Gregory Keyes - The Blood Knight

But maybe Winna did understand that. Maybe that was the problem.

It’s all moot if the slinders get us , he reckoned, and he nearly chuckled. It sounded like one of those sayings. As well stretch your neck for the Raver as marry. A good day is the one you live through. It’s all moot if the slinders come …

Sceat, he was starting to think like Stephen.

He shot another slinder.

Three arrows left.

It wasn’t as easy cutting through branches as Stephen might have wished or imagined. The sword had an edge, but it wasn’t that sharp, and he’d never really done much wood chopping, so he wasn’t certain about the best way to go about the task.

A glance showed him that the outer branches were nearly low enough for the slinders to reach; that meant he had to hurry.

He reared back for a more powerful swing and nearly fell. He was straddling a limb, clutching it with his inner thighs the way one did a horse. But like a horse, the branch refused to be still, and it seemed a dizzying long way to the ground.

He renewed his balance and made a more modest cut, feeling the living wood shiver under the blow and watching a smallish chip fly. Maybe if he cut straight, then at an angle…

He did, and that worked better.

He couldn’t stop paying attention to the slinder song. There was a language there; he felt the cadence, the flow of meaning. But he couldn’t understand it, not a single word, and given his saint-blessed memory and knowledge of languages, that was astonishing. In his mind he compared it to everything from Old Vadhiian to what little he knew of the language of Hadam, but nothing fit. Nevertheless, he felt as if the meaning was incredibly close, resting on his nose, too near to his eyes to quite see.

Aspar thought the slinders had changed. What did that mean?

“Slinder” was an Oostish word that just meant “eater” or “devouring one.” But what were they really? The short answer was that they had once been people who lived near or in the King’s Forest, before the Briar King awoke. Since his awakening, entire tribes had abandoned their villages to follow the king, whatever he was.

There were legends of such things, of course. There was a detail in the Tale of Galas , the only remaining text from the ancient vanished kingdom of Tirz Eqqon. The great bull of the Ferigolz had been stolen by Vhomar giants, and Galas had been sent to retrieve it. In his quest he had met a giant named Koerwidz who had a magic cauldron, a drink from which transformed men into beasts of various kinds.

Saint Fufluns was said to possess a pipe whose music filled men with madness and turned them cannibal. Grim, the Raver—the dark and terrible Ingorn spirit that Aspar swore by—also was said to inspire battle madness in his worshippers, making birsirks of them.

The limb gave way with a snap, hung for a moment by its bark, then fell. The portion Stephen was on sprang up like the arm of a catapult, and he suddenly found himself airborne and feeling stupid.

On the Sundry Follies of the Thinks-Too-Much , he began, a new essay he’d just decided to write in his head. He reckoned he had time for another line or so as he flailed wildly for purchase. His thigh hit a branch, and he scrabbled for it, losing the sword, of course, in the process and not securing a hold, either.

Looking up, he saw Winna’s face far above, tiny but beautiful. Did she know he loved her? He was sorry he hadn’t told her even though it might mean the end of their friendship—and of his friendship with Aspar.

His hand caught a branch, and fire seemed to shoot up his arm, but he held it, nevertheless. Gasping, he glanced down. The slinders were there, leaping for him, missing his dangling feet by a yard or so.

The chief virtue of the Thinks-Too-Much is that it isn’t likely to reproduce its kind, for its lack of attention to matters at hand oft leads to an untimely demise. Its only virtue is its love of friends and sorrow that it could not help them more.

He saw that the sorcelled tree limbs had reached the ground, and the man-beasts were swarming up into the branches. He looked up in time to see a leering face just before another body grappled his and pulled him into the salivating mob below.

“I’m sorry, Aspar!” he managed to shout before he was smothered in greedy hands.

Leoff gagged at the pain as his fingers were stretched toward what had once been a natural angle for them. “The device is my own invention,” the leic explained proudly. “I’ve had great success with it.”

Leoff blinked through his tears and peered at the thing. It was essentially a gauntlet of supple leather with small metal hooks at the end of each finger. His hand had been inserted into the glove and placed on a metal plate with various holes drilled for the hooks to catch in. The doctor had stretched his fingers out in the directions they ought to lie and fixed them there with the hooks.

Then—the most painful part—a second plate was fitted above his hand and tightened down with screws. The tendons of his arm ran with fire, and he wondered if this was just a more subtle form of torture devised by the usurper and his physicians.

“Let’s go back to the heat and the herbs.” Leoff winced. “That part felt good.”

“That was just to loosen things up,” the leic explained, “and to invoke the healing humors. This is the important part. Your hands were mending all wrong, but fortunately they had not been allowed to progress for too long. We must now guide them into the proper shape; after that, I can build rigid splints that will hold them in place until the true healing can occur.”

“This comes up often, then?” Leoff gasped as the fellow further tightened the screws. His palm was still far from flat, but already he could feel multiplied tiny snaps within his bruised flesh. “Hands done up like this.”

“Not like this,” the leic admitted. “I’ve never worked on hands damaged quite in this way. But hands crushed by blow from mace or sword are common enough. Before I was leic to His Majesty, I was physician to the court of the Greft of Ofthen. He held tournaments every month, you see, and he had five sons and thirteen nephews of jousting age.”

“So you’ve only recently come to Eslen?” Leoff asked, glad for the distraction.

“I came about a year ago, though at the time I was attendant to the leic who served His Majesty King William. After the king’s death, I served Her Majesty the queen briefly before becoming attendant to King Robert’s physician.”

“I am recently come here as well,” Leoff said.

The physician tightened the screws.

“I know who you are, of course. You gained a reputation rather quickly, I should say.” He smiled thinly. “You might have exercised a bit more prudence.”

“I might have,” Leoff assented. “But then we wouldn’t have the fun of seeing exactly how effective your device will be.”

“I will not deceive you,” the leic said. “Your hands can be made better, but they cannot be made as new.”

“I never imagined they could be.” Leoff sighed, blinking away tears of pain as another half-healed bone snapped and went groaning into a new position.

The next day he clumsily pawed through one of the books the usurper had supplied him, using hands encased in rigid gloves of iron and heavy leather, as the physician had promised. They were splayed out, fully stretched, and looked altogether too much like the comically exaggerated hands of a puppet. He couldn’t decide whether he appeared droll or horrible as he tried to turn the pages with his cumbersome mittens.

He soon forgot that, however, as he was lost in puzzlement.