Chapter XL
XL
At first there was only silence. Sarmodel shifted warily above me. Had I misjudged?
Then there was a deep gulping sound. The pool lurched and bubbled. A torrent of rotting detritus was sucked to the surface, releasing a rank, swampy stench into the air.
The naiad began to rise, ascending from the fouled water. I almost wept to see her.
I expected she would be changed; the state of her sanctuary was warning enough. But this . . .
Sarmodel coiled reflexively, rearing like an adder in my mind. Sebastian, please—just this once, heed me. Kill her now!
I . . . I . . . I could only stammer, agape, as Dayane emerged fully to stand on the surface of the pool.
I couldn’t bear to look at her, but nor could I look away. I understood in that moment why Cecile had been unable to reach her mistress, and what had happened to the wild Spirits of the woods.
“Oh, Dayane. Oh no.”
The water nymph’s corruption was absolute.
The down-covered horn buds on her forehead had grown into enormous, twisted antlers, spreading like the branches of a blighted tree over the pool.
Her white body, which had once seemed to me like living ivory, was now disfigured with brown, fetid growths.
With her hands she held her sagging, distended belly, bulging almost to her knees; Dayane’s back stooped under the weight of it.
Her hair—her beautiful green-black hair—once garlanded with water chestnut, was now matted with algae and clusters of tiny bones.
No longer immune to the touch of the Mundane world, she dripped black mud into the water.
She raised her head and looked at me with something like desperation. Cruelly, her beautiful deep brown eyes were unchanged.
“Why? Why have you come?” she croaked. “What more do you want?” The water nymph’s words were strangely impeded. Her jaw had grown too wide and muscular for easy speech, and her mouth too full of long teeth.
“I have . . . I have come to seek your mercy, Dayane, and one final boon if you will grant it,” I managed to say. I still held my silver sword at the ready.
“I closed the way, Magician. I do not—ah!” Dayane groaned and her face twisted in a grimace as she clutched her bloated abdomen. “I wish to tra?c no more with the world of men. Leave me, please.” She collapsed to her knees with a moan as some terrible pain gripped her.
“Dayane, what has happened to you?” I asked softly. “Is this Avstamet’s curse? Can we help you?”
“Do not say his name! I still hear his voice! He speaks to me!” she said, struggling to talk through her pain. “Oh, leave me! I must eat.” She groped for the boar carcass, barely able to rise to her feet.
I could say no more, utterly horrified. Pity and revulsion warred for dominance within me, both of them competing with the insidious suspicion that this was all my fault.
Sarmodel was not so a?icted. He assumed his most persuasive and ingratiating tone. But we have brought you a gift, my sweet thing. Will you sing for us in return? Or tell us a story? The tale of your victory at the Lupercalia, perhaps?
Privately, he hissed a warning. Sebastian, she is beyond recovery. As soon as she is within reach, take her.
Is there nothing we can do? Sarmodel, she may be the last of her kind.
And we may be the last of ours if you are not careful.
I nodded, swallowing. I glanced at Jacques, who was smiling in rapture, utterly enthralled by the corrupted nymph. He still held his arm over the pool, dripping blood into the water. Worryingly, he had put down his musket and was rubbing slowly at the front of his breeches with his other hand.
“A song? They came to hear me sing once. Kings and queens and great sorcerers.” Dayane’s voice was wistful.
She rose unsteadily to her feet again, fighting the terrible weight of the antlers and her swollen belly.
“I could sing for you. Yes. What is your gift? Is it something to eat?” The water nymph’s eyes brightened.
Her lips parted around her frightful teeth in hopeful anticipation. “I am always so hungry.”
That is up to you, my darling. It is the life you were promised so many years ago—the price for your gracious assistance, replied my silken-tongued Guest. The Baron d’Ocerne’s firstborn.
“My price?” Dayane looked suddenly stricken.
She grasped the roots of her antlers as though to tear them free.
“No! No! I was patient, for the stream is patient. Years I waited for my due and was refused. Years his voice was inside me, whispering and growing. Years I grew ever hungrier until I could bear it no longer. Each year I sent my handmaiden to collect the price, and each year I was denied. One final warning I gave to your young lover, Magician—I would have the boy when he reached his eighteenth birthday, or our bargain was forfeit. And again I was refused.”
“So you cursed him,” I said.
“I returned the Beast’s gift to him, tenfold,” Dayane hissed. “He who would not give me his son will live to see misery visited on all of his sons, and their sons, and theirs. Lords and masters? Savages and beasts, rather. The House of Avenel will show its true face with every new generation.”
“Are you Lady Dayane? Can you help me?” Jacques interrupted suddenly.
His eyes were half closed, his voice lazy and thick.
His mouth worked soundlessly for a few seconds, as though it were jammed with words and he could not choose among them.
“I killed my friends and ate their hearts,” he said finally.
At first I thought that she had not heard him.
But then she began to stagger toward us, her footfalls impossibly heavy on the surface of the water.
Her eyes were not on Jacques, but on me.
“Yes, I have a song for you, Magician. There is always a song at the end,” she panted.
“We will . . . weave rainbows—and we will eat. With patience, the stream will eat even the mountain.”
I closed my eyes in dismay. Everything had turned to madness.
She came faster now, the mare’s tail beneath her feet quivering.
“What is Mundane flesh but earth and water?” she mused, drooling.
“Dayane, I am sorry,” I murmured.
I gathered myself and spoke the Crippling Yoke.
Only a few paces away from us, the water nymph stopped short, wrenched into a closing vise of Arcane facets.
In seconds, she was bent and bound, held rigid with her arms outstretched, like a woman in the stocks.
She screamed as the Yoke burned into her, searing flesh and anima both.
She struggled like the Beast himself, her savage antlers tearing the air.
“No! Let me eat! Always I am deceived!” she sobbed.
“Please, Dayane, I do not want to kill you,” I said, trying not to see my own brutality.
In my mind, Sarmodel was coiling taut in readiness.
“You must relent, I beg you. Surely there is something we can offer to earn your favor once more, you who are so full of favor. Something to ease your pain, to take away this curse you have held for too long?”
“It is too late!” Dayane began to sob, her tears as filthy as the mud that dripped from her skin.
“I did not know what it was you gave me—I did not know. It took root within me and grew with each passing year, and now it is too late. I am the Water from the Mountain but I could not wash it away, not with rain, not with patience, not with blood. And now it is become me; I am the fountainhead and the stream, and every thirsty throat in Gévaudan will taste of it.” She cried out again, the heartbroken wail of the betrayed.
“Ask no more of me! Was it not enough? Did I not treat with you in good faith?”
“You did, Dayane. Always. Now please, this one last time, help me—how can we be rid of it? Please, you risk the return of the Warfather!”
Tighten the Yoke, Sebastian, urged Sarmodel. Squeeze it out of her if you have to.
I will not. This is already cruel beyond words.
Dayane subsided, crying desperately. “He is here already! Within me. Within the young lord. Within every soul who drinks the Water from the Mountain. The Beast has planted his seed, and he will have what he wants.”
“Will the lady not help me, Professor?” asked Jacques languidly. “Can she cure me of this sickness?”
“I fear we have already asked too much of—”
“Yes!” Horribly, Dayane began to laugh between her sobs. “The remedy. It is a rite of the flesh,” she said. “In flesh, it will be performed.”
Sebastian.
I know.
I wished I could close my eyes for the final betrayal. My silver blade was light and sharp, and rippling with Violations. I prayed that it was also painless.
Her heart. Once, twice and thrice.
It was not anger but sorrow I saw in her eyes as she died. The luminous green pool suddenly dimmed and clouded. The waving mare’s tail disappeared beneath a plume of silt. The eternal cascade faltered and stopped.
I covered my ears and screamed to hide Sarmodel’s triumphant howl as he claimed her essence. I could not bear it.
Dayane’s anima thundered into him like the rushing stream itself, filling us both with surging strength. My every cell and organ hummed with indescribable ecstasy. She left the mineral tang of snowmelt and an aftertaste of carrion in the back of my throat.
I wanted none of it.
“I am sorry,” I said again, uselessly.
The Crippling Yoke still held the nymph’s body as it began to dissolve. Her skin wept plasma and the monstrous antlers collapsed into ash. I dispelled the pitiless Arcane bonds, letting her fall into the depths of the pool.
Dayane, the Water from the Mountain, was no more.