The Gathering Storm

by Kate Elliott

  “Very good.”

  “I pray you, Prince Sanglant.” Lady Wendilgard of Avaria came forward with a dozen of her best soldiers at her back. Although her nose and cheeks had been burned red by the sun, her face had the pallor of a woman held under a tight rein. “We have come from the forward line.”

  When she knelt before him in an uncharacteristic show of humility, he smelled trouble. The way she had set her mouth, teeth clamped shut and lips pressed thin, bode ill. “I pray you, go on.”

  In the distance he heard the griffins shriek. Lady Wendilgard remained silent too long, and when she spoke, she spoke too quickly.

  “I have been to the forward line, my lord prince. I have seen the walls of Estriana. My father’s banner flies beside that of Aosta. He rides with Queen Adelheid. I cannot fight against him.” For once she could not look him in the eye, knowing what he was: bastard and rebel. “I cannot.”

  Silence was a weapon, and she employed it better than he did.

  He spoke first. “It may be a feint. How do you know your father himself rides with the queen?”

  Like her parents, she was proud and with a few breaths regained her composure enough to look him in the eye. “I called out to the guards on the wall, my lord prince.” Such formality from a woman who was near enough his equal in rank condemned him. He knew what she would say next. “My father was summoned. I saw him on the walls, hale and alive.”

  He tapped a foot on the dirt, stilled it; a surge of energy coursed through him but he had to remain seated and in control. “So,” he said, temporizing, but he had already lost this battle and it was too late to change the course of the defeat.

  “So be it,” she replied, again too quickly. “I gave you my oath, my lord prince, which I will not forswear. I will not draw my sword against you. Yet I must remain loyal to my father. I and my Avarians will withdraw from the army and return home.”

  XXXI

  THE LOST

  1

  HE could not let it be. The lady and her soldiers rode out in the late afternoon while Adelheid’s men gathered on the walls of the town and jeered those who remained, although the griffins prowling between ditch and wall gave the enemy pause. One man shot an arrow which fell harmlessly short of Domina.

  The Avarian defection dealt the siege a grievous blow. Men frowned as they dug the ditches that would protect them. Soldiers muttered and fell silent as he passed. They gazed north, toward home. They argued about who had the camp next to the Quman contingent although Fulk had already assigned places, and Gyasi was forced to order his nephews to stake out a rope to encircle the Quman encampment and bind it with charms and bells to keep Wendish and Quman apart.

  Worst of all, the griffins flew off suddenly, and although they had done so before in order to go hunting and had always returned, this time their departure smelled of defeat. Men watched them go and turned muttering back to their tasks. On the rocky shoreline, five dead dolphins washed up, their corpses half decayed and infested with tiny worms. In the wake of this omen the seawaters began to retreat as though draining away into a sinkhole. Fish flopped and gasped in shrinking hollows on the exposed seabed, and his soldiers waded out into the muck to retrieve them in baskets—yet one man wandered too close to the walls and three arrows pierced him before his comrades could drag him to safety. He died shortly after, as the sun was setting, and no sooner had the one piece of ill news made the rounds than two horses suffering from colic had to be slaughtered.

  Sanglant took Hathui aside as the camp settled in for an uneasy night punctuated by curses and jeers from Estriana’s walls and the too-distant sigh of the sea, whose waters receded finger’s width by finger’s width although by now the tide—if there even were one in the sheltered Middle Sea—ought to be turning to come back in. Drought on the land and an uncanny ebb tide at sea. What next?

  “Saddle a mount. I’m riding after Wendilgard.”

  She began to speak, but after making that first sound—no recognizable word—she shut her mouth.

  “You know I value your advice. I pray you, Eagle, say what you think.”

  “Only this, my lord prince. Best that you persuade her to return. The Avarians make up a fifth part of the army. Lady Wendilgard commands respect because she, too, rode south not for glory but because of loyalty to her father. Now folk are reminded that you are a rebel. They do not like to think of fighting against the regnant they love.”

  “How is it, then, that you dare think of it, Hathui?”

  Her steady gaze matched his. She held her ground. “I witnessed what they did to the king. Who is to say they have not ensorcelled Duke Burchard in the same manner? Isn’t it a form of sorcery if he doesn’t know the truth and instead remains faithful because of a lie? How is it rebellion to raise weapons against false dealing?”

  By the time they rode out along the road that cut into the wooded hills left of the bluff, it was night with only the waxing crescent moon to light their way and a wind blowing in hard off the water. He took fifty men, half of them dismounted and walking on foot with torches. The road plunged into a pine-and-oak forest open enough that they could see the stars twinkling through the foliage. Wendilgard had ridden farther than he expected, and the moon had set by the time he called his soldiers to a halt and went on with only Hathui.

  The Avarian sentries heard him coming and let him pass into the center of the encampment, which had been hastily thrown up in the lee of a solitary hill with the slope at their backs and a ravine, not much more than a ditch, protecting their left flank. Wendilgard had set up her tent beside a jumble of boulders and dressed stones as big as a man’s torso. These had once rested higher up on the hill where the face of a long abandoned fortress was being eroded by degrees. She greeted him with reserve. Wind tossed the branches of the trees, and they heard a roar of wind sweeping in from the east.

  “Come,” she said, beckoning him into the tent as her men raced for cover under the trees or where fallen walls made a windbreak.

  A gust raced through camp so swiftly that men had just begun yelling by the time the wind abated and Wendilgard and Sanglant came out of her tent to see half a dozen tents flattened. Horses had bolted free of their lines. Men scattered to search. Distantly, they heard the rumble of thunder, but no herald of lightning lit the sky. There was no rain.

  “So,” said Wendilgard as they stood by the ruined fire her stewards had lit earlier. Its coals were scattered, and servants stamped out sparks. “What do you want, my lord prince?”

  “I want you to come back.”

  “Impossible. I cannot fight against my sire.”

  It was too dark to see her face well. All of the torches that had earlier lit the camp had been doused by the wind, and the soldiers searching for the lost horses had claimed the first to be refit. The glimmer of their flames winked and vanished and reappeared like the dance of will-o’-the-wisps in a summer forest in the north, spirits that would lead a man astray if he followed them into the dark.

  “You knew I meant to lead an army against King Henry. If your father fights with those who corrupted Henry, is he not more of a rebel than we are?”

  She said nothing at first. She had the knack of keeping still, like stone. He tapped his own thigh repeatedly with one hand because he could not pace.

  “I do not disagree with you,” she said at last. “But when I saw my father, I knew I could not raise my sword against him. I could not ask his Avarians to press into battle against their brothers and cousins. I could not do it. How do you know, Sanglant, how you will react when you meet your father on the field?”

  “If I do. If he is ensorcelled, and I believe he is, then I would be a traitor not to free him.”

  “Yet wouldn’t you wonder? What if there is no enchantment? I tell you frankly: I doubt, where I did not doubt before. Are you sure of your information? Or are there other ambitions driving you that whip doubt away?”

  “I am not ambitious,” he said impatiently. “I have always been an obedient son
.”

  “Have you? Rumor has it you married against your father’s wishes. I hear whispers that the end of the world is upon us, that drought and famine and plague and even the Quman invasion afflict us because of God’s displeasure. Because of a curse laid on humankind by the Lost Ones many ages ago. Now I am no longer sure. You are only half human blood. Are you my ally, or my enemy?”

  “I was abandoned by my mother! My loyalty has always been to my father!”

  He hadn’t meant to speak so sharply. All around the camp men raised their heads and looked toward them. A few touched swords and spears; a dozen moved closer, but Wendilgard waved them away. She was a prudent woman, not easily cowed and rather older than he was, a late child of mature parents and after the untimely death of her younger brothers and older sister the only remaining direct heir.

  “I am on the knife’s edge,” she said quietly. “If I choose wrong, then I doom my own people as well as my father. Avaria has suffered badly these last few years. I weep when folk come before me and tell me their tales of hardship. I have not protected them.”

  He reined in his temper, hand clenched now and rapping a staccato rhythm against his leg. “Caution will not save us.”

  “Maybe not, but I have come too far. Or rather I should say: I have come as far as I can go. My soldiers will not fight, Sanglant. They have seen my father’s banner. Some among them have seen my father, as I have, and now all know he lives and rides beside Adelheid, who is, after all, Henry’s wife. If I press them, they will mutiny. I cannot help you.”

  “Without your forces, Henry may be lost.”

  “If I rejoin you, my forces will be lost because they will rebel against me.”

  “What will come is something far worse than fears of rebellion. If we do not save Henry and turn against Anne, we are lost.”

  She shook her head. “You ask too much of me and of my soldiers. Thus are we caught. There is nothing I can do.”

  She would not be swayed and in the end he had to retreat to save face, but he did not go gladly. He fumed, although he spoke no word of his vexation aloud. He went graciously, because anger would lose him even, and especially, her respect.

  But he was angry. He burned with it, and because he could not even stay seated in the saddle without risking too hard a hand on Resuelto’s mouth he walked and soon outpaced his own guardsmen whom he waved back when they jogged up to catch him. Hathui he tolerated because he knew that she, like a burr, would cling unless he tore her loose and he hadn’t the energy, had too much energy, to pry her off.

  “My lord prince,” she said as they walked down the path where it hooked and crooked among oak and pine and underbrush, “this is the wrong turn. We’re going back the way we came. Can you see there, through, the trees? That dark shadow is the hill where the Avarians camped. Those are their torches.”

  “Damn her!” He kept walking. “Will she now be a threat to our rear? Will she try to lift the siege? Should I attack her at dawn and take her men prisoner? Can I trust her to retreat north and leave us, so that she’s neither threat to me nor aid to Burchard and thus to Adelheid? God Above, Hathui! I have trusted your word this long. Is it true my father is ensorcelled? Am I driven by other ambitions? Did I sell Sapientia to elevate myself? No doubt she’s dead now, and I’m no better than a murderer who kills his own sister to gain the family lands.”

  She said nothing, only followed as they blundered on. He couldn’t listen, although he knew he ought to. Branches scraped his face. The brush layer crunched beneath his boots.

  “My God,” Hathui said, and stopped dead.

  He thrashed on for another ten paces through the undergrowth until he glanced up through the trees. The heavens bled fire across them, whips of pink, orange, and a drowsy red light that writhed like serpents. A drumming like rain swept out of the north, and as they stood there, a second tempest swept over them.

  While in the distance his men shrieked in fear, they were pounded by hail the size of fists and he shrank under the shelter of an oak tree whose trunk was laced by a thick cloak of ivy. Hail pummeled him, even through the branches, tearing leaves loose, ripping ivy from the trunk. Hathui cursed and cried out. He called to her and, when she did not answer, dashed out to find her. He held his arms over his head as the hail bruised him all along his back and shoulders. The brunt bore him down to his knees because it came so fiercely. He crawled, seeking shelter under a bush that smelled faintly of honeysuckle, and there, strangely, no hail struck him although it slammed down on either side. A peculiar gleam painted vague shadows along the lacy architecture of the bush whose branches arched over him. His hands scrabbled in the moist leaf litter. He dug away several old layers to reveal dry earth beneath, white grains like sand, and beneath these chalky smears a paved stone road. He tasted the sting of magic on his tongue.

  The front passed as swiftly as it had come, and when he staggered out with his palms and knees weeping sodden leaves, he found Hathui trembling so hard beneath a black pine that he actually grabbed her shoulder to stop her. The heavens were bright with stars but otherwise perfectly normal as though no strange strands of color had ever shone there.

  There were no clouds.

  She could not speak because she was shaking so hard.

  A ghostly half moon floated in the sky, fading in and out of focus, although the crescent moon had already set. It was too dark for him to see, but he could hear. A few animals braved the quiet: two squirrels scrabbling up a rustling branch, three pigs, a deer. Their scents brushed him but faded as they fled away through the forest. The whisper of footfalls was itself like a breeze, carried on the air. No scent of humans touched him, yet someone approached from the northwest traveling through the woods without dust or actual sound.

  Hathui stared past him, gone rigid.

  He turned.

  Light shone in a thread whose unwinding ran right across the spot where he had crouched beneath the bush during the hailstorm. That pale ground was part of a path no wider than his outstretched arms, glittering now with sorcerous light. Shadowy figures appeared on the old road, marching south. He slid his sword from its scabbard and pushed Hathui backward, staying between her and the gleaming path.

  The shadows walked at a steady pace, not quickly, not slowly, but with the certain stride of folk who have walked a long way and mean to reach their destination. As they walked they sang in a lost language, the rhythm of their song timed to the fall of their feet on the ground. The words were unknown to him, yet the meaning seemed clear, as if he had absorbed this secret out of his mother’s body during that interval when he had existed not as a self but as part of her.

  They sang of a land lost, which was their home; they sang of families never forgotten, of love unfulfilled. They sang of war, and of vengeance unsated. Yet a note of hope twined through their song, as if they had sung it for a very long time but believed that a final cadence would soon signal its end. Although he hadn’t Liath’s salamander eyes, he saw them clearly as they passed him in a line that straggled along the path. Old men led children. Strong warriors both male and female masked with animal faces strode proudly, armed with bows or spears or strange swords forged not of metal but rather edged with black glass. Stout old women balanced on their hips baskets woven of reeds and jars decorated with spirals and hatch marks, white paint on red fired clay. They were all of them shadows walking amid shadows; they weren’t real, they hadn’t substance, not as he did. Yet they were as perilous a people as he had ever met.

  They were the Lost Ones, the Ashioi. His kinfolk.

  For a long time he watched them pass. Hathui spoke no word. He could not even hear her breathing because the unearthly hush that had fallen over the wood muffled all earthly sound. It seemed he and the world slipped into shadow as the shadows marched. They passed, one after another after another and on and on, so many he could not count but certainly more than a tribe, more than a town. They were a host, journeying southeast on the gleaming path.

  The stars whe
eled above on their appointed round as the night wore on. The world lay still, waiting, as did he. He had a wild notion that he could fall in at the end and join that line, although none seemed to notice him—he might as well be a shadow to them, as they were to him. Was he only dreaming? Would he see his mother among them?

  He did not see her. As the first gray tiding of dawn filtered through the trees, the last of the line passed him, brought up, in the rear, by a proud young man of stature very like to his and a face that seemed eerily familiar, a man’s face molded out of the lineaments of his own mother. He was clad in a cuirass molded of bronze whose surface shimmered. The young warrior halted and stared at the prince. His hip-length white cloak swirled in an unfelt breeze. Leather tasses clacked softly about his thighs.

  “Kinsman!” he called. “How is it you watch us pass and do not join us? It is near. It is close. Can’t you feel it?” He faltered, shifting his entire body as a shudder passed through him. “How can it be?” he demanded, voice changed. “You are not one of us, yet I recognize you. Who are you?”

  This was no language Sanglant knew, yet he understood it anyway. It melted into him like the heat of the sun, which shines on all folk whether they know to call it the sun, or whether they are blind.

  “I am Sanglant,” he replied, taking a step toward the path. “I am son of Henry, king of Wendar. I am son of Uapeani-ka-zonkansi-a-lari.”

  The other man lifted his spear in a gesture of warding, or astonishment. Beaded sheaths covered his forearms and calves, and in the twilight they flashed, catching the attention of the warriors who had gone on and now paused, turning.