He hadn’t realized how much the hard years had stripped from him until now, when he suddenly had it back. Was it really this place that was different, somehow more alive than the rest of the world, or was it a change in Aspar White, brought on by—well, Grim, he could admit it to himself, however foolish it might sound aloud—love?
He didn’t know and hardly cared. For the first time since he was a boy, he felt perfectly at one with the world.
There was indeed a cliff, as sheer as ever one could be, and it seemed to drop forever. That was difficult to tell, of course, for the canyon—it was certainly that now, with walls scarcely a stone’s throw apart—was filled with trees. Not tall, slender boles, but a writhing, twisting, twining maze of thick branches, black-skinned and armed with thorns bigger than his hand. They rose from the unseen bottom in a heady tangle that reminded him of nothing so much as the tyrants. You couldn’t fall far, in there. Of course, if you fell at all, you were likely to be impaled by the dagger-size thorns.
“What sort of tree is that?” Winna asked.
“I’ve never seen its like.”
Winna waved at the glossy green leaves, shaped like long, narrow hearts. “Briar trees, maybe? For a Briar King?”
“Why not?” Aspar wondered.
“We have to climb down through that, though, don’t we?”
“It’s that or go back,” Aspar replied.
“What about the horses?”
Aspar nodded reluctantly. “We’ll have to leave ’em. I suspect we’ll be back this way anyhow. I’ve a feeling this valley boxes, somewhere up ahead.”
He turned and patted Ogre’s cheek. “Take care of these two, as you did before, yah? I’ll be back for you.”
Ogre looked at him darkly, then tossed his head and stamped.
They kept close to the solid comfort of the granite wall, descending down the snaky branches from one to another. So tightly did they coil and twine, rarely was there room for Aspar to straighten. The thorns, at least, were spaced wide enough to avoid with relative ease, and in fact made good handholds.
The sky above became a mosaic, stained glass, a memory. At noon they were in twilight, and the leaves were going thin and yellow, starved for sunlight. A little lower, there were no leaves at all. Instead, the limbs were home to pale shelf fungi and yellow slime mold, white mushroomlike spheroids, and vaguely obscene crimson pipes.
Dragonflies the size of small birds wove in and out of the briars, and pale, squirrellike beasts scampered away from As-par and Winna as they climbed farther and farther from the sun.
Winna, ever delighted, and getting comfortable with their descent, moved ahead of Aspar by a stone’s throw. He didn’t like that, and said so, but she replied with lighthearted taunts about his age and encouraged him to greater speed.
When first she shrieked, he thought it was another joke, so unreal did her scream sound. But when she repeated herself, he understood the terror in it.
“Winna!” He dropped his own height, hit a branch slick with fungus and nearly fell. He caught himself, though, and went down the next branch as dexterously as a squirrel. He could see her, but he couldn’t see what threatened her.
He swung under the next branch, and something hit him in the face, something that gripped him like a giant, hairy hand. He gave a hoarse cry and clawed at it, pulling off a spider bigger than his head. He was mired in a web, too. It ripped easily enough, but it was sticky and disgusting. He hurled the spider away, hoping it hadn’t bitten, not feeling a bite.
A moment later he was just above Winna. She, too, was veiled in the sticky white spider-weave, crying and shaking. One of the eight-legged creatures was advancing toward her along the limb.
He pinned it there with his throwing ax. Its legs flailed wildly, but it was stuck fast.
“Were you bit?” he asked, as he reached her at last. “Did one of those things bite you?”
She shook her head, but waved a trembling hand around them.
They were everywhere, the spiders, spread between nearly every limb. Some were the size of fists, some as large as a cat. They were thick-legged, hairy, with yellow striping. An arm’s length from Winna, one of the squirrels struggled in a web, as its weaver moved toward it, mandibles working eagerly.
“Are they poisonous?” Winna rasped faintly.
“We aren’t going to find out,” Aspar said. “We’re moving back up. We’ll travel in the higher branches.”
“But don’t we have to go down?”
“Not yet. Not now. Maybe this is just a local nest of ’em.”
Aspar retrieved his ax, and they climbed back up, weaving carefully between the webs. A spider dropped from a branch, straight toward Aspar’s head, but he batted it away with a disgusted growl.
Finally, when they were well above the level where the spiders dwelt, they stopped and cleaned off as many of the webs as they could. Then they examined one another for wounds and spent a few moments nestled together.
“We’ll want to be out of these trees by nightfall,” Aspar said.
“Why? You think the spiders will come up?”
“No. But what else lives in here? What lives even farther down, where it must always be dark? I don’t know what might come up at sunfall, and that’s the problem. As well, we won’t sleep well in these branches, and we can’t start a fire.”
“We should go, then.” She sounded shaky.
“Can you?”
“Yah. I can.”
He had the sudden urge to kiss her, and he did.
“What was that for?” she asked.
“You’re a brave lass, Winna. The bravest.”
She uttered a staccato laugh. “I don’t feel brave. Screaming at spiders.”
Aspar rolled his eyes. “Come on, you.”
They went on, keeping to the middle heights. The rift walls came nearly together and then began to widen again, and as they got wider, the thorn forest dropped lower and lower; without the narrow walls to crowd them up toward the sun, the branches wandered in a more leisurely fashion.
Now and then, Aspar could actually see the ground, covered with what resembled white ferns.
But the great, dark, unknown cavern behind them troubled him more and more as the day waned. He could almost smell the presence of something large and mirksome, caged by the sun but free to walk when the Shining King slept.
And he would sleep soon.
“Let’s go down,” Aspar said, “and hope for no more surprises.”
The spiders were there, but in much fewer numbers and spread much more thinly. They were also generally smaller, and so Aspar and Winna made their way down through them with relatively few anxious moments. Finally, reluctantly, As-par dropped around twice his height from the last branch onto the leaf mold that covered the ground, avoiding the patches of white, whisklike growth that might hide more many-legged predators.
A moment later, he caught Winna as she followed him down.
More than ever it seemed like a cave. The trunks of the thorn trees were massive in girth, but spaced wide apart. The result was like a gigantic, low-roofed hall with many pillars. A very dark hall, and from the way they had come, from the heart of that darkness, Aspar smelled something fetid.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s hurry.”
They more or less ran. Aspar strung his bow, brandishing it in front in case of spiderwebs they might not see. The ground was level and flat and deep with mold. It smelled like centipede, like the underside of a piece of rotting bark.
As the light faded, the tree trunks grew taller, but Aspar still saw no end to them. Finally, desperate, his back itching and the smell of autumn leaves filling his nostrils, he noticed one tree with a large hollow in it.
“If this forest has an end, we won’t find it before nightfall,” he told Winna. “This is the best we can do.”