by Dale Lucas
“You all heard?” Tymon asked the crowd.
Murmurs of assent all around. A few of the watchers started to shout proposed punishments, or even to cast boos and hisses at their onetime leader. Orhund shot to his feet and glared at the troublemakers, instantly silencing them.
“Very well, then,” Tymon said. “Korin Lyr, known among us as the Red Raven, I hereby strip you of your rank as first bow, the mantle of Red Raven, and the authority previously granted you to lead this company.”
“What’s my sentence, then?” Korin asked.
Tymon said nothing.
Orhund said nothing.
Dedrik said nothing.
The world was still and silent as everyone waited for an answer to Korin’s question, and no one rushed to offer it. Tzimena waited, as well. She assumed it would be nothing good—nothing merciful. She only hoped she might escape the same fate.
“That shall have to wait,” Tymon said, then looked to Zayber, Lyme, and another pair of outlaws lingering nearby. “Take them back to their cages.”
Tzimena felt Zayber’s and Lyme’s hands on her arms, pulling her back to her feet again. The other two men flanked Korin and moved to usher him away. Korin looked as though he’d just seen something terrible—something beautiful, irretrievably broken. His eyes were downcast, and he remained silent.
“How long shall we wait?” Tzimena cried, finally finding her own voice. “You’ve adjudged him guilty—now he’s got to sit and stew while you lot come up with the worst punishment imaginable?”
Tymon moved quickly, crossing the space between herself and Tzimena in three long strides. Before she’d even arrived in the space before Tzimena, one long arm had snapped out, and one strong hand raked hard across Tzimena’s cheek. The sound of the slap in the quiet forest was loud and flat and ugly.
“Keep your mouth shut or I’ll gag you,” Tymon said through gritted teeth. “This is your fault as much as his.”
Tzimena was truly dumbstruck. Her fault . . . ?
“Get them out of here,” Tymon commanded, and their guards obeyed this time. Tzimena wondered, all the way back to the cages in the cave, just what Tymon Longstride had meant by that remark.
This is your fault as much as his.
Impossible, she thought. How? What did I do? What am I guilty of?
No answers were forthcoming. She wasn’t even sure she wanted them.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“Wakey wakey,” a croaky voice said, accompanied by a waft of fetid air that Rem assumed was the speaker’s rancid breath.
He didn’t really want to open his eyes. His head felt too large for his shoulders and ponderously heavy, like an overfilled wineskin. He managed, however, and was most puzzled by what he saw.
Everything was upside down.
No, that couldn’t be right.
He was upside down. He could feel it now—his tied feet far above him, his arms hanging below, his body and head swaying gently on the end of his tether like the clapper in an iron bell. His mouth was dry enough to sand lumber with, and his throat felt as if someone had tried to hang him and mucked up the job. He tried to draw a deep breath, gagged, and launched into a terrible coughing fit. The spasms that racked him as he coughed made him swing in a slightly wider arc. Trying to stop the coughing and catch his breath while hanging head downward like this was nigh impossible.
But he supposed, at present, that was the least of his worries.
What truly concerned him was not how terrible he felt, nor how helpless he was, hanging by his bound feet about an arm’s length above a wood plank floor. No, what unnerved him—what terrified him, really—was the rustic ugliness of his surroundings and the hideous, troglodytic visages of the three figures who stood before him.
One wore a mask—a human face, Rem realized with dread and astonishment. Or rather pieces of human faces, sewn together into an unholy patchwork.
It wasn’t orcs after all, Rem thought. This is where that poor fellow’s face got off to . . .
Behind the flesh-masked man was another, tall and muscular, but twisted, as well, like a gnarled oak, shoulders uneven, a hump on one shoulder blade, head bent at a strange, sideward angle, one arm ending in a stunted, two-fingered hand held against his big chest, the other arm dangling at his side, impossibly long.
The third figure was an old woman. Her face looked as though it had been carved from a sun-seasoned piece of old tree bark, lined and weathered and bleached and creased, framed by thin wisps of white, tangled hair. She only had one eye—where another had been was nothing but an empty black well—but that single orb threatened to pop right out of her head, bulging against the failing restraints of her eyelids.
She was the closest. The one who’d blown her rank breath into Rem’s face as she’d urged him back to wakefulness.
Merciful Aemon, gods of the Panoply and saints of grace and fortune, don’t let me die here, Rem thought suddenly. Anywhere else—in the woods, in the river, tossed from a cliff, mauled by a bear . . .
But not here.
Not among these things . . . these half people, errant from a nightmare of big witches and child-snatching ogres.
“There he is,” the old crone croaked. She was bent double, her head craned almost upside down to match the position of Rem’s. She stood uncomfortably close to him, and he could smell her even when she wasn’t speaking. She had a reek like rotting flesh and sickness.
The big one with the twisted body clapped its mismatched, misshapen hands. “Gar gar gar,” it babbled in a low, throaty voice. “Gar norf ner wender kop.”
Rem thought it might be speaking the common tongue—there was something familiar in those words. But the thing’s horrid mouth, tongue, and palate—pure wreckage, all, like the gaping entrance to a collapsed mine shaft—kept it from forming its words correctly.
“Siebel says he wants the leg, great-mother,” the one with the quilt-like human face mask said. “I’ll settle for the soft bits. His bobs and his black-nappy and the red-ropes.”
“Wallow your hogs, Swifty,” great-mother said impatiently, her face still an inch from Rem’s. “There’s questions need answerin’.”
“Kefrums?” the big one, Siebel, said.
“You heard me!” great-mother snapped, now standing to her full height—which was only a little taller than Torval. The old crone was so withered by time, so bent by the blows of fate and circumstance—and, Rem guessed, inbreeding—that she looked almost like a butcher’s hook on legs. She turned, addressing someone unseen.
“Brown Bon! Fopsy! Stoke that fire! We need the cauldron boiling!”
“Stoked,” someone said. It sounded like a woman, but Rem couldn’t be sure.
“Sundry hells it is!” great-mother crowed, then stalked toward whomever she was addressing, giving Rem a casual shove as she did so. Suddenly Rem found himself spinning on his tether, the whole topsy-turvy world around him whirling in lazy circles, with no means of stopping in sight.
He caught scattered impressions of the place they were in. It was a cottage of some sort, roomy inside, with a high ceiling and a great deal of space between the visible walls. It was sloppily made, wide gaps between most of the clapboards that made up the outer walls allowing pale sunlight in from the outside. Every inch of the place was littered or decorated with the castoffs of these terrible, bloody-minded wood folk: small fragments of bone, crumbs, old dried leaves, and desiccated clumps of moss littering the floor; ragged furs and half-cured pelts and great swaths of flayed and half-tanned skin nailed to the walls or hanging from curing hooks; iron tools from an age already ancient when Hobb’s Folly had been full of life and hope; strange bottles and jars filled with all sorts of horrifying, quasi-identifiable flora, fauna, or body parts; and ill-made, tilting furniture that would have been comical if it hadn’t been found in such a hideous, hellish place. All around him was the smell of death and decay—the coppery tang of blood, the astringent stink of piss and the low, mulchy odor of excrement, as well a
s a horrid, rotting scent that reminded Rem of both worm-ridden fruit and fish left to ferment under a hot sun.
The others, Brown Bon and Fopsy, stood behind Rem, shuffling around a great, stone-ringed firepit—built inside this firetrap of a house, brilliant—attending to a giant iron cauldron hanging above crackling flames. Fopsy was, indeed, a woman—thick through the middle, barefoot, thin, stringy hair having mostly fallen out in clumps, wearing an old, ragged dress that had clearly been taken from a rich owner five or ten years ago. Brown Bon had his back to Rem, so he could see little of the man, no matter how many times he passed through Rem’s spinning vision. From the back he wasn’t so fearsome—just a man, thin, bony, a little hunched—but Rem guessed he’d be just as vile once he got around to revealing himself.
Gods, what had he gotten himself into?
The one-eyed old woman—great-mother—turned back toward Rem from the cooking cauldron. She shuffled nearer and lowered her terrible, time-furrowed visage close to Rem’s. Before speaking she reached out a single bony hand and arrested Rem’s spin, as well.
“Now then,” she said, once more blowing that rancid breath into Rem’s face. “Let’s us have a palaver, eh? How would supper like that?” He was entirely too close. He could not only see that she had no teeth, but could make a close examination of the yawning, black wells in her gums where teeth used to be, every time she spoke.
And did she just call him supper?
“Palaver,” he managed, “absolutely. As you wish, madam. Ask me your questions and I’ll answer honestly, you have my word.”
She hit him headwise. “Shush, now, supper. You talks too much.”
“Forgive me,” Rem said, trying to maintain some modicum of restraint. “How came I to be here, may I ask?”
She hit him again, harder this time. “Quiet, says I! That’s talking, ain’t it?”
The one with the human face mask—Swifty—slid into Rem’s field of vision now. His body was rocked by strange spasms. When an odd sound emanated from the strange goblin of a man seconds later, Rem realized he was laughing, snickers that rocked his whole body as if he was in on some hilarious joke that Rem himself had missed entirely.
“You stalked the coney,” he said, fingers fluttering like an excited child’s, even as his height and deep voice told Rem that he was probably at least thirty or forty years old. “That was mine! My trick! My trap! Swifty caught you, didn’t he? Caught you good!”
He launched into another laughing fit. Watching that patchwork mask of noses, eyeholes, mouths, and ears stretch and contort as he brayed beneath it was going to give Rem nightmares for the rest of his life, if he did get out of this mess alive. He wondered if the effect might be less loathsome—less disturbing—if this Swifty just wore a single face at a time, instead of this hideous, slapped-together monstrosity.
Great-mother drove one fist into Swifty’s gut and he spat out a breath, wheezing. He bent double and moaned as the old witch turned back to Rem.
“Clap that hog trough,” she muttered. “Idle, prattling, foolish boy.”
“That hurt, great-ma,” Swifty said.
“And good thing it did!” she hissed. “Elsewise you might not get the message carried, eh?”
“Look,” Rem said, voice calm, eminently reasonable. “I was separated from my friends. They’ll be looking for me. If they find me in this state”—he indicated his topsy-turvy position—“they’re liable to be quite cross with you. What say you cut me down and see me on my way?”
Great-mother smiled a little, then made an offer of her own. “What say we cut your throat like a pig, dress you like a deer, then stew you like a stringy old horse?”
Rem weighed those words. She was utterly serious. Even pleased by the prospect. “Not my first choice,” he said.
“Let me do it, great-ma!” Swifty begged, having found his breath and his voice again. “Let me bleed him!”
Siebel shuffled into view now, the big, twisted oaf with the misshapen limbs and bent neck. “Ma tu, ma tu!” he chuffed. “Nyet ma dommer um. Bas? Baaaas?”
Rem could see his face more clearly this time, and he shuddered at the sight. The creature was, he thought, human—or some small part so—but a primitive existence and spoiled lineage hadn’t been kind to him. His head was a misshapen oblong covered in seeping boils and lumpy tumors that threatened to split the skin, his eyes small and dark and deeply recessed under a sloping brow, his nose a mashed, broken appendage all but spread across his face like a piece of soft, rotten fruit. His mouth was the worst, though—soft palate cleft, lips strangely puckered and leathery, hanging loose as though they’d been glued on by their horrid architect at the last moment, teeth a tangle of yellow and black discoloration against livid red gums.
“Where’s the little ’uns?” great-mother asked.
Swifty shrugged. “Chuck hunting. Birding. Egg picking. How should I know?”
Rem fought the urge to cry out. Little ones? Here? Among these?
You’ve got to stall them, Rem thought. As long as possible, any way possible. Maybe if you stall them long enough, you’ll think of something . . . formulate a plan . . . see a way out of this . . .
But he imagined there was no way out of this. He’d already reached his hands up quickly and subtly to his belt and found his dagger gone. The one in his boot might still be there—it was hard for him to tell, at present—but summoning the strength and speed to reach up and grab it before his captors could hurt or kill him? That was a long shot. Great-mother and Swifty each had a collection of knives, shoved naked into the hemp ropes they both used to bind their tunics round their thin waists. Maybe if one of them got close enough, he could grab a blade and . . .
No. That was foolish. He was hanging upside down. Even if he could snatch a knife and stab whoever stood right in front of him, whatever wound he gave them, even if fatal, would take forever to kill them. They’d have plenty of time to cast him into the dark ahead of them. Or any of the others might intervene.
Stall anyway, he thought. You’ve got nothing to lose. Every breath earned is hope. Try to remember that . . .
“I’m sorry,” Rem said. “I’ve totally forgotten my manners. Might we introduce ourselves?”
Great-mother, Swifty, and Siebel—all gathered in a tight cluster beside the cauldron and the cookfire—turned to stare at Rem as though he’d just uttered words in Old Horunic. Fopsy and Brown Bon gave him odd looks, as well, pausing briefly in their ministrations to the fire and the contents of that big iron pot.
“My name’s Rem,” Rem said, placing his hands on his chest to suggest himself. “I’ve come from Yenara, on my way to Erald. Who am I speaking with?”
Great-mother surprised him then by taking two long, swift strides across the littered floor and grabbing his balls with one of her clawlike old hands. The crone squeezed hard, and Rem screamed to wake the dead. Gods, but that hurt. It hurt bad. Worse than anything he’d ever experienced.
“You’ve got a name, and it’s supper, supper!” great-mother snarled around her pitted gums. “As for who’s come claiming you, ain’t you knowin’ nothing about the Big Wood? Ain’t you heard who’s the first, last, and best crow feeders hereabouts? I’s the great-mother—oldest and wisest—of the Bosker clan, and these here striplings are my bloody brood. Welcome, keener, to the family citadel!”
She gave his scrotum one last, hard squeeze, then released it. Rem felt on the verge of vomiting, the pain of her assault and his long period inverted both threatening at once to overwhelm him. He coughed, sputtered, drew breath like a man who’d been drowning. He realized that his eyes were wet with tears, and he might have uttered a sob or two as she’d squeezed.
“Pleased to meet you,” he croaked.
“We’s the jeepiest, hereabouts—the shiniest, the broviest, the bloggiest! Why, people sing songs of we, the Bloody Boskers, far and wide! If you come mopsing through this wood unknowing, you’s a fool indeed.”
“Fool indeed,” Rem parroted, the a
gony between his legs now subsiding to a dull, throbbing ache.
“Squidge him again, great-ma!” Swifty urged. “I like it when he blargs like that!”
“Please don’t,” Rem begged.
“Fine, then! On to business!” the old woman said, cackling as she did. Clearly she was pleased with herself for causing Rem so much pain. Now she shuffled nearer again. “How many?” she asked.
“How many what?” Rem asked in return.
Great-mother hit him across the face. The touch of her rank skin, however brief, was enough to make him gag. “How many come you? You’s not alone, not in these woods! We seen your snaky train!”
“If you saw,” Rem said, “then you know how many.”
“Can’t count,” Swifty said apologetically. “Not well.”
“Shut your gullet!” great-mother snapped, then returned her attentions to Rem. “Tell us, now: How many? Give us the trues and we’ll do you quick, supper. No pain. Just whoosh—fast and neat. Out like a candle.”
“There were forty of us,” Rem lied. “And we’re expecting a hundred more. The duke was to meet us, with a full-company honor guard, somewhere west of the river ford.”
“Forty and a hundred!” Swifty gasped. “That’s more than twenty! Maybe even more than thirty!”
“Bot hanken warty,” Siebel snuffled.
Great-mother wasn’t convinced. Rem could see it in the way her single eye narrowed suspiciously, probing into him like the point of a sharp bodkin. “Lies, I says. Wasn’t more than a score, most like. Maybe less.”
“Fine,” Rem said, thinking of another approach. “You’ve found us out. We’re outlaws, here to trade with the Devils of the Weald.”
To Rem’s surprise, great-mother suddenly stood upright—at least as close as she could come to it—and screamed in horror. It was a sound of shock and disgust and distress; a woman finding a rat in her larder, calling for someone to come kill it.
