The Charnel Prince - J. Gregory Keyes [152]
“This way,” she told Austra. “Quickly, before they can see us.”
It felt like forever, reaching the walled garden, but as they passed through the ruined arch, the knights still weren’t in sight. Anne got down on her hands and knees and began pushing through the gnarled vegetation, which if anything grew more thickly than in the horz Austra and she used to haunt in Eslen-of-Shadows. The earth smelled rich, and slightly rotten.
“They’re going to find us,” Austra said. “They’ll just come in after us, and we’ll be trapped.”
Anne wriggled between the close-spaced roots of an ancient olive tree. “They can’t cut their way in,” she said. “Saint Selfan will curse them.”
“They murdered sisters of a holy order, Anne,” Austra pointed out. “They don’t care about curses.”
“Still, it’s our only choice.”
“Can’t you—can’t you do something, like you did down by the river?”
“I don’t know,” Anne said. “It doesn’t really work like that. It just happens.”
But that wasn’t really true. It was just that when she had blinded the knight outside the coven and hurt Erieso in z’Espino, she hadn’t premeditated it, she’d just done it.
“I’m frightened of it,” she admitted. “I don’t understand it.”
“Yes, Anne, but we’re going to die, you see,” Austra said.
“You’ve a point there,” Anne admitted. They had gone as far into the horz as they could. They were already lying flat on their bellies, and from here on, the plants were woven too tightly.
“Just lie quiet,” Anne said. “Not a sound. Remember when we used to pretend the Scaos was after us? Just like that.”
“I don’t want to die,” Austra murmured.
Anne took Austra’s hand and pulled her close, until she could feel the other girl’s heartbeat. Somewhere near she could hear them talking.
“Wlait in thizhaih hourshai,” one of them said in a commanding voice.
“Raish,” the other replied.
Anne heard the squeak of saddle leather and then the sound of boots striking the ground. She wondered, bizarrely, if anything had happened to Faster, her horse, and had a painfully clear flash of riding him across the Sleeve in sunlight, with the perfumes of spring in the air. It seemed like centuries ago.
Austra’s heart beat more frantically next to hers as the boot sounds came nearer and the vegetation began to rustle. Anne closed her eyes and tried to work past her fear to the dark place inside her.
Instead she touched sickness. Without warning it swept through her in a wave, a kind of fever that felt as if her blood had turned to hot sewage and her bones to rotting meat. She wanted to gag, but somehow couldn’t find her throat, and her body felt as if it had somehow faded away.
“Ik ni shaiwha iyo athan sa snori wanzyis thiku,” someone said very near them.
“Ita mait, thannuh,” the other growled from farther away.
“Maita?” the near man said, his tone hesitant.
“Yah.”
There was a pause, and then the sound of something slashing into the vegetation. Anne gasped as the sick feeling intensified.
Austra had been right. These men showed no fear of the sacred.
She pressed herself harder against the earth, and her head started to spin. The earth seemed to give way, and she began sinking down through the roots, feeling the little fibers on them tickle her face. At the same time, something seemed to be welling up from beneath her, like blood to the surface of a wound. Fury pulsed in her like a shivering lute string, and for a moment she wanted to catch hold of it, let it have her.
But then that, too, faded, as did the nausea and the sensation of sinking. Her cheek felt warm.
She opened her eyes.
She lay in a gently rolling spring-green meadow cupped in a forest palm of oak, beech, poplar, liquidambar, everic, and ten other sorts of trees she did not know. Over her left shoulder, a small rinn chuckled into a mere that was carpeted with water lilies and fringed by rushes, where a solitary crane moved carefully on stilt legs, searching for fish. Over her right shoulder, the white and tiny blue flowers of clover and wimpleweed that were her bed gave way to fern fronds and fiddleheads.