The Born Queen (8 page)

That brought Stephen to the end of the first sheet. He lifted it and went to the next and saw that it was different. The hand was the same, but the characters weren’t all Virgenyan and neither was the language.

“Like the epistle,” he murmured. “A cipher.”

He lifted his pen to begin the work of translating it and realized with a start that his hand had been in motion while he’d been reading. He looked to see what he had written, and when he did, crawlers went up his neck. It was in Vahiian, and the hand was an oddly angular scrawl not at all his own:

S
OMETHING TERRIBLE IS IN THE MOUNTAIN
. I
T DOES NOT MEAN YOU WELL.

T
ELL NO ONE YOU’VE FOUND THE BOOK.

CHAPTER SIX

A M
ESSAGE FROM
M
OTHER

A
SPAR DROPPED
belly-down when he saw the greffyn. That put it out of sight, but he still could feel the burn of its yellow eyes through the trees. He glanced up at Leshya in the branches above him. She touched her eye with two fingers, then shook her head no. It hadn’t seen him.

Gradually he raised his head until he was peering down the streambed.

He counted forty-three riders. Three of them were Sefry, the rest human. But that didn’t end the count of the procession. He’d spied at least three greffyns: horse-size beasts with beaked heads and catlike bodies, if one discounted the scales and coarse hair that covered them. Four vaguely manlike utins loped alongside the horses, mostly on all fours, occasionally raising their spidery limbs to grasp and swing from low branches. A manticore like the one he and Leshya had killed that morning finished up the unlikely company.

Grim,
Aspar wondered,
is all of that really for me?

He all but held his breath until they had passed. Then he and Leshya compared their count.

“I think there may be one more greffyn or something about that size and shape,” she said. “Following a few dozen kingsyards behind and deeper in the woods. Other than that, that’s about the size of it.”

“I wonder what they left up in the pass.”

She thought about that for a moment. “The lead riders. Did you get a good look at them?”

“They were Sefry. Your lot?”

“Yes. Aitivar. But the three leading, those were all three
Vaix.
”

“Vaix?”

“Aitivar warriors.”

“Only three?”

She shook her head. “You don’t understand. The Mannish are probably fighting men. But there are only twelve Vaix at any given time. They aren’t ordinary warriors. They’re fast, strong, very skilled, very hard to kill.”

“Like that Hansan knight?”

“Hard to kill, not impossible. But they have feyswords and other arms inherited from the old times.” Her mouth quirked. “My point is, Fend has a quarter of his warriors out looking for you. You should be flattered.”

“Not flattered enough. He’s not with them.” He frowned. “How do you know Fend is their master?”

“Because I believe he drank the blood of the waurm you killed. I think he’s the Blood Knight, which means the Aitivar have won.”

“I’m not following you.”

“Well, this isn’t the time to talk about it,” she said.

“No, that would’ve been sometime in the last four months.”

“I told you—”

“Yah. When there’s a chance, you’re telling me. But sceat, yah, now we’ve got to get out of here. So, back to the question: How many do you think they have in the pass?”

“Too many,” she said. “But I can’t think of another way to leave.”

“I can,” Aspar said.

She lifted an eyebrow.

Aspar grabbed at a scraggly yellow pine as the rotten shale under his foot shifted and then snapped. He watched it turn in the air, the flat fragments almost seeming to glide on their long way down.

He felt the pine start to pull up from the roots and, with a grunt, pushed with the foot that still had purchase—and fell forward.

His target was a sapling growing up from the narrow edge below. He caught it, but it bent like a green bow, and he lost his grip and went back out into the air, turning, flailing for any purchase at all. Everything seemed to be out of reach.

Then something caught him. At first he had the impression of a giant spiderweb because it sagged as his weight went into it. He lay there for a moment, blinking, feeling the air all around him. The almost vertical slope stretched twenty kingsyards above, shattered stone and crevices filled with soil supporting a tenacious forest. Higher, the sky was simple and blue.

About four kingsyards up, Leshya’s face peeked down from where she was braced in the roots of a hemlock.

“That was interesting,” she said. “How I wonder what you will do next.”

A quick survey showed Aspar that he’d fallen into a sort of hammock of wild grapevines. Just below, the stubborn forest gave way to a gray stone cliff. If the vines failed to support him, there was nothing between him and the jumble of fallen rock a hundred yards below. He couldn’t even see the river at the bottom of the gorge, so there wasn’t much hope of hitting that.

He looked back in the direction from which he’d fallen. He and Leshya had been working their way down a groove worn by water running off the plateau. Not quite as perpendicular as the rest of the precipice, it was cluttered with enough debris to offer purchase, or at least so it had seemed from above. It was starting to look more dubious now as the water track steepened. The gray stone was harder, it seemed, than the shale above.

“What can you see from there?” Leshya asked.

“The channel hits the gray rock and gets steeper,” he said.

“Steeper?” she said dubiously. “Or impossible?”

“Steeper. Work your way to the deepest cut and there should be handholds. Below that, there’s a talus slope, like I reckoned.”

“How far below that?”

“I maun thirty kingsyards.”

“Oh, is that all? Thirty kingsyards of wedging our fingers and boot tips in cracks?”

“If you’ve got a better idea…”

“I do. Let’s go back up and fight them all.”

Aspar grabbed the thickest vine and carefully pulled himself to a sitting position. The natural net creaked and sagged, and leaves and chunks of rotting wood fell silently past him. Then he started working his way toward the rock face, cursing Grim in advance should a vine come unanchored and send him to the bonehouse.

He reached the wall and managed to scrabble sideways to the ledge, where he spent a few moments appreciating having something solid between him and the earth’s beckoning.

He turned at a slight noise and found Leshya on the shelf just above him.

“How’s the leg?” she asked.

Aspar realized he was wheezing as if he had just run for half a day. His heart felt weak, and his arms already were trembling from fatigue.

“It’s fine,” he said.

“Here,” Leshya said, holding out her hand.

She helped him up, and together they sat, regarding the descent still before them.

“At least we don’t have to go
up
it,” Leshya said.

“Sceat,” Aspar replied, wiping the sweat from his brow.

It had looked somehow better from the other angle. Now he could see the river.

“You might make it to the talus slope,” she said. “But the river…”

“Yah,” Aspar snarled.

The river had dug itself down another hundred kingsyards. Although he couldn’t see the canyon wall on his side, the other side looked as smooth as a fawn’s coat.

“We need rope,” he said, “and lots of it.” He glanced back at the vines.

“No,” Leshya said.

He didn’t answer, because she was right. Instead he scrutinized the gorge, hoping to find something he had missed.

“Come on,” Leshya said. “Let’s make it to the slope. At least there we’ll be able to camp. Maybe we’ll see a way to the river, maybe we won’t. But if they don’t think to look down here, we could survive for a while.”

“Yah,” Aspar said. “You said this was a stupid idea.”

“It was the only idea, Aspar. And here we are.”

“From here I might be able to get back up. Certain you could.”

“Nothing up there we want,” the Sefry replied. “Are you ready?”

“Yah.”

They started from the ledge at middagh, and it was almost vespers when Aspar finally half fell onto the jumble of soil and rocks, his muscles twitching and his breath like lungfuls of sand. He lay looking up from the deep shadow of the gorge at the black bats fluttering against a river of red sky, listening to the rising chorus of the frogs and the ghostly churring of nightjars. For a moment, it almost felt normal, as if he could rest.

It sounded right. It looked right. But he could smell the disease all around him. It was all poisoned, all dying.

The King’s Forest probably was already dead without the Briar King to protect it.

He should have understood earlier. He should have been helping the horned one all along. Now it was too late, and every breath he drew felt like wasted time.

But there had to be something he could do, something he could kill, that would set things right.

And there was Winna, yah?

He pushed himself up and began to limp his way down to the next broad ledge at the bottom of the slope, where he could see Leshya already searching for a protected campsite.

In the fading light, from the corner of his eye, he saw something else. It was coming down the way they had, but quickly, like a four-legged spider.

“Sceat,” he breathed, and drew his dirk, because he’d bundled his bow and arrows and dropped them down before the most arduous part of the climb. They were still ten yards down the slope.

He relaxed his grip and shoulders, waiting.

The utin changed course suddenly, leaping from the rock face into the tops of some small poplars, bending them in a nightmare imitation of Aspar’s earlier stunt. As the trees snapped back up, he saw it land effortlessly on the slope downgrade of him.

He let his breath out. It hadn’t seen him.

But his hackles went back up when he saw that its next leap was going to take it right to Leshya.

“Leshya!” he howled, coming out of his crouch and starting to run downhill. He saw her look up as the beast sprang forward. Then his leg jerked in a violent cramp and his knee went down, sending him into a tumble. Cursing, he tried to find his feet again, but the world stirred all about him, and he reckoned that at least he was going in the right direction.

He shocked against a half-rotted tree trunk and, wheezing, came dizzily to his feet, hoping he hadn’t broken anything new. He heard Leshya screaming something, and when he managed to focus on her, he saw her below him, backed against a tree, grimly stringing her bow. He didn’t see the utin until he followed the Sefry’s desperate gaze.

The tree-corpse that had stopped him was part of a jumble clogging a water cut in the slope. He was on top of a natural dam.

The utin was two kingsyards below him. Something seemed odd about the way it was moving.

Aspar got his footing and leaped.

It was really more of a fall.

The utin was on all fours, and Aspar landed squarely on its back. It was very fast, twisting even as the holter locked his left arm around its neck and wrapped his legs around the hard barrel of its torso. He plunged his dirk at the thing’s neck, but the weapon turned. That didn’t stop him; he kept stabbing away. He saw something bright standing in the utin’s chest, something familiar that he couldn’t place at the moment. He also noticed that the monster was missing a hind foot. Then the night was rushing around him at great speed. He leaned back to avoid the creature’s armored head slamming into his face and felt his weapon drive into something. The ear hole, maybe. The beast gave a satisfying shriek, and they were suddenly in the air.

Then they hit the ground hard, but Aspar had already blown out the breath in his lungs. He tightened his grip and kept thrusting.

Then they were falling again for what seemed like a long time, until the utin caught something, arresting their descent so hard that Aspar actually did loosen his grip around its windpipe. He expected to be flung off, but suddenly they were plummeting again. He managed to throw both arms around its neck.

It fetched against something else, howled, and fell again, twisting in the holter’s grip like some giant snake. Aspar’s arms were numb now, and he lost his clench again. This time he didn’t find it before something astonishingly cold hit him hard.

“Holter.”

Aspar opened his eyes, but there wasn’t much to see. He hadn’t lost his senses in the fall, but it had been hard keeping hold of them since. He’d been lucky in hitting the river where it was deep and relatively slow. From the rushing he heard up-and downstream, that easily could have not been the case.

Once he had dragged himself out, his abused body had finally given out. The warm air soon had taken the water’s chill, and the forest had worked to soothe him to sleep. He’d fought it but had drifted into and out of dream, and he wasn’t sure where he was when the voice spoke.

“Holter,”
it croaked again.

He sat up. He’d heard an utin speak before, and this was just what it sounded like. But he couldn’t tell how far away it was. It could be one kingsyard or ten. Either way it was too close.

“Mother sends regards, Mannish.”

Aspar kept quiet. He’d lost the dirk and was unarmed. However badly the utin was hurt, if it could move at all, he doubted very much he could fight it with his bare hands. His best chance was to stay still and hope it was bleeding to death. Failing that, morning might give him a better chance.

He heard something sliding through the undergrowth and wondered if the monster could see in the dark. He hoped not, but that seemed like a thing monsters ought to be able to do.

“Mother,”
the voice sighed again.

Something tickled the back of Aspar’s neck, something with a lot of legs. He stayed frozen as it explored around his ear, across his lips, and finally down his chin and across his jerkin.

It was quiet save for the gentle
shush
of the river, and after a time the sky above began to gray. Aspar turned his head slowly, trying to piece together his surroundings as the light came up. He made out the river first and then the reeds he’d crawled through into the shelter of the trees. The cliff across the water came into focus, and the boles nearest him emerged from darkness.

Something big fell behind him, brushing limbs and breaking sticks. He whipped his head around and saw something bright, glittering.

It was the thing in the utin’s chest. The creature itself lay collapsed only a kingsyard away. It had been right above him.

The thing in its chest, he saw now, was a knife, and he suddenly remembered, months before, a battle in an oak grove in Dunmrogh where a knight had wielded a sword that shone like this, a sword that could cut through almost anything.