The Savage woke at dawn, curled up alone at the bottom of a ravine. For two days he had run from the stone city below Scourtop. During the day and while he was moving, he had not felt the cold, the loss of his shirt. During the night the wolf had kept him warm in the shelter of whatever small trees or bushes they could find. But last night it had rained, and he woke up with his teeth chattering.
He had flint and steel and he made a fire. After half an hour Eleuthra returned, the king s thighbone in her hand. She threw down a brace of fat red squirrels, which the Savage cut apart with his new sword. Its blade, astonishingly sharp, was slightly curved, forged in many layers of tempered, folded steel. A line of runes was etched into the edge, a geometric pattern whose meaning was forever lost.
Similar runes decorated the king s thighbone. The druid threw it carelessly into the rocks. She was dressed in her wolf skin and at that moment, in the dawn light, the Savage found her intolerably beautiful dark hair, high cheekbones, dark eyebrows, dark blue eyes. He imagined his awareness of her beauty had increased since he d first seen her, doubled hour by hour. And he wondered if this feeling was connected to a change in the way she d treated him since they d left the crypt, with her ever-increasing anger.
She stood above him, a faraway look in her eyes. I was on the mountaintop. She gestured vaguely. I was in the thunderclouds. I looked behind us at Malar s temple where the stones are wet with blood. They divided the priestess s body between the altar stones and burned the offerings. The Beastlord has come out to smell the morning air. He is sniffing at our trail.
She raised both hands to her hair and stretched her elbows back, a gesture he found painful, because it displayed her body s shape. He hates you because of the creature you killed. And he hates you because of what you stole because of your greed. Only gold has value to you. Only things, because you live so long. How could you have any feelings for another mortal creature? I hate you too, she said, unnecessarily.
The pain in his forearm, where the dragon had bitten him, had abated. But he was afraid he had absorbed some kind of poison, something that made him lightheaded, weak. He had no strength to muster any kind of illusion, to mask the red slits in the centers of his eyes, to alter his complexion or else blunt his teeth. He had no strength to argue with her. He bent over the squirrel meat, cutting it into chunks.
I was in the clouds, she said again. I saw a storm over Caer Moray, and then it moved off to the south and east. I felt the earth turn over and the battlements fall. Across the straits I saw a storm over Gwynneth Island and the fey. Nature itself rises up, and the Earthmother. In my lifetime I ll see Karador sink into the lake and all the tunnels drowned. All of you will drown like maggots. Your bodies will rise to the surface of the water.
He stared at her, chewing the raw meat. There was no reason to cook it, no reason to pretend. He rubbed his cold hands together and then, as if he wanted to prove her right, he brought out the king s treasure piece by piece from his pockets, fingering the gold as if to warm himself. Already he had wound one of the rings into his yellow hair, and slipped some of the others onto his fingers and thumbs. The inner and outer surfaces were thick with meaningless runes. The metal was soft enough to take a fingerprint if you squeezed hard.
The circlet from the king s brow he slipped over his ears and down onto his shoulders. The druid was right: The gold was a source of comfort, though maybe not in the way she thought. It felt warm to him, warmer than the sunshine that now broke through the clouds. And the jewels he held the demon-eye ruby in his hand and felt the thrill of it against his palm, an electric charge.
I thought you were different, she goaded him. She put her hands on her hips and drew the wolf skin up above her knees.
The goddess help me, I thought so.
All boys are used to this: The more she hated him, the more he wanted her. But it had been a long time since he d felt so young. He closed his eyes, ashamed of his response to her, and brought the jewel up to his lips.
Malar will hunt you down, she said. The goddess help me, he will hunt the both of us.
That same morning in Caer Moray, Lukas and Gaspar-shen stood in the ruins of the courtyard. The curtain wall had collapsed into the ditch along the landward side. The Northlander women were gone from the banquet hall, and many of the lycanthropes, male and female, had slunk away into the woods. The ones that were left wandered over the fields, examining the wreckage cast up by the big wave and marking it stumps, timber, and corpses with their urine.
I have heard, remarked Gaspar-shen, of a man who owns a shop in Chasoln on the other side of the Shining Sea. He builds a confection made of creamed cheese and marzipan in a bed of puff pastry. He wraps it in silver foil and people eat it on the street. The pastry comes apart under your fingers. There are pistachios involved.
I d like to eat one of those, Lukas said. That morning there was nothing to eat in Caer Moray.
I am not sure about that. But I would like to see the face of the man who could invent such a thing, continued the genasi. I would like to walk the streets that smelled of such a thing. I believe we are talking about a town made of wooden houses, with long shaded galleries along the street and slatted blinds against the sun. The town smells like old dust, and oblique sunlight, and pistachios.
All this, Lukas thought, meant that his friend was eager to be gone. And he also had spent as much time as he needed in this mournful place, full of carrion. Lycanthropes, dead, were no different from ordinary animals. Overhead, the air was full of crows.
They stood inside the fallen gate. Both had been scratched and bitten in the fight, though their wounds had scabbed over. Hurt and weary, Lukas sank down on broken stone, the remnant of a cornice, now sunk deep into the ground.
We should find our friends, he said. Kip and Marikke, and the swordmage. I had hoped the Beastlord would bring them here. But I think he has many incarnations.
And the gnome? The genasi s high, airless voice held no expression.
Lukas said, Ever since I looked back from Kork Head and saw the signal fire I ve feared the worst.
These people are liars, he continued, meaning the commissar in King Derid s court who had sent them to Gwynneth Island, and then more particularly the leShay queen.
They play with us like checkers, he murmured, his words sounding weak and carping even to himself. When was it ever different between rich and poor, long- and short-lived, strong and frail?
Outside the gate a crow perched on the head of a fallen bull, part of a team that had brought up the ram. The crow pecked at the animal s eye.
I have heard, said Gaspar-shen, that in Chasoln there were no kings and queens. The citizens elected a guild to administer the town. There was an official to maintain the pistachio supply, and one for marzipan, and one for dough. A person could have had his own shop in the street of filled pastry. Bribes and corruption were unheard of.
Gaspar-shen s tiny lips were incapable of smiling. But the energy lines under his skin glowed in unusual colors peach and cherry-red when he was talking horseshit, like now. No one knew what kind of government they had in Chasoln. The town was just a word, too far away to have a meaning.
In order to travel there, the genasi murmured, it would be best to have a boat.
Yes, sighed Lukas. It would be best to have a boat.
In Chasoln there was a process in which a piece of hollow chocolate or else sometimes in other recipes a piece of wood was set on fire and then entirely submerged in brine. In both cases it is called a Sphinx.
It sounds delicious.
It is not. No one thinks so. Especially not me. And then after a moment: This wave that came last night was a beautiful thing. A very, very beautiful thing. Now it is gone.
In the years Lukas had known him, this was as close as his friend had come to a reproach. We will find the others, Lukas said. Then we will return to Gwynneth Island, to Caer Corwell. Like many people who take on the role of leader, he was at his most definitive when he was most unsure.
And the Lady Amaranth? said Gaspar-shen.
A voice came from behind them: What about her? The lady, hair still wet and disheveled, was climbing down a slope of gravel from the keep, surrounded by a pack of wolves. She smiled at Gaspar-shen, but didn t even glance at Captain Lukas, perched on the fallen chunk of cornice. These are my sisters, she explained. Daughters of the great Deucala, who took me in when I was starving and my brother also. She indicated a burly, reddish male, who slunk down to lift his leg against the stone gatepost. For years he s been living beyond our walls, bringing news to us. Now that her kingdom was destroyed, she sounded more like a queen or a ruler than she had before. This is Lightfoot and this is Bay, she said, introducing two of the four females. They all looked identical to Lukas, especially when they snarled at him in greeting, and raised the frosted hackles between their shoulder blades.
Captain, Amaranth continued, I wanted to thank you for your bravery first of all. She stared at Gaspar-shen as she said this, while Lukas examined the soil between his boots. Still he was aware of the play of colors through his friend s energy lines, the plum color that suggested his discomfort.
I have spoken to the wolves, said Amaranth.
I told them about something I saw last night in the middle of the earthquake when the walls came down. I saw someone who told me something I will go with you to Karador. That s where I was young, and as the youngest of my family, I have a power there. I will speak to my half sister, and she will release your friend from prison as she promised you. I do not believe she would ever harm me, and my sister s son will also welcome me home. If it is necessary, he will intercede, if for some reason I cannot understand I have offended her. He was kind to me when I was young, when he would put me on his knee and kiss me, and tell me that he loved me. And I would play with his gray hair, and marvel that he was my nephew. But surely that will give me power over him, the power to do good. I believe my country needs me to make peace a final peace between the Ffolk, the Northlanders, and the fey. Nor can I accomplish that from here, where I have become an irritant. Captain, I am at your service, and I will help you if you help me. With my sister and my nephew I have a bond of blood that cannot be broken, and I will reward you all of you.
All this was to Gaspar-shen. How much? he said, which Lukas thought was a kind of a joke, though it was hard to tell. If he was right, then it was a joke that flew straight over Lady Amaranth, who looked up at the genasi, after her bold and noble peroration, with a confused expression on her face.
I want my friend to negotiate for me, Lukas said. After the carnage and uncertainty of the night before, the day had turned out bright, a warm sun and a blue sky streaked with horse-tail clouds. He looked up at Amaranth, wondering briefly if he should have stood when she approached, and that was why she wouldn t talk to him a breach of protocol. But he was tired and filthy, and he hadn t slept. He had laid his sword upright against the stones, and he reached for it as he rose to his feet. The wolves sniffed at him and growled. Amaranth didn t look at him. She glanced away and blushed. Because her skin was so pale, he could see the color move over her cheeks.
I m depending on you, she murmured, which touched him.
Later, when he d made his preparations to depart, he knocked on the door of her room in the old keep, where she was talking to the wolves. At Caer Moray he had seen many lycanthropes whose human guise and form might have been close enough to fool him if the light were bad, or if he hadn t been paying attention, or if he hadn t already known the truth. Performing human tasks, huddled in their homespun clothes these wolves weren t like that. They had made no effort to be something they were not. For one thing, they were naked, covered with hair, and their body language, also, was more bestial than human, the way they scratched themselves, sniffed and licked at each other, wrinkled their noses, and bared their gleaming teeth. Lukas wondered if they knew how to sweat, because their mouths were always open, their tongues extended, their lips damp.
Even when the genasi wasn t with him, at first it was hard for Amaranth to look at him. Lukas assumed this was because of what had happened on the ramparts when Malar the Beastlord hammered on the gate. He resolved not to speak of it, even though it was hard to see her without remembering that he had touched her, kissed her on her eyes and cheeks and lips, not long ago. But he was sure that Bay and Lightfoot and the rest would rip him into little pieces if he mentioned anything like that. He wondered if they could even smell his thoughts on the subject, the suspicious way they looked at him and licked their teeth.
Lady, he said, I will do what you request. But I must ask you to consider: You have two families of wolves, but these are like lambs compared to your family on Gwynneth Island.
At these words the lycanthropes surrounded him in a rough circle. One of them, the largest female, had stared at her until she dropped her eyes.
You escaped here with your life, he said.
Nothing has changed in ten years. I will return to Caer Corwell for my friend s sake. But after that I could take you somewhere else, to Alaron, perhaps.
She looked at him for the first time that day, in the light.
The fey must go where the fey are wanted, she said.
Where they are tolerated. You are not the only one who has a duty to perform.
She glanced out the window and continued, I will leave this place to the daughters of Deucala. But Coal will come with us. She indicated the male lycanthrope who squatted in a corner of the room. Our way is neither land nor sea nor air. Captain, I understand we must search for your friends first of all. I know you are loyal to your friends I honor that. Captain she looked back at him from the window, a streak of light across her face will you be my friend?
You were the one who told me about these things, the Savage said. He held the ruby in his palm. Now you blame me for taking them.
You re a liar.
But it was true. It was the wolf who had gone up on her hind legs to push the stone lid from the sarcophagus. But maybe the druid in her human shape couldn t remember what the wolf had thought or done. Maybe she moved back and forth between two separate consciousnesses. Or else maybe that was what she pretended, for reasons of her own. Maybe even her hatred of him was a pretense. What had he done, that she should hate him so? He d saved her life, after all. Maybe that s what she couldn t forgive.
Or else maybe it was in her nature to hate him for himself, regardless of what he said or did, the same way that it was in his nature to care for her, not for any reason. She stood above him with the sunlight behind her head, her body poised as if to leap at him, to strike him or else scratch him with her nails. She raised the king s thighbone onto her shoulder. It was carved and incised with letters, but also broken and gnawed, as if in her wolf s shape she had cracked it to suck out the ancient marrow. Her dark hair, blue eyes, chapped lips and cheeks. He squeezed the ruby in his palm and felt the thrill of it, felt also the heaviness of the gold circlet around his neck, the throbbing in his forearm where the dragon had bit him. His head ached, and he felt sick, lovesick, he thought he hadn t felt this way for many, many years. He had forgotten the sensation, the feeling of being separate from yourself, the feeling also of being simultaneously powerful and weak, clever and stupid, good and bad. Best of all, there was no reason to hide himself from this woman. He could be himself, because she knew the worst about him. Perhaps soon he would tell her his real name.
What do you see? he asked.
She glowered down at him. They are preparing for the hunt. The dogs go first and then the pigs. The rest will follow. Malar the Beastlord
As she spoke, the Savage found himself not so much listening to her as watching the scene that she described as if through her eyes. Or as if the world around him the rocks, the dry ravine, the little fire of twigs, the gorse bushes, the mossy freshet with a single trickle of water all had disappeared, or else receded into the background of something else, a vision that lingered halfway between reality and illusion, like painted images on a transparent screen images that moved.
He saw the boy Kip standing erect between two collapsed stone pillars, the black kitten in his hands. He raised it up above the pack, who swerved and turned around his boots. The little shifter grinned and licked his lips, his animal nature evident in his hooked nails and wicked teeth, more evident than the Savage had ever seen. And his hair, which previously had ranged from white to calico, depending on his mood, was dark now, black as the kitten who hung suspended from its nape. With a sudden gesture he dashed it onto the rocks so that it disappeared into the swirl of beasts it was so vivid, the Savage cried out.
But this was surely what love was, this ability to communicate, to see something through your beloved s senses. How long had it been since he d felt this way? Forty, fifty years? When Eleuthra s mother was a little girl, perhaps, he had known someone in Baldur s Gate, a girl with squinting eyes whose face he could now scarcely bring to mind. But he had felt in tune with her, in harmony. Like now.
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.
They gathered around him, and he opened his bleary, ice-blue eyes. If he was frightened of the wolf, he didn t show it. He spoke in the Common tongue, his voice high and weak, The goddess be praised. It is as she told me years ago, that at the end I would see a genasi warrior, and a beautiful maiden, and a wild beast, and a stubborn fool. That would be the end of my life s passage, and the beginning of another journey that would take me far from here, beyond the Astral Sea. I was just a boy when I saw her in my mother s garden, and since then I have wandered my life away, searching for this moment. Here it is at last. And I was to give you a message let me see. She made me repeat it over and over. Let me see
His voice trailed away. Cursing silently, Lukas bent down over him, close enough to smell his foul breath, his teeth worn to carious stumps. Let me see, the old man mumbled. It was so long ago. I saw here in the garden she was just a little girl. A girl my own age, but I knew who she was. Since then I have looked for her all over the Sword Coast, and now all through these islands not for me to follow in my father s trade. Not for me to marry and have children. But all these years I have been searching for you four at first I thought it would be a matter of months! A year at most. I did not guess it would consume my life oh, I am ready to see her again.
The message, suggested Lukas grimly. The old man was pitiable, but he refused to pity him. This was all Chauntea s trick, an invention of the past few hours.
Amaranth, though, went down on her knees and took his hand.
Younger than you, he said, and not as pretty. But I knew who she was. She made me repeat the message in a language I didn t understand I hope I can remember it. I made a little song out of it and would repeat it to myself before I went to sleep.
Amaranth had tears in her eyes. Lukas had an inclination to seize the old man s hat and pull it down over his eyes, or grab hold of his beard and wag his head from side to side. Lukas looked up at the genasi, who studied him impassively. The wolf sat on his haunches in the grass.
The old man closed his eyes, perhaps to compose himself for death, perhaps from the effort of remembering. When he spoke, it was in the primordial language of the gods: Idiot. You re a pig s ass. Your nose is like a big, fat turd, and your friend is ugly. You ve taken the girl far afield, and for what? The daemonfey is going toward the same place. The loregem showed him, and you will meet him there. Tarkhaan s son, Bishtek Dlardrageth, whom you call the Savage. This is my desire and command. As for the other two, you must look no further, unless you search in the Nine Hells. They are dead. The priestess and the boy. Malar killed them.
Lukas stood up straight. You re lying.
Am not. If you don t believe me, wait for a few hours right where you are. You ll see Malar face to face. No, here, the old man continued, stretching out his clawlike hand.
I ll show you.
But he didn t. Instead he fell backward off the stump, legs in the air.
Amaranth bent over him. Oh, dear, she said.
Leave him, Lukas said.
No. How can you be so heartless? she said. She had been holding the old man s hand, but now she pulled away in disgust, because the hand had come apart. She staggered up, and together they watched the old man s body subside, as if through an instantaneous process of decomposition his flesh was dry as ash. After a moment Gaspar-shen drew his scimitar. With its hooked end he drew back the brim of the man s hat, showing the heap of powder that had been his skull, while clumps of his beard and hair drifted away.
He was a liar, Lukas said again. He didn t show me anything. And the golden elf has no demon blood, I d swear to it. You d be able to see it in his face, he continued, remembering a morning when he had seen the Savage washing, seen the scars along his back, the sharp bones of his vertebrae almost like spines. And Marikke and Kip aren t dead. And he didn t show me anything, he concluded, repeating himself lamely, while at the same time he could not but imagine the Beastlord in his panther s shape bounding toward them through the forest, surrounded by his pack of wolves.
After a moment s waiting while Lukas overcame his doubts, they turned back the way they d come.
But it was the Savage and the wolf that first arrived at the place. They had crossed a river near an abandoned town, the stone streets empty, the roofs caved in. But the bridge to the far bank was intact, an elegant single span, and on the other side a raised cobblestone track that led into the marsh what had once been, the Savage guessed, irrigated agricultural land, now flooded and overgrown. But then they passed an earthen dike and the road gave out, and then they were in the marsh itself, and the way was difficult. Not for Eleuthra, who slid through the undergrowth and loped tirelessly ahead, but for the Savage, who slapped at the mosquitoes and stumbled through the muck. In places he had to cut himself free with the king s sword, whose edge was supernaturally sharp. Nevertheless, the prickers caught at his bare skin, and sometimes he had to draw breath, lightheaded, close to tears.
The treasure he had taken from the tomb now weighed him down. But more than that the gold was changing him in ways both good and bad.
At moments when he bent down in the undergrowth, his ears ringing and his head aching, he thought he would remove the rings from his pockets and his fingers and his hair, remove the circlet from his neck, and drop them one by one into the noisome pools, saving the ruby for last. Or else he would scatter them in different directions, because he imagined that together they held between them a black power. At such moments they seemed too heavy to lift. But then he would remind himself how deeply he d been hurt the past few days, the wound he d taken to his chest in his fight with the angel, the dragon bite he d taken to his forearm. Surely it was not just the effect of Marikke s healing that had enabled him to survive these things, that had reknit his bones and strengthened his blood and healed his skin. Surely there was some spell or magic in the gold, an effect that he could feel when he passed it over his flesh, a force that drew out his malignancies like a lodestone drawing out an iron needle from the sand. Without that force, he never would have been able to struggle this far. In the night, after Eleuthra had left him, it was the gold that had kept him warm in the chill spring wind without a coat or even a shirt.
And the healing and the warmth were not superficial, but deep inside, a reordering. Something long dispersed, now coming together. No wonder he was weak. He had read of demons in the Nine Hells who, if you ripped or cut away one of their limbs, would regrow it from the stump. But it took time to nurse or heal such a wound, and doubtless the demon would feel weak and nauseated they did have feelings, didn t they? Perhaps he would find out.
And if not, perhaps that was just as well, because feelings were killing him, and he was sick of love. How many years had it been since he had felt like this, felt this tingling on his skin, this new sensitivity to every stimulation? Over the decades he had been with many women, too many to count or remember. But now he was like a boy again, and the sensation was both pleasurable and painful, like the feeling of blood returning to a sleeping limb, or of awakening from a long dream. Now this was real. The wolf had disappeared into the marsh.
Up to his shins in the black water, he stood up straight and lifted his sword. The sun shone overhead through the slender trees, the nets of vines. He clenched the demon-eye ruby in his left fist, and for a moment he thought of Marikke and Kip, for whose sake he had entered Malar s tomb, fought Malar s angel. Disoriented, head throbbing, he imagined their faces red-cheeked Marikke, little Kip.
He imagined their faces, but he couldn t see them. Instead, he saw where he was going, a dry place in the middle of the marsh, a grove of beeches, and a circular pool of water. The jewel showed him. The loregem, Eleuthra had called it. It did not show him scenes from his own memory. It did not show him what was happening elsewhere. It did not prophesize what was to come. Instead, he thought it was like a book of knowledge or of spells, a book that was in sympathy with himself, which was why his palm thrilled with electricity and why his head ached and throbbed. The gem knew what he wanted or what he needed. The gem showed him the way. The gem allowed him to follow the wolf, and in his mind s eye that morning he had seen her squat and piss on a fallen gatepost in the abandoned town beside the river. When he arrived, the stone was dry, and he could read the inscription with the loregem s help. The soft flesh of the ruby thrilled under his fingers, and what had been indecipherable was now suddenly plain:
This is not the way forward.
And on the other side of the empty town it was called Horsa, he realized suddenly he had found traces of the wolf, a mound of scat. There was the bridge, the single span over the river. The wolf had ripped away the moss from a stone, revealing a column of runes carved in a language he had not known until that instant:
Do not follow me.
And beyond the causeway in the marsh where he was now Breasal Marsh, he knew its name he saw the wolf pause half a mile ahead, and cough or vomit up the fragments of bone from some unlucky small animal over a stone tablet just submerged. Inspired now, granted new energy despite his aching arms and head the mental images, so clear, so sharp, were like an irritant, he thought, like shards of rock or glass inside his brain he stumbled forward on Eleuthra s trail, looking also for the broken twigs or wet prints that marked her passage. Again he thought he was reminded for the first time in many years what love felt like, a hidden, urgent communication, a synchronicity in his and the druid s vision of the world, a shared experience that was painful and disorienting, but also welcoming and addictive. He needed her, and the gem knew it, and knew other things as well, like the location of the black, circular pool in Breasal Marsh, a portal before the Spellplague, when all this country had been full of fey, dead now, annihilated, as Eleuthra had told him, the water and the mud full of old and broken bones.
He splashed his way to the submerged tablet, tried to push the water away. Then he bent down, and with sensitive new fingers read the incised letters like a blind man:
You disgust me, ugly creature.
Do not chase me.
I will break your demon heart.
These words were like food to him, nourishment to keep him going. And so he came to the place in time, as the land rose and dried out in the center of the marsh, and the trees grew straight and big, silver, smooth-barked beeches with their leaves like the blades of little knives, like the knife Marikke had left for him in the king s barrow below Scourtop, where he had broken his chains. And in the middle of a secret grove among the green, yellow, and copper-colored leaves, he found the pool, and the wolf waiting.
No, not the wolf. He saw Eleuthra in her human shape, the wolf skin and the king s thighbone cast upon the bank. But she was washing the muck and sweat off her body in the clean water, the clean light of the afternoon, clothed only in the dappled shadows as the leaves turned and stirred above her head. Bent over in pain, leaning on his sword, he watched her from the deeper trees, watched the language of her gestures change as she became aware of his presence. Nor did she try to hide the treasures of her body, but instead displayed them more openly. The water was cold, he could tell by the gooseflesh on her arms, the color in her cheeks. But a woman does not hide herself from the gaze of an animal. And as he watched, he felt more and more distorted and deformed, as if from the inside out. This also the loregem was showing him as he squeezed it and it slipped and throbbed between his fingers: a vision of himself, the barbed tail hanging down between his legs, the high leather wings arching from his back, the row of sharp spines between them a monster, a daemonfey from House Dlardrageth itself. The loregem was showing him, and the king s gold was healing him, and the love knot with Eleuthra was binding him to her knowledge of what he was, awakening his nature, bringing it out of him, breaking down the walls that hid him from the world, cunningly constructed by his father and himself over many, many years that s what love is, isn t it?
She ran her hands through her wet hair, elbows back. Then she turned around and bent down to examine a cut along the outside of her thigh, a beaded line of blood. Don t touch me, she said as he came close. But he didn t pay any attention.
It s strange, she said later, turned away from him, lying on her side on the green turf. I knew this place, but I didn t know how to find it. I thought I was following you, even though you were behind me.
He grunted.
It s a gate to something, she continued.
That I know. But the door is closed. You cannot open it. And even if you could, I wouldn t go inside it. Not with you.
She turned over onto her back and pointed up at the sky. There were clouds overhead and as the Savage watched they gathered and combined into a knot of darkness overhead, which blocked the sun. And it began to rain, a soft, cleansing shower that drifted down, he suspected, onto themselves alone. The raindrops almost looked like flecks of gold, he thought, as they filtered down through the leaves.
Then she turned toward him. What is your name? she asked. Your real name?
But he wouldn t tell her. Later the shower dissipated as she fell asleep, lying naked on her wolf skin, while he looked for the gate. He laid his sword next to the sleeping girl but gathered up his other treasures, which he thought would help him. He held the loregem in his left hand. Without it he felt naked.
The pool was as round as a drain. He knew it wasn t natural, a plug of water perhaps a dozen feet in diameter, much smaller than he had thought when he had seen it in his mind. At first the slope was gentle, a circle of gray sand then it dropped away until the water was black at the center of the pool.
He walked around it on the circular strand, his head hurting. When he was with Eleuthra, near her, he felt better, healed, but now the pain was back. He felt swollen, as if some new growth inside his body were displacing the old, or as if his brain were too big for his skull, as if the loregem, squeezed in his left hand, had given him too much, too fast, too soon.
In the old days, he said, the Kendricks had a way to move between the islands, a charmed circle in each of the Moonshaes, in private shrines and antechambers in the palaces and temples. There was one in Norland and Oman, and in Caer Westphal in Snowdown, and Caer Callidyrr, and Caer Corwell on Gwynneth Island. I believe when I saw the High Lady Ordalf on the terrace of the moon, that she had come from there. Those ways have been blocked for eighty years. But I know a way.
He spoke loudly, as if to overcome the buzzing in his head. Loudly enough to wake Eleuthra, who sat up to watch him from across the water, scratching herself idly and softly. She wrapped the wolf s skin around her body. She yawned, sticking out her tongue.
I know how to open the door, said the Savage, his head bursting, his heart swollen with the sight of her, the way she moved. There are signs along this shore look, he said, squatting down. He took the knife Marikke had left him, and used it to cut away the leg of an old stump, half submerged in the water. Look, here. In a minute he had uncovered what he sought, a buried hunk of volcanic rock, a hexagonal slice of black basalt not native to that place or time, and with the sigil incised in it. He couldn t read it, but once again he touched it with his fingertips and the meaning came clear:
I regret what you have made me do.
He rose to his feet and staggered drunkenly along the shore until he found the place. He knelt, and in the hard sand and gravel he uncovered it, the hideous face of a demon carved into the black basalt, lips stretched wide, and the sigil cut into his tongue:
I hate the feeling of your hands on me.
And then another and another, each one a sixth of the way around the circle, each one carved into a block of basalt:
I regret the taste of your lips.
It is bitter in my mouth.
You will never have me.
Only my heart is pure.
This had brought him around the entire circle. Now he was on the shore below her where she lay on the grass under the beech trees, watching him, an unreadable expression on her face. She had wrapped the wolf skin around her upper body, but her legs were still uncovered. Ah, he thought, there is a sign or sigil in her body, which I can read with my fingers.
The way is open, he said, as the loregem had taught him, in the mark of the Black Blood. It s hidden now, but the water will clear. And we ll see the one in Corwell, see right through to the other side, the circle there.
She shrugged, scratching at her armpits and the outside of her thighs, sniffing at her fingers. Sarifal, she said.
The country of the fey.
Come with me, he said, his voice harsh and pleading even in his own ears. Malar is hunting us. You saw him.
He s hunting you, she said. Not me. Then she turned her head away from him, staring into the trees, entirely focused on a noise he couldn t hear, a smell he couldn t catch, until the bracken parted and another wolf loped into the grove, paused, lifted his leg against an old stump.
He was a heavy brute with reddish fur, and a black mark on his forehead. He drew his lips back from his teeth. The Savage got up from his knees, his knife in his right hand, the loregem in his left. Hating the wolf, he did not see or even predict Eleuthra s transformation, until the female stepped delicately into his line of vision, hesitant and unsure, he thought, a beautiful brindled creature as if from a different species than the squat and heavy lycanthrope oh, how his head ached to see them move under the trees, circling around each other nose to tail. Eleuthra squatted to urinate, and the Savage wondered if she had come suddenly into estrus, perhaps that same day, perhaps an hour before as he lay with her on the bank; the stink of it still lingered. And now it was as if the wolves were playing with each other, running under the trees, chasing each other and then doubling back, sinking down onto their forelegs and then bounding up she was doing this to spite him, hurt him. He gripped the leaf-shaped knife in his right hand. The Black Blood. He needed the Black Blood. The Black Blood would save them. It would open the gate.
Stung with jealousy, he blundered up the bank between the leaping wolves.
Lukas had seen the knot of clouds from miles away, above and ahead of them as they clambered through the Breasal Marsh. It was the last sign the goddess showed them, the last they needed. Coal had run ahead, Lady Amaranth s lycanthropic brother, and they followed wearily, he, Gaspar-shen, and the eladrin princess. Some day, she said, I would request for you to play more music, when I am home in Karador.
She meant it kindly, Lukas imagined as they struggled through the oleander bushes, the small branches whipping back. Still, he could not help but picture himself dressed in a servant s motley, sawing away, perhaps one of a quartet of tame humans in Lady Ordalf s court, while others, dancers or gymnasts, capered before the grave-faced, beautiful, ageless fey.
It will be my pleasure, he murmured, teeth set, meaning the opposite. It was his intention to gather together his small crew, find the gnome, take whatever gold was due to them and then be gone, back to Alaron. There were packet boats, he knew, that left from Borth and Kingsbay, the free-Ffolk ports on the east coast of Gwynneth Island. Then he would build a new boat and sail north or south or east or west, anywhere out of the Moonshaes, where he had not been happy for a long time. He imagined the salt drying his skin as he tacked away from Callidyrr, Marikke at the foremast, Kip in the bilge, miserable, covered in tarpaulins. They were not dead. He could not believe that they were dead. The black cloud was above him now, and he heard Coal yowling and snarling, and the smash of heavy bodies through the bushes. Then they had reached the dry land, and they were underneath the beech trees. They came up the slope above the pool, and when he saw the Savage on the gravel shore, up to his shins in the black water, he knew that it was so, and everything the dead or dying old man had told him was true, and great Chauntea had not lied.
The golden elf was stripped to the waist. What had the goddess called him? Daemonfey? Bishtek Dlardrageth? He stood with a shining, glowing stone in one hand, a knife in the other, while the red wolf jumped at him from the bank, rising up on his hind legs and scratching at his shoulders with his forepaws, biting at his face. The Savage turned to him, and Lukas could see the red slits down the centers of his eyes, see the sharp, predatory teeth as he sank them into the wolf s throat, the muscles of his back straining, his skin covered with scabs. Lukas could see amid the wreck of scar tissue on his shoulders and down his spine, the fresh growth there, the pinnacles of bone that had broken from the skin. He had a new circlet of gold around his neck.
Lukas saw him drop the glowing jewel into the water. He saw him reach down with his knife and open up the belly of the wolf, while with his other hand he seized hold of the viscera and pulled it out, so that a cascade of blood fell into the pool, and the red wolf staggered and fell. Lady Amaranth cried out, her bow already in her hand, while a tide of blood washed away from the dying wolf, spreading around the shore as if drawn by a strange current. There was a black stone in the gravel at the water s edge, and when the blood touched it, it began to glow.
Amaranth drew her arrow to her ear. Loyalties split, Lukas hesitated, and her bowstring sang. His face twisted with rage, the Savage ducked his head, and the arrow passed over his shoulder. At the same time, Lukas saw another woman on the shore, kneeling as if out of breath, dressed only in a brindled wolf skin. She rose to her feet, holding a strange, curved sword. Gaspar-shen had drawn his, and the blade glowed with emerald fire. But she paid no attention. She stood on the grass bank, and as another black stone showed its glowing sigil, and then another farther along the circle of the shore, she cried out, I hate what you have made me do. I hate the feeling of your hands. Your taste is bitter in my mouth.
As she spoke, the entire surface of the water started to turn in a counterclockwise direction. Touched by the wolf s blood, the six stones came alight. The Savage stood up to his shins in the little pool. At any moment he expected to see the water clear, the opaque surface open, and the other side of the portal reveal itself, the circle of lamps on a stone floor, perhaps, in a temple of the gods anywhere but here. He didn t have the ears of a wolf, but even he could hear the baying of the hounds, the hunt approaching through the marsh. The afternoon light slanted down through the beech trees, and among the silver trunks he could see his friends Lukas and the genasi. He almost didn t recognize them, not because they d changed, but because he had. His eyes saw differently, the sound of his voice was foreign to him, and the pain in his shoulders and down his back was hard to tolerate. His chest and hands were greasy with the wolf s blood. He looked up into the eyes of a pale eladrin maiden with red hair, a bow in her hand, a second arrow pulled back to her ear, a tattooed line of thorns below her jaw he knew who she was, the Lady Amaranth, the Rose of Sarifal. Lukas had found her, and if he could keep her from shooting him, then together they would bring her back to Caer Corwell as her sister had demanded, and they would unlock the gnome from her cage, and accomplish good, pure, right things to change the world, and perhaps save the lady also, and depose or destroy the leShay queen, who had hurt the mortal realm for far, far, far too long. The Savage s thought branched into the future like a sudden bolt of lightning, breaking it apart there were kingdoms to be saved or overturned. There was a treasure to be won. Eleuthra stood above him with his sword in her hands, the king s sword he had taken from the tomb. With his new eyes he couldn t read the expression on her face. The world, the light, seemed tinged with blood. With his new ears he couldn t understand what she was saying. The lycanthropes came running up the slope under the trees, and the eladrin girl had turned her arrow that way, had shot one of the slavering great brutes. Lukas had drawn his sword, and the genasi, also, was hacking at the wolves why wouldn t the water clear? The sigils were alight. The circle was made. His friends had turned away from him and only Eleuthra was left, the Ffolk druid, King Kendrick s spy, who stepped down from the bank into the water, an unreadable expression on her face. No she was bringing his sword to him. But why had she raised it above her head as if to cut him down? The pain in his head could not be tolerated, the buzzing in his ears. The dogs were barking, and now there were new beasts among the trees, and then Great Malar himself came up the slope in his panther shape, his black shoulders mangy and streaked with scabs. Still joined to his haunches were the dry and withered remnants of the boy Kip, attached like remnants of a skin that a serpent was sloughing off. A boneless hand hung down between his legs. The god rose up on his hind legs, transforming as they watched. Lukas, Amaranth, and Gaspar-shen had stumbled down into the water now, still black as ink why wouldn t it clear? The lamps were lit. Eleuthra had come to him, whether to kill him or stand with him, he couldn t tell. As the god towered above them, losing his panther shape and metamorphosing instead into an enormous bear, the girl came to embrace him, kiss him, while at the last moment he wrested the sword from her, kicked aside the floating body of the dead wolf, and pushed her down into the bloody water. And with the king s sword in his hand he left the turning circle to do battle, Bishtek Dlardrageth the Savage. He climbed up out of the water to do battle with the god. The loregem was already lost. He wrenched the gold circlet from his neck and threw it into the pool, and his headache was immediately gone.