The Gathering Storm (Crown of Stars 5)

Sometimes the mercy of death was preferable to living.

Yet.

Never let it be said that he did not fight until his last breath. He tried to speak her name but could get no voiced breath past his lips.

“He moves,” said the healer, speaking to someone unseen. “See you his finger, this twitch? Fetch the Bright One.”

A shadow skimmed the curved wall of the sky, distorted by corners and angles, and abruptly he recognized his surroundings: he lay inside a tent. He sensed a smaller body lying asleep near to his, but as the flap of the tent lifted a line of light flashed, waking every point of pain.

He gasped out loud. Agony shattered his thoughts.

“Sanglant.”

Her voice startled him out of the stupor of pain. This time he could speak.

“Liath? Where have you been? You abandoned us.”

She was crying softly. “I was taken away by my kinfolk, but I had no wings to fly with. I could not follow them nor return to you. But now I have walked the spheres, love. Now I’ve come back to you and our child.”

“Ah,” he said.

The light faded. He fell into darkness.

And woke.

He hurt everywhere, but the pain no longer was excruciating; it was only a terrible throbbing ache that radiated throughout his body. Air thrummed against the walls of the tent in a complex melody that rose and fell depending on the strength of the wind and minute shifts of its direction, although in general it seemed to be coming from the southeast.

He heard Liath’s voice.

“I can see nothing. I have little knowledge of healing. I do not understand why she should have fallen into this stupor. What can I do to wake her?”

“Look more closely, Bright One.” The shaman’s inhuman voice stirred unexpected feelings in his breast—irritation that she had dismissed him so easily, fear for his lost daughter, determination to hunt down Bulkezu.

Bulkezu was dead.

But not by Sanglant’s hand.

A strange scent tickled his nostrils, a light stinging heat that was both sweet and hot and yet not really a smell at all. It was the taste and touch of sorcery.

Liath caught in her breath in the way a woman might, prodded to ecstasy. “I see it! It’s a pale thread, there. She is still linked to the daimone that suckled her, who returned to the sphere of Erekes.”

“Nay, as you see, the thread is broken.”

“So it is, God help us. As long as I walked the spheres, the thread between them remained unbroken. But when I crossed back into the world below … think of a man on the shore and one in a boat on the river who remain in contact by both holding onto a rope. If that rope is cut, the one on the river will be borne away by the current.”

“She has drunk the milk of the aether and it has changed her. She has not grown in the fashion of a child of Earth, not if she was born only four years ago.”

“She’s grown so quickly.”

“In body, but not in mind. Now that thread of unearthly sustenance is cut off. She lies adrift, betwixt and between this world and the one above.”

“What can we do?”

“Ah. You have asked me a question I cannot answer. I have not walked the spheres, nor can any reach the ladder who are mired in Earth.”

“How came my father by such knowledge, then, that he could teach me and that I could use that knowledge to climb?”

The shaman chuckled. Something about the comradely wryness of her response aggravated Sanglant in the same way a constantly buzzing mosquito makes it difficult to sleep. The centaur had not treated him with such respect. He was not accustomed to being treated as anything lower than a king’s son, a prince of the realm, and captain of a powerful army. He was not accustomed to being expected to prove himself to another’s satisfaction.