King's Dragon (Crown of Stars 1)

“It is you, Alain!”

Through the pain in his head he heard her stumble toward him across the cracked paving. “Did you see it? Did you hear it?” She threw herself on him. He staggered back under the force of her fear and dropped the lantern. It sputtered out. “All black, they were, running through the sky like the count’s own hounds but screaming with hunger! If they had caught us, they would have devoured us.”

The heat of her body pressed against him drained the fog from his mind. He pushed her away though she was still babbling about red eyes and six-legged dogs, grabbed the lantern, and ran to the altar house. But the shade was gone.

“Don’t go in there!” she screamed as Alain crossed the empty threshold.

But there was nothing inside, nothing except the gleam of the ruined stone walls and an ovoid stone of pale marble—what those like Cook would call an altar—embedded in the earth at the center of the chamber. Nothing else except for grass and one scraggly bush whose waxy leaves left a trail of sticky ooze on his fingers. From outside he heard sobbing and then the sound of Withi running away down the broken avenue. He sat down on the altar stone.

This place, this outpost of the old Dariyan Empire, had stood here in all its glory so very long ago, for how many years he could not imagine, knowing only that the Lost Ones lived many more years than did men. Only in the end it had died, in its way, burning, while the lost prince searched for his Liathano and horses galloped away into a night drawn red with fire.

The gleaming stone faded to dull shadows. The stars lost their miraculous glamour and moved onward, ever westward on their endless round. He lifted a hand to his face and discovered his eyes were wet with tears. A shadow raced overhead, but it was only the owl, hunting in the night.

2

SUMMER passed. Alain did not have the heart to go back to the old ruins, knowing he would only find them empty. There was no answer for him there. Withi no longer spoke to him, and when he watched her, remembering her embrace, how she had clasped him close against her, he knew she was whispering of him to the others. Bitter, he kept to himself.

No other strange incidents disturbed the quiet of long summer days. Spelt was harvested. The oats were almost ripe. Chatelaine Dhuoda returned to the fortress with Lady Aldegund, wife of Lavastine’s cousin Geoffrey. A girl of about fifteen, she arrived at Lavas faint from exhaustion and from her advanced pregnancy. A wandering laborer, come to Lavas for the harvest work, had been one month ago in Osna village; he reported that Aunt Bel and her family were all well and had given him three days’ work hauling stone for quernstones from the quarry to Bel’s workshop.

On the feast day of St. Tiana the Joyous, holy martyr of the town of Bens, a messenger rode in. Alain looked up from the shed where he had been stacking bundled hay from the second crop cut on the south quarter.

The man had a dirty white rag tied around his head, covering his right eye and ear. Old blood stained it brown. His clothes were worn out, patched with the remains of other hose and tunics. When he dismounted next to the hall, he walked with a limp. It took Alain that long to recognize him as Heric, the brash young soldier of midsummer. His entire aspect was muted now.

Alain leaned against the low fence that hemmed in the open side of the shed and listened as Heric delivered his message in a vivid, penetrating voice to Chatelaine Dhuoda and her shadow cleric, the frater. People gathered to hear the news.

“The campaign is done for the season. The winds are changing. The Eika have sailed north back to their own ports for the winter. All along the coast they attacked. But here at the end three Eika ships bottled themselves up the Vennu after the tide had gone out. They built themselves a stockade, but the count begged for the Grace of Our Lord and Lady and led the attack. We stormed it!” He slapped a fist onto his other, open hand, grinning for the first time where he had been grim before. “Even their dogs gave way before us, and they more ferocious than their masters, for they would gladly eat any person who fell within reach of their teeth.” His audience murmured appreciatively at this gruesome detail. He went on. “But this time we slaughtered them Eika like sheep. Though it’s true they have tough hides. Hard as leather and gleaming like they was forged in a blacksmith’s furnace, not born from a decent mam like the rest of us. Those that ran out onto the flats got caught as the tide come in, and their ugly dogs with them!”

“I heard they was shapechangers,” said Cook, who had status enough that she might press to the front. “Half fish.”

Heric shrugged. The brief note of triumph died in his eyes; now he only looked weary. “They drown as well as we do. If any swam away, well then, I never saw them go. We took a captive, a prince of their kind. Lord Geoffrey wanted to kill him, but the count in his wisdom said we’d do better to give his kin someone to ransom than someone to avenge. They’re bringing the barbarian back, in a cage, with the count’s hounds tied to the bars, so no one can get in nor the barbarian out.” He shuddered and drew the Circle of Unity at his breast.

Chatelaine Dhuoda glanced about the fortress yard, marking each listener who loitered to hear the messenger’s tale. “How soon will his lordship arrive?”

“Within a fiveday. They were marching hard behind me. It was a long summer, and too much fighting. We’re all anxious to be home.”

“Go with Cook, then, and she’ll feed you.” Dhuoda nodded briskly at Cook, who took the hint and hurried back into the kitchens. “Then you’ll come back to me—what is your name again? You will give me a more detailed report.” Her gaze raked the loiterers again. Alain, half hidden, watched as the others moved quickly away. He stayed where he was.

When the yard was clear, Dhuoda signaled to the messenger to wait for a moment. “Did the count give any direction as to where he wants this Eika prince confined? Below? Or in one of the tower chambers?”

“I can’t be certain, Mistress,” said Heric with a bowed head. Alain marveled at how much the young man-at-arms had changed since midsummer. “I believe he means to kennel him with those black hounds. I heard him say with my own ears that he can’t be sure by any other means that the Eika will not find some unnatural way to escape.”

The chatelaine’s expression remained placid, although the frater drew the circle as against a bad omen. “That is all,” said Dhuoda. “You may go.”

Heric inclined his head obediently and limped off to the kitchens.

Dhuoda and the frater walked back toward the gate. Alain, shifting back against a shadowed wall, heard their voices as they passed.

“Is it true,” the frater asked, “that it was those black hounds that killed Count Lavastine’s own wife and daughter? That the count only keeps them because of a pact made by his grandfather with unholy devils, of which those black hounds are the living representatives?”

“I will only tell you once,” said Dhuoda. Alain had to strain to hear her voice. “To talk of such things here, Frater Agius, will give you as good a reception as if you were to argue your heretical views in front of the skopos.”

“But do you believe it to be true?” asked Agius.

“It is true that the original hounds, and the descendants born ever after of those first black hounds, obey only the trueborn counts of Lavas. Where they came from, no one knows, only that they were a gift from a Salian biscop—”

e feast day of St. Tiana the Joyous, holy martyr of the town of Bens, a messenger rode in. Alain looked up from the shed where he had been stacking bundled hay from the second crop cut on the south quarter.

The man had a dirty white rag tied around his head, covering his right eye and ear. Old blood stained it brown. His clothes were worn out, patched with the remains of other hose and tunics. When he dismounted next to the hall, he walked with a limp. It took Alain that long to recognize him as Heric, the brash young soldier of midsummer. His entire aspect was muted now.