Cazio turned back toward Anne.
“So, if ‘lover’ is erenterra,” he said, “I must disagree with you.”
“Perhaps a man can have a lover and remain free,” Anne said. “A woman may not.”
“Nonsense,” Cazio said. “So long as her—eh, lover—is not also her husband, she can be as free as she likes.” He smiled even more broadly. “Besides, not all servitude is unpleasant.”
“You’ve slipped back into Vitellian again,” Anne said, lacking entirely Cazio’s affection for the subject. She was sorry to have brought it up. “Let’s return to the topic of snow. Tell me more about it—in the king’s tongue.”
“New thing for me,” he said, his voice going instantly from glib near music to clumsy, lumbering prose as he switched languages. “Not have in Avella. Very, eh, fullovonder.”
“Wonderful,” she corrected as Austra giggled.
In fact, the snow didn’t seem wonderful to Anne at all—it seemed a nuisance. But Cazio sounded sincere, and despite herself, it made her smile to watch as he grinned at the white flakes. He was nineteen, two years older than she, but still more boy than man.
And yet she could see a man in him now and then, just on the verge of escaping.
Despite the uncomfortable turn of the conversation, for a moment Anne felt content. She was safe, with friends, and though the world had gone mad, she at least knew her footing now. Forty some men weren’t enough to free her mother and take back Crotheny, but soon they would reach the estates of her aunt Elyoner, who had some soldiers, and perhaps she would know where Anne could acquire more.
After that—well, she would build her army as she went. She knew nothing of what an army needed, and at times—especially at night—that gripped her heart too tightly for sleep. But at the moment she somehow felt as if it would all work out.
Suddenly something moved at the corner of her vision, but when she looked, it wasn’t there…
Leaning against the tree, Anne exhaled frost and noticed that the light was fading.
Where was Cazio? Where was everyone else?
Where was she?
The last she remembered. They’d just struck north from the Old King’s Road, through the forest of Chevroché toward Loiyes, a place where she’d once gone riding with her aunt Lesbeth many years ago.
Her bodyguard Neil MeqVren had been riding only a few paces away. Austra had dropped back to talk to Stephen, the young man from Virgenya. The holter, Aspar White, had been scouting ahead, and the thirty horsemen who had attached themselves to her at Dunmrogh had been ranged protectively about her.
Then Cazio’s expression had changed, and he had reached for his sword. The light had seemed to brighten to yellow.
Was this still Chevroché? Had hours passed?
Days?
She could not remember.
Should she wait to be found, or was there no one left to search for her? Could an enemy have snatched her away from her guardians without killing them all?
With a sinking heart, she realized how unlikely that was. Sir Neil certainly would die before allowing her to be taken, and the same was true of Cazio.
Trembling still, she realized that the only clue she had to her current situation was the dead man.
Reluctantly, she trudged back through the snow to the place where he lay. Gazing down on him through the dimming light, she searched for details she might have missed before.
He wasn’t a young man, but she couldn’t say how old he was, eitherforty, perhaps. He wore dark gray wool breeches stained at the crotch with what had to be his own urine. His buskins were plain, black, worn nearly through. His shirt was wool, too, but beneath it bulked a steel breastplate. That was worn and dented, recently oiled. Besides the knife, he had a short, wide-bladed sword in an oiled leather sheath. It was affixed to a belt with a tarnished brass buckle. He wore no visible sign that proclaimed his allegiance.
Trying not to look at his face or bloody throat, she pushed and patted her hands through his clothes, searching for anything that might be hidden.
On his right wrist she noticed an odd marking, burned or dyed into the skin. It was black and depicted what appeared to be a crescent moon.
She gingerly touched the marking, and a mild vertigo reeled through her.
She tasted salt and smelled iron and felt as if she had plunged her hand up to the elbow into something wet and warm. With a shock she realized that though his heart no longer beat, there was still quick in the man, albeit leaking rapidly away. How long would it take for all of him to be dead? Had his soul left him yet?
They hadn’t taught her much about souls at the Coven Saint Cer, through she had learned something about the body. She had sat through and aided in several dissections and remembered—she thought—most of the organs and their primary humors. The soul had no single seat, but the organ that gave it communication was the one encased in the skull.
Remembering the coven, she felt inexplicably calmer, more reassuringly detached. Experimentally, she reached up and touched the corpse’s brow.
A tingle crept up her fingers, passing through her arm and across her chest. As it moved on up her neck to her head, she felt suddenly drowsy.
Her body became distant and pillowy, and she heard a soft gasp escape from her lips. The world hummed with music that would not quite resolve itself into melody.
Her head swayed back, then down again, and with what seemed great effort she parted her eyelids.
Things were different, but it was difficult to say just how. The light was strange, and all seemed unreal, but the trees and the snow remained as they had been.
As her gaze sharpened, she saw dark water bubbling forth from the dead man’s lips. It cascaded down his chest and meandered through the snow a few kingsyards until it met a larger stream.
Her vision suddenly lengthened, and she saw a hundred such streamlets. Then a thousand, tens of thousands of black rills, all melting into larger streams and rivers and finally merging with a water as wide and dark as a sea. As she watched, the last of that man flowed away, and like leaves on a stream there passed the image of a little girl with black hair…
The smell of beer…
The taste of bacon…
A woman’s face more demon than human, terrifying, but the terror itself was already nearly forgotten…
Then he was gone. The liquid from his lips slowed to a trickle and ended. But from the living world the dark waters continued to flow It was then that Anne noticed that something was watching her; she felt its gaze through the trees. Inchoate fear turned in her, and suddenly, more than anything, she didn’t want to see what it was. The image of the demon-woman in the dying man’s eyes freshened, the face so terrible that he hadn’t been able to really see it.
Was it Mefitis, saint of the dead, come for him? Come for Anne, too?
Or was it an estriga, one of the witches Vitellians believed devoured the souls of the damned? Or something beyond imagining?
Whatever it was, it grew nearer.
Gathering the courage in her core, Anne forced her head to turn—
—and swallowed a scream. There was no clear image, only a series of numbing impressions. Vast horns, stretching to scratch the sky, a body that spread out through the trees…
The black waters of a moment before were fastened to the thing like leeches, and though it tore at them with a hundred claws, each tendril that fell away was replaced by another, if not two.
She had seen this thing before, in a field of black roses, in a forest of thorns.
The Briar King.
He had no face, only dreams in motion. At first she saw nothing she recognized, a miasma of colors that had scent and taste and palpable feel. But now she could not look away, though her terror was only growing.
She felt as if a million poisoned needles quilled her flesh. She could not scream.