In the Ruins (Crown of Stars 6)

She had to turn back to face the attack. A score of arrows went up in flame, in a sheet that caught the next volley. But they would shoot again, and again. Arrows had felled her before. She had only one defense against arrow fire and she could not use it, not even to save her own life. Not again.

She would rather die than see another person melt from the inside out.

“I’ll trap her!” cried Kansi. “The rock will eat her!”

A third volley vaulted into the air toward her and erupted into sparks and a shower of dark ash as she called fire into the shafts. The rock beneath her splintered with a resounding snap. The ground cracked open, and she fell.

The gust of wings and a sultry heat swept over her, and the golden griffin swooped down and took her shoulders in its claws. With a jerk they lurched up, then down so she scraped her knees on rock, then up again, into the air. But not out of range.

More warriors had pressed forward on the road, spreading out at Zuangua’s order to get a better shot. The griffin could not gain height easily. Liath was too heavy. But the beasts, too, were tacticians.

Shouts and screams erupted down the line of waiting Ashioi as the silver male skimmed low over the line of march from behind. That disruption was all it took for them to get out of range and the silver to bank high and head inland.

Held in the griffin’s claws, knowing her weight was a burden, Liath dared not twist in the hope of seeing Eldest Uncle one last time. Her throat was dry and her heart ached. She feared that she would never see him again. What right had his brother and daughter to judge Sanglant out of their own anger at their ancient enemies and thus separate the old man from his only grandchild? Every right, they would say. But it made her angry that Eldest Uncle might never know his grandson or kiss the brow of his great grandchild, if Blessing still lived.

Nay, she knew it in her heart. She had seen true visions. Blessing had survived the cataclysm, just as Sanglant had.

“We will find her,” she swore.

The pain of the griffin’s grip tightening on her shoulders forced tears to her eyes, hot from pain, from anger, and from grief as they flew low over the wasteland and she saw it in all its hideous glory. A blasted wilderness of ash and stone and a skin of still smoking molten rock, cooling and hardening as the days passed. The channel deep into the earth was closed; the Old Ones had seen to that. But the devastation spread for leagues in all directions, and when at last she saw trees again, places where they hadn’t been incinerated, they were blown down all in the same direction. Many trunks still stood, scorched on one side. As they rested and flew and rested and flew, the worst of the destruction eased and she saw vegetation growing again but never sun and rarely rain. Now and again lightning flared to the north. Once, she saw a ragged man herding a trio of sheep along a dusty path; amazingly, he did not look up when the griffin called, as if he had at last decided it was better not to know.

It’s never better not to know.

The pain in her shoulders was bad, but enduring that pain brought her closer to her goal. What if she never knew what had happened to the others? If the griffins could not find Sanglant? If they never got Blessing back? Months, or at least weeks, had passed since she and Sorgatani and Lady Bertha and their retinue had stumbled into Anne’s ambush. She might never know whether her faithful companions had survived the storm. Hanna might be dead, and poor Ivar lost forever in the wilderness that is distance, time, and the events that drag us forward on an unwanted path. She had so few that she counted as some manner of kin or companion that she wept to think of losing any, and yet surely she had lost them years ago, the day she crossed through the burning stone and ascended the mage’s ladder. Sanglant was right: she had abandoned them.

I had no choice.

It was getting dark. She was as ready for a rest from the vista of desolation as the griffin was ready for a respite from the burden of bearing her. The landing in a broad clearing was a tumble, and she skinned one knee but didn’t break anything. A stream’s water, mercifully clear, slaked her thirst, but there was nothing to eat among the withered plants. God, she was so hungry! She was so cold, and her shoulders ached so badly. A claw had torn her skin above her right breast. Blood leaked through the tunic, and it hurt to move her arms to gather grass to press the wound dry.

For a while, as it got dark, she sat with eyes closed and tried to breathe away the pain. The female crouched protectively over her, letting her curl into the shelter of that soft throat and away from the cutting wing feathers, for she had not even a mantle to cover herself with. She dozed, although she had meant to gather sticks for a fire. The griffin huffed and wheezed all night, and Liath slept erratically, waking at intervals to glance at the heavens, but she never saw stars. It was very cold, but the griffin, like her, had fire woven into its being, and that kept her alive, just as the pigs had once kept her alive.

She smiled sleepily, remembering the pigs: Hib, Nib, Jib, Bib, Gib, Rib, Tib, and the sow, Trotter. Silly names. It seemed so long ago. She conjured Hugh in her mind, but he did not frighten her. All that fear and pain was part of her now, woven into her bones and heart in the same manner as her mother’s substance. It did not make her less than she was. The streaming waters cut a channel in the earth that humankind named a river, and each winter and flooding spring that channel might shift and alter, but the river remained itself.

She dreamed.

The aether had once been like a river, pouring from the heavens into Earth along that deep channel linking Earth to Ashioi country adrift in the heavens. But now that channel lies breached, buried, and broken, and the aether flows instead as a thousand rivulets, spreading everywhere, penetrating all things but as the barest trickle.

She walks along a stream of silver that flows through the grasslands, but there is no one waiting for her, only the remains of the Horse people’s battered camp and a few hastily dug graves.

Morning came with no sunrise, a lightening so diffuse that it wasn’t clear it came from the east at all. It was quiet, not a breath of wind. A branch snapped, the sound so loud she scrambled to her feet just as the silver male called a challenge. A half dozen men appeared at the other side of the clearing, carrying staves and spears. They had the disreputable and desperate appearance of bandits. They stared at her for a long time, measuring what she offered and what danger she posed. She held her bow tight, but she had no arrows. Her quiver had burned away like all the rest, even her good friend, Lucian’s sword.

At last, one stepped forward from the rest and placed his weapon on the ground. He spoke in a dialect of Dariyan, the local speech. She could follow the gist of it. “Are you angel or demon? Whence are you come?”

“I am as you see me,” she answered boldly. “No more, and no less.”

“Has God sent you? Can you help us?”

“What manner of help do you need?” They were desperate, certainly, but as she studied their callused hands and seamed, anxious faces, she realized they were farmers.

“We have lost our village,” said the spokesman. “Our houses torn down by the wind. A lord with soldiers came by then, three days past. He took what stores we held by us. Now we have nothing to eat. We could not fight. They had weapons.”

The spears were only sharpened sticks, and the staves were branches scavenged out of the forest. One had a shovel. Another carried a scythe.

“Be strong,” she called, knowing how foolish the words sounded, but she had nothing to give them.

“Whuff!” coughed the female, rising, and the men scattered into the trees.

“Let’s go.” Better the pain in her shoulders than the knife of helplessness held to her throat. Whose army had stolen their grain? She hoped it was not Sanglant’s.