The Gathering Storm (Crown of Stars 5)

“I have done nothing to Princess Blessing except spare her the brutal mercies of the beast who stalks in the grass. What affliction besets her, I do not know.”

“There are healers in the prince’s camp—”

“This is not an earthly affliction. There is nothing we can do.”

“There has to be something!”

“Does there?” The tone made Anna flinch, but no blow landed. “The storm blows itself out. A warm wind will finish it, and the first flowers of spring will bloom. We will wait. I will not interfere with the hunt.”

Anna wiped her eyes and knelt beside Blessing, clasping her hands over the girl’s heart. Blessing’s chest rose and fell in a steady rhythm, but her eyes remained open, blind and unresponsive.

“What do you do?” asked the shaman curiously.

“The only thing left me to do. I’m going to pray.”

2

WHEN you have seen the world end and you are lost in a storm of ice, all you can do is fight forward toward an unseen and even unknowable destination.

Wind battered her. The ground became rocky as they began to climb. The stranger leading her dropped in and out of sight, screened by a blast of snow one moment only to be revealed as the wind shifted. His unbound hair whipped and curled in the gale like writhing snakes. Hunched over, he trudged up the steep slope into the teeth of the wind and did not look back to see if she were following.

Where else would she go?

They walked forever until her hands and feet were numb and she could not feel the weight of her bow on her back. Her cheeks burned. Twice she slipped and stumbled as loose rocks, unseen under the blowing snow, rolled away beneath her feet. Each time she cursed as she hit knees, once an elbow. The wind screamed down off the height, pummeling her; a pebble gouged a cut below her eye, the blood wicked away by the blast of the gale.

He vanished. She stumbled over rubbish, tripped, hit the ground knees first and found herself scrabbling among bones, but her hands were so numb that she couldn’t feel to get her balance. He hauled her up and shoved her forward into the shelter of a lopsided hut crazily woven of sticks and grass. An old and threatening scent pervaded the air, but at least the cutting wind had lessened enough that she could hear him speak in perfectly grammatical but clearly accented Wendish.

“If you light fire, we live.”

Out of the wind, she began shivering all down the length of her body. It was hard to concentrate, even to think of her own name much less remember how to call fire in such a dangerous place, with dry vegetation all around them ready to burst into an inferno.

He nudged a pile of debris on the ground which she recognized belatedly as a fire pit stacked with dried dung. As she knelt, her knees popped and creaked like those of an elder. A finger bone slipped under her knee and rolled away into the fire pit. What manner of predator devoured human flesh yet built nests like a bird?

She already knew the answer.

Although it was difficult to coordinate her movements with her hands numb and aching, she pulled off one glove and rested her fingers on the lowermost layer of dung. Out on the open ground, she had called fire indiscriminately; here, she must probe as with a needle, sewing finest silk, so as not to engulf herself in her own conflagration.

Fire caught in the fuel and licked upward as she sat back hard, out of breath. It was so cold. So cold.

“Where have you come from?” asked the man.

With an effort, she lifted her head. He crouched down opposite her, eyeing her with an intelligent if disturbingly intent gaze across the waxing fire. His hair had settled, not snakes at all but long, thick, black hair furiously tangled by the wind. It made her think of Sanglant—who had never tired of combing out her hair, the one thing he could sit still for, who was always needing to pace, to walk, to move.

Ai, God, where was Sanglant now? Where was their daughter? She had prayed that the force of her longing for them might drag her back close to them, but now she despaired. What reason had they to be wandering in this wasteland? She didn’t have time to seek them out, because time and tide and the infallible turning of the stars would not wait. How could she get back to them knowing that she might be driven onward on a path that would not intersect with theirs for days or months or even years? She did not know how long she had been absent from this world. She did not know how much time she had left until the great conjunction.

“Tell me first,” she said carefully, “who you are.”

“If I were your enemy, you would already be dead.”

She laughed because, as he spoke, the tenor of his face reminded her of Cat Mask. She touched her sword, Lucian’s friend, to reassure herself that it still hung faithfully at her belt. “Perhaps. It is possible that you are not capable of killing me. It is possible that you would not wish to.”

“It is possible that you are now my hostage.”

“It is possible that you are mine.”

He laughed, an echo of hers, but his voice cracked and she had an uneasy feeling that he was hiding something profound, not just his identity and his purpose here but a deeper secret, like a fire smoldering beneath peat that may burst out unexpectedly to scorch the digging hand.

“I am no one, just a man in search of griffin wings.”