“These will not save you,” he said. “The griga’ath will not recoil from them, shivering in a corner. But for perhaps an instant it may remember flowers. It may remember that it was human once.”
He never gave us a chance to break down. I think none of us dared to look at one another—I certainly did not— and for my part I felt as though all the blood in my body had turned to tears. He said, “It will look like me. You must understand that, for your lives’ sake. It will look exactly like me, and it will be hungry. Listen now. Throw the flowers in its path, vase and all—that had better be you, Soukyan—then turn and run. Do not look back, not even to aid each other. Do not meet the griga’ath’s eyes. Have you understood me?”
None of us could speak. I heard his impatient little sigh—familiar to me as my own breath, and as dear—and again I was oddly struck by the dry-eyed anger and resolve in Lukassa’s face. My friend said, “You must not weep when I go—there will not be time,” and at that moment the door opened and the old man in the red coat came sauntering in.
I know now about the fox. I know what he was, and I know how he and Soukyan met, and what they meant and did not mean to each other. But at that time I made no connection between him and courtly, over-jolly old Redcoat, and I was astonished to see Soukyan whirl on him furiously, shouting in a sibilant tongue that I should have recognized from hearing him speaking to the fox, that very first night. Redcoat paid him no mind at all, but beamed benignly on us all and started toward the bed. I barred his way, without knowing why.
“Let me pass, foolish woman,” he ordered me, in a voice that started out as Redcoat’s fox-bark and became something else, something I had also heard before. Behind me, my friend said softly, “Let him pass, Lal.” Then I knew who it was, and I stepped aside.
He did not shift shape until he was standing close beside the bed, looking down at my friend out of the fox’s yellow eyes. They were the first to change, turning the unfocused, pupilless blue that I remembered. The rest of the metamorphosis seemed to happen slowly—hideously, languorously slowly—yet when it was over, it was impossible to believe that anyone but Arshadin had ever been there, saying in his own flat, arid voice, “I told you long ago we would meet like this at the last. You cannot say I never told you.”
My friend answered him, infuriatingly calm as ever. “Do not preen yourself quite yet, Arshadin. Great as you are, and weak as I am, still it took you long and long to pry the sun from my grasp and force it down into darkness. And even now you cannot kill me, but must await the new moon. I would have brought a book, or a bit of needlework, if I were you.”
But there was no baiting Arshadin, not this time. Bleakly placid, he replied, “I can wait. You know better than any how I can wait. It is the others who cannot.”
“Then they will have to learn,” my friend retorted. “I am better acquainted than you with those others of yours, and there’s not one would dare try conclusions with me as I lie here. Come, draw up a chair, let’s talk a little last while. Indulge an old pedant,” he added, and I caught my breath, thinking, he has a plan, oh he has, I must be ready. Even then I would have believed that he knew something Uncle Death did not know.
There was a stool, but Arshadin never looked at it, nor at anyone else in the room. He remained standing, blank and heavy and damp as so much cheese; but his attention was such a physical reality that it seemed a visible beast, crouching red-jawed over my friend on the bed. He said stolidly, “What have we to talk about, you and I? I know what you know, and you must finally understand what I have been trying to tell you since the first day I was your student.” The word broke free of his taut, flat lips with such force that my friend put up a hand as though to ward it off. “Your student,” Arshadin said again. “Your disciple, your apprentice, your anointed crown prince, your inheritor. I would have sold myself gladly to the vilest west-country slaver to be rid of those wondrous birthrights forever. Do you hear me now, now, at last, my master? Do you hear me now?“
My friend did not answer. Soukyan growled very softly and took a step toward Arshadin. I caught his arm. Rosseth kept glancing at the door, plainly needing Tikat to come through it. As for Lukassa, she never took her eyes off Arshadin: their expression was so rapt that she might have been gazing at her lover, if you ignored the set of her mouth. She looked far older than she was.
Arshadin did not notice her. Beyond the window, the last stains of twilight had already bled away into a strange, pale dark: not the transparent summer night of the north, but a watery false dawn, gray and evasive as quicksilver. There was a light bent through it, faintly brightening the room though no candle had been lit. Rosseth’s body was utterly rigid, his eyes too wide and still. I put my arm around him, so that he could let himself tremble against me.
On the bed, my friend mumbled, “I had very little to teach you, Arshadin, but that little will cost you dear when you learn it at last, at other hands.” His voice was fraying, his words beginning to blear into each other. He said, “You were never my student—that was the mistake. I should have mocked and browbeaten you, riddled you without letup, insulted you, challenged you morning to night, just as I treated Lal and Soukyan and all the others. But they were students—you were my equal, from that first day, and I let you know it. That was the mistake.” He had no strength even to shake his head, but barely managed to turn it from this side to that. “Yet what else should one do with an equal? I had no practice at it— perhaps you will deal more wisely in your turn.” The last words might have been drops of rain in dry leaves.
I thought he might be dead then, but Arshadin knew better. He leaned down over him and shouted at his closed eyes, “If you thought me your equal, why did you never trust me with those things I needed to know? Why were you so sure that I would use them for ill? I was young, and there were choices yet before me—there were other ways, other journeys, there were!” Once again, for an instant, I saw his thick, empty face turn almost incandescent with old pain, almost beautiful with bitterness. Then he caught himself and went on stiffly, “Much could have been different. We were not doomed to end here.”
My friend opened his eyes. When he spoke this time, his voice was different: weary beyond telling, but calm and clear and strangely young, as the nearness of death often makes voices sound. He said, “Oh, yes, yes, we were, Arshadin. There was never but the one road for you, being who you are. Being who I am, I loved you because of what you are. So we were doomed to this, you see, it did indeed have to happen so.” He reached up and took sudden frail hold of Arshadin’s right hand. He said, “And yet, knowing, I did love you.”
Arshadin snatched his hand away as if the old man’s touch had seared it through. “Who ever cared about that?” he demanded. “Your love was your own affair, but I had a right to your faith. Deny it and you’ll die lying.” He was screaming now, more human in his fury and pettishness than I could have imagined him. “By every filthy god and demon, I had a right to your faith!”
“Yes,” my friend answered him softly, “yes, you did. Yes. I am sorry.” I had never heard him say such a thing before. “But I must tell you even so, you were a fool to trade your heart’s blood for your heart’s desire. It is an old bargain, and a bad one. I expected you to make a better deal.”