Honor among thieves

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Walking through the brambles surrounding Coruth’s shack was disincitement enough, Malden thought, to keep most intruders away. Yet he now knew there would be other, less passive guardians to deal with. He tried to be on his guard.

Yet when a horse snorted close to his left ear, he still jumped. He wheeled around, half expecting to see some spectral animal gnashing its big ghostly teeth at him, but there was nothing there.

He had dealt with the supernatural often enough to respect it, and to avoid it whenever possible. He was willing to give up, to return to his boat and row away, his original purpose thwarted. He would come by at some later date when Coruth was prepared to receive him. However, when he tried to retrace his steps toward the shore, he heard a great rumbling thunder of hooves treading the flinty soil, directly between him and his rented boat.

“All right, witch-show me how to leave, that’s all I ask,” he said aloud.

The neighing of horses all around him was like laughter.

He could see nothing. The ghosts of horses left no hoofprints in the soil, it seemed. Nor could he smell any animals. Yet whenever he tried to lift a foot, or move his hands, he heard them all about him as if they were pressed very close, ready to stampede and trample him.

If he remained very still, he thought, perhaps he would be safe. Perhaps the ghostly trap was only meant to keep him where he was, until such time as Coruth chose to collect him.

But then he heard the noise of a great charger running straight toward him, every hoof falling like thunder. He could hear its great infernal breath snorting in and out of its undead lungs, even hear the brasses slapping and ringing on its sides. If he didn’t move, if he didn’t flee, it would surely run roughshod right over him Unless, of course, this was one of those traps that only fooled you into thinking you were in danger, when in fact you were perfectly safe the whole time. Typically such traps were designed to startle you into running away, right into an actual hazard you could have easily avoided.

Malden tried to stand his ground. Yet as the sound of the galloping horse came closer and closer, never deviating in the slightest from its course, clearly intent on his destruction, even his devious brain stopped thinking and started reacting.

Shouting in his fear, he turned and ran.

Horses were on either side of him, their heavy feet crashing down so fast and so frequently he was certain they would step on him at any moment. He felt their hot breath on his neck, could hear nothing but their whinnying and snorting and the enormous noise of their rhythmic running. He threw his arms over his head for protection and ran he knew not where. If he ended up running right into the cold waters of Eastpool, that was fine. If he was being herded back to his boat, he would give great thanks, if Something very solid and very real smacked into his face and nearly broke his nose. When he dared open his eyes again he saw he was standing on the porch of Coruth’s shack in the middle of the island. He’d run right into her front door.

He could no longer hear the sound of horses from any direction. The salt wind barely moved through the thorny vegetation behind him. The silence was like deafening laughter, and he felt his cheeks grow hot.

Then the door of the shack opened with a creak. Light and warmth spilled out across him, and then Cythera was standing before him, speaking his name, a look of utter confusion on her face.

He grabbed her up in a feverish embrace and kissed her deeply. She did not resist-not here, where there was no one to see it.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

He kissed her again.

“Sweet kisses,” she laughed, “do not an explanation make.”

“Just glad to be alive,” he told her. “Your mother’s illusory guardians are most compellingly believable.”

“The horses?” she asked.

“The horses,” he said. “Though-now that I can think again, I have to wonder. Why not something more immediately frightening? Like basilisks, or demons?”

“I seem to remember the first time you sat a horse,” Cythera laughed. “You were certainly frightened then!”

Malden smiled. “It wouldn’t stop moving. I was certain I would fall.”

Cythera laughed again. “If you must know, witchcraft doesn’t work that way,” she told him, ushering him inside. “Certainly a sorcerer could create the illusion of dragons swooping down, spitting fire, or whatever the sorcerer could imagine to scare away interlopers. Sorcery draws power from the pit and its denizens, but they have to be repaid for their gifts-you’ve seen the way they distort a sorcerer’s soul.”

“Not to mention his face,” Malden said, thinking of some of the sorcerers he’d met. No natural deformity could match the freakish countenances of wizards. In public, they always wore black veils to hide their features.

“Witches use the power of the world around them. They make subtle changes in what is already there, that’s all. This is the Isle of Horses, so horses it must be.”

“I see,” Malden said, though as usual when someone tried to explain magic to him, he had the creeping suspicion that the parts that seemed to make sense were only glosses on a text far beyond his comprehension. “To actually answer your question,” he said, putting matters of philosophy aside, “I’ve come to see your mother.”

“You’ve met someone else,” Cythera said teasingly. “You want to buy a love spell. Or is it revenge you want-on me for being such a fickle lover?”

He smiled. She wasn’t normally this playful. “Neither, my leman. You’re the only woman in all Skrae who can catch my eye, and I love your contradictions as much as I love your deeper constancy. But tell me-what’s put you in such a good mood?”

Her smile fell for a moment, but then it returned. “Mother’s been scrying. Watching the land around Helstrow, specifically.”

“A grisly sight to behold, I’m sure,” Malden said, thinking of what the barbarians must at that very moment be doing to the farmland around the royal fortress.

“I didn’t ask for details. I only wanted to know one thing, and I got the answer I was looking for. Croy still lives.”

“Does he?” Malden asked.

“Don’t look so dismayed. When he finds out about us he’ll be wrathful, but for now he thinks of you as his best friend. Here, sit down. I’ll get you a cup of tea. Mother will be out in a moment, once she’s finished with her working.”

Malden sat down and watched her head through another doorway into what appeared to be a kitchen. The shack was quite different from what he’d expected. He had imagined a cauldron bubbling over a fuming fire of brimstone. Bits of various animals, hacked off and dried and hanging from the ceiling by bits of string. Perhaps bones everywhere, or instead thousands of glass bottles holding weird and unknowable substances. A pile of books with a human skull on top as a paperweight. He would not have thought a stuffed reptile or two would be remiss.

Instead he was sitting in a very tidy, very plain parlor. The chair he sat in and the few other sticks of furniture in the room looked well-made but simple. There was a fire in a hearth but it glowed the cheery orange of normal, healthy, burning wood. There was only one sign that he was in the receiving room of a terrifying witch, and at first glance it seemed wholly innocuous: a bucket sat on a table at the far end of the room. Malden got up and glanced inside it, sure he would find frogs brains or skinned ghosts or the blood of virgins set to congeal-the kinds of things a witch would collect and use in her spells.

Instead the bucket held a half dozen long, pale roots, parsnips perhaps. Maybe Cythera had collected them to make her mother’s dinner. Malden was slightly disappointed. Yet when he looked closer, he saw the roots were strangely bifurcated, so that each of them seemed to have legs and arms. Indeed, they looked almost like human bodies. One even had a crude mouth and a pair of wrinkles that might have been eyes. He started to reach for one of the roots but before he could touch it jumped back in terror. He was certain one of those wrinkles had opened-and a blind, milky eye had peered back at him.

Coruth came storming into the room then, her iron-colored hair flying all around her head. “Whoever you are, it’ll mean your life if you touch that!” she screamed.