Briar King

by Keyes, Greg

  Aspar couldn’t help it; a laugh burst entirely unbidden from his lips.

  “What—what’s so funny?”

  “You. Of course he’s dead. Grim’s eye, look at him!”

  “See here—” Stephen’s eyes bulged and watered, and he spasmed, as if about to vomit again, but then he straightened. “I’ve never seen a dead man before. Not like that.”

  “Well, there’s plenty more men dead than alive, you know,” Aspar said. Then, remembering his first dead man, he softened his tone. “Never mind him. The other two? Did you leech them?”

  “I—I started one …” Stephen looked sheepish.

  “I shouldn’t have left them to you. My mistake.”

  “I’m trying! It’s just, well, the blood—”

  “Like I said,” Aspar said gruffly. “My fault. I should have reckoned you’d never actually done it before. I’m not blaming you.”

  “Oh,” Stephen said. “Do you think they’re dead, too?”

  “I doubt it much. I shot ‘em in muscle, see? Not in the organs.”

  “Why? You don’t seem to care much about killing.”

  “I told you. I need to question ‘em.”

  “Oh.”

  “Let’s start again. Can you cut bandages? Can you do that?”

  “I already did.”

  “Good. Let me see if I can’t save these fellows from Mother Death, then, so as you can keep your next meal down, yah?”

  “Yes,” Stephen replied weakly.

  Aspar knelt beside Redhead, who was dead to the world but still breathing. The arrow was lodged in his shoulder bone, so it would take a little cutting to get it out. Aspar started to it, and Redhead moaned.

  “What did you want to question them about?” Stephen managed.

  “I want to know where they were a few days ago,” Aspar grunted, grasping the arrow shaft and working it back and forth.

  “Kidnapping me.”

  “Where?”

  “Two days back.”

  “Not when—where.” The shaft came out, clean with the head. Aspar pressed the rag Stephen had cut into the wound. “Hold this here,” he commanded.

  Stephen made a gagging noise but did as he was told. As-par found another bandage and began wrapping it.

  “Where?” he repeated. “Press hard.”

  “Two days back along the King’s Road,” Stephen replied.

  “That being where? Nearer Wexdal or Forst?”

  “I don’t really know.”

  “Well, had you crossed the Owl Tomb before they took you up?”

  “That’s a river? I’m not sure.”

  “Yes, the Owl Tomb is a river. You couldn’t have missed it. It had an old stone causey over it. You can let go now.”

  Stephen lifted his hands, staring at the blood on them, his eyes a little unfocused. “Oh. You mean the Pontro Oltiumo.”

  “I mean what I say. What’s that gibberish?”

  “Old Vitellian,” Stephen said. “The language of the Hegemony, who built that causeway a thousand years ago. They made this road, too. Owl must be a corruption of Oltiumo.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “I looked at maps before I came. Hegemony maps.”

  “How is it you thought that maps made a thousand years ago would do you any good at all?”

  “The Hegemony made better maps than we do. More accurate. I have copies of them, if you want to see.”

  Aspar just stared at him for a second, then shook his head. “Priests,” he muttered, making certain it sounded like a swear word. “Let’s do this other.”

  Big Nose was easier. The shaft had gone straight through the muscle of the thigh without even grazing the bone.

  If Gangly and his bunch had taken Darige east of the Owl, it was impossible for them to have been anywhere near Taff Creek. There went that possibility. So it was on to the Taff, after he figured out what to do with this bunch.

  Whatever he decided, it would take him at least a day out of his way.

  That couldn’t be helped, he supposed, not unless he wanted to kill them all and set the priest a-wandering. It was a tempting thought.

  “Help me get these men up on their horses,” he grunted, when they were finished.

  “Where are we going?”

  “You’ll see.”

  “I mean, I’ll be late getting to the monastery.”

  “Will you? I’ll try to hold my tears.”

  “Why—what are you so angry with me for, holter? I didn’t do anything to you. It’s not my fault!”

  “Fault? What does that mean, or matter? You set out from Virgenya alone, didn’t you? Just you and your maps, isn’t that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why? What book put that in your head?”

  “Presson Manteo did it, almost a hundred years ago, when he wrote the Amvionnom. He said—”

  “Doesn’t matter what he said, does it? It didn’t do you a damned bit of good.”

  “Well, I know it was stupid now,” Stephen said. “It still doesn’t explain why you’re mad at me.”

  It didn’t, did it? Aspar took a deep breath. The boy didn’t seem a bad sort, actually; he was just a burden Aspar didn’t need at the moment. And that superior tone and low-country accent didn’t help make him more endearing.

  “I see a few of your sort every year,” he explained. “Little noblings off for a romp in the wild. Usually what I see are their corpses.”

  “You’re saying I’m a burden to you?”

  Aspar shrugged. “Come on. I’ll take you someplace safe.”

  “Tell me the way. I’ll go alone. You’ve saved my life. I don’t want to trouble you anymore.”

  “I have to take the prisoners anyway,” Aspar said. “Ride along with me.”

  He started to mount.

  “Aren’t we going to bury him?” Stephen asked, pointing at Gangly.

  Aspar considered that, then walked over to the deceased bandit. He dragged the corpse about ten feet off the side of the trail, folded its arms across his breast.

  “There we go,” he said, with mock cheer. “A holter’s funeral. Care to say any words?”

  “Yes. There is a proper liturgy—”

  “Say it as we travel, then. We have someplace to be before dark.”

  Like most priests—and boys—Darige couldn’t seem to stop talking. Within a bell, he had quit moping from being chastised and begun chattering constantly about the most inane subjects—the relation of Almannish to Hanzish, the dialects of Virgenya, the virtues of certain stars. He gave trees and birds and hills names that were long, unpronounceable, and entirely wrong and thought himself clever. And he kept wanting to stop to look at things.

  “There’s another,” he said, for the fifth time in two bells. “Can you wait just a moment?”

  “No,” Aspar told him.

  “Really! Just a moment.” Stephen dismounted, and from his refurbished pack drew a roll of paper and separated a leaf from it. From a pouch at his belt, he produced a chunk of charcoal. Then he hurried to a waist-high stone standing by the side of the road. There were many such, along Old King’s way, all like this, squared columns two hands on a side. Most had been pushed out of the ground by roots growing up beneath them, expelled like infected teeth.

  “This one still has writing on it!”

  “So?”

  Stephen pressed his sheet of paper against the stone and began blackening it with his charcoal.

  “What in Grim’s eye are you doing?”

  “Taking a rubbing—I can study it later. See? The writing comes through.” He held the sheet up, and Aspar saw, indeed, that in addition to the grain of the stone itself and the impressions of lichens, he could make out a number of angular marks.

  “Ancient Vitellian,” Stephen said triumphantly. “This marks the boundary of two meddixships, and tells the distance to the next and last guardtower.” He squinted. “But here they call this road the Bloody Trace. I wonder what that means? The maps al
l mark it as the Vio Caldatum.”

  “Why is your head full of this?” Aspar asked.

  “It’s my calling—ancient languages, history.”

  “Sounds useful.”

  “If we have no past, we have no future,” Stephen replied cheerfully.

  “The past is dead, and the Bloody Trace is an old superstition.”

  “Aha! So you’ve heard the name. Local folklore? How does it go?”

  “You wouldn’t be interested.”

  “I just said I was.”

  “Then you shouldn’t be. It’s old pig-wife talk.”

  “Maybe. But sometimes the folk preserve a primitive sort of wisdom that scholarship has forgotten. Real bits of history, packaged up in simple conventions, made entertaining so common people can understand it, distorted here and there by misunderstandings, but still keeping some truth for those with the wits and education to riddle it out.”

  Aspar laughed. “Makes me proud to be ‘folk,’ ” he said.

  “I didn’t mean to imply you were simple. Please, can’t you tell me? About the Bloody Trace?”

  “If you get back on your damned horse and start riding again.”

  “Oh—certainly, of course.” He carefully rolled up his paper, placed it in a canvas sack, and remounted.

  “Not much to tell, really,” the holter said, as they started along once more. “It’s spelt that long ago, when the demon Scaosen ruled the world, they used to keep humans like hounds, and race ‘em up and down this road till their feet wore to the bone. They’d gamble on the outcome, keep ‘em going until they all dropped dead. They say the road was ruddy from one end to the other, from the blood of their torn feet.”

  “Scaosen? You mean the Skasloi?”

  “I’m just telling a story.”

  “Yes, but you see, with a bit of truth! You call them the Scaosen, while in the Lierish tongue they are known as Echesl. In Hornladh, Shasl. The ancient term was Skasloi, and they were quite real. History doesn’t doubt them in the slightest. It was the first Virgenyans who led the slaughter of them, with the aid of the saints.”

  “Yah, I know the story. Me, I’ve never seen a Scaos.”

  “Well, they’re all dead.”

  “Then it doesn’t much matter whether I believe in them or not, does it?”

  “Well, that’s not a very enlightened attitude.”

  Aspar shrugged.

  “I wonder,” Stephen said, stroking his stubbly face. “Could this have really been a Skasloi road before it was Vitellian?”

  “Why not? If you believe that sort of thing, the whole stretch of it’s said to be haunted by alvs. The old people say the alvs come as white mists, or as apparitions, so terrible in beauty to see them is to die. The Sefry say they’re the hungry ghosts of the Scaosen. People leave them things. Some ask them for favors. Most try to avoid them.”

  “What else do these alvs do?”

  “Steal children. Bring sickness. Ruin crops. Make men do evil by whispering evil words in their ears. They can still your heart just by reaching their misty fingers into it. Of course, I’ve never seen one, so—”

  “—you don’t believe in them. Yes, holter, I think I’m starting to understand you and your philosophy.”

  “Werlic? Good. Now, if it please you, could you stop your nattering for a space? So if there be alvs or uttins or booghinns sneaking about us, I’ve me a chance to hear ‘em?”

  Miraculously, Stephen did quiet after that, studying his rubbing as they rode. After a moment, Aspar almost wished he would start up again, for the silence left him with the uneasy memory of the spring, the dead frogs, the print that had so bruised the earth. It reminded him that there were, indeed, things in the forest that he hadn’t seen, even in all of his days roaming it.

  And if some strange beast, why not the Briar King?

  He remembered a song they had sung as children, when he lived with the Sefry. It went with a circle game and ended with all playing dead, but he couldn’t remember the details. He remembered the song, though.

  Nattering, nittering

  Farthing go

  The Briar King walks to and fro

  Chittering, chattering

  With him fly

  Greffyns and manticores in the sky

  Dillying, dallying

  When you see

  The Briar King he’ll sure eat thee

  Eftsoon, aftsoon

  By-come-by

  He’ll spit you out and break the sky.

  “What was that?” Stephen said.

  “What?” Aspar grunted, starting from the membrance.

  “You were singing.”

  “No, I wasn’t.”

  “I thought you were.”

  “It was nothing. Forget it.”

  Stephen shrugged. “As you wish.”

  Aspar grunted and switched his reins to the other hand, wishing he could forget as easily. Instead, he remembered a verse from another song, one Jesp used to sing.

  Blasts and blaws so loud and shrill

  The bone-bright horn from o’er the hill

  The Thorny Lord of holt and rill

  Walks as when the world was still.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE PRINCESS

  “THEY’VE SEEN US!” Austra gasped.

  Anne leaned around the side of the oak, fingers gripping its rough skin. Behind her, her cream-colored mare stamped and whickered.

  “Hush, Faster,” she whispered.

  The two girls stood in the shadows of the forest at the edge of the rolling meadow known as the Sleeve. As they watched, three horsemen made their way across the violet-spangled grass, heads turning this way and that. They wore the dark orange tabards of the Royal Light Horse, and the sun glinted from their mail. They were perhaps half a bowshot away.

  “No,” Anne said, turning to Austra. “They haven’t. But they are looking for us. I think that’s Captain Cathond in the lead.”

  “You really think they’ve been sent out to look for us?” Austra crouched even lower, pushing a lock of golden hair from her face.

  “Absolutely.”

  “Let’s go deeper in the woods, then. If they see us—”

  “Yes, suppose they do?” Anne considered.

  “That’s what I just said. I—” Austra’s blue eyes went as round as gold reytoirs. “No. Anne!”

  Grinning, Anne drew her hood over her red-gold hair, then took Faster’s reins, gripped the saddle, and flung herself up. “Wait until we’re out of sight. Then meet me in Eslen-of-Shadows.”

  “I won’t!” Austra declared, trying to keep her voice low. “You stay right here!”

  Anne clapped her thighs against her horse’s flanks. “Faster!” she commanded.

  The mare broke from the woods in full gallop, a few leaves swirling in her wake. For perhaps ten heartbeats the only sound was the muffled thumping of hooves pounding damp soil. Then one of the mounted men started shouting. Anne glanced back over her shoulder and saw she had been right: Captain Cathond’s red face was behind the shouting. They wheeled their white geldings to pursue her.

  Anne shouted in joy at the rush of wind on her face. The Sleeve was perfect for racing, long and green and beautiful. To her right, the forest was dressed in spring leaves, dogwood and cherry blossoms. Left, the Sleeve dropped a steep shoulder down to the marshy rinns that surrounded the island of Ynis and bordered the broad river Warlock, which lapped honey-gold against his banks.

  Faster was living thunder, and Anne was the bright eye of lightning. Let them try to catch her! Let them!

  The Sleeve curved around the southern edge of the island, then turned right, climbing up to the twin hills of Tom Woth and Tom Cast. Anne didn’t wait for the Sleeve to bend, however, but twitched the reins, commanding Faster into a sharp turn, sending clots of grass and black earth flying, veering them back into the woods. She ducked branches and held tight as the horse leapt a small stream. A quick look back showed the horsemen cutting into the woods earlier in hopes of head
ing her off. But the wood was thick with new growth through there and would slow them.

  She had ridden, though, the tract that had been burned off a few years before. It was relatively clear, a favorite cutoff of hers, and Faster could whip around the great-girthed ash and oak. Anne crowed as they sped beneath one tree that had fallen aslant upon another, then up a hill, right, and back out onto the Sleeve, where it curved up to Tom Woth and Tom Cast. As she gained altitude, the topmost towers and turrets of Eslen castle appeared above the trees to her right, pennants streaming in the breeze.

  When the men emerged from the wood again, they were twice as far behind her as they had been when they began the pursuit, and there were only two of them. Smugly, she started around the base of Tom Woth, headed back toward the south edge of the island. There was no challenge to it now; when she came to the Snake they wouldn’t even see her performance. A shame, really.

  “Good girl, Faster,” she said, easing up the pace a little. “Just don’t go skittish on me, you hear? You’ll have to be brave, but then you can rest, and I’ll find you something good to eat. I promise.”

  Then she caught motion from the corner of her eye and gasped. The third horseman, through some miracle, had just entered the Sleeve almost at her elbow. And worse, a new fellow on a dun wearing a red cape appeared just behind him. A hot flash of surprise burned across Anne’s face.

  “Hey, there! Stop!”

  She recognized the voice of Captain Cathond. Her heart drummed, but she clapped Faster fiercely, circling the hill. Tom Woth and Tom Cast together looked like an ample woman’s breasts. Anne rode right down the cleavage.

  “You’d better slow up, you damned fool!” Cathond shouted. “There’s nothing on the other side!”

  He was wrong. There was plenty on the other side—a spectacular view of the verdant rinns, and far below, the river, the southern fens. Coming from between the hills, there was a terrible and wonderful moment when it seemed the whole world was spread before her.

  “Here we go, Faster!” Anne cried, as they crossed the lip over nothing and all of Faster’s feet were in the air. Now that it was too late, she felt a thrill of fear so sharp she could nearly taste it.

  An instant stretched to eternity as Anne lay flat and knotted her hands in Faster’s mane. The warm musk of horse, the oil and leather of the saddle, the rushing air were her whole universe. Her belly was stuffed with tickly feathers. She shrieked in delirious fear, and then her mount’s hooves struck the Snake, a narrow gorge slithering down the steep side of the island.