“We seem to have a choice of two,” he observed with a roguish smile. “The Imperial Crown, or the Daffodils.” And Eshiala, who may have become bolder during the past few weeks or perhaps merely tired of resisting the inevitable, blushed and announced, “I think I’d like to try the Daffodils.”
So it was in Maple that Ylo gained his reward and Eshiala learned how an expert made love. It was a very prolonged affair, at times gentle, at times extremely energetic. It began with her toes, and involved a lot of laughter and eventually tears that were not tears of sorrow, and it lasted until dawn.
By coincidence or divine irony, it was during that same night of rapture that a solitary rider thundered through Maple without stopping, passing below the chamber window. He thus drew ahead of his quarry. He had always known that this absurdity might befall his solitary pursuit, but he had heard Ylo speak of a warmer climate and guessed that he planned to return to Qoble. There were very few passes into Qoble, and they were all guarded by detachments of the XIIth legion. Its officers would listen to Centurion Hardgraa; every man in the ranks knew Signifer Ylo.
In Qoble the child would be recaptured and the traitor who had abducted her would pay the penalty.
SIX
Westward look
1
The forest giant had toppled years ago, and its trunk was thickly encrusted by moss of an especially nasty green. Higher than Rap’s head, it lay across his path like a wall. “Path” was a misnomer, of course. There was no path. There was almost no light to see by, or solid ground to stand on, or space to squeeze between the branches and suckers and vines. The rain did stop sometimes, briefly, but such momentary droughts made no difference at the bottom of that sea of vegetation, where water dribbled and dripped continuously. He had been clawing his way through this nightmare for more weeks than he could bear to think about. Had there been any way to give up, he would have given up long ago. Even fauns were not that stubborn.
Thrugg had found handholds somewhere and swung his great form onto that fallen trunk—peering up, Rap could see his enormous feet and calves like flour sacks. The rest of him was hidden in leaves. Then he crouched down, coming into view with the usual spray of water. He bared teeth in a grin. ”Coming?”
He went naked and there was not a single mark on his doughy hide. Rap was swathed in garments of stout linen, yet he had almost no undamaged skin left between scars, scrapes, rashes, bruises, and insect bites. He had renewed his entire outfit from hat to boots just three nights ago, and put a preservation spell on it, but already it was rotting and falling apart.
The surprise was not that the Impire had never conquered the Mosweeps; the surprise was that it had ever wanted to.
Stop! He was veering perilously close to an attack of self-pity, and he seemed to be doing that far too often recently. Go on, or sit down and die—those were the choices. Or use sorcery and be snapped up by Zinixo, of course, which would certainly be a worse ordeal than this. Fauns did not sit down and die! Nor did jotnar.
Thrugg’s big paw was waiting. Rap grabbed it with both hands and felt a familiar humiliation as the young giant yanked him effortlessly skyward. A rush of wet leaves in his face, and he was standing at the troll’s side, feeling childlike and helpless.
Thrugg pushed aside vegetation and peered at him with an expression of bestial ferocity that would have given a professional torturer nightmares for months. Rap could identify it now as mild concern, just as he had learned to make out the slurred mumble of trolls’ speech—the words were all in there, if you listened carefully enough.
“Not long now. You manage?”
Was his frailty so obvious? “Sure I can manage! Race you to the next castle . . . if you’ll just tell me where it is.” Thrugg chuckled, a deep rumbling noise inside the barrel of his chest. He thumped a friendly hand on Rap’s shoulder in approval. The moss crumbled under Rap’s feet, and he shot down into a soggy, crumbling paste, coming to rest with his arms on the green carpet and the troll’s horny toes in front of his face. Oh, Gods! Again he felt black blankets of despair envelop him. What was the use?
“Not down there!” Thrugg said.
Rap summoned his resources. Fight on! There would be humor in this situation somewhere, if he could find it. “I think you’re cheating!” he moaned. “Do troll rules let you nail your opponent into the ground?”
“Sure. Now I stamp on your head.”
“It’s not fair, you know! You must outweigh me three to one, and I’m the one who falls through?”
“Standing with feet wrong way.”
“Well, it is restful, like a warm bath.”
“That’s good! Dead trees usually full of many-legs. No bites? Stings?”
At once Rap’s skin began to crawl with a million tiny feet, real or imaginary. “Get me out of here!” he yelled, close to panic.
Thrugg lifted him out and jumped, still holding him like a child. They came down on the far side of the tree with a splash, knee-deep in mud. The brief stay in the rotted wood had been long enough for Rap’s clothes to be invaded by the many-legs, and several no-legs also. With howls, he began stripping them off.
“Use sorcery?” the troll asked urgently. He hated to see anyone else suffer, although he had endured months of slavery at Casfrel rather than wield his power against another human being.
“No!” Rap said. The Covin seemed to have abandoned its search, but the fugitives had agreed to continue their avoidance of magic in the open, and he would not be the first to give in. He clawed at something squishy feeding on his thigh. “Ugh!”
“Next castle’s shielded.”
“Wonderful! How’d you know that?”
“Been there before. Almost there now.” How Thrugg found his way through this impenetrable maze was a complete mystery. Rap thought he did it by smell. He could navigate just as well in the dark during a thunderstorm. He never lost his sense of direction, and he invariably found some sort of shelter for the night—not that he needed shelter, but the visitors did. He did not use sorcery, for Rap would have detected that.
“Then I’ll clean up there. Lead the way.” Leaving his infested clothes where they were, Rap set off in only his boots and a bare minimum tied around his middle. When he wore clothes, he sweated to death in the steamy heat. When he didn’t, he was stung and scratched unbearably. He could never decide which was worse. But if there was shielding ahead, then he could put everything right in a few minutes. New clothes, new skin. Cold beer!
Today they had crossed a single ridge, covering less than a league, and Witch Grunth’s home was a long way off yet. Insidious voices whispered that this expedition was a terrible mistake. The moon was past the full again, so Rap had been floundering around in the mountains for more than two months. He had no idea what was happening outside in the real world. He had no way now to communicate with Shandie or the warlock. For all he knew they might both have been captured, leaving him to fight a hopeless single-handed battle against the Covin. At the present rate he was going to die of old age before he achieved anything at all.
Krasnegar itself might no longer exist. He could not bear to think of Inos and the children. In the letter he had sent with Shandie, he had urged Inos to leave and take refuge at Kinvale. She might have sent the kids away, but he doubted she would have abandoned her kingdom. She took her royal responsibilities more seriously than anything else in her life, and at times she could be as stubborn as a faun.
Would he ever see her again? More likely he would die of old age in this Evil-begotten morass. What had ever possessed him to come here? Lith’rian would have been a far better bet than Grunth.
And always, that haunting half memory that whispered he had forgotten something important and was overlooking a winning move . . .
Thrugg had been right again, though. In a few minutes they heard running water and the ground dipped steeply. Rare was the stream that had no castle on it. Trolls spent their lives home-making, building huge edifices of rock, almost always straddling running water. A cataract in every room seemed to be the most desired feature in domestic architecture, except possibly incompleteness. As soon as he saw his work nearly finished, a troll would wander away and start again somewhere else. A man’s gotta do something, Thrugg said, and what else was there to do in the Mosweeps? Most of the jungle was edible for trolls, so there was no need to farm. Once in a while they would run down a deer—usually just for sport, but rarely for a taste of meat. Wood and paper and cloth turned to mush in days. Fires would not burn. Heaving rocks around creatively was better than doing nothing.