King's Dragon (Crown of Stars 1)

That was all she had time for.

A shout rose from the gathered crowd outside.

“The Dragon! The Dragons have broken!”

Liath clapped her hands over her ears just as the two men lost their grip on her. She fell but could not land hard because the people were packed so tightly in the cathedral. Even shoving, panicking, trying to move one way or the other, no one could shift more than half a step to right or left.

The next instant a horn call blasted through the space, echoing off stone, deafening her and every other soul inside. But it silenced the crowd long enough, just long enough, that the biscop could be heard.

“This I say!” she cried in her powerful voice. “This I say to you, my people, that I will not stir from this Hearth until all have reached safety or the Eika have been repulsed. So must all who are fit take up any weapon you can find and fight to save this, our city. In the name of Our Lady and Lord, in the name of St. Kristine who, though she suffered and died in this holy place, did not forsake us.”

She drew breath, but such was the power of her voice and the tense expectation that none spoke or filled the void with clamor.

“So has St. Kristine appeared to the prince, he who even now fights with his own body to spare ours pain and desecration. This is my word, and you my people shall obey it. Let those who are children or who are nursing children follow this Eagle into the crypt, in an orderly fashion. Gather the children, for they and the holy relics of this Hearth are the treasures of our city.

We must save them, if it is so willed by Our Lady and Lord and the saint who watched over us. Let the elder children shepherd the younger, and let the infirm wait with me at the Hearth. Let us put our trust in God. Lord, have mercy. Lady, have mercy upon us.”

Her deacons brought torches. With the crowd parting before her, Liath took a torch and led the way down into the crypt. As she descended the steps, all the din and tumult was lost to the muffling encasement of stone and earth, to the cloak of death and the pale tombs of the holy dead. The torch burned steadily, heat blowing in her face, stinging her eyes.

She stood while deacons carrying the holy relics of St. Kristine crowded behind her and the stairs filled with softly weeping children, pressing, waiting. She felt them at her back like a weight: on her all depended.

“Save all you can,” Sanglant had said. And others, crying out: “The Dragons have broken.”

She had no idea where the saint’s tomb was. Everything looked changed. The crypt opened out before her in silent mystery, taciturn, unwilling to give up its secrets.

Then, on a whim, she knelt where her footsteps and Sanglant’s, so short a time before, had scuffed the earth. She cast about, and—there!

On the dirt perhaps two strides away she saw the flecking of dried blood.

She followed this trail left by the bleeding saint. It led her to the sinkhole and the stairs that yawned into the black earth beneath. The crypt quickly filled behind her. Deacons whispered, frightened. An infant sobbed and was muffled.

Of the battle in Gent, she could hear nothing. She did not know whether Sanglant yet lived; she had no idea what had happened to Wolfhere and Manfred.

She could at least hope that Hanna had made it away from Gent alive. It seemed ironic now that Hanna, forced to flee, had been granted the safer path, though it had not seemed so at the time.

She could not delay. What lay there in the dark earth could not be worse than the fate awaiting those who faced the Eika onslaught. She took in a deep breath and started down the steps.

She counted as she went, aware always of the press of refugees at her back though she never turned to see them, to help them, to make sure they did not stumble. She had to walk the unknown path. She counted eighty-seven steps, because counting gave her the courage to go on, speaking the numbers aloud so she couldn’t hear, so the blackness didn’t seem so utterly enveloping. The air was close, smelling of mildew and earth. Once, or twice, hand brushing the wall, she thought her fingers touched worms or other moist creatures that live only in the night. But she did not have time to flinch. She had to press forward.

The steps ended and the floor leveled out and turned sharply. It widened to the width of her outstretched arms. She paused then, but only that one time. The torch illuminated rough stone walls and a low ceiling hewn out of rock. The floor here was also rock, strewn with small stones and pebbles that rustled under her boots. But it was fairly smooth, as if water had once streamed through here or many feet marched back and forth, grinding it down under the weight of years and passage.

She could not see far ahead of her, but she felt the air had a flavor untouched by burning and war and death. She smelled oats, a touch caught on a bare wisp of a breeze borne down from distant hills. That gave her heart. The deacons pressed up behind her, the wooden chest which contained the saint’s relics jutting into her back. A child said, in a high, wavering voice: “But it’s so dark. Where is my momma?”

She walked on into the darkness. She led them, counting until it became ridiculous to count, past one thousand and two thousand and beyond that. The tunnel ran straight, like an arrow toward its intended victim.

She wept as she walked, plain good tears, quiet ones. She could not afford to sob. She could not afford to be blinded by grief. Behind, she heard those who followed, the thin wails of infants and the helpless weeping of children who could not understand what was happening to them. The deacons murmured in soft voices to the rhythm of their step, the words of the psalm they had sung in the cathedral:

“‘For She has charged Her angels to guard you wherever you go, to lift you on their hands.’”

On she walked, leading them. On and on, away from the fall of Gent. So few would be saved.

“We will hold them as long as we are able.” His last words.

He was not meant for her, of course. It was foolish, an infatuation, not love, surely, for love is built on ties of blood or of shared work and companionship, not on a glance or the stray wanderings of stubborn and insistent desire. Never meant for her, even if he had lived. It was not only the difference in their births, for she believed what Da had told her, that she need only bend her knee before the king. They were freeborn, of an old lineage, so Da always said, though he had never given her more information than that. Of a lineage that had gained lands in return for lordship over themselves, beholden to no count or duke but only to the king. As Hathui’s people had, in these times, in the eastern marches.

No, it was more than that, and utterly different.

“Be bound, as I am, by the fate others have determined for you.” So Sanglant had said. Was it not the duty of the captain of the King’s Dragons to die in the service of his king? And hers to live, if she was able?