The Gathering Storm (Crown of Stars 5)

Ai, God! The feathers! He grabbed for his knife’s sheath, but in the course of the battle the feathers had torn it right open. They were gone, and half the sheath with them. If only one feather would come drifting down from on high into his hand, he could succeed.

Henry—the daimone—laughed cruelly and lunged forward. Just in time Sanglant stepped aside and parried the blow, but that blow hit his shield so hard that wood disintegrated and he was sent reeling, and tripped, and stumbled, and barely fended off another cut from one of Henrys captains, then went down on a knee. The captain gasped sharply as a dart sparkled in his shoulder.

Sanglant got to his feet. Zuangua had leaped to cover him and now danced back and forth as Henry struck blow after blow, attempting to get through him to Sanglant. The shadow prince was bleeding from face and leg and gut, and still he fought while his warriors pressed back the nobles.

Sanglant pulled his knife out of his boot and leaped in to grab Henry from behind. He kicked him hard at the back of one knee as he wrapped his arm around his father’s throat and pulled him backward. But the daimone caught the blade and just the touch of that hand shattered the iron blade into shards that sprayed out, caught fire, and spattered against the ground in a hissing hail of sparks.

Henry reached back and wrenched Sanglant’s helmet right off his head. Before the prince could react, Henry twisted his fingers into Sanglant’s hair. Sanglant squeezed harder, trying to choke him, but those fingers ground into his flesh and twisted as though to yank his head right off his neck. What claws had cut open the aetherical substance of Zuangua’s shade had no purchase on mortal flesh, but the cutting edge of Henry’s iron gauntlets cut into Sanglant’s skin and seemed likely to sever tendons.

He struggled, but it was futile. Henry’s unnatural strength could not be bested, not even by him. The pain made spots flash and fade before Sanglant’s eyes. The world hazed as the daimone throttled him. His own grip slackened. He could not hold on.

Zuangua’s black-edged spear stabbed right through his father’s head. He felt the whisper of its passing as a hot tingle below his own chin.

Clutched so close, he actually felt the daimone die as the shadow blade pierced its soul and released it. That inhuman strength snapped and with an ungodly shriek it vanished into the aether, banished from Earth. He recoiled and collapsed onto his back with his father on top of him and his arm still wrapped around Henry’s throat.

His gaze was forced heavenward as he fought for breath. Through the boughs he saw stars swollen to twice their normal size. The Crown of Stars stood at zenith, so bright it hurt his eyes. The wheel of the stars throbbed and pulsed until that music reverberated through his head and sank into his very bones, making him weak, shaking the Earth itself with a roar filled with bangs and loud knocks and tremendous booms rolling on and on and on and on. Successive waves of a sickly, nacreous light washed across the sky.

“For Henry!” shouted Liutgard behind him.

“For Wendar!” cried Burchard. “And the empress!”

Then it hit.

A wind blasted out of the southeast. Trees snapped and splintered as they were scythed down. Men tumbled to the ground. Horses screamed as the gale sent them flying. The gale scorched the air and turned the heavens white, and the leaves of a butcher’s-broom shriveled, curled, and disintegrated right before his eyes. His skin hurt.

He rolled to get his father’s body beneath him, to protect him from debris, and in that movement saw Zuangua and his companions staggering backward and their bodies shifting and changing as the wind howled over them, as if that wind were filling them with substance, with earth, with mortality. Liutgard had flung her spear before she was herself hurled to the ground; the weapon carried on the wind but held true, piercing Zuangua in the shoulder where he clung to a toppled tree trunk.

The Ashioi prince screamed, who had gone untold generations without any pain except that hoarded in his heart. Blood as red as a mortal man’s gushed from the wound.

The wind died abruptly, although Sanglant heard it tear away across the land, moving outward. He sat back on his heels. We must take shelter, Gyasi had said, and he knew it to be true: there was worse yet to come.

A horrible orange-red glare shot up into the heavens along the southeastern horizon. It looked as if the world had caught on fire. It reminded him of Liath, and a wave of sick dread coursed through him. Was she dead?

Henry groaned.

“Father!” He pulled off his father’s gauntlets and helm, chafing his hands, staring into his eyes, which looked like any man’s eyes in this strange half-light. “Ai, God! Father!”

Henry lifted an arm weakly. “Hush, son,” he said in a voice entirely like his own familiar beloved voice. His hand brushed Sanglant’s hair and stroked it softly. “Hush, child. Go back to sleep. You are Bloodheart’s prisoner no longer.”

Sanglant wept.

Around him, folk began to shake out of their stupor, those who had not been knocked unconscious by debris or falling trees. He heard a thrashing out in the forest as men and horses came to their senses, got up, then fled or shouted for help or moaned in pain, depending on their injuries. An unseen soldier yelled out an alarm, but it was too late. A dust-covered, blood-soaked nightmare of a man stumbled out of the trees, laughing as coarsely as a madman. This creature steadied himself on the shaft of a banner pole from which hung a tattered banner so stained and ripped that it was almost impossible to mark what sigil had been embroidered thereon.

Almost, but not quite: it was a glittering crown of stars set on a sable field representing the night sky.

“Cousin! I have found you at last! God Above, you bastard, you abandoned me on the field! But this time I bested you. I won!”

Zuangua had roused; now he spoke a word. The hawk-masked woman leaped forward and, before Wichman realized what she meant to do, pulled the banner out of his hand. In an instant she stood back beside her captain, spear raised. Other Ashioi clattered in from the woods to form a grim wall made up of flesh and blood bodies and expressions filled with an ancient hatred.

The air was utterly still, the only sounds the cries of men and animals out among the trees, the snap of a weakened branch and the rustle and crash of its falling, and the steady filtering patter of falling ash.

“Let him go,” said Liutgard sternly. She had regained her feet although she had lost her horse. Burchard lay on the ground, not moving; Henry’s companions shook themselves off or writhed on the earth, and at least one had been crushed by a falling tree.

“Ah!” said Henry, blinking his eyes. “I’m dizzy. Sanglant, what has happened?”

The prince rose, but he knew already what faced him, standing as he did between the two sides and with what remained of his army, he prayed, safe within the fortress—but out of his reach. He was no different than his dragon tabard—one half smeared and grimy with earth and the other stained with blood. As inside, so outside.

“Now it is time to make peace,” he said.