The Blood Knight

by Greg Keyes

  And Eslen. Above all Eslen, her white towers burning here in sunlight and ghostly pale there in shadow beneath the broken clouds, her pennants fluttering like dragon tails in the sky. Off to the right the lesser twin mounds of Tom Cast and Tom Woth showed fawn crowns above shoulders of evergreen. She felt lifted and at the same time disoriented.

  She had not feared Artwair at all, but now her terror was back.

  What was she doing?

  She wanted to run back to her cousin, place herself in his care, let him take the responsibility and power he so clearly desired. But even that wouldn’t save her, and for the moment that was what kept her going. She had seen the arrival of the Lierish ships, just as she had told Artwair. She had seen the passages only women could see.

  But she had seen something else, as well: the monstrous woman of her Black Marys, crouching beneath the cold stone in the city of the dead.

  She’d been eight when she and Austra first had found that crypt, and like the little girls they were, they had imagined it to be the tomb of Virgenya Dare, though no one really knew where the Born Queen had been buried. They had scratched prayers and curses on lead tissue and pushed them through the crack in the sarcophagus, and they more than half believed their pleas were effective.

  As it had turned out, they had been right. Anne had asked for Roderick of Dunmrogh to love her, and he had been driven completely mad by love. She had asked for her sister Fastia to be nicer, and she had been—most apparently to Neil MeqVren, if Aunt Elyoner was to be believed.

  What they had been wrong about was who lay in the crypt, who was answering their prayers.

  She came out of her reverie and realized that Robert was leaning against the stone retaining wall of the dike, watching her.

  “Well, dear niece,” he said, “are you ready to return home?”

  Something about the way he said it seemed odd, and she wondered again if this had somehow been all his idea.

  “Pray that I find my mother well,” she answered.

  “She is in the Wolfcoat Tower,” Robert offered helpfully. He nodded toward his only male companion, a short man with wide shoulders and blunt features garnished by the same prim mustache and beard Robert wore. “This is my trusted friend Sir Clement Martyne. He carries my keys and my authority.”

  “I am your humble servant,” the man said.

  “If harm comes to her, Sir Clement,” Neil said, “you shall know me better, I promise you.”

  “I am a man of my word,” Sir Clement said, “but I should be happy to become further acquainted with you, Sir Neil, under whatever conditions you might care to set.”

  “Boys,” Robert said, “be nice.” He reached for Anne’s hand. She was so startled, she let him take it. As he raised it to his lips, she had to choke back the urge to vomit.

  “A good journey to you,” he said. “We shall all meet back here in a day, yes?”

  “Yes,” Anne replied.

  “And discuss our future.”

  “And discuss the future.”

  A few moments later she was on a canal barge with her men and their mounts, moving across the water toward Eslen. She felt in her bones as if it were a place she had never been.

  When they reached the docks, they mounted and that impression grew.

  The castle of Eslen was built upon a high hill, protected by three concentric walls. The Fastness, its outmost wall, was the most impressive, twelve kingsyards high and watched by eight towers. Outside of it, on the broad lower ground between the first gate and the docks, a town had grown up over the years: Docktown, a collection of inns, brothels, warehouses, alehouses—everything a wandering seafarer might want, whether he arrived when the city gates were open or closed. It was usually a bustling, rowdy place, considered dangerous enough that the few times Anne had seen it had been when she had sneaked out of the castle incognito and against her parents’ wishes.

  Today it was quiet, and the only seafarers she saw were those wearing the royal insignia. There weren’t many, though; most were on the fleet her boat had passed through on their way in.

  Through open doorways and windows, Anne caught glimpses of men, women, and children—the people who actually lived there—and wondered what would happen to them if and when the fighting started. She remembered the little villages around the castles her army had reduced. They had not fared well.

  After some explaining by Sir Clement and the presentation of a letter in Robert’s hand, the gates were opened, and they proceeded in to Eslen itself.

  The city was a bit livelier than Docktown. Anne imagined it had to be. Even if war threatened, bread still had to be baked and bought, clothes had to be washed, beer brewed. Despite the bustle, though, her party drew a lot of curious stares.

  “They don’t know me,” Anne noticed. “Do I look so different?”

  Cazio chuckled at that.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Why should they know you?” the Vitellian asked.

  “Even if they don’t know me as their queen, I have been their princess for seventeen years. Everyone knows me.”

  “No,” Austra corrected. “Everyone in the castle knows you. The nobility, the knights, the servants. Most of those would recognize you. But how would the people in the street identify you unless you actually wore a symbol of office?”

  Anne blinked. “That’s incredible,” she said.

  “Not really,” Cazio replied. “How many of them have had the opportunity to meet you face to face?”

  “I mean it’s incredible that I never thought of that.” Anne turned to Austra. “When we used to come into the city, I always wore disguises. Why didn’t you say anything then?”

  “I didn’t want to spoil your fun,” Austra admitted. “Anyway, there are people who would have known you, and some of them might have been the wrong people.”

  Watching her companions grin, Anne felt unaccountably conspired against, as if Austra and Cazio had somehow planned for this bit of stupidity on her part. She quashed the irritation, however.

  The winding way steepened before they reached the second gate. The city of Eslen was laid out somewhat like a spider’s web draped over an anthill, with the avenues paralleling the broad circles of the ancient walls and streets running down the hills like streams. The largest thoroughfares, however, the ones used by armies and merchants, wound up the hill to prevent them being too steep for wagons and armored horses.

  They followed just such a route—the Rixplaf—and so their path carried them through most of the Westhill neighborhoods. Each was distinctive, or so she was told. With some it was obvious; the houses in the old Firoy ward had the steepest roofs in town, all of black slate, so as the road wended above them, it was like looking down on stony waves. The people were pale, with lilting accents. The men wore two-color plaid jerkins, and the women’s skirts rarely had fewer than three bright shades.

  The ward of Saint Neth, on the other hand, felt distinctive, but there was nothing Anne could actually point to to explain why. Still, of most of the city’s eighteen wards, Anne had seen only the houses fronting them to the streets, with tantalizing glimpses down the narrow alleys. Once she and Austra had slipped into Gobelin Court, the Sefry quarter, which she believed to be the most exotic part of the city with its vibrant colors, alien music, and odd, spicy smells. Now, after her experiences in the countryside of Crotheny, Anne wondered if the Mannish neighborhoods were not perhaps as strange and distinct.

  In short, who were the people of Eslen?

  She realized she didn’t know and wondered if her father had. If any king or emperor of the Crothanic empire ever had, and if in fact such a thing were really knowable at all.

  At the moment they were in the Onderwaed district, where the sign of the ridge-backed swine was everywhere in evidence: in door knockers, on small paintings above the doors, as wind vanes on the roof. The plastered houses tended all to be the same umber hue, and the men wore brimmed hats pinned up on one side. Many of them were butchers, and in
fact, Mimhus Square was dominated by the impressive facade of the butcher’s guild, a two-story building of yellow stone with black casements and roof.

  As they entered the square, Anne’s attention was drawn more to the spectacle than to the buildings around it. A large crowd was gathered around a raised podium in the center of the plaza, where many oddly clothed persons seemed to be under guard by soldiers. The soldiers wore square caps and black surcoats with the sigil of the church on them.

  Above them—quite literally, perched on a precarious-looking stilt-legged wooden chair—a man dressed as a patir seemed to be presiding over some sort of trial. A gallows loomed behind him.

  Anne had never seen anything like it.

  “What’s going on here?” she asked Sir Clement.

  “The Church is using the city squares for public courts,” the knight replied. “Heretics are common in the city, and it looks as if the resacaratum has discovered more.”

  “They look like actors,” Austra noted. “Street performers.”

  Sir Clement nodded. “We’ve found that actors are most particularly susceptible to the lures of certain heresies and shinecrafting.”

  “Are they?” Anne asked. She spurred her horse toward the attish.

  “One moment!” Sir Clement cried in alarm.

  “I heard my uncle state that you were at my command,” she responded over her shoulder. “I wonder if you heard the same thing.”

  “Yes, of course, but—”

  “Yes, Highness,” Anne said icily. She noticed Cazio placing himself so he could come between her and Robert’s knight should the need arise.

  “Yes…Highness,” Sir Clement gritted.

  The patir was watching them now.

  “What’s going on here?” he called.

  Anne drew herself up. “Do you know me, patir?” she asked.

  His eyes narrowed, then widened.

  “Princess Anne,” he replied.

  “And, by law of the Comven, sovereign of this city,” Anne added. “At least in my brother’s absence.”

  “That is debatable, Highness,” the patir said, his gaze flickering nervously to Clement.

  “My uncle gave me passage into the city,” Anne informed him. “Thus, it would seem he has some belief in my claim.”

  “Is this so?” the patir asked Clement.

  Clement shrugged. “So it would seem.”

  “In any case,” the churchman said, “I’m engaged in the business of the Church, not that of the crown. It is immaterial who sits on the throne so far as these proceedings are concerned.

  “Oh, I assure you that isn’t the case,” Anne replied. “Now, please tell me of what these people are accused.”

  “Heresy and shinecraft.”

  Anne looked the company over.

  “Who is your leader?” she asked them.

  A balding man of middle years bowed to her. “I am, Your Majesty. Pendun MaypValclam.”

  “What did you do to come before this court?”

  “We performed a play, Majesty, nothing more—a sort of singspell.”

  “The play by my mother’s court composer, Leovigild Ackenzal?”

  “Yes, that one, Majesty, as best we could.”

  “The play has been judged to be shinecraft most foul,” the patir erupted. “That confession alone consigns them to the necklace of Saint Woth.”

  Anne arched her eyebrows at the patir, then turned and gazed around the square at the faces of the assembled onlookers.

  “I’ve heard of this play,” she said, raising her voice. “I hear it is very popular.” She sat straighter in the saddle. “I am Anne, daughter of William and Muriele. I have come to take my father’s throne. I’ve a mind to let my first act be the pardoning of these poor actors, for my father would never have tolerated this sort of injustice. What do you say to that, people of Eslen?”

  She was met by a moment of stunned silence.

  “It is ’er, you know,” she heard someone call out from the crowd. “I’ve seen ’er before.”

  “Free ’em!” someone else yelled, and in a moment everyone but the soldiers and churchmen had taken to shouting for the troupe to be let go.

  “You are free to go,” Anne told the players. “My men will escort you from this court.”

  “Enough,” Sir Clement shouted. “Enough of this nonsense!”

  “Anne!” Cazio said.

  But she saw them, as she had half expected: footmen in Robert’s colors, entering the square from every direction, pushing through the indignant crowd.

  Anne nodded. “Well,” she said. “Better to know this now than inside the Wolfcoat Tower, don’t you think?”

  “What shall we do?” Cazio asked.

  “Why, fight of course,” she replied.

  “WINNA’S NOT doing well,” Ehawk murmured.

  Aspar sighed, tracking his gaze across the distant hillside.

  “I know,” he said. “She’s been coughing blood. So have you.” He pointed at a line of blackened vegetation. “See, there?”

  “Yes,” Ehawk replied. “It came out of the water over there.”

  Something that left a trail like that ought not to be hard to track, but the woorm used rivers for a lot of its traveling, and that was a problem, especially when the river branched. They might have lost it when it turned up the Then River, but for the dead fish flowing from its mouth into the Warlock.

  They followed the trail at the greatest distance possible, never actually stepping on it or taking water downstream of it, and Aspar had hoped that the poison already in them would work its way out.

  It hadn’t.

  The medicine they’d gotten from Fend’s men sustained them, but they were forced to take less and less of it each day to stretch it out. The horses seemed better, but then, none of the beasts had actually stood on poisoned ground or breathed the monster’s breath.

  Not far away, Winna coughed. Ehawk knelt and searched through the remains of the campfire.

  “You think this is Stephen’s trail?”

  Aspar glance around. “Four of ’em, and they didn’t come from the river. They came down from the Brog y Stradh. If it’s Stephen, the woorm isn’t following him, but their paths keep crossing.”

  “Maybe it knows where he’s going.”

  “Maybe. But at this point I’m more concerned with finding Fend.”

  “Maybe he died.”

  Aspar barked a sharp laugh that became a cough. “I doubt it. I should have finished him.”

  “I don’t see how. By the time we found your arrow, the woorm was gone. You can’t imagine you were going to kill it with your dirk.”

  “No, but I could have killed Fend.”

  “The woorm is his ally. We were lucky to escape.”

  “So now we die slow.”

  “No,” Ehawk said. “We’ll catch it. It’s on land now, so it won’t be as fast.”

  “Yah,” Aspar said, a bit doubtfully. Ehawk was probably right, but they, too, were slower every day.

  “See to the horses and the camp,” Aspar said. “I’ll find us something to eat.”

  “Yah,” Ehawk said.

  Aspar found a game trail and a convenient perch in a sycamore. He settled there and let weariness have his body while trying to keep his eyes and wits sharp.

  It had been ten years since Aspar had been in the low marshes around the Then, on one of his rare ventures outside the boundaries of the King’s Forest. He’d gone to deliver some bandits to the magistrate of Ofthen town, and while there he had heard interesting tales about the Sarnwood and the witch who was supposed to live there. He’d been at his most footloose back then and reckoned he’d see what the ancient, supposedly haunted forest was really like. He’d made it only about halfway before news about the Black Wargh turned him back south, and he hadn’t ever taken up the trip again.

  But he’d stopped there for a few days to hunt. That had been in the summer, with everything lush and green. Now it all appeared thin, a landscape of r
ushes and broken cattails, brittle sheens of ice in the standing places that clutched any color the sky might give them. To his right he made out the black stone remains of a wall, and farther up a mound that looked suspiciously regular. He’d heard there had been a mighty kingdom there long ago. Stephen probably could go on about it at distracting length, but all Aspar knew was that it was long gone, and once you got a few leagues from Ofthen, this was one of the most desolate parts of the Midenlands.

  The soil was poor even when the land was drained, and what few people lived in the area were mostly river fishers or goat herders, but there wasn’t much sign even of them. He vaguely remembered hearing something about the land having been cursed during the Warlock Wars, too, but he’d never paid much attention to that sort of thing, though in hindsight maybe he should have.

  Something caught his eye: not movement but something weird, something that ought not be there…

  A sick prickling crept up his shoulders as he realized what it was. Black thorns had sprouted from a dead cypress and had clawed their way into nearby trees. He’d seen such thorns before, of course, first in the valley where the Briar King slept and later as infestations in the King’s Forest. And here they were, too.

  Did that mean that the Briar King had come this way? Or that the briars were now spreading everywhere?

  He shuddered, then went dizzy and nearly fell from his roost. He clung desperately to the branches, his breath coming in fits. Spots danced before his eyes. He’d only pretended to drink his fraction of the medicine for the last few days, and that was starting to take its toll.

  He had to catch Fend. Where was the sceathaoveth going?

  Something had been nagging at him, and he suddenly realized what it was.

  Before he could think much about it, movement caught his eye. Barely breathing, he waited until it resolved itself into a doe. Calming his shaking hand, he took aim and put an arrow through her neck. She bolted, and with a sigh he climbed down from the tree. Now he would have to follow her for a while.