The Blood Knight - J. Gregory Keyes [18]
The horz represented wild, untamed nature. The saints of the horz were Selfan of the Pines, Rieyene of the Birds, Fessa of the Flowers, Flenz of the Vines: the wild saints. How must the wild saints feel about being bound when once the whole world must have been theirs? She remembered the horz back in Tero Gallé, where she had entered the other world. She’d had a sense of diseased anger there, of frustration become madness.
For a moment the stone walls seemed to become a hedge of black thorns, and the image of the antlered figure returned to her.
He was wild, and, like everything truly wild, he was terrifying. The thorns were trying to bind him, weren’t they? The way the walls of the horz bound wildness. But who sent the thorns?
And had she thought of that herself, or had he left it in her head? How had she made that connection?
On the east she couldn’t remember what had happened to her. On the west her mind found strange conclusions. Had she lost control of her thoughts entirely? Was she mad?
“Detoi, meyez,” someone said, interrupting her ponderings. “Quey veretoi adeyre en se zevie?”
Anne tensed and tried to focus through the dark. To her surprise, what had seemed to be a mere shadow suddenly clarified as a man of middle years wearing livery she recognized: the sunspray, spear, and leaping fish of the dukes of Loiyes.
“Do you speak the king’s tongue, sir?” she asked.
“I do,” the man replied. “And I apologize for my impertinence. I could not see in the dark that you are a lady.”
Anne understood the peasant’s reaction now. Her king’s tongue and the accent she spoke it with gave her away immediately as a noble of Eslen, or one of the nobles’ close servants, at least. Her clothes, however dirty, surely confirmed it. That could be good or bad.
No, not good or bad. She was alone, without protectors. It was most probably bad.
“Whom do I have the honor of addressing, sir?”
“Mechoil MeLemved,” he replied. “Captain of the guard of Sevoyne. Are you lost, lady?”
“I’m on my way to Glenchest.”
“Alone? And in these times?”
“I had companions. We were separated.”
“Well, come in from the cold, lady. The coirmthez—I’m sorry, the inn—will have a room for you. Perhaps your companions are already waiting for you.”
Anne’s hopes slumped further. The captain seemed too unsurprised, too ready to accommodate her.
“I should warn you, Captain MeLemved,” she said, “that attempts have been made to deceive me into harm before, and my patience is very short with that sort of thing.”
“I don’t understand, Princess,” the captain said. “What harm could I mean you?”
She felt her face freeze.
“None, I’m sure,” she said.
She kicked Prespine into motion, wheeling to turn around. As she did so, she discovered there was someone behind her, and even as she perceived that, she noticed something in her peripheral vision just before it slapped her hard across the side of the head.
She gasped as everything spun in four or five directions, and then strong fingers pinched into her arms, dragging her from her mount. She squirmed, kicked, and screamed, but her cries were stifled quickly by something shoved into her mouth, followed immediately by a smell of grain as a sack was pulled over her head. Anger flared, and she reached to the place in her where sickness dwelled, sickness she could give to others.
What she found instead was a terror so vivid that her only escape from it was another retreat into darkness.
She woke sputtering, her nose burning, her throat closed. An acrid alcoholic stench suffused everything, but that seemed strangely distant.
Her eyes peeled open, and she saw through a glassy vertigo that she was in a small room lit by several candles. Someone was holding her hair back, and though she felt her roots pulling, it didn’t hurt that much.
“Awake now,