Tangled Webs (42 page)

In moments the water nymph came to Liriel’s command. The creature retained little of the radiant beauty that had so entranced Wedigar. Even her voice was wan and pale as she begged for her shawl. Pitiless, the drow wrapped the wide silken sash around her own waist and faced down the nereid.

“What do you know ofHrolfthe Unruly? A big man, yellow braids, a mustache that came nearly to his chin? Did you cast a charm upon him? Answer truly, or I’ll rip these three pieces off the shawl’s fringe!”

“No, I have charmed no man since the brown-bearded shapeshifter,” the nereid whined. “Is there one you would like me to charm and drown? This Hrolf?”

Liriel’s eyes blazed as she tore the threads from the nereid’s soulshawl. The nymph let out a wail of anguish and began to sob into her hands.

“Little raven, what are you doing?”

The drow turned and shielded her eyes with one hand. Fyodor stood atop the bluff, his blue eyes filled with horror as he gazed at the scene below.

“Getting answers,” she called up to him. “Listen if you want, and come down if you must, but by all means let me get on with it!”

At once she turned back to the weeping nereid. “Was it you who caused the other men to drown?”

“Some of them,” the creature admitted. “Others were lured into the embraces of my sisters. A few, though, were taken in by kelpies.”

“Kelpies?”

“Plant creatures. Third-rate sirens,” the nereid said with professional disdain. “It was a kelpie, I am told, that captured the sea elves your fisherfolk dragged ashore.” “Xzorsh did not speak of this,” Liriel mused.

“As well he would not! It is hardly something to boast of.”

“What do these kelpies look like?”

“In water, they appear much as any common seaweed, with long wavering fronds. From time to time they throw off sprouts-small, round things whorled like the shell of a snail. When full grown, kelpies can cast a charm that makes them appear as a woman, a horse, or a sea mountor whatever other creature the victim is most likely to desire.”

Liriel tucked this information away. Most of it was new to her, but she wondered why the seagoing Ruathen did not suspect such creatures were at work. Most likely kelpies were unfamiliar to them, perhaps brought from distant shores. “From where did these kelpies come?” she demanded, hoping the nymph would name Luskan. That was the sort of evidence she needed!

A sly look entered the nereid’s eyes. “From a place far beneath the sea. I will take you there,” she promised eagerly. “I will show you where they are grown!”

The drow lifted one snowy brow. “Grown?”

“The sprouts are tended, then sown into the sea to grow and to kill. Oh, let us go there!”

But Liriel remembered something she had seen just a few days earlier, and vague suspicion firmed into certainty. She doubted she had to go anywhere with this nereid in order to find the immediate source of the kelpie sprouts. “You will stay here until I have need of you,” the drow commanded.

“But my shawl,” the nereid pleaded, her hands extended. “Give it to me, and I will do anything you ask!”

Liriel turned away and climbed the bluff, paying no heed to the nymph’s piteous entreaties. Fyodor extended a hand to her and helped her up the last few steep feet of the incline.

“Is such treatment truly a needed thing?” he asked her. The drow shrugged. She untied the white silk from her waist and stuffed it carelessly into her bag, not caring that this action brought another wail of pain from the evil creature below. But the look on Fyodor’s face did trouble her. He was clearly upset by Liriel’s casual enslavement of the nereid.

“Would you agree that the information provided by a nereid slave was a ‘needed thin~ if I told you that you, in ignorance of this information, might have killed the wrong man?”

Fyodor frowned. “What do you mean?”

“What if Ibn did not kill Hrolf?”

“He attacked you. His death is earned thrice over.”

“All right, granted, but I do not believe he killed Hrolf or that he has any part in Ruathym’s troubles. The first two times Ibn attacked me, I think he was driven mostly by his hatred of elves and his superstitions about females aboard ship. He didn’t want to endanger the other sailors. But today he attacked me because he thought I was partly responsible for Hrolf’s drowning, because of my involvement with the sea elves. Did you see how surprised he looked when I suggested that he drugged the men of HoIgerstead with that wretched mead? I was too angry to see this before,” Liriel admitted. “But if this is true, it means

there is yet a traitor on Ruathym. We must find him–0r her-and not regret the means it takes to do so!”

Fyodor nodded somberly as he took this in. He did not quite agree with the drow’s ruthless treatment of the nereid, but he recognized the importance of uncovering the traitor. “Do you know who it is?”

“I think so,” Liriel said shortly. “Did it not seem strange to you that Dagmar appeared in Holgerstead the very day of the attack? With a wagonload of provisions for her ‘bride price,’ no less?”

“Not really. This is the custom of the land.”

“But where could the mead have come from except Hrolf’s warehouse? And who else had a key, besides his first mate and me?”

“There might have been many. Hrolf was a man who trusted easily.”

“True, but consider this: just before Dagmar left for Holgerstead, she went alone to the warehouse to pick up a few things, apparently as payment for the poor sod who had to take her. Isn’t it possible she added a keg or two of mead to sweeten the deal?”

“Possible,” Fyodor admitted, “but it does not seem likely. Even if the mead were tainted, even if it came along with Dagmar’s bride price, who is to say this was not an accident, but a deliberate act of treason? Dagmar’s devotion to her people is beyond question. Why else would she go to Holgerstead as second wife in Wedigar’s household?” Her friend’s steadfast defense of the Northwoman was beginning to wear on Liriel’s nerves. “Small loss, if she knew the man would be dead long before she was required to bed him,” she snapped. “Not that it would be such a hardship. Wedigar is not entirely without appeal, as humans go.”

The young man flinched; he could not help but take personally the drow’s dubious assessment of human men. “Hardship only in that she does not care for him,” Fyodor said stiffiy.

Liriel eyes narrowed and turned hard. “But she does care for you, is that what you are saying?”

“I am saying that Dagmar’s willingness to go to the bed of a man she hardly knows-be that Wedigar or me-speaks well of her desire to do her duty to Ruathym,” he

explained. “It is not the way of Northwomen to take such things lightly. I do not see how a woman with such devotion to duty could become traitor.”

His words cut Liriellike shards of glass, for despite all her early adventures with this or that drow playmate, she herself hardly took “such things” lightly. Had Fyodor truly so little understanding of what she had gone through before she could accept him as a friend, much less a lover? Fyodor had demanded more of her than she had known was in her to give. To Liriel, a drow of Menzoberranzan, the path that led to such intimacy had been one of painfully won insight, of enormous change and growth. In light of all this, for Fyodor to vaunt the Northwoman’s reticence as virtue was past insult!

“As to Dagmar’s motives, we shall know them soon enough,” Liriel proclaimed wrathfully. “Perhaps you cannot look beyond a woman’s pretty face, but by the power of Lloth, I can!” The drow snatched up her obsidian pendant and brandished it purposefully.

A look of horror crossed Fyodor’s face. “Do not,” he admonished her. “Little raven, have nothing more to do with this goddess!”

An inhuman rage rose in her like a dark, crackling flame. Liriel recognized in it the touch of the Spider Queen, and too late she remembered the cruel rituals required of the drow priestesses who served her. The jealous goddess did not allow her clergy to form close attachments of any kind and was particularly offended by the idea that a priestess might become fond of a mere male. Often were the females of Menzoberranzan required to sacrifice their mates, their lovers, and even their sons to appease the Queen of Spiders. Lloth would not long countenance an alliance with a human male, especially if that male presumed to intrude upon Liriel’s devotion and duties. Fyodor did not realize how precarious was the path he trod. Until this moment, neither had Liriel.

“Do not speak ill to me of Lloth,” she warned him. “I am pledged as priestess to her. This I did, in exchange for the Elfmaid’s magical escape.”

Fyodor gasped and reached for her hands. “That was the doing of your goddess? Liriel, it is no wonder you wept, knowing to what you had given pledge! Never have I felt such despair in a place, or such evil!”

“Or such power,” she added coldly.

“But at what price?” he persisted. “How can good come from evil? I fear for you, little raven, and for what you might become. Already you have taken a slave and accused a good woman of treachery.”

His words held enough truth to sting her, and she snatched her hands away. “Have a care how you speak to me,” she snarled. “Need I remind you that I could command you to rip out the heart of that ‘good woman’?”

A stunned silence met Liriel’s words.

For what seemed like a very long time, she and Fyodor merely stood and stared at each other. It was obvious the man was shocked by this outburst, but no more so than Liriel herself. For the first time ever, the young drow heard in her own words the echo of her grandmother’s malevolent voice. For a moment, the ancient evil that was Matron Boerne had lived and breathed and found a home in Lire’s heart.

“I didn’t mean it,” she whispered.

Fyodor nodded, silently accepting her words. But Liriel knew by the sadness in his eyes that he doubted the truth of them-and he knew she doubted it, too.

Impulsively she threw herself into her lover’s arms, wishing to recover the closeness they once knew. Fyodor held her lightly, but beneath her seeking hands the muscles of his shoulders and chest and arms were tensed, forbidding. He offered no response to her, and no welcome. Liriel raised questioning eyes to the young man’s face.

“My lady, would you command this of me, as well?” he asked in a tight voice.

Stunned by this accusation, Liriel fell back from the unwilling embrace. Through the transparent window of Fyodor’s eyes, she read both his profound pain and rigid pride, and suddenly she understood the depth of the blow that she had dealt his honor. By the very suggestion that he might do evil at her bequest, she had gone against his dearly held faith in her as wychlaran, and in himself as a berserker knight pledged to a worthy lady. And noble and selfless though he might be, his own very personal pride was also deeply wounded. Most painful of all, Liriel saw that Fyodor had come to fear, and to regret, the link that had been forged between them.

With a little cry, she tore herself from him and raced wildlyaway.

This time, Fyodor did not follow.

After a time alone to compose herself, Liriel returned to Ulf’s cottage. She went straight to the garden and to the wooden boxes where she’d seen the odd seaweed Dagmar had tended. She wanted to see ifit matched the description given her by the nereid. But there was nothing in the salty water but a few somnolent clams.

Given all that had happened, Liriel could not help but doubt her own memory and the conclusions she had drawn. She hadn’t looked all that closely at the sprout she’d nibbled, nor did she truly know whether or not Dagmar had had anything to do with the attack on Holgerstead. Perhaps Fyodor was right-perhaps the power Liriel courted was changing her. Perhaps it was already warping her perspective and inflaming her desire for petty revenge.

Liriel resented Dagmar for her early condescension and for her attempt to seduce Fyodor. That alone would be enough to send many a drow into an out-of-control fury. So many of her people were blinded by their singleminded lust for vengeance. She wondered if this was the taint left by the worship of Lloth, the ash that remained upon the soul when the flame of power burned low.

The young drow had always taken great pride in her independence of mind. She had chosen and controlled her own destiny to an extent unimagined by most of Menzoberranzan’s drow. But it occurred to her now that in her quest to retain her drow powers, she might well have lost much of herself. Where one began and the other left off, she could no longer say.

Finally, too heartsick and exhausted to ponder the matter more, Liriel entered Ulf’s cottage and climbed the ladder into the loft. She plunged gratefully into slumber and the oblivion it offered.

Much later that night, a soft, weighty pressure stole the drow’s breath and tore her from slumber. Instinctively her fingers closed on the dagger that lay within reach. She lunged upright, slashing out as she rose.

In a haze of lazily drifting duck feathers stood Dagmar, dressed in her nightclothes and holding half of a severed pillows lip in each hand. The woman and the drow stared at each other in stunned astonishment.

“You might have killed me,” whispered the Northwoman.

“That was the general idea,” Liriel snarled. She rolled off the far side of the bed, putting some space between herself and the much larger human. “What in the Nine Hells do you think you’re doing, intruding upon me like this? It might be your fathers house, but it’s my room! And haven’t you the sense not to creep up on a sleeping drow?”

Dagmar shrugged. “I was downstairs, unable to sleep. I heard you call out as if you were in danger.”

“And so you rushed to my aid armed with a pillow?” Liriel sneered. “This, from a daughter of warriors!”

The girl’s chin lifted. “When I entered the room the first time,” she said evenly, “I was relieved to find that you were threatened only by a bad dream. I saw that you did not have a pillow. I brought you one, thinking it might help you sleep better.”

“You put it on my face,” Liriel pointed out.

“It fell from my hand,” Dagmar returned.

Liriel stared at the girl for a long moment. All of her earlier suspicions returned to her, for she had caught Dagmar in not one lie, but two. Yet the young Northwoman’s face was set in strong, certain lines, and there was no hint of duplicity in her pale blue eyes.