The Briar King

by Greg Keyes

  Excited, Stephen pored through similar sources, and found some of the children's songs mentioned, but nothing that cast more light on the current situation.

  The hour was late, and he alone remained in the scriftorium. Sleep tugged at the corners of his eyes, and he was near concluding that he had found all he was going to. One scrift remained, and it wasn't promising, being little more than a book of children's tales, but as he wearily unscrolled it, a small illustration caught his eye. It was of a manlike creature made up of leaves and vines, with limbs spreading from his head like antlers. In one hand, he gripped a small horn. It captioned a song he had already seen twice, a circle dance for children.

  As he was about to put it away, his fingers brushed the margins, and he felt something—an imprint in the vellum. Intrigued, he examined it more closely.

  It looked as if someone had written a note on another vellum or piece of paper, likely with a lead stylus, and the impression had gone through. Eagerly, he found a piece of charcoal and lightly rubbed the paper, as he had the stone markers on the Vio Caldatum, and faint characters emerged. When he was done, he sat staring at the results.

  The characters were the same as those inscribed on Aspar's horn, to the letter. Following it was a single word in the king's tongue.

  Find.

  “I'd stay away from her, if I were you,” Brother Ehan remarked the next day as Stephen sidled nearer Angel.

  “I've ridden Angel before,” Stephen said. “Haven't I, girl?”

  The mare looked dubious.

  “Well, she may not be as crazy as the other, but she's learned some wildness.”

  “Shh. Angel.” He proffered the mare an apple. She sniffed suspiciously and her eyes rolled, but she took a step or two closer.

  “That's it, good girl. Come here.”

  “I don't see what the point is, anyway,” Ehan said.

  “The point is,” Stephen said softly, “I want to ride her.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it would take too long to walk where I want to go.”

  “What in Saint Rooster's name are you talking about?”

  The mare was almost close enough to touch now. Her flanks were trembling as she took another step, ducked her head, pulled it back up, and gently took the apple.

  “That's fine, girl,” Stephen said. “Remember this?” He drew a bridle from behind his back.

  Angel eyed the thing, but seemed almost calmed by its presence. Stephen lay it against the side of her head, letting her get a good whiff of him and it, then gently started putting it on her. She didn't object.

  “That's my sweetheart,” Stephen cooed.

  “Tell me where you're going,” Ehan demanded. “We're supposed to be tending the orchard after this.”

  “I know. If I'm missed, I don't expect you to lie for me. I'm not going to tell you where I'm going for the same reason.”

  Ehan chewed his lip and spat. “You'll be back by vespers?”

  “Or not at all,” Stephen assured him. “All right, girl, are you ready?”

  Angel answered by not throwing him once he'd gingerly climbed on her back. She stamped a little skittishly, but then took the bridle. Stephen switched her into a brisk trot, which wasn't all that pleasant bareback, for either party.

  “Sorry, girl,” he said, “I couldn't have brought a saddle out here without being noticed.”

  It had taken him almost two days to drag Aspar White from where he had found him to the monastery, but in fact the distance was only about a league. Unencumbered and mounted, he covered the distance in under two bells. His memory was as perfect at mental mapmaking as in every other thing since his fanewalk, so he found the spot without much trouble.

  He surveyed the scene, frowning, and dismounted. Dead leaves littered the ground, fallen from a tree that might have been lightning struck but there was no mark of lightning on it. Nevertheless it was dead, and so was a trail of ferns and undergrowth that wound into the clearing, stopped short of the remains of his fire, then continued off in a different direction. The point where the trail turned was exactly where he remembered the beaked creature standing.

  “No lion did this, Angel,” he murmured. Not that he had ever accepted the fratrex's rationalization.

  He was still studying the unnatural trail when he heard voices in the distance.

  Stephen had had plenty enough experience with strangers in the forest for one lifetime, so he began quietly leading Angel away. Remembering Aspar's story, he went up a ridge where a line of thicker growth hid him from the valley. He tethered the mare on the other side of the ridge, then crept down where he could have a view of the place he'd found As-par White.

  After perhaps half a bell, eight mounted men came into view. Stephen felt a cold shock when he saw who they were.

  It was Desmond Spendlove and his men. They had their cowls down, and Stephen recognized several of them: the hulking Brother Lewes, Brothers Aligern, Topan, and Seigereik—the four nastiest of the bunch, according to Ehan. The others he had seen but couldn't name. They were eight in all.

  They stopped and examined the campfire and dead vegetation.

  “What is it up to?” Lewes grunted.

  Spendlove shook his head. “I don't know. It was chasing someone. Maybe that holter Fend told us about.”

  “Right. Then where is he?”

  “Someone dragged his body out,” Seigereik said, examining the ground. “That way.”

  “D'Ef is a league that way,” Spendlove mused. “How interesting.”

  “But the greffyn didn't follow,” Seigereik said.

  “It probably left after killing its prey.”

  “Are we to take up its trail again, then?”

  Spendlove shook his head. “No. We've work to do in the west.”

  “Ah. The queen?”

  “The changeling in her guard bungled her killing. Now it's our turn. We're to meet with Fend in Loiyes.” He looked again at the greffyn's trail. “But first I think we'd better stop in at d'Ef, to learn more about what happened here.”

  “With the allies Fend has, he should be able to handle this on his own,” Topan said, his ice-blue gaze needling casually through the surrounding forest.

  “Fend can fail, just like the changeling. They should have sent us to begin with, but ours isn't to question.”

  “Still, it could take us a month to get there,” Topan argued. “What if we go all that way for nothing?”

  “There are other matters to tidy,” Spendlove assured him. “Besides, the country air will do you good.”

  “I've had too much of that lately.”

  “We do what we do,” Spendlove replied. “If you don't want to do it anymore, you know the way out.” He started for his horse.

  As they rode off, Stephen didn't dare breathe. He lay there, teeth clenched, realizing that he had taken Aspar White to perhaps the most dangerous place imaginable.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE WOMB OF MEFITIS

  ANNE DREAMED OF THE LIGHT of the sun on the grassy Sleeve, of the furnace of sunset on the rinns, of the simple dance of a candle flame. She wrapped herself in the memory of color and shadow and hoped she wouldn't forget the way the wind in the leaves of the tall elms along the canals shivered the light into pieces of phay gold. Not the way she had forgotten Roderick's face.

  They won't let me go mad, she thought. They won't leave me down here for a nineday.

  But maybe they already had. Maybe she had been here for a month. A year. Maybe her hair had turned gray and Roderick was married. A father dead of old age. Maybe her madness was in clinging to hope, in pretending she hadn't been here for very long at all.

  She tried to re-create time by counting heartbeats or tapping her fingers. She tried to measure it by her periods of hunger, and how much food and water remained. She preferred to keep her eyes shut rather than open. With them shut, she could pretend things were as they ought to be, that she was in her bed, trying to sleep.

  Of course, she
had mostly lost the difference between waking and sleeping.

  Her only consolation was that she had begun to hate the darkness. Not to fear it, as she first had, or capitulate to it as Sister Secula surely meant her to.

  No, she loathed it. She plotted against it, imagining how she might strike a light in its ugly belly and kill it. She searched through the meager supplies, hoping to find some small piece of steel, something that would make a spark against stone, but there was nothing. Of course there wasn't. How many girls had they put down here, over the centuries? How many must have thought of the same thing?

  “But I'm not another girl,” Anne muttered, listening as the sound of her voice filled the place. “I'm a daughter of the house Dare.”

  And so, with great determination, she stared at nothingness and imagined a single point of light, banishing every other thought. If she couldn't break the darkness in reality, she could at least do so in her heart. She tried, and maybe she slept, and she tried again. She took the idea of light, her memories of it, and squeezed them together between her eyes, willing it to be real with every fiber of her being.

  And suddenly it was there—a spark, the tiniest of points, no larger than a pinprick.

  “Saints!” she gasped, and it vanished.

  She wept for a little while, dried her eyes, and with greater determination than before, began again.

  The next time the spark appeared, she held it, nurtured it, fed it all of the membrance of light she could find, and slowly, hesitantly, beautifully it grew. It grew to the size of an acorn, then as large as a hand, and it had color in it, and spread like a morning glory opening its petals. She could see things now, but not what she had expected. No walls and floor of stone, but instead the rough bark of an oak, twining vines, a spray of yellow flowers—as if the light was really a hole through the wall of a dark room, opening into a garden.

  But it wasn't a hole; it was a sphere, and it pushed away the darkness until there was none left and she stood not in a cave, but in a brightly lit forest glade.

  She looked down and could not see her shadow, and with a skip of her heart knew where she was. She also knew her madness must be complete.

  “You've come without your shadow,” a voice said.

  It was a woman, but not the same one she had seen before, that day on Tom Woth. This one had unbound hair of fine chestnut and a mask carved of bone polished very smooth. Its features were fine and lifelike, and her mouth was not covered by it. She wore a dress of golden brown silk embroidered with interlaced braids and knots of ram-headed serpents and oak leaves.

  “I didn't mean to come here at all,” Anne told her.

  “But you did. In Eslen you made a pact with Cer. It took you to the Coven Saint Cer and now it brings you here.” She paused. “I wonder what that means?”

  For some reason, that simple question frightened Anne more than the darkness had.

  “Don't you know? Aren't you a saint? Who are you, and where is the other woman, the one with the golden hair?”

  The woman smiled wistfully. “My sister? Near, I'm sure. As for me, I don't know who I am, anymore,” she said. “I'm waiting to know. Like you.”

  “I know who I am. I'm Anne Dare.”

  “You know a name, that's all. Everything else is a guess or an illusion.”

  “I don't understand you.”

  The woman shrugged. “It's not important. What do you want?”

  “What do I want?”

  “You came here for something.”

  Anne hesitated. “I want out of the cave, out of the womb of Saint Mefitis.”

  “Easily done. Leave it.”

  “There's a way out?”

  “Yes. You found one way already, but there is another. Is that all?”

  Anne considered that carefully for a moment. She was probably mad, but if she wasn't …

  If she wasn't, she would do better this time than she had the last.

  “No,” she said firmly. “When your sister abducted me she said some things. I thought they were nonsense, or that I was having a dream. Praifec Hespero thought so, too, when I told him.”

  “And now?”

  “I think she was real, and I want to understand what she said.”

  The woman's lips curved in a smile. “She told you that there must be a queen in Eslen when he comes.”

  “Yes. But why, and who is ‘he’? And why tell me?”

  “I'm sure you asked those questions of my sister.”

  “Yes, and she answered with nonsense. I was scared then, too scared to demand better answers. Now I want them.”

  “You can't always have the things you want.”

  “But you—she—wants me to do something. Everyone wants me to do something. Act one way instead of another, go to a coven, promise this or that. Well, here I am! If you want something from me, explain it or stay out of my dreams!”

  “You came here this time, Anne, of your own free will.” The masked woman sighed. “Ask your questions. I'll try to be more helpful than my sister. But you must understand, Anne, that we are far less masters of ourselves than you are, however you might feel. A dog cannot speak like a man and a cloud may not sound like a lute. The dog can bark, the cloud can thunder. It is how they are made.”

  Anne pursed her lips. “Your sister said that Crotheny must not fall, and that there must be a queen in Eslen when your mysterious ‘he’ comes. At the very moment she told me that, my mother the queen was nearly killed. Did she know about that?”

  “She knew.”

  “Why didn't she tell me?”

  “What good would it have done? The attempt on your mother was over before you returned to Eslen. My sister told you what you needed to know.”

  “She didn't tell me anything. Who is this man who is coming? Why must there be a queen? And mostly—mostly— what must I do?”

  “You'll know when the time comes, if you only remember what she said. There must be a queen. Not the wife of a king, you understand, but a queen paramount.”

  Anne's jaw dropped. “No. No, I didn't understand that at all. But still—”

  “You must see that there is a queen, Anne.”

  “You mean become one?”

  The woman shrugged. “That would be one way.”

  “Yes, an impossible one. My father and mother and brother and all of my sisters would have to be dead … before …”

  For a moment she couldn't go on.

  “Is that it?” she asked, feeling cold. “Is that what's going to happen?”

  “I don't know.”

  “Don't tell me that! Tell me something real.”

  The woman cocked her head to the side. “We only see need, Anne. Like a good cook, I know when the roast needs more salt or a bay leaf, whether it needs to stay on the spit for another bell or not.”

  “Crotheny is not a roast.”

  “No. Nor is the world. Perhaps I am more like a chirgeon, then. I see a man so wounded and infected that parts of him have begun to rot, and the worms, growing bolder, begin to devour what is left. I feel his pain and disease, and know what salves he needs, where fire needs to be put to the wound, and when.”

  “Crotheny isn't rotting.”

  The woman shook her head. “It is very nearly dead.”

  Anne slashed the back of her hand in the woman's direction. “You're a cloud, you're a chirgeon. Crotheny is a roast, it's a wounded man. Speak plain words! You suggest that my country and family are in gravest danger, and that I must be queen or queen-maker, yet here I am in Vitellio, a thousand leagues away! Should I stay or leave? Tell me what to do, and no more nonsense about roasts and invalids.”

  “You're where you are supposed to be, Anne, and I've already told you what to do. The rest you must discern for yourself.”

  Anne rolled her eyes. “No better. No better. Then answer this straight, if you can. Why me? If you can't really see the future, why am I needed, and not Fastia, or Mother, for love of the saints?”

  The woman turned h
er back on Anne and walked a few paces. Her back still turned, she sighed. “Because I feel the need for you,” she said. “Because the oaks whisper it, even as the greffyn kills them. And because, of all living women, you are the only one who can come to me like this, unbidden.”

  “What?”

  “My sister summoned you when you walked widdershins under the sun. I did not summon you—you summoned me.”

  “I … how?”

  “I told you. You made a pact with Saint Cer. When you send prayers by the dead, there is always a cost, there is always consequence.”

  “But I didn't know.”

  The woman uttered a chilling little laugh. “If a blind man walks over the edge of a cliff, does the air ask if he knew what he was doing before it refuses to hold him up? Do the rocks below ask what he did or didn't know about them before they break his bones?”

  “Then Cer has cursed me?”

  “She has blessed you. You have walked her strangest faneway. You are touched by her as no other mortal.”

  “I never walked any faneway,” Anne said. “Faneways are for priests, not for women.”

  A smile drew across the woman's thin and bloodless lips. “The tomb below Eslen-of-Shadows is a sedos,” she said. “The womb of Saint Mefitis is another, its twin. They are two halves of the same thing. A very short faneway, I suppose, but very difficult to find. You are the only one to walk it in more than a thousand years. You will be the last to walk it for another thousand, perhaps.”

  “What does it mean?”

  The woman laughed again. “If I knew, I would tell you. But I do know this: It needed to happen. Your prayer to Saint Cer brought you here and set in motion every consequence of that trip. Including this one. As I said, you are where you were meant to be.”

  “So I'm to stay in the coven, even if they throw me in the earth to rot? No, I see. They were supposed to throw me down here, because Saint Cer willed it.” She snorted. “What if I choose not to believe you? What if I think you're some shine-crafting witch, trying to trick me? You come into my dreams and tell me lies and expect I will eat them like gingercake.”