The Briar King

by Greg Keyes

  “Something came out, but it made no sound and left no prints. It went away before the dawn.”

  Winna frowned. “I dreamed of something that smelled foul.”

  “The foul smell wasn't a dream,” Aspar said. “That's for certain.”

  “Could it—could it have been the Briar King himself ?” she wondered.

  “Grim, I hope not,” Aspar swore. “Whatever was out in the dark, I never want to see it.”

  Winna looked unsettled at that, but she didn't say anything.

  “What now?” she asked instead.

  “I suppose we go on, and see what there is to see. Do you need food?”

  “Not yet. We can eat in a while. If there are more of those spiders overhead, I'd like to be out from under 'em. Saints, yes! They crawled all through my dreams, too.”

  As the space widened between the trunks of the trees the white, strawlike ground cover gave way to ferns and horsetails, then to bushier growth—rambling mounds of blackberry bushes, knee-high catgrass and broomsedge, grapevines groping over all. For Aspar, it was a relief to see plants he knew, by Grim's bloody eye!

  At last, just short of midday, they left the forest behind them. The trees ended rather abruptly, giving way to a gently rolling valley floor. Mountains framed every direction, adding force to Aspar's guess that the only way in and out of the valley—short of crawling across the icy glaciers—was probably the way they had come.

  The fields were brushy with grass and thistle and wild primrose, but riddled with enough animal trails to make the going easy most of the time.

  If they had anywhere to go, which they didn't.

  They struck on toward the far valley wall, but slowly. Aspar wondered just what in the name of the Sarnwood witch he was looking for.

  It was a bell later when Winna pointed off to their right. “What's that?” she asked.

  Aspar had already noticed what she was gesturing at—a line of small trees, not much taller than the grass, marching toward the valley wall, not quite paralleling their own path.

  “A stream, most likely,” he grunted.

  “Most likely,” Winna conceded. “But it seems odd to me.”

  “Nothing odd about it,” Aspar argued.

  “What would it hurt to have a look?” Winna asked. “I don't see anything else even a little strange.”

  “You've a point,” he allowed. They turned their steps that direction.

  After a few hundred paces, Winna asked, “Aspar, what do the Sefry expect us to do here?”

  “Find the Briar King, I reckon.”

  “Just find him?”

  “That's what Mother Gastya said,” Aspar replied.

  Winna nodded. “Yah. But aren't you the one who says the Sefry always lie?”

  “I am,” Aspar admitted. “But that doesn't matter. Whatever they want of me, I would have come here eventually. I've lived in this forest all of my life, Winn. Something's wrong with it. Very wrong.” He chewed his lip, then cleared his throat. “I think it's dying. I think the greffyn has something to do with it, and if there is a Briar King, and he's at the bottom of this rot—I need to know.”

  “But suppose Mother Gastya lied. Suppose this isn't where the Briar King is. What if she sent you as far from him as she could?”

  “I thought of that. I took the chance.” He glanced at her. “But that's not what you're worried about, is it? You're worried that he is here.”

  For a few moments the swishing of Winna's tattered skirts against the grass was the only sound. “I know he's here,” she said finally. “But what if the Sefry sent you to him so he could kill you?”

  “If Mother Gastya wanted me dead, she needed only to have kept silent for another few heartbeats, back in Rewn Aluth,” Aspar pointed out. “Whatever the Sefry want, it's not just my death.”

  “I guess not,” Winna conceded. Then she stopped.

  They had reached the line of small trees. “I don't see a stream.”

  “No,” Aspar said slowly.

  The trees were very small versions of the briar trees. They stood just over waist high.

  “Look how regular they're spaced,” Winna said. “Like somebody planted them.”

  “There's something else,” Aspar said, crouching. “Something …” It reminded him of tracking, somehow. But it took him another twenty heartbeats to understand why.

  “They're planted like a man's footsteps,” he said. “A big man. But see? It's as if at every stride, a tree sprang up.” He glanced back over his shoulder. The trail of trees led back into the forest—and it led ahead, to the valley wall.

  “What's that up there?”

  Aspar followed the imaginary line her finger traced in the air. Far off—half a league, maybe—the row of trees led to some sort of dome. It looked man-made.

  “A building?” he speculated. “It looks a little like a Watau longhouse.”

  It wasn't a longhouse. His mother's people built their lodgings of freshly cut young trees, bending them into arches and then covering all with shingles of bark. The structure he and Winna beheld was likewise made of trees—but they were still alive, thrusting strong roots into the soil and lacing their branches tightly together. It was shaped like a giant bird's nest, turned upside down. It stood perhaps twenty yards high at its apex.

  So tight and dense were the trees woven that nothing could be seen within, even when they drew near enough to touch it.

  A circuit of the weird, living structure led them to an opening, of sorts—a twisting path between the trunks and branches just large enough for Aspar to squeeze through. No sound came from within.

  “You'll stay here,” Aspar told Winna.

  Winna frowned at him. “Aspar White, I've climbed mountains, swum in freezing water, and endured thunderstorms with you. I've saved your life twice now, by my count—”

  “Winna, do this for me.”

  “Give me a reason to. One that makes sense.”

  He stared at her, then took a step and put his palm to her cheek. “Because this is all different,” he said. “There's nothing canny, here. Who knows which stories are true, and which are lies? Who knows but that if the gaze of the greffyn brings faintness, the eyes of the Briar King might not slay in a single blink?” He kissed her. “Because I love you, Winna, and would protect you, whether you want me to or not. And finally, if something happens to me, someone must get word to the king, and the other holters. Someone has to save my forest.”

  She closed her eyes for a long time, and when she opened them, they were smiling and moist. “I love you, too, you great lout. Just come out alive, will you? And then take me out of this place. I couldn't find my way back alone anyhow.”

  “I'll do that,” he said.

  A moment later, he stepped into the trees.

  Immediately, something went strange. He felt a sort of shock, like he might feel if he had nodded off, then jerked his head up suddenly. A bumblebee seemed to be buzzing someplace inside his chest, accompanied by a rhythmic humming from his lungs.

  He continued on, following the winding path, and felt deepness, as if he were far beneath the earth.

  There was a scent, too, powerful and changeable, never the same from one breath to the next, and yet somehow consistent. It was pine sap, bear fur, snake musk, burning hickory, sour sweat, week-old carcass, rotting fruit, horse piss, roses. It grew stronger as he approached, and seemed to settle, to become less varied, until the smell of death and flowers filled his head.

  Thus Aspar turned the last corner of the maze and beheld the Briar King.

  He was shadow-shape, caught in the thousand tiny needles of light piercing the gaps in the roof of the living hall. He was thorns and primrose, root and branch and knotted vines, tendril-fingered. His beard and hair were of trailing gray and green moss, and hornlike limbs twisted up from his head.

  But his face—his face was mottled lichen papered on human skull, black flowers blooming from his eye sockets. And as Aspar watched, the king turned slowly to face
him, and the roses opened wider, still blooming.

  Aspar opened his mouth, but he didn't say anything. He couldn't look away from those widening eyes, the ebony stamens that seemed to grow larger until they were the only things in the world. The stench of death and perfume choked him, and his limbs began to twitch, his body felt violent, itchy, and suddenly, without warning, his vision cracked like a mirror and from behind it he saw … things.

  He saw the ironoaks—his ironoaks, the tyrants—rotting, limbs snapping, plagues of worms and flies bursting from beneath their putrefying bark like maggots from a corpse. He saw the Warlock River running black, deer falling in their tracks, green things shriveling and melting into a viscous pus. He smelled the putrefaction. The sickness he had felt on touching the greffyn's spoor hit him again, a hundred times stronger, and he doubled to vomit, and then—

  —then he went mad.

  The next time he knew anything clearly, it was agony. His shoulder was on fire.

  “Aspar?”

  He looked up through a film of pain to see Winna, staring frantically down at him. They were in a stand of trees, someplace. Poplars. He had something gripped in his hand.

  “Aspar, is that you? Are you sensible?”

  “I—wha's happening?”

  “You were gone—” Her head suddenly jerked up, and when she started again, her voice was much lower. “You were in there for three days! The tree house closed up, and I couldn't go in after you. Then when you came out, you ran like a wild man. I chased you.”

  He clawed at his shoulder and found a crude bandage, soaked in blood.

  “The one-eyed man and his band are here. You attacked them, and they shot you. They're hunting for us, now.”

  “Fend? He's here?”

  “Shhh. I think they're close.”

  “Three days?” Aspar grunted. “How can that be?” He looked around. “My bow? Where is it?” He looked dully at what he held in his hand. It was a horn, a white bone horn, incised with weird figures. Where had he gotten that?

  “Still with the Briar King, I guess. When you came out, you didn't—” Her head jerked up again, and she raised a dirk. It was Aspar's dirk.

  “Give me that,” he grunted. “I can still fight.” He put the horn in his haversack and reached for the weapon.

  “But I wouldn't advise it,” a familiar voice said.

  A circle of bows appeared around them, and there, in As-par's pain-reddened vision, stood a Sefry in a broad-brimmed hat, bundled against the pale amber evening that suffused the scene. He wore a jerkin and cloak of umber felt, the same color as his hat. He had one eye of pale green, and where the other eye ought to be was a yellow patch.

  “Fend,” Aspar snarled. “Come and die.”

  Fend laughed. “No, thank you,” he said.

  “Stay back,” Winna said. “I'll cut the first to come near.”

  “We won't come near, then,” Fend said reasonably. “We'll fill you both with shafts from a distance. Aspar, tell your little girl to put down her knife and come here.”

  Aspar chewed that for less than a heartbeat. “Do it, Winna,” Aspar said.

  “Asp—”

  “He'll kill you if you don't.”

  “What about you?”

  “Girl,” Fend said, “I've nothing against you, really. I can't allow Aspar to live, of course. He knows it, and so do I. But he also knows that if you behave, I might let you live.”

  “And leave her alone,” Aspar said. “Promise to do her no harm.”

  “Why should I?” Fend asked. “After all, there are so many kinds of harm. She might even come to like some of them.”

  Winna reversed the knife and placed it against her breast. “You can forget that,” she said.

  But in the next eye blink, the dirk was on the ground, and Winna was screaming and staring wide-eyed at an arrow shaft neatly piercing her palm.

  “Winna!” Aspar shrieked. And then, “Fend!” An impossible energy lurched into Aspar's limbs, and he picked up the knife, hurling himself forward.

  A second shaft struck him in the thigh, a third in his arm. Even as he staggered, he knew they were missing his vitals on purpose, and he remembered the bodies around the old sedos shrine on the Taff, tortured and bled while they were still alive.

  He got back up, grimacing, and heard Fend's laughter.

  “Oh, Aspar. I so admire your tenacity.”

  “I'll kill you, Fend,” Aspar said quietly. “Believe it, you bitchson.” He twisted the shaft in his thigh until it snapped. He went light-headed from the pain, but then took another step toward the one-eyed Sefry. The point hadn't cut any tendons.

  Suddenly, Fend's men gave ground, and Fend himself stepped back, eyes widening. Aspar felt an instant's savage satisfaction before he realized it wasn't him they feared.

  It was the greffyn. It had stepped from the wood very, very quietly. With silent purpose it padded toward Aspar.

  “Well,” Fend said. “It's chosen you. I would have preferred to kill you myself, but I imagine this will do. Good-bye, Aspar.”

  Aspar blinked once at the greffyn, less than a kingsyard away. Then he turned and ran. Fend laughed again.

  The greffyn seemed in no hurry to finish him. Aspar ran as if in a nightmare, his feet cloying to the ground. If he could only escape the greffyn and find his bow, he might have a chance to save Winna.

  He clung to that thought, to keep him going, to keep his heart pumping blood and his legs moving. He didn't look back, but he could hear the greffyn behind him now, hissing along through the grass. Enjoying the chase, perhaps, like the cat it resembled.

  He knew where he was, now, anyway. In his madness, he had gone farther along the canyon wall. Ahead he could see the Briar King's weird, living barrow. If he could reach it, the greffyn might not be able to squeeze through the narrow opening. And his bow was in there.

  He ran on, but his legs called a halt, and his body left his feet behind. With dull surprise, he found his face pressed into the earth.

  He managed to roll over, with the dirk held up.

  The greffyn was there, looking down at him with saucer-size eyes.

  Aspar's other hand strayed to his belt, and found his ax.

  The greffyn came a step closer and lowered its head. It sniffed at him. It clacked its jaws, then came even closer and sniffed again.

  “Just a little closer,” Aspar said, gripping his ax. “Come on, what are you waiting for?”

  But it sniffed once more, and then drew back.

  Aspar didn't know what that meant, but he took the opportunity to regain his feet. He turned and continued on, staggering often, but the greffyn didn't follow.

  Its gaze did, however, the sweet, hot sickness that he had known three times already. It wasn't as bad, this time. Maybe the medicine Mother Gastya had done to cure him back in Rewn Aluth was still working. Maybe that was why the greffyn hadn't wanted to touch him.

  Whatever the case, two arrow wounds and the greffyn's deadly gaze proved finally too much. He fell into the tall grass and slept, and dreamt foul Black Marys.

  He awoke smeared with his own vomit. His wounds were no longer bleeding, but they were throbbing and red, and felt hellishly hot.

  He got up anyway, thinking of Winna in Fend's hands. He started a small fire and plucked out the remaining arrow, then seared out the wounds with a glowing coal. He pressed the paste Mother Gastya had given him into the cauterized holes and bound them with scraps of his shirt.

  The night came and went before he could manage to stagger more than a few yards at a time, but the sun seemed to bring him new strength, and he grimly rose to search for Fend, and his men, and Winna. Most of all, Winna.

  He found only their trail, leading back into the briar tree forest.

  Implacably, wishing his head would clear, wishing the pain would ease off instead of getting worse with each step, he set off after them.

  “I will kill you, Fend,” he murmured. “By Grim, I will. I will.”

  He
repeated it until it made no sense, until long after he was capable of rational thought.

  But even then, he didn't stop moving. Only death could stop him.

  PART III

  THE RECONDITE STIRS

  THE YEAR 2,223 OF EVERON

  THE MONTH OF PONTHMEN

  When wakes the recondite world, the sword shall appear as a feather, the wolf as a mouse, the legion as a carnival. I shall laugh from my grave, and it shall sound as a lute.

  —FROM THE CONFESSION OF THE SHINECRAFTER EMME VICCARS, AT THE PRONOUNCEMENT OF HER SENTENCE OF EXECUTION

  CHAPTER ONE

  IN THE WARHEARTH

  WILLIAM POURED ANOTHER GOBLET of his favorite Virgenyan wine and paced across the red marble floor of Warhearth Hall. He took a healthy swallow of the amethyst-colored vintage, then set the goblet down on the broad black table in the center of the room.

  The paintings were looking at him again. Rebelliously, he returned their scrutiny.

  They were everywhere; whole floor-to-ceiling panels of the wall were bracketed in gilded oak-leaf molding and painted in dense and murky colors, as if rendered with mud and soot and blood. In a sense they were, for each was a depiction of some part of the long history of his family's wars.

  “Would you rather look at those old pictures or me?” Alis Berrye inquired sulkily. She was draped upon an armchair, bodice unlaced so as to reveal her firm, rose-tipped breasts. She rolled off her stockings and threw one bare leg over the arm of the chair. It was a pretty leg, slender, white as milk. Her chestnut hair was mildly tousled, sapphire eyes languid, despite her vexed tone. She was nearly as full of wine as he, and totally unlike the paintings in character.

  Well, not entirely true. She wasn't murky, but she was a bit dense.

  “I am sorry, my dear,” William murmured. “The mood is no longer on me.”

  “I can put it on you, my lord, I assure you.”

  “Yes,” he sighed. “I'm certain you could. But I do not wish it.”

  “Do you tire of me, Your Majesty?” Alis asked, unable to hide a bit of panic in her voice.