by Greg Keyes
Daylight surrendered without much of a fight a few bells later, lead tarnishing to black, with a wicked promise of hard cold. They lit torches. The snowfall thickened, and the flames hissed and fussed in it.
Though Aspar didn’t want to admit it, he was tired, so tired that his knees were quivering against Ogre’s flanks. And though she didn’t complain, Winna seemed on the verge of dropping, as well. It had been a very long day, a day lived almost entirely at the edge of death, and that could wear iron down to rust.
“How are you holding up over there?” Aspar asked.
“The snow will cover the tracks if we stop.” She sighed.
“Not so I can’t find the trail,” Aspar said. “Even if there aren’t any more bodies, they’ve scraped tree bark, broken branches—I can follow ’em.”
“What if we stop and they kill Stephen while we’re resting?”
“They won’t, not if we’re right.”
“But we might be wrong. They might cut his heart out at midnight, for all we know.”
“They might,” Aspar agreed. “But if we find him now, in the shape we’re in, do you really think we could do anything to help him?”
“No,” Winna admitted. “Is that really the point?”
“Yes,” Aspar said. “I’m not some kinderspell knight, ready to die because the story says I ought. We’ll save Stephen if I think we’ll survive it or at least have a decent chance. Right now, we need a little rest.”
Winna nodded. “Yah,” she said. “You’ve talked me into it. Do you want to camp here?”
“Nah, let me show you something. Just up ahead.”
“Feel the notches?” Aspar asked, searching up through the darkness and finding Winna’s rump.
“Yah. And watch your paws, you old bear. I’m not that forgiving, not with you making me climb another tree.”
“This should be an easier climb.”
“It is. Who cut the notches? They’re old; I can feel bark that’s grown back on ’em.”
“Yah. I cut ’em, back when I was a boy.”
“You’ve been planning this a long time.”
Aspar almost chuckled at that, but he was too exhausted.
“Just a little higher,” he promised. “You’ll feel a jut.”
“Got it,” Winna said.
A few moments later Aspar followed Winna onto a hard flat surface.
“Your winter castle?” she asked.
“Something like that,” he replied.
“It could do with some walls.”
“Well, I couldn’t see anything then, could I?” Aspar said.
“We can’t see anything as it is,” Winna pointed out.
“Yah. Anyway, it’s got a roof to keep the snow off, and there ought to be a piece of canvas we can raise to hold the worst of this noar’wis off of us. Just mind the edge. I only built this for one.”
“So I take it I’m the first woman you’ve brought home.”
“Ah—” He stopped, afraid to answer that.
“Oh,” she said. “Sorry, I was just joking. I didn’t mean to bring that up.”
“It was a long time ago,” Aspar said. “It doesn’t bother me. I just didn’t…” Now he was sure he shouldn’t say anything else.
But then he felt her mitten on his face. “I’m not jealous of her, Aspar,” she said. “That was before I was born, so how could I be?”
“Raiht.”
“Raiht. So where’s the hearth?”
“Ah, I reckon you’ve just laid your hand on it,” he said.
“Oh, well.” She sighed. “I guess it’ll be better than freezing.”
It was considerably better than freezing, Aspar reckoned when the morning gray woke him. Winna was nestled into the crook of his arm, her bare flesh still hot against his, and the both of them were cocooned in blankets and skins. They’d found some energy neither thought they had, enough that it was a miracle they hadn’t fallen off the platform during the night.
He kept his breathing slow and deep, not wanting to wake her yet. But he turned his gaze about, marveling still at what had struck him with wonder as a boy, all those years ago.
“There you are,” Winna murmured.
“You’re awake?”
“Before you were,” she said. “Just looking. I never knew there was anyplace like this.”
“I call ’em the tyrants,” Aspar said.
“Tyrants?”
He nodded, looking up at the spreading and interlocking branches of the huge tree they rested in and those all around it.
“Yah. It’s the biggest, oldest stand of ironoaks in the forest. No other trees can live here; the oaks shade ’em out. They’re the kings, the emperors of the forest. It’s a whole different world up here. There are things that live on these branches and never go down to the ground.”
Winna leaned to peer over the edge. “How far down is—eep!”
“Don’t fall,” he said, gripping her a little tighter.
“That’s farther than I thought,” she rasped. “A lot farther. And we almost, last night we nearly—”
“No, never,” Aspar lied. “I had us the whole time.”
She smiled wryly and kissed him.
“You know,” she said, “when I was a girl, I thought you were made of iron. Remember when you and Dovel brought in the bodies of the Black Wargh and his men? It was like you were Saint Michael made flesh. I thought that with you at their side, a person wouldn’t have to worry about anything.”
Her eyes were serious, as beautiful as he had ever seen them. Somewhere nearby a crow-woodpecker hammered at a tree, then vented a throaty warble.
“Now you know better,” he said. “Fend took you from me, right out from underneath my nose.”
“Yah,” she said softly. “And you got me back, but it was too late. I already knew that you could fail by then, that no matter how strong and determined you were, the bad things could still get me.”
“I’m sorry, Winna.”
She gripped his hand. “No, you don’t understand,” she said. “A girl falls in love with a hero. A woman falls in love with a man. I don’t love you because I think you can protect me; I love you because you’re a man, a good man. It’s not that you always succeed but that you’ll always try.”
She looked away, back down at the distant forest floor. It was a relief, because he couldn’t think of any reply to that.
He remembered Winna as a kindling, a bundle of legs, hands, and blond hair racing around the village, always bothering him for stories of the wider world. Just one of a hundred children he’d watched flicker through mayfly childhood to become mothers, fathers, grandparents.
Aspar wasn’t sure what love was. After his first wife, Qerla, was murdered, he’d spent twenty years avoiding women and the entanglements they brought. Winna had snuck up on him, masquerading as a little girl well after he ought to have known better. But in the end the surprise had been a pleasant one, and for a short time he’d surrendered to it as much as he ever had yielded to anything.
That was before Fend had captured her. Fend had killed his first love; he seemed destined to kill all of them.
In any event, Aspar had been more and more uneasy since then, less and less sure of his feelings. He knew they were there, but what it came down to was that as long as they were on the move, fighting, always in danger of death, it was easy not to think about the future, easy to imagine that when this was all over, Winna would go back to her life and he would go back to his. He would miss her and have pleasant memories, but it would be something of a relief.
But now he suddenly realized how deep the water was, and he wasn’t sure if he could swim in it.
Without meaning to, he recalled Leshya. The Sefry woman was tough and wise and kept what feelings she had close, very close. There wouldn’t be any confusion with her; with her it would be honest and simple—
He suddenly felt the tree tremble. Not from the wind; the cadence was all wrong, and it came up from the roots.
&
nbsp; Winna must have seen him frown.
“What?”
He held a finger to his lips and shook his head, then returned his gaze to the ground. The vibration in the tree continued, but he couldn’t imagine what it was. It might be a few hundred horsemen, so many of them that the percussive thutter of hooves melted together. It might be slinders again, though it didn’t feel like that, either. There was a sustained quality to the vibration that was like nothing he’d ever experienced before, but it was getting stronger.
He shallowed his breathing, waiting for the sound.
A hundred heartbeats later he heard the start of a scraping, a grinding sort of noise. A few dead leaves gave up their desperate hold on their branches and drifted down. Aspar still couldn’t see anything, but he noticed that the woodpecker had stopped, as had all bird noises.
The sound was clearer now, and the shivering of the tree even more pronounced, so that at last he felt a heavy rhythm, a dull whump-whump-whump-whump almost below hearing. That said to Aspar that something very large and very heavy was running through the forest, faster than a horse could gallop.
And it was dragging something huge.
He noticed Winna’s breath quicken as he reached carefully for his bow and arrows, so he found her hand again and squeezed it. He glanced at the sky; it was still gray, but the clouds were high and on the bright side. It didn’t look like there would be more snow.
Whatever it was, it was coming from the same direction they had: north and west. The branches of the trees in that direction swayed visibly. He deepened and slowed his breath, trying to relax, focusing on the Old King’s Road below them and slightly to the north.
He caught only glimpses at first of something huge, black, and gray-green winding through the trees, but his senses couldn’t focus it into reality. He concentrated on two gigantic tyrants arching over a long clearing on the Old King’s Road, reckoning that that would be where he would get his first good look at it.
A mist poured through the trees, and then something dark and sinuous, moving so quickly that Aspar first thought he was seeing some strange flood, a river flowing above ground. But then it stopped as suddenly, as did the sound of its passage and the shaking in the tree.
The mist coiled, and something like a viridian lamp burned through it.
Instantly, Aspar felt his skin prickle and ache like the onset of a fever, and he clapped a hand over Winna’s face to stop her vision. For as the mist cleared, he saw that the green light was an eye, seen as just a sliver, above it as they were. But that might be enough.
Its head, he reckoned, was as long as a decent-sized man was tall. It had a long tapering snout with fleshy nostrils, something like that of a horse, but toward the neck its skull flared and thickened to resemble an adder’s. Two black horny ridges jutted up just behind the eyes, which bulged out of round, bony sockets. It had no ears that he could see, but it had a ruff of spikes that started at the bass of the skull and ran down its thorny spine.
It wasn’t a snake, for he could see that after four kingsyards or so of very broad neck it was drawn up on immensely thick legs terminating in what resembled a huge hoof cloven five times. However, like a snake, it dragged its belly, and its body twisted behind it, so long that he couldn’t tell whether it had rear legs, and he could see what he reckoned to be ten or twelve kingsyards of it.
The head lifted, and for an instant he feared it would turn its deadly eyes up toward them, but instead it lowered its nostrils to the ground and began to sniff at the trail. Its neck moved this way and that.
Was it following us or the slinders? he wondered. And who will it follow now?
It was then he noticed something he hadn’t before. The body widened above the legs to accommodate a massive bunching of shoulder muscles, and there, at its thickest place, was something strange, a flash of color that didn’t seem to belong, something sticking up.
Then he got it. It was a saddle, strapped around the girth of the thing, and there were two people sitting on it, one bareheaded and one wearing a broad-brimmed hat.
“Sceat,” Aspar murmured.
As if in response, a flash of pale appeared as the man with the hat looked up. And though the distance was great and the mist obscuring, Aspar knew by the eye patch and the shape of the nose exactly who it was.
Fend.
DUKE ERNST reached for his sword, but Neil’s already was flying from its scabbard, feylight lapping up the length of its blade. Ernst froze and stared, as did his men, and Neil backed his horse so that he was not pressed, so that he could face both Ernst and Elyoner.
“By my fathers and their fathers,” he snarled, “Anne Dare is under my protection, and I will slaughter any man who threatens to lay a hand on her.”
Another sword hissed from its sheath, and Cazio bounded down, placing himself between Anne and Ernst, but with his back to the Craftsmen. At this point Neil thought that might be a mistake.
“Shinecraft!” Ernst said, still staring at Draug. “Witchery. The praifec shall deal with you, whoever you are.”
“Much comfort that will be to your corpse,” Neil shot back. “In any event, I took this sword from a servant of the praifec, which I’m sure is as strange to you as it is to me.”
Ernst finished drawing his weapon. “I have no fear of your sorcery and no belly for your lies,” he said. “I will carry out my lord’s command.”
“My uncle is an usurper,” Anne said. “Your duty does not lie with him. It lies with me.”
Ernst spat.
“Your father my have badgered the Comven into legitimizing you as his heir, but do not become confused, Princess. There is only one Dare whose blood is thick enough to rule Crotheny, and that is King Robert. Whatever childish adventure you have embarked upon, I assure you that it ends now.”
“Oh, let the girl remain a child for a bit longer,” Elyoner broke in.
“Duchess?” Ernst said.
“Anne, dear,” Elyoner said, “you may want to close your eyes.”
Neil heard the sudden strum of bowstrings, and his flesh went cold and hot as he cursed his stupidity.
But it was Duke Ernst who showed the most surprise—one arrow went through his throat, and another vanished a fourth of its length into his right eye socket.
More darts followed, and in the space of but a few heartbeats, all of Ernst’s riders had fallen from their saddles. Only then did four men in yellow hose and orange surcoats appear from behind the wall. They began to slit the throats of the wounded with long wicked knives.
Anne gaped in astonishment.
“Oh, dear,” Elyoner said. “I thought I told you not to look.”
“It’s not my first time to see men die, Aunt Elyoner,” Anne replied. She looked pale and her eyes were watery, but she watched the murder with a steady gaze.
“Sadly, yes,” Elyoner said. “Despite a residue of naïveté, I can see that you have grown up, haven’t you? Well, enough of this unpleasantness,” she continued, pulling on the reins of her horse. “Let’s go see what my staff can find in the kitchens.”
As they started up the avenue toward the mansion, Neil trotted his horse up next to Elyoner.
“Duchess—”
“Yes, sir knight, I know it was boorish to think me a traitor and a liar, but there’s no need to apologize,” she said. “You see, I hadn’t expected the duke to arrive until tomorrow, and I had arranged for him to meet with an ill fate before even reaching here.”
“Robert will soon know that something has happened to them,” Neil said.
“Tsk, tsk.” Elyoner sighed. “These are evil times. Monsters and terrible people wander the roads. Even the king’s men aren’t safe.”
“You think Robert won’t see through that?”
“I think we have a little time, dove,” Elyoner assured him. “Time enough to eat and drink and rest. The morning is early enough for plans, I should think. No, we need to be fresh when we discuss what to do next. After all, you didn’t imagine that you were
just going to ride up to Eslen and demand that they open the city gates, did you?”
Neil felt his mouth twist a bit.
“Well, that’s the problem,” he replied. “If I may be candid, Duchess…”
“You may be as candid with me as you like,” she said wryly. “Or you may deceive and taunt me. Either way, I will find my amusement.” Her lips bowed slightly.
“I’ve fought in many battles,” Neil said, ignoring her flirtation. “My father first gave me a spear when I was nine, to kill Weihand raiders who were in the employ of Hansa. After my fah died, Baron Fail de Liery took me into his household, and I battled for him.
“Now I’m a knight of Crotheny. But I’ve little knowledge of how to wage a war, you see. I’ve led raids and defended redoubts, but taking a city and a fortress, especially one like Eslen—that’s not something I know how to do. Nor, I fear, does Anne.”
“I know,” Elyoner agreed. “It’s all so precious, this campaign of yours. But you see, my dear, that’s all the more reason you should spend a little time with me. So I can introduce you to the right people.”
“What do you mean?”
“Please have a little patience, dove. Trust Elyoner. Have I ever given you poor advice?”
“I can think of one instance,” Neil said stiffly.
“No,” Elyoner said softly. “I don’t think so. That it didn’t turn out well was no fault of mine. Your tryst with Fastia wasn’t the cause of her death, Sir Neil. She was killed by evil men. Do you think a knight who did not love her could have saved her?”
“I was distracted,” Neil said.
“I don’t believe that. Muriele didn’t, and I’m sure Fastia would never blame you. Nor would she want you to weep overlong. I know you have mourned her, but she is gone, and you yet live. You should—oh, my.”
Neil felt his cheeks burn.
“Sir Neil?”
“Duchess?”
“You’re face is so charmingly transparent. You looked so guilty just now. Who has taken your fancy?”
