King's Dragon (Crown of Stars 1)

“Word of what?” To form the question was difficult enough. She could not move. She could not even remember what it was to move.

“Of the fall of Gent. Of the death of his son.”

The death of his son.

“Fed to the dogs,” murmured Wolfhere. He grimaced like a man enduring an arrow’s barbed head being dug out of his thigh.

Liath fell forward onto her knees and clasped her hands before her. “Ai, Lady,” she whispered. “Hear my pledge. I will never love any man but him.”

“Reckless words,” said Wolfhere, his tone sharp. “Come, Liath.”

“Safe words,” she replied bitterly, “since he is now dead. And I will follow the fate others have determined for me.”

“So do we all,” he said quietly.

They left the fire still burning and returned back around the huts to find the field crowded with refugees forming into staggered lines, making ready to leave.

“Has so long a time passed?” Liath asked, amazed. She judged that another hundred or so refugees filled the oat field, and a few more trickled from the tunnel, scarred, shaking, and weeping. But these had left Gent hours ago. They could not know what had just transpired, what she and Wolfhere had seen. “How long did we look into the fire?”

Wolfhere did not answer. He had gone to confront Mayor Werner, to demand that the Eagles be given two horses. Liath did not listen to the argument; she stared at the cave’s mouth, where people still emerged into daylight, blinking, weeping, frightened, relieved. How many more would arrive? Was Manfred among them, or had he been killed? Did the biscop survive?

“Liath!” Wolfhere called to her, impatient, tense, and angry. “Come!”

Horses were brought. Werner sputtered and looked furious, but could not refuse. Liath took the reins of a gelding and mounted.

“What about Manfred?” Liath asked, looking back over her shoulder past the line of wagons and the tidy groups of refugees as they got into place, ready to begin their long march. She stared hopefully, hopelessly, toward the cave’s mouth.

“We can’t wait,” said Wolfhere. He urged his horse forward, angling up to the old road.

The first of the wagons jerked forward, heading west for Steleshame and safe haven. The refugees, with murmurings and sighs and one voice that could not stop sobbing out its grief, began to walk. But Liath hesitated, staring back.

Perhaps it was a trick of the eye. She thought she saw a faint figure standing on the rocky ridge above the mouth of the cave: the form of a woman draped in a gown of ancient design, herself wounded yet standing, unbroken by those wounds. The patron saint of Gent still watched over her flock.

hrough him a gateway, his shade itself is the gateway, like stars seen through a gauze of fine linen. A drum sounds like a heartbeat, and a flute draws its music over the air like the rising and falling of waves. She sees through flames, staring out through a fire but a different fire, not her own.

There on a flat stone sits a man—not a man, perhaps, for his features are exotic and unlike those of any man Liath has seen except there is a passing resemblance to Sanglant, that bronze-tinged skin, the high, broad cheekbones, the beardless face. He is dressed strangely in a long, beaded loincloth so cunningly worked that the pattern of beads describes birds and leaves woven into a tight embrace. Leather sheaths encase his forearms and his calves, covered with gold and green feathers and tiny shells and gold beads and polished stones strung together. A cloak trimmed with white shells and clasped with a jade brooch at his right shoulder drapes to his waist. He twists lengths of fiber—flax, perhaps—along his bare thigh, binding them into rope.

He looks up, startled, and stares at her but without truly marking her. Behind him, a figure moves, too far away to be plainly seen.

“Liath.”

She jumped back and found herself, face singed from heat, staring at the hearth fire and at Wolfhere, across from her. Tears stood on his cheeks, but only a few. He stared into the flames and finally drew his gaze away as if from down a long distance and murmured, so soft she barely heard him:

“Aoi.”

She blinked, bewildered. Who had spoken her name, there at the end, wrenching her out of that final vision?

“Those were the Lost Ones, Liath.”

“Who were?” But she could not make sense of the world, of her fingers on her hands, of the snap of fire or the brush of wind on her face.

Ai, Lady. Sanglant was dead.

Wolfhere shook himself all over, like a dog—or a wolf—and stood abruptly. “This mystery must be solved later,” he said. “Come, Liath. Our first duty is to the king, and he must have word of this.”

“Word of what?” To form the question was difficult enough. She could not move. She could not even remember what it was to move.

“Of the fall of Gent. Of the death of his son.”