by Kate Elliott
“We trusted them in the old days.”
“A few. The others always fought us, and will do so again. They will never trust us.”
“They won’t,” said Kansi. “They hate us. They fear us.”
“Do you speak such words even of your son?” Eldest Uncle asked.
“His heart lies with his father. I do not know him.”
“None of us know him. Better to learn what we can, scout the ground, before we act precipitously.”
“Better to act before we are dead!” retorted Zuangua. “So your daughter has advised me.”
“So.” Eldest Uncle sighed and shut his eyes a moment. “The first arrow has pierced deepest. You will believe her, despite what anyone else has to say.”
Liath had backed up four steps by now, one slow sweep at a time so as not to attract attention.
“Look!” cried Falcon Mask from up on the wall. “Is that an eagle?”
On the White Road, a hundred warriors raised their bows and each nocked an arrow.
“Let her go.” Eldest Uncle caught Liath’s gaze and lifted his chin in a gesture uncannily like that of his daughter. The message was unspoken: Now!
She bolted. Kansi leaped after her and got hold of the mantle’s hem, but as Liath strained and Kansi tugged, Eldest Uncle shut his eyes and muttered words beneath his breath. The binding cord fell away and the mantle slipped off her shoulders into the Impatient One’s clutching grip. Kansi stumbled as the tension was released. Liath ran.
“She is most dangerous of all—” cried Kansi.
Other voices called after her.
“That scrawny, filthy creature is a danger to us?”
“Not only a sorcerer, but … walked the spheres—”
“Let her go, Zuangua! I ask this of you, by the bond we shared in our mother’s womb.”
She stumbled over the White Road and tripped and banged her shin as she slipped over bare ground covered with ash and loose stone. The ground seemed to undulate of its own accord under her feet. Sharp edges sliced through her soles. Where her blood spattered on rock, it hissed, and the surface skin of rock gave way, cracking and steaming, as she leaped for a flat boulder whose surface remained solid. She smelled the sting of sorcery, a spell trying to slow and trap her: Ashioi magic, that manipulated the heart of things.
Liath sought her wings of flame, but the Earth bound her. She was trapped by the flesh she had inherited from her father.
“Hai! Hai!” shouted Zuangua far behind. “At will, archers! Do not let her escape!”
She had to turn back to face the attack. A score of arrows went up in flame, in a sheet that caught the next volley. But they would shoot again, and again. Arrows had felled her before. She had only one defense against arrow fire and she could not use it, not even to save her own life. Not again.
She would rather die than see another person melt from the inside out.
“I’ll trap her!” cried Kansi. “The rock will eat her!”
A third volley vaulted into the air toward her and erupted into sparks and a shower of dark ash as she called fire into the shafts. The rock beneath her splintered with a resounding snap. The ground cracked open, and she fell.
The gust of wings and a sultry heat swept over her, and the golden griffin swooped down and took her shoulders in its claws. With a jerk they lurched up, then down so she scraped her knees on rock, then up again, into the air. But not out of range.
More warriors had pressed forward on the road, spreading out at Zuangua’s order to get a better shot. The griffin could not gain height easily. Liath was too heavy. But the beasts, too, were tacticians.
Shouts and screams erupted down the line of waiting Ashioi as the silver male skimmed low over the line of march from behind. That disruption was all it took for them to get out of range and the silver to bank high and head inland.
Held in the griffin’s claws, knowing her weight was a burden, Liath dared not twist in the hope of seeing Eldest Uncle one last time. Her throat was dry and her heart ached. She feared that she would never see him again. What right had his brother and daughter to judge Sanglant out of their own anger at their ancient enemies and thus separate the old man from his only grandchild? Every right, they would say. But it made her angry that Eldest Uncle might never know his grandson or kiss the brow of his great grandchild, if Blessing still lived.
Nay, she knew it in her heart. She had seen true visions. Blessing had survived the cataclysm, just as Sanglant had.
“We will find her,” she swore.
The pain of the griffin’s grip tightening on her shoulders forced tears to her eyes, hot from pain, from anger, and from grief as they flew low over the wasteland and she saw it in all its hideous glory. A blasted wilderness of ash and stone and a skin of still smoking molten rock, cooling and hardening as the days passed. The channel deep into the earth was closed; the Old Ones had seen to that. But the devastation spread for leagues in all directions, and when at last she saw trees again, places where they hadn’t been incinerated, they were blown down all in the same direction. Many trunks still stood, scorched on one side. As they rested and flew and rested and flew, the worst of the destruction eased and she saw vegetation growing again but never sun and rarely rain. Now and again lightning flared to the north. Once, she saw a ragged man herding a trio of sheep along a dusty path; amazingly, he did not look up when the griffin called, as if he had at last decided it was better not to know.
It’s never better not to know.
The pain in her shoulders was bad, but enduring that pain brought her closer to her goal. What if she never knew what had happened to the others? If the griffins could not find Sanglant? If they never got Blessing back? Months, or at least weeks, had passed since she and Sorgatani and Lady Bertha and their retinue had stumbled into Anne’s ambush. She might never know whether her faithful companions had survived the storm. Hanna might be dead, and poor Ivar lost forever in the wilderness that is distance, time, and the events that drag us forward on an unwanted path. She had so few that she counted as some manner of kin or companion that she wept to think of losing any, and yet surely she had lost them years ago, the day she crossed through the burning stone and ascended the mage’s ladder. Sanglant was right: she had abandoned them.
I had no choice.
It was getting dark. She was as ready for a rest from the vista of desolation as the griffin was ready for a respite from the burden of bearing her. The landing in a broad clearing was a tumble, and she skinned one knee but didn’t break anything. A stream’s water, mercifully clear, slaked her thirst, but there was nothing to eat among the withered plants. God, she was so hungry! She was so cold, and her shoulders ached so badly. A claw had torn her skin above her right breast. Blood leaked through the tunic, and it hurt to move her arms to gather grass to press the wound dry.
For a while, as it got dark, she sat with eyes closed and tried to breathe away the pain. The female crouched protectively over her, letting her curl into the shelter of that soft throat and away from the cutting wing feathers, for she had not even a mantle to cover herself with. She dozed, although she had meant to gather sticks for a fire. The griffin huffed and wheezed all night, and Liath slept erratically, waking at intervals to glance at the heavens, but she never saw stars. It was very cold, but the griffin, like her, had fire woven into its being, and that kept her alive, just as the pigs had once kept her alive.
She smiled sleepily, remembering the pigs: Hib, Nib, Jib, Bib, Gib, Rib, Tib, and the sow, Trotter. Silly names. It seemed so long ago. She conjured Hugh in her mind, but he did not frighten her. All that fear and pain was part of her now, woven into her bones and heart in the same manner as her mother’s substance. It did not make her less than she was. The streaming waters cut a channel in the earth that humankind named a river, and each winter and flooding spring that channel might shift and alter, but the river remained itself.
She dreamed.
The aether had once been like a river, pouring from th
e heavens into Earth along that deep channel linking Earth to Ashioi country adrift in the heavens. But now that channel lies breached, buried, and broken, and the aether flows instead as a thousand rivulets, spreading everywhere, penetrating all things but as the barest trickle.
She walks along a stream of silver that flows through the grasslands, but there is no one waiting for her, only the remains of the Horse people’s battered camp and a few hastily dug graves.
Morning came with no sunrise, a lightening so diffuse that it wasn’t clear it came from the east at all. It was quiet, not a breath of wind. A branch snapped, the sound so loud she scrambled to her feet just as the silver male called a challenge. A half dozen men appeared at the other side of the clearing, carrying staves and spears. They had the disreputable and desperate appearance of bandits. They stared at her for a long time, measuring what she offered and what danger she posed. She held her bow tight, but she had no arrows. Her quiver had burned away like all the rest, even her good friend, Lucian’s sword.
At last, one stepped forward from the rest and placed his weapon on the ground. He spoke in a dialect of Dariyan, the local speech. She could follow the gist of it. “Are you angel or demon? Whence are you come?”
“I am as you see me,” she answered boldly. “No more, and no less.”
“Has God sent you? Can you help us?”
“What manner of help do you need?” They were desperate, certainly, but as she studied their callused hands and seamed, anxious faces, she realized they were farmers.
“We have lost our village,” said the spokesman. “Our houses torn down by the wind. A lord with soldiers came by then, three days past. He took what stores we held by us. Now we have nothing to eat. We could not fight. They had weapons.”
The spears were only sharpened sticks, and the staves were branches scavenged out of the forest. One had a shovel. Another carried a scythe.
“Be strong,” she called, knowing how foolish the words sounded, but she had nothing to give them.
“Whuff!” coughed the female, rising, and the men scattered into the trees.
“Let’s go.” Better the pain in her shoulders than the knife of helplessness held to her throat. Whose army had stolen their grain? She hoped it was not Sanglant’s.
It took the griffin two tries to get enough lift to get up over the trees, and if the clearing hadn’t been so broad they wouldn’t have accomplished it at all. They made less distance this day but still far more than she could have walked. As the afternoon waned, more a change in the composition of the light than anything, they came to earth on a wide hillside better suited for the griffin’s size. The silver male had fallen behind and at length appeared with a deer in his claws.
She had nothing to cut with and so waited until she could pick up the scraps left by their ripping and tearing. She gathered twigs and fallen branches and stones and dug a fire pit with her hands as well as she could. To call fire into dry kindling took only a moment’s concentration: seek fire deep within the parched sticks and—there!—flames licked up from the inner pile, neatly stacked in squares to give the fire air to feed on. The scraps of meat cooked quickly skewered on a stick, and she ate with juice dribbling down her chin.
The griffins settled away from the fire, too nervous to doze. She licked her fingers and studied the darkening sky. The cloud cover made it difficult to gauge sunset.
Sanglant. Blessing. Hanna. Sorgatani. Hathui. Ivar. Heribert. Li’at’dano. Even Hugh. She sought them in the fire with her Eagle’s Sight, but all she saw was a crackling blur of flames and shadow.
IV
TALES TO SCARE CHILDREN
1
“REFUGEES,” said Fulk as he reined in beside Sanglant where the regnant rode in the vanguard of the army.
They had begun the climb into the foothills through dreary weather with scarcely a drop of rain and not a single glimpse of the sun. They had lost a hundred horses in the last ten days and still had the crossing over the mountains ahead of them with winter coming on. It had, at least, been unusually warm, but in the past two days the bite of winter had strengthened.
Fulk indicated a trail that led off the road into a hollow where some twoscore desperate travelers had taken shelter under wagons and canvas lean-tos against evening’s approaching dark.
“I know this place,” said Sanglant. “This is where we found those men with their throats cut, after the galla attacked us.”
“Indeed, Your Majesty. I see no sign of the massacre now. It’s a good camping spot. Do we stop here for the night? These folk may ask for food and water and we haven’t any to spare.”
“The Aostan lords are shortsighted,” remarked Sanglant. “Every village we passed has already been looted. If there is no one to till the fields because the farmers have all died of starvation, if there is no seed grain, they will not be able to feed their war bands. So be it. We’ll camp here.”
Sanglant urged Fest forward and with Fulk, Hathui, and a dozen of his personal guard at his back he rode into the hollow. He feared no violence. They could not kill him, and in any case it was obvious that these ragged fugitives posed no danger to an armed man. They hadn’t even posted a sentry, only thrown themselves to the ground in exhaustion.
Hearing horses and the noise of men’s voices, the refugees staggered up, huddling in groups of two and three.
“Who are you?” he asked.
When they heard him speak, half fell to their knees and the rest wept.
“Is it possible?” asked one middle-aged man, creeping forward on his knees with arms outstretched in the manner of a supplicant. “You speak Wendish.”
“We are Wendish,” he began, but a woman in cleric’s robes hissed sharply and tugged on the first man’s sleeve.
“It is Prince Sanglant, Vindicadus. Look! There is the banner of Fesse!”
“Who are you?” he asked again, not dismounting.
The one called Vindicadus rose as others urged him forward. It was a strange group, only adults in their prime and youths. There was one suckling infant in arms, no young children, and no elderly. Under the dirt they were sturdily and even well clothed, and several by their robes he identified as clerics.
“We are Wendish folk, my lord. We are those from King Henry’s progress who were left behind in Darre because we belong to the households of clerics and presbyters.”
“Why are you here now?”
In their silence, their hesitation, their indrawn breaths, he heard an answer. Some looked away. Some sobbed. A pair of servants clung to the sides of a hand-cart on which a man lay curled, hands in fists, eyes shut. He was dressed in the torn and stained robes of a presbyter. There was blood in his hair, long dried to a stiff coppery coating.
“They attacked us, my lord,” said the one called Vindicadus at last. “Because we were Wendish. They said we had angered God by our presumption. They said we had caused the storm of God’s punishment. We are all that remains of those of Wendish birth and breeding who served in the palaces in Darre. Our companions were slaughtered that day, or died on the way. I pray you, my lord, do not abandon us.”
“Who attacked you?”
“Everyone, my lord.” He wept. “The Aostans. The people of Darre. The city took terrible damage in the winds and the tremors that followed. Fissures belch gas out of the earth. Toward the coast, fire and rock blasted up from the Abyss and destroyed everything it touched. At least three mountains spew fire all along the western coast. It is the end of the world, my lord. What else can it be?”
“True words,” murmured Hathui.
“Will you help us, my lord? We are unknown to you, but many of us served in King Henry’s schola.”
“You are dressed in frater’s garb. Are you such a one?”
“Nay, my lord. I am a lowly servingman from Austra, once bound to the service of Margrave Judith but later coming into the service of her magnanimous son, Presbyter Hugh.”
Sanglant felt a kick up inside his ribs. Hathui looked at him sharp
ly, as though he had given something away, and maybe he had. She knew Liath’s history as well as he did. “You served Lord Hugh?”
“I did, my lord. Of his schola and retinue, six remain. The others are dead—” He choked on the word and for the space of five breaths could not go on. Sanglant waited, hearing the army toiling up the road just beyond the low ridge that separated the hollow from the main path. “They are dead.” He was not an old man but he had seen better days; grief made him fragile. “The rest went north months ago with the presbyter.”
“Hugh went north? When was this?”
“Months ago, my lord. In the month of … aye, let me see. It seems years ago. I don’t recall now. It was late summer. Yes, that’s right.”
“Wise of him to avoid the disaster,” muttered Sanglant.
“He might be dead, Your Majesty,” said Hathui.
“So we can wish, but I must assume the worst.” He glanced at her while the refugees waited. She raised an eyebrow, a gesture so slight that it shouldn’t have hit him so hard. “Not just because of Liath! He is the one who seduced Adelheid to trust him. The one who ensorcelled my father. He is ambitious, and he has reached the end of his rope.”
“Queen Adelheid was not a fool. She was ambitious in her own right. It might be she who seduced Hugh to dream of power beyond what he had otherwise hoped for.”
He snorted. “Do you think so, Hathui?”
“Nay. Only that they found a ready ally, each in the other.”
“Did he bed her?”
“I believe she was faithful to your father. She admired and respected Henry.”
“I am glad to hear it. Although surely, if that is true, it makes her actions harder to understand.”
“They have two children, Your Majesty. What mother does not seek advancement for her beloved children? Presbyter Hugh achieved his high position because of his mother’s devoted affection.”
“True enough. Margrave Judith was no fool except in her love for him.”