The Blood Knight - J. Gregory Keyes [163]
But deer couldn’t see you when they were feeding. When they had their heads down to the ground, you could walk straight toward them so long as they were upwind and couldn’t smell you. Frogs couldn’t see you unless you moved, either.
So maybe to whatever was following him, Aspar was basically a frog.
He chuckled under his breath. It might have been the fatigue, but that actually did seem funny. Maybe he should have given the actors a little more credit.
A rasping wheeze caught his attention, something off the trail a bit. He didn’t forget the old man’s warning to stay on the path, but he didn’t much trust it, either. After all, if no one lived through coming here, what was the point of following directions? With only a little hesitation he turned Ogre toward the sound.
He didn’t go far before he saw it: a large black hairy form quivering in the ferns. It raised a bristly head when it saw him and grunted.
Ogre whinnied.
It was a sow, a big one, bigger because she was pregnant. It was a little early for that—the piglets usually came with the first flowers—but something much more fundamental was wrong, he could see. Whatever was pushing from inside its belly was a lot larger than a piglet. And there was blood, a lot of it, around the sow, leaking from her wheezing nostrils, from her eyes. She didn’t even know he was there; her grunt had been one of pain, not of perception.
She died half a bell later even as he watched, but whatever was inside her kept moving. Aspar noticed that he was shaking, but he didn’t know with what, only that it wasn’t fear. He felt the weight above him, the thing bending the branches, and suddenly the side of the boar split open.
Out pushed a bloody beak, a yellow eye, and a slimy scaled body.
A greffyn.
Very deliberately he dismounted as the thing fought to release itself from its mother’s womb.
“Stop me if you can,” he said to the forest.
Its scales were still soft, not hard like an adult’s, but its glare took a long time to dim even after its head was off.
He wiped his ax on dead leaves, then doubled over, retching.
But at least he knew something now. He knew why he’d passed forty years in the King’s Forest without seeing a trace of a greffyn, an utin, a woorm, or anything of the like, yet now the whole world was lousy with them.
People had said they were “waking up,” like the Briar King, which implied they’d been sleeping like a bear in a hollow tree—except for a thousand years.
They hadn’t been sleeping anywhere. They were being born. He remembered an old tale about basil-nix coming from hen’s eggs.
Sceat, they probably did.
He waited for the wrath of the witch to descend on him, but nothing happened. Still shaking, he remounted and went on.
It was almost without surprise that he saw buds on the trees. They were not natural buds but black spikes splitting through trunks and branches. It was easy enough to recognize the black thorns he’s seen in the King’s Forest and again in the Midenlands. Here they sprouted from galls on the trees themselves, and the deeper he went, the more growth he saw, and the more variety.
The thorns in the King’s Forest had all looked the same, but here he saw many sorts, some narrow, their spines almost feathery in their delicacy and number, and others that bore blunt knobby growths. Within a bell he didn’t even recognize the parent trees anymore; like the sow, they were giving birth to monsters and were being consumed in the process.
Then he came to the end of the trail and an eldritch mere beneath the boughs of the strangest forest he had ever seen.
The largest of the trees were roughly scaled, with each branch spawning five smaller ones and each of those five spawning more, endlessly, so that the fringes were cloudlike. Aspar was reminded of some sort of pond weed or mossy lichen more than of any real tree. Others looked something like weeping willows save that their fronds were black and serrated like the tail of a fence lizard. Some of the saplings looked as if a mad saint had taken pinecones and stretched