The Blood Knight - J. Gregory Keyes [43]
Propping himself up, he looked around but saw no sign of Ehawk. Had they eaten the boy, after all? Had they killed him? Or merely ejected him from the procession, ignoring him as they had Aspar, Winna, and the knights?
The aroma of food suddenly broke through the smell of the slinders and struck him like a physical blow. He couldn’t quite identify the scent, but it was like meat. When he understood what it probably was, his stomach knotted, and if he had had a meal to vomit, he certainly would have. Had Ehawk been right? Had the slinders refined their culinary tastes? Was he to be braised, roasted, or boiled?
Whatever their ultimate intentions, at the moment the slinders appeared to be ignoring him, so he studied the scene around him, trying to arrange sense from it.
At first he had seen only the huge flame in the center of the chamber and an undifferentiated mass of bodies, but now he noticed dozens of smaller fires, with slinders grouped about them as if in clans or cadres. Most of the hearths bore kettles, the sort of copper or black iron kettles he might find at any farmstead or small village. A few of the slinders actually were tending the pots; that struck him somehow as the strangest thing he had seen yet. How could they be so senseless yet still be capable of domestic tasks?
Using his hands, he managed to climb unsteadily to his feet, and then he turned, trying to remember which way they had come from. He found himself looking squarely into a pair of vivid blue eyes.
Startled, he stepped back, and the face came into perspective. It belonged to a man, probably around thirty years of age. His face was streaked with red pigment and his body was as naked and tattooed as the others, but his eyes seemed—sane.
Stephen recognized him as the magician who had been calling down the branches.
He held a bowl in his hands, which he proffered to Stephen.
Stephen examined it; it was full of some sort of stew. It smelled good.
“No,” he said softly.
“It isn’t manflesh,” the man said in king’s tongue with an up-country Oostish burr. “It’s venison.”
“You can talk?” Stephen asked.
The man nodded. “Sometimes,” he said, “when the madness lifts. Eat. I’m sure you have questions for me.”
“What’s your name?”
The man’s brow knotted. “It seems like a long time since I had a name that mattered,” he said. “I’m a dreodh. Just call me Dreodh.”
“What is a dreodh?”
“Ah, a leader, a sort of priest. We were the ones who believed, who kept the old ways.”
“Oh,” Stephen said. “I understand now. Vadhiian dhravhydh meant a kind of spirit of the forest. Middle Lierish dreufied was a word for a sort of wild man who lived in the woods, a pagan creature.”
“I am not so learned in the ways our name has been misused,” Dreodh said, “but I know what I am. What we are. We keep the ways of the Briar King. For that, our name has been maligned by others.”
“The Briar King is your god?”
“God? Saint? These are words. They are of no value. But we waited for him, and we were proved right,” he said bitterly.
“You don’t sound glad of that,” Stephen noted.
Dreodh shrugged. “The world is what it is. We do what needs being done. Eat, and we can talk some more.”
“What happened to my friend?”
“I know of no friend. You were the object of their quest, no other.”
“He was with us.”
“If it will ease your mind, I will search for him. Now eat.”
Stephen poked at the stew. It smelled like venison, but then, how did human meat smell? He seemed to remember that it was supposed to be something like pork. And what if it was human?
If he ate it, would he become like the slinders?
He set the bowl down, trying to ignore the pain in his belly. It wasn’t worth the risk on any level he could think of. A man could go a long time without food. He was sure of it.
Dreodh returned, looked at the bowl, and shook his head. He left again, returned with a small leather purse, and tossed it to Stephen. Opening it, Stephen found some dried and slightly molded cheese and hard, stale bread.
“Will you trust that?” Dreodh asked.