The Rose of Sarifal (16 page)

“It’s not a weapon,” she protested. “Besides, I can’t get free.” Suka, close to the bars along her side, reached
in her hand as if to comfort her, but instead at the last moment ran her little fingers along the back of the fomorian’s bulbous head, under her hair, releasing the catch. Then she drew back her hand as quickly as she could in case she had violated some long-established cultural taboo, which had to be punished, say, by biting or dismemberment. She hoped the effect, to Marabaldia, was that the iron and leather half mask over her eye, which had been her constant bane for many years, had fallen away as if by magic, or else in answer to her own prayers to Selûne, the goddess of maidenhood and the moon. She burst into tears, and when she raised her head, Suka could see in the almost-total darkness, for a moment, some vestige or version of the beauty she had boasted of.

“Do you think he will still love me?” the fomorian asked softly, “after all these years?”

Suka knew what she meant, and she found herself affected, especially since Marabaldia could not possibly be so stupid that she did not guess or know or understand that the bridegroom she remembered was now probably long dead.

Then she turned her head. Her eye shone softly in the darkness, and Suka found herself unable to look somewhere else. What her father had described as something evil and disgusting and destructive did not seem that way. She stared into it, and she was caught.

Which didn’t mean she couldn’t move, but that she didn’t want to. “It’s not a weapon,” Marabaldia had said, which Suka now believed. Doubtless you could use it
that way. But anything could be a weapon. You could kill somebody with a feather, not that she’d tried.

It was like watching a play—tiny figures on a distant stage. Or standing in the dark outside the lighted window of a tiny house and peering inside. And what you saw was hard to recognize, because you’d come in in the middle and, squinting, could discern, in this case, well, what was it? Suka found herself immobile, pressing her face against the bars, wondering if it were possible that she was staring in through Marabaldia’s eye into the proscenium of her brain, or else perhaps a screen on which mental images could be projected in black and white and various shades of gray: She saw a smoky, spitting phlogiston torch, burning in an iron lantern hanging from a stone ceiling. Under it there was a silent fight between two animals, a hooded serpent and some kind of deep-chested, clawed monstrosity with a tiny head and a circle of needlelike teeth. The snake had twisted itself around the monster but taken terrible damage, its side slashed to rags. The image faded, and under the same lantern Suka saw a party or a masked ball, with men and women dancing in formal gowns and suits. In the background, musicians played silently on violins and guitars. A handsome couple spun and twirled under the lantern, and it took Suka a moment to realize they were fomorians, and she was watching an entire festival or celebration of fomorians, none of whom looked either grotesque or gigantic, because (Suka guessed) the images were being filtered through Marabaldia’s perception, her memories or
imagining—Suka was unsure which, or in the case of the monsters whether she was watching a language of symbols rather than events. The dancers disappeared, their place under the lantern taken by a blurred sense of movement, of drow soldiers marching in a line, black skin, black armor, and gleaming white hair. They carried swords and shields, spears and longbows, and now they seemed to break out of the confines of the tiny mental theater where Suka watched, entranced, alone in the audience, and past her into the darkness of her cell, a line of ghostly images suddenly interrupted and cut off as Marabaldia blinked.

Suka had no experience of the Feywild, or of the Underdark beneath the lake, where the Feywild had first extruded onto Gwynneth Island. She had been born in Myrloch Vale. It was her father who had come up with the host of creatures, good and evil, that had burst from that crystal, shining pustule into the world of men, displacing them from the land of their ancestors, chasing them from their homes. Suka’s father had been a slave in the retinue of some fomorian lord, who had freed him for the sake of his good company, his subtle playing on the pipe and harp. Suka had never known her mother. Everything she had heard of the darkness underneath the mortal realm, where the gnomes led lives of torment, packed like maggots in the belly of a corpse, came through him, a drunken, easy-hearted old scoundrel who never told the truth. There were sun-drenched landscapes in the Feywild also, Suka knew, beechen glades where the elves and the eladrin ruled, in the perpetual autumn of their lives.

She found herself pressing her body against the gap in the bars, reaching her hand up toward Marabaldia, who had knelt down over her, so that their faces were almost level. And when the fomorian opened her eye again, Suka gasped, for she saw a face she recognized, the gray-haired, spotted, bloated visage of her old dad himself, lying asleep on the broken-backed settee, perhaps the last time she had seen him when, scarcely grown, she had stood in the doorway of their stupid little house in the sodden, stupid little village above the vale on the way to Crane Point. In Leaffall she had watched the eladrin hunting parties ride through.

She hadn’t woken him when she left. Marabaldia blinked again, and Suka saw the cliffs above Llewellyn Harbor on the straits of Alaron, when she first saw the
Sphinx
racing the gap and then coming about, its raked masts crowded with sail. No one there had ever seen such a ship before, though there’d been copies since, and right then Suka decided she would find the man who built that ship and join his crew and sail the seas with him, not realizing he would turn out to be one of the most chuckle-headed commanders who ever lived, looking for trouble as a burr looks for a dog’s back.

And as if liberated by the sight of the little ship as it came flying over the bar, cleaving the line between the dark water and the light, she saw Lukas, tall and gawky, turning toward her with a long, slow smile. She saw Gaspar-shen, his strange companion, the water haze around him, the lines glowing on his bald head, caught as if interrupted in one of his perpetual conversations
about food—they were never really about food. He never actually ate any of the things he talked about. And the Savage, the golden elf, his face haughty and guarded also. Only once, when he thought he was alone, had she seen him with his black shirt unbuttoned, seen the terrible scars along his spine. And then the cat-boy and the priestess, whom Suka hated, with her incessant droning in the service of the goddess. Better to pretend the gods didn’t exist, and thus escape their notice. Marikke had come aboard the boat not because of any skill or help she could provide, but because of Lukas’s half-baked sense of chivalry. She had needed rescuing from the slums of Callidyrr, and the shifter too.

Once the gnome had spoken her mind to Lukas, who had laughed. “You don’t like her because she is a woman—” Marabaldia blinked, and Suka saw nothing more. She found herself grasping the bars of her cell, her face inches away from the fomorian’s, who grinned, displaying fearsome teeth.

“Hello,” she said, and Suka leaped back.

So after that, everything was easy. Minion of a corrupt state, the warden in Lady Ordalf’s prison had no idea what he was doing. The fey queen had pretended she would remove one set of bars every five days, in order to provide Lukas with an incentive, and guarantee his return. But it was doubtless confusing to follow the wishes of a liar, whose only constant was her perpetual bad faith and her refusal to explain her motives, especially to a human slave who she regarded as a cross between a slug and a wad of excrement. Besides, she hated the gnome, who she
regarded as the most loathsome kind of traitor—one who had managed to escape the web of lies with which she had encircled her own kingdom. She had no interest in keeping Suka alive. She wanted her to die a terrible death, torn apart by her race’s ancient adversary. Only that, in Lady Orlaf’s mind, would restore the proper balance to the world. In addition she was far away among the crystal spires of Karador, and her commands were muted by distance. As a result, the warden had unbolted two bars in six days, and now came again on the evening of the ninth, and Suka and Marabaldia were ready.

“Let’s go find him,” Suka had said, meaning the fomorian’s lost bridegroom, sold to his doom by the treacherous Prince Araithe.

The Ffolk soldiers came in, three men with crossbows, two with wrenches and a stepladder, and the warden with his hoop of keys. The archers arranged themselves in a triangle while the turnkey unlocked Suka’s cage.

“Stay away from the bars,” he admonished, a sallow, fat-bellied man whose skin stank of his unhappiness. He was speaking not just to the gnome but to Poke and Marabaldia as well.

Suka’s skill was misdirection. The trick was, she thought, to keep the guards from realizing that they themselves were under attack. This was, after all, the moment when the gap between the bars was large enough to let the fomorian into her cell. They had been starving Marabaldia in anticipation of this day, and therefore had to expect a certain rowdiness—it was the whole point of what they were doing. If the
giantess just sat glumly in her cage, Lady Ordalf would be disappointed. She wanted Suka to be torn apart, punished for her treason against the fey.

So when one man was up on the stepladder, unbolting the long bar, and the other man was on his knees below him, Marabaldia sidled over to the gap. “Stand away!” said the turnkey, but he didn’t mean it.

The moment the bolts were loose she smashed her way through, upending the stepladder, kicking over both the men. At the same time, Suka started yelping like a rabbit and running round and round. She stumbled over one of the men and cut him over the eye with one of her secret knives. The idea was to make him bleed as if injured in his fall. Marabaldia had wrenched the ten-foot iron bar from its frame and made a show of chasing after Suka with it. In the pursuit she knocked the men over once again. One of them, bleeding like a pig, crawled on his hands and knees toward the cell’s sliding door. The turnkey, shouting commands, had come into the cell to meet him, help him to his feet, the archers close behind. Marabaldia had caught Suka now, and made as if to strangle her while the gnome reached up and freed the clasp of her iron mask, which dropped away.

Even now, because of Suka’s feigned terror, the turnkey still imagined he was breaking up an altercation between inmates, and his task was to remove his people, lock the sliding cage, and let nature take its course. But Suka slipped out of the giantess’s grasp and scampered for the opening. One of the archers brought up his bow
just as Marabaldia heaved her iron bar and caught him in the chest. Then Suka was out into the room. The turnkey hadn’t moved. The gnome uttered a charm of misdirection as the bolt from one of the crossbows passed over her shoulder and crashed into the wall. She reached the brazier and kicked its leg, spilling the charcoal from its pan, scattering the coals. Now in that noisome, sweating room the most concentrated light came from Marabaldia’s eye. Again, the turnkey hadn’t moved. Suka slid into the final archer’s legs just as he released his bolt, and that was that.

And when the men were locked inside her cell, she led the way up the spiral staircase, up toward the surface and the streets of Caer Corwell. She remembered coming down three levels, and on the second floor she found the entrance to the main stairs leading up and down, wide stone steps around a square shaft. Peering down, she couldn’t see the bottom, but only endless galleries lit with fire, brighter and brighter the deeper she looked, a spectrum of infuriated colors. She went the other way, climbing up into the darkness, though when they reached what must have been the ground floor of the brick prison, they wandered through a series of dusty, ruined, windowless rooms without finding any exit.

“Shit,” she murmured, hiding her distress. She was the one with the plan, she reminded herself, though in fact all of her thinking had ended here, with them breaking through the wide doors into the courtyard and then into the street. She had thought it might be
evening, had imagined the fresh soft air. Shit, shit—she must have been spending too much time with Lukas, and some of his stupidity must have rubbed off on her. This was the fey she was dealing with. There was no gate to the outside.

They stood looking at each other in the empty room, a big, high-ceilinged useless cube with only a single doorway. Light came from a remnant of the searing fire that rose up from the bottom of the stairwell. It curled over the threshold. Opposite, an expanse of moldy brick. But surely this was where the gate had been. What purpose otherwise could the room have served?

They had taken the three crossbows and other weapons. Marabaldia had her iron bar, and Suka had filched a long, hilted knife from the turnkey’s belt. Poke had dressed herself in the clothes of one of the archers, leaving him naked. She stood breathless in her most human shape, a strong fleshy woman with an upturned nose, long hair down her back, and a powerful set of teeth.

Now they heard a noise from the direction of the light, an ominous clanking and the stamp of heavy feet. “We have to leave,” whispered the gnome. “Can you find a way?”

Unspoken was the obvious, that Lady Ordalf had sealed the gates not with bricks and mortar but with something more subtle, a woven pattern of illusion. Suka, in one of her first jobs after leaving home, had traveled with a circus among the small towns of Alaron. One of her teachers had been a hypnotist who could
make his subjects stagger around stupidly, looking for the opening to the tent. Moving her head back and forth, Suka felt some of the same queasiness, the same inability to see what was plain and clear. Marabaldia’s eye was useless now.

Worse was a feeling of numb hopelessness, which Suka knew was part of the spell—it didn’t help to know it. The excited rush of her escape was over. Doubtless the Ffolk wardens three floors below had already succeeded in freeing themselves, and had summoned some terrible power to recapture her. Perhaps all of the events of the past hour had been plotted in advance by Lady Ordalf and her slaves, part of a web of fey deceit more complicated than the future of a single stupid gnome—what had made her think, years ago, when she left her father’s house, that she could ever truly get away?