Gregory Keyes - The Blood Knight

Then he was gone.

Then another figure plunged through the frame, caricatured by distance as Stephen, a knife gleaming in his hand as he swung purposefully from the branch into the grove of raised arms and their five-petaled blooms.

Ehawk.

From somewhere near Aspar heard a raw scream of rage. Part of him wondered vaguely who it was, and it was only later, when he felt the soreness of his throat, that he realized it had been his own.

He started forward on his branch, but there was nothing he could do. Winna shrieked again, a sound that somewhat resembled the boy’s name. Aspar watched, his heart frozen, as Stephen’s face appeared once, streaked with blood, and then went back down in the mass.

Ehawk he didn’t see again. He aimed the bow, wondering what target to hit, what miracle shot could save his friends.

But the cold lump in his chest knew the truth: They were already dead.

Fury welled up in him. He shot, anyway, wanting to kill another of them, wishing he had enough arrows to slaughter them all. He didn’t care what they had been before the world went mad. Farmers, hunters, fathers, brothers, sisters—he didn’t care.

He looked at Winna, saw the tear-brimmed eyes, the utter helplessness that was mirror to his own. Her gaze pleaded for him to do something.

His survival instinct made him turn to use. his last few arrows on those slinders who still would be climbing up after them, but to his surprise he realized that they were gone. As he watched, the last of their attackers leapt from the tree, and like a wave retreating after it runs up a shingle, the mass of grotesque bodies flowed away into the twilight.

In but a few heartbeats, there was only the hushed sound of them retreating through the forest.

Aspar continued to crouch, staring after them. He felt incredibly tired, old, and lost.

“It’s snowing again,” Winna said sometime later.

Aspar acknowledged the truth of that with a little shrug.

“Aspar.”

“Yah.” He sighed. “Come on.”

He stood on his perch and helped her down. She wrapped her arms around him, and they clutched there for a few moments. He was aware of the two men-at-arms watching them, but for the moment he didn’t care. The warmth and the smell of her felt good. He remembered the first time she had kissed him, the confusion and the exhilaration, and he wanted to go back to that moment, back before things had become so confusing.

Before Stephen and Ehawk had died.

“Hello!” a voice called up from below.

Looking past Winna’s curling snow-damped locks, Aspar saw the knight Neil MeqVren. The Vitellian swordsman was standing with him and the girl Austra. An oblique black anger stirred. These three and the men-at-arms—they were almost strangers. Why should they be allowed to live when Stephen was torn limb from limb?

Sceat on it . There were things to be done.

“Let me go,” Aspar muttered gruffly, pulling at Winna’s arms. “I need to talk to them.”

“Aspar, that was Stephen and Ehawk.”

“Yah. I need to talk to these men.”

She let him go, and, avoiding her eyes, he helped her the rest of the way down the tree, jumping to avoid the bodies piled up on the spreading roots, wary that one or more of them might still be alive. But none moved.

“You’re all all right?” he asked Neil.

The knight nodded. “Only by the mercy of the saints. Those things had no interest in us.”

“What do you mean?” Winna demanded.

Neil lifted his hands. “We were just attacking Austra’s captors when they came pouring out from the woods. I cut three or four of them down before I realized they were just trying to run around us. We sheltered against a tree to keep from getting trampled. When they were passed, we fought Austra’s kidnappers. I’m afraid we had to kill them all.”

Austra nodded as if in agreement but seemed too shaken to speak, clinging tightly to Cazio.

“They ran past you,” Aspar repeated, trying to understand. “Then they were after us?”

“No,” Winna said thoughtfully. “Not us. They were after Stephen. And as soon as they got him, they left. Ehawk…” Her eyes widened with hope. “Aspar, what if they’re still alive? We didn’t actually see—”

“Yah,” he said, turning it this way and that in his head. After all, they had thought Stephen dead once before, and then they actually had had his body.

Winna was right .

“Well, we have to go after him, then,” Winna said.

“A moment, please,” Neil said, still studying the landscape of bodies. “There’s a lot here I don’t understand. These things that attacked us—these are the slinders you described to the queen on our first day of riding?”

“That they are,” Aspar admitted, impatience beginning to grow in him.

“And these serve the Briar King?”

“Same answer,” Aspar replied.

“And what is that ?” Neil pointed to the half-chewed carcass of an utin.

Aspar looked at the thing, thinking that Stephen would probably like to see it dissected like this so he could study it.

Instead of skin, the utin was covered in horny plates, not unlike the scuts of a tortoise. From the joints of those plates, black hairs bristled. In Aspar’s experience, that natural armor was good enough to turn arrows, dirks, and axes, but somehow the slinders had pried some of the horn up and dug into the flesh, exposing the wet organs within the thickly boned rib cage. The creature’s eyes had been clawed out, the bottom jaw broken and half torn off. A human arm, severed at the shoulder, was jammed in its throat.

“We call it an utin,” Aspar said. “We fought one before.”

“But these were killed by the slinders.”

“Yah.”

“From what you’ve been saying, then, of all of us, the slinders only attacked the utins and Frète Stephen.”

“That’s what it looks like,” Aspar agreed brusquely. “That’s what we’ve been saying.”

“But you think they took Stephen alive?”

For answer, Aspar spun on his heel and paced to where he had last seen his friend, where the oak’s unnaturally twisted branches still touched the earth. The others followed him.

“I’ve seen the slinders kill,” he said. “They either eat the dead on the spot or leave them torn to pieces. There’s no sign of that here, so they took Stephen and Ehawk with them.”

“But why would they take just those two?” Neil persisted. “What would they want with them in particular?”

“Why does it matter?” Winna challenged angrily. “We have to go get them back.”

Neil blushed, but he lifted his shoulders higher and tilted his chin up.

“Because,” he said, “I understand what it’s like to lose comrades. I know right well the conflict of two loyalties. But you are pledged to serve Her Majesty. If your friends are dead, they are dead, and nothing can be done about it. If they are alive, then they were spared for some reason also beyond your control. I implore—”

“Neil MeqVren,” Winna said, her voice cold now with fury. “You were there, at Cal Azroth, when the Briar King appeared. We all fought together there, and we all fought again at Dunmrogh. If it weren’t for Stephen, we would all be dead, and Her Majesty, too. You cannot be so unfeeling.”

Neil sighed. “Meme Winna,” he said, “I’ve no wish to hurt or offend you. But without any other bond, all of us—besides Cazio, here—we all are subjects of the throne of Crotheny. Our first allegiance is there. And if that were not so, remember that we all took an oath before leaving Dunmrogh to serve Anne, the rightful heir to that throne, and see her on it or die.

“Stephen and Ehawk took that oath, too.” His voice raised a bit. “And we have lost her. Someone has taken her from us, and we—her supposed protectors—are much reduced in number. Now you propose to divide us further, meme. Please remember your promise and help me find Anne. For the saints, we don’t even know Stephen and Ehawk are alive.”