by Kate Elliott
In truth, they were an easy target, but although Henry’s forces harried them, the king—the emperor—did not press an all-out assault. Henry, too, was impeded by night.
“He’s holding off,” said Sanglant to Hathui. “He’s waiting. For what?”
“We’re deep in enemy territory without support. Why should he risk losing more men than he needs to if he can pick us off piece by piece at less risk to his own? Too, I think his men are afraid of the griffins.”
“As they should be. But the griffins can’t help us now.”
Lightning turned the sky to a ghastly gray-white. The silhouettes of trees leaped into prominence, and were gone, all except the afterimage. Distant thunder rumbled, then faded. His ears felt full, as though ready to pop. An arrow whooshed past to bury itself into the wood of the wagon just in front of them. Out in the forest, a man yelped as he was struck.
They held their position as they trudged along. The lightning storm flashed and boomed off to the east as they kept moving in formation, not breaking ranks. They had lost far too many men in the field, but he dared not number or name them now. They had retreated over the corpses of their own, but they had not left behind any wounded man who could be moved. Yet the heat had sapped them, and they had abandoned more horses than men. Half their supplies had been lost. Even at such a slow pace and with the mercy of night they could not go on much longer. He was still sweating; the night hadn’t cooled down, and the air got thicker and more humid until it seemed difficult to take in a breath.
The sky lit so brightly that it blinded him. Thunder rolled in over them, wave upon wave of it, and a bolt of lightning ripped through the sky and hung against blackness for what seemed forever, burning itself into his vision so that when it flicked out he still saw it against the starry heavens like a twisting road delineating the path on which angels descended to Earth to collect the souls of the newly dead.
There were so many dead.
“My lord prince!” A man appeared out of the darkness with a comrade leaning on him, an arrow in his thigh. “Terrence here can’t walk, but there’s no room in the wagon.”
Sanglant dismounted and broke the shaft off near the leg. The man gritted his teeth and did not scream. “Put him on the horse,” he said.
“My lord!” cried Hathui.
Malbert and Sibold protested. “Ride our horses, my lord. We’ll walk.”
“Go on,” he said. “I’ll stay with the rear guard. We’ll all get free, or none of us will.” He had seen the bones of his Dragons covering the flagstones in Gent Cathedral. He had no wish to be the last to remain alive, not again. No wonder his mother’s blessing was in truth a curse. To survive might be a worse punishment than to die. How many people had he led to their deaths while he remained among the living?
A gust of wind rattled the trees and showered leaves and twigs down on them. As the line moved forward, he fell in with the last rank. The torches held by Henry’s soldiers flared a spear’s throw behind, but Henry’s men did not speak, only followed. An arrow hissed out of the night and struck his shield, hanging there to join the stump of the arrow left by one of Liutgard’s archers earlier that day. Lewenhardt moved up behind him, took aim, and shot. His arrow skittered away through brush. He heard laughter, followed by a captain’s command to draw back.
“No more,” he said quietly to Lewenhardt. “Save your arrows for daylight.”
“Yes, my lord prince.”
The archer stuck behind him, unwilling to leave, and Sibold came up as well, having given his mount to another man. Malbert might have come as well if he hadn’t been carrying the banner. Except for a dozen men with Captain Fulk, they were all that was left of his personal guard. Lightning flashed, illuminating a straggling line of men following their trail, a hundred or more within view and the noise of thousands marching up from behind. They were gone again as night returned, their line shrunk to the pitch fire of torches.
Lewenhardt whistled softly. “I never thought there would be so many.”
No one faltered. No one stepped out of line or wept with fear. They were good soldiers, the best; It was a curse to lead men to their deaths. He understood that well enough. He had done it so many times.
“Not this time,” he muttered. Anger built. Like the pressure in the air, it throbbed through him. Not this time. He might have lost this battle and far too many men and horses but he would not lose his army no matter what he had to do to save them.
To the north, from the van, he heard a cry. A horn blatted, sounding the alarm. Had Henry sent men through the forest to surround them?
Wendilgard and her banner had not yet been seen, although some of her force had reinforced the Fessians. Did she still hold the old ruined fortress to their north? Had his army retreated into another trap?
“Sibold. Lewenhardt. Hold this line together no matter what. Keep a slow retreat until you hear from me. Hathui! Sergeant Cobbo! You’ll come with me!”
Wounded Terrence he put behind the soldier now riding Sibold’s horse. Leading Fest, he jogged up along the line with the sergeant lighting his way. It was narrow going. Often there wasn’t room between wagon and trees and sometimes he had to wait with frustration welling while a wagon trundled past a gap before he could follow through; other times he cut through the undergrowth although Fest didn’t like the darkness and the footing. He passed wagons, marchlander infantry with spears resting on shoulders and grim expressions on their dust-stained faces, a quiet group of Ungrians with heads bowed, and at last he negotiated past the awkward wings of the Quman clansmen, not fit for the confines of woodland travel.
“Prince Sanglant!” Gyasi rode at their head. “I smell a powerful weaving taking shape. We must take shelter.”
The heavens caught fire, white and bright, but as he blinked everything went dark again. Thunder cracked over them. A net of lights sparkled high overhead before fading in spits and sparks.
Shouting broke out ahead on the road, echoed by the sudden ringing clash of a skirmish opening up at their rear. Lightning flashed. Thunder rolled. There was still no sign of clouds. The stars seemed so close he thought he might pull them down from the sky simply by reaching; they pulsed as if to the beating of his heart.
Something is coming:
He ran, dropping Fest’s lead line and leaving Eagle and sergeant behind, stumbled, tripped once and fell hard, jolting himself right up through his shoulders. One greave, rent from a sword blow, pinched at the back of his knees. Drawing his knife he cut the straps as he picked himself up and ran on. If Wendilgard were there, he would slay her for her treachery. No quarter, no ransom.
Lightning flashed, and again, and again, and in each flash he saw the faces of his men, haggard, drained, but determined as they marched on into what fate they did not know, only believed that he would lead them to victory or to shelter.
Out in the forest an uncanny path gleamed. He saw it now, crossing the road at an angle. Not too much farther up the trail Wendilgard had camped yesterday, and beyond that, having lost his way because of anger and doubt, he had encountered the Lost Ones. Surely they had moved on.
He ran. The transition from woodland to open space came abruptly. One moment branches whipped past him, the next he bolted out under the stars and right there, just beyond the last tree, he tripped and fell hard across a body, caught himself on an outflung arm. Lightning flashed again and he saw that he lay on top of the corpse of a man wearing the sigh of Avaria’s lion, one of Wendilgard’s soldiers. Dead with no apparent wound, no blood staining the ground around him, and quite stiff, which meant he had died many hours ago, long before Wendilgard’s forces had attacked Sanglant’s forces below the bluff.
Avarian dead lay scattered across the clearing throughout the ruins of Wendilgard’s bivouac, under the shadow of those ancient walls. Again a flash illuminated the clearing. A stone’s toss from him lay the torn remnants of her proud banner and, across it, her body. Her red-and-white tabard was dusty but otherwise intact and unstaine
d; her lips were pulled back in a rictus grin, and her eyes stared at the heavens although it was quite obvious she no longer saw anything.
Wendilgard was dead.
She had died fighting—but not against him. The Ashioi had killed her, the same ones he had met in the forest, and her Avarians had blamed him and taken what revenge they could by aiding Liutgard.
He jumped up and ran out into the clearing. It was dominated by a low hill on whose height a fortress had once stood, although it was now only shattered walls and fallen stones. He crossed the outer works of the fortress, so fallen and moss-covered that it appeared to be little more than a garden wall. Sanglant plunged right into the midst of a skirmish, his own men screaming and shouting as they fell back before the determined onslaught of the Ashioi. By the light of their torches he glimpsed the scene: the Lost Ones poured out of the fortress.
They had taken refuge there at dawn—so he guessed—as though it had been their place long ago and they defended it now against interlopers.
Night slammed down again. He rushed forward to the front ranks where men stumbled back, some falling to shadowy darts that dissolved as quickly as they struck. He pushed past the ragged line where Fulk and a few others held their ground to let the others retreat. He had thought the battle lost, but now he realized he had forgotten the one chess piece he had thought he would never dare to play, that he would, in fact, never want to play.
Hadn’t his mother abandoned him? Had she loved him at all? Yet her blood had mingled with that of his father to create him. She would always be part of him, and never more so than now.
He pulled off his helm, gulped in air, then shouted. “Cousin! I pray you, Cousin! Heed me, who is son to Uapeani-kazonkansi-a-lari. I need your help!”
“Prince Sanglant!” Fulk called him back.
He jumped into the gap and raised his sword as the clearing lit again, casting a pallor over the melee. A rank of shades stared at him, many wearing the bodies of men but the faces of animals. They paused as he called out once more.
“Cousin! I am the son of Uapeani-kazonkansi-a-lari. Heed me! We are cousins. Kinsmen. Why do we fight?”
The shades drew back to let the shadow prince approach. He and Sanglant stood among the corpses of Wendilgard’s troop and a few fresh Wendish ones, facing each other with their soldiers at their back, all of his living and solid and all of the Ashioi insubstantial shades.
“You stand in our sacred ground, a fortress once dedicated to She Who Will Not Have A Husband. These others camped here, so we slew as many as we could and drove off the rest. Now we must hasten.”
“I pray you, aid me, and I will aid you. I am pursued by an army of humankind who seek my destruction and who seek yours as well. Listen!”
A bolt of lighting scorched the sky, hanging in the air for three breaths before it flicked out, leaving behind an afterimage that cut a blazing line across the rank of shadow elves who stood listening. Waiting. He saw trees through the outline of their bodies. Far back, he heard a horn call ring out and the sound of clashing weapons, and a horse’s screams.
“Why do you fight your own kinsmen?” asked the shadow prince.
“We fight those who are weaving a spell to cast your exiled land back into the aether. I am not a sorcerer. I do not understand by what means such a spell can be woven into being.”
The other one laughed. “No more so am I a mage’s apprentice, although my brother was. I prefer to hold a weapon in my hand. A spear is something I can comprehend. What is your name, Cousin?”
“I am called Sanglant, prince of Wendar and Varre, son of Henry and Uapeani-kazonkansi-a-lari. Who are you?”
“I am called many things. That is the custom among my people. Some called me Younger Brother, while others called me Gets-Into-Trouble. But you may call me Zuanguanu-kazonkiu-a-laru. Or Zuangua, for I know that humankind has difficulty with our names.”
Sanglant laughed. “I not least among them. So, Zuangua. Will you aid us against our enemy? I have no wish to harm them, only to drive them off so that I do not lose more of my men. The king I must capture alive. He has been made a prisoner by the sorcerers who also wish to harm your people. I carry two griffin feathers with me that will cut the threads of magic. Once he is free of the spell that binds him, he will no longer fight us.”
The prince grinned, and Sanglant recognized that grin for he had felt it on his own face many times, born of a reckless and bold impulsiveness, the willingness to throw oneself forward into an unknown battle where the outcome was in doubt. “Will he not? What if I desire battle? I have waited a long time to kill humans in revenge for what they did to my people. But very well. The time is near. If aiding you will aid my people, then I will aid you. If it does not, then I can kill you as easily as any other mortal man.”
Zuangua lifted his sword. Lightning flashed, making his white cloak blaze before night returned. A woman standing beside him fitted out in warrior’s armor and wearing a hawk’s mask pushed up on her head brought a jewel-encrusted conch, bigger than her hands, up to her lips. She blew. The sound arched up just as thunder cracked, but where the thunder splintered and rolled away into silence the mournful note held on and on. The Ashioi warriors scattered into the woods, quickly lost in the darkness.
When the call faded, Zuangua gestured toward the ancient walls on the height. “Find refuge there for your wounded. The rest, range below. Together, we will fight.”
“My lord prince!” cried Fulk as lightning shot white fire through the air. His anxious expression lit, and vanished, as blackness crashed down.
Sanglant shouted as thunder pealed right on top of them. “Go! Form a shield wall with those who are strong, and put the injured up in the fortress. Do not touch any of the Lost Ones who bide there. Go! Go!”
He himself turned back to Zuangua. “Will you hunt with me, Cousin? I seek my father, and I mean to free him.”
2
ON the afternoon of that day—the tenth of Octumbre—when Hugh led them up through the maze of ruins that surrounded the tumulus to wait beside the stone crown, Zacharias was ready. The high grass had been scythed for fodder. They waded through its stubble single-file with Hugh in the lead and Zacharias walking behind him, head high. He would make Hathui proud, although she would never know it.
The waxing crescent moon rode high in the heavens as the company spread out around the stones. There were two score guardsmen, Deacon Adalwif, a pair of Hugh’s servants, and himself. Zacharias knew well the sandy patch of ground from which the threads were woven; he and Hugh had practiced here many nights in preparation. As the sun sank westward, Hugh nudged Zacharias to this patch and placed the weaving staff into his hands, then stood behind him. The light faded and the first stars winked into view in the darkening sky: the Diamond, Citrine, and Sapphire that graced the Queen’s Sword, Staff, and Cup, with the Diamond so close to zenith it made him dizzy to stare up at it. It was cold, and bitterly clear; with a cloak Zacharias felt the fingers of winter clutching at his bones, but such trifles meant little to him this night.
No rain had fallen for two months and the river that ran below the tumulus was no more than a trickle over its stony bed, while livestock and villagers alike suffered from thirst. The young wheat, recently planted, had not yet sprouted, and the deacon and her villagers despaired, fearing it might never do so without autumn rains to germinate it. Obviously Holy Mother Anne and her tempestari had done their work well, keeping the heavens clear for the weaving across so vast a span of land. Just as obviously they cared nothing for the consequences that fell hardest of all on the common folk. His folk. His kind.
Before his birth a King’s Eagle had ridden through the Wasrau River Valley, where farming families crowded the arable land cheek by jowl, all paying heavy taxes and yearly service to one lady or the next in return for protection, right of way, and a pittance of grain during lean years, not always delivered.
King Arnulf the Younger had decreed that any family willing to risk the long jour
ney east to the marchlands, there to farm rich upland country never before touched by a plow, would be freed of the yoke of lady’s and lord’s service, owing allegiance only to the regnant of Wendar. Most people stayed put: everyone knew that the marchlands were hard, dangerous country, close to the barbarians, where you were as likely to die in a Quman raid or have your daughters raped by Salavii or be eaten by griffins and lions as you were to prosper. His grandmother had packed up her household without looking back once.
His grandmother had understood the way of the world. She had journeyed east because she had hated the yoke of servitude more than she had feared danger and hardship. Now, for the first time since his captivity among the Quman, he was truly her grandson. Her heir.
“Ah,” said Hugh, more breath than word.
At the hazy western horizon, still tinged with a fading gold, bright Somorhas winked briefly before heaven’s wheel dragged her under. Mok, the Empress of Bounty, shone high in the southwest, on the cusp between the Penitent and the Healer.
“There,” said Hugh, and there Zacharias saw, rising as the wheel turned, the cluster of seven stars known as the “Crown.”
Tonight the Crown of Stars would crown the heavens.
I pray you, Old Ones, give me strength.
You are strong, Grandson. Do as we have taught you.
Zacharias felt Hugh’s chest against his own back, as close as that of a lover, but when the presbyter’s hand closed on his elbow his grip was iron, the chain by which he bound his servants to his will. He held Zacharias’ hand, and thus the staff, steady.
“Now you will weave as I have taught you, Brother Zacharias. With this spell you will see into the heart of the God’s creation itself if you do as you are bid. This, I promise.”