The Gathering Storm (Crown of Stars 5)

The birds are right to fear us, he thinks. They have no means by which to fight back.

Ki parts the reeds and beckons. He pads up beside her and gazes across a last glittery stretch of open waters. Three islands rise from the marsh, two of them low, buttressed by earth embankments thrown up around their perimeters that serve both as dikes and as fortifications, and the third a fully natural island set high enough that the tidal wash and the spring and summer floods cannot swamp it. There are so many armed men on the islands that the land is covered with them like swarming locusts. Tents lie higgledy-piggledy on the lower islands although some training grounds have been left bare, where men practice their swordcraft. Even from this distance he can hear the slap and ring of blows struck and countered as they prepare for war. A longhouse and three attendant huts hold pride of place on one of the islands but they were clearly built long ago, not newly raised. A golden banner marked with the image of a white stag flies from the thatched roof of the longhouse.

The Alban queen is here.

He can smell her. Her power and the magic of her tree sorcerers has a scent as sharp as smoke.

“Look!” whispers Ki, pointing.

The low summit of the third island bristles with teeth—or so he thinks until he realizes that a stone crown rises from the hill. All of the undergrowth has been ruthlessly cut back away from the circle of stones, and men labor with ropes and levers and earth ramps to raise a fallen monolith into position.

“What goes on there?”

She shakes her head in dismay. “When our family watched over the holy place, we left it in peace. No good will come of this, I am thinking. They’ll stir up the old spirits. Men have come from over the sea.”

“Ones like me?”

“Nay, not like you,” she says boldly. “None of you dragon-men. You would not touch the holy place, I am thinking. These are circle priests who have come from the east lands across the sea. Elafi saw there was a fight between the circle priests and the tree priests, for the queen’s favor.”

“How saw he this?”

“There’s a place to come up close without being seen, right up inside the crown. Only our family knows about it, because we got the secret from the grandmothers.”

“Can you take me?”

Ki has a pup’s grin, full of sharp teeth and playful expectation. “Not till the dark of the moon. It isn’t safe otherwise.”

Out of the still waters a majestic heron takes flight, wings wide as it glides low over them with its head tucked back on its shoulders and its legs dangling low, brushing the reeds. Its shadow covers them briefly.

Ki murmurs a blessing or a spell and ducks her head. “It’s a sign of the goddess’ favor,” she whispers.

Perhaps.

The gods seem fickle to Stronghand, offering favor or withdrawing it according to unknown and unpredictable whims. The RockChildren have never been burdened by meddling gods. They are masters of their own destiny.

But still, only a fool casts dirt in clean water when he is thirsty.

“If your goddess smiles on us, then truly we will meet with success.”

“What do you mean to do?”

He looks up at the gray sky. He smells a change in the weather, the wet taste of the east wind. A misting rain approaches. He can actually see the shadow of its passage over the pools and dark waters as it nears them.

“We will wait until the dark of the moon,” he says. “Then you will show me this secret place inside the crown.”

The girl is sharper than most of his advisers. She has never lived under the heel of a lord who holds over her the threat of life and death. That is why she is not afraid to question him. That is why she does not fear taking him out into the fens. “And then?”

Stronghand bares his teeth, a startling flash that, for an instant, takes the youth aback. Maybe, for the first time, she understands the threat he poses. Ki’s hand tightens on her knife, but she does not move at all, only stares back at him, eye for eye.

“I would like to know who these circle priests are, and what they are doing to the stone crown. Once I discover that, I will know what to do next. I have dreams, too.”

Ki pinches her lips together, eyes drawn tight. “Dreams are dangerous, my lord. My mother says that dreams have killed men and brought low those who were once queens and those who wished to rule after them.”

The rain front washes over them, hissing in the waters. Through the curtain of rain it is hard to see farther than a spear cast; the islands lie obscure and veiled, but he feels the presence of the stone crown as a throb deep in his bones. A shout carries over the waters. A cheer.

A stone has been raised, and sunk in place.

“Dangerous,” he agrees, “but it is more dangerous still to ignore them.”