Kayyin, though, was unmoved. “Begone, Snout. Tell your mistress I brought these ladies out for some air. If she wants to kill me for that, she may. Otherwise, take your leave.”
The thing stared at him with brightly furious eyes, but there was more to its expression than simply that of an angry animal.
What are these creatures, Utta could not help wondering, these… fairies? Did the gods make them? Are they demons or do they have souls as we do?
The creature snorted what sounded like a warning, then it scrambled back up to the roof as swiftly as it had descended and was gone from sight.
“Oh, that gave me a dreadful turn!” Merolanna detached herself from Utta’s grasp, fanning her face with her hands. “What was that horror?”
Kayyin seemed amused. “A disciple of the Virtuous Warriors clan—cousins of mine, in fact. But he knows I am not to be touched, and my shadow seems to cover you two as well.” He sounded as if he hadn’t been completely certain the creature would obey him, which made Utta wonder how close they’d just come to being sent back… or worse.
“How could you call such a monstrosity your cousin?” Merolanna was still fanning determinedly, as though trying to disperse not just air but also the unpleasant memory. “You are nothing like it, Kayyin. You are almost like… like one of us.”
“But I was shaped to be so, Duchess.” Kayyin bowed his head. “My master knew I would be long among your kind, so he gave me a gift of changing to make me… it is hard to explain… soft like bread dough, so that I could take on the semblance of that which was around me. So I remained for years—a poor copy, but sufficient—until I was awakened again.”
“Awakened to do what? ” It was the first Utta had ever heard of all this. She had thought Kayyin merely an accident of nature or congress between the tribes of fairy and man.
Kayyin shook his sleek head. Now that Utta’s attention had been drawn, she could not help thinking that there was indeed something strange about him, a lack of distinctive characteristics. She could never remember what he looked like when he was not around. “I do not know the answer myself,” he said. “My king wished to prevent war between your race and mine if he could, but I do not think I have done much to make that so. It is a puzzle, to be honest.” He cocked his head. “Ah, there—do you hear? It is beginning again.”
He moved toward the balcony railing and Utta moved with him. She could hear it now, too—the deep, creaking sounds that had plagued them all day. Beneath their balcony, hidden deep in the roiling fogs, a dull light flared and abated but never quite died, as though down on the hidden beach below someone had lit a massive bonfire of blue and yellow flames.
“What is it? What are your people doing?”
“I am not certain they are my people anymore,” said Kayyin with an odd, sad smile. “But it is the work of my lady’s eremites, of course. They are building the Bridge of Thorns.”
“Blessed gods!” murmured Merolanna. Utta turned to see a vast black something appear slowly out of the murk, like the tentacle of some awesome sea creature. In the moments before wind swirled the mists back around it again, she could make little sense of it. A plant, she realized at last—some kind of monstrous black vine as big around as a peasant’s cot and covered with thorns long as swords. A breeze from the invisible bay tugged at the mist again; this time she could see not just the nearest branch but several more in the foggy depths, all twining upward. The terrible rumbling, screeching noise, so low and loud that it made the very timbers of the balcony they stood on quiver in sympathy, was the sound of the thing growing—growing up from the shore beneath them, stretching out like greedy fingers toward Southmarch Castle on the far side of the water.
“The Bridge of Thorns…” she said slowly.
“But what is it?” Merolanna demanded. “It makes me sick just to see it. What is it?”
“They… they will use it to attack the castle,” Utta told her, fully grasping it all only as she said it. “They will climb the branches like siege ladders, across the bay and over the castle walls. They will clamber over it like ants and kill everyone. Isn’t that right?”
“Yes,” Kayyin said. He might have been a little sad about it. “I expect she will indeed kill everyone she finds. I have never seen her so angry.”
“Oh!” said the duchess. For a moment Utta was afraid the older woman would fall again. “Oh, you monster! How can you… just speak of it, as though… as though…” She turned and stumbled back into the room. A moment later Utta heard her make her way slowly down the stairs.
“I should go with her,” Utta said, hesitating. “Is there nothing anyone can do to talk your mistress out of this terrible attack?”
“She is not my mistress, which is a small part of the problem—instead, the king is my master, and if there is one thing Yasammez hates it is disloyalty, especially from family.”
“Family?”
“Did I never tell you? Lady Yasammez is my mother. The birth was years and years ago and we have been long estranged.” His bland face reflected nothing deeper than the interest of someone with a mildly diverting tale to tell, but Utta could not help feeling there was a great deal more behind his words—there must be. “I am by no means the only child she ever had, but I am almost certainly the last one living.”
“But you said once you thought she would execute you one day. How could a mother do such a thing to her child?”
“My people are not like your people—but even among our people, Lady Yasammez is a strange and singular case. The love she bears is not for her own offspring, but for her sister’s. And though she carries the Fireflower, unlike all others in our history, she carries it alone.”
Utta could only shake her head in confusion. “I do not understand any of this. What is a Fireflower?”
“The Fireflower. There is only one. It is our great lord Crooked’s gift to the Firstborn, because of the love he felt for one living woman—Summu, my mother’s mother. And it is the legacy of the children he bore with her.” He saw her expression and paused. “Ah, of course, your people know Crooked by a different name—Kupilas, the Healer.”
In other circumstances Utta would have dismissed his words as the babble of a madman, and certainly there was a quality in Kayyin’s dull, unexcited tones that made him seem deranged, but she had met the terrifying Yasammez; that, and watching the thorny results of the great magics the dark woman had put into effect made it hard to dismiss such things out of hand. “You are saying… that your mother Yasammez was fathered by a god? ”
“That is your word, not mine—but yes. In those distant days the ones you call gods were the powerful masters, but your people and mine served them and were sometimes bedded by them. And at times true friendship and even love ripened between the great ones and their short-lived minions. Loving or not, though, some of the unions resulted in those you call demigods and demigoddesses, in heroes and monsters.”
“But Kupilas… ?”
“What Crooked truly felt for Summu no one can know, since they both are gone now, but I do not think it would be wrong to call it love. And the children that they made together were like no others—they became the rulers of my race. All whom Crooked fathered had the gift called the Fireflower—a flame of immortality like the gods themselves carried. In Yassamez and her twin Yasudra it burned fiercely indeed, and it still burns in Yasammez, because she has never surrendered it to another. In fact, none of Summu’s three firstborn children—my mother, Yasudra my mother’s twin, and Ayann their brother—allowed their gifts to be diluted.