The Gathering Storm (55 page)

“I am not your enemy!”

“I could argue that you are my enemy twice over. Still, I will be willing to speak with you as if you were a female, Prince Sanglant, but only when you have proved your fitness to lead.”

The words angered him, but he replied as evenly as he could. “How may I do that?”

“Have you not already spoken of it? Males prove their fitness in the same fashion, whether human or horse. They exist to breed, and to protect the herd when brute force is needed. There is a beast loose in the grass—”

“You have seen him?” Hope shone briefly. Anger sparked, blazing hot and strong. “He has taken my daughter captive!”

“Destroy the beast that stalks in the grass,” she repeated. “Then I will speak to you again.”

“Will you not help me save my daughter?”

She raised an arm. A huge owl glided in to perch on the centaur’s glove. Breschius gasped out loud. The centaur leaned closer to the owl, but even with his keen hearing, Sanglant made out only a rustling as soft as downy feathers rubbed together. She launched the owl back into the air, and it flew away over the ranks of the centaurs, quickly lost to sight.

She examined Sanglant again. “Hunt, Prince Sanglant. If you return, then we will negotiate.”

With a flick of her tail, she sidestepped, turned, and walked up the hill to her army.

Hathui had got a spear from Captain Fulk and now hastened up the slope to bring it to Sanglant. He unfastened his cloak and turned it inside out, hiding the bright red cloth and exposing the pale fox-fur lining, which blended better with the grass.

“My lord prince.” Hathui handed him the spear, the best balanced of those he possessed. Fulk had chosen well, of course. “I beg you, my lord prince, go carefully. We are all of us—all of Wendar and Varre—lost if you are lost to us.”

“I am lost if I let a man like that kidnap and despoil my daughter.”

“He wants you to follow him. Surely he must kill another griffin, and defeat you, in order to restore his honor and position. Princess Blessing is merely bait.”

“So I hope,” said Sanglant as he surveyed the sky and the slope of the hill. “That will make it easier to find him.”

“Shall I attend you, my lord prince?”

“Nay. Repair camp. Find a more sheltered spot, if you can. Fortify yourselves against unexpected attack, from whatever quarter. Take what you need from what the Quman abandoned. Do not forget that they may creep back and ambush you, but I think that Gyasi can warn you if they approach.”

“If we can trust him,” said Hathui.

“I trust that he seeks revenge against those who wronged him. Watch him, but do not ignore what he has to say.”

“As you wish, my lord prince,” said Breschius.

“What if Bulkezu’s tribe claims him?” asked Hathui.

“They fled before they could collect on their bargain, taking my sister with them. No matter.”

He hefted the spear. Storm clouds piled up to the east where a line of crags erupted out of the high plateau. He smelled the tempest on the west wind. Out in the grasslands, up in the highest lands beyond the reach of the centaur witch, winter still ruled.

Its chilly blast could not possibly be as savage as his anger.

“Bulkezu is a dead man now.”

FOR a moment only, as she crossed through the heart of the burning stone, she kept hold of Alain and his hounds. Then the weight of the world below ripped them out of her grasp, and she spun, between the worlds, balance lost, the Earth turning beneath her as she fell back into the world she had left behind days ago. She glimpsed the winking glimmer of the crown of stars, laid out across the land, but the turning spheres caught her in their rotation, propelling her away from the lands she knew. The heavy elements of earth and water dragged her down as her wings disintegrated, their aetherical substance too fragile to exist in the world below.

As she passed from the aether into the net of the solid world, she fell through a nether world, betwixt and between, neither grounded in the world below nor afloat in the aether like the Ashioi homeland. She glimpsed a band of shadowy figures on the march, outfitted with spears and bows, children and dogs, both male and females armed and ready. They wore clothing like to that worn by the Lost Ones, and the young man leading them looked strangely familiar to her although she knew she had never seen him before. He looked a little like Sanglant.

He glanced up, sensing her, but he
could not see her. “Soon!” he called to the people following him. “We have not much longer to wait. Make haste! Make ready!”

She reached for him, seeking an answer to this mystery, but tumbled past, drawn by a force she could not measure and could not see. Eastward as the land lay, as the world spun, helpless against that great dragging weight, she was pulled far off course as by a grasping hand. What linked her to Earth, calling her back?

Was it Sanglant? The baby?

An instant she had to pray before she fell into a screaming blizzard, the cold so bitter that she could not take in a breath of air because her lungs froze and her face burned and her courage splintered, cracked, and shattered.

Cold
.

She was numb with cold. She would never be warm again. Hugh would come, with his lamp, and lead her back into the church where he had made her his slave. She whimpered. God Above, let her imprisonment not happen again.

All this passed through her mind as swiftly as a rock drops from hand to ground. Then, as stinging snow bit into her skin and the wind screamed against her, she fought up to her knees, defying the storm.

She was not that girl any longer. She was no longer defenseless and alone. She had walked the spheres. She had found her mother’s kin. She had made peace with her father’s memory and his struggles. She had unlocked the door behind which Da had sealed her power.

Hugh no longer ruled her.

But cold could still kill.

The howl of the storm deafened her and she could not see more than a stone’s toss in any direction, blinded by snow. She knelt in grass bent earthward by the wind’s force; it, too, gave no shelter, but within its fibrous stems lived fire.

Downwind, she called fire out of the grass. Flames licked upward, burning fiercely in an arc of brightness, and she pressed as close to the fire as she dared, careful of her cloak and clothing. The blaze warmed her for a time, difficult to count how long she stood there shivering, but the blizzard beat against fire and bit by bit smothered the flames until they wavered, receded, and died.

The wind screamed, scattering the ashes. She tugged her cloak more tightly around her shoulders. Already, through her gloves, her fingers grew numb. Her ears hurt. Cold seared her.

Again she called fire, this time in a wider swath.

As the flames sprang to life in a semicircle around her, a hunched figure emerged from the blizzard, approaching her at a run. It was a man; that much she could see. He carried a spear.

She drew her knife and waited. No use shooting arrows in this wind. The heat of the fire melted the snow around her; icy water pooled at her feet, soaking her boots. The man halted a prudent distance from her, measuring her as she measured him. Although the clothing he wore appeared scarcely heavier than her own, he did not seem on the verge of death by freezing. He was, oddly enough, smiling as he surveyed her. Ice rimed his black hair, and he had a startling and massive scar across one cheek that marred his features but did not, quite, make him ugly. Otherwise he appeared as might any man caught out in such a storm: wary, freezing, desperate, and respectful of the fire burning at her back.

“I saw the fire,” he shouted, words almost inaudible under the scream of the wind. “Are you the one called Liathano? I did not think to find you in this country.”

She had never seen this man before. Or had she? Memory nagged at her, but she had no time for the luxury of caution. Questions must come later. Already she could not feel her feet, and the hot flames were losing their battle against the storm, dying down around her despite their initial fury. Against the blizzard, even fire could not triumph. By his coloring and the cast of his features, this man was one of the steppe tribesmen. Although barbarians, they knew this country as no other humans did.

“Do you know where we can find shelter?” she cried, pitching her voice to be heard above the wind.

He laughed, a mad and rather disturbing cackle. “Here there is no shelter but that found where griffins nest.”

“So be it,” she said, “for I will certainly die out here without shelter but may yet survive hidden within a griffin’s nest.”

He gestured with his spear. Within this storm, all directions looked the same to her. “Come,” he said.

Bracing herself against the wind, she followed him.

IN the great hall that had once belonged to the queen of Alba, Stronghand held court as winter winds blew a chill rain across the courtyard outside, visible through open doors.

“Bring the prisoners forward.”

A captain herded the captives up before the dais, adults and children all together, a pack of ragged fugitives. They had been living no better than animals out in the woods when a patrol had stumbled across their stick hovels and crude tents and rounded them up. Winter had rendered them too weak to fight and now the presence of his dogs, eager to kill, made them too scared to run away.

They huddled together in such a trembling mass that it was difficult to distinguish one from another. Their clothes hung in tatters; their emaciated bodies gave them the look of cattle better slaughtered for soup bones than left out to graze winter pastures, where they would only die and their carcasses be gnawed by wolves.

But these Alban folk had not died, or at least not all of them had. Daily his troops captured such refugees, folk who had escaped the fall of the city or who had fled the nearby farms which had once fed the town. While his strike forces searched and harried the countryside beyond the reach of the Temes River, he had a different task.

He beckoned to his interpreter, a Hessi merchant’s son named Yeshu. Like a well-trained dog, he approached without fear.

“Discover what manner of people these are,” he told him.

The Hessi merchants taught their children many languages, the better to follow the trade routes. Yeshu spoke his tortured mother tongue as well as Alban, Wendish, and Salian.

“They are artisans, my lord, so they say,” he replied after an interrogation of the eldest woman. “According to their report, they fled the city and hid in the forest lands. Half of them have died so far this winter, so they claim.”

“What kind of artisans?”

“Carpenters and turners, my lord.”

He glanced around the great hall, crudely refurbished after the battle fought last autumn but in need of good craftsmen to restore it. “Are they kin to each other? Of one tribe?”

“Out of two clans and three houses, my lord.” He wore a cap out of which black locks straggled. His dusky skin stood in marked contrast to the fair-skinned, light-haired Albans. “This is what they tell me: they came together in their flight because some of their kinfolk married between them, as is the custom of Alban artisans.”

“Woodworkers,” he mused, looking them over. They were a sorry lot, and many might still die no matter what mercy he showed them, but that they had survived for so long and stuck together in numbers, to protect themselves, suggested intelligence and practicality. A tool may look worn and almost broken yet may still be fixable. Useful.

There was more than one way to conquer a country.

“Let them be given grain and such salt as they need for the remainder of the winter. They will be left in peace to ply their trade as long as they reestablish themselves in their home and put themselves to such tasks as they are accustomed to. They will give me labor in exchange for my protection. This hall needs rebuilding. The doors do not shut properly. What tithe did the queen require of them?”

Another conversation ensued. The youth could bargain; since Stronghand could understand what Yeshu was saying to the Alban prisoners he understood that the elders of their house, despite the seeming hopelessness of their condition,
hoped to convince the lad that the Alban queen took less of a tithe than he knew she normally did based on the testimony of other prisoners and the Hessi merchants with whom he had established trading relationships.

“Enough,” he said at last, in Wendish. Even the Hessi lad did not yet suspect that he understood the Alban speech. In truth, he was surprised he understood it at all, but ever since the return of Alain, the speech of all creatures seemed eerily open to him, as though the all-encompassing wisdom and sight of the OldMothers had infested his mortal, crippled blood. “If they argue, then they do not wish to tell the truth. One day in three will be their tithe. If they are faithful, they can earn the privilege that those loyal to my rule enjoy of one in six. Tell them to return to their home and rebuild.”

This mercy they had not expected. Weeping and wailing, they threw themselves down before him to offer obeisance, but he knew he could not trust them. To show his displeasure he chose the healthiest looking child from their group to send to Mother Ursuline at Rikin Fjord as an acolyte. He cared little for the quarrels between the gods of the Alban tree sorcerers and the circle god esteemed by the Wendish, but the adherents of the circle god were more useful to him, especially while the tree sorcerers remained his adversaries.