Free The Rose of Sarifal by Paulina Claiborne Page B

forests and the fruit trees had no purchase here, and could not find her in the dead underground, in the Beastlord’s tomb.
    The lycanthropes followed, quiet and subdued. Perhaps they also were lacking faith, Marikke thought. Perhaps every month Argon Bael had tried some trick like this to keep their hearts alight. “Oh, sweet Mother,” she prayed, “make me wise when the time comes—” but there was silence in the part of her mind where the goddess lived. Instead she filled it with worrying and predictions while she ransacked her memory for the words of the prophecy that Argon Bael had mentioned. And there was something else he’d said. “Tell me about the flower,” she asked him. “In Caer Moray. Is it a … yellow rose, by any chance?”
    The torches around them burned up bright. The angel hurried down the slope, which curved to the right. He stopped and turned, his eyes blazing, his sword across his back, the sleeping boy in his arms who cried out as if beset by evil dreams.
    “This is not a flower that is native to Moray,” hissed Argon Bael. “It is an alien species that has come to us from Gwynneth Island, where it crept up from the Feywild, beautiful and deadly. Let me tell you what the lycanthropes have done in Caer Moray, these last ten years. They have turned away from Malar and the hunt. They offer no blood sacrifices. They ignore our cherished festivals, and instead have forged alliances with our enemies. In the winter months they visit Northlander villages in the deep snow and bring food to them if they are starving, smoking meat from their own tables. They claim this is an ancient rite, handed down by Garmos Saernclaws himself—it is a heresy, a perversion. The Feast of Stags, they call it. Always they feed the human part and starve the beasts, so that many of them can no longer run on four legs and stumble if they try. Slaving together under their fey princess, they have rebuilt the old human walls, the human towns and palaces that our ancestors burned, that our ancestors spilled their hot blood to destroy, and now they live in them, sitting in chairs and sleeping in beds and roasting their food in fire. They do all this as if in Malar’s name. And he permits it in his slumber. But when he wakes …”
    In his arms, Kip moaned aloud. The angel smiled, and stroked his brow with a gesture that seemed for amoment like tenderness. Then he turned and hurried down the slope, deeper into the tomb.

    The Savage, crouching in the drizzle up above, in the darkening afternoon, now witnessed a strange thing. He hid behind a broken marble pillar. In front of him the horses, sheep, and goats stood in clumps, tearing at the grass that grew up through the stones, or nibbling at the wet branches of the gorse trees. Among them and around them prowled a wolf, an enormous brute who had established a perimeter for them, squatting to piss along a circuit of fallen stones. Whenever she got close they shied away in terror, but then quickly forgot as soon as she retreated into the wide porch, where, because of a protruding section of the wall, she was invisible to them, but not to the Savage as he watched. Distracted for a moment by a noise behind him, the elf turned his head. But it was nothing, a trick of the wind between two stones, and when he turned back the beast had changed.
    This in itself was no surprise, because the lycanthropes were always changing, moving back and forth between their beast and human forms through a dozen different gradations. Even in the most rapid transformations he could see the shift, as their jaws, hair, and teeth grew or receded, and their joints reformed. Even in their most human state, he could still see the beast inside of them, and even as animals he sensed the human clawing to get out.
    Nor did they wear clothes. The Savage had heard of lycanthropes wearing coats or cloaks and breeches, even boots, when they wanted to hide among humans or come into a town and steal away a human