke could see that now.

She felt his lips close to her ear. “This is a matter of justice, not revenge,” he whispered in his harsh voice. “All the other islands, they will hunt these creatures as they find them, exterminate them all. Here only are they safe. Is it too much to ask, one little island in the bright sea? One little sanctuary for the Beastlord? You know there are orcs in these mountains. And giants. And on the north coast, in Trollclaw, even men. Not all of them are dead. Is that fair, do you think? Is it too much to ask, to be rid of them? To wipe this land clean?”

“There is room in the world for all creatures,” murmured Marikke, sounding stupid even to herself.

“Is there? Is there so?”

He helped her to her feet. When he touched her hands, the pain in them disappeared, and she could move her fingers. “Attend the boy,” he said, nodding to the shifter. “Stay with him. You know they hate him more than you. Because he is more like them. It is their own nature they can’t stand. Do not stray from me. I will protect you. These others …”

He swung his sword, shaking the blood of the wereboar off the blade. The gesture took in the ruined stable and the nearby ground. At that moment their enemies did not seem intimidating. Many sat or squatted, staring vacantly, while others curled up, already asleep. But after Argon Bael wiped and sheathed his sword, he clapped his hands. And in a moment the circle had reformed. The lycanthropes surrounded them again, and caught
them in a net of focused and intense ferocity, following every motion or gesture with their eyes, and giving the impression that it was only Argon Bael that kept them from tearing Marikke and Kip apart.

“Come,” he said, and strode through the collapsed wall into the bright light of the morning. Above him, Marikke could see his wings, which seemed incorporeal, not part of his body so much as implied, a shimmering trick of light that spread out behind him, where the air seemed unsteady and discolored. He extended them as if for her inspection.

She helped the boy to his feet. Grabbing, chafing his hands, she provided a small version of the comfort the angel and the goddess had given her. Murmuring a prayer, she stroked the blood into Kip’s fingers and led him forward, stumbling through the ranks of wolves until they reached the open hillside and the beginning of the rock fall. There a fresh breeze waited for them, and a change in the weather. Clouds passed over the sun, wisps of fog blew over the mountain crests, and it began to rain.