The Briar King

by Greg Keyes

  As they drank, Neil thought that perhaps some of Lonceth's squires did not agree but were too polite to say anything.

  “Tell me, Sir Ferghus,” Sir Fail said, once the toast had gone around. “I've heard little of your illustrious uncle. How does he find Paldh?”

  The two knights talked for some time after that, and the squires, as was meet, stayed quiet. Most of Lonceth's men drank heavily. Neil, as was his custom, did not.

  When a lull came in the conversation, Neil tapped his master on the shoulder.

  “I would check on the horses, Sir Fail,” he said. “Hurricane and Sunstamper both were having trouble with their land legs.”

  Fail looked at him with a slightly suspicious smile. “See to it, then. But hurry back.”

  The two horses were fine, as Neil knew they would be. And the massive, blue-eyed Hansan and two of the other Hanzish squires were waiting for him in the street—also as he knew they would be.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE NOVICE

  ASPAR AWOKE IN THE SURE GRASP of a tyrant, and to music. The music was a wild one—drumming of a woodpecker, the lark's trilling melody rising above, the drifting, whirring chords of cicadas beneath. He rubbed dream grit from his eyes, braced his hands on the narrow wooden platform, and sat up carefully to greet the quick of dawn.

  A wind soughed through the tyrants as they stretched their ancient, creaking limbs to the morning, clucked their smaller branches, bruised a few leaves into giving up their green, peppery scent.

  Below, Ogre whickered. Aspar leaned from his perch to gaze at the faraway ground, to see that both his mounts were where he'd left them the evening before. From his prospect they seemed no larger than dogs.

  The woodpecker drummed again as Aspar loosened his joints for the climb down. He had overslept on purpose this time. He liked to be in the branches when the first bronze of the sun came slanting through and the forest hummed and grumbled to life. This ancient stand he called the tyrants was one of the few places he could do that. In other places, centuries of fire, logging, and disease left at best one or two of the ancient ironoaks towering over lesser trees. Here they stood proud and unchallenged for leagues, ancient, titanic wrestlers, their muscular arms intertwined, gripping and pulling at each other, holding up a world in itself. A man could be born, live, and die up here, drinking the dew that gathered in mossy recesses, eating shelf fungus and squirrel or the flightless branch quail that ran peeping along the great boughs.

  The world below—the world of Man and Sefry—did not matter up here.

  Or so he had believed when he was a boy, when he discovered this place and built his first platforms. He'd imagined then that he would live here.

  But even the tyrants could be chopped down or burned. Even the eternal could be killed by a hungry charcoal burner or for a nobleman's whim. He had seen it, the boy Aspar had been. It was one of the few times in his life he had cried. That was when he knew he wanted to be a holter.

  The King's Forest, bah. The boy back at the inn was right about that at least. The king came here once or twice a year to hunt. This was Aspar's forest. His to protect.

  And something was happening out here. The Sefry were liars, yes, and not to be trusted. But if they really were fleeing the forest, with its deep sunless shadows and myriad caves, there had to be a reason for it. The Sefry did not step into the sun lightly.

  So, reluctantly he made sure he had everything and started back down, limb to limb, to where the lowest branches, too heavy to keep themselves up, slopped in mazy, ropy paths to earth, there to put down new roots.

  That was why Aspar called them tyrants; beneath their shading, creeping branches, no other green thing could live, save moss and a few ferns.

  But deer and elk could survive, on the ankle-deep acorns, and the dappled cats that hunted them, like the lithe specimen he saw giving him a wary look from a few branches over. This one was small, just triple the size of a village tabby. In the Mountains of the Hare there were still lions, and here a few panthers worthy of note. But they wouldn't bother him.

  Ogre gave him a cross look as he stepped onto the black leaf mold. Angel tossed her head in greeting.

  “Don't look at me like that, you nag,” Aspar grunted at Ogre. “You've had the night to roam. You want me to start tethering you or keeping you hobbled?”

  Ogre continued to glare, but he let Aspar mount, and picking their way through roots that sometimes mounded as high as the horses' shoulders, they walked leisurely back to the Old King's Road, a wide track that ran along a series of low ridges. In places it had been built up with stone and embanked, so it stood above the roots. Low branches had been cut away, allowing wagons to pass. To Aspar, the Old King's Road was an affront, a leagues-long gash in the living forest. Still, it seemed unlikely that the tyrants would notice such a minor injury.

  Midday he grew thirsty. He dismounted and made his way down a slope to where he knew a spring was—no point in wasting what he had bottled. Besides, springborn water was clean and cold, better than the flat rain-gathered stuff from the village. He found the stream bubbling from a sandy dish below a low cleft of crumbling rock, from whence it ran for a few large man's jumps into Edwin's Brooh. He knelt at the spring pan, cupping his hands, and then stopped still as a statue, trying to understand what he saw.

  The natural basin was about as wide as his forearm, and water trickled cheerfully into it, as usual. But the pan seethed with black-peeping frogs scrambling away from his approach. A half dozen of them lay belly-up in the pool.

  Nor were they alone. A yard-long creek-eel lay putrefying, its eyes filmed blue. Several large croaker-frogs sat there, too. All of them were alive, but they didn't look healthy, nor did they even try to flee.

  Aspar backed away from the spring, his stomach feeling funny. In all his years, he had never seen such a sight.

  After a moment, he walked the rivulet's length, down to where it met the brooh. All the way down it was clogged with dead frogs and, in its lower reaches, fish.

  There were dead fish in the brooh, too, big ones, fetched up against the ferny banks or caught in natural weirs of sticks and roots.

  The chill in his bones deepening, he unlimbered his bow and strung it, then started upstream. Something had poisoned the brooh, somehow, and its creatures had sought up to the springhead for cleaner water. There were folk who used the root of the sawbriar to stun fish to make them easy for the catching, but that worked only in a small, still pool. To kill a whole brooh would take more sawbriar than there was in the world.

  The dead fish continued for a hundred paces, then a hundred more, and he was just about to return for his horses when he noticed that the stream had become clear again. He went a bit farther, to make sure, then backtracked, and on this pass noticed something else. A clump of ferns on the side of the stream had a distinct yellow cast to them. As if they, like the fish and frogs, were dying.

  It was next to the ferns that he found the print.

  Prints didn't take well in the dense leaf mold of the forest floor, but on the muddy verge of the stream he found the impression of a paw. Though water had filled it and softened its outlines, it looked essentially like a cat track. But no dappled cat paw made this, nor even a panther. Aspar's hand would just barely cover it. Even the lions of the Mountains of the Hare didn't get that big. If this track belonged to a cat, it was bigger than a horse.

  He traced the outline with his finger, and the instant he touched it he tasted metal on his tongue, and his belly spasmed, trying to give up his lunch. Almost without thought he scrambled back from the brooh and stood fifteen paces away, shivering as if he had a fever.

  He might have stood there longer, save that he heard voices in the distance. On the road.

  Where his horses were.

  He ran back that way, as quickly and quietly as he could, the sick feeling melting as swiftly as it had come.

  There were four of them, and they had already found Ogre and Angel when he got there.

/>   “Got the king's mark on 'em, they have,” one of them was saying, a tall, gangly young man with a missing front tooth.

  “Ought to leave 'em, then. No good will come of taking 'em.” That was an older fellow, short, tending toward fat, with a big nose. The third man, a thickly built redhead, seemed to have no opinion. The fourth clearly had one, but he couldn't express it, bound and gagged as he was.

  This last fellow appeared to be no more than sixteen and had the look of a townsman about him in his impractical doublet and hose. His wrists were tied in front of him and then tethered to an old yellow mare. They had two other horses, a bay gelding and a sorrel mare.

  The redhead was watching the woods. He had looked twice at Aspar where he crouched in a brake of ferns, but gave no indication of having seen him.

  “A kingsman wouldn't just abandon his horses,” Gangly argued. “He's either dead or these have run away. See? They izn' tethered.”

  “You don't have to tether horses like that,” Big Nose replied. “He's probably just off taking a piss.”

  “He went a long way, then,” the redhead grunted. “He did'n want his horses to see 'im piss?”

  Aspar had never seen these fellows, but he was pretty certain he knew who they were; the three fit the description of some bandits lately come down from Wisgarth to worry at the occasional traders on the King's Road. He'd planned to hunt them down in the summer, when he had enough men.

  He waited to see what they would do. If they didn't take his horses, he'd just follow them for a while. In fact, maybe he had already found his killers; Gangly wore a bloodred cloak trimmed in umber. Those were close to the king's crimson and gold.

  “We take 'em,” Gangly said. “I say we take 'em. Even if he's here someplace, we can put a day between us easy with all of this horseflesh and him afoot.” He started forward, toward Ogre. “Easy, you nag.”

  Aspar sighed, and fitted an arrow to his string. He couldn't afford to be generous with these three.

  Ogre did the first part of his work for him, of course. As soon as Gangly was close, the great beast reared and dealt him a thunderous blow in the chest with his hooves. By the time Gangly hit the ground, Big Nose was staring at the arrow sprouting from his thigh.

  Redhead was faster than Aspar anticipated, and keener of eye. Aspar got a shot off first, but he was still shaky from whatever had sickened him near the creek. He missed, and Redhead's bow sang out. The holter saw the arrow spinning toward him dead-on, deceptively slow, a trick of the mind. He could never move in time.

  But the missile struck the tendril of a grapevine, glanced wide, and chuckled past his cheek.

  “Raver!” Aspar swore. That had been close.

  He bolted into motion, and so did Redhead, both fitting arrows to their bows, weaving through the trees. Redhead had the high ground. He was light of foot and a damned good shot. The two men ran parallel to each other, though their paths were gradually converging.

  At fifteen yards Redhead took his second shot. It hit Aspar high in the chest and glanced from the leather cuirass beneath. Aspar missed his next shot, and then they were separated by a copse of new growth too dense to see through.

  They came out six yards from each other, in a clearing. As-par stopped, stood profile, and let his shaft fly.

  Redhead's dart whirred by, missing by nearly a foot. As-par's yard nailed through Redhead's right shoulder.

  The man shrieked as if he had been disemboweled, and dropped his bow. Aspar reached him with five quick strides. The fellow was going for his dirk, but Aspar kicked his arm, hard, just at the elbow.

  “Lie still and live,” he grunted.

  Redhead shrieked again when Aspar yanked both his injured and his good arm behind his back, cut the sinew cord from the discarded bow, and tied him up. With a long cord in his side bag he fashioned a noose to slip over Redhead's throat.

  “Walk ahead,” he commanded, still warily searching the surroundings for more enemies.

  Gangly was still down when they reached the horses, and Ogre wasn't finished with him yet; the bay's foreparts rose and fell, and he was bloody to the withers. Big Nose was lying on the ground, staring at the scarlet pooling there.

  About the time they reached them, Redhead's legs gave out and he collapsed, eyes closed and breath coming in harsh wheezes.

  Aspar cut up the reins from the yellow mare and trussed Big Nose. Gangly he didn't bother with; his ribs had been splintered into his lungs and he'd choked on his own blood.

  During all of this, the boy on the horse had been making all manner of gruntings and muffled squeals. It wasn't until he was sure the bandits were secure that Aspar turned his attention to him, pulling the gag down.

  “Ih thanka thuh, mean froa,” the boy began, in breathless and somewhat clumsy Almannish. “Mikel thanks. Ya Ih bida thuh, unbindan mih.”

  “I speak the king's tongue,” Aspar grunted, though he understood the boy plainly enough.

  “Oh,” the fellow replied. “So do I. I just thought you must be from hereabouts.”

  “I am. And not being stupid, I learned the king's tongue, just like everyone in his service,” Aspar replied, unaccountably annoyed. “Besides, Virgenya is just through the mountains, so Virgenyan is as common in these parts as anything else.”

  “My apologies. No offense intended. What I meant to say was thank you, thank you very much, and could you untie my hands, as well?”

  Aspar glanced at the knot. It wasn't complicated. “Probably,” he said.

  “Well? Aren't you going to?”

  “Why did they have you tied up?”

  “So I wouldn't run away. They robbed me and took me prisoner. You probably saved my life.”

  “Probably.”

  “For which, as I said, I'm grateful.”

  “Why?”

  The fellow blinked. “Well—ah—because I feel I have much left to do in my life, much of value—”

  “No,” Aspar said, talking slowly as if to a child. “Why did they take you prisoner after they robbed you?”

  “I suppose they thought to ransom me.”

  “Why would they suppose that was worthwhile?”

  “Because, I—” The boy stopped, suspicious. “You're like them, aren't you? You're just another bandit. That's why you won't cut me loose. You think you can get something from me, too.”

  “Boy,” Aspar said, “don't you recognize by my colors and badges that I'm the king's holter? Yah, well, that's one sort of stupid. But insulting an armed man when you're tied up, that's another.”

  “You're the holter?”

  “I'm not given to lying.”

  “But I don't know you. How do I know that? You could have killed the real holter and taken his things.”

  Aspar felt a smile try to quirk his lips. He resisted it. “Well, that's a point,” he allowed. “But I'm the kingsman, and I'm not planning to sell you for your pelt or anything else. Who are you?”

  The boy pulled himself straighter. “I'm Stephen Darige. Of the Cape Chavel Dariges.”

  “Indeed? I hayt Aspar White of the Aspar White Whites. What business have you in the King's Forest, Cape Chavel Darige? Lost your carriage?”

  “Oh, very good,” the lad said sarcastically. “A very clever rhyme. I'm traveling the King's Road, of course, which is free to all.”

  “Not if you're a merchant, it isn't. There's a toll.”

  “My father is a merchant, but I'm not. I'm on the way to the monastery d'Ef, or was when these ruffians took me. I'm to be a novice there.”

  Aspar regarded him for a moment, then pulled his dirk and cut the young man's bonds.

  “Thank you,” Stephen said, rubbing his wrists. “What changed your mind? Are you a devout man?”

  “No.” He gestured at the fallen men. “Priest, eh? You know any leeching?”

  “I've been at the college in Ralegh. I can bind wounds and set bones.”

  “Show me, then. Get the arrows out of those two and make it so at least one of 'em doesn
't bleed to death. I need to talk to 'em.” He swept his hand around. “Are there any more of these fellows, or is this the whole gang-along?”

  “That's all I ever saw.”

  “Good. I'll be back.”

  “Where are you going?” Darige asked.

  “King's business. I'll be back.”

  Aspar scouted back down the road half a league, just to make certain there were no trailing bandits. Returning, he rode back up Edwin's Brooh, looking for more signs of whatever had made the print, but couldn't find anything. He suspected the creature must have walked in the stream itself. Given time, he could probably pick up the trail, but right now he didn't have the time. The boy seemed truthful enough, but you could never be certain. And he was starting to feel that it was very urgent indeed that he see exactly what sort of massacre had happened at Taff Creek.

  When he rode back up, he found Stephen rising unsteadily; he'd been kneeling over what looked very much like a pool of vomit.

  “Well, Cape Chavel Darige, how has it been?”

  Stephen gestured at Gangly. “He's dead,” he said weakly.

  Aspar couldn't help it; a laugh burst entirely unbidden from his lips.

  “What—what's so funny?”

  “You. Of course he's dead. Grim's eye, look at him!”

  “See here—” Stephen's eyes bulged and watered, and he spasmed, as if about to vomit again, but then he straightened. “I've never seen a dead man before. Not like that.”

  “Well, there's plenty more men dead than alive, you know,” Aspar said. Then, remembering his first dead man, he softened his tone. “Never mind him. The other two? Did you leech them?”

  “I—I started one …” Stephen looked sheepish.

  “I shouldn't have left them to you. My mistake.”

  “I'm trying! It's just, well, the blood—”

  “Like I said,” Aspar said gruffly. “My fault. I should have reckoned you'd never actually done it before. I'm not blaming you.”

  “Oh,” Stephen said. “Do you think they're dead, too?”

  “I doubt it much. I shot 'em in muscle, see? Not in the organs.”