The Charnel Prince - J. Gregory Keyes [103]
“—send you to kill the only enemy strong enough to interfere with his designs?” Leshya finished rather smugly. “Saints know.”
“What makes you think the Briar King is against the Church and not with it?”
“Ask your lover.”
Aspar nearly jumped at the word, and when he looked back at Winna found an odd expression on her face.
“What, Aspar?” she asked.
“We saw him,” he told her. “The slinders—the things Ehawk saw, the things you heard—they were at his command. They killed the priests, and could have killed us, but he held them back.”
“Then the Briar King is good?”
“Good? No. But he’s fighting for the forest. The thorns that follow him—they’re trying to destroy him, pull him down like they’re doing the trees. The greffyn wasn’t his servant—it was his foe.”
“Then he is good,” Winna insisted.
“He fights for the forest, Winna. But he’s no friend of us, no friend of people.”
“Still, you didn’t kill him,” she said. “You said you didn’t even try.”
“No. I don’t know what’s going on exactly. I can use this arrow only once more—as long as the praifec wasn’t lying about that—and I don’t want to use it on the wrong thing, if you catch my meaning.”
Winna shot a sharp glance at Leshya. “We’ve no idea whom we can trust, then.”
“Werlic.”
“So what do we do? The praifec sent us out here to kill the Briar King. You didn’t do it. So what do we do now?”
“We take Stephen to the sedos and see what happens. That’s where we start. After that, we figure out who’s lying to us, the praifec—” He looked straight at Leshya. “—or you.”
The Sefry just smiled and pulled her boot back on.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE THIRD FAITH
ANNE MANAGED TO CRAWL out onto the deck before being sick again. She even made it to the steerboard rail, and there her whole body spasmed and she vomited until she thought her breast would tear apart. Then she slid trembling to the deck and puddled there, weeping.
It was night, and if the ship wasn’t still, the wind was. She heard a sailor laugh briefly and another hush him. She didn’t care. She didn’t care about anything.
She wished she could just die and have it over with. She deserved it.
She had killed Sir Neil, as certainly as if she had pushed him into the ocean herself. He had traveled across half the world and saved her—saved all of them—and all she had been able to do was watch the sea close over his head.
If she lived forever, she would never forget the look of betrayal in his eyes.
She took a deep, shuddering breath. It was better out here in the air. When she went below to the tiny cabin she shared with Austra, everything spun around. Two days now like that. She couldn’t keep any food down at all, and wine just made it worse, even when it was mixed with water.
She rolled over onto her back and looked up at the stars.
The stars stared back at her. So did an orange half-moon that seemed somehow far too bright.
She was starting to feel sick again.
She fixed her eye on the moon, trying to make the motion go away, to focus beyond it. She picked out features from the dark splotches, remembered maps, and noticed strange patterns that signified nothing she had ever seen, but nevertheless seemed to have meaning.
The motion of the ship gradually faded, and the light of the Moon went from orange to yellow to—as she hung directly overhead—shining silver.
With a soft movement, the ship was gone altogether. Anne looked around, only half surprised this time to find herself in a forest still bathed in moonlight.
She gathered her feet under her and stood up shakily. “Hello?” she said.
There was no answer.
She had twice been to this place. The first time she had been forced—drawn from her sister’s birthday party by a strange masked woman. The second, she had come herself, somehow, trying to escape the darkness of the cave where she had been confined by the sisters of the coven Saint Cer.
This time she wasn’t sure if she had been called or come or something in between. But it was nighttime, where before it had always been bright. And there was no one here