Crown of Stars (Crown of Stars 7)

The other Stephen joined her about fifty paces out from the opening of the chapel, where a low stone wall made a protected vantage point. He was a good dozen or more years older, pale-haired, blue-eyed, steady, smart, patient, and tough.

They braced themselves a body’s length apart to get the broadest view of the slope of the fore hill and the lower ground, all lost in night. In good weather they might have marked the passing of time by the rise and fall of the stars, but as it was they just sat, watching and listening. Now and again a shimmer of rain passed over, but it always faded. It was silent and cool. He shifted occasionally, feet scraping on the ground. For some reason her hands ached, and twice she inhaled a curious scent of charred wood melded with the acrid flavor of juniper.

Stephen said, “did you hear that?”

“No.”

Night noises, nothing more: a brief hiss of rain, the crackle of branches where the wind stroked them. The shifting and settling of the earth as it cooled. A cold breeze poured out of the heavens, seeming to drop right down on them from the height of the sky.

We are alone in the world, she thought.

And then: All things are alone, yet nothing is alone, it is all tangled together, woven as in a weir to create an obstacle or diversion or as in a tapestry to make out of its parts a vision of a greater whole.

She felt Stephen’s presence, how he shifted to find a more comfortable position for his right knee, how he stifled a cough by turning it into a grunt. She felt the pool of air beyond where the land sloped away downward. She smelled the sparks and ash of the wood fire and the aroma of horsehair and horse piss and horse manure. A man coughed, back in the shelter of the chapel.

She yawned, swaying, and slipped into that semi-alert twilight state that is neither waking nor sleep.

The wind picked her up as if she were a downy feather, and she spun away across the ruins, across a river, across forest and distant hamlets and stretches of meadowland and woodland farther and farther still, uncounted leagues flashing beneath her until the landscape that fell away under her feet was grass and only grass, pale in the dawn twilight. There comes blindingly and amazingly a glimpse of the rising sun tinted blue behind a veil of dust as it shoulders up over a golden-green horizon of grass. A procession moves at a steady pace through this grass, strange folk with almond-shaped eyes and eastern complexions. Some are Quman, wearing feathered wings attached to their armored coats; some are women whose hips flow into and become the bodies of horses. One is a shaman stippled with the tattoos of his kind, the spirit companions whose magic he can call on at need. She follows them. They are taking her where she needs to go.

Where a silver river ribbons in long looping curves across the golden landscape, the land sinks into a marshland of tall reeds and shallow pools of standing water. Beyond, paler grass grows in clouds like mushrooms, but these are, after all, tents sighing in the wind. The camp wakens. Its inhabitants crowd onto the margins to mark the group that approaches them.

Far above, a shrill cry reverberates. A woman who is also a mare turns and sights and points, calling to her companions to warn them, then raises her bow and releases an arrow into the sky. It burns, and Hanna tumbles. Tumbling, she sees griffins spinning above her, one gold and one silver, flying east toward the dark spires of distant mountains. They pass over her, and she twists and finds herself wading in ankle-deep water, pressing through reeds, scratched by blades of grass as she pushes up out of the shallows onto dry land that at first sinks beneath each step and then dries and stiffens to dusty earth and a sheen of green-gold grass so fresh and new that it smells of spring.

“We return,” says the centaur who leads the others. She stands in the center of camp, where the grass is flattened in a circle. “We have seen terrible things. Our ancient enemy has returned.”

“Where is the child?” asks the Quman shaman.

“Gone, gone,” the others sigh, shaking their heads. “Vanished from underneath the hill.”

“Where has she gone?”

They do not know.

“Where is the Holy One?” asks the centaur woman who leads the newcomers. “I am charged with a message for her.”

The Holy One walks slowly, favoring her hind legs in a manner that makes it obvious each step brings intense pain. She is not silver-white but rather so old that every hair has turned gray; she is so old that it is impossible she still lives. Magic has kept her alive all this time.

Her ears flick. “You have returned, Capi’ra, young one. What message? What news?”

The herd listens in intent silence as the story is told, and Hanna hears the news she has sought for so long: Liath is alive, traveling with Prince Sanglant. Except now he is king. Henry is dead.

She wipes her eyes, but the tears keep flowing. She touches to her lips the emerald ring he gave her, but even that gesture gives her no comfort.

King Henry is dead.

A great cataclysm has shaken the Earth.

“War is coming,” says Li’at’dano. “The ancient paths along the burning stone are closed to me now. The aether is too weak to hold those paths open for more than glimpses. So this is the first I have heard of these events. This changes everything. We are too distant to aid those who would be our allies.”

“I am here!” calls Hanna.

Li’at’dano’s head raises in surprise. At first, seeking, she does not find Hanna among the herd, but at last, spying her hidden in the grass, she nods. Hanna steps into the open.

“Luck of Sorgatani,” the centaur shaman says, but where she looks none of the others can see anything. Not even the Quman shaman can see her. He stares, he seeks. The others stare, they listen, but Hanna understands that only the Holy One can see and hear her because Hanna inhabits this land as a part of that dream known solely to the Kerayit sorceresses, who are bound to the Horse people by threads woven in the time long ago.

“What news?” Li’at’dano asks her.

Quickly, Hanna tells her what she knows: the battle between Anne and Liath fought by the standing stones and reported to her by Bertha and Sorgatani; the fiery tempest as seen by Bertha’s party and by Hanna and the clerics within the Arethousan army; the destruction along the coast that wiped out the imperial city of Arethousa; the little band that has trudged through mountains and forest across a vast distance to reach Wendar at last. She is an Eagle, trained to distill and to report.