Briar King

by Keyes, Greg

  He was filthy, covered in mud and blood from shallow scratches. He smelled like he hadn’t bathed in weeks, and it smelled wonderful.

  As reason reasserted itself, he began to try to work out where he was. He had collapsed—who knew how long ago— on the gently sloping hill of a sedos, bare of trees but covered in bracken fern. At its summit was a small fane, and by the characters graved on its face he recognized it as dedicated to Saint Dryth, the final incarnation of Decmanus on the faneway.

  Which meant he had finished the walk. The saints had not destroyed him.

  He found a pool fed by the clear waters of a spring, stripped off his rank clothing, and bathed beneath the overhanging branches of an ancient weeping willow. His stomach was as flat and hollow as a tambour, but he felt incredibly good despite his hunger. He scrubbed his clothes, hung them out to dry, and lazed on the mossy bank, drinking in the sounds around him, so happy to be alive and sensible that he didn’t want to miss anything.

  Some sort of bird trilled a complex bramble of notes and was answered by another with a slightly different song. Bronze and metal-green dragonflies danced over the water, and water-skitters dimpled along the transparent surface of another world where silver minnows darted and crayfish lurked in search of prey. All was fascinating, all was wonder, and for the first time in a long time it seemed, he remembered why he had wanted to be a priest: to know the world, in all its glory. To make its secrets a part of him, not for gain, but for the simple pleasure of knowing them.

  The sun climbed to noon, and when his clothes were reasonably dry he donned them and set his feet back on the path toward the monastery, whistling, wondering how long he had been gone. Trying to understand what had happened to him. He spoke aloud, to hear his own voice.

  “Each saint took a sense from me,” he told the forest. “In the end they gave them back. But did they fashion them? Did they change them, as a blacksmith takes rough metal and makes something better? Nothing feels the same!”

  Moreover, he felt that nothing ever would be the same again.

  He started whistling again.

  He stopped still when his whistling was answered in kind, and with a start he realized that it was the birdsong he had heard earlier. Every note, every variation of it was still in his head, clear and delicate. He laughed again. Could he have done that before, or was it a gift from walking the fanes? The gifts were different for each faneway and for each person who walked them, so there was no way of knowing what he had gained. At the moment, he felt that if this one thing—the power to imitate the birds—was all he had received, it would be enough.

  At night the songs changed, and as he sat beside his fire, Stephen delighted in learning them as he had those of the day. It seemed he could forget nothing, now. With no effort at all he could recall to the least detail the appearance of the pool he had bathed in. He could feel the patterns in the night as if he had always understood them.

  The sahto of Decmanus was that of knowledge, understanding in all of its forms. It seemed he had indeed been … improved.

  The next day he further tested his abilities by reciting ballads as he traveled. The Gorgoriad, the Fetteringsaga, the Tale of Findomere. He never stumbled on a word or phrase, though he had heard the last only once, ten years earlier, and its recitation took almost two bells.

  He sacrificed near each shrine and thanked the saints but did not mount their sedoi. Who knew what walking the fanes backwards would do?

  His second night, something in the nightsong changed. There was a tremor in it, an echo of a thing he knew, as if the forest were gossiping about something dark and terrible that Stephen had once met. The more Stephen listened, the more convinced he became that it had to do with him. The conviction grew as sleep eluded him, but he tried to ignore it. He was expected back at the monastery. He had work to do, and the fratrex probably would be unhappy if he dallied. He had walked the fanes early so as to better perform his tasks, after all.

  But morning found the waking forest with the same terrible undertone, and whenever Stephen turned his face east he felt a chill and a vague sickness. He remembered the dark tales at Tor Scath, the old knight’s conviction that something evil was abroad. When he thought of the Briar King, he felt a terror that nearly scalded him.

  At the fane of Saint Ciesel, the feeling began to fade, and with each step nearer the monastery it faded more. Soon he began whistling again, singing other songs and ballads he knew, but even so his joy was diminishing, replaced by a nagging in his bones. Something out there was wrong, something needed him, and his back was to it.

  He came to a stream, one he remembered crossing early in his journey. He was nearly there, would probably be at the monastery by sundown. By morning he would be testing his new gifts on the things he loved best, the ancient scrifts and tomes of the church. Surely that was what Saint Decmanus wanted of him, not to go chasing a bad dream through the wilderness.

  He stared at the stream for a while, dithering, but in the end he let his newly minted heart turn him east. He struck from the path, out to the wilderness.

  Hunger was a living thing in him now. He must have lost the food he’d brought early in his journey; he didn’t think he had eaten for three or four days. The forest provided little; nothing edible grew beneath the great trees, and he knew nothing of hunting or snaring. He managed to spear a few fish with a stick he sharpened using his finger knife, and he discovered that open places, burned off by lightning in years past, were veritable oases; in those places not shadowed by branches he found understories of hard apples and persimmons, tiny cherries and grapes. By seeking these he managed to sustain himself, but his hunger continued to grow.

  For the rest of the day he traveled east and camped in a high place where stone had cut up through the earth and dressed itself in lichen. He built a small fire and listened to the night grow frantic.

  For whatever worried the forest was near. His ears were sharper than they had been; he could hear labored footsteps in the darkness, the snapping of limbs and scraping of something against bark. Now and then a coughing growl wended through the columns of the trees.

  What am I doing here? he wondered, as the snapping became a crashing through the forest. Whatever that is, what can I do about it? He wasn’t Aspar White. If it was the greffyn, he was surely dead. If it was the Briar King …

  The crashing was very close, now. In a sudden panic, Stephen felt hideously exposed in the firelight. With his sharpened fish spear, he moved out of the circle of light, wondering belatedly if he should climb a tree, if he could find one with branches low enough.

  Instead he crouched near a large bole, trying to still the echo of his heart beating in his ears.

  Then the sounds ceased. All sounds had ceased. The nighthawks and whippoorwills, the frogs and the crickets. The night was an empty box. Stephen waited, and prayed, and tried to keep his fear from clawing out of his head and into his legs. He’d seen a cat, once, stalking a field rat. The cat had toyed with the smaller creature, never striking until the mouse’s fear made it bolt. Not because the cat couldn’t see its prey, but because the cat, like all of its kind, had a cruel streak. Stephen felt very much like the mouse now, but he wasn’t one. He had reason. He could fight his instincts.

  But maybe in this case, after all, it would be better to run …

  The old Stephen would never have heard the sound in time to move, the faint whisper of leather against damp leaves. He threw himself forward, away from the sound, but something struck him hard across the back of his legs, and he lost his stride and fell. A dark thing clawed at his feet, and Stephen turned on his back and kicked at it, pushing away from it with the palms of his hands. The creature came on, rearing up and revealing itself in the firelight. It had the frame of a man, and a visage so terrible and so well known at the same time.

  “Aspar!” Stephen shrieked, even then not absolutely certain.

  But it was the holter, his face blackened and bruised, his eyes bereft of human knowing. He
lurched forward at his name, gasping.

  “Aspar, it’s me, Stephen Darige!”

  “Ste—?” The holter’s face softened to a sort of insane puzzlement, and then he collapsed at Stephen’s feet. Stephen opened his mouth and took a step toward the holter, then held himself very still as he saw what was behind his erstwhile companion, what his body had hidden when he was standing.

  Behind the holter, a pair of glowing yellow eyes stared at Stephen through the darkness. They shifted noiselessly closer, and the wavering firelight limned something huge with a beak like a bird. It sniffed at him, and the eyes blinked slowly. Then the head raised, and it uttered a sound like a butcher sawing the long bone of a cow.

  It took another step toward Stephen, then nodded its beaked head angrily at him. The eyes blinked once more, and in a silent rushing it was gone, off through the trees, running faster than anything could run, leaving only the silence, and Stephen, and the dead or unconscious Aspar White.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  COURSE OF STUDY

  ANNE FELT A BRIEF TASTE of bile in her throat as the flesh of the man’s chest opened in two great flaps like floppy cupboard doors. Within was a wormy mess such as she had never imagined could be found in a human being. She supposed she had always imagined the inside of a person much like the outside, perhaps redder for the blood, but relatively featureless. What she saw now seemed senseless and bizarre.

  The girl on her right dropped to her knees, retching, which began a trend that left all but two of the eight girls in the chamber relinquishing their morning meal. Anne did not join them, and neither did Serevkis, the long-necked young woman who had nicknamed her “Princess Mule.” From the corner of her eye, Anne caught a glance from Serevkis and was surprised when the girl sent her a brief, sardonic smile.

  Sister Casita, who had made the incisions on the corpse, waited patiently for the involuntary purging to end. Anne absently maneuvered to keep her shoes clean, but focused her attention on the cadaver.

  “That’s a natural reaction,” Casita said, when the round of sickness seemed to be over. “Be assured that this man was a criminal of the worst sort. Serving the church and our order in death is the only virtuous thing he has ever accomplished, and it will earn his remains decent internment.”

  “Why isn’t he bleeding?” Anne asked.

  Casita regarded her with a lifted eyebrow. “Sister Ivexa asks an interesting question,” she said. “Out of turn, but interesting.” She gestured at something fist-size and bluish gray in the center right of the chest. “Here is the heart. An ugly thing, is it not? In appearance hardly worthy of the praise heaped on it in poetry and metaphor. But it is indeed an organ of importance. In life it contracts and expands, which makes the beating you feel in your own breasts. In so doing, it sends blood racing around the body within tubular canals. You see four of these here.” She indicated four large pipes stuck fast to the heart. “In death, the heart ceases its activity and the blood ceases to move. It pools and congeals in the body, so as Sister Ivexa notices, even the most grievous cut draws little blood.”

  “Permission, Sister?” Serevkis murmured.

  “Granted.”

  “If you were to cut a live man, we would see his heart beating, and the blood would flow?”

  “Until he died, yes.”

  Anne placed her hand over her sternum and felt the heart beneath. Did hers really look like that?

  “And whence comes the blood?”

  “Ah. It is generated by a confluence of humors in the body. All of this you will learn in due time. Today we will learn the names of certain parts, and later the humors that control them. Eventually we will discuss how each organ can be made to sicken and die, whether by insult from a wound, from physic, or from holy sacaum. But today, I want you to be most clear on this.” She swept her eyes about the chamber. “Sister Facifela, Sister Aferum—are you paying attention?” she snapped.

  Facifela, a gangly girl with a weak chin, looked up meekly. “It is hard to look at, Sister Casita.”

  “At first,” Casita said. “But you will look. By the end of the day, you must name all of these organs to me. But the first lesson is this, so all of you listen carefully.” She reached into the body cavity and pushed things around, making a wet sucking sound.

  “You, your father, your mother. The greatest warrior of your kingdom, the highest fratrex of the church, kings, scoundrels, murderers, stainless knights—inside, all of us are this. To be sure, there is variation in strength and health and internal fortitude, but in the end it matters little. Beneath armor and clothing and skin, there is always this soft, wet, infinitely vulnerable interior. Here is where life resides in our bodies; here is where death hides, like a maggot waiting to be born. Men fight from the outside, with clumsy swords and arrows, trying to pierce the layers of protection we bundle in. They are of the outside. We are of the inside. We can reach there in a thousand ways, slipping through the cracks of eye and ear, nostril and lip, through the very pores of the flesh. Here is your frontier, Sisters, and eventually your domain. Here is where your touch will bring the rise and fall of kingdoms.”

  Anne felt a little trembling in her and for an instant thought she smelled the dry decay of the crypt she and Austra had found long ago. The feeling wasn’t one of fear but of excitement. It felt, suddenly, as if she sat in a tiny boat on a vast sea and had for the first time been explained the meaning of water.

  Walking into the hall, she nearly bumped nose to nose with Sister Serevkis and found herself staring into the girl’s cool gray eyes.

  “You weren’t repelled?” Serevkis asked.

  “A little,” Anne admitted. “But it was interesting. I notice you didn’t get sick either.”

  “No. But my mother was the undertaker for the meddix of Formesso. I’ve seen the insides of bodies all of my life. This was your first time, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  Serevkis looked off somewhere behind Anne. “Your Vitellian has improved,” she noticed.

  “Thank you. I’m working hard on it.”

  “A good idea,” Serevkis replied. She smiled and her gaze met Anne’s again. “I must go to my cyphers tutorial. Perhaps I’ll see you at the evening meal, Sister Ivexa.”

  The rest of Anne’s classes were less intriguing, and numbers least of all, but she did her best to pay attention and do her sums. After numbers came greencraft, which she thought at first would be better. Even Anne knew that the weeds from beneath a hanging tree and the dark purple blossoms of the benabell were used as poisons. They did not discuss any such thing, however, but instead doted on the care of roses, as if they were training to be gardeners instead of assassins. At the end of greencraft, Sister Casita came in and called three names. One of them was Anne’s. The other two girls Anne did not know. They went, of all places, to the yard out back of the coven, where sheep were brought in from the fields to be milked and fleeced. Anne stared at the dumb creatures as they wandered aimlessly, while Sister Casita explained something to the other girls in their own language, which Anne thought might be Safnian. She turned her attention back to the older woman when she switched to Vitellian.

  “My apologies,” the sister said. “These two haven’t made the progress in Vitellian you have. I must say, you’ve done very well in a short time.”

  “Brazi, Sor Casita,” Anne said. “I studied the church Vitellian at home. I suppose more of it stuck than I thought, and many of the words are similar.” She nodded at the animals. “Why are we here with the sheep, Sister?” she asked.

  “Ah. You’re going to learn to milk them.”

  “Is sheep’s milk of some use in physic?”

  “No. At the end of the first month, each sister is assigned a duty. This is to be your job, milking and making cheese.”

  Anne stared at her, then laughed aloud.

  Tears stung Anne’s eyes as the switch laid a bright strip across her bare shoulders, but she did not cry out. Instead, she fixed her tormentor with a glare that would h
ave sent any courtier scurrying.

  Sister Secula was no courtier, and she did not so much as flinch at Anne’s expression.

  Another lash came down, and this time a little gasp escaped Anne’s lips.

  “So,” Sister Secula exclaimed. “Only two for you to find your breath? You don’t have the bravery to suit your attitude, little Ivexa.”

  “Switch me all you want,” Anne said. “When my father finds out—”

  “He’ll do nothing. He sent you here, my dear. Your royal parents have already agreed to any medicine I administer— and that is the last time I shall remind you of that. But I won’t switch you again, not just now. I’ve already learned what I wanted. Next time, you may expect more than three strikes of the switch. Now—back to the task set for you.”

  “No, I will not go,” Anne told her.

  “What? What did you say?”

  Anne straightened her back. “I won’t milk sheep, Sister Secula. I was born a princess of the house Dare and a duchess of the house de Liery. I will die as such, and I will be those things all the years between. However long you keep me in this place, and however you choose to treat me, I remain who I am, and I will not be lowered to menial tasks.”

  Sister Secula nodded thoughtfully. “I see. You’re protecting the dignity of your titles.”

  “Yes.”

  “As you protected them when you ignored your mother’s wishes and rode like a wild goat all over Eslen? As when you were busy spreading your legs for the first buck to spout poetry at you? It seems you’ve discovered the dignity becoming your station right quickly and conveniently when asked to do something you find distasteful.”

  Anne laid her head back down on the chastising table. “Strike me more if you wish. I do not care.”

  Sister Secula laughed. “That is another thing you will learn, little Ivexa. You will learn to care. But perhaps it is not whipping that will make you do so. Who do you think the ladies of this coven are, lowborn peasants? They are from the best families in all the known lands. If they choose to return to the world, they will find their titles waiting. Here, they are members of this order, nothing more and nothing less. And you, my dear, are the very least of them.”