The Throne of Bones by Brian McNaughton Read Free Book Online Page B

worse. What I felt was the firm pliancy of young wood. No creature had seized my son from the earth. It was he, Dendrard, who gripped the earth with the root sprouting from his backbone.
    I stumbled backward, cursing and praying with equal futility. My eyes remained fixed on him, on his calm, empty gaze as he stared up at the blue sky, opening his little fists and spreading his fingers like branches.
    I ran. Roots tripped me, branches raked me, trunks battered me. I fought my way free of the angry forest, but the first men I met on the open road were a press-gang from the Lord Admiral’s fleet, wandering far inland in their desperation for recruits. They thought I was mad, but they told me lunacy was no impediment for an oarsman on a trireme, nor were they much impressed by my assumed cough. They had seen real plague, they said, as I would.
    I vowed to go back and find Dendrard one day. I never imagined that thirty years would pass. I hadn’t remembered that your lands contained so many hills, so many springs, so many trees. Nor had I foreseen that Cluddites would rearrange the landscape.
    * * * *
    Ringard’s tale was ended, and so was the wine. The servants had long since gone to bed, but I took him up to the room they had prepared. The candles had burned out; it surprised me to see that the glowing sky made them unnecessary. The forest beyond the window nevertheless looked very dark.
    “If you find him,” I said, “what do you propose to do?”
    “Listen to his voice—although it’s been a very long time since I last heard the voices of trees, I may have an ear for that of my own son.” He flashed his unpleasant smile. “If not, perhaps I’ll merely sit for a while in his shade.”
    I left him, and in the morning he was gone.
    * * * *
    Several days later I heard that the Snake Man had fallen afoul of the Sons of Cludd. Anyone with a good word to say for an accused witch becomes a suspect, but I felt that the man had a claim on me. And I was curious to learn if any trees had spoken to him.
    The smell of burning wood, burning flesh and righteously unbathed bodies led me inerrantly to the Holy Soldiers’ encampment. Easing my horse through a mob draped in white robes and droning dissonant hymns, I bitterly regretted the good old days when my father would set the hounds on Cluddite preachers. Now they were more numerous than those hounds’ fleas, and not even a lord of the House of Sleith would dare to throw one down the stairs if he came calling.
    They had transported much of the forest to their camp, stripped the trees of branches, set them in rigid ranks, and decorated each with an unlucky victim. Some were already choking on the smoke of their feet as it rose to their nostrils, but I was not too late. The pyre around the distinctive figure of Ringard lay unlighted.
    “Take heart!” I called to him when I came near enough to be heard. “Your nephew is here, Lord Fariel.”
    They hadn’t quelled his wit. “I wouldn’t boast of our connection in this company, if I were you.”
    Before leaving to seek someone in authority, I asked, “Did you find him? Dendrard?”
    “No, fortunately. They would have liked him even less than his father.”
    Talking to the victims was forbidden, I learned from the men who rushed up to unhorse me and hustle me before their captain. He was in a good mood—he didn’t smile, of course, they consider that a sin, but he didn’t tie me to a stake—but that was all I could gather from his barbarous accent and Zaxoin turns of phrase, some of which, I believe, he made up as he went along to confuse an unbelieving outlander like me. I did pick the words “talk” and “tree” out of his rapturous gabble, but even if he speaks perfect Frothen, it’s hard to concentrate on the words of a man whose sleeves are decorated with the dried tongues of blasphemers and ears of heretics.
    “Wroken word on writhen tree spoken, burn on broken tree witch writhen!” he bawled, winding up his