A Thief in the Night

chapter Eighty-seven

When Aethil returned, Slag lay slumped on the divan again, one forearm pressed against his eyes. “Oh, woe is me,” he moaned, and rocked his head back and forth.

Malden hoped he wasn’t overdoing it.

The elf queen, however, for once didn’t seem to notice her paramour’s emotional state. She went to her sideboard and poured a goblet full of dark wine, then lifted it with a shaking hand. She looked even paler than she’d been before.

“Sir Croy,” she said, softly, “you didn’t . . .” She couldn’t seem to finish the thought. After a moment she swallowed her wine and shook her head. “No. Of course not. I refuse to believe it. You’re an honorable human. Not at all like the ones in the stories.”

Cythera stood up from her chair in the corner. “Your highness,” she said. “You don’t look well.”

Aethil gave her a bitter smile—then sighed and favored them all with a more sincere countenance. “Just a trifle tired. The soldiers were wounded most horribly, and many of them didn’t survive. I . . . I don’t normally see so much . . . blood.”

“A cave-in must be a terrible thing down here,” Cythera sympathized.

“It was no accident. The wounds I saw were made with swords. Iron swords . . . they tell me there are other humans in our home now. Two fierce warriors, brutes who offer no quarter or mercy. Supposedly they’re even being helped by a dwarf, of all things. They lay ambushes for our soldiers and cut them down without warning.”

Cythera gasped, though Malden was certain it wasn’t out of horror. These two warriors the queen described could be none other than Croy and Mörget. The dwarf with them must be Balint or one of her crew.

“I know,” Aethil said, draining more of her wine, “that you three had nothing to do with this. You couldn’t have—it’s—it’s impossible. You were with me, or in the gaol, this whole time. So I will not say more, for fear of offending you. Yet when these two men are caught—and their traitorous dwarf—well, justice must be done.”

“Of course,” Malden said. He sidled over to the queen and went to one knee before her. “Perhaps you’ll let us see them when they are brought in, so we can revile them with you.”

Aethil shook her head. “I would grant that wish if I could, but I’m afraid right now I have little ability to arrange things.” She looked at Malden, and for a moment he thought she was looking at a thinking, rational being. Always before she’d regarded him like an especially talented pet. “The lords have been in close council with the Hieromagus. They have a plan, they claim. Some method to capture the fugitive humans without losing any more of our people. They wouldn’t tell me the details—already they’ve stopped trusting me. They’ve also been saying things about me. Hurtful things.”

Malden was so shocked by her confiding in him that for a moment he could only respond in kind. “They threatened you?”

The queen shook her head. “I’ve told you. I have very little real power. For simple things, for things that don’t matter, sometimes my words are heeded. But this is different. Those soldiers . . . they died to protect me. From humans. And the lords are saying I’ve already shown you three humans far too much compassion. They fear you, squire. They are afraid, and they are men, and when men are afraid, they think only of violence. I’m not sure but I think they may try to harm you, and Cythera, and Sir Croy.”

Malden wasn’t sure what the elfin lords could do to him worse than throwing him into their ancestral mass. But then he remembered they had a reputation as torturers. “If there’s anything we can do, anything to help—”

Apparently Slag hadn’t forgotten that they were trying to use Aethil to aid their escape. He went on with the scheme, as planned—exactly according to the script they’d worked out. “Oh!” the dwarf moaned, more loudly this time. “Woe is me!”

Aethil dropped her goblet on the floor, spilling wine across the hem of her gown. She rushed to the divan and knelt beside it, grabbing up Slag’s hands in her own. “Sir Croy! Are you sick? What has befallen you while I was gone? Oh, I hurried back here as quickly as I could. You must believe me!”

“Oh, to die, to perish here, in this dark place,” Slag moaned.

“You won’t die at all!” Aethil’s voice was near hysterics. “My love, you’re going to live forever. And I can come visit you as often as you like, once you’re part of the ancestral mass.”

“To live . . . forever,” Slag said. He shook his head wildly. “In the dark!”

Aethil looked up at Malden and Cythera, her eyes pleading.

Malden almost regretted what they would say next. He was not pleased with the harm they’d already done to Aethil. But he knew this was their only chance.

“Sadness has gripped him like a fever,” Cythera explained.

“He longs for one thing only,” Malden added, perhaps not with the same theatrical plaintiveness he’d originally planned on putting into the words.

“What is it? My darling, tell me, and I’ll give it to you with all my heart. Is it another kiss? Is it a caress? I’ll gladly give to you my virtue, if it will—”

“I must feel the sun’s light on my face, one last time,” Slag whispered. “Or my soul will shrivel and f*cking perish.”

Malden’s hands were balled into tight fists at his sides. This was the moment that could be their undoing—or mean their escape. If Aethil agreed to let them go up to one of the exits from the Vincularium, they could slip past any escort and be free. If she refused, there would be no more chances, no more possibilities—

“Of course you can see it,” Aethil said.

The dwarf’s body stiffened on the divan. “Really? I don’t mean the red bauble you’ve got chained up down here either. I mean the sun that warms the surface world. The—The—”

“The golden orb of day, the fiery chariot of heaven,” Malden supplied.

“Aye, that one,” Slag concurred.

“Well, yes, of course I knew which one you meant,” Aethil told him. “Nothing could be simpler. Are you too gripped by sadness to walk? I can summon servants to carry you there, if you like.”

Slag sat up and then slid off the divan to his feet. “I can manage.”

“Then come this way,” Aethil told him. She looked back at Malden and Cythera, and for a moment Malden was terrified she would tell them to wait there, that she and Slag would go look on the sun alone. “Your servants must come with us. Though they lack your sensitive nature, I’m sure they’ll want to see this as well.”

“I wholeheartedly agree,” Slag said, and started toward the door.

“Oh, no, not that way,” Aethil said. “I’ve been given instructions not to let you leave my chambers. Luckily we don’t need to, for this.” She walked toward the back of the room, to where the curtain of water fell constantly. She lifted a hand and the waters parted, revealing a dark room beyond. Lifting a candlestick from one of her tables, Aethil stepped through and into a sumptuous bedchamber. “I had planned on showing you this room anyway,” she told Slag. “Though not in such company.”

The queen led them through the bedchamber to a broad archway. Myriad glinting beams of light emerged from beyond the arch. One by one they filed through, into a cave of unsurpassed beauty.

At first Malden thought the walls were decked with snow, and that icicles of impossible size and profusion had grown from the ceiling. It was no colder in this hidden cave, however, than in the rest of the Vincularium, and he quickly determined that the “snow” was in fact a dense encrustation of rock crystals. They covered every surface, sending up faceted spearheads both minuscule and gigantic, sticking out in every possible direction. One spar fifteen feet long crossed the cave on a diagonal slant, and as Aethil’s light touched it, beams of pure color shot out to dazzle Malden’s eyes.

“This is my personal grotto,” Aethil explained. “For centuries, only royalty have been allowed back here. Please, don’t touch that!”

Malden looked up just moments after he’d touched a rock so covered with crystal spines that it resembled a sea anemone. Even the softest contact was too much, as it turned out—the crystals snapped off one by one and fell to the floor to shatter.

“Oh, they’re so delicate,” Aethil said.

“I am sorry,” Malden told her.

She shook her head prettily. “Never mind. Come this way.”

Deeper in the cave, its natural shape curved around an entire pipe organ’s worth of standing crystal columns, each thicker and taller than the last. In the next section a perfectly still pool of water covered most of the floor, with islands of crystal rising from the yellowish water here and there. Still farther on, a narrow path led upward, fringed on either side by perfect growths, like a garden of diamonds.

Slag must have seen him slipping crystal shards into a pocket of his robe. The dwarf shook his head and leaned back to whisper, “They’re worthless, lad. Too fragile to use as gemstones, and common as crap.”

Malden frowned. He’d thought perhaps to make his own fortune here. He still hadn’t forgiven himself for failing to rob the Hall of Masterpieces when he had the chance. Yet all expression left his face when he followed Aethil up the path—and sunlight fell across his hands.

Real sunlight.

The light of day—the light of the surface world.

Its color, its warmth, its clarity, all proclaimed its provenance. He hurried after the queen, and nearly trampled on a patch of crystals grown into the shape of flowers.

“Here, stand just here,” Aethil said. She showed Malden the exact patch of cleared ground she meant. “Now. Look—there.”

Malden looked up, following her pointing finger.

And saw a patch of blue sky.

It was beyond being beautiful. It was the coolth of summer shade, the first taste of ale after a day of thirst. It was perhaps six inches on a side. The cave stretched onward and upward, he could not say how far—perhaps hundreds of feet. It opened on what must be the side of the mountain, a natural exit from the Vincularium. Too bad, then, that it was so encrusted with crystals that not even Balint’s knocker could have fit through that gap.

Of course, if one were to break the crystals out of the way, say with a hammer, uncaring of their beauty in the desperation of one’s need to get out—

“Let Sir Croy look now. He feels the need the most,” Aethil said.

Reluctantly, Malden stepped away from the viewing place and let Slag take his spot.

“I used to come here when I was a young girl, and dream of what strange lands might lay out there,” Aethil confided. “I think even then I knew that my lover waited for me out there in the other world, waited for the day when he would come find me. Is it not beautiful?”

The tears that came to Slag’s eyes, Malden thought, might be tears of desire. Or they might be tears of irritation—a dwarf’s eyes were far too sensitive for the sun’s pure light. He could not know.

“Aye, lass,” Slag said. “Pretty as a f*cking picture.”