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

"I can kill another griffin. In your heart, crawling one, you will never be more than a worm."

"No," whispered Zacharias, but in his heart he knew it was true. Once he had been a man in the only way that truly counted: He had held to his vows. But he had forsaken his vows when God had forsaken him.

Bulkezu glanced toward the woman. He could move his neck and shoulders, wiggle a bit to ease the weight on his knees and hands, but he was otherwise pinned to earth, no matter how he tried to force or twist his way free of her spell. "I will raise an army, and when I have, I will burn every village in my path until I stand with your throat under my heel and her head in my hands."

Zacharias shuddered. But he had come too far to let fear destroy him. Against all hope he was a free man again, bound by his own will into the service of another. He might be a worm in his heart, but hearts could change.
She
had said that all things change.

"Come, you who were once called Zacharias-son-of-Elseva-and-Volusianus." She had stepped back from the edge of the stone circle and hoisted two baskets woven of reeds and slung them from the ends of Bulkezu's spear, then balanced and bound the spear as a pole over the saddle. To the saddle she tied three pale skin pouches, odd looking things that each had five distended fingers probing out from the bottom as if they had been fashioned from a cow's misshapen udder or a bloated, boneless hand. She tossed dirt over the fire. She whistled tunelessly and wind rose, blowing the fog outside the sanctuary of the stone circle into tufts of a wicked, cutting gale. The distant riders retreated farther away.

Bulkezu strained against the spear with its many rootling arms that clasped him to the earth, but he still could not shift at all, The remaining griffin feather hissed and fluttered in the rising wind. While she tested the harness, ignoring him, he tested his shoulders to see how far he could slide his wings out, or if he could wedge himself down far enough to cut at the magicked staff with the iron edge of that last feather. "I will have my revenge!"

She took no notice of his threat. Instead, when everything was to her liking, she returned to the eastern portal to watch. Fog shrouded the land, and in this fog she—and Zacharias with her—could easily make their escape, concealed from the eyes and ears of the waiting riders. But how long would they have until the Quman riders tracked them down?

She turned to smile at him as if, like the spotted thrush, she

had divined his thoughts. Carefully, she wiped drying blood from her abdomen, then clapped red-streaked hands together and spoke words. A flash of heat blasted Zacharias' face, and suddenly, as winked back into existence in the center of the stone circle, he knew that the Aoi woman would not leave this sanctuary by any earthly road.

The woman regarded him unblinking, as if testing his courage. Bulkezu said nothing. Zacharias dropped the horse's reins and untied the bedroll behind the saddle, shook it out to reveal the fine knee-length leather jacket that Quman men wore when they did not wear armor. He offered this to her so that she could cover herself, because not even necklaces covered her upper body now, only the smears and drying tracks of her own blood.

The stone burned without sound. Wind swirled round them, whistling through the stones.

Bulkezu threw back his head and howled, the eerie ululation that according to the shamans was the cry of the he-griffin. Zacharias had heard that call once, from far away, when the Pechanek clan had wandered the borderwild of the deep grass— the land beyond human ken into which only heroes and shamans might venture. Ai, God! He had never forgotten it.

But he would not let it rip his hard-won courage from him now.

She stepped forward. Zacharias followed, leading the horse.

The heat of fire burned his face, but just before he could flinch back from the flame, they passed through the gateway. Bulkezu's call, the high-pitched song of wind through grass and stone, the moist heat of a midsummer day blanketed by fog— all of these vanished as completely as though they had been sliced away by a keen and merciless blade.

I

THAT WHICH BINDS

THE ruins stretched from the river's bank up along a grassy slope to where the last wall crumbled into the earth at the steep base of a hill. Here, on this broken wall under the light of a waning quarter moon, an owl came to rest. It folded its wings, and with that uncanny and direct gaze common to owls it regarded the ring of stones crowning the hilltop beyond.

Stars faded as light rose and with it, shrouded in a low-hanging mist, the sun. The moon vanished into the brightening sky. Still the owl waited. A mouse scurried by through the dew-laden grass, yet the owl did not stir to snatch it. Rabbits nosed out of their burrows, and yet it let them pass unregarded. Its gaze did not waver, although it blinked once. Twice. Thrice.

Perhaps the mist cleared enough for the rising sun to glint on the stones that made up the huge standing circle at the height of the hill. A light flashed, and the owl launched itself into the air, beating hard to gain height. From above the stones it swooped down into the circle, where certain other stones lay on the soil in a pattern unreadable to human eyes. Flame flickered along the ancient grain of a smallish standing stone in the center of the ring. Out of the flame came faint words overheard in the same way that whispers escape through a keyhole, two voici in conflict.

"It seems to me that you have all been too gentle. A firms hand would have solved the matter long ago and bent this ori
_:
you seek to your will."

"Nay, Sister. You do not fully understand the matter."

"Yet do you not all admit that I have certain gifts none
f
the rest of you possess? Is that not why I was brought amon your number? Is it not fitting that you let me try my hand
ii
this in case your other plan fails? Then you will see what I
aiij
capable of."

"I am against it. "

"Yours is not the final word. Let the others speak."

Wind sighed in the distant trees and hummed through ths stones. A hare bounded into view, froze, its ears twitching, anl then flinched and leaped away into the cover of mustard flowei and sedge.

"We risk nothing if she fails," said a third voice. "If she suA, ceeds, we benefit, for then our absent sister can return her( quickly and we can return to our work that much sooner."

Hard upon these words came a fourth voice, "I am curious. I would like a demonstration of these methods we have heart so much about."

"I care not, " said the fifth voice, so faint that the sound
o
it almost died on the wind. "This is a trifle. Do as you wish."

Now the first spoke again. "Then I will attempt it. What hat eluded you for so long will not elude me! "

The owl glided down in a spiral. With sudden grace it foldei its wings and, heedless of the flames, came to rest on the smooti knob at the top of . The sun's light pierced th last strings of mist and broke brightly across the grandeur the stone circle.

Between one moment and the next, van ished—and the owl with it.

IN any village, a stranger attracts notice—and distrust. But Eagles weren't strangers, precisely; they were interchangeable, an arm of the king—his wings, so to speak—and they might come flying through and, after a meal and a night's sleep, fly away again, never truly at rest.

Liath had discovered that as a King's Eagle her only solitude on any errand she rode for the king came while actually on the road itself, because the roads were lightly traveled. Wherever she stopped to break her fast or for a night's shelter, she had no rest as long as she stayed awake. Villagers, deacons, chatelaines, nuns, even simple day laborers: All of them wanted gossip of the world beyond because few of them had ever ventured more than a day's walk from their home—and even fewer had actually seen the king and his court.

"Did the foreign queen die?" they would ask, surprised, although Queen Sophia had died almost four years ago.

"Lady Sabella rebelled against King Henry's authority?" they would cry, aghast and amazed, although all this had taken place a full year before.

"We heard the Eika sacked the city of Gent and are laying the countryside waste all around," they would confide nervously, and then she would calm their fears by telling them of the second battle of Gent and how Count Lavastine and King Henry had routed the Eika army and restored the ruined city to human hands.

To them, she was an exotic bird, bright, fleeting, quickly come and quickly gone. No doubt they would remember her, and her words, long after she had forgotten them and theirs.

It was a sobering thought.

In the village of Laderne full twenty souls crowded the house of her host, turning her visit into a festive gathering. They entertained her with songs and local gossip while she ate, but as soon as her host brought her a mug of beer after the meal, th turned their questions on her.

"What's your errand, Eagle? Where did you come from' Where are you going?"

She had learned to judge how much to say: when to keerf close counsel or when to be more forthcoming. Many people favored her with better food the more she told them, and this old) householder clearly thought her visitor important: She hadn' watered down the beer. "I'm riding to the palace at Weraushausen, at the king's order. He left his schola there, many of his clerics and most of the noble children who attend the progress. His own young son, Prince Ekkehard, is among them. I'm to give the word where they are to meet him."

"Weraushausen? Where's that?"

"Beyond the Bretwald," she said. They shook their heads, hemmed and hawed, and advised her to ride carefully and on no account to cut through the old forest itself.

"Young fools have tried it now and again," said Merla, the old householder. She had about six teeth left and was proud of them. "They always vanish. Killed by wolves and bears, no doubt. Or worse things." She nodded with satisfaction, as in pleased at their dreadful fate.

"Nay, I heard at market that foresters was cutting a roac through the heart of the BretwaJd at the king's order," protested one of the men. He had a face made bright red by many hours working in the sun.

"As if any could do so," retorted the old woman. "But you've said nothing of the king. Has he named an heir yet? This Prince Ekkehard, perhaps?"

"He has an eldest daughter, Princess Sapientia. She's old enough to be named as heir now that she's ridden to battle and borne a child."

"Ach, yes, proven her fertility and led soldiers in war. God have marked her as worthy to rule."

They nodded sagely all round, much struck by this sign oi God's favor, all except one thin man in the back. He sipped beei and regarded Liath with pale eyes. He was almost as brown as she was on his face and hands, but where his tunic lay unlaced at his chest—for it was still warm—she could see how pale his skin was where the sun didn't reach. "He'd another child, a son, with a Salian name—
Sawnglawnt,
or something like that. Hi was a grand fighter, captain of the King's Dragons. But I heard from a peddler that he and his Dragons died when the Eika took Gent."

She flushed, and was grateful that people who did not know her well could not see any change in her complexion, dark as it was. "Not dead," she said. How on God's earth did she manage to keep her voice from shaking? "He'd been held prisoner, but he was freed by troops under the command of Count Lavastine. He is now safe at the king's side."

They exclaimed over this miracle. She gulped down her beer. But the damage had already been done. That night she slept restlessly and in the morning blushed to recall her dreams.

Ai, Lady. What had he said to her six days ago as the dawn light rose over the king's camp, set up outside Gent?

"Marry me, Liath."

All day the sun shone as Liath rode northwest along the great northern loop of the Ringswaldweg. She passed only a few travelers during the day: two carters hauling coarse sailcloth weighted down by a dozen bars of pig iron; a quiet pack of day laborers seeking a harvest; a peddler pushing a handcart; and a trio of polite fraters walking south with bare feet, callused hands, and
sun-chapped
faces. The
ancient forest
known as the
Bretwald
loomed to her left, so thick that it was no wonder travelers did not bother to try to hack through it but rather suffered the long journey round its northern fringe. Land broken up by trees, pasture, and the occasional village surrounded by strips of fields marched along on her right. She was used to traveling. She liked the solitude, the changing landscape, the sense of being at one with the cosmos, a small moving particle in the great dance of light.