For the first time, she was really afraid. The demon was anathema to her. She could think of no worse fate than to be the mother of its children, the mother of demonkind, a bearer of monsters. She had never considered the possibility. She had never recognized that the Straken Lord had any interest in her beyond keeping her imprisoned and alive until its creature, the Moric, could do whatever it had been sent to do in her own world.
«This was the reason for bringing me here?» she managed to ask, working hard to keep her voice steady.
Weka Dart shook his head, his gimlet eyes glittering. «No. The idea must have occurred to him after you were his prisoner. His plans are much grander than that.»
«How much grander?»
The Ulk Bog leaned close. «He has been searching for a way to send the Moric into your world for some time. But for that to happen, it was necessary to find someone in your world willing to help. He found those people, and he used them as his tool. Whoever they were had no idea what the Straken Lord intended, but were only interested in disposing of you. That was what your betrayer knew that using the magic would banish you to the world of the Jarka Ruus. That, and nothing more. Your betrayers knew nothing of the exchange, nothing of the way the magic really worked, nothing of the trade that was necessary to bring you here. The Straken Lord was careful to keep that secret hidden.»
Aswell it should have been, she thought. But she wasn't sure that knowing a trade was required would have stopped whoever was desperate enough to send her into the Forbidding.
«But why was I brought here if not to mate with Tael Riverine?» she pressed.
«You miss the point, Straken!» Weka Dart snapped. «Bringing you here was never what mattered! What mattered was sending the Moric into your world!»
She shook her head. «Why?»
«So that it could destroy the barrier that keeps us locked away! So that it could free the Jarka Ruus!»
Now she understood. The Moric had been sent to complete the task that the Dagda Mor had failed to accomplish more than five hundred years earlier—to break down the walls of the prison behind which the dark things of Faerie had been shut since before the dawn of Man.
Her mind raced. To do that, it would have to destroy the Ellcrys, the magic–born Elven tree that had been created to ward the Forbidding. How would it manage that, when the tree was always so closely guarded?
More important, how could she stop it from happening?
«Does the Moric have a way to destroy the barrier?» she asked Weka Dart.
He shook his head. «It was to find one once it crossed over into your world. It is very talented and very smart. It will have done so by now.»
She ignored the fear that rushed through her at the thought that the Ulk Bog might be right. «Do you have a way to get me out of here?» she asked quickly.
On the landing above them, at the top of the stairway, a door opened and closed with a thud. Footsteps sounded on the stone steps, coming down.
«On the floor!» he hissed at her, and darted away.
She threw herself back down, sprawling in the same position in which he had found her, her heart pounding, her muscles tensed.Don't move, she told herself. Don't do anything.
The steps approached her cell and came to a stop. A silence settled in like morning mist. Eyes closed, body still, she waited.
Twenty–nine
Pen Ohmsford's ascent from the ravine was an endless slog. Burdened with self–recrimination and despair, it was all he could do to place one foot in front of the other. He kept thinking he should go back, should attempt one final time to free Cinnaminson, make one more plea or take one last stand. But he knew it was pointless even to think about doing so. Nothing would change until he had some better means of succeeding. Yet he couldn't stop thinking about it. He couldn't stop himself from feeling that he should have done more.
Lead–footed, he climbed through the hazy darkness, working his way up the narrow switchback trail, ducking under vines and brushing past brambles and scrub, leaning on his staff for support, his thoughts scattered all over the place. His grip about the rune–carved handle of the darkwand helped to center him, a reassurance that he had accomplished something in the midst of all the failures. Lives had been lost and hopes blown away like dried leaves in a strong wind, and he blamed himself for most of it. He should have done better, he kept telling himself, even though he could not think what more he might have done or exactly what he might have changed. Hindsight suggested possibilities, but hindsight was deceptive, sifted through a filter of distance and reason. Things were never so easy as they seemed later. They were mostly wild and confused and emotionally charged. Hindsight pretended otherwise.
But knowing so didn't make him feel any better. Knowing so only made him work harder to find a reason to believe he had failed.
He took some comfort in the fact that he had gotten to Stride–gate at all, that he had confronted the tanequil and found a way to communicate with it, that he had secured the limb he needed and shaped it into the darkwand. He had gotten much farther with his quest than he had ever believed he would. He had never spoken of it, but he had always thought in the back of his mind that what the King of the Silver River had sent him to do was impossible. He had always thought that he was the wrong choice, a boy with little experience and few skills, a boy asked to do something that most grown men would not even attempt. He did not know what had persuaded him to try. He guessed it was the expectations of those who had accompanied him. He guessed it was his own need to prove himself.
These and other equally troubling thoughts roiled through his brain as he climbed, working along the tunnels of his conscience like worms, probing and sifting for explanations that would satisfy them. He tried to lay them to rest, but he only managed to settle with a few. The rest continued on, digging away, finding fresh food in his doubts and fears and frustrations, growing and fattening and taking up all the space his emotional well–being would allow.
He rested at one point, dropping down on his haunches with his back against the wall of the ravine, feeling the cold and damp of the earth seep through his clothing and enter his body, too tired to care. He leaned on the darkwand for support as he lowered his head and cried soundlessly, unable to help himself. He was not the hero and adventurer he had envisioned himself to be. He was just a boy who wanted to go home.
But he knew that wasn't something that was going to happen anytime soon, and it wasn't helping him to think that it might, so he quit crying, stood up, and began climbing once more. Overhead, the daylight was beginning to fail, a graying of the sky that signaled the onset of twilight. He needed to reach the top of the ravine so that he could cross the bridge before it was dark. It never occurred to him that he would have any trouble doing so, — the tanequil would let him pass unmolested. It had taken from him already what it wanted.
The slope broadened and the trail cut away from the bridge into a thicket of scrub and grasses that quickly melded into the beginnings of the island forest. The way forward grew more difficult and the light continued to dim steadily. He continued on, eyes forward as he resisted the urge to look back, knowing he would see nothing if he did, that she was too far away from him now. His memories of her were firmly etched in his mind, and that was as much as he could hope for.
He was thirsty and wished he had something to drink, but that would have to wait. He was hungry, too. He hadn't eaten anything since … He tried to remember and couldn't. More than a day, he thought. Much more. His stomach rumbled and his head felt light from the ascent, but there was no help for it.
He rested again, pausing in the dark concealment of a stand of saplings to let the dizziness pass, and it was then that he realized he wasn't alone. It happened all at once. A mix of things warned him of his danger—things not so much external as internal, a sensing through his magic that the world about him wasn't quite right. He stood listening to the silence, took notice of the way the light shifted with the passing of clouds west across the sunset, caught the feel of the wind through the trees. His awareness was born of those mundane, ordinary observations, though he couldn't explain why. Something was there that hadn't been there earlier. Something he knew.
Or someone.
