“Go with the Lord and Lady’s grace,” said Sanglant. “There is nothing more we can do for you.”
“Liat’ano,” it said again, and pointed toward the sky and then toward the ground.
“Does she live?” Sanglant asked, knowing that the pain in his heart would never cease, not until he knew what fate had befallen her and their daughter. He had lost so much, as they all had, but he feared there was worse yet to come.
Lying there awkwardly on the ground, it glanced toward the sea, then copied with eerie precision his earlier gesture. It waved toward the forest, suggesting haste, and said a curt word, repeated twice, something like Go. Go. It had the cadence of a warning. Surely it could sense the tides of the sea better than he could. Fulk shifted from one foot to the next, glancing from the creature to the sea and back again.
“Ai, God!” swore Sanglant. “Come, Fulk.”
They left, jogging across the plain. In places the tide had swept the ground clear. Elsewhere, ditches, small ridges, or other obstacles had caught debris in a wide swathe, corpses and branches and here and there a weapon or wagon wheel tangled together and stinking as the hours passed. Nothing moved on that plain. There was still no sign of life among the broken walls of the town. No birds flew, and now and again lightning brightened the clouds, followed by a distant rumbling of thunder.
They heard the water rising before they reached the soldiers waiting for them at the edge of the forest, nervous as they listened and watched the glimmer of the sea. He turned as the rest of the troop hurried away along the road into the cover of the blasted trees. The water rose this time not in any distinguishable wave but as a great swell. He could not see the mer-creature. The light wasn’t strong enough, and the shoreline was, in any case, too far away and the ground too uneven. Like the rest of them, it would survive the tide of destruction, or it would perish.
A dozen men waited at the verge, unwilling to depart without their prince. Without their king.
“She must still be alive,” he said.
“Yes, Your Majesty,” said Fulk.
Lewenhardt offered him reins. Sanglant mounted Fest and together the remnants of his once proud company rode into the trees.
2
“I looked through fire for those whose faces I know, Your Majesty, but I saw nothing.”
Sanglant glanced toward his council members waiting on the ramp that led up into the ruined fortress. The army had settled down under the afternoon haze to lick its wounds, recover its strength, and assess its numbers and provisions. “The Seven Sleepers may have protected themselves from Eagle’s Sight. We must act as if they still live. They remain a threat.”
Hathui shrugged. “I saw flames and shadow. Flashes of things. An overturned wagon. Falling rocks. A horse killed by a falling branch. None of it made any sense, nor could I hold any one vision within the fire. And of Liath, I saw nothing.”
“Ai, God!” He paced, kicking up ash, and spun to face her. “Seek her at nightfall, each night, and hope she seeks in turn.”
“Nightfall is difficult to gauge with this cloud cover and ash fall, Your Majesty. We might each seek the other every evening and never touch. The Eagle’s Sight is a powerful gift, but a man butchering a deer has more accuracy and delicacy.”
He laughed, more in pain than amusement. “The crowns have the same failing, do they not? Thus we are spared the weight of a power too great to combat by natural means. I no longer wonder—” He swept an arm wide to indicate the heavens and the shattered forest. “—why the church condemned sorcery. See what sorcery has wrought.”
“Liath is a mathematicus, Your Majesty. Do you mean to put her aside because she knows the art of sorcery?”
He grinned. “I began as captain of the King’s Dragons. I have always been a soldier. If a weapon is put in my hands, I use it. And anyway …”
And anyway I love her.
He could not speak those words aloud. He was regnant now, but his position was by no means secure. He could show no weakness; he could possess no weakness, and if he did, if he loved unwisely, then he must conceal the nature of his desire or it would be used against him. In that way the Pechanek Quman had tried to dishonor him by tempting him with a woman’s flesh. He had come close to falling.
“Seek her at nightfall, Hathui. Keep trying.”
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
He strode over to those who waited, climbed the ramp until he stood above them, and situated himself so all those gathered below or huddled within the ruined walls could hear. He raised a hand for silence, and they quieted, but it was never still. The hiss of falling ash, the crack of breaking branches in the forest, not as many now but sharp and startling each time the sound came, and the moans of the wounded ran beneath his words.
“Cousin,” he said. “What accounting have you reached?”
Liutgard was an excellent administrator and a wise enough soldier that she let her captains fight her battles for her. When she was younger, her husband had carried her sword as a talisman in place of her, but since his death some years earlier she had shown a disturbing tendency to take to the field herself.
She beckoned her chief steward forward. That woman tallied their remaining forces and lines of command, about two thousand men and perhaps half that many horses remaining although strays were continually being roped in. They had salvaged provisions for about three weeks, if strictly rationed, but were low on fresh water and feed for the horses. There were not enough wagons to carry all the wounded though crude sledges could be built and the wounded placed upon those and dragged by healthy men.
“What now, Your Majesty?” Liutgard asked when her steward had finished.
“Yes, what now?” they asked, all the assembled nobles and captains, those who had survived.