Crown of Stars (Crown of Stars 7)

He nodded, although his expression was grave. “Leaving me with the dogs biting and growling at my heels as I settle once and for all who is regnant in Wendar and Varre. Eventually you must go. But not yet.”

PART ONE

DEATH AND

LIFE

I

TRAVELERS

1

ALL morning Alain and the hounds walked east and southeast as they had done for many days. Lavas Holding lay far behind them. Their path this day cut along an upland forest, mostly beech although what seedlings had thrust up through the field layer were fir. The view through the woods was open but because of the clouds the vista had a pearly sheen to it, as though he were staring into a lost world just out of reach. Into the past, or into the future.

Yet the present had an inevitable way of intruding into the finest-spun thoughts. Sorrow barked to alert him. A massive beech had fallen over the path in such a way that although Alain might climb with difficulty over its barrel of a trunk, he could not hoist the hounds up and across. Nor was there room for them to squeeze through the hand’s-width gap below. He beat out a track along the length of the trunk upslope only to find that a score of other huge trees—more beech together with silver fir—had fallen parallel so close that he was fenced in. Returning to the path and the waiting hounds, he ventured the other way, skirting the thicket of branches at the crown, and discovered that here, too, more fallen trees barred his path.

All had fallen in a northwesterly direction, snapped by a gale out of the southeast, the same tempest, no doubt, that had swept Osna last autumn. That tempest had changed the world, and created a vast trail of debris.

He pushed through the branches at the crown of the tree—a difficult path to break but one on which, at any rate, the hounds could follow. Dry leaves crackled under his feet and dragged at his hair and skin. Twigs poked him twice in the eye and prodded his limbs and torso. Sorrow whined, ears flat and head down, and Rage picked her way with surprising delicacy for such a huge creature, very dainty as she set down each paw into dying wood rush and the splintered remains of the tree.

The trunk was crowded with branches, a maze to confound the hounds, but the bole was negotiable at this point, not as big around as the thicker trunk lower down. With his help they scrambled their way through clumsily. Branches rattled. They were as noisy as an army of blundering farmers lost in the woodsman’s domain.

A sound caught him. A strange croaked cry made his limbs go stiff with apprehension. He heaved Rage by the scruff past the worst of the inner branches, and there the hounds stood frozen within the shelter of the branches. They did not bark. A large creature passed by, but they could not see anything clearly through the screen of leaves and brittle branches, only hear its heavy tread, a snorting under-cough, the uncoiling disturbance as branches were pressed back and either cracked, or sprang back with a rattling roar. A smell like iron made him wince. Unbidden, he recalled Iso, the crippled brother at Hersford Monastery. Had Iso survived the tempest? Did he work there still as a lay brother under Father Ortulfus’ strict but fair rule?

The noise subsided. Sorrow’s tail beat twice against branches as he lifted his head, eager to get on, but neither hound barked nor made the slightest noise. They struggled out of the branches and Alain beat a way back to the path. About a hundred strides ahead he found the ground disturbed as at the wake of a monster pressing through the forest. He knelt beside a scar freshly cut into the ground by claws as long as his forearm and traced the curve of the imprint.

“A guivre,” he said to the hounds. What they heard in his voice he did not know, but they whined and, flattening their ears, ducked their heads submissively.

Sorrow sniffed along the trail left by the creature and padded into the forest, back the way it had come. Rage followed. They vanished quickly, moving fast, and Alain went after them but soon fell behind. He found them several hundred paces off the path, nosing the carcass of a half eaten deer. Like him, they had eaten sparsely on their journey, dependent on what they could hunt in the woodland and beg in whatever villages and farmsteads they passed through. Now, they tore into the remains. He sat on a fallen tree and gnawed on the last of his bread and cheese. He trimmed mold from the cheese with his knife and contemplated the buds on the standing beech. Frost had coated every surface at dawn, and he still felt its sharp breath on his cheek although it was late spring and late afternoon. The cold chafed his hands. An ache wore at his throat, as if he were always about to succumb to a grippe but never quite managed to. The trees had not yet leafed out, although they ought to be bursting with green at this time of year. A spit of rain brushed over them and was gone. Its whisper moved away through the forest.

At first hidden by the rustling of branches and forest litter stirred by raindrops, another sound took shape within the trees. The hounds were so hungry that they cracked bones and gulped flesh and took no notice, but at the moment he realized he heard a group of men, they growled and lifted their massive heads to glare down the trail, back the way the monster had come from originally. He walked over to stand beside them with staff in hand, listening.

“Hush, you fool! What if it hears your nattering?”

“We thunder like a herd of cattle as it is. We’ll never sneak up on anything.”

“Ho! Watch that shovel. You almost stove in my head.”

“You should go in the lead, Atto. You’ve got the good spear.”

“Won’t! I never wanted to come at all. This is a stupid idea! We’ll all be devoured and to no purpose.”

“Shut up.”

He saw the men in the distance past fallen trees and shattered branches. They had not yet noticed him, so he whistled to get their attention and called out before they could react in a reckless way that might cause someone harm.

“I’m here,” he said, “a traveler. The creature you seek passed by some time ago. I and my hounds heard it pass.”

They hurried forward. They were what he expected: a nervous group of local men armed variously with spears, staves, shovels, and scythes and driven by one scowling big-boned man who walked at the back of the group holding the only sword.

“Who are you?” he demanded, pushing forward through the rest but halting when he saw the size of the hounds.

“I’m a traveler called Alain. I hope to find shelter for the night and continue my journey to Autun in the morning.”

“You saw the beast, yet live to tell the tale?” He indicated the carcass and the bloody muzzles of the hounds. “Pray excuse me, friend, if I doubt your tale. None who see the beast live to tell of it.”

“Has it killed human folk, then? What manner of beast is it that you stalk? Are you not feared to stalk a creature that will kill you once you see it?”