That night, after the scolding, when the candles went dark and she and Austra lay on their broad feather bed, Anne pinched Austra’s arm. Not hard enough to hurt, but almost.
“Ow!” Austra complained. “Why did you do that?”
“If you ever tell what we found today,” Anne warned, “I’ll pinch you harder!”
“I said I wouldn’t tell.”
“Swear it. Swear it by your mother and father.”
Austra was quiet for a moment. “They’re dead,” she whispered.
“All the better. The dead are better at hearing promises than the living, my father always says.”
“Don’t make me,” Austra pleaded. She sounded sad, almost as if she was going to start crying.
“Never mind,” Anne said. “I’m sorry. I’ll think of something else for you to swear by tomorrow. All right?”
“All right,” Austra said.
“Good night, Austra. May the Black Mary stay away.”
“Good night,” Austra replied. And soon her breathing indicated she was asleep.
But Anne couldn’t sleep. Her head filled with stories, heroic tales of the great war with the Scaosen, demons, and of Virgenya Dare. And she thought of that dark crack in the coffin, the faint sigh she was sure she had heard. She nursed her secret, her prize, and finally, smiling, drifted into dreams of darkling fields and brooding forests.
Part I
The Coming of the Greffyn
The year 2,223 of Everon
The month of Terthmen
The blood of regals shall run like a river.
So drowndeth the world.
1
The Holter
Aspar White smelled murder. Its scent was like a handful of autumn leaves, crisped by the first frost and crushed in the palm.
Dirty Jesp, the Sefry woman who had raised him, told him once that his peculiar sense came from having been born of a dying mother below the gallows where the Raver took his sacrifices. But Jesp made her living as a liar, and the why didn’t matter anyway. All Aspar cared about was that his nose was usually right. Someone was about to kill someone else, or try.
Aspar had just walked into the Sow’s Teat after a week of hard going in the Walham Foothills. His muscles burned with fatigue, his mouth was grittier than sand, and for days he had been dreaming of the cool, dark, honeyed sweetness of stout. He’d had just one sip, one moment of it dancing on his tongue, one kiss of foam on his lips, when the scent came and ruined the taste.
With a sigh, he set the grainy earthenware mug on the pitted oak of his table and looked around the dark, crowded interior of the tavern, one hand straying to the planished bone grip of his dirk, wondering where death was coming from and where it was going.
He saw only the usual crowd—charcoal burners mostly, their faces smudged black by their trade, joking and laughing as they drank away the taste of soot on their tongues. Nearer the door, which had been propped open to let in the evening air, Loh—the miller’s boy, in his clean, lace-trimmed shirt— gestured grandly with his mug, and his friends hooted as he drained the whole thing in one long draught. Four Hornladh merchants in checkered doublets and red hose stood near the hearth, where a spitted boar dripped sizzling into the coals, and around them gathered a clump of youths, faces eager and ruddy in the firelight, begging stories about the wide world beyond their tiny village of Colbaely.
Nothing that even looked like a brawl about to start. Aspar picked up his mug again. Maybe the beer was a little off, today.
But then he saw where murder was coming from. It came in through the open door, along with the first tentative trilling of whippoorwills and a faint, damp promise of rain.
He was just a boy, maybe fifteen. Not from Colbaely, Aspar knew for sure, and probably not even from the Greffy of Holtmarh. The newcomer swept a desperate, hurried gaze around the room, squinting, trying to adjust his eyes to the light, clearly searching for someone.
Then he saw Aspar, alone at his table, and lurched toward him. The young fellow was clad in brain-tanned elkskin breeches and a shirt of homespun that had seen better days. His brown hair was matted, caked with mud, and full of leaves. Aspar saw the apple in his throat bobble convulsively as he pulled a rather large sword from a sheath on his back and quickened his pace.
Aspar took another pull on his beer and sighed. It tasted worse than the last. In the sudden silence, the boy’s buskins swish-swished on the slate-tiled floor.
“You’re the holter,” the boy said in a thick Almannish accent. “The kongsman.”
“I’m the king’s forester,” Aspar agreed. “It’s easily known, for I wear his colors. I’ll be Aspar White. And you’d be?…”
“H’am the man is going to slooter you,” the boy said.
Aspar lifted his head just slightly, so he was looking at the lad with one eye. He held the sword clumsily. “Why?” he asked.
“You know why.”
“No. If I knew why, I never would have asked.”
“You know saint-buggering well—tho ya theen manns slootered meen kon—”
“Speak the king’s tongue, boy.”
“Grim take the king!” the boy shouted. “It’s not his forest!”
“Well, you’ll have to take that up with him. He thinks it is, you know, and he’s the king.”
“I mean to. Right after I take it up with you. This goes all the way back to Eslen before h’am done. But it starts here with you, murtherer.”
Aspar sighed. He could hear it in the young man’s voice, see it in the set of his shoulders. No use talking anymore. He stood quickly, stepped inside the sword point, and slammed his beer mug against the side of the boy’s head. The kiln-fired clay cracked and the fellow screamed, dropping his weapon and clutching his split ear. Aspar calmly yanked out his long dirk, grabbed the boy by the collar, hauled him up easily with one large, callused hand, and pushed him down roughly onto the bench across the table from where he had been sitting.
The boy stared defiantly at him through a mask of pain and blood. The hand holding the side of his head was shiny and dark in the dim light.
“You all see!” the boy croaked. “Witness, all! He’ll murther me like he slootered mine fam’ly.”
“Boy, just calm down,” Aspar snapped. He picked up the sword and set it next to him on his bench, with the table between it and the boy. He kept his own dirk out.
“Armann, bring me another beer.”
“Y’just busted one of my mugs!” the hostler shouted, his nearly round face beet-red.
“Bring it or I’ll bust something else.”
Some of the charmen laughed at that, and then most of the rest of them joined in. The chatter started up again.
Aspar watched the boy while he waited for the beer. The lad’s fingers were trembling, and he couldn’t look up. His courage seemed to be leaking out of him with his blood.
That was often the case, Aspar found. Bleed a man a little, and he grew less heroic.
“What happened to your family, boy?”
“As eft you don’t know.”
“You want another cuff ? Grim eat you, but I’ll beat you till you come out with it. I don’t take to threats, and I don’t take to being called a killer unless I did the killing. And in the end I don’t care what did ’r didn’t happen to a bunch of squatters— except that if something ill happened in the forest, that’s my job, to know about it, y’see? Because if I don’t care about you, I care about the forest, and about the king’s justice. So spell me it!”