by Greg Keyes
Areana glanced at Leoff, who nodded. He was starting to feel rather wrinkled but had no intention of asking to get out while the girls were still present.
“It happened when they were building the great northern canal,” she said. “They did not know it, but when they diverted the channel of the river, they destroyed a kingdom, a kingdom of the Saethiod.”
“Saethiod? A kingdom of Meremen? How delightful.”
“Only one survived. Maersca, the daughter of the king, the granddaughter of Saint Lir. She swore vengeance, and so she put on human form to wreak it. When the canal was done, she went to the great sluice with the intention of flooding the newly drained land. But she saw Brandel Aethelson on the birm. She spoke to him, feigning womanly interest, asking how it was that the water was held back and how it might be loosed. She was clever, and he did not suspect her designs. In fact, he began to fall in love with her.
“Thinking that she could do more damage if she learned more, Maersca pretended to love him, as well, and soon they were married. She hid her sea-skin in a coffer in the roof beams of the house, and she gave him this condition: that each year on the day of Saint Lir she must bathe alone, and he could not watch her.”
“And so for months she nursed her vengeance, and the months became years, and in that time a boy was born to them, and then a girl, and after a fashion she began to love her husband and to love Newland, and her thirst for vengeance faded.”
“Oh, dear,” Robert said.
“But the husband’s friends chided him,” Areana continued. “‘Where does your wife go on the day of Saint Lir?’ They filled his head with the notion that she had a secret lover and that his own children were not indeed his. And so, over the years he became uncertain, and finally, one Saint Lirsdagh, he followed her. She went to the birm and cast off her clothes, then slipped on her fish skin, and he saw her for what she was—and she knew it.”
“‘You’ve broken your vow,’ she said. “‘Now I must return to the waters. And if ever I come out into the air again, I shall die, for this changing can only happen once.’
“In despair, he begged her not to go, but go she did, leaving him with her children and his tears.
“Many years passed, and he searched for her in all the rivers and canals he knew. Once or twice he thought he heard her song. He became old, and his children grew up and married.
“Then the army of the Skellander swept down from the North Country, putting all before them to the torch, and next was Newland. The people gathered on the birmsteads and prepared to loose the waters and flood their country, for that was their only protection against the invader. But the capstone would not break; it had been built too well.
“And now the army was near.
“It was then the old man saw his wife again, as lovely as the day they’d met. She emerged from the waters, put her hand on the capstone, and it broke in half, and waters swept the invading army away. But the damage was done, for Maersca had been forced to take off her skin to leave the water, and in so doing took the curse of her ancestors on herself. She died in the old man’s arms. And he died shortly after.”
Her eyes cut over to Robert. “Their children were among the first of the landwaerden. Many of us claim our descent from Maersca.”
Robert scratched his head and looked perplexed.
“This is a complicated story,” he said. “I wonder if you might not be planning to hide some unflattering commentary about me in it, as you did before.”
“I will not,” Leoff promised. “I intend only to use a story beloved of the landwaerden, as I did the last time. It was a king of Eslen who rewarded the children of Maersca with their positions. He was the youngest son of the king before, and it is said he worked with the people on the dikes when he was young. In him, we could suggest you: a monarch whose heart lies with Newland and its guardians.”
“And who is the villain of the piece?”
“Ah,” Leoff said. “The Skellander was led into Newland by none other than the daughter of the old king, the sister of Thiodric, a shinecrafter most foul who poisoned her father and slew all her brothers save the youngest, who—as we shall see—was saved from drowning by none other than Maersca.”
“And you could make this sister a redhead,” Robert mused. “Very well, I like this.
“As I told you before, I’ve no doubt that you are clever enough to somehow betray me, even if I were to assign you a story. So know this: If you disgrace me further, I will hardly have anything to lose, and I will cut the throats of these young ladies myself, in your presence.
“Indeed, let me be even more candid. Even if your work appears to have been composed in good faith, if your play fails to turn the landwaerden back to favoring me, their fate will be the one I’ve just described.” He patted Leoff on the back.
“Enjoy your stay here. I think you will find it more than comfortable.”
A SPAR’S FINGERS felt as papery as birch bark as he set an arrow to the string.
Fend, who had killed his first love. Fend, who had tried to do the same to Winna.
Fend, who now rode the back of a monstrous woorm.
He measured the distance down the shaft. It seemed enormous, the arrow, and he was aware of every detail of it: the hawk-feather fletching wound on with waxed red thread, the almost imperceptible curve in the wood that had to be corrected for, a dull glint of sun from the slightly rusted iron head, the smell of the oil from the sheath.
The air ebbed and flowed around him, and dead leaves, like the signal flags of an army, showed him the way to Fend’s flesh and blood and bone.
Yet he couldn’t quite feel it. At this range, from this angle, it was an uncertain shot. And even if the shaft flew true, there was the improbable but terribly possible presence of the woorm. No arrow—or any number of arrows—could slay that thing.
But no, that wasn’t entirely true. There was the black arrow of the Church given him by Praifec Hespero, the one he had used to slay the utin. It was supposed to be able to kill even the Briar King; it ought to be able to slay a woorm.
Not that he knew the slightest thing about woorms.
Winna was trembling, but she didn’t say anything. The woorm and Fend both dropped their heads, and the creature began moving again. Aspar relaxed a little, rolling completely out of sight, and held Winna tightly until the sound of the thing’s passage had faded.
“Oh, saints,” Winna finally breathed.
“Yah,” Aspar agreed.
“Just when I think I’ve seen every nightbale from all the kinder-spells.” She shuddered.
“How do you feel?” he asked. Her skin felt clammy.
“Like I’ve been alvshot,” she said. “A little feverish.” She looked up at him. “It must be poison, like the greffyn gave off.”
Aspar had first found the greffyn by its trail of dead and dying plants and animals. Greffyns weren’t much bigger than horses, though. This thing—
“Sceat,” he muttered.
“What?”
He placed his hand against the trunk of the tree, wishing it had a pulse like a human being but feeling the truth somehow in his bones.
“It’s killed this tree,” he whispered. “All of these trees.”
“And us?”
“I don’t think so. The touch of it, the fog that it breaths—that’s down there. The roots are dead.”
Just like that. Alive for three thousand years…
“What was it?” Winna wanted to know.
Aspar lifted his hands futilely. “Don’t matter what we call it, does it? But I reckon it’s a woorm.”
“Or a dragon, maybe?”
“Dragons are supposed to have wings, as I remember it.”
“So are greffyns.”
“Yah. True. So like I said, it doesn’t matter what we call it. Only what it is, what it does. And Fend—”
“Fend?”
Raiht, he’d had her eyes covered.
“Yah, Fend was riding the damned thing.”
“Fend is riding the woorm,” she said at last. “That’s just, just so…” Her hands grasped at her sides, as if whatever word she was looking for might be caught there.
“Where did Fend find a woorm?” she finally settled on.
Aspar considered what he regarded as an essentially insane question.
For most of his forty-two years he had lived and breathed in the King’s Forest, seen the darkest, most tangled corners of it, from the Mountains of the Hare to the wild cliffs and weevlwood swamps of the eastern coast. He knew the habits and sign of every living thing in all of that vast territory, and never—until a few months ago, anyway—had he ever seen so much as the droppings of a greffyn, or an utin, or a woorm.
Where had Fend found a woorm? Where had the woorm found itself? Sleeping in some deep cave, waiting in the depths of the sea?
Grim knew.
And Fend seemed to know. He’d found a greffyn; now he’d found something worse. But why? Fend’s motives were usually simple, profit and revenge being chief among them. Was the Church paying him now?
“I don’t know,” he said at last. Then he peered over the edge. The mist the woorm had left seemed to have dissipated.
“Should we get down?” Winna asked.
“I think we ought to wait. And when we do go, we’ll go down over there, farther from its path, to avoid the poison.”
“What then?”
“It’s following the slinders, I think, and the slinders have Stephen. So now I guess we’re following the woorm.”
What seemed like a safe amount of time passed, and Aspar was ready to suggest that they start climbing down, when he heard the muffled chatter of voices. He put a finger to his lips, but Winna already had heard them, too. She nodded to let him know she understood.
A few moments later six horsemen came riding along in the very furrow created by the woorm.
Three of them were narrow of shoulder and slim of body and wore the characteristic broad-brimmed hats that protected Sefry from the light of the sun. The other three were larger and uncapped, probably human. The horses were all smallish and had the scruffy look of northern breeds.
Aspar wondered where his own horses were. They might all three be dead if they had been near the woorm’s exhalations, but horses, and Ogre especially, seemed to have good sense about things like that.
Anyway, the riders below weren’t dead. Nor was Fend, and he was riding the thing. Maybe the woorm wasn’t as poisonous as the greffyn. The utin, after all, hadn’t been. On the other hand, the monks at the hill of the naubagm had seemed immune to the greffyn’s influence, and a Sefry witch who called herself Mother Gastya had once provided Aspar with a medicine that neutralized the effect of the poison.
Aspar patted the branch and mouthed the words “wait here.” Winna looked concerned but nodded.
He padded across the broad branch carefully. It was so thick here it wouldn’t rattle smaller branches and give him away, like some gigantic squirrel. Working to a lower branch, he continued until he was just behind the riders and still comfortably above them. They had stopped talking now, and that presented him with something of a dilemma.
He’d been hoping they would say something to give away their purpose, something like “Don’t forget, fellows, that we work for Fend,” but that didn’t seem likely to happen anytime soon. There were three reasons he could think of that might have sent these men chasing the woorm that was tracking the slinders. One, they were with Fend, following in his path—about the same wicked work but slower. Two, they were enemies of Fend, following him for the same reason as Aspar: to kill him. Third, they were a group of travelers following the trail out of stupid curiosity.
If the trail of the beast was poisonous, the last possibility could be left right out. Random wayfarers weren’t likely to be carrying the antidote for woorm venom with them and would be pretty ill right now.
That left them with Fend or against him.
Well, he didn’t have much longer to consider it, and the worst thing a man could do was dither. There were far too many of them for him to ask politely.
He sighted down his first shaft, aiming for the neck of the man in back: a human. If he could drop one or two of them before the others caught on, it would increase his chance of survival a good deal.
But…
With a sigh he shifted his aim and sent it into the fellow’s right biceps instead. Predictably, the man screamed and fell off his horse, thrashing wildly. Most of the others just looked at him, puzzled, trying to work out what was wrong, but one—and now Aspar could see it was a Sefry—leapt from his horse and began stringing a bow, eyes scanning the trees.
Aspar shot him through the shoulder.
This fellow didn’t scream, but his intake of breath was audible even at Aspar’s distance, and his gaze immediately found the source of his wounding.
“Holter!” He bellowed. “It’s the holter, you fools, in the trees! The one Fend warned us of!”
There, Aspar thought. I could have hoped for that before they knew I was here, but…
Another of the men had strung his bow, Aspar saw. He fired at the fellow, but the man was in motion, and the arrow only whittled a bit of ear. The man returned a shaft, a damned good shot, considering, but Aspar was already dropping to the next branch down.
He landed on slightly flexed legs, wincing at pain in his knees that wouldn’t have been there five years ago, and loosed his third dart at the other archer. The man was cupping his wounded ear and just starting to scream when the arrow went through his larynx, effectively silencing him.
Aspar fitted another shaft and carefully shot another Sefry who was just putting arrow to string. He hit him in the inside of the thigh, dropping him like a sack of meal.
A red-fletched missile spanged against Aspar’s boiled leather cuirass, just above his lowest rib, knocking most of the breath out of him. The world went all black spots and whirling, and he realized his feet weren’t on the branch anymore, though they were still roughly beneath him.
His left foot caught the ground first, but his body had fallen too far back for him to land with balance or for his knees to absorb the shock. He did manage to twist and take part of the fall with his shoulder, but that caused more pain, this time with white sparks.
Grunting, he rolled out of it and noticed he no longer had his bow. He reached for his hand-ax and, as he came up, found himself looking down the shaft of the third Sefry. He threw the ax and spun to his left.
The ax missed by a hairsbreadth, but only because the Sefry flinched, throwing his aim wide. Snarling, Aspar hurled himself at his assailant, unsheathing his dirk. Ten kingsyards should have provided plenty of time for the Sefry to fit another arrow and take a close shot, but he apparently didn’t know that, instead seeming to poise among shooting, drawing his blade, and running.
He finally settled on the blade, but by that time Aspar was there; he came in close, grabbing the Sefry’s shoulder with his free hand and turning him to expose his left kidney. His first stab met mail, so he changed elevation and slashed the carotid, blinking his eyes against the spray of blood and running on past as his foe became a corpse.
He felt suddenly blind, because he knew there was one uninjured man he had lost track of. The first two he had shot might also be problems, but it was unlikely that either could wield a bow.
The fourth man announced himself in a huff of breath; Aspar spun to find him charging, wielding a broadsword. Aspar’s knees went wobbly, and he felt as if there were nettles in his lungs. The feeling was familiar, like when the greffyn had looked at him the first time.
Answers that, he thought. Poison.
A smart man with a sword ought to be able to kill a man with a dirk. This one, fortunately, didn’t seem too smart. He had his weapon lifted for an overhead cut; Aspar feinted as if he were desperately leaping inside—an impossibility given the distanc
e—and the fellow obliged by slashing hard and fast.
Aspar checked back, however, not actually coming into range, and as the whirling sword swept past on its way to the ground with too much momentum to reverse, he did leap in, catching the wielding arm with his left hand and driving his dirk deep into the man’s groin, just to the left of his iron codpiece. The man gagged and stumbled backward, rowing the air with his arms to keep from falling, color draining from his face.
Aspar heard a choking sound at his back and spun unsteadily, only to find the first Sefry who had taken a shot at him staring in surprise. He had a short sword, but even as Aspar watched, it dropped from his fingers and he sank to his knees.
About ten kingsyards behind him, Winna grimly lowered her bow. She was looking pale, whether from poison or from nerves he wasn’t sure.
Wonderful.
He could feel the fever burning in him now. Already he was nearly too weak to hold the dirk.
He forced himself to walk the round, though, making sure his foes were dead—all but one, the first one he had shot. The man was crawling across the ground, holding his arm and whimpering. When he saw Aspar coming, he tried to crawl faster. He already was weeping, and now his tears began to flow more freely.
“Please,” he gasped, “please.”
“Winna,” Aspar called. “Search the other bodies for anything unusual. Remember the stuff Mother Gastya gave me? Anything like that.”
He put his boot on the man’s neck.
“Good morning,” he said, trying to sound steadier than he was.
“I don’t want to die,” the man whimpered.
“Raiht,” Aspar said. “Neither do I, yah? An’ more, I don’t want my lovely lass here to die. But we’re going to, aren’t we, because we’ve stepped in the path of this damned thing Fend conjured up. Now, all of your friends, I’ve sent them to Grim for his morning meal, and they’re callin’ for you, across the river. I can pitch you over there good and quick just by pushing this knife up into the bottom of your head.” He knelt and thrust his fingers into the place where spine met skull. The man screamed, and Aspar smelled something foul.