3
Country Known and Strange
Anne’s mount snuffled in fear as they approached yet another wall of black thorns wound so thickly through the trees as to deny entrance to anything larger than a vole.
“Hush,” Anne said, patting the beast’s neck. It flinched and shied from her touch.
“Be nice.” Anne sighed. “I’ll give you a name, all right? What’s a good name?”
Mercenjoy, a little voice in her seemed to titter, and for an instant she felt so dizzy, she feared she might fall off.
“No, then, not Mercenjoy,” she said, more to herself than to the horse. That was the name of the Dark Knight’s mount in the phay stories, she remembered, and it meant “Murder-Steed.”
“You belonged to a bad man,” she said as reassuringly as possible, “but you aren’t a bad horse. Let’s see, I think I’ll call you Prespine, for the saint of the labyrinth. She found her way out of her maze—now you’ll help me find our way out of this one.”
Even as she said it, Anne remembered a day that now seemed long ago, a day when her cares had been relatively simple ones and she’d been at her sister’s birthday party. There had been a labyrinth there, grown of flowers and vines, but in a moment she’d found herself in another maze, in a strange place with no shadows, and since then nothing had been simple.
Anne hadn’t wanted to get up, to catch the horse and ride. She’d wanted to stay huddled in the roots of the tree until someone came to help her or until it didn’t matter anymore.
But fear had driven her up—fear that if she stayed in one place for long, something worse than death would catch up with her.
She shuddered as a change in the wind brought a stench from the black briars, a smell that reminded her of spiders, though she couldn’t recall ever having actually smelled a spider. The strange growth was somehow like spiders, too. The vines and leaves glistened with the promise of venom.
She turned Prespine, following the thorns but keeping a respectable distance from them. Far off to her left, she thought she heard a sort of howling for a time, but as quickly as it began, it was gone.
The sun passed noon, then continued on toward its night home in the wood beyond the world. Anne imagined that the country where the sun slept couldn’t be any stranger or more terrible than this place. The thorns seemed almost to be guiding her, herding her toward some destination she almost certainly did not desire to visit.
As the sky darkened, she also began to feel something behind her, and she knew she had been right back at the tree. Something was coming for her. It began as small as an insect, but it grew, with its many eyes fastened greedily on her back.
When she turned, however, no matter how quickly, it was gone.
She’d played this game as a child, as most children do. She and Austra had pretended the dread Scaos was after them, a monster so terrible that they could not look at it without being turned to stone. Alone, she had imagined a ghost walking behind her, sometimes at the corner of her vision but never there when she turned to confront it. Sometimes it frightened her, sometimes it delighted her, and usually both. Fear that one had under control had a certain delicate flavor.
This fear was not under her control. It did not taste good at all.
And it only grew more substantial. The unseen fingers clutched ever closer to her shoulder, and when she spun about, there was something, like the stain the bright sun leaves beneath the eyelids. The air seemed to clot thickly around her, the trees to bend wearily earthward.
Something had followed her back. But back from where? Where was that place of dark waters?
She had journeyed beyond the world before, or at least beyond her part of it. Most often she had been to the place of the Faiths, which was sometimes a forest, sometimes a glen, sometimes a highland meadow. Once she had taken Austra there with her to escape some murderous knights.
The place she had gone with the dying man was different. Had it been the land of the dead or only the borderlands? She remembered that the land of the dead was supposed to have two rivers—though she couldn’t remember why—but here there had been more than two; there had been thousands.
And the Briar King. He had been shackled by those waters, or at least they were trying to bind him. What did that mean? And who was he?
He had communicated something to her, not with words, but his desire had been clear nonetheless. How did he even know who she was?
The face of the demon-woman flashed through her memory, and terror tremored freshly through her. Was that who followed her? She remembered the Faiths telling her that the law of death had been broken, whatever that meant. Had she committed some crime against the saints and brought death after her?
Red-gold sun suddenly spilled like a waterfall through the upper branches, and with terrible relief she suddenly realized that the briars had ended. Not much farther ahead the trees thinned to nothing as well, giving way to a sweeping, endless field of yellowed grass. With a mixed shout of fear and triumph, she spurred Prespine out into the open and felt the creeping presence behind her diminish, slinking back into the thorn shadows where it was comfortable.
Tears sprang in Anne’s eyes as her hood fell away and the wind raked through her breviated hair. The sun was just above the horizon, an orange eye half-lidded by clouds bruised upon a golden west. The glorious color faded into a vesperine heaven so dark blue, she almost imagined that it was water, that she could swim up into and hide in its depths with its odd bright fish and be safe far above the world.
The clouds were mostly gone, the snow had stopped, and everything seemed better. But until the forest was a thinning line behind her, Anne kept Prespine at a run. Then she brought her to a walk and patted the mare’s neck, feeling the great pulse beating there, nearly in time with her own.
It was still cold; indeed, it felt colder than when the snow had been falling.
Where was she? Anne swept her gaze about the unfamiliar landscape, trying to conjure up some sort of bearings. She never had paid much attention to the maps her tutors had shown her when she was younger. She’d been regretting that for several months now.
The sunset marked the west, of course. The plain sloped gradually down from the forest, so she could see for some distance. In the east, the dusk glimmered on a broad river across which, far away, she could see the black line of more trees. The river curved north and vanished into the horizon.
Nearer, she happily made out the spire of what must be a bell tower. The landscape in that direction seemed pimpled with tiny hills, which after a moment she realized must be haystacks.
She paused for a long moment, watching the distant signs of civilization, her feelings clouding a bit. A town meant people, and people meant food, shelter, warmth, companionship. It could also mean danger; the man who had attacked her—he must have attacked her—had come from somewhere. This was the first place she had seen that might explain him.
And where were Austra and the rest? Behind her, in front of her—or dead?
She took a deep breath, trying to release the tension in her shoulders.
She had been talking to Cazio, and everything had been fine. Then she had been alone with a dying man. The most logical assumption was that somehow he had abducted her, but why couldn’t she remember how it had happened?
Even trying to think about it brought a sudden panic that threatened to cloud all other thoughts from her mind.
She pushed that away and concentrated on the present. If her friends were alive, they were searching for her. If they were not, then she was alone.
Could she survive a night on the plain by herself? Maybe, maybe not. It depended on how cold it got. Prespine’s saddlebags contained a bit of bread and dried meat but nothing more. She had watched Cazio and z’Acatto start fires, but she hadn’t seen anything that resembled a tinder-box in the dead man’s possessions.