The Briar King

by Greg Keyes

  He stared at the stream for a while, dithering, but in the end he let his newly minted heart turn him east. He struck from the path, out to the wilderness.

  Hunger was a living thing in him now. He must have lost the food he'd brought early in his journey; he didn't think he had eaten for three or four days. The forest provided little; nothing edible grew beneath the great trees, and he knew nothing of hunting or snaring. He managed to spear a few fish with a stick he sharpened using his finger knife, and he discovered that open places, burned off by lightning in years past, were veritable oases; in those places not shadowed by branches he found understories of hard apples and persimmons, tiny cherries and grapes. By seeking these he managed to sustain himself, but his hunger continued to grow.

  For the rest of the day he traveled east and camped in a high place where stone had cut up through the earth and dressed itself in lichen. He built a small fire and listened to the night grow frantic.

  For whatever worried the forest was near. His ears were sharper than they had been; he could hear labored footsteps in the darkness, the snapping of limbs and scraping of something against bark. Now and then a coughing growl wended through the columns of the trees.

  What am I doing here? he wondered, as the snapping became a crashing through the forest. Whatever that is, what can I do about it? He wasn't Aspar White. If it was the greffyn, he was surely dead. If it was the Briar King …

  The crashing was very close, now. In a sudden panic, Stephen felt hideously exposed in the firelight. With his sharpened fish spear, he moved out of the circle of light, wondering belatedly if he should climb a tree, if he could find one with branches low enough.

  Instead he crouched near a large bole, trying to still the echo of his heart beating in his ears.

  Then the sounds ceased. All sounds had ceased. The nighthawks and whippoorwills, the frogs and the crickets. The night was an empty box. Stephen waited, and prayed, and tried to keep his fear from clawing out of his head and into his legs. He'd seen a cat, once, stalking a field rat. The cat had toyed with the smaller creature, never striking until the mouse's fear made it bolt. Not because the cat couldn't see its prey, but because the cat, like all of its kind, had a cruel streak. Stephen felt very much like the mouse now, but he wasn't one. He had reason. He could fight his instincts.

  But maybe in this case, after all, it would be better to run …

  The old Stephen would never have heard the sound in time to move, the faint whisper of leather against damp leaves. He threw himself forward, away from the sound, but something struck him hard across the back of his legs, and he lost his stride and fell. A dark thing clawed at his feet, and Stephen turned on his back and kicked at it, pushing away from it with the palms of his hands. The creature came on, rearing up and revealing itself in the firelight. It had the frame of a man, and a visage so terrible and so well known at the same time.

  “Aspar!” Stephen shrieked, even then not absolutely certain.

  But it was the holter, his face blackened and bruised, his eyes bereft of human knowing. He lurched forward at his name, gasping.

  “Aspar, it's me, Stephen Darige!”

  “Ste—?” The holter's face softened to a sort of insane puzzlement, and then he collapsed at Stephen's feet. Stephen opened his mouth and took a step toward the holter, then held himself very still as he saw what was behind his erstwhile companion, what his body had hidden when he was standing.

  Behind the holter, a pair of glowing yellow eyes stared at Stephen through the darkness. They shifted noiselessly closer, and the wavering firelight limned something huge with a beak like a bird. It sniffed at him, and the eyes blinked slowly. Then the head raised, and it uttered a sound like a butcher sawing the long bone of a cow.

  It took another step toward Stephen, then nodded its beaked head angrily at him. The eyes blinked once more, and in a silent rushing it was gone, off through the trees, running faster than anything could run, leaving only the silence, and Stephen, and the dead or unconscious Aspar White.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  COURSE OF STUDY

  ANNE FELT A BRIEF TASTE of bile in her throat as the flesh of the man's chest opened in two great flaps like floppy cupboard doors. Within was a wormy mess such as she had never imagined could be found in a human being. She supposed she had always imagined the inside of a person much like the outside, perhaps redder for the blood, but relatively featureless. What she saw now seemed senseless and bizarre.

  The girl on her right dropped to her knees, retching, which began a trend that left all but two of the eight girls in the chamber relinquishing their morning meal. Anne did not join them, and neither did Serevkis, the long-necked young woman who had nicknamed her “Princess Mule.” From the corner of her eye, Anne caught a glance from Serevkis and was surprised when the girl sent her a brief, sardonic smile.

  Sister Casita, who had made the incisions on the corpse, waited patiently for the involuntary purging to end. Anne absently maneuvered to keep her shoes clean, but focused her attention on the cadaver.

  “That's a natural reaction,” Casita said, when the round of sickness seemed to be over. “Be assured that this man was a criminal of the worst sort. Serving the church and our order in death is the only virtuous thing he has ever accomplished, and it will earn his remains decent internment.”

  “Why isn't he bleeding?” Anne asked.

  Casita regarded her with a lifted eyebrow. “Sister Ivexa asks an interesting question,” she said. “Out of turn, but interesting.” She gestured at something fist-size and bluish gray in the center right of the chest. “Here is the heart. An ugly thing, is it not? In appearance hardly worthy of the praise heaped on it in poetry and metaphor. But it is indeed an organ of importance. In life it contracts and expands, which makes the beating you feel in your own breasts. In so doing, it sends blood racing around the body within tubular canals. You see four of these here.” She indicated four large pipes stuck fast to the heart. “In death, the heart ceases its activity and the blood ceases to move. It pools and congeals in the body, so as Sister Ivexa notices, even the most grievous cut draws little blood.”

  “Permission, Sister?” Serevkis murmured.

  “Granted.”

  “If you were to cut a live man, we would see his heart beating, and the blood would flow?”

  “Until he died, yes.”

  Anne placed her hand over her sternum and felt the heart beneath. Did hers really look like that?

  “And whence comes the blood?”

  “Ah. It is generated by a confluence of humors in the body. All of this you will learn in due time. Today we will learn the names of certain parts, and later the humors that control them. Eventually we will discuss how each organ can be made to sicken and die, whether by insult from a wound, from physic, or from holy sacaum. But today, I want you to be most clear on this.” She swept her eyes about the chamber. “Sister Facifela, Sister Aferum—are you paying attention?” she snapped.

  Facifela, a gangly girl with a weak chin, looked up meekly. “It is hard to look at, Sister Casita.”

  “At first,” Casita said. “But you will look. By the end of the day, you must name all of these organs to me. But the first lesson is this, so all of you listen carefully.” She reached into the body cavity and pushed things around, making a wet sucking sound.

  “You, your father, your mother. The greatest warrior of your kingdom, the highest fratrex of the church, kings, scoundrels, murderers, stainless knights—inside, all of us are this. To be sure, there is variation in strength and health and internal fortitude, but in the end it matters little. Beneath armor and clothing and skin, there is always this soft, wet, infinitely vulnerable interior. Here is where life resides in our bodies; here is where death hides, like a maggot waiting to be born. Men fight from the outside, with clumsy swords and arrows, trying to pierce the layers of protection we bundle in. They are of the outside. We are of the inside. We can reach there in a thousand ways, slipping through the cra
cks of eye and ear, nostril and lip, through the very pores of the flesh. Here is your frontier, Sisters, and eventually your domain. Here is where your touch will bring the rise and fall of kingdoms.”

  Anne felt a little trembling in her and for an instant thought she smelled the dry decay of the crypt she and Austra had found long ago. The feeling wasn't one of fear but of excitement. It felt, suddenly, as if she sat in a tiny boat on a vast sea and had for the first time been explained the meaning of water.

  Walking into the hall, she nearly bumped nose to nose with Sister Serevkis and found herself staring into the girl's cool gray eyes.

  “You weren't repelled?” Serevkis asked.

  “A little,” Anne admitted. “But it was interesting. I notice you didn't get sick either.”

  “No. But my mother was the undertaker for the meddix of Formesso. I've seen the insides of bodies all of my life. This was your first time, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  Serevkis looked off somewhere behind Anne. “Your Vitellian has improved,” she noticed.

  “Thank you. I'm working hard on it.”

  “A good idea,” Serevkis replied. She smiled and her gaze met Anne's again. “I must go to my cyphers tutorial. Perhaps I'll see you at the evening meal, Sister Ivexa.”

  The rest of Anne's classes were less intriguing, and numbers least of all, but she did her best to pay attention and do her sums. After numbers came greencraft, which she thought at first would be better. Even Anne knew that the weeds from beneath a hanging tree and the dark purple blossoms of the benabell were used as poisons. They did not discuss any such thing, however, but instead doted on the care of roses, as if they were training to be gardeners instead of assassins. At the end of greencraft, Sister Casita came in and called three names. One of them was Anne's. The other two girls Anne did not know. They went, of all places, to the yard out back of the coven, where sheep were brought in from the fields to be milked and fleeced. Anne stared at the dumb creatures as they wandered aimlessly, while Sister Casita explained something to the other girls in their own language, which Anne thought might be Safnian. She turned her attention back to the older woman when she switched to Vitellian.

  “My apologies,” the sister said. “These two haven't made the progress in Vitellian you have. I must say, you've done very well in a short time.”

  “Brazi, Sor Casita,” Anne said. “I studied the church Vitellian at home. I suppose more of it stuck than I thought, and many of the words are similar.” She nodded at the animals. “Why are we here with the sheep, Sister?” she asked.

  “Ah. You're going to learn to milk them.”

  “Is sheep's milk of some use in physic?”

  “No. At the end of the first month, each sister is assigned a duty. This is to be your job, milking and making cheese.”

  Anne stared at her, then laughed aloud.

  Tears stung Anne's eyes as the switch laid a bright strip across her bare shoulders, but she did not cry out. Instead, she fixed her tormentor with a glare that would have sent any courtier scurrying.

  Sister Secula was no courtier, and she did not so much as flinch at Anne's expression.

  Another lash came down, and this time a little gasp escaped Anne's lips.

  “So,” Sister Secula exclaimed. “Only two for you to find your breath? You don't have the bravery to suit your attitude, little Ivexa.”

  “Switch me all you want,” Anne said. “When my father finds out—”

  “He'll do nothing. He sent you here, my dear. Your royal parents have already agreed to any medicine I administer— and that is the last time I shall remind you of that. But I won't switch you again, not just now. I've already learned what I wanted. Next time, you may expect more than three strikes of the switch. Now—back to the task set for you.”

  “No, I will not go,” Anne told her.

  “What? What did you say?”

  Anne straightened her back. “I won't milk sheep, Sister Secula. I was born a princess of the house Dare and a duchess of the house de Liery. I will die as such, and I will be those things all the years between. However long you keep me in this place, and however you choose to treat me, I remain who I am, and I will not be lowered to menial tasks.”

  Sister Secula nodded thoughtfully. “I see. You're protecting the dignity of your titles.”

  “Yes.”

  “As you protected them when you ignored your mother's wishes and rode like a wild goat all over Eslen? As when you were busy spreading your legs for the first buck to spout poetry at you? It seems you've discovered the dignity becoming your station right quickly and conveniently when asked to do something you find distasteful.”

  Anne laid her head back down on the chastising table. “Strike me more if you wish. I do not care.”

  Sister Secula laughed. “That is another thing you will learn, little Ivexa. You will learn to care. But perhaps it is not whipping that will make you do so. Who do you think the ladies of this coven are, lowborn peasants? They are from the best families in all the known lands. If they choose to return to the world, they will find their titles waiting. Here, they are members of this order, nothing more and nothing less. And you, my dear, are the very least of them.”

  “I am not the least,” Anne replied. “I will never be the least of anything.”

  “Absurd. You are the least learned in every subject. You are the least disciplined. You are the least worthy of even that novice robe you wear. Listen to you! What have you ever done? You have nothing that was not given to you by your birth.”

  “It is enough.”

  “It is if your only ambition is to be the brood mare for some highborn fool, for brood mares neither need nor have brains enough to want more than they were born with. Yet my understanding is that the very reason you were sent to me is that even that lowest of ambitions escapes your thick head.”

  “I have talents. I have a destiny.”

  “You have inclinations. You have desires. A plow-ass has those.”

  “No. I have more.” My dreams. My visions. But she didn't mention those aloud.

  “Well, we shall see, shan't we?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You think yourself a creature apart, better than every other girl here. Very well—we shall give you the chance to prove that is so. Yes, we will. Come with me.”

  Anne gazed down into the utter blackness and tried not to tremble. Behind her, three sisters tightened a series of ropes supporting the leather harness they had strapped on her.

  “Don't do this,” Anne said, trying to keep her voice low.

  None of the sisters answered, and Sister Secula was already gone.

  The air wafting out of the hole was cold and metallic.

  “What is it?” Anne asked. “Where are you putting me?”

  “It is called the womb of Lady Mefitis,” one of the initiates answered. “Mefita is, as you know, an aspect of Cer.”

  “The aspect that tortures damned souls.”

  “Not at all. That's a common misconception. She is the aspect of motion in rest, of pregnancy without birth, of time without day or night.”

  “How long am I to be down there?”

  “A nineday. It is the usual penance associated with humility. But I urge you to use your time in meditation, and in perceiving the glory of our lady. After all, her fane is there.”

  “A nineday? I'll starve!”

  “We're going to lower food and drink sufficient for that time.”

  “And a lamp?”

  “Light is not permitted in the womb.”

  “I'll go mad!”

  “You won't. But you'll learn humility.” Her smile hid an uncertain emotion. Triumph? Grief ? Anne thought it could be either. “You must learn it some time, you know. Now, in you go.”

  “No!”

  Anne kicked and screamed, but for naught. They had her strapped well, and in no time the initiates had her out over the black well and descending into it.

  The opening was as
wide as she was tall. By the time her descent ended and her feet touched stone, it seemed no larger than a bright star.

  “Keep near, where the stone is flat and level,” a voice floated down. “Do not go beyond the wall we have built, or you will find danger. The caves are empty of beasts, but full of cracks and chasms. Stay in the wall, and you will be safe.”

  Then the circle vanished, and the only light remaining was the illusion of it painted on her eyelids, a single spot fading quickly from green, to pink, to deep red—gone.

  And Anne screamed until her throat felt torn.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE KEPT

  PRINCE CHEISO OF SAFNIA spasmed and coughed flecks of blood onto the stone floor as his torturer drew a score across his back with a red-hot iron, but he did not scream. William could see the scream anyway, buried in the Safnian's face, digging to get out like the larvae of an earth wasp struggling to emerge from a paralyzed spider. But it stayed prisoned in that proud, dark face.

  William could not help but admire Cheiso's bravery. The man had been whipped and burned, the flesh of his back sanded raw and rubbed with salt. Four of his fingers were broken, and he had been dunked repeatedly in a vat of urine and offal. Still he did not beg, or cry out, or confess. They were made of sterner stuff than William had known, these Safnians. He doubted that he would have held up so well.

  “Will you speak now?” Robert asked gently. He stood behind the prince and stroked his brow with a damp rag. “You have sisters yourself, Prince Cheiso. Try to imagine how we feel. We degrade ourselves when we treat you thus, but we will know why you betrayed her.”

  Lying there on a table turned upright, Cheiso lifted his eyes then, but he did not look at Robert. Instead, his black eyes focused steadfastly on William. He licked his lips and spoke.

  “Your Majesty,” he said, in that faraway accent of his kind, “I am Prince Cheiso of Safnia, son of Amfile, grandson of Verfunio, who turned away the Harshem fleet at Bidhala with two ships and a word. I do not lie. I do not betray my honor. Lesbeth your sister is my dearest love, and if any evil has come to her, I will live to find who did it and make him pay. But you, Emperor of Crotheny, are a fool. You have supped on lies, and they have fattened your wits. You may dig with your prick of iron down to my very bones and carpet your floor with my blood, but there is nothing I can tell you save that I am innocent.”