They hadn’t been sleeping anywhere. They were being born. He remembered an old tale about basil-nix coming from hen’s eggs.
Sceat, they probably did.
He waited for the wrath of the witch to descend on him, but nothing happened. Still shaking, he remounted and went on.
It was almost without surprise that he saw buds on the trees. They were not natural buds but black spikes splitting through trunks and branches. It was easy enough to recognize the black thorns he’s seen in the King’s Forest and again in the Midenlands. Here they sprouted from galls on the trees themselves, and the deeper he went, the more growth he saw, and the more variety.
The thorns in the King’s Forest had all looked the same, but here he saw many sorts, some narrow, their spines almost feathery in their delicacy and number, and others that bore blunt knobby growths. Within a bell he didn’t even recognize the parent trees anymore; like the sow, they were giving birth to monsters and were being consumed in the process.
Then he came to the end of the trail and an eldritch mere beneath the boughs of the strangest forest he had ever seen.
The largest of the trees were roughly scaled, with each branch spawning five smaller ones and each of those five spawning more, endlessly, so that the fringes were cloudlike. Aspar was reminded of some sort of pond weed or mossy lichen more than of any real tree. Others looked something like weeping willows save that their fronds were black and serrated like the tail of a fence lizard. Some of the saplings looked as if a mad saint had taken pinecones and stretched them out ten yards high.
Other plants were a bit more natural. Pale, nearly white ferns and gigantic horsetails sedged the edges of the pool stretched out before him. Beyond and to his left and right, rocky walls rose up to place him and the mere in the bottom of a gorge. The entire grotto had been decorated with human skulls, which japed down at him from the trees, from the crannies in the rock, and along the ground bordering the pool.
Everything bent toward him.
“Well,” Aspar said. “Here I am.”
He felt the presence, but the silence stretched until, very quietly, the water started to mound, and something rose up out of the mere.
It wasn’t the Sefry woman but something larger, a mass of black fur mated with pond weed, dead leaves, and fish bones. It stood more like a bear than a man, but its face was froglike, with one bulging, blind white eye visible and the other occluded by a mane of oily strands that seemed almost to pour from the crown of its head. Its mouth was a downturned arc that took up most of the bottom of its face. Its arms dangled down to the water, depending from massive sloping shoulders. There was nothing feminine—or masculine, for that matter—about it.
Aspar faced the thing for a few moments, until he was certain it wasn’t going to attack, at least not yet.
“I’ve come to see the woman of the Sarnwood,” he finally said.
Silence followed for several long tens of heartbeats. Aspar was starting to feel a little foolish when something else stirred in the water just in front of the whatever it was.
A head emerged. At first Aspar thought it was just another, smaller version of the creature, but the resemblance was superficial. This once had been a man, though his eyes were now filmed and his flesh an ugly shade of bluish-gray. Aspar couldn’t see what had killed him, but aside from the fact that he was standing up, he was clearly long dead.
The corpse suddenly started jerking, and water spurted from his lips. As this continued, a sort of wet gasping sound emerged and grew louder.
Finally, after the last of the water, Aspar began to recognize speech, soft around all the edges but understandable if he concentrated.
“They bring blood who come to see me,” the corpse said. “Blood and someone to speak for me. This one has almost been dead too long.”
“I had no one to bring.”
“The old man would have done.”
“But I didn’t bring him. And you’re talking to me.”
The witch shifted her monstrous head, and even without human expression, he felt her anger.
“I wish to kill you,” she said.
Aspar lifted what he held in his hand: the arrow given him by Hespero, the treasure of the Church said to be capable of killing anything.
“This was meant to slay the Briar King,” he said. “I reckon it will murder you.”
The corpse started gasping, as if for air. It took a while for Aspar to recognize laughter.
“What will you slay?” the witch asked. “This?” The massive paw reached up to touch its breast. “You might kill this.”
The trees around him suddenly creaked and groaned, and he felt the presence that had followed him since he’d entered the forest press down with incredible weight, then push through him so that he fell roughly to his knees. He tried to bring the arrow to the bow, but both were suddenly too heavy to hold.
“Everything around you,” the corpse gurgled. “Everything you see that grows or creeps or crawls in the Sarnwood—that is me. Can you put an arrow in that?”
Aspar didn’t answer, concentrating his will in a fierce effort to stand, to at least not die on his knees. Muscles trembling, groaning, he lifted first one knee, then the other, and from a squat tried to come upright. He felt as if he had ten men standing on his shoulders.
It was too much, and he collapsed again.
To his vast surprise, the pressure suddenly eased.
“I see,” the witch said. “He has touched you.”
“He?”
“Him. The Horned Lord.”
“The Briar King.”
“Yes, him. What have you come here for?”
“You sent a woorm from here with a Sefry named Fend.”
“Yes, I did that. You’ve seen my child, haven’t you? Isn’t he beautiful?”
“You gave Fend an antidote to its poison. I need that.”
“Oh. For your lover.”
Aspar frowned. “If you already knew—”
“But I didn’t. You say certain things, I see others. If you never say anything, I never see anything.”
Aspar decided to let that pass.
“Will you help me?”
The leaves rustled around him, and he heard a murder of crows cawing somewhere in the trees.
“We do not have the same purposes in this world, holter,” the Sarnwood witch told him. “I can think of no reason to help someone who is determined to slay my child, who has already slain three of my children.”
“They were trying to kill me,” Aspar said.
“That is meaningless to me,” the witch replied. “If I give you the medicine you seek, you will return to the trail of my woorm and with that arrow of yours you will try to slay him.”
“The Sefry with your child, Fend—”
“Killed your wife. Because she knew. She was going to tell you.”
“Tell me? Tell me what?”
“You will try to slay my child,” the witch repeated, but this time in a very different tone, not so much stating a fact as reflecting, musing. “He has touched you.”
Aspar let out a deep breath. “If you save Winna—”
“You shall have your antidote,” the witch interrupted. “I have changed my mind about killing you, and you will hunt my son whether I give you the cure for his poison or not. I see no reason to help you, but if you will agree you owe me a service, I see no reason to refuse you.”
“I—”
“I won’t ask you for the life of anyone you love,” the witch assured him. “I won’t ask you to spare one of my children.”
Aspar thought that over for a moment.
“That’ll do,” he said finally.
“Behind you,” the witch said, “the thorny bush with the cluster of fruit deep in the leaves. The juice of three of those should be sufficient to cleanse a man of venom. Take as many as you like.”
Still suspecting a trick, Aspar looked where he was told and found hard, blackish purple fruit about the size of wild plums. Defiantly, he popped one in his mouth.