by Greg Keyes
But she’d run away with him to live alone in the forest, and for a time that had been enough.
For a very short time. Maybe if they could have had children. Maybe if either the Sefry or the Mannish world had been a little more accepting.
Maybe. Maybe.
But instead it was hard, and it grew harder every day, so hard that Qerla slept with an old lover. So hard that when Aspar found her body, part of him was relieved that it was over.
He hated Fend for killing Qerla, but he saw now that he hated Fend more for showing him this dirty thing about himself. Aspar had spent twenty years without a lover, but it hadn’t been because he feared losing her. It was because he knew he hadn’t been worthy of loving someone.
He still wasn’t.
“Sceat,” he told the fire. When had he started all this thinking? Much good it was doing him.
The wolves had found him. He could hear them rustling in the dark, and now and then a pair of eyes or a gray flank would pick up the firelight. They were big, bigger than any wolves he’d seen before, and he had seen some pretty big ones. He didn’t reckon they would come after him, not with the fire going, but that would depend on how hungry they were. It also depended on whether they were like the wolves he was familiar with. He’d heard tell of some northern varieties that hadn’t the same worries about men that the common sort did.
For now they were keeping their distance. They might be more trouble in daylight.
He brightened the fire with a few pokes, turned for one of the logs he’d placed beside him—and stopped.
She was only four kingsyards away, and he hadn’t heard anything, not the slightest sound. But there she sat, crouching on the balls of her feet, watching him with sage-colored eyes, her long black hair settled on her shoulders, skin as pale as the birches. She was naked and looked very young, but the top pair of her six breasts was swollen, which happened in Sefry only after the age of twenty.
“Qerla?”
She only talks to the dead.
But Qerla was very dead. Bones. Town people saw the dead, or so they claimed, on Temnosnaht. Old Sefry women pretended to speak to them all the time. And he himself had seen something in the deep mazes of Rewn Aluth that had been either an illusion or—something else.
But this…
“No,” he said aloud. “Her eyes were violet.” But other than that, she was so like Qerla: the faint turn of her lip, the trace of veins on her throat, in one place shaped almost like those of a hawthorn leaf.
Very like.
Her eyes widened at the sound of his voice, and he hardly dared breathe. His right hand was still reaching for the log; his left had gone instinctively for his ax, and it still rested there on its cold steel head.
“Are you her?” he asked.
Them that see her in Sefry or human shape don’t usually have many breaths left in the lands of fate, the old man had said.
She smiled very faintly, and the wind started, jittering his fire and wisping her fine hair.
Then she was gone. It was as if he had been seeing her reflected in a giant eye, and the eye had blinked.
He was still breathing the next morning and set out at the earliest hint of the sun. He worried about the wolves, but pretty soon he noticed they wouldn’t cross, or even come onto, the trail he was following.
That bothered him more in some ways. Wolves belonged in the forest. What could be so bad about this bit of ground that they wouldn’t walk on it?
He counted a pack of about twelve. Could he and Ogre take that many in the state they were in? Maybe.
The forest opened up for a while as the girth of the trees increased, revealing small, mossy meadows here and there. The sky was blue when he saw it, dazzling when a shaft or two of it fell through to the forest floor. The wolves paced him until midday, then vanished. Not much later he heard wild cattle trumpet in alarm and knew the predators had found prey they reckoned worth their while.
He was glad to be rid of the wolves, but something was still following him. It bent branches not like a wind but like a weight settling on them from above. As if it was walking on them, all of them at once, or at least all of them around him. If he stopped, it stopped, and he was reminded of a very stupid entertainment given by a traveling troupe in Colbaely. One fellow walked stealthily behind another, mimicking his motions exactly, and whenever the person being followed turned, the stalker would freeze in place, and the fool in front wouldn’t see him. Aspar had found it annoying rather than funny.
But deer couldn’t see you when they were feeding. When they had their heads down to the ground, you could walk straight toward them so long as they were upwind and couldn’t smell you. Frogs couldn’t see you unless you moved, either.
So maybe to whatever was following him, Aspar was basically a frog.
He chuckled under his breath. It might have been the fatigue, but that actually did seem funny. Maybe he should have given the actors a little more credit.
A rasping wheeze caught his attention, something off the trail a bit. He didn’t forget the old man’s warning to stay on the path, but he didn’t much trust it, either. After all, if no one lived through coming here, what was the point of following directions? With only a little hesitation he turned Ogre toward the sound.
He didn’t go far before he saw it: a large black hairy form quivering in the ferns. It raised a bristly head when it saw him and grunted.
Ogre whinnied.
It was a sow, a big one, bigger because she was pregnant. It was a little early for that—the piglets usually came with the first flowers—but something much more fundamental was wrong, he could see. Whatever was pushing from inside its belly was a lot larger than a piglet. And there was blood, a lot of it, around the sow, leaking from her wheezing nostrils, from her eyes. She didn’t even know he was there; her grunt had been one of pain, not of perception.
She died half a bell later even as he watched, but whatever was inside her kept moving. Aspar noticed that he was shaking, but he didn’t know with what, only that it wasn’t fear. He felt the weight above him, the thing bending the branches, and suddenly the side of the boar split open.
Out pushed a bloody beak, a yellow eye, and a slimy scaled body.
A greffyn.
Very deliberately he dismounted as the thing fought to release itself from its mother’s womb.
“Stop me if you can,” he said to the forest.
Its scales were still soft, not hard like an adult’s, but its glare took a long time to dim even after its head was off.
He wiped his ax on dead leaves, then doubled over, retching.
But at least he knew something now. He knew why he’d passed forty years in the King’s Forest without seeing a trace of a greffyn, an utin, a woorm, or anything of the like, yet now the whole world was lousy with them.
People had said they were “waking up,” like the Briar King, which implied they’d been sleeping like a bear in a hollow tree—except for a thousand years.
They hadn’t been sleeping anywhere. They were being born. He remembered an old tale about basil-nix coming from hen’s eggs.
Sceat, they probably did.
He waited for the wrath of the witch to descend on him, but nothing happened. Still shaking, he remounted and went on.
It was almost without surprise that he saw buds on the trees. They were not natural buds but black spikes splitting through trunks and branches. It was easy enough to recognize the black thorns he’s seen in the King’s Forest and again in the Midenlands. Here they sprouted from galls on the trees themselves, and the deeper he went, the more growth he saw, and the more variety.
The thorns in the King’s Forest had all looked the same, but here he saw many sorts, some narrow, their spines almost feathery in their delicacy and number, and others that bore blunt knobby growths. Within a bell he didn’t even recognize the parent trees anymore; like the sow, they were giving birth to monsters and were being consumed in the process.
Then he came t
o the end of the trail and an eldritch mere beneath the boughs of the strangest forest he had ever seen.
The largest of the trees were roughly scaled, with each branch spawning five smaller ones and each of those five spawning more, endlessly, so that the fringes were cloudlike. Aspar was reminded of some sort of pond weed or mossy lichen more than of any real tree. Others looked something like weeping willows save that their fronds were black and serrated like the tail of a fence lizard. Some of the saplings looked as if a mad saint had taken pinecones and stretched them out ten yards high.
Other plants were a bit more natural. Pale, nearly white ferns and gigantic horsetails sedged the edges of the pool stretched out before him. Beyond and to his left and right, rocky walls rose up to place him and the mere in the bottom of a gorge. The entire grotto had been decorated with human skulls, which japed down at him from the trees, from the crannies in the rock, and along the ground bordering the pool.
Everything bent toward him.
“Well,” Aspar said. “Here I am.”
He felt the presence, but the silence stretched until, very quietly, the water started to mound, and something rose up out of the mere.
It wasn’t the Sefry woman but something larger, a mass of black fur mated with pond weed, dead leaves, and fish bones. It stood more like a bear than a man, but its face was froglike, with one bulging, blind white eye visible and the other occluded by a mane of oily strands that seemed almost to pour from the crown of its head. Its mouth was a downturned arc that took up most of the bottom of its face. Its arms dangled down to the water, depending from massive sloping shoulders. There was nothing feminine—or masculine, for that matter—about it.
Aspar faced the thing for a few moments, until he was certain it wasn’t going to attack, at least not yet.
“I’ve come to see the woman of the Sarnwood,” he finally said.
Silence followed for several long tens of heartbeats. Aspar was starting to feel a little foolish when something else stirred in the water just in front of the whatever it was.
A head emerged. At first Aspar thought it was just another, smaller version of the creature, but the resemblance was superficial. This once had been a man, though his eyes were now filmed and his flesh an ugly shade of bluish-gray. Aspar couldn’t see what had killed him, but aside from the fact that he was standing up, he was clearly long dead.
The corpse suddenly started jerking, and water spurted from his lips. As this continued, a sort of wet gasping sound emerged and grew louder.
Finally, after the last of the water, Aspar began to recognize speech, soft around all the edges but understandable if he concentrated.
“They bring blood who come to see me,” the corpse said. “Blood and someone to speak for me. This one has almost been dead too long.”
“I had no one to bring.”
“The old man would have done.”
“But I didn’t bring him. And you’re talking to me.”
The witch shifted her monstrous head, and even without human expression, he felt her anger.
“I wish to kill you,” she said.
Aspar lifted what he held in his hand: the arrow given him by Hespero, the treasure of the Church said to be capable of killing anything.
“This was meant to slay the Briar King,” he said. “I reckon it will murder you.”
The corpse started gasping, as if for air. It took a while for Aspar to recognize laughter.
“What will you slay?” the witch asked. “This?” The massive paw reached up to touch its breast. “You might kill this.”
The trees around him suddenly creaked and groaned, and he felt the presence that had followed him since he’d entered the forest press down with incredible weight, then push through him so that he fell roughly to his knees. He tried to bring the arrow to the bow, but both were suddenly too heavy to hold.
“Everything around you,” the corpse gurgled. “Everything you see that grows or creeps or crawls in the Sarnwood—that is me. Can you put an arrow in that?”
Aspar didn’t answer, concentrating his will in a fierce effort to stand, to at least not die on his knees. Muscles trembling, groaning, he lifted first one knee, then the other, and from a squat tried to come upright. He felt as if he had ten men standing on his shoulders.
It was too much, and he collapsed again.
To his vast surprise, the pressure suddenly eased.
“I see,” the witch said. “He has touched you.”
“He?”
“Him. The Horned Lord.”
“The Briar King.”
“Yes, him. What have you come here for?”
“You sent a woorm from here with a Sefry named Fend.”
“Yes, I did that. You’ve seen my child, haven’t you? Isn’t he beautiful?”
“You gave Fend an antidote to its poison. I need that.”
“Oh. For your lover.”
Aspar frowned. “If you already knew—”
“But I didn’t. You say certain things, I see others. If you never say anything, I never see anything.”
Aspar decided to let that pass.
“Will you help me?”
The leaves rustled around him, and he heard a murder of crows cawing somewhere in the trees.
“We do not have the same purposes in this world, holter,” the Sarnwood witch told him. “I can think of no reason to help someone who is determined to slay my child, who has already slain three of my children.”
“They were trying to kill me,” Aspar said.
“That is meaningless to me,” the witch replied. “If I give you the medicine you seek, you will return to the trail of my woorm and with that arrow of yours you will try to slay him.”
“The Sefry with your child, Fend—”
“Killed your wife. Because she knew. She was going to tell you.”
“Tell me? Tell me what?”
“You will try to slay my child,” the witch repeated, but this time in a very different tone, not so much stating a fact as reflecting, musing. “He has touched you.”
Aspar let out a deep breath. “If you save Winna—”
“You shall have your antidote,” the witch interrupted. “I have changed my mind about killing you, and you will hunt my son whether I give you the cure for his poison or not. I see no reason to help you, but if you will agree you owe me a service, I see no reason to refuse you.”
“I—”
“I won’t ask you for the life of anyone you love,” the witch assured him. “I won’t ask you to spare one of my children.”
Aspar thought that over for a moment.
“That’ll do,” he said finally.
“Behind you,” the witch said, “the thorny bush with the cluster of fruit deep in the leaves. The juice of three of those should be sufficient to cleanse a man of venom. Take as many as you like.”
Still suspecting a trick, Aspar looked where he was told and found hard, blackish purple fruit about the size of wild plums. Defiantly, he popped one in his mouth.
“If this is poison,” he said, “I’ll find out now.”
“As you wish,” the witch said.
The fruit had a sharp, acidic bite with a bit of a putrid aftertaste, but he felt no immediate ill effects.
“What are you?” he asked.
Again the corpse laughed. “Old,” she replied.
“The black thorns. Are they your children, too?”
“My children are being born everywhere now,” she said. “But yes.”
“They’re destroying the King’s Forest.”
“Oh, how sad,” she snarled. “My forest was destroyed long ago. What you see here is all that remains. The King’s Forest is a stand of seedlings. Its time has come.”
“Why? Why do you hate it?”
“I don’t hate it,” the witch said. “But I am like a season, Aspar White. When it is time for me, I arrive. I’ve nothing to do with the order of the seasons, though. Do you understand?”
“No,” Aspar r
eplied.
“Nor do I, really,” the witch replied. “Go now. In two days your girl will be dead, and all of this will have been for nothing.”
“But can you see? Will I save her?”
“I see no such thing,” the witch replied. “I only tell you to make haste.”
Aspar took as much of the fruit as his saddlebag would hold, fed a handful to Ogre, and left the Sarnwood.
SISTER PALE led Stephen through the night without benefit of a torch. She somehow knew where she was going and kept one hand clasped firmly on his. It was a peculiar sensation, that contact of flesh against flesh with a strange woman. He hadn’t held the hands of many women: his mother’s, of course, and his older sister’s.
Embarrassingly, this recalled that; he felt very much the little boy, protected from things he did not understand by the caring grip of fingers in his own. But because this wasn’t his mother or his sister, it brought out other, more adult feelings that didn’t contrast very well with the childish ones. He found himself trying to translate the pressure of her fingers, the shift of grip from intertwined digits to clapped palms into some sort of meaningful cipher, which of course it wasn’t. She just wanted him to keep up with her.
He didn’t know what she looked like, but he teased himself with an image based on the shadowed glimpses he’d gotten. It was only after a bell or so that he realized that the image was that of Winna, almost precisely.
They weren’t alone on the trail; he heard the snuffling of her dogs moving around them, and once one of them nosed into his free hand. He wondered what faneway the sister had walked that allowed her to move in such utter darkness; even his own saint-blessed senses didn’t allow for that.
The moon finally rose; it was half-gone and a strange, astringent yellow Stephen had never quite seen before. Its light revealed a little more of his companion and surroundings: the hood and back of her paida, jagged lines of landscape that seemed impossibly far above them, the silhouettes of the dogs.