The Blood Knight - J. Gregory Keyes [165]
“Oh. For your lover.”
Aspar frowned. “If you already knew—”
“But I didn’t. You say certain things, I see others. If you never say anything, I never see anything.”
Aspar decided to let that pass.
“Will you help me?”
The leaves rustled around him, and he heard a murder of crows cawing somewhere in the trees.
“We do not have the same purposes in this world, holter,” the Sarnwood witch told him. “I can think of no reason to help someone who is determined to slay my child, who has already slain three of my children.”
“They were trying to kill me,” Aspar said.
“That is meaningless to me,” the witch replied. “If I give you the medicine you seek, you will return to the trail of my woorm and with that arrow of yours you will try to slay him.”
“The Sefry with your child, Fend—”
“Killed your wife. Because she knew. She was going to tell you.”
“Tell me? Tell me what?”
“You will try to slay my child,” the witch repeated, but this time in a very different tone, not so much stating a fact as reflecting, musing. “He has touched you.”
Aspar let out a deep breath. “If you save Winna—”
“You shall have your antidote,” the witch interrupted. “I have changed my mind about killing you, and you will hunt my son whether I give you the cure for his poison or not. I see no reason to help you, but if you will agree you owe me a service, I see no reason to refuse you.”
“I—”
“I won’t ask you for the life of anyone you love,” the witch assured him. “I won’t ask you to spare one of my children.”
Aspar thought that over for a moment.
“That’ll do,” he said finally.
“Behind you,” the witch said, “the thorny bush with the cluster of fruit deep in the leaves. The juice of three of those should be sufficient to cleanse a man of venom. Take as many as you like.”
Still suspecting a trick, Aspar looked where he was told and found hard, blackish purple fruit about the size of wild plums. Defiantly, he popped one in his mouth.
“If this is poison,” he said, “I’ll find out now.”
“As you wish,” the witch said.
The fruit had a sharp, acidic bite with a bit of a putrid aftertaste, but he felt no immediate ill effects.
“What are you?” he asked.
Again the corpse laughed. “Old,” she replied.
“The black thorns. Are they your children, too?”
“My children are being born everywhere now,” she said. “But yes.”
“They’re destroying the King’s Forest.”
“Oh, how sad,” she snarled. “My forest was destroyed long ago. What you see here is all that remains. The King’s Forest is a stand of seedlings. Its time has come.”
“Why? Why do you hate it?”
“I don’t hate it,” the witch said. “But I am like a season, Aspar White. When it is time for me, I arrive. I’ve nothing to do with the order of the seasons, though. Do you understand?”
“No,” Aspar replied.
“Nor do I, really,” the witch replied. “Go now. In two days your girl will be dead, and all of this will have been for nothing.”
“But can you see? Will I save her?”
“I see no such thing,” the witch replied. “I only tell you to make haste.”
Aspar took as much of the fruit as his saddlebag would hold, fed a handful to Ogre, and left the Sarnwood.
SISTER PALE led Stephen through the night without benefit of a torch. She somehow knew where she was going and kept one hand clasped firmly on his. It was a peculiar sensation, that contact of flesh against flesh with a strange woman. He hadn’t held the hands of many women: his mother’s, of course, and his older sister’s.
Embarrassingly, this recalled that; he felt very much the little boy, protected from things he did not understand by the caring grip of fingers in his own. But because this wasn’t his mother or his sister, it brought out other, more adult feelings that didn’t contrast very well with the childish ones. He found himself trying to translate the pressure of her fingers, the shift of grip from intertwined digits to clapped palms into some sort of meaningful cipher, which of course it wasn’t. She just wanted him to keep up with her.
He didn’t know what she looked like, but he teased himself with an image based