The Gathering Storm (Crown of Stars 5)

He could not smell him, but an itch between his shoulders, along his palms, a whisper in his mind, told him that Bulkezu was close. Smoke tickled his nose.

He edged forward along an outcropping and negotiated a scatter of boulders fallen from the crags above. Beyond this obstacle a hollow widened out of the mountainside, forming a sheltered niche where griffins had built a gigantic nest out of branches, grass, reeds, bones, scraps of cloth, and a litter of iron feathers woven together.

The huge nest blazed up into the night sky. A griffin crouched in the space between the burning nest and the far edge of the hollow, where the mountainside split away into a cliff face. It was a magnificent creature, bigger than an ox, with gleaming iron wings and a pale-silver coat, its eagle’s head raised as it stared at a single figure standing a stone’s toss away from it. The slender human had retreated up on a tumble of rocks. Facing each other, at a stalemate, neither griffin nor the foe it hunted moved. The fire sparked and roared.

He tightened his grip on his spear as a faint rose glow brushed the eastern horizon beyond the line of crags. The griffin shifted position, lashing its snake’s tail, ready to spring. The last glint of the setting moon’s light washed the mountainside in silver and revealed the form and face of the person standing up on the rocks.

Liath.

He was dreaming. Bulkezu had cast a spell over him.

Moonlight gilded her hair to a pale glamour. Her face had not changed at all in the intervening years, and it seemed the spark of blue fire in her eyes blazed so brightly that he could believe he actually saw a flicker of fire reflected there, although certainly he was too far away to see the details of her face. Fire consumed the nest, smoke and flame billowing heavenward, and a faint shimmer of golden-orange-red light danced like an aurora around her as well, making her shine as invisible fire limned her body.

She was as beautiful as he remembered her, but she was something else now—powerful in a discomforting way like the blast of heat from a well-stoked hearth that prevents the blacksmith from approaching too closely.

She did not see him.

The hem of her cloak lifted as wind caught it, swirling it around her knees. She had braced herself on the rock, bow bent with an arrow ready to fly, yet she did not loose it. The griffin did not spring, although its tail whipped along the ground, stirring up a misty cloud of dust.

He stared, stupefied at the unanticipated sight of her. Where had she been all this time? Why had she never sought him out?

Ai, God. A single arrow was no match for a griffin.

He broke forward—and in that instant death brushed his shoulders. Turning and ducking in the same motion, he just missed being caught in the face by a spear point thrust out from the rocky shadows behind him. His enemy had crept up while he gaped, dumbfounded and witless, at his lost wife. He tripped, rocks slipping under his boots, and threw up his spear barely in time to knock away Bulkezu’s second thrust. Falling hard, he lost control of the spear, which rolled into the rocks. Bulkezu leaped forward with his own spear and planted himself before the prince, legs braced, hands sliding and then tightening on the haft as he spun the weapon a quarter circle and raised it for the final, downward thrust.

Time slowed, as it often did for Sanglant in battle, when the world around him shrank until only he and the enemy he fought remained in focus. He grabbed for his knife, but his belt had twisted in the fall and the sheath was caught beneath his hip.

Could a man cursed as he was survive a thrust through the heart?

Bulkezu shouted—a word, a battle cry, a curse—his scarred face lit with triumph as he laughed madly and tightened his hands to drive home the blow.

The arrow blossomed to the left center of his torso, in the heart.

Sanglant flung himself hard to the right over the rugged ground as Bulkezu toppled forward, a surprised look on his face. Even so, the prince’s legs got tangled in the corpse, and as he struggled to free himself, the griffin cried shrilly behind him. A cloud of dust and a battering ram of sharp wind, the gust made by its wings, slowed him as he grabbed the spear out of Bulkezu’s hands and ran forward, half blinded by the stinging particles of earth blown up into the air, the grit pummeling his face.

It was too late.

The griffin had launched itself into the air and as he watched helplessly, too far away even to cast his spear, the beast lifted Liath off the rock, her shoulders caught in its talons. She had a new arrow half drawn from her quiver, but as the griffin carried her upward, she lost hold of it and it fell to clatter in among the tumble of rocks where she had been standing.

Cursing, he watched the great creature fly heavily westward out over the plain as the sun crested the heights behind him. Dawn came and with it a warm breeze off the crags. He was sweating freely now from both exertion and the change in temperature. Mist rose out of the valley, shrouding the lowlands in gloom, and into this haze of white the griffin and Liath vanished.

“Blessing!” he shouted. “Anna!”

There was no answer. An animal scrabbled through the rocks. A flock of early swifts circled over the nearest crag, swooping for insects.

Bulkezu’s corpse lay among the stones. Wind whispered in the arrow’s flighting where it protruded from his chest. Amazingly, there was no blood.

He called again, listened, but heard nothing except the wind moaning along the heights, the crackle of the dying fire, and the scratching of that damned animal. Briefly, it popped up into view—a rabbitlike creature with small ears. As abruptly it disappeared, bolting for cover. An owl ghosted into view and settled on a nearby rock. It appeared to study first him and then the burning nest before launching itself into the air again and flying away westward. He recognized the shaman’s familiar. Through the owl’s senses she saw all; perhaps she knew all. Yet she refused to aid him.

Swearing like a madman, he groped among the rocks until he found the arrow Liath had dropped wedged in a crevice. He wrenched it free and stood staring at it. He was staggered, his mind empty. The sight of Liath had utterly stunned him, who had always before acted swiftly and decisively in battle.

Slowly, in the way a sleeping man wakes up bewildered at his surroundings and takes in only one small detail at a time, he really looked carefully at the object he held in one hand. He had fletched this very arrow for her back in Verna. He recognized the goose feathers, taken from the same wing, and the horsehair from Resuelto used to secure the plume.

How could it be that after three years she still had this arrow? Had she lived all this time in no danger, a life of ease? Why was she here on the steppes? How had she got here?

Why had she never sought him out in all this time?

He wept without shame, as a man weeps when powerful emotion overcomes him. Anger, fear, loss, lust, duty, honor, frustration all tangled within his breast, a maze without end or beginning.