“Please,” said the girl. “We’ll tell no one else. I swear. It will be our secret.”
“It has been my experience,” replied the peddler, “that children are not especially good at keeping secrets.” She laughed quietly and chewed at the stem of her pipe. “But I will tell you all I know, which is, I have no doubt, not as much by half as you three would wish to hear.” The peddler shifted in the chair, and her back popped loudly.
“The sickly woman in Sinara claimed that her own father had stood with Elspeth Snow in the Battle of the Vale of Pnath, and that he had ridden with her after the defeat of the King of Bones and Rags, down winding, perilous canyon roads to witness the sundering of the onyx gates of the royal city of Amaakin’šarr. There he watched as the Twilight’s Wrath — this is the sobriquet Isobel had been given by her troops — confronted her father on the torch-lined steps of the palace. His guards bowed before her, praying she would spare their lives. But the Qqi d’Tashiva drew his sword against her and stood his ground. In the decades since his sister’s escape he’d known only loneliness and regret, not one single hour of joy, and what was the loss of his life when he’d already lost the kingdom he’d hoarded at the cost of his only love?
“‘Father,’ said Isobel Snow to him, ‘will you not now cast aside your folly and old misdeeds? Will you not put down your blade that I will not have to cause you further harm than already I have?’
“The King of Bones and Rags, he sneered hatefully and advanced towards her, blue eyes blazing, his sword glinting in the light of the flickering torches. There was naught remaining in him but bitterness and rage. ‘Do not call me Father, whore, for you are your mother’s bitch and none of mine. Now, come down off your horse and face me.’
“Elspeth Snow, Twilight’s Wrath, the Maiden of Serannian — for she was called that, as well — did not dismount, as she desperately did not wish to slay the man who’d sired her, no matter his crimes against her mother and against the ghouls and all of the denizens of the Underworld. In her heart, she knew mercy, which Isobel had taught her, having learned it herself from the actions of Pickman and Sorrow. Did they not have fair cause to slay her, rather than aid in her escape? Sure. She had been half the author of their pain and the subjugation of their race. But even the black hearts of ghouls may feel pity.
“‘No, Father,’ said Elspeth. ‘I have brought too much death this day, and your blood will not also stain my hands. I shall not be the despoiler you have become. That will not be your legacy to me.’
“‘Thief,’ he growled. ‘Coward and thief, usurper and witch. You come to take my lands from me, but have not the courage to test your mettle against the rightful Qqi d’Tashiva. No whelp of mine would flinch from her final duty, cur.’
“At that, one of Elspeth’s lieutenants drew an arrow from his quiver and nocked it, taking aim at Isaac Snow. But she was quick, and she stayed the man’s hand. Again, her father cursed her as a coward.”
“She should have killed him,” said the boy who’d yawned.
“Of a certain,” agreed the tow-headed girl.
“That may be. In the years to come, said the woman in the tavern in Sinara, Elspeth would sometimes doubt her choice that day, and sometimes she would wish him dead. But the fact, as this woman would have it, is that she did not kill him, nor did she permit any other to bring him harm. She declared that any who dared touch him would suffer a judgment far worse than death.”
“Then what did she do?” asked the boy on the tow-headed girl’s right.
“What she did do, child, was bestow upon him a gift.”
All three children stared back at her now in stark disbelief.
“No,” said the girl.
“Yes,” replied the peddler, “if the woman who had been a priestess in a temple of the Elder Ones, and before that a pirate and a smuggler, if she is to be trusted. Though, of course, it may be she was a liar or mistaken or mad, and sure, you may choose to believe or not.”
“Then . . . what did she do?” asked the boy who’d yawned. “I mean, what manner of gift did she give such a wicked man?”
At that the peddler smiled and slowly shook her head. “The woman in the tavern did not say, because she did not know. Her father had never told her, not specifically, but said only that it was a gift that lifted from the shoulders of Isaac Snow all his bitterness and insanity, all of his fury and grief. Elspeth’s gift, said the woman in the tavern, restored to him that which he’d held so dear, though how this was accomplished we do not know. But he was changed — and changed utterly. Afterwards, Elspeth ordered him escorted to the seven hundred steps and up, up, up . . . and up . . . to the Gates of Deeper Slumber, where he was sent back to the Waking World to live out the remainder of his days and where he may yet dwell, for none in the Dream Lands have knowledge of what became of him. We can say only, by this version of the truth, that he passed beyond the ken of the world.”
“That isn’t a very good ending,” frowned the tow-headed girl.
“It most assuredly isn’t,” said the boy who’d yawned.
“Not at all,” added the boy on the girl’s right side.
The peddler tilted her head, and she said sternly, “Do you imagine this is the way of tales, the way of the world, that it is somehow beholden to come with satisfying conclusions? If, indeed, it comes with any conclusions at all?”
The children didn’t answer the question. The boy who’d yawned peered over his shoulder at the fire, which was beginning to burn down. The tow-headed girl stared down at her bare feet. And the boy on her right picked at a loose thread in his trousers. Only the girl spoke. She asked the old woman, “Aunty, did Elspeth Snow become the new Queen of Bones and Rags?”
“No, child, she did not. She had no taste for power, though the temptation must have weighed heavily on her soul. Elspeth entrusted Richard Pickman and his compatriots with the future of Thok and with the task of rebuilding Amaakin’šarr. She forsook what remained of the prophecy, vowing never again to be a soldier, and she rode away from Thok and back to the Upper Dream Lands. She took with her the Basalt Madonna, which, I have heard, she carried far across the Middle Ocean and even beyond the Eastern Desert and Irem, City of Pillars. It could not be destroyed, and she dared not entrust it to the hands of any being so mighty they could have undone the Qqi d’Evai Mubadieb. But she did hide it, and she hid it well. Some say she cast it over the edge of the world, though, personally, I think that is likely an exaggeration.”
“And what became of her after that?” asked the girl, not looking up from her feet.
“Some say that she returned at last to Serannian, where she died many years ago. And others say she went to Celephaïs, and still others that, by wielding the Madonna she’d become undying and was permitted a place among the Old Ones in the shining city of Kadath. But these are all rumors, and no more to be trusted than ever rumors should be,” and with that, the peddler drew a deep breath and said that she’d told all she could tell in a night.
There were questions from the children, but she did not answer them. She sent the three away to their beds, and then went to the garret room she’d been provided for the night — in exchange for a story. Several of the cats followed her, including the tabby tom, and they stood sentry at the top of the stairs. However, despite her great exhaustion, the peddler did not immediately seek sleep. Rather, she opened the shutters of the garret’s single small window, and there in Ulthar, she undressed before the brilliant eye of the moon and before all the icy, innumerable stars that speckle an early autumn evening sky. The night regarded her with perfect indifference, and she regarded it with awe. And the peddler, the seller of notions and oddments, the nameless old woman who wandered the cities on the plains below Mount Lerion, she recalled her mother, and a kindly ghoul named Sorrow, and the last face her father had worn. And she told herself a truer tale than she’d told the children.