The Born Queen - J. Gregory Keyes [46]
He felt the geos of the Sarnwood in his belly, cold, waiting. Who would it be?
All the while, the terrain turned them south.
It was getting dark when they heard dogs and smelled smoke. Soon they saw, on a rise some distance from the stream, a fenced yard and a large cabin built of split cypress.
To Aspar’s relief, Leshya gestured away from that and upslope, where in time the trees thinned into pasture. The stars began to appear, although the sun was barely gone behind the mountain they just had come down from. Aspar found himself looking back often, and once something caught his eye. He thought at first that it was a bat, but then he kenned he’d misunderstood the distance; if it was a bat, it was a very big one.
He suddenly felt like a hare on a broad plain.
“Ah,” Leshya said. He found her staring at the thing as it vanished into shadow.
“Any ideas what that might be?”
“No. But I reckon we’d better sleep in tonight.”
“Go back down to the cabin?”
“No. This is winter pasture. There ought to be something up here.”
She was proved right before the darkness was total; they found a small sod house in good repair. It was even sparely furnished with firewood, a cooking pot, a cask of somewhat weevily oats, and a little dried meat. Cobwebs testified that all of it was from the last season.
They didn’t build a fire, and so the oats stayed where they were, but the dried meat proved hard to resist, thievery though it was.
“Blood Knight,” Aspar said as he lay back on a straw mat and pulled the ragged bits of a blanket over his legs.
“Right,” she said.
He couldn’t see her at all in the darkness. “And you can throw in as a bargain where you got this witchy knife.”
“That’s easier,” she said. “I found it on a dead man back at the mountain. One of Hespero’s men.”
“Where are they getting those things?”
“Old places,” she said. “There were once quite a lot of them.”
“When your folk ruled the world.”
“When we were being beaten by yours,” she replied. “The fey weapons were forged by humans. Virgenya Dare found the knowledge of their making. The Skasloi wouldn’t use such weapons.”
“Why?”
“Because they draw on the sedos power. The Skasloi wouldn’t have anything to do with that.”
“Why?”
She sighed. “You know we don’t really write things down, we Sefry. But we live a long time. Seventy generations have come and gone for your kind since you won your freedom. But my mother was born four hundred years ago, and her mother was born six hundred before that. Three more generations back—”
“You were Skasloi. Yah.”
“So our memories are better. But there’s still a lot we don’t know. Things our ancestors intentionally didn’t pass on and others they may have lied about. So understand that everything I’m about to tell you might not be true.”
“I grew up with Sefry, remember? I know a thing or two about their lies.”
She shrugged. “We couldn’t have survived all of these centuries without a talent for dissembling. If we had been found out—if the Mannish races ever knew what we really were—we would have been slaughtered.”
“Yah,” Aspar said drily. “I reckon.”
“Anyway, what I was getting to. My ancestors did use the sedos power once. But they discovered that using it isn’t without cost. Each time it’s drawn on, it leaves a poison behind it. The pollution builds up over time like dead fish in a stream, and things begin to die. Almost everything died once, before my ancestors understood the consequences of the sedos power and forswore its use.”
“But the Skasloi were supposed to be demons, with lots of strange shinecrafting.”
“The Skasloi had magicks, yes. They found another source of power, one without the same ill effects as the sedos. But by that time the world was a wasteland. They discovered a way beyond the lands of fate to another place, an otherwhere, and they brought plants to make the world green again. They brought animals, too, and in time they brought