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CHAPTER THREE

Swordsman, Priest, and Crown

When Stephen broke the praifecs seal, he knew he had severed himself from the Church. The seal was sacrosanct, to be opened only by the intended recipient.

Punishment for a novice or priest who broke that sacred trust began with expulsion from holy orders. After that, they were subject to temporal punishment'which could be anything from a whipping to death by drowning.

But to Stephen, that was nothing. For the Church to prosecute him for the crime, they would have to know he had committed it, and if he wished to hide that from them, he probably could. No, the reason he broke the seal was because he knew in his heart the rot he'd found in the monastery d'Ef wasn't just a bad spot on a pear'the whole fruit was rotten, through and through, along with the tree it grew on.

If the fathers of the Church were behind the waking of the Damned Saints, the implications were staggering. And if the Church itself was corrupt, he wanted no part of it'or, rather, no part larger than the one he had already played. He would serve the saints in his own way.

'Stephen?' Winna asked. 'What does it say?'

He realized he'd been staring past the inked characters without reading them. He tried to clear his mind and concentrate.

Strange, he thought. Besides the signature and a verse that looked like Vadh'an, the letter was gibberish.

'Ah. It's some sort of encryption,' he told them. 'A cypher.'

'A knot of words you can't untie?' Aspar said. 'I doubt that.'

Stephen nodded, concentrating. 'Given time, I could read it. It's based on Church Vitellian, and an older liturgical language called Jhehdykhadh. But written as it is, it doesn't mean anything. There is this verse here, though''

He trailed off, studying it. It was Old Vadh'an, or some closely related dialect.

'There's a canitu here,' he said, 'in the language of the Warlock Lords, a canitu subocaum'ah, an 'incantation to invoke.' '

'Invoke whom?' Leshya asked.

'Khrwbh Khrwkh,' he replied, shaking his head. 'I've never heard of it, whatever that is. But not all the Damned Saints are commonly known. Actually, it sounds more like a place than a person'it means something like 'bent mound.' '

'Could it refer to a sedos?' Leshya asked.

'Easily,' Stephen replied. 'And given what we've seen so far, that makes the most sense. It's just that they've prefixed the name with dhy, which usually indicates that the name following will be that of a saint. It's quite puzzling.'

'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.'

Swordsman, Priest, and Crown

'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 Marhirheben.

'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?'

Swordsman, Priest, and Crown

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 Vadh'an, Vhydhrabh.' He moved his finger east, until it came to rest on the d'Ef River. There was a town labeled Vit-raf.

'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 Swordsman, Priest, and Crown

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 Vadh'an 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.'

Swordsman, Priest, and Crown

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.

Including, unfortunately, the bit about love not caring what was right, or good, or what anyone wants.

Whitraff was there, but even at a distance it looked dead. The air was chill, yet not a single line of smoke traced the sky. No one was in the streets, and there was no sound that might come from man or woman.

Most of the villages and towns around the King's Forest weren't all that old'most, like Colbaely, had sprouted up in the last hundred years. The houses tended to be built of wood and the streets of dirt. Aspar remembered Whitraff as an old town'its narrow avenues were cobbles worn shiny by a hundred generations of boots and buskins. The heart of the town wasn't large'about thirty houses huddled around the bell-tower square'but there had once been outlying farms to the east and stilt houses along the riverfront that went on for some way. It had always been a pretty lively place, for all of its small size, because it was the only river port south of Ever, which was a good twenty winding leagues downriver.

Now the outliers were ash, but the stone town still stood. Looking down on it from the hill above, Aspar noticed that the bell tower was missing. It was simply gone. In its place'on the mound where the tower had once stood'was the now all-too-familiar sight. A ring of death.

'Sceat,' he muttered.

'We're too late,' Winna said.

'Far too late,' Leshya said. 'This was done months ago, to judge by the burned homesteads.'

Aspar nodded. The dead scattered around the sedos looked to be mostly bone.

'Bad luck, that,' he said, 'to build your town on the footprint of a Damned Saint.'

'I don't see how you can joke about it,' Winna said. 'All those people' I don't see how you can joke about it.'

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Aspar glanced at her. 'I wasn't joking,' he said softly. Lately it seemed impossible to say the right thing around Winna. 'Anyway, maybe it's not so bad as it looks. Maybe the rest of the townsfolk got away.' He turned to the Sefry.

'This is a good position. You and Ehawk keep a watch from up here while we go down to have a look.'

'Suits me,' Leshya said.

They took the road in, and despite his words, it was as he'd feared. No one came out to greet them. The town was as quiet as its twin, Whitraff-of-Shadows, just upstream. Of the people there was no sign.

Aspar dismounted in front of the River Cock, once the busiest tavern in the village.

'You two watch my back,' he told Stephen and Winna. 'I'm taking a look in here.'

There wasn't anyone inside, and there were no bodies, which wasn't terribly surprising. But he did find that a roast on a spit had been allowed to burn to char, and one of the ale taps had been left open, so all the beer had drained out to form a still-sticky mass on the floor.

He went back out into the square.

'They left in a hurry,' he said. 'There's no blood, or signs of fighting.'

'The monks might have thrown the bodies into the river,' Winna suggested.

'They might have, or they might have gotten away. But here's what I'm wondering'this river isn't the busiest around, but someone would have noticed this, and as Leshya said, this must have happened a couple of months ago, maybe even before we fought Desmond Spendlove and his bunch. Why hasn't anyone cleaned up the bodies? Why hasn't anyone moved in, or at least sent word downriver?'

'Maybe they did,' Stephen said, 'and the praifec kept it to himself.'

'Yah, but rivermen who saw this would talk it all up and down the river. Someone would have come to have a look.'

'You're thinking the Church left it garrisoned?' Stephen asked.

'I don't see sign of that, either. Plenty of ale and stores left in Swordsman, Priest, and Crown

the tavern'you'd think a garrison would have tucked into that. Besides, I didn't see any smoke coming in, and I don't smell it now. But if it isn't garrisoned, why hasn't some passing boatman robbed the tavern?'

'Because no one who's come here has left,' Winna said.

'Werlic,' Aspar agreed, scanning the buildings.

'Maybe there's a greffyn here,' Stephen said.

'Maybe,' he conceded. 'There was one with the monks back at Grim's Gallows.' He didn't mention that it had avoided him.

'I'm going down the waterfront,' he decided. 'You two follow and keep me in sight, but not too close. If a greffyn's been killing boatmen, we ought to find their boats and bodies.'

His boots echoed hollowly as he made his way down the little street that sloped toward the river. Soon enough he made out the wooden docks. Still there. He didn't see any boats at all. Crouching in the shadow of the last house, he peered intently at the far bank of the river. The trees came right up to the water, and nothing obviously worrisome caught his eye. He glanced back and saw Winna and Stephen, watching him nervously.

He motioned that he was going closer.

A tattered yellow wind-banner fluttered in the breeze, producing nearly the only noise as he approached the planking of the docks. The only birds he heard were quite distant.

Which was odd. Even in an empty town, there ought to be pigeons and housecrows.

On the river there should be kingfishers, whirr-plungers, and egrets, even this time of year.

Instead, nothing.

Something caught his eye, then, and he dropped back into a crouch, bow ready, but he couldn't identify what he'd seen. Something subtle, a weird play of light.

And the scent of autumn in his nostrils that always meant death was near.

Slowly, he began to back up, because he could feel something now, something hiding just beneath the skin of the world.

He saw it again, and understood. Not the world, but the water. Something huge was moving just under the surface.

He kept backing up, but he remembered that being far from the water hadn't helped the people of Whitraff.

The water mounded up suddenly, and something rose above it with the sluggishness of a monster in a dream that knows its victim can't outrun it. He had only an impression of it at first, of sinewy form and sleek fur or possibly scales, and of immensity.

And then it called in a voice so beautiful that he knew he'd been wrong, that this creature was no destroyer of life, but was the very essence of it. He'd come to the place where life and death changed, where hunter and hunted were one, and all was peace.

Relieved beyond words, Aspar lay down his bow, stood straight, and walked to meet it.

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