file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswijk/Mijn%20d...lliott%20-%20Crown%20Of%20Stars%2006%20-%20In%20the%20Ruins.html IN THE RUINS

A Crown of Stars 06

Kate Elliott

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswijk/Mijn%20d...lliott%20-%20Crown%20Of%20Stars%2006%20-%20In%20the%20Ruins.html

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswijk/Mijn%20d...lliott%20-%20Crown%20Of%20Stars%2006%20-%20In%20the%20Ruins.html

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswijk/Mijn%20d...lliott%20-%20Crown%20Of%20Stars%2006%20-%20In%20the%20Ruins.html PROLOGUE

FEATHER Cloak was fertile, the only pregnant woman left among her people. Indeed, she was the only woman living who had quickened more than once. Therefore, she presided over the council of tribes because she had power the others did not possess, power that had been draining from the land during their exile. No one could explain this slow leaching, but they knew it presaged the death of both land and people. If anyone could save them, it must be the one in whom power still resided long after it had departed from the rest.

The Eagle Seat had yielded to her. In truth, it was now the only place she rested easily. Her older child was almost an adult in aspect and learning, but in the days when he had grown within her, he had not waxed so large. It seemed she would harvest a giant's spawn, although she happened to know that the sire of her budding child was Rain, who was no smaller or larger than any other man. He was a gentle soul of medium build, good-natured, a hard worker with clever hands, a skill for flint-knapping, and a well-omened name, and for all these reasons a much better choice for a father than arrogant warriors like Cat Mask and Lizard Mask who liked to shake their spears and strut before the women.

As they were doing now.

"We must gather in one place, farther inland where we'll be protected, and ready ourselves! Then we can act at once, and in numbers. We can strike before our enemy expects us!"

"Better to station ourselves in smaller groups, you fool! Spread out around the countryside. If one group is taken by surprise, the others will be able to harry the enemy and regroup when it is safe."

"If the enemy strikes first, if the enemy passes the White Road and sets foot in our country, we are lost!" Cat Mask pounded the haft of the speaking staff repeatedly into the dirt to emphasize his point. As if his voice wasn't loud enough!

Lizard Mask had half a head of height over Cat Mask. He used it now, puffing up his chest and jutting out his chin, as he curled a hand around the haft above Cat Mask's hand. "If the enemy invades, how can we know where he will cross? If we're all in one place, we'll lose mobility.

We'll lumber along as slowly as your mind works!"

"Feh! Your wish to be safe has made you frightened. We must be bold!"

"We must be cautious but clever, the thorn in their side."

"The arrow in their heart! One blow to cripple them, not a frenzy of meaningless stings that will only anger them but do no lasting damage."

The councillors were seated around the cavernous chamber, watching the two young warriors stamping and blowing in the center. The older women seemed amused and indulgent, while the younger women had settled into expressions of disgust or intent interest depending on their liking for belligerent male posturing. The older men stood with crossed arms and resigned expressions as they waited for the storm to die down; they had blustered in like manner in their own day and knew better than to intervene.

"A swarm of bees may bring down a wolf who angers them and disturbs their hive."

"A wolf may outrun them and stalk back at night when they sleep to rip their refuge to shreds for other animals to mangle and devour!"

Because men had the floor, it wasn't the place of women to speak, but Feather Cloak was not surprised when The Impatient One— Uapeani-kazonkansi-a-lari, daughter of Eldest Uncle—

laughed.

"What fine phrases these are!" she cried. "Shall we acclaim the one who pierces us with the finest poetry?"

The two men flushed red. Faced with her mockery, they shifted their stances to join against her.

In years past, The Impatient One had slept with both of them, and cast both aside, and whatever jealousy they nurtured each toward the other measured less than their resentment of her indifference.

"You argue over war," she went on, "but force of arms cannot win this battle."

"We must fight!" declared Cat Mask.

"Whether we choose to mass our forces or disperse them, we must be ready to fight," agreed Lizard Mask.

She snorted. "They are many and we are few. Beyond that, humankind are only one of the dangers we face. We may yet suffer grievous harm when the day comes—close now!"

As if to emphasize her point in the same way Cat Mask had rapped his spear against the ground, the land beneath shuddered. The vibration resembled a temblor but was instead the judder of the land as it called out like to like, seeking its home through the waves of aether that surrounded it.

It shook right through Feather Cloak's body. Her womb clenched and relaxed in harmony with that rhythm. She wiped her brow with the back of a hand, knowing her time was close, just as the day they had so long awaited was close.

What was torn asunder would come back to its resting place, and the Ashioi, cursed and exiled, would come home.

Many spoke, all at once, now that The Impatient One had spoken out of turn. Peace. War.

Appeasement. Negotiation. Each view had its adherents, but those who clamored for war shouted loudest.

"I will speak," Feather Cloak said. The rest, even The Impatient One, quieted. "Listen well. If we do not speak with one voice, we will surely perish. We no longer have leisure to argue. A decision must be made, so I will make it. Let it be done in this way: Let the people be gathered inland, where they may hope for the most safety. But let them assemble in thirteen groups, each apart from the others, so that if one falls into danger the others may yet escape. Cat Mask, you will split our warriors into two groups. The larger group will remain with you at a place of your choosing, where you can move and fight swiftly. Lizard Mask, you will order the rest into small groups that can patrol the borderlands to warn the rest of us if any hostile force passes our borders. The council will disperse with the others. I will remain here until the storm passes.

White Feather will act as my midwife. For the rest, we must prepare to defend ourselves, but only after the storm can we know how we are situated and how many of us have survived. We will assemble again at that time to choose our course of action. I have spoken. Let none dispute my words."

She had only once before invoked her right to make a unilateral decision. No wise leader did so often. She sighed, doubly burdened, as the council acquiesced. Most left swiftly to carry out her orders. A few tarried, arguing in soft voices that nevertheless echoed and reechoed in the cavern.

Only Eldest Uncle remained silent where he sat, cross-legged, on the second terrace.

"You have offered no opinion, Uncle," she said.

"He has no opinion," replied his daughter, turning away from her conversation with her companion White Feather who, like her, was harsh but strong. "He has fallen in love with his grandson's naked mate, whom all men desire because she burns with the fire of the upper spheres."

Eldest Uncle sighed.

"Is this true?" asked Feather Cloak. "I admit I was surprised when you brought her before the council. She is dangerous, and in the way of such dangerous things, attractive and bright."

"She is young, and wanted teaching. If you women can think of nothing but sex, that is not my fault."

"My father and my son—both enslaved to her! What do you say, Feather Cloak?"

"I banished her, seeing what she was. Beyond the danger she poses to every earthly creature because of what she is, I saw no harm in her."

"You are a fool!"

Feather Cloak smiled, clasping her hands over her huge abdomen. "That may be. And maybe you are jealous."

Eldest Uncle chuckled.

The Impatient One glared.

"But I sit in the Eagle Seat. If you dispute my right to take this place, you will have to prove yourself more worthy than I am."

Like every adult among her people, Feather Cloak could use a bow and had learned to defend herself with knife and staff, but The Impatient One had relished the arts of war in which all adolescents trained. She was physically strong, with powerful limbs and a martial grace that could be used to protect, or to threaten, as she did now, tense and poised, a warrior ready to cast a spear at her enemy.

"I have walked the spheres! Do not mock my power."

"I do not mock you, Cousin. But I do not fear you either. Power is not wisdom. It is only power.

Cat Mask and his warriors cannot protect us if he makes rash choices. We are weakened by our exile. We do not know what we may yet suffer. I counsel caution and readiness. You yourself spoke against using force of arms."

"Only because they are many, and we are few. We must strike swiftly with other means. The greatest and cruelest of their warriors can be overcome by sorcery. I have defeated even the wild beasts among them who would have torn me limb from limb."

"Beware," said Eldest Uncle quietly. "We have seen how much greater is suffering when sorcery is used for harm."

"You think we should surrender!"

"Do I? We must seek peace."

"Peace is surrender! Humankind will never offer us peace."

"How can you know this, Daughter?"

"I know them better than you do! I have lived among them. I bore a child to one of them." She looked defiantly at Feather Cloak. "They are not like us. They will never make peace with us. My son was raised as an outcast among them, and even so they seduced him to their ways."

"Better to have raised him in our ways," said Eldest Uncle, "instead of abandoning him there."

"So you would say! But it was decided to try the course of appeasement by birthing a child who would mix their blood and ours. That plan has failed!"

"Has it?"

"Do you believe otherwise? How can you know? You have not walked on Earth since the old days, and the old days are forgotten by humankind. They recall us only in stories, as an ancient enemy long banished and defeated. Or is it the memory of the Bright One that blinds you, so that you do not wish to war against them?"

"It is ill mannered for a daughter to speak so disrespectfully to her own sire," commented Feather Cloak. "Your words may carry truth, but your behavior gives us cause to doubt you."

"You are fools!" The Impatient One snapped her fingers, and one of the young warriors, loitering by the passageway that led out of the cavern, came to attention. "Still, it is possible—-just possible—if they are not dead but only caught between the worlds. ..." She grinned, leaped up the steps, and vanished into the darkness, the young man at her heels.

"Who is dead?" asked White Feather.

"We are caught between the worlds," said the elderly woman known as Green Skirt. "What mischief is she up to?"

"She'll try to get pregnant again," said White Feather. "She'll want the Eagle Seat. She'll wrest it from you, if she can."

Feather Cloak had weathered many trials in her life. They all had, who lived in exile. She smiled, feeling the familiar tug of weariness at her heart, leavened only by a memory of laughter she had once shared with The Impatient One when they were girls together. "In the old days," she said as the last of her council gathered around her, "we did not acclaim a leader solely on her fertility. It is a shame it has come to this." She patted her belly. Muscles tightened under her hand. The skin rippled as the child within rolled like one of the fabled merfolk underwater.

"How has the world changed?" she asked the others, marking each one with her gaze: Eldest Uncle, Green Skirt, the old warrior Skull Earrings, and White Feather, who would act as midwife.

These were the ones she trusted most because they were honest, even and particularly when they did not agree. They were her spring, winter, autumn, and summer. "We do not know what we will find when we return to Earth, for none among us has walked in the other land as it is now. None except The Impatient One."

"Uapeani-kazonkansi-a-lari walked the spheres," said White Feather. "She risked her life so that she could learn what was necessary to cross over the aether and back onto Earth. We should not dismiss her words so lightly, just because she does not agree with her father."

Eldest Uncle chuckled.

Green Skirt had an older woman's distaste for nonsense. She lifted her chin sharply to show she disagreed. "That she refuses to listen to her elders is precisely what makes her opinion suspect.

She is rash."

Skull Earrings crossed his arms. He had once been a bold, impetuous, impatient warrior like Cat Mask, but age, hunger, and despair had worn him down. He was like ancient gold, burnished to a soft gleam. "First, let us survive what is coming. We do not know what to expect, except what the Bright One told us. That our old enemies the Horse people and their human allies still live, and seek to exile us forever more. If we survive, then we can send scouts to survey the lay of the land.

If we do not survive, if we are cast adrift a second time, then we will certainly die. What can we do?"

"We can do nothing," said Eldest Uncle, "except take shelter and hope for the storm's winds to spare us."

"There must be something we can do!" cried White Feather. "Are we goats, to be herded at the shepherds's whim and slaughtered when it is time for meat?"

"Now—right now—we are helpless," said Eldest Uncle. "There is no shame in accepting this as truth, since it is so. I agree with my nephew." He gestured toward Skull Earrings.

The other man laughed. 'After so many years, it is good we agree at last, Uncle!"

The old man smiled, but Feather Cloak saw that the gesture came only from the head, not his heart. "I will wait beside the clearing where the burning stone appears," he said.

"That is on the edge of the land,' protested Feather Cloak. "The tides may wash over you. You will be at risk."

"As you are here, Feather Cloak."

"I cannot leave the Eagle Seat. I like you close at hand. It makes me feel more at peace."

He shrugged, knowing she was right, knowing that as leader she had no peace. The weight of the Eagle Seat was as heavy a burden as pregnancy. "Nevertheless, I must wait there, in case—"

White Feather snorted. "In case the Bright One reappears? Perhaps your daughter speaks the truth, Uncle. You have a young man's mind in an old man's body."

"That never changes!" he retorted, but he was not offended by her statement. The others laughed.

"I am eldest. I will do as I wish in this. I will see what I will see. If the tides overwhelm me, so be it."

A contraction gripped Feather Cloak's womb. As if in echo, the earth trembled and shook on and on until she found herself breathing hard, hands clutching the eagle's wings.

White Feather knelt beside her. "You are close." She beckoned to Green Skirt, who nodded and hurried to the door to give a stream of directions to one of the warriors waiting there, a young woman wearing a fox mask tipped back onto her hair. The girl ran out to fetch water while White Feather emptied coals out of a hollow stick and coaxed a fire into flame. Skull Earrings fetched the birthing stool.

All this industry, and the intense grip of further contractions, distracted Feather Cloak. She had the merest impression of Eldest Uncle's brief farewell and the pair of young warriors who followed him. When she next looked around the chamber, all three were gone.

As the contractions came hard and with increasing frequency, she began no longer to be able to distinguish the forces shaking her body and those shaking the land. So many burdens; so much exhaustion; so great a trial to be faced. She had to let it go. It was beyond her control. All she could do was endure it. All she could do, between stabs of red-hot pain, was pray to Sharatanga, She-Who-Will-Not-Have-A-Husband.

"Guide us through this birth and this death. Give us your blessing." Was that her voice or White Feather's? Was it Green Skirt speaking, as the green beads and little white skull masks clicked together each time the old woman moved? Did she herself mumble words, or only grunt and groan and curse as the pains of opening came and went?

She was vaguely sensible beyond her skin of the greater skin of the cosmos, that which wrapped Earth, opening as a flower opens to receive that which now returned to it: the exiled land. Vast forces moved within the deeps. The sea waters raged on the surface and winds howled, while in the caverns far beneath, rivers of fire shifted to create a new maze of pathways.

Earth is welcoming us home.

"Hush," said White Feather. "Hold your breath so you can push."

"Listen to what Feather Cloak says!" objected Green Skirt. "She can see where we cannot."

The pain of opening transformed her awareness as the child within pressed forward, ready to be born. It was not pain but inevitability that dragged her. Now the exiled land was drawn back to the place it had come from, where it had always belonged. Now the child would be born, because children must be born once they have begun that journey.

Four attended her: White Feather, Skull Earrings, Green Skirt, and the fox-masked young warrior, a serious girl who glared at everyone as she ran to and fro on whatever errands they gave her.

She knew this not because she paid attention to them, but because she knew all things. The vital soul that resides in the cosmos and imbues it and all things with life, even those that may seem dead, became visible to her. She saw the vibration of all things down to their smallest particle.

She saw the reach of the heavens as they expanded in an infinite curve whose unknowable horizon confounded her. The exiled land was almost drained of this soul. Ruptured from its nurturing womb, it had waned as the tide of the sacred presence had ebbed. Now the vibrant net that entangled Earth swallowed them, and as the child in her belly was thrust out from its shelter, they were dragged in to the ancient nest in whose architecture still resided a memory of their place within it.

The slippery mass of a child dropped into White Feather's waiting hands.

She groaned, or perhaps it was the earth grinding at a register almost too low to be perceived.

'Another one!" cried Green Skirt in shock.

"Twice blessed! Twice cursed!" sang out White Feather, shoving the first infant into the waiting hands of Skull Earrings so she could catch the impatient second, now crowning.

Feather Cloak pushed as the world was born again, as the White Road flared into existence, a ribbon so bright that it shone, as Earth exploded beyond the borders of the Ashioi land.

Firestorms raged and gales seared the land. Yet all this transpired at such a remote distance from the heart of the maelstrom that her awareness of the cosmos, too, faded, and she was after all weary. So weary.

"Two girls!" said Skull Earrings, cradling the first tenderly in his arms. "The gods have favored us!"

She slid down the long road of exhaustion and fell into sleep.

North of the land lies devastation so complete that the land steams. Has their return created such a wasteland that smoke and ruin are all she sees?

No. Beyond the scar lies land touched by fire, by wind, by raging seas, by great shifts in the earth itself, by tumult, but it is not dead.

She sees now what caused the land just beyond the White Road to be engulfed by molten rock. The Bright One walks in the wasteland. She created it with the power that resides within her, the curse she received from her mother's kin. She is naked and carries nothing except a bow layered with the magical essence of griffin bone. So bright it shines. . . .

She moaned and came awake, squinting against a light she did not recognize.

"Ah\" She shielded her eyes. "What is it?"

"He-Who-Burns!" cried Green Skirt. "That is the sun. See how his light shines!" She pointed at the roof of the cavern, where a yellow glare illuminated the spray of plant roots dangling from crumbling ridges of soil.

Skull Earrings stepped forward with White Feather beside him. "Here are your daughters," he said, displaying the dark babies.

White Feather nodded. "So small. So perfect!"

Weeping, she kissed them. "They will never know exile. We have come home."

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswijk/Mijn%20d...lliott%20-%20Crown%20Of%20Stars%2006%20-%20In%20the%20Ruins.html PART ONE

THE TIDES OF

DESTRUCTION

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswijk/Mijn%20d...lliott%20-%20Crown%20Of%20Stars%2006%20-%20In%20the%20Ruins.html I

A VISION OF

THE END

1

WHEN the earth began to shake, his jailers abandoned him within the ruins of the old monastery, beside the roofless church and its stone tower. From his prison, in his cage in the back of the cart, he watched in a confused stupor as both horses and oxen bolted, spooked by the unnatural weather.

Along the shoreline of Osna Sound, the water receded far out past the line of the ebb tide, exposing seabed and a line of sharp rocks below the curve of the Dragonback Ridge. Above, the sky was a sheet of lightning that veiled the stars, but that light in the heavens was an uncanny thing because no thunder answered it. A stillness, more like an indrawn breath, settled over the country, and it hung there, waiting.

Soon.

The silence was broken with a roar as the ground jolted. The cart pitched over. The post to which Alain was chained snapped as it struck the ground. With a groan, the stone tower collapsed into a cloud of dust and grit that choked him as he sprawled, like the fish flopping in the exposed seabed, gasping for breath. Scattered by a rising wind, the storm of dirt quickly dissipated, but the ground had not finished shifting.

The Dragonback Ridge splintered with a deafening crack. Sheets of rock cascaded into the sound.

Beneath the booming clatter of rock, the earth moved as the dragon woke. Its tail, lashing as it was freed from the soil, snapped trees. As its flank heaved up where once lay the high ridge, dirt avalanched seaward, obliterating the old shoreline. The creature lifted a claw and set it down, and the ground trembled beneath that tread. It raised its huge head to examine the heavens, then slewed around. Chained and caught, Alain could only stare as the head lowered down and down and paused at length before the cage to stare at him.

With one bite it could devour cart and man both. He struggled to his knees to face it, although it took all his strength to rise.

Its scales shone like gold. Its eyes had the luster of pearls. It was not untarnished from its waking: there was a cut in its belly, and from this a tear of bright, hot blood hissed, splashing over him. Its touch burned him to the heart, not with heat but with truth.

My heart is the Rose. Any heart is the Rose of Healing that knows compassion and lets it bloom.

It blinked, huffed a cloud of steam, reared its head up, and opened its vast wings. Their span shadowed the monastery grounds. It bunched its haunches, waited a breath, ten breaths, a hundred breaths, as if listening, as if it, too, were waiting.

A wind howled up out of the southwest, shattering trees as it came, and when it hit, the dragon launched itself. Alain fell, never sure if the gale or the weight of its draft had battered him down.

Its shadow passed away. Beyond, the sea raged against the rocks. Above, the stars had gone out.

All he could see of the sky was a swirling haze mixed of dust and ash and wind and bits of foliage, and the trailing sparks of a vast spell.

He heard still a roar of sound, building in volume, and before he understood what it was, a wave out of the sea swept over him. His chains held him under the water as he tumbled in its surf, fighting for the surface. And as he drowned, he saw in a vision the land un-folding before him.

He saw as the spell tangled and collapsed in on itself. He saw the land of the Ashioi materialize out of the aether, back to the place it had come from long ago.

He saw what happened in the wake of that spell:

All down the western shoreline of the boot of Aosta, a ridge of volcanoes shakes into life. Lava streams out of the earth. Fields crack open, as the pit yawns beneath. An unstoppable tide of mud and ash slurry buries villages and the folk who live in them. There is no warning, no time to flee.

The waters of the Middle Sea that are displaced by the returning land speed outward in vast concentric rings. These waves deluge distant coastlines, drowning the shore.

All along the northern sea rivers run backward and ports are left dry as the land groans and shifts, rising no more than a finger's span as the weight settling in the south tilts the entire continent.

Temblors shake the land. The gale that blasted across the earth dissipates in wilderness among the dumb beasts. Deep in the earth, goblins race through ancient labyrinths, seeking their lost halls. Under the sea, the merfolk dive deep to escape the maelstrom. Out in the distant grasslands, the Horse people shelter in hollows in the land. The magic of the Holy One shields them from the worst even as it drains the life out of her.

All this he sees as he struggles in the waters. He sees, and he understands: Those who were most harmed in ancient days ride out the storm with the least damage. It is humankind who suffer most. Perhaps Li'at'dano hoped or planned that in the end the weaving would harm those who were the greatest threat to her people: both the Cursed Ones, and her own human allies.

Perhaps the WiseMothers suspected that humankind would take the brunt of the backlash. Perhaps they had no choice except to do what they did, knowing that the belt was already twisted and the path already laid clear before their feet They speak to him through rock and through water, although the salt sea almost drowns their voice.

It. Is. Done. You. Have. Saved. Us.

He gasps for breath but swallows water. The link between them is broken so sharply that it is as if it had never existed.

Caught in the riptide, he came clear of the water suddenly and flailed and gasped and choked and coughed as the tide hauled him toward the sea. The chain jerked him back to the ground. The cart, trapped in the fallen stones, had saved him, which had all this time imprisoned him. He lay there, too dazed to move.

At length daylight filtered into the haze of ash and dust that clouded the heavens. After a long time he realized that he was alive and that, impossibly, the world had survived. The great weaving that Adica had made so long ago with her compatriots was at long last finished. The spell had come all the way around and returned to where it began. The Lost Ones had returned from their exile.

He had seen both beginning and end, only of course the end was now a beginning.

After all, he was not alone in the ruins, as he had thought. The hounds came and with them came his foster father, Henri. "Where are we going?" Alain asked him. "Home, Son. We're going home."

2

BECAUSE the ridge had been obliterated by the dragon's wak-ing, their way proved rough and strenuous as they walked toward home through a jumble of boulders, fallen trees, and tide-wracked debris. In the end Alain's legs failed him and his strength gave out. He could scarcely breathe. Once they reached a real path, Henri had to carry him, stopping at intervals to rest.

"You're nothing but bones and skin," Henri said one of those times. He sat, sweating, on a smooth beech tree, uprooted in last night's storm. Alain wheezed, curled up on the ground because he hadn't the strength to sit upright. The hounds nosed him fretfully. "You weigh no more than a child. I'll never forgive Lord Geoffrey for doing this to you. It's a sin to treat another human being so cruelly."

He was too weak to answer. The world seemed dim, but perhaps that was only because of clouds covering the sky.

Henri sighed. "You do stink, though, Son. Whew!" The affection in his voice made Alain's lips tremble, but he could not manage a smile. For so long he had endured. Now, safe, he thought he might at last die because he had been worn too thin. He wanted to go on, but he had nothing left.

"Here, now, you beasts, move aside."

Henri hoisted him effortlessly, shifted him onto his own back so Alain's head rested on Henri's shoulder, and kept walking. It seemed likely that they should have passed through Osna village, but apparently Henri kept to those woodland paths that took them around the village and onto the broad southern road. Many trees were fallen. Branches littered the path. It was silent, not even bird call to serenade them, and not a soul out on the roads the morning after. Where the road forked, Henri veered to the right along a narrower side path that wound through oak and silvery birch, maple and beech. Long ago he had ridden down this path with Count Lavastine. The memory seemed as a dream to him now, no more real than his life with Adica. All gone, torn away by death.

Yet there was life here still. Some manner of person had husbanded these woods, cutting down trees for firewood and boatbuilding in many spots but fostering quick-growing ash and sparing half the slow-growing oaks in others. Coppice-cut willow, hazel, and hawthorn flourished in various states of regrowth, some freshly cut and others ready for felling again. Sorrow barked.

Pigs squealed away into the undergrowth.

"Who's there?" came a cry from ahead.

"I've found him!" cried Henri.

Alain hadn't the strength to raise his head, so, sidewise, he watched the estate emerge as the path opened onto neatly-mown hayfields and a tidy garden, recently harvested. Two corrals ringed sheep and a pair of cows. Geese honked, and chickens scattered. There was even a horse and a pony, riches for a free-holding family without noble forebears. Folk had come out of the workshop and the house to stand and stare, but it was the ones he knew best who ran up the path to meet them. Julien was scarred and lean. Stancy was pregnant; she ran forward with a child grasping her hand. Was that third adult little Agnes, grown so comely and tall?

"That can't be Alain," said Julien. "That creature's nothing more than skin pulled over bones."

"It's him," said Stancy. "Poor boy." She wiped away tears.

"Stink! Stink!" wailed the child, tugging to break free and run. "He scares me."

"Hush!" Aunt Bel strode up to them, looked at him hard, and frowned. "Stancy, kill a chicken and get a broth cooking. He'll not be strong enough to eat solid food. Agnes, I'll want the big basin tub for bathing him. Outside, though. Julien, haul water and tell Bruno to heat it on the workshop fire. We'll need plenty. He can't be chilled."

Like the chickens, they scattered but to more purpose.

"Dear God," said Aunt Bel. "That's a strong smell. We'll have to Wash him twice over before we bring him inside. I'll have the girls make a good bed for him by the hearth. He'll be abed all winter, if he survives at all. He looks more like a ghost than like our sweet lad."

"He can hear you."

"Can you hear me, boy?" she demanded. Because it was Aunt Bel asking, he fluttered his eyelids and got out a croak, not much more than a sigh. "It's a wonder he's still alive, abused like that."

She made a clucking noise, quite disgusted. "It's a good thing you went after him, Henri."

"Don't let him die, Bel. I failed him once already."

"It's true you let your pride get the better of you. You were jealous."

The movement of Henri's shoulders, beneath Alain's chest, betrayed a reaction.

"Nay, there's nothing more to be said," retorted Bel. "Let it be, little brother. What's in the past is gone with the tide. Let him be. I'll nurse him myself. If he lives, then we can see."

A drop of moisture fell on Alain's dangling hand. At first, he thought it might be rain from those brooding clouds, but as they trudged down into the riot of the living, he realized that these were

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswijk/Mijn%20d...lliott%20-%20Crown%20Of%20Stars%2006%20-%20In%20the%20Ruins.html Henri's tears.

II

THE LUCK OF

THE KING

1

SANGLANT knew dawn came only because he could smell the sun's rising beyond the haze that concealed all horizons. Ash rained down on his army as they straggled through the scorched forest, dragging their wounded with them. Here and there fires burned in the treetops. Smoke rose, blending with the ash drifting over them. Limbs snapped and crashed to earth to create echoes within echoes as the devastated forest collapsed on itself.

They assembled in their tattered legions around the ancient fortress where Lady Wendilgard had met her death. Up on the height of half fallen walls, Captain Fulk posted sentries to watch over the wounded. The prince stood on the shattered ramp, once a causeway leading up into the fortress and now a series of broken stair steps littered with stones, weapons, and four dead men not yet dragged away. The last surviving troops who had heard the call to sheathe weapons and retreat emerged battered, bruised, and limping from the trees to take up places in the clearing.

They were crammed shoulder to shoulder, weary and frightened, and all of them awaiting his command.

Perhaps two thousand troops remained to him, out of opposing armies which had each easily boasted twice that number. Of his personal guard, once numbering more than two hundred, some two score remained. Every man among them bore at least one wound, some minor and a few, no doubt, mortal. To his left waited Capi'ra and her centaurs, who had weathered the storm better than most, and a remnant of Quman soldiers. The winged riders had been hit hard in the field by the heavier numbers of Henry's army, but they had held their ground. It was largely due to their courage and will that he had saved as many of his troops as he had during that initial disastrous retreat when Henry's forces had overpowered him in the early part of the battle. Of the rest of his noble brethren who had marched with him from Wendar and the marchlands, he had only two surviving commanders: Lord Wichman and Captain Istvan, the tlngrian. Lord Druthmar was lost on the field, although no man living had seen him fall, and he had long since lost track of the rest of his captains and lords, who might still be huddling in the forest or lying among the dead.

Henry's army formed up to his right: Duchess Liutgard and her cavalry out of Fesse, Duke Burchard and his Avarians together with his daughter Wendilgard's remaining men, and others from Saony and the duchies of Varre. The terrible storm and the blast of burning wind had hit Henry's army as hard as his own.

Henry's army no longer.

Henry's corpse lay fixed over Fest's saddle. Sanglant held the reins.

"Your Majesty." Hathui bowed before him. "What now?"

"Where is Zuangua?" he asked, surveying the scene. "I see no Ashioi among our number."

"They did not follow us back this way, my lord prince ..." Lewenhardt corrected himself. "Your Majesty." Like the others, the young archer was filthy, smeared with ash and dirt and blood. Ash pattered down, the sound of its steady rain audible even through the many noises of the army creaking into place, men weeping, men talking, horses in distress, a few dogs barking, and wagon wheels squeaking on the fine layer of ash and grit. "They went off into the trees toward the sea, along the old track they were following before. I don't know where they've gone."

"I do," Sanglant said. "They've abandoned us and gone home, for I'm thinking that their homeland must surely have returned from its long exile." It hurt to breathe. It hurt to think of Liath struggling among the living or lost to death. "Hathui, if we build a fire, can you seek Liath through the flames?"

"I can try, Your Majesty."

He nodded. She took two soldiers and trudged through the pall into the forest, where charcoal would be easy to gather. The trio passed a group of exhausted men stumbling out of the trees. The ash so covered every least thing that it was impossible to tell what lord or lady these soldiers had served before the night's cataclysm.

All his, now. Every one of them. With his dying breath, Henry had willed Wendar and Varre to his favorite child, his obedient son, the bastard, the one the king had long wished to succeed him despite all opposition.

"We cannot see into the future," Helmut Villam had once observed. That was a mercy granted to humankind, who would otherwise drown in a sea of unwanted knowledge filled with reversals, tragedies, unhoped-for rescues, and the endless contradictions of life.

He remembered the passion in his own voice that day by the river, below the palace of Werlida, when he had spoken so decidedly to his father the king. "I don't want to be king. Or heir. Or emperor."

And now, of course, he was. King, and heir to an empire he had never desired.

"What of your Aostan allies?" he asked his cousin Liutgard, nodding also at the old duke, Burchard.

The duchess shrugged, wiping ash off her lips with the back of one filthy hand. Her hair was streaked with ash, tangled and dirty; impossible to tell how fair it was under all the soot. "They fled west along the coast instead of following us," she said. "Their allegiance was to Adelheid, not to Henry. There are yet stragglers, and a few wandering confused among our troops. For the rest, those who live, I believe they will all fly home."

With a sigh, Sanglant rubbed his stinging eyes. "Has there been any report of the griffins?" he asked those standing nearest to him. Clustered behind Hathui were a dozen Eagles rescued from Henry's train.

In truth he needed no answer. If the gale had not killed the griffins outright, then it had surely blasted them far away. It seemed impossible for any creature in the air to have survived the storm.

Ai, God, he was so weary that he had begun to hear things, a strange rushing roar that nagged at his hearing until even the folk surrounding him heard as well. To the south, shouts of alarm rang out above the snap and crash of branches as though a second wind raked through the forest.

Scouts left behind to stand sentry over the road tumbled into the clearing.

"The ocean! The ocean has risen!"

He gestured to Lewenhardt and Captain Fulk. Together they ran along the road into the trees, and before they had gone far they saw an astonishing sight. Water surged inland through the trees, losing depth quickly until it lapped and sighed around their boots. As they stared, it drained away, most into the ground but in a few stubborn rivulets back toward the sea, dragging twigs and leaves in its undertow. Sanglant knelt and brushed his fingers through a remnant pool as the roar of the receding waters faded. He touched the moisture to his lips, spat out the salty brine.

"This is seawater."

"That is not possible," said Captain Fulk. "No tide can rise so high. It's a league at least—more!—

from here to the ocean!"

"Bring Fest. I'll need an escort of a hundred men. If there's any hope of capturing Queen Adelheid, we must seek her now. Bring Duke Burchard, since he knows the town and its defenses. Tell Duchess Liutgard to make an account of what provisions are left us, tend to the wounded, and ready the men for a long march. Bury the dead before they begin to rot."

"Even the emperor, Your Majesty?"

"No. We must prepare Henry for the journey north. See that his heart is removed from his body, and his flesh boiled until there is nothing left but bones."

The road through the forest had survived the conflagration, but it was muddy and streaked with debris. The wind gusted erratically and after one man was knocked out cold by a falling branch, they watched for limbs with each flurry. The trees were blackened and burned on the side facing the southeast. Desiccated leaves filtered down with the ever present ash fall. Light rose as the morning progressed, but the day remained hazy and dim and the heavens had a glowering sheen.

Every sound was muffled by the constant hiss of ash and the layer of soot and mud blanketing the damp ground. It was cool, yet clammy, and the long walk exhausted them and their horses alike.

"Is it the end of the world, my lord pr— Your Majesty?" Lewenhardt whispered.

"If it is the end, then why are we not dead? Nay, Lewenhardt, it is as it seems. A terrible cataclysm has overtaken us. We may yet survive if we keep our wits about us, and if we hold together."

Duke Burchard drew the Circle of Unity at his chest, but said nothing. The old man seemed too stunned to speak. He was not alone in this. For every soldier who exclaimed out loud at the scorched forest and the marks of the recent flood there were four or five who gaped at the devastation as though they had, indeed, lost their wits.

"I dislike this, Your Majesty," said Fulk. "What if the sea returns?"

"We must see. Besides Queen Adelheid, we must seek out those who survived and hid until daybreak. Liutgard said many of the Aostans marched west along the coast. What of them?"

Pools of salty water filled the ruts in the road, and a gloomy vista awaited them when at last they emerged from the trees and gazed through the swirling ash that obscured the bay of Estriana, half a league away. The plain looked strangely scumbled, strewn with debris. He could not mark the field where the battle had been fought or the line of their retreat because branches and corpses and planks from wagons and all manner of flotsam lay tumbled everywhere. He saw no life at all in the distant town.

"You are sure?" he asked Duke Burchard. "You left Queen Adelheid behind in Estriana?"

The old man's voice was more like a croak. "So I did, Your Majesty. She held a reserve behind the walls in case of disaster. It was already agreed that she would remain in the tower rather than sortie out. She is a strategist, Your Majesty, not a soldier."

"So she is," agreed Sanglant, "if she yet lives. I walked right into the ambush she and Henry laid between them."

Burchard shook his head impatiently. "We saw well enough what trap Henry fell into. The daimone with which Presbyter Hugh ensorcelled him spoke his words and moved his limbs according to the presbyter's command. Henry did not speak. That plan was the queen's alone."

"She is a formidable opponent, then. What do we do with her now?"

Staring across the plain toward the Middle Sea, Burchard wept softly. "Perhaps bury her?"

The pall of dust hid the waters, which seemed, impossibly, at low tide, drawn far back across tidal flats.

'Ai, God!" cried Lewenhardt, who possessed the sharpest gaze among them, able to pierce the haze. "Look!"

The water was rising swiftly. It swelled at the mouth of the bay into a monstrous wave that crested into a wall of foaming white. The wave surged forward across the bay and smashed down onto the town and the shoreline, engulfing it and inundating the land. The water rose up and up, still climbing as it flooded the plain.

"Run!"

The others turned and fled. Sanglant could not bring himself to move. He could not quite believe, despite the evidence of his eyes, that the sea could rise so fast and run so far. The whiter crest that battered the town dissipated quickly, subsumed in the vast tidal swell that rolled inland across the plain. Fest snorted and shied, and he reined him in, turning in a complete circle before the horse settled, uneasy and in protest but holding fast.

"My lord prince!" cried Captain Fulk, returning in haste to rein up beside him. "We'll be drowned. You must come!"

The tide lapped to its highest extent a stone's toss from Fest, not even reaching the outlying trees of the forest, and sucked hissing and burbling back into the sea. All that lay strewn over the plain from the first surge rushed outward with it. Even the stone walls of Estriana toppled into the wave, all but the highest tower, which was protected by a double ring of walls that had taken the brunt of the impact.

His men, creeping back, wept to witness the sea's fury. As the wave receded, the ruins of the town emerged from the water. The stone walls were shattered at a dozen places. Seen through those gaps, the buildings looked like piles of sticks.

'Ai, God!" cried Duke Burchard. "Queen Adelheid must surely be dead! No one could have survived such a deluge!" He glanced at Sanglant and wiped his brow nervously. "Surely she had a reason for the terrible course she took, Your Majesty. Surely she did not wish to harm the king.

She loved him. She is a good woman."

"Let us hope we do not have to make decisions as cruel as the one she felt herself forced to make," replied Sanglant.

"I think it most prudent if we retreat," said Fulk. "We have seen that these unnatural tides are not yet faded. Look how the water sucks back out again. What if a larger surge comes?"

"Look," said Lewenhardt. "Something is moving out there!"

Sanglant dismounted.

"Your Majesty!" protested Captain Fulk

"I'll walk. The footing looks too tricky for horses."

"Why go at all? If you're swept away—"

"I think we have time. The second wave did not approach until we had walked all the way from the old fort. If you have ever sat upon the sea's shore and watched the waves, Captain, you will have seen they have a rhythm of their own. These great waves need time to approach."

Fulk had stood firm through many terrible events when others quailed and faltered, and although the prospect of drowning clearly horrified him, he did not fail Sanglant now. "Very well. I'll come with you, Your Majesty."

Sanglant grinned and strode forward. The ground was not hopelessly muddy because the tide had come up and receded too swiftly to soak in, but damp ash made the ground slick and debris from the forest caught about their ankles and snagged in their leggings. It was not silent but uncannily still, with no sign of life but their own soft footsteps. The hissing fall of ash serenaded them.

Maybe it would never stop raining down. Perhaps the heavens themselves had burned and now shed the soot of their destruction over the earth. The throttling gurgle of the sea faded in the distance as the tide receded back and back beyond the tidal flats, although it was difficult to see anything clearly through the haze. Now and again they caught the scent of rot.

They walked out onto the plain, glancing back at intervals to see the forest, farther away each time, and the troop clustered at the fringe of the trees, obscured by falling ash.

'Are you sure Lewenhardt saw anything, Your Majesty?" Fulk asked at last. "It could have been the wind. It's hard to see anything with all this cloud and ash."

"Hush." Sanglant held up a hand, and Fulk fell silent, not moving, chin lifted as he, too, strove to hear. But few men had the unnaturally keen hearing that Sanglant possessed, and Fulk could not hear the faint sounds of splashing. "It sounds like a fish flopping half out of water. There!"

A ditch had captured something living that now thrashed in a remnant of seawater. They came cautiously to the edge and stared down into a pit filled with a murky blend of mud, water, and scraps of vegetation. A corpse was fixed between the axles of a shattered wagon, face mercifully hidden by one wheel, legs gray where they stuck out of the scummy surface.

'Ai, God!" cried Fulk, stepping back in horror.

The tide had trapped a monster from the deeps. Sensing them, it heaved its body fully back into the water with a splash, but it had nowhere to hide. They could distinguish its huge tail sluicing back and forth. At last it reared up out of the mud defiantly, whipping its head side to side and spraying mud and flecks of grass and leaves everywhere. Its hair hissed and snapped at them, each strand like an eyeless eel seeking a meal out of the air. It had a man's torso, lean and powerful, shimmering with scales. It had a face, of a kind: flat eyes, slits where a nose should otherwise grow, a lipless mouth, and scaly hands webbed between its clawed fingers.

"It's a man-fish," whispered Fulk. "That kind we saw on the river!"

It was trapped and therefore doomed, washed in and stranded by the tide, but a fearsome beast nevertheless and therefore not worthy of mercy. Yet Sanglant frowned as Fulk drew his sword.

The creature stared boldly at them. Sharp teeth gleamed as it opened its mouth. And spoke.

"Prinss Ssanglant. Cap'tin Fulk."

Fulk jumped backward. "How can this beast know our names!"

"Prinss Ssanglant," it repeated. The eels that were its hair hissed and writhed as though they, too, voiced a message, one he could not understand.

"Can you speak Wendish? What are you? What are you called?"

"Gnat," it seemed to say, yet it kept talking in a language he did not understand, although he had heard it before.

"That's Jinna."

"It's too garbled, Your Majesty. I can't tell."

"Can you speak Wendish?" he said slowly, because he knew no words of Jinna. He tried out the other languages he could stumble along in. "Can you speak Ungrian? Can you speak the tongue known to the Quman? Can you—"

"Liat'ano," it said, lifting a hand in pantomime to shade its flat eyes as would a man staring into the bright sun.

"Liathano! Do you speak of my wife, Liath?"

The creature hissed, as in agreement.

"What does this mean, my lord prince?" whispered Fulk. "How can such a monster know our names?"

"I don't know. How could such a creature have learned to speak Jinna?"

"Jinna!" The creature spoke again at length, but they could only shake their heads. Impatience burned at him like fire as he wondered what this creature knew and what it could tell him. Did Liath live, or was she dead? How did it recognize them?

'Are there any in our party who can speak the language of the Jinna?" asked Fulk.

"Only Liath," he said bitterly. "That's why she took those two Jinna servants with her. She was the only one who could understand them."

"What do we do?"

"Drag it back to the sea. If it can speak, then it is no mute beast but a thinking creature like us."

"What if it is our enemy? You see its teeth and claws. I heard the stories the ship-master told us—

that it eats human flesh."

"It is at our mercy." He shook his head. "It gives me hope that my wife still lives. For that reason alone I can't kill it, or leave it to die, as it surely will, stranded here."

It was, indeed, no mute beast. He gestured toward the sea. He spoke his own name, and Liath's, and Fulk's, and gestured toward the sea again, as the creature stared at them. When they clambered down the crumbling bank and grabbed its arms, it did not fight them. It was heavy, and strange, and difficult to drag although its glistening tail slid easily over most obstacles. In the end, out of breath and sloppy with mud and ash, they got it to what had once been the shoreline.

The sea had sucked well out into the bay, but they dared not walk there among slick rocks knowing that the next wave would come soon.

"Go with the Lord and Lady's grace," said Sanglant. "There is nothing more we can do for you."

"Liat'ano," it said again, and pointed toward the sky and then toward the ground.

"Does she live?" Sanglant asked, knowing that the pain in his heart would never cease, not until he knew what fate had befallen her and their daughter. He had lost so much, as they all had, but he feared there was worse yet to come.

Lying there awkwardly on the ground, it glanced toward the sea, then copied with eerie precision his earlier gesture. It waved toward the forest, suggesting haste, and said a curt word, repeated twice, something like Go. Go. It had the cadence of a warning. Surely it could sense the tides of the sea better than he could. Fulk shifted from one foot to the next, glancing from the creature to the sea and back again.

"Ai, God!" swore Sanglant. "Come, Fulk."

They left, jogging across the plain. In places the tide had swept the ground clear. Elsewhere, ditches, small ridges, or other obstacles had caught debris in a wide swathe, corpses and branches and here and there a weapon or wagon wheel tangled together and stinking as the hours passed.

Nothing moved on that plain. There was still no sign of life among the broken walls of the town.

No birds flew, and now and again lightning brightened the clouds, followed by a distant rumbling of thunder.

They heard the water rising before they reached the soldiers waiting for them at the edge of the forest, nervous as they listened and watched the glimmer of the sea. He turned as the rest of the troop hurried away along the road into the cover of the blasted trees. The water rose this time not in any distinguishable wave but as a great swell. He could not see the mer-creature. The light wasn't strong enough, and the shoreline was, in any case, too far away and the ground too uneven.

Like the rest of them, it would survive the tide of destruction, or it would perish.

A dozen men waited at the verge, unwilling to depart without their prince. Without their king.

"She must still be alive," he said.

"Yes, Your Majesty," said Fulk.

Lewenhardt offered him reins. Sanglant mounted Fest and together the remnants of his once proud company rode into the trees.

2

I looked through fire for those whose faces I know, Your Majesty, but I saw nothing."

Sanglant glanced toward his council members waiting on the ramp that led up into the ruined fortress. The army had settled down under the afternoon haze to lick its wounds, recover its strength, and assess its numbers and provisions. "The Seven Sleepers may have protected themselves from Eagle's Sight. We must act as if they still live. They remain a threat."

Hathui shrugged. "I saw flames and shadow. Flashes of things. An overturned wagon. Falling rocks. A horse killed by a falling branch. None of it made any sense, nor could I hold any one vision within the fire. And of Liath, I saw nothing."

'Ai, God!" He paced, kicking up ash, and spun to face her. "Seek her at nightfall, each night, and hope she seeks in turn."

"Nightfall is difficult to gauge with this cloud cover and ash fall, your Majesty. We might each seek the other every evening and never touch. The Eagle's Sight is a powerful gift, but a man butchering a deer has more accuracy and delicacy."

He laughed, more in pain than amusement. "The crowns have the same failing, do they not? Thus we are spared the weight of a power too great to combat by natural means. I no longer wonder—"

He swept an arm wide to indicate the heavens and the shattered forest. "—why the church condemned sorcery. See what sorcery has wrought."

"Liath is a mathematicus, Your Majesty. Do you mean to put her aside because she knows the art of sorcery?"

He grinned. "I began as captain of the King's Dragons. I have always been a soldier. If a weapon is put in my hands, I use it. And anyway ..."

And anyway. / love her.

He could not speak those words aloud. He was regnant now, but his position was by no means secure. He could show no weakness; he could possess no weakness, and if he did, if he loved unwisely, then he must conceal the nature of his desire or it would be used against him. In that way the Pechanek Quman had tried to dishonor him by tempting him with a woman's flesh. He had come close to falling.

"Seek her at nightfall, Hathui. Keep trying."

"Yes, Your Majesty."

He strode over to those who waited, climbed the ramp until he stood above them, and situated himself so all those gathered below or huddled within the ruined walls could hear. He raised a hand for silence, and they quieted, but it was never still. The hiss of falling ash, the crack of breaking branches in the forest, not as many now but sharp and startling each time the sound came, and the moans of the wounded ran beneath his words.

"Cousin," he said. "What accounting have you reached?"

Liutgard was an excellent administrator and a wise enough soldier that she let her captains fight her battles for her. When she was younger, her husband had carried her sword as a talisman in place of her, but since his death some years earlier she had shown a disturbing tendency to take to the field herself.

She beckoned her chief steward forward. That woman tallied their remaining forces and lines of command, about two thousand men and perhaps half that many horses remaining although strays were continually being roped in. They had salvaged provisions for about three weeks, if strictly rationed, but were low on fresh water and feed for the horses. There were not enough wagons to carry all the wounded though crude sledges could be built and the wounded placed upon those and dragged by healthy men.

"What now, Your Majesty?" Liutgard asked when her steward had finished.

"Yes, what now?" they asked, all the assembled nobles and captains, those who had survived.

He was at first silent, but at length he spoke. "If fire and ash and water have wreaked such havoc here, how badly has the rest of the land suffered?"

Lord Wichman laughed coarsely and shouted, "Surely we have survived the worst!"

"Hush! You fool!" said Liutgard to her cousin. "Do not tempt God! There may be worse yet to come. What do you mean to do, Your Majesty?"

The curse of foresight had spared him, as it spared all born of humankind. It was amazing that he had once said to his father: "1 don't want to be king with princes all biting at my heels and waiting for me to go down so they can rip out my throat. I want a grant of land, Liath as my wife, and peace." Such luxury was no longer in his grasp. If he did not lead, then this army would fall to pieces and much worse would indeed come to pass.

"We must move out, and swiftly. This land is too devastated to support an army."

"What of Queen Adelheid, Your Majesty?" demanded Burchard.

Sanglant laughed bitterly. "You and I both saw the ruins of Estriana. I think there are no survivors."

"Should we send scouts into the town?"

"How can we tell when another wave may overtake any of our scouts who go down to search? If we wait for the sea to subside completely, we will suffer losses ourselves from thirst and starvation. Nay, I pray you, Burchard, we have no choice. Queen Adelheid is living, or she is dead. If she is dead, there is no help for her. If she lives, those who have survived with her will lead her to safety. Our situation is too desperate."

Burchard bowed his head, but he did not protest. Liutgard nodded to show she approved.

"The Brinne Pass," he continued. "It's too late in the year to attempt the higher passes, but there's a chance at least that we can cross into the marchlands and thence west to Wendar."

"At last!" cried Liutgard. "Home!"

"Your Majesty," objected Burchard. "What about Darre? What about Henry's empire?"

"Without Wendar there is no empire. Imagine, if you will, how far the tide of this destruction may have spread. Look at it! We do not know how distantly the deadly winds have struck or what damage they leave in their wake. The people of Wendar have already suffered greatly. If there is no succor for them, they will turn to others who will offer them surety and order. We must secure what is ours first, our birthright. When that is safe, then we shall see if my father has an empire left to defend."

They knelt to display their obedience, all except Liutgard and Burchard.

"What of Henry's remains?" Liutgard asked.

"His bones and heart must go to Quedlinhame."

She sighed. He recalled her as so young and bright and spirited when they had grown up together in the king's schola. Now she looked as aged as he felt, scarred by Henry's ill-fated expedition into Aosta and by the events of the last two days. But she was too strong of spirit to dwell on what could not be changed. She beckoned to her steward and they spoke together before the duchess turned back to her cousin. "My steward has been overseeing the boiling, Your Majesty.

She'll find a suitable chest, and a box for the heart."

"So be it. We'll camp here to tend our wounded and repair what we can in preparation for the journey to come. Drink sparingly. Fulk, send out scouts to search for water, and others to see if there is aught to be recovered from within the forest: wagons or armor, provisions, strays.

Wounded. Anything. Bury the dead that you find, but we can leave them no monument and we can carry none of the dead home with us, none but my father. As soon as the king's remains are fit to move, we will leave."

As the rest dispersed to their night's bivouac, Hathui came up beside him. "What of Liath, Your Majesty? If she reached Dalmiaka, as she hoped, then she is south and east of us. We're leaving her behind."

"We cannot act unless we know she lives and exactly where she is."

'An expedition could be sent. I would go—"

"I haven't strength or provisions enough to split my forces."

"A small group only, Your Majesty. Ten or twelve at most surely—"

"To ride where?"

"We can guess where she might be. A scouting expedition only. I could find a dozen who would be brave enough—"

He gritted his teeth and she stammered to a halt, seeing his expression. "Do not pain me with these objections, Eagle. Liath is powerful enough to rescue herself."

"If she is injured?"

"Then I am too far away to help her. For God's sake, Hathui, do not forget my daughter! I have not! I do not know if Blessing lives, or is dead. If the Horse people kept their oath to us, or have killed her or enslaved her. I may never know. But we must march north. We must march now. I will not split up my army. No."

She met his gaze. She was a bold woman, and for that he respected her. "It is a terrible choice, Your Majesty."

"It is the choice that has to be made. We are two thousand here with at least a thousand horses, without enough water, feed, and food, in hostile country swept by untold damage, and with winter coming and mountains to be crossed. Our situation is dire. If we lose Wendar, we have lost everything. Liath will find us if she lives."

"I will pray, Your Majesty."

"So will we all."

III

AWAITING THE

FLOOD

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1

SHE waited alone in a vast new world. For a long time she stood at the top of a ragged ridgeline, the earth smoking, hot in many places, and stared as the sun's rising illuminated the changed landscape. Devastation surrounded her. The extent of the destruction was staggering. What remained of the old land had been stripped to rock by the force of the explosion, or vaporized by the heat, or scalded clean by the blast of a gale. West and northwest as the wind blew, a cloud of ash obscured the horizon. East and northeast the ash fall wasn't as severe, but the ground had altered strangely, forming eerie ranks of hills one after the next, each with the same height and curve. In hollows, pools of muck stank like sulfur. Nothing moved. Nothing lived. Nothing that had once lived here existed even to decay. Right above her the sky had an odd look to it, which she recognized after long consideration as the natural blue sky.

Only to the south, most changed, had life escaped harm. Some magic, perhaps the embrace of the aether itself, had protected the Ashioi land from the backblast of the spell. Although it had suffered from drought during its exile, it appeared rich with its living bounty in contrast to the destruction around her. To the east, the sun struggled to break free of the ashy haze but could not; it glowered, an ominous red, as it climbed.

What to do?

The magnitude of the destruction so overwhelmed her that she could not even weep. It was as if half of her had been blasted clean away by the cataclysm, leaving her with no tears but rather a few practical questions that really had to be answered.

Clothes. Water. Food. Her lost companions. Sanglant and Blessing.

The rest could wait.

Behind her the land looked impassable. Certainly she'd not find food or drink for many a league inland. There was no telling how far the storm had blown. She doubted she'd last long once night fell and the temperature dropped. It was late in the year. There had already been snow, now burned off for as far as she could see.

She shifted her grip on her bow and walked south toward the hills of the ancient land now returned. Ashioi country. She heard a faint horn call. From farther away, through the intense silence, a human cry shuddered, but it might have been a trick of the air. She saw nothing and no one. The heat of the ground chapped her feet, and as the morning passed her soles dried and cracked until they bled, leaving drops of blood as a trail in her wake. It was so hot, but heat had never troubled her. Thirst hit harder, and her feet hurt, and her skin stung from the ash. The spell had exhausted her. But if she stopped and could not get going again, then thirst, hunger, and weakness would defeat her, and no person born of humankind alone could negotiate this steaming landscape to rescue her, not until it cooled. And they would only attempt a rescue if they knew she was here, which they did not.

Sanglant was too far away to help her, if he even lived.

In time, the sun nosed up over the haze and reached zenith within that mote of clear sky directly above. The sun was so bright. Even the ground blinded her as she stumbled onto a ribbon of chalky white. She halted. She stood on a narrow road, bleeding onto its gritty surface. Behind there was nothing to see except empty wilderness and smoking pits. Ahead, the ground rose precipitously. Grass clung to the hill in patches. Here and there clefts and holes split the hillside like so many narrow cave mouths. At the height of the rise a ruined watchtower rose at the limit of a stand of pine trees.

She had been here before.

She had enough energy for a chuckle, then trudged upward, weary beyond measure.

Unbelievably, he was there, waiting for her with a skin of water. He stepped out from behind the tumbled wall with a look of such surprise that she knew he had not, precisely, expected to see her.

"Liath!"

"Eldest Uncle! Ai, God! I've need of that water, if you've any to share."

"Plenty to share, as you will see." He smiled. "The young should know better than to parade in front of the old with that which can never be regained."

"I beg your pardon!" She guzzled water, but forced herself to stop before she drank the entire thing. She poured water on her hand and wiped her brow. Her fingers came away black with grime. She looked down at herself. "I'm cloaked in ash," she said, and it was true, but she was nevertheless naked even if smeary with soot. He was amused.

"Come with me." He gestured toward the trees.

"Where are we going?"

"To the river, where you can wash yourself. I'll see if I can weave a garment out of reeds."

The water gave her strength, but a second, more intangible force did so as well. She recalled clearly the last time she had walked through this grove of pine trees, just before she had ascended the mage's ladder into the heavens. Then, the air had been dry and the ground parched. Now she smelled water in the air. She felt it in the greening leaves and the rash of shoots lacing green trails along the ground. Its softness cooled her skin.

Yet, when they walked out from the shadow of the pines, the meadow that had once grown lush with cornflowers and peonies, lavender and dog roses, lay withered. On the path, drying petals crackled under their feet.

"Come." Eldest Uncle hastened forward, ignoring the dying clearing.

"This was once so bright. What happened to all the flowers?"

"The aether used to water this land, drawing moisture up from deep roots. Now that link is gone, and these flowers die. But the land will live. See there!"

See there! She hurried after him along what they had once called the flower trail, to the river.

Where once a trickle had moistened the rocks, a current now flowed in full spate. Laughing, she splashed into the shallows and threw herself full length into the cold water. The shock stung. Her skin hurt, everywhere, but the water was like the kiss of God. She ducked her head under, and again, and a third time, and scrubbed her hair and scalp until the worst of the filth was gone, and afterward floated until her teeth chattered and her hands were blue. At last she fetched her bow and waded to the far shore. Eldest Uncle waited for her on a carpet of grass. Fresh shoots flourished along the river as far as she could see. The land that had once lain yellow and brown had turned with the onslaught of a false spring, although she knew that winter was yet to come.

"Ai, God!" She sat down beside him. Grass tickled her rump. Water dripped. "That felt good! I'm so tired."

She yawned, cradling her head on her bent knees, arms wrapped tight around her legs. The world slipped so easily away. She slid into a doze.

Started awake, hearing voices.

Eldest Uncle stood farther up the path, under the shade of trees, speaking with two masked warriors, one male and one female. She grabbed her bow, and recalled belatedly that she no longer had any arrows. That she needed no weapons. She was a weapon.

Memory struck, because she was vulnerable. She was only half awake, unable to fend off the visions. The soldiers burned like torches. They screamed and screamed as their flesh melted off them . . .

"Liath!"

/ burned them. She was shaking.

Eldest Uncle knelt beside her. He did not touch her.

"Who are they?" she demanded, indicating the two young warriors with her glance. One wore a falcon mask and the other that of a buzzard, smooth and rufous and alert. She was shaking too hard to move. She felt sick to her stomach. "Must get up. ... if Cat Mask ..."

"These are not Cat Mask's warriors. They will not harm you."

Trust him, or do not trust him. "Why would you betray me?" she asked softly.

His smile had a bitter tinge, but he was not offended. "Why, indeed?"

She slumped forward, too weary to fight, and fell at once into a dreamless sleep.

2

SHE dreamed.

She walks through grass so tall she cannot see beyond it. The whisper of another creature's passage touches her ears, and she halts.

Grass bends, golden tops bowing and vanishing. Something big approaches.

She turns as the Horse shaman pushes through and pulls up short, seeing her. "Liathano! I have been looking for you!"

Other voices flood over them, and the grass and the centaur ripple like water stirred by a gusting wind.

"This one, again! If Cat Mask finds her, he'll kill her while she sleeps."

"Then we must be sure that Cat Mask does not find her. Will you tell him?"

"I will not!"

"You spoke against her before, White Feather."

"So I did. But now we are fallen safely back to Earth. It may be she had a hand in our homecoming, as she promised us. If that is the case, she does not deserve death. Although I think it best if one possessing such power does not bide long in our land."

Liath groaned and shook herself awake, startled to find a short mantle draped over her body. It covered her from shoulder to mid-thigh, and was woven out of a coarse brown thread. She sat up carefully, wrapping the cape around herself. She was sore everywhere. Her skin was rashy, and here and there marked with the imprint of a rock. Her neck ached, and she had a headache. Eldest Uncle offered her a pouch of water to drink. Sipping slowly, she surveyed her surroundings.

There was noticeably more green than there had been when she'd fallen asleep. The trees seemed fuller, the ground moister. Even the distant meadow, seen across the flowing river, boasted a score of budding flowers, fresh growth that had sprouted while she slept. The light had changed; it was as dim as the gloom that presages a thunderstorm.

White Feather regarded her pensively, perhaps with distrust. Farther away, Falcon Mask and Buzzard Mask crouched on their haunches, watching her and then the river.

"How long did I sleep? Will it soon be nightfall?"

"Nightfall, indeed," agreed Eldest Uncle. "Nightfall of a new day. You slept through yesterday afternoon, an entire night, and most of this day."

She whistled, feeling as if she'd been punched in the stomach. "I'm still tired! Hungry and thirsty, too."

"Hunger is a pain we all share," said White Feather tartly. "But before I left the council hall, I heard a half dozen reports that the old fields are already sending up shoots. If we can survive the winter with what stores remain to us, we may hope for a plentiful harvest. Still. I would not see you fall into Cat Mask's hands because of weakness."

She offered Liath a square of dried berries and grains, and although it was tough to chew, it was edible and filling. Liath took her time as she ate, knowing how little food the Ashioi had. At least there was no shortage of water. The vegetation seemed to be growing unnaturally quickly, fertilized by the fading influence of the aether, as though all this potential had lain dormant for years, awaiting the flood. She nibbled. She knew she ought to save half for later, but she was so hungry she finished it all.

Like White Feather, Eldest Uncle looked away while she ate, to give her privacy or to restrain his own feelings of hunger.

"What now?" she asked him, getting his attention. 'Am I in danger from Cat Mask? Will he come hunting me?"

"Only if he discovers you are here," said White Feather in her blunt way. "He fears an invasion of humankind."

Liath laughed bitterly. "Have you walked the land beyond the white path, north of here? Nothing lives there, nor can any living creature cross it."

"You crossed it."

"I created it."

White Feather touched the obsidian knife tucked into a sheath at her hip. "What do you mean?"

"I am born half of fire. The one you call Feather Cloak glimpsed the heart within me. That is why they called me 'Bright One.' " She wiped sweat from her brow. Although cloudy, it was hot. Even the breeze made her uncomfortable.

Eldest Uncle looked more at ease than she had ever seen him. He looked younger, an old man restored to vitality by his return to the world where he had been born. It was as if the waters flooded him as well, as if he were greening like the plants.

"Look!" cried Falcon Mask. She leaped to her feet. Far above, a pair of buzzards soared. She pushed her mask up to get a better look; she was crying, silently, with joy.

"A good omen," agreed Eldest Uncle. "You are not the only one who can cross. Others will come."

"Our enemies," said White Feather. "How is that a good omen?"

"Feather Cloak has birthed twin girls. What more powerful omen could there be?"

The older woman snorted. She had a stern face, no longer young. The white feather fastened to her topknot bobbed in the warm wind. "You are weak, Bright One. I make this promise to you in exchange for the promise you made to us, that you would see us safely home. Rest here to regain your strength and I will divert Cat Mask's attention from this place. After that, you must depart, or I will set Cat Mask and his warriors on you myself."

"Do not do that, I pray you," murmured Liath. "You do not understand. . . ." She was shaking again as memory gripped her hard. It was too much. She still heard their screams, the way the sound choked off when the fire burned away their voices. She squeezed her eyes shut and willed the memory to shut itself away behind a closed door.

"Whsst!" called Falcon Mask. "Gone now, into the trees. Yet there! Do you hear?"

From nearby came a raspy cry. At the unexpected sound, Liath opened her eyes.

"What is it?" demanded Buzzard Mask, pushing his mask up. He was as young as Falcon Mask.

They might have been twins with their bronze faces, broad noses, and dark eyes.

"It's a tern," said Liath, recognizing the call. "It must have been blown inland. How far away is the sea?"

"I've forgotten," said Eldest Uncle.

"I've never seen the sea," said White Feather as the young warriors nodded to show that they, too, had never seen it. "I've only heard stories. How far the shore lies I do not know. I walked most of yesterday and all this morning to reach you, Uncle. Feather Cloak asks that you return. The warriors have moved out to explore the borderlands. There will be a council soon."

"What of my daughter?" asked Eldest Uncle.

White Feather shrugged. "She is stubborn."

"Ha! Tell me a truth I do not yet know."

"Feather Cloak thinks Kansi-a-lari has left the land. She cannot hear her footsteps on the earth. If she crossed the White Road, she would be invisible to us."

"How could she cross such devastation? It is a steaming wasteland."

"North of here," said Liath. "But what about the coasts? It might be possible to cross along the coast."

What had become of Gnat and Mosquito? No way to know, not unless she reached the sea, and even then she might never find them.

She barely had strength to rise and relieve herself in the privacy of the woods, barely managed afterward to stagger up the path with the mantle clutched around her torso and find her way to the remembered clearing that she had walked in so short, and so long, a time ago. Once, the burning stone had appeared here. The pallet of leaves and grass she had gathered days—nay, months or years—ago was scarcely disturbed. She collapsed onto it, under the shelter of a holm oak, and plunged into sleep.

Sanglant, riding on an unfamiliar horse. He is filthy and his expression is grim.

Fire burned in her heart, and in its flames she glimpsed Hathui and Hanna, looking for her, seeking, calling . . . but she was too exhausted to rouse.

Blessing shouts at a young man whose face seems familiar although Liath cannot name him, and he turns to face a landscape of burning sand. A lion with the torso and face of a woman rears above her, raking with its claws as the girl screams, only it is not herself she sees but a young woman as dark of complexion as she is. A silver-haired man leaps into the fray, thrusting a burning torch between sphinx and bleeding girl. As he spins, panting, he sees her and cries out

"Liathano! Where are you?" The centaur shaman walks on the shore of a shallow river that snakes away through grassland but the bright currents drag her away. She drowns, yet at the same time the aether feeds her as it feeds all that is elemental.

She stirred at intervals, sometimes finding food and drink waiting for her although she barely recalled eating and drinking; the threads of aether nourish her; it is all the food she needs. Other times she woke hoping to see the stars, but the haze never lifted and it was ungodly warm.

Thoughts emerged with unexpected clarity.

/ should have looked for him at nightfall with Eagle's Sight.

Land displaces water of equal volume.

Did all the Seven Sleepers die, or did some survive?

If the thread that bound the Ashioi land to Earth is severed, then is the aetherical realm closed to us? Is the mage's ladder gone? Is my mother's home lost to me now? Where does the aether come from that is woven around the Earth? Is it constantly replenished or will it fade? Is there less of aether in the world now that the gateway is closed?

At nightfall, with Eagle's Sight, Hathui seeks in the fire, but sees only fragments, glimpses of fractured sight shot through with flames and shadow.

Sleep claimed her, and her thoughts, and what coiled in her heart and mind dissolved into dreams so finely spun that each filament frayed away into nothing, all a hazy white drift of ash spreading in all directions over pale dunes that had neither beginning nor end, only desolation

"Will she die? She's been like this since I left. That was five days ago!"

"I think she will not die. She's not wasting away. The substance that knits together the universe feeds her. It is invisible to us because it exists beyond our five senses. Remember that she walked the spheres and crossed through the burning stone, and what else after that I do not know, but we can imagine it was no easy task. Now she is paying the price."

"What if Cat Mask comes? He has gathered his warriors. He's made his peace with Lizard Mask, and they are making their plans, wondering when humankind will attack us."

"Cat Mask does not scare me, White Feather. Return to Feather Cloak. I will come when I can."

"Feather Cloak cannot delay the council any longer. If you do not walk back with me now, I will have to tell her you are not coming. The council will speak without your voice."

"I will not leave her until she is strong enough to fend for herself."

"Does no one look for her, Uncle? Has she no family?"

"She has her husband, but how can we know whether he lives or is dead? I have stood many mornings at the edge of the desolation to the north, beyond the White Road."

"A wasteland worthy of He-Who-Burns! It is a terrible sight."

"I do not know how far the destruction extends. I do not know who and what has survived or if they can even reach here, or will attempt it."

"Then perhaps we will have less fighting to do! It would serve humankind very well if their sorcery hurt themselves worst of all in the end."

"I am thinking we have all suffered, and will continue so. This weather makes me uneasy. We should see the sun."

"Should we? Does the sun often shine? It was always like this before."

"Because it was 'like this' when we journeyed in the aether, the land died. So will it now without rain and sun. These are not natural clouds. I remember what it was like when I was a young man.

It was not like this. We saw both rain and sun."

'All this I will tell Feather Cloak. But if you will not accompany me, Eldest Uncle, then you must not complain if Cat Mask's views are accepted by the others simply because he talks the loudest and puffs up his manly chest."

A chuckle. "I trust you, White Feather, not to be dazzled by his words. Or his chest. Is there still no sign of my daughter?"

"A small sign. Scouting groups have walked the coastline and brought news of many strange things washed up on the shore. On the western coast about a day's walk from here, this green wing feather was found among the rocks. Do you recognize it?"

'Ah! Ah! Yes. It is the color of her eyes. This is surely the one I gave to her when she gained her woman's power. I cannot believe she would have discarded it so carelessly."

"Uh," said Liath, trying to rouse, but they did not hear her and she was so tired. How could anyone be so tired, all vitality drained from them?

"There were markings in the sand, too, but we could not interpret them. Something like this. . . ."A fine scritching eased her back into a dreamy haze. So soothing. So tired.

"I don't know. I would have to see it for myself. It looks like the track of a boat pulled up on shore."

"What is a boat? Oh, yes. A wagon that carries you over water. Where might she find a boat?"

"Perhaps it washed up on shore. ..."

Water, like fire and air, is a veil through which distant sights can be glimpsed by those who do not fear to see. She dreamed.

Sanglant and a ragged army toil through a blasted countryside. He pauses beside a half dozen men in stained and ragged clothing who are digging a grave. They wear the badge of Fesse, its proud red eagle sigil visible despite the dirt.

"One of Liutgard's men?" he asks as they bend knees and kneel on the parched ground.

"Our sergeant, Your Majesty," says one. "His wound went rotten, all black and with a nasty smell."

His aspect is so grave, as if the cataclysm blasted him as well, right down to his soul.

"Will we see our homes again, Your Majesty?"

"This poor man will not. But the army will reach Wendar, although I fear our dead men and horses mark our trail for any who seek to follow us."

"It will be good to shake Aosta's dust from our feet! We came south over the high passes west of here, Your Majesty. How will we go home?"

"See!" He points toward a place she cannot see, not even in her dreams. "There are the mountains. We're close enough that you can see them even through the haze. That notch, there, marks the valley that will lead us up to the Brinne Pass. Once we have crossed, we will be in the marchlands."

"Your Majesty!" A man's urgent cry causes every soldier to stand nervously, awaiting a call to action against some as yet unseen foe. "See there!" A young man appears on a restive mare, a bow slung over his back and his hand extended as he indicates the cloudy heavens to the northeast. "The griffins!"

Shouts break out everywhere, some frightened and some triumphant, welcoming their return. A yelping call rings down from the sky as if in reply. Horses scream, and Sanglant reins in his gelding with a press of his knees. His lips part as he stares upward at a sight she cannot see, and yet she can feel the gleam of their presence, woven through with magic down to the bone. They fly overhead and on, continuing southeast.

"Where are they going, Your Majesty?" asks the young archer as all heads turn, following the course of that flight.

Sanglant shakes his head, eyes narrowed, and for an instant his shoulders slump, as though he has been defeated. "I don't know."

"Will they return?"

"I do not possess foreknowledge, Lewenhardt." Hearing his own words, thinking them, he smiles sharply and urges his mount forward on the path. "Best be grateful they survived the blast. Best to wonder why they fly toward the heart of the cataclysm."

She spins upward on the wind and finds herself aloft, flying with griffin wings. Her sight is as sharp as an eagle's.

Was she not an Eagle once? She learned the gift of sight and it inhabits her even in her dreams as she floats between dreaming and waking on the last fading swell of the aether as the aftershocks of the cataclysm rumble away into nothing. The breath of the heavens long spilled its respiration into the lower world through the thread that bound the exiled land to its root. Soon that road will be pinched closed.

Will the magic of Earth fade, no longer fertilized by that rich vitality? Aether is an element like the other four, woven through the very fabric of the cosmos. Surely some breath of aether remains on Earth.

Yet knowledge of the future is closed to her, because she is grounded here. It isn't even shadows seen beyond a translucent shroud; it is an impenetrable curtain. Only the elementals who breathe and respire in the pure aether can see forward and backward in time. Only God can know past, present, and future as if it is all one.

Did her mother know what fate awaited her? Did she go willingly into that darkness, or did she fight it?

Did she love my father anyway?

I'll never know.

The landscape skims past below, a blighted roll of dusty hills and tumbled forests. Now and again a village passes beneath her sight, roofs torn off, fences down, dead animals floating in briny pools. With each league as they move southeast the land's scars grow more noticeable. Trees are burned on one side, those that still stand. The ground is parched and bare. They have turned south and she smells the sea.

Waves lap lazily against a battered shoreline. They pass over a ruined town whose stone walls have fallen into heaps. A cockroach scuttles along the stones. No. It is a person, small and fragile but somehow still alive. Then the town falls behind.

So close to the sea nothing moves except the wind through what remains of vegetation. Out in the water she sees the smooth back of a mer-creature split the surface and slide beneath.

Is it Gnat, or Mosquito?

The griffin shrieks, and banks to the right in a wide circle. Below, marching along parallel to the shoreline, walk human figures. So many! Two thousand at least, or four or ten, impossible to count so many. It is a refugee host strung out in double or triple file and marching into the worst of the devastation.

There are many children and old people among them. It seems there are more groups coming up from behind, all moving in the same direction.

She wants to cry out. She wants to warn them: "Turn back! This way lies ruin!" But she has no voice.

And then she truly sees them.

By face and feature they are Ashioi. Where have they come from? There were not so many children among the exiles as she sees in this company. The larger help the smaller. The warriors march in the van and at the rear to guard the helpless, who are also the most precious. They are well dressed in tunics and knee-length cloaks, their warriors in fine armor and brightly painted masks.

The Ashioi she lived among, however briefly, were so poor that none had more than a rag or worn skin to cover themselves with, not even the warriors. That's why she sleeps beneath a covering woven of reeds.

Eldest Uncle doesn't even have a spare tunic to gift her so that she might not sleep, or wake, naked. All the animals died in exile, and toward the end even the fields of flax withered.

These are not the same people. Yet who else can they be?

Ahead, the ground raises up to mark the blast zone. To the northeast the earth steams, but along the shoreline the way remains barely passable because the sea has cooled the fire out of the depths. The earth lies quiet. The Old Ones have withdrawn their power. All that is left is the wasteland. On the strand a boat lies beached. A single figure rushes, shouting, to greet the refugees.

Her sight tunnels. She fixes on her prey, and recognizes her: Sanglant's mother, who is also Eldest Uncle's only daughter. Kansi-a-lari runs forward, then stops short, staring at the man who leads the rest. Her mouth drops open. She exclaims aloud, and he laughs, mocking her.

"So you are the one!" he says. "I met your son. But I did not believe him. Greetings, Daughter."

"Daughter?" Her fierce expression clouds and her brows pinch together with confusion as she stares at the prince, who is certainly younger than she is. "Why do you call me—"

"Look! Look up there!" Behind him, a warrior wearing a fox mask lifts her bow, draws it deep, and looses an arrow.

"Hai!" cried Liath, jerking upright, torn right out of sleep and startling Eldest Uncle, who sat, as usual, bending and plaiting supple willow into a large basket.

'Ai, God!" she said a moment later in frustration, pulling the mantle around her as Eldest Uncle chuckled. "Is there nothing I can clothe myself with?"

"Indeed, Daughter, the women have concerned themselves mightily to please your modesty. See here."

Out of a second basket he lifted a folded square of cloth as though it were more precious than gold. "In the vaults beneath the council chamber the last treasure has been removed, oil and grain stored against the final drought, bronze tools, cloth, and the scrolls sacred to He-Who-Burns."

The cloth was undyed although a trifle yellowed with age, and finely woven out of a thread whose softness she did not recognize. When she unfolded it, she discovered a sleeveless tunic that reached to her knees. She quickly slipped it on. It was shapeless, two rectangular blocks of cloth sewn together along the sides and shoulders, but functional enough to give her the confidence to test her legs. She tied the mantle on over it, then walked to the river to drink her fill. Berries ripened in dribs and drabs along the banks, and she ate until her fingers were stained purple although the berries tasted tart.

"I'm so hungry! Ugh! I'll give myself a stomachache with this."

"You're feeling better," said Eldest Uncle, who had followed her. She saw no sign of Falcon Mask and Buzzard Mask.

"Stronger, too. I dreamed ..."

A horn's call sounded to the north.

"It wasn't a dream! Come quickly!"

While she slept, they had fixed a rope bridge over the rushing stream, three thick ropes strung taut between trees, with one for the feet and two above to hold on to. She got the hang of it quickly, balancing as she crossed with her bow slung over her back and Eldest Uncle behind her.

The flower trail had bloomed in sickly patches of color, covered by a skin of ashy gray dust that coated leaves and stones. She shaded her eyes, then lowered her hand.

"There's no sun," said Eldest Uncle. "I remember sun from my youth, but we've seen the sun no more than two or three times while you slept and then only for a brief span."

"How long did I sleep?" They walked into the shade of the pine forest. Fallen needles squished under her feet. Before, everything had been so brittle. Now it seemed spongy.

"Ten nights. Eleven, perhaps. I lost count. The days are hazy, and the council argues."

"Look." She pointed to the watchtower. Falcon Mask perched on the uppermost wall, peering west.

Buzzard Mask saw them and came running. "Who are they?"

"Who are who?" Eldest Uncle replied.

Buzzard Mask had a youth's voice, not quite sure that it had broken. "There's an army coming along the White Road! They're not dressed like us, but many wear warrior masks."

Liath ran to the watchtower and clambered up beside Falcon Mask. The young woman looked at her, surprised, then grinned and sidled to one side to make room. Young and bold, she did not fear heights, but for Liath it was dizzy-making to crouch up here with sheer wall and steep hillside plunging away below. Yet that giddy feeling was no worse than the sight of the desolation she had wrought, off to the north, the wasteland that was the aftermath of the eruption that had killed Anne and her people, most of them guilty of no greater crime than loyalty. What manner of man would refuse the summons of the skopos, after all? Yet Anne had not cared for their virtues, or their sins; they were pawns, nothing more, and pawns are sacrificed.

On the road, the lead group came into view beyond a straggle of trees, then was lost again behind foliage. Eldest Uncle spoke a word and crumpled to his knees. He would have fallen if Buzzard Mask hadn't leaped to his side to support him.

"What is it, Uncle? What ails you?"

"I am struck," he said to the youth. "I am hit."

"Get their attention," said Liath to Falcon Mask.

"There are so many! And more behind them! I've never seen so many people!" The young woman wavered. She was unsure, reluctant. "Is it safe?"

"They are your own people." She scrambled back down and knelt beside Eldest Uncle, who seemed too weak to rise. "Is it your heart?" she demanded, terrified that he would die right then.

"It is my heart." He wept silent tears as the procession reappeared on the White Road below them. It was strange to watch with the steep hillside and ragged forest on one side of the chalky ribbon of road and on the other the scarred, barren earth stretching north as far as she could see.

These refugees were caught between two worlds, it seemed, as they had been for centuries.

She walked down the slope to meet them. Her hair was all tangles, and sweat and grit slimed her body.

/ should have stopped to bathe.

Stepping onto the White Road, she faced their approach. The line of marchers wound away beyond a curve in the path, hidden behind trees and a distant ridgeline. They were the same people she had seen in her dream. The man leading them wore a crested helmet unlike the animal masks worn by the other warriors. He had a proud, handsome face, terribly familiar in a way she did not understand. As they neared and saw she did not mean to move, he raised a hand and halted and the others slowed to a halt behind him. He looked Liath up and down while a fox-masked woman beside him glared, but it was Sanglant's mother, in the front, who spoke first.

"Liathano! Where is my father?"

Liath gestured.

"This one?" asked the handsome man. "This is your son's mate whom you spoke of?"

His gaze followed her gesture, and he looked toward the old man being helped down the steep slope by young Buzzard Mask. A cool wind out of the north rustled leaves. Out in the wasteland, dust funneled heavenward until, all at once, the wind's hand dropped it and a thousand million particles pattered to bare rock.

"Lost to me," he breathed. His spear clattered to the ground unheeded beside him, and he leaped forward like a hart and dashed up the hill, not many steps, after all. They were so close; they saw each other clearly. Liath ran after him, but when he stopped two paces from Eldest Uncle she stopped, too.

She stared, seeing it for the first time and understanding why the young man looked familiar. The daimones of the upper air can see forward and backward in time because time has no hold on them; they live above the middle world where time's yoke subjugates all living creatures. She had a moment's dislocation. For a moment, she saw as did her kinfolk: youth and age, what had been and what would become.

Eldest Uncle and the young warrior were the same man, but one was old and one was young.

Eldest Uncle covered his eyes and trembled. The other shook his head like a madman.

"Brother!"

"How can this be?"

It was only a whisper. Two whispers. She did not know which one spoke. Buzzard Mask released his hold on the old man, and the young one took a step toward the old one and as of one thought they embraced, holding tight, two creatures who in their hearts are one.

"Do you understand it yet?" asked Sanglant's mother. As she came up beside Liath, she indicated the men with a lift of her chin. She laughed, but not kindly, sensing Liath's bewilderment.

"Why do you dislike me so much?" Liath asked her.

"I don't know. I just do."

"How can you dislike someone you don't know?"

"I had to listen to my son talk on and on about you in the days we were together—you, and battle.

Those are the only two things he's ever thought deeply about, if a man can be said to think deeply where his cock is concerned."

"You don't like your own son?"

"He's not what I wanted."

Liath smiled sharply, wishing she could intimidate others with clever words and the stiffening of her shoulders, as Sanglant could. "He's what he is, no more and no less than that. If you don't like it, you missed your chance to make him something else, didn't you? He is Henry's son, not yours."

"Born of humankind," said Kansi with a sneer.

"Look!" cried Falcon Mask from the wall. She had braced herself with one hand on the highest course of stone as she rose, balancing precariously with drops before and behind. She pointed at the heavens.

The two men released each other, stepping back from the embrace to stare as one at the cloudy sky. How strange it was to see a man both old and young, the same man, as if time had split him into two parts and in its circular discursion finally caught up with itself. There was a wink of light against the clouds as quickly gone.

"We saw two griffins," said the young man. "But our arrows scared them off."

Hope leaped in Liath's heart, but she said nothing.

Eldest Uncle rested a hand on the other one's shoulder, taking strength there, and gazed at the procession waiting on the White Road. "Who are these? Where have you all come from?"

"We were caught between the worlds in ancient days. Now you have returned, and we are released from the shadows."

"There are more of you?"

"I was with one group, but we met up with many others. There are more, still, coming this way."

'All those sent to the frontier before the end," said Eldest Uncle.

"What do you mean?" asked Sanglant's mother and Buzzard Mask at the same time.

"I must sit down," he said apologetically, but it was the young one who helped him up to the tower most solicitously, who sat beside him, staring intently at his face as though to memorize every wrinkle and crease.

"I never thought to see you again," said the young one. "I thought you were lost to me."

"I, too. I despaired, but then I lived." They had an easy way of touching, a hand placed carelessly on the other's knee or shoulder.

It was as though there was a misunderstanding between them and they had forgotten that normally there is an infinitesimal space between one body and the next, that which separates each solitary soul from another.

"You are old."

"I am eldest."

"Not bad looking, for an old man! Not like that warty, flabby old priest of a Serpent Skirt."

They laughed together, almost giggling, suddenly younger than their years, boys again. Brothers.

Twins.

"Don't you see what this means?" demanded Sanglant's mother with fists on hips, looking disgusted as she watched them slap each other's arms. "More will come from the north! Cat Mask's army will grow. We need not fear our enemies any longer, not with such a force."

"Cat Mask's army?" asked the young one, turning away from his brother. "Who is Cat Mask?

What has he to do with me?"

"Hsst! She-Who-Creates has much to answer for! Will you strut and preen like the rest of the young men and fight for command like so many pissing dogs?"

His eyes narrowed. "You are my daughter by blood. My niece. Do not speak so to your elders, young one!"

"You are younger than I am! I have a grown son! I can speak any way I please!"

"Evidently your daughter more than mine, Zuangua," said Eldest Uncle with a wheezy laugh.

"Quick to temper, slow to wisdom. Both impatient. So I named her, remembering you."

Instead of answering, Zuangua rose and stared north, a gaze that swept the horizon. Now Liath saw the resemblance to his twin brother, to his niece, and to Sanglant. The lineaments of his face had the same curve and structure. She felt the warmth of a mild, woken desire, seeing him as an attractive man. Until he looked straight at her. His expression shifted, the tightening of lips, the merest wrinkling of the nose, but she felt his scorn, she knew that he recognized her interest and rejected it. Rejected her.

His sneer scalded. She wasn't used to indifference from men. She hadn't desired or sought their interest, truly, but she had become used to it. Even King Henry, the most powerful man she had ever met, had succumbed.

So I am repaid for my vanity, she thought, and was cheered enough to smile coldly back at him.

He turned away to address his brother. "We will return, all of us were caught beyond the White Road when the spell was woven. we who were once shadows are made flesh again. We want revenge for what we suffered. We will return day by day more coming each day until we are like the floodwaters rising. Once we are all come home, we will make an army and destroy humankind. Our old enemy."

"We are stronger than I thought!" murmured his niece. 'Already more have joined the march than survived in exile!"

"It is not the right path," said Eldest Uncle.

"So you have always claimed, but see what they did to us." Zuangua gestured toward the barren wilderness. "This is what humankind made—a wasteland. You are old. Our people are diminished. Kansi said so herself, and if these rags are the best you have to wear, then I see it is true. The humans are many, but they are weak and the cataclysm has hurt them." He touched the stained cloth that bound his shoulder. "Their king gave this wound to me, but I killed him. He is dead and your grandson risen in his place."

Risen in his place.

Liath took a step back. The others did not notice, too intent on Zuangua's speech.

"He seeks an alliance. We did act in concert when his need was great, but now we must consider him a danger. We cannot trust humankind."

"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.

/ 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 the 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, cer-tainly, 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

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswijk/Mijn%20d...lliott%20-%20Crown%20Of%20Stars%2006%20-%20In%20the%20Ruins.html 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

"REFUGES," 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 handcart 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 sharply, 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."

One of the clerics limped out of the crowd and whispered into Vindicadus' ear, then shoved him, pressuring him forward.

"My lord. I beg you. What news of the king? I know—we knew— you rebelled against him."

"My father is dead."

They cried out loud at that. He heard their whispers: Murderer. Patricide.

"Your Majesty," said Fulk in loud voice. "Here comes Duchess Liutgard."

Her mount picked its way down the slope. Her banner bearer rode to her left and her favored steward to her right. She gasped when she saw the refugees. Her face grew even whiter. Seven of them ran forward and flung themselves into the dirt before her, careful of the hooves of her horse, but she dismounted and tossed the reins to her steward before walking in amongst them and taking their hands, calling them by name.

"How has this happened? Why are you here?" she demanded.

They spoke all at once, words tumbling each over those of the others. "... blast of wind . . .

rumblings, then a terrible quake . . . fire in the sky . . . glowing rock, flowing everywhere.

"Riots. A storming of the palace. Flight through the ruined streets.

"All is chaos, my lady," wept the eldest, who was not more than forty. "I am called Elsebet, a cleric in Emperor Henry's schola. We lost half of our number in the first day, and half again as many in our trek here. We dared not attempt the Julier Pass. This one, Brother Vindicadus, was once in the service of Presbyter Hugh and before him Margrave Judith. He knew of an eastern pass that was little traveled. You see what remains of the king's schola. We lost so many. Is it true? Is it true the regnant—the emperor—is dead?"

"Henry is dead," said Liutgard as she looked at Sanglant. "That we are any of us living now is due to my cousin, Sanglant. Henry named him as heir as he was dying. It was—" Her voice broke, but she went on. "It was the wish of his heart to see Prince Sanglant become regnant after him. Henry was not himself at the end, not for the last two or three years. He was ensorcelled by his queen and by presbyter Hugh. It was Sanglant who freed him from their net. Hear me!" Her voice rang out above the murmurs. "It is true. I swear it on my mother's and father's graves. I swear it by the Hand of the Lord and Lady. Sanglant is regnant now over Wendar and Varre. He is the one we follow. He is leading us home."

"We'll set up camp here for the night," said Sanglant quietly to Fulk. "We must make room for these."

"We haven't enough to feed them, Your Majesty."

"We cannot abandon them. They are our countryfolk. If I cannot save them, then who will?"

Fulk nodded, and left to give the orders.

They settled down to camp in marching order as dusk crept over them. Every man and woman slept fully clothed and with weapons beside him, although many put off their mail. The horses were rubbed down, watered, and fed; it was their good luck to find an unpolluted stream close by.

With Lewenhardt, Surly, and a limping Si-bold in attendance, Sanglant walked down through the line of march, pausing to speak to many of the soldiers, and fetched up at last with the rear guard.

The centaurs, led by Capi'ra, had volunteered for this onerous task, and he supposed the sight of them alone might have deterred many a rash attack from behind.

'Anything?" he asked her after their greeting.

"The same as every day. We see signs of men following on our tracks, but they fade away. Fewer today. There are fewer folk living here, and if they would not attack us when they have greater numbers, then they will fear to attack us when they are only a handful."

He nodded. It was almost dark. Night came early now, not just because of the time of year. Even during the day the clouds obscured the sun. His skin ached for light. Everyone felt its lack.

"It is strange to walk among you," said Capi'ra after a silence. "Your kind are so reckless. I will be glad to return to my homeland." She snorted, a horsey sort of chuckle. "No offense meant to you, Sanglant. We are not easy here. The land looks wrong. It smells funny. The winds aren't the ones we know."

"Look!" he said, squinting. "I thought I saw a flash."

"Lightning?"

He beckoned. "Lewenhardt. Come forward. Do you see it?"

The archer rode forward and stared south into the dark sky. He began to shake his head, then stiffened. "Could it be?" he whispered, then shouted aloud. "The griffins! It is the griffins, Your Majesty!"

Sanglant rode forward past the rearmost line, head bent back to stare heavenward as the news was called down the line of march so men could control their horses. Dogs barked.

Lewenhardt came up beside him. "They're flying low. One has something . . . something in its grip ... a deer, perhaps? If they've been hunting. . . . ?"

"Ai, God," breathed Sanglant.

Such a bolt of adrenaline slammed through him that he thought he would go blind. He slipped getting off Fest and stumbled running forward downslope as the griffins dipped low and lower still, Domina weighed down by the burden she carried. The precious burden brought all this way to him, the one who had decreed that they must move on and leave her, unsought and unfound, behind.

/ am no better than she was. I did what I thought was necessary.

Domina stooped that last short drop and when Liath was a man's height from the ground the griffin released her and she tumbled, hitting hard. He fell to his knees beside her, wondering if she was alive or dead, but he knew she was living and not just because she laughed and cried and embraced him so tightly with her head pressed against his shoulder that when she pulled away he could see the impress of his mail on her cheek.

He was struck dumb.

"The Lord and Lady have blessed us," she said, wincing as she used him as a support to clamber to her feet. "The griffins found you."

He was paralyzed, still on his knees as she gritted her teeth and tested her shoulders, shrugged them up and down, drawing circles with her arms. Blood stained the pale cloth of her sleeveless shift, but any fool could see she wasn't badly hurt, only tired, thin, dirty, and very sore.

She stared at him, seeking into his heart. At last, she kissed him on the lips. She tasted salty, and a whiff of something like brimstone trailed off her body. He shut his eyes, savoring her touch, needing only to let all the flavors of triumph and horror and joy mix within him.

In time he found himself, his words, his strength.

"With you," he murmured, "anything."

He rose, holding her close although it was clear she was not going to fall.

"Is it true you are regnant now?" she asked.

"I am. How could you know?"

"I met Zuangua."

'Ah. What of your companions, the ones who departed with you through the crown?"

She shook her head. "I don't know. I lost them months ago." She shuddered. "It was a terrible thing, Sanglant. Terrible. Anne is dead."

Said in such a voice, raw with grief. He had no need to question. Anne was dead. Liath had done what needed doing, although the cost had been high. He felt a wild laugh rise, and swallowed his fear and sorrow and anger, because they had not yet come close to knowing the full weight of the storm or how far it had spread its wings.

"You'll tell me what I need to know," he said. "Come. I can get you a bit of food at least. You're too thin, my love."

"What of those we left behind?" she demanded, clinging to him so he couldn't take a step. "What of Blessing? Heribert? Where is Hanna? What about Ivar? And Sorgatani and Bertha? Are they all lost?"

"I don't know."

She let go of him to cover her face with her hands. He waited while she trembled, lost in a battle for which he carried no weapons, but at length as the night darkened and the griffins settled down with coughs, scratching in the dirt, and distantly a voice called for folk to lie back down and get some sleep by God ... at length she sighed and lowered her hands.

"There," she said. "There. All done. Where are we going?"

"Home to Wendar." He took her hand as they walked up toward the army, who stared in astonishment. How could they not? He was their regnant now, and Liath would be their queen.

2

AT night, high in the Alfar Mountains, Liath stood beside a fire and told the story to several hundred listeners, who would in their turn pass the tale back to the rest of the army. Many more crowded up in the darkness, waiting in utter silence, but because she told the tale as a poet declaims into a shuttered hall, not as a captain shouts, her voice did not reach as far as his might have, pitched to pierce the clamor of battle.

Still, he could not tell the tale as she could. He left her to it while he sat in his father's chair, which, because it was the regnant's chair, was now his. The small chest containing Henry's ashes, bones, and heart sat on the ground to his left, pressed up against the legs of the chair. He did not like it to rest too far from him, day or night.

"My knowledge is incomplete," she began—as she would! "But this is what I know which is certain, as well as what I believe must be true based on the stories and experiences I have myself heard and seen. All this was hidden or forgotten for long years, for generations, a time beyond our imagining. It was forgotten or became legend long before the birth of the blessed Daisan, who brought Light to us all. This tale must come to light now. It should be known to as many people as possible, if we are to make sense of what we must do next."

He marked their audience. Closest sat the most noble of his companions, Duchess Liutgard, trembling Duke Burchard, Lord Wichman who was, for once, paying attention, and the other lords and a few ladies who had marched south with Henry or with him. Beyond them crowded the clerics of the king's schola, led by Sister Elsebet, and those church folk who rode in the retinue of one or the other noble. He noted that the man known as Vindicadus had found a place close enough to hear, although he had no noble patron who might speak up for him. Behind this rank stood the captains and stewards who ordered the army and farther back yet waited sergeants and soldiers and servants hoping to catch what they could.

All must hear, so that they would understand.

He had ordered this assembly. The tides of destruction they had experienced had made them wonder and had made them fear. Any explanation was better than none, no matter how strange it might sound even when it was the truth.

"Two thousand seven hundred and four years ago, the Horse people allied with seven sorcerers from seven human tribes against a common enemy, known to them as 'The Cursed Ones' or the Ashioi. They wove a spell of power using the music of the spheres. This is the sorcery we call

'the mathematica.' This spell they threaded through seven stone circles, which they called looms and we call crowns. This spell ripped the homeland of the Ashioi out of the Earth and cast it into the aether."

"What is the aether?" someone called.

"That part of the universe that lies within and beyond the upper spheres. It's one of the five elements. The others are air, water, fire, and earth. Aether is the most rarified and pure. Unlike the others, it is untainted by darkness. Beyond the upper spheres, so the scholars teach, exists only aether, nothing else." She hesitated and, hearing no further question, continued. 'All the Ashioi were flung into the aether with their land, all except those who were not actually in their homeland at the time. These other Ashioi were pulled halfway but not completely out of the world. Their shades haunted the forests and trails of Earth for centuries as elves who shot poison darts at any person unlucky enough to stumble across them."

"Those are just tales told to scare children," said a voice from the crowd.

It was Vindicadus, once Hugh's servant. Sanglant had not expected to hear a challenge so soon.

Liath smiled, but her look was grim. "I have met shades while traveling through the deep forest.

They are not tales. Their elf shot killed my horse. And drove off bandits."

Among the sergeants there came a flurry of movement. A white-haired man pushed forward into the ranks of the captains. "Let me speak!" he cried. "I have served with Prince Sanglant. He himself freed me and my four men from Salavii merchants who had captured us and meant to sell us into the east."

"What's your name?" asked Liath.

"This is Gotfrid," said Sanglant, before the old soldier could answer. "I recall you from Machteburg. What is it you have to say, Sergeant?"

"Just this." He surveyed the assembly with the hard gaze of a man who has seen enough that he no longer fears the disapproval of others. "I and ray men—we survived the attack of Lost Ones.

We saw our comrades fall beneath the sting of their darts. If you doubt the lady, then I pray you, answer me how I could have seen them as well. Two of my men are still with me. They will tell as well, if you ask, what they saw."

"What of the other two?" Sanglant asked, knowing the answer because he had already heard the tale.

The man gestured with his hand, a flick, as dismissal. His throat and chin tightened.

Folk murmured, but it was hard to tell who they believed.

"Is there anyone else here who wishes to speak about the existence of the Lost Ones?" asked Liath.

No one did. The heckler had vanished back into the crowd. Sanglant could, in a manner of speaking, smell that he still lingered, and he wondered what twisted loyalty held the man to Hugh of Austra. Liath was already going on.

"As centuries passed, the story of the great spell was lost until it became nothing more than legend. The Ashioi came to be known as the Aoi, the Lost Ones. The knowledge used to weave the spell was lost also, because, I believe, all seven of the sorcerers who wove it were killed in the backlash from the spell."

A murmur followed this statement, quickly stilled.

"Perhaps they left no apprentices to carry on their learning, although that would surprise me."

"Perhaps those who were left behind chose to forget," said Sister Elsebet. "What the church has condemned must be immoral."

"This was before the time of the blessed Daisan," said Liath. "They would not have been able to follow the rulings of the church."

"They might have known in their hearts that it was wrong," retorted the cleric.

Liath nodded amiably. "There are many possible answers. Perhaps their apprentices were too inexperienced, or too secretive, or too horrified to pass on the knowledge. Perhaps they were told not to. We'll never know, since we have no way of asking."

"I pray you, Lady Liathano," said Duchess Liutgard with a doubting smile, "how can you tell us this knowledge was lost when you stand here before us branded as a mathematicus yourself? The Holy Mother Anne boasted of her sorcery, and taught these arts openly in the skopal palace these last two or three years."

Liath nodded, echoing the other woman's formality. They did not know each other. Liutgard knew of Liath only as the Eagle who had stolen Henry's favorite child away from the glorious alliance Henry had promised him. Yet it seemed to Sanglant that Liath was deaf to whatever undertones sang through the nobles as they measured her. She was focused, simply and always, on understanding the truth.

"A good question, my lady. If you will allow me to unfold my argument, then the map will become clear to all, I hope."

Liutgard nodded. She was, Sanglant thought, not afraid to offer Liath a reasonable chance to explain herself.

"In time, certain half-Ashioi, half-human descendants of the original Ashioi built a powerful empire in the southern lands bordering the Middle Sea. They called it Dariya, and called themselves Dariyans. As it was sung by the poet,

"Out of this people came one who ruled as emperor over men and elvish kind both."

"The Dariyan Empire soon ruled much of the northwestern continent and the lands along both the northern and southern shores of the Middle Sea. We are traveling on a road paved by this empire.

Eventually, the Horse people—the Dariyans and historians call them the 'Bwr' which is derived, I think, from the word—"

She broke off, catching herself, and, as a rider shifts her mount's direction, got herself back on the main path.

"The Horse people became aware of the Dariyan Empire. They feared and hated the Dariyans because the Dariyans were descended in part from the hated Ashioi. In the early 200s, the Bwr invaded in a host and burned and pillaged the city of Dariya. It's likely that in the course of their invasion they contracted a plague that decimated their numbers. They retreated to the eastern steppe that was their ancient homeland to protect themselves against further incursions by humankind, although humankind had once been their chief allies."

Burchard coughed. 'Are these Horse people you speak of not the same ones who ride with us, as our allies? Does this mean they are still our enemy? Or our friends?"

Liutgard's mouth tightened as she looked past Sanglant to the honor guard attending at his back.

Her forces had taken the worst of the centaur assault. She had no reason to love the Horse people.

Sanglant glanced behind. Captain Fulk and Captain Istvan stood behind his chair, alert to the disposition of his most loyal forces.

Capi'ra and her sergeants waited in shadow, seeming at first glance like women mounted on horses, but he could hear their soft whickering commentary although he could not understand what they were saying. Beyond them rested the slumbering griffins with their wing feathers touched by the light of the camp's bonfire.

Smoke stung his face as the wind shifted. He fanned a hand to drive it away although in truth it made no difference.

"The Horse people are our allies, Burchard," he said.

"Your allies," said Liutgard.

"Mine," he agreed, "and thus, for the moment, yours, Cousin. I pray you, Liath, go on."

"I pray you!" cried a voice from the back, that damned serving-man again. "You speak of the lives and empires of the heathen, yet you have not said one word about the blessed Daisan! Do you even believe in God?"

"Hush!" said someone else in the crowd.

"Let her speak!" cried another, the words echoed by a chorus of "let her speak" and "yes" and

"shut your mouth."

"Else we'll be standing out here in the damned cold all night and freeze our hands to what they're scratching," finished a wit.

"Well," said Liath, raising her voice as the others dropped theirs. She slid easily into the silence.

"All here have heard told the life of the blessed Daisan and his chief disciple, Thecla the Witnesser. This we know and believe, that the blessed Daisan revealed to all of humankind the truth of the Circle of Unity, of the Mother and Father of Life, and our belief in the Penitire." Her gaze had a peculiar way of going flat when she quoted from memory, as if she looked inward, not outward. " 'The blessed Daisan prayed in ecstacy for six days and on the seventh was translated up to the Chamber of Light to join God.' "

Her gaze sought the heckler, and perhaps it found him, because she paused for a moment with a fixed stare, then smiled just a little as a bully might, seeing his prey flinch. The man had by this time moved so that his body was hidden to Sanglant's line of sight.

"What matters to the story I tell you tonight is that the belief in the Circle of Unity and the Word of the blessed Daisan spread outward on the architecture of the old Dariyan Empire."

"More than that!" interposed Sister Elsebet indignantly.

"Ai, God! Spare us these interruptions! I'm still scratching!" cried the wit.

Sanglant sighed.

Sister Elsebet stepped forward and glared her audience into silence. "None of us can speak as if this war is ended."

"Which war is that?" asked Liath. "I thought I was speaking of a war."

Elsebet pounded her staff twice on the ground. "I will listen, but I will not remain silent on this matter. I pray you, Your Majesty!"

He was caught, and he knew it as well as the cleric did. "Go on, Sister. What is it you must say?"

"That the woman has knowledge of sorcery and history I can see, and perhaps respect. But the war that afflicts those of us who live within the Circle of Unity is never ending. It is impossible to speak of the blessed Daisan without speaking as well of those who have sought to corrupt his holy teachings."

"Have we time for this?" Sanglant asked Liath.

A foolish question. She was interested, and entertained. She could go on in this vein for hours.

"You speak of heresy, Sister Elsebet, do you not?"

'As must we all! Alas!"

"Then I pray you, educate us."

Once offered, quickly taken. Sister Elsebet did not strike Sanglant as a fussy, troublesome woman, nor had he in their brief acquaintance been given any reason to believe she was one of Hugh's adherents.

"Go on," he said, giving her permission.

She came forward. Liath did not, in fact, make way or give up her own place standing on a conveniently situated rock that elevated her a bit above the rest, but she did drop her chin and, between one breath and the next, efface herself. The shift was astonishing. Sanglant had never seen her do such a thing before, as if she doused the radiance that made her blaze. Before, she must command the gaze; now, she was only a woman standing on a rock listening as a cleric spoke of the holy truth that sustained them.