Stealing the Elf-King's Roses: The Author's Cut (33 page)

“You think it’ll help?” he gasped from behind her.

Her heart seized. She was so used to thinking of Gelert as stronger, more robust than she was; but here it looked as if he was suffering far more from the cold than she was. “It might. Think of it at least not falling on us.”

She tried to do that herself as she kept moving, tried to think of them both as being surrounded by a bubble of clear air, no fog in it, no snow. 
Just a few meters’ worth of visibility, say ten meters, that
 
would be plenty
— She leaned her will against the world. It resisted her, or something did. 
Just a pause
 
in this
, Lee thought, briefly angry, 
a fighting chance, come on—

Maybe it was the anger that helped. The air abruptly cleared around them, as if they were in the reverse of a paperweight snowglobe, the whiteness briefly beating all around the outside of the globe but not coming in. Lee paused, still hugging herself against the wind, for whatever she’d managed had no effect against that. “Come on, Gel!” she said, and went up what little she could still make out of the trail, a stretch where the snow had been a little less deep because of the mountain wall right next to it. And just past there, the spire of grey stone sticking up out of the foot of the neighboring hill, the spire all white with snow on the south side, but still mostly bare on the north: and at the bottom of it, half full of drifted snow, the little cave— “There it is, come on!”

The two of them floundered toward it through the snow. Seconds later their protection gave way, as they reached the opening of the cave, and the snow slammed stinging into them from behind, as if in revenge for the temporary frustration. Lee used her arms and the Alfen pulse rifle to try to sweep the snow out of the opening, back toward the trail: a frustrating business, as the wind just blew it right back in at her. The cave was smaller than she remembered it, shallower, and wasn’t going to provide much protection against that wind, to judge by the snow already drifted in. But it was the best they were going to get. “Come on, we’ve got to get rid of some of this!” she said to Gelert. “If it drifts in on top of us, it’s insulation—”

Gelert didn’t answer her, just started digging. Within a couple of minutes there was enough room for them both to crouch into the little space. Gelert collapsed to the floor and curled himself into as tight a ball as he could: Lee wrapped herself more or less around him, shivering, feeling the snow melting between them. “Not much help,” he said faintly. “Sorry.”

Outside, the wind rose to a scream, then a shriek, and the relentless snow began to pile in on top of them again. Lee got the pulse rifle around in front of her, out of the snow, and had little strength to do anything else. The shivering was shaking Lee’s whole body now, and the cold of the snow burned her, but there was no use in trying to shake it off; it simply flew up into her eyes again, blinding her, and continued piling up. Insulating it might be, but it was still wet, and the chill of it seeped into her, relentless.

“We’re going to die here,” Gelert said softly.

It was a thought that had occurred to Lee just before he said it; but she hadn’t been willing to make it real by letting it out.
Too late now.
“This is my fault,” Lee said. “I’m sorry.”

There was a long silence. Finally, Gelert cocked one eye up at her. “It’s all right,” he said. “Nuala knew.”

“Knew—”

“She wouldn’t let me be, last night. I had to tell her, finally—” A tremor of cold shook him. “Tell her how dangerous this was likely to be. She said she understood. She said I had to go.”

The tears came to Lee’s eyes. It was almost impossible to listen to this, under the circumstances, let alone respond to it. But at the same time, if they were going to be dead soon, she could at least deal with the difficult things.

It still took her a while. “I envied you that, you know?” she said at last.

“What?” Gelert said.

“What you two have,” Lee said, hugging herself against the cold. “The understanding. How you always seemed able to be together without rubbing each other raw. It always seemed to come so naturally to you. The closeness…” Her eyes hurt her; she tried to blink them against the ferocious cold, and found that she was having trouble. Lee put her hands over her eyes, trying to protect them from the wind…or at least that was the excuse. But her hands were as cold as her face.

“Once I actually had to leave the room,” she said, between spasms of her teeth chattering, “after I’d been watching you two for a while. It was just after everything blew up with Matt.” Lee shook her head. “I just couldn’t bear it, sitting there, seeing how close you two were, knowing that I had something like that with Matt, and now it was gone, and wasn’t going to come back. She was lying there with her head on your back, the way she does…” Lee had to stop for a moment, her teeth chattering so hard she couldn’t speak. “That sense of trusting another person, knowing you were safe with them, and that they were safe with you— It pierced me. I had to leave. I felt so stupid, and so selfish…”

“We knew you were hurting,” Gelert said. “But sometimes—that idiom about being there for somebody, actually just means to 
be
 there. Doing anything, saying anything, sometimes you know it’ll hurt them worse than just being quiet, and being close.”

For a while neither of them said anything. Finally, looking out into the blinding whiteness, Lee said, “It’ll never happen now. And I was just starting to believe it didn’t matter if it never happened. I thought, we’ll go home from this job, and I’ll get used to being by myself. That foolish time in my life is over. And now look at me. Now that I know—” she looked at Gelert, and still couldn’t say “we’re going to die.” “Now suddenly it feels important again.” She started to laugh, bitter laughter that would have gone on for a long time—but the cold was more bitter than her mood; when she drew breath it cut the inside of her throat like breathing broken glass.

We can’t last much longer.
 “You’ve always been a good partner,” Lee said. “I wish it wasn’t going to end here.”

“You’ve been a better one. Harder working, more serious…” Gelert shook his head and winced at the pain of his ears. They looked stiff, and their insides were the wrong shade of pink; they were starting to freeze.

Lee gathered his head into her chest and tried to shelter it enough from the wind to share a little warmth with it. “What do you mean I was harder working?” Lee said, and had to shake her head to whip the tears out of it before they froze her eyes shut again. “You were the one who always made all the money…”

He didn’t answer. She could hear and feel his breathing coming harder now, wheezing. His people weren’t meant for this kind of temperature; she might actually last longer than he would. She had to do something. 
It’s got to stop
, she thought. 
I can’t get him out of here. It’s got to stop…

She closed her eyes and tried leaning her will against the world one last time.

Briefly, to Lee’s delight and growing hope, the snow began to drop off somewhat, the flakes getting bigger, their fall becoming slower, and the wind dropped off too, the shriek dying to a moan over their heads… But again it didn’t last. Within a couple of minutes, long enough for Lee to feel certain that the effect was due to something she was doing, the wind started to pick up again—and there was almost a message in it: 
No. No matter what happens to me, you’re not going to live through it.

Dierrich
, Lee thought. She set her teeth and strove harder in her mind to make the snow stop; at the very least to make the wind drop off, for at these temperatures, it was the wind that would suck the heat out of their bodies and kill them at last. But it wasn’t working.

“Gelert—”

He didn’t reply. Lee felt the warmth start creeping up on her, slowly. 
No!
 Lee thought, for she knew what that meant. She tried to start moving again, just enough to slap herself with her arms if nothing else, but her body just wouldn’t obey her. In this short time that she hadn’t been moving, all her limbs had gone stiff as iron.

She closed her eyes for one last effort. 
Don’t leave them that way too long, they’ll really freeze shut,
 
this time
—She clarified the image of what she wanted in her mind. The wind silent, the snow ceased, the air warming, the sky clearing up past the mountain wall—

As she considered the mountain, without warning something seized Lee’s imagery and pulled it farther up the wall of stone, rushing her past the boundaries she had been considering. Her vision was caught up in a larger flow of power: more certain, more direct, going straight to the heart of what was happening around them. The wind was dropping off, too, but she began to get the feeling that it wasn’t her doing.

Lee blinked, trying to see clearly what was going on around her. Her Sight, however, had for the moment been co-opted, swept fully into the ambit of that larger power. She couldn’t see anything of the snowy darkness of the cave, or the brighter world outside. All she could See was the walls of the Laurins’ House, somewhere high above them, built of the same gray-white stone, but hewn and polished; and high up on those walls, a broad terrace inside the parapet on the longest wall that looked north. A group of people were gathered there down at one end of the terrace, seemingly looking northward, too. Lee tried to turn her Sight away, but it was as if something here, maybe the world itself, thought that this was more important and was overriding all other vision—

Lee gulped, suddenly finding it hard to breathe, as if the air itself was holding its breath. And then the voice spoke, the one the world had been waiting for.

“Dierrich,” it said. “I dislike seeing my prerogatives usurped. Exercise of mastery in this world, when the Laurin is here, is the Laurin’s business. What are you doing?”

The tone of voice was light, but there was more menace underlying it than Lee ever thought she had heard in a human voice. 
But he’s not human…
 And as he spoke, the wind stopped completely, as if someone had thrown a switch. Perhaps the snow had stopped, too; Lee couldn’t tell—she was blind to everything except what was happening up there on the castle walls. Her slightly frostbitten face could feel the air temperature starting to rise; an unpleasant sensation, as if someone was waving a blowtorch in front of her.

“Gelert! Gel!” Blind as she was, Lee could still feel him. She started shaking him, rubbing him. “Gelert—!”

He was still cold, and she couldn’t see him; but after a long, terrible moment, she heard him sneeze. 
Now
, he said down the implant, 
I bet you’re sorry you said that big soulful goodbye.

Oh, shut up!
 She would have kept on rubbing him, but her Sight was locked so tightly to that other view that she finally had to stop, unable to concentrate on anything else. Up there on the terrace that overlooked the city, a group of Alfen stood, surrounding one small radiant form in daycloak and robes, traditional Alfen wear; and set over against them near the other end of the terrace was a single shape, a man’s shape, still, tall, arms folded, very dark, in a business suit and a tie.

For a moment Lee was distracted even from her astonishment at what was unfolding by a sudden memory, a sense of something familiar. Looking with her Sight at the group of Alfen standing about Dierrich, Lee abruptly made the connection. One of them, one of the Alfen up there, had a psychospoor that she would have recognized anywhere, she had spent so long contemplating it as she ran and reran her recording. The being associated with it had looked out of a shadow at the corner of Eighteenth and Wilshire, and been amused by the death of another Alfen, and had then parted the air and the darkness and stepped back into them. 
That’s him!

The little silver-haired woman walked slowly out of the group of Alfen among whom she’d been standing, walked up to the Elf-King, considered him a moment—then struck him hard across the face. 
“Traitor!”

His voice, when he replied, was surprisingly unmoved. “I trusted you with all my plans and dreams,” he said. “Bitter it is to discover that trust can be so utterly misplaced.”

Lee’s heart seized. Above, Dierrich’s beautiful, grave, calm face contorted with rage. “When a madman trusts those around him to humor his madness,” Dierrich said, “he’d better 
expect
 to be disappointed. We don’t want you for our lord anymore, ‘King of all the Elves!’ Our people waited patiently, they watched a long time, to see if the exercise of power would eventually teach you sense. No one forgot how you came to rule, in your arrogance, so sure you knew everything just because your power was greatest! Half a millennium, we all thought, would teach you better. Worldmastery’s its own school, our forefathers always said; give it time to work. And for a while it looked as if you’d seen sense, and some of us became willing to stand with you. But then your vision went irrational again, and you went back to your paranoid babblings about the great war between the worlds that was coming. No one will ever manage such a thing—”

“The supranationals are managing it right now, Dierrich,” the Elf-King said. “You’ve seen the preparations. You know the invasion they’re planning as well as I do. Another six months, no more, and they’ll be ready.”

Dierrich’s voice was scornful. “They don’t have six months, and they don’t even know it. We’ve been moving against them for the last five years… and 
you
 haven’t even known it! We’ve been playing the ephemeral nations and worlds off against each other; our people have been killing their operatives, especially the Alfen double agents they’ve suborned, sending them the message. Alfheim is 
ours
; no one plots against us and escapes, even though Alfen may be helping them. They in particular will pay the price of their treachery in full.”

The Elf-King shook his head. “You still don’t understand. Stop this attempt by the mortals, teach them the lesson you think you’re teaching them, and they’ll back down…for a few years, a decade or two. But they’ll remember other things besides the lesson. They’ll remember that we hold final power in our hands, and that they’re powerless against it; that we exclude them in every way we know from any access to the true power at the heart of things. The resentment will build again. And in twenty years, or thirty years, or fifty, they’ll come again; with much more terrible weapons, this time. Right now, armies, yes, nuclear weapons, yes, those we might be able to stop them from using…perhaps. Or even absorb such a blow, and rebuild. But in fifty years, when their weapons are more terrible than we can presently predict, when maybe all it’ll take is one slipup on our part, one day’s relaxation of vigilance at our borders…and all life in our universe can be snuffed out in a week, or a day?” He shook his head. “This is our last chance, our best chance, to solve the problem—to cure the disease before it’s too late.”