The Blood Knight - J. Gregory Keyes [169]
“Yes. And then the praifec sent us out after the Briar King, but halfway through that business we figured out that the real evil was Hespero himself, and we ended up trying to foil their plans to awaken a faneway of the Damned Saints. After doing that we were thrown in with a princess off to reclaim her throne from an usurper—something I really had no idea how to do—and the next thing I know I’ve been snatched by slinders and I’m sitting with my old fratrex, whom I thought dead, and he tells me the world’s only hope is for me to come up here…I just wanted to study books!” He couldn’t continue then. Why was he going on like this, anyway?
He sounded like a child.
“I’m sorry,” he finally managed. “That must all sound ridiculous.”
“No,” she said, “it sounds reasonable. I knew a girl who wanted to study letters at the Coven Saint Cer. She’d wanted to do so since she was five, when she was in the care of her aunt, who dusted the temple library in Demsted. Everything looked hopeful, but then a boy she’d known forever but never thought twice about seemed suddenly to shine like a watchstar, and she couldn’t bear the thought of not knowing his touch.
“And then she found herself with child, and her dreams of a coven education dropped away. Suddenly marriage—something she had always wished to avoid—became her only path.
“She’d just begun to settle in to that, to lose the edge of her resentment, when her husband died and then her child. Just to live, she had to become the maid of a foreign noble, tending children who were not hers. Then one day a woman appeared and offered her another chance at her dream, to study in a coven…”
Her voice had become hypnotic, and he could see both of her eyes now, small half-moons.
“That’s how life is, my friend. Yours seems strange because it is full of wonders fantastic, but the fact is that few people remain on the path they begin on. The truth is, we have dreams like you describe because our dreams are dark mirrors of waking.
“But here is where you are lucky,” she continued. “I have come to put you back on your path. You joined the Church because you loved knowledge, yes? Loved mystery, old books, the secrets of the past. If we find the place you’re looking for—if we find the Alq—you’ll have all of that, and more.”
Stephen felt as if he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think of anything to say.
“The girl, the one who wanted to study—”
She leaned forward, and her lips met his, caressed them slightly. A shock ran down his spine, a very pleasant one.
But he pulled away.
“Don’t do that,” he said.
“Why? Because you like it?”
“No. I just told you. I don’t trust you.”
“Hmm,” she said, leaning back in. He meant to stop her, he really did, but somehow her lips were on his again, and he did like it, of course, and as if he had gone mad, he suddenly let go of her hand and reached around her, drew her body against his, realizing with a shock how small she was, how good she felt.
Winna, he thought, and touched her face, ran his fingers under her hood into her blond hair, seeing her in his mind’s eye with the perfect clarity only an initiate of Decmanus could conjure.
She placed both hands on his chest then and pressed him away gently. “We can’t stay here,” she said. “It’s not much farther, and we’ll be safe.”
“I—”
“Hush. Try not to think too much about it.”
He couldn’t help it. He laughed quietly. “That will be very difficult,” he said.
“Think about this instead,” she told him, taking his hand again and beginning to lead him back to the trail. “Soon the sun will rise, and you will see that I am not her. You should be prepared for that.”
Sunrise found them on a rocky white path winding through a high, treeless moor. The clouds were low, wet and cold, but the ground cover was brilliant green, and Stephen wondered what it was. Could Aspar name it, or were they too far from the plants the holter knew?
Snow capped the surrounding peaks, but it had to be melting, for the path was often crossed by rivulets, and virtual waterfalls cascaded down the sides of many of the hills. They stopped