The Gathering Storm (Crown of Stars 5)

“How much time? The longer she eludes me, the stronger she gets. You cannot remain Lord of Weorod if the queen of Alba regains what she has lost.”

Ediki grinned, easy to see in the moonlight. He had strong, straight teeth for a man of his years; he hadn’t lost even one, remarkable considering the many healed stripes Stronghand had seen on his back the day Ediki had joined up with his army.

“Before the moon is full again, my lord, I promise you, I will find you a guide into the fens. But the queen is powerful and her sorcerers are dangerous, as my kinfolk discovered to their sorrow back in the days when we were still free, and rulers of this country. Long ago.”

Stronghand glanced toward Tenth Son, standing close enough to hear every word. His littermate shook the standard, and the bones and beads rang, clacking together.

“I do not fear the tree sorcerers, nor should you. We are strong, we who were born in the north. Your kin will rule again in this land if they are among those who serve me well and faithfully. Show me how to find the queen. That is the first task I set you and your tribe.”

Ediki bowed his graying head as a sign of obedience and understanding, but he looked pensive and content. The days of traveling and fighting had not wearied him. “It is a small task compared to the years I struggled to hold my head high although I was a slave.”

Moonlight shivered on the waters. The beauty of the half-seen landscape and the quiet night washed over Stronghand as if on a rising tide, enveloping him. It was so still. The countryside was a mystery to him, a trackless wasteland of water and reeds that was, despite everything, a place of numinous wonder. Did the spirits of drowned men cause the waters to shine, or was that only a glamour of the moon? Lights flickered and sparked and died among the shadows, among the sedge beds and stands of reeds, each flare like a candle lit for a moment before being extinguished.

Like life, he thought. His own life would be a bright, brief flame that might split the darkness for as long as lightning kindled the heavens, but no more. Even the moon’s glow could only reach so far into the ceaseless tide of years.

“What are those lights?” he asked Ediki. “They burn for an instant and then they’re gone.”

The lord of Weorod smiled sadly, but his expression was clean and joyful as he gazed over the landscape of his childhood.

“Those are the souls of the men we killed today. They’re seeking the gateway that leads to the other side, to the land of the dead, where the meadow flowers bloom.”

2

EDIKI steered the canoe down a side channel into a labyrinth of sedge and reed. Islets like the rounded backs of whales humped up out of the shallow waters, covered with grass or low-lying brush willow, white with flowers. Through this maze they glided, Ediki kneeling at the stern of the canoe and his nephew Elafi at the stem.

They had found Elafi ten days after the assault on Grim’s Dike, and it had taken all of Ediki’s persuasive powers to convince the young man that he was who he said he was. In the end, Stronghand had agreed to come alone to meet the refugees in the marsh. It was the only way Elafi would agree to guide them into the marshland.

The sun was just coming up as the crescent moon set. The last stars faded as the sky slowly brightened, and the soft breath of a dawn breeze lifting off the waters whispered through the reeds like the murmuring of the drowned.

“We’re here, Uncle,” said Elafi, grinning back at Ediki. “You’re a little slow and sloppy, but you steer like a man who grew up in the fens.”

Here proved to be nothing more interesting than a broad hummock of sedge and reeds shouldering out of the waters, but Stronghand smelled that people camped here. The canoe slid up onto a muddy shore where the reeds had been cut back; otherwise it was impossible to see that the islet was inhabited.

“There she is,” said Elafi unnecessarily as a short, middle-aged woman pressed through the reeds and halted on the beach, mud squishing between her toes as she stared at them, face alight with joy.

“Manda!” Ediki clambered from the boat, but in his haste the boat tipped and sloshed, and he splashed up to the woman, laughing, and she grabbed him and hugged him fiercely as she wept.

“Brother. Brother. I thought you were lost to us.”

Elafi gestured to Stronghand to climb out of the canoe; together, they pulled the boat up onto the shore and stowed it where it could not be seen. There were a half dozen crude boats hidden among the reeds. He took his standard and his spear and followed the young man up to the camp where Ediki was now greeting every person from the eldest to the youngest.

This was a camp of fugitives, about a score, half of them children. The sturdiest shelter consisted of a lean-to built of sticks covered by a roof woven of reeds, their clothing was little more than grass skirts and cloaks, cunningly braided together, and they had only one cooking pot among them as well as baskets and sharpened sticks fashioned into spears or fishing forks. Yet there was plenty of food: plucked ducks and coots, skinned voles and hares, gutted perch, roach, and pickerel as well as a bounty of slippery eels, and blossoms and young leaves from the spring flowering.

A lad approached them, bearing a bronze cup.

“Will you drink, Honored One?” he asked boldly.

Stronghand regarded the cup gravely. The liquid steaming within did not smell at all appetizing. Ediki hurried back with his sister beside him.

“My kinfolk offer you guest rights,” he said. “I pray you, my lord. Drink.”

He let his grin flash, knowing that they tested him. He took the cup from the youth and raised it.

“I come alone to offer an alliance to you,” he said, and drank half. The brew went down easier than he had imagined, laced with an aftertaste that puckered his tongue so sharply he almost laughed in surprise. Instead, he held out what was left.

Ediki’s sister stepped forward. “I am Manda, grandmother of this clan. I give you welcome. I dreamed of you, dragon-man.”

She was not lean and muscled like a warrior; she was stocky, even plump, despite the obvious hardships she and her clan had suffered, and she had the same coarse black hair—cut short—as Ediki had, although hers had less gray in it. She looked like an ordinary woman in all ways, if one only looked on the surface. But in her stance he saw authority and in the way the others deferred to her, holding back until she had spoken, he saw leadership. She was a honed spear forged in a time of trouble. She had weight, and heft, and her surety was like the sharpened edge of a killing blade.