“Mother Gastya called the greffyn that,” Winna supplied.
Leshya’s eyes went round. “You spoke to Mother Gastya?” she said, clearly surprised. “I thought she was dead.”
Aspar remembered his last sight of the old woman, how she seemed to be nothing but bone. “Maybe she was,” Aspar said. “But that’s not far nor near.”
Leshya acquiesced to that with a twist of her mouth. “There is no true Sefry language,” she clarified. “We abandoned it long ago. Now we speak whatever the Mannish around us do, but we keep old words, too. Sedhmhari is an old word. It means ‘demon of the sedos.’ The greffyn, utin, and nicwer are all sedhmhari.”
“They’re connected to the sedoi?” Stephen asked.
“Surely you knew that,” Leshya said. “The greffyn was walking the sedoi when you first saw it.”
“Yah,” Aspar said. “It’s how the churchmen were finding them.”
“But you’re implying a deeper connection,” Stephen persisted.
“Yes,” Leshya said. “They are spawned by the power of the sedoi, nourished by them. In a sense, they are distillations of the sedos power.”
Stephen shook his head. “That doesn’t make sense. That would make them distillations of the saints themselves.”
“No,” Leshya said carefully, “that would make the saints distillations of the sedos power, just as the sedhmhari are.”
Aspar almost laughed at the way Stephen’s jaw dropped. For an instant he seemed the same naive boy he had met on the King’s Road, months ago.
“That’s heresy,” he finally said.
“Yes,” Leshya said dryly. “And wouldn’t it be terrible to contradict a church that’s sacrificing children to feed the dark saints? I’m very ashamed.”
“Yet—” Stephen didn’t finish his thought, but his expression grew ever more furiously thoughtful.
“It seems to me most of this is moot, at the moment,” Winna interrupted. “What matters is finding that last sedos, that Bent Hill.”
“She’s right,” Aspar concurred. “If we don’t have time to kill the nicwer, we don’t have time for you two to stand here and go all bookish for a nineday.”
Stephen reluctantly conceded that with a nod. “I’ve looked on my maps,” he said, “but I don’t see anything marked that looks at all like Khrwbh Khrwkh. Logic dictates that it has to be to the east.” He knelt and flattened the map on the ground so they could all view it.
“Why?” Aspar asked.
“We know the order of the faneways from the invocation, and we know where the first one was. These others have been leading steadily east. Most faneways fall in lines or arcs that tend to be regular.”
“Wait,” Winna said. “What about the faneway they meant to sacrifice me at? That was near Cal Azroth, and so would be north.”
Stephen shook his head. “They did a different ritual there, not the same thing at all. That wasn’t part of this faneway, but a sedos used for the single purpose of possessing the queen’s guards. No, this faneway goes east.”
Aspar watched as Stephen’s index finger traced a shallow curve, across what must be the Daw River and into the plains near where Dunmrogh was located now.
“That’s the Daw there, and the Saint Sefodh River there?” Aspar asked.
“Yes,” Stephen replied.
“The forest extended that far—all the way into Hornladh? It’s no wonder the Briar King is angry. The forest is half the size it was.”
“A lot of it was destroyed in the Warlock Wars,” Stephen said. “The Briar King can hardly hold that against us.”
Leshya snorted. “Of course he can. He doesn’t care which particular Mannishen destroyed his forest, only that it was destroyed.”
“There’s still a stand of ironoaks in Hornladh,” Aspar said. “I passed through there on my way to Paldh once. Had a funny name—Prethsorucaldh.”
“Prethsorucaldh,” Stephen repeated. “That is a strange name.”
“I don’t speak much Hornish,” Aspar admitted.
“The ending, caldh, just means ‘forest,’” Stephen said. “Preth means a ‘copse,’ like a copse of trees. Soru, I think, means a ‘louse’ or ‘worm’ or something like that.”
“Copse-Worm-Wood?” Leshya said. “That doesn’t make a lot of sense. Why would they call it a copse and a forest in the same name?”
Stephen nodded. “Doesn’t make a lot of sense, which means it probably wasn’t originally a Hornish name. It was something that sounded like Prethsoru, so over time they substituted words that made sense to them.”
“What do you mean?” Leshya asked, sounding as lost as Aspar felt.
“Like this place, Whitraff,” Stephen explained. “In Oostish, it means ‘White Town,’ but we know from this map that the original name was Vhydhrabh, which meant ‘Huskwood,’ corrupted through Vitellian to ‘Vitraf.’ When Oostish speakers settled here, they heard the name and thought it meant White Town, and so it stuck. You see?”
“This is hurting my head,” Aspar said. “Is there any point to this?”
“Preth-whatever doesn’t sound anything like Khrwbh Khrwkh,” Winna tentatively pointed out. “At least not to me it doesn’t.”
“No, nothing like it at all,” Stephen mused. “But it reminds me . . .” He paused. “The map is Vitellian, made just as the Hegemony was taking control of this territory. Most of the names on it were originally Allotersian or Vadhüan. But later on, there must have been Vitellian names for towns and landmarks.”
“Do you have another map from later on?” Leshya asked.
“No, not of that region,” Stephen told her. “And I still don’t see how Khrwbh . . .” He stopped again and seemed to stare off into the weird. It worried Aspar, sometimes, how quickly and oddly Stephen’s mind worked, ever since he walked the faneway of Decmanis. Not that it hadn’t worked strangely to start with.
“That’s it,” Stephen murmured. “It has to be.”
“What’s what?” Aspar asked.
“They translated it.”
“Translated what?”
“Names of places are funny,” Stephen said, his voice growing more excited—as it always did when he’d figured something out. “Sometimes, when a new people with a new language come along, they just keep the old name, not knowing what it means. Sometimes they bend it so it does mean something, as with Whitraff. And sometimes, when they do know what the old name means, they translate it into their own tongue. Ehawk, what do your people call the King’s Forest?”
“Yonilhoamalho,” the boy replied.
“Which means?” Stephen pressed.
“The King’s Forest,” Ehawk responded.
“Exactly. In the language of the Warlock kings, it was named Khadath Rekhuz. The Hegemony called it Lovs Regatureis, and during the Lierish Regency it was Cheldet de Rey. In Oostish it’s Holt af sa Kongh, and when Virgenyan became the king’s tongue we started calling it the King’s Forest. But the meaning remains unbroken after a thousand years, you see?”
“All that to spell what?” Aspar asked, a little put off that he still didn’t see where this was going, and knowing he was going to feel stupid when Stephen reached his conclusion.
“I think Prethsoru came from Vitellian Persos Urus,” Stephen replied triumphantly.
“Hurrah,” Aspar said. “What the sceat does that mean?”
“Bent Hill,” Stephen rejoined, too smugly. “Do you follow me now?”
“Sceat, no, I didn’t follow any of that,” Aspar shot back. “It’s a bridge made of mist.”