The Born Queen tkotab-4

by Greg Keyes

  "Maybe they needed me to find the journal. Maybe the battle was a ruse to make me feel safe and in charge. Maybe Fend is stark raving mad. That wouldn't surprise me in the least."

  "Or maybe, as some of the legends say, the Blood Knight is your servant and ally," she said.

  He nodded. "That's his claim."

  "The thing in the mountain-suppose that's the Vhelny? What if it's here, watching, waiting?"

  She paled. "I hadn't considered it. I've thought of all of this as prophecy for so long, as an ancient and distant thing. In my mind's eye, the Vhelny would come like a dragon, all flame and shadow, not sneak about like a thief. But no tale or legend describes him." She rubbed her forehead. "Saints, it's likely, isn't it?"

  "Yes," he said, reaching for his clothes.

  "Where are you going?"

  "To read more of the journal. Virgenya Dare found this place. She walked the faneway I'm supposed to walk. Let's see what she has to say about it."

  SLAVES HAVE SECRETS, AND THIS IS ONE OF THEM, THIS CIPHER. WILL AND I INVENTED IT TO WRITE EACH OTHER. WILL'S MASTER MAKES LEAD TISSUE, AND SO HE FINDS IT IN PLENTY.

  WILL'S MASTER BROUGHT HIM HERE WHEN I WAS TWELVE, BY MY FATHER'S RECKONING. THEY PUT US IN A ROOM TOGETHER, AND WE KNEW WHAT WE WERE SUPPOSED TO DO. THE MASTERS WERE WATCHING, BUT THEY COULDN'T HEAR WHEN WILL WHISPERED AND TOLD ME IT WOULD BE OKAY. HE WHISPERED A LOT ABOUT HOW OUR FATHERS KNEW EACH OTHER, ABOUT WHERE HE LIVED. IT HELPED ME FORGET WHAT WAS GOING ON AND HOW SCARED I WAS. AFTER THAT I WASN'T SCARED. I LOOKED FORWARD TO OUR WHISPERED CONVERSATIONS. IT WAS LIKE MY BODY WASN'T THERE AT ALL. WILL STARTED TEACHING ME THE SECRET LANGUAGE THE SLAVES IN HIS FORTRESS HAVE, AND I MADE UP THESE LETTERS FOR IT. WE PASS EACH OTHER NOTES WHEN WE MEET. I'LL SEE HIM AGAIN NEXT WHEN THE MOON IS FULL.

  I DIDN'T BLEED THIS MONTH, AND WILL DIDN'T COME. THE MASTER SAYS I WILL HAVE A YOUNGLING. THE HOUSE SLAVES TELL ME THAT A LOT OF WOMEN DIE WHEN THEY DO THAT. I DON'T WANT TO DIE, BUT I AM OFTEN SICK. MY FATHER SAID WE ESCAPE THE MASTER WHEN WE DIE. I WONDER IF THAT IS TRUE.

  I HAVE SEEN WILL AGAIN. THEY RACED HIM, WITH FIFTY OTHERS. THEY DROVE THEM WITH CHARIOTS, AND IF ANY FELL, THEY CUT THEM TO PIECES. WILL RAN HARD; THEY DIDN'T CATCH HIM. MY MASTER KEPT ME CHAINED AT THE FRONT OF HIS FLYING BARGE, SO I WOULD HAVE TO WATCH HIM, BUT I DIDN'T WANT TO LOOK AWAY. TWO DAYS THEY RAN, WITHOUT SLEEPING OR EATING. BY THE END OF THE SECOND DAY, ONLY THREE WERE LEFT, AND ONE OF THEM WAS WILL. I WAS SO PROUD OF HIM. I WAS PROUD TO HAVE HIS DAUGHTER IN MY BELLY.

  SIX MOONS HAVE WAXED AND WANED. MY BELLY IS LARGE, AND THE MASTER HAS TAKEN ME TO THE MOUNTAIN FORTRESS FOR THE REST OF MY PREGNANCY. IT IS A HABIT FROM THE OLD DAYS, WHEN MASTERS COULD HAVE CHILDREN. I HAD NOT SEEN MOUNTAINS BEFORE, AND I LOVE THEM. THEY MAKE ME THINK STRANGE, LOVELY THOUGHTS. AND THERE IS SOMETHING IN THE FORTRESS, OR DEEP BELOW IT, SOMETHING THAT MAKES MY BELLY TINGLE AND SOMETIMES SETS MY TEETH ON EDGE.

  I HAD A DREAM LAST NIGHT. I DREAMED I WAS A MOUNTAIN, AND MY FEET PULLED LOOSE OF THE EARTH, AND I WALKED, CRUSHING EVERYTHING BENEATH ME. I CRUSHED THE MASTER. WHEN I WOKE, I WAS FRIGHTENED HE WOULD FIND OUT AND PUNISH ME, BUT HE DIDN'T. I ALWAYS THOUGHT HE COULD SEE MY DREAMS. HE HAS TOLD ME WHAT I DREAMED BEFORE. BUT THIS DREAM WAS DIFFERENT. I THINK SOMEHOW THE MOUNTAINS HAVE TAUGHT ME HOW TO DREAM IN SECRET. THAT WOULD BE NICE.

  IT HURT, JUST AS THEY SAID IT WOULD. IT HURT SO MUCH, I ALREADY CAN'T IMAGINE THE PAIN. AND THERE WAS BLOOD, A LOT OF IT. EVERYTHING WENT DARK, AND I THOUGHT I HAD DIED AND WAS IN A STRANGE PLACE. THERE WERE TWO RIVERS THERE, A BRIGHT BLUE-GREEN STREAM AND A BLACK ONE. I STOOD WITH A FOOT IN EACH, AND I WAS TALL, LIKE A MOUNTAIN. I WAS TERRIBLE.

  THEN I WOKE, AND THERE WAS MY DAUGHTER, AND I FINALLY UNDERSTOOD WHAT MY FATHER MEANT BY THE WORD "LOVE."

  I WON'T WRITE WHAT THEY DID. I WILL NOT. IT IS DONE. But I'm going to kill them. I'm going to kill all of them.

  Stephen gasped and pulled his fingers away as the lead scrift was suddenly too hot to touch. The purest hatred he had ever felt scalded through him, so uncontainable in its fury that he found himself shrieking. And as that awful rage trembled through him, he turned and caught a motion from the verge of his eye. He spun to find a boiling, kinetic darkness like black oil poured in water and almost a shape. Then his gaze rejected it and turned his head away, and when he was able to look again, it was gone.

  The anger burned away as quickly as it had come, replaced by shivering fear. He sat, quaking, for long moments, his brain refusing to tell him what to do. Where was the thing? Was it still here, perhaps a fingers-breadth from him, hiding in the air itself, waiting to strike?

  You don't have to be afraid, a voice whispered. You never have to be afraid again.

  "Shut up," Stephen muttered, rubbing his shaking hands together.

  It took a long time for him to manage to stand, and when he did, his body felt light enough to blow away on the wind.

  He flipped through the journal until he found what he was looking for.

  A little later he heard a slight scuffing and saw that Zemle was watching him from the stairwell.

  "What's wrong?" she asked.

  He closed his eyes. "Enough," he said. "Enough."

  "What?"

  "Call Adhrekh. I'll start walking the faneway. Tonight."

  CHAPTER TEN

  THREE THRONES

  ASPAR SHIFTED his grip on the knife a bit and licked his dry lips. He'd heard-or thought he'd heard-something coming through the dense bottomland forest, but now all he could make out was the rushing of the stream and the scraping of branches in low wind.

  But then, behind him, he caught the faintest hiss of fabric on wood and whipped around to face whatever it was.

  He found himself staring down an arrow shaft at Leshya's violet eyes.

  "Sceat," he muttered, sagging against the rough, twisty bark of a willow.

  "I took the longer way down," she explained.

  "Yah."

  She glanced at the corpse of the utin. "You're still alive," she said.

  "Yah."

  "I've lived a long time, Aspar White, and been almost everywhere. But you, my friend, are unique." She shook her head. "Any open wounds need stopping? Broken bones?"

  "I don't think so."

  "I noticed a rock shelter not far from here. Let's go there and take a look."

  He nodded wearily.

  He winced as her fingers prodded the tissue of his leg, but actually it almost felt good, like sore muscles after a hard hike.

  "Well, you didn't break it again," she said.

  "Well, Grim must love me, then," he said.

  "If he loves anyone, I'd say so," she replied. "Now let's have your shirt off."

  He didn't feel like he was capable of doing much more than raising his arms, but she shucked it off with a few sharp tugs. He felt a jagged pain in his side.

  "Need a bath," she said.

  "Sefry bathe too much," he replied. "Unhealthy habit."

  "But we smell good," she said.

  In fact, she smelled of sweat and leather, and it did smell good.

  "Ah, there's a home for gangrene," she said.

  Aspar looked down and saw a ragged but not particularly deep cut on his ribs. Blood had glued his jerkin to the wound, which was what he'd felt when she had dishabilled him.

  He took deep breaths and tried to stay relaxed as she cleaned out the gash with water and then pressed some sort of unguent from her haversack into the cut.

  "You saved my life," she said, her voice sounding oddly soft.

  "Yah. You've saved mine a time or two."

  "You're important, Aspar. You're worth saving."

  Without thinking, he caught her hand. "You're worth saving, too," he said.

  Her startled gaze met his and settled there, and he felt a sort of jolt, and in an instant he was gazing into the deepest forest in the world, more impossible to enter than the Sarnwood, even less possible to leave. He felt beaten, and happy to be beaten, happy to finally go home.

  He saw the path in for perhaps ten
heartbeats, and then the trees closed ranks. She pulled her hand away, and he knew that if she had just squeezed his fingers, he would have acted foolishly.

  Sceat, he thought. At a time like this he was thinking about women? Two of them? Was he seventeen?

  "I don't think we have all that long," Aspar said. "The utin said Fend sent him. If Fend is leading that motley up above-"

  "He is the Blood Knight, then."

  "Yah, whatever the sceat that means."

  "I'll tell you, I promise. But right now we need to go. And quietly."

  "Soon," he said.

  "Soon."

  The valley narrowed to the point where they were always on a slope. Aspar's leg ached even with the new crutch Leshya had cut him, and as the way turned more and more downhill, his knees began to hurt as well.

  In the back of his mind he'd always reckoned that after a while he'd be back to his old self, but now he was starting to wonder. He was past forty winters, and at his age, when things broke, they didn't necessarily get fixed.

  They came at last to steep, shallow shoals with nothing but cliffs on either side.

  "We'll be getting wet," Leshya said.

  They went down basically sitting, letting their boots find the rocks. The mountain water already had winter in it, and before they were a third of the way down, Aspar's extremities were numb. Halfway, his boot slipped and the current got control of him, sweeping him down until he lodged hard against a log.

  The sky was wider there. Two white-tailed eagles turned high above. Treetops peered down at him from the gorge's rim.

  It's still alive here, he thought. Despite the monsters. Why should I go back to the King's Forest, where everything is dead? Why not stay here, fight, die, sink into the earth?

  It was only when something struck him across the face that he realized there was water in his mouth and lungs. His body understood then, and he started hacking it up in long, painful coughs.

  "Get up," Leshya said. "You're not done, Aspar White."

  They made it the rest of the way down, and he took a few minutes to finish clearing his lungs.

  "Sceat," he managed weakly.

  "You've got to help me more than this, Aspar," Leshya said. "You've got to try harder."

  "Sceat on you," he muttered, and for a moment he wanted to kill her just for seeing him like this. It was the most humiliating thing he could imagine.

  Up until now, at least. Now he could envision more worlds waiting for him as the years crept by. Why, there was Winna, still young enough to bear children, rolling him over to change the linens under him, the ones he'd just soiled…

  He pushed himself up with the crutch, then threw it away.

  "Let's go," he said.

  The valley broadened out into a gentle, ferny glen where the warmth of the sun took the chill from his bones. Dragonflies whirred over the water and its sedge of horsetails. Snakes and turtles lazily quit their perches as the two travelers neared them. The cliffs became slopes, and trees walked down them; soon they were able to move out of the marsh and travel on drier ground.

  He also began seeing more signs of man. Some of the forest bore old farming terraces, and they passed several hunting shelters. The rinn was joined by several others, and some had the scent of manure in them.

  He felt the geos of the Sarnwood in his belly, cold, waiting. Who would it be?

  All the while, the terrain turned them south.

  It was getting dark when they heard dogs and smelled smoke. Soon they saw, on a rise some distance from the stream, a fenced yard and a large cabin built of split cypress.

  To Aspar's relief, Leshya gestured away from that and upslope, where in time the trees thinned into pasture. The stars began to appear, although the sun was barely gone behind the mountain they just had come down from. Aspar found himself looking back often, and once something caught his eye. He thought at first that it was a bat, but then he kenned he'd misunderstood the distance; if it was a bat, it was a very big one.

  He suddenly felt like a hare on a broad plain.

  "Ah," Leshya said. He found her staring at the thing as it vanished into shadow.

  "Any ideas what that might be?"

  "No. But I reckon we'd better sleep in tonight."

  "Go back down to the cabin?"

  "No. This is winter pasture. There ought to be something up here."

  She was proved right before the darkness was total; they found a small sod house in good repair. It was even sparely furnished with firewood, a cooking pot, a cask of somewhat weevily oats, and a little dried meat. Cobwebs testified that all of it was from the last season.

  They didn't build a fire, and so the oats stayed where they were, but the dried meat proved hard to resist, thievery though it was.

  "Blood Knight," Aspar said as he lay back on a straw mat and pulled the ragged bits of a blanket over his legs.

  "Right," she said.

  He couldn't see her at all in the darkness. "And you can throw in as a bargain where you got this witchy knife."

  "That's easier," she said. "I found it on a dead man back at the mountain. One of Hespero's men."

  "Where are they getting those things?"

  "Old places," she said. "There were once quite a lot of them."

  "When your folk ruled the world."

  "When we were being beaten by yours," she replied. "The fey weapons were forged by humans. Virgenya Dare found the knowledge of their making. The Skasloi wouldn't use such weapons."

  "Why?"

  "Because they draw on the sedos power. The Skasloi wouldn't have anything to do with that."

  "Why?"

  She sighed. "You know we don't really write things down, we Sefry. But we live a long time. Seventy generations have come and gone for your kind since you won your freedom. But my mother was born four hundred years ago, and her mother was born six hundred before that. Three more generations back-"

  "You were Skasloi. Yah."

  "So our memories are better. But there's still a lot we don't know. Things our ancestors intentionally didn't pass on and others they may have lied about. So understand that everything I'm about to tell you might not be true."

  "I grew up with Sefry, remember? I know a thing or two about their lies."

  She shrugged. "We couldn't have survived all of these centuries without a talent for dissembling. If we had been found out-if the Mannish races ever knew what we really were-we would have been slaughtered."

  "Yah," Aspar said drily. "I reckon."

  "Anyway, what I was getting to. My ancestors did use the sedos power once. But they discovered that using it isn't without cost. Each time it's drawn on, it leaves a poison behind it. The pollution builds up over time like dead fish in a stream, and things begin to die. Almost everything died once, before my ancestors understood the consequences of the sedos power and forswore its use."

  "But the Skasloi were supposed to be demons, with lots of strange shinecrafting."

  "The Skasloi had magicks, yes. They found another source of power, one without the same ill effects as the sedos. But by that time the world was a wasteland. They discovered a way beyond the lands of fate to another place, an otherwhere, and they brought plants to make the world green again. They brought animals, too, and in time they brought your people."

  "To use as slaves."

  "Pets at first. Curiosities. But eventually slaves, yes."

  "Until the pets found the sedos power."

  "Exactly."

  A thought struck him. "So the monsters, the black thorns, the things destroying the world-that's from using the sedos power?"

  "Yes. You told me about the boar you saw in the Sarnwood, how it gave birth to a greffyn. The sedhmhari are born from natural things poisoned by sedos power. Some say they are shadows of the elder beasts that walked the world before the great dying, the ancient life trying to push through the new, but tainted by the venom of the sedos."

  He remembered the Sarnwood again, the strange plants that grew in its heart.
"The Sarnwood witch," he murmured.

  "We don't know what she is, but she is very, very old. Older maybe than my race."

  "She's from the old forest. The one your people destroyed. The one my forest replaced."

  "Maybe," she said cautiously. "As I said, we don't know much about her."

  "What does she want?"

  "We don't know."

  Aspar nodded, but he had an idea he already knew. If he was the witch of the Sarnwood, he knew what he would want.

  "What's all this got to do with Fend?"

  "That's another legend, a prophecy, really. There are seasons larger than the ones you know, seasons that last hundreds and thousands of years. The powers-we call them thrones-of the world wax and wane with those seasons. When Virgenya Dare found the sedos power, it was strong. But over time it weakened, and the other thrones waxed, bringing on the Warlock Wars and all sorts of havoc. But now the sedoi swell very powerful, more powerful than ever. They say that whoever controls the sedos throne at its peak will be able to subjugate the other thrones forever and end the long, slow change of seasons."

  "And these other powers-these thrones-what are they?"

  "There are only three. The sedos we've been talking about. The second is the power your folk call shinecraft and witchcraft, and it comes from the abyss beneath the world. It makes unlikely things likely and the certain impossible. It can bring a rain of fire from heaven or stop water freezing even though it is bitter cold. It brings things together that belong apart and pushes things apart that belong together. That was the throne the Skasloi mastered, and after them the warlocks. We called that throne the Xhes throne."

  "And the third power?"

  "That's the one you've felt in your bones every day of your life, Aspar White. Generation and decay. Death and birth. The energy that makes life into dirt and dirt into life. We called that throne the Vhen throne."

  "The Briar King's throne."

  "Not anymore," she said softly.

  "Because Fend killed him. Why did he do that?"

  "According to the elders, the master of the Xhes throne is a creature we know as the Vhelny, a demon. The Blood Knight is said to be his servant. He is the foe of the masters of the other thrones."