The Gathering Storm (100 page)

He grunted, and brushed his fingers over the gold torque at his neck that Waltharia had given him, symbol of his descent from the royal line. “Is it my father she wishes to rule Wendar, or me?” he asked softly.

Hathui’s smile cut. “The margrave wishes for prosperity and peace, as do we all. That her people have not suffered as badly as some is due to her wise and prudent stewardship.”

“What do you think, Eagle? Ought I to remain in Wendar and restore what I can?”

She would not be drawn. “I am the king’s Eagle, my lord prince. I serve Henry. It is to Henry that I desire to return. Free him, and he will return to Wendar of his own volition and set all things right.”

“Very well. What of supplies?”

“Ten wagons.”

He gestured to a steward. “Let two bags of seed grain be given to Brother Anselm. Brother.” The monk crept forward, tears in his eyes. “Husband this grain well. Your monastery
must become a refuge to all folk who suffer in difficult times. Hold fast.”

The monk kissed his hand, weeping openly. “Bless you, Your Highness.” The steward led him away.

“Let the next one approach.”

A brawny man with arms the size of tree trunks shuffled forward; he was lame in one leg. His face looked odd until Sanglant realized that he lacked eyebrows. His face was red, but his gaze was steady.

“I am a smith out of Machteburg, my lord prince. By name of Johann.”

“How goes it in Machteburg? That’s a long walk from that town to this place, if I judge it rightly.”

“A long walk, it’s true, but I came east hearing a report that my sister’s village was besieged by barbarians, these Quman. By the time we came, we saw no sign of them for they’d ridden on west into Avaria.”

“Your sister?”

“Still living, thank God. I stayed to help her people rebuild their village and forge weapons. I married again, for my wife died two years back of the lung fever. But I found these things out in the woodland where we went to get trees for the palisade.”

He gestured to the trio of men who followed at his heels and they opened leather bags and poured out a treasure trove of armor, pieces large and small as well as two complete suits of mail. The prince picked up a shoulder piece stamped with a dragon rampant and turned it in his hands. A gold tabard had been washed and mended, but many small tears and cuts obscured the black embroidery that adorned the front. Last of all they set down a shield; its rim had splintered and half of the middle had been stove in, but it was still possible to make out the remains of a dragon rampant matching that on the tabard and the shoulder piece.

“There’d been a battle, my lord prince,” said the blacksmith. “This is what we found.”

“Dragons!” His skin burned where he touched the armor, and he dropped the shoulder piece as though it had scorched him. Bile rose in his throat. He had lived as a beast among the bones of his faithful Dragons for a year; he had discovered
their remains and the leavings of their armor in the crypt at Gent. His sight dimmed as he struggled to prevent memory from overwhelming him.

“Ai, God! Look at that sky!”

Thunder cracked.

“Hold on to the tents!” cried Captain Fulk in the distance as soldiers raced among the tents. “This should blow through—”

A wall of dark cloud, almost green, bore down on them. Wind whipped the tops of trees, and the folk waiting on the open ground ran for lower ground. Many threw themselves down on the earth as the wind roared over them, and even Hathui crouched and bent her head, tugging her cloak up to protect her face, but Sanglant stood.

The world might cast a thousand arrows at him; his enemies might raise winds and storms to slow him down, but as the gale streamed around him, as the awning strained at ropes held by soldiers, he braced himself against the onslaught and let the blast of rain scour him. Wind screamed. Hail drummed across open ground as people cried in terror, horses neighed, dogs barked, the griffins screamed in challenge, and the wind howled on and on. The storm boiled over them like a huge wave.

He had faced worse; and would face worse still. Hail peppered his head and chest. It had been too hot to wear his cloak, and he had nothing but his tunic to protect him, but he minded it not. The storm broke free the regrets and cautions that infested his heart.

He missed Liath bitterly, but he had done the right thing, the only thing. He must strike south and strike quickly. Free Henry, and then turn his sights north to restore peace to the land. If Henry remained a prisoner in Aosta, Wendar could never be at peace, no matter who pretended to rule there. If Wendar was not at peace, then he and Liath could never live at peace.

The storm blew past as quickly as it had come in, leaving the land strewn with branches, leaves, torn canvas, lost clothing, and every manner of weeping and wailing and shouts as folk picked themselves up and ventured to measure the damage, then cast themselves back on the ground as the female
griffin launched herself into the air with a thunder of wings and flapped off on the trail of the storm.

Hathui had thrown herself flat to the ground when the griffin sprang, and now she unbent and rose with a sheepish grin, helping up the blacksmith whose stalwart nerves had been undone by the sight of that beast leaping into the sky. The man had fallen into the pile of armor, whose polished iron surfaces were now scumbled by damp leaves and streaks of grass and twigs and even feathers. Pellets of hail had fallen in between the pieces, collecting in hollows on the ground.

“Whew!” said Johann. “That was a strong one! We had a blow last month that near tore down the houses. And look there! Beasts ride the wind. Some folk say the end of the world is coming. Can’t say I blame them.”

“Make ready.” Sanglant bent to pick up the shoulder piece. The rain had cooled the iron; it didn’t burn him now. “Take this armor. Build your houses as sturdily as you can. A storm is coming, Blacksmith. You and your people must be strong to survive it.”

It alone of all the daimones bound into service in the vale had not fled on the day when its elder cousins had come calling with a conflagration that had set even the heights of the mountains on fire. Though the thread binding it to Earth had been severed by the edge of a griffin’s feather, although it was free to escape back to the sphere that had given it birth, it had remained to haunt the buildings and the orchard.

As a lower form of daimone, it had little memory and less will, easily bound and easily trained, more like a hound than a man and yet unlike because it was a creature whose aetherical body could not be touched by earthly ills and earthly mortality.

Yet its captivity had altered it, given it a semblance of human memory and will beyond that granted to its cousins. It persisted here, it waited, although it had forgotten what it waited for: A familiar touch. A familiar voice. A familiar presence. It lingered among the burned-out ruins.

One dawn as the sun rose the dead stones sparked and spit out a stumbling collection of mortal beasts, some on two legs and others on four, a confusing starburst of colors and heat
and voices. It raced down on the wind to investigate, curling around the newcomers. None saw it; they were blind. Only there was one they kept enclosed in a little house on wheels, and this one had power to see both what lay above and what lay below and when it insinuated itself through a crack the creature spoke to it, so it fled.

It fled, but there remained a greater threat. The Bright One, child of flame, had returned, the one who had brought the conflagration down upon them. It concealed itself in the boughs of an apple tree, too frightened to approach the creature with a heart of flame yet so curious it wished to see what was going on. In the end apprehension mastered it, and it fled to the hut where it had in times before slept alongside the familiar presence of the one it longed for.

There it hid until nightfall, venturing out when darkness might hide it from mortal eyes, but the Bright One and her retinue still inhabited the valley, and it feared they meant to stay and perhaps even to call the elder cousins down upon them all again in a terrible, incandescent bloom.

“That is the River of Heaven,” the Bright One was saying to an audience of eight shivering souls seated by the stones beside the remains of a dying fire. “See how the Serpent is swimming across it.”

“It’s so bright!”

“Those are the souls of the dead, streaming upward to the Chamber of Light. Or so the church says.”

“What else could it be?”

“The ancient writers had many explanations. Look there! Mok still resides in the Unicorn. There is Jedu—that red star—rising with the Penitent. I do not see the Red Mage or Somorhas. The moon hasn’t risen yet, if it means to rise at all. The mountains block part of our view, as well. As the hours pass, we’ll look for the other wandering planets, but already I can guess that about four to six months have passed since we left the east.”

“How can you guess that?”

“It isn’t really a guess. The planets wander along the ecliptic in a regular pattern. Mok spends about one year in each house, Jedu from one to two months or as many as six months if it is in retrograde—”

Two voices spoke, overlapping. “You’ve lost me!”

“What is ‘retrograde’?”

A ripple of laughter raced around the cluster of seated figures. The Bright One stood and went to lean against the wagon. Its door stood open, a stick propped against it to hold it wide, and a figure stirred, hidden behind a curtain of beads, peering outward.

“Nay,” said the Bright One as she brushed fingers over the beaded curtain. “I’m going too fast. Let me start at the beginning. We stand on the Earth, which is a sphere. Earth lies at the center of the universe, so the scholars claim, which is also a sphere. But I wonder—nay, never mind that now. The Earth is encircled by the seven planetary spheres and by the outermost sphere, that of the fixed stars. Beyond that lies the Chamber of Light.”

As her voice flowed on, the stars crept along their fixed paths across the heavens. Later, after the moon rose, the watchers slept, all except the Bright One and the hidden woman, who ventured outside, heavily veiled. These two spoke in quiet voices far into the night, and now and again held their faces close to the flames of a campfire, as if staring within.

Toward dawn, the veiled woman climbed back inside her cage as the camp roused. By torchlight and moonlight men and horses made ready to depart. The Bright One wove threads of starlight into the stones, and one by one the visitors crossed through the brilliant gateway and vanished.

Last of all, the Bright One turned, there at the verge.

“Who are you waiting for?” she asked. Then she was gone.

The blazing threads frayed and collapsed in a shower of sparks. Dust eddied around the base of the stones before settling. Shadows faded. The peaks dazzled as the sun crested the eastern heights and its light caught the blinding white snow fields. On one of those heights a cliff of snow calved loose and roared downslope in a tumble that shook the valley as a white haze rose off the mountain. The avalanche of snow and ice roared and boomed and at length slowed, gentled, and came to rest, still so high above the tree line that it was
impossible to see any change in the shape of the mountain itself. The cloud of snow and ice sparkled and sank.

A leaf drifted in on the breath of the avalanche, spinning and dancing, at play among the stones, but although the daimone chased it, the leaf was a dead thing, its spirit fled, and it could give no companionship to one who was lonely.

Who are you waiting for
? the Bright One had asked it, but only the wind moaning through the stones answered.

“Who? Who?”

“YOUR Excellency, we’ve had word that the honored presbyter and his party arrive today.”

Antonia set aside her book. The library in Novomo had so few volumes, even supplemented with those she had removed from the convent of St. Ekatarina, that she had been forced to reread St. Peter of Aron’s
The Eternal Geometry
three times in the last nine months, although she still didn’t comprehend more than a third of it. Lady Lavinia’s steward waited beside the door, hands folded, as Lavinia paced to the unshuttered window. Light pooled on the table, illuminating the precious chronicle and the huge map inked onto a sheep’s hide cured and treated but left intact instead of cut in sheets for vellum.

“He will bring news of my daughter. There was talk of marriage to one of the king’s Wendish lords, although I would hate to see her forced to live in the cold north. Yet if Father Hugh thinks it for the best …”

Lavinia was a loyal and righteous woman and certainly devout enough that she insisted Antonia deliver the sermon in her household chapel every Ladysday, but she had long since developed an unfortunate infatuation for the handsome presbyter and treated him more as if he were God’s bright messenger than one of God’s humble servants.

“He would not countenance any alliance that might bring
her to harm, not after saving her from Ironhead and introducing her into the queen’s household. She is quite the queen’s favorite, I hear. A marriage to a Wendish lord would improve the family fortunes. We could seek further alliances in the north for my kinfolk. But there is a boy of good family in southern Aosta, too, whose family has shown interest in a match with our house.”

As she rattled on, still staring out the window, Antonia cut quills. The lady’s concerns were the heart of the round of life on Earth; a lady must steward her estates and prepare for the next season, breed her herds and tend her gardens. How her children married affected the prosperity of her household and the longevity of her line, and every noble lady and lord had a duty to perpetuate the lineage out of which they themselves flowered.

These toiled worthily in the service of God, who had created all, but they had not been fitted with the task of supervision. That task fell to the elite.

“With all this talk of the emperor and empress riding east to Dalmiaka to make war against the Arethousan Emperor—I don’t know what to expect. None of us know what to expect.”

“Only God can see into the future, Lady Lavinia.”