The Rose of Sarifal (23 page)

“Why?” she said, a big question that had always bothered her.

She watched the fomorian and her cyclops labor slowly up the slope—it must be difficult being so big. It must be difficult to move or run if you’ve been locked in a cell for ten years. With all her heart Suka missed her little band of misfits, now that she was running away from the only place they knew to look for her. This jolly collection of ancient ancestral enemies was no substitute. But should she leave them, strike out on her own? Find her way east to the Ffolk settlements along the coast and then to Alaron, as she had many years before? But Lukas would be looking for her here. He had promised.

But then Marabaldia appeared out of the end of the street, and joined them in the empty lot, her face agonized and frightened. “Drow,” she said, which was a relief, in a way, because it delayed thinking. And it was true: Dark figures massed in the shadows below them,
gathering among the ruined houses. Suka and the pig had stopped just inside the old city wall, much of which had been cannibalized for building material even before the fey came to Gwynneth. But the gate was intact, and the road out of it. A few arrows stuck into the rubble around them, and then they were off again, as quickly as they could, out the gate into the world, an expanse of fallow land that had once been wheat fields, and a mile or so in the distance, visible just as a smear of purple shadow in the failing light, the woodlands underneath the high, chalk-white ridge, its eastern slopes still lit by the setting sun.

But there were drow there, too. In the middle of the flat, open, shelterless, bare ground, at a crossroads marked by a stone obelisk, Marabaldia stopped, planted her iron bar, and the others gathered around her. The cyclops was so tired and hurt that he could scarcely stand. He’d pressed his palm into his side, and blood seeped between his fingers. With her left hand, Marabaldia seized hold of his jaw and turned his face until his single eye raised toward her, and she could look down on him with all the force of her own eye. Again it seemed to Suka that she could see or at least imagine a beam of light pass between them, and she wondered what it could mean—a last farewell, an exchange of information, psychic healing? Because they were in trouble, obviously. The drow had caught them in a spider’s web. They had come out from the dark woods, and out from the shadow of the wall, and had spread into the fields at either side.

Marabaldia looked up. “Friends,” she said, “let us prepare to do our duty here. And if the day should go against us, let our final consolation be that we have borne ourselves according to the highest standards of our character. A bold death is a treasure that cannot be bought or sold. As for myself—Poke, you, and Suka, and you, Borgol—I will always be grateful …”

Suka thought: What, cyclopses have names? And in this case “always” looked to be about seven minutes. The drow weren’t wasting their arrows, but moved steadily toward them along each of the four roads and also through the dried brambles of the fields. Nevertheless she found herself inspired almost against her will, as she unhooked the crossbow from her back and wound it up. She risked a smile at the cyclops, who was crouched so low his head was scarcely a foot higher than her own—Borgol, are you kidding me? What kind of a stupid name was that?

“How’s it going?” she muttered, planting her back foot and taking aim at one of the drow captains who sauntered insolently up the road, the last of the light in her white hair. Oh, well. At least she didn’t have to make any decisions. And Marabaldia had saved her life back in the prison. Suka owed her something, whatever little she had.

The cyclops had a big face, heavy and massive as if hacked from wood, but not unpleasant, his big lips and brows. And he spoke in a low voice, a rhythmic chanting in a language she didn’t think she recognized, until she did. As the shadows darkened, she found it speaking to
her from the depths of forgotten memory, a prayer out of the Underdark, in the first language of the fey.

Then she heard screaming in the harsh voices of the drow. A stroke of light split the darkness north of them, toward the wood, and the dark elves scattered from the road. Horsemen were there, a troop of horsemen. But Suka saw the captain on the west road raise her black sword, and she shot at her and missed, hitting another behind her shoulder. Then the drow were on them, and it was hard for them to use their bows in such close quarters. Suka had her knife out, and she stabbed a fellow through his black leather armor into his belly, and felt the blood slide over her hand. The horsemen were around them, driving the drow back, and a man reached down and grabbed her by the back of her leather shirt, and lifted her over the saddle bow—she couldn’t tell what kind of man he was. Someone held onto her foot, and she kicked away hard, while at the same time she watched Poke clamber up onto an enormous Cambro draft horse, twenty hands high—now that’s something you don’t see every day, she thought, a pig riding a horse, and not doing it well, which was a relief. Suka wasn’t much of a rider herself.

But Borgol was dead. He had stood up to protect his mistress from the arrows, and had taken two in the chest. The light behind his eye flickered and went out. Marabaldia lowered him to the ground. The horsemen raged around them, keeping the drow at bay, but only for a time because their numbers were so great. Marabaldia stood over him, and it was only when he was gone that
she stepped up into the stirrup and swung her leg over the great horse, who quailed under her weight. She pulled her dress up around her thighs and shook her bridle free; she knew how to ride. She held the iron bar above her head. And with her hair flowing in the wind she kicked her horse up the road toward the black trees.

Suka had already reached them. The boughs hung close overhead. Feeling her indignity, she squirmed around onto her back, so that she could see her rescuer, a human being by the look of him, black-bearded, dressed in chain mail and wearing a steel cap. He had an axe in one hand, and with the other he held onto the collar of her shirt. The horse galloped with no need of direction, a beautiful flaxen-haired creature who now broke away from the dirt road under the trees, following the others through the sylvan glades, between the cedar trees, up the slope into the hills. Sharp small branches whipped at Suka’s legs as they passed, and whipped at her arms.

But they didn’t go far. Suka reckoned they were scarcely more than a mile into the trees when the horse paused at the crest of a low ridge, then walked his horse downhill into a bowl-shaped dell where a fire already burned. Not a bonfire, but instead a soft, cool radiance that rose up as if from a hole in the ground. Other riders had dismounted, and the Northlander pirate—for that was what he was—released his hold on the back of Suka’s shirt, and she scrambled down.

As was her habit, she tried to salve with bellicosity her injured pride. Swearing and muttering, she
put herself in order, pulling her clothes down over her stomach, running her fingers through her hair, dusting herself off, taking inventory—she had lost her crossbow but retained her knife and several other small weapons. And when her rescuer climbed down out of his saddle and busied himself with his horse, checking her for wounds, rubbing her neck, murmuring appreciation, Suka accosted him, not with recriminations, which would have been absurd, since he had saved her life, but with complaints: “Are we safe here? They’ll have us surrounded in half an hour. They can see the glow—,” et cetera, et cetera, until the Northlander held up his hand.

“Peace,” said someone else, still on horseback. “They won’t come here.” And when she turned her rage on him, he explained: “This is a fierce wood since the Spellplague and the fall of Caer Corwell—a wild wood. Two hundred years ago the Kendricks ripped these groves up by the roots, but they’ve grown back. The dark elves won’t risk it. Not on foot.”

This wasn’t quite the reassurance Suka had been looking for. The rider must have seen a question in her face. “We’ll be all right,” he grunted. “This is a haven for my kind, but we won’t stay past dawn.”

He raised the visor of his cap, and Suka saw with surprise that he was an eladrin, with sharp, feminine features and bright eyes that seemed to pick up a reflected radiance from the fire. He took off his cap, revealing his gray and yellow hair, which he shook free around his face. He was dressed in the scaled armor of
his kind, skillfully worked and decorated with damasked lines of gold.

Marabaldia, whose horse was slower and more heavily burdened, now appeared at the top of the slope.

“Princess,” said the eladrin, making a gesture with his arm, “I am honored to welcome you. I see the reports of your beauty are justified, and if anything fail to express the truth. I did not expect, though, such courage and such grace …” all of which seemed a little much to Suka, a little over the top, since, personal virtues aside, Marabaldia was nine feet tall if she was an inch, with purple skin, straw-colored hair, and widely mismatched eyes. But maybe there was something about the magic light in the little dell, because as the giantess swung her leg over her horse’s rump and stepped down from the stirrup—the great draft horse, meanwhile, seemed suddenly buoyant, suddenly inflated because of the reduced weight—Suka was able to imagine what the eladrin was talking about. In the kind radiance the giantess’s features seemed less bloated and grotesque, and her voice, always her best quality, sounded positively angelic when she said, “Captain, I will not forget what you and your brave men have done tonight. You have my thanks. You know my name and some of my history, but I confess that I am ignorant of yours. And I wonder, do you have something else for me to wear?”

The light, also, was kind to the blue dress, which, though tattered and ripped, Suka now confirmed to be of costly fabric, some type of iridescent velvet, with a woven pattern that had been invisible before.

“In the Common tongue,” said the eladrin, “my name is Mindarion, warden of Synnoria, and I am at your service. This is my friend and companion, Captain Rurik of Winterglen.”

Other soldiers milled around, both eladrin and Northlanders. Poke’s horse had arrived with the last stragglers, and she needed help in her dismount. She rolled out of the saddle and sprawled heavily onto the ground. Her own clothes, which she’d taken from the Ffolk guards in Corwell prison, had scarcely survived her transformation and return to human shape, but someone had thrown a cloak over her, which she had wrapped around her body. Aghast, Suka looked into her face, examining the mixture of human and porcine features, and at the same time she was thinking how astonishing it was to hear an eladrin of high rank identify a man as his friend—what did the word mean to him? To both of them? And in this new world of possibilities, was it conceivable that her own friends and companions were a fomorian princess and a lycanthrope? She felt lightheaded, sick.

“And yes,” continued Mindarion. “I believe we can find some more suitable clothes.”

The horses had been drawn away to the other side of the fire. Suka noticed that no one was attempting to strip them of their saddles or bridles, and she drew a small conclusion as she turned to face the Northlander, a famous man, after all, and the reason she had come to Gwynneth Island in the
Sphinx
, with Aldon Kendrick and the others, carrying an important letter (yeah, right) from King Derid. “I have a message for you,” she said.

He raised his big eyebrows.

“The message is—” she coughed into her hand portentously—“that the leShay can kiss my scrawny ass.”

She watched him laugh. Some of his teeth were false, made of steel, and a livid scar ran over his lips and down into his beard.

“Miss,” said Mindarion gravely. “I hope, believe, and pray we can accommodate you, at some time in the future.”

But in the meantime, there was much that Suka didn’t understand. Later, she, Poke, and Marabaldia sat on campstools near the fire, eating bowls of actual food for the first time (in the princess’s case) in many years. Suka couldn’t think about that. Her own hunger was fierce enough, and she didn’t even know what she was eating, nor did she care. Poke and Marabaldia had found new clothes more appropriate for traveling. Rurik and Mindarion sat with them while their soldiers milled around, a dozen or so, not more. Suka hoped they were right about the drow, and for some reason found herself picturing the captain she had seen strolling toward her up the road, a smile on her black lips, her black sword held nonchalantly to the side. She did not look to be afraid of any fey creatures in the woods or from the trackless fens, whether night hags or shadow hounds or displacer beasts or owlbears. Suka even wondered, if she were Prince Araithe, if she might allow a few unimportant prisoners to be rescued, if it meant discovering the whereabouts of other more powerful enemies outside Synnoria, which was, of course, impregnable. But perhaps Mindarion
had hidden them somehow, wrapped them in an incantation so the light from their fire wouldn’t spill out of their little dell. Certainly he looked at ease, though he didn’t smile. Nor did he eat, but drank a horn of water, sniffing it sometimes as if it were fragrant wine.

“Do you have any wine?” she asked, and Rurik laughed again.

“I like you,” he said, “but we have things to discuss. Tell me about King Derid’s message.”

She did, while he scratched his beard. “It worries me,” he said, “that Ordalf has any communication with spies in King Derid’s court, even if it’s not with the king himself. Of course I have been hoping for his support in our war. But he’s afraid.”

“Tell me about the drow,” said Marabaldia. Startled, Suka looked at her, avoiding any glance at her right eye. Even so, it was hard to see any trace of the hunched figure in her cell, weeping over the various iterations of
Oh, Father Dear
. For the first time Suka imagined something else had happened when the giantess had lost her mask, some internal sharpening of perception.

Mindarion spoke. “That is who lives in Citadel Umbra now. That is who does Prince Araithe’s bidding. The eladrin have fled from there, and everyone but the dark elves. He must have made some kind of pact, promised them something, but I do not know what.”