Prince of Dogs (Crown of Stars 2)

Or perhaps it was only a hawk, hunting for its supper.

A thin crest of breeze touched her ears, and she thought she heard the bird’s harsh call; its slow spiral did not alter. As she waited, the heavens shaded from the vivid blue of afternoon into the intense blue-gray of impending twilight. Shadow crept up the stark white peaks as the sun sank in the western sky.

Where had Wolfhere gone, and why was he taking so long to return?

The path wound farther up into heather and gorse, sidetracked by heaps of sharp boulders and the high shoulder of a cliff face. Beyond, the dirt track lost itself in a narrow defile. Wolfhere had bade her wait here while he walked on ahead, disappearing through the narrow gate of stone and crumbling cliff into the vale that lay beyond. Through the gap Hanna saw the rippling tops of trees, suggesting a cleft of land that ran lush with spring-fed plants. She had seen other such valleys in these mountains, sudden gorges and startlingly green vales half hidden by the jagged landscape. Beneath the scent of gorse she smelled cookfires and a distant whiff of the forge.

Why had Wolfhere wanted her to accompany him this far, and no farther?

“Stay here and watch,” he had said. “But on no account follow me and let no other follow me.”

What was he hiding? What other did he expect to follow them up here, on this goat track he called a path? She turned to look back the way they had come. At first she thought they had been following a goat track along the heights towering above the ancient paved road that marked St. Barnaria Pass. But no goat’s track sported a thin trail of wagon wheels, although how a wagon could possibly be dragged up here was more than she could imagine.

It was very strange.

A few steps back, an outcropping gave her a good view down onto the pass below. The road had been built during the old Dariyan Empire by their astoundingly clever engineers. In the hundreds of years since then, not even winter storms had washed it away, although many of its stones were cracked or upturned by the weight of snow, the thawing power of ice, or the simple strength of obstinate grass. Its resilience astonished her.

The hawk wafted lazily above. She blinked back tears as her gaze caught the edge of the sinking sun. Specks swam before her eyes; then she realized that two more birds had joined the first.

Her neck hurt from staring upward for so long, but in her seventeen or so years of life she had never imagined there might be a place like this. She knew the sea and the marsh, rivers and hills and the dark mat of forest. She had now seen the king’s court and the glittering parade of nobles on his progress. She had seen the Eika raiders and their fearsome dogs so close she could have spit on them.

But to see such mountains as these! The peaks were themselves presences, towering creatures hunched in sleep, their shoulders and bowed heads covered by drifts of snow deeper than anything Hanna had ever seen. Last winter she would have laughed at any poor soul foolish enough to suggest that she, Hanna, daughter of the innkeepers Birta and Hansal, would herself journey across those mountains wearing the badge of an Eagle. Last winter her mother and father had arranged for her betrothal to young Johan, freeholder and farmer, a man of simple tastes and no curiosity, his gaze fixed on the earth.

Now, as summer flowers bloomed alongside the high mountain pass, she—mercifully unbetrothed—was on her way south across the Alfar Mountains, an agent of the king on an important errand to the skopos herself. Truly, her life had taken a sudden and surprising turn. How distant Heart’s Rest seemed now!

From the outcropping she could see down to the road and, farther back, partially hidden by the thrusting shoulder of a ridge, the hostel where their party had halted for the night. The stone buildings nestled into the ridge’s spine. Under the protection of the skopos, the hostel was run by monks from the Order of St. Servitius. According to Wolfhere, those monks stayed up in these inhospitable heights through the winter. A merchant in their party had been snowed in one terrible winter, or so he claimed, and he had regaled the party with a horrific story of fire salamanders, cannibalism, and avenging spirits. The story sounded so true when he told it, but Wolfhere had stood in the shadows of the campfire that night, shaking his head and frowning.

She had seen heaps of snow in shadowed verges beside the road and huge fields of ice and snow on the slopes above, giving credence to the tale, but she had also seen flowers aplenty, pale blue, butter yellow, scarlet and orange, scattered across tough grass and ground-clinging shrubs. She had seen sky so deep a blue that it shaded into violet as if brushed with a stain of beet juice. She laughed at herself. Their party included a bard journeying to Darre to make his fortune, and he never used such prosaic images as beet juice to describe the sky.

No one traveled the mountains alone, not even King’s Eagles. They had found a party assembling in the city of Genevie and joined it. Now they counted among their companions the bard, seven fraters, a high and mighty presbyter returning to the skopos with an important cartulary and his train of clerics and servants, and a motley assortment of merchants, wagons, and slaves—and the two prisoners she and Wolfhere and ten of King Henry’s Lions escorted to the palace of the skopos in Darre.

A breeze skirled down from the heights, and the sun slid behind a low-lying ridge. The moon’s pale disk gleamed softly against the darkening sky. Dusk. She shuddered.

Where was Wolfhere? How was she to make her way back down that path in darkness? What if he had fallen and hurt himself?

A bird called. She had a sudden, awful feeling of being watched.

She spun and there, perched on a stub of rock jutting out from the cliffside that demarked one side of the narrow defile, sat a hawk. She let out a nervous chuckle and fanned herself, abruptly flushed though the day was cooling fast. The hawk did not stir. Uncanny, with eyes as dark as amber, it stared unblinking at her until she felt chills run up her back.

And there was something else … a suggestion of something hovering just where the path dipped out of sight. Something there and yet not there, a figure glimpsed out of the corner of her eye, a pale woman creature whose skin had the color and texture of water. But when she looked directly, she saw nothing, only shadows sliding along the rock like the ripple of water over pebbles in a stream.

The hawk launched itself up in a flurry of wings. She ducked instinctively and heard a gasp. Was it her own or someone else’s, someone hidden?

The hawk was gone. A light bobbed into view. Wolfhere, whistling, came up the path around the shoulder of the cliff face.

“Lady Above!” she swore. “I thought you weren’t coming back.”

He stopped and looked around, then cocked an eyebrow and resumed walking past her and down the path toward the hostel. To keep in the light she had to hurry after; the moon was not yet half full and did not give enough illumination for her to negotiate the hillside track.

“Where did you get that lantern?” she demanded, angry that she had waited for so long but would evidently get no explanation.

“Ah,” he said, hoisting the lantern a little higher.

He did not intend to answer her. Fuming, she followed him down the path, stumbling now and again over a rock or a thick tuft of grass grown untimely in the middle of the track. By now the hostel appeared below them only as a dark encrustation against the blacker ridge; a single lantern burned at the enclosure’s gateway. So did a light burn all night, every night, a beacon for any lost traveler caught out and struggling toward safe haven just as after the body’s death the soul struggles upward to the Chamber of Light—or so the bard had said, thinking it a poetical conceit.

“Where did you go?” Hanna asked, not expecting an answer. Wolfhere gave her none. She watched his back, his confident walk, the gray-silver gleam of his hair in the twilight, his ancient, seamed hand steady on the lantern’s handle.

Hanna did not distrust Wolfhere, but neither did she precisely trust him. He kept his secrets close by him, for secrets he clearly had. Starting with the one he had never answered: How had he come so fortuitously this past spring to the inn at Heart’s Rest just in time to save her dear friend Liath from slavery? He had freed Liath and taken her away from the village, made her a King’s Eagle like himself. Like a leaf drawn in the wake of a boat, Hanna had been dragged along also. She, too, had been made a King’s Eagle, had left the village of her birth to begin these great adventures. Wolfhere was not a man of whom one asked questions lightly, but Hanna was determined to see Liath remain safe. So she had asked questions, which was more than Liath was willing to do. How had he known Liath was in Heart’s Rest and in danger? From what was he protecting her? Wolfhere had never taken offense at those questions; of course, he had never answered them either.