The Blood Knight - J. Gregory Keyes [37]
But the cold lump in his chest knew the truth: They were already dead.
Fury welled up in him. He shot, anyway, wanting to kill another of them, wishing he had enough arrows to slaughter them all. He didn’t care what they had been before the world went mad. Farmers, hunters, fathers, brothers, sisters—he didn’t care.
He looked at Winna, saw the tear-brimmed eyes, the utter helplessness that was mirror to his own. Her gaze pleaded for him to do something.
His survival instinct made him turn to use his last few arrows on those slinders who still would be climbing up after them, but to his surprise he realized that they were gone. As he watched, the last of their attackers leapt from the tree, and like a wave retreating after it runs up a shingle, the mass of grotesque bodies flowed away into the twilight.
In but a few heartbeats, there was only the hushed sound of them retreating through the forest.
Aspar continued to crouch, staring after them. He felt incredibly tired, old, and lost.
“It’s snowing again,” Winna said sometime later.
Aspar acknowledged the truth of that with a little shrug.
“Aspar.”
“Yah.” He sighed. “Come on.”
He stood on his perch and helped her down. She wrapped her arms around him, and they clutched there for a few moments. He was aware of the two men-at-arms watching them, but for the moment he didn’t care. The warmth and the smell of her felt good. He remembered the first time she had kissed him, the confusion and the exhilaration, and he wanted to go back to that moment, back before things had become so confusing.
Before Stephen and Ehawk had died.
“Hello!” a voice called up from below.
Looking past Winna’s curling snow-damped locks, Aspar saw the knight Neil MeqVren. The Vitellian swordsman was standing with him and the girl Austra. An oblique black anger stirred. These three and the men-at-arms—they were almost strangers. Why should they be allowed to live when Stephen was torn limb from limb?
Sceat on it. There were things to be done.
“Let me go,” Aspar muttered gruffly, pulling at Winna’s arms. “I need to talk to them.”
“Aspar, that was Stephen and Ehawk.”
“Yah. I need to talk to these men.”
She let him go, and, avoiding her eyes, he helped her the rest of the way down the tree, jumping to avoid the bodies piled up on the spreading roots, wary that one or more of them might still be alive. But none moved.
“You’re all all right?” he asked Neil.
The knight nodded. “Only by the mercy of the saints. Those things had no interest in us.”
“What do you mean?” Winna demanded.
Neil lifted his hands. “We were just attacking Austra’s captors when they came pouring out from the woods. I cut three or four of them down before I realized they were just trying to run around us. We sheltered against a tree to keep from getting trampled. When they were passed, we fought Austra’s kidnappers. I’m afraid we had to kill them all.”
Austra nodded as if in agreement but seemed too shaken to speak, clinging tightly to Cazio.
“They ran past you,” Aspar repeated, trying to understand. “Then they were after us?”
“No,” Winna said thoughtfully. “Not us. They were after Stephen. And as soon as they got him, they left. Ehawk…” Her eyes widened with hope. “Aspar, what if they’re still alive? We didn’t actually see—”
“Yah,” he said, turning it this way and that in his head. After all, they had thought Stephen dead once before, and then they actually had had his body.
Winna was right.
“Well, we have to go after him, then,” Winna said.
“A moment, please,” Neil said, still studying the landscape of bodies. “There’s a lot here I don’t understand. These things that attacked us—these are the slinders you described to the queen on our first day of riding?”
“That they are,” Aspar admitted, impatience beginning to grow in him.
“And these serve the Briar King?”
“Same answer,” Aspar replied.
“And what is that?” Neil pointed to the half-chewed carcass of an utin.
Aspar looked at the thing, thinking that Stephen would probably like to see it dissected like this