The Blood Knight - J. Gregory Keyes [55]
“If it’s the only way to save it.”
“Does that really make sense to you?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know he’s right, the Briar King? How do you know he isn’t lying to you?”
“He isn’t,” she said. “And you know it, too.”
She steered them along the dark waters, and soon they were in a tunnel so low-roofed that Stephen had to duck his head to keep from striking it. The sound of the oars chuckled off into the distance and back to them.
“Where were you from, Starqin?” Stephen wondered aloud. “What town?”
“Colbaely in the Greffy of Holtmarh.”
A little chill went up his spine. “I have a friend from there,” he said. “Winna Rufoote.”
Starqin nodded. “Winna was nice. She used to play the holly pole with us and give us the barley rusk after her father made beer. She was too old, though. Not one of us.”
“She had a father—”
“He owned the Sow’s Teat.”
“Is he a wothen?”
She shook her head. “He left when we started burning the town.”
“You burned your own town?”
She nodded. “It had to be done. It wasn’t supposed to be there.”
“Because the Briar King said so.”
“Because it wasn’t supposed to be. We children always knew that. We had to convince the adults. Some weren’t convinced, but they left. Fralet Rufoote was one of them.”
They continued on in silence; Stephen wasn’t sure what else to say, and in the absence of questions, Starqin didn’t seem inclined to pursue conversation.
The ceiling rose again until it vanished from the faint glow of the witchlights. After a time, another illumination arose, a distant, slanting shaft of radiance that turned out to be sunlight descending through a hole high up in the roof of the cavern.
Starqin brought the craft to rest at another stone quay.
“There are steps carved in the stone,” she said. “They lead up to the exit.”
“You’re not going with me?”
“I have other things to do.”
Stephen regarded the girl’s eyes, now jade in the sunfall from above.
“This can’t be right,” he told her. “All of this death, all of this killing—it can’t be right.”
Her features shifted briefly through something he didn’t understand, but it was a glimmer of a silvery fish in a deep pool. Then the water was again empty and calm.
“Life is always coming and going,” she said, “if you watch. Always something being born, always something dying. In the spring more is being born; in late autumn more is dying. Death is more natural than life. The bones of the world are death.”
Stephen’s throat tightened. “Children shouldn’t talk like that,” he said.
“Children know these things,” she said. “It’s only adults that teach us that a flower is more beautiful than a rotting dog. He just helped us keep what we were born knowing, what every beast that doesn’t know how to lie to itself understands in its marrow.”
Stephen’s sorrow and sympathy suddenly twisted, and for an instant he was so angry at the girl, he wanted to strangle her. In the midst of his doubts and uncertainty the sheer satisfaction of that absolute feeling was so wonderful and terrible that it left him gasping, and when it passed, as it did seconds later, he was actually shaking.
Starquin hadn’t missed it.
“Besides,” she said softly, “you have whole seasons of death in you.”
“What do you mean?”
But she just pushed off and did not answer, and soon the skiff was lost from view.
Stephen began to climb.
The stone steps switched their way back and forth up the stone wall until at last they brought him to a small landing. The cave opening was quite small, and beyond it he could see little more than a screen of cane. A narrow path led through the stiff vegetation, however, and he picked his way along it until suddenly the hillside opened up.
He found himself gazing down upon pasture, and beyond that the orderly rows of apple trees. Across the little valley, above the trees, a stone building rose. He gasped involuntarily as emotions rushed up to him like old acquaintances: anticipation, boyish excitement, pain, disillusionment, rank terror.
Anger.
It was the monastery d’Ef, where he first had learned how corrupt the Church of his childhood