The horrible thing was, part of him was already thinking about how life would be without her. The same part that was shy about the idea of a permanent arrangement in the first place. What were men made of, he wondered, that they thought such thoughts? In his deepest heart, did he want her to die? When Qerla—
“No,” he said, loudly enough that Ogre looked at him.
There it was.
He’d met Qerla when he was very young, younger than Winna. He’d loved her with an absolute madness he’d never imagined feeling again. He could still remember the smell of her, like water caught in the bloom of an orchid. The touch of her skin, a little hotter than Mannish flesh. Looking back on it, she had been even madder than he, for whereas Aspar had little to lose in the way of community and friends, Qerla had been born to a family famous for seers. She had property, and prospects, and all the best marriage opportunities.
But she’d run away with him to live alone in the forest, and for a time that had been enough.
For a very short time. Maybe if they could have had children. Maybe if either the Sefry or the Mannish world had been a little more accepting.
Maybe. Maybe.
But instead it was hard, and it grew harder every day, so hard that Qerla slept with an old lover. So hard that when Aspar found her body, part of him was relieved that it was over.
He hated Fend for killing Qerla, but he saw now that he hated Fend more for showing him this dirty thing about himself. Aspar had spent twenty years without a lover, but it hadn’t been because he feared losing her. It was because he knew he hadn’t been worthy of loving someone.
He still wasn’t.
“Sceat,” he told the fire. When had he started all this thinking? Much good it was doing him.
The wolves had found him. He could hear them rustling in the dark, and now and then a pair of eyes or a gray flank would pick up the firelight. They were big, bigger than any wolves he’d seen before, and he had seen some pretty big ones. He didn’t reckon they would come after him, not with the fire going, but that would depend on how hungry they were. It also depended on whether they were like the wolves he was familiar with. He’d heard tell of some northern varieties that hadn’t the same worries about men that the common sort did.
For now they were keeping their distance. They might be more trouble in daylight.
He brightened the fire with a few pokes, turned for one of the logs he’d placed beside him—and stopped.
She was only four kingsyards away, and he hadn’t heard anything, not the slightest sound. But there she sat, crouching on the balls of her feet, watching him with sage-colored eyes, her long black hair settled on her shoulders, skin as pale as the birches. She was naked and looked very young, but the top pair of her six breasts was swollen, which happened in Sefry only after the age of twenty.
“Qerla?”
She only talks to the dead.
But Qerla was very dead. Bones. Town people saw the dead, or so they claimed, on Temnosnaht. Old Sefry women pretended to speak to them all the time. And he himself had seen something in the deep mazes of Rewn Aluth that had been either an illusion or—something else.
But this…
“No,” he said aloud. “Her eyes were violet.” But other than that, she was so like Qerla: the faint turn of her lip, the trace of veins on her throat, in one place shaped almost like those of a hawthorn leaf.
Very like.
Her eyes widened at the sound of his voice, and he hardly dared breathe. His right hand was still reaching for the log; his left had gone instinctively for his ax, and it still rested there on its cold steel head.
“Are you her?” he asked.
Them that see her in Sefry or human shape don’t usually have many breaths left in the lands of fate, the old man had said.
She smiled very faintly, and the wind started, jittering his fire and wisping her fine hair.
Then she was gone. It was as if he had been seeing her reflected in a giant eye, and the eye had blinked.
He was still breathing the next morning and set out at the earliest hint of the sun. He worried about the wolves, but pretty soon he noticed they wouldn’t cross, or even come onto, the trail he was following.
That bothered him more in some ways. Wolves belonged in the forest. What could be so bad about this bit of ground that they wouldn’t walk on it?
He counted a pack of about twelve. Could he and Ogre take that many in the state they were in? Maybe.
The forest opened up for a while as the girth of the trees increased, revealing small, mossy meadows here and there. The sky was blue when he saw it, dazzling when a shaft or two of it fell through to the forest floor. The wolves paced him until midday, then vanished. Not much later he heard wild cattle trumpet in alarm and knew the predators had found prey they reckoned worth their while.
He was glad to be rid of the wolves, but something was still following him. It bent branches not like a wind but like a weight settling on them from above. As if it was walking on them, all of them at once, or at least all of them around him. If he stopped, it stopped, and he was reminded of a very stupid entertainment given by a traveling troupe in Colbaely. One fellow walked stealthily behind another, mimicking his motions exactly, and whenever the person being followed turned, the stalker would freeze in place, and the fool in front wouldn’t see him. Aspar had found it annoying rather than funny.
But deer couldn’t see you when they were feeding. When they had their heads down to the ground, you could walk straight toward them so long as they were upwind and couldn’t smell you. Frogs couldn’t see you unless you moved, either.
So maybe to whatever was following him, Aspar was basically a frog.
He chuckled under his breath. It might have been the fatigue, but that actually did seem funny. Maybe he should have given the actors a little more credit.
A rasping wheeze caught his attention, something off the trail a bit. He didn’t forget the old man’s warning to stay on the path, but he didn’t much trust it, either. After all, if no one lived through coming here, what was the point of following directions? With only a little hesitation he turned Ogre toward the sound.
He didn’t go far before he saw it: a large black hairy form quivering in the ferns. It raised a bristly head when it saw him and grunted.
Ogre whinnied.
It was a sow, a big one, bigger because she was pregnant. It was a little early for that—the piglets usually came with the first flowers—but something much more fundamental was wrong, he could see. Whatever was pushing from inside its belly was a lot larger than a piglet. And there was blood, a lot of it, around the sow, leaking from her wheezing nostrils, from her eyes. She didn’t even know he was there; her grunt had been one of pain, not of perception.
She died half a bell later even as he watched, but whatever was inside her kept moving. Aspar noticed that he was shaking, but he didn’t know with what, only that it wasn’t fear. He felt the weight above him, the thing bending the branches, and suddenly the side of the boar split open.
Out pushed a bloody beak, a yellow eye, and a slimy scaled body.
A greffyn.
Very deliberately he dismounted as the thing fought to release itself from its mother’s womb.
“Stop me if you can,” he said to the forest.
Its scales were still soft, not hard like an adult’s, but its glare took a long time to dim even after its head was off.
He wiped his ax on dead leaves, then doubled over, retching.
But at least he knew something now. He knew why he’d passed forty years in the King’s Forest without seeing a trace of a greffyn, an utin, a woorm, or anything of the like, yet now the whole world was lousy with them.
People had said they were “waking up,” like the Briar King, which implied they’d been sleeping like a bear in a hollow tree—except for a thousand years.