CHAPTER TEN

INTO THE TANGLE

“I'VE NEVER SEEN ANYTHING SO BEAUTIFUL,” Winna said, her voice hushed with awe. She stood on a stony ridge, profiled against the monstrous peak of Slé Eru, where glaciers threw the sun back at itself and eagles glided in lazy spirals. On either side the ridge—really a saddle between Slé Eru and the lesser but still dazzling peak of Slé Cray—dropped into breathtaking glens, deep and forested. They had just come up from Glen Ferth, where the headwaters of the Slaghish had their start in the ice melt of the two mountains. That was a very deep drop, a great green bowl whose other rim was hazed blue with distance, and the Slaghish was a tiny silver rill in its bosom. The other side of the ridge did not drop so far, but it was no less breathtaking, a highland valley of meadows and birch, and behind it another line of modest mountains, the footstool of the immense range whose pinnacles faded from sight, even in a clear blue sky.

“It's true,” Aspar replied. But he wasn't looking at the landscape; he was looking at Winna standing against the backdrop of the high snowfields of Slé Eru. She wore a wide grin and her cheeks were pink with exertion and excitement, eyes all wonder-jeweled.

Winna caught that and gave him a sly, sidewise glance. “Why, Aspar White! Was that honey talk?”

“The best I can do,” he replied.

“You do well enough,” she assured him. She pointed at the highest peaks on the horizon. “What mountains are those?”

“Sa'Ceth ag sa'Nem—the Shoulders of Heaven,” he said.

“Have you been there?”

“Yah.”

“Did you climb them?”

“No man has ever climbed the Shoulders,” he replied. “Not even the tribesmen who live on them. Those mountains have barely gotten started when the snowline starts.”

“They're wondrous.”

“That they are,” he agreed.

“And this valley below us? What's it called?”

“Anything you like. I've never seen it before, nor heard it named. Those are the Cockspurs beyond.”

“Then Mother Gastya was right. There is a hidden valley here.”

“Looks like it,” Aspar agreed. He wanted to be annoyed about that, but found he couldn't. Instead he wondered how powerful the magic must be to hide a whole valley—and what such power might mean if it was turned against two small people.

“Let's go, then!” Winna exclaimed.

“Give the horses a few moments,” Aspar replied. “They aren't used to the heights, and they had a hard climb up. After all they've been through, I don't want to risk a bad step now.”

When they'd come out of the waterway that led from Rewn Aluth, Ogre, Angel, and Pie Pony had been waiting for them. How they knew where to be would always remain a mystery; Ogre was a smart horse, but not that smart. Mother Gastya had to have had a part in such things, and Aspar didn't like that, much—the thought that his horses could be shinecrafted.

Though he was damned grateful to have them.

“How long should we let them rest?” Winna asked.

“A bell or so. Let them forage downslope a bit.”

“Yah. And what might we do meantime?”

“Rest ourselves, I suppose,” Aspar said.

“Indeed?” Winna replied. “With a bedroom view like this? I had other in mind.” And she smiled, in a way he had come to like quite well.

“What are you looking at now?” Winna asked, a bell later. They were still on the ridge, Winna doing up the fastenings of her dress, Aspar pulling on his buskins. Aspar was gazing back toward the Slaghish, and the way they had come.

“Well?” Winna persisted. “Do you see them?”

“Not a sign. That's what worries me. Twenty-five days since we left Rewn Aluth, and no hint of either Fend or the greffyn.”

“Are you disappointed?”

“No. But where are they? If the greffyn is coming here, as Mother Gastya said, and if Fend and his bunch are with it, or following it—” He shook his head. “What are they doing?”

“Don't you reckon they're the ones making the sacrifices at the old—how did you say it?—sedos fanes? The ones cutting up those poor people?”

“There were men with the greffyn at Taff Creek,” Aspar said, lacing his buskin. “Some of them stayed with it all the way to Rewn Aluth, I think, but some went back west. I couldn't follow 'em both, of course. So, yah, I think Fend is mixed up in that, though it wasn't him alone. There's another bunch out there somewhere.”

“So they killed squatters in the forest, and went after the Halafolk at Rewn Aluth,” she said. “They're chasing folk out of the King's Forest.”

“Yah.”

“So maybe they aren't done yet. Maybe they went after more squatters, or another Halafolk rewn before coming back to the Briar King.”

“That sounds sensible,” Aspar agreed.

“But I don't understand the sacrifices. The greffyn kills just by a touch. So the men are the ones doing the awful things, yah? Not that any death isn't awful, but you know what I mean.”

“I do. And, yah, men did what I saw on the Taff.”

“Then why? What has it to do with the greffyn?”

Aspar examined the back of his hands, noticing as if for the first time how wrinkled they had become. “That priestish fellow I told you about, the Virgenyan—he said the warlocks used to do things like that, ages ago. Sacrifices to the Damned Saints, he said. My father's folk—” He gestured vaguely northeast. “—they still hang criminals as sacrifice to the Raver.”

Winna's eyes widened. “That's the first you've ever said of your parents.”

“My father was an Ingorn, my mother a Watau. My mother died when I was born, but my father took a second wife, and we lived with my father's people, in the mountains. The Ingorns keep to the old ways, but I don't remember much about living there. There was a feud, of sorts, and my father was outlawed. He moved down a few leagues from Walker's Bailey, and we lived in the woods there till I was seven or thereabouts, I guess. Then the feud caught up with us. They killed my father and stepmother. I ran like a rabbit, but an arrow caught me. They reckoned me for dead, and I would have been, but Jesp found me.”

“And raised you up.”

“Yah.”

“I'm sorry about your parents. I guess I reckoned they were dead, but nobody ever knew.”

“I haven't told that story in a long time.”

“Aspar?”

“Hmm?”

She kissed his cheek. “Thank you for telling me.”

He nodded. “It's getting awful easy, telling you things.” Too easy, maybe.

They followed the glen down, as Mother Gastya had instructed, camping that evening at the edge of a meadow, and waking to the low calls of aurochs. The forest cattle were rooting in the edge of the woods, and a few of the males cast uneasy glances in Aspar and Winna's direction. Ogre stamped and whinnied a challenge.

“Calves,” Aspar whispered, nodding toward the smallest of the beasts. “Best we back away from here, slow.”

So they broke camp and retreated into the woods, making a wide circle around the meadow and its touchy occupants.

For most of the day they continued down the gently sloping valley, through fields of brilliant green, or flaming with red clover. Deer, elk, and one pride of spotted lions that Aspar noticed watched them go, with mostly lazy eyes. It was as if the reputation of man had never reached this place.

Late in the day, the land fell more steeply, and they found themselves following the stony course of a stream bordered with head-high horsetails and ferns. The valley walls rose steeply on each side, closing them in, unscalable without rope and spike.

Night came swiftly in the narrow valley, and Aspar and Winna bathed in a shockingly cold pool, embracing first for warmth and then for more. Winna tasted like the water, almost metallic with youth and life. After, they curled in their blankets beneath the ferns. When Winna was asleep, Aspar lay listening to the warbling of frogs and nightbirds, and the trickle of water over stone. Somewhere near, that trickling became a rushing hiss as the stream dropped for some unknown depth. It was that sound that had stopped Aspar a little shy of true dark. If they were to negotiate a cliff, let them do it in morning's light.

As he lay there, he was amazed at how good he felt. There was something in the forest here, some almost sensual vitality, that he hadn't noticed since he was a boy. It was the force that had first made him fall in love with the woods, a force that was wonder and beauty and awe forged together.

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.”

Striking tinder, he held it inside and made certain the space was empty, then the two of them crouched within.

The forest faded and vanished, and Aspar placed himself between Winna and the outside, gripping his bow.

Behind him, after a bell or so, Winna's breath starting coming slow and regular.

A little after that, the nightbirds stopped singing, and the dark grew very quiet indeed. And then—there was still no sound, but Aspar felt it, like a blind man feels the heat of the sun on his face. The earth trembled faintly, and then a stench thickened the air.

Aspar squinted at the darkness, and waited.