Chert lifted an eyebrow. “I am a Funderling. That murderous creature is a drow.”
Chaven waved his hand. “Of course, of course. Your pardon. In any case, will you come? Captain Vansen asked for you.”
He shook his head. “No. I must stay with my boy. Too many things have called me away from him. Besides, there is nothing I can do there to help Vansen. If he truly needs me I will come to him tomorrow.” He smiled sourly. “Unless the Qar murder us all before then, of course.”
The physician didn’t know quite how to take this. “Of course.”
When Chaven had left Chert went to look in on the boy. Flint’s face was slack in sleep, mouth open, his tousled hair lighter even than citron quartz. What did all that mean? Chert wondered. He knows, but he doesn’t know?
As always, Chert could only wonder at the strange thing he and Opal had brought into their lives, this changeling boy… this walking mystery.
Utta pulled at the older woman’s arm, trying to hold her back, but her efforts had little effect. Together they slid and slipped in the mud of the main street. Kayyin made a languid move to help them, but they regained their balance.
“I will not be stopped, Sister.” Merolanna was breathing hard from the exertion and the cold. Before the Bridge of Thorns had begun to grow the days had actually turned warm, but since the beginning of the monstrous project the entirety of the coastline around Southmarch had been shrouded in chill wet mist, as if summer had entirely passed them by and they had tumbled straight into Dekamene or even later.
“Kayyin, help me,” Utta begged. “The dark lady will kill her.”
“Perhaps,” the Qar said. “But, see—we are all still alive. My mother seems to have lost a bit of her bloodlust in these sad, late days.”
“Are you mad, Halfling?” Merolanna said. “Lost her bloodlust! She is killing our people this moment! I can hear the screams!”
Kayyin shrugged. “I did not say she had become a different person entirely.”
Merolanna strode on, determined, smacking away Utta’s hand when the Zorian sister tried to slow her. “No! She will hear me. I will not be stopped!”
“If Snout and his fellow guards had not been called to the siege,” Kayyin said cheerfully, “you would not have gotten out the front door.”
Merolanna only showed her teeth in an expression that on someone other than a respectable dowager might have been called a snarl.
The collection of docks and harbor buildings facing the castle’s drowned causeway had become a scene of nightmarish chaos. Creatures of dozens of different shapes and sizes hurried back and forth through the fog as the vast, creaking, treelike branches of the Bridge of Thorns loomed over all like the deformed bones of a collapsing temple. Merolanna, mud now spattered halfway up her skirt, did not flinch from even the most grotesque creatures that appeared out of the murk, but stamped along like a determined soldier, headed for the black and gold tent standing by itself at the center of things.
She is brave, Utta thought, I cannot take that away from her. But the one she seeks is not some ordinary mortal to be cowed by an irate old woman. If what Kayyin said was true, the dark lady herself is older than we can imagine—the child of a god. And sweet Zoria knows that she is angry and vengeful beyond our understanding as well.
If it had not been for the strangeness of the last year, the mad things she herself had seen, Utta would have dismissed the Qar’s talk of gods and Fireflowers and immortal siblings as nonsense… but no other answers fit what she had seen and what was all around her this moment! For Utta Fornsdodir, who thought of herself as an educated woman, one who despite her calling could glean the difference between the important truths in the old stories and the superstition and silliness of some of the tales themselves, it had been a shocking and even disheartening time.
Yasammez stood before her tent like a statue of Nightmare, all in spiked black armor, an ivory-white sword hanging naked and unsheathed at her belt. She was watching something Utta could not see in the clouded heights of the thorns and did not turn even when Duchess Merolanna stumbled to a halt in front of her and slowly, painfully, lowered herself to her knees. A thin shrieking that might have been the wind wafted over the silent tableau, but Utta knew it was not the wind. Inside the walls of Southmarch castle, the fairies were killing men, women, and children.
“I cannot take this cruelty any longer!” Merolanna’s voice, so firm only moments ago, now had a hitch that was more than fear, Utta sensed: something about dark Yasammez was enough to make the words stumble in anyone’s throat. “Why are you murdering my people? What have they done to you? Two hundred years since the last war with your kind—we had all but forgotten you even existed!”
The face of Yasammez turned slowly toward her—an emotionless mask, pale and weirdly beautiful despite the inhuman angles of its bones. “Two hundred years? ” the fairy-woman said in her harshly musical voice. “Mere moments. When you have seen the centuries flutter past as I have, then you may talk of time as if it meant something. Your people have doomed mine and now I am returning the favor. You may watch the ending or you may hide yourself away, but do not waste my time.”
“Kill me, then,” said Merolanna. The hitch in her throat was gone.
“No, Duchess!” Utta cried, but her legs suddenly felt wobbly as spring rushes and she could not move closer.
“Quiet, Sister Utta.” The duchess turned back to the angular shadow that was Yasammez. “I cannot simply watch my people die—my nieces and nephews and friends—but I cannot hide from it, either. If you understand suffering as you say you do, end mine.” She bowed her head. “Take my life, you cold thing. Torture does not befit a great lady.”
Yasammez looked at Merolanna and something like a cold smile played across her face. For a long moment they stood like characters in a play, by appearance a terrifying conqueror and a helpless victim or an executioner and condemned prisoner—but it was nothing quite so simple, Utta realized.
“You should not speak to me of suffering,” Yasammez said at last. Her voice was still rough and strange, but lower, softer. “Never. Were I to bring your loved ones here one by one and execute them in front of you, still you should not speak that word to me.”
“I don’t know what…” Merolanna began.
“Silence.” The word hissed like a red-hot blade thrust into cold water. “Do you know what you and your wretched kind have done to my people? Hunted us, murdered us, poisoned us like vermin. Those who survived driven into exile in the cold lands to the north, forced to draw the mantle of twilight over themselves like a child hiding beneath a blanket. Yes, you even stole the sun from us! But, cruelest jest of all, you pushed our race to the brink of destruction and then also snatched away our last chance at survival.” The pale face tilted forward, black eyes slitted. “Torture? If I could, I would torture every one of you soft mortal slugs, then burn the fat from your bodies while you screamed. Mounds of your charred bones would be your only monument.”
The dark woman’s hatred was like an icy blast of wind down a mountainside. Utta could not help herself—she let out a little noise of terror.
Yasammez turned on her as if she had noticed her for the first time. “You. You call yourself a servant of Zoria. What beside sentimental nonsense do you know of the white dove—of the true Dawnflower? What do you know of the way her father and his clan tormented her, killed her beloved, then handed her over to one of the victorious brothers as if the goddess of the first light was nothing but a spoil of war? What do you know of the way they tortured her son Crooked, the one you mayflies call Kupilas, until he was willing to give up his own life to rid the world of them? For thousands of years he has suffered to keep the world safe, agonies you and even I cannot imagine. Then think of this—you call him a god… but I call him Father.” Her face, the mask of rage, suddenly went as slack as the features of a corpse. “And now he is dying. My father is dying, my family is dying, my entire race is dying—and you talk to me of suffering.”