The Blood Knight - J. Gregory Keyes [51]
She was slim, but her hands, head, and cowskin-slippered feet looked too large. Her nose was a small dipping slope—a girl’s nose still—but her cheekbones were beginning to lift her face into a woman’s. In the pale light, her eyes appeared hazel. Her brown hair was lighter on the crown and at the ends. And he could easily imagine her in a meadow, wearing a necklace of clover, playing Rickety Rock Bridge or Queen o’ the Grove. He could see her twirling so that the hem of her dress puffed out like a ball gown.
“The forest is ill,” the girl said. “The sickness is spreading. If the forest dies, so does the world. Our parents broke the ancient law and helped bring this sickness upon the trees. We’ve asked them to set things right.”
“When you blew the horn, you summoned the Briar King to his work in the world,” Dreodh explained. “But his way has been prepared for generations. Twelve years ago, we dreothen sang the elder rites and made the seven sacrifices. Twelve years—the heartbeat of an oak—that’s how long it has taken for the earth to give him up at last.
“And in that twelve years, every child born on the ground hallowed of the forest was born of wombs stroked by hemlock and oak, ash and mistletoe. Born his. When he awoke, they awoke.”
“We knew what we had to do, all of us at once,” the girl took up. “We left our homes, our towns and villages. Those who were too young to walk, we carried. And when our parents came after us, we told them how things would be. Some resisted; they wouldn’t drink the mead or eat the flesh. But most did as we asked. They are his army now, his host to sweep the forest clean of the corruption that invades it.”
“Mead?” Stephen asked. “Is that what’s in the cauldrons? It’s mead that robs them of their senses?”
“Mead is a convenient word,” Dreodh said, “but it’s not the get of honey. It is Oascef, the Water of Life, it is Oasciaodh, the Water of Poetry. And it does not rob us of our senses—it restores them. It returns us to the forest and to health.”
“My mistake,” Stephen said. “The slinders that brought me here seemed rather…insane. This Oascef isn’t made from a mushroom that resembles a man’s member, by any chance?”
“What you call madness is divine,” the girl replied, ignoring his question. “Him in us. There is no fear or doubt, no pain or desire. In such a state we can hear his words and know his will. And only he can save this world from the fever that crawls up from its roots.”
“I’m at a loss, then,” Stephen said. “You say you have chosen to become what you are, that the unspeakable acts you commit are justified because the world is ill. Very well, then: What is this illness? What are you fighting, exactly?”
Dreodh smiled. “Now you’ve begun to ask the right questions. Now you begin to understand why he called for you and commanded that you be brought to us.”
“No, I do not,” Stephen said. “I’m afraid I don’t understand at all.”
Dreodh paused, then nodded sympathetically. “Nor are we the ones to explain it to you. But we will take you to the one who will. Tomorrow.”
“And until then?”
Dreodh shrugged. “This is what remains of the Halafolk settlement. It will be destroyed in time, but if you wish to explore it, feel free. Sleep where you want; we will find you when the time comes.”
“May I have a torch or—”
“The witchlights will accompany you,” Dreodh said. “And the houses have their own illumination.”
Stephen walked through the dark, narrow streets, trying to sort out his priorities, but found himself captivated by the city itself. The street was bounded on both sides by buildings two, three, sometimes four stories tall. They were fantastically slender, many joined side to side, others separated by narrow alleys. Although built of stone, they had a gossamer quality, and where the witchlights drifted