The Rose of Sarifal (4 page)

She shrugged a little, turned in a half circle, then took a few staggering steps. “You must forgive me. I had something to drink while I was waiting. And I’ve brought something for you. I thought you might be hungry after a tenday of biscuits and dried sausages.”

Behind her in the Palace of the Moon, a new light shone among the columns of the portico and from the stone window frames, a row of empty arches save for the greenish glow. None of the crew had for a moment relaxed their vigilance, unless you could count Lord Aldon Kendrick, besotted by the beauty of the girl in front of him. He wiped his lips, wagged his big head back and forth on his long neck. “Yes,” he said, making a motion to the others. “You may stand down.”

They didn’t move until Lukas gave the signal, stepping forward as he replaced the arrow in his quiver. They found themselves moving, he imagined, through a trap made of spider silk rather than steel, and it was not with steel that they could free themselves. And though the air was thick with menace, he felt instinctively it was not meant for them, the members of his crew, and that the trap would tighten only if he resisted.

Aldon Kendrick, though, was already caught. The golden elf sheathed his greatsword on his back and stepped aside. Kendrick replaced him, and as the lady stumbled from feigned drunkenness he took her by the elbow. She thanked him with her smile and drew him forward into the portico, where Lukas could see a table had been spread for them, or else for Kendrick alone—there was one silver plate, one knife and fork, one silver goblet, one chair. It occurred to him she knew the others were not so stupid as to eat or drink anything she gave to them, which left only Kendrick.

Even two days before he might have intervened to save the man from his own innocence and foolishness. But he had brought this danger on himself. Lukas already knew that Kendrick—weak when he should have been strong, obstinate when he should have given way—would tolerate no opposition to his orders, and he had ordered them to lay their weapons down. Lukas was nothing if not dutiful. He raised his hand, and his crew gathered round.

The lady favored him with a complicit, conspiratorial smile as she drew Kendrick to the carved chair and sat
him down and poured a cup of wine for him. So vain he was, Lukas imagined, that it never occurred to him to wonder why there was only one place set. It was the honor due his rank. On board the
Sphinx
he’d never dined with them. He was too proud. Instead he had preferred the single cramped, uncomfortable cabin below decks.

Now he took off his cap and gloves and bowed his head. The lady curtsied and drew up a stool. She had her own cup of wine, but she didn’t drink. Instead she made a gesture with her finger, and Lukas could hear, as if at the limit of his hearing, a sound that was like music.

“Please, my lord,” she said. “Am I right in thinking you are Aldon Kendrick, worthy and handsome cousin to King Derid in Callidyrr? Yes, the family resemblance is too strong. You must allow a simple maiden to entertain you, while you wait for Captain Rurik—please, whatever you desire …”

Kendrick sipped his wine.

“Oh, that was too easy,” smiled the lady. She turned her head toward Lukas and the rest, where they had gathered on the portico. “Come sirs, and you also,” she continued, indicating the golden elf and the gnome. “Cousins, and you, sir,” she said to Lukas, “let me thank you for not resisting me. Death comes so soon for your kind. So soon, but not today. That would have been a shame. Besides, I have need of you—strong soldiers! Brave warriors. And loyal, too! Loyal until death. No, I am teasing. This fellow, how much was he paying you?”

Just at the limit of his hearing, a sound that was like music, a violin, perhaps, and then a pipe. Lukas could almost hear it better when he wasn’t listening. “You knew we were coming,” he said. “The men who hired us to protect him, I think now they must have wanted us to fail.”

The lady laughed. “Do you now? Captain, you have a suspicious nature. But let me ask you this: If you don’t manage to defend him, despite your best effort, will you forfeit your reward? Or were you prudent enough to take your payment in advance? No matter—whatever coin was promised, I will double it.”

She had stood up from her stool, and now she stood behind Kendrick’s chair, her long hand caressing his cheek as he goggled and drooled, his freckled face empty of understanding, his big head wagging back and forth.

For days Lukas had despised him. Now, seeing him helpless, he could only feel pity. “I’ll take him back,” he said. “He’s a cousin of the king. He’ll require him breathing, at least, though it is obvious this mission was not intended to succeed.”

The lady was dark-haired, bright-skinned, with long golden eyes. She smiled, and drew her thumb along Kendrick’s shaven jaw, across his throat. “Ah yes, his mission, to a nonexistent army of assassins and rebels. The Claw.” She mimed the word with her curved fingers. “Is this something I should fear? I don’t think so. Not when I’ve received another message from another Kendrick—oh, this king has many cousins. I am envious. Captain,” she told him, “I believe you’ve
been misled, as you yourself have guessed. What you see here is the successful end to your endeavor, we can agree. Why would you bring his lordship all this way, just to take him back again? No. This is a job well done.”

Lukas looked around at the faces of his crew, gathered around the table. Gaspar-shen, the genasi, stared down at the tabletop, spread with pies and jellies and roasted meats that gave off no smell at all. The energy lines on his bald forehead glowed with a lambent flame.

Kip, the little shifter, catlike and quick, reached his padded hand out for a pear then drew it back. His fingernails retracted.

“Now that you mention it,” said Lukas, “usually we’re paid half in advance. This time we had debts against the crown, which were dismissed by the high procurator.”

“He promised you the rest?”

“Yes.” Lukas made a calculation, doubled it, then doubled it again. “Three hundred gold pieces.”

“Ah, so you see. But let me promise you, Lord Kendrick’s safe return was not part of your contract. On the contrary. Cousins of kings, they hate each other, always.”

Lord Kendrick’s forehead was high and bald, his hair drawn back in a queue, which normally he coiled under his velvet cap. The lady took it in her hand. She pulled back his head to show his throat and his protruding larynx, which convulsed as he swallowed. “It doesn’t matter,” continued the lady. “You humans—now, tomorrow, what does it matter? You understand—” she indicated with her golden eyes the gnome and the
elf—“these others, what does it matter? What can they expect, fifty years, sixty years more? But I was already old when Caer Corwell fell, in the Year of Risen Elfkin. From the battlements I watched those other Kendricks dance on the scaffold, King Derid’s great-uncle, or great-great-uncle—they breed like mice, or weasels. Now here’s another one. He lives, he dies, in the blinking of an eye.”

She ran her thumbnail down the length of his throat. A thread of blood followed it down. “There, it is done,” she said. All together, they watched Lord Kendrick’s throat swallow and convulse, swallow and convulse, swallow and convulse. Then it was still.

“A sad thing,” she said, reaching for a napkin from the table. She wiped her hands. “But not tragic. Not like the death of one of ours, or even—” her eyes glittered as she nodded at Suka and the Savage—“traitors like you. Traitors to the fey.”

Suka grinned, stuck out her tongue, and ran her fingers through her pink hair. Like the elf, she had several piercings and tattoos, including a purple dog’s head on the surface of her tongue. From its mouth protruded a silver stud in the shape of a bone, which she now exhibited to the company.

Their host stared at them then threw down her napkin, turned, and stalked out through the portico. Outside it was a bright day, the last of the afternoon. The torches were dark, the fountain dry, the shadows long. “Leave him,” she said, and they followed her to the long stairs.

“Come,” she said to Lukas, who hurried by her side. “You see you were meant to die here with Lord Kendrick. Three hundred gold pieces—the high procurator of Alaron could have promised you six hundred, or a thousand. He never meant to pay. But I have work for you.”

In the light she was impossibly lovely, with her straight, dark hair and pearly skin. But now that Lukas knew that she was old, hundreds, perhaps thousands of years old, he could see behind her eyes a hooded shadow. She climbed rapidly downstairs then turned into the cobblestone streets of the old town. The doors gaped open in the empty houses, stone and brick, and dark passageways smelling of bat dung. Flocks of birds rose from the courtyards, and rats scurried among piles of fallen masonry.

She turned under a high gate into the block of an old prison, its windows covered with a mesh of corroded iron bars. Lukas stopped her in the courtyard. “We aren’t following you here.”

His crew moved into position, a ragged semicircle behind him. He raised his hand. Weapons were useless. His own bow was upon his back.

The lady turned around, then came back toward him until she stood uncomfortably close, her eyes almost level with his own. Even at that distance, her body and her clothes gave off no scent. “Captain,” she said, her thin dark lips a few inches away. “What is your name?”

He told her. “And me,” she said. “Do you know who I am?”

“I have an idea.”

“Tell me,” she said. Her teeth were small and very white. He watched the tip of her tongue move between them. It was dark, and a peculiar shade of lavender.

“I believe you are High Lady Ordalf of Sarifal, queen of this land.”

A hiss escaped her lips, and Lukas could feel her cool breath. “Is that what you believe?” she asked, her long eyes mocking him. “Then you must also believe I have the power to destroy you where you stand.”

He shrugged.

“But I mean you no harm! On the contrary, I mean to reward you. Three hundred gold pieces from the procurator—you won’t see that gold, I’m afraid. You wouldn’t even see it if you dragged Lord Kendrick’s worthless carcass back to Alaron. But I will make you rich men.”

She blinked, and a tear formed in the long lashes at the corner of her eye. She raised her hand to touch it, pull it away, roll it between her fingers, a jewel now, or something close to it, a sapphire or a piece of crystal. She laughed, flicked it away. “And not just men,” she continued. “Please, introduce me to your company.”

The prison walls rose above them, three stories high. In the late afternoon, the flagged courtyard was full of shadows. She stepped away, then moved around the semicircle as Lukas named each member of the crew. “What kind of creature do you call yourself?” she said to Gaspar-shen. “You must forgive me. I do not travel
much. This is the farthest I have been from Karador in many years.”

The genasi—small for his race, blue-skinned, almost naked—stood with his legs spread. “What kind of creature?” repeated the queen. Her gaze flicked briefly down his body to his eel-skin breeches. “And you, a human woman,” she said, moving to Marikke. “Priestess of Chauntea—you don’t find it … difficult, to share your quarters with so many … males?” She laughed, curtseyed sardonically, drunkenly, and then continued on to Kip, the cat-shifter. “Boy, I hate your kind.”

She made as if to turn away, but then turned back. Her beautiful face took on a hard, penetrating look. “Touch me,” she commanded, and Kip, hesitantly, as if against his will, brushed his hand against her outstretched fingers. She gave an exaggerated shudder, then smiled. “I hate you,” she repeated. “But not as much as I hate traitors.” She stared long and hard first at the elf, then the gnome.

Suka yawned, once more showing them the stud in her long tongue. “Thank you,” said the queen. “That’s quite enough. More than enough. Three hundred thalers each,” she said, mentioning the Amnian gold coins now current throughout the islands. “Three hundred more on your return. When you bring me … what I want.”

She paused, then continued: “Captain, come with me. You and one other—you,” she said, pointing at Suka. “The rest, wait for us beside the dock. You understand, I need some security. Someone to guarantee you won’t just sail away with my gold.”

She gave the genasi a final appraising glance then turned away under an arched doorway. Lukas nodded, and the company drew back, except for Suka, who peered up at him. “Your choice,” he said.

She shrugged as if to say there was no choice. The two of them followed the queen through the archway at the top of a flight of stairs, lit from below. Under the level of the port, the walls sweated and stank.

And there were men here too, the first Lukas had seen, sallow Ffolk on unknown errands dressed in urine-colored rags, who sank to their knees as the queen passed. “Behold the Claw,” she said. “The Winterglen Claw. Rebels. Warriors. Perhaps we should be quaking in our shoes.”

She was barefoot. Her high-arched soles left prints on the damp stones, as if she dried them just by touching them. The Ffolk squeezed their eyes shut and pressed their fists against their mouths. “Doubtless they will kill us in our beds,” she murmured.

Two levels down, the stairs debouched onto a wide, low-ceilinged gallery, stinking of offal and slime, lit with torches. She paused. “Captain, let me tell you a story.”

Again she came to stand in front of him, her lips close to his own, her cool breath on his face. “Ten years ago, I had a sister, who was taken from me. A half sister. My mother’s daughter, not my father’s. She was … younger. Much, much younger even than my own son.

“You know,” she said, “that things are different for us. You humans can have many children in your tiny lives. An eladrin woman—one, perhaps two
pregnancies, each one lasting several years. We give birth in pain, you understand. We live a long time, and because of it, it is the youngest who inherits. Always the youngest. My sister was nine years old when she disappeared.”

“Where did she go?”

The queen shrugged. “It was a mystery. A traitor stole her from her bedchamber in the high citadel. Suborned six members of my dragonborn guards. They took her to Crane Point on the lake, that much is known. There was a plot to kidnap her and take her to the castle of the Daressins on Snowdown—she did not arrive. Though we do not visit these places, still we have eyes and ears. A hippogriff snatched her from the lakeshore—we saw it. After that, nothing. Except a rider washed up on the west coast not far from here, at the entrance of the firth. A rider’s corpse, burned from the fire. This was ten years ago.”