The Gathering Storm (Crown of Stars 5)

“I was, Your Excellency.”

“Then how are we to know that you did not turn traitor against your countryfolk as well, if this tale of Prince Ekkehard’s treachery is true? How can we be sure that any of these stories you bring to us are truth, and not lies? Do you support the rightful king? Or do you support those who rebel against him?”

God, what a fool she had been to think she could outmaneuver him.

He smiled sadly. The light pouring over him made him gleam, a living saint. “So it is, Eagle, that the king must consider you a traitor as well. You know how he feels about Wolfhere, whom he banished on less account than this. How can he treat a traitor otherwise? How can he even bear to speak to one of his own Eagles if he believes that Eagle has betrayed him together with his dearest children?” Although he had not moved, he seemed to have grown even more imposing, a power which, like the sun, may bring light to those trapped in darkness—or death to those caught out under its punishing brilliance.

“I will do what I can to see that you are not imprisoned outright for treason, Hanna. I have done that much for you already. The dungeons here are not healthy. The rats grow large. Yet if you do not cooperate with me, then there is nothing I can do, no case I can make before the king. If that happens, I do not know what will happen to you then. Do you understand?”

2

GASPING, he came to himself as everyone around him rose. The service had ended. The two Lions no longer sat on the benches to his right. Maybe he had only hallucinated them. He was dreaming, confusing past and present.

Only Adica seemed real—she, and the bronze armband bound around his upper right arm that he could not pull off.

“F-friend.” Iso had a limp and a stutter. Abandoned by his parents, he had been a laborer at the monastery for half of his life. Although he didn’t act any older than sixteen, he looked aged by pain and grief and an unfilled childhood hunger. “It’s a—uh—it’s a—uh—a hurt one. Come.” He had bony fingers that no amount of porridge could fatten up, and with these he tugged at Alain’s sleeve as the laborers waited for the monks to file out before them. The abbot sailed out with a fine stern expression on his face and his guests quite red with consternation behind him, but Iso kept pulling on him and his quiet pleading dragged Alain out of his distraction.

“I’ll come.” He let Iso lead him out of the church and, with the hounds following, to the stables.

Iso didn’t have many teeth left, which was why he could only take porridge and other soft foods. Sometimes his remaining teeth hurt him; one did tonight. Alain knew it because now and again Iso brushed at the lower side of his right jaw as though to chase away a fly, and a tear moistened his right eye, slipping down to be replaced by another. Iso never complained about pain. Maybe he didn’t have the words to, and anyway it was probably the only existence he knew. Perhaps he had never experienced a day in the course of his entire life without physical pain of some kind nagging him, the twisted agony of his misshapen hip, the withered ruin of his left hand, burned and scarred over long ago, the nasty scars on his back.

Yet for all the pain Iso lived with, and maybe because of it, he hated to see animals suffer. More than once he had taken a rake from a furious cat when he’d saved a mouse from its clutches, or risked being bitten by a wounded, starving dog at the forest’s edge when he offered it a scrap to eat.

The beech woods had been so heavily harvested in the vicinity of the estate that the nearby woodland was dominated by seedlings and luxuriant shrubs. The hounds smelled a threat in the undergrowth beyond the stable, and they bristled, curling back their muzzles as they growled. Twigs rattled as a creature shifted position. It sounded big. The twilight gloom amplified the sense of hugeness.

Alain gripped Iso’s shoulder, holding him back. The smell of iron tickled his nostrils, and a taste like fear coated his mouth. Although he saw only the suggestion of the shape where young beech trees struggled with honeysuckle and sedge for a footing, his skin crawled.

In the east, a waning gibbous moon, just two days past full, was rising.

“Th—they’ll kill it if th—they f-find it.” Tears slipped from Iso’s chin to wet the back of Alain’s hand.

“Hush now.” Alain signed to the hounds and they sat obediently, although they didn’t like it. Cautiously, he stepped forward to part the brush.

The creature lying under the shadow of sedge flicked its head around, and where its amber gaze touched him, torpor gripped his limbs. Iso whimpered. Sorrow yipped. The creature was as big as a pony, with a sheeny glamour. It scrabbled at the earth with its taloned feet. Leaves sprayed everywhere. It had the head of an eagle with the body of a dragon, and a whiplike tail that thrashed against the bole of the sedge behind it. Awkwardly, it heaved itself backward. It was meant to fly, but its wings were still down, not yet true feathers.

“What i-i-is it?” whispered Iso. “M-my feet feel so slow.”

“It’s a guivre.” Its hideous shape should have frightened him. “It’s a hatchling.” The torpor wore off. It hadn’t the full force of an adult’s stare, that would pin a man to the ground. The nestling stabbed forward with a stubborn “awk” but couldn’t reach him because it dragged one leg under its body. It feared him more than he feared it and what it would become. “It can’t even fly yet. Do you see the wings? They don’t have their feathers yet. It should still be in the nest.”

“I—it’s a m-monster. Th-they’ll kill it if they f-find it.”

“So they will.”

Maybe they should. One shout would bring an army and with staves, shovels, and hoes they could hammer it to death, staving in its skull. But it was so young, and it was free, not chained and brutalized like the one that had killed Agius. In its own way it was beautiful, gleaming along its scaly skin where the last glow of sunlight and the silvery spill of moonlight mingled to dapple its flanks. Only God knew how it had come to be here.

Then he saw the wound that had crippled it, opening the left thigh clean to the bone.

“Iso, get me combed flax and a scrap of linen soaked in cinquefoil. Do it quickly, friend. Don’t let anyone see you.”

Iso mumbled the words back to himself, repeating them. He had a hard time remembering things. He lurched away with a rolling gait, for on top of everything else, he had one leg shorter than the other.

Alain eased into the brush and crouched as the hatchling hissed at him to no avail. It couldn’t reach him, nor could it retreat. Leaves spun in an eddy of wind, fluttering to the ground as the breeze faltered. Distantly, voices raised in the service of Compline, the last prayer of the day. The monks’ song wound in counterpoint to his own voice as he spoke softly to the hatchling. He spoke to it of Adica, of the marvels he had seen when he walked as one dead in the land where she lived. He spoke to it of dragons rising majestically into the heavens and of the lion queens on whose tawny backs he and his companions had ridden. He spoke of creatures glimpsed in dark ravines and deep grottos and of the merfolk and their glorious undersea city.

Guivres were unthinking beasts, of course, but the hatchling listened in that way in which half-wild creatures allow themselves to be soothed by a peaceful voice. The hounds lay in perfect silence, heads resting on their forelegs and eyes bright.

Iso returned with his hands full. The young guivre kept its amber gaze fixed on Alain but remained still as he pulled the lips of the wound together, pressing linen over the cut, and bound it with flax tightly enough to hold but not so tight that it cut into flesh.

“Harm none of humankind,” he said to it, “but take what you must to survive among the beasts of the forest, for they are your rightful prey. May God watch over you.”