The Charnel Prince (49 page)

“In any event,” Leshya said, “it’s pointless to go back to Eslen to alert your praifec, since it seems perfectly clear he’s well aware of what’s going on out here.”

“Well,
I’m
not clear on it,” Aspar said.

“Neither am I,” Leshya shot back, “but we know now that the Church is waking an old faneway, and it seems just as certain that it’s not a good idea to let them finish it.”

“They may
have
finished it,” Aspar said.

“I don’t think so,” Stephen said. “I believe these are the instructions for the consecration of this
Khrwbh Khrwkh
, whatever exactly it might be. And the canitu appears to be part of a longer piece—or more specifically, the
end
of a longer piece.”

“You’re saying that we have what they need to finish it.”

“Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Listen, I’ll try to translate for you.” He cleared his throat.

And now to the Bent Mound

The Bloody Crescent

Blood for the Bent Mound

Blood of Seven

Blood of Three

Blood of One

Let the Seven be mortal in all ways

Let the Three be Swordsman, Priest, and Crown

Let the One be Deathless

Beat then the Heart of Bent Mound

Flow from the Spectral Eye

Flow from the Mother Devouring

Flow from Pel the Rage Giver

Flow from Huskwood

Flow from the Twins, Rot and Decay

Flow from the Not Dead.

Here it begins, the way is complete.

There was a moment of silence, and then Aspar grunted. “A drinking song it’s not.”

“I’m not sure about all of it,” Stephen admitted. “That bit about swordsman, priest, and crown, for instance. The words here are
Pir Khabh, dhervhidh
, and
Thykher
. The first is very particular, a man who fights with a sword.
Dhervhidh
means ‘someone who has walked a faneway,’ but not necessarily in orders. The third,
Thykher
, could be anyone of noble blood or it might mean a king specifically. Without better resources, better reference materials, I’ve no way of knowing for sure.”

“What was that about ‘deathless’?” Winna asked.

“
Mhwrmakhy
,” Stephen said. “It really means ‘servant of the
Mhwr
,’ another name for the Black Jester, but they were also called ‘anmhyry’ or ‘deathless.’ We don’t know much about them except that they don’t exist anymore.”

“Didn’t exist anymore, you mean,” Leshya said. “That used to be true of a lot of things.”

“Granted,” Stephen agreed, a little diffidently. Something was gnawing at him about the list of “flowing froms.”

Aspar noticed his inattention. “What is it?” he asked.

Stephen folded his arms across his chest.

“A faneway has to be walked in sequence, and the whole faneway has to be awake, so to speak, for its power to flow properly. That’s why something strange happened when I set foot on one, probably because I already have a connection to the sedoi.”

“And so?” Leshya asked.

“Well, if I understand this invocation, the last sedos in the faneway is
Khrwbh Khrwkh
,” Stephen explained. “We don’t know where that is, obviously, but according to this verse, the first one is the Spectral Eye . . .”

“You know where that is?” Aspar asked.

“In a minute,” Stephen said absently. “I’m still thinking this through.”

“No, please, take your time,” Aspar muttered.

“The second one, ‘Mother Devouring’—that’s the fane I went in, I’m certain of it. The first one Leshya led us to. That’s one of the titles of Marhirehben.”

“Aspar, back when you were tracking the greffyn, after you sent me off to d’Ef, you said you found a sacrifice at a sedos. Where was that, exactly?”

“About five leagues east of here, on Taff Creek.”

“Taff,” Stephen considered. Then he reached into his saddle, back where his maps were rolled up. He selected the one he wanted, then sat down cross-legged and rolled it out on the ground.

“What map is that?” Leshya asked, peering down at it.

“Stephen is in the habit of carrying maps a thousand years out of date,” Aspar said.

“Yes,” Stephen said, “but it may have finally done some good. This is a copy of a map made during the time of the Hegemony. The place-names have been altered to make sense to the Vitellian ear and to be written in the old scrift. Where would the Taff be, Aspar?”

The holter bent over and studied the yellowed paper. “The forest is different,” he said. “There’s more of it. But the rivers are near the same.” He thrust his finger at a small, squiggling line. “Thereabout,” he said.

“See the name of the creek?” Stephen asked.

“Tavata,” Winna read.

Stephen nodded. “It’s a corruption of Alotersian
tadvat
, I’ll wager—which means ‘specter.’”

“That’s it, then,” Leshya said.

Aspar made a skeptical noise.

Stephen moved his finger over a bit. “So the one on the Taff is the first. The one I stepped into is the second, and about here. That last one was about here.” He placed his finger on curved lines indicating hills. One, oddly, had a dead tree sketched on its summit.

“Does that mean anything to you, Aspar? Do you know anything about that place?”

Aspar frowned. “It used to be where the old people made sacrifice to Grim. They hung ‘em on that Naubagm tree.”

“Haergrim the Raver?”

Aspar nodded slowly, his face troubled.

“I’ve never heard of Pel,” Stephen allowed, “but the fact that both he and Haergrim are connected to rage is interesting, isn’t it?”

“I follow you now,” Leshya said. “So far, the monks have been moving east, and we’ve seen the first three of them. So where is the fourth?”

“Huskwood. In Vadhüan,
Vhydhrabh
.” He moved his finger east, until it came to rest on the d’Ef River. There was a town labeled Vitraf.

“Whitraff!” Winna exploded. “It’s a village! It’s still there!”

“Or so we hope,” Stephen said grimly.

“Yah,” Aspar said. “We’d best go see. And let me know when our prisoner wakes. He might be convinced to tell us more about this.”

But when they checked him, the monk was dead.

They gave the monk a holter’s funeral—which amounted to nothing more than laying him supine with his hands folded on his chest—and set off across the Brog-y-Stradh uplands. The forest often dissolved into heathered meadows and lush, ferny cloonys. Even with winter set to pounce, in these parts, the King’s Forest seemed to teem with life.

Stephen could tell that Aspar and Leshya saw things he didn’t. They rode at the front like dour siblings, guiding Ehawk’s mount. Winna had ridden with them for a time, but now she dropped back. “How are you feeling?” she asked.

“I feel fine,” Stephen said. But it wasn’t completely true—there was something nagging at him. He couldn’t tell her, though, that when he had awakened on the mound and grabbed Ehawk’s bow, he’d very nearly put an arrow into her instead of the monk.

Those first few heartbeats, he had felt a hatred that he couldn’t have imagined before, and could not now truly recall. Not for Winna specifically, but for everything living. It had faded so suddenly that he almost doubted he’d truly felt it.

He’d remembered dreams of some sort on first waking, as well, but those were gone, too, leaving only a vague, unclean feeling. “What about you?” he asked. “I’ve never seen you so subdued.”

She grimaced slightly. “It’s a lot to take in,” she said. “I’m a hostler’s daughter, remember? A few months ago my greatest worry was that Banf Thelason might get drunk and start a fight or Enry Flory might try and run off without paying for his ale. Even when I was with Aspar when he was tracking the greffyn, it was pretty simple. Now I don’t know who we’re supposed to be fighting. The Briar King? The praifec? Villagers gone mad? Who does that leave out? And what good am I?”

“Don’t talk like that,” Stephen said.

“Why not? It’s what Aspar has been saying all along. I’ve denied it, come up with excuses, but down in the marrow, I know he’s right. I can’t fight or track, I don’t know much of anything, and every time there’s a brawl, I have to be protected.”

“Not like Leshya, eh?” Stephen said.

Her eyes widened. “Don’t be cruel,” she whispered.

“But it’s what you’re thinking,” he said, surprised to hear such bold words coming from his mouth. “She’s beautiful, and more his
age. She’s Sefry and he was raised that way, she can track like a wolf and fight like a panther, and she seems to know more about this whole business than the rest of us put together. Why wouldn’t he want her instead of you?”

“I—” She choked off. “Why are you talking this way?”

“Well, for one thing, I know how it feels to think you’re useless,” he said. “And no one can make you feel as perfectly useless as Aspar. It’s not something he does on purpose—it’s just that he’s so good at what he does. He says he doesn’t need anything or anyone, and sometimes you actually believe him.”

“You, useless?” she said. “You’ve saint-given talents. You’ve knowledge of the small and the large and everything between, and without you we wouldn’t have the faintest idea what to do.”

“I wasn’t saint-blessed when Aspar met me,” he pointed out, remembering vividly the holter’s undisguised contempt, “and Aspar certainly thought I was dead weight. By the time we parted, I thought he was right. But I was mistaken. So are you, and you know it.”

“I don’t—”

“Why did you follow Aspar, Winna? Why did you leave Colbaely and your father and everything you knew to chase after a holter?”

She bent her mouth to one side, a habit he found winsome. “Well, I never maunted to actually
leave
Colbaely,” she said, “not for this long. I thought Asp was in danger and went to warn him, and then I reckoned I’d go back home.”

“But you didn’t. Why?”

“Because I’m in love with him,” she said.

That pricked a peculiar feeling in Stephen, but he pressed on through it. “Still, you must have been in love with him for a while,” Stephen said. “It didn’t happen that fast, did it?”

“I’ve loved him since I was a little girl.” She sighed.

“So why, suddenly, did you do something about it?”

“I didn’t intend to,” she said. “It’s just—I found him all laid out on the ground. I thought he was dead, and I thought he would never know.”

“Why did you imagine he would care?”

She shook her head and looked miserable. “I don’t know.”

“May I tell you what I think?” Stephen asked.

Winna tossed her hair out of her face. It had been cut short when he met her, but now it was getting pretty long. “Why not?” she said morosely. “You’ve been about as blunt as I can imagine already.”

“I think you saw in that moment that Aspar was missing something. He’s strong and determined and skillful, and he’s smart, in his way. But he doesn’t have a heart, not without you. Without you, he’s just another part of the forest, wandering farther and farther from being human. You brought him back to us.” He paused, retracing the words in his mind. “Does that make any sense?”

Winna’s brow crinkled, but she didn’t say anything. “It’s why the three of us work so well together,” he went on. “He’s the muscle and the knife and the arrow. I have the book knowledge he pretends to disdain, but knows he needs, and you’re sovereign to us both, the thing that ties us all together.”

She snorted. “Swordsman, priest, and crown?”

He blinked. She was referring to the Vadhüan incantation. “Well, it is a very old trinity,” he said. “Even the saints break out in threes, that way—Saint Nod, Saint Oimo, and Saint Loy, for instance.”

“I’m not a queen,” Winna said. “I’m just a girl from Colbaely who’s gone off where she doesn’t belong.”

“That’s not true,” Stephen said.

“Well then where does
she
fit in?” she asked, jerking her nose
toward Leshya.

“She doesn’t,” Stephen said. “She’s another Aspar, that’s what she is, and he won’t get a heart from her, nor she from him.”

“Aspar’s never much wanted a heart,” Winna said. “Maybe what he needs is a woman who’s more like him.”

“Doesn’t matter what he wants,” Stephen said. “Love doesn’t care what’s right, or good, or what anyone wants.”

“I know that all too well,” Winna said.

“Do you feel any better at all?”

“Maybe,” she said. “If I don’t, it’s not for lack of trying. Thank you, Stephen.”

They rode silently after that, and Stephen was glad, because he wasn’t sure he could defend Aspar much longer without breaking faith. He hadn’t lied—everything he’d said was true.