The Hidden Stars

by Madeline Howard

  “Andeissach séo feilh oewislin,” cried Thaga, drawing and loosing the crystal arrow. “Om yffran dioha Faolein.”

  Perhaps his hand was unsteady, perhaps the earth gave another slight imperceptible shake; however it was, the missile did not fly true. The arrow streaked through the air and buried itself in the wizard’s side, under his ribs.

  A shudder passed over Faolein, a shivering across the skin. His face contorted in agony. All the air around him seemed to shatter, then flesh and blood began to fray, to dissipate like smoke, but just as the last faint traces threatened to disappear entirely, they began to take on substance again, a boiling cloud of matter writhing and spinning in the air, as if struggling to assume its accustomed form.

  All at once, the five colored lights on the towers went out, and the lines of the pentacle faded. Where Faolein had been, chaos shaped itself into a great bird of prey, an immense sea eagle. With a cry that rent the night, it spread its wings and rose high into the air. Light blazed up again, but this time it was golden and pulsing with life.

  Thaga gasped and fell back against the parapet wall, but Dreyde stood rooted to the spot. The eagle was beautiful and terrible, all silver and gold, its talons swinging like scythes overhead. The thunder of its wings seemed to rock the towers anew. Light poured from it like water, spilling from its feathered wingtips and setting the night on fire. The sorcerer shaded his eyes; Saer covered his with both hands.

  Then, suddenly, the eagle’s light was extinguished; a cold wind blew across the battlements, across the tower roof. With another shrill cry, the great raptor launched itself into the sky. For many minutes more, they could hear the mighty strokes of its wings, like a gigantic heartbeat, as it flew off into the night.

  For a time, neither man spoke, neither moved. Then Thaga rose unsteadily to his feet, dusted himself off. Dreyde uncovered his eyes, passed a hand across his forehead, which was drenched in sweat.

  “It is done,” said the magician, in a shaken voice.

  But the Lord of Saer ground his teeth and gnawed on his lower lip. “He isn’t dead. He ought to be dead.”

  “He is as good as dead,” said Thaga, in a dull, flat voice. “He is trapped in that shape more effectively than in the pentacle; he will never escape it. And the change will drive him mad. Either he will fly until his heart bursts from exhaustion, or he will freeze to death in the upper air.”

  Two flights below, Faolein’s daughter and the Prince crept out from their place of concealment and approached the sleeping guards.

  Ruan was all for cutting their throats while they slept, but Sindérian threw out a hand to stop him. “No. I can’t permit you to do that.”

  He bridled again, gave her another black look under his silvery eyebrows. “Lady, we are surrounded by enemies.”

  “But these are helpless.”

  “We may encounter them again when they are not helpless. And we have already been betrayed. These people,” he said, with a sudden intensity, “these people may have injured you even more than you know.”

  Sindérian drew in a breath. She could guess what he meant: that Faolein might be dead, or hurt in some way that she could not heal. “For all that,” she replied in a voice shaking with outrage, “I did not render these men helpless so that you could slaughter them like sheep!”

  The earth rumbled again; the fortress rocked like a ship in a storm. There was an underground concussion like a clap of thunder, which stunned the ear. But the foundations held.

  Sindérian could see the hunger for revenge in Prince Ruan’s face, the Ni-Féa compulsion that burned so fiercely within him. For a moment, she was afraid that he would kill the men in spite of her. But he only swore under his breath and rammed his dagger back into its sheath. Then, bending down, he began to search the fallen guardsmen, one by one, until he found the key to the door.

  He fitted the key in the lock, and the door swung open with a grating sound; something had settled during the earthquake. Sindérian could see the foot of a stone staircase curving upward into shadows. Prince Ruan led the way, and she followed after him.

  “You thought me a fool back there,” she said as she climbed.

  Ascending three steps ahead of her, he shrugged his shoulders but did not look back. “I have heard it said that wizards are overscrupulous. Now I see that it’s true.”

  “Wizards must needs be overscrupulous—and princes, too. It is far too easy for us to become tyrants, arrogant and merciless!”

  He glanced back at her then, a quick look under his long eyelashes, not without irony. “I might take that to heart, Lady, if there were fewer than a dozen kinsmen between me and the throne.”

  At the top of the stairs, Sindérian felt a sudden urgency. Possessed by a reckless feverish haste, she pushed past the Prince, threw open the door, and slipped on through. She came out on the walkway behind the battlements, with a clear view in all directions.

  The moon shone down, huge and horrible, almost as bright as day. Sindérian set off walking, following the parapet wall, going as fast as her legs would carry her, until she came to the flat roof of the round tower, where Ruan finally overtook her.

  “Take care,” he warned, catching her by the arm. “I sense a trap.”

  She shook him off, took another two steps. Something brittle crunched underfoot. She could still sense the lines of force from tower to tower. They left a smell like lightning on the night air, and the stones continued to sizzle with energy. Something had drawn on the power here, on the wards and the ley lines. When she closed her eyes, it was as if she could see a faint residue of the pentagram lingering on the air, but rapidly fading. “A trap has already been sprung!”

  She opened her eyes. Catching sight of something at her feet that glittered in the moonlight, she bent down and picked it up. It was a splintered shaft of crystal about as long as her hand.

  As she realized what she held, her fingers suddenly went slack, and the crystal shaft dropped at her feet. Over by the parapet she caught sight of the silver bow, gleaming with a sullen light, where the magician had cast it aside.

  With a wrenching cry of despair, Sindérian threw herself down on her knees. “There are not many ways to destroy a wizard like Faolein, but they have found one—they have found one!” She beat both fists against her knees.

  Never there when I am needed, she thought. Tears ran down her face and her breath came out in great tearing sobs. Why will they never let me stand with them and die? She bent almost double, and pain shot through her entire body.

  He had no right to leave me, she raged into the night. He had no right!

  “Is he dead, then?” said Prince Ruan, sounding bewildered.

  Raising her head, Sindérian was surprised to see him kneeling there beside her, one hand extended, as if uncertain whether to offer sympathy or not. She gasped for breath, gazed up at him with red-rimmed eyes. “If he’s not dead now, he will be soon.” She shoved a fist into her mouth to stifle the sobs.

  Yet she was a wizard and a healer, trained since childhood in a hard, hard school to put grief aside and do whatever had to be done. She might wish to stay there and wail like a lost child, but she knew that she would not. Too much depended on her—too much depended on whether she could think clearly, and make the right decisions. She had all her life before her to grieve for Faolein’s death.

  Wiping her eyes on her sleeve, she put back her hair with both hands. “Do you see—this was not the work of a moment, or even an hour,” she said hoarsely. “The preparations necessary for casting the Great Pentacle take an entire day, and to hallow and prepare the crystal arrow takes even longer. Beyond all doubt, we were expected here!”

  At that moment, there was a clatter and a rush of footsteps along the walls. The Prince sprang lightly to his feet.

  “We have been spotted,” he said, catching her up just behind the elbow and forcing her to stand. She stumbled, tripping on the hem of her gown, and would have fallen except for his painful grip on her arm.

/>   Recovering her balance, she allowed him to pull her behind him, back the way they had just come. Men shouted, a gong somewhere began to sound, and an arrow flew past Sindérian’s head, so close that she could feel the feathered fletching brush against her cheek. She saw Ruan duck his head just in time to avoid another.

  At last they reached the doorway and passed on through. Ruan pulled the door shut behind them and slammed the bar into place.

  12

  The last red light of sunset burned on the water, reflected off brass-plated figureheads, as a vast fleet of black ships, powered by great banks of oars, rounded the point at Apharos, glided past the last of the nine grim fortresses guarding the harbor and the bay, and came out on the open sea.

  Standing on the foredeck of his flagship, which alone bore Ouriána’s likeness cast in solid gold, Prince Cuillioc gazed out across a seemingly boundless expanse of fiery ocean, and for one moment it seemed that all the world had turned to blood and flame.

  Then the water began to swirl and shimmer with a sorcerous light. An almost impossibly beautiful vision appeared on the surface: Ouriána, her face pale as pearl, her eyes as deep and dark as the night sky, her ruddy hair stretching out across the sea from horizon to horizon in burning streamers of crimson and gold. The night fairly swooned with her presence, like heady incense.

  He saw her red lips move, heard her voice chiming like crystal against crystal inside his head: Do not fail me. This time, do not disappoint me.

  Cuillioc’s mouth went suddenly dry; he clutched at the rail, his pulses quickening. For a brief time more she was there, filling the night; then her image faded, and the sea went dark and empty. The Prince released a long slow breath, and his shoulders sagged.

  This time, do not disappoint me. It was, he knew too well, meant for a warning as much as a command. If Mirizandi did not fall; if he did not return to Apharos in the autumn, his ships richly laden with silks and perfumes, gold, gemstones, jade, and rare spices; if instead of the fabled wealth of the southern continent he had nothing to lay at her feet but another tale of misfortune and miscalculation…

  Ouriána had excused much in the past simply because he was her son, yet she was not, as a rule, either patient or forgiving. The thought that he might spend the rest of his days banished from her presence, crushed by the terrible knowledge of her implacable displeasure—Cuillioc felt a familiar pain twist inside him, and it was almost too much to bear.

  The sun went down beneath the water, and a young moon painted the sea in shades of silver. It was after midnight before the wind freshened, the sails were set, and the Prince abandoned his vantage point on the deck for his cabin and his narrow bed, hoping to catch an hour or two of sleep before sunrise.

  But his mind was overwrought, his nerves unstrung with anticipation. And every time he closed his eyes, he could feel the horror of the nightmare pressing down on him; all his hopes and fears chased each other through his brain. He tossed and turned, threw off his silken comforters, and beat at his goose-down pillows, until finally the very effort to rest exhausted him, and he rose from his bunk, cold and haggard in the chill grey hour before the dawn. Dressing hastily, he returned to his place beside the rail just in time to see the first flash of gold on the eastern horizon.

  For more than a fortnight the armada continued south and east, between the scattered islands of the central archipelago. Depending on the wind, they rowed or sailed: past lonely islands where primitive villages straggled along ivory beaches or huddled under shiny black cliffs; past islets clothed in trees, and atolls occupied only by multitudes of seabirds.

  A hundred miles from the southern continent, where a chain of rocky islets so small, desolate, and uninhabitable they did not appear on any map jutted out of the sea, the galleys each dropped anchor, small boats were lowered from the sides, and slaves rowed the various dignitaries from their respective vessels to the Prince’s flagship, there to take part in a final Council of War before the invasion.

  The priest Iobhar was the first to arrive, pale and unnatural in his scarlet robes, but soon the deck was aswarm with the richly clad nobles, each apparently intent on outshining his fellows.

  Their meeting was brief but decisive. Elaborate plans had been laid before leaving Phaôrax, and no one, least of all Cuillioc, saw fit to alter those plans in any detail. Having arrived at an agreement with remarkable dispatch, everyone then took part in a meal laid out by the Prince’s servants for the Prince’s guests under a crimson silk canopy.

  Whatever his faults, none could deny that Prince Cuillioc was an excellent host, and his flagship had embarked fully provisioned. Moreover, there were those in attendance that day who, for all their gaudy display of velvets and embroidered silks, were accustomed to regard themselves as pursepinched if not absolutely indigent—they were therefore more than happy to dine at the Prince’s expense, on mussels simmered in white wine and artichokes steeped in butter; on salads of cress and sharp green lettuce, poached fish of all sorts, eel pies, and soft cheeses; to nibble on candied fruits and sip a cool sweet wine flavored with anise.

  While these noble gentlemen inclined to linger long over the sugared figs and dates, there were others who wandered off together in smaller groups, seeking such privacy as the limited space provided. The furiádh Iobhar and a certain Lord Cado made up one such cabal, and were, in fact, the first to excuse themselves.

  They retreated to the tiny afterdeck, where they were deep in conversation when the priest startled his companion by interrupting himself in midsentence and diving behind a pile of rope and tackle. There he engaged in a brief brisk scuffle with some unknown person and emerged a moment later dragging behind him a scrawny small boy, rather grubbily attired as a page in soiled silks and rubbed velvets.

  “Now, whose spy are you, little rat?” hissed Iobhar, holding both thin wrists in an iron grip that the child could not break for all his squirming and his frantic struggles. When the boy refused to speak, the priest heaved him up off the deck and dangled him over the rail.

  Suspended some fifteen feet in the air with nothing between him and the dazzling surface of the water, the urchin very wisely went utterly limp and still.

  “Is it mute, do you suppose?” asked Lord Cado, viewing the proceedings with a dispassionate eye.

  Ignoring his question, Iobhar spoke to the boy in a threatening growl. “I don’t suppose you know how to swim, little rat. I have only to open my hand and you’ll sink like a rock, never to be seen again.”

  “Your pardon,” said a cool voice behind him. “But that disreputable object belongs to me. If he has done anything to annoy you, I can only apologize, but unless one of you has a burning desire to spend the rest of the voyage acting as my body servant, I urge you to return him to me. A comely child he is not, but he is the only page I’ve brought with me.”

  Iobhar dropped the boy unceremoniously on the deck. He landed with a soft thud, scrambled to his feet, and scurried below. The priest and Lord Cado acknowledged Prince Cuillioc’s presence with stiff bows.

  “Great Lord,” said Iobhar, slipping his hands into the hanging sleeves of his scarlet robe. He bared his yellow teeth in what might have been intended for a conciliating smile, their color a startling contrast with his dead white skin and hair.

  It was unlikely he had ever been a good-looking man, with his sloping forehead and weak chin, but of all the Furiádhin there was a particularly loathsome quality about him—one that never failed to raise the fine hairs at the back of Cuillioc’s neck. It was said that no man knew the precise nature of Iobhar’s deformity, but he walked with a slight limp, and sometimes there was a little scaly rustling sound under the long train of his robes. Next to Goezenou, the Prince hated him most of all.

  “I had no idea I was meddling with your property. The boy was insolent; I will say no more than that. No doubt you will wish to deal with the matter yourself.”

  “No doubt I will,” Cuillioc replied agreeably, baring his own even white teeth. “As well
as any other displays of—insolence—I might chance to encounter.”

  Hostility flared, briefly, between the Prince and the furiádh. But then, with an effort, Iobhar remembered himself. “I am duly reprimanded,” he murmured, making a deeper and more reverent obeisance than before. “But surely the son of the Goddess knows that I am his to command.”

  Cuillioc shrugged. “That goes without saying. As for the boy—I will make certain that he doesn’t annoy you again.”

  The visitors returned to their ships soon after, and it was time to pull up anchor. With a stiff breeze bellying their sails, the Prince’s armada left the chain of islands behind and looked fair to reach the Bay of Mir before many more days had passed.

  They had strayed into waters where no man of Phaôrax had ventured for more than a hundred years. By night, clouds of stars whirled overhead in strange constellations. So alien were these stars that Cuillioc could never quite make out their patterns; as soon as he thought he detected a figure, it somehow seemed to shift. By day, a hot southern sun beat mercilessly down, turning the waves the color of molten gold.

  Once, a school of whales swam by in the middle distance. With water pouring off their blue-grey flanks, they sent up columns of wild white spray. Another time, the Prince’s galley passed by a solitary beached leviathan, dying on a rocky shoal. Staring into the tiny sunken eye of the half-dead whale, Cuillioc felt a shiver of fear pass through his stomach at the ill omen.

  It soon proved accurate. The fleet was spread out over a half mile of ocean, already within sight of land, when a great storm roared in from the east, bringing with it a pelting rain and waves of such enormous size they seemed likely to swamp some of the smaller vessels.

  Cuillioc arrived on deck, caught hold of a mast to keep from being blown away, and peered out across the water. Visibility was so poor that most of the fleet was already hidden behind inpenetrable curtains of rain, yet it was impossible to mistake Iobhar standing at the rail of the nearest ship, his red robes flapping, his silky white hair streaming on the wind, as he shouted out spells to quell the blast.