The Blood Knight - J. Gregory Keyes [162]
He hated Fend for killing Qerla, but he saw now that he hated Fend more for showing him this dirty thing about himself. Aspar had spent twenty years without a lover, but it hadn’t been because he feared losing her. It was because he knew he hadn’t been worthy of loving someone.
He still wasn’t.
“Sceat,” he told the fire. When had he started all this thinking? Much good it was doing him.
The wolves had found him. He could hear them rustling in the dark, and now and then a pair of eyes or a gray flank would pick up the firelight. They were big, bigger than any wolves he’d seen before, and he had seen some pretty big ones. He didn’t reckon they would come after him, not with the fire going, but that would depend on how hungry they were. It also depended on whether they were like the wolves he was familiar with. He’d heard tell of some northern varieties that hadn’t the same worries about men that the common sort did.
For now they were keeping their distance. They might be more trouble in daylight.
He brightened the fire with a few pokes, turned for one of the logs he’d placed beside him—and stopped.
She was only four kingsyards away, and he hadn’t heard anything, not the slightest sound. But there she sat, crouching on the balls of her feet, watching him with sage-colored eyes, her long black hair settled on her shoulders, skin as pale as the birches. She was naked and looked very young, but the top pair of her six breasts was swollen, which happened in Sefry only after the age of twenty.
“Qerla?”
She only talks to the dead.
But Qerla was very dead. Bones. Town people saw the dead, or so they claimed, on Temnosnaht. Old Sefry women pretended to speak to them all the time. And he himself had seen something in the deep mazes of Rewn Aluth that had been either an illusion or—something else.
But this…
“No,” he said aloud. “Her eyes were violet.” But other than that, she was so like Qerla: the faint turn of her lip, the trace of veins on her throat, in one place shaped almost like those of a hawthorn leaf.
Very like.
Her eyes widened at the sound of his voice, and he hardly dared breathe. His right hand was still reaching for the log; his left had gone instinctively for his ax, and it still rested there on its cold steel head.
“Are you her?” he asked.
Them that see her in Sefry or human shape don’t usually have many breaths left in the lands of fate, the old man had said.
She smiled very faintly, and the wind started, jittering his fire and wisping her fine hair.
Then she was gone. It was as if he had been seeing her reflected in a giant eye, and the eye had blinked.
He was still breathing the next morning and set out at the earliest hint of the sun. He worried about the wolves, but pretty soon he noticed they wouldn’t cross, or even come onto, the trail he was following.
That bothered him more in some ways. Wolves belonged in the forest. What could be so bad about this bit of ground that they wouldn’t walk on it?
He counted a pack of about twelve. Could he and Ogre take that many in the state they were in? Maybe.
The forest opened up for a while as the girth of the trees increased, revealing small, mossy meadows here and there. The sky was blue when he saw it, dazzling when a shaft or two of it fell through to the forest floor. The wolves paced him until midday, then vanished. Not much later he heard wild cattle trumpet in alarm and knew the predators had found prey they reckoned worth their while.
He was glad to be rid of the wolves, but something was still following him. It bent branches not like a wind but like a weight settling on them from above. As if it was walking on them, all of them at once, or at least all of them around him. If he stopped, it stopped, and he was reminded of a very stupid entertainment given by a traveling troupe in Colbaely. One fellow walked stealthily behind another, mimicking his motions exactly, and whenever the person being followed turned, the stalker would freeze in place, and the fool in front wouldn’t see him. Aspar