The Blood Knight - J. Gregory Keyes [193]
“Hespero?”
“You will call him ‘your grace,’” the knight at Hespero’s side demanded.
“Now, Sir Elden,” Hespero replied, “this is my holter. Didn’t you know that?” Judging from the volume, he had said it entirely for Aspar’s benefit.
Aspar thought about playing along but quickly discarded the idea. He’d been alone in the forest for enough days to have lost any taste for dissembling.
“Not anymore, your grace!” he shouted. “I’ve seen enough of your work.”
“That’s fair,” Hespero replied. “I’ve heard enough of yours. Fare you well, then, holter.”
Aspar turned his head and made as if to ride away but kept his eyes up. He saw Sir Elden draw his bow.
“Yah, that’s all the excuse I need,” he muttered under his breath.
He’d been wondering if he even required that, but Hespero had solved that problem for him with a word too low to hear. He leapt off Ogre as the first shaft missed him by more than a yard. As he found the ground, he calmly took aim and put one in the archer, right up through the bottom of his chin. He slipped another arrow to string and sent it after Hespero, but another mounted man surged into the path of the shot, catching it in his armored side.
The remaining ready archers scrambled off their mounts, and he noticed at least six more stringing their bows. He fired again, then whirled at a crash into the underbrush. He found himself looking down his shaft at the first man he’d shot, who had fallen from the cliff and lay broken on a boulder at its base.
Aspar stepped that way and ducked under an overhang just as arrows appeared to sprout from the earth like red-topped wheat. He caught the dead man and dragged him in, giving his body a quick search, taking his arrows and provisions, then finding a bit more than he had bargained for. Because in the man’s haversack was a horn—and not only that, a horn Aspar recognized, made of white bone and incised with strange figures.
It was the horn he’d found in the Mountains of the Hare, the horn Stephen had blown to summon the Briar King.
The horn they had given to Hespero for study.
Aspar put the horn back in its bag, looped it around his neck, took a deep breath, and bolted.
Most of the barrage missed him; one missile struck his cuirass and glanced away, and then he was well in cover of the trees, back on Ogre, and off at a gallop.
As it became clear he had outdistanced anyone who might be following, he slowed his pace and had time to wonder what it meant that Hespero was here. Coincidences happened, but he was sure this wasn’t one.
He thought about it as he rode, still at a reasonably brisk pace, checking behind him every thirty beats or so at first, less often later. Coming down a cliff was easier than going up one, especially if one had rope, and he was betting Hespero’s party had rope. Lowering horses down the cliff would take time, if they were able to manage it at all, so he should be able to keep his distance from any pursuers if he stayed away from the crags.
Of course, there was always the chance they knew the lay of the land better than he did. The cliff might become a gentle slope or sprout a ravine leading down. But there was nothing he could do about that.
Aspar wondered if Hespero was following the woorm, too, though given the direction he’d come from, that didn’t make a lot of sense. Perhaps, instead, he was following what the woorm was after, which, if he could believe Fend, was Stephen.
So what was Stephen doing up here in the mountains? And why was everyone so interested?
That he couldn’t know, but he guessed he would soon, because all the trails seemed to be converging. It ought to be interesting when they did, he reckoned.
The forest here wasn’t dead yet, although the track he was following was probably a mortal wound. It was too bad, because he found himself liking the conifer-rich landscape. Aspar had been in evergreen forests before, but only in the heights of the Hare. He liked the novelty of finding one on relatively flat ground.
What were the forests of Vestrana and Nahzgave