The Blood Knight - J. Gregory Keyes [111]
“Come on,” he told her. “Come on, Winn; let’s get out of this place.”
She looked up at him, her eyes filled with greater despair than he had imagined her capable of.
“We can’t get out,” she said softly. Then something seemed to explode in her. “We can’t get out!” she shrieked. “Don’t you understand? We can’t get out! We’ve been here! We’ve already been here, and it just gets worse and worse, everything, we’re…we’re not…” Her words tapered off into an incoherent wail.
He held her shoulders, knowing all he could really do was wait until it passed.
If it passed.
With a sigh he sat next to her.
“I’ve been in this rewn before,” he said, not sure if she was listening. “It’s not much farther to the city. We could—it should be cleaner there. You could rest.”
She didn’t answer. Her teeth were gritted and her eyes squeezed shut, and her breath was still racing with her heartbeat.
“That’s it,” Aspar said. He picked her up. She didn’t resist but buried her head in the crook of her arm and wept.
He dithered briefly, torn between continuing on and going back, but then it struck him how utterly stupid it would be to go after Fend and a woorm, carrying Winna all the while. True, he might hide her in the Sefry city, but that might be exactly where Fend and his pet had come to a stop. With his luck, the instant he left to look for them, Fend would sneak in from behind and make off with Winna again.
So he started back the way they had come.
The woorm had gone into the rewn; it had to come out. Aspar knew of only three entrances to the rewn: this one, another many leagues north, and a third just over the next ridge.
And suddenly he had a plan that made sense.
The horses were still outside—and alive—when he exited the cave. He got Winna up onto Tumble, made sure she had enough awareness to stay on, then took the horses’ reins to lead them. They started winding their way up the hillside.
Half a league up, he felt his breath coming easier and he started to sweat, even though it was bitterly cold. His step strengthened, and at first he thought it was just that he had removed himself from the woorm’s venomed trail.
Then he realized it was more than that. He was surrounded by life again, by sap that was slow but not dead. Squirrels scampered through the branches above, and a flight of fluting geese sang by high overhead. He watched them, smiling in spite of himself, but felt a slight chill as they suddenly changed course.
“There we are,” he said, urging Ogre up the slope in the direction the geese had avoided. “It’s there, just as I thought.”
Two bells later, about a bell before sunfall, they reached the top of the ridge. Winna had calmed, and Aspar got her down, then situated her in the roots of a big tree. Reluctantly, he left the horses saddled, because for all he knew they might have to bolt at any moment. Could a horse outrun a woorm? Maybe for a little while.
“Winna?” He knelt and tucked another blanket around her.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. It was faint and she didn’t sound good, but it lifted the strongest fear off his heart: that her spirit had gone away. He had known such things to happen; he’d rescued a boy whose family had been slaughtered by the Black Wargh. He’d left the lad in the care of a widow in Walker’s Bailey. She’d tried to take care of him, but he never spoke, not for two years, and then he drowned himself in the mill creek.
“These are mirk and horrible things,” Aspar said. “I would be more worried if they didn’t upset you.”
“I was more than upset,” she said. “I was—useless.”
“Hush. Listen, I’m going to climb up for a better view. You stay here, watch Ogre. If something’s coming, he’ll know before you do. Can you do that?”
“Yah,” Winna said. “I can do that.”
He kissed her, and she answered with a sort of desperate hunger. He knew he ought to say something, but nothing seemed right.
“I won’t go far” was what he settled on.
He’d taken them up to a section of the ridge too rocky to support many trees. For his watchtower he chose a honey locust perched on the edge of a broken stone shelf.