The Gathering Storm (Crown of Stars 5)

The abbess nodded toward her before continuing. The tent grew dim as shadows lengthened, as the sun set and the blazing temperatures abated with the coming of twilight and the promise of night. They had no lamps.

“If this woman, this skopos, who calls herself Anne is truly Liathano’s mother, then that is where Liath will go. Seek out the Holy Mother Anne, and we will find the one we seek. That is where I wish to go.” Tears glistened on the old woman’s cheeks, and Diocletia tenderly wiped them away. “I am content with this turn of events, my friends. I am old, at the end of my life. The world will end for me whether a storm comes or not, and now I see that all along I have been selfish.”

Although outside the tent’s walls the camp grew lively as night fell, inside a hush contained them. The twilight wind fluttered along the canvas.

“I want to meet my granddaughter before I die.”

XXIX

THE TRAP SHE HAD LAID

1

IN Verna, Liath used an arrow to weave a net of magic through the crown. The threads pulled down from the heavens thrummed through her arms. This was joy. She felt transported and alive; her body hummed with the touch of the stars and the music of the spheres, the ever-turning wheel of the cosmos singing through her from top to toe.

Lady Bertha rode in the van, leading her thirty mounted men-at-arms in ranks of two through the blazing portal. Sorgatani followed, her wagon driven by the two slave women who attended her while her Kerayit guard rode behind. Last of all, Gnat, Mosquito, and Breschius paused, glancing back at her, and she willed them to forge forward. She dared not speak or move for fear of shifting the portal as the stars spun slowly westward, tugging at the threads.

The subtleties of direction and distance were harder to control than she had imagined, but with practice—indeed! With practice she could master this skill. The stars could speak through her; she could sing with them. She could dwell on Earth among those she loved and still touch the heavens.

As long as they defeated Anne.

The three men dashed forward through the archway at last. The ethereal threads quivered as if in a gusty breeze as the men passed under them and vanished, and as she pulled the threads in behind herself she paused on the threshold and looked back. The daimone waited in the valley, hiding itself, but she could see its pale form quavering against the fading night. It had hovered nearby all night.

“Who are you waiting for?” she asked, but it did not answer, so she turned her back on Verna and stepped through as light cascaded around her. It seemed in that passage as if all those threads drew the spheres in behind them, the entire cosmos—stars, the sun, time itself—swirled as the light from one body blurred into the next.

She sees Sanglant marching out of the mountains at the van of a great army. He rides at the front on Resuelto with Hathui behind him and noble ladies and lords surrounding him. On either side pace the two griffins. The male no longer wears a hood. It lifts its eagle’s head and shrills a call that echoes down the valley. No clouds soften the hard blue glare of the sky. The view is glorious, and the road lies clear before them, all the way down to the coastal plain.

An Eika prince sails on choppy seas, brooding at the stem of his ship. He stares across the gray waters, hand clenched around the haft of a standard laced with bones and beads and feathers. Two black hounds lie at his feet. Behind him, a deacon prays.

Ivar rides along a woodland path beside a young man who looks startlingly familiar. Erkanwulf? Wind ripples through the leaves, turning her down a new path.

She sees Hanna steeping.

Hanna!

The threads whip and crack her sight down new passageways, a maze that pulls her in a hundred directions as it splinters into manifold paths.

She has lofted far above the world, and she sees how the threads of each life are intertwined with all the others, a chain linking every soul and every thing and every place.

A filthy beggar with hands and feet chained is shoved into a cage. Shadow obscures his face.

A creature half-man half-fish swims in calm waters, hair writhing like eels.

Sister Venia wipes her brow, standing among two score corpses. She has blood on her hands, and a disfiguring anger suffuses her expression.

In the depths of the earth, a wizened beast crouches before a sheet of metal and runs its fingers across a glowing sequence of lumps and etchings. Others cluster behind it, clicking and humming, tapping the ground.

Snakes hiss. A phoenix stirs in its deep cavern. The ground trembles.

An owl hoots. She turns to see Li’at’dano looking right at her through a stone burning with blue fire “Beware!” the centaur cries. “Beware the trap she has laid!”

Seven crowns of seven stones form the loom on which the great spell was woven in the long-ago days, laid out across the land to make the points of a vast crown. She glimpses each circle in turn, and she sees:

Meriam.

Hugh.

Marcus.