The Gathering Storm (123 page)

“Move!” screamed Bertha. “Go! Go!”

“Charge them, men!” bellowed a captain among the enemy. More massed behind that front line. Archers with burning hands wept. A horse thrashed on the ground beside her, pierced by a dozen arrows.

The Kerayit slave women drove the wagon headlong into the burning wall, their horses frantic with fear as they plunged through the fiery gap. Under the press of the wheels, logs crumbled like burning straw, and the flames that licked along
the painted wagon guttered and failed as Sorgatani’s magic killed them. The wagon was through! A cheer rose from the survivors as they pressed forward in its wake, seeing escape.

A roar unlike that of fire rose from the enemy.

“Forward!” The captain took a step, then a second. “Forward, you cowards!”

The line doubled, swelled, gathering strength for the charge.

“You must go, my lady!” cried Bertha, coming up beside her, still mounted. Her horse’s eyes were rolling with fear, and it was streaked with ash and flecks of charcoal, but it held its ground. An arrow dangled from its saddle, fixed between pommel and seat. Bertha’s shield had been lopped in half, and she cast it away.

“Mount up behind me!” she cried.

“Go on!” shouted Liath. “I’ll hold the rear. Hurry!”

Bertha did not hesitate as Liath delved into the iron rimming of shields; she sought deep within swords for sparks of fire bound tightly within. Boot and belt, hair and bone, all bloomed as fire scorched through the front line, and yet they came on and on, screaming, shrieking, while those behind them yelled and cursed and some ran toward her all over fire like torches.

I am a monster
.

One passed by her and threw himself on a Kerayit who hung back with a few others to protect her back. She saw their faces change shape as fire ate flesh down to bone. Their eyes were black pinpricks, bursting open at the moment of death. The tents within arrow shot burned so bright it seemed like day. Yet nothing touched her. She was the center, the sun.

“Fall back, my lady!” cried Bertha far behind her. “Or we shall all surely die waiting for you!”

Had they all gone so quickly? She retreated, step by step, holding the enemy at bay simply because she existed. More than two score men lay in ruin around her, some dead, their fingers and arms curling like charred twigs. A few, the unfortunate, writhed on the ground, whimpering, moaning, skin melted off or hanging like rags. Smoke, sweet with scorched flesh, drifted in a haze around her so it seemed she moved backward into a miasma.

So I do
.

She fought an urge to run. To turn her back would be certain death as arrows still rained around, many burned away within an arrow’s length of her body. Hundreds of furious, fearful men kept their distance but moved with her, pace by pace. She saw her death in their gaze. They hated her for what she was.

“Liath!” cried Breschius from far away, but not so far, where moments might seem like an hour, where three strides might seem like three leagues The stockade still burned; she heard the rattle of the wheels of Sorgatani’s wagon crunching away over dirt. Had she taken more than ten breaths between the collapse of the stockade and now?

She was almost there. The heat of the burning logs whipped along her back.

“Bright One! Run quickly!”

Gnat’s voice came from the wrong direction. She lost track of her footing. With her next step she tripped over the leg of a fallen horse.

She was able to catch herself as she rolled onto the body of the beast, but before she could rise, an arrow struck through her thigh, piercing her flesh and burying its head deep in the horse’s belly.

She screamed. Pain bloomed. Flames spit up from the earth. As she twisted, seeing fletchings protruding from the leg, a second arrow hit through the same thigh, at a different angle.

Mosquito appeared, dodging through burning tents, ducking behind a fallen horse. “Mistress! I come!”

Fire shot up in a wall, driving her foes back. Horsehair singed, its scent stinging her.

“Go!” she screamed. “I command it, all of you. Gnat! Mosquito! Retreat! Save Sorgatani!”

She grabbed one of the arrows, but her touch on the shaft sent pain shooting up her spine and down her calf. She choked down a scream; she knew what she had to do.

Let them run
, she prayed.
Let them retreat and save themselves
.

She grabbed each shaft, closed her hands around them, and called fire. The pain inside her thigh flared; it bit; it flowered.
It stunned her with its ferocity, eating at the flesh from inside. She wept. Tears spattered her face with cold fierceness. There was a terrible strong wind blowing in off the sea. Thunder rumbled.

Or was it the earth trembling beneath her?

Fire guttered as rain splashed, yet it wasn’t the rain that cooled the flames but the sparkling wings of butterflies, a thousand winking shards. Where they fluttered, flame died.

The first arrow crumbled away into ash. Blood from the wound gushed down the belly of the horse. Ash and blood in a muddy mixture dripped onto her feet. She tugged on the second arrow and almost passed out, but it did not break. It had not burned through.

“I’ve got it, Mistress! I’ll put it out.”

Mosquito was the one with the round scar on his left cheek and a missing tooth. Gnat had broader shoulders, a broader face, and was missing the thumb on his right hand.

And, damn him, there he was, scuttling in beside his brother. He shoved a knife between her thigh and the horse, levering it in until it hit the shaft.

She thought the pain of that movement alone would kill her. The heavens dazzled; stars spun webs, and Mosquito yelped with fear as Gnat sawed and she moaned. A glittering net drifted out of the sky an arm’s length above them. Butterflies skimmed across her cheeks.

Anne stepped out of the line of soldiers and halted a stone’s toss in front of her. The skopos was crowned and robed in the splendor of her office, wearing white robes embroidered with red circles. No ash marred the purity of that linen. A gold circlet rested on her brow, mirroring the gold torque that circled her neck, the sigil of her royal ancestry.

Anne regarded her in silence for some moments. Because the light of the burning tents blazed behind her, her face was in shadow, half obscured. Yet Anne had always been obscured; if there was passion beneath that cool exterior, it, like coals, had always been buried beneath a layer of ash.

“Shoot the servants,” she said.

Five arrows flashed out of the burning night. Three thudded wetly into flesh: two into Mosquito and one into Gnat,
just above his collarbone. He fell back, choking. Mosquito had collapsed without a sound.

“I am disappointed in you, Daughter,” Anne said in that mild, flat tone. Anne never raged. “You cost me so much. Yet now I have nothing to show for it.”

“Did I cost you so much?” The agony awash in her thigh, the sting of the blade’s edge pinching her mangled flesh where the knife was still wedged between leg and horse, was nothing compared to the pain in her heart. “I cost you nothing. My mother and father are both dead. What cost was there for you in my conception? In my mother’s death? In my father’s murder? Except that you had to lie to the others all these years, pretending that I was born from your womb.”

“Ah.” Even with the truth cast on the ground for them both to consider, with the charred bodies of men smoldering around them, Anne did not flinch or falter; she showed not the least tremor of emotion. “Well, then. Certainly there is no hope of a rapprochement if you have discovered the truth. Yet I wonder. How do you know these things?”

“Well, then,” echoed Liath, mocking her. Mockery was all she had, surrounded by the ruin of her hopes. “It seems you have told me more than I have told you, since you have now confirmed what I only guessed at. I have nothing further to say.”

The first strands of that net brushed her hair and settled over her shoulders. The fire that burned inside her, her mother’s spirit, shrank from its cold touch.

“You need not speak, Liath. Your plans are an open book to me. You may have a fire daimone’s heart, but you are weak, as Bernard made you. You were easily captured and will be easily held in my power. With this same net of sorcery I caged your mother.”

The net was a cage for fire. But she was only half born of fire. The rest of her was common human flesh, Da’s heritage.

She grabbed the arrow and wrenched. The pain blinded her, but only for an instant. Gnat’s knife had done just enough work, weakening the shaft, which snapped, half charred, half splintered. She rolled sideways over the smoking body of the horse to fall between her wounded servants.

She grabbed their arms and, of a miracle, they scrambled
up although it was impossible to know how they could still walk. They ran, staggering, bent over, while men shouted and gave chase.

One glimpse only she caught of the smoking gap in the stockade, of Anne’s soldiers pouring through the opening in pursuit of her own people. Rain swept over them. Hail burst, thundering over the ground. Lightning flashed to display in one sharp vision the broad expanse of sea, waves churning up as a storm drove down on them from across the waters. Whitecaps foamed.

A wall of men blocked the gap in the stockade. Anne’s net brushed the skin of her trailing hand, leaving bloody welts.

“This way!” cried Mosquito, but his voice was liquid; the second arrow had punctured his lung and blood frothed on his lips.

They wavered on the edge of the cliff, poised there, staring down and down to the water below. There was no beach, only the sheer face of the cliff and a scattering of rocks showing above the waves. Out in the sea, mer creatures swarmed, their ridged backs parting the choppy waters as if they sensed the battle, or the magic, above and wished to discover what was going on.

“There is no other way,” murmured Gnat. “It is better if they do not have the chance to mutilate our bodies.”

He leaped, and his brother jumped after, and she did not think or hesitate as she followed them over the edge, springing out as strongly as she could so that she might not fall straight down to the deadly rocks below.

Her wings of flame shuddered, flared and unfolded, and for two breaths she had lift. Gnat hit the water and vanished under the waves. Mosquito was gone an instant later, swallowed by the sea. The wind blasted her sideways. Thunder crashed.

Her aetherical wings had not the strength to hold her. Their substance collapsed as the wind battered her. The inexorable weight of the Earth was like grief, dragging her down.

I’ll never see my beloved, or my child, again.

She plunged, wingless, lost, and tumbled into the sea.

HAMMERS rang. Axes thunked into wood. Shovels scraped into dirt followed by the spitting fall of earth thrown up onto the growing ramparts, the sound like hail spattering against the ground. The music of these labors accompanied Stronghand as he toured the new fortifications at Medemelacha. Eika and men worked together if not always side by side.

With his escort of the five dour merchants whose families controlled most of the commerce in the town, a dozen men-at-arms, and his most faithful attendants—the two hounds—he walked down to the strand where the shipyard bustled. Axes and adzes rose and fell. Men hammered wedges into a huge trunk to cleave it in two. Four boats lay propped up on stumps and posts, the newest no more than a keel while the most complete was being fitted with a side rudder. Soon it would be ready to launch.

Medemelacha had doubled in population in the last six months as folk swarmed to the trading town to get work in the shipyards and on the fortifications. Barracks had been built for the workers and to house the garrison. The farmland for a day’s walk on all sides lay under his control, enough to feed the population as long as the harvest was good. He had given up inland strikes in favor of consolidating his position on the Salian coast and in Alba.

Yet the failure of his rescue gnawed at him. He had no peace; he could not savor his triumphs.

“There are three men in the customhouse who await your pleasure, my lord,” said Yeshu as they lingered in the shipyards and the merchants began to fidget.

He tore his gaze away from a young Alban man, his pale hair tied back with a strip of leather, who under the hot harvest sun had stripped down to a loincloth as he carved out a stem with an ax. It was sweaty work. He worked in tandem with an Eika brother, a handsome, brawny fellow whose skin gleamed with silver and who had taken to wearing a tunic in the human fashion, covering him from shoulders to knees. They worked easily together, making a comment now and again, picking out splinters, blowing away sawdust; laughing
once, as comrades do. A young woman came by with a skin of ale; he could smell it from here. She had her hair concealed under a scarf and her skirt robed up for ease of movement so that her pale calves and bare feet were exposed. They joked with her, Alban and Eika alike, although it seemed she was Salian and could barely understand them. Yet she did not fear them. She, too, laughed.

This was prosperity—that folk laughed while they worked because they did not fear hunger or war.

“My lord,” repeated Yeshu.

He returned his attention to his companions. The merchants murmured among themselves. One was a veiled Hessi woman; she stood away from the others, who were Salians once beholden to other noble protectors. Out in the bay, a longship was being rowed toward shore, and its oars pulled in as the sailors made ready to draw up on the beach. It flew Rikin’s banner. He sighed, and as he turned to address the others, he stifled a nagging sense of regret that he could no longer stand where the Lightfell plunged down the mossy rock face, far down into the still, blue fjord. Hadn’t he known peace there once?

Maybe not. Maybe he had never known peace from the day he was hatched and began his struggle to live.

“What matter needs my attention in the customhouse? Is there not a council of elders to consider such things?”

“Yes, my lord. But it seems two of these men are suspected of being smugglers, and the other is a merchant from north up the coast, out of Varre. It’s thought you might wish to speak to him. He may know something of the disposition of Duke Conrad’s forces.”