The Gathering Storm

by Kate Elliott

  “There are healers in the prince’s camp—”

  “This is not an earthly affliction. There is nothing we can do.”

  “There has to be something!”

  “Does there?” The tone made Anna flinch, but no blow landed. “The storm blows itself out. A warm wind will finish it, and the first flowers of spring will bloom. We will wait. I will not interfere with the hunt.”

  Anna wiped her eyes and knelt beside Blessing, clasping her hands over the girl’s heart. Blessing’s chest rose and fell in a steady rhythm, but her eyes remained open, blind and unresponsive.

  “What do you do?” asked the shaman curiously.

  “The only thing left me to do. I’m going to pray.”

  2

  WHEN you have seen the world end and you are lost in a storm of ice, all you can do is fight forward toward an unseen and even unknowable destination.

  Wind battered her. The ground became rocky as they began to climb. The stranger leading her dropped in and out of sight, screened by a blast of snow one moment only to be revealed as the wind shifted. His unbound hair whipped and curled in the gale like writhing snakes. Hunched over, he trudged up the steep slope into the teeth of the wind and did not look back to see if she were following.

  Where else would she go?

  They walked forever until her hands and feet were numb and she could not feel the weight of her bow on her back. Her cheeks burned. Twice she slipped and stumbled as loose rocks, unseen under the blowing snow, rolled away beneath her feet. Each time she cursed as she hit knees, once an elbow. The wind screamed down off the height, pummeling her; a pebble gouged a cut below her eye, the blood wicked away by the blast of the gale.

  He vanished. She stumbled over rubbish, tripped, hit the ground knees first and found herself scrabbling among bones, but her hands were so numb that she couldn’t feel to get her balance. He hauled her up and shoved her forward into the shelter of a lopsided hut crazily woven of sticks and grass. An old and threatening scent pervaded the air, but at least the cutting wind had lessened enough that she could hear him speak in perfectly grammatical but clearly accented Wendish.

  “If you light fire, we live.”

  Out of the wind, she began shivering all down the length of her body. It was hard to concentrate, even to think of her own name much less remember how to call fire in such a dangerous place, with dry vegetation all around them ready to burst into an inferno.

  He nudged a pile of debris on the ground which she recognized belatedly as a fire pit stacked with dried dung. As she knelt, her knees popped and creaked like those of an elder. A finger bone slipped under her knee and rolled away into the fire pit. What manner of predator devoured human flesh yet built nests like a bird?

  She already knew the answer.

  Although it was difficult to coordinate her movements with her hands numb and aching, she pulled off one glove and rested her fingers on the lowermost layer of dung. Out on the open ground, she had called fire indiscriminately; here, she must probe as with a needle, sewing finest silk, so as not to engulf herself in her own conflagration.

  Fire caught in the fuel and licked upward as she sat back hard, out of breath. It was so cold. So cold.

  “Where have you come from?” asked the man.

  With an effort, she lifted her head. He crouched down opposite her, eyeing her with an intelligent if disturbingly intent gaze across the waxing fire. His hair had settled, not snakes at all but long, thick, black hair furiously tangled by the wind. It made her think of Sanglant—who had never tired of combing out her hair, the one thing he could sit still for, who was always needing to pace, to walk, to move.

  Ai, God, where was Sanglant now? Where was their daughter? She had prayed that the force of her longing for them might drag her back close to them, but now she despaired. What reason had they to be wandering in this wasteland? She didn’t have time to seek them out, because time and tide and the infallible turning of the stars would not wait. How could she get back to them knowing that she might be driven onward on a path that would not intersect with theirs for days or months or even years? She did not know how long she had been absent from this world. She did not know how much time she had left until the great conjunction.

  “Tell me first,” she said carefully, “who you are.”

  “If I were your enemy, you would already be dead.”

  She laughed because, as he spoke, the tenor of his face reminded her of Cat Mask. She touched her sword, Lucian’s friend, to reassure herself that it still hung faithfully at her belt. “Perhaps. It is possible that you are not capable of killing me. It is possible that you would not wish to.”

  “It is possible that you are now my hostage.”

  “It is possible that you are mine.”

  He laughed, an echo of hers, but his voice cracked and she had an uneasy feeling that he was hiding something profound, not just his identity and his purpose here but a deeper secret, like a fire smoldering beneath peat that may burst out unexpectedly to scorch the digging hand.

  “I am no one, just a man in search of griffin wings.”

  “And this—” She gestured. “—is a griffin’s nest?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you are in the right place to meet the fate you desire.”

  He laughed again, that disquieting cackle. “Are you? Where have you come from? What do you seek?”

  She said nothing.

  He brushed a hand along the curve of his throat. The casual movement unsettled her. Not meaning to, she touched the gold torque she wore, which she no longer had the right to wear.

  “Only the lineage of the regnant wears the ring of gold at their neck,” he said. “Who is your father?”

  “A humble man with neither king nor queen in his ancestry. How is it you speak Wendish? Are you a merchant?”

  “I am nothing, nameless and purposeless, until I have griffin wings.”

  “Then what will you be?”

  “That depends on whether I defeat my enemy. He also wears a gold ring at his neck.”

  She flushed, feeling heat on her skin, the racing of her heart. Henry might be fighting the easterners. It was too much to hope that this man knew the whereabouts of Sanglant, and she dared not reveal knowledge he could use against her.

  “How will griffin wings defeat your enemy?”

  “The feathers of griffins are proof against magic. Maybe even proof against yours, Liathano.”

  He was, probably, a little mad, and certainly he played this as a game, shifting ground, casting straw into his opponent’s eyes. This man was not her friend. It was still difficult to gauge whether he was her enemy. She changed her tactics.

  “How do you know my name?”

  The fire snapped as he regarded her, tilting his head to one side, listening. She heard only the howl of the wind and the whispering rustle of the outermost layers of the giant nest.

  “I have been seeking you because yours is a name of great power. Because you burned down a palace. Fire is a weapon.”

  “Then you must know that you can’t hope to kill me, or take me prisoner. Fire is a weapon that not even griffin feathers can defeat.”

  “You have already served your purpose. Listen.”

  She listened. But all she could hear was the wind.

  He gripped his spear across his body and without warning dashed outside. She jumped up just as the entire nest shuddered. Sticks and debris rained down on her. A broken eggshell, disturbingly large, dropped from the ceiling and shattered into tiny pieces at her feet. The low opening quivered as though probed. A beast screamed shrilly outside. A vast shape moved beyond the entrance and before she could find shelter—not that there was any crevice or cove to crawl into—a huge tufted eagle’s head thrust in through the opening. Snowflakes glittered on its beak. Its throat feathers had an iron gleam and its eyes the look of amber, but it rested its bulk on a lion’s tawny paw, made sharp with cruel talons.

  The griffin had come home.


  3

  SANGLANT had never had cause to consider the limits of his mother’s curse. His wounds never festered, only healed. The grippes and agues that afflicted others never touched him. He could not die in battle or intrigue, only watch as his allies and enemies succumbed.

  Now, some hours after fording the shallow river, he huddled in his cloak while the freezing gale tore at him, chilling him to the bone. Walking had warmed his wet feet and boots, but every time he stopped they stiffened and burned. Storm, he reflected, is neither male nor female. Cold is no disease but merely a state.

  Maybe Bulkezu wouldn’t need to kill him, only get the credit for it afterward when he dragged in Sanglant’s frozen corpse.

  Yet Sanglant could do nothing else but hunt him down. At first, traveling east across Ungria and through the steppe, duty had driven him. Now hate and rage impelled him.

  Bulkezu had stolen his daughter.

  To even think about it made his head cloud with fury, made him want to shriek and rend like a maddened dog.

  But he was a man, and he would only defeat Bulkezu and recover his daughter if he thought and acted like a man.

  How did a man hunt a griffin?

  Seek them in their lair.

  As he did himself, child of human and Aoi, griffins partook of different essences: eagle, lion, and snake. Lions prowled the plains, so lore said, and eagles loved rivers and mountains, often preferring open country. Before the storm closed in around him, he had got a good look at the landscape that lay east, where a river wound through a broad, grassy valley that ended abruptly in the steep slopes of rocky crags.

  He heaved himself up to his feet and headed east into the wind. The cold raged around him, but he trudged onward. As the day faded, the gray sky turned to a deep blue-gray shadow and the high crags became a black wall. The snow trailed off, leaving frozen ground swept clean by the wind. The temperature did not rise, nor did it fall.

  Through the night he walked on, never varying his pace. His voice was lost; no words formed in his head. Thoughts existed in their raw, inhuman, natural form as he turned his senses outward, seeking, listening, smelling.

  The night spoke to his ears: “There is nothing before you, nothing behind.” The earth spoke on his feet as the thin crust of soil was crushed beneath each step: “This is a hard land. Beware.” The cold spoke through his skin: “I come from the mountain, from the sky, from the cold worlds beyond. Join me, and I will carry you away.”

  The wind spoke most clearly, bringing scent as he neared the eastern heights. A deer, injured, bleeding, lay down to die. A winter-starved wolf and its mate circled in for the feast. A lone eagle dove in the turbulent winds, investigating a blast of heat high up on the westernmost outcropping of the crags.

  Fire.

  A blaze tore at the wind high above him, directly east. A campfire, or a bonfire. A signal.

  To this conflagration Sanglant listened, thwarted in his quest when the wind shifted and whispered other secrets, as if knowing he sought signs of human life, teased forward when it changed direction and blew down from the east once again. As the night drew on, the cold winter gale subsided into a drowsy breeze hinting of spring, blown up from the south along the ridgeline. He began to lose the scent.

  He walked more quickly. The ground shifted subtly upward, then steepened, until he had to pick his route up the slope using his spear as a staff to steady his way. He smelled and listened to the lay of the ground more than saw it; his eyesight was not particularly keen at night, so the curl of the breeze against the land revealed the trail. Late into the night, with the scent of dawn in the air and the clouds shredding into patches through which stars shone, he caught sight of a flicker of light high up among the rocks.

  The waning moon breached the clouds, its light casting a silver sheen over the rocks, and with this lamp to guide him he made a track through fallen rocks, careful not to slip and betray himself with a loud sound.

  He thought the campfire far away and was not prepared to hear its steady roar so close by, a trick perhaps of the echoing rock face of the crags above him. Behind, the valley lay in darkness, as unfathomable as the sea. He paused to catch his breath, shut his eyes to listen for the scrape of a foot on the rock that would give away the presence of his enemy.

  He could not smell him, but an itch between his shoulders, along his palms, a whisper in his mind, told him that Bulkezu was close. Smoke tickled his nose.

  He edged forward along an outcropping and negotiated a scatter of boulders fallen from the crags above. Beyond this obstacle a hollow widened out of the mountainside, forming a sheltered niche where griffins had built a gigantic nest out of branches, grass, reeds, bones, scraps of cloth, and a litter of iron feathers woven together.

  The huge nest blazed up into the night sky. A griffin crouched in the space between the burning nest and the far edge of the hollow, where the mountainside split away into a cliff face. It was a magnificent creature, bigger than an ox, with gleaming iron wings and a pale-silver coat, its eagle’s head raised as it stared at a single figure standing a stone’s toss away from it. The slender human had retreated up on a tumble of rocks. Facing each other, at a stalemate, neither griffin nor the foe it hunted moved. The fire sparked and roared.

  He tightened his grip on his spear as a faint rose glow brushed the eastern horizon beyond the line of crags. The griffin shifted position, lashing its snake’s tail, ready to spring. The last glint of the setting moon’s light washed the mountainside in silver and revealed the form and face of the person standing up on the rocks.

  Liath.

  He was dreaming. Bulkezu had cast a spell over him.

  Moonlight gilded her hair to a pale glamour. Her face had not changed at all in the intervening years, and it seemed the spark of blue fire in her eyes blazed so brightly that he could believe he actually saw a flicker of fire reflected there, although certainly he was too far away to see the details of her face. Fire consumed the nest, smoke and flame billowing heavenward, and a faint shimmer of golden-orange-red light danced like an aurora around her as well, making her shine as invisible fire limned her body.

  She was as beautiful as he remembered her, but she was something else now—powerful in a discomforting way like the blast of heat from a well-stoked hearth that prevents the blacksmith from approaching too closely.

  She did not see him.

  The hem of her cloak lifted as wind caught it, swirling it around her knees. She had braced herself on the rock, bow bent with an arrow ready to fly, yet she did not loose it. The griffin did not spring, although its tail whipped along the ground, stirring up a misty cloud of dust.

  He stared, stupefied at the unanticipated sight of her. Where had she been all this time? Why had she never sought him out?

  Ai, God. A single arrow was no match for a griffin.

  He broke forward—and in that instant death brushed his shoulders. Turning and ducking in the same motion, he just missed being caught in the face by a spear point thrust out from the rocky shadows behind him. His enemy had crept up while he gaped, dumbfounded and witless, at his lost wife. He tripped, rocks slipping under his boots, and threw up his spear barely in time to knock away Bulkezu’s second thrust. Falling hard, he lost control of the spear, which rolled into the rocks. Bulkezu leaped forward with his own spear and planted himself before the prince, legs braced, hands sliding and then tightening on the haft as he spun the weapon a quarter circle and raised it for the final, downward thrust.

  Time slowed, as it often did for Sanglant in battle, when the world around him shrank until only he and the enemy he fought remained in focus. He grabbed for his knife, but his belt had twisted in the fall and the sheath was caught beneath his hip.

  Could a man cursed as he was survive a thrust through the heart?

  Bulkezu shouted—a word, a battle cry, a curse—his scarred face lit with triumph as he laughed madly and tightened his hands to drive home the blow.

  The arrow blossomed to the left cente
r of his torso, in the heart.

  Sanglant flung himself hard to the right over the rugged ground as Bulkezu toppled forward, a surprised look on his face. Even so, the prince’s legs got tangled in the corpse, and as he struggled to free himself, the griffin cried shrilly behind him. A cloud of dust and a battering ram of sharp wind, the gust made by its wings, slowed him as he grabbed the spear out of Bulkezu’s hands and ran forward, half blinded by the stinging particles of earth blown up into the air, the grit pummeling his face.

  It was too late.

  The griffin had launched itself into the air and as he watched helplessly, too far away even to cast his spear, the beast lifted Liath off the rock, her shoulders caught in its talons. She had a new arrow half drawn from her quiver, but as the griffin carried her upward, she lost hold of it and it fell to clatter in among the tumble of rocks where she had been standing.

  Cursing, he watched the great creature fly heavily westward out over the plain as the sun crested the heights behind him. Dawn came and with it a warm breeze off the crags. He was sweating freely now from both exertion and the change in temperature. Mist rose out of the valley, shrouding the lowlands in gloom, and into this haze of white the griffin and Liath vanished.

  “Blessing!” he shouted. “Anna!”

  There was no answer. An animal scrabbled through the rocks. A flock of early swifts circled over the nearest crag, swooping for insects.

  Bulkezu’s corpse lay among the stones. Wind whispered in the arrow’s flighting where it protruded from his chest. Amazingly, there was no blood.

  He called again, listened, but heard nothing except the wind moaning along the heights, the crackle of the dying fire, and the scratching of that damned animal. Briefly, it popped up into view—a rabbitlike creature with small ears. As abruptly it disappeared, bolting for cover. An owl ghosted into view and settled on a nearby rock. It appeared to study first him and then the burning nest before launching itself into the air again and flying away westward. He recognized the shaman’s familiar. Through the owl’s senses she saw all; perhaps she knew all. Yet she refused to aid him.