Priest by Colville Matthew

Author:Colville, Matthew
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2010-05-28T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirty Two

It was maybe an hour later and a large ravine navigated before they stopped again. They were covering miles at a time. A relentless pace. Their way lit by starlight.

They stopped because something brought Aderyn up short. At first, Heden not seeing her clearly in the darkness, he thought they’d come upon the urq. Then he remembered they were first going to a stream. The urmen should still be hours away. And there was no stream nearby.

He looked at her, expecting to see her sniffing the air again. He couldn’t tell what she was looking at, something on the ground.

“The urq?” he asked.

She shook her head. “We are in the territory of the brocc,” she said. The quasi-mythical badger-men who called the southern wode home. Where Heden grew up, far to the south, they were a story told to children at bedtime. Heden had met them though, they were anything but myths. They didn’t mind men, but only the men who lived close to the forest had any kind of relationship with them.

“Not even an army of urq would test the mettle of the brocc,” she explained. Heden knew this to be true. Where there was one, there were thousands, and they were incredibly fierce fighters, but difficult to interest in anything except the defense of their territory.

Heden approached slowly and looked around, not seeing what she was looking at. She appeared to be staring at the base of a tree covered in lichen and mushrooms, a large bush growing around it.

Heden stared at it again, and like a cloud that suddenly coalesces into the shape of a bird or a horse, he saw it.

There was a knight lying against the base of the tree, illuminated by starlight.

“Sir Perren,” Aderyn said.

He’d been there some time; the undergrowth had almost completely enveloped him. Heden could see his armor and his sword. A lump that was probably a shield. Heden remembered Brys explaining that the forest would grow quickly to protect the knight, but Heden had a hard time imagining that Sir Perren had been here less than a year. And Brys had known he was in this state. He’d said Sir Perren would not come to the priory.

“Is he alive?” Heden asked.

Aderyn nodded.

“But all the knights are at the priory,” he said. Aderyn frowned, pained. Looked like she was struggling with a difficult decision. Or a difficult realization.

“He attempts a casting. He casts his thoughts out, far beyond this demesne,” Aderyn explained. She was only half paying attention to Heden.

Heden looked at the nightmare picture of a man physically and mentally merging with the wode. “Who is he trying to commune with?”

Aderyn turned away, her mouth open, breathing heavily, looking at the stars.

“Commander Kavalen,” she said.

Heden was horrified.

“Can he…is that possible?”

“Sir Perren was closest to the wode. He would sometimes say “we” instead of “I” and flew into a rage if he found an urq or kethat harming a tree.”

Heden stared at the lichen covered face of the knight.

“The death of Commander Kavalen has driven him mad,” Aderyn said.

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