Then the wave broke, and lost its height, and surged ashore over the low bluffs, across the meadows, over the causeway and beyond, until it flowed into the ditch itself, and broke against the walls of Caer Moray. When it pulled back, Amaranth could see Malar the Great in the shape of a black alligator, tumbling over the fields toward the shore.
Goodbye, Chauntea said. Turning on the parapet, stretching out her arms, she danced back the way she had come, sometimes hopping on one foot. Whether it was from the force of her steps, or from the water churning underneath her, just behind her the wall cracked and slid down into the ditch Amaranth wasn t watching. The chaos closed around her now. She picked her sword up from her feet and ran down the steps into the courtyard where the fighting was over, the armies were dispersing, whatever remnants could pull themselves away.
Chapter Eleven — Captain Rurik
Kill him, Suka said, scratching her nose.
They stood outside the prison in Caer Corwell. Poke had dragged the leShay prince over the cobblestones, away from the blank wall and down the street. Now they paused to draw breath and consider the next step, Marabaldia, the gnome, the cyclops, and the pig. It was early evening, and there was a mist over the port.
No one followed them. For a moment, Prince Araithe seemed almost human in his vulnerability, whimpering with shock, his velvet cap awry, his eyes closed, his gray hair stringy and unkempt, his shirtsleeve ripped and bloody. He lay on his back. Poke had him below his elbow. His gloves were gone. Marabaldia stood above him in her old blue dress, holding the iron bar she had taken from her cell. In this light her eyes shone in different colors.
Kill him, repeated Suka. You know that s what he would have done, which didn t make much sense she meant it s what he would have done to them, was, in fact, trying to do whatever. She looked up at Marabaldia, and for a moment before she turned away in self-defense she caught a glimpse of herself in the giantess s right eye, as if in a mirror.
With an odd sense of distance she saw herself as others saw her, a tiny figure with an upturned, freckled nose and short pink hair, grinning with nervousness and gesticulating like a monkey, terminally unheroic, and the piercings and tattoos didn t help, seemed an obvious overcompensation, though she d never thought of them that way.
You know if we don t kill him, he will hunt us down, she grumbled, even her voice unfamiliar. It didn t surprise her when Marabaldia disagreed with her. How could anyone agree with anything she said?
And are we bound by what our enemies do? said the giantess, her voice gentle and pure, her skin a regal purple in the failing light. Isn t it always better to show mercy, as bright Sel ne has commanded us? Perhaps instead of copying the vices of our worst enemies, we should learn from them. Treachery and murder have brought this person low.
Suka looked away. Once delivered from the effect of Marabaldia s evil eye, she heard the wisdom of her own advice, which was obvious enough to convince even a pig, she observed. Poke had broken the prince s forearm, snapped the bone between her enormous molars, but the strange thing was, he didn t even seem to notice the pain but just lay on his back in the dust, helpless, Poke s cloven foot in the middle of his chest. It was as if his spirit had already left his body. She wagged her head from side to side, pulling at the joint until the arm was almost severed, while at the same time she began her transformation to her human shape, climbing up the ladder gratefully yet painfully, Suka imagined, until she let the prince s arm drop from her mouth and stepped away from him, a fleshy, pink-skinned woman with a crest of yellow hair. She spat a long splinter of bone out of her mouth, then raised her hand to wipe the blood from her lips. Suka could see the climbing rose tattoo under her arm.
Come this way, she grunted softly. I ve been here before.
And so what else was there to do? She took off running up the street away from the port, climbing the terraces below the castle s ruined walls. Suka put her knife back in her belt, picked up her crossbow, and ran off after her, cursing freely. They were sentimental, moralizing fools, but it was possible also that they had already lost their chance, that whatever rag or shard of Prince Araithe they d had under their hands was no longer where his spirit lived.
Marabaldia followed more slowly, her iron bar in her right hand. The cyclops came last of all, head bowed, unsteady on his feet, which Suka thought might be a matter of the terrible depth perception endemic in his kind, until she saw he had been hurt. Now, in the better light, as she looked back she realized he was smaller than she d thought inside the prison, smaller than Marabaldia, a yellow-haired, muscular fellow, barefoot and bare-chested, except for crossed leather bands over his shoulders. He was bleeding freely from a wound in his side. He had lost his axe.
Where are we going? Suka gasped as they hurried up the stone steps into the poorer neighborhoods of the abandoned city.
The large civic buildings near the port had given way to what had once been residential structures, their doors and windows black and open, their roofs often collapsed. In the cool, open air, her brain was working better, though she was still making the transition between escaping from something drow, Araithe, certain death and running toward something, into the future, but what, exactly? Maybe it was indicative of a sad lack of imagination that she was running after a pig, asking it for directions. On the other hand, presumably the pig wanted to find its way back to Moray, where Lukas and the boys were chasing after the ginger slut how happy she would be to see them again! She d never liked or felt comfortable around women, or females of any kind. She d hated Marikke, the only fly in the ointment of their little band, sanctimonious, like all religion freaks, but maybe she had died or something priests and priestesses were always among the first to go, evidence of their misplaced loyalty to the capricious gods.
Into the trees, said Poke, answering her question.
The city of Caer Corwell was a small one, built mostly on a hill above the firth. Suka and Poke stopped to draw breath in an open space, a vacant lot choked with dry weeds and refuse, and waited for the others to catch up. Suka turned toward the north, raising her nose into the cool evening wind, opening her senses to the breath of freedom. Above them she could see the highland ridge as it curled away northwest of them toward the places where she d grown up, along the southern edge of Myrloch Vale. Instinctively she looked to the other direction, beyond a gap in the Corwell wall, northeast toward Synnoria and Cambro and eventually Winterglen, seventy, eighty miles away is that where they were going? To bring Marabaldia back home? Surely that was not her fight.
Why? she said, a big question that had always bothered her.
She watched the fomorian and her cyclops labor slowly up the slope it must be difficult being so big. It must be difficult to move or run if you ve been locked in a cell for ten years. With all her heart Suka missed her little band of misfits, now that she was running away from the only place they knew to look for her. This jolly collection of ancient ancestral enemies was no substitute. But should she leave them, strike out on her own? Find her way east to the Ffolk settlements along the coast and then to Alaron, as she had many years before? But Lukas would be looking for her here. He had promised.
But then Marabaldia appeared out of the end of the street, and joined them in the empty lot, her face agonized and frightened.
Drow, she said, which was a relief, in a way, because it delayed thinking. And it was true: Dark figures massed in the shadows below them, gathering among the ruined houses. Suka and the pig had stopped just inside the old city wall, much of which had been cannibalized for building material even before the fey came to Gwynneth. But the gate was intact, and the road out of it. A few arrows stuck into the rubble around them, and then they were off again, as quickly as they could, out the gate into the world, an expanse of fallow land that had once been wheat fields, and a mile or so in the distance, visible just as a smear of purple shadow in the failing light, the woodlands underneath the high, chalk-white ridge, its eastern slopes still lit by the setting sun.
But there were drow there, too. In the middle of the flat, open, shelterless, bare ground, at a crossroads marked by a stone obelisk, Marabaldia stopped, planted her iron bar, and the others gathered around her. The cyclops was so tired and hurt that he could scarcely stand. He d pressed his palm into his side, and blood seeped between his fingers. With her left hand, Marabaldia seized hold of his jaw and turned his face until his single eye raised toward her, and she could look down on him with all the force of her own eye. Again it seemed to Suka that she could see or at least imagine a beam of light pass between them, and she wondered what it could mean a last
