Mara rushed blindly through the thickening forest, heedless of obstacle or danger. Three times she saw a flash of brilliant black amid the trees ahead of her, heard the clear and familiar whistle and chatter, its accents dire and urgent. Each time she turned toward the source of the sound and rushed toward it, only to find that the spider, made frantic by pain, had scurried elsewhere, leaving her alone with her deepest fears.
On she raced, her thoughts darkening as the foliage closed around her. Ahead, the cry arose again, this time shrill and different. She saw him finally, thrashing in the leaves of a sunlit clearing, a deep, tattered wound on his back. Two legs held at a grotesque, broken angle, he was screeching in pain and trying to burrow at the base of a blasted oak. Mara raced to the spider and touched him. Frantically Cyren spun about, arching his shattered back in desperate, witless self-defense.
When he saw it was Mara, something in the spider surrendered to the darker thing that had chased him for a mile through the midday forest. Slowly, as though he were trying to remember something deep in the years of a memory as old as his species, Cyren folded quietly, the leaves around them stirring as he trembled and twitched.
"Cyren," Mara said vaguely, again extending her hand toward the creature. She was no healer, no scholar, but she was woodwise and acquainted with winter, and she knew the seasons of death. Bravely fighting back tears, she draped her cloak about the thorax of the spider, unsure if such was even a comfort to his kind.
The creature looked at her in its ugly innocence, and for a moment, she almost thought she saw a more soothing face amid the fangs, pedipalpi, and the multiple eyes-the vanished face of Cyren the elf, stolen by magic from her eyes these three years and soon to be lost forever, as death approached with its cold forgetfulness.
"All will be well," Mara soothed desperately, wrapping her thin arms about the creature's savaged midsection. "Sturm will destroy that… that thing back there, and we will finish our business in the Southern Darkwoods. All will be well, Cyren Calamon, and to us the night of the moons will come."
She didn't know what else to say. She sat beneath the oak in a daze, and it was a goodly while before she noticed that the body she held was not that of a spider but of a mortally wounded elf.
"Mara," Cyren breathed, in his voice still the dry, clicking sound of the spider's call. She turned to him, her eyes widened, and a brief, momentary joy flickered in the depths of her heartbreak.
"Oh, Cyren," she marveled. "You have… you have returned. Even if-"
She stopped herself at once, deploring her grief-loosened words. But Cyren smiled and touched her face gently with his damaged hand.
"Even if only for a while? Yes, Mara. There is a certain… Tightness in this form. There is naught I would rather be but Cyren the elf, though he lies indeed at the threshold of death."
Weeping, Mara cradled his head.
"The last cruelty," she said, "is that you are yourself again, only to die."
Cyren chuckled bitterly, his breathing wet and strained.
"Not the last cruelty, dear Mara, but the last save one. For you see, I am not myself but an enchantment cast over the creature who traveled with you these three years in its natural, accustomed form.
"I was a spider by nature, Mara, a spider at my birth and destined to die a spider, I suppose. But there have been… two brief times of otherness: one in Qualinost, three years back, and the other…
"The other is now."
Dumbstruck, Mara rested her head against the bole of the tree. The clearing reeled about her, and she struggled for her senses. Meanwhile, the elf-the spider-in her arms continued, a pitiful account of how the sorcerer Calotte had drawn him from his web in the height of a thick, black-leaved oak and imprisoned him until a time when he could work his terrible magic.
"For you see," Cyren explained, his breathing more shallow, his hair matted and dull, "the enchanter gave me this form to draw you to him. He thought that you would… surrender to him to free me, and then… well, then I should be a spider, and you…"
"Left with the sorcerer Calotte as husband, or cast from the people forever, to make my way alone and unfriended in wilderness and desolation" Mara concluded weakly, recalling the rigid words of Qualinesti law that enforced the proper behavior of maidens. "But why enchant a spider into you? Why not… make himself handsome, so that despite his rotten heart, a maiden's eye might… incline his way?"
"He wanted you, Mara. And he wanted you to come to the ancient, ugly Calotte, knowing full well the creature who stood before you."
"It was a plan spawned in the Abyss!" Mara muttered, her grief turning slowly to anger.
"And yet… it brought me a world of light and connection, no longer ending at the edge of the web, and for a while, days and time and seasons and words sprang into being."
Cyren smiled to think of it, but his eyes seemed to focus on a distant point. His voice grew faint and the words faltered.
Cyren looked at her with surpassing tenderness, and for a moment, the elf maiden recalled the green boats and messages along the River Thon-Thalas.
"Does… does it hurt very much, Cyren?" she asked, meeting his golden gaze. And she held him there as that gaze became glassy and distant, as his almond eyes became round, lidless, and segmented, as he died into the shape he knew best, and she was left in the shadowy clearing holding a crumpled spider, her thoughts halfway between wonderment and sorrow.
Chapter 18
The two of them sat on horseback overlooking the Vingaard Ford.
Eight miles south of Vingaard Keep, the ford was the most common passage from the west of Solamnia to the east. The old caravan routes crossed the river at these rocky shallows, and in the oldest Solamnic instructions of geography and survival, it was said that all paths to the mountains, to the castles and towers that guarded the ancient region, passed over the river at this time-honored point.
It was a dated teaching. There were a dozen fords along the Vingaard, some of them veiled, some forbidden by the Measure for reasons lost deep in the Age of Might. Nonetheless, commerce from Kalaman, Nordmaar, and Sanction still crossed the river at the Vingaard Ford, where sharp eyes at the keep stood vigil against bandits and darker things.
They must have blinked, those sharp eyes, or the climbing fog off the river and the special darkness of this moonless night must have obscured all view from the towers of the keep, for the two rode unnoticed down to the banks of the ford, the hooves of their horses wrapped in cloth and muffled.
The smaller of the men leaned forward in the saddle and sneezed, unaccustomed to the long riding and the moist night air.
"Hist!" the taller one warned, reaching for the reins of his companion's horse. "You'll call down a rain of arrows with that racket, Derek Crownguard!"
"I don't understand this, sir," Derek whispered. "Veiled missions far to the east in the middle of a cold night, the servants sworn to silence at our departure, and you've threatened me from the Wings of Habbakuk to this very spot as if we were bound for battle."
"Which we may be," Boniface replied, pushing back his hood. "Which we may be, beyond what you have reckoned."
He was more pale, more furtive than Derek had seen him before, his small eyes haunted and calculating.
It will serve me better not to argue with him, the boy thought, but he kept at it nonetheless.
"You said yourself that he was in the Darkwoods, Uncle. Rotting in a druid prison, you said. That when they tired of keeping him-"
"I know what I said!" Boniface snapped. He rose in the saddle and leaned forward, his breath hot with wine and something animal and fearful.