by Greg Keyes
She took a deep breath, trying to release the tension in her shoulders.
She had been talking to Cazio, and everything had been fine. Then she had been alone with a dying man. The most logical assumption was that somehow he had abducted her, but why couldn’t she remember how it had happened?
Even trying to think about it brought a sudden panic that threatened to cloud all other thoughts from her mind.
She pushed that away and concentrated on the present. If her friends were alive, they were searching for her. If they were not, then she was alone.
Could she survive a night on the plain by herself? Maybe, maybe not. It depended on how cold it got. Prespine’s saddlebags contained a bit of bread and dried meat but nothing more. She had watched Cazio and z’Acatto start fires, but she hadn’t seen anything that resembled a tinderbox in the dead man’s possessions.
Reluctantly, she made her decision and prodded the mare toward the town. She needed to know where she was, at the very least. Had she made it to Loiyes? If so, the village ahead ought to be under the governance of her aunt. If she wasn’t in Loiyes, she needed to get there. She was more certain of that now than ever, for she had seen it in the face of the Briar King.
She realized that she knew something else.
Stephen Darige at least was alive. She knew this because the Briar King knew it. And there was something Stephen was supposed to do.
Not much farther along she came across a rutted clay road wide enough for wains; cut down into the landscape as it was, it had hidden itself from her earlier view. From where she met it the road wound off through cultivated fields. She noticed bits of green peeking through the snow, leading Anne to wonder what sorts of crops the farmers grew in winter or whether they were just weeds.
The haystacks she had seen as tiny at a distance were here prodigiously tall. Gaunt scarecrows in tattered rags stared empty-eyed from heads of gourd or shriveled black pumpkin.
The woodsmoke and its comforting aroma draped across the cold earth, and before long she came to a house, albeit a small one, with white clay walls and a steeply pitched thatch roof. A shed attached to the side seemed to serve as the barn; a cow watched her from beneath its eaves with dull curiosity. She could just make out a man in dirty tunic and leggings, pulling hay down from a loft with a wooden-tined pitchfork.
“Pardon me,” she called tentatively. “Can you tell me what that town ahead is named?”
The man glanced back at her, his tired eyes suddenly rounding a bit.
“Ah, edeu,” he said. “She ez anaméd Sevoyne, milady.”
Anne was taken aback by his accent, which was a bit difficult to decipher.
“Sevoyne?” she said. “That’s in Loiyes?”
“Edeu, milady. Loiyes ez here. Whereother should she beeth, to beg theen perdon?”
Anne let the question go as rhetorical. “And can you tell me where Glenchest is from here?” she pursued.
“Glenchest?” His brow furrowed. “She most to four leagues, creed-I, ’long the road most to way. You are working for the duchess there, lady?”
“That’s where I’m going,” Anne said. “I’m just a little lost.”
“Never-I’ve been thet faer along,” the fellow said. “But they tell ez net s’hard to find to ’er.”
“Thanks, then,” Anne said. “Thanks for that.”
“Velhoman, and good road ahead, lady,” the man said.
As Anne rode on, she heard a woman’s voice behind her. The man answered, and this time the language was one she did not know, though it carried the same peculiar cadence as his very odd king’s tongue.
So this was Loiyes, in the heartland of Crotheny. How was it, then, that the peasants here didn’t speak the king’s tongue first?
And how was it that she hadn’t known as much? She had been to Loiyes before, to Glenchest. The people in the town in Glenchest spoke perfectly good king’s tongue. According to the man, this was less than a day’s ride from there.
She had spent so much time traveling in foreign lands. The thought of a homecoming—of reaching a place where people spoke the language she had grown up with and everything was familiar—was something she had been longing for for months.
Now here she was, only to discover that the country of her birth was stranger than she had ever known.
It made her feel a little sick.
By the time Anne reached Sevoyne, the appearing stars were vanishing behind a new ceiling of cloud rolling in from the east, bringing for Anne a return of the claustrophobia she’d experienced in the forest. Her silent pursuer was near again, emboldened by the deep shadows.
She passed the town horz, the one spot where things were allowed to grow absolutely wild, albeit caged by an ancient stone wall. For the first time Anne recognized that contradiction, and she felt it sharply, another familiar stone in her world that had turned over to reveal the crawling things festering beneath.
The horz represented wild, untamed nature. The saints of the horz were Selfan of the Pines, Rieyene of the Birds, Fessa of the Flowers, Flenz of the Vines: the wild saints. How must the wild saints feel about being bound when once the whole world must have been theirs? She remembered the horz back in Tero Gallé, where she had entered the other world. She’d had a sense of diseased anger there, of frustration become madness.
For a moment the stone walls seemed to become a hedge of black thorns, and the image of the antlered figure returned to her.
He was wild, and, like everything truly wild, he was terrifying. The thorns were trying to bind him, weren’t they? The way the walls of the horz bound wildness. But who sent the thorns?
And had she thought of that herself, or had he left it in her head? How had she made that connection?
On the east she couldn’t remember what had happened to her. On the west her mind found strange conclusions. Had she lost control of her thoughts entirely? Was she mad?
“Detoi, meyez,” someone said, interrupting her ponderings. “Quey veretoi adeyre en se zevie?”
Anne tensed and tried to focus through the dark. To her surprise, what had seemed to be a mere shadow suddenly clarified as a man of middle years wearing livery she recognized: the sunspray, spear, and leaping fish of the dukes of Loiyes.
“Do you speak the king’s tongue, sir?” she asked.
“I do,” the man replied. “And I apologize for my impertinence. I could not see in the dark that you are a lady.”
Anne understood the peasant’s reaction now. Her king’s tongue and the accent she spoke it with gave her away immediately as a noble of Eslen, or one of the nobles’ close servants, at least. Her clothes, however dirty, surely confirmed it. That could be good or bad.
No, not good or bad. She was alone, without protectors. It was most probably bad.
“Whom do I have the honor of addressing, sir?”
“Mechoil MeLemved,” he replied. “Captain of the guard of Sevoyne. Are you lost, lady?”
“I’m on my way to Glenchest.”
“Alone? And in these times?”
“I had companions. We were separated.”
“Well, come in from the cold, lady. The coirmthez—I’m sorry, the inn—will have a room for you. Perhaps your companions are already waiting for you.”
Anne’s hopes slumped further. The captain seemed too unsurprised, too ready to accommodate her.
“I should warn you, Captain MeLemved,” she said, “that attempts have been made to deceive me into harm before, and my patience is very short with that sort of thing.”
“I don’t understand, Princess,” the captain said. “What harm could I mean you?”
She felt her face freeze.
“None, I’m sure,” she said.
She kicked Prespine into motion, wheeling to turn around. As she did so, she discovered there was someone behind her, and even as she perceived that, she noticed something in her peripheral vision just before it slapped her hard across the side of the head.
She gasped as everyt
hing spun in four or five directions, and then strong fingers pinched into her arms, dragging her from her mount. She squirmed, kicked, and screamed, but her cries were stifled quickly by something shoved into her mouth, followed immediately by a smell of grain as a sack was pulled over her head. Anger flared, and she reached to the place in her where sickness dwelled, sickness she could give to others.
What she found instead was a terror so vivid that her only escape from it was another retreat into darkness.
She woke sputtering, her nose burning, her throat closed. An acrid alcoholic stench suffused everything, but that seemed strangely distant.
Her eyes peeled open, and she saw through a glassy vertigo that she was in a small room lit by several candles. Someone was holding her hair back, and though she felt her roots pulling, it didn’t hurt that much.
“Awake now, eh?” a man’s voice growled. “Well, drink, then.”
The hard lip of a bottle was pressed against her lips, and something wet poured into her mouth. She spit it out, confused, recognizing how she felt, remembering that something had happened but not sure what. There had been a woman, a terrible woman, a demon, and she had fled her, just as she had before…
“Swallow it,” the man snarled.
That was when Anne realized she was drunk.
She had been drunk a few times before with Austra. Mostly it had been pleasant, but on a few occasions she had been very sick.
How much had they made her drink while she was asleep?
Enough. Horribly, she almost giggled.
The man held her nose and poured more of the stuff down her throat. It was like wine but oceans harsher and stronger. It went down this time, fire snaking through her throat and arriving in a belly already warmed to burning. She felt a sudden nausea, but then that cleared away. Her head was pulsing pleasantly, and things around her seemed to be happening much too quickly.
The man stepped to where she could see him. He wasn’t very old, maybe a few years older than she. He had curly brown hair, lighter at the ends, and hazel eyes. He wasn’t handsome, but he wasn’t ugly, either.
“There,” he said. “Look, there’s no reason for you to make this hard.”
Anne felt her eyes bug, and tears suddenly stung them. “Going to kill me,” she said, her words slurring. She wanted to say something much more complicated, but it wouldn’t come out.
“No, I’m not,” he said.
“Yes, you are.”
He frowned at her without speaking for a few moments.
“Why—why am I drunk?” she asked.
“So you don’t try to escape. I know you’re a shinecrafter. They say brandy makes it harder for you to use your arts.”
“I’m not a shinecrafter,” she snapped. Then, all restraint gone, she began shouting. “What do you want with me?”
“Me? Nothing. I’m just waiting for the rest. How did you get away, anyway? What were you doing alone?”
“My friends are coming,” she said. “Believe me. And when they get here, you’ll be sorry.”
“I’m already sorry,” the man said. “They left me here just in case, but I never thought I would have to deal with you.”
“Well, I—” But as soon as she started the thought, she lost it.
It was getting harder to think at all, in fact, and her earlier fear that she was losing her mind resurfaced as something of a private joke. Her lips felt huge and rubbery, and her tongue the size of her head.
“You gave me a lot to shr—drink.”
“Yes, I did.”
“When I fall asleep, you’re going to kill me.” She felt a tear collect in the corner of her eye and start down her cheek.
“No, that’s stupid. I would have killed you already, wouldn’t I? No, you’re wanted alive.”
“Why?”
“How should I know? I just work for my reytoirs. The others—”
“Aren’t coming back,” Anne said.
“What?”
“They’re all dead. Don’t you see that? All of your friends are dead.” She laughed, not quite sure why.
“You saw them?” he asked uneasily.
Anne nodded the lie. It felt as is if she were wiggling a huge kettle at the top of a narrow pole. “She killed them,” she said.
“She who?”
“The one you see in your nightmares,” she said tauntingly. “The one who creeps on you in the dark. She’s coming for me. You’ll be here when she finds me, and you’ll be sorry.”
The light was dimming. The candles were still lit but seemed to have faded somehow. The darkness wrapped around her like a comforter. Everything was spinning, and it seemed far too much trouble to talk.
“Coming…” she murmured, trying to keep a sense of urgency.
She didn’t fall asleep exactly, but her eyes closed, and her head seemed full of strange trumpets and unnatural lights.
She drifted in and out of scenes. She was in z’Espino, dressed like a maid, scrubbing laundry, and two women with large heads were making fun of her in a language she didn’t recognize.
She was on her own horse, Faster, riding so hard that she felt like vomiting.
She was in the house of her dead ancestors, the house of marble in Eslen-of-Shadows with Roderick, and he was kissing her on the bare flesh of her knee, moving up her thigh. She reached down to stroke his hair, and when he looked up at her, his eyes were maggoty holes.
She shrieked, and her eyes fluttered open to watery, half-focused reality. She was still in the little room. Someone’s head was pressed against her chest, and she realized with dull outrage that her bodice was open and someone was licking her. She was still in the chair, but his body was between her legs, which she could see were bare of stockings. He had hiked her skirts up all the way to her hips.
“No…” she murmured, pushing at him. “No.”
“Be still,” he hissed. “I told you this wouldn’t be so bad.”
“No!” Anne managed to scream.
“No one can hear you,” he said. “Calm down. I know how to do this.”
“No!”
But he ignored her, not understanding that she wasn’t yelling at him anymore.
She was yelling at her as she rose up from the shadows, her terrible teeth showing in a malicious grin.
LEOFF CLUNG to his Black Marys. No matter how terrible they were, he knew waking would be worse.
And sometimes, in the miasma of darkness and embodied pain, among the distorted faces mouthing threats made all the more terrible by their unintelligibility, amid the worm-dripping corpses and flight across plains that gripped up to his knees like congealed blood, something pleasant shone through, like a clear vein of sunlight in a dark cloud.
This time, as usual, it was music—the cool, sweet chiming of a hammarharp drifting through his agonized dreams like a saint’s breath.
Still he clenched; music had returned to him before, always beginning sweetly but then bending into dread modes that sent him plunging ever deeper into horror, until he put his hands to his ears and begged the holy saints to make it stop.
Yet it stayed sweet this time, if clumsy and amateurish.
Groaning, he pushed at the sticky womb of dream until he tore through to wakefulness.
He thought for a moment he had merely moved to another dream. He lay not on the cold, stinking stone he had become accustomed to but on a soft pallet, his head nested on a pillow. The stench of his own urine was replaced by the faint odor of juniper.
And most of all—most of all, the hammarharp was real, as was the man who sat on its bench, poking awkwardly at the keyboard.
“Prince Robert,” Leoff managed to croak. To his own ear his voice sounded stripped down, as if all the screaming he had done had shredded the cords of his throat.
The man on the stool turned and clapped his hands, apparently delighted, but the hard gems of his eyes reflected the candlelight and nothing more.
“Cavaor Leoff,” he said. “How nice of you to join me. Look, I’
ve brought you a present.” He flourished his hands at the hammarharp. “It’s a good one, I’m told,” he went on. “From Virgenya.”
Leoff felt an odd, detached vibration in his limbs. He didn’t see any guards. He was alone with the prince, this man who had condemned him to the mercies of the praifec and his torturers.
He searched his surroundings further. He was in a room a good deal larger than the cell he had occupied when last sleep and delirium had claimed him. Besides the narrow wooden cot on which he lay and the hammarharp, there was another chair, a washbasin and pitcher of water, and—and here he had to rub his eyes—a bookshelf full of tomes and scrifti.
“Come, come,” the prince said. “You must try the instrument. Please, I insist.”
“Your Highness—”
“I insist,” Robert said firmly.
Painfully, Leoff swung his legs down to the floor, feeling one or two of the blisters on his feet burst as he put weight on them. That was such a minor pain, he didn’t even really wince.
The prince—no, he had made himself king now, hadn’t he? The usurper was alone. Queen Muriele was dead; everyone he cared about was dead.
He was worse than dead.
He stepped toward Robert, feeling his knee jar oddly. He would never run again, would he? Never trot across the grass on a spring day, never play with his children—likely never have children, come to that.
He took another step. He was almost close enough now.
“Please,” Robert said wearily, rising from the stool and gripping Leoff’s shoulders with cold, hard fingers. “What do you suppose you will do? Throttle me? With these?” He grabbed Leoff’s fingers, and such a shock of pain exploded through Leoff that it tore a gasp from his aching lungs.
Once it would have been enough to make him scream. Now tears started in his eyes as he looked down to where the king’s hand gripped his.
He still didn’t recognize them, his hands. Once the fingers had been gently tapered, lean and supple, perfect for fingering the croth or tripping on keys. Now they were swollen and twisted in terribly unnatural ways; the praifec’s men had broken them methodically between all the joints.