The Born Queen - J. Gregory Keyes [140]
“Aspar,” the old man said. “What a pretty gift you bring me.” He frowned. “Is this little Winna?”
“It’s me, Sir Symen,” she confirmed.
“Oh, sweet girl, how you’ve grown. It’s been too long since I went to Colbaely.” He glanced at her belly but politely didn’t say anything.
“Have you heard anything about the town?”
“Your father left, I know that; headed over the mountains toward Virgenya. Most others fled or died when the slinders came.”
He turned to clasp Aspar’s arm. He felt no more substantial than a straw.
“I told you, didn’t I, Aspar? Hardheaded man you are.”
He nodded. “You were more right than wrong,” he admitted. “What happened here?”
“Sit,” Sir Symen said. “I still have wine. We’ll have a drink.”
He signed, and a young boy who had been sitting on a stool in the corner got up and went off down the hall.
“Anfalthy?” Aspar asked.
“I sent her to relatives in Hornladh,” he replied. “Along with the other women. This is no place for them now.”
The boy returned with a jug of wine. Mazers were already scattered about the table, and he set about filling them.
Symen took a long quaff. “It’s good to have visitors to drink with,” he said. “We don’t have much company these days.”
“You never did,” Aspar replied.
“No, that’s true,” the knight allowed. He trailed a glance at Emfrith and his men. “Who are your friends?”
Aspar made the introductions, trying not to let his impatience show. When that was all settled, Symen finally got around to the holter’s question.
“The slinders came,” he said. “But they couldn’t breach the walls, and they soon left. They came several times, but it was always the same. They were terrifying if you met them in the forest, but against a keep—even such a poor keep as this one—they had no weapons. They couldn’t chew their way through stone, could they? So we stayed put, and when they were distant, I sent men to help the villagers and to lay up meat for a siege.
“Then the monsters started to show, but it seems mad King Gault wasn’t so mad after all. He built this place to keep the alvs and booyghs out, and damned if it doesn’t.”
“What do you mean?”
“They can’t or won’t come in. I can only imagine some enchantment keeps them out.”
“Grim,” Aspar murmured. “That’s a turn of weird.”
“But a fortunate one for us,” Symen replied.
“Yah.”
“So they came and went, and then the forest began to die. Then slinders returned, hundreds of them, and greffyns and manticores and all manner of beasts, and they killed each other outside the walls, and what was left starved. We waited inside here, and now here you are.”
“But that’s wonderful,” Emfrith said. “Holter, this is the place. This is where Winna can have her child.”
The geos was still finding a lie for Aspar to tell when Isarn suddenly burst into the hall.
“Sir Symen,” he shouted. “There’s an army coming, not two leagues away. Henne saw it.”
“From the north?” Aspar said. “Yah, that’ll be Fend.”
“And he’ll be helpless,” Emfrith said. “His beasts can’t harm us here. They’ll starve like the others.”
“He still has men,” Aspar pointed out. “They can come in, and probably the Sefry, too.”
“This army is marching from the west,” Isarn replied. “Men and horses, maybe five hundred.”
“Not Fend, then,” Winna said.
“Relief from Eslen, perhaps?”
“Perhaps,” Aspar said. But he remembered what Fend had told him, and in his heart he didn’t think there was any relief in sight.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
DRINKING WITH WARRIORS
THE ARROW felt like liquid fire in Cazio’s arm, and he went all knee-weak.
Dodging arrows, he had decided, was not his forte. That was too bad, because he could see that the man who had shot him was drawing back another shaft as another fellow with ax and shield was bearing down on him hard.
He stepped to put the axman between him and the archer and raised Acredo, glad he’d been hit in the left arm. The arrow was still there, like a little tree sprouting