The rest—greffyns, the Briar King, and the like—that part he didn’t trust.
Though Symen’s speculations were less than reliable, it was something in Aspar himself that worried him. The night before, on the road when he’d been trying to scare the young priest-to-be, he’d almost frightened himself, almost imagined that the wild soul-hunt had really fallen upon them—despite that he had always known, in his head, that it was merely Symen and his dogs.
Something was out there, and he didn’t know what. For all his babbling about greffyns and Briar Kings, neither did Symen. And that was the worrisome thing, the not knowing.
Ogre was skittish, his ears pricking all of the time, and twice shying—Ogre, shying—at nothing at all.
And so, by degrees, Aspar prepared himself for what he would find on Taff Creek.
The bodies lay like a flight of birds broken by some strange wind, scattered around their unfinished nests. He tied his horses a safe distance away and went on foot among them.
They had been dead for days, of course. Their flesh had gone black and purple, and their staring eyes had sunk into their heads, as if they were really carved from pumpkins, then left too long in the sun. That shouldn’t have been. The ravens should have picked their eyes long ago. There should be worms, and the stink of putrefaction.
Instead he smelled only autumn leaves.
It was as Symen had described; they had simply dropped dead. Which might mean …
He looked around.
Seothen—sedoi, the priestling had called them—were usually on high ground, but not always. If the church built fanes on them, there were paths, but as the boy said, few of the sedoi in the King’s Forest were used by the church, though until last night Aspar had never thought to wonder why. He’d only known that the church didn’t bother with most of them.
Somebody was bothering with them, though.
He found it on a little hillock, not far from the stream, aided by its smell of rotting flesh and the croaking of ravens. The fane itself was almost gone, a few rocks still holding the shape of an ancient wall and an altar stone. But on the trees encircling it, the bodies of men, women, and children had been nailed up by the hands and feet. They had been split open from sternum to crotch and their intestines pulled like ropes about the fane, forming a sort of enclosure. The big muscles of their arms and legs had been flayed open, too.
This near, the smell was almost enough to make him retch. Unlike those in the field, these corpses were rotting, and the trees were full of man-fatted corbies. A few bodies had already parted from their limbs, upsetting the unholy architecture of the murderers.
Down the hill, Ogre whinnied, then snorted. Aspar recognized the tone and, turning his back on the ghastly tableau, hurried back.
He stopped still as he neared the horses and saw, in the tangle by the stream, an eye the size of a saucer.
The rest of it was all guessing, lost in the mosaic shadows of the forest. But it was watching him, of that he was certain. And it was big, big enough to have made the print he had seen by Edwin’s Brooh. Bigger than Ogre.
He exhaled softly, and as he inhaled again, he reached for the quiver on his back, pinched one of the black-fletched arrows in three callus-hardened fingers, and drew it out. He lay it on his bow.
The eye shifted, and a few leaves stirred. He saw a beak, black and curving and sharp, and wondered if he was dead already, just from having caught its gaze.
He couldn’t remember that much about greffyns. They didn’t exist, and Aspar White had never paid much attention to things that didn’t exist. But there it was. And it had killed the squatters without touching them. Somehow.
Why was it still here? Or had it gone and returned?
He brought the weapon up, as the greffyn nosed into the clearing.
Its head was vaguely eaglelike, as the old stories told, though it was flatter than that. It had no feathers, but was scaled in black and dark, iridescent green. A mane of what looked like coarse hair began at its neck. Its foreparts were thickly muscled, ox-size but sinuous. It moved like a bird, jerky, but fast and sure. He would get one shot. He doubted very much that it would be enough.
He aimed for the eye.
The greffyn cocked its head, and he saw something in it then he had never seen in an animal. Consideration, calculation.
Disdain.
He drew the bow. “Come on, then, you mikel rooster,” he growled. “Come or go, it makes no never mind to me, just do one or the other.”
It crouched, like a cat preparing to spring. Everything went still. The bowstring cut into his fingers, and the scent of the resin on it tickled his nose. He smelled leaf mold and chestnut blossoms and woodsmoke—and it. Animal, yes, but also something like rain hitting the hot rocks around a campfire.
It uncoiled like a snake striking, bounding up and out, a blur. Despite its size, it was the fastest living thing he had ever seen. It tore across the meadow at a right angle to him, south. In two eye blinks it was gone.
He stood for a long moment, marveling, wondering if he could have hit it, glad enough that it hadn’t come down to that.
Glad that its gaze wasn’t enough to kill.
Then his feet wobbled out from under him. The forest floor came up to smack his face, and he thought he heard Dirty Jesp somewhere, laughing her silky, condescending laugh.
He awoke to fingers brushing his face and a soft murmuring.
He reached for his dirk. Or tried to—his hand didn’t move.
I’m tied up, he thought. Or nailed to a tree.
But then he opened his eyes and saw Winna, the hostler’s daughter from back in Colbaely.
“What?” he mumbled. His lips felt thick.
“Did you touch one of them?” she asked. “I can’t find any sign, but—”
“Where am I?”
“Where I found you, near the Taff, right by where all that poor boy’s kin lie dead. Did you touch one of the bodies?”
“No.”
“What’s wrong with you, then?”
I saw a greffyn. “I don’t know,” he told her. He could move his hands now, a little. They were tingling.
“The boy died,” she said. “That purple hand of his—his whole arm turned black. It wasn’t a bruise. It started after he tried to shake his mother awake.”
“I didn’t touch any of them. Can you help me sit up?”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
She held up her own hands, showing angry red marks on the fingers and palms. “I got this from washing his wounds. It hurt that night, but I gave it no mind. By midday after you left, I was blistered.”
Cold seeped up Aspar’s back as he remembered Symen’s missing fingers. “We’ll need to find you a leic,” he said.
Winna shook her head. “I saw Mother Cilth. She gave me an ointment and told me the poison was too weak to do me real harm.” She paused. “She also told me you needed me.”
He started to deny that last, but a wave of dizziness overcame him.
Winna got around behind him, reached her small arms up under his, and lifted. He felt weak, but between the two of them, they managed to get him scooted against a tree so he could stay up.
She felt soft, and she smelled good. Clean.
“I thought you were dead,” she said, voice low.
“You followed me here?”
“No, you great fool, I conjured you back to Colbaely with my alvish broom-handle. Yes, of course I followed you. I was afraid you would touch the bodies, and catch whatever shine-craft killed them.”
He looked up at her. “Sceat. You followed me here alone? Do you know how dangerous that was? Even on a good day, there’s cutthroats and beasts, but now—wasn’t it you warning me that the forest is different now?”