CHAPTER ELEVEN

The FarReach Mountains, Southern Kyros

T hey’d made good distance over the past few days, mainly because Salome was no longer feeling quite so fatigued. The two guides traveling with her were palpably relieved, to Salome’s grim amusement.

What man ever liked a weak woman?

Gods, she hated them, too.

StarDrifter was not far ahead. Salome could sense it. She wasn’t sure why, or how she knew this—perhaps that extraordinary sexual magnetism somehow communicated itself to her, even now—but just ahead he most certainly was.

The weather was sliding deeper into autumn. The mornings were frosty, the nights had that edge of ice to them associated with winter, and made sleeping uncomfortable. Salome was glad that StarDrifter was still this side of the FarReach Mountains. At least she could deal with him now, finish what lay between them, without having to voyage through the mountains in ever-deteriorating weather.

On this day they were traveling at a brisk trot along a little-used path, heading directly for the mountains that rose perhaps a day’s ride away; pink and purple massifs that wore tangled clouds about their snowy peaks and promised enormous hardship for those foolish enough to risk the passes. The guides had told Salome that few people dared to try—the FarReach Mountains effectively cut off Isembaard from the Northern Kingdoms.

Salome didn’t care about the mountains.

All she wanted was her chance at StarDrifter.

In the midafternoon, when she was tired enough that her attention had begun to lag, one of the guides murmured a caution.

“Someone approaches.”

Salome jerked to full attention, looking ahead.

A lone rider, a man, approached them on the road. He was bare-headed and unarmed, and did not appear surprised to see the three travelers halting their horses.

He pulled his own horse to a stop a few paces away from Salome and her guides.

“My name is Maximilian,” he said. “Of Escator.”

Salome frowned, trying to remember where she’d heard that name. It may not have come to her so quickly, had not she noticed the sudden servile demeanor of the guides.

“Oh,” she said, “you’re the King of Escator.”

He smiled very slightly. “Yes. I am the King of Escator.”

Salome’s frown deepened. There’d been some trouble with the King of Escator. In fact, there had always been trouble, of one sort or another, associated with this man’s life. Salome tried to remember the details, but her life had been so centered on Coroleas and on her own schemes that she’d paid scant attention to what happened elsewhere in the world.

“I’m sorry,” she said vaguely, and hoped that would cover most eventualities in this man’s history.

His smile widened, his dark blue eyes danced, and Salome suspected she had just made a complete fool of herself.

“That is very good of you,” he said, and Salome knew she had made a fool of herself.

She opened her mouth to make a tart comment (for the gods’ sakes, this man was a nobody king of a nothing kingdom!), but Maximilian continued speaking, addressing the two guides.

“I assume you are here to guide the Lady Salome?”

Salome’s mouth, already open, hung a little wider in her shock. How had he known who she was?

One of the guides nodded. “She hired us in Narbon, sire, to bring her south. She’s looking for a man.”

“StarDrifter SunSoar,” said Maximilian. “Yes, I know.” He looked directly at Salome. “He is back at my camp, Salome, waiting for you. An hour’s ride away.”

Then he addressed the guides again. “The lady has paid you? Yes? Then your task is done, my good men. She and I thank you, and I shall take over the lady’s care from this point. You may return to Narbon.”

Salome had managed, by this stage, to wrench her mouth shut. She was torn between irritation with this Maximilian who had just ridden into her life and decided to take it over, and the continuing bewilderment she felt as to how he’d known who she was and who she hunted (and what was the King of Escator doing out here, anyway?). She was also torn between a thrill of excitement and a growing self-righteous anger now she knew StarDrifter to be so close.

Finally, she would get her hands on him.

She’d drifted off again, and realized suddenly that the two guides had turned their horses and were cantering back down the track.

Maximilian was still smiling at her.

“They did say good-bye,” he said, “but your thoughts had wandered.”

“I’m sorry,” she said again, and then flamed in humiliation. What had happened to her famous poise?

“You do not have to apologize for everything,” Maximilian said. “Come, ride on. We have a way to go, and we can talk as we go.”

“How did you know who I was?” said Salome, kicking her horse after Maximilian’s. “And who I hunted? And how it was that I was here?”

“I am traveling into Isembaard,” said Maximilian, “hunting my wife, who was stolen from me. I have a somewhat disparate group of individuals within my group. StarDrifter, who you seek—”

“Does he still have the Weeper? I want it back.”

“Yes, we have the Weeper, but I doubt you will ‘get it back.’”

“It is mine.”

Maximilian gave a small shrug, his eyes on the road ahead. “I think the Weeper chooses his own companions. Now, please, allow me to finish.”

Salome gave a curt movement of assent with her head, wondering how it was that this man could make her feel so small with such a simple statement.

“I also have in my group four Icarii—I assume you know of the Icarii?”

“Yes,” Salome said, “of course. They fluttered uselessly about Yoyette from time to time.”

That earned her an unreadable look from Maximilian, but he made no comment on her words.

“I also have two marsh women with me,” he said. “Witch-women who walk the boundaries between the dream world and this one. Their names are Venetia and Ravenna, mother and daughter. Venetia knew you were coming, and asked me to wait for you. She knows you hunt StarDrifter, and—”

“Does she know why I hunt him?”

Maximilian’s look of sympathy at that point almost undid her.

“Yes,” he said. “At least we know some of it—of what happened after StarDrifter stole the Weeper and left you to suffer the hatred and revenge of the Corolean court.”

“They murdered my son!” she hissed. “Murdered him!”

“And you were poorly treated, too,” Maximilian said. “I am sorry, Salome. You have our sympathy for it, know that. Although I will not allow you to physically harm StarDrifter, I am prepared to stand back and watch whatever else you deal to him.”

Salome humiliated herself yet further by bursting into tears. She had been deeply angry and emotionally overwrought for many weeks. Maximilian’s unexpected sympathy caught her so unawares she could not prevent the emotion spilling over.

“I want to kill him so badly,” she managed to get out between the sobs. “I want to…but I can’t…I can’t.”

Maximilian pulled his horse to a halt across the path of Salome’s horse, making it stop as well. He didn’t say anything, but he reached out a hand, resting it on her shoulder, and Salome dropped her reins, lowered her face into her hands, and cried as she’d never allowed herself in her life previously.

StarDrifter rose to his feet as he saw the two riders approaching.

Nerves fluttered in his belly.

Everyone else—the Icarii, Maximilian’s two guardsmen, Venetia and Ravenna—stood slightly apart from him, distancing themselves both physically and emotionally.

The sound of the horses’ hooves grew louder, and StarDrifter forced himself to look at Salome.

She was still lovely, but the suffering she’d experienced at the hands of the vengeful Coroleans (at his hands) showed clearly on her face and in the brittleness of her eyes.

She and Maximilian pulled their horses to a halt, Maximilian dismounting and then helping Salome off her mount.

Salome’s eyes did not leave StarDrifter for one moment.

She was dressed in men’s clothes, leather trousers and boots, and a jerkin over a thickly woven undyed linen shirt, but StarDrifter could still see that she’d lost a lot of weight.

Maximilian bent down and said something very quietly in Salome’s ear.

She gave a tight nod, then walked over to StarDrifter.

The atmosphere was so tense that StarDrifter could barely breathe. The sheer weight of the guilt he felt was almost too much to bear.

All he’d wanted was to snatch the Weeper and walk away. He didn’t really want to know about what Salome had endured after he’d taken the Weeper, and he very much didn’t want to be faced with it now.

She didn’t say anything. Not at first. She stood before him, regarding him with such a passion of hatred that StarDrifter was forced to drop his eyes.

“Do you have any idea?” she whispered finally. “Any idea, StarDrifter, what you did to me?”

There wasn’t anything he could say. He wanted to say that it hadn’t been him, that it had been Ba’al’uz, but he knew he couldn’t say that.

In the end, he was as guilty of what had happened as Ba’al’uz.

StarDrifter forced himself to meet Salome’s eyes again.

They were brilliant with emotion.

“They murdered Ezra,” she said, her voice close to breaking. “They brought him before me and, not enough that they’d raped me, they raped him, five men, or perhaps ten. I lost count. They brutalized him so badly…”

Her voice broke, her entire body shook, and for a moment StarDrifter thought she would fall over.

He reached out a hand, but she flinched away from him.

“Don’t touch me!” Salome took several huge breaths, managing to bring her emotions under control enough to resume speaking. “They raped and brutalized him, before the entire court, then took a knife and cut off his penis and his testicles, and they let him bleed out in front of me, over me…I still feel his blood all over me, StarDrifter! It stained me, it stains me, to this day, and it stains you, too…can’t you feel it, can’t you see it? Can’t you…can’t you…”

She burst into sobs. StarDrifter knew he should do something, but didn’t know what, then in a moment Maximilian was beside her, an arm about her shoulder, pulling her against his body, murmuring something into her hair.

StarDrifter wanted to sink into the ground. He wanted one of Gorgrael’s Ice Worms to appear right now and swallow him. He wanted a gryphon to drop down from the sky and seize him in cruel talons and carry him to a mountaintop where he would be torn apart and released from this damned, cursed misery of guilt.

He thought he could have weathered a Salome accusing him of the hurt done to her, but this broken woman before him now, accusing him of the hurt and harm and death done to Ezra, who StarDrifter had never meant to hurt, against whom he had held absolutely no grudge at all…

“I’m sorry,” he murmured, and Salome tore herself out of Maximilian’s arms.

“Do you have any idea what it is like to watch your child die before you?” she screamed at him.

StarDrifter’s eyes filmed with tears—not tears of pity for himself, but for Salome. “Yes,” he said, very softly, remembering watching his granddaughter Zenith being torn to pieces before his eyes.

He’d been responsible for that death, too.

“Yes,” he said, “I do know, Salome. I am so sorry, I don’t know what I can do to—”

“I don’t want you to do anything!” she shouted. “Nothing! I want nothing from you! I want…I want…”

Suddenly she wheeled to one side, almost leaping the two or three paces between herself and Doyle. The movement shocked and surprised everyone, and before Doyle could stop her Salome had seized his sword, and was back before StarDrifter again.

She shrieked, lifted the sword above her shoulders, and, even as Maximilian grabbed frantically at her, hit StarDrifter across the cheek with the flat of the blade with all the strength she could muster.

StarDrifter staggered back several paces. He raised a hand to his cheek, watching Salome, now held firmly about the waist by Maximilian.

He pulled his hand away from his cheek. It was slick with blood. Salome had hit him with only the flat of the blade, but even so the twin edges of the blade had cut into his flesh, and now he had two parallel cuts along his cheek.

“I want to murder you,” Salome said in a voice half hiss, half whisper. “I want to stick this into your belly, and make you suffer the way Ezra suffered, but I can’t…I can’t…I can’t kill you…”

She bent half over, still holding the sword, the point of the blade now resting on the ground, and sobbed again, once, twice, then she looked up to StarDrifter, her eyes swollen with emotion and grief.

“I can’t kill you, StarDrifter, because I am pregnant with your baby. An Icarii baby, and I know more than anyone that if a woman bears an Icarii baby without its Enchanter father there to sing it out, then the baby will tear her to pieces, and I don’t want to die like my grandmother died, screaming and bleeding as her child was born…I don’t want to die like my grandmother died…”

StarDrifter already felt as if his world was falling apart—his child? She was pregnant with his child?—but then Salome uttered the words that exploded his entire life into a million jagged, terrible pieces.

“I don’t want to die like Embeth died,” she whispered.