Briar King

by Keyes, Greg

  Finally, sweating and knowing he needed sleep to be alert, he sat back on the bed and put his head in his hands.

  He almost missed the slight creak of the door under the pounding of his pulse, but his body was limbered and ready, and in a swift instant he had his sword in hand and at guard.

  “Sir Neil, it is me,” a woman’s voice whispered.

  Slowly he lowered the sword, trying to make out the vague shadow in the doorway. He knew it must be the duchess, and his blood roared even more loudly in his ears.

  She stepped a little farther in, so that the moonlight through the window touched her face, and he beheld with a start that it was Fastia.

  CHAPTER TWO

  TRACKS

  ASPAR KNELT BY THE STILL-SMOKING ASHES of the campfire and growled in the back of his throat.

  “What’s wrong?” Stephen asked.

  The holter didn’t look at the boy but stood and surveyed the clearing again. “They didn’t try to hide their sign,” he grunted. “They didn’t even stop the embers smoking. They led us right here.”

  “Maybe they don’t imagine we’re following them. It’s been nearly a month.”

  Indeed, they’d left d’Ef in the hottest days of Sestemen, but they were now well into the month of Seftmen. The leaves were already touched with autumn color, even here in the lowlands, where pasture and farmland cut up the King’s Forest. Aspar simply hadn’t been able to keep the pace needed to catch the monks early on. He was stronger now, though he still didn’t feel quite himself.

  “They know we’re after them,” he said. “Make no mistake.” He fitted an arrow to his bow, one of the four that remained. The others had broken in hunting.

  “You think—” Stephen began, but in that moment Aspar smelled the ambush. Two men were racing from the trees behind them. Stripped to the waist, they were heavily tattooed on their shoulders and chests, and they bore broadswords. They were running faster than men ought to be able to run.

  “That’s Desmond’s men!” Stephen shouted. “Or two of them.”

  “Mount,” Aspar shouted, leaping onto Ogre and digging in his heels. The big horse jolted into motion. The men split, one headed toward Stephen and one keeping a course toward Aspar.

  Aspar stood in his stirrups and turned, sighting down a shaft at the one attacking Stephen. Ogre wasn’t quite settled into a stride, but Aspar couldn’t wait. He released the dart.

  The arrow flew true, or almost so, striking the monk in the kidney. He fell, giving Stephen time to get up on Angel, but came back to his feet with absurd speed.

  Meanwhile, incredibly, the other monk was gaining on Ogre. Grimacing, Aspar fitted another arrow to his bow and shot it, but just as he did so Ogre leapt a downed log and his shot went high and wide.

  Now he was down to two arrows.

  He yanked on his reins, spun the horse around, and aimed him right at his pursuer, staring down the shaft at him. He saw the man’s face, set and determined, and as mad as one of the Raver’s berserks. He aimed for the heart.

  At the last instant, the monk threw himself aside, so the arrow buried itself in sod. He cut viciously at Ogre’s legs as he tumbled past, but the horse avoided the blow by whiskers. They thundered by, back toward Stephen, whose wounded attacker was nearly on him. He was bleeding freely, but that seemed only to have slowed him a little. Fortunately, he was so intent on the boy that he didn’t notice Ogre until it was too late, until the beast’s forehooves had crushed his skull.

  Aspar wheeled again, taking out his last arrow and leaping down from the beast.

  “Ogre, qalyast!” he shouted.

  Ogre immediately charged the monk, who set himself grimly to meet the horse. In that instant of relative stillness, Aspar shot him in the center of the chest.

  The monk spun with the blow, avoiding Ogre as he did so, and ran past the horse toward Aspar. Cursing, Aspar turned and lifted the dead man’s sword. It wasn’t a weapon he knew a lot about—he wished he had his dirk and ax—but he held it at guard and waited. Behind him, he heard Stephen drop to the ground.

  The monk was on him, then, cutting fast and hard toward Aspar’s head. Aspar gave ground, but not enough, and had to bring the heavy weapon up to parry. His shoulder jarred as if he’d just stopped thirty stone falling from a tower. Stephen came in from the right, swinging his farm tool, but the swordsman turned and neatly hacked through the wooden shaft. As-par swung clumsily, and the monk danced aside, feinted, and cut. Aspar leapt inside the swing, dropped his own weapon, grabbed the sword arm with his left hand, and punched the monk in the throat. He felt cartilage crush, but his opponent kneed him viciously in the chest, hurling him back and to the ground, empty of breath. The monk staggered forward, lifting his sword, just as Ogre hit him from behind. He fell, and Ogre kept stamping him until his hooves were red and the corpse wasn’t twitching.

  “They could have killed us if they’d been a little smarter,” As-par said, when he got his wind back. “They were overconfident. Should have ignored us and gone straight for Ogre.”

  “Contemptuous is more like it,” Stephen replied. “Those were two of the pettiest of Spendlove’s bunch—Topan and Aligern. Spendlove himself would never be so stupid.”

  “Yah. I maunt he sent the men he could most afford to lose. Even if they’d got only one of us, it would have been a bargain. He should’ve given ‘em bows.”

  “Those who walk the faneway of Saint Mamres are forbidden to use bows,” Stephen remembered.

  “Well. Thank Saint Mamres in your prayers, then.”

  They stripped the corpses, and to Aspar’s satisfaction found a fighting dirk not unlike his own lost one. They also found a few silver tierns and enough dried meat and bread for a day, all welcome additions to Aspar and Stephen’s meager possessions.

  “I reckon that leaves about six of them,” he mused, “and however many Fend brings. Let’s hope they keep sending them two at a time like this, so we can keep evening the odds.”

  “I doubt Spendlove will make the same mistake twice,” Stephen said. “Next time, he’ll be sure.”

  “Next time could be anytime. These two might have just been to lull us. We’re riding out of here, right now, and not the way they’ll expect. We know where they’re going, so we don’t need to trail them.”

  Once they were mounted, Aspar chuckled.

  “What?” Stephen asked.

  “I notice you aren’t arguing we bury these, like you did those last.”

  “A holter’s burial is good enough for them,” Stephen said.

  “Werlic,” Aspar allowed, “at least you’ve learned something.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  PLOTS

  “WELL, SISTER MULE,” Serevkis said. “The greencrafting has become much more interesting, hasn’t it?”

  Anne glanced up from her examination of the double boiler and the fermenting ewe’s milk it contained. She loved the scent of it, still warm from the sheep, and even more the anticipation of the magic that was soon to occur.

  “Why do you still call me that?” she asked absently.

  “Wouldn’t you rather be a mule than a little cow?”

  Anne smiled. “There’s that,” she admitted. “Yes, green-craft is more interesting now. Everything is.”

  “Even numbers?” Serevkis sounded skeptical.

  “Yes. If they’d told me from the start that we were studying numbers so we could manage the moneys of our households, I might have paid more attention in the beginning.”

  “But greencraft is the most interesting,” Serevkis insisted. “Who knew how many poisons lie right beneath our feet or in garden walls, and requiring only a little alchemy to make them potent.”

  “It’s like a lot of things,” Anne said. “Even this cheese I’m making. To know we have the power to change things, to make one thing into another.”

  “You and your cheese. Is it doing anything yet?”

  “Not yet,” Anne said.

  “But you’re right,” Serevkis w
ent on. “To be able to make something harmless into something deadly—it’s wonderful.”

  “You’re a wicked girl, Sister Serevkis,” Anne said.

  “Who will you kill first, Sister Mule?”

  “Hush!” Anne said. “If the mestra or one of the elders hears you talking like that …”

  Serevkis yawned and stretched her long limbs. “They won’t,” she said. “The mestra and her favorites went off through the gates four bells ago, and the rest are teaching. No one ever comes to the creamery. Who will you murder in the night?”

  “No one comes to mind, except a certain long-necked name-caller.”

  “I’m serious.”

  Anne met the girl’s casually evil gaze. “Do you have someone in mind?”

  “Oh, indeed. Several someones. There’s Dechio—he’d be first. For him it will be the pollen of the witherweed, cooked into a gum with nightshade. I’ll put it in the candles in his room.”

  “That’s a slow, cruel death. What did this Dechio ever do to you?”

  “He was my first lover.”

  “And jilted you?”

  “I was ten. He was twenty. He pretended to be my friend and made me drink wine until I couldn’t stand, and then he had his way with me.”

  “He raped you?” Anne asked, incredulous.

  “There’s the word,” Serevkis said. Her mouth twitched, after.

  “And your father? He did not avenge this?”

  Serevkis laughed, a bit bitterly. “What use to a father a daughter so early despoiled? No, it would have been better to leap to my death from the moat tower than tell my father what Dechio did that day, and continued to do until I grew too old to attract him.”

  “I see.” Anne didn’t see, though. She couldn’t imagine. “May I make a suggestion?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Black widow spiders, fatted on corpse flies. Glue little threads to them and the other ends under the edge of the sitting-hole in his privy. When he dangles down …”

  Serevkis clapped her hands. “Wonderful. It would rot like an old sausage, wouldn’t it? But it might not kill him.”

  “True. But there are other ways to finish him off. After all, the candles might kill someone innocent—the girl who cleans his chambers, or another of his victims.”

  “Or I could leave him to live with a rotted poker,” Serevkis said. “Clever, Sister Mule.”

  “Thank you.” She glanced back at her boiler. “Look!” she exclaimed. “See! It curdles!”

  Serevkis got up to see.

  A solid white mass had formed in the pot, shrinking slightly as it did so, so that it pulled away from the edges of the container. It floated there like an island, surrounded by clear, yellowish liquid. Anne inserted a wooden skewer into the solid part, and when she withdrew it, the hole remained.

  “The thick part is the curd,” Anne explained. “The rest is whey.”

  “What worked this change?” Serevkis asked, suddenly interested. “What broke the milk in two?”

  “Rennet, taken from a cow’s belly.”

  “Appetizing. What else might it clot, I wonder? Blood? I suppose I see why you find this interesting.”

  “Of course. It once was one thing—milk—and now it is two.”

  “It still doesn’t look much like cheese.”

  “True. There is more magic to be worked.”

  “You know,” Serevkis mused, “when I was young, we had a servant from Herilanz. She had the pretense of religion, but in fact she was pagan. Once, she told me her god, Yemoz, created the world from milk.”

  “Separating curd from whey, sea from land,” Anne mused. “It makes a sort of sense. After all, the saints did separate the world into its parts.”

  “Saint Mule, the woman who brought curd and whey from milk,” Serevkis said, and laughed. “You are like a goddess now.”

  “You may laugh,” Anne said, “but that’s the point. When we learn to create these things—your poison candles, my cheese—we partake of creation. In a little way, we do become like the saints.”

  Serevkis pinched a skeptical frown. “You’ve been listening to Sister Secula too much,” she said.

  Anne shrugged. “Cruel she may be, but she knows everything.”

  “She put you in the cave!”

  Anne smiled enigmatically. “It wasn’t so bad.”

  Everyone had been surprised at Anne’s composure when they brought her up from the shrine of Mefitis, and Sister Secula had given her more than one suspicious look and remarked on her color. The matter hadn’t been pursued, though. Anne didn’t expand now to Sister Serevkis. She hadn’t even told Austra. She felt somehow that what happened in the cave and beyond were her secrets, and hers alone.

  It certainly would not do for Austra to know that she’d sent a letter to Roderick; though it wasn’t a violation of the oath, Anne still suspected Austra would be anything but pleased.

  Cazio had been good to the first part of his word. When she cast the letters down from the window her first evening back in the coven, he’d appeared near sundown, waved to her, and taken the correspondence with him. Time would tell if he was truly honest.

  Meanwhile, she was content. Everything was suddenly interesting to her, and she’d begun to understand what Sister Secula meant when she called Anne’s presence at the Abode of Graces a privilege.

  She still hated the mestra, but she’d begun to grudgingly admit that she was worth listening to.

  “Now what?” Serevkis asked.

  “Now we cut our new-made world into cubes,” Anne replied, “to let the whey still within it seep out.”

  With a sharp ivory knife, she did just that, slicing it first lengthwise, then crossways, then at an angle toward the bottom of the crock. When she was done, and had stirred it once, a jumble of neat cubes floated in the yellowish whey.

  “Now we cook it a little longer and put it in a mold and press. Six months from now, we eat it.”

  “Creation takes a long time,” Serevkis said. “I’m hungry now.”

  “That’s why saints are patient,” Anne told her. “But there’s plenty of food around—”

  Austra, dashing into the creamery from the garden outside, interrupted her.

  “Have you heard?” the blonde girl said excitedly.

  “Hello, Sister Persondra,” Anne said, rolling the rs comically.

  “I have heard,” Serevkis remarked. “I continue to.”

  “The news, I mean,” Austra said. “The girls are all talking about it. We’re going out.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “To a grand triva in the country. The casnara there hosts an annual fete for the women in the coven, and it’s happening in three days’ time!”

  “Really?” Anne said. “I can hardly see Sister Secula allowing that.”

  “No, it’s true,” Serevkis confirmed. “The older girls have spoken of it. It’s said she throws a lovely ball, albeit one without men.”

  “It still sounds fun,” Austra said, a bit defensively.

  “If it’s not,” Serevkis replied, “we’ll make it so.”

  “What sort of party can we have with everyone dressed in these habits?” Anne wondered.

  “Well, you have your things, Sister Mule,” Serevkis said. “But I’ve heard the countess keeps gowns enough for all of us.”

  “A borrowed gown?” Anne said distastefully.

  “But not for us,” Austra exclaimed. “As Sister Serevkis says, thanks to your stubbornness, we at least may wear our own things.”

  “You may,” Anne replied. “I brought only one dress, and I gave that to you.”

  Austra’s mouth hung open for a moment. “But your other chest. It’s even heavier than mine.”

  “That’s because my saddle is in it.”

  “Your saddle?” Austra said.

  “Yes. The one Aunt Fiene gave me, the one I rode Faster with.”

  “You worked all night and earned the mestra’s displeasure for a saddle?” Serevkis ask
ed.

  Anne merely nodded. She didn’t feel like explaining.

  But Austra, of course, would not let the matter rest.

  “Why?” she demanded, that night in their room. “Why did you bring the saddle? So you could run away?”

  “That was one reason,” Anne allowed.

  “But you dragged it up the stairs, after you promised me you wouldn’t try to leave.”

  “I know.”

  Austra was silent for a moment, and when she spoke again it seemed almost as if her voice crept out of her reluctantly. “Anne, are you cross with me?”

  Anne sat up in her sheets and looked at her friend’s face in the faint moonlight. “Why would you think that?” she asked.

  “Because you—you’re different,” Austra answered. “You spend so much time with Serevkis, these days.”

  “She’s my friend. We’re studying the same subjects.”

  “It’s just—you never had any other friends in Eslen.”

  “You’re still my favorite, Austra. I’m sorry if you feel neglected, but—”

  “But I cannot discourse of the same things you and Serevkis do,” Austra said flatly. “You learn sorcery while I scrub pots. And she is gentle born. Naturally you prefer her company.”

  “Austra, you silly diumma, I don’t prefer her company to yours. Now go to sleep.”

  “I don’t even know what you just called me,” Austra murmured. “You see? I’m stupid.”

  “It’s a sort of water spirit,” Anne told her. “And you aren’t stupid just because you don’t know a particular word. If you were allowed to study what I do, you would know it. Enough of this! Austra, I will always love you best.”

  “I hope so,” the younger girl said.

  “Just think how you’ll look at the ball. The only girl in her own gown.”

  “I’m not going to wear it.”

  “What? Why? It’s yours.”

  “But you don’t have one. It wouldn’t be right.”

  Anne laughed. “As a lot of people—you included—have been fond of telling me, we are not in Crotheny anymore. I am not a princess here, and you are not a maid.”

  “No?” Austra said softly. “Then how is it you learn magic, and I beat rugs?”