The Hidden Stars

by Madeline Howard

  “The healers come in after the fighting,” said Haakon, taking the reins out of her hands. “Princess, begging your pardon, you’d only be in the way.”

  Yet Winloki remained uncertain, until she saw that the older, more experienced healers were going, too. Then she consented to be led.

  It was a hard pull up the hill for the heavier wagons. Axles groaned, and wheels found little purchase, but the stolid draft horses caught some of the tension and made a valiant effort, straining at the traces with their big heads down. At last they were all there at the top of the rise, in a great loose circle two wagons deep. The drivers unhitched the horses and led them into the center for their better protection. At the same time, some of the other females hastily began to unload bales and barrels and cords of firewood, piling them up in the gaps between the wagons, forming a solid barrier. Two companies of riders had detached themselves from the rest of the army and stationed themselves outside the circle, waiting with their swords drawn, in case the enemy should try to storm the hill. Some of the drivers carried bows and arrows with them, to defend themselves at need, and those few quickly armed and clambered up onto the barricade.

  Winloki urged her mare through a noisy ferment of women and horses, edging toward a better vantage point, where she could look down on the battle. By that time, the Eisenlonders had come into view: a great mass of riders, too many to count, and hundreds of foot soldiers, carrying axes and spears that glittered in the sun.

  “I didn’t think they would be mounted. At least not so many of them,” she said, catching her breath at the sight. She had expected a ragged barbarian rabble, not these well-armed men in armor of leather and steel, and certainly no cavalry worthy of the name.

  “They are great horse thieves, the Eisenlonders,” answered one of her guards, a man called Arvi, curbing his dancing black stallion. “They’ve been carrying off the pick of our herds for years.”

  Down below, trumpets sounded, swords and spears and axes clattering against shields as both lines spread out. A loud cry went up from the ranks of the Eisenlonders, a bestial howling, and Winloki saw that there were uncanny wolflike creatures among them, rising on shaggy grey haunches, almost like men, and clashing their yellow teeth.

  As if in response to a common signal, both armies swept forward at once. The thunder of that charge caused the very air to vibrate; the world seemed to tilt. Watching them, Winloki felt a flush of triumph, a thrill of pride, for it was a lovely thing to see: all the bright banners flaming out on the wind, green and gold, blue and red; the beautiful, spirited horses stretching out from a canter to a gallop, with their silky tails streaming behind them, and the grass bowing in the wind of their passage; the sun reflecting off iron-bladed spears and long, slender swords.

  But then the two lines came together with a roar and a clash of arms, a shock that reached all the way to Winloki up on her hilltop. Shields and lances met and shattered. Horses screamed and reared up, fighting the air. Horns blared. Men cried out in agony.

  At first, it was difficult to sort out her impressions—it was all just hideous noise and turmoil, the smell of blood on the wind. But as more and more men and horses went down, she began to feel their pain and terror battering at her in great waves, to hear their dying screams ringing inside her skull. She covered her ears, bowed down over the horse’s neck, and screwed her eyes tightly shut; but it was no better that way. Empath and healer as she was, the horror was inside her as much as without. Bile rose in her throat, almost choking her, and sweat broke out all over her skin.

  Winloki raised her head. Fighting for breath, she opened her eyes. A red mist obscured her vision. All around her was a seething mass of skittish sidestepping horses, of women weeping with fear and excitement. Down below, metal hammered against metal, against flesh and bone, and men were dying in their own blood. Arrows flew. Horses threw their riders to the ground and bolted. She saw some of the fallen stagger to their feet, catch hold of dangling reins, and heave themselves back up into strange saddles, but many more were crushed and mutilated under stamping hooves.

  Gradually she became aware of little whirlwinds of movement between the men and horses, of threads and tendrils of shadow that flowed and crept across the ground. They weaved in and out among the combatants—apparently unseen, as no one reacted to them—but every now and then a tentacle would break away from the central mass, rear up, and take on an almost-shape of man or beast that would strike out against the men of Skyrra with the rude beginnings of a hand, or a claw, or a taloned foot.

  Watching the shades was like looking at something out of one eye. They had no depth, no dimension. Being shadows, they had no shadows themselves; they seemed to have no sides, only surface; they were almost impossibly thin and tenuous.

  Yet if they had hardly any substance, they had power and will and the strength to do harm. They did do harm. Again and again Winloki saw them overwhelm men and horses, who fell and never knew what struck them.

  Sometimes it happened that one of the shadow things was trampled under the hooves of a warhorse, or a warrior caught one on the backstroke of his swing, or an arrow meant for the Eisenlonders struck one. Then that shade would dissipate and fade like smoke. But how were men to defend themselves effectively against things they could neither see nor sense?

  Meanwhile, Winloki’s guards watched the battle with eager faces and burning eyes. They seemed to understand it all far better than she did, for several times they raised their fists and shouted. Perhaps, in spite of the shadow-things, her countrymen were faring much better than she thought.

  “Are we winning?” she asked faintly.

  “Aye,” said Arvi grimly, “though with heavy casualties on both sides.”

  But then the tide of battle shifted; Kivik’s line broke and scattered. There was fighting at the very foot of the hill. Winloki saw a man beheaded, and another impaled. She saw werewolves attacking the horses, pulling them down. She saw shadows engulf the fallen riders, swallow them up, and drain them of life.

  Watching these things, she felt crushed with horror. She had imagined that she was strong, had honestly believed herself accustomed to the ugliest sights, having treated wounded men, set broken and shattered bones more times than she could count. But she had never seen blood pumping from an open wound, never seen swords hew living flesh, or arms and legs and heads hacked off before her very eyes. Once, she had even helped to amputate a leg below the knee when the patient was sedated with syrup of poppy, dazed with mandragora—that had been soul-shaking enough, but nothing to compare with this, this carnage, this obscenity of men being butchered by other men.

  And this is war, she thought. Behind all the tales of glory and heroism, this was the reality: this din, this chaos, this filthy, bestial, wanton waste of life. Why did they do it? What could possibly be worth it?

  As though sensing her thoughts, Haakon spoke somewhere behind her, over the hoarse shouts of the fighting men, the shrill neighing of the horses. “We didn’t start this, my Lady. We’re only defending our own lands, our own people. We never wanted it to come to this.”

  She looked back at him over her shoulder, bewildered and only half-comprehending. “They started it? It was none of our choosing? But even so, why would they—?”

  He shook his head, reached down and patted his shivering piebald gelding. “Rightly speaking, I don’t suppose they started it either. Someone has been inciting them. They’ve always had nasty habits, the Eisenlonders, but they were never like they are now: raping and burning, consorting with skinchangers.” On the field below, Kivik stood high in the stirrups, brandishing his sword and calling out to his men, rallying them. “Nor were there ever so many of them, or so well armed.”

  It was too much for her to take in; it made her head ache just to think of it, let alone try to understand it. “But why? What could anyone have to gain, sending them out to slaughter us, to be slaughtered themselves? Who could possibly hate us so much?”

  He shook his head again. Her q
uestions were simply unanswerable, yet the proof of his words was there on the battlefield before them, living and dying in a welter of blood and a cacophony of human misery.

  17

  Faolein is dead. That was Sindérian’s first thought on waking—as it had become, almost invariably, her last thought at night. There had been a time, not so long ago, when she woke to painful memories of Gilaefri’s fall, of Cailltin’s death, but now it was Faolein’s loss that greeted her each new day. As she propped herself up with one elbow on the stony ground and rose from her uncomfortable resting place, this third day of traveling through Hythe, she wondered if that was how she would reckon her life in after years, with a growing litany of her dead.

  Shivering in the half-light of dawn, she rolled up her blankets and bound them securely, then joined the others for a hasty cold breakfast: goat cheese and dry, gritty seedcake, a mouthful of ale. As they saddled up the horses and broke camp, thunderclouds, violet and gold, lay heaped on the eastern horizon; a chill wind came whipping down from the north, smelling unseasonably of snow.

  “Queer weather this time of year,” said Aell, narrowing his eyes against the stinging gale.

  “Curious weather whatever the year or season,” Sindérian muttered under her breath as she swung up into the saddle.

  The others mounted, too. One of the first things they had done on shaking off the dust of turncoat Mere was to buy more horses in one of the border towns, so that no one need walk. That should have made for swifter travel, had it not been for a long series of mishaps and near-disasters that had plagued them along the way. Too many such mishaps, Sindérian considered, by far too many all to be happenstance.

  They set off along the same road they had been following for days: that straight road which arrows through the countryside from Dacre on the border to the rocky foothills of the Cadmin Aernan. Before they had gone more than a mile or two, the rain came down, swift and cold. Thunder pealed in the distance, and branched lightning lit the sky: white, blue-white, blue-violet.

  Trees creaked in the icy blast; leaves and branches tore loose and whirled in the air like bats. Jago’s grey, Gilrain’s black mare, both reared up, raking the air.

  “This,” said the Ni-Ferys, shouting to be heard over the tumult, “is no ordinary storm.”

  “No,” Sindérian answered, breathless after a tussle with the chestnut gelding. The hood of her cloak had slipped back, and her hair was streaming with water. “This is Thaga’s doing.”

  To her wizard’s sight, the very landscape seemed perilous, full of dark omens. In the straggling woods to either side of the road, uncanny lights, violet and indigo, danced from branch to branch and tree to tree. Hungry mud sucked at the horses’ hooves, and the wind raged at them with shrieking maledictions. “Just as the bridge that began to collapse under us yesterday was Thaga’s work. And the fire in that cottage where we stopped two nights ago—Dreyde’s men wouldn’t dare to follow us across Prince Bael’s lands, but the mage’s spells respect no borders.”

  There came another violent crash of thunder directly overhead. The air crackled with electricity. “Lady, is there nothing that you can do?” shouted Prince Ruan.

  Sindérian turned an angry white face his way. He had scarcely deigned to speak with her these last several days, and typically, she thought, he broke his silence only to give her an order. “I am doing more than you think. We would all be dead by now if I had done nothing. It’s no easy thing,” she added, with a curling lip, “to deflect lightning from those of our party who ride about dressed in iron.”

  They rode for several miles more in the drenching rain, with water down their necks, soaking through their heavy garments. The horses plodded on with their ears laid back, with draggled manes and tails, looking utterly miserable. Clouds boiled overhead, and lightning struck on all sides. First one, then another of the horses would refuse to go forward, eyes rolling white, fighting at the bit until the foam flew.

  Exhausting enough, Sindérian reflected wearily, just trying to sit upright in this battering wind, without contesting for every yard of the road as well.

  An oak ripped up out of the ground and crashed into the road ahead of them, setting all the horses bucking and dancing. Almost simultaneously, a vivid bolt of lightning struck a beech less than twenty yards away. It burst into flame, showering sparks like a torch in the rain.

  “Is there no place where we can take shelter?” growled the Prince, curbing his dun stallion with a heavy hand.

  “There’s Kemys just over the hill and beyond the wood.” Gilrain blinked back the water that was running down his high white forehead and dripping into his eyes. “A den of thieves by reputation, though in my experience they’re more likely to cheat—” The rest of his sentence was lost in another rolling chord of thunder.

  Sindérian gritted her teeth to keep them from chattering. There was sleet mixed in with the rain, and it grew steadily colder. Her hands on the reins felt numb and lifeless, her feet, in the well-worn boots, like wooden blocks. “Then take us there. If we’ve a roof over our heads, walls around us, I can set wards.”

  Gilrain swung the black mare’s head around, skirted the fallen tree, then urged the mare off the road and up a steep slope, following a trail so faint that Sindérian could barely make it out in the sheeting downpour. Pulling up her hood, she leaned forward in the saddle to avoid as much of the wind as possible, and muttered a béanath under her breath.

  The village of Kemys was a labyrinth of slatternly old timber houses and squalid little beehive huts, all packed together inside a stone wall rotten with time and neglect.

  Scant welcome and even scanter hospitality our travelers had there. Stabling for the horses and shelter for themselves, all crowded together in a hut with a leaky roof, this they obtained from the village headman in return for a handful of copper coins; and the other villagers sold them firewood and cider at extravagant prices.

  Inside the hut, Sindérian made a little blue-grey bubble of werelight to work by, and everyone was busy for a time, unsaddling the horses and rubbing them down.

  Then, while the men hung up their sodden cloaks to dry, shook water out of their hair, and emptied it out of their boots, Sindérian set her wards. As she felt them take hold, some of the tension in her neck and shoulders relaxed. There, at least, was safety, no matter how temporary.

  Meanwhile, Gilrain had succeeded in coaxing a fire from the few sticks of uncured wood the villagers had sold them. Even a wizard might be hard-pressed to start a blaze under such conditions: the wood green, and damp at that. Was this simple woodcraft, Sindérian wondered, or some fairy spell?

  The Prince was right: I know less than I should about the Faey, she thought with a lump in her throat.

  The sad truth was, her ignorance in many areas was likely to get them all killed, now that she was the wizard the rest depended on. Her whole life up until then began to feel like a fraud and a waste. Had she spent the last six years studying on Leal, instead of mending broken bodies in Rheithûn only to send them out to be slaughtered more efficiently the next time, she might almost be fit for the task before her.

  It should be Faolein here now, she thought miserably. Why was it my father who died and I who lived? Either the Fates are against us, or they’ve gone mad and senile.

  But that was a thought too impious even for her, and she felt an immediate twinge of remorse. Perhaps the Fates were simply punishing her for her crisis of faith. Yet Faolein would say that Servants of the Light did not mete out punishments, that they were wholly beneficent and kind, though their ways were often mysterious. Of late, they had been far too mysterious for Sindérian.

  Making supper under such damp, crowded conditions soon became an adventure. The horses’ hooves and tails seemed to be here, there, and everywhere; among the two-footed, knees, ribs, shins, and elbows appeared to exert a magical attraction, with many bumps and bruises resulting. The small smoky fire went out twice and had to be rekindled.

  And when Jago
jostled Gilrain’s arm, tipping a cauldron of broth into the flames, Prince Ruan gave a snort of disgust, left his seat on the ground, and stalked outside.

  “Much good a warding spell does us, when we insist on inviting ill luck inside with us!” he said over his shoulder, as he passed through the doorway.

  Bristling up, Gilrain scrambled to his feet, but Sindérian threw out a hand to restrain him. “Please do not,” she said. “You’ve no need to defend yourself. No one, not even the Prince, really blames you for our bad fortune.”

  The Ni-Ferys settled down again with a rueful look. “I shouldn’t allow him to provoke me. Nor should I find so many ways to provoke him. It is a curious thing: the Prince and I were both raised among Humans, and as a general rule we consider ourselves Men rather than Faey; I have even heard it said that Ruan is entirely estranged from his mother’s people; but throw us together in the same company…”

  He smiled and shrugged. “No doubt to you our two tribes are practically indistinguishable; but believe me, we are no more alike than chalk and cheese. We regard them as insufferably proud and high-handed, and they see us as sly and insinuating. Perhaps there is fault on both sides.”

  Sindérian shook her head wearily. “Who am I to judge the Ni-Ferys and Ni-Féa, when Men have been at war my entire life? Some of the grievances between Thäerie and Phaôrax go back for hundreds of years, when the truth is they are kindred peoples, who ought to live together like brothers and sisters. But the years pass, and still we go on slaughtering each other.”

  Gilrain sat gazing into the fire for a long time before he spoke. “It may not be a war of Men only—or of Men and half-Men like myself and the Prince—for much longer.” In the pale firelight, his eyes were luminous like a cat’s, and his fair hair tinted with all the colors of the flames. When he spread his hands, there was a thin, translucent webbing between his third and fourth fingers, which Sindérian had noticed before. Another hybrid anomaly that was, like the color of Prince Ruan’s eyes.