by Greg Keyes
“The reed-water-place,” the young man said. “The well of life. The hole everything came out of at the beginning of time.”
“Grim’s eye,” Aspar swore. “You know something about it?”
“My people have lived in the mountains for a long time,” the Watau replied. “That’s a real old legend.”
“What do they say?” Aspar asked.
“It gets pretty complicated,” Ehawk said. “Lots of tribes and clan names. But really, when you simple it, the story spells that in the ancient times everything lived beneath the earth: people, animals, plants. There was also a race of demons under there that kept everything penned up. They ate us. So one day a certain man got out of his pen and found a reed that went up into the sky. He climbed it and came out here, in this world. He went back down and led everyone else up here, too. That man became the Etthoroam, the Mosslord—him you call the Briar King. He stopped the demons from following, and he made the sacred forest. When he was done, he went to sleep, and he told the people to worship the forest and keep it from harm or he would wake and take his revenge. And the place where he came up is called Segachau. They say you can’t always find it.”
Aspar scratched his chin, wondering what Stephen would make of that story. The Watau didn’t have writing or libraries. They didn’t follow the ways of the Church any more than his father’s Ingorn people did.
And yet in two ways at least, Ehawk’s story agreed with Leshya’s tale of the Vhenkherdh. Both said the Briar King came from it, and both agreed it was the source of life.
Other than that, though, the Watau story was very different from the Sefry’s, and that made him feel suddenly better about the whole thing. He’d learned from Stephen just how twisted time could make the truth; maybe no one, not even the Sarnwood witch, had all the facts. Maybe when he got there, Aspar could find some way to surprise everyone. Come to think of it, he probably knew at least one thing no one except maybe Winna did.
“It’s good to have you back, Ehawk,” he said, patting him on the shoulder.
“’Tis good to be back, master holter.”
Aspar’s improved mood didn’t last long.
Another two days brought them to the Then River, and the land was starting to warn Aspar what to expect on the road ahead.
Green fields gave way to sickly yellow weeds, and the only birds they saw were high overhead. At the banks of the Then, some tough marsh grass still clung to life, just barely.
But across the stream what once had been rich prairie was brittle and brown, dead for a month or more. There was no birdsong, no buzz of crickets, nothing. It was wasteland.
The villages were dead, too. They found no one alive, and the bones that remained were gnawed and crushed as no natural beast could manage.
The next day, the edge of the King’s Forest appeared, and Aspar prepared himself for the worst.
Winna, who hadn’t been talking much to him lately, rode up beside him.
“It’ll be bad, won’t it?” she said.
“Yah.” He already could see how wrong the tree line was.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know how it hurts you.”
“I’m the holter,” he said. “I’m supposed to protect it.”
“You’ve done your best,” she said.
“No,” he replied harshly. “No, I haven’t.”
“Aspar,” she said gently, “you have to talk to me. I need to know why we’re coming here, where everything is dead except for monsters. I trust you, but you usually tell me what’s going on. Fend’s not even trying to catch us, and Emfrith is starting to question our direction, too. He’s wondering what happens when we run out of supplies.”
“Emfrith can ask me himself,” Aspar snapped.
“I don’t think this is about taking me someplace safe,” Winna said.
The geos stung him, but he held his ground against it, because now the only way to convince Winna that they should be doing this entailed telling her part of the truth.
It was such a relief, he almost felt like crying.
“Listen,” he said softly. “I learned some things from the Sarnwood witch, from my trip into the Bairghs. What you see here—what we’ll see ahead—it’s not stopping with the King’s Forest. It’ll keep spreading until everything is dead, until there are no woods or fields anywhere. There’s nowhere I can take you where you and the child will be safe, not for long.”
“What are you telling me?”
“I’m spellin’ that our only chance is to stop this somehow.”
“Stop it?”
He explained in brief about the Vhenkherdh and the possibility of “summoning” a new Briar King. He didn’t tell her how Leshya had come by her knowledge, and of course he made no mention of Fend’s assertion that her unborn child was to be the sacrifice that would save the world. He still wasn’t sure he believed that himself. When he was done, she looked at him strangely.
“What?”
“There’s still something I don’t understand,” she said. “I accept it’s true that there’s no place where this rot won’t eventually reach me. But there are places that will be safe from it for a while longer. The Aspar I know wouldn’t have wanted me along for this…attempt, not in my condition. He would have had Emfrith take me as far from the King’s Forest as possible while he went to fight and maybe die. Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m glad you didn’t do that.”
“I think Fend’s after you, too,” he said.
“Then why doesn’t he send an utin for me?”
“The wyver attacked you, remember?”
She nodded uneasily. “Is that the only reason?”
“When I saw Fend last, he told me as much,” Aspar said.
“But why?”
“You were his captive for nearly a month. What do you think? Fend hates me, he’s barking mad, I love you. How much reason do you maunt he needs?”
“Right,” she said. “Right. It’s just—something doesn’t feel right.”
“Nothing is right,” Aspar replied.
“I know,” she said calmly. “But we’re going to fix it, werlic. So our child can grow up.”
“Yah,” he said, his voice tight.
“I’ve thought of names,” she said.
“The Ingorn don’t name children until they’re two years old,” Aspar said roughly.
“Why not?”
“Because most don’t live,” he said. “If you don’t name them, they can try to be born again. Them with names die true deaths.”
“That’s stupid,” Winna said. “Why name anyone, ever?”
“Because eventually our names find us, just like our deaths.”
“This child isn’t going to die, Aspar. I know that in my heart. I don’t know why you would try to—” Her voice cracked.
They rode along for a moment.
“What names?” he asked.
“Never mind,” she answered.
He glanced over at her. “I always thought Armann was a good name,” he said.
She frowned, and at first he thought the conversation really was over. But then she nodded. “Yes,” she allowed. “My father would like that.”
“And if it’s a girl?”
“I like Emmer,” she said. “Or Sally.”
A bell later the wind shifted to blow from the woods, and the scent of corruption was so strong that Aspar gagged and lost his breakfast, then lay over his horse’s neck dry-heaving.
“For the saints, Asp, what’s wrong?” Winna asked.
“The smell.”
“Smell?” She sniffed at the air. “I smell something a little rotten,” she said. “Nothing to be sick over. Are you all right?”
“Yah,” he said.
But he wasn’t. When they got nearer, he saw some others wrinkling their noses, but to him the stench was so overpowering that he could hardly think. He wanted anger to hold him up, get him through it, but mostly he felt sick, tired, and sad. Something deep in his chest told him it was time to lie down and die, along with the
forest he had known.
Because it was gone.
Every natural tree had rotted into viscous black slime, and growing from their putrefied corpses were the triumphant black thorns he first had seen growing from the footprints of the Briar King.
But it wasn’t just the vines now. They had been joined by trees with long saw-toothed leaves, barrel-shaped plants that resembled giant club moss, leafless, scaly bushes. He recognized some of them as being like those he had seen in the Sarnwood, but although unnatural, those had seemed healthy. These were not; like the ironoak, yew, poplar, and pine they had sprung from, these plants were dying, too.
So were the beasts. They came across the corpses of a greffyn and an utin. It looked like the first had killed the second, started to eat it, and then died of its own wounds.
Later they came across other sedhmhari that appeared simply to have dropped dead, perhaps of hunger.
There were no birds at all, no sounds except those they and their horses made. And for Aspar the smell only got worse and worse as they climbed up into the Lean Gable Hills and then back down along the edge of what once had been the Foxing Marshes but were now noisome meres infested with the giant scabby mosslike plants. There were things still moving in the water, big things, but none came close enough to see.
“This is insane,” Emfrith said as darkness started to settle in and Aspar hunted for a campsite. “What could have done this?”
Aspar didn’t feel like answering and didn’t, but the knight persisted.
“And what refuge do you hope to find in this desert? And where will we find supplies? We don’t have that much food or wine left, and I wouldn’t drink from any of the springs we’ve seen. There’s nothing to hunt.”
“I know a place where we might find supplies,” Aspar said. “We can be there by tomorrow.”
“And then what?”
“Then we head into the mountains.”
“You think they won’t be like this?”
No, Aspar thought. They’ll be worse.
They reached the White Warlock the next morning, crossing the ancient Brew Bridge, a narrow span of pitted black stone. The river was no longer the clear stream that had inspired its name but ran black as tar.
When they were halfway across, something exploded out of it.
As his horse reared, Aspar had the impression of something that married snake and frog. Its immense greenish-black bulk rose up above them and showed a mouth topful of yellow needles that was reared to strike down toward them.
But it stopped suddenly, swaying there. Aspar saw that its eyes had pupils like a toad’s, and weird gills opened and closed on the sides of its massy neck. He saw no limbs; the sinuous neck—or body—continued deep into the water.
He started to put an arrow to his bow, but the beast suddenly turned its head, looked back the way Aspar and his companions had come, and vented a forlorn croak. Then it withdrew into the river as quickly as it had risen.
“Sceat,” Aspar breathed.
“It didn’t attack us,” Emfrith wondered.
“No,” Aspar agreed. Fend told it not to.
After the lowlands around the river, they again began to climb up into the Brogh y Stradh, where wild cattle once grazed in pleasant meadows and periwinkle finches came to breed and lay their eggs. Traveling through the forest wasn’t the discovery of a loved one lost; it was a fresh loss around every corner, a new corpse every league.
Toward dusk they reached Tor Scath.
Unlike the forest around it, Tor Scath was unchanged. The last time he’d been there had been with Stephen Darige. He’d just rescued the lad from bandits, and he remembered with muffled amusement the way the boy had gone on and on about things that at the time seemed absurd.
But time told, and in the end he had been more of a fool than Stephen, hadn’t he? Stephen, with his knowledge of the ancient past, had been more ready to face what was coming than Aspar, despite the lad’s sheltered upbringing.
“That’s an odd-looking place,” Emfrith said, breaking Aspar’s chain of thought.
Aspar nodded, taking the place in once again. It was as if someone had taken a small, perfectly reasonable keep and tried to cram as many weird towers onto it as possible. There was actually one tower that had another one starting from it halfway up.
“Yah,” he agreed. “They say it was built by a madman.”
“Does anyone live here? It hardly seems defensible.”
“It’s lately a royal hunting lodge,” Aspar replied. “Kept by a knight named Sir Symen Rookswald. I doubt that anyone is here now.”
“Surely Sir Symen left in time,” Winna murmured.
“I’m sure he did,” Aspar said. “He was onto the danger before I was.”
He said it, but he didn’t really believe it. Sir Symen took his duty seriously despite his morose character.
Human bones lay in a thick scatter outside the walls.
“The people of the keep?” Emfrith asked.
Aspar shook his head. “I maun Tor Scath is more defensible than you think. These died trying to get in.”
“Slinders,” Winna reckoned.
“Yah.”
“So Sir Symen stayed and fought.”
“For a while, anyway.”
“What are slinders?” Emfrith asked.
“Tribespeople from the hills, driven mad by the Briar King. They were like locusts. They would pull down and eat anything before them.”
“Eat?” the knight asked incredulously. “I heard rumors like that, but I never believed ’em.”
“No, they ate people, all right,” Aspar said. “Without salt, even. Now keep aware. We don’t know what lives in here now.”
The keep’s entrance was as odd as the rest of it, a smallish gate at the base of a narrow tower. Aspar tested it and found it barred from the other side, but that triggered a sudden baying and barking from within.
“There are dogs in there,” Emfrith said. “How is that possible?”
A few moments later the gate opened, revealing a hulk of a man on the other side.
“Isarn?” Aspar said, not believing it.
“Master White,” the fellow replied. “It’s good to see you.”
But Aspar was looking around, astonished. There were not only dogs in the yard but chickens and geese. There were even a few green weeds and what looked like a plot of turnips.
“Sir Symen? Is he here?” Aspar asked.
The giant nodded. “In the hall. He’ll be glad to see you. Let me show you where to put the horses.”
Symen’s long hair and beard were more unkempt than ever, lending him the appearance of an old lion on the verge of starvation, but he smiled and came shakily to his feet when Aspar entered. Winna rushed to him and gave him a hug.
“Aspar,” the old man said. “What a pretty gift you bring me.” He frowned. “Is this little Winna?”
“It’s me, Sir Symen,” she confirmed.
“Oh, sweet girl, how you’ve grown. It’s been too long since I went to Colbaely.” He glanced at her belly but politely didn’t say anything.
“Have you heard anything about the town?”
“Your father left, I know that; headed over the mountains toward Virgenya. Most others fled or died when the slinders came.”
He turned to clasp Aspar’s arm. He felt no more substantial than a straw.
“I told you, didn’t I, Aspar? Hardheaded man you are.”
He nodded. “You were more right than wrong,” he admitted. “What happened here?”
“Sit,” Sir Symen said. “I still have wine. We’ll have a drink.”
He signed, and a young boy who had been sitting on a stool in the corner got up and went off down the hall.
“Anfalthy?” Aspar asked.
“I sent her to relatives in Hornladh,” he replied. “Along with the other women. This is no place for them now.”
The boy returned with a jug of wine. Mazers were already scattered about the table, and he set about filling
them.
Symen took a long quaff. “It’s good to have visitors to drink with,” he said. “We don’t have much company these days.”
“You never did,” Aspar replied.
“No, that’s true,” the knight allowed. He trailed a glance at Emfrith and his men. “Who are your friends?”
Aspar made the introductions, trying not to let his impatience show. When that was all settled, Symen finally got around to the holter’s question.
“The slinders came,” he said. “But they couldn’t breach the walls, and they soon left. They came several times, but it was always the same. They were terrifying if you met them in the forest, but against a keep—even such a poor keep as this one—they had no weapons. They couldn’t chew their way through stone, could they? So we stayed put, and when they were distant, I sent men to help the villagers and to lay up meat for a siege.
“Then the monsters started to show, but it seems mad King Gault wasn’t so mad after all. He built this place to keep the alvs and booyghs out, and damned if it doesn’t.”
“What do you mean?”
“They can’t or won’t come in. I can only imagine some enchantment keeps them out.”
“Grim,” Aspar murmured. “That’s a turn of weird.”
“But a fortunate one for us,” Symen replied.
“Yah.”
“So they came and went, and then the forest began to die. Then slinders returned, hundreds of them, and greffyns and manticores and all manner of beasts, and they killed each other outside the walls, and what was left starved. We waited inside here, and now here you are.”
“But that’s wonderful,” Emfrith said. “Holter, this is the place. This is where Winna can have her child.”
The geos was still finding a lie for Aspar to tell when Isarn suddenly burst into the hall.
“Sir Symen,” he shouted. “There’s an army coming, not two leagues away. Henne saw it.”
“From the north?” Aspar said. “Yah, that’ll be Fend.”
“And he’ll be helpless,” Emfrith said. “His beasts can’t harm us here. They’ll starve like the others.”
“He still has men,” Aspar pointed out. “They can come in, and probably the Sefry, too.”