The Gathering Storm (Crown of Stars 5)

Page 286

Here, with these griffins, through whose eyes she had seen the whole. She had saved the very creature who would strike the deathblow.

“Ai, God,” she whispered. If she killed them, then they could not kill Sanglant. She sheathed her sword and fumbled for her bow, set an arrow to the string, and bent it. But the bow swung wildly in her hand, tugging her off the mark. However many times she pulled it back to aim at the breast of the nearer beast, it jerked away. She could not draw on either griffin. Seeker of Hearts would not slay them. Was there some virtue in the griffins that made it impossible to kill them? Or was it the sorcerous heart of the bow that twisted away from inflicting harm on the beasts?

To fight them with only a short sword was absurd, and suicidal.

“Think, you fool,” she muttered as the silver-hued griffin watched her with an almost comical amiability, as if her struggle with the bow amused and interested it. It made no move to assault her.

They do not stalk me.

These fearsome creatures had not attacked her. The larger ducked its head as hounds do to invite play.

In the sphere of Jedu, she had experienced the unfolding scene through the eyes of the griffin. Now, she stood in that very place, alive and present. Sanglant lived; she had seen him herself. Therefore, he had not yet met his fate at the sunning stone. He would follow the griffin.

She pulled the hood of her cloak over her head to ward off the glare of the sun and, with her short sword resting over her thighs, settled down against the vantage stone to wait for him.

AS the fog lifted, Sanglant clambered down the slopes of the crags. Sometimes he scraped his hands and once, badly, his knees, but the discomfort only fueled his anger and frustration and urgency. The griffin had taken Liath. Bulkezu was dead and could not be forced to tell him what he had done with Blessing. And now he must hunt griffins in the midst of a wilderness whose landscape was utterly unfamiliar to him, nothing like the fields and woodland and hills he had grown up in.

He called out as he went and took numerous side trips to investigate hollows and overhangs, but he found no sign of Blessing or Anna nor even of Bulkezu’s passage. When he reached the valley, a little before midday, he struck out for the river.

His hearing and keen sense of taste and smell served him well; despite the bewildering lack of direction once he waded through the high grass, the scent of flowing water and the alteration in vegetation along the river as it wound through the valley guided him. Stunted fir trees grew along the banks, and it was in one of these copses that he halted late in the afternoon. He slid down the chalky slope that gave way where the ground formed a lip above the river itself, forming a bluff face not much more than an arm’s length high but crumbling and dangerous because of soft earth and the erosion caused by the snow melt that had swelled the river’s banks. As he crouched down with water swirling around his toes, he drank his fill and considered his situation. The cold water was like a slap as he splashed it on his face and washed the worst grime off his hands. He was light-headed; hunger gnawed in his belly, but he had no more food and only the river water for his thirst and, at least, a waterskin to carry it in. His daughter was missing and possibly dead. His wife—

A griffin screamed. The shrill call reverberated from upriver.

He waited, but the call did not come again.

Liath, at least, he had a hope of finding. He used his spear to lever himself up the bluff, grasped the tough roots of a straggling bush, and scrambled up to catch his breath in the copse of fir. The sky overhead remained gloriously clear, the hard blue dome of the heavens dappled with streaming clouds like dissolving gossamer wings. He ripped up a handful of clover and ate the fresh leaves, knowing that these might provide him with some strength. He picked what he could find for later, rolling them into a bundle tied up with stems of grass and tucking them away into a sleeve. The rest of the foliage was unknown to him, and he dared not experiment. He could not afford any retching sickness brought on by poisonous plants. Last, he checked his weapons—the knife and the spear, good iron.

He had survived a year of captivity by Bloodheart. He would survive this, and he would find his daughter whether she was alive or dead. Best not to consider that, if she were dead, he could never avenge her. He had not been granted the immense satisfaction of killing Bulkezu himself.

He hiked upstream along the river, watching the sky and the billow of the grass as the wind moved across it. The day’s shadows drew long as the sun sank toward the golden curve of the western hills. The frosty sliver of the waxing moon crept above the dark crags. A harrier glided close to the river’s bank. A startled grouse rustled away into a taller stand of grass. Following its path, he almost stepped on an abandoned nest, half of it scattered by winter’s storms. He knelt, but it was too early for eggs.

truck at his vulnerable eyes.

Dead.

The female griffin had killed Sanglant.

Here, by this stone.