Observations of the quaint and curious holter-beast—in the act of procreation, this ordinarily closemouthed creature vocalizes extraordinarily, though only in low tones. He makes rhymes of his lover’s name—mina-Winna, fenna-Winna, and the inevitable winna-Winna. He calls her by other silly appellations of his own invention, notwithstanding that Winna is already a rather silly name.
There’s someone new, a Sefry. Winna doesn’t like her because Aspar does, though he denies it every way he can. I wonder if she looks like his wife, the dead one?
They’re taking me to the next faneway, which for them is clever. I wonder what will happen there? The first was very strange, and I am hard put to explain why it affected me the way it did. It was consecrated to one of the damned saints, she who was known as the queen of demons. Perhaps Decmanis is punishing me for stepping on her faneway, and yet somehow that doesn’t feel right. The only other possibility that occurs is that she is somehow also an aspect of Saint Decmanis, which would be very interesting indeed, not to mention heretical.
Can saints be heretics?
We’re approaching the fane. I can feel it like a fire.
Aspar surveyed the clearing and the mound. The bodies were still there, and none of them were moving. Of the Briar King and his hunt there was no sign, save the dead bodies of slinders and the monks they had killed.
“Oh, saints,” Winna said when she saw the carnage.
“Weak stomach?” Leshya asked.
“I’ve seen bodies like this before,” Winna said. “But I don’t have to pretend I like it.”
“No, you don’t,” the Sefry agreed.
“So what do we do now?” Winna asked.
Aspar shrugged and dismounted. “Take Stephen up on the mound, I reckon. See what happens.”
“Are you quite certain this is the wise thing to do?” Leshya asked.
“No,” Aspar answered shortly.
Stepping carefully, they picked their way around where the bodies were thickest and up to the top of the sedos. Aspar laid Stephen out in the very middle.
As he’d more or less expected, nothing happened.
“Well, it was worth a try,” he muttered. “You three watch him. I’m going to have a better look around.”
Aspar walked back down through the carnage, feeling tired, angry at himself for having nursed such a forlorn hope. People died. He knew that by now, didn’t he? He used to be easy about it.
The slinders looked like people now, their faces relaxed in death. They could have come from any village around the King’s Forest. He was thankful that he didn’t see anyone he knew.
After a time he wandered to the edge of the forest, and before he realized it found himself standing beneath the gnarled branches of the naubagm and the strands of rotted rope that hung from them. The earth had drunk a lot of blood in this place. It had drunk his mother’s blood.
He’d never been told what brought her here. His father and foster mother rarely spoke of her, and when they did it was in hushed tones, and they made the sign against evil. Then they had died, and he’d ended up with Jesp.
A raven landed on the uppermost branch of the tree. Farther above, he saw the black silhouette of an eagle against the clouds. He took a deep breath and felt the land roll away from him, getting bigger, stretching out its bones of stone and sinews of root. He smelled the age and the life of it, and for the first time in a long while felt a kind of peaceful determination.
I’ll fix this, he silently promised the trees.
“I’ll fix this.” It was the first thing Jesp had said when she found him. He’d been running and bleeding for a day, the forest turned to shadow around him. When he finally fell, he’d dreamed he was still running, but now and then he woke and knew he was lying in the reeds of some marsh, half covered in water. He’d been awake when he heard her coming, and tried to reach for his knife, but he didn’t have the strength to move. Seven winters old, he’d been. He still remembered the way his breath whistled, because he’d kept forgetting that’s what it was, kept thinking it was some sort of bird he’d never heard of.
Then he’d seen Jesp’s face, that ancient, pale Sefry face. She stood there for what seemed a long time, while he tried to talk, and then she knelt down and touched his face with her bony fingers.
“I’ll fix this,” she said. “I’ll fix you up, child-of-the-Naubagm.”
How she knew that about him, she never said. But she raised him, and filled him with Sefry nonsense, and she died.
He missed her. And now that he knew that Sefry stories weren’t all nonsense, he desperately wished he could talk to her again. He wished he’d paid more attention when she was alive. And maybe he wished that he’d thanked her, at least once.
But that was done.
He sighed and cracked his neck.
A few kingsyards north, something ran out of the forest, moving faster than a deer.
It was a man, dressed in the habit of one of the monks. He had a bow, and he was making straight for the sedos, where Aspar could still see the others.
With a silent curse, Aspar pulled a shaft from his quiver, set it to the string, and let it go.
The monk must have seen the motion from the corner of his eye—even as the arrow arced toward him, he dropped into a sudden crouch and whirled, firing at Aspar.
Aspar’s shot missed by a thumb’s breadth; the monk’s missed Aspar by just twice that.
Aspar stepped behind the Naubagm as the monk fitted and fired another arrow. It struck quivering into the ancient tree.
The monk turned again and sprinted toward the mound and out of range. Cursing—and at a much slower pace than his adversary—Aspar ran after him.
The monk did a strange, twisting dance, and Aspar realized that Ehawk and Leshya were firing at him now. Both missed, and before either could draw new arrows, the churchman shot back. Aspar watched in throat-choking helplessness as Ehawk jerked weirdly and fell. Winna was crouching, but still far too large a target.
Leshya fired again and again without success.
The monk’s dodging gave Aspar a chance to get back in range, and he drew back to shoot, still running.
His bowstring snapped with a hollow thud.
He drew his ax, snarling.
Leshya drew and shot. This time the monk had to dodge so violently that he stumbled, but he rolled and came back up, facing Aspar.
Aspar threw the ax and sidestepped. The churchman’s shaft sang through empty air, but the ax also missed.
The monk suddenly jogged to the right, and Aspar grimly understood he had no intention of closing for close combat. He’d just keep running and shooting until they were all dead or he was out of arrows.
He reached into his haversack, found his extra sinew, pulled it out to restring the bow. An arrow struck his boiled-leather cuirass with a thump, and he cursed and dropped to the ground. He finished stringing his bow. Another arrow plowed the soil right in front of his nose, and now the monk was hurtling toward him again, ignoring Leshya.
Aspar nocked the arrow to his string, the bow turned flat to the ground. It was an awkward pull, and he knew the other man would have one more shot before he got his.
But the monk stumbled, an arrow suddenly standing in his thigh. He shouted, turned, and loosed his dart toward the mound, but another arrow hit him in the center of the chest, and he sat down, hard. Aspar fired, hitting him in the right collarbone, and the fellow pitched over, howling.
Leshya was on him almost immediately, kicking the bow from his hands.
“Don’t kill him,” a familiar voice shouted.
Aspar looked toward the mound. Stephen stood there, holding Ehawk’s bow. Winna was running toward him, and nearly barreled him over with a hug.
Aspar couldn’t stop the smile from raising his lips. It felt too good, seeing Stephen standing there.
“Sceat,” he murmured. “It worked.”
“Keep him alive,” he told Leshya, waving at the monk.