Crown of Stars

by Kate Elliott

  Footsteps warned them of Hathui’s return. She appeared in the door, looked from one to the other, and said, “The horses are saddled and ready, Your Majesty. Your Highness.”

  Theophanu indicated the door. “I follow where you lead. Let us make sure that Ekkehard does not escape his duty.”

  “So are we all what our father made of us,” he said to her.

  She cocked her head to one side, lips thinned, the mere quirk of a smile. “That’s true enough.” She was both amused and bitter. “Father always got what he wanted. Even when it killed him.”

  3

  THE frosty air of early morning chilled skin and made strong men shudder. The horses bogged down in soggy ground that had never dried out because there was no sun to bake it dry. On the whole, the morning had a miserable air that weighed on everyone and made them ride in disgruntled silence. Why must Ekkehard act like such an idiot?

  “Some questions cannot be answered, Your Majesty,” said Hathui, and Sanglant realized he had spoken out loud.

  The guards at the gate had pointed north. At a hamlet where the road forked, an old woman, who according to her testimony never could sleep well at night because of the particular ache in her hip that made lying down an agony, had heard a troop of horsemen turn down the northwest fork and rattle off in the twilight hours before dawn. A nervous peddler pushing his cart along that narrow way had seen and heard a dozen men pass his hidden campsite at dawn.

  “We’re getting closer,” said Captain Fulk. “See, here. Hoofprints at the verge. Still fresh.”

  Liath had fallen to the back of the troop of two-score riders so she could talk to Lord Wichman. Sanglant glanced back, then turned a little to watch them. Liath talked. Wichman seemed to be answering in monosyllables. Hathui snorted.

  “Nay, have no fear, Your Majesty,” she said.

  “Fear of Liath seeking comfort from Wichman? I think not!”

  “Nay. Fear of him harming her. Look at his posture.”

  It seemed that Wichman rode a little off-balance, that he was in fact leaning somewhat away from his interlocutor, keeping his distance.

  “That damned phoenix,” said Sanglant. “She will gnaw at it.”

  “She is what she is, Your Majesty.”

  He sighed.

  Ahead, a scout appeared at a canter. The man reined in and waited, and when the king’s party were in earshot, announced:

  “Ahead! The lady’s mount has gone lame and they’re arguing over whether to leave it.”

  “There’s the wrong battle to be fighting,” muttered Fulk.

  Hathui chuckled.

  “The better to fall into our hands,” said Sanglant wearily. “I am relieved we have no great hunt to pursue.”

  The noise of their company reached Ekkehard’s party before they came upon them in a clearing surrounded by hornbeam and oak. A few trees lay cracked and fallen, trunks stretched over hawthorn and dogweed and flowering stitchwort. The others towered like pillars, overseeing the hapless soldiers and frightened lady scrambling to mount horses made restive by their handlers’ fear. Ekkehard was already in the saddle. He rode forward to confront his brother, placing himself between his pursuers and his retinue.

  “What have you come for?” he demanded imperiously. “I won’t go back to Gerberga!” He drew his sword.

  Sanglant motioned the others to fall back and rode himself to meet the younger man on the path. He pitched his voice to carry. “I pray you, Ekkehard, come quietly. Lady Theucinda cannot marry a man who is already married. Or do you mean to bed her and then cast her off?”

  The girl looked up, hearing Sanglant, but she was just a little too far off for him to study her expression.

  “I do not!” objected Ekkehard. “That’s not what I intend! I’ll marry her!”

  “Are you not already wed to Gerberga?” Sanglant asked as pleasantly as he could. “Did you not already consummate the marriage?”

  Ekkehard’s deep flush made him look furious and ridiculous. Sanglant felt a flash of sympathy for the rash fool, but it passed as soon as he remembered that Ekkehard had ridden with Bulkezu and his Quman invaders.

  “For shame,” Sanglant said in a voice only the two of them could hear. “For shame, Ekkehard. Take your punishment, which you have earned. Does Gerberga abuse you?”

  “She does not,” admitted Ekkehard sulkily. “But she doesn’t respect me. She only respects my rank and title. She wouldn’t have wanted me if I wasn’t Henry’s son.”

  He brandished his sword. Sanglant’s men murmured with alarm, but Sanglant raised a hand to quiet them. Ekkehard was only expressing his frustration.

  “Why can you have what you want?” added Ekkehard craftily. “Why can you, but not the rest of us? No one wants her as queen. She’s born of no particular noble house, only a minor landholding family, she admits it herself, that she isn’t really Taillefer’s granddaughter. She’s some kind of creature, a daimone. Maybe she has no soul. And she’s a sorcerer. So why must I marry for the sake of alliance, to benefit my family, if you don’t have to?”

  There was no answer to this reasonable question.

  Ekkehard grinned triumphantly. “It’s just that you can, and I can’t. Because you have the army, and I am a prisoner.”

  Was that ringing in his ears his blood and anger rising? Everyone listened and watched. In battle, he always knew how to counterstrike, but in the courtier’s world he was not as adept.

  A sharp tang as of iron made him sneeze. Had there been a chapel in that last village, where bells might be ringing?

  Ekkehard lifted his chin, very much like the boy who has at last defeated his powerful rival. “You can’t answer me!” he crowed.

  “Sanglant!” Her voice cut through everything else.

  He turned in the saddle to see Liath pressing her mount forward, to see her speaking as she rode in a manner that caught Hathui and Fulk’s attention. His guardsmen scattered like chaff before wind.

  “What?” he began.

  Too late, he recognized the threat.

  “Behind me!” she shouted, riding toward him. “I still have my bow and a dozen griffin feathers. Best if Ekkehard’s men spread out. They must not clump together.”

  This he had seen for himself that awful night on the foothills of the Alfar Mountains.

  “How many?” she asked. “I can’t see them.”

  Galla.

  He smelled them now. He heard their bell-like voices tolling, two of them, four of them, whispering his name and Liath’s name: Sanglant. Liathano. But he could not see them through the trees.

  “Four, I think.”

  “Who are they after?”

  “Only you and me.”

  “Ai, God.” She was furious, scared, and determined. “Who has sent them?”

  “There!”

  Branches swayed and snapped. Where their track led across the underbrush it left a barren trail in its wake.

  “I see only three.” Her bow was already strung. She drew an iron feather out of her quiver and set it to the string, heedless of the trickle of blood on her skin.

  The galla approached from the south, two of them moving one behind the next and one about thirty paces off to one side. He hissed, then shut his eyes, seeking, listening, smelling, letting the touch of the wind on his cheek speak to him. He heard a fainter set of bells, but the ringing of the other three drowned it and he could not mark its direction.

  Horses screamed. Men shouted, trying to control them. He heard a man fall, the thump of his impact on the ground, a shattered bone, a weeping curse at the injury.

  “Fulk!” Sanglant shouted, not looking to see where Fulk was. He dared not look away from the advancing galla. “Scatter the men and keep them away from me and Liath! Do as I say!”

  “Ride quickly!” said Ekkehard, behind them. “We’ll get away.”

  Sanglant drew his sword, because he could not stand his ground without his sword in his hand, even knowing the sword was useless.

  “Back
up,” said Liath to him. “I need a clear shot.”

  She drew but held it, lips parted, gaze drawn as tight as the bowstring. Her braid hung down her back. Her chin was lifted and her shoulders in perfect alignment. The mellow light gave her skin a rich gleam. Her eyes flared with blue. She was as beautiful as any creature he had ever seen, bright, poised, and deadly. No wonder he loved her so much.

  The galla shuddered as they came out from under the trees, as if the pale light of this cloudy day hurt their essence. Light hurt them, because they were creatures formed out of shards of darkness. They were pillars of black smoke, roiling, faceless but not voiceless. He heard them speak.

  “Sanglant. Liathano. Liathano.” And, more faintly, “Liathano.” One for him, but three for her. Why not twenty? Why not a hundred? He was sweating; he was cold.

  They glided forward over the ground.

  “Nay!” shouted Fulk. “Stay back! Stay back!” He sounded likely to weep, but he had seen galla before. No human weapon could defeat them.

  Liath loosed her first arrow.

  The leading galla vanished with a ringing wail, and a sizzle, and a snap. The smoky pillar simply flicked out of existence. He no longer heard his own name, only hers.

  “Get away from me,” she said to him as she pulled a second griffin feather from her quiver. He sheathed his sword and rode to her to pull a feather out of the quiver. The hard vanes cut right through his leather gloves and into the skin below, but the pain seemed trivial compared to the threat.

  “Damn it.” Her face was slick. A sick pallor made her skin gray, but her hands were steady. “Move off. I need a clean shot.”

  He reined Fest aside and saw how close those other two creatures had come, as if the death of the first one had caused them to leap forward without hesitation. Were they intelligent, or only mindless servants? She shot. A second winked away.

  The wind gusted out of the east, and the third galla veered west as though blown off course by that wind. Liath set one more arrow to the string. He heard Ekkehard’s troop clattering away up the road, the cowards. She swore as the arrow slipped crookedly in her bloody hands.

  There came, from behind, a sudden horrible shriek of pain and fear and a cacophony of terrified screams. He shifted, and what he saw made his breath catch. Ekkehard’s troop had fallen back from the western path crying and wailing, scrambling to get out of the way of the fourth galla which emerged unexpectedly from the western trees. Theucinda’s horse bolted, so panicked by the demon sailing across the clearing that it headed straight for the galla coming out of the woods.

  Too far to shoot.

  Liath had seen. She fixed her gaze on Theucinda. The girl tugged hopelessly at the horse’s reins. Ekkehard screamed.

  Fire exploded up from the grass, running in a line that quickly separated Theucinda from the galla. The horse veered sharply away from the blaze, stumbling. She tumbled down, landing hard, shouting out in pain. The horse galloped out of the way. The galla passed through the fire behind her, untouched by the flames, and kept on coming, leaving Theucinda unharmed.

  “You take that one,” said Sanglant, “and for me, the other.”

  Without waiting to hear Liath’s reply, he drove Fest forward toward the third galla, which had by now tracked back to approach them. An overpowering stench of iron and blood swamped him as he neared the galla. He could hear nothing but that clamorous ringing and Liath’s name, tolling on and on. It seemed at this angle to reach as tall as the trees, a vast horrible black tower. Singing death. Singing give me release. He tugged Fest to the right and leaned left with the griffin feather extended, and slashed right through it.

  Fest charged toward the trees with nervous energy. He fought the gelding back around to see the fourth galla disappear between one gasp and the next. Smoke poured into the sky as the fire spread. Men shouted in confusion, but he heard, faintly, Fulk’s commands as he rounded them up. Sanglant could not catch his breath. He rested in the saddle for the longest time as his troops herded Ekkehard’s party into line and retrieved Theucinda’s skittish mount. The girl limped but seemed otherwise unhurt. One of Fulk’s soldiers had been dumped and had broken an arm. All told, they had come off lightly.

  Liath rode up beside him. She wiped sweat off her forehead and afterward clasped his wrist with her unbloodied hand. “You’re clammy.” Her voice shook, but she held steady.

  “The griffins have left us,” he said to her in a low voice, as if it were a secret. “We have only fifteen feathers left.”

  “Eleven, now.”

  “If the galla come upon us again …”

  “Are sent against us again, you mean.”

  “They must kill to raise them, slaughter men like sheep.” It made him sick to think of it.

  “Then for the sake of the ones who will die, let us hope they give up.” Her smile told a different story. She knew their enemies would never give up.

  4

  FROM Walburg, the king’s progress rode west along a grassy track that dipped south through fertile countryside before swinging back north to Osterburg along the Veser River. At length they crossed the Veserling and rode through woodland along the broad track where three years ago Sanglant’s soldiers had chased down and broken the Quman army. It was a gray day, so cold that the shallow puddles along the road were iced over. That hard skin of ice cracked and shattered where hoof, foot, and wagon wheel struck. Moisture dripped from branches. Some of the trees had budded, but there was little spring-green foliage in the forest.

  In a clearing she saw a hillock that looked strangely familiar, although at first she could not place it. Only when she looked closer did she see scattered bones and the shattered remains of rotting Quman wings. Her chest pulled tight; she found herself short of breath.

  “Here, in this meadow, we broke the Quman,” he said in a queer voice. “That was a bad day, thinking Blessing was dead.”

  He could say nothing more. Nor could she. It hurt too much to think about Blessing, yet she did think. In silence, they passed through the clearing. She stared, but except for the tree at the crown of the hill and the unmistakable shape of that odd little hill, she could not relate this peaceful, isolated clearing with the carnage and chaos of a desperately fought battle, one she had seen only in a vision.

  They came out of the forest close by a low, isolated hill which was surrounded by boggy ground, brackish puddles, and rotting reeds and bracken.

  “There Bayan died,” said Sanglant, pointing to the hill. Its crest lay bare of vegetation, as though recently burned. He indicated a patch of open ground in the western hills that rose beyond the Veser River. “There the Quman set their camp.”

  Liath felt a bite in the air, as at a cold snap of wind, but this was not wind. “A powerful spell was woven here. I can still taste it.”

  “Two spells, in truth. The first killed Bayan. The second was his mother’s revenge on the sorcerer who killed both her son and her self.”

  “Killed her as well? How?”

  “Bayan was her luck. She was a Kerayit shaman.”

  “Ah.” She felt the same prickling discomfort along her skin that she might feel before a thunderstorm breaks. She thought of Hanna and Sorgatani, but they were lost, and she had no way to find them.

  Horns called from the battlements and were answered. Sanglant’s straggling troops fell into line as they approached the gates of Osterburg. The hymn surfaced deep in the ranks and, like a storm, swept over the entire army.

  Open the gates of victory that I may enter,

  That I may praise God.

  It was a familiar psalm, and by the time they entered the streets of Osterburg much of the populace had taken up the hymn, repeating its verses in ragged, heartfelt voices. So many folk flooded onto the streets to watch the regnant and his noble companions ride that it was difficult to pass. Some were certainly refugees who had fled from outlying areas where they could no longer find food or safety. Five or ten thousand altogether, she supposed, a vast number, y
et she could not help but reflect that Osterburg and all the Wendish cities were only towns compared to the great cities of the south along the shores of the Middle Sea and in the lands of the heathen Jinna. Even Darre, now only a humble shadow of its imperial self, dwarfed as important a town as Osterburg. Yet Wendish soldiers had defeated Aosta’s best armies. The new often overruns the old as the old gets worn and tired. That was the way of the world, so her father had taught her.

  Newest of all were the Ashioi, the refugees who had at long last come home.

  5

  AT dawn, the morning after the magnificent feast to celebrate both the feast day of St. Sormas and the investiture of the new duchess of Saony, Sanglant slept, but Liath woke. She had trouble sleeping past the break of day. As soon as she woke, she thought of Blessing, and as soon as she thought of Blessing, she could as easily go back to sleep as fly. Sanglant slept soundly, one arm splayed over his head and the other thrown across his torso. He was out cold. He’d had a lot to drink. She dressed and left the inner chamber of the royal suite. Although she stepped carefully, she woke Hathui, who lay on a pallet athwart the door that let into the inner room.

  “What? Eh? Ah. Liath.”

  “No need to rise. I’m just going out to walk.”

  Hathui groaned, pressing the heel of a hand to her forehead. “You’ve the head for it. Mine aches.”

  “As it will, if you drink so much,” said Liath with a laugh.

  Hathui burped. “Ai, truly, it was a good feast.”

  “Well deserved,” said Liath, sidling on, wanting solitude. “Princess Theophanu will rule Saony wisely and well.”

  Which was true, and scarcely needed to be said. Still, Theophanu was a puzzle to her. She respected Theophanu but felt no warmth and no camaraderie. Theophanu was nothing like Waltharia. She smiled a little, thinking of the margrave. Maybe a friend. Certainly an ally.

  She was careful not to wake the other stewards and servants, rafts of them, it always appeared to her, floating on their pallets that, when the day properly began, would be stored out of the way together with the bedding. Yet half of them were already waking, stretching, rising. Nodding at her with murmured respectful greetings. She could never interpret their expressions in any way that satisfied her that she understood what they were thinking. She had not half the skill that Sanglant did. It always seemed to her that he could judge mood and tone to a nicety. She reached the outer door to find a pair of drowsy whippets huddled at the feet of a snoring servant. They sensed her coming and, whining, ears flat, slunk out of her way. She let herself out and hurried through the barracks room, lined with sleeping soldiers bivouacked along both walls. This room opened onto a landing, crowded with dozing men. Even on the stairs folk slept but so uncomfortably that she wondered they could sleep at all. So many retainers were crammed into Osterburg’s ducal palace that it was only outdoors one could smell anything but the stink of unwashed bodies. When she emerged into the central courtyard of the square palace tower, she found folk stretched out on the raised and covered walkways that linked the old two-storied tower to the newer one-story wing. They huddled under eaves and under wagons, anywhere they might keep dry or off the ground. Her feet crushed the skin of ice that made the ground glitter. She slipped out through the inner gateway. Guards stared at her and backed up a step. Belatedly, they dipped their heads and said anxiously, “my lady.”