In the Ruins (Crown of Stars 6)

“Would it not have been better had she done so?” asked Liutgard. She gestured toward the ragged army gathered around. “Would it not have spared us this?”

Liath shook her head. “No. You saw what tides of destruction the spell wrought. That devastation would have rebounded on Earth tenfold had Anne’s spell succeeded. It would have been far worse. Earth is not meant to be sundered from Earth. The ancient ones—our ancestors—meant to save themselves. But by their own act they doomed us. I think they were ignorant. They did not know. Yet we are left with the consequences nonetheless.”

PART TWO

IN THE RUINS

V

SALVAGE

1

ANNA clawed awake from a terrible dream. She lay with eyes closed, aware of the rise and fall of her breathing, and let the threads of that awful nightmare fade. An endless trek across a wilderness of grass under the hammer of a brutal winter cold. A blizzard turning to flowers. Bulkezu’s hand tightening on her throat. Blessing as limp as a corpse, wasting away, dying. Buried alive deep within an ancient tumulus. Worms crawling over and swallowing her body.

With each exhalation the images became more tattered until at last they dissolved into nothing, and with a sigh of relief she opened her eyes. It was still night. Clouds hid the stars. She couldn’t see anything, not even her hand in front of her face.

Even a moonless night was never this dark.

Her heart thundered. She whimpered, afraid to move or speak lest speaking and moving reveal her nightmares as truth. If she wished hard enough, it would all go away and she would be back in Gent sitting cozy by the fire in Mistress Suzanne’s weaving hall.

A voice mumbled a curse. Stone snapped on flint. A spark glittered, faded, then a second snap struck and its spark caught a wick. As light bled into their grave, memory returned in a rush.

Prince Sanglant’s army had marched east in search of griffins and sorcerers. He had found them and much more besides, but Blessing had fallen ill with an aetherical sickness and had to be left behind, close to death. Six attendants stayed with her. In the hope that the spell woven by Princess Liathano through the stone crown would miraculously preserve Blessing in a kind of stasis, they had crawled into the grave mound between the stones. There they had waited until blue fire engulfed them and all sensation ceased.

Anna groaned and raised up on her elbows, staring around in shock. Brother Heribert had lit the lamp, and he, too, stared slack-jawed at their surroundings. Thiemo, Matto, the Kerayit healer, and the young Quman soldier still slept, each in his place in the ring around Princess Blessing. But the low, cramped chamber in which they had taken their place had vanished … and so had Blessing.

“Ai, God! Lord protect us! Lady have mercy!” Anna scrambled to her feet.

“What’s happened?” As Heribert rose, he almost lost his footing as a temblor rumbled through the ground. The flame wavered. A web of blue fire shuddered into existence around them, hot and bright.

“Something’s coming,” said Heribert. “Can you feel it, Anna? It’s like a weight descending. We’re not safe here.”

She stared at the high cavern in which they stood. Stalactites glittered under the net of fire. Thiemo snored softly, one hand cupped at his throat. Matto lay with mouth agape and eyes and hands fast shut. It was all true. They had crawled into the ancient burial chamber to protect Blessing and possibly to die, but they hadn’t died and indeed they were no longer where they had started out. The burial chamber had been dirt; this place was stone. In the burial chamber there had barely been room to stand upright in the center, this place could hold a council of twoscore nobles and their horses. In the burial chamber there had been a single entrance, a tunnel that led to the outside. Here, at least four passageways left the chamber at different directions. They might be anywhere.

She, too, felt a stiffening in the air, a tension in the earth, like the breath of a huge monster about to lunge out of darkness onto its hapless prey.

“Come quickly!” Blessing’s voice pierced the silence, although there was no sign of her in the chamber. “No! This way! You’re so slow! I said this way!”

“What a brat!” said a second voice, laughing.

“I am not a brat! I’m not!”

“You are!”

“I’m not!”

Blessing’s companion laughed merrily, and before Anna or Heribert could react two figures trotted into the cavern, the smaller grasping the larger by his wrist. Blessing dropped her grip and clapped her hands to crow in triumph.

“Look what I found, Brother Heribert! And not just that, but a pile of treasure!”

The earth shook violently. The net of blue fire sparked and dazzled, and began to pulse.

“Lord have mercy,” said Heribert, staring at Blessing, who looked painfully thin but otherwise emphatically alive and vital. Anna didn’t know whether to be giddy with joy or annoyed that Blessing after all hadn’t changed one bit and probably hadn’t a thought to spare for the sacrifice her attendants had made so willingly for her.

“I’m Berthold,” said the youth, a nice-looking boy most likely a little younger than Anna, fifteen or sixteen or so. He wore a handsome pale blue tunic of an excellent weave trimmed with yellow embroidery, a hip-length cape lined with pale fox fur, and soft leather boots bound up with laces. He held calfskin gloves casually in one hand, and at his waist rode a sword in a richly tooled sheath bearing the mark of the silver tree.

“Lord have mercy,” repeated Heribert, shifting his stunned gaze away from Blessing. “You must be Villam’s son.”