Crown of Stars

by Kate Elliott

  Where a silver river ribbons in long looping curves across the golden landscape, the land sinks into a marshland of tall reeds and shallow pools of standing water. Beyond, paler grass grows in clouds like mushrooms, but these are, after all, tents sighing in the wind. The camp wakens. Its inhabitants crowd onto the margins to mark the group that approaches them.

  Far above, a shrill cry reverberates. A woman who is also a mare turns and sights and points, calling to her companions to warn them, then raises her bow and releases an arrow into the sky. It burns, and Hanna tumbles. Tumbling, she sees griffins spinning above her, one gold and one silver, flying east toward the dark spires of distant mountains. They pass over her, and she twists and finds herself wading in ankle-deep water, pressing through reeds, scratched by blades of grass as she pushes up out of the shallows onto dry land that at first sinks beneath each step and then dries and stiffens to dusty earth and a sheen of green-gold grass so fresh and new that it smells of spring.

  “We return,” says the centaur who leads the others. She stands in the center of camp, where the grass is flattened in a circle. “We have seen terrible things. Our ancient enemy has returned.”

  “Where is the child?” asks the Quman shaman.

  “Gone, gone,” the others sigh, shaking their heads. “Vanished from underneath the hill.”

  “Where has she gone?”

  They do not know.

  “Where is the Holy One?” asks the centaur woman who leads the newcomers. “I am charged with a message for her.”

  The Holy One walks slowly, favoring her hind legs in a manner that makes it obvious each step brings intense pain. She is not silver-white but rather so old that every hair has turned gray; she is so old that it is impossible she still lives. Magic has kept her alive all this time.

  Her ears flick. “You have returned, Capi’ra, young one. What message? What news?”

  The herd listens in intent silence as the story is told, and Hanna hears the news she has sought for so long: Liath is alive, traveling with Prince Sanglant. Except now he is king. Henry is dead.

  She wipes her eyes, but the tears keep flowing. She touches to her lips the emerald ring he gave her, but even that gesture gives her no comfort.

  King Henry is dead.

  A great cataclysm has shaken the Earth.

  “War is coming,” says Li’at’dano. “The ancient paths along the burning stone are closed to me now. The aether is too weak to hold those paths open for more than glimpses. So this is the first I have heard of these events. This changes everything. We are too distant to aid those who would be our allies.”

  “I am here!” calls Hanna.

  Li’at’dano’s head raises in surprise. At first, seeking, she does not find Hanna among the herd, but at last, spying her hidden in the grass, she nods. Hanna steps into the open.

  “Luck of Sorgatani,” the centaur shaman says, but where she looks none of the others can see anything. Not even the Quman shaman can see her. He stares, he seeks. The others stare, they listen, but Hanna understands that only the Holy One can see and hear her because Hanna inhabits this land as a part of that dream known solely to the Kerayit sorceresses, who are bound to the Horse people by threads woven in the time long ago.

  “What news?” Li’at’dano asks her.

  Quickly, Hanna tells her what she knows: the battle between Anne and Liath fought by the standing stones and reported to her by Bertha and Sorgatani; the fiery tempest as seen by Bertha’s party and by Hanna and the clerics within the Arethousan army; the destruction along the coast that wiped out the imperial city of Arethousa; the little band that has trudged through mountains and forest across a vast distance to reach Wendar at last. She is an Eagle, trained to distill and to report.

  “Why are you come to me? Where is my daughter, Sorgatani?”

  “Sorgatani sleeps in her cart. I am on watch. We fear enemies may stalk us, robbers or outlaws. The wind carried me here. I don’t know why.”

  “Hai!” The Quman shaman points to the heavens. “Beware!”

  Smoke curls up into the heavens, dirty streamers against the white-blue sheen of the sky. Distant shouts ring. Horses trumpet in alarm.

  “Raiders have set fire to the grass!”

  “Where are they? What happened?”

  “They wear the faces of animals!”

  Li-at-dano staggers as if she has been shot. Horse people and their Kerayit clansmen bolt into action. The swirl catches Hanna, spinning her away as on a rising plume of smoke.

  “Beware!” the Quman shaman cries again.

  A hiss burns her cheek.

  “Aie! Unh!”

  Stephen’s shout yanked her back into the night shadows. In the camp, the dogs barked furiously, whining and growling. At first, she could make sense of nothing except that it was night. The air tasted of rain, but no drops struck her.

  A second hiss teased her ear. The air trembled, displaced, and as if it had sprouted there, an arrow quivered in the ground a finger’s width from her left knee.

  That woke her.

  “Unh! Unh! Ai, God! God!”

  Stephen had fallen onto his back. She flung herself down alongside him. Blood coated his shoulder. A shaft protruded from his flesh. A third arrow whistled overhead.

  “Attack! Attack!” She jumped to her feet, got her hands under his good arm, and dragged him backward. He was a big enough man that he ought to have been difficult to pull along, but he pushed with his legs and anyway she was racing in her heart, every limb on fire and her face flushed and her breath catching in her throat. Lady Bertha shouted commands, barely heard above the clamor of the dogs, and not soon enough Hanna stumbled into what shelter the half fallen walls of the chapel offered. Other hands grabbed Stephen and hauled him away. She sank down on her knees, bent over her thighs, and tried desperately to catch her breath. Little thunks peppered the other side of the wall as the enemy shot at them from the safety of the darkness.

  By the light of red coals simmering in the fire pit, she measured their position. The dogs swarmed around Lady Bertha’s feet, yapping and circling. A dozen soldiers were ranged around the chapel, a few fixed up on the wall, others braced behind the wagons or the shields. One man cut away at the arrow in Stephen’s shoulder.

  “You’ve suffered worse, old friend!” the surgeon joked. “You’re just wanting a scar to impress new lovers—”

  Stephen gagged, stiffened, and went into convulsions, twisting right out of the other man’s grasp. Hanna stumbled forward, dropped beside him, and held him down, but when the fit passed, he stopped breathing and fell slack.

  Dead.

  The other soldier—it was Sergeant Aronvald—looked up at her, eyes wide with disbelief. “That shouldn’t have killed him.”

  Hanna touched the shaft where it met the skin. She circled it with her finger, then sniffed. “Poison, perhaps. Or magic.”

  “Poison!”

  She wiped her moist skin on the dead man’s leggings, then for good measure in the dirt, rubbing it and rubbing it to make sure it all came off.

  On the wall, a man cried out. “Uhng! Damn. Scraped me, but I’m still good.” She saw him only as a shadow. He twisted the arrow in his hand and set it to the string.

  “So far no sign of any but these damn arrows out of the dark,” said Bertha from the corner where wagon met stone wall. She hushed the dogs.

  “Best smother what remains of the fire,” said Hanna, not realizing she had a voice.

  The coals gave only enough light to distinguish one form from another. The horses had been moved back to the raised dais where the altar had stood. Their hooves rang on stone as they shifted nervously under the control of Bertha’s groom Geralt, Sister Ruoda, and Brother Jerome, who calmed and comforted them. The skewbald kept his head, nipping younger horses who wanted to kick up a fuss. Canvas had been rigged to form a measure of shelter against rain.

  Sorgatani’s cart was set against the right-hand wall. Tracery gleamed on its painted walls, pa
tterns that to Hanna’s eyes seemed to slowly unravel and knit together. The goats had been tied up on a line behind it, and they protested with a constant chorus of bleats.

  They had shoved Mother Obligatia’s pallet under the Kerayit cart. Others huddled there with her, as many of the clerics as could fit: sobbing Gerwita, Petra and Princess Sapientia, Hilaria, Diocletia, slight Jehan. Heriburg was wedged between cart wheel and stone wall stubbornly sharpening willow wands into pointed sticks which might be used as weapons in close quarters if all else failed. Hanna could not see Sister Rosvita or Brother Fortunatus.

  “Let us pray they get bored and fade back into the woods,” murmured the sergeant.

  “Ai! Ai! What fire burns me!”

  The man up on the wall who had been scraped by arrow shot roared in pain, thrashed, and tumbled. He did not fall more than ten feet, but he fell hard and wetly and lay dead still. His bow smacked into the dirt beside his body. The terrier trotted over to him, sniffed the glistening tip of the arrow that had felled him, and backed away growling.

  The sergeant looked at her, and she looked at him. He scrambled for the fallen man, pressed his own head down over the other man’s head. For a moment no arrows struck the stone; only the wind wept among the ruins.

  He flung back his head. “My lady! Lady Bertha! I fear these points are poisoned. Any scrape, any strike, will kill us. Ai, God have mercy!”

  An arrow clacked against the wall.

  “I’m hit,” said Jerome, from among the horses.

  Every person startled, as if his words were a blow. For the longest time, no one moved or spoke as from the night came no fresh shower of arrows. Even the scrape of Heriburg’s knife ceased. Rain clattered in the trees.

  Or was that rain? Pebbles shaken in a gourd might make such a sound. Whining, the dogs slunk under the wagons.

  A man’s scream rose out of the night. No one moved. They were all afraid of exposing themselves to an arrow’s poisoned barb. The cry cut off. The rainlike sound ceased.

  “That was Wilhelm,” said the sergeant. “At the first wall, twenty paces out.”

  The men stared into darkness. They were nothing but silhouettes, barely visible. Spears and swords and bows had no more substance than branches. When the next flight of arrows poured in, anyone might be scratched, and die.

  Hanna stood. “Under the wagons. Under shields. Under canvas, any cover at all. Cover your faces. No matter what you hear, don’t look. Be blind.”

  “We can’t fight if we’re blind and hiding!” said the sergeant.

  The enemy didn’t have their range quite right. Half the next volley snapped on stone and a dozen arrows skittered along the canvas awning, but one buried its point into the dirt an arm’s length from the sergeant and another skipped across Lady Bertha, but surely her mail had protected her.

  “Ai, God!” cried the sergeant. “Are you hit, my lady?”

  Bertha’s face was pale, but Hanna could not tell if the arrow had drawn blood. She did not answer.

  Above, another soldier shrieked. “Ai! Ai! I’m hit!”

  Two dropped out of the wall. “Peter’s touched! We’re like trapped ducks there, strung up for market day!”

  “It burns!” screamed Jerome, and Ruoda began sobbing and wailing, “No, no, Jerome! God! I pray you! Spare him!”

  “Down!” cried Hanna, and Bertha answered her.

  “Down! All of you! Take cover! Cover your faces! Do as the Eagle says!”

  Hanna ran to the cart, not waiting to see if they obeyed her, although she heard them scrambling. The shaking rain began again.

  They are advancing.

  She pulled open the door and shoved past Brother Breschius, who was poised a hand’s breadth from the threshold. Out of the darkness, cries rose from inhuman throats, but their battle cry was a name she recognized:

  “Sanglant! Sanglant!”

  “Sorgatani! We’re lost if you do not come now! We have no defense against their weapons. I pray you! I do not know what enemies these are—”

  “I know who they are.”

  The Kerayit shaman was bright in her golden robes, beautiful and terrible. Her expression was cold. In one hand she clutched an anklet of bells. She said nothing as Hanna stepped aside to let her pass.

  “Hanna,” said Breschius. “Don’t ask this of her.”

  “She must go, or we’ll all die.”

  Sorgatani crossed the threshold and descended the stairs, shaking the slave’s bells like an amulet in front of herself. There was power in her. Her robes captured the fading light of the coals and shone with a dull gleam whose trail left a ghastly miasma along the ground, almost a living, breathing, crawling mist of shimmering copper intertwined with mottled patches of blood-red vapor.

  “This is a terrible thing,” murmured Breschius. “I cannot watch.” He hid his eyes against a forearm.

  Hanna went to the door. One of the horses had fallen, and in its screaming and thrashing had driven the other horses out beyond the aisle, where they milled about in the open chapel. Jerome’s body lay trampled under their hooves. Of the groom and Sister Ruoda, Hanna saw no sign, nor of anyone, not one except a half dozen pairs of feet and two rumps peeping out from beneath the canvas awning, pulled down on top of them, and shapes huddled under the wagons and the shields. Sorgatani whistled softly, and every horse quieted. The dogs fell silent. Even the goats ceased their complaining.

  Movement flashed by the narrow gap where the cargo wagon met wall. At first, Hanna thought it was their enemy, come to fight at close quarters. Then, horribly, she saw otherwise.

  Lady Bertha staggered into view, leaning against the wall, struggling although there was no sign of a wound on her. Her grin was lopsided, as though half of her face had already lost mobility and feeling.

  “Ah! Ah!” she said, in gasps of pain as she tried to speak words to the golden presence approaching her. “Too late for me. Too late. Blooded. But I had to see. I always wondered what you looked like. So beautiful!”

  She sagged, slipped down onto her knees, and slumped against the wall, eyes still open but staring sightlessly.

  Sorgatani walked past without faltering, through the gap. Hanna ran to the sheltering line of wagons. Sorgatani walked into the darkness. She was her own lantern. The mist boiled out from under her robes, streaming down the slopes in a flood that insinuated itself into every fold of ground, every crevice and gap of the ruins.

  Their cries changed at first into those of unknown animals heard at a distance in a trackless forest: faint, clipped, despairing. A few arrows flew. None touched the Kerayit woman. Figures darted among the low walls, but they dropped in their tracks as Hanna watched in astonishment. They could not outrun the sorcery that stalked them. Where it touched them, they died, until that light washed the ruined palace and the slopes of its hill, everything Hanna could see, like the moonlight she had not seen for months but turned here into a curse not a blessing. The color was wrong, a haze of corruption.

  Hanna stood at the breach. The wind had died. In all that world she heard each footstep as Sorgatani circled back and circumnavigated the chapel to flush out anyone hiding behind.

  Even that noise failed, as if she had fallen deaf and the world gone mute.

  She stumbled out, cautious of her feet, seeing shapes tangled on the ground where they had fallen, and sought through the weeds and stone until she found Sorgatani awash in a pool of pale light shrinking around her. She was kneeling. Retching. Braced on her hands, shoulders heaving as she coughed and spat.

  Hanna crouched beside her but did not touch her. “Sorgatani?”

  The light contracted, stealing back into her robes. Ribbons of angry brilliance twisted along the ground like brilliant snakes but these, too, faded. At last they waited together in night. A slight, copper gleam still shone from Sorgatani’s palms but otherwise shadow covered them.

  “The curse is real,” Sorgatani said in a hoarse whisper. Hanna could make no sense of her expression. Was she resigned? Triu
mphant? Appalled? Detached?

  “You saved us,” Hanna said.

  The shaman rose, staring at her shining palms. “I am a weapon the Cursed Ones do not know and cannot remember. My kind was not yet bound to the Horse people, our mothers. Do you think it is for this we Kerayit were made?”

  “It is only a few of you who are so cursed.”

  “It needs only a few.” She did not look at Hanna. All the Eagle saw was her troubled profile, eyes and brow tightened with disquiet, lips pressed firm, and the golden net of wire and beads that covered her black hair gleaming uneasily where the light gilded its webbing.

  “Can the Horse people have been planning for so long?”

  Sorgatani looked at her, half laughing, half grim. “Can they not have been? The Holy One is as old as the exile of the Cursed Ones is long. She must have wondered if they would return, if the spell might weave itself with its own pattern, unknown to us until it was too late.”

  “What will you do?” Hanna did not want to walk in the morning out among the dead. She did not want to make an accounting. Yet it would be done.

  “Make sure ours are still hiding. I must go to my cart.”

  Back to her exile. Her prison.

  For the first time, Hanna really understood what it meant. Even Sorgatani’s slaves had more freedom than she did.

  2

  AT first light they crawled out from under the wagons and gathered their dead: the archers Peter and Rikard; Brother Jerome; Aurea, Rosvita’s beloved servingwoman; Stephen and Wilhelm and Gund who had been out on sentry duty. It wasn’t clear if Gund had been killed by the enemy or by the curse, because he was quite a ways away, caught in the midst of a group of warriors as though they had captured him and dragged him off still alive.

  It scarcely mattered now. Lady Bertha was dead, and their enemy wiped out. They gave up counting enemy dead when they reached nineteen. There was some talk of burning the corpses, but no one wanted to touch them because these were creatures who appeared scarcely human. They had bronze-colored complexions and frightening animal masks and bronze body armor, molded to fit the slopes of their bodies as good masons built cunningly along the contours of hills. In truth, no one wanted to take their weapons or steal even such a trove of armor. No one wanted anything except to leave as quickly as possible. Sister Rosvita told them that the convent of Korvei lay ten or twelve days’ journey from here, in the borderlands between the duchies of Avaria and southeastern Fesse. From Korvei they could head north toward Quedlinhame and Gent, or west to Autun.