The Charnel Prince

by Greg Keyes

  “He’s the Briar King,” the Sefry replied. “He’s always different, always the same.”

  A crowd of slinders followed him, and when the briars sprouted, they hurled themselves upon them, trying to tear them from the ground. Their bodies were flushed with blood, for the thorns cut deep, but like the monks, the thorns were no match for determination and numbers. The slinders bled and died, but the thorns were ripped apart as surely as their human foes.

  The Briar King, seemingly unconcerned with any of that, strode up to the fallen monks, and the forest at his back seemed to strain to follow him.

  Grimly, Aspar reached for the black arrow. He knew his best chance when he saw it.

  “And here is where your choice lies, holter,” the Sefry whispered.

  “No choice,” Aspar said. “He’s killing the forest.”

  “Is he? Are your eyes truly open, holter?”

  For answer, Aspar fitted the arrow to the sinew of his bow.

  The wind dropped, and then the Briar King turned. Even at that distance, Aspar could see the green glint of his eyes.

  The slinders looked up, too, and started toward Aspar, but the horned monarch lifted one hand, and they stopped in their tracks.

  “Think, holter,” the Sefry said. “I only ask you to think.”

  “What do you know, Sefry?”

  “Little more than you do. I only know what my heart tells me. Now ask yours what it tells you. I brought you here because no one knows this forest better than you—no Sefry, no Mannwight. Who is the enemy here? Who gave you that arrow?”

  The wind was nothing now. He could make the shot almost without thinking.

  He could end it.

  “Those things that follow him,” Aspar said, “they used to be people. Villagers.”

  “Yes,” she agreed. “I’ve seen the empty villages.”

  “Then . . .”

  But the Briar King had saved his life. He’d been poisoned by the greffyn, and the king had stooped upon him. He remembered only a dream of the roots, sinking deep, of treetops drinking in the sun, of the great wheel of seasons, of birth and death and decay.

  He’d told himself it was a lie.

  The Briar King turned very slowly and walked back toward the forest. Aspar pulled the bow to its full draw, and suddenly noticed that his fingers trembled.

  The Briar King’s gaze lingered. In the eyes of the greffyn, he’d seen only sickness. In the eyes of the Briar King, he saw life.

  Cursing softly, he lowered the bow as the creature and its entourage faded into the trees.

  The howling stopped, and the forest was quiet.

  “I cannot say for certain that was the right choice, holter,” the Sefry said, breaking the silence. “But it is the one I would have made.”

  Aspar returned the arrow to its case. “And now suppose you just tell me who you are?” he muttered.

  “My clan is Sern,” she replied. “My talking name is Liel, but I prefer the name I was given in Nazhgave—Leshya.”

  “You’re lying. No one from clan Sern has left the Halafolk rewns in a thousand generations.”

  “Did you find any of my clan at Rewn Aluth? You’ve seen for yourself that we have. And I broke that prohibition long ago, before any of my folk.”

  “Sceat,” he snarled. “How do you know so much about me, when I’ve never heard of you?”

  She smiled grimly. “You think you know everything about the Sefry, Aspar White? You do not, and far less about me. As I said, I’ve been away. Thirty winters I spent in the north. I only came back when I felt him wakening.”

  “You didn’t answer my question. How do you know so much about me?”

  “I’ve taken an interest in you, Aspar White,” she said.

  “That’s still no answer,” he said. “I don’t have much patience with Sefry two-talk.” He narrowed his eyes. “Every Sefry in the forest left months ago. Why are you still here?”

  “The others flee from their duty,” she said sternly. “I do not.”

  “What duty is that? I’ve never heard of any Sefry having a duty to any beyond themselves.”

  “And I’m afraid that for the time being you’ll remain unenlightened,” she said. “Will you attack me for my silence?”

  “I might. You got a friend of mine killed.”

  “The mannwight? I had no way of knowing that would happen—I only wanted you to see what the Church was doing. He must be somehow sensitive to the fanes. Was he a priest?”

  “So you don’t know everything either.”

  “No, of course not. But if he was a priest, and has walked another faneway, perhaps one related to this one, it might explain—”

  “Wait,” Aspar said, as memory suddenly struck him. “This sedos—is it part of the same faneway as the first one you led us to?”

  She raised an eyebrow. “It seems most likely. Those monks built that fane first, then came here.”

  “And were they finished here? Did they complete their rites?”

  She glanced at the messy corpses around the mound. “I think so,” she said, “but I am certainly no expert on these matters.”

  “Then I’ll bring the one who is,” Aspar replied. He turned to leave.

  “Stay a moment, holter. We still need to talk. We are, it seems, working toward the same purpose.”

  “I have only one purpose right now,” Aspar replied, “and I doubt very much that it’s the same as yours.”

  “I’m going with you, then.”

  Aspar didn’t answer. He found Ogre, mounted, and rode toward where he had left the others.

  But still the Sefry followed.

  He found Ehawk, Winna, and Stephen not far from where he’d left them, except they had somehow gotten Stephen’s body up into an ironoak, safely wedged in the crotch of two branches. Ehawk had his bow out.

  “That’s them,” he said, when he saw Aspar. “That’s what attacked us in the Duth ag Paé. Hear them?”

  The song of the slinders had begun again, albeit very distantly. “Yah,” Aspar said. “But I don’t think they’re coming this way.”

  “You saw them?” Winna asked, starting to clamber down.

  “Yah. I saw ’em.”

  Winna’s feet hit the ground, and she ran to throw herself into his arms. “We thought they had you,” she whispered, pressing her face into his neck. He felt dampness.

  “It’s fine, Winna,” he said. “I’m fine.” But it felt good, after the days of tension and argument.

  But then she stiffened in his arms. “He’s here,” she said. “Behind you.”

  “Yah. It’s not Fend.” Nonetheless, he shot Ehawk a cautioning glance. The boy nodded and stayed in the tree with his weapon ready.

  “No?” she pulled away from him, and they watched the Sefry walk into the camp.

  Leshya glanced at Winna, then bemusedly at Ehawk. “The squirrels run large here,” she said.

  “And dangerous,” Aspar replied.

  “Who is she?” Winna asked.

  “Just a Sefry,” Aspar grunted. “As full of lies and trouble as any of them.”

  “And she can speak for herself,” Leshya said. She sat on a log and pulled off one of her buskins, spilling a rock from it and massaging her foot.

  Winna stood watching her for a few moments, trying to absorb the new situation.

  “Our friend was hurt because of you,” Winna finally said, angrily. “You led us—”

  “I heard he was dead,” Leshya interrupted. “Was that opinion somewhat exaggerated?”

  “Maybe,” Aspar allowed.

  “What?” Winna said. “You’ve changed your mind?”

  Aspar held his hands out, cautioning. “Don’t get your hopes up,” he said. “But something like this happened to him before, to hear him tell it. When he walked the faneway of Saint whoever.”

  “Decmanis.”

  “Yah. He said he lost all feeling in his body, forgot who he was, that even his heart stopped beating. Maybe something like that’s
happened now. Maybe he just needs to finish the faneway.”

  Winna’s eyes lit with hope, then dulled again. “We don’t know about these things, Aspar. Last time he managed it alone, because the saints intended it. This time—” She nodded up at the still body.

  “You said yourself he hasn’t started to rot.”

  “But— No, you’re right. We can’t just do nothing. We have to try. But we don’t even know where the rest of the faneway is.”

  “We know where part of it is,” Aspar said. “That’s a start.”

  “Consider carefully,” Leshya interposed, “whether anyone—even your friend—should walk a faneway such as the Church is creating.”

  “The Church?” Winna looked at Aspar.

  “Yah,” he said. “There were priests at the sedos. They cut people up and hung them about, like we’ve seen before.”

  “But that was Spendlove and his renegades,” Winna said. “Stephen said the Church didn’t know anything about them.”

  Leshya snorted. “Then your friend was wrong,” she said. “This is no small band of renegades. You think Spendlove and Fend were working alone? They are but a finger of stone on a mountain.”

  “Yah,” Aspar said. “And what do you know of that? Where would I find Fend?” He cocked his head. “For that matter, you knew about the arrow. How could you know that?”

  She rolled her eyes. “I saw you shoot the utin. I examined its body. The rest I either heard from you when I was following you or guessed. Someone from the Church gave it to you, didn’t they? And asked you to kill the Briar King.”

  “Fend,” Aspar insisted, not to be sidetracked. “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know where to find him,” she said. “I heard he was in the Bairghs when I came through there on my way south. One rumor was that he was going to the Sarnwood Witch, but who knows if that’s true?”

  “Then how did you find us? How did you know who we were?” Winna demanded.

  “You? Luvilih, I’ve no idea who you are, or who that boy in the tree is. But Aspar White is well known throughout the King’s Forest.”

  “Not thirty years ago, I wasn’t,” Aspar said. “If you haven’t been here in that long, then it’s a fair question.”

  “No, it’s still a stupid question. I was searching for the king’s holter, so I started asking who he was and how I might find him. Among other things, I heard about your fight with the greffyn, and that you were the one who first saw the Briar King. They said you’d gone to Eslen, so I was on my way there to find you. I was in Fellenbeth a few ninedays ago and heard you’d come through heading this way. So I followed.”

  “But didn’t bother to introduce yourself.”

  “No. I’ve heard of you, but I don’t know you. I wanted you to see the things I had seen, and I wanted to see what you would do.”

  “And now you’re our best friend,” Winna said acidly. “And after all your help with the utin and leading poor Stephen straight to his doom, you reckon we’re yours.”

  Leshya smiled. “You like them young, don’t you, holter?”

  “That’s enough,” Aspar said. “More than enough. What’s the Church got to do with this?”

  “Everything,” Leshya replied. “You saw the monks.”

  “Not the praifec,” Winna blurted angrily. “If he knew about this, why would he—?”

  “—send you to kill the only enemy strong enough to interfere with his designs?” Leshya finished rather smugly. “Saints know.”

  “What makes you think the Briar King is against the Church and not with it?”

  “Ask your lover.”

  Aspar nearly jumped at the word, and when he looked back at Winna found an odd expression on her face.

  “What, Aspar?” she asked.

  “We saw him,” he told her. “The slinders—the things Ehawk saw, the things you heard—they were at his command. They killed the priests, and could have killed us, but he held them back.”

  “Then the Briar King is good?”

  “Good? No. But he’s fighting for the forest. The thorns that follow him—they’re trying to destroy him, pull him down like they’re doing the trees. The greffyn wasn’t his servant—it was his foe.”

  “Then he is good,” Winna insisted.

  “He fights for the forest, Winna. But he’s no friend of us, no friend of people.”

  “Still, you didn’t kill him,” she said. “You said you didn’t even try.”

  “No. I don’t know what’s going on exactly. I can use this arrow only once more—as long as the praifec wasn’t lying about that—and I don’t want to use it on the wrong thing, if you catch my meaning.”

  Winna shot a sharp glance at Leshya. “We’ve no idea whom we can trust, then.”

  “Werlic.”

  “So what do we do? The praifec sent us out here to kill the Briar King. You didn’t do it. So what do we do now?”

  “We take Stephen to the sedos and see what happens. That’s where we start. After that, we figure out who’s lying to us, the praifec—” He looked straight at Leshya. “—or you.”

  The Sefry just smiled and pulled her boot back on.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE THIRD FAITH

  ANNE MANAGED TO CRAWL out onto the deck before being sick again. She even made it to the steerboard rail, and there her whole body spasmed and she vomited until she thought her breast would tear apart. Then she slid trembling to the deck and puddled there, weeping.

  It was night, and if the ship wasn’t still, the wind was. She heard a sailor laugh briefly and another hush him. She didn’t care. She didn’t care about anything.

  She wished she could just die and have it over with. She deserved it.

  She had killed Sir Neil, as certainly as if she had pushed him into the ocean herself. He had traveled across half the world and saved her—saved all of them—and all she had been able to do was watch the sea close over his head.

  If she lived forever, she would never forget the look of betrayal in his eyes.

  She took a deep, shuddering breath. It was better out here in the air. When she went below to the tiny cabin she shared with Austra, everything spun around. Two days now like that. She couldn’t keep any food down at all, and wine just made it worse, even when it was mixed with water.

  She rolled over onto her back and looked up at the stars.

  The stars stared back at her. So did an orange half-moon that seemed somehow far too bright.

  She was starting to feel sick again.

  She fixed her eye on the moon, trying to make the motion go away, to focus beyond it. She picked out features from the dark splotches, remembered maps, and noticed strange patterns that signified nothing she had ever seen, but nevertheless seemed to have meaning.

  The motion of the ship gradually faded, and the light of the Moon went from orange to yellow to—as she hung directly overhead—shining silver.

  With a soft movement, the ship was gone altogether. Anne looked around, only half surprised this time to find herself in a forest still bathed in moonlight.

  She gathered her feet under her and stood up shakily. “Hello?” she said.

  There was no answer.

  She had twice been to this place. The first time she had been forced—drawn from her sister’s birthday party by a strange masked woman. The second, she had come herself, somehow, trying to escape the darkness of the cave where she had been confined by the sisters of the coven Saint Cer.

  This time she wasn’t sure if she had been called or come or something in between. But it was nighttime, where before it had always been bright. And there was no one here—no strange masked women making obscure statements about how she had to be queen, or the whole world was going to end.

  Maybe they didn’t know she was here.

  A cloud passed across the moon, and the shadows in the trees deepened, seemed to slink toward her.

  That was when she remembered that there were no shadows in this place, not under the sun, at least. The
n why should they be here when it was night?

  She was starting to think she wasn’t in the same place at all.

  And it dawned upon her that she had been wrong about another thing. There was someone there, someone her eye kept avoiding, would not let her stare straight at. She tried harder, but each time she turned one way, she found herself looking another, so the tall shadow was always at the corner of her eye.

  A soft laugh touched her ears. A man. “What is this,” a voice said. “Is this a queen, come to see me?”

  Anne realized she was trembling. He moved, and she gritted her teeth as her head turned in response, so as not to see him. “I’m not a queen,” she said.

  “Not a queen?” he asked. “Nonsense. I see the crown on your head and the scepter in your hand. Didn’t the Faiths tell you?”

  “I don’t know who you’re talking about,” Anne said. “I don’t know any Faiths.” But she knew she was lying. The women she had met here before had never named themselves, but that name seemed very right, somehow.

  He knew, too. “Perhaps you do not know them by name,” the voice purred, echoing her thoughts. The shadows drew closer. “They are known by many. Hagautsin, Vhateis, Suesori, Hedgewights—the Shadowless. It doesn’t matter what they’re called. They are meddlesome witches with not nearly the wisdom or power they pretend to.”

  “And you? Who are you?” Anne tried to sound confident.

  “Someone they fear. Someone they think you can protect them from. But you cannot.”

  “I don’t understand,” Anne said. “I just want to go home.”

  “So you can be crowned? So you can become what the Faiths predicted?”

  “I don’t want to be queen,” Anne replied truthfully, continuing to edge away. Her fear was a bright cord around her heart, but she reached for the power she had unleashed in z’Espino. She felt it quivering there, ready, but when she reached toward the shadow, there was no flesh, no blood, no beating heart. Nothing to work upon.

  And yet there was something, and that something came suddenly, racing across the green from not one direction, but from all of them, a noose of darkness yanking tight. She balled her fists, trembling, and turned her face to the moon, the only place her flesh would let her look.