She rode for the river. Men scrambled away, fleeing from her—or from what pursued her, half hidden in the forest behind. The cold water came as a shock, coursing past her thighs as she urged her horse across the stream. The animal needed no pressing; it, too, was smart enough to run. The water flooded its rump and washed away the thin stream of blood that ran from the cut made by the arrow. For a moment, Liath felt the horse lose its footing; then they were struggling up the far bank, breaking through the film of ice that rimed the shoreline.
From behind she heard screaming; she did not pause to look. In the center of the road, stunned into immobility, stood one of the bandits. He stared in horror at the burning bridge and at his comrades falling on the other side or thrashing their way down the cold stream.
“Do you think King Henry leaves his Eagles unprotected?” she cried. He bolted into the woods, running from her—or from what lay behind her. She turned.
The burning bridge flared like a beacon. No shadows emerged from the forest, and the bandits had scattered. The bridge would be ruined. As she stared, she realized she could not put the fire out—she did not know how. She tried reaching, imagined a fire dying to embers and embers dying to dead coals, but the bridge burned on with the glee of a raging fire. It terrified her. She had no way to control it.
Then they came out of the forest. They had bodies formed in human shape, even the suggestion of ancient armor, hammered breastplates decorated with vulture-headed women and spotted lions without manes. But she could see the trees through them. They were more like a dense smoky fog forced into an alien shape, humanlike and yet not human at all—and they were coming after her. One raised its bow and shot at her, but the silver arrow, a wink against the sun, vanished in the flames. They came to the stream’s bank, well away from the scorching flames that devoured the old bridge, but they did not attempt to cross the water.
She turned her horse and fled.
She rode, walked beside her horse, rode again, then trotted again alongside her tired mount. But though a winter’s day was short, this one seemed to drag on and on. The forest would never end.
At dusk, at last and amazingly, it gave into scrub and overcut woods. Pigs scattered away from her. Fields which cut into stands of trees like gaping scars lightened her way. She was still shaking with reaction when she reached the town of Laar as the waxing gibbous moon rose behind her.
At the closed gates she called out. “I beg you. I am a King’s Eagle riding on the king’s business. Give me shelter!”
The gate creaked open, and they let her in. Good Varren villagers, they were not sympathetic to Henry, but she was a lass riding alone and, when it came down to it, they were eager to hear what news she had.
The village deacon led the horse away at once and applied a salve of holy water, dock, and stitchwort to the elfshot gash while singing psalms over the wounded beast. “It is clear you have been at your prayers, daughter,” said the deacon, “for surely the intervention of St. Herodia— whose feast day this is—saved you from harm this day.”
Liath left the horse in the deacon’s care and let herself be escorted to a longhouse where the whole village gathered to watch her eat a cold supper. The villagers knew of the bandits and were glad to be rid of them, and it was clear that Laar’s townsfolk had long ago resigned themselves to the depredations of the nameless creatures who lurked in the forest.
“Do you know what they are?” Liath demanded.
“The shades of dead elves,” said the householder who had taken her in.
“They are doomed to wander the earth,” said a village elder, “because they cannot ascend to the Chamber of Light.”
“My wise aunt told me the Lost Ones ruled here once,” added the householder. “Their shades can’t bear to leave the scene of their great glory. So they haunt us and try to drive us away so that their kin can come back and rule again.”
One tale led to another, and of course they wanted to know what message she took to Count Lavastine, whom they had heard tell of; his southernmost holdings lay not ten days’ ride from here. A few of the villagers had even seen the count and his army when they had returned this way last summer after the battle at Kassel.
“He had his heir with him,” said the householder. “A good-looking boy, tall and noble. What does the king want with Count Lavastine? Him being Varrish, and all, and the king Wendish. Maybe the king don’t like Varrish counts.”
So she told them about Gent.
“Ai, the Dragons!” said one old woman. “I saw the Dragons years ago! Very glorious, they was.”
That night, lying rolled in her cloak before the hearth fire, she dreamed of the Eika dogs.
XII
READING THE BONES
1
AS winter dragged on and the Eika left in Gent grew bored, Sanglant began to lose his dogs. Like his Dragons, they fought for him when he was attacked. Like his Dragons, they died. He did what he could to save them, but it was never enough.
Eika needed to fight and the combats they arranged against slaves were terrible to watch. The few combats they arranged against him, they lost. It was beneath their dignity to fight him many against one or with a weapon while he stood unarmed, and he had honed his skills so well over the months that none of them, however stout or bold, could best him.
That some Eika still raided he knew when one of the restless princeling sons brought in a few pathetic slaves or a handful of baubles to parade in front of Bloodheart, but the pickings in the region around Gent were pitifully thin by now after three seasons of raiding. Others hosted gatherings during which one or another of the savages would tell a tale of butchery in their harsh language that sometimes included horrible reenactments with living slaves, poor doomed souls.
Such shows impressed Bloodheart not at all. He, too, was restless. He played his bone flutes. He played with his powers, such as they were—Sanglant had little experience with sorcery and did not know how to measure what he saw: webs of light caging the cathedral with brightness; keening dragons that filled the vast nave with slashing tails and searing fire before they dissolved into mist; glowing swarms of mitelike bees that tormented Sanglant, stinging him until his hands and face swelled—only, all at once, to vanish together with the swelling when Bloodheart grew tired of the game and put down his flutes.
When the madness threatened to descend, he took refuge in his manor house, built as painstakingly over the winter as if he had sawed the logs and raised the roof with his own hands. The vision of the manor house saved him from the black cloud more times than he could count.
But it was never enough.