The Rose of Sarifal (15 page)

I
N THE OLD HUMAN CAPITAL OF
C
AER
M
ORAY
, L
UKAS
moved among the beasts. During the battle on the ridgetop an orc had cut him in the side and broken three ribs. His life had never been in danger, and he was healing. The previous night he had slept on an actual straw mattress on an actual bed, and in the afternoon he toured the battlements.

He leaned forward on his elbows on the old stones, looking out over the sea of Moonshae with its white-capped waves. A fresh wind blew from the north. Lady Amaranth stood beside him, dressed in a gray wool cape—the day was pretty, though the air was cold. In places, arrows of sunlight split the clouds and struck the dark water underneath, making it tremble and glisten.

“Thank you,” said Lukas, finally. “You saved our lives, my friend and me.”

“Captain, we have you to thank. Without you, we would have come too late. Those women would have died.”

She meant the Northlanders. The orcs had raided and burned a settlement along the coast, poor fishermen
and crofters growing potatoes in the stony soil. They had killed the men and children, and stolen the women. Idly, briefly, Lukas wondered if it was merciful to salvage the lives of people who had lost so much. But life is always precious and the mind can heal. He knew this from experience. Besides, it didn’t matter. Stupid evil—like those orcs—must always be confronted and attacked if the world was to continue turning.

Amaranth glanced at him. “You must forgive me,” she said, “if I don’t know what to say. I have lived for a long time alone among my people, separate from my own kind. And I thought there were things I understood. You are a … man, isn’t that so? A human male?”

“Last I checked.”

She did not smile. “I determined this as I was tending you, the night before last. It came as a surprise. You must forgive me, but my life has been … sheltered in some ways, and there is much I do not understand. I must ask you—why did you attack those creatures at such risk to yourselves?”

“The orcs? I hate them.”

She nodded as if satisfied. “It was from hatred. And if you had chased them away, despite the odds, and found those women still alive, what would you have done?”

Lukas shrugged. “I hadn’t gotten that far.”

“Because you were blind from hatred. I see that. So you would have taken them for yourselves. Mated with them.”

Startled, Lukas turned to face her. “I don’t think you understand. These women, they aren’t my concern. I was glad to help them. But I have friends who are in
danger, and I blame myself. I was stupid to bring them to this island, stupid not to follow them, stupid to have lost them. Even now, if I felt I could run, and if my friend wasn’t so hurt, I would be after them.”

Amaranth looked puzzled. Her brow furrowed, and she rubbed her nose. “Your friend—I think I am the stupid one,” she said. “If you didn’t want the women, why did you attack the orcs? Oh, blind hatred, I think you said …”

Like all eladrin she was beautiful, an impossible, mournful beauty. Because they lived so long, even young they had no springtime in them, no sense of freshness or urgency. When Lukas was an old man she would look like this. For hundreds of years after his death, she would look like this, her skin clean as paper, her red hair blowing around her face. A leShay, or half a leShay, there was no telling how long she’d live. What would it feel like to be at the beginning of such a journey?

“I ask you,” she said, “because it’s hard not to imagine from what you say, that these instincts that drive you are in some way … valuable. Friendship. Loyalty. Sacrifice. Even guilt and self-doubt. And yet you are a … man.”

Suddenly bored, Lukas turned away. “Stick to the blind hatred,” he murmured. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I want to see someone.” He had left Gaspar-shen at noon, his head bound up, asleep.

“But I do not excuse you,” said Lady Amaranth. “You do not have my permission to leave me.”

She had turned around with him, and now they stood with their backs to the sea, looking down over
one of the courtyards toward the base of the ruined keep. Below them the lycanthropes worked among the tumbled stones, sorting them and shaping them. As far as Lukas could tell, the curtain walls were complete. But these interiors needed some work. Caer Moray had been sacked during the Spellplague, and then abandoned for a hundred years.

Amaranth made a delicate gesture with her fingers. “These are my … people,” she said. “We keep no male animals inside the gates, no bulls or rams. Instead we have … ewes, and mares, and bitches. Lots of bitches,” she murmured, and Lukas studied her face, to see if she was aware that what she said might be considered funny—that Suka, for example, would have laughed. But there was no hint of humor in her face. In a moment, Lukas found his heart go out to her, because how could it be otherwise? For ten years, since she was nine years old, she had lived on Moray Island, alone among the humorless beasts.

She had told him some of the story the first night, as they descended through the thick woods toward the coast. And of course Lady Ordalf, her sister, had already given him the bones of it in Corwell; how traitors had stolen her away and packed her onto a hippogriff somewhere in the highlands above Myrloch Vale; how the hippogriff’s rider, wounded, had taken her off course and fallen into the sea; how she had come to Moray, alone and defenseless. Even the first night after the battle, walking along the forest path in the rain, suffering with his shattered ribs and bleeding side, leaning on a broken
spear, Lukas had regretted the judgments he had come to earlier, when he had imagined some kind of collusion between the sisters—it was not like that. If this girl had been lonely in her isolation here, at least she had not been ruined by the fey.

The lycanthropes had wooden stretchers that they used to carry the genasi and the women they had rescued from the orcs. Tireless, they had hurried on ahead, while Lukas and Amaranth stumbled behind. As they came down the long, winding paths through the wet trees, as finally they could see the lights of Caer Moray in the distance, the eladrin told him what she had discovered or concluded. “She saved my life. Mistress Valeanne. She and the dragonborn, and those riders, they gave their lives to save me. Since then I have brooded on the source of the danger—who it was that was trying to kill me, a nine-year-old child. Who would send a company of drow from Myrloch Vale? Surely such a thing could not have happened without the permission or consent of the leShays—my sister or perhaps Prince Araithe, her son? But perhaps there is something I don’t understand. If I could see them again, or talk to them, then I would ask them face to face.”

Lightning flashed above them. Rain dripped down her neck. She had bound her red hair underneath her leather cap. Earlier that night, as he felt her fingers probing his side, examining his ribs, Lukas had rejected the idea that he would ever do her harm, return her dead or living to her sister’s mercy, whatever the consequences—the girl had saved his life.

Now, at Caer Moray, looking down from the walls over the courtyard, Lukas said, “I want Gaspar-shen to see me when he wakes up. I don’t want him to be alone.”

Amaranth smiled, a wistful expression on his face. “Yet I have been alone all this time,” she said. “No friends. You are friends with this creature, is it not so?”

He shrugged. Many things sound stupid when you say them out loud.

“And what is he … a genasi, is that what you said? From far away?”

“From the deserts of Calimshan. And yet he has a water-soul, from Abeir. Always he was looking for the sea. The Moonshaes were more welcoming than home.”

“And … how did you meet?”

“In Alaron. I had a boat called the
Sphinx
. We ran cargo between Callidyrr and Snowdown, for the Amnians.”

“Yet he has a different nature than yourself.”

“We manage.”

He stared at her, fascinated. He knew what she was asking. He wondered how she would phrase it. “We also have a different nature,” she said. “You and me.”

“Is that because I am a human being?” he asked. “Or because I am a man?”

And then immediately he felt bad, when he saw the hopelessness in her face—he wasn’t used to these concessions from the fey. Lady Ordalf wouldn’t have considered asking him for friendship, any more than she’d have considered asking a fruit fly or a caterpillar or a bee. But then he had to remind himself that this
girl was only nineteen years old, younger than he was, and that she’d led a life that made her simultaneously more innocent and more mature—descending to this island like a blazing star, a child alighting from the back of a hippogriff amid a circle of worshiping lycanthropes. Would he have survived as well, if he were nine years old?

“If you are a sailor,” she faltered, “perhaps then you could bring me home. My sister …”

She stopped, unable to continue. Because this desire was so different from the one she had previously expressed, it must be, Lukas thought, a sign of terrible desperation—she must know and must be told, he thought, that there was no home for her on Gwynneth Island as long as Lady Ordalf was alive.

And so he told her that the
Sphinx
was at the bottom of Kork Bay. And he told her why he had come to Moray Island. He told her about Suka, a prisoner in Caer Corwell, and he found some comfort in telling her, because the little gnome was never distant from his thoughts.

He stopped when he saw the tears on her cheeks. “And is my sister … well?” she asked.

For an answer he left her. He limped along the battlements, a pain in his side. It hurt to breathe. When he reached the signal tower he ducked his head inside, then climbed the wooden stairs down to the genasi’s room.

He was being tended by one of the bitches, as Amaranth had called them, a soft-faced, long-eyed
young woman with a ridge of fur combed back into her homespun cowl. She carried an empty chamber pot. “When can we leave?” Lukas asked, but she said nothing. Not all of them could talk.

Gaspar-shen lay immobile, his head bandaged and his eyes shut. But Lukas could tell he was awake—he didn’t sleep much, and when he did, he dived down deep into the bottom of the soundless sea. The energy lines that ran over his body throbbed and burned and took on a distinctive amber hue, made a circling pattern over his greenish skin. Today he was very pale.

Lukas sat down on a stool by his head. These artifacts—the stool, the bed, the curtains in the window—were cunning and well made in a workshop of quick-fingered lycanthropes. Amaranth had shown it to him earlier, set up in the keep’s enormous banquet hall, a bewildering assortment of spinning wheels, belching forges, and turning lathes, manned—that wasn’t the right word, Lukas thought—in shifts.

He touched his friend’s right shoulder and felt the tiny electric hum. Lukas was frustrated and out of sorts, consumed with regret. If only he hadn’t consented to Lord Aldon Kendrick’s wild goose chase. The procurator on Alaron must have recognized his desperation and recklessness—a crew of losers whom nobody would miss.

And when Lady Ordalf betrayed them to the lycanthropes, if only he had managed to keep the crew together. Now they were spread over the island of Moray, with only the golden elf’s sword to protect Marikke and the boy. And if only he had not allowed
himself to be distracted by the orcs. Then Gaspar-shen would not be lying here, and he would be days closer to rectifying all this.

And yet, what could he have done differently? He could not even bear to think about Suka in her cell.

Methodically, the genasi licked around the rim of his circular mouth. His breath whistled through the slits of his nose. “In Callidyrr,” he said in his light, airless voice, “I was at the bar of a little restaurant in Centipede Street. They had a cake with something they called sea-foam icing. It was made from caramelized sugar and vanilla, combined in a double boiler …” His voice trailed away.

“Is that all?” asked Lukas. Then in a moment: “What were the other ingredients?”

The genasi frowned, a fluctuation of his hairless brows. “Egg whites and cold water and maize sirop. Beat it for seven minutes. It whips up so delightfully, like little waves. The burnt sugar is the light at sunset over the surface of the water.”

“What was the spicing of the batter?”

“I don’t remember.”

Behind him in the doorway, Lukas heard a little gasp. He turned his head and saw Lady Amaranth standing there.

The wolf-woman pulled away the blanket from the bottom of the bed, revealing one of the genasi’s shining legs.

“They grow so fast,” said Amaranth. “One year, two, and they are fully grown. Ten years—most of them—and they are old. Many have died since I first came
here. Not from violence—they turn gray, sleep all the time, curl up on their mats, indistinguishable from beasts. Is it possible that I could live here for another hundred years? For them, how many generations will have passed?”

She was talking about the lycanthropes. “I have tried to leave,” she said, “but they won’t let me. I spoke to a fisherman in the Northlander settlements. But at night the rats attacked his boat and sunk it at the dock. So then I built a boat myself—I had it built. I wouldn’t step in it myself—they wouldn’t let me. I sent my friend the pig, the cleverest of all of them. They are very rare, the pigs, special and rare. My friend—I’d given her a name. I sent her with a message to my sister, begging her. But I wonder if her crew mutinied, or else she forgot—they are forgetful. I haven’t heard.

“I have waited,” continued Lady Amaranth. “But time has no meaning here. I have so much, and they have so little.”

S
UKA’S
E
SCAPE