The Gathering Storm (Crown of Stars 5)

AS the fog lifted, Sanglant clambered down the slopes of the crags. Sometimes he scraped his hands and once, badly, his knees, but the discomfort only fueled his anger and frustration and urgency. The griffin had taken Liath. Bulkezu was dead and could not be forced to tell him what he had done with Blessing. And now he must hunt griffins in the midst of a wilderness whose landscape was utterly unfamiliar to him, nothing like the fields and woodland and hills he had grown up in.

He called out as he went and took numerous side trips to investigate hollows and overhangs, but he found no sign of Blessing or Anna nor even of Bulkezu’s passage. When he reached the valley, a little before midday, he struck out for the river.

His hearing and keen sense of taste and smell served him well; despite the bewildering lack of direction once he waded through the high grass, the scent of flowing water and the alteration in vegetation along the river as it wound through the valley guided him. Stunted fir trees grew along the banks, and it was in one of these copses that he halted late in the afternoon. He slid down the chalky slope that gave way where the ground formed a lip above the river itself, forming a bluff face not much more than an arm’s length high but crumbling and dangerous because of soft earth and the erosion caused by the snow melt that had swelled the river’s banks. As he crouched down with water swirling around his toes, he drank his fill and considered his situation. The cold water was like a slap as he splashed it on his face and washed the worst grime off his hands. He was light-headed; hunger gnawed in his belly, but he had no more food and only the river water for his thirst and, at least, a waterskin to carry it in. His daughter was missing and possibly dead. His wife—

A griffin screamed. The shrill call reverberated from upriver.

He waited, but the call did not come again.

Liath, at least, he had a hope of finding. He used his spear to lever himself up the bluff, grasped the tough roots of a straggling bush, and scrambled up to catch his breath in the copse of fir. The sky overhead remained gloriously clear, the hard blue dome of the heavens dappled with streaming clouds like dissolving gossamer wings. He ripped up a handful of clover and ate the fresh leaves, knowing that these might provide him with some strength. He picked what he could find for later, rolling them into a bundle tied up with stems of grass and tucking them away into a sleeve. The rest of the foliage was unknown to him, and he dared not experiment. He could not afford any retching sickness brought on by poisonous plants. Last, he checked his weapons—the knife and the spear, good iron.

He had survived a year of captivity by Bloodheart. He would survive this, and he would find his daughter whether she was alive or dead. Best not to consider that, if she were dead, he could never avenge her. He had not been granted the immense satisfaction of killing Bulkezu himself.

He hiked upstream along the river, watching the sky and the billow of the grass as the wind moved across it. The day’s shadows drew long as the sun sank toward the golden curve of the western hills. The frosty sliver of the waxing moon crept above the dark crags. A harrier glided close to the river’s bank. A startled grouse rustled away into a taller stand of grass. Following its path, he almost stepped on an abandoned nest, half of it scattered by winter’s storms. He knelt, but it was too early for eggs.

Hunched low and unable to see over the grass, he heard the beating of wings and so kept still just as mice freeze when the shadow of a hawk passes overhead. A silver griffin—not the one that had carried off Liath—flew upriver not a stone’s throw from his hiding place. He waited until the noise of its wings had faded, then followed its trail. By keeping to the tallest stands of grass, the occasional screen of shrubs or a narrow rank of such trees as could survive alongside the river, he kept out of sight. Where the river made a broad bend, the slope of the land rose on the riverside but fell gently away to the east to form a hollow.

The ground had been worn away to expose a wide, flat rock. The silver griffin lay draped along the warm stone, sunning itself with its head resting on its paws and its wings folded back over its body. Its tail flicked up and down, up and down, as though its bodily repose concealed a restless heart.

A scan of the landscape revealed only grass, the spearlike tops of a trio of lonesome fir trees, and a scattering of gray rock outcrops thrust up here and there throughout the grass. He heard no birdsong, only the sigh of the wind. He was alone with the griffin. He took a step, and a second, as he shifted his grip on the spear and edged sideways.

His keen hearing saved him—that, and the unwieldy mass of the second griffin.

The scrape of its footfall rang out like a scream in the silence. He spun, throwing up the spear to protect himself, but her body bore him to the ground and the spear shattered under the force of her swiping claw. She was immense. He jabbed his knee up into her belly. That beaked head sewed around to get a better look at him. He clawed desperately at her throat, but each time he closed his hand, each time he scrabbled for purchase at her neck as he tried to squirm away out from under her, her feathers cut him. Blood streamed from his hands from a score of fine incisions. She reared back her head and struck.

He jerked sideways, but not far enough. Pain ripped through his chest and his vision hazed. His bleeding hands flexed impotently as they sought any kind of weapon to grip, but their feeble grasp closed on nothing, only air, and even that weak movement sent waves of pain flooding through his body until he could neither think nor move. He could not even see. Agony blinded him. He could only wait for the deathblow.

He could only wait.

A flash of heat and fire exploded around him. Had the griffin struck again? Was this the pain of dying? Or was he already dead, ascending through the spheres toward the cold bright eternity of the Chamber of Light?

I don’t want to die.

I’m not ready.

Pain, and this billowing heat that washed over him in unending waves, tore away his thoughts.

The shadow of the griffin moved off him. The sun’s blazing light scalded his face and made him blink.

Liath stood over him, golden-brown hair fallen all untidy over her shoulders. It needed combing. He loved to comb her hair. That steady stroke in the lush thickness of her hair was one of the few things that could soothe the restlessness that ate at him.

“Pray God I am not too late,” the vision of Liath said, although she could not possibly be kneeling beside him. She had abandoned him four years ago, left him and the child without a word. He had a lot of things to say to her, hoarded up over the months, some of them festering and rancid and others painful and sweet.

An actual physical body blocked the stabbing of light that tormented him. A touch brushed his brow.

“Sanglant, I pray you, answer me if you can.”

Her lips touched his parted mouth. It was like water to a parched man, giving him strength for the fight ahead.

Never let it be said that he did not fight until his last breath.

“You will never kill me,” he said to Bloodheart. Some days, those were the only words he remembered how to say.

“He lives.” A fire burned behind her, or perhaps it was the setting sun streaming golden light across grass troubled by the wind. A knife flashed, but he could not struggle against the killing blow. He was paralyzed, staring at the knife in her hand. She cut away his tunic from his torso and bared his flesh to the air. So much color leached from her face that she looked gray when she saw what lay beneath the cloth.

“I was too slow,” she said. “Too late.”

A few solitary raindrops splashed on his cheek, although he saw no clouds in the darkening expanse above. Nearby, a griffin shrieked its chilling call.