The Born Queen - J. Gregory Keyes [45]
“But we smell good,” she said.
In fact, she smelled of sweat and leather, and it did smell good.
“Ah, there’s a home for gangrene,” she said.
Aspar looked down and saw a ragged but not particularly deep cut on his ribs. Blood had glued his jerkin to the wound, which was what he’d felt when she had dishabilled him.
He took deep breaths and tried to stay relaxed as she cleaned out the gash with water and then pressed some sort of unguent from her haversack into the cut.
“You saved my life,” she said, her voice sounding oddly soft.
“Yah. You’ve saved mine a time or two.”
“You’re important, Aspar. You’re worth saving.”
Without thinking, he caught her hand. “You’re worth saving, too,” he said.
Her startled gaze met his and settled there, and he felt a sort of jolt, and in an instant he was gazing into the deepest forest in the world, more impossible to enter than the Sarnwood, even less possible to leave. He felt beaten, and happy to be beaten, happy to finally go home.
He saw the path in for perhaps ten heartbeats, and then the trees closed ranks. She pulled her hand away, and he knew that if she had just squeezed his fingers, he would have acted foolishly.
Sceat, he thought. At a time like this he was thinking about women? Two of them? Was he seventeen?
“I don’t think we have all that long,” Aspar said. “The utin said Fend sent him. If Fend is leading that motley up above—”
“He is the Blood Knight, then.”
“Yah, whatever the sceat that means.”
“I’ll tell you, I promise. But right now we need to go. And quietly.”
“Soon,” he said.
“Soon.”
The valley narrowed to the point where they were always on a slope. Aspar’s leg ached even with the new crutch Leshya had cut him, and as the way turned more and more downhill, his knees began to hurt as well.
In the back of his mind he’d always reckoned that after a while he’d be back to his old self, but now he was starting to wonder. He was past forty winters, and at his age, when things broke, they didn’t necessarily get fixed.
They came at last to steep, shallow shoals with nothing but cliffs on either side.
“We’ll be getting wet,” Leshya said.
They went down basically sitting, letting their boots find the rocks. The mountain water already had winter in it, and before they were a third of the way down, Aspar’s extremities were numb. Halfway, his boot slipped and the current got control of him, sweeping him down until he lodged hard against a log.
The sky was wider there. Two white-tailed eagles turned high above. Treetops peered down at him from the gorge’s rim.
It’s still alive here, he thought. Despite the monsters. Why should I go back to the King’s Forest, where everything is dead? Why not stay here, fight, die, sink into the earth?
It was only when something struck him across the face that he realized there was water in his mouth and lungs. His body understood then, and he started hacking it up in long, painful coughs.
“Get up,” Leshya said. “You’re not done, Aspar White.”
They made it the rest of the way down, and he took a few minutes to finish clearing his lungs.
“Sceat,” he managed weakly.
“You’ve got to help me more than this, Aspar,” Leshya said. “You’ve got to try harder.”
“Sceat on you,” he muttered, and for a moment he wanted to kill her just for seeing him like this. It was the most humiliating thing he could imagine.
Up until now, at least. Now he could envision more worlds waiting for him as the years crept by. Why, there was Winna, still young enough to bear children, rolling him over to change the linens under him, the ones he’d just soiled…
He pushed himself up with the crutch, then threw it away.
“Let’s go,” he said.
The valley broadened out into a gentle, ferny glen where the warmth of the sun took the chill from his bones. Dragonflies whirred over the water and its sedge of horsetails. Snakes and turtles lazily quit their perches as the two travelers neared them. The cliffs became slopes, and trees walked down them; soon they were able to move out of the marsh and travel on drier ground.
He also began seeing more