The Gathering Storm (Crown of Stars 5)

He heaved himself up to his feet and headed east into the wind. The cold raged around him, but he trudged onward. As the day faded, the gray sky turned to a deep blue-gray shadow and the high crags became a black wall. The snow trailed off, leaving frozen ground swept clean by the wind. The temperature did not rise, nor did it fall.

Through the night he walked on, never varying his pace. His voice was lost; no words formed in his head. Thoughts existed in their raw, inhuman, natural form as he turned his senses outward, seeking, listening, smelling.

The night spoke to his ears: “There is nothing before you, nothing behind.” The earth spoke on his feet as the thin crust of soil was crushed beneath each step: “This is a hard land. Beware.” The cold spoke through his skin: “I come from the mountain, from the sky, from the cold worlds beyond. Join me, and I will carry you away.”

The wind spoke most clearly, bringing scent as he neared the eastern heights. A deer, injured, bleeding, lay down to die. A winter-starved wolf and its mate circled in for the feast. A lone eagle dove in the turbulent winds, investigating a blast of heat high up on the westernmost outcropping of the crags.

Fire.

A blaze tore at the wind high above him, directly east. A campfire, or a bonfire. A signal.

To this conflagration Sanglant listened, thwarted in his quest when the wind shifted and whispered other secrets, as if knowing he sought signs of human life, teased forward when it changed direction and blew down from the east once again. As the night drew on, the cold winter gale subsided into a drowsy breeze hinting of spring, blown up from the south along the ridgeline. He began to lose the scent.

He walked more quickly. The ground shifted subtly upward, then steepened, until he had to pick his route up the slope using his spear as a staff to steady his way. He smelled and listened to the lay of the ground more than saw it; his eyesight was not particularly keen at night, so the curl of the breeze against the land revealed the trail. Late into the night, with the scent of dawn in the air and the clouds shredding into patches through which stars shone, he caught sight of a flicker of light high up among the rocks.

The waning moon breached the clouds, its light casting a silver sheen over the rocks, and with this lamp to guide him he made a track through fallen rocks, careful not to slip and betray himself with a loud sound.

He thought the campfire far away and was not prepared to hear its steady roar so close by, a trick perhaps of the echoing rock face of the crags above him. Behind, the valley lay in darkness, as unfathomable as the sea. He paused to catch his breath, shut his eyes to listen for the scrape of a foot on the rock that would give away the presence of his enemy.

He could not smell him, but an itch between his shoulders, along his palms, a whisper in his mind, told him that Bulkezu was close. Smoke tickled his nose.

He edged forward along an outcropping and negotiated a scatter of boulders fallen from the crags above. Beyond this obstacle a hollow widened out of the mountainside, forming a sheltered niche where griffins had built a gigantic nest out of branches, grass, reeds, bones, scraps of cloth, and a litter of iron feathers woven together.

The huge nest blazed up into the night sky. A griffin crouched in the space between the burning nest and the far edge of the hollow, where the mountainside split away into a cliff face. It was a magnificent creature, bigger than an ox, with gleaming iron wings and a pale-silver coat, its eagle’s head raised as it stared at a single figure standing a stone’s toss away from it. The slender human had retreated up on a tumble of rocks. Facing each other, at a stalemate, neither griffin nor the foe it hunted moved. The fire sparked and roared.

He tightened his grip on his spear as a faint rose glow brushed the eastern horizon beyond the line of crags. The griffin shifted position, lashing its snake’s tail, ready to spring. The last glint of the setting moon’s light washed the mountainside in silver and revealed the form and face of the person standing up on the rocks.

Liath.

He was dreaming. Bulkezu had cast a spell over him.

Moonlight gilded her hair to a pale glamour. Her face had not changed at all in the intervening years, and it seemed the spark of blue fire in her eyes blazed so brightly that he could believe he actually saw a flicker of fire reflected there, although certainly he was too far away to see the details of her face. Fire consumed the nest, smoke and flame billowing heavenward, and a faint shimmer of golden-orange-red light danced like an aurora around her as well, making her shine as invisible fire limned her body.

She was as beautiful as he remembered her, but she was something else now—powerful in a discomforting way like the blast of heat from a well-stoked hearth that prevents the blacksmith from approaching too closely.

She did not see him.

The hem of her cloak lifted as wind caught it, swirling it around her knees. She had braced herself on the rock, bow bent with an arrow ready to fly, yet she did not loose it. The griffin did not spring, although its tail whipped along the ground, stirring up a misty cloud of dust.

He stared, stupefied at the unanticipated sight of her. Where had she been all this time? Why had she never sought him out?

Ai, God. A single arrow was no match for a griffin.

He broke forward—and in that instant death brushed his shoulders. Turning and ducking in the same motion, he just missed being caught in the face by a spear point thrust out from the rocky shadows behind him. His enemy had crept up while he gaped, dumbfounded and witless, at his lost wife. He tripped, rocks slipping under his boots, and threw up his spear barely in time to knock away Bulkezu’s second thrust. Falling hard, he lost control of the spear, which rolled into the rocks. Bulkezu leaped forward with his own spear and planted himself before the prince, legs braced, hands sliding and then tightening on the haft as he spun the weapon a quarter circle and raised it for the final, downward thrust.

Time slowed, as it often did for Sanglant in battle, when the world around him shrank until only he and the enemy he fought remained in focus. He grabbed for his knife, but his belt had twisted in the fall and the sheath was caught beneath his hip.

Could a man cursed as he was survive a thrust through the heart?

Bulkezu shouted—a word, a battle cry, a curse—his scarred face lit with triumph as he laughed madly and tightened his hands to drive home the blow.

The arrow blossomed to the left center of his torso, in the heart.

Sanglant flung himself hard to the right over the rugged ground as Bulkezu toppled forward, a surprised look on his face. Even so, the prince’s legs got tangled in the corpse, and as he struggled to free himself, the griffin cried shrilly behind him. A cloud of dust and a battering ram of sharp wind, the gust made by its wings, slowed him as he grabbed the spear out of Bulkezu’s hands and ran forward, half blinded by the stinging particles of earth blown up into the air, the grit pummeling his face.

aning moon breached the clouds, its light casting a silver sheen over the rocks, and with this lamp to guide him he made a track through fallen rocks, careful not to slip and betray himself with a loud sound.

He thought the campfire far away and was not prepared to hear its steady roar so close by, a trick perhaps of the echoing rock face of the crags above him. Behind, the valley lay in darkness, as unfathomable as the sea. He paused to catch his breath, shut his eyes to listen for the scrape of a foot on the rock that would give away the presence of his enemy.