Without warning, the slinders carrying Stephen suddenly set him unceremoniously on his feet. His weakened knees collapsed, and he fell where they dropped him.
Propping himself up, he looked around but saw no sign of Ehawk. Had they eaten the boy, after all? Had they killed him? Or merely ejected him from the procession, ignoring him as they had Aspar, Winna, and the knights?
The aroma of food suddenly broke through the smell of the slinders and struck him like a physical blow. He couldn’t quite identify the scent, but it was like meat. When he understood what it probably was, his stomach knotted, and if he had had a meal to vomit, he certainly would have. Had Ehawk been right? Had the slinders refined their culinary tastes? Was he to be braised, roasted, or boiled?
Whatever their ultimate intentions, at the moment the slinders appeared to be ignoring him, so he studied the scene around him, trying to arrange sense from it.
At first he had seen only the huge flame in the center of the chamber and an undifferentiated mass of bodies, but now he noticed dozens of smaller fires, with slinders grouped about them as if in clans or cadres. Most of the hearths bore kettles, the sort of copper or black iron kettles he might find at any farmstead or small village. A few of the slinders actually were tending the pots; that struck him somehow as the strangest thing he had seen yet. How could they be so senseless yet still be capable of domestic tasks?
Using his hands, he managed to climb unsteadily to his feet, and then he turned, trying to remember which way they had come from. He found himself looking squarely into a pair of vivid blue eyes.
Startled, he stepped back, and the face came into perspective. It belonged to a man, probably around thirty years of age. His face was streaked with red pigment and his body was as naked and tattooed as the others, but his eyes seemed—sane.
Stephen recognized him as the magician who had been calling down the branches.
He held a bowl in his hands, which he proffered to Stephen.
Stephen examined it; it was full of some sort of stew. It smelled good.
“No,” he said softly.
“It isn’t manflesh,” the man said in king’s tongue with an up-country Oostish burr. “It’s venison.”
“You can talk?” Stephen asked.
The man nodded. “Sometimes,” he said, “when the madness lifts. Eat. I’m sure you have questions for me.”
“What’s your name?”
The man’s brow knotted. “It seems like a long time since I had a name that mattered,” he said. “I’m a dreodh. Just call me Dreodh.”
“What is a dreodh?”
“Ah, a leader, a sort of priest. We were the ones who believed, who kept the old ways.”
“Oh,” Stephen said. “I understand now. Vadhiian dhravhydh meant a kind of spirit of the forest. Middle Lierish dreufied was a word for a sort of wild man who lived in the woods, a pagan creature.”
“I am not so learned in the ways our name has been misused,” Dreodh said, “but I know what I am. What we are. We keep the ways of the Briar King. For that, our name has been maligned by others.”
“The Briar King is your god?”
“God? Saint? These are words. They are of no value. But we waited for him, and we were proved right,” he said bitterly.
“You don’t sound glad of that,” Stephen noted.
Dreodh shrugged. “The world is what it is. We do what needs being done. Eat, and we can talk some more.”
“What happened to my friend?”
“I know of no friend. You were the object of their quest, no other.”
“He was with us.”
“If it will ease your mind, I will search for him. Now eat.”
Stephen poked at the stew. It smelled like venison, but then, how did human meat smell? He seemed to remember that it was supposed to be something like pork. And what if it was human?
If he ate it, would he become like the slinders?
He set the bowl down, trying to ignore the pain in his belly. It wasn’t worth the risk on any level he could think of. A man could go a long time without food. He was sure of it.
Dreodh returned, looked at the bowl, and shook his head. He left again, returned with a small leather purse, and tossed it to Stephen. Opening it, Stephen found some dried and slightly molded cheese and hard, stale bread.
“Will you trust that?” Dreodh asked.
“I don’t want to,” Stephen replied.
He did, though, scraping off the mold and devouring the ripe stuff in a few hard bolts.
“The ones that brought you, they don’t remember your friend,” Dreodh told him as he ate. “You must understand, when the calling is on us, we don’t perceive things the way you do. We don’t remember.”
“The calling?”
“The calling of the Briar King.”
“Do you think they killed him?”
Dreodh shook his head. “This calling was simply to locate you and bring you here, not to kill or feed.”
Stephen decided to let the particulars of that go for a moment. He had a more pressing question.
“You say that the slinders came after me. Why?”
Dreodh shrugged. “I am not certain. You have the stink of the sedhmhari about you, and so our instincts tell us that you should be destroyed. But the lord of the forest thinks otherwise, and we can but obey.”
“Sedhmhari—I know that word. The Sefry use it to refer to monsters like greffyns and utins.”
“Just so. You might add to your list the black briars that devour the forest. All the creatures of evil.”
“But the Briar King is not sedhmhari?”
To Stephen’s surprise, Dreodh looked shocked. “Of course not,” he said. “He is their greatest enemy.”
Stephen nodded. “And he speaks to you?”
“Not as you understand it,” Dreodh said. “He is the dream we all share. He feels things, we feel them. Needs. Desires. Hatreds. Pain. Like any living thing, if we feel a thirst, we try to quench it. He put a thirst for you in us, and so we found you. I do not know why, but I know where I am to take you.”
“Where?”
“Tomorrow,” he said, waving the question away with the back of his hand.
“May I walk, or must I be carried again?”
“You may walk. If you struggle, you will be carried.”
Stephen nodded. “Where are we?”
Dreodh gestured. “Under the earth, as you can see. An old rewn abandoned by the Halafolk.”
“Really?” That raised interest in him. Aspar had told him of the Halafolk rewns, the secret caverns where most of the strange race called Sefry dwelled.
The Sefry most people knew of were the traders, the entertainers, those who traveled about on the face of the earth. But those were the minority. The rest had lived in recondite caverns in the King’s Forest until just recently. Then they had left the homes they had lived in for countless millennia, fleeing the coming of the Briar King.
Aspar and Winna had entered one such abandoned rewn. Now, it seemed, he was in another.
“Where is their town?”
“Not far from here, what remains of it. We have begun to raze it.”
“Why?”
“All the works of man and Sefry, throughout the King’s Forest, will be destroyed.”
“Again, why?”
“Because they should not be here,” Dreodh said. “Because men and Sefry broke the sacred law.”
“The Briar King’s law.”
“Yes.”
Stephen shook his head. “I don’t understand. These people—youyou must have been villagers, tribesmen at one time. Living in the King’s Forest or near it.”
“Yes,” Dreodh said softly. “That was our sin. Now we pay for it.”
“By what sorcery does he compel you? Not everyone comes under his spell. I’ve seen the Briar King, and I didn’t become a slinder.”