Winna frowned. “I dreamed of something that smelled foul.”
“The foul smell wasn’t a dream,” Aspar said. “That’s for certain.”
“Could it—could it have been the Briar King himself ?” she wondered.
“Grim, I hope not,” Aspar swore. “Whatever was out in the dark, I never want to see it.”
Winna looked unsettled at that, but she didn’t say anything.
“What now?” she asked instead.
“I suppose we go on, and see what there is to see. Do you need food?”
“Not yet. We can eat in a while. If there are more of those spiders overhead, I’d like to be out from under ’em. Saints, yes! They crawled all through my dreams, too.”
As the space widened between the trunks of the trees the white, strawlike ground cover gave way to ferns and horsetails, then to bushier growth—rambling mounds of blackberry bushes, knee-high catgrass and broomsedge, grapevines groping over all. For Aspar, it was a relief to see plants he knew, by Grim’s bloody eye!
At last, just short of midday, they left the forest behind them. The trees ended rather abruptly, giving way to a gently rolling valley floor. Mountains framed every direction, adding force to Aspar’s guess that the only way in and out of the valley—short of crawling across the icy glaciers—was probably the way they had come.
The fields were brushy with grass and thistle and wild primrose, but riddled with enough animal trails to make the going easy most of the time.
If they had anywhere to go, which they didn’t.
They struck on toward the far valley wall, but slowly. Aspar wondered just what in the name of the Sarnwood witch he was looking for.
It was a bell later when Winna pointed off to their right. “What’s that?” she asked.
Aspar had already noticed what she was gesturing at—a line of small trees, not much taller than the grass, marching toward the valley wall, not quite paralleling their own path.
“A stream, most likely,” he grunted.
“Most likely,” Winna conceded. “But it seems odd to me.”
“Nothing odd about it,” Aspar argued.
“What would it hurt to have a look?” Winna asked. “I don’t see anything else even a little strange.”
“You’ve a point,” he allowed. They turned their steps that direction.
After a few hundred paces, Winna asked, “Aspar, what do the Sefry expect us to do here?”
“Find the Briar King, I reckon.”
“Just find him?”
“That’s what Mother Gastya said,” Aspar replied.
Winna nodded. “Yah. But aren’t you the one who says the Sefry always lie?”
“I am,” Aspar admitted. “But that doesn’t matter. Whatever they want of me, I would have come here eventually. I’ve lived in this forest all of my life, Winn. Something’s wrong with it. Very wrong.” He chewed his lip, then cleared his throat. “I think it’s dying. I think the greffyn has something to do with it, and if there is a Briar King, and he’s at the bottom of this rot—I need to know.”
“But suppose Mother Gastya lied. Suppose this isn’t where the Briar King is. What if she sent you as far from him as she could?”
“I thought of that. I took the chance.” He glanced at her. “But that’s not what you’re worried about, is it? You’re worried that he is here.”
For a few moments the swishing of Winna’s tattered skirts against the grass was the only sound. “I know he’s here,” she said finally. “But what if the Sefry sent you to him so he could kill you?”
“If Mother Gastya wanted me dead, she needed only to have kept silent for another few heartbeats, back in Rewn Aluth,” Aspar pointed out. “Whatever the Sefry want, it’s not just my death.”
“I guess not,” Winna conceded. Then she stopped.
They had reached the line of small trees. “I don’t see a stream.”
“No,” Aspar said slowly.
The trees were very small versions of the briar trees. They stood just over waist high.
“Look how regular they’re spaced,” Winna said. “Like somebody planted them.”
“There’s something else,” Aspar said, crouching. “Something …” It reminded him of tracking, somehow. But it took him another twenty heartbeats to understand why.
“They’re planted like a man’s footsteps,” he said. “A big man. But see? It’s as if at every stride, a tree sprang up.” He glanced back over his shoulder. The trail of trees led back into the forest—and it led ahead, to the valley wall.
“What’s that up there?”
Aspar followed the imaginary line her finger traced in the air. Far off—half a league, maybe—the row of trees led to some sort of dome. It looked man-made.
“A building?” he speculated. “It looks a little like a Watau longhouse.”
It wasn’t a longhouse. His mother’s people built their lodgings of freshly cut young trees, bending them into arches and then covering all with shingles of bark. The structure he and Winna beheld was likewise made of trees—but they were still alive, thrusting strong roots into the soil and lacing their branches tightly together. It was shaped like a giant bird’s nest, turned upside down. It stood perhaps twenty yards high at its apex.
So tight and dense were the trees woven that nothing could be seen within, even when they drew near enough to touch it.
A circuit of the weird, living structure led them to an opening, of sorts—a twisting path between the trunks and branches just large enough for Aspar to squeeze through. No sound came from within.
“You’ll stay here,” Aspar told Winna.
Winna frowned at him. “Aspar White, I’ve climbed mountains, swum in freezing water, and endured thunderstorms with you. I’ve saved your life twice now, by my count—”
“Winna, do this for me.”
“Give me a reason to. One that makes sense.”
He stared at her, then took a step and put his palm to her cheek. “Because this is all different,” he said. “There’s nothing canny, here. Who knows which stories are true, and which are lies? Who knows but that if the gaze of the greffyn brings faintness, the eyes of the Briar King might not slay in a single blink?” He kissed her. “Because I love you, Winna, and would protect you, whether you want me to or not. And finally, if something happens to me, someone must get word to the king, and the other holters. Someone has to save my forest.”
She closed her eyes for a long time, and when she opened them, they were smiling and moist. “I love you, too, you great lout. Just come out alive, will you? And then take me out of this place. I couldn’t find my way back alone anyhow.”
“I’ll do that,” he said.
A moment later, he stepped into the trees.
Immediately, something went strange. He felt a sort of shock, like he might feel if he had nodded off, then jerked his head up suddenly. A bumblebee seemed to be buzzing someplace inside his chest, accompanied by a rhythmic humming from his lungs.
He continued on, following the winding path, and felt deepness, as if he were far beneath the earth.
There was a scent, too, powerful and changeable, never the same from one breath to the next, and yet somehow consistent. It was pine sap, bear fur, snake musk, burning hickory, sour sweat, week-old carcass, rotting fruit, horse piss, roses. It grew stronger as he approached, and seemed to settle, to become less varied, until the smell of death and flowers filled his head.
Thus Aspar turned the last corner of the maze and beheld the Briar King.
He was shadow-shape, caught in the thousand tiny needles of light piercing the gaps in the roof of the living hall. He was thorns and primrose, root and branch and knotted vines, tendril-fingered. His beard and hair were of trailing gray and green moss, and hornlike limbs twisted up from his head.
But his face—his face was mottled lichen papered on human skull, black flowers blooming from his eye sockets. And as Aspar watched, the king turned slowly to face him, and the roses opened wider, still blooming.