The Gathering Storm (Crown of Stars 5)

The wind tickled her neck. A chill ran down her spine, and she shivered. The agony in his tone was awful to hear but Sanglant was not a subtle man. What he felt, he expressed. He knew no other way. He could be no other way.

“There,” he said, his voice a scrape. “I’ve said it. You know how badly I want you, Liath. God know how desperately I have dreamed of you by day and by night. Worst it was, by night. I have kept concubines briefly, or gone without, but whichever it was, it never made any difference. I could never stop thinking of you and wondering if you ever intended to come back to me, if you really cared for me and the child. Or if you were dead. There were days, God help me, when I thought it would be simpler if you were just dead, for then I would know that you had not meant to leave me behind. That you still loved me truly. Not that you made a rash vow once when you thought I was safely dead, or spoke a pledge in a rush of infatuation and desire for me, but that it was the wish of your heart despite anything else the world and the heavens offered you. That you want me that much. As much as I want you.”

He gripped her wrists, pinning her hands to the ground on either side of his body.

“I must know, Liath. I must know.”

She wept silent tears, burned out of her by the force of his pain and his honesty. After a while she was able to speak past the quaver that kept strangling her words.

“I possessed wings made of flame. Wings. My kinfolk welcomed me into my mother’s home, a city encompassed by aetherical fire. It is the most beautiful place I have ever seen.

“A river of fire flowed there, and I followed its current into both past and future. The ladder of the mages was laid plain. I glimpsed the mysterious heart of the cosmos. Nothing was closed to me. Nothing. Not even my own heart. Because that is what I fear most.”

“Your heart?” His gaze remained fixed on her, dark and terrible. The breeze swept strands of his black hair across his face, their movement too dim for mortal eyes to see—but not for hers. She knew now what she was, and what she was not.

“Just … just …” Each word was a struggle. The truth was so hard. “Being brave enough to trust. To love. Being brave enough not to hide. I don’t know—” Emotion choked her, and she shut her eyes to contain it, as if it might explode out through her gaze. Grains of fire trembled everywhere around her, in the grass, in the earth, in the wind itself, the seeds of a devastating conflagration. She dared not let them loose.

He lifted a hand to touch her chin. The caress of his fingers was like water, cooling, calming.

“I’m not like you,” she said, “so open. So honest and true.”

“So mad,” he muttered.

She smiled. The salty liquid of her tears tickled her lips.

“So mad. And so strong.”

“Am I?”

“You are. I don’t know if I can love fully and truly. Da and I lived apart from the world for so long. We hid ourselves away. We veiled ourselves from the sight of those who hunted us. When Hugh took me as his slave, I built an even higher wall to protect myself. It was easier that way; it was the only way I knew. But even when you came, though I let you in, that wall held firm. I was used to the wall. I felt safe with it to protect me. And then. When I ascended into the heavens, I saw everything I had ever wanted.”

She tilted her head back and through a blur of tears gazed at the beauty of the sky so shot through with stars that it seemed to hold as much light as darkness.

He was silent. He did not move except to release her wrists.

“I could have abandoned the world below to its fate. I could have left all this behind. Forever. Anne and her sleepers, Henry and his wars, everyone and all of it. Hanna and Ivar. You and the baby. I could have joined my mother’s kinfolk and cast off this flesh. But I had to know. I couldn’t leave you behind because I’ve never really known you. I don’t know if I can want you as much as you want me. I don’t even know how much that is. But I have to try. That’s why I came back.”

The stars burned in the night sky. Did her kinfolk journey there, so high above? They had not mourned her leaving; the span of a human lifetime meant little to them. They had simply looked into her heart and let her go.

She cupped his face in her hands. “Look into my heart, Sanglant.”

“Ai, God,” he murmured, like a man who has received his deathblow, but he gazed at her face, searching.

Poised there, she waited as the wind rustled in the grass and a nightjar churred. In the distance an owl hooted.

“Fire,” he whispered hoarsely, as though stricken by wonder; but then, his voice always sounded like that. “Fire is the heart of you.”

He reared up, almost dislodging her from his lap, and crushed her in an embrace so tight that for a moment she could not breathe. “I am not waiting any longer,” he added, half laughing and all out of breath, so vibrantly alive and awake and aware that his presence swallowed everything else, the heavens, the world, sound, and light.

Well. Everything except the grass tickling the sole of her left foot.

But when she kissed him, when he kissed her, that distraction, too, vanished.

4

EXCEPT for the presence of the daimone-woman, she could have made easy work of the hunter now sprawled, sleeping, on the grass, vulnerable and alone away from his tribe. Yet she had killed him once already, hadn’t she? Hadn’t that stab been enough to kill an elk or a bear?

He had recovered because of the magic woven into his bones.