by Greg Keyes
“Weren't you raised Sefry, Master White? Didn't Dirty Jesp raise you?”
“Yah. So I know what I'm talking about.”
The Sefry had chosen a nice spot, a violet-embroidered meadow overlooking the river and embraced on all sides by thick-limbed wateroaks. They were still setting their tents. A big one of faded crimson and gold was fully erected, the clan crest—three eyes and a crescent moon—waving in a diffident zephyr. Hobbled horses grazed in the meadow, where ten men and twice that many children hammered stakes, uncoiled lines, and unrolled canvas. Most were stripped to the waist, for the sun wasn't yet high enough to sear their milk-white skin. Unlike most folk, the Sefry never darkened from the sun. In full light, they went swaddled head to toe.
“Hallo, there,” one of the men called, a narrow-shouldered fellow with features that suggested thirty years but that Aspar knew were lying by at least fifteen. He had known Afas when they were both children, and Afas was the older. “Do I see Dirt's Bastard, there?”The Sefry straightened, hammer swinging at his side.
Aspar dismounted. Dirt's Bastard. Not a nickname he'd ever cared for.
“Hallo, Afas,” he replied, refusing to let his annoyance show. “Nice to see you, too.”
“Come to run us off ?”
“What's the point? I'd just be wishing you on a different town, probably another in or around my jurisdiction. Besides, I'm on my way out.”
“Well, that's generous.” The Sefry tilted his head. “She said you'd be here. She was almost wrong, ney?”
“Who's ‘she’?”
“Mother Cilth.”
“Grim! She still alive?”
“They rarely die, these old women.”
Aspar stopped a few paces from Afas. The two men were of a height, but there the resemblance stopped. Aspar had weight to go with his altitude, an oak to Afas' willow. Close up, Afas' skin was a map, the blue rivers, streams, rills, and rinns of his veins plainly visible. He had six pale nipples, set like a cat's on his lithe, wiry torso. His hair was midnight dark, tied back with a gold ribbon.
“Where'd you just come from?” Aspar asked.
“South.”
“Come through the forest?”
Afas' indigo eyes went wide and guileless. “You know better than that, Holter. We wouldn't travel in King Randolf's forest without permission.”
“King Randolf died thirteen years ago. It's William, now.”
“Nevertheless.”
“Well. I'm going to Taff Creek. A boy came in last night saying his kin were murdered down there. I'd be grateful if you've heard anything worth repeating. I wouldn't ask too close where you heard it.”
“Decent of you. But I wat nothing about that. But I'll tell you this—if I had been in the forest, I'd be out of there now. I'd be going far away from it.”
“Where are you going?”
“We'll tinker here for a few days, to earn for supplies. After that? Far away. Tero Gallé, maybe, or Virgenya.”
“Why?”
Afas jerked his head toward the largest tent, the one already set up. “Because she says so. I don't know more than that, nor do I want to. But you can ask her. In fact, she said you'd want to ask her.”
“Hmm. Well. I suppose I ought to, then.”
“Might be healthiest.”
“Right. Stay out of trouble, hey? I've got enough to worry about without having to track you down later.”
“Sure. Anything for you, Dirt.”
Mother Cilth had been old when Aspar was a boy. Now she might have been a ghost looking across the chasm of death. She sat on a pile of cushions, robed in black, coifed in black. Only her face was visible, an ivory mask spidered with sapphire. Her eyes, palest gold, watched his every movement. Jesp's eyes had been that color. And Qerla's.
“There you are,” Mother Cilth rasped. “Jesperedh said you would be here.”
Aspar bit back telling her how long Jesp had been dead. It wouldn't matter. Whether it was all pretense or whether the Sefry had come to believe their own lies, he had never really known. It didn't matter, because either way their constant talk of speaking with the dead was so much annoying sceat. The dead were dead; they did not speak.
“You wanted to see me?” He made a small attempt to keep the irritation from his voice, but it wasn't something he was good at.
“I see you already. I want to talk to you.”
“I'm here, Mother. I'm listening.”
“Still rude. Still impatient. I thought my sister taught you better.”
“Maybe her lessons would have taken better if she had had a little help from the rest of you,” Aspar replied, unable to keep the bitterness from his voice. “Take me as you find me or not at all. It wasn't me wanted to talk to you.”
“Yes, it was.”
That was true, sort of, but he didn't have to like it. He turned on his heel to leave.
“The Briar King is waking,” Cilth whispered.
Aspar paused, a bright tickle like a centipede crawling on his backbone. He turned very slowly to face the old woman again.
“What?”
“The Briar King. He wakes.”
“That's sceat,” Aspar said harshly, though a part of him felt as if the earth had opened beneath his feet. “I've traveled the King's Forest all my life. I've been in the deepest, black heart of it, and I've been places in the Mountains of the Hare that even the deer never saw. There is no Briar King. That's just more of your Sefry nonsense.”
“You know better. He slept, and was unseen. Now he wakes. It is the first sign. Surely Jesp taught you.”
“She taught me. She also taught me to cheat at dice, and to play the voice of a ghost for her seances.”
The old woman's face went even harder than it had been. “Then you should know the difference,” she hissed. “You should know the difference between the cold and the hot, between the breeze and the storm.” She leaned even closer. “Look in my eyes. Look there.”
Aspar didn't want to, but her eyes had already caught him, like a snake about to eat a mouse. The gold and copper of her orbs seemed to expand until they were all he could see, and then …
A forest turned into gallows, rotting corpses hung from every branch. The trees themselves gnarled and diseased, covered in black thorns, and instead of foliage they bore carrion birds, ravens and vultures, gorged and fat.
In the depths of the forest the shadows between the trees shifted, as if something large were moving there. Aspar searched, but the movement stayed at the corner of his eyes, always still when he stared full at it.
Then he noticed the nearest corpse. The rope that hung her was nearly rotted through, and mostly it was just bones and blackened flesh hanging there, but the eyes were still alive, alive and pale gold …
The same eyes he was looking into now. Mother Cilth's eyes.
With a harsh gasp, Aspar turned his gaze away. Mother Cilth grated out a laugh.
“You see,” she murmured.
“Sceat,” he managed, though his legs were trembling. “A trick.”
Cilth drew back. “Enough. I thought you were the one foretold. Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps you learned nothing after all.”
“I can only hope.”
“A shame. Truly. For if you are not the one foretold, he is not yet born. And if he is not yet born, your race—and mine—will be wiped from the earth, as if we had never been. That part of the telling cannot be doubted except by fools. But maybe you are a fool. My sister perished for nothing.” She reached up and drew a veil over her face. “I dream,” she said. “Leave me.”
Aspar obeyed her, fighting an unaccustomed urge to run. Only when the Sefry camp was a league behind him did his breathing calm.
The Briar King.
What sceat, he thought.
But in the corner of his vision, something was still moving.
CHAPTER TWO
IN ANOTHER TAVERN
“THE QUEEN, OF COURSE, must die first. She is the greatest danger to our plans.”
/> The man's voice was cultured and sibilant, speaking the king's tongue with a hint of some southern accent. His words sent a snake slithering up Lucoth's back, and he suddenly feared the sound of his heart was a drum for all to hear.
I am a mouse, he told himself. A mouse.
Which was what everyone called him. His real name was Dunhalth MaypHinthgal, but only his mother had ever called him Dunhalth. To everyone else in the small town of Odhfath, he was Lucoth, “the mouse.”
A dry silence followed the man's pronouncement. From his vantage in the rafters, Lucoth could not see any of their faces, only that there were three of them, and from their voices, all men. He knew they'd paid hostler MaypCorgh for the use of the back room of the Black Rooster Inn, which in Lucoth's experience meant that they probably had some secret business to discuss.
Lucoth had eavesdropped on such meetings before. He had an arrangement with hostler MaypCorgh, who let him know when the room was in use. In the past, he'd mostly overheard smugglers and brigands, and often learned things that Mayp-Corgh could use to turn a profit, part of which he would pass on to Lucoth.
But these weren't smugglers or highwaymen. Lucoth had heard murders plotted before, but never that of a queen. Excitement replacing fear, he listened as another of the men spoke.
“The queen,” he sighed. This one had a deeper voice, with some gravel in it. “Is the prophecy so clear?”
“In all ways,” the first man replied. “When he comes, there can be no queen of the blood in Eslen.”
“What of the daughters?” the final man asked. His accent was strange even to Lucoth, who had heard many odd ones. The town of Odhfath was at a crossroads: Take the eastern way, and you came in time to Virgenya. West lay the port at Paldh. North brought you to Eslen and finally Hansa. The south road met the Great Vitellian Way, with its colorful merchant caravans.
“The daughters may not succeed to the throne,” the second man said.
“There is movement afoot to legitimize their succession,” the first man replied. “So they must all die, of course. The king, the queen, their female issue. Only then will our plans be assured.”
“It is an important step,” the third man said reluctantly. “A step that cannot be taken back.”
The first man's voice dropped low and soft. “The Briar King wakes. The age of man is ended. If we do not step now, we will perish with the rest. That will not happen.”
“Agreed,” the second man said.
“I'm with you,” the third said. “But care must be taken. Great care. The time is coming, but it is not yet here.”
“Of course,” the first man said.
Lucoth licked his lips, wondering what reward might come from saving a queen. Or a whole royal family.
He had always dreamed of seeing the wide world and seeking his fortune in it. But he was wise enough to know that a fourteen-year-old boy who went on the road with no coin in his pocket would meet a bad end, and likely sooner than later. He had saved over the years—almost enough, he reckoned, to make a start of it.
But this—he almost saw the gold before his eyes, heaps of it. Or a barony, or the hand of a princess. All of that.
Hostler MaypCorgh wouldn't know about this, oh no. Odds were too great he'd try to blackmail the men below. That wasn't the way to do it. The way to do it was to lightfoot out of the loft, wait till tomorrow, and get a good look at the men so he could describe them. Then he'd take his earnings, buy a donkey, and set out for Eslen. There he would find an audience with Emperor William and tell him of what he had heard.
He suddenly realized the men below had gone silent, and left his imaginings to focus on them.
The first man's head moved, and though Lucoth saw no eyes through the shadows, he felt a gaze burning on him.
Which was impossible. He held his breath, waiting for the illusion to fade.
“You have a loud heart, boy,” the man said. His voice was like velvet.
Lucoth jerked into motion, but it was the motion of nightmare. He knew the rafters of the inn like he knew the inside of his palm, but somehow it seemed all alien to him now, the few yards he had to cross to find safety a distance of leagues. Still, the thinking part of his mind told him, cross the wall, drop down. They'll have to go around, by the door; that will put them long moments behind, plenty of time for a mouse to find a hiding place in the town of his birth.
Something smacked him on the side of the face, not too hard. He wondered what they had thrown at him, but was relieved it wasn't something more deadly.
Then he understood that whatever it was, was still there, resting against his cheek. He didn't have time for that, though. He went over the wall—it did not extend into the rafters—and dropped down into the next room. The open window was there, waiting for him. He felt dizzy and tasted something strange. For some reason he wanted to gag.
Only when he had reached the street did he feel to see what was stuck to him, and then he didn't quite understand it, because it was the hilt of a dagger, which made no sense at all …
Then he realized that it did make sense if the blade was in his throat. Which it was. He could feel the tip of it inside his windpipe.
Don't take it out, he thought. Take it out, it'll bleed …
He started running down the street, but he couldn't take his hand away from the thing in his neck, any more than he could wrap his mind around what had really happened to him.
I'll be fine, he thought. It must have missed my veins. I'll be fine. I'll just get old Horsecutter to take it out. He'll sew the wound. I'll be fine.
Something thumped onto the street behind him. He turned to see a man-shaped shadow.
It started toward him.
He ran.
He could feel the pulse in his neck now and something clotting in his throat. He vomited, and that brought agony that sheeted down the whole left side of his body. He stumbled a few more steps.
Saints, please, leave me be, I'll never talk, he tried to say, but his voice was pinned inside of him by the dagger.
Then something cold punched into his back. He thought it was three times, but maybe it was four. The final touch was faint, like a kiss, and right at the base of his skull.
“Sleep tight, boy,” he heard someone say. It sounded like a saint, which made him feel a little better.
CHAPTER THREE
THE SQUIRE
NIGHT-WINGED CLOUDS RUBBED AWAY the moon, and a freezing sea wind bittered the darkness. Neil had almost no feeling in his toes or fingers. He could smell nothing but brine and hear nothing but the wind and waves savaging the shore. But he could imagine much more: the breath of the foe, somewhere out there in the night. The clash of steel that would greet the dawn. The droning dirge of the cold, restless draugs beneath the waves, dead yet alive, shark-toothed mouths gaping in anticipation of the meat of the living. Of Neil MeqVren's meat.
“Dawn's almost here,” his father murmured, lowering himself to lie next to Neil on the sand. “Be ready.”
“They might be anywhere,” someone else said. Neil thought it was probably Uncle Odcher.
“No. There are only two places they could have put their ships in. Here, or on the Milkstrand. We're here. They must be there.”
“They say the Weihands can march at night. That they can see in the dark, like the trolls they worship.”
“They can't march at night any better than we can,” Neil's father said. “If they aren't on their ships, they're doing exactly what we're doing—waiting for the sun.”
“I don't care what they can do,” another voice muttered. “They never reckoned on meeting the men of clan MeqVren.”
What's left of us, Neil thought. He had counted twelve, last time the sun went down. Twelve. The morning before, they had been thirty.
He was rubbing his hands to try to warm them when a fist closed over his fingers. “You ready, son?” his father whispered.
“Yeah, Fah.” He couldn't see his face, but what he heard in the voice made his scalp pric
kle.
“I shouldn't have brought you on this one.”
“I been to war before, Fah.”
“Yes. And proud I've been of you. No MeqVren—nor no man of no clan I've ever heard tell of—ever killed his first foe when he had only eleven winters, and that's been a year gone for you, now. But this—”
“We going to lose, Fah? We going to die?”
“If that's the way the saints want it, damn them.” He cleared his throat and sang, very softly,
“To fight and die is why we're born
Croak, ye ravens, I'll feed ye soon.”
Neil shivered, for that was part of the MeqVren death-chant.
But his father clapped him on the arm. “I don't intend for us to die, lad. We'll catch 'em off guard.”
“Then the lord baron will pay us a pretty penny, eh, Fah?”
“It's his war. He's a man of his word. Now let's be still, for here comes the dawn.”
The sky lightened. The twelve men of the MeqVren clan crouched behind the dune, motionless. Neil wondered what the baron or the Weihands might want with this wretched island anyway, with it so rocky and hard it wouldn't support even sheep. He turned to look back at the sea. The sky had lightened enough so he could make out the prow of their longship, a horse-head silhouette.
And down the beach, another. And another.
But the MeqVrens had only one ship.
He tugged at his father's sleeve.
“Fah—”
That's when something hissed along and thumped into his father's back, and his father sighed strangely. That's when the shouting started, and the MeqVrens rose to their feet in a shower of arrows, to face three times their number coming up the strand. Neil closed his eyes, then jumped up with the rest of them, his hands too cold to feel his spear, but he could see it, clutched in his hands.
Then an arrow hit him. It made the same sound as the one that had hit his father, just a little higher in pitch.
Neil jerked awake and found himself clutching his chest, two fingers below his heart, breathing as if he had just run a league. He felt like he was falling.