The Gathering Storm (75 page)

Her breath came in ragged gasps as she sprinted, seeing the smoke of their campfires just over the next rise.

The griffin bounded to the crest of the hill and paused there, shining in the midmorning sun to scream its rage as a challenge. Adrenaline hammered through her as she bolted forward, hoping she had not come too late. When she crested the rise and saw the unexpectedly large camp laid out in an orderly fashion below her, when she saw—and how could she miss it?—what Sanglant had done, she began to laugh or else, surely, she would have cried.

“THERE’S a griffin on the hill, my lord prince!” Even Captain Fulk, pushed to his limit, could sound frightened sometimes. “God Above! And a woman walking with it. She has a bow.” The hesitation that followed these words was so heavy that Fulk’s astonishment seemed audible. “Lord have mercy!”

“My lord prince,” said Heribert softly. Joyfully. “It is Liath.”

Sanglant had never known it could hurt to open your eyes, but it did. Everything hurt. Breathing hurt. The sunlight hurt, but he looked anyway at the dazzle of light on the eastern slope. It was hard to see anything with the sun so bright and the beast that paced there so very large and fierce-looking, its wings gleaming ominously as it stretched them wide.

It screamed a challenge. Horses whinnied in fear, and he heard men shouting. In response to that cry the silver griffin strained and fought against the ropes and chains that bound it, but the soldiers had done their work well. One rope snapped, but the others, and the chains thrown over its deadly wings, held. Surly darted in to grab the thrashing rope and with the help of several of his fellows tied it down. No one got hurt this time, although it had been a different outcome hours ago when they had walked the hobbled, hooded griffin into camp and staked it down.

“What do we do, my lord prince?” asked Fulk, still nervous. Horses stamped and whinnied, not liking the approach of the griffin one bit despite the calming work of their grooms.

That griffin did indeed look fearsome. Its iron tang drifted on the breeze. It had, no doubt, come to rescue its mate. But what on earth was Liath doing walking beside it as though it were her obedient hound?

“Where is Lewenhardt? We’ll need every archer. Spearmen set in a perimeter, in staggered ranks. Double the guard on the horses if you haven’t already.”

He rested on a couch his soldiers had dragged out into the center of camp so that he could lie close—but not too close—beside
his captured griffin and talk to it, when he didn’t doze off. It had to become accustomed to him.

He gritted his teeth and made an attempt to stand, but he did not have the strength. Hathui and Fulk and Breschius moved to help him, but he waved them away impatiently.

“Let her come to me. I need not move.”

I cannot move.

“My lord.” They glanced at each other; if thoughts were words, he would have heard an earful, but they remained mercifully silent. Liath started down the hill toward them while the griffin remained on the hill. Maybe it had intelligence enough to be wary of the soldiers forming up throughout camp, faces grim and weapons ready. Maybe she commanded it with words alone. Maybe she had that much power.

“Do you wish for shade, my lord prince?” asked Hathui.

“No,” he said, because the sun’s warmth—such as it was so early in the spring—soaked into his skin in a healing fashion, as though light itself could knit him back together again.

His retinue gathered beside him, keeping well back from the hooded griffin. It had not liked entering the camp; the scent of horses stirred its blood, and Sibold had taken a gash to his shoulder and several men had been clawed, but in the end they had secured it without loss of life. Blinded by the cloak, it had submitted. Now it stirred again, knowing its mate was close. But that hood still constrained it. It hated and feared blindness.

It was his, now, and he did not intend to lose it. Not even to his wife.

She walked into camp, armed and glorious, and approached him, halting a body’s length from the couch on which he lay. He found himself distracted by that long snake of a braid falling over her shoulder and across one breast, all the way down past her waist. He remembered the way the tip of that golden-brown braid swayed along her backside when she walked.

“Prince Sanglant,” she said in the formal manner, jolting him back to the cold, cruel present.

Two could play that game.

“I am Prince Sanglant.”
In case you have forgotten.

Her expression did not change, but her chin lifted, so he knew she had taken the blow. Yet she went on in the same vein.

“I am come to make an alliance with you. You marched east seeking griffins and sorcerers. I see that you have captured your griffin. What of the second part of your quest?”

“I believe I can train a griffin to eat from my hands and come at my call. Are sorcerers as obedient?”

Anger sparked in her eyes—really sparked; it was uncanny how the blue fire of her irises flashed as though it burned.

“May we speak privately?” she asked finally.

He had enough strength to lift a hand. Fulk chased off the onlookers and finally only Fulk, Hathui, Breschius, and Heribert were left in attendance, hovering close, anxious and pale.

“I listen,” Sanglant said, in the formal manner.

“Where is our daughter?”

“With me; under my care and that of her loyal attendants who have served her faithfully for four long years, never leaving her side and even risking their own lives to keep her safe.” He read how the blow landed by the tightening of her lips and the twitch of her shoulder, but she did not reel or stagger.

“She suffers from a malady that cannot be healed by any ordinary physician. She will die if she is not protected by sorcery until we understand how we might heal her.”

“She has not died yet. I believe it was your return that injured her.”

“Sanglant!” Yet she hesitated. She thought, hard and deeply, although her expression gave away nothing. His attendants stared at her, amazed at her presence; amazed, perhaps, by this negotiation that was more like the maneuvering of rival families than the reunion of intimate partners.

Heribert seemed ready to speak, but Sanglant caught his gaze and, with a sharp sigh, Heribert shifted from one foot to the other and kept his mouth shut.

“Sanglant.” Again she hesitated, but only to gather her voice, to speak softly enough that even those standing nearby
might not hear her words. “Why do you speak to me as though we are enemies?”

He did not care what others heard. He wanted witnesses. “Enemies? Worse than enemies! You abandoned me! Just left me behind in Verna. Your daughter is enchanted, spelled in a way no one here can comprehend, but you were not here to combat it. Now maybe she will die. I was left behind with all else. For four years! I thought you vowed to be faithful to me, but you proved no different than my mother. Husband and child, abandoned without thought.”

It was so good to fight back. He wanted his words to hurt her, and they did. He saw her face go gray; he saw her hands curl and her entire body quiver.

She was not without weapons of her own.

“Your mother was never married to King Henry.”

“That’s right! She’d made no pledge to him! She had no obligation to uphold! But you did! Why did you leave us? Why did you wait so long to return?”

Now she was really angry; she shone with it. “I did not abandon you! I was taken from Verna by my kinfolk. I never asked to go with them. When I could not follow them higher up into the heavens, I found myself in your mother’s land, where I learned all that Anne says is true, and worse besides, that her understanding of the truth is twisted by her own fanaticism. But now I have walked the spheres. I have seen through the gateway of the burning stone into the ancient past. I know what destruction awaits us if Anne weaves the spell a second time.”

She had really worked herself up. Her voice rang as if above the din of battle, carrying over the camp so that the griffin quieted and every soul stopped and turned.

“I did not leave you for four years. In the lands of the Ashioi, time does not run by the same measure it does here. There is an old sorcerer still alive there who lived in the days of the great cataclysm when his people and their land were torn from Earth. He is your
grandfather
, Sanglant. Still alive, although by our measure he would have lived—ai, God—twenty centuries or more. Yet he seems no older than an elder who boasts seventy years. When I walked in that far country, when I ascended the mage’s ladder and walked the spheres,
it seemed to
me
that no more than seven days had passed. It seemed that I left Verna only a handful of days ago. I could not have returned sooner! I did everything I could. I suffered, and I learned, and I placed myself in danger, and I have grasped the heart of the power that is within me. Maybe I am the only one here who can stop Anne. Maybe that duty, that obligation, has been forced upon me. Maybe that obligation has to come first. Maybe the lives of untold countless thousands and tens of thousands have to count for more than one life, even the life and happiness of my beloved husband. I am sorry that four years passed for you! I would not wish for it to have happened in this way, but there was nothing I could have done differently. I could have stayed there, with my kinfolk, in a place much better and brighter than this one! But I chose to return to you. To Blessing. To Earth. To my father’s home. And I surely expected to come back to a better welcome than this!”

In the absolute stunned silence that followed this declamation a rolling rumbling
whoosh
of flame erupted along the ridge, causing the big griffin to take wing and circle away to a safer resting place. Grass sizzled and soldiers cried aloud. Smoke poured heavenward as Liath looked up, startled, and saw the spreading fury of the fires. With an intent gaze, attention shifting entirely and horribly away from him, she frowned. The fires snuffed out, just like that. Smoke puffed; ash sprinkled down over the camp and drifted away on the wind.

Sanglant had become suffused with an entirely unexpected—or foredoomed—flush of arousal just looking at her, being close enough really to smell the perfume of her. His anger made his senses that much more on edge and her presence that much more intimate, although they did not touch. She was so beautiful, not in the common way but in the remembered way, when he had dreamed of her those nights in Gent, when he had woken up beside her those nights in Verna and been astonished and delighted and utterly famished, starving for the touch of her skin, her hands, her lips.

Maybe he couldn’t walk yet, but he had strength enough to move his arms. He caught her around the back of the neck, where skin and hair met at the nape. Just that touch made him
drunk with ecstasy. He pulled her head toward him and kissed her. And kissed her.

And kissed her.

Her warmth melted him like the sun’s fire, as though desire itself could knit him back together again.

“My lord prince! The griffin!”

He released Liath as she pulled away from him, jumping to her feet. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes bright, as passionate as he was. But behind her, the griffin stalked through the line of tents. Men cowered, but the beast did not strike. Fulk stepped forward, spear raised, but Liath intercepted him.

“Don’t move!” she said sharply.

Heribert had gone gray-white, like curdled milk, and Hathui tensed, her mouth a grimace, as she prepared herself for death. Only Breschius stared in outright awe, gaze lit with wonder, as the griffin swung its head to examine him. The frater looked ready to die at that moment, as long as he was slain by something so terribly beautiful.

Then the creature moved past him and loomed over Sanglant.

“Don’t move,” said Liath, but of course he could not move even had he meant to kill it. An iron reek rolled off it like the heat of the forge, soaking him to the bones. He had to close his eyes; his face was sweating.

“Now what?” he asked, cracking open his eyes. He almost laughed. He was entirely helpless; it could take his head off, and even his mother’s curse could not save him then. Yet he could not keep his gaze away from his wife’s form, glimpsed beyond that massive eagle’s head. He knew what lay beneath Liath’s tunic; he saw the curve of her hips, the swell of her breasts, and frankly after all this time the griffin seemed rather more a distraction than a danger. At this moment. At this instant. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to die if you expired in the arms of the one you loved best.

The griffin huffed, a wheezing cough, and the silver griffin uttered a yelping call in answer.

“Do you wish to free her mate?” Liath asked.

“No,” he said defiantly. “I need griffin feathers. A live
beast serves me as well or better than a dead one. I claim him.”

“So does she.” She, too, was laughing—although not aloud. Her expression sang with it. She didn’t fear the griffins, and more importantly she still desired him.

The griffin lowered its head until that deadly beak hovered an arm’s length from his face, seeking his scent or an understanding of his essence.

“Do you still love me?” he asked, thinking that he might die before he could take another breath. He had to know.

Now she did laugh. “I swore an oath to never love any man but you, Sanglant, so it scarcely matters, does it? I bound myself. I will never be free of you.”

“Thank God.”

The griffin huffed again, a noise that shuddered through its body, and lifted its head, then sat down on its haunches like a watchdog. The audible gasps of the soldiers and his attendants flowed around him like the murmur of a rising wind. An iron feather shook free and drifted down to slice through the grass beside his couch. He reached and found that if he grasped the quill and kept his fingers away from the feathered vane and edges, he did not cut himself.

“I couldn’t even kill Bulkezu,” he said in a low voice, staring at the feather. The anger wasn’t gone, only swallowed. “I need this griffin, or you may as well lead the army yourself.”

She grimaced as a shadow covered her face. “I am no leader. I am no regnant.”