The Gathering Storm (Crown of Stars 5)

“Princess Mathilda is your heir, Your Majesty,” said Burchard, troubled now, wiping ash from his face. “You named her yourself.”

“Under duress … even Sapientia not worthy. This one.” He reached across his chest, found Sanglant’s other arm, and clutched it tight. “This one. Swear to me. Give me your oath. You will follow Sanglant. He becomes regnant after me. Swear it!” He choked and convulsed, but he held on. “Swear it!”

They swore it, each one of them, because Henry was their king, the one they had followed all this way.

“Ah!” he said when last of all Burchard and Liutgard knelt and gave their oath. He looked up into Sanglant’s eyes. His own were free of any taint. “Ah! The pain is gone. My son. My beloved son.”

The light passed out of him. His soul was released, there one instant and in the next gone utterly.

Sanglant bowed his head, too stricken even to weep any longer. At first, the rustling seemed part of the strange night, more ash falling, perhaps, or leaves tickling down through dead and blasted branches. Then he looked up.

They had knelt, all of them; all but the Ashioi, who waited. Tears streaked Liutgard’s cheeks. Burchard sobbed silently, shoulders shaking. Beyond, as far back into the forest as Sanglant could see, captains and sergeants and men-at-arms knelt to honor their dead king.

Out of the gloom stumbled two recognizable figures—Lewenhardt and Hathui. The Eagle cried out and flung herself down beside Henry’s corpse.

“He died as himself,” said Sanglant as she wept, and she shook her head to show she’d understood because she could not speak through her grief. “He died as regnant.”

“Tell me, Cousin,” said Zuangua a little mockingly behind him. “What does this display of passion and weeping portend?”

Even Wichman had knelt, but he sprang up at the sound of Zuangua’s voice and with a roar leaped forward and ripped the imperial banner out of the hawk-woman’s grip. He stuck it into the ground behind Sanglant, and he laughed.

“What is your command, Your Majesty?” he said, the words almost a taunt.

Sanglant laid his father’s body gently on the ground. He rose, shaking ash from his shoulders. Henry’s blood streaked his hands. His sword, shield, and lance were gone, but his father’s last gift to him had been the most powerful weapon of all.

“The storm is upon us,” he said, letting his voice carry. Ash and grief and exhaustion made him hoarse—but then, his voice always sounded like that. “I do not know what else we will have to endure to gain victory.”

What I will have to endure, he thought, if Liath and Blessing are dead.

“We have allies.” He looked at Zuangua, but the Ashioi prince only shrugged, unable to comprehend his words, holding himself aloof. I hope we have allies.

“We have enemies. Some of them are those we trusted in the past.”

And some, like Adelheid and Hugh and Anne, don’t yet know what they have lost.

“Who follows me?”

“Your Majesty,” said Duchess Liutgard and Duke Burchard. Said the noble companions who remained. Said the captains still living. Said Lewenhardt, speaking for his own faithful soldiers.

Henry’s army echoed them, every one. They were his. He ruled them now.

5

ANNE ruled the heavens. Her net of magic spanned the Earth as the exiled land belonging to the Lost Ones shifted out of the aether in its attempt to return to its earthly roots. That net quivered under so much weight, but it held. Even lacking three crowns it would hold, it would cast the Aoi land back into the aether, but beneath the weaving the first intimations of doom swept across the land as lightning torched the sky and earthquakes shuddered across the entire continent of Novaria. What the Seven Sleepers did not understand and refused to understand and cared nothing for was that by dooming the Lost Ones they were dooming Earth. They could not change their course now. They would not. They had won.

Anne’s triumph was as palpable as sand—and like sand, it could be washed away with one tidal surge.

Liath called fire from the deeps.

The eruption of molten rock exploded straight up through the heart of the stone circle that was itself the heart of the weaving. Liath felt Anne die. She felt Anne’s life ripped from her. The skopos hadn’t time even for a single startled exclamation. Between one breath and the next she was dead.

The souls of all of Anne’s retinue and Anne’s army were torn from their bodies as the power of the blast vaporized every living thing that stood or moved within a league of the crown. It stripped away the topsoil to expose the rock beneath. Ash and pulverized stone sprayed upward. The rock hammered to earth in a hail that struck up and down the coast and made the Middle Sea foam for leagues outward. The ash rose into the heavens as a churning plume that soon covered half the sky. Lava poured over what remained of the cliff face into the waters, where clouds of steam boiled upward to meld with ash and smoke.

Inside the shelter of her wings Liath witnessed all this and more, the massive destruction she and the WiseMothers had wrought in order to rip apart the spell. The stone crown was obliterated. Anne and her retinue were dead, utterly gone.

And this was only the beginning. This was not even the worst of it. As you sow, so shall you reap. Humankind and their Bwr allies had sown two thousand seven hundred and four years ago and now their descendants faced a bitter harvest.

The storm was coming.