The Briar King (37 page)

Desmond growled up something like a laugh. “I never could,” he replied.

“Why did you steal my work?”

“Why not?”

“But you gave it to the fratrex.”

“Yes. Believe what you might about me, Brother Stephen, but I do serve my order.” His voice dropped even lower. “Very well I serve it.”

Stephen nodded. “Well, you've done me a favor. I didn't know if I would have the courage.”

“What do you mean?”

Stephen suddenly wished he could see Brother Desmond's eyes. For the first time since they had met, the other man sounded puzzled.

“You know,” Stephen said. “You know very well I won't be walking any fanes after the fratrex reads what I wrote and realizes what I've done.”

“You did what he told you to do,” Spendlove replied, and this time there could be no doubt about it, the monk was puzzled, or doing a blessed good imitation.

“Brother Desmond, the work of the church has always been to destroy such foul texts. The moment I knew what it was, I should have consulted with the fratrex. Instead, I barreled ahead and translated a forbidden scrift. I've probably damned myself, and I will certainly lose my position here.”

That got a wry chuckle from Spendlove.

“Brother Stephen, you may think I'm your worst enemy in this place. I'm not. You're your own worst enemy. I wouldn't wish that on anyone.” With that, Brother Desmond stood. “Good luck walking the fanes,” he said. He almost sounded as if he meant it.

A moment later Stephen was alone again, with the stars.

The fratrex looked up from a desk cluttered with books, paper, and several inkwells.

“Eh? Good morning, Brother Stephen.” He tapped some sheets of paper on his desk. “Excellent work, this. Are you quite sure of it all?”

“Reverend? As sure as I can be.”

“Well. I am not disappointed in you, I can tell you that.”

“But, Reverend—” He felt as he had in the woods, when the hounds were coming, and for an instant he really had believed Aspar White's Grim Raver was stooping on him. He had felt the same way when he was halfway through the manuscrift and really understood what he had.

It was that spinning sensation that came of suddenly realizing he truly didn't understand the world. Of having too many secure assumptions upset at once.

The fratrex sat waiting for him to continue, one eyebrow cocked.

“The nature of the scrift,” Stephen explained. “I should have told you as soon as I knew. I should have stopped before
I finished it. I'm sorry. I'll understand if you ask for my resignation.”

“You don't have to tell me that,” the fratrex said. “If I ask for your resignation, I shall get it, and whether you
understand
or not is entirely beside the point. But why should I ask for it? You did exactly what I requested, and splendidly.”

“I don't understand, Reverend. Church policy—”

“Is much better understood by me than by you,” the fratrex finished dryly. “The church has concerns you cannot begin to understand, and which I cannot, at this time, explain to you. Suffice to say that there is evil in the world, yes? And that evil may remain silent for many years, but when it speaks, we should at least know the language. If we do not, it may well talk us all into its spell.”

The implications of that walked through Stephen like a ghost, leaving chill footprints on his heart.

“Reverend, may I confide in you?”

“As in no other.”

“I heard … things on the way here. On the road. At Tor Scath.”

“Go on. Please, sit. You look as if your legs are ready to give way.”

“Thank you, Reverend.” He settled onto a small, hard stool.

“So tell me these things.”

Stephen told him the rumors of the greffyn, and the terrible rites on the abandoned sedos fanes. When he was done, the fratrex leaned forward.

“Such rumors are not unknown to us,” he said, in a low voice. “Nor should they be spread any further. Keep them to yourself, and be assured that the church is not complacent in these matters.”

“Yes, Reverend. It's just that—the sacrifices at the fanes. They resemble certain rites described in the scrift.”

“I have seen that. What reason do you think I had for wanting this translated?”

“But—I think whoever is doing these things only half understands what they are about.”

“What do you suppose they are about?”

“I'm not sure, but I think they are trying to revive an ancient faneway, one of the forbidden ones. Perhaps the very one that the Black Jester walked to gain his unholy powers. The rites are a sort of test, to help them learn which of the thousand fanes in the forest still have power, and to determine the order in which they ought to be walked.”

“But they aren't doing the rites correctly, so we have nothing to fear—yet,” the fratrex reasoned.

“Yet my work would help them,” Stephen said softly. “Some of the missing pieces to their puzzle may lie in what you have before you.”

The fratrex nodded solemnly. “Of course, we are aware of that. But we cannot risk fighting this enemy in the dark. They have some of the secrets. They got them somewhere. We cannot oppose them when we know nothing.”

“But, Reverend—” The image of Desmond Spendlove flashed through his mind. “—what if our enemies are in our midst already? In the church itself ?”

The fratrex smiled grimly. “The surest way to catch a weasel is to set a trap,” he said. “And for a trap, bait is needed.”

He stood. “I thought I taught you a lesson in humility, Brother Stephen. I wonder now if I succeeded. I am no doddering fool, and the church is too canny to be cuckolded by evil. But your loose tongue and your questions could do a great deal of damage, do you understand? Perform the tasks I set before you. Do not speak of them to anyone but me. Do your best to keep anyone else from seeing your work.”

“But my work has already been seen.”

“By Brother Desmond, yes. That was not unforeseen. But do better in the future. Hide your progress. Write faulty translations as well as sound ones.”

“Reverend? The translation is done.”

For answer, the fratrex stooped, and from beneath his desk he brought up a large cedar box.

“There are more,” he said. “I expect the same alacrity that you have already shown.” He smiled thinly. “And now, I suggest you meditate and prepare. Soon you will walk the
faneway of Saint Decmanus, and you must be in the proper state of mind.”

Stephen knelt and bowed. “Thank you, Reverend. And I apologize for any impertinence. I assure you it comes entirely from concern for the welfare of the church.”

“In this place, that is my concern,” the fratrex reminded him. He waved the back of his hand. “Go on,” he said. “Put away your worries, and prepare for revelations.”

But Stephen left feeling that he had already had one revelation too many. He feared another might break him.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE BRIAR KING

MORNING'S SOFT STIRRING found Aspar still awake, legs cramping beneath him, bow still strung.

Whatever had come in the night had gone with it, leaving only the memory of its stink. And when Winna began to wake, Aspar stepped cautiously into the light and gazed around him.

Sun maidens were kissing the leaves high above, and though shadows lay long on the earth, they all pointed back toward the way from which Aspar and Winna had come. Before them, the forest grew thinner, and not far away, Aspar could reckon the end of it, by the open look of the treetops.

He inspected the damp leaf litter for some sign of what had come stalking the night before, but found no track or spoor, no broken branches, fur or feathers. This left him wondering if his senses hadn't betrayed him, somehow. He was, after all, on a Sefry errand, where truth and lies mixed in the same muddy water.

“Good morning to you, Aspar,” Winna said. “Didn't you sleep at all?”

He grinned wryly. “Not likely.”

“We agreed that we would share the watches,” she reminded him, exasperation in her voice. “You should have waked me.”

“You can have tomorrow night, then, the whole thing,” he promised. “Anyhow, look, I think we're nearly out of the forest.” He nodded in the direction where the trees thinned.

Winna stretched and yawned. “Looks the same to me, but
I'll take your word for it. Did we have any visitors in the night?”

“Something came out, but it made no sound and left no prints. It went away before the dawn.”

Winna frowned. “I dreamed of something that smelled foul.”

“The foul smell wasn't a dream,” Aspar said. “That's for certain.”

“Could it—could it have been the Briar King himself ?” she wondered.

“Grim, I hope not,” Aspar swore. “Whatever was out in the dark, I never want to see it.”

Winna looked unsettled at that, but she didn't say anything.

“What now?” she asked instead.

“I suppose we go on, and see what there is to see. Do you need food?”

“Not yet. We can eat in a while. If there are more of those spiders overhead, I'd like to be out from under 'em. Saints, yes! They crawled all through my dreams, too.”

As the space widened between the trunks of the trees the white, strawlike ground cover gave way to ferns and horsetails, then to bushier growth—rambling mounds of blackberry bushes, knee-high catgrass and broomsedge, grapevines groping over all. For Aspar, it was a relief to see plants he knew, by Grim's bloody eye!

At last, just short of midday, they left the forest behind them. The trees ended rather abruptly, giving way to a gently rolling valley floor. Mountains framed every direction, adding force to Aspar's guess that the only way in and out of the valley—short of crawling across the icy glaciers—was probably the way they had come.

The fields were brushy with grass and thistle and wild primrose, but riddled with enough animal trails to make the going easy most of the time.

If they had anywhere to go, which they didn't.

They struck on toward the far valley wall, but slowly. Aspar
wondered just what in the name of the Sarnwood witch he was looking for.

It was a bell later when Winna pointed off to their right. “What's that?” she asked.

Aspar had already noticed what she was gesturing at—a line of small trees, not much taller than the grass, marching toward the valley wall, not quite paralleling their own path.

“A stream, most likely,” he grunted.

“Most likely,” Winna conceded. “But it seems odd to me.”

“Nothing odd about it,” Aspar argued.

“What would it hurt to have a look?” Winna asked. “I don't see anything else even a little strange.”

“You've a point,” he allowed. They turned their steps that direction.

After a few hundred paces, Winna asked, “Aspar, what do the Sefry expect us to do here?”

“Find the Briar King, I reckon.”

“Just find him?”

“That's what Mother Gastya said,” Aspar replied.

Winna nodded. “Yah. But aren't you the one who says the Sefry always lie?”

“I am,” Aspar admitted. “But that doesn't matter. Whatever they want of me, I would have come here eventually. I've lived in this forest all of my life, Winn. Something's wrong with it. Very wrong.” He chewed his lip, then cleared his throat. “I think it's dying. I think the greffyn has something to do with it, and if there
is
a Briar King, and he's at the bottom of this rot—I need to know.”

“But suppose Mother Gastya lied. Suppose this isn't where the Briar King is. What if she sent you as far from him as she could?”

“I thought of that. I took the chance.” He glanced at her. “But that's not what you're worried about, is it? You're worried that he
is
here.”

For a few moments the swishing of Winna's tattered skirts against the grass was the only sound. “I
know
he's here,” she said finally. “But what if the Sefry sent you to him so he could kill you?”

“If Mother Gastya wanted me dead, she needed only to have kept silent for another few heartbeats, back in Rewn Aluth,” Aspar pointed out. “Whatever the Sefry want, it's not just my death.”

“I guess not,” Winna conceded. Then she stopped.

They had reached the line of small trees. “I don't see a stream.”

“No,” Aspar said slowly.

The trees were very small versions of the briar trees. They stood just over waist high.

“Look how regular they're spaced,” Winna said. “Like somebody planted them.”

“There's something else,” Aspar said, crouching. “Something …” It reminded him of tracking, somehow. But it took him another twenty heartbeats to understand why.

“They're planted like a man's footsteps,” he said. “A big man. But see? It's as if at every stride, a tree sprang up.” He glanced back over his shoulder. The trail of trees led back into the forest—and it led ahead, to the valley wall.

“What's that up there?”

Aspar followed the imaginary line her finger traced in the air. Far off—half a league, maybe—the row of trees led to some sort of dome. It looked man-made.

“A building?” he speculated. “It looks a little like a Watau longhouse.”

It wasn't a longhouse. His mother's people built their lodgings of freshly cut young trees, bending them into arches and then covering all with shingles of bark. The structure he and Winna beheld was likewise made of trees—but they were still alive, thrusting strong roots into the soil and lacing their branches tightly together. It was shaped like a giant bird's nest, turned upside down. It stood perhaps twenty yards high at its apex.