Fallowblade (45 page)

So that, on the cloudy morning when Asr
ă
thiel tried to sleep, racked by thoughts and desires, handsome Zaravaz, whose hair was blacker than wickedness, entered the twilit bedchamber where she was lying awake, and merely took a seat at the foot of her couch, nothing more.

She saw him through the gloom, sitting silently with his back turned, as if deep in thought, or as if waiting. At first she said to herself,
I will fight this
, but he continued to remain there without moving, and when she looked upon him once more all else vanished from sight and comprehension, leaving nothing but the intensity of his beauty, and she thought she must die of yearning. In spite of her misgivings she was no longer able to resist. She rose up from her pillows, reached out and touched him on the shoulder. He turned around.

After the swiftest of glances, which clearly told him all he needed to know, his reaction was as immediate as it was extreme. He took her in his arms, pushing her back down upon the pillows. She felt his weight on her, his darkness pouring around them both like a canopy, his desire an ignition. Long and taut was his body, lean as a blade and hard. Through the spilling strands of her own hair, she stared with wide-open eyes at his handsome face, finely drawn against all that liquid shadow, and saw his look of fierce hunger. His mouth tasted as sweet as rain; his fragrance was myrrh and incense. A sweet and terrible heat spread from him to her like a delicious contagion, coursing through every pathway of her blood, and she lay transfixed with rapture beneath his touch. There could be no other embrace like this.

They spoke not a word to each other, but the consummation of their passion was single-minded, vehement and all-devouring. It was a gale picking them up and dashing them against the midnight sky; more than a wind, a hurricane, a storm of ecstasy, but she clung to him as if she were drowning.

All she could do was try to breathe.

T
hen it happened that each day, while the goblin knights slumbered, or dozed, or lounged on cushioned couches idly pondering chess moves, or lingered in some trancelike state; and while the trows, who had retreated to their own niches, remained dormant until nightfall, and while the sun laved the Northern Ramparts with a pale radiance beyond Sølvetårn’s black curtains, they lay together, Zaravaz and Asr
ă
thiel; and each night, as if by mutual consent—although no such pact had been made between them—they behaved as though nothing had occurred. It was as if each of them had split between two different modes: the driven, silent, desperately sensual persona of Sølvetårn’s sleeping hours, each devouring the other with need; and the cool, calculating, courteously aloof persona of the waking hours.

For matters had changed between them, necessarily.

All the ardency burned there in his hard and insistent touch, his look of fire, and she made no attempt to hide her own compulsion. When they were publicly in each other’s company, however—at feasts, or when surveying some treasure store, or gliding in silver boats on mountain tarns, or riding through the wind-swept steeps—their conversations together held nothing of that. At nights they never spoke of their daily encounters, although the intensity of their fervour was conveyed with every glance and contact.

As for the actual encounters—never a word passed between them then, either. All took place in silence, for the language of the body was sufficient communication and more, and expressed what words could never, need never convey.

For Asr
ă
thiel it was as if talking about what happened and acknowledging it would make it real; as if by never referring to it, she might make believe it was not taking place. Often, when alone, she would imagine she must have been bewitched. She could not conjure any legitimate excuse why she would lie with the very incarnation of wickedness. Every rational principle protested against it. He was not of her kind. He was iniquitous and fell. Indeed he was beautiful, but he was not for her, never for her, and she felt she ought to have held out against his allurement. And she would picture William, dear kind William, her friend and gentle companion who would have risked his life to save her. For years he had loved her without pressing his suit, because he comprehended she was not ready to love him in return. Patiently he waited, as her friend. Asr
ă
thiel understood, now, how corrosively the waiting must have seared his spirit.

Sometimes she felt as if she were transfigured into another person entirely, every morning when her eldritch lover came to her, in her bedchamber. It could not possibly be Asr
ă
thiel, daughter of the House of Maelstronnar, powerful weather-mage, who had allowed herself to descend into such a predicament—bound by wanton passion to an unseelie lord. To lie with him was like coupling with the night itself; it was to be consumed in an inferno of bliss. She wondered, was she exceptional in his eyes, did she mean anything to him, or was he perhaps so amorous with all women? But there was no way of knowing, and ultimately it hardly mattered, since, of course, she cared nothing for him and was merely ensorcelled.

She mused, too, upon the histories of mortal men and women who had united with eldritch wights. Swanmaidens and lake damsels had been known to marry human men, for example. The men had prospered in their lives before losing their seelie, luck-bringing wives by carelessly violating some eldritch prohibition. Not so fortunate were human beings who transacted with unseelie incarnations—the seductive, deadly youths called ganconers satisfied their lust with unwary maidens then left their pining victims wasting away to their deaths. The baobhansith were sluttish beauties who slew their erstwhile lovers and, conceivably, drank their blood. Whether seelie or unseelie, every such alliance ended in tragedy. There was a saying in the Four Kingdoms of Tir: ‘All love between mortal and immortal is doomed’; but some quoted it as, ‘All love between human being and eldritch wight is doomed.’

However, there was no love involved in their intrigue, Asr
ă
thiel told herself, and no mortal, either. It was outside the bounds of anything that had been before, and subject to no rule except the natural law that dictated that the flame of desire must eventually flicker out, but might be enjoyed before its inevitable extinguishment.

At whiles she went out riding with the horde, and they would career across the mountains as if winged, leaping impossible gulfs, springing up to incredible heights, with the breath of chaos howling in their hair, in an ecstasy of exhilaration. Joy was hers, and pure elation. It came to Asr
ă
thiel that she was in fact celebrating life to the fullest, for the very first time—rejoicing in the heart that throbbed with vitality, the pulse that quickened to the exuberance of song, the flight of dance, and the thrill of speed, and power, and lovemaking.

A verse from one of the urisk’s old ribald ditties ran through her head and would not be got rid of:

Asr
ă
thiel guessed the goblin king understood she was acting against her better judgement, being swayed by ungovernable impulses. Once, as they paused on an icy summit watching stars fall from the night sky, he said, as if commenting on the spectacle, ‘We are all at the mercy of forces beyond our control. The world itself is subject to influences from alien reaches, such as this ceaseless rain of flaming meteors. From epoch to epoch, chunks of interstellar rock or ice the size of planetoids slam directly into the planet’s surface, with far-reaching effects on the environment. The sun’s rays power the atmosphere, nourish life and propel the currents of the oceans. Solar flares influence auroras and the world’s magnetic fields. The moon collaborates with the sun to create tides in the oceans, in the atmosphere and even in solid rock. When a mortal man is shut away from sunlight for a long period, as Toadstone was, the internal clock that tells him when to wake and when to sleep resets, synchronising itself with the tides. Even the world’s pathway around the sun is being gradually changed by the gravitational tug of other planets. Over a one hundred thousand year cycle, the shape of the orbit alters from a circle to an ellipse. What’s more, the pull of other planets modifies the angle of our planet’s axis, giving rise to profound climatic changes; the cycle of the ice ages. The inspiration of stars that died billions of years ago still lives on in ourselves, and in this globe of ore and stone veiled with water. Celestial bodies and otherworldly energies affect life forms and their habitats everywhere. If the very world is subject to unruly persuasions, what chance have such as we to dodge them?’

Asr
ă
thiel made no reply and Zaravaz said no more on the topic.

Days and nights passed, throughout which she exchanged more letters with the outside world by way of trow messengers, thereby learning from her grandfather that William had been sending messages she never received. She presumed either the trows had lost them or, more likely, Zaravaz had intercepted and destroyed them. Her indignation had no recourse; if she accused the goblin king he might decide to cut off her every contact with the outside world, and that she would not risk.

Avalloc’s letters kept her abreast of the principal events unfolding in Tir. Across the four kingdoms the human population was striving to rebuild lives riven by warfare. Many nonhuman populations were also striving to recover, for there had been much slaughter and destruction done by the travelling armies; large numbers of wild birds and beasts had been slain by foragers. The Kobold Watch that the goblins had left behind was assiduous in its duty, zealously keeping an eye out for what they considered to be wrongdoing, and swooping in to chastise.

At High Darioneth there were few prentices who could wield the brí, but Aoust being a temperate month of long, sunny days and balmy nights, scant weathermastery was called for. Dristan oversaw such matters. Avalloc spent many hours in his library, deep in discussion with two of his oldest friends, who had accepted the Storm Lord’s invitation to live out the rest of their days in the Maelstronnar household.

Following the goblins’ startling and ominous removal of Primoris Asper Virosus the Sanctorum authorities, eager to undo Virosus’s works and thereby prove themselves unallied with that offender of goblin sensibilities, had released the controversial sage Constantor Clementer from the sink of a cellar beneath a remote rural sanctorum, in which he had languished for years. Somewhat the worse for wear, but with his spirits unbroken and his notes for
A Treatise on the Iron Tree: A Narrative Concerning the Tree, the Precious Stone Trapped Therein, and the Consequences of the Stone’s Removal
intact, Clementer and his colleague and life-long comrade Almus Agnellus were enjoying Avalloc’s hospitality at Rowan Green. No longer was there any need for Agnellus to spend his days in hiding, travelling incognito, continually moving from place to place to elude discovery, living from hand to mouth. In their twilight years these two venerable gentlemen could take pleasure in bodily comforts, good company, and the leisure to write page after page in undisturbed contentment.