The Blood Knight - J. Gregory Keyes [161]
The forest itself lay just beyond, slouching down from the hills into the wide valley of the White Warlock. The river itself vanished into its ferny mouth a couple of bowshots north of him. He crawled his regard across every bit of the tree line he could see, trying to take its measure.
Even at a glance it was different from the King’s Forest. The familiar fringe of oak, hickory, witaec, larch, and elm was replaced by high green spears of spruce and hemlock, thickly bunched though currently leafless heads of ironwood, and stands of birch so white that they resembled bones against the dense green conifers. Off toward the river black alder, twisting willow, crack willow, and pine dominated his view.
“Well, Ogre,” he grunted. “What do you think?”
Ogre didn’t opine until they were closer, and then he did it silently, with a bunching of muscles and a studied hesitation that was uncharacteristic of the stallion. Of course he was tired, hungry, and still feeling the effects of the woorm’s poison, but even so…
Aspar found himself trying to recall how old Ogre was as the trail led them beneath the first branches of the Sarnwood. He remembered, didn’t like the answer, and started wondering instead why there should be a path in a forest no one dared enter. What kept it clear?
He had a few hours of daylight left, but the overcast sky and high-reaching evergreens brought dusk early to Aspar and his mount. He strung his bow and rested it on the pommel of his saddle, felt the shifting of massive muscles beneath his thighs as Ogre continued his reluctant way forward, trudging through the frequent streams that Aspar reckoned came from snowmelt in the foothills. Despite the cold, the understory was already verdant with fern, and emerald moss carpeted the ground, as well as the trunks and branches of trees. The forest appeared healthy to the eye, but it didn’t smell right. Even more than the King’s Forest, it seemed somehow diseased.
He thought they were probably about a league in when it finally got dark enough to make camp. It was cold, and Aspar could hear wolves waking up not far away, so he decided he didn’t much care how the witch felt about fire. He gathered tinder, twigs, and branches, set them up in a cone, and with a spark brought it all to life. It wasn’t a big fire, but it was enough to keep one side of him warm. He sat on the corpse of a linden tree and watched the flame feed, wondering glumly if Winna was still alive, if he should have stayed as she had asked.
To hear her last words? Sceat on that.
The horrible thing was, part of him was already thinking about how life would be without her. The same part that was shy about the idea of a permanent arrangement in the first place. What were men made of, he wondered, that they thought such thoughts? In his deepest heart, did he want her to die? When Qerla—
“No,” he said, loudly enough that Ogre looked at him.
There it was.
He’d met Qerla when he was very young, younger than Winna. He’d loved her with an absolute madness he’d never imagined feeling again. He could still remember the smell of her, like water caught in the bloom of an orchid. The touch of her skin, a little hotter than Mannish flesh. Looking back on it, she had been even madder than he, for whereas Aspar had little to lose in the way of community and friends, Qerla had been born to a family famous for seers. She had property, and prospects, and all the best marriage opportunities.
But she’d run away with him to live alone in the forest, and for a time that had been enough.
For a very short time. Maybe if they could have had children. Maybe if either the Sefry or the Mannish world had been a little more accepting.
Maybe. Maybe.
But instead it was hard, and it grew harder every day, so hard that Qerla slept with an old lover. So hard that when Aspar found