The Rose of Sarifal (42 page)

Gaspar-shen was staring at Amaranth. “We can’t fight them,” he said. “If the prince wants what I think he wants.”

Lukas was too tired to argue. The dead hung close around them. “We have no choice,” he said, bending to pick up his drow saber. An unfamiliar weapon, yet he would make it sing.

“Poke is dead?” asked Lady Amaranth. Slowly, as if unwillingly, she turned to him.

The gnome was looking at her as if she had two heads. “Ah, forgive me,” she said to Marabaldia. “It is the Yellow Rose of Sarifal.”

Amaranth put up her hands. “Let us make an end to all this fighting.”

The cyclopses had focused their regard. She stood in their eyes’ light as if on stage, her shadow stretching out behind her. And because she seemed to Lukas suddenly like an actress on a stage, he made himself aware of every tiny gesture, aware of how she moved her fingers as if caressing the soft breeze, aware also of how the part she played was different from the person she had been not ten minutes before.

“There’s another way,” she said. “Let me speak to my nephew. He’ll grant you safe passage. He’ll do what I say.”

Her red hair hung listless. Her freckled cheeks were chapped and preternaturally pale in that strange light. Her eyes were wide and determined, or else afraid. Later, on board ship, his own gaze fixed deliberately on the horizon, he would remember how she didn’t look at him as she stepped backward into the shadow. He would remember how no one spoke. He would remember how it seemed for a moment as if she had something more to say. But then maybe she thought better of whatever it was. After a moment she turned, and the darkness consumed her. They listened to her soft footsteps receding, and then nothing.

Later, on board ship, Suka would tell Gaspar-shen and him her entire story, and he would tell her everything he knew. But now, they all stared at one another as if they were strangers. After twenty minutes, as they waited, Marabaldia called for a rest, for the first time on the march from Synnoria. She herself did not let go her spear. She sent some of the fomorians up ahead, and
she posted a guard, but the rest of the cyclopses opened their packs and pulled out bottles of water, and loaves of bread, and links of sausages, and sat down or lay down, and they made camp.

H
OME-SCHOOLED IN
K
ANSAS BY
C
HINESE MISSIONARIES
,
Paulina Claiborne has eschewed all subsequent education. Between the prison terms that punctuate her life, she has worked as a cook, a hairdresser, a lifecoach, a toxicologist, a freelance letter-opener, and a private surgeon. She has won several prestigious literary awards, including the Warden’s Special Prize for Model Servitude. She enjoys quilt-making, knife-fighting, and alcohol. For the past few years she has had no fixed address.