boy found her hand and squeezed it.
But the angel of vengeance, also, felt a change in the rock chamber. Putting his sword aside, he clambered up to stand over them. And because he was unarmed, and because of the small measure of peace in her heart, and because the boy had now closed his eyes in sleep, she was able to look up at him without fear. She could see that he also was weary and unquiet, his hair dirty and thin, and a rash over his cheeks.
Tell me, he murmured, is there anything else left there for me?
He reached down and seized her by the hair, hurting her a little bit. Let me tell you why you re here, he said. I want you to know, because when a woman and a child sacrifice their lives, it must be in the spirit of loving kindness, a gift rather than a coercion. Otherwise it is for nothing.
He tightened his grasp of her long hair, pulling her head back so she could look into his eyes, haunted and colorless and ringed with darkness. You must think we are alone here on this island. All the others, boats travel back and forth between the busy harbors. But here also I have ways of getting news, and when I heard from the fey queen in Karador that she was sending a gift to me, a priestess of Chauntea and a shifter boy, I dispatched my servants to the beach to intercept you and bring you here. I saw the signal fires across the strait from Kork Head. A present from Lady Ordalf, who is otherwise a mangy vixen from the pits of the Nine Hells. The others, they don t matter. Do you know why that is?
Marikke had already guessed, but she wanted him to say it:
Tonight it is the dark of the moon, continued the angel. For many years the tribes of the Black Blood have gathered here and prayed to our god s memory, and watched our power dwindle. Northlanders in the Delve, raping our land of its treasures. Terrible creatures in these same mountains. But that s not all, and not the worst. For ten years in the ruins of Caer Moray there has bloomed a flower.
But now suddenly Marikke didn t want to hear what he was talking about. She wanted to know about the Beastlord. Ever since the Spellplague nearly a hundred years before, the grip of Malar had weakened in these lands. No lycanthrope now living, or his father, or his father s father, could have seen him prowl these mountains. For all these generations, Marikke imagined, this one angel had kept the fire of his worship burning in this place with stories, and faith, and empty rituals.
Tonight that would change. As she looked at him, as she listened not to his words but to his tone, Marikke could see and hear in Argon Bael a mixture of urgent hope and desperation. He was like a starving man who has been offered meat, but fears he is too weak to stomach it. Or he was like a man grown used to insubstantial shadows, and both fears and craves the light.
Tonight is the night of prophecy, he said, and the air carried to her, again, a whiff of carrion. Queen Ordalf knew it I saw her face in the surface of the pool when she spoke to me. It is because of our sins that the deities of fury turned away from these lands and left us alone. I have tried to nurture the pure faith, even as I have seen many of my beasts abandon it over these ten years, seduced by heretics in Caer Moray. But tonight we will redeem ourselves, and you will help us.
Wildly and circuitously, he spoke of a prophecy Marikke knew: These small deities, cast down in the Spellplague, could not reassume their actual flesh without the intervention of a greater god, the Great Mother, perhaps. Until then they could exist only in nightmares and visitations, when they could trouble the minds of their worshipers and gnaw on their dreams. They survived best in memory, which was not strong among the savage lycanthropes.
I will not help you, she said.
Ah, but what about the boy? Do you think he could live here without you? Or without my protection my people hate him, because he can survive in the human lands. They will tear him limb from limb.
Marikke tightened her grip on the boy s shoulder, felt his cheek against her side. I will not help you, she said.
But what if I don t need your help? Argon Bael bent over her, his narrow face as intense as any bird of prey s. Queen Ordalf is notorious, but not for her stupidity. She scarcely saw the boy, yet she knew what he was. She touched his fingers and she knew.
I will not help you.
I think you will, he said, and let go her hair.
Come, my boy, he continued, smiling, and Marikke could see his angel nature struggle to the surface, as if he d lit a lamp inside himself, and she could see it glowing through his alabaster skin.
The torchlight around them seemed to diminish, and outside the afternoon was far gone. Argon Bael bent down and gathered up the sleeping boy into his arms, and with a tender gesture brushed his shock of hair from his delicate ear, just faintly tinged with calico fur. Kip seemed to fall into a deeper slumber, and he put his arms around the angel s neck for comfort, and sighed as if reassured. Argon Bael carried him over the wet stones of the porch, stepping lightly over the smeared blood, and into the tunnel s mouth.
Miserable and dispirited, Marikke followed close behind, and as they moved past the torches in their brackets each one flickered to life as if touched by the angel s essence and then bound to mimic it, all the way into the mountain s heart. The tunnel was rough-walled and unshaped, in contrast to the marble porch, a hole that wound down into darkness, its floor covered in gravel. Oh, sweet Mother, Marikke prayed. But it was as if the goddess of the forests and the fruit trees had no purchase here, and could not find her in the dead underground, in the Beastlord s tomb.
The lycanthropes followed, quiet and subdued. Perhaps they also were lacking faith, Marikke thought. Perhaps every month Argon Bael had tried some trick like this to keep their hearts alight. Oh, sweet Mother, she prayed, make me wise when the time comes but there was silence in the part of her mind where the goddess lived. Instead she filled it with worrying and predictions while she ransacked her memory for the words of the prophecy that Argon Bael had mentioned. And there was something else he d said. Tell me about the flower, she asked him. In Caer Moray. Is it a yellow rose, by any chance?
The torches around them burned up bright. The angel hurried down the slope, which curved to the right. He stopped and turned, his eyes blazing, his sword across his back, the sleeping boy in his arms who cried out as if beset by evil dreams.
This is not a flower that is native to Moray, hissed Argon Bael. It is an alien species that has come to us from Gwynneth Island, where it crept up from the Feywild, beautiful and deadly. Let me tell you what the lycanthropes have done in Caer Moray, these last ten years. They have turned away from Malar and the hunt. They offer no blood sacrifices. They ignore our cherished festivals, and instead have forged alliances with our enemies. In the winter months they visit Northlander villages in the deep snow and bring food to them if they are starving, smoking meat from their own tables. They claim this is an ancient rite, handed down by Garmos Saernclaws himself it is a heresy, a perversion. The Feast of Stags, they call it. Always they feed the human part and starve the beasts, so that many of them can no longer run on four legs and stumble if they try. Slaving together under their fey princess, they have rebuilt the old human walls, the human towns and palaces that our ancestors burned, that our ancestors spilled their hot blood to destroy, and now they live in them, sitting in chairs and sleeping in beds and roasting their food in fire. They do all this as if in Malar s name. And he permits it in his slumber. But when he wakes
In his arms, Kip moaned aloud. The angel smiled, and stroked his brow with a gesture that seemed for a moment like tenderness. Then he turned and hurried down the slope, deeper into the tomb.
The Savage, crouching in the drizzle up above, in the darkening afternoon, now witnessed a strange thing. He hid behind a broken marble pillar. In front of him the horses, sheep, and goats stood in clumps, tearing at the grass that grew up through the stones, or nibbling at the wet branches of the gorse trees. Among them and around them prowled a wolf, an enormous brute who had established a perimeter for them, squatting to piss along a circuit of fallen stones. Whenever she got close they shied away in terror, but then quickly forgot as soon as she retreated into the wide porch, where, because of a protruding section of the wall, she was invisible to them, but not to the Savage as he watched. Distracted for a moment by a noise behind him, the elf turned his head. But it was nothing, a trick of the wind between two stones, and when he turned back the beast had changed.
This in itself was no surprise, because the lycanthropes were always changing, moving back and forth between their beast and human forms through a dozen different gradations. Even in the most rapid transformations he could see the shift, as their jaws, hair, and teeth grew or receded, and their joints reformed. Even in their most human state, he could still see the beast inside of them, and even as animals he sensed the human clawing to get out.
Nor did they wear clothes. The Savage had heard of lycanthropes wearing coats or cloaks and breeches, even
