Queen of Thorns Read online

  "What is wrong with you?" Kemeili shouted at Oparal. Her hands remained on Radovan's neck, where her prayers had closed the worst of his wounds. "You nearly killed him!"

  Oparal wiped demon filth from her cheek. Without a glance at Radovan, she cleaned her sword and returned it to its scabbard.

  "Forget it," grumbled Radovan. His eyes lingered on the paladin's until she looked away, and I knew he would not forget it. He traced the wet scar from his check to a point just above his navel. "She missed the jacket."

  "That's not the point!" protested Kemeili.

  "Now is not the time for quarrels," said Caladrel. "Let's put more healing on that wound."

  Silently, I thanked the ranger. He was right. Now was not the time for quarrels. But that time would come.

  "My powers are spent," said Kemeili. "Where's Fimbul—?"

  We turned as one to see the gnome lying motionless beside the fire. I moved toward him, but fleet Caladrel was there first. Fimbulthicket's skin had lost its last blush of color. Even his eyes had surrendered their last faint tint of blue.

  Caladrel touched the gnome's cheek. "Too late," he said. "He's gone."

  Chapter Eight

  The Century Root

  Radovan

  You know you want it," said Kemeili.

  "You don't know what you're talking about, sweetheart." Even in the forest shade, the summer sun was baking us. I shrugged off the jacket and hooked it over my shoulder along with the elven cloak. A day earlier, I'd dropped the cloak all inconspicuous-like. Caladrel returned it to me at supper. It was hard to read those elven eyes, but I thought he was on to me.

  "I can feel the heat coming off you. That's what first drew me to you, back in Iadara. But you don't look on me with that heat anymore."

  "I've been busy getting perforated by secondhand unicorns."

  "I see it when you look at Oparal."

  "Give me a break. I'm not interested—"

  "You ache for it. I can tell. You'd like to put your hands around that thick neck of hers and squeeze the breath—"

  "Shut up." It was a relief that Kemeili was talking about revenge, not the one sting of Calistria I actually liked. For a second I was afraid I was going to have to put up with a jealous elf, which sounded a lot more dangerous than a mean one.

  I flattened a mosquito on my cheek and got a little shiver. I'd been getting that feeling again, like somebody was watching me. The trees were probably lousy with fey. That had to be it, I told myself.

  "I could make it easy. I could give you a taste of Calistria's fury. Let the goddess guide your hands." Kemeili unbuttoned her leather vest and slid a pair of fingers around the tattoo circling her belly button. The ink on the dagger tattoos glimmered. The three blades on her skin were what she had for a fetish connecting her to the goddess. She started saying the prayer to call down the magic.

  "I said no." I slapped a hand over her mouth, hitting her harder than I'd meant.

  Her eyes flashed angry, but she smiled and licked a drop of blood from her lip. "That's more like it."

  "I didn't mean to smack you. Sorry."

  "Don't be." She showed me a wicked little smile. "You should be angry, just not at me. Oparal's the one who tried to kill you. I just want to help you get the revenge you deserve."

  We both looked at Oparal. The paladin walked up front with Caladrel. At the sound of the slap, they'd stopped to squint back at us. They'd gotten used to hearing me and Kemeili play rough, but smacking her like that looked bad.

  Almost as bad as I felt about it.

  "I really am sorry. I don't want to be that way."

  "Why not? It's who you are."

  "No, it's not!" A flock of sparrows exploded away from us. I lowered my voice. "Anyway, it ain't who I want to be."

  "Oparal is strong, but you could kill her if you wished it."

  "Well, I don't wish it. What's your problem with her, anyway? She didn't do anything to you. It sounds like you're the one who wants revenge."

  "She thinks she can spend her whole life among the humans and then offer her sword to the queen as if she weren't Forlorn. Just think of the way she's treated you. She has no subtlety—none! And she's a complete hypocrite. She spits on the idea of revenge but uses the word 'justice' to attack you without provocation. And don't get me started on lust! Even before the unicorn, was there anyone who didn't know she's a maiden? She's barely even an elf. She has no right to serve the throne, not compared to someone who's dedicated her entire life to Calistria."

  Just as she was working up a good mad, Kemeili caught herself. Maybe she realized she'd said too much. I tried to keep a straight face, but on the inside I was taking notes for the boss. Insecure? Check. Jealous? Check, and thank Desna it wasn't pointed at me. Dangerous? Hard to tell. Needs further hands-on investigation.

  "Besides, no one's allowed to hurt you but me." Kemeili's snarl turned into a lash of a smile.

  Her "love bites" from the other night were still tender. I rubbed my neck. "Speaking of that—"

  "I know, I know," she sighed. "'Don't break the skin.' You're as delicate as a lily petal."

  "I'm serious."

  "Spoilsport."

  While she didn't manage to get me into a fight with the paladin, Kemeili did get me thinking about Oparal. Five days out from Erithiel's Hall, I'd managed to avoid the Forlorn rather than give her hell for the slash she'd given me. I wasn't sure she'd meant to kill me along with that big demon, but I wasn't sure she hadn't, either. Arnisant felt the same way, growling whenever she came up behind me. He's a loyal boy, that hound. A better bodyguard, too, I sometimes think.

  The boss told me he'd have a little talk with Oparal, but I didn't think he'd found the "opportune moment," as he put it. Oparal didn't seem to like him any better than she liked me, so I couldn't see what good that'd do.

  He'd already had some one-on-one time with the others to explain that it wasn't demon but devil blood I had in my veins. The difference is lost on a lot of people outside of Cheliax. It all boils down to one thing: You can make a deal with a devil, if you're clever. There's no bargaining with a demon.

  After the fight at Erithiel's Hall, no one was in much of a talking mood anyway. My little spat with Kemeili had just told me more about her opinion of Oparal than I'd gotten out of her in our trysts away from camp. Once she was good and relaxed, I tried to snake out her real reasons for coming with us, or what she thought the others might be up to. Usually I was pretty good with the pillow talk, but somehow she always managed to change the subject in a way that made me extra sleepy.

  You could say she had a knack.

  The boss dug up nothing new on his old man at Erithiel's Hall, but he found so many references to this place called the Century Root that he asked Caladrel to lead us there. Once we set out, we didn't see much of Caladrel except in the morning and at supper time when he'd appear with a brace of hares or pheasants.

  On our first day out, soon after Caladrel left, the boss took me aside and told me what he'd discovered just before the demon attack.

  "An elf gate?" I snickered.

  "You must call it an aiudara. For some reason the elves consider the common term vulgar."

  I fell out laughing. The night we'd met, Kemeili had used that phrase, and I figured it out the first time. When the boss raised his eyebrow, I said, "You don't even want to know."

  I made my escape before the confusion on his face gave me another fit of the chuckles.

  At least there was plenty to see on the trip to this Century Root. The deeper we went into the Fierani Forest, the weirder it looked.

  It wasn't just that the trees were so much bigger than normal. Some had leaves that were green on top and red on the bottom. Others had bladders the size of grain sacks huffing orange spores out of their trunks. Caladrel warned us to stay clear of those ones.

  The boss recited the names of trees we passed, most of which I'd never seen before. Pretty soon, he began asking the others to tell him the names of the ones
he'd never seen. That was something that didn't happen every day.

  Rings of brown and yellow fungus formed platforms among the trees, making me think of the gnome city in Upper Omesta. Sometimes I caught sight of little sprites sitting on the edges looking down at us. Some waved, some laughed, and others took one look at us and fled inside their mushroom homes. One of the little jerks beaned me with an acorn. I threw him the big smile, and his whole gang flew off squeaking. Kemeili and Caladrel left offerings of food or cheap jewels at the foot of their trees to make peace. Eventually the fey stopped hassling us.

  Birds sang all day, different ones taking over at dusk, and another shift at night. Sometimes the buzz of insects was louder than the birdsong. Almost every day I spotted wasps or bees bigger than Arnisant, thankfully at a distance. Once I saw a mob of them flying together, carrying the carcass of a centipede the size of a crocodile. Kemeili threatened to summon them over just to watch me squirm. She wouldn't let me forget the way I'd winced at the gold wasp she'd teased me with back in her room.

  The light was different in this part of the forest, like the leaf mold somehow stained the air. When I stepped through a shaft of sunlight, it warmed my skin for a few seconds before the shade put its cold fingers back on my neck.

  Caladrel made one of his bird whistles and waved me forward. He'd begun including me in his short scouting runs, including this one, in which we were circling around the rear to check for unwelcome followers.

  I wondered why the ranger wanted me. Here in the forest, he was obviously better than me. Give me a warehouse, a cellar, or a dark alley, and I can make myself invisible. Out here, he was the ghost. I was lucky not to trip over a root or step in a gopher hole.

  Oparal peeled away from Caladrel as I came up. That was just as well, because the last time she gave me one of her dirty looks I'd shot her the tines. She'd spent enough time in Cheliax to know everything the gesture implied, and we almost had it out right there. After they'd pulled us apart, I promised the boss not to provoke her. That's when Kemeili really started bugging me to get my revenge.

  "The count should have finished his introductions by now," said Caladrel. "It's time we joined them." He pointed with a newly carved arrow to a ridge just beyond the next stand of trees.

  "You've been busy." I nodded at his quiver, which he'd filled with at least a dozen new arrows. The longer I looked at the quiver, the more arrows I realized it held. There was some kind of magic to the thing, lifting up just the arrow he wanted when he reached for it.

  Caladrel shrugged. "Most are plain arrows, but I've replaced some of the bleeders. It takes a while for them to weaken a demon, but they make a difference in a long battle."

  "Good thinking." I'd learned a similar lesson on Eel Street back in my Goatherd days. You don't need to kill a guy on the first shot. Make him bleed and back off. If he's got a lick of sense, he'll slink off to wrap himself up, and you can go about your business. If he follows you, then he's that much beat already.

  "You make all your own arrows?"

  "Most of them, but some require magic from our wizards." He plucked a red-fletched shaft from his quiver. "Demonbane arrows. Not as useful as my sword, which can smell the demons' approach, but deadly when well placed."

  "I notice you don't miss a lot."

  He smiled.

  "What's that one for?" I pointed at the arrow that clung to the outside of his quiver, like a bit of iron on a lodestone. Its head was half as wide as my hand. Instead of steel, it was carved out of wood with wormy veins running across its surface.

  "That is for when all else fails," he said. "Have you ever used a bow?" He offered me his, but I waved it away. I'd seen all kinds of weapons, but for my money a knife and a soft word are the best. I'm happiest when the word is all it takes.

  We reached the ridge and looked down into the biggest clearing I'd seen since we entered Kyonin. What I saw there made my jaw drop.

  "I know." Caladrel watched me. "I felt the same way the first time I saw the Century Root."

  It took me a minute to understand what I was seeing. At first it looked like a ruined city on a hill, maybe half a mile across. Jagged towers crouched above a brown cliff. Thick ridges ran down in all directions, like the roots of a gigantic tree.

  No, I realized. They weren't like roots. The long brown hills were roots.

  Those weren't towers up above, either. Tall as Egorian townhouses, they were splinters jutting up around the edges of a mountain-sized tree stump. Deep pits in the wood looked like windows and doors. Inside the perimeter, little forests sprouted on the surface of the stump. In other places, crevices in the stump floor looked like country roads. Green waterfalls trickled off the sides.

  All around the base of the trunk stood ordinary trees, or that's what it looked like. Again, what I thought I saw wasn't what I saw.

  "That one just moved." I pointed at a rowan I'd thought was swaying in a breeze before it passed in front of a pair of elms. Standing at its foot was the boss, looking tiny as a sprite. "Tines! It's a whole colony of Walking Men!"

  "No," said Caladrel. "The Walking Man is a construct. These are living creatures, the Fierani."

  "Huh. I thought they'd be smaller."

  The tree-people were every bit as tall as the Walking Man, only not so massive. And they weren't made of a big mess of trees and plants. They looked a lot like regular trees, except that they milled about like nobles strolling through a park.

  By the time we came down the shallow hill, the boss was walking toward us, Arnisant at his side. "They are the most inhospitable creatures I have ever encountered. They will not even acknowledge my presence."

  "Perhaps he will have better luck." Caladrel nodded past the boss at the little ghost sitting at the base of one of the roots. He had his shoes off, and he'd stuck his feet into the soft loam.

  When Fimbulthicket went down at Erithiel's Hall, I thought he'd died. Oparal pressed her hands to his skinny chest and poured holy light into him until it became obvious it wasn't going to help. Kemeili took over, but it was just no good. The little guy hadn't been injured in the fight. I guessed his heart just gave out.

  Just when we'd all given up, he lifted his head.

  "Thank Iomedae," said Oparal.

  "Thank Calistria," said Kemeili.

  "Thanks for nothing," said Fimbulthicket. His voice was a whisper from the end of a sewer tunnel. His eyes were pale before, but now they were the color of clear ice. Faint gray veins pulsed under his thin skin.

  Later the boss told me the gnome had finally succumbed to his "Bleaching" disease. Before that night he was just fading. Now he was all gone, caught between, not life and death, the boss said, but something like the real and the unreal. The certain and the possible. Something creepy like that.

  I didn't understand the difference until a couple of days later while we were slogging toward this Century Root. The gnome stood straighter than before, moving easy through the woods even with his big pack.

  "You'd make one hell of a porter, Fim."

  "My name is Fimbulthicket."

  "You got it, little guy."

  "Not 'little guy.' Not 'Thick' or 'Shorty' or 'Spooky.' It's Fimbulthicket."

  "Sure. It's just everyone's got nicknames for their pals."

  "We are not pals."

  "All right, all right," I tried to laugh it off. "'Fimbulthicket.'"

  "Too late for that now," he said in his chilly voice. "You had your chance."

  I kept shy of him after that.

  "Has Fimbulthicket been able to help?" Caladrel asked the boss. Oparal and Kemeili came up behind him, both looking curious about the answer.

  "He has remained silent since we arrived, and the Fierani will not speak to me." The boss pointed at a few of the nearby tree-men. They looked back at us. Sometimes two would lean their branches together. They creaked open their mouths, letting out a sound of wind and rain.

  "I suppose you tried addressing them in Elven," said Caladrel. "More of them will spe
ak our language than the common tongue."

  The boss nodded. "And in the fey tongue—although mine is limited—to no avail. Whatever brought them to this impossibly huge tree stump consumes their interest."

  "What about the little—Fimbulthicket?" I said. "Can't he talk to the plants and animals?"

  "He has been attempting to do just that," said the boss. "It appears he has made some progress, but it is impossible to know until he deigns to speak to us. He has become quite terse since his incident."

  "Kind of spooky, too, if you ask me."

  He shot me the look that said he hadn't asked me. Everyone else grimaced or looked away. I wasn't the only one Fimbulthicket made nervous.

  "Look," said Oparal. "Here he comes."

  He walked with his shoes and stockings in hand, clumps of dirt and grass still stuck between his toes. He hadn't smiled since that night he "went over," as he put it. He didn't show any emotion. He tramped up to us and spoke without looking at anybody in particular.

  "I told them why we came."

  "The Fierani have been gathered here for almost two hundred years," said Caladrel. "Did you at least find out why they have come to the Century Root?"

  "You didn't tell me to ask about that. I asked about Variel. They say an elf came with questions about ancient sites across Kyonin almost a century ago. Most of the Fierani ignored him, all except one. And none of the others will speak to that one."

  "Who was it?" said the boss. "What was his name?"

  Fimbulthicket opened his mouth and breathed out a sound like a death rattle. It made my teeth hurt to hear it. Arnisant whimpered and covered his ears.

  "Nobody understands that noise." Kemeili stuck her fingers in her ears. "What do we call him?"

  Fimbulthicket thought a minute and said a couple of elven words I hadn't learned yet. I nudged the boss. "What's that mean?"

  "It translates, more or less, as 'Peculiar in the Head.' Or perhaps 'Eccentric of Mind.' Though I cannot say either particularly rolls off the tongue."

  "How about 'Oddnoggin'?" I suggested.

  "I like that," said Fimbulthicket, but in his hollow voice it was hard to tell whether he meant it.