The Rose of Sarifal (26 page)

He replaced the jewel in his pocket. “I’m the one he’s searching for,” he said, getting to his feet, rubbing the grease from his hands, the squirrel queasy in his stomach. “You could go free. Run away to safety under his nose. North of here. Down to the coast.” In her beast’s shape, he thought. And he would let her go, because he loved her.

She wrinkled her nose. “I want to be there for the kill,” she said. “When the dogs rip you apart.”

He shuddered, and a thrill went through him. She didn’t mean it. How could she mean it? The night before she had curled up next to him, and he’d felt the warmth of her hairy body. When he woke in the middle of the night, he’d found new scratches on his shoulders and his ribs.

“You ought to save yourself,” he persisted. “Run down to the Northlander villages. They will take you in.”

She looked at him as if he were insane. “I’ll stay with you,” she said. “They’ll track you with my scent.”

What was this buzzing in his head? Was this love? It had been so long. These human women had so much juice in them. Not like the long-lived fey. When she was close to him he felt the heat rise from her body, invigorating him, making him crazy. Now she came down from the boulders above him and stood in front of him, close enough so he could feel her breath and smell her smell, which even in this body had the partial stink of a wild animal. She reached out and touched him underneath his arm, the angry cicatrices where the doctors had maimed him, and yet left traces of his nature that could not ever be expunged. If he were a man, a human creature like her, a Ffolk warrior, or else a rich man in Caer Callidyrr, would she love him then? The Savage didn’t think so.

“I’ll follow you,” she sneered.

Where? But he knew. And he imagined she must know too, that her reluctance or ignorance was for show, because if he had a vision of the place and a sense of how to get there, where could it come from, if not from her? He was a stranger here. But she had run through every forest dale and mountain valley on Moray Island, or else seen them from the air through some druidic process he didn’t understand. But now, in his mind’s eye, he could see a place, a pool of water in a narrow wood, a grove of beech trees with silver trunks and copper-colored leaves turning over all at once as the wind caught them. And there was something in the water, a reflection that was different from the pattern of branches that spread over the surface, perhaps because of the soft breeze,
or perhaps because there was something submerged there, some relic or portal of a simpler time before the Spellplague had altered the secret pathways of the world.

Had he dreamed about the place? If so, had the dream come from her, because she had slept with her head against his breast? In the middle of the night she had regained her human shape, and he had embraced her, and she had resisted after her own fashion, and then stopped resisting, and then scratched him on his shoulders.

She turned her face to him. So close, she was. His hands were slick with squirrel grease. He felt the bulge of the jewel in his pocket. His body was wracked with a dozen new sores and wounds. His head ached, and yet still he kept, as if in the center of his skull, the vision of the little pool in the beech grove.

“You must know the place,” he said, his voice a dry croak. And when she said nothing he went on, “Tell me. Were there ever … fey creatures—drow or fomorians, dwarves or elves, or any monsters from the Underdark—here on Moray Island?”

He watched her teeth, the tip of her tongue, when she replied, “They annihilated them. One by one. Hunted them down. Scoured the land. Cleansed it. After the Spellplague. One hundred years, almost. Good riddance.”

“Where?” he said.

She laughed. “You tell me. You’re the one with the … 
telkiira
in his pocket. You’re the one who stole it. The … loregem. Has it made you … stupid yet? I
think it would kill me if I touched it. Has it told you want you wanted?”

“It told me,” he said. And he bent down to kiss her, only she slapped his face away.

Ten hours later, Malar the Beastlord paused in the same spot where the Savage and Eleuthra had camped. He examined the cold remnants of the fire. Almost on a whim he had maintained his human body, now the worse for wear. His feet were broken and bloody from the stones, his hands and arms ripped and pierced from following his pack of hunters through the brambles. They hadn’t stopped since he had put them on the trail.

Jumping over a fallen tree, he had cut his leg to the bone, which caused him no pain. The boy, though, was in agony, which gave the Beastlord a distracted kind of pleasure. Like all gods he was a simple creature, intent on his own gratification, on revenge on the world that had imprisoned him. That it had been Kip who’d freed him, he neither understood nor cared.

The boy was a prisoner inside his own body, as Malar had been inside his tomb, aware of time, able to feel, yet helpless. Occasionally, as he ran, Malar could hear the grunts and screams that came unbidden to his own lips—he loved the sound of them. He loved the sight of his bloody footprints and handprints on the bare rocks. Cut and mauled in a dozen places, he squatted down
and inhaled the fragrance of the campsite, which told him everything he needed. The pack was around him, tongues lolling out, panting or else lapping at the water from the little spring.

The quarry had turned. They were headed to the fens.

But he wanted to move faster. The boy was falling apart. He could proceed no longer. His small bones would break. With all his mind the boy prayed and begged for a relief to his suffering. He had started up above, below Scourtop, at the moment the pack had fallen on Chauntea’s priestess. When the dogs had pulled her body back and forth between them, and her joints had first given way, when her red arm and clutching hand had been separated from her shoulder, then he had started his prayer, a small, weak noise. Malar lived in the landscape of the beating heart, the pumping lungs, the wheezing bowels; he did not listen to prayers. He had no interest in what was happening in the boy’s brain. But in time he found himself annoyed as the words, by dint of repetition, finally impressed themselves on his divine consciousness—“Oh, my Mother, my Mother, my dear Mother …” A prayer to Chauntea, the great whore who had birthed the entire world. Or perhaps the priestess had been the boy’s actual or adopted mother. Who could understand these human things? But hour after hour the boy had rasped out variations of the same words, squeezed them out through his bleeding lips, his broken teeth. At the same time liquid had poured out of his eyes, obscuring the god’s sight—it was enough. Time to make an end.

He let the prayer rise up. Because of the boy’s pain it had become meaningless, a garbled shriek. But Malar had a command of his own. His hunters were in their simplest beast shape, but they could respond to human words. He called them back from the trail at the bottom of the ravine, where they were eager to set out again. In time, my beauties, in time. But first—

They moved around him in a circle. A person standing up above, or a bird flying overhead, would have seen a terrible thing: a child, hurt beyond endurance, disappearing beneath the pack of wolves. Presently they drew back in a froth of red. The body, mauled past recognition, twitching still. Somehow, the corpse seemed larger than the child had been, as if clay or marl from the blood-saturated ground had coated it, or as if the wolves had added something of their own saliva and energy, without subtracting anything. And the corpse started to move, to split apart, revealing the larger animal underneath, the oily black pelt, the heavy claws. It ripped at what was left of the boy’s shredded skin.

“Follow the signs,” said Lady Amaranth as she bent over the path. “That’s what she said.”

Embarrassed, almost shamefaced, she had revealed her conversation with the goddess. “I’m only telling you part of it. I know you must find your friends,” she said. “I accept that. But we can’t neglect the signs.”

“What signs?” asked Lukas, though he knew. He hated these signs. He had spent years perfecting the art of chasing enemies or game, turning every broken stick into a narrative, a vision of the past. In a muddy puddle he could see, as if reflected in a mirror, an image of the creatures who had stepped that way—or so he told himself.

But these signs were like a joke. They’d found the first more than a mile from the coast, far beyond the wreckage from the wave. It was the body of a lycanthrope, hanging upside down from the bough of a white pine tree, not a mark on him. Rigor mortis had frozen his face into a horrifying rictus, a parody of a human smile. It had extended his right arm perpendicular to his body, had even extended his forefinger, which had pointed uphill.

What kind of a narrative was that? Later on, three twigs had formed an arrow pointing along the ridge, though there wasn’t any sign of the person that had made it, not so much as a bent blade of grass. Half a mile onward, a spider’s web was soaked in dew, the outline of an arrow spun into its fabric.

Irritated, Lukas had kicked it from the stalks of grass that held it. Not that it mattered—for the first day the goddess had led them in the direction he would have chosen anyway, back to Kork Head, where he could pick up Marikke’s trail again. In his mind he held a vision of her and the boy held captive in a wooden cage, surrounded by a pack of howling lycanthropes. Marikke had her arms around the little shifter, protecting him. The Savage could take care of himself, at least in the
ranger’s imagination—he was never there, was always somewhere else.

But on the morning of the second day, the goddess had tried to lead them inward, away from the coastal swamp where he and Gaspar-shen had chosen the wrong way their first night on Moray Island. And when he had reminded Amaranth of her promise—that they would look for his friends first of all—she had acquiesced. Still, she found it hard to look at him and spoke instead to the genasi, or to her brother, the wolf. She had allowed him to lead her toward Kork Head, but the goddess would have none of it. A couple of hours after they’d turned their backs on her last blaze of signs—a sequence of aspen trees whose leaves, though it was springtime, had already changed color—they discovered something new.

The wolf’s name was Coal, because of a black mark on his forehead. He ran down a rabbit, tore into its stomach, and there, packed inside the viscera, was a slip of ivory or a spur of bone that was not natural. The rabbit had been slow and sick. And the piece of bone had writing on it, miniature letters written in a bloody ink, a fey script that Amaranth and Lukas could decipher once Coal had brought it to them—the bone tasted awful, he indicated in a series of grunts.

Lukas held the piece of bone up to his eye. Here is what the letters said: “You are stupid. Is your friend a freak? He is not from the real world.”

Impassive, the genasi scratched his arms, running his sharp nails along the lines that ran under his skin like
glowing veins. His thin lips closed and opened, but he said nothing.

They continued southeast. In the afternoon Coal caught another animal, an otter on the bank of a small stream. The otter didn’t slip into the water, didn’t run away. His head and body were covered with tumors, and his little eyes, when Coal slit his belly, seemed to be pleading for release. A stink rose from his insides, and a black fluid erupted from his body, as if it had been held under pressure by his skin. Coal jumped back, and the fluid splattered on the dry ground, leaving tiny marks in the same fey script: “Stupid, stupid.”

But they pressed on. As they neared the coast, they discovered a man sitting on a stump. He was ancient, asleep in the sunlight, his long white beard sunk to his chest, his long white hair struggling out from underneath his broad-brimmed hat. He was dressed in rags, and a walking stick lay beside him. At first Lukas imagined he too had expired, and that they were supposed to open him up to find some new insulting signal from the Earthmother. He’d be damned if he did that. But there was no human habitation in fifty miles, and there was no reason for this man to be here, no way for him to get here to this glade in the woods with no path or road to follow.