The Charnel Prince - J. Gregory Keyes [100]
Aspar had tracked one greffyn over half of Crotheny. He’d never seen it run from anything.
If the greffyn had fought alongside them, the monks might have stood a chance. He had seen how their kind could fight, and even a poor fighter with a sword was more than a match for any number of naked, unarmed attackers.
But these attackers didn’t care if they died, and that in itself was a potent weapon.
So he watched as the slinders hurled into the monks glittering blades like meat into a grinder, with much the same results. In instants the clearing was bathed in gore, viscera, severed heads and limbs. But the attackers kept coming without hesitation, without fear, like Grim’s birsirks—though birsirks usually carried at least a spear. He saw one who had lost a leg dragging himself toward the monks. Another impaled himself on a sword, locking his hands around his foe’s throat.
There was fighting against that, but there was no winning. One by one the monks were dragged down by sheer force of numbers and had their throats bitten out or their bellies clawed open. Then, with his stomach lurching, Aspar watched the slinders feed, tearing into the bodies like wolves.
He glanced aside at the Sefry, but she wasn’t watching the slinders. Her eye was on the forest edge from which they had emerged. He followed her gaze and saw that the trees were still trembling, swaying even, and he felt as if the sun were rising, but there was no light. Just the feel of radiance on his face and the sense of change.
Something new stepped from the forest, then, not as tall as the trees but twice the height of a big man. Black antlers branched from its head, but its face was that of a man with birch-bark pale skin and a beard like thick brown moss. He was as naked as the slinders, though thick hair or moss covered much of him. Where his feet struck the ground, black briars spurted up like slow fountains.
“He didn’t look like that before,” Aspar muttered.
“He’s the Briar King,” the Sefry replied. “He’s always different, always the same.”
A crowd of slinders followed him, and when the briars sprouted, they hurled themselves upon them, trying to tear them from the ground. Their bodies were flushed with blood, for the thorns cut deep, but like the monks, the thorns were no match for determination and numbers. The slinders bled and died, but the thorns were ripped apart as surely as their human foes.
The Briar King, seemingly unconcerned with any of that, strode up to the fallen monks, and the forest at his back seemed to strain to follow him.
Grimly, Aspar reached for the black arrow. He knew his best chance when he saw it.
“And here is where your choice lies, holter,” the Sefry whispered.
“No choice,” Aspar said. “He’s killing the forest.”
“Is he? Are your eyes truly open, holter?”
For answer, Aspar fitted the arrow to the sinew of his bow.
The wind dropped, and then the Briar King turned. Even at that distance, Aspar could see the green glint of his eyes.
The slinders looked up, too, and started toward Aspar, but the horned monarch lifted one hand, and they stopped in their tracks.
“Think, holter,” the Sefry said. “I only ask you to think.”
“What do you know, Sefry?”
“Little more than you do. I only know what my heart tells me. Now ask yours what it tells you. I brought you here because no one knows this forest better than you—no Sefry, no Mannwight. Who is the enemy here? Who gave you that arrow?”
The wind was nothing now. He could make the shot almost without thinking.
He could end it.
“Those things that follow him,” Aspar said, “they used to be people. Villagers.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “I’ve seen the empty villages.”
“Then . . .”
But the Briar King had saved his life. He’d been poisoned by the greffyn, and the king had stooped upon him. He remembered only a dream of the roots, sinking deep, of treetops drinking in the sun, of the great wheel of seasons, of birth and death and decay.
He’d told himself it was a lie.
The Briar King turned very slowly and walked back toward the forest. Aspar pulled the bow to its full