“That is not the custom of my tribe,” he said.
Moaning into her hands, she didn’t hear. “I am carefully punished. All these months I’ve used my own self to entice you, everything I am-I knew what I was doing. Why else would you have come?”
Then she looked up, her cheeks wet, her eyes glinting savagely. “What do you want? Don’t keep me in suspense. Whatever it is, I am bound to give it, as a good wife should.”
Standing in the bone-white roadway, Haggar cleared his throat. He fiddled with his totem stick, picking with his thumbnail at the chunks of agate. “In my clan,” he murmured humbly, “that is not the measure of a good wife.”
She gave him a glance in which a moment of clear gratitude was immediately clouded with suspicion. “Easy to say. Are you so stupid that you can’t understand what I’m offering you?”
He smiled, because he thought he understood how to disarm her. “Astriana,” he said, and saw her flinch. “Woman,” he amended, “this is what I want.” Again she cringed away, as if from a blow. “I want to understand why you have brought me here, to this place. For nine years you made the journey to my world. ‘Put him with the others,’ you said, when I was lying in the cart.”
She looked at him then, a long, slow stare. She wiped her nose on her hem and, eyes dry, clambered to her feet. “That’s what you want?”
“That’s what I want.”
“I swear you’re even stupider than I thought,” she said, but then she smiled when he burst out laughing. “In the Feywild we are bound by our promises, you understand?”
He nodded.
“Then come,” she said. “I’ll tell you. It was not nine years for me.”
She turned down the road into the forest. “What about your men?” he asked her. “Will you come back in the morning?”
“Who?” She shrugged. “They’re gone. I hired them in the village.”
“Even so. We should go back. One of them was just a child.”
She gave him a look that suggested his stupidity had grown so powerful, it had become a force of nature like the ocean or the wind.
“Besides,” he said. “We have no weapons.”
“That’s not the place to search for them.” She gestured with her hand. Looking back through the gate, he could see an enormous figure standing in the roadway near where they’d struggled over the cart. His shape was human, but his size was not.
“We have no choice,” she said. “Lord Kannoth has taken everything, all our strength. It’s a tradition. His gift to us.”
Now suddenly she was in a hurry. She turned and ran down the gentle slope, and he followed her. She had spoken the truth: there was no strength in him, no trace of his totem animal. Heavier than she, he labored to keep up, as if the air of this new world were too rich for him to breathe.
After a mile and a half, she stopped to draw breath under the forest’s eaves. “How long?” he asked, after a moment.
“Until dawn tomorrow. It happened when I made my vow. It is the way of the eladrin, to come together without any skills or powers, as simple men and women on our wedding night.”
He had the impression, now, that she was mocking him. “Don’t keep saying that.”
“It gives me no pleasure to remind you. Nine months, it was, not years. Nine months I cast my hook into that pool. You’re not the only fish I caught.”
“I suppose not.”
She studied his face as if, he thought, she were trying to memorize his ugliness. “Why aren’t you angry?” she asked. “I would be angry at the things I say.”
They stood beside a stone pillar at the entrance to the forest. It marked the border where the bleached dust of the roadway and its verges gave way to the darkness of the trees. Where the paving stones gave out and the road became a rutted track, two enormous oak trees stood as sentinels.
“Kannoth’s protection ends here,” she said. She shrugged. “Even my knife is cold.” She turned under the oaks and disappeared into the darkness.
He didn’t know whether she was lying or didn’t understand her own powers, but she retained some luminescence in the dark, a greenish glow that led him onward. Without it, he’d have had to pick his way like a blind man, because the canopy of leaves denied all but an occasional shaft of moonlight, and the path was muddy, and wound among tangled masses of roots. Soon the way steepened, and in some places they descended a cliff face among evergreens, clambering down over wet boulders. Rivulets of water fell around them, and Haggar was astonished at the fecundity of this place, the denseness and intensity of life. Every place he put his hand or foot, living creatures squirmed or flopped or skittered away, and the air was thick with bugs, which got into his nostrils and his mouth. In the darkness, sounds and smells assaulted him with an almost physical pressure, a profusion of squawking and chittering and grunting and croaking, of sap and ash and mud and rotting wood. But among all these he caught the tiny, evanescent perfume of cinnamon or clove, which he followed downward like a gleaming thread, hour after hour. Sometimes the scent of her would thicken, and he would find her waiting for him in some crevice or dell, her skin glimmering faintly.
And at these moments as they rested, she would give him partial answers to the question he’d asked: “I had to find some help,” she said. “In the deep Feydark, where we are going, there is a portal called the Living Gate. For many generations, which means many hundreds of your years, a cohort of my people were its guardians. Over the years they relaxed their vigilance because the gate was shut, sealed in the old days. Even though we retain terrifying stories of the days before the seal was put in place, still over time these legends lost their urgency, sank into myth.”
He stood beneath an overhang of gnarled roots while she bent to scoop up a handful of water. A beetle scurried up his neck and he slapped at it. When he looked down she had disappeared, and he clambered after her through the boulders. It was only after half an hour, sitting on a fallen tree trunk in a broad forest of oaks, that he heard the continuation: “So the traditions of the guardians became empty and ceremonial. It was a mark of honor at the Summer Court to be its captain. Last year a nephew of the queen achieved this post, a boy named Soveliss, and he used it to discover a way to break the seal, perhaps because he was curious about the world beyond the portal, the Far Realm. Perhaps for the glory of closing it again-we cannot question him, for he is dead, or worse than dead.”
Her voice was a drifting whisper, and he had to lean in close to understand. She turned her head away. “Your breath stinks,” she murmured softly.
The way grew steep again. In a crevice between enormous boulders, she paused. “At first, out of shame, he hid what he had done. He knew nothing of druidic lore, or any of our traditions. He was a boy flailing in the dark, and by the time he had confessed, most of my cohort was already destroyed. Nor was I able to recruit another, for the boy had been a favorite of the queen, and she refused to allow it. She was the one who suggested I go elsewhere, so as to find cruder folk. We are long-lived, and one of our lifespans is worth seven of yours.”
“That is well known,” grunted Haggar. “The arithmetic is clear,” he added, and Astriana smiled.
“It was my choice to train you as I did,” she said.
He remembered the long hours by himself, the years of study. “You didn’t train me.”
She shrugged. “But I provided the spark.”
Then she was gone again and he hurried after, stumbling down through smaller trees with trembling leaves and pale branches, until he reached level ground, where he sank up to his shins in water, and his bare feet disturbed minnows and frogs.
When the trees gave out entirely, he strode though waist-high bushes in the swamp. The moon was down behind the hills, and the first red glow of dawn was in the sky. From this new vantage point, and under this new light, he saw he stood in a bowl among high hills with the forest all around him. He saw for the first time that the way they had traversed, wild as it seemed, was not untouched by ancient architects and builders, for here at the bottom of the bowl, rising up out of the swamp, he could see the remains of ruined buildings, the stone foundations of colossal structures. Following Astriana’s footsteps, he soon found himself on the lip of a sinkhole which, though it was topped with mud and grass, and though rivulets of water coursed over its edge and fell in endless streams, revealed itself under the pink light as a gigantic cylinder of stone masonry, whose circumference was three miles or
