A Prayer for Dead Kings and Other Tales by Scott Fitzgerald Gray

said, pointing to Scúrhand. Thiri’s look told him she didn’t
understand, but Morghan only laughed again.
    Scúrhand watched, smiling himself after a time. “Are you
absolutely sure you’re quite all here?” He caught Thiri’s eye as he glanced
back, but it was Morghan she moved toward.
    “More sure today,” the warrior said. He shrugged as he nodded to
Thiri. “We’ll see what tomorrow brings.”
    There was nothing more to say as they returned to the horses,
just waking from a fitful sleep within the hissing curtain of the wind. They
rested themselves only for a short while before they set off, Morghan with
Thiri behind him, Scúrhand thoughtful as they rode out against the red flood of
dawn.

 

     
    WITHIN THE WOOD, yellow-green tendrils of creeping
snow-vine thread the eye sockets of a frost-splintered skull. Old magic
lingers in these secret places of the world, the Quick Ones say. He hears
their songs. Knows that this place that is his is one such place they sing of.
    The skeleton spreads beneath the green shroud of endless
branches. Its fingers of grey bone, still as death, clutch the ice that binds
them. His fingers of black wood shift slowly with a silent wind, scratching
distant sky. Great roots hunch and rise like talons dug deep into freezing
earth, a wide swath that pushes up and out as thick ridges of buckled stone.
Ice-choked rills mark the shattered lines of the land, root-web twisting down
and out through a skin of earth and wood-bark, shrouding the living ground
beneath.
    He knows the ancient magic of this place, drinks it deep through
the roots that are his feet. He spreads it to sky and air through the ancient
bare fingers of his blackened arms. He feels the sun, cast along the
edge-precipice of western horizon, jagged gash of crimson flaring beyond cloud
and freezing haze. The dome of dark sky presses down, split by pale dusk like
cracks in the acorn that let frost seep within. He feels white flowers thread
their way between weathered teeth, triggered to life by winter’s first breath.
    He knows the reckoning of seasons since the body fell and turned
to bone. Seasons come and pass endlessly for him, each stretched and twisted out
to the next, glistening mirror-moments of time catching each other’s
reflections like raindrops striking still water. For an age, golden grass grows
up and through the skeleton’s weathered bones, fragile mineral of life fissured
and broken, overgrown and swallowed in a heartbeat of passing days.
    The bones are of a Quick One, whose kind pass only rarely through
the wood, but who are not of the wood. Born of blood as are all the creatures
of the world, the Quick Ones are set above the world by bright minds, by
spirits that burn like no other creatures’. Quick Ones come in smooth and tall,
scaled and short, the green and grey of forest shadow, the pale rose of first
light at dawn. Sharing shapes and colors
with other Beasts and Birds, but standing always tall where their kin of blood
crouch low.
    The Quick One fallen at his feet had been smooth-skinned, had
borne a shell of steel long years before. That shell has long ago turned to
rust in his slow senses, fused with bone and rock, flaked finally to nothing. Steel
is a secret of the Quick Ones, who collect the soft stones of the open desert
to burn and hammer to a cutting brightness.
    From the day when the Quick One fell, only the sword is left
behind.
    He knows blades from the past. He feels axe and adze raised
against the groves around him when he is young. Even in that ancient youth,
though, his visage and power drove the Quick Ones from the wood. In later
years, they did the task themselves with dark legends and warning tales, felt
through the touch of those few who once walked within his shadow. Warriors,
mostly, avoiding the wyrms that prowl the dry wastes and the mountains that are
the lands within which the wood is set. The old magic that lingers here is
thing that the Quick Ones do not understand, and so