The Gathering Storm

by Kate Elliott

  “Showed she no sign of waking?”

  “None, my lady.”

  The griffins gleamed in the darkness, their wings faintly luminescent. With their heads set on their foreclaws they seemed to be slumbering.

  “Have the griffins eaten anything? If they become hungry, they’ll become more dangerous.”

  “Prince Sanglant has already seen to that, my lady.” Fulk’s tone held a hint of reproach. “Two deer were brought in this afternoon.”

  “Ah.” She should have known Sanglant, even as injured as he was, would not forget.

  She ate mechanically, knowing she must eat to keep up her strength. The stew was hot but its flavor bland. Only the fermented mare’s milk had bite enough to make an impression. Captain Fulk and the servant hovered, and the Jinna man took everything away when she was finished.

  “Have you aught you wish to say to me, Captain?” she asked.

  “My lady,” he said. That was all.

  He walked with her to the tent where her husband and daughter slept. She did not know him—she could not tell whether he wished to speak and kept quiet because he feared her or whether he was content with circumstances as they stood. This was Sanglant’s army, Sanglant’s people, all of them loyal to Sanglant. She was simply not accustomed to moving within a mass of hundreds of people—as many as a thousand, she guessed, measuring the circumference of the camp. Sanglant lived and breathed this life; it was the one he knew best and loved most. He had never been happy in the isolation of Verna.

  Even inside the tent there were a dozen souls present, half of them asleep and the rest chatting idly or finishing up their work before snuffing the flame from the precious oil lamps. They glanced at her but said nothing as she set down her weapons and her cloak. She knelt beside Blessing and stroked the child’s lank hair, matted from being pressed against the mattress, but although her daughter breathed, she was unconscious to the world. The Kerayit healer sat at the foot of the bed.

  Liath took off her boots, and lay down beside Sanglant. There was just room enough on the traveling pallet to squeeze in beside him. The warmth of his body was a comfort to her. Because she had only left him a few days ago, by her reckoning, she had never got used to sleeping alone after those long months at Verna sleeping always beside him.

  He slept deeply, his breath steady and his body still. He did not stir as she rested her head alongside his shoulder. He was warm and solid, and he smelled good.

  She woke at dawn to see one of her Jinna servants curled up at the foot of the pallet like a faithful dog. The other crouched at the entrance, keeping watch as attendants moved in and out of the tent.

  She sat up. Sanglant appeared not to have moved at all during the night. His color was better, his breathing slow and restful. She beckoned the healer and together they inspected the wound on his chest. The Kerayit shook her head, whistling sharply through her teeth as if she did not like what she saw.

  “It looks as if it is healing,” whispered Liath, not wanting to wake Sanglant.

  “Yes,” agreed the healer with a frown. “Is not natural, to heal quick. The wound must kill him. But it not kill.”

  What kind of sorcery did Sanglant’s mother possess that she could knit magic into her son’s body? That was a question Liath had never asked Eldest Uncle, and perhaps even he could not answer her. He had not walked the spheres, but his daughter had. She had surpassed her father in power, if not in wisdom. Liath, too, had gained greatly in power by walking the spheres, but the power she had gained came really more in self-knowledge than in any heightened sorcerous strength. If anything, her ignorance seemed clearer to her now; the gulf between what she had seen and what she truly understood yawned as perilous as the Abyss.

  “I will sit with my daughter,” she said when Fulk knelt to ask what commands she had for the army. “Let any who wish to speak with me wait outside, and I will come to them. Send Hathui to the centaur camp to convey this message: tomorrow morning we will ride out to a meeting place midway between this camp and that of the centaurs. There we can hold our council of war.”

  Fulk regarded her unsmiling. She could not read him at all, though he did not seem to be a surly or uncommunicative sort. He struck her as exactly what he was: the kind of man you wanted at your back in a fight. Assuming he was on your side.

  He nodded, rose to leave, but turned back briefly. “I will see that Argent and Domina are fed, my lady.”

  “Argent and Domina?”

  “The griffins, my lady. The prince named them.” Was he mocking her? Or sharing a joke?

  She could only incline her head to show her approval.

  She cradled Blessing’s head in her lap while Sanglant slept soundly beside them. In the child’s narrow face she sought desperately the memory of the infant Blessing had been. The chubby cheeks were gone, and it was difficult to trace a resemblance to father or mother because of the slackness that muddied her features. The girl’s color had faded to a sickly gray and her black hair tangled lifelessly. Her lips were as bloodless as those of a corpse. The healer squeezed a little honey and broth down her throat by slipping a hollow reed into her mouth and pinching fluid through, but such meager nourishment could only stave off the inevitable.

  I gave up four years of her life, the only time she may have.

  She wept silently but no great fist of grief gripped her chest; no wrenching sobs, no moans of sorrow. Do I not love her? If she loved her more, would she feel a fiercer grief? Yet the child’s slight weight seemed more comfort than sorrow. She mourned what she had lost, but she knew she could have done nothing else. The fire daimones had taken her without her own volition; once she found herself in the country of the Ashioi, she had comprehended the full weight of obligation. Duty might be cruel, but it was necessary.

  Had she not made the sacrifice, Anne would win without a struggle. Anne had been willing to sacrifice Blessing to begin with; perhaps Jerna’s gift had been to gain Blessing four years of life with a doting father. Anne might still win, and Blessing might die, but Blessing would have died anyway without Jerna’s nourishment, and Anne had not triumphed yet.

  Within the interstices of the burning stone lay many paths, some taken in the past, some branching into the present, and some only possibilities that would vanish when no foot took passage there. It was a madman’s game to second-guess oneself.

  But it would have been nice to watch the child grow, to see her face animated, to hear her talk and laugh and sing, to feel her little arms thrown around her mother’s waist, as children did, and the warmth of her cheek pressed against her mother’s face. It would have been nice to soothe her tears and kiss her small hurts.

  It had all just happened so fast—a handful of days like a coil of rope on one side that had been stretched out to its full extent on the other. The years had burned through her hands without her even realizing they had passed.

  The dim tent made a fitting bower as the hours passed. Blessing’s attendants woke and went about their business, but they were inclined to murmur among themselves and approach her with questions and requests and at least four times Fulk himself came in to ask her to meet with one person or another outside the tent who had a niggling concern that for some reason they felt obliged to bring to her attention. Couldn’t they just do what needed doing and leave her alone?

  Heribert sat beside her for a time, the only person who knew how to bide in silence. He held Blessing’s limp hand and wept silently. Outside, the soldiers followed their round of work, although once she heard a griffin’s shriek and hard after that the sounds of crunching and tearing as the creatures set to work on a meal.

  After some time, the sleeping Jinna woke and traded places with his companion, who crawled over to Liath.

  “What is your will, Bright One? May this miserable worm bring you food?”

  “What is your name?”

  “Whatever name you wish to call me, Bright One.”

  “I wish to call you by the same name your comrade addres
ses you by.”

  “He calls me ‘brother,’ Bright One.”

  She smiled. “Are you brothers in truth, then?”

  “We are, Bright One.”

  “Was it your father or mother who named you at your birth?”

  He recoiled slightly. “It would be against God to name a baby before it lives through three summers and can speak like a human being.”

  “Then what name were you given when it was time to give you a name?”

  He glanced up at her and as quickly averted his gaze. Like his brother, he was not nearly as tall as the average Wendishman. He had a complexion darker than her own and eyes so brown they were almost black, with thick lashes and heavy black eyebrows. She did not know how long he had been a slave, but something in the way he and his brother persistently insisted on serving her had a certain irritating charm.

  “My child name was Mosquito, Bright One, and my brother was called Gnat. We bothered our aunts greatly, and so won these names from them. But when we were sent to the men’s house to be sealed by fire—” He brushed the mark branded across his brow. “—we were given our men’s names, which I may speak aloud to no woman, not even one of God’s messengers.”

  “Then I will have to call you Mosquito and Gnat, after the fashion of your aunts.”

  “That would be well, Bright One.”

  She chuckled, but her amusement only pleased him.

  “I will take broth and heated water.” She consulted with the healer. “These herbs can be steeped in water, so that I may wash my daughter.”

  All was done as she wished, but the tincture rubbed over her skin made no difference to Blessing’s deteriorating condition. Sanglant slept all day, and Liath was driven outside in the afternoon to get fresh air, to survey the restless griffins and their nervous keepers, to walk for a while along the hills outside camp so that she might have solitude. The big griffin—Domina—paced a stone’s toss behind. Grass raked along its legs, and now and again the touch of its feathers sent sliced stalks fluttering into the breeze, spinning and tumbling. Only its threatening presence kept Mosquito and Gnat at a distance; they seemed eager to stick as close as the bugs their aunts had named them after.

  All these tents, soldiers, comradeship, and the seemingly incessant desire of every person there to chat about the most inane subjects, never leaving a person free simply to ponder without interruption, was driving her crazy. How did Sanglant endure it? How did anyone?

  So much needed to be done as they prepared their counterattack against Anne, and she needed time to think. There was no paper to be had, so that she might make calculations, a tremendously difficult task even for a mathematicus and practically impossible if it had to be done all in the head, even for a person trained in the art of memory. How did one get anything done with these constant interruptions?

  “Liath!” Hathui this time, returned from her errand. Only belatedly did she recall that Liath, once her comrade among the Eagles, was now something entirely else. “My lady! If you will.”

  “What news, Hathui? You need stand on no ceremony for me.”

  “Do I not? You are changed, Liath.”

  “So I have been told,” retorted Liath a little bitterly. “What news?”

  “This. That the centaurs will meet us just after dawn.”

  Liath looked out across the encampment with its circle of tents, makeshift corrals made by rope strung into fences between squares of wagons, and a stretch of empty ground around the slumbering griffin. Farther out and well upwind of the griffins, soldiers kept a tight check on grazing horses, taken out in shifts so as to minimize the likelihood that the griffin would decide to steal a snack from among them. There were so many people, more than had lived in the neighborhood of Heart’s Rest, certainly, and all of them loitering or working or gossiping or drilling. It was a king’s progress, for wasn’t Sanglant king among them in all but name?

  “Tomorrow, then,” said Liath, exhausted at the sight of such a large gathering.

  “Will we ride west at last? I fear we may already be too late for King Henry.” Hathui’s gaze was steady. She expected bad news but did not fear to hear it. She had taken three scars to the face in the years since Liath had seen her last and walked with a limp. Her injuries had not dimmed her strong spirit, yet Liath glimpsed vulnerability in her expression.

  “You are Henry’s loyal Eagle, are you not, Hathui?”

  Pride sparked in her face. She lifted her chin. “I am.”

  “Then I’ll tell you truly. I just don’t know. I’ve heard your tale, and I think it likely that his keepers must keep him alive until Princess Mathilda is older. It’s even possible they don’t actually wish to kill him, only to control him.” Despite his twisted nature, Hugh had never seemed to Liath like a man who reveled in death. He would choke you until you yielded, but he would not gleefully spill blood. He liked things tidier and more elegantly disposed. “That’s all we can hope for.”

  “What of you, Liath? You gave up your Eagle’s badge to follow Prince Sanglant, yet now the prince has rebelled against his father. It was said you were the great granddaughter of Emperor Taillefer, yet now you deny it. What are you, then? King Henry’s subject? Or do you also count yourself a rebel?”

  Liath shook her head. “My fight goes so far beyond the regnant’s authority that I cannot really consider his well-being as I make my plans. If we do not stop Sister Anne, then we may all die. What does his lineage and mine and yours matter then? Isn’t it true that in the Chamber of Light, before God, we all stand as equals? It may be we will find out.”

  “And what then?” Hathui’s face and lips were chapped from months of battering by cold and icy wind, yet the sunshine of the last few days had burned her hawk’s nose, now peeling. If it hurt, she seemed not to notice it. She had suffered worse, no doubt.

  No, Hathui wasn’t afraid of the truth. She could face down anything.

  “What then?” Liath echoed. “I have walked the spheres. I have seen things I cannot describe, though when I close my eyes I can still see them as vividly as ever I did when I faced them. A daimone of glinting ice barring my path. A sea of burning water that ate through the flesh of my hand. A golden paradise rotten with illusion and false hope. Wheels that spun and burned. A rainbow stairway that led up into the highest reach of the heavens. My mother’s death. And more besides, far more.”

  Hathui nodded. Liath had not spoken in detail of her journey, not even to Sanglant, but the Eagle understood its momentous import. The wind stirred the grass around them. The sun sank westward and the lazy warmth of its glow melted into her skin.

  “I have seen a crown of stars laid out across the land, spanning Taillefer’s empire and far beyond. In ancient times seven sorcerers wove a vast spell to sunder the land. I do not believe that these seven wielded such power because they came of noble bloodlines. I believe they possessed hard-won knowledge, they possessed determination, they possessed courage. They feared and hated their enemy so much that they were willing to risk anything and everything to rid themselves of them. They were willing to die. And to kill.”

  Willing to die, and to take friend and foe with them into death. One of these victims she had known.

  By unknown sorcery, Alain had come to inhabit the ancient past. What did he know of the great spell woven there? He might possess valuable secrets, crucial knowledge, if only she could find him.

  “And then?” Hathui coaxed.

  “And then?” The comment left her scrambling to remember what she had been speaking about. “Only this. Why do God grant each one of us souls? Is the soul of King Henry weightier than yours? Or does each woman and man bear a burden of equal worth? If King Henry can save us, then I will follow him gladly. But if he cannot, then I see no need to follow him blindly only because he is the son of a king.”

  “These are dangerous words.”

  “Are they? Or are they practical ones? Sister Anne is the granddaughter of the Emperor Taillefer, but that does not mean we must do
what she wishes us to do only because of her grandfather’s imperial throne.” Examining Hathui’s wary expression, Liath shook her head, dismayed. “Nay, you yourself, Hathui, are worth far more than she is.”

  The griffin huffed behind them, and Hathui started, then sidestepped nervously, keeping her gaze half on the griffin and half on Liath as if she were not sure who posed the worst threat.

  Would it always be like this? Liath knew her journey had changed her, and now she wondered if she could ever again live easily among humankind.

  Sanglant was awake when she returned to the tent, and not just awake but up and moving with only a trace of the stiffness one expected in a man who had so recently suffered such grave injuries. In fact, he was sitting on a bench and eating, careful not to bolt his food but clearly starving. When she swept past the entrance flap of the tent, he looked up immediately, set down his spoon with a sharp rap on the camp table, and stood.

  She had forgotten the way every action in any chamber he inhabited danced about the center—which was him. He did not clamor for attention; he just possessed the king’s luck, the regnant’s glamour, that brought all gazes to him whether they intended to look that way or not.

  “Liath,” he said. That was all. What he didn’t say needed no words. He stared at her. Devouring her with his gaze, as the poets said. He didn’t even need to touch her.

  Two unlit lamps caught flame.

  She flushed, bent her mind to their fires, and snipped them off.

  He laughed and, satisfied, sat back down and took up his spoon.

  “My lord prince.” Captain Fulk entered with a young soldier behind him.

  “What is it?” Sanglant saw the second man and beckoned him closer. “What news, Lewenhardt? Were you on watch?”

  “I was, my lord prince. Gyasi returns with two-score companions, half of them winged and the others women or boys. They’ll be here within the hour.”

  “Very well. Place my best chair outside with an honor guard. Let it face west. Call all the captains. I will receive them there.”