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The desiccated twine parted with faint puffs of powder as his knife touched it, and the brittle canvas cracked away. A discolored nettle-silk ba
Horseriver handed his mount’s reins to Ingrey and took the bridle of Fara’s black cob. He led off this time on foot, weaving his way oddly through the tussocks of yellow grasses. Ingrey saw why as they passed deceptive dark patches, sucking bogs lethal to a horse’s heavy step. He took care to steer his mount precisely in the earl’s wake. The day’s warmth lingered in the air despite the dankness rising from the marsh. But then the shadow of the wood, cast long by the setting sun, crept out to meet them; when they passed into it, the sudden biting chill of it turned their exhalations to pale mist.
They approached the outlying oak tree, and the name of Wounded Woods seemed doubly earned to Ingrey. The tree was huge and old, but seemed blighted. The leaves still clinging to its withered branches were not crisp, brown, fluted curls, but limp, blackened, and misshapen. Trunk and branches seemed knotted and twisted far beyond the rule for oaks—wrung like rags—and tumorous burls wept sickly black ooze.
A warrior stepped from the tree. Not from under it, or beside it, or behind it: he stepped from the trunk itself as though passing through a curtain. His boiled leather armor was rotten with age. From the haft of his spear, upon which he leaned as though it was an old man’s staff, an unidentifiable scrap of animal fur fluttered. His blond beard was crusted with dried blood, and he still bore the wounds of his death; an ear hacked away, ax gashes splitting the armor, a dismembered hand tied to his belt with a bit of rag. A badger pelt was attached by its skull to his rusty iron cap, peering through sightless dried eyes, and the black-and-white fur dangled down the back of his neck as he turned to slowly scrutinize each of the three before him.
Ingrey grew aware only then that sometime during the passage of the marsh they had stepped from the world he knew into another, where such sights were possible; its congruence with the world of matter filling his fleshly eyes was but a feint. Fara, too, was drawn into this vision; her body remained rigidly upright, her face blank, but from the corners of her eyes a faint gleam of moisture trickled downward. Ingrey decided not to draw Horseriver’s attention to this, lest he subtract her tears as well as her voice.
The warrior straightened, and with his handless stump signed the Five, touching forehead, mouth, navel, groin, and heart—though he could not there spread his fingers. “Hallowed lord, you come at last,” he said to Horseriver. His voice was a groaning of branches in a bitter wind. “We have waited long.”
Horseriver’s face could have been a carved wooden mask, but his eyes were like a night without end. “Aye,” he breathed.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The sentinel led off, limping, using his spear as a walking stick. Horseriver continued to lead Fara. Her hand clutched the ba
As they entered the margins of the woods, more revenants stepped from the trees. They were as tattered as their sentry, or worse; most were decapitated, and carried their heads, sometimes still in helmets, variously: tied to belts by the hair or braids, tucked under their arms, over their shoulders in makeshift carrier bags made of rope or rags. It took Ingrey’s disquieted gaze a few moments to wrench from their wounds and begin to take in other details of decoration, weaponry, or garb that told of their kin identities. Or personal identities. See my things that I have chosen; by them you shall know me, silently cried belts, loops of necklaces, and furs and skulls and pelt after pelt of the wisdom animals whose strength they’d hoped to inherit. Everywhere, faded stitchery peeked out, on collars, on baldrics, on the hems of cloaks, on embroidered armbands. My wife made this, my daughter, my sister, my mother. See the intricacy, see the colors intertwined; I was beloved, once.
A tall soldier, whose head still balanced upon a neck half–cut through and crusted with dark blood, sidled close to Ingrey. He bore a thick wolf pelt over his shoulders, and he stared at Ingrey in as great a wonder as if Ingrey had been a ghost and he a living man. He reached out a hand, and Ingrey first flinched away, but then set his teeth and endured the touch. More than a gust of air, less than flesh, it left a liquid chill in its wake across his skin.
Other wolf-skin-clad warriors clustered about Ingrey, and a woman as well, gray-haired, stout, her torn dress elaborated with twining strips of gray fur, her looping gold armbands tipped with elegant little wolf’s heads with garnet eyes. Some of these could be my own forefathers, Ingrey realized, and not just on the Wolfcliff side; a dozen other kins’ blood ran through his veins from foremothers as well, in a turbulent stream. It had disturbed him to think himself an intruder in a graveyard; it devastated him to suspect the fascination of the ghostly warriors with him was the excitement of grandparents seeing for the first time a child they’d never hoped to look upon. Five gods help me, help me, help me… to do what?
He blinked in astonishment when the growing parade was joined by half a dozen dark-haired hacked-about men wearing the tabards of Darthacan archers of Audar’s day. They swung wide around Horseriver, but crept up to Ingrey’s heels. The other revenants did not seem to mind their presence here; equal in death for four centuries, perhaps they had made their own soldier’s peace. Audar, Ingrey had heard, had carried out his own dead rather than burying them in this accursed ground, sealed from men and gods, but the battle had been great, and conducted largely in the dark; it was no wonder a few had been missed.
The warriors flowed after the kingly ba
The bowl of the valley had turned shadowless with evening, but the sky above was still pale, and the oak branches overhead interlaced against it like crooked black webs. Horseriver seemed to be aiming generally toward the center of the wood, but not in a straight path; it was as though he searched for something. A faintly voiced Ah told Ingrey he had found it. The roof of branches thi
Released, the horse sidled nervously away through the trees, somehow avoiding touching any of the gathering mob of curious revenants. More than curious, Ingrey realized; agitated. His blood seethed in the surf of their excitement. More and more came, crowding up thickly around them, and Ingrey began to feel in his marrow just how many four thousand murdered men were. He tried to count them, then count blocks and multiply, but lost his place and abandoned the attempt. It failed utterly to aid his sweating grip on reason anyway.