The Born Queen

by Greg Keyes

  “Soon.”

  The valley narrowed to the point where they were always on a slope. Aspar’s leg ached even with the new crutch Leshya had cut him, and as the way turned more and more downhill, his knees began to hurt as well.

  In the back of his mind he’d always reckoned that after a while he’d be back to his old self, but now he was starting to wonder. He was past forty winters, and at his age, when things broke, they didn’t necessarily get fixed.

  They came at last to steep, shallow shoals with nothing but cliffs on either side.

  “We’ll be getting wet,” Leshya said.

  They went down basically sitting, letting their boots find the rocks. The mountain water already had winter in it, and before they were a third of the way down, Aspar’s extremities were numb. Halfway, his boot slipped and the current got control of him, sweeping him down until he lodged hard against a log.

  The sky was wider there. Two white-tailed eagles turned high above. Treetops peered down at him from the gorge’s rim.

  It’s still alive here, he thought. Despite the monsters. Why should I go back to the King’s Forest, where everything is dead? Why not stay here, fight, die, sink into the earth?

  It was only when something struck him across the face that he realized there was water in his mouth and lungs. His body understood then, and he started hacking it up in long, painful coughs.

  “Get up,” Leshya said. “You’re not done, Aspar White.”

  They made it the rest of the way down, and he took a few minutes to finish clearing his lungs.

  “Sceat,” he managed weakly.

  “You’ve got to help me more than this, Aspar,” Leshya said. “You’ve got to try harder.”

  “Sceat on you,” he muttered, and for a moment he wanted to kill her just for seeing him like this. It was the most humiliating thing he could imagine.

  Up until now, at least. Now he could envision more worlds waiting for him as the years crept by. Why, there was Winna, still young enough to bear children, rolling him over to change the linens under him, the ones he’d just soiled…

  He pushed himself up with the crutch, then threw it away.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  The valley broadened out into a gentle, ferny glen where the warmth of the sun took the chill from his bones. Dragonflies whirred over the water and its sedge of horsetails. Snakes and turtles lazily quit their perches as the two travelers neared them. The cliffs became slopes, and trees walked down them; soon they were able to move out of the marsh and travel on drier ground.

  He also began seeing more signs of man. Some of the forest bore old farming terraces, and they passed several hunting shelters. The rinn was joined by several others, and some had the scent of manure in them.

  He felt the geos of the Sarnwood in his belly, cold, waiting. Who would it be?

  All the while, the terrain turned them south.

  It was getting dark when they heard dogs and smelled smoke. Soon they saw, on a rise some distance from the stream, a fenced yard and a large cabin built of split cypress.

  To Aspar’s relief, Leshya gestured away from that and upslope, where in time the trees thinned into pasture. The stars began to appear, although the sun was barely gone behind the mountain they just had come down from. Aspar found himself looking back often, and once something caught his eye. He thought at first that it was a bat, but then he kenned he’d misunderstood the distance; if it was a bat, it was a very big one.

  He suddenly felt like a hare on a broad plain.

  “Ah,” Leshya said. He found her staring at the thing as it vanished into shadow.

  “Any ideas what that might be?”

  “No. But I reckon we’d better sleep in tonight.”

  “Go back down to the cabin?”

  “No. This is winter pasture. There ought to be something up here.”

  She was proved right before the darkness was total; they found a small sod house in good repair. It was even sparely furnished with firewood, a cooking pot, a cask of somewhat weevily oats, and a little dried meat. Cobwebs testified that all of it was from the last season.

  They didn’t build a fire, and so the oats stayed where they were, but the dried meat proved hard to resist, thievery though it was.

  “Blood Knight,” Aspar said as he lay back on a straw mat and pulled the ragged bits of a blanket over his legs.

  “Right,” she said.

  He couldn’t see her at all in the darkness. “And you can throw in as a bargain where you got this witchy knife.”

  “That’s easier,” she said. “I found it on a dead man back at the mountain. One of Hespero’s men.”

  “Where are they getting those things?”

  “Old places,” she said. “There were once quite a lot of them.”

  “When your folk ruled the world.”

  “When we were being beaten by yours,” she replied. “The fey weapons were forged by humans. Virgenya Dare found the knowledge of their making. The Skasloi wouldn’t use such weapons.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they draw on the sedos power. The Skasloi wouldn’t have anything to do with that.”

  “Why?”

  She sighed. “You know we don’t really write things down, we Sefry. But we live a long time. Seventy generations have come and gone for your kind since you won your freedom. But my mother was born four hundred years ago, and her mother was born six hundred before that. Three more generations back—”

  “You were Skasloi. Yah.”

  “So our memories are better. But there’s still a lot we don’t know. Things our ancestors intentionally didn’t pass on and others they may have lied about. So understand that everything I’m about to tell you might not be true.”

  “I grew up with Sefry, remember? I know a thing or two about their lies.”

  She shrugged. “We couldn’t have survived all of these centuries without a talent for dissembling. If we had been found out—if the Mannish races ever knew what we really were—we would have been slaughtered.”

  “Yah,” Aspar said drily. “I reckon.”

  “Anyway, what I was getting to. My ancestors did use the sedos power once. But they discovered that using it isn’t without cost. Each time it’s drawn on, it leaves a poison behind it. The pollution builds up over time like dead fish in a stream, and things begin to die. Almost everything died once, before my ancestors understood the consequences of the sedos power and forswore its use.”

  “But the Skasloi were supposed to be demons, with lots of strange shinecrafting.”

  “The Skasloi had magicks, yes. They found another source of power, one without the same ill effects as the sedos. But by that time the world was a wasteland. They discovered a way beyond the lands of fate to another place, an otherwhere, and they brought plants to make the world green again. They brought animals, too, and in time they brought your people.”

  “To use as slaves.”

  “Pets at first. Curiosities. But eventually slaves, yes.”

  “Until the pets found the sedos power.”

  “Exactly.”

  A thought struck him. “So the monsters, the black thorns, the things destroying the world—that’s from using the sedos power?”

  “Yes. You told me about the boar you saw in the Sarnwood, how it gave birth to a greffyn. The sedhmhari are born from natural things poisoned by sedos power. Some say they are shadows of the elder beasts that walked the world before the great dying, the ancient life trying to push through the new, but tainted by the venom of the sedos.”

  He remembered the Sarnwood again, the strange plants that grew in its heart. “The Sarnwood witch,” he murmured.

  “We don’t know what she is, but she is very, very old. Older maybe than my race.”

  “She’s from the old forest. The one your people destroyed. The one my forest replaced.”

  “Maybe,” she said cautiously. “As I said, we don’t know much about her.”

  “What does she want
?”

  “We don’t know.”

  Aspar nodded, but he had an idea he already knew. If he was the witch of the Sarnwood, he knew what he would want.

  “What’s all this got to do with Fend?”

  “That’s another legend, a prophecy, really. There are seasons larger than the ones you know, seasons that last hundreds and thousands of years. The powers—we call them thrones—of the world wax and wane with those seasons. When Virgenya Dare found the sedos power, it was strong. But over time it weakened, and the other thrones waxed, bringing on the Warlock Wars and all sorts of havoc. But now the sedoi swell very powerful, more powerful than ever. They say that whoever controls the sedos throne at its peak will be able to subjugate the other thrones forever and end the long, slow change of seasons.”

  “And these other powers—these thrones—what are they?”

  “There are only three. The sedos we’ve been talking about. The second is the power your folk call shinecraft and witchcraft, and it comes from the abyss beneath the world. It makes unlikely things likely and the certain impossible. It can bring a rain of fire from heaven or stop water freezing even though it is bitter cold. It brings things together that belong apart and pushes things apart that belong together. That was the throne the Skasloi mastered, and after them the warlocks. We called that throne the Xhes throne.”

  “And the third power?”

  “That’s the one you’ve felt in your bones every day of your life, Aspar White. Generation and decay. Death and birth. The energy that makes life into dirt and dirt into life. We called that throne the Vhen throne.”

  “The Briar King’s throne.”

  “Not anymore,” she said softly.

  “Because Fend killed him. Why did he do that?”

  “According to the elders, the master of the Xhes throne is a creature we know as the Vhelny, a demon. The Blood Knight is said to be his servant. He is the foe of the masters of the other thrones.”

  “So now that he’s slain the Briar King, he’ll go after the sedos throne. Who is the master of that?”

  “No one. The Church has used the sedos power, but the throne hasn’t been occupied since the time of Virgenya Dare. But it will be soon. That’s what all of this is about.”

  “The Briar King was fighting the sedos power.”

  “Of course. It was destroying his forest.”

  “But the Xhes throne wasn’t, yah? So it seems like he and this Vhelny should be allies against the sedos throne when it rises. Why kill the Briar King now?”

  “Because the Vhelny wants all the thrones, of course.”

  “Ah,” Aspar murmured, rubbing his forehead. He wished he could see Leshya’s face, but he knew he still wouldn’t be able to tell if she was having him on.

  “You don’t know how much of this is pure sceat?” he finally said.

  “Not really,” she said. “You asked, and I told you what I know. I’ve never lied to you, have I?”

  “Knowing all this and not mentioning it earlier is very much like a lie, I maun,” he replied.

  “To have told you earlier, I would have had to tell you what the Sefry really are. After that, you wouldn’t have listened to anything I said. But after Fend let the secret slip, and after all the time we’ve been together…”

  “You reckoned I’d be more gullible.”

  “I didn’t ask you to believe it,” she snapped.

  “Yah,” he muttered, waving at the darkness. “So Fend’s after me because he works for the Vhelny thing and he’s afraid the Briar King might have told me something or other.”

  “Either that or Fend’s just using his power to indulge a personal vendetta. You did take one of his eyes.”

  “Not a lot of love between us,” Aspar admitted. “Not much at all.”

  “Any other questions?” Leshya asked, her voice sounding stiff.

  “Yah,” he said. “Just what are you hoping the Briar King passed on to me?”

  She nodded and was still for a long moment. “We made the Briar King,” she finally said.

  “What?”

  “The Skasloi. The Xhes and sedos thrones existed before any history I know. We may have created them, or some elder race, but we believe they were created.”

  “I thought the saints created the sedoi.”

  “Not the saints as your people worship them. We simply don’t know. But the Vhen—the essence of life and death—that was in everything, and it had no throne, no being that controlled it. After we brought the world back from the brink of death, the Skasloi decided that the Vhen needed its own guardian, its own focus. So they created the Briar King—or, more specifically, they created the Vhenkherdh, the heart of life, and from that he was born.”

  “And you hope he told me where that place is?”

  “Did he?”

  “No.”

  But suddenly he did know.

  She saw it on his face. “You’ve been there. That’s why you want to go back. Not to just die there.”

  “It’s only a feeling,” he said.

  “Of course. I’ve been stupid. He wouldn’t have put a map in your hand.”

  “But he’s dead. What can we do now?”

  “Without his protection, everything will die. But if he is reborn, we might have a chance.”

  “You think that’s possible?”

  “I don’t know. But it’s something, isn’t it?”

  “Then why haven’t you been in more of a hurry to leave?”

  “Because I think you’re the key to whatever must happen, and I didn’t want you to die before you knew where to go or die on the journey from starting too early.”

  “Well,” he said. “Well. I need to chew on all of this for a while.”

  “Fine. Shall I take first watch?”

  “I’ll take it.”

  She didn’t say anything else, but he heard the rustle of her situating herself. He suddenly felt heavy and stupid. He listened to her breathing.

  “Thanks,” he said. “I don’t always mean to be like I am. I just—I like things simple.”

  “I know,” she replied.

  He went outside. The stars were out, but the moon was no more than a faint glow in the west. He studied the sky, watching for something dark moving against the constellations, straining his ears for any distant warning.

  The Aitivar had been mounted. If they stayed that way, they would have to go back up and out of the pass and wind their way here. That could put them far behind, but if he really had seen some sort of flying beast…

  But he didn’t see or hear anything, so he let his thoughts wander ahead. Tomorrow they ought to be out of the hills and into the river plain of the White Warlock. If they were where he thought they were, another day or two would get them to Haemeth, where he’d left Winna and Ehawk.

  But if he was dragging a war band of monsters after him, was that really what he wanted to do?

  What did he want to do?

  That hardly mattered, did it? Because he would have to do what the Sarnwood witch had geosed him to do.

  He hadn’t told Leshya about that, had he? Why?

  He didn’t have the answers, and if the stars and the wind did, they weren’t telling. And so his watch passed, and then he slept.

  The next morning he and Leshya marched across the Fells, hugging the thin tree lines that followed streams for cover, keeping their thoughts to themselves. But at midday they were working their way down the last line of leans, and he caught a glimpse of the Warlock in the distance before they slipped beneath the comforting branches of a small wood. There wasn’t much old growth. Wood was cut here, and often. Mannish trails were everywhere. Still, it kept them out from under the sky, at least for a little while.

  But after about a bell, things went quiet—all the birds, even the jays—and a shadow passed. Aspar looked up and caught a glimpse of something big.

  “Sceat,” he said.

  They crouched beneath huckleberry bushes and waited for it to return, but instead, afte
r a moment, Aspar heard a shriek. Without a thought, he suddenly found himself running and wondering why.

  “Aspar!” Leshya snapped, but he ignored her.

  He bounded down a series of old terraces and broke into a clearing, and there was the thing, gleaming black and green, its wings folding down as its claws came to earth. But in that terrible moment, that was not what held his attention. It was Winna, coming shakily to her feet next to a fallen horse, her eyes wide, a knife in her outstretched hand.

  She was in profile, and so he could see the round bulge of her belly.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  A CHALLENGE

  THE HANSAN KNIGHT stepped nearer, and Neil tried to keep his hand off Battlehound’s hilt. A hush settled over the room, more profound by far than the earlier pause in the revelry that had greeted his lady.

  “Sir Alareik,” Neil acknowledged. “We’ve met before, it’s true. I can’t recall any unfinished business between us.”

  “Don’t you? The Moonfish Inn at the docks in Eslen?”

  “I remember,” Neil said. “I was Sir Fail’s squire, and he sent me to ask you to dine with us. You refused.”

  “You insulted me. Since you were a squire, honor forbade me taking the field against you. That is no longer the case.”

  It didn’t stop you sending three of your squires to ambush me in the stables, Neil remembered, but he didn’t think it best to bring that up.

  In fact, before he could reply at all, Aradal broke in.

  “Sir Alareik, this man is a member of an embassy and therefore a guest of our king. You will treat him with all the respect that comes with that position. Whatever grievance you have with him can be settled later.”

  “I’ll not attack him out of hand,” the Wishilm knight replied. “But there’s nothing in the old code that says he can’t agree to meet me with honor. There’s no law in the world that forces a man to hide behind skirts and pretty words rather than step out and take arms like a knight. Well, maybe in Crotheny that’s how they do things, but I’d rather think that even there knights are knights.”

  A general mutter went up at that, and a few shouts of agreement. Neil sighed.