The Charnel Prince - J. Gregory Keyes [113]
I can hear Aspar, Winna, and Ehawk, but my body is lost to me. I cannot speak to them or move a finger or an eyelid.
I remember I used to care for them.
I do still, in many ways. When Winna is near I can smell her, feel her, almost taste her. When she touches me, it sends shivers through me that somehow are not revealed on my dead flesh.
I heard her and Aspar last night. She smells different when they do that, sharper. So does Aspar.
Observations of the quaint and curious holter-beast—in the act of procreation, this ordinarily closemouthed creature vocalizes extraordinarily, though only in low tones. He makes rhymes of his lover’s name—mina-Winna, fenna-Winna, and the inevitable winna-Winna. He calls her by other silly appellations of his own invention, notwithstanding that Winna is already a rather silly name.
There’s someone new, a Sefry. Winna doesn’t like her because Aspar does, though he denies it every way he can. I wonder if she looks like his wife, the dead one?
They’re taking me to the next faneway, which for them is clever. I wonder what will happen there? The first was very strange, and I am hard put to explain why it affected me the way it did. It was consecrated to one of the damned saints, she who was known as the queen of demons. Perhaps Decmanis is punishing me for stepping on her faneway, and yet somehow that doesn’t feel right. The only other possibility that occurs is that she is somehow also an aspect of Saint Decmanis, which would be very interesting indeed, not to mention heretical.
Can saints be heretics?
We’re approaching the fane. I can feel it like a fire.
ASPAR SURVEYED THE CLEARING and the mound. The bodies were still there, and none of them were moving. Of the Briar King and his hunt there was no sign, save the dead bodies of slinders and the monks they had killed.
“Oh, saints,” Winna said when she saw the carnage.
“Weak stomach?” Leshya asked.
“I’ve seen bodies like this before,” Winna said. “But I don’t have to pretend I like it.”
“No, you don’t,” the Sefry agreed.
“So what do we do now?” Winna asked.
Aspar shrugged and dismounted. “Take Stephen up on the mound, I reckon. See what happens.”
“Are you quite certain this is the wise thing to do?” Leshya asked.
“No,” Aspar answered shortly.
Stepping carefully, they picked their way around where the bodies were thickest and up to the top of the sedos. Aspar laid Stephen out in the very middle.
As he’d more or less expected, nothing happened.
“Well, it was worth a try,” he muttered. “You three watch him. I’m going to have a better look around.”
Aspar walked back down through the carnage, feeling tired, angry at himself for having nursed such a forlorn hope. People died. He knew that by now, didn’t he? He used to be easy about it.
The slinders looked like people now, their faces relaxed in death. They could have come from any village around the King’s Forest. He was thankful that he didn’t see anyone he knew.
After a time he wandered to the edge of the forest, and before he realized it found himself standing beneath the gnarled branches of the naubagm and the strands of rotted rope that hung from them. The earth had drunk a lot of blood in this place. It had drunk his mother’s blood.
He’d never been told what brought her here. His father and foster mother rarely spoke of her, and when they did it was in hushed tones, and they made the sign against evil. Then they had died, and he’d ended up with Jesp.
A raven landed on the uppermost branch of the tree. Farther above, he saw the black silhouette of an eagle against the clouds. He took a deep breath and felt the land roll away from him, getting bigger, stretching out its bones of stone and sinews of root. He smelled the age and the life of it, and for the first time in a long while felt a kind of peaceful determination.
I’ll fix this, he silently promised the trees.
“I’ll fix this.” It was the first thing Jesp had said when she found him. He’d been running and bleeding for