The Price of a Child
The Falcon's Children, Prologue
This is the prologue for The Falcon’s Children, a fantasy novel being published serially on this Substack. For an explanation of the project, click here. For the table of contents, click here. For an archive of world building, click here.
The priests told her to pray, to tithe and sacrifice, to trust in the sun god’s perfect will, but after she lost the fourth baby Ylaena had no more use for priests.
She had no use for anyone, for a time, refusing to let the maids wash or burn the bloody sheet, closing her doors to her husband and his hovering sisters, leaving her hair unbrushed and uncut, her face unpainted, staying the long days and nights alone in her chambers in the manor house’s upper floor, with the mirrors draped and the curtains drawn, weeping a little now and then but mostly sitting quiet in her nightgown, in the daylight and the dark.
They said she was in mourning. That was the excuse her husband gave his visitors, the story he told their noble neighbors, the tale he put in letters to his cousins, and so far as he knew it was the truth.
But Ylaena wasn’t grieving; she had grieved enough for the first three lost children, the first two stillborn and the third miscarried just like this one, her fourth pregnancy in three years and her shortest one, as though her body were getting more incompetent through practice, more cursed through repetition. No, she wasn’t mourning. She was preparing, steeling herself for what she knew she had to do.
Summer gave way to autumn while she remained cloistered, and when she finally emerged, dressed and calm and pleasant, as though she had not been a month absent from the manor’s life, the colors had come out in the woodlands and dells all around her husband’s greatest house. So it was not surprising, it was even reassuring, when she told him that she intended to go riding every day while the weather remained fair, in the crimson and yellow of the woods, before the rains came and the winter ice.
The area was peaceful, the brigandage of a few years ago had been dealt with, and it was safe, entirely safe, for a lady to ride abroad with only a few attendants and a pair of knights for an escort. There was no objection when her rides swept wider and wider arcs around her husband’s fiefs, no anxiety when she returned ever-closer to the ever-earlier encroachment of the autumn dusk. There was no worry in the manor house, no sense that she was building up to anything dangerous or desperate — until the night her ladies and knights returned bearing their own desperation at having lost her somewhere, leagues away, on the very edge of the great dark forest, the gloomy fringes of the Mar Tyogg.
There, having shaken all her escorts, she left her horse tied to an ash tree and took the track that in girlhood had been pointed out to her, the winding path roofed with oak limbs and carpeted with moss. She came as far as her friends had dared when they were young, all the way to the second stream, the ones whose rocks were smooth and round and just a little bit too blue, and without any hesitation she went across and followed the track downward, down and down, the weak light of sunset leaking through the canopy, the hanging spiderwebs immense, everywhere the smell of loam and damp and rot.
The undergrowth thickened, the tree roots spread, the fall of leaves grew deeper and deeper, and just when she thought the path was lost entirely she realized that the tangle ahead of her was dense with thorns and autumn roses, rising like a hedge to block her way.
Prick your thumbs, they said. She clambered over roots that were now knee-high, half-wading in the dry leaves and feeling her cloak catch on trailing prickers as she approached the wall of bramble. She lifted a thin branch, found one of the larger thorns and pressed it deep into one thumb, then another.
The pain, the welling blood — it was nothing, because it was pain and blood that she controlled, not the unbidden flood carrying away her children. She squeezed the drops and let them fall — one crimson bead on the brown carpet of leaves, a few more on the faded green of the branches, and one caught, glistening, by the ocherous petal of a rose.
A wind came up, strong despite the height and depths of trees around her, and it shook the brambles and the roses. Nothing else changed; it was not that a path opened in the hedge, that the knotted branches somehow shifted and opened and gave way. No, the path had always been there, narrow and thorny but obvious now that she had noticed it, easy to enter and to follow further in.
It seemed straight at first but after she had been following it for a few moments she realized it must be curving subtly, because when she looked back the way bent and quickly disappeared. There were birch trees on either side of her now, the brambles growing in and out of them, twining their trunks, brown and green on white, the roses bright in the half-light, the birches gleaming. There was a sound that might have been birdsong from somewhere in the forest. But she had not seen a single living creature — not a bird, not a squirrel, not a moth — since she had entered the Mar Tyogg.
Through the gate, they said, and there it was, an arch of tangled branches where two birches grew together, just wild enough to possibly be natural, just elegant enough to seem like a fashioned thing. Then the thorns were behind her, the path leveled, the birches giving way to oak and ash and alder once more.
The fallen leaves were thinner here, and among the roots that grew across the path there were curious white stones, almost like the stones that a gardener might choose to line paths between his hedges. They gleamed strangely in the gloom, as though reflecting some invisible lantern’s evening glow, and they thickened as the path went on, and finally spread out into a kind of beach, unfurling like a gleaming cloth around the fringes of a woodland lake.
The trees bent and stretched and clawed over one another, but they did not quite roof the water; there was an opening like a skylight in the canopy, where the sky at dusk showed through.
Now, she thought, it was time to light the torch. There was no breeze and the lake was still and yet the shadows jumped and danced on the surface when the fire was up. The glow cast by the torch reached well across the water; it did not reveal the other shore.
Salt on the waters, they said, and she reached into her pouch and brought forth a pinch and cast it out, across the surface, the grains swallowed up in liquid dark.
The boat appeared immediately, except that as with the path through the briars appeared was the wrong word. It was more that her eyes had not been looking in the right place to see it, and now they were, and did, as it glided toward her, high prow and plain wood and empty seats.
She let it come, heard the faint grinding sound as its keel scraped the rocks, and then without hesitation lifted her skirt with her free hand and waded through the shallow water and pulled herself aboard.
It began moving immediately, as though pulled by a deep current. The shore fell away behind her, and the torch cast its light into a sphere of watery dark. In the circle of sky above the first stars were coming out. There was no wind now, no sound except the very faint noise of ripples spreading where the prow (or was it the stern? both ends of the boat were alike) cut through the water. She tested herself and found herself unfrightened. In another life, a different story, this was a moment where she might have said a prayer. But being here, making the journey, meant that she was no longer interested in mere supplication, in simply petitioning the invisible. Her patience had run out; only bargaining would do.
At last there were shapes ahead of her, a low barrier of rushes and then huge oaks rising behind them. The boat kept its course and there was a channel through the rushes to the shore, another grinding sound and a sharp bump, and as the boat came to rest she saw the opening before her, wide and dark, leading in between the heavy trunks. She rose and —
— pay the boatman, they said. But there was no boatman, no one with her in the almost-dark. She swept the torch around her, washing the shoreline and the forest with its light; nobody, nothing, no movement, not a sound.
Pay the boatman. In the tales the fools always thought that they didn’t need to follow the instructions, and she was determined not to be a fool. Her pouch held gold and silver, and she took out a gold piece, a tree, bearing the bearded visage of the king and on the other side the oak that gave the coin its name. She held it up for a moment, imagining all manner of strange things — a bird swooping down and carrying it away, an invisible hand plucking it, a sudden dematerialization.
Nothing happened; the coin gleamed in the torchlight, that was all. So she tossed it, gently, into the boat, where it landed — the thunk was shocking in the silence — and lay there, still gleaming, near the place where she had been sitting. Then the boat began to move again, sliding over the stones and back out into the water, and for just an instant, just a flicker, there was somebody there, a cowled shape, a black cloak that was darker than the dark, and a face, such a face, that looked at her …
Then it was gone, the boat slid away from the torchlight and was lost in the darkness, and for the first time Ylaena felt a tremor of real fear.
But she could only go on, so she took the path that opened through the oaks, which turned out to be more like a stair, rough stone steps arranged haphazardly up a hillside so that she had to hunt for each one, and sometimes leap from one to another, the torch bobbing and the shadows flailing as she moved. Up and up she went, the air growing colder, the dusk now simple dark, the trees mostly leafless here, roots becoming pillars becoming branching eldritch shapes above. Eventually, after she had climbed long enough to be unsure how long she had been climbing, there was a circle of light waiting for her, the pale glow of moonlight. She realized that she had been holding her breath for some time, for many steps, and she exhaled sharply and rushed upward for the last distance, stumbling a little on the last few steps, and came out through the trees onto the hilltop.
The moon was high, higher than it should be unless she had been even longer on the climb than she imagined, and it spilled its light across grass that was thicker and fuller and, under her torchlight, greener than it should be this far from summer’s end. The hilltop was smooth and gently rounded, the grass like a priest’s shaven crown atop the wooded slopes, and the treeline made a perfect ring enclosing the greensward. In the center there was a white boulder, cloven down the middle but otherwise entirely smooth, with grass growing between its severed pieces.
The space was empty, silent, still, and yet much more than in the woods she felt that she was watched, that if she turned quickly she might see something unexpected, something she did not want to see.
The wine in the ground, the bread and milk on the stone. From her pouch she took the vial of wine, pushed the little cork free with her thumb, and crossing the green to the split stone she poured it into the seam of earth that the fissure in the rock exposed. Then she took out the end of the loaf, taken from the manor’s kitchen that morning, and laid it gently atop one half of the split boulder. On the other half she placed the vial of milk. Now her pouch was lighter, just the silver coins and her tinder. The only other thing she carried was her protection, the iron nail that hung hidden between her breasts.
She stepped back from the stone expectantly, fearfully, and then without a sound her torch went out, a few sparks swirling and then vanishing, leaving the hilltop darker, lit by the moon and stars alone. She almost went for her pouch to re-light the torch, but before she did she realized that there was someone across the stone from her, a figure watching her from the brightest spot the moonlight made.
It will be a woman, they said, but surely this had to be a man. He — it? — was slightly taller than her husband and her father, but not so tall as to be alien or impossible or even all that strange. His hair was like a new fall of snow, brighter than the moon itself, and he wore a pale cloak and a pale tunic and hose that all somehow managed to be different shades of white. His face was beardless, long, narrow, with eyebrows that went up diagonally and a nose that sprang forward like a dagger. The only colors on him were his green eyes and his smiling, slightly-too-red lips.
“So few come,” he said, the voice deep, mellifluous, unaccented, “and so few remember. But you are here. Tell me who you are, and what you ask, and what price you would freely pay.”
Do not lie, but never say your name, they said.
“I am the lady of lands that lie against these woods,” she said, laying the extinguished torch down in the grass, spreading her arms in what she hoped was a gesture of supplication. “I am the daughter of the green salamander, the wife of the red wolf. I come to ask you for the gift” — she heard her voice tremble, and controlled it — “the gift of a healthy child, a healthy son, with a long life, to be my comfort and bear my husband’s name.”
“A … child?” His wry smile widened, and his teeth showed sharper than she liked. “A healthy child who lives … a very long time?”
“A healthy child who lives his mortal span of years,” she said, ignoring the hint of mockery. “Long enough to have grandchildren of his own. A human child, of my own loins, and of my husband’s.”
“And your husband’s? Ah. How disappointing.” Now the teeth were very bright, and very sharp. “In the old days when covenants were kept there were … other ways to give a lovely girl the gift she sought.”
She was prepared for this, she didn’t flinch at the insinuation. “I know those ways, but I do not ask for them. I ask for something simpler: That my body might hold the next child that I conceive. A simple thing, for a great one such as yourself.”
Flatter them, they said.
“Were I so great I would not be here with you tonight. The great ones do not keep these hills and watch these altars, as in the old days when there was often business here.” There was resentment in his voice, grudges long remembered. “But I can bargain as well as any of them, fear not. So tell me — what have you brought to bargain with? These gifts” — a gesture to the stone, the bread and milk — “are only sufficient for this audience, not for what you ask.”
She had expected this but still some part of her had hoped that it might be otherwise. She let that part die, steeled herself, and spoke:
“I offer part of my own body, a tithe from my own flesh.”
“Ah.” There was an unsettling pleasure in his voice. “How much, then, daughter of the salamander, lady of the wolf? For a life, a healthy, long-lived child, it will take more than a pricking of blood, more than what you paid to pass the thorns.”
She stretched out her left hand, pale and vulnerable, the nails still faintly orange with the colors they had painted on her when she left her chambers and returned to the manor’s normal life.
“I offer a bone of my bones, a finger’s length taken from my flesh.”
He looked at her hand, looked hungrily she thought, and she dared to hope that this would be enough.
But then he was shaking his head sadly. “No, no, not enough, not enough. Once, perhaps, when supplicants came often. But you are a victim of your people’s lack of faith, I fear. In these times it will take more than this to make the bargain possible.”
She withdrew her hand, let it brush against her chest and the hidden iron for reassurance. “I cannot bargain against myself,” she said. “What would you ask of me?”
He cocked his head and looked at her in a colder and more exacting version of the weighing way that older men had looked at her when she was still a maiden unbetrothed. The silence lasted a long time, and then, as if satisfied with his assessment, he smiled at her again.
“Just an eye,” he said. “Just an eye, lady of the wolf, just a small piece of your beauty, and you may choose which one.”
Was it better or worse than a foot, a hand, a limb? Would it be easier to explain when her husband’s searchers found her? Should she make a counteroffer – teeth, perhaps, or an ear?
“No,” he said, though she hadn’t spoken anything aloud, “I’m afraid none of that will do. It is not in my power to grant on those terms. An eye for a child, a healthy child, a child of your own that is also your husband’s get. That is the price we can agree upon. The only question is whether you can pay.”
“I can pay,” she said. She had not come so far without knowing it might come to this. She lifted her chin. “But I hope I will not be asked to cut it out myself.”
She had not seen the knife in his hand, but it was there: As white as the rest of him, a bone knife, with a thin blade and a strangely worked handle. He hefted it, and laid it on the rock between them — on the altar, he had called it, and suddenly she did not want to know what sacrifices had been offered here, what else besides her beauty this knife had cut away.
“The bargain can be fulfilled any way you like,” he said, and now his smile’s width was definitely inhuman. “You need not carve it out and hand it to me; I have the power to take it with less pain. But for that you would need to remove that … thing around your neck.”
Her hand went, quicker than thought, to her bodice and the hidden nail. Somehow she had thought … what had she thought? That the iron would protect her from the bad magic but let the magic that she wanted do its work? She had thought so hard about all of this, how had that bit of naivete lingered in her thinking?
“You are in no peril from me,” the man, the creature, the thing in white said to her. “We are making a bargain, daughter of the salamander. You would not be here if you did not know that we always keep our bargains. You can remove it and, save for the sacrifice you offer, I promise that I will not do you any harm.”
They may deceive you but they do not lie.
“No peril from you,” she said. “But I did not wear this for protection just from you.” She thought of the way back, the trees, the boat, the river, the silence, the eyes that watched her now.
“Every queen has her hunting pack,” he returned gravely, as if in recitation, “and there are many more ways down than back. But the road you took does not go under the hills, nothing hunts in these woods tonight, and if you paid the boatman he will carry you once more. Still — ” he gestured with the hand that had held the knife, with fingers that were too long just as his smile was too wide — “once you have given me your gift, there is no reason that you cannot put your … trinket on once again. I will not hide it from you; indeed I cannot do anything with it, as you must know. It can lay behind you there, in the grass, while you approach.”
She looked at the knife, the pale blade, and tried to imagine herself driving it into her own eyesocket, carving around the eyeball, carving despite the shock and pain and blood. She had dared much to come here, she was not afraid of blood and pain — but she was afraid of failing, of mutilating herself to no purpose, of ruining the bargain that she had steeled herself to strike.
They may deceive you but they do not lie.
“Swear to me,” she said. “Swear to me that if I let you do this thing it would be the wiser course, the course that brings me back to my home alive and safe.”
“I am not a prophet,” he said sharply, “and the bargain we strike here will not be fulfilled if you should do something foolish, like wandering off the path or trying to swim the waters on your passage back. I can swear to you that I will allow you to replace the necklace, and that you will be in no danger that I know of here until you do. But you must know that nothing is certain in your kind’s little lives. For all I know a breeze might come and carry you off, you poor little windblown mortal thing. No, you must choose, and choose now; I will not tarry while you wring your hands and fret.”
“I am thinking, not fretting,” she returned. “And I think that I will accept. If – if – when you take my eye, my payment, what will remain? An empty socket? A scar? Will I … will I bleed from it?”
“Ah, wife of the wolf, we are more gracious than that. We ask for your eye, the true thing, not the mere eyeball. It will die to you and live for us. The pain” — he waved a hand — “well, I imagine that you will scream. But I can even be truly gracious, truly kind, and send you to another place, a pleasant place, a place of my own devising for the worst of it. And when your beloved husband looks upon you he will simply see scarred and withered flesh, a dead spot on your lovely face.”
Then he smiled again. “If you let me do it, that is. I will take the cruder, bloody way, if that is what you choose.”
“No,” she said. “No. I am not a butcher or a surgeon. I will take the bargain as you offer it. I will take your word.”
He nodded. “Wise and brave at once. Come closer, when you have removed the … thing.”
She raised the chain, the nail rising with it, and lifted it in a swift motion over her head. When it entered the moonlight there was a rustling, soft but clear, from the circle of trees, and a soft hiss from her companion – though when she looked at him his face was still, imperturbable. Slowly, deliberately, she turned with it and laid it a span behind her on the grass, which was cool to her touch and smelled faintly of the summer.
When she turned back to him he had bared an arm, the arm that now once more held the knife.
“Come closer, mortal. Come of your free will. Come and seal our bargain with your beauty and your blood.”
She came. The stone was still between them and yet somehow it was not, and without going over it or through it he was standing very close to her, looming over her, larger now than he had appeared at first, grave and terrible like one of the angels they worshiped to the south and east.
“Of your own free will,” he said.
“Of my own free will,” she echoed, as though it were a necessary incantation.
The knife went in, too fast for her to flinch, a tremendous coldness penetrating her, dividing flesh from flesh and bone from bone. She opened her mouth to scream, feeling a terrible vibration running up her spine — but when she tried, automatically, to blink, the penetrated eye reopened on a woodland landscape in daylight, a clearing under autumn trees. The scream choked off, and for a moment her vision was doubled, she was in the woodland and on the hilltop both, staring at the restful autumn landscape and into the avid elfin face. Then what she could see resolved into a single image, a panorama as she wheeled and took it all in, the trees red and gold and glorious, the breeze stirring the branches, the grass bisected by paved paths with a fountain bubbling in a pool of sunlight where they met.
As suddenly as the pain had filled her it was gone, and now she felt utterly tranquil -- as though she were out wandering in a copse near her husband’s manor, or in the woods behind her father’s house in the days before anything had disturbed her girlhood’s peace. There was a flickering in her vision as she moved, flashes of light somewhere in the corner of her eye, little bursting stars, and she felt they meant something, they reminded her of something … but the thought slipped away, all uncomfortable thoughts slipped away, and she was walking under the shower of leaves, letting them twist and flurry around her, swinging her arms wide, experiencing something unexpected, something like a child’s delight.
A child … at first she thought it was only the laughter of the fountain’s water that she heard, the churn of froth around sculptured birds and butterflies and foxes, but the sounds resolved themselves and she realized they were separate, the burbling and the laughter, and she spun suddenly and saw the little girl, red-haired like Ylaena’s mother, standing hands-on-hips in a blue dress where one of the paths passed from the grass into the trees. She looked about four or five years old, the dress loose like a sack, the hair unbound, her eyes agleam – and then the girl turned and darted off the path, around one of the nearer trees, her head appearing once and then vanishing again, and her giggle and a catch me, catch me, Mama! floating back to where Ylaena stood.
She would catch her. She lifted her skirts — she was in a white dress with red ribbons, the dress in which her father had brought her to her husband’s house, four long years ago — and ran for the tree, darting around its ivy-skirted trunk, to see the flash of red hair a little further away from her, a little deeper in the wood. She chased anew, and this time the flash came from her left, where one of the paths continued through the trees, and she reached it and saw the child further away still, flying down the path and disappearing, with a giddy leap, between two balustrades and down a flight of steps.
The lights flashed again in her vision as she reached the steps herself, and she paused uncertainly for a moment and then descended, yellow leaves crackling underfoot, the staircase cracked and mossy, and no sign of the child — my child — in the shadowed space below. The stones were mostly green beneath her feet, the leaves that covered them were red, and a gate rose before her, not iron but some paler, sinuous substance, like a net of bone pinned against the dark, flanked by brick walls that stretched away into the trees.
The gate had no hinge, no joint, no bar. Beyond it the woodland looked identical, the same lush fall colors, the same mossed-over path leading away into a shadowland cloven by shafts of sunlight from above. Another flash touched her eyesight, reminding her of … what? Nothing, surely; nothing that could be as important as catching up to her daughter, who might have slipped through this gate or might be hiding somewhere in the woods nearby. She looked around, left and right and behind, but the trees were silent, the breezes stilled. She pushed at the gate, and met firm resistance — but could the girl have slipped underneath? No, it went down to the ground and then into it somehow, the white not-metal swallowed by the earth. Could she have climbed? No, it was somehow too smooth to grip and hold.
There was a sound, a rustle, just a little way along the red wall to her right. She looked quickly and saw something moving, the bushes still quivering as if someone had just passed. Lifting her skirts again she went along the wall, where the undergrowth was light, looking and listening, and after she had gone a little distance there was another rustle, another hint of movement, and she went more quickly around one tree trunk and another and another, opening her mouth to call out for her daughter, to chide her for leading such a chase —
— but then the leaves of a bush rustled to her right, a holly bush with fat red berries, and instead of hiding a little girl she saw that the branches bore a bird, a raven, jet black and keen-eyed, that cocked its head and regarded Ylaena as thought it were poised to speak. Then it spread its wings and flew directly in front of her, so close that the flapping wingspan almost touched her face, and landed atop the red wall to her left. And beneath its perch there was a gap, a space of ragged stone barely wider than a human body, with dark green vines and brown roots spilling and coiling through the crumbled brick, like the tentacles from a sea creature tearing through the bottom of a ship.
Her disappointment at finding the bird instead of the daughter gave way to — flash, in her eye, flash — hope and curiosity. She went to the gap, the bird holding its perch even when she was just a few feet below, and peered through the crumbled section of the wall, looking and listening for any sign of running or laughter. The forest beyond was mostly ash and alder, leaves red-almost-to-purple and dappled gold. There was an almost-path leading away from the gap, if you followed the track of the vines and roots along the forest floor, and then she saw a flicker, a blue flicker, where the trunks thickened and the almost-path was lost to sight.
She took a step through the gap, and as she did so she thought she heard a floating voice behind her, a Mama … from somewhere back the way that she had come. But as soon as her foot touched the ground beyond the wall the sound cut off, and she decided that it had just been a breeze, a trick in her mind.
Then the raven took flight once more, scudding away along her line of sight, along the trail of vines and roots, toward the spot where she had seen the blue that might have been a dress. The bird perched on an alder for a moment and then, flying again, vanished into the trees. And she followed, stumbling a little, noticing absently that the air smelled different beyond the wall, with a hint of some unrecognizable spice.
She had only gone a little distance when the breeze returned, shaking the trees, shaking off the autumn leaves and spilling them down on her until she had to brush them from her shoulders, her cloak, her loosened hair. Then instead of slackening the breeze became a gust, the gust became a strong wind, and the leaves kept falling and falling, so many of them that after a moment she could no longer see her way. It was like being lost in a blizzard, cascading orange and red and brown instead of white, and she squinted and thrust her hands forward as if to somehow push her way out and through, out and through —
— and then she was through, the leaves parting before her like a curtain as she stepped into an entirely different place, no longer the autumn wood at all but an endless-seeming hallway, a corridor that was like the hall upstairs in the manor house and yet also somehow a forest path, like the paths she had followed to get here but longer, longer, tree after tree after tree, their leaves dark instead of golden, the space between them lamplit somehow, the branches an infinite ceiling overhead, running away from her, away away away, down and down and down.
The raven was there with her, occupying a branch that extended, clawlike, from somewhere just behind her shoulder. He eyed her with a kind of satisfaction and then took flight again, winging away down the corridor of trees. Her eyes followed him until he vanished, off away and to the right, and somehow she knew that there were doorways all along the woodland hallway’s length, doors opening left and right like the doors into bedchambers off the manor house’s upstairs. Except that these led between the trees, between the branches, out of the lamplight and into other places, places where there was light and singing, places that were green and places that were watery, places that were placid and places that were hungry
How many doors lead into the black?
How many travelers never come back?
The child’s rhyme … was that her voice? Was that her voice? Was that
Then something was coming. Something was coming down the hall, down the path, between the trees, and it was far away still, too far away to see, but it was coming, a door had opened somewhere far, far down the hall, and whatever was behind it had been waiting for her, waiting for her, waiting and waiting and waiting for so long, so very long, and wasn’t she a lovely thing, wasn’t she so very lovely, so lovely her face, so lovely her eyes, so lovely her breasts and her belly and thighs, so lovely the gifts they gave him once, so lovely the gifts lost for so long …
He was coming. The trees were shaking. The lights were blue. There was a roaring in her ears to match the vibration in her bones, and what was strange was that she felt terror and desire intermingled, because whatever was coming would destroy her and yet she wanted it, she wanted him, whatever He was, whatever he offered she wanted it, or enough of her did to bury the screaming part of her, the screaming Ylaena, the true Ylaena, the Ylaena who had been a brave fool and now would have to pay for it, pay for it, pay for it …
He was there. His shape was a man’s shape, cloaked and crowned, and oh with such a crown, and the blue of eyes beneath, bright blue like the lights, and he was reaching out for her, reaching, and she wanted to pull away and she wanted to lean forward, to let him take her, and it didn’t matter what she did because he would have his will, have his way with her, nothing could stand before him, nothing, he was the true and only king
He touched her and there were no words to describe it, no words in the screaming corridors of her mind to match the unholy, ecstatic feeling of that touch —
— and then she was pulled back as no human being could ever have been pulled before, yanked and hauled and dragged through a kaleidescope of faces, fox faces and bird faces, thin faces and fat faces, colors riper and richer than anything on earth, wings and scales and wings again, flowers and thorns, flames and mirrors, all the mirrors showing her face, her own face, her face with a dark pit where her eye had been and a single thread of blood lacing down her cheek.
She hit the ground hard, her back slamming down and the breath going out of her, and for a moment the pain lancing through her head, through her eyesocket, blotted out everything else. When she finally could raise herself, gasping, enough to prop herself on her elbow and look about wildly – look about with half her vision, with a black shadow pressing in from somewhere to her left – she saw that everything had changed. The moon was still high but the grass was brown and crackling instead of green and lush beneath her. The circle of trees around the hilltop were completely bare of leaves, their branches wild like a witch’s hair against the sky. And the stone, the altar, was no longer split neatly in two but fully broken, the halves lying spans and spans from one another, jutting up at opposing angles as though some hammer had come down to send them flying well apart.
There was someone sitting on the winter grass between the stones, someone who had the same general shape as her negotiator, but who surely could not be the same man-thing with whom she had bargained just a little while – was it just a little while? – before. Unless her eyesight was truly ruined, that is, so that what had been a smooth and ageless figure now appeared as a ragged, slumped scarecrow, white cloak exchanged for tattered gray, the shock of moonbright hair torn away to expose a maggot-white skull, and the face when the thing lifted it – oh, it was old, so old, more womanish than masculine, but mostly just a mass of wrinkles, the green eyes filmed, the lips sallow, the skin sagging like a melting mask.
The mask spoke. It was the same voice, ground through gears and then rising from the bottom of a well.
“It’s been too long, the vines grow in, I should have noticed … Did he touch you?”
She opened her mouth to speak and what came out was a gasp from the pain that was still a lance right through her head, and instead of saying yes she simply nodded, and as she did a single drop of blood fell from her face to gleam upon her cloak.
The creature that had been so pleased with itself earlier, so smooth and alien and arrogant, managed to pick itself up and shamble toward her, trailing rags like a wedding train. It bent to her and touched her, the wrinkled touch strange but so much less strange than the last way that she had been touched – its carress passing across her cheek below the socket that she knew was as empty as a skull.
She managed a croak. “What was it. What was it.”
The voice was no less strange sounding closer to her ear. “The king,” it said. “The king has touched you, mortal. And to keep you from him, I have given much.”
It rose, haggard and ruined, and stood over her for a moment, a ravaged face on a blasted hillside in the wintry-seeming dark. Then it turned and began to shamble away, between the broken altar pieces, headed for the treeline and the deeper darkness waiting there.
“Wait.” She gasped the words. “Wait. Why. What. Why did you save me?”
It turned back, and its voice was still rough and grinding but somehow a little fuller, with even a trace of its former arrogance. “I made a bargain, daughter of the salamander, bride of the wolf. We keep our bargains. Or at least … at least we try.”
It turned again and shambled another ten paces, almost to the trees, when she gathered enough strength to cry after it:
“Did you keep it? Did you keep it? You have taken my eye! After all this, shall I bear a child?”
She could not tell what happened to it next, whether the darkness took it or whether in the last moment its rags and tatters became wings and somehow it flew. But she knew what she heard it say, the words that she held onto all the long way back, and across all the strange and haunted days and nights that followed.
“A child?” The words were heavy with something, a nameless something, a feeling that she could only think of as pregnant when she remembered it, aware of the irony, trying to put away the fear.
“A child? No, not a child, mortal. The king has touched you, and you shall bear him twins.”