In the Ruins (Crown of Stars 6)

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

“It was terrible!” exclaimed the lad. He shifted restlessly, mail rustling like the wind in dry leaves. “A great wave struck the shoreline. A score of fishing villages were wiped out, just like that, swept into the sea never to be seen again! I hadn’t any kinfolk there, but a fellow I know—he lost his entire family! Never saw them again! For seven days after the tempest, the river ran backward. It flooded fields all around the city.”

“With seawater?”

“With evil things—! Ow!”

The older man clipped the younger one on the head to silence him. “Nay, Your Majesty. He’ll tell you all manner of wild tales. This is what happened. The tempest made the land shake and the shoreline fall away. Or the sea fall. I don’t know which. You’ll see by daylight that there’s no seagoing boats drawn up on the strand below, as there used to be.”

“Indeed. Gent is known for its trade and its many workshops. The river seems to be flowing well enough.”

“So it appears, but the course changed.”

“It’s a league farther to the sea than it was before!” said the lad.

“How can that be?”

“Not a league, Your Majesty, but a good long way. There were two channels before. One wasn’t deep enough before to take seagoing vessels. Now even the deeper channel dried up. Not even silted, just went dry. Boats couldn’t come through, it was a swamp, no more than an elbow deep. After the winter, the river cut a new path to the sea, many fingers but none of them deep. There’s talk of building a new port out by the shore where ships can put in, mayhap carting goods overland to Gent. Digging a canal. Yet if we lose our trade, I don’t know how the city will thrive.”

“There’s been no ships anyway,” said the lad. “None at all, and winter’s over and sailing season ought to have begun. The fishermen—those who survived—say the tides have changed and the winds are fierce out there. That it isn’t safe to be on the water. That creatures swim there that will tear boats into pieces with their claws and eat the men who fall into the water.”

“Whsst! Stop telling stories, boy!”

“Nay, let him speak, Grandfather. Stories may hold a grain of truth. Yet Gent seems prosperous.”

“As long as the stores hold out, Your Majesty. Biscop Suplicia and Lady Leoba are good stewards. I pray Lady Leoba will not go riding after the princess again, God save her, for she watched over us well enough and with the biscop’s aid set aside grain against famine. That’s what’s held us. Yet if there’s no crop and no trade this year …”

He could not go on.

“It would be God’s will,” muttered the lad. “Punishment for turning away from the truth of the phoenix.”

“Hush!” The old fellow slapped him in the head again.

“I did not know,” murmured Sanglant.

The wind came up suddenly out of the north, spilling over the parapet, rattling along the rooftops.

“Like that,” the old guard said. “A north wind like that, it never used to come this time of year. Weather’s changed. The winds aren’t the same as they was used to be, in the days before.”

“Everything’s changed,” whispered the lad, then hunched his shoulders, waiting for a blow that did not come.

“I did not realize the tides of destruction had washed so high.” Sanglant leaned out over the wall, breathing in the murmur of the air. The night’s presence poured over him. The whole wide world lay beyond. It stretched to every horizon, covered in darkness, unseen and unknowable without moon or stars to light the land.

A battle might be fought and won in a day, but the ebb and flow of the sea and the heavens never ceased. What had been set in motion might not trough, or peak, for weeks or months or years. The riptide might already be dragging them under while they never knew they were drowning.

Out of the night a deep hoot trembled. Grit slipped under his sandals as he turned, trying to pinpoint the sound.

“Whsst!” said the old guard. “That’s an owl! Did you hear it?”

“Is that a good omen?” asked the lad plaintively. “Or an evil one?”

“I’ve not seen feather or beak of a bird these last months,” the old man said, then shrieked and ducked as a huge owl skimmed out of the darkness right over their heads and with a graceful plummet came to roost on the wall. Its massive claws dug into the wood. By lantern light, its amber eyes gleamed boldly, seeming lit from within. The light set off the streaks of white on its breast and the tufted ears.

“What is this?” asked Sanglant.

It blinked.

“Where is your mistress?” he demanded.