Elliott, Kate - Crown of Stars 3 (112 page)

The wind had come up, as if blown off the march itself, the procession winding by. They walked two abreast, with their unearthly bronze-complexioned faces and their strange garb, more beads and feathers than Alain had ever seen. Only a few wore rnetal, whether armor or decoration. All their weapons were of stone except for their arrows, which looked like slender, arm-length darts whittled out of bone. Not one man among them had a beard. Not one woman did not carry a bow. There were a few children, preciously guarded in the middle of the long line, naked bronze-skinned babies or long-limbed, silent youngsters with eyes as bright as stars. Every soul among them wore jade in an ear. Their passage was like the wind, and as Alain watched, he realized that in fact their feet didn't quite truly tread on the ground. No grass bent. No dirt stirred.

They weren't really here, not as he was.

Some man was crying in fear among the human crowd, babbling about a procession of shades come to haunt the waking world.

"Where do you come from?" Alain asked softly as the last dozen strode by, as silent as corpses, eyes alert although in truth they didn't really seem to see him. "Where are you going?"

"We were caught between one place and the next when the world changed. We were swept out to sea where the ground always shifts beneath our feet. But I feel the tide turning. It is coming back in. As the reckless one said, mayhap the tide will wash us back onto the earth again. Then we will have our revenge."

The prince swung into line behind the last of his soldiers.

Light rimmed the horizon. A cock crowed. The thin pinch of the last waning crescent moon floated just above the trees, fading into the dawn.

They vanished.

Had Alain been slugged in the stomach, he wouldn't have felt any more like the wind had been knocked right out of him. The stream flowed past, gurgling over the stones, and now it ran the same way it had last night, northeast, into the forest. Or perhaps he had only been dreaming it, before.

"What was that?" demanded Thiadbold as everyone began to talk at once.

"Captain! Captain!" A man came running. "It's Leo. He was sentry out by the forest. It's elfshot, Captain! He's terrible shot through with fever."

Alain went to the forest's edge with Captain Thiadbold, the blonde Eagle, and a nervous crowd of Lions, who promptly spread out in pairs to search among the trees. Dawn made them bold. There was no trace on the narrow track that any party, much less one of a hundred or more people, had passed over it during the night.

Leo was a man who didn't say much, and then usually only to swear. He was shaking now, a hand clasped over his right shoulder, but the rash had already spread up his exposed throat.

Sweat ran from his neck and forehead. His eyes had the glaze of shock.

"Nay, nay," he was mumbling, trying to push away someone in front of him who didn't exist. "Nay, nay. Be quiet now or they'll hear you coming."

"Get his mail off so we can see the wound," said Thiadbold. He still wore his helm, covering his red hair, but Alain could just see the scarred ear where the leather ear flaps had been pulled askew. "I thought it was a dream," the captain went on, looking at Alain. "That's why I went along with what you said. That, and what Hanna said—" He gestured toward the Eagle, who had evidently scrambled up so quickly from her bed that she hadn't belted up her tunic. "You sounded so sure of yourself—" He shook his head, frowning. Not quite suspicious, but looking as if he were sorry that he'd ever agreed to take on Henry's new recruit.

"Many of us have seen strange things in these days," said the Eagle. "Strange things in strange times."

Her words produced a flood of anxious commentary from the assembled Lions, broken only when Leo screamed as three of his fellows pinioned him and pulled his mail coat up over his shoulders. Then, thrashing, he rolled on the ground like a madman.

"Hush," said Alain, stepping forward and pressing him down by one shoulder. "God will help you if you will only be still."

Leo moaned, spittle running from his mouth, then fainted.

There was no sign of any arrow in his shoulder nor, when Alain probed with his fingers at the little hole pierced in Leo's shoulder, did he find a point or shaft broken off in the skin. But it was festering. Angry red lines already lanced from the wound, and his skin was rashing and blistering all around it. Alain set his mouth to the wound and sucked, spat, sucked again, spat again, until his jaws ached.

"Waybread and prayer for elfshot," said Alain. "That's what my Aunt Bel always said."

"A poultice of wormwood to draw out the poison," added the Eagle, but she gestured toward Thiadbold. "Your healer may know other charms."

"I've never seen so strange a sight," said Thiadbold. "Not once in my ten years as a Lion." He wasn't looking at Leo at all, but at Alain. "You were speaking to them, but I couldn't hear a word they said. They were only shades. Shadows of the Lost Ones. How could you speak to them, who are ghosts? What manner of man are you?"

Folquin and Ingo shoved their way through the crowd of Lions. "Here, Alain," said Folquin too heartily, but he reached down to grasp one of Leo's legs. "Let's carry him back to camp."

"We can rig a place on one of the wagons," said Ingo, drawing Thiadbold aside. "It won't take much time. We won't lose much on the march. I'd just as soon be through this forest before twilight."

In this way, they moved on. Folquin and Stephen jested with Alain and with the men around them as the day passed swiftly, a steady march under the canopy of the forest. By evening they cleared the thickest portion of the wood and, from a ridgetop lookout, could see the Veser River a half day's march beyond. Incredibly, Leo was recovering and he ate so much at supper that they joked they'd all have to fast. No one mentioned Alain's part in the incident, or at least not within his hearing.

Yet Alain was so tired he was dizzy, and he couldn't eat. He bundled up his bread and cheese and eased away from the fire. He found Hathumod easily enough, sitting in the last twilight trying to mend a torn skirt, squinting at the needle. As he came up beside her, coughing softly to let her know of his approach, she started, jabbed the needle into her fingers, and cried out.

"I beg your pardon, Lady Hathumod," he said. "I didn't mean to startle you."

"Nay, my lord," she said in a soft voice. Blood welled up on her forefinger, and without thinking she lifted the finger to her mouth to suck. She had gotten thinner. He wondered if she ever had enough to eat or if, like Tallia, she chose to fast.

He held out the bread and cheese. "You must eat this, Lady Hathumod, for you must keep up your strength. You can't fast and also march all day. Truly, I don't begrudge these beggars their share, but I haven't enough to feed them all."

She looked at him strangely. "Of course there will be enough, my lord, if it comes from your hands."

It was impossible to argue with someone who talked like that. He wondered how many beggars she had really seen before running off in the wake of the Lions. Did she cherish an innocent belief that Lady Fortune smiled equally kindly on every soul, here on this earth? Was her faith more pure than his, or only more naive?

He left her, because he couldn't bear the calm zealotry of her expression. He wandered up on the ridgetop, stumbling on rocks because he couldn't see his feet well. Up on the ridge, he felt the open land to his left, falling eastward into mystery, the uncharted land that is every footstep into the future. He felt the forest off to his right, a restless, breathing beast that had much to say in the wind of night and many secrets to hide. Had the prince and his followers been marching into the forest, or out of it? He couldn't now remember. Maybe it had been a dream.

But there was a flavor in the air tonight, something new that he hadn't tasted there before. At times the world seems to shift and invert: inside turns out, and outside turns in; dreams become waking, and waking becomes a dream.

Crickets thrummed. An owl hooted.

When he closed his eyes he could see Stronghand riding the waves, his ship turning as the tide turned, heading out to sea.

Something was going to happen. He would gather ships and allies, and he would drive Nokvi to a final confrontation in which one would emerge the winner, and the other would be thrown into the sea.

A watchfire burned in the distance, marking Namms Dale's new hall, so freshly built that the timbers still wept pitch and the aroma of pine was as heavy as incense. He was dizzy tonight, or perhaps it was only the veil of time opening and closing like bellows pumped by vast hands. Had dream become waking, and waking turned into dream?

The water chopped against the hull as the rowers set to. Stronghand shifted as they hit a swell, rode it, and plunged forward into the sound. A single lantern blazed at the stem, held aloft on a post. He knew the waters well, here. They would beach at a sand spit out in the sound and there he and his favored advisers—four warriors of his own tribe, two from Hakonin, and two human slaves—would take council, where the merfolk could send an emissary: a place between sea and land where neither held the advantage.

It washed him again, an invisible tide that overturned all things that lay in its path. He knelt on the deck to steady himself as the lantern swayed, back and forth, back and forth
and he is walking down through the camp where the Lions, still jumpy from their dawn encounter with the shades of the Lost Ones, have come to find entertainment among the whores. Lamp oil burns aplenty tonight; lanterns seemingly as numerous as the stars sway from branches. He smells venison roasting.

There, beside the fire where a raggedly-dressed boy turns a haunch of venison on a spit, he sees Hathumod holding what must be her only possession: a battered and smudged copy of the Holy Verses. Folk have gathered at the fire, mostly beggars and hangers-on but a few Lions also, but he is alert tonight, he knows the tide is turning and that anything might happen. Because he is alert he sees them coming, Lord Dietrich and his two cronies, big, broad bodies pushing arrogantly through the crowd as they make their way toward their prey and then, abruptly, sit down at the front, taking precedence over the others.

He moves forward quickly. "Are they bothering you?" he asks her, catching Hathumod by the sleeve before she can step forward into the firelight.

"Nay, my lord," she says, and her surprise is the surprise of the guileless child who is asked if she has ever laid an offering before her grandmother's gods. "They've done as you said. They've chosen their place. They've come to hear the teaching. "

IN the evening light, the stones looked like shrouded clerics standing watchfully at the top of the slope. Waiting for what? Since the fiasco at the old cottage, she and Sanglant had searched many times among the boulders in the high meadow but had found no path. Jerna still nursed Blessing, but her voice was gone; stolen, perhaps, or closed off by Anne's magic, who had used the daimone to lure Sanglant away and then made sure she could not be used in that way again.

As Liath waited for the first stars to wink into life above, she spun through her fingers the gold feather she had received from the old Aoi sorcerer. There was a secret hidden in the stones, and it was being concealed from her by the very people who claimed to be her teachers: everything was shrouded, not just the stones. She hugged the sleeping Blessing against her chest, kissed her black hair. Her little soft, round body was easy to hold and easy to cradle. She had a habit of sucking on two fingers as she drowsed off. Now, fast asleep, her tiny mouth had relaxed enough that the equally tiny and perfect and somewhat chubby little fingers lay tucked between her cheek and Liath's shoulder.

Her braid stirred. Wisps of loose hair fluttered on her neck. Was that a rising breeze, or the touch of one of the servants? Had Jerna followed her? She didn't look.

The stone crown at Verna was not a true circle but rather more of a slightly flattened oval. That it drew in the power of the rising and setting stars, the angles of the planets each to the other as they traveled through the ecliptic, seemed obvious to her: that was the art of the mathematici. At first she had examined the circle from within, standing at the central stone and sighting outward, but no reasonable line of sight presented itself. It seemed impossible to weave the alignments of the stars from inside the circle, like trying to draw the shuttle through the warp when you yourself were within the loom and the threads, not standing outside it.

That observation, of course, had made all the difference.

She heard footsteps and now she did turn, tucking the feather between tunic and breast so it lay concealed.

He had his tunic off his shoulders, gathered by his belt at his hips so that his chest and back were bare. With his ax balanced along his shoulders, he looked a tempting sight. He swung down the ax, kissed her, then the baby, then pressed against her as if to kiss her again. The sheen of sweat on his body must have been cooling rapidly as the night breeze rose; surely he was cold, or perhaps he just didn't notice. She was trembling, but not from cold. She touched a finger to his lips and just so slightly pushed him back.