by Greg Keyes
That notch was Caspator’s death wound. There was no repairing such damage without reforging the entire blade, and with a new blade it wouldn’t really be Caspator anymore but a different weapon. But even having a new blade forged wasn’t so likely in these northern climes, where everyone favored overgrown butcher’s cleavers to the rapier, the soul of dessrata. Dessrata was impossible without the right weapon, and where was he to find another sword that would serve, short of going back to Vitellio?
He really did miss z’Acatto. Not for the first time, he wished he’d returned to Vitellio with his old swordmaster.
He’d begun the expedition in high hopes for adventure. Harrowing as it had been at times, he’d seen more wonders since leaving Vitellio than in all his life until that time. But it had been just the four of them: Anne, Austra, z’Acatto, and himself.
Now Anne had a knight with a magic sword, a woodsman who could drill an arrow through a pigeon at six miles, and a priest who could hear twelve leagues in every direction. Winna didn’t have any arcane abilities that he could see, but he wouldn’t be entirely surprised if she suddenly began calling the animals, imploring them to fight at their side.
And what was he? A fellow who’d let the queen and her maid be kidnapped from beneath his very nose, who couldn’t even speak the language of the kingdom, and who would be dead useless once his sword inevitably snapped.
The strangest thing was that that didn’t bother him so much. Well, it did, but not the way it would have a year before. He did feel inadequate, but that in itself wasn’t the problem. It wasn’t his pride that hurt; it was the fact that he couldn’t serve Anne the way he should.
It was that Austra was in the hands of someone evil.
He’d been trying to distract himself with selfish thoughts to keep himself from dwelling on the really soul-crushing possibility—that his friends were already dead.
Up ahead he noticed Stephen beckoning him with one hand and holding a finger to his lips with another. He spurred his horse forward, wondering what this fight would be like.
As it turned out, there was mixed news. The men Stephen had heard were allies—four of the knights from Dunmrogh—crouched behind a cairn of stones at the top of the nearest hill. They were hunkered there because the next ridge over was held by their enemies.
“This was very well planned,” Neil said to Aspar. “A main assault to distract us, sorcelled horsemen to take the girls, and a series of rear guards to slow us down while they escaped. But why not brave it all on a single assault?”
Aspar shrugged. “Maybe they’ve heard tell of us and think we’re stronger than we are. More likely you’re wrong. Could be their plans didn’t go as well as it seemed. I think they did mean to kill us all in a single assault, and if you think about it, they came pretty close. We had near forty men when we left Dunmrogh. Now there are nine of us left, but they don’t know that. What with the snow and us separating, they’re as confused as we are.
“For all we know, we outnumber them now. That could be the last three of ’em there, over on that ridge, and the girls might be with ’em. No way to tell, now that it’s getting dark.”
“There are six of them,” Stephen said, “and I do hear a girl, though I can’t swear she’s one of ours.”
“It must be,” Neil said.
“Werlic,” Aspar agreed. “So we’ll just have to go and get ’em.” His eyes traced lazily through the trees, down into the small valley, up to the opposing ridge.
“Aspar…” Stephen murmured.
“Yah?”
“There’s something—something else. But I can’t tell you what it is.”
“With the men?”
Stephen shook his head. “No. It might be very far away.”
“Then we’ll grab the first branch before reaching for the next,” Aspar said. “But if you make out anything more clearly—”
“I’ll let you know,” Stephen promised.
Neil was still studying the terrain. “They’ll have plenty of clear shots at us before we can get to them,” he noted.
“Yah,” Aspar said. “That would be a good reason not to charge them through the valley.”
“Is there another way?”
“Plenty of other ways. They’ve got the highest ground, but this ridge joins theirs up to our left.”
“You know this place?”
Aspar frowned. “No. But that brooh down there’s pretty small; see? And I can smell the springhead. And if you look at the light through the trees—well, its high ground up there, trust me. The only thing is, if we all go that way, they might bolt.
“If they follow the ridge down, it’ll take ’em to the marshes on the Warlock, and we’ll get them there. But if they go north, down the ridge, they’ll find themselves breaking out of the woods onto prairie, and there they’ll have a choice of crossing the river and taking the Mey Ghorn plain or heading east.
“Either way, we’ll have to catch them again, if we can. Right now we know where they are.”
“But why are they waiting there?” Neil asked.
“I reckon they’re lost,” Aspar said. “They can’t see the open ground from where they are. If they ride a hundred kingsyards, though, they will. Then we’ve got trouble.”
“What do you propose? Have someone sneak around on the high ground?”
“Yah,” Aspar said.
“And I suppose that person would be you.”
For answer, the holter suddenly bent his bow and let fly a shaft. A sharp cry of consternation echoed from across the dale.
“Ney,” the holter said. “I’m needed here to convince ’em that we’re still on this ridge. You and Cazio go. When Stephen hears you near, we’ll make our run down the valley and back up the other side. You just be sure and keep them busy.”
Neil thought about it for a moment, then nodded. “That’s worth trying,” he said.
“Can you keep it quiet?”
“In the forest? I’ll leave my armor. But still…”
“I’ve no sense that they’re woodsmen,” Aspar said. “We’ll try to keep things lively here.”
Neil glanced over at Cazio. “Stephen,” he said, “could you explain to Cazio what we just said?”
Stephen did, and when he was done, the swordsman grinned and nodded. Neil stripped down to his quilted gambeson, took up Draug, and a few moments later they were skirting the ridge east, wincing at the sound of each broken twig, hoping Aspar was right about everything.
They needn’t have worried. The ridge turned, just as the holter had predicted, forming a sort of cul-de-sac below. The hill dipped again as it curved, then began rising toward the high point where their enemies waited.
Now and then Neil heard shouted exchanges between Aspar, Winna, Stephen, and the men ahead of them. That was a relief, because it provided a further guide.
Neil found himself holding his breath. Annoyed, he forced himself to breathe evenly. He had attacked in stealth before; in the strands and high meadows of the isles he had fought many a night battle, positioning himself for surprise. But the islands were sand and stone, moss and heather. Moving with the easy silence of Aspar White through these treacherous hills and trees was well beyond his abilities.
He glanced at Cazio and found the Vitellian stepping with the same exaggerated care.
The shouting up ahead was growing nearer now. Crouching lower, Neil reached for his sword.
Aspar turned when he heard Stephen gasp.
“What?”
“All around us,” Stephen said. “Moving from every direction.”
“More of them? An ambush?”
“No, no,” Stephen said. “They’re quieter than they were before, much quieter, almost like wind in the trees. His power is growing, and theirs is, too.”
“Slinders,” Winna gasped.
“Slinders,” Stephen said.
“Sceat,” Aspar grunted.
Cazio stopped when he caught a glimpse of color through the autumn-shorn trees. The unde
rstory was thick and brambly with wild blueberry, harlot creeper, and cruxflower vine.
To his right he saw that Neil MeqVren also had paused.
The brush was both a boon and a problem. The archers among their enemies would have difficulty finding a target until they were nearly in the clearing. However, it would slow Cazio and the knight as they made their approach.
Wrong. Suddenly Sir Neil was charging, whirling that eerie butchering blade of his in front of him like a gardener’s bill, and the underbrush was no more resistant to it than was flesh or armor.
Wishing he could have known a little more about the plan, he fell in immediately behind Neil, excitement winding in him like the cord of a ballista arming.
The instant Neil burst into the clearing, Cazio dodged around him, neatly stepping into the path of a black-feathered shaft. It skinned along his belly, leaving a deep score of pain. He couldn’t tell if he’d been eviscerated or merely scratched, and he didn’t really have time to check, since a piggish brute with a broadsword came snuffling quickly toward him.
Cazio put Caspator out in a line; the rapier was easily twice the length of the hacking weapon his opponent carried. The fellow was bright enough to understand that and beat fiercely at the narrow blade to move it out of his path. He wasn’t smart enough to stop charging, though, apparently confident that his wild attack on the blade would succeed.
But with a deft flick of his wrist, Cazio avoided the searching weapon without withdrawing his line so that the man obligingly ran straight onto the tip of his weapon.
“Ca dola da,” Cazio began, customarily explaining to his foe what deftness of dessrata had just wounded him. He didn’t finish, though, because—impaled or not—the pig aimed a ferocious cut at Cazio’s head. He avoided it only by ducking, which sent a fresh sear of pain along his wounded belly.
The blade missed him, but the momentum of the swing carried the man’s sword arm into Cazio’s shoulder. Cazio caught the arm with his left hand and held it as he twisted Caspator free from the man’s lungs. For an instant sea-green eyes filled Cazio’s world, and with a shudder he understood that what he saw there wasn’t hatred, or anger, or even a seething battle rage but horror and desperation.
“Don’t…” the man gasped.
Cazio pushed him away, feeling sick. There was no ‘don’t.’ The man was already dead; he just wasn’t able to accept it yet.
What was he doing here? Cazio had been a duelist since he was twelve, but he had rarely fought to kill. It simply hadn’t been necessary.
But now it is, he thought grimly as he drew-cut a crouching archer’s string, thus preventing the man from shooting him in the face. He followed that with a violently swung boot that caught the fellow beneath the chin and lifted him toward a bed of briars and bushes.
He was just turning to meet another attacker when the forest exploded.
He had a sudden sense of darkness, the scent of unbathed bodies, and something else: a smell like the sweet alcohol perfume of grapes rotting on the vine, the odor of black dirt. Then it seemed a hundred limbs were clutching at him, clenching him, and he was borne down into chaos.
ANNE’S MOUNT snuffled in fear as they approached yet another wall of black thorns wound so thickly through the trees as to deny entrance to anything larger than a vole.
“Hush,” Anne said, patting the beast’s neck. It flinched and shied from her touch.
“Be nice.” Anne sighed. “I’ll give you a name, all right? What’s a good name?”
Mercenjoy, a little voice in her seemed to titter, and for an instant she felt so dizzy, she feared she might fall off.
“No, then, not Mercenjoy,” she said, more to herself than to the horse. That was the name of the Dark Knight’s mount in the phay stories, she remembered, and it meant “Murder-Steed.”
“You belonged to a bad man,” she said as reassuringly as possible, “but you aren’t a bad horse. Let’s see, I think I’ll call you Prespine, for the saint of the labyrinth. She found her way out of her maze—now you’ll help me find our way out of this one.”
Even as she said it, Anne remembered a day that now seemed long ago, a day when her cares had been relatively simple ones and she’d been at her sister’s birthday party. There had been a labyrinth there, grown of flowers and vines, but in a moment she’d found herself in another maze, in a strange place with no shadows, and since then nothing had been simple.
Anne hadn’t wanted to get up, to catch the horse and ride. She’d wanted to stay huddled in the roots of the tree until someone came to help her or until it didn’t matter anymore.
But fear had driven her up—fear that if she stayed in one place for long, something worse than death would catch up with her.
She shuddered as a change in the wind brought a stench from the black briars, a smell that reminded her of spiders, though she couldn’t recall ever having actually smelled a spider. The strange growth was somehow like spiders, too. The vines and leaves glistened with the promise of venom.
She turned Prespine, following the thorns but keeping a respectable distance from them. Far off to her left, she thought she heard a sort of howling for a time, but as quickly as it began, it was gone.
The sun passed noon, then continued on toward its night home in the wood beyond the world. Anne imagined that the country where the sun slept couldn’t be any stranger or more terrible than this place. The thorns seemed almost to be guiding her, herding her toward some destination she almost certainly did not desire to visit.
As the sky darkened, she also began to feel something behind her, and she knew she had been right back at the tree. Something was coming for her. It began as small as an insect, but it grew, with its many eyes fastened greedily on her back.
When she turned, however, no matter how quickly, it was gone.
She’d played this game as a child, as most children do. She and Austra had pretended the dread Scaos was after them, a monster so terrible that they could not look at it without being turned to stone. Alone, she had imagined a ghost walking behind her, sometimes at the corner of her vision but never there when she turned to confront it. Sometimes it frightened her, sometimes it delighted her, and usually both. Fear that one had under control had a certain delicate flavor.
This fear was not under her control. It did not taste good at all.
And it only grew more substantial. The unseen fingers clutched ever closer to her shoulder, and when she spun about, there was something, like the stain the bright sun leaves beneath the eyelids. The air seemed to clot thickly around her, the trees to bend wearily earthward.
Something had followed her back. But back from where? Where was that place of dark waters?
She had journeyed beyond the world before, or at least beyond her part of it. Most often she had been to the place of the Faiths, which was sometimes a forest, sometimes a glen, sometimes a highland meadow. Once she had taken Austra there with her to escape some murderous knights.
The place she had gone with the dying man was different. Had it been the land of the dead or only the borderlands? She remembered that the land of the dead was supposed to have two rivers—though she couldn’t remember why—but here there had been more than two; there had been thousands.
And the Briar King. He had been shackled by those waters, or at least they were trying to bind him. What did that mean? And who was he?
He had communicated something to her, not with words, but his desire had been clear nonetheless. How did he even know who she was?
The face of the demon-woman flashed through her memory, and terror tremored freshly through her. Was that who followed her? She remembered the Faiths telling her that the law of death had been broken, whatever that meant. Had she committed some crime against the saints and brought death after her?
Red-gold sun suddenly spilled like a waterfall through the upper branches, and with terrible relief she suddenly realized that the briars had ended. Not much farther ahead the trees thinned to nothing as well, giving wa
y to a sweeping, endless field of yellowed grass. With a mixed shout of fear and triumph, she spurred Prespine out into the open and felt the creeping presence behind her diminish, slinking back into the thorn shadows where it was comfortable.
Tears sprang in Anne’s eyes as her hood fell away and the wind raked through her breviated hair. The sun was just above the horizon, an orange eye half-lidded by clouds bruised upon a golden west. The glorious color faded into a vesperine heaven so dark blue, she almost imagined that it was water, that she could swim up into and hide in its depths with its odd bright fish and be safe far above the world.
The clouds were mostly gone, the snow had stopped, and everything seemed better. But until the forest was a thinning line behind her, Anne kept Prespine at a run. Then she brought her to a walk and patted the mare’s neck, feeling the great pulse beating there, nearly in time with her own.
It was still cold; indeed, it felt colder than when the snow had been falling.
Where was she? Anne swept her gaze about the unfamiliar landscape, trying to conjure up some sort of bearings. She never had paid much attention to the maps her tutors had shown her when she was younger. She’d been regretting that for several months now.
The sunset marked the west, of course. The plain sloped gradually down from the forest, so she could see for some distance. In the east, the dusk glimmered on a broad river across which, far away, she could see the black line of more trees. The river curved north and vanished into the horizon.
Nearer, she happily made out the spire of what must be a bell tower. The landscape in that direction seemed pimpled with tiny hills, which after a moment she realized must be haystacks.
She paused for a long moment, watching the distant signs of civilization, her feelings clouding a bit. A town meant people, and people meant food, shelter, warmth, companionship. It could also mean danger; the man who had attacked her—he must have attacked her—had come from somewhere. This was the first place she had seen that might explain him.
And where were Austra and the rest? Behind her, in front of her—or dead?