The girl, however, was wiser. Alone in the cart with him, she bent over him. Her yellow hair fell over her face and he could smell the scent of her, a perfume like cinnamon or clove. “Listen to me, you bird-brained pig,” she murmured. “Let me explain. In half an hour it will be dark. Sooner if you persist. Even in twilight, we won’t last ten minutes here. Lord Kannoth will open up the gates of his black palace, and he will hang our corpses from the trees. He has an army of undead soldiers who worship him as a god. Do you want to play your stupid games with him?”
“Free me,” Haggar croaked. His voice was ugly even to himself.
She bent lower, so that she could whisper softly in his ear. “You stinking lump of excrement.”
Above them the sky was black, and a foul mist had gathered. Rearing up, screaming with terror, the horses yanked at their traces and the cart fell to one side, kept from overturning by the swarming vines. The girl stepped to the ground and stood erect. She raised her cupped hands, filled now with a greenish light that ran down her naked arms and over her body, soaking her clothes until she herself was a radiant torch against the darkness. She drew her knife and cut the horses free of the vines, and in an instant they were quiet; they stood trembling, patient, their eyes wide, their nostrils rimmed with foam. Then she bent to hack at the creepers that held the wheel, and Haggar could feel the cold edge of the blade as if against his own skin.
He rolled down against the side of the cart, and there he found his totem stick discarded and wedged in a crevice between the knotted slats; the eladrin had thrown it there, not respecting him enough to keep it safe. Rolling against the wolf’s-head knob, pressing his shoulder into it, he snarled an evocation and felt his body change. He felt the bone absorb into his body. The ropes slackened, and he bit at them until they gave way.
He no longer suffered the edge of the girl’s knife. Instead, she’d turned away from him, walked a few paces down the road to illuminate a wider area. Her arms were upraised, and the knife glowed in her left hand. In the mist, Haggar could see she kept at bay an emaciated pale creature taller than herself, while the other eladrin, the two soldiers and the driver, cowered behind her. Shaking himself free of the last knots, he bounded from the cart and moved away into the darkness, only to turn when he heard one of the horses groan, a low gurgle deep in its chest.
Both animals had sunk to their knees on the stone road. A hideous spider, larger than a man, crouched above them. Snarling and cursing, Haggar did his best to clear the darkness he had made, conjuring up a wind to blow the mist away, break apart the clouds. But he knew that whatever he did, he would find the day had sunk to twilight. Whatever creatures lurked in the catacombs and forests of Cendriane, their feeding time had come.
But there was a full moon here, too, or almost full, brighter than its counterpart in the mortal world. By its light, and the light cast by the girl, he could watch the spider wrap its kill in pale cords as thick as a man’s wrist. In the other direction, toward the eastern gate, the way was blocked by a dozen or more of the undead, their bone- bleached skin luminous in the moonlight. Skeletal, with swollen heads and grinning jaws, they carried weapons of a type Haggar had never seen, swords that shone like crystal, and bows of yellow horn. One of them nocked a gleaming arrow, and in a moment the eladrin driver fell, shot through the eye.
Again Haggar paused, one forefoot upraised. This was not his fight. But then he saw another of the eladrin stumble to his knees, a sword through his belly. The final soldier was just a boy, and he fought bravely, his yellow hair matted with blood. But then one of the pale creatures pulled him down from behind, which left only the girl, twisting away from a behemoth with an axe, cutting him through the ribs and then shying back, her green fire diminished, almost extinct.
Haggar threw back his head and howled, and a single bolt of lightning hit the spike of the creature’s axe, sending him sprawling. A peal of thunder shook the ground, and then Haggar was upon them, snatching the thin bones of the skeletons’ legs. And when the girl fell, he seized hold of the collar of her shirt, gripping the fragile cloth in his narrow jaws, dragging her away. At the same time a miasma of fog seemed to spill out of the ground, and the creatures, disoriented, hacked and stabbed at shadows, while a freezing wind surrounded them in a sudden squall of snow. Haggar backed away from them, dragging the girl over the icy stones until they reached the gate at the base of the avenue, an enormous arch of carved and decorated marble, with friezes and embellishments of fighting beasts, and a squat stone eagle on each corner of the roof.
On the other side of the arch, the moon rode high and unimpeded above the forest’s edge. Not knowing if she was alive or dead, Haggar dragged the girl out through the gate, out of the city, and immediately found himself returned to his common form, a lurching half-breed orc, gesticulating impotently with his totem stick while the fingers of his other hand grasped at her torn collar. Back through the arch he could still see the blizzard, but here everything was still.
Or not quite. There was a sound of melancholy laughter. Then a man detached himself out of the shadow of the gate, and Haggar understood without knowing that this was Lord Kannoth, archfey ruler of the catacombs of Cendriane.
He was a man of middle height, dark, delicate, and slender, and dressed in a jacket of wine-colored velvet. His only weapon was a flower, a lily at the end of a long stalk. Bending down over the recumbent girl, he touched the lily to her brow, her lips. His voice was light and mocking. “When I first saw you, I thought perhaps you were an enemy to be feared, some wild lycanthropic berserker out of Brokenstone Vale. But in the moonlight, as you perceive, these illusions have melted, and here we are, a simple eladrin maiden, a cowering orc, and me.”
As he spoke, the snow died away on the other side of the arch. The mist dissipated, and as far as Haggar could see, the Avenue of the Gods stretched unimpeded to the blue-tiled pool. The wreckage from the fight had been pulled away. The stones were white as chalk under the moon.
“Tell me,” said the archfey. “Now that everything is still, and if you can remember, and if you have the wisdom to speak, what is the impulse that has powered all this violence? Don’t worry,” he said, as Haggar crouched over the girl’s body, stretched out his hand and then drew it back. “She is asleep, waiting for you to wake her. It is love, is it not? It is love that has caused all this.”
He didn’t deny it. In slumber, in the moonlight, all the anger and contempt that had disfigured her were bleached away. She lay on her back, her hair away from her face.
“And what about her? What does she feel? An orc and a fey maiden-I must confess to you, a story such as this could touch my heart.”
Haggar shook his head. Lord Kannoth smiled. “But that might change. You must not give up hope. Don’t be afraid-she cannot wake unless you kiss her lips.”
Haggar looked up in wonder into the archfey’s pensive face. Again he put his hand out, pulled it back.
“Boy,” advised Lord Kannoth, “it is a token of my good will. But do not make me wait. For only a few more moments will I consent to be amused.”
And so Haggar closed his eyes, leaned forward, and placed the lightest possible kiss on the girl’s lips. Instantly she came awake, and when she saw him, she twisted away as if he’d burned her. She turned her face to the ground and spat. “Pig!”
Lord Kannoth laughed. “This boy has saved your life. Show some gratitude, my child. Pride is nothing, beauty is nothing, compared to the virtues of an honest heart. Believe me, this I know.”
With his lily wand, he pulled the hair back from his feral, delicate face. And wherever the flower touched, the skin changed. What had been pale and pure, in a moment was scorched and ridged, grotesque and distorted, with ragged lips pulled back in a grin. “Child,” he said softly. “What’s your name?”
“Astriana, my lord,” she mumbled into the dirt.
“Astriana, that’s a flower’s name. Accept your fate, Astriana, as I have accepted mine. This is your husband. Do you understand me?”
Tears glistened in her eyes. “Yes, my lord.”
“Speak the oath in your heart, where I can see it. Good. Then it is done.”
He stood and turned away from them. The moon slid behind a cloud. When it came free again, Lord Kannoth had disappeared.
“Come,” Haggar said, after a moment. “Let’s leave this place. It’s not safe to stay here.”
A hundred paces from the road, the forest waited. “No one will harm us,” murmured Astriana. “Are you so stupid that you did not hear? He gave his word.”
She was weeping into her fists. She crouched in the road as he stood over her, embarrassed. The air around them stood still.
“Are you so stupid that you don’t understand?” she continued. “You’re my husband now. Anything you ask, I am sworn to deliver, especially on this night.”
