“If this is poison,” he said, “I’ll find out now.”
“As you wish,” the witch said.
The fruit had a sharp, acidic bite with a bit of a putrid aftertaste, but he felt no immediate ill effects.
“What are you?” he asked.
Again the corpse laughed. “Old,” she replied.
“The black thorns. Are they your children, too?”
“My children are being born everywhere now,” she said. “But yes.”
“They’re destroying the King’s Forest.”
“Oh, how sad,” she snarled. “My forest was destroyed long ago. What you see here is all that remains. The King’s Forest is a stand of seedlings. Its time has come.”
“Why? Why do you hate it?”
“I don’t hate it,” the witch said. “But I am like a season, Aspar White. When it is time for me, I arrive. I’ve nothing to do with the order of the seasons, though. Do you understand?”
“No,” Aspar replied.
“Nor do I, really,” the witch replied. “Go now. In two days your girl will be dead, and all of this will have been for nothing.”
“But can you see? Will I save her?”
“I see no such thing,” the witch replied. “I only tell you to make haste.”
Aspar took as much of the fruit as his saddlebag would hold, fed a handful to Ogre, and left the Sarnwood.
12
Sister Pale
Sister Pale led Stephen through the night without benefit of a torch. She somehow knew where she was going and kept one hand clasped firmly on his. It was a peculiar sensation, that contact of flesh against flesh with a strange woman. He hadn’t held the hands of many women: his mother’s, of course, and his older sisters.
Embarrassingly this recalled that; he felt very much the little boy, protected from things he did not understand by the caring grip of fingers in his own. But because this wasn’t his mother or his sister, it brought out other, more adult feelings that didn’t contrast very well with the childish ones. He found himself trying to translate the pressure of her fingers, the shift of grip from intertwined digits to clapped palms into some sort of meaningful cipher, which of course it wasn’t. She just wanted him to keep up with her.
He didn’t know what she looked like, but he teased himself with an image based on the shadowed glimpses he’d gotten. It was only after a bell or so that he realized that the image was that of Winna, almost precisely.
They weren’t alone on the trail; he heard the snuffling of her dogs moving around them, and once one of them nosed into his free hand. He wondered what faneway the sister had walked that allowed her to move in such utter darkness; even his own saint-blessed senses didn’t allow for that.
The moon finally rose; it was half-gone and a strange, astringent yellow Stephen had never quite seen before. Its light revealed a little more of his companion and surroundings: the hood and back of her paida, jagged lines of landscape that seemed impossibly far above them, the silhouettes of the dogs.
Neither of them had spoken since leaving the town through a secreted gate Stephen was certain he could never find again. He’d been concentrating too closely on not stumbling, on straining for sounds of pursuit, and on the hand holding his. But finally the muffled sounds of Demsted faded into the winds south quarter, and he couldn’t make out any hoofbeats or footsteps pursuing them.
“Where are we going?” he whispered.
“A place I know,” she answered unhelpfully. “We’ll find mounts there.”
“Why are you helping me?” he asked bluntly.
“Sacritor Hespero—the man you know as the praifec—he’s your enemy. Did you know that?”
“I know it well,” Stephen said. “I just wasn’t certain he knew it.”
“He knows,” Pale replied. “Did you think it a coincidence that he arrived shortly before you did? He’s been waiting for you.”
“But how could he know I was coming here? That doesn’t make sense unless…” He allowed the words to trail off.
Unless the praifec and Fratrex Pell were in league.
Pale seemed to pluck the thought from his mind.
“You weren’t betrayed by whoever sent you,” she told him. “At least, that isn’t required to explain why he’s here. He may not have even known you were the one who was coming.”
“I don’t understand.”
I suppose you wouldn’t,” she said. “You see, before he was praifec in Crotheny, Hespero was sacritor in Demsted for many years. We liked him at first; he was wise, caring, and very smart. He used Church funds to make improvements in the village. Among other things, he expanded the temple a bit to include a ward for the care of aged persons with no kin to tend them. The elders tried to stop him from doing that.”
“Why? It seems a worthy endeavor.”
“Nor would the elders disagree. It was the location they objected to. To build the addition, he broke down an old part of the temple, a part that had once been the sanctuary of the older pagan temple that was here before. And he found something there, something our forefathers hid instead of destroying. The Ghrand Ateiiz.”
“Book… ah, returning?”
She squeezed his hand in what felt like affection, and he nearly swallowed his tongue.
“The Book of Return,” she corrected. “After he found it, Hespero changed. He became much more distant. He still managed the attishmanaged it better than ever, in fact—but his love for us seemed forgotten. He took to long trips into the mountains, and his guides came back changed with fear. They would not speak of what had happened or even where they went. Eventually he tired of that and focused all his energies on advancing his rank in the Church.
“When he was promoted and finally left, we were relieved, but we shouldn’t have been. Now the resacaratum is upon us, and I fear he will hang everyone in Demsted.”
“Are you all heretics?” Stephen asked.
“In a way, yes,” she replied with surprising frankness. “We understand the teachings of the Church a little differently than most others.”
“Because your church was founded by a Revesturi?”
She laughed quietly.
“Brother Kauron did not found our Church. Because he was Revesturi, he saw that we already followed the saints in our own way. He merely helped us shape our outward image so that when the Church finally came, they would not burn us as heretics. He helped us preserve our old ways. He cherished them, and he cherished us.”
“So the Book of Return …”
“Is about Kauron’s return. Or, more properly, the coming of his heir.”
“Heir? Heir to what?”
“I don’t know. None of us have ever seen the book. We thought Kauron took it with him. Our traditions were passed down mouth to ear, and we know its writings foretold these times. That much has been made clear by the things that have come to pass. And we know that Kauron’s one heir is destined to come, driven by a serpent into the mountains. The one who comes will speak with many tongues, and it is he who will find the Alq.”
“The Alq?”
“It means a sort of holy place,” she explained. “A throne or a seat of power. We’ve debated endlessly whether it is a physical place or a position, like that of sacritor. Whichever is true, it was fated to remain hidden until the day the one returned.
“And that one seems to be you. We knew you were coming, and we have only the scraps of knowledge remembered from the Book of Return. Hespero has the book itself, so his knowledge of the signs is more precise. He was waiting for you because he knew you could lead him to the Alq.”
“Then all he need do is follow us,” Stephen said, instinctively glancing over his shoulder into the darkness.
“True. But this way we have a chance of arriving ahead of him and preventing him from becoming the heir.”