The Blood Knight - J. Gregory Keyes [139]
“I’ve heard of this play,” she said, raising her voice. “I hear it is very popular.” She sat straighter in the saddle. “I am Anne, daughter of William and Muriele. I have come to take my father’s throne. I’ve a mind to let my first act be the pardoning of these poor actors, for my father would never have tolerated this sort of injustice. What do you say to that, people of Eslen?”
She was met by a moment of stunned silence.
“It is ’er, you know,” she heard someone call out from the crowd. “I’ve seen ’er before.”
“Free ’em!” someone else yelled, and in a moment everyone but the soldiers and churchmen had taken to shouting for the troupe to be let go.
“You are free to go,” Anne told the players. “My men will escort you from this court.”
“Enough,” Sir Clement shouted. “Enough of this nonsense!”
“Anne!” Cazio said.
But she saw them, as she had half expected: footmen in Robert’s colors, entering the square from every direction, pushing through the indignant crowd.
Anne nodded. “Well,” she said. “Better to know this now than inside the Wolfcoat Tower, don’t you think?”
“What shall we do?” Cazio asked.
“Why, fight of course,” she replied.
“WINNA’S NOT doing well,” Ehawk murmured.
Aspar sighed, tracking his gaze across the distant hillside.
“I know,” he said. “She’s been coughing blood. So have you.” He pointed at a line of blackened vegetation. “See, there?”
“Yes,” Ehawk replied. “It came out of the water over there.”
Something that left a trail like that ought not to be hard to track, but the woorm used rivers for a lot of its traveling, and that was a problem, especially when the river branched. They might have lost it when it turned up the Then River, but for the dead fish flowing from its mouth into the Warlock.
They followed the trail at the greatest distance possible, never actually stepping on it or taking water downstream of it, and Aspar had hoped that the poison already in them would work its way out.
It hadn’t.
The medicine they’d gotten from Fend’s men sustained them, but they were forced to take less and less of it each day to stretch it out. The horses seemed better, but then, none of the beasts had actually stood on poisoned ground or breathed the monster’s breath.
Not far away, Winna coughed. Ehawk knelt and searched through the remains of the campfire.
“You think this is Stephen’s trail?”
Aspar glance around. “Four of ’em, and they didn’t come from the river. They came down from the Brog y Stradh. If it’s Stephen, the woorm isn’t following him, but their paths keep crossing.”
“Maybe it knows where he’s going.”
“Maybe. But at this point I’m more concerned with finding Fend.”
“Maybe he died.”
Aspar barked a sharp laugh that became a cough. “I doubt it. I should have finished him.”
“I don’t see how. By the time we found your arrow, the woorm was gone. You can’t imagine you were going to kill it with your dirk.”
“No, but I could have killed Fend.”
“The woorm is his ally. We were lucky to escape.”
“So now we die slow.”
“No,” Ehawk said. “We’ll catch it. It’s on land now, so it won’t be as fast.”
“Yah,” Aspar said, a bit doubtfully. Ehawk was probably right, but they, too, were slower every day.
“See to the horses and the camp,” Aspar said. “I’ll find us something to eat.”
“Yah,” Ehawk said.
Aspar found a game trail and a convenient perch in a sycamore. He settled there and let weariness have his body while trying to keep his eyes and wits sharp.
It had been ten years since Aspar had been in the low marshes around the Then, on one of his rare ventures outside the boundaries of the King’s Forest. He’d gone to deliver some bandits to the magistrate of Ofthen town, and while there he had heard interesting tales about the Sarnwood and the witch who was supposed to live there. He’d been at his most footloose back then and reckoned he’d see what the ancient, supposedly haunted forest was really like. He’d made it only about halfway before news about the Black Wargh turned him back south, and he hadn’t ever taken up the trip again.
But he’d stopped there for a few days to hunt. That