Part 19 (1/2)
”You are my coven sister, my-” I fumbled for the word ”-my friend friend. You must have seen something, learned something.”
”She was with a man.”
”A man man?” I was taken aback. I had thought better of her-even her. ”What kind of a man?”
”Not handsome, as you or I would have it, but who is? What can I say? I saw him briefly, through my lashes. If he were a knight, his armor would be black. He would win in the joust because he could not endure to lose. If he had come to my island, I would have snared him with a will. I would have turned him into a black boar, but he would have kept the mind of a man, even to the moment when I set him on the spit for roasting. He had power, of a kind. The Gift, or something else.”
”This is nonsense.” She was rambling; she had often rambled. ”Death has done nothing to sharpen your wits. Forget your brain-soft fantasies. As for his Gift, how could you know?”
”I did not know. I felt felt.”
”Are you sure?”
”No. How could I be sure? I kept my eyes closed-”
”Venture further with your impudence,” I whispered, ”and I will lance your core with an auger, and watch the mold ooze out.”
”I am dead. You cannot harm me.”
”I can hurt you.”
”Then hurt me. I will tell you this much: Morcadis has grown. Not in inches, but within. Her power, her spirit waxes to a new fullness. I saw her face, and it was as cold and implacable as the moon. She will find a way to defeat you: it is her fate, and yours.”
”There is no way!” My grasp tightened on the severed stem and gossamer hair.
”There is always a way. Don't you remember the stories? The door that cannot be opened, the task that cannot be completed, the battle that cannot be won, and yet there is always a key, completion, victory. Your doom was in her face, Morgus: I saw it as if it were written. Do you believe in stories, my coven sister, my friend? Do you-”
”Go to h.e.l.l,” I screamed, ”the quick way!” and I hurled the head against the wall with all my strength.
Maybe that was what she wanted. I have wondered.
Half her face was squashed into a red mess; the debris dropped to the floor; blood-bright juice ran down the wall. The remaining eye rolled, and was still. ”That was swifter than your deserts,” I said, but she was silent now, and I had no means to retrieve her voice. She had been my sole companion for endless ages under the Eternal Tree, but Morcadis had slain her, and now she was gone indeed. (Morcadis, always Morcadis. There was too much to add to the reckoning.) I did not miss her. There had been love between us once, when our exile was still fresh, but it had worn out long, long ago. I would not miss my Sysselore.
Nehemet waited, her tail twitching, her feline features impa.s.sive. What goes on behind her unchanging expression I will never know.
”I must find Morgun,” I said. There were secrets to be whispered, tales to be told. Somehow, I sensed that with my twin I would learn the answer to the final question, the question I could not frame. I must have forgotten she, too, was only a fruit.
I went to the spellchamber, but it was undisturbed, though they had been there. Who the man might be with Fernanda I did not pause to speculate; some henchman presumably, a servant or an admirer she had enspelled whose potential for power Sysselore had undoubtedly overestimated. He was not important; I had other concerns. The trail led to the attic, to the prisoner whom I had not visited for weeks. The stench made my senses reel. The spell barrier was undamaged as I had been sure it would be; none other could unravel the complexities of that pattern, nor would have the power to counter my Commands. But she had been there, with Morgun: she had stood by the door, staring into the barred gloom, seeing the downfall of the creature she had used and discarded. She might have considered him her ally, but I doubted it. She had learned that much from me: accord no man respect that he cannot compel, give no man grat.i.tude that he cannot demand. My prisoner had always been less than a man; now he was less than a beast. He cowered in the corner, below the single window cas.e.m.e.nt. Outside, no moon sailed, no star peeped. Within, the darkness was yet darker, but he still skulked behind dirt-clogged hair, arms wrapped around his torso, tail hiding his feet. His eyes were mere slits between puffball lids.
”Morcadis was here,” I said. ”Your little witch. Was she pleased to see you?” And, when he remained silent: ”I asked you a question. Answer it, or I will send the nightmares to plague you again! Was-she-pleased-to-see-you?”
”She didn't say.” The response came as if wrung from his lips.
”What did did she say?” she say?”
”Hail and farewell. What was there to say? She tried to let me out.”
”And she failed! She will always fail. Hope if you will: it prolongs your suffering. Despair is the more terrible when it succeeds a period of hope.”
”I will remember that.”
”Only my will can release you-”
”Or your death.”
”My death! I snapped her charms like cobwebs, yet she could not penetrate mine. I am the greatest of witchkind, twice-born, once into life, once out of death; my body was anointed in Stygian magic and the sap of the Great Tree runs in my veins. I cannot be slain, nor conquered. There is no power in the world that could engender my death.”
”Then why are you afraid?”
I would have boiled his meager brain inside his skull, but I had made the spell wall too strong, and it would take time to bypa.s.s it. He was right, of course. That was unforgivable.
”When I have leisure,” I said, ”I shall enjoy refining your punishment, since there is clearly still something left of you to punish.”
”Not much . . . but something.” He tried to grin, baring ragged teeth. I saw them, a yellow gleam in the darkness. Stained, chipped into bitter sharpness. Probably he had attempted to bite through his shackles or tear up the floorboards. It would avail him nothing. The magic held him.
”Good,” I said, and turned to leave.
”She has-something-that belongs to you,” he called after me.
”I know. Did you see it?”
”It was in a bag, I think . . . gagged. It may have tried to speak.”
My eagerness redoubled, and my urgency. ”Don't worry: I will get it back. She will regret her theft-but not for long.”
Only later did I wonder why he should have told me that. Maybe it was the nearest he would come to wheedling, to begging a diminution of his punishment. But I would hear him beg, and see him rot, before I reduced it by as much as an ounce of suffering or a minute of time.
When I left him, I descended to my bedchamber. I was in too much haste to draw the circle, but there were questions I wanted to ask, though I doubted the answers would be very instructive. A seeress cannot lie, but she may be enigmatic with the truth. And although the sisterhood see farther than other beings, there are none left who can read the future, save in the indices of the present-and that is a trick anyone with a little wisdom can a.s.say. I pa.s.sed my hands across the oval mirror above my dressing table, murmuring the words of summons. In such a mirror, Snow White's stepmother fished for compliments; mirrors have many uses. They can be an all-seeing eye, a dimensional breach, a portal between reality and dream. This particular mirror was old and knowing: there were times when I had seen my face in it the way it used to be during my sojourn beneath the Eternal Tree, a bloated pallor, slug lipped, the nostrils like pits. But the eyes do not alter, whatever visage I choose to wear. As I spoke the gla.s.s clouded and my reflection was lost. Gradually, another face emerged, broad and ebon dark, veiled in scarlet. Leopana Pthaia, Leopana the Black. A hand removed the cloth and set the Eye in one empty socket.
”You are peremptory, Morgus, to call me with so little ceremony. A seeress should not be summoned as if she were a familiar imp, and to a looking gla.s.s, forsooth!”
”Yet you came.” I had the power, and she knew it. It would have cost her dear to deny me.
”Question me, and be done with it.”
”I planted a cutting from the Eternal Tree in this world, and it bore fruit. The fruit has ripened into the head of my sister Morgun-or so it appears. Is it indeed my twin?”
”That is beyond my Sight.”
”Then tell me this at least: she was fruit on the parent Tree, but did she pa.s.s the Gate?”
Leopana's gaze grew misty as she peered backward in time. ”She did not. She was strong in enchantment, and she found a way to put her spirit elsewhere.”
”So it is her! But why? Why would she linger? And why is she ripening on my my Tree?” Tree?”
”I am a seeress,” the Pthaia responded, and her Eye flashed. ”I can tell you what is, and what was, and what may be, but it is not for me to reason or deduce. The magic is yours: search your own thought for understanding.”
”If you know what is,” I persisted, though her evasion vexed me, ”then you know Morcadis has stolen my fruit. Is it unharmed?”