Crown of Stars

by Kate Elliott

  These were serious temptations, indeed.

  “I pray you,” Alain began, but the door opened and a steward hurried in, windblown and red in the face.

  “The rider has returned,” he said, making way for a messenger who staggered in and knelt before the two nobles. He smelled of leaves and rain and wind and dirt, and of smoke, as though he had sat by many campfires and never washed afterward. He peeled gloves off his hands and accepted a cup of wine gratefully.

  “What news?” Sabella demanded.

  “Ai, God!” said Conrad. “Let him finish his drink.”

  Before he could speak, a second steward appeared at the door.

  “My lady. The soldier you wanted is here.”

  She beckoned.

  Captain Lukas entered with Atto. The young man was sweating, as pale as if he were ready to faint. He dropped to his knees at once, caught sight of Alain, and started noticeably.

  “You are the one who brought report of the guivre’s trail?” Sabella had a way of looking over young men that made them squirm, but in this case she dismissed his physical charms.

  “Y-yes, my lady. I come from a village along the West Way. We call it Helmbusch, for the ridge, you know. The rock juts up just above where the chapel sits. There are ten houses and three milk cows and we have our own pair of plowing oxen …” He trailed off, licked his lips, and swallowed.

  “Can you lead us to it?”

  “To Helmbusch, my lady? Oh, yes, certainly, but I had no intention of returning. Things aren’t so good there, now, with the weather and the livestock wandering off and the refugees bothering us along the road. I came from there to seek employment—”

  “To the guivre!”

  “To the guivre?” He had long since undergone the change from a boy’s voice to a man’s, but his voice shot up an octave nevertheless.

  “The creature’s lair. If you’ve seen its trail, you can guide my soldiers to its lair.”

  “But I don’t know about that,” he said desperately. “I came to serve as a soldier.”

  “So you will. You’ll guide us to the guivre.” She examined him as he shifted his knees on the floor and pulled nervously at his sleeve. He kept his head bowed, but his torso, leaning away from her, spoke as clearly as words. “When I command,” she added, “my soldiers serve.”

  He did not answer.

  “There is a young woman who came with him,” said Captain Lukas. “His betrothed. I put her in the kitchens.”

  Sabella’s smile was slight but chilling as she examined young Atto. She did not suffer fools or cowards. She appeared to be the kind of woman who didn’t like anybody very much. “Could she not serve us better in the brothels? We have enough servants in the palace.”

  Atto flung back his head, shifting forward onto one knee, with the other leg tucked up under as though he meant to push up to his feet. “She is my betrothed! She’s pregnant! She can’t—” Too late he recalled to whom he was speaking, and he broke off.

  She nodded, satisfied that she had gotten the reaction she wanted. “If you serve me well, I will see she retains a protected position in the kitchens.”

  The threat had jarred Atto. He twisted, angry enough to be bold, and pointed at Alain. “He knows better. He saw the guivre. So he claimed.”

  “Did you?” asked Conrad with a jovial interest that barely masked his sudden intense attention. He set his elbows on his knees. “Saw it, and lived to tell the tale?”

  “I heard it in the forest,” said Alain, “although I did not see it. I was concealed within the branches of a fallen tree.”

  “He can guide you! Better than I could!”

  “No, you’ll guide us,” said Sabella to Atto, who shuddered. She turned to Alain. “Perhaps you had best go also. I remember it was said of you when you were Lavastine’s heir that you fought well in battle. In fact, I recall it said that you helped Brother Agius kill my last guivre. In recompense, you can help me capture another.”

  “It seems a dangerous venture for small gain.” Conrad shook his head.

  Sabella turned her gaze to the waiting messenger, who had by now caught his breath and drunk his fill. “What news?” Then she settled back as if she already knew what he was going to say.

  “I am come from Quedlinhame, my lady. Prince Sanglant was crowned as regnant in the presence of Mother Scholastica and at least five or six biscops, and many noble lords and ladies.”

  None murmured in shock or alarm. No one exclaimed out loud in surprise or indignation. This news was expected.

  “You rode as quickly as you could to bring us this news?” she asked him.

  “I did, my lady.”

  “Must we expect an attack soon?”

  “We have yet some time. He turned east, to ride his king’s progress through Saony and into the marchlands. So that the populace could see him and the nobles acclaim him. He will ride west once he has made himself king throughout Wendar by displaying his crown and his sword. Afterward, he will march west, into Varre.”

  “We must be ready,” said Sabella. “Captain Lukas!” She gestured, and he came forward. “It is time to make ready our attack.”

  “Past time,” muttered Conrad. “As I’ve been telling you. We need Kassel’s grain stores.”

  “There is one other thing, my lady,” the messenger added, hesitant to continue. “Difficult to believe, yet I saw with my own eyes.”

  “Go on.”

  “Griffins, my lady.”

  “Griffins?” asked Conrad, sitting up. “What do you mean?”

  “The prince marches with a pair of griffins, my lord duke. He captured them in the east. They follow him like … like dogs.”

  Courtiers glanced at Sabella to see if she would believe this outrageous tale.

  She merely nodded. “Now you see. Conrad, why we need a guivre to counter this threat. A guivre will allow us to strike first, before Sanglant expects battle.”

  “We are already striking first, by allying with one he trusts.”

  “Perhaps. But a guivre will guarantee victory.” She smiled bitterly as she shifted her attention. “Do you not think so, Lord Alain? Would this not be a wise strategy?”

  Alain nodded. A sense of peace settled over him. He had done the right thing by coming here. He saw now what he had to do. “Yes,” he said, “a guivre will grant victory.”

  3

  ONCE the necessary formal greetings were fulfilled at the shore, once folk began to unload the cargo of Alban goods, Stronghand climbed the slope of the valley. He walked into the shadow cast by the heights and across the skin of soft green grass that surrounded OldMother’s hall. Late-blooming snowdrops speckled the ground. SwiftDaughters eyed him from where they stood by the mouths of their cave. Their hair swayed like a glamour, and he paused by the threshold, distracted by their beauty. Wind trembled against his back in an unexpected gust, and he shook himself and walked forward.

  He crossed into a gulf of darkness too large to be confined in any finite space, much less the eaves and timbers visible as the outside dimensions of the hall. A tremor teased the ground. He heard as at a great distance a breathy piping like a wheezing breath. No stars shone; blackness veiled the heavens. It was as still as if wind had never been known in the world, utterly silent and cold as the skin of stone in the dark of winter.

  She said, “Stronghand.”

  “I am here.”

  She said, “Go to the fjall. The WiseMothers await you.”

  The air twisted around him, spinning the staff he held in his right hand, and he staggered backward and found himself tossed out the doorway, surprised by the light. The SwiftDaughters had vanished. Below, the ships rode high, or had been pulled up onto the strand, lightened of their load.

  How had time passed so swiftly? Around the hall and the farther village, seen through a fence of pine and spruce, folk were busy sorting and accounting. Most had gone back to work now that the excitement of his arrival had faded.

  They had not forgotten him. H
e walked among them to reach the trail that led up into the highest reaches of the valley, and as he bent his path in that direction he found himself with an escort, mostly children, none daring to ask what venture he’d set himself this late in the day.

  The children loped alongside like a pack of overgrown puppies, all in a tangle that sorts itself out into pairs and triads before melding together again. Human children ran with the hatchlings he had sired. They jostled each other like littermates, and the softer, weaker human kin whacked at the four-legs with stout sticks to keep their sharp teeth at bay when the nipping and tussling got out of hand. The sight of this extended pack caused a stab of foreboding. What strengthened the human children would surely weaken the children of rock, who did not leap to the kill as they would have done in the old days in such a crowd. They ran as one great many-limbed beast, so that he could scarcely tell one limb from another as they tumbled and shouted and galloped and giggled around him.

  Perhaps it was too easy to condemn, he thought as he strode on tireless legs, as he inhaled the sweet scent of home flavored with burning charcoal, pine sap, and the cold bite of northern air. The old days, by the reckoning of his kind with their short lives, were easily swallowed by the longer span of years in which humankind revel and which they did not fully appreciate. To live seventy years, as some of them did! Even Deacon Ursuline, who claimed to have survived forty or fifty seasons, could boast of a life span unknown even to the sorcerers of the Eika tribes, the ones who schemed and stole hearts and souls and magics in order to extend their lives.

  No matter. A flame may still burn brightly, though its wick is short.

  Rikin Fjord prospered because it was now a many-limbed beast. Sheep grazed where meadows found purchase on level ground, although he noted few twin lambs among the ewes: harbinger of a hard year ahead. Goats scrambled nimbly along the steep slopes of the valley. Pens held pampered cattle, who needed a cozy byre to outlast the winter. It was winter still, with frost crackling under each step and snow heaped where shadows lingered longest. A late sowing might prove too short for a decent crop.

  Still, the Eika could rely on raiding to fill their larders. Long had they honed their skills as the wolves of the sea. Now, it seemed, they must learn and change, so learn and change they would. There was no going back.

  The ground grew rockier as the path cut steeply toward the fjall. The children quieted. Many turned back although a few dogged his heels, too curious to stop. No adult followed him this far, although down the path he saw a dozen or more looking up after him. The trees became withered and stunted, and fell away altogether, leaving boulders and skirts of moss and a patchy carpet of lichen. He looked in vain for the youngest of the WiseMothers, climbing this path, but she had gone.

  He crossed over the rim and onto the undulating plain that was the fjall. Snow dusted the open reaches, where the wind battered at all things. In the sheltered lee of boulders and along the uneven rise and fall of the earth, old snow had hardened. It was so cold that his footfalls resounded as his weight cut through the remains of last winter’s snowfall.

  In the distance, where the land dipped into a hollow, the WiseMothers congregated. One more stood among them: she had reached her destination who was most recently OldMother, the one who spawned him and his brothers. He crossed the plain, slipping once where the snow concealed loose rock debris along a slight incline. The wind’s howl muted to a moan, and as he reached the edge of the circle the wind ceased altogether. The clouds cast a gray pallor over the day. Every object seemed muted and lessened. Even the WiseMothers looked, for an instant, like nothing more than big, unshapely stones fixed in an irregular oval around a sandy basin, whose smooth surface was untouched by snow or stick or even a wrinkled scrap of torn lichen. The hummock that marked the center had altered. Once, its curve had borne a pearlescent gleam. Now it sat with a kind of menace he could not describe. Corruption had infested it, turning it as black as charcoal, as though it had rotted from the inside out.

  He shuddered, afraid, but of nothing he could touch or smell or hear or see. It seemed stupid to make his way across the sands in order to stand on a place that looked as likely to hold his weight as the deck of a ship eaten away by fire. The smell of sulfur made his eyes water and his skin itch. The stench actually seemed to ripple off the ground. He began to think he could see the stink rising in waves. That smell made him reel, gulping air and expelling it as quickly as he coughed and gagged and, at last, calmed his breathing.

  Of the ice wyrms, he saw no sign, not even a tracery under the glitter of sand.

  He stood for a long time, trying to decide what to do, and after a while he heard the whisper of the wind among the stones and after a longer while he realized that the wind remained becalmed and that these were voices tugging at him, faint and far off, receding as a traveler recedes as he sails away from shore.

  “Your. Brother. You. Owe. Him. A. Debt. Is. It. Repaid.”

  A life for a life. He knew what they spoke of.

  “Go. To. Him. Now. Repay. This. Debt. Now.”

  Now.

  A sound cracked, as explosive as a heated rock splitting asunder. Not meaning to, he ducked. The air had changed, thickened, hardened until he could scarcely draw in breath. Wave upon wave of heated air rippled out of the hollow.

  Their voices were as faint as the hiss of a feather falling.

  “Our. Task. Is. Ended. You. Are. Now. Alone. Our. Children. Our. Children. Born. Of. Mute. Rock. Human. Flesh. Dragon’s. Blood. You. Must. Make. Your. Own. Way. Without. Us.”

  A temblor eased through the earth. Its groan sighed like longing. The surface of the hollow shifted. In branching lines no wider than his claws, the sands poured away as though, underneath, tunnels were caving in. The black hummock snapped fiercely, so loud that the sound echoed off the far mountainsides. He heard it as through a vast chamber, down along a far-reaching path, multiplied over and over as if he heard not one sound but a hundred cracks each one of which sent him plummeting into the ancient past:

  Screaming rage and pain, the dragons plunge. Before they reach the shelter of earth their hearts burst from the pressure of the great weaving. Their blood rains down on the humans who shelter against the stones. The hail of scalding blood burns flesh into stone, melding them into one being, born out of humankind, dragon’s blood, and mute stone.

  A crack shivered across the surface of the hummock, widened, and without warning the slick black curve shattered into pieces. The hollow sagged and collapsed inward as a dark shape uncoiled out of the spilling sands.

  Stronghand scrambled back from the brim, tripped over a rock, and fell to his rump as the hatchling reared up. It raised its golden head on a golden neck and with an effort unfurled moist wings, shaking them in the wind. It was as big as a warhorse, bigger, if more slender and equally graceful. Its eyes were like coals, black and fathomless. It swept its gaze over him without appearing to mark him as anything different than the stone and the sand and the tufts of lichen. It shook its wings, which spanned what was now a sinkhole. Flecks of an acidic spray spattered him, burning him, but he gulped down a cry of pain.

  A call chased along the horizon.

  The hatchling twisted its neck to stare toward the north.

  Somewhere, out there, another has been born.

  As soon as the thought took form, he understood how foolish it was. Not one, but a hundred and more, one for every tribe, for every circle of WiseMothers, who for this span of time had incubated the eggs of the FirstMothers, the ones who in ancient days bred with the living spirits of earth and gave birth to his kind.

  So the story was told among the Eika.

  It leaped. The pressure of its fledgling wingbeats battered him supine against the ground. It caught an updraft, and yet it beat those flashing wings as though to churn the still day into a gale. The clouds tore apart as it vanished into them. Lying stunned on the ground, he saw revealed the hard blue pan of the sky and felt—so briefly!—the melting warmth of an ear
ly summer sun.

  The wind whirlpooled around him as though trying to suck him up into the heavens. Pebbles scooped up by the gale pummeled him. Lichen and moss writhed in strips through the air. The wind poured into him, blowing right through his skin and into every part of him, enveloping him, drowning him.

  Alain stands at the wall staring toward the north, although he isn’t sure how he has come to be out here with the evening settling in and the wind pouring through him. He burns as if the wind is fire on his skin.

  He hears their calls, even though they rise so far away that he should not be able to hear them. They raise a clangor, deeper than bells, that resonates in his body until he weeps without knowing why. The hounds whine, licking his hands, but he cannot stop the tears.

  A puny, cold, fragile creature moves up beside him, only it is after all the servant assigned to make him comfortable in the palace. “My lord? I pray you, my lord, is there something the matter? How can I help you?”

  It hurts, but he doesn’t know why. He listens for the last echoes whispering out of the north.

  Their voices came to him, a thousand, a myriad, but all familiar to him and beloved in their way.

  “Good. That. You. Are. Strong. Of. Hand. Son. Fare. Well. Be. Wise.”

  The tempest quieted. A ragged wisp of lichen settled out of the air and onto his face. He brushed it aside, shook himself, and jumped to his feet. Above, the clouds were knitting themselves together again. The wind had failed utterly, and the day became silent and colored With the pearl-gray filter of a clouded sun. The fjall lay empty. Nothing moved, nothing spoke, nothing breathed, except him. He might have been the last creature alive in the entire land.

  Certainly he stood alone here.

  Altogether alone.

  He sensed it at once, greater than emptiness: an abyss where once earth had lain firm beneath the feet of his people. A strange dullness afflicted the ache of the wind and the whisper of sand where grains rolled down the steep sides of the new sinkhole into a shallow chamber half filled with the birth sands that had once covered it. A few tiny ice-white forms lay tumbled in the collapse: the ice wyrms that had long protected the treasure that the WiseMothers had incubated. They, too, lay as still as death.