The Gathering Storm (Crown of Stars 5)

The greenery hid the land around them, but they still had ears.

“Did you hear something?” A woman’s voice, speaking in the Alban tongue, floated on the air.

“Nay, I can’t hear nothing for the slithering of these eels.” Her companion was an aggrieved man.

“Here, now, set down that basket and have a look round.”

“I will not! I’ll never get this thing heaved back up, it’s that heavy.”

“Do it anyway, you fool! You’ve heard the news as well as I have, that the savages have come and burned Weorod Holding and killed our good queen’s uncle and brother over there by Grim’s Dike. They might be anywhere, skulking like serpents and creeping up to kill us. I think I heard something scraping along over there, by that tuft—where the willow is.”

Elafi lifted a charm to his mouth and blew softly.

“Look there,” said the woman, after a moment. “It’s a deer.” Something skittered through sedge and branches nearby, ending with a soft plosh in the water.

She swore. “It was too quick for me.”

“And an arrow wasted, when we’ve none to waste. It’s too dark for you to find it now. Let’s get on then. Tide’ll be coming back in. Venison would’ve been nice, I grant you, but all this talk of savages is making my skin crawl.”

They waited in silence under the willow as twilight darkened imperceptibly into night and the voices moved away.

“Keep silence,” said Elafi at last. “That means you, Ki.”

He pressed the branches aside with his oar and they nosed out of their hiding spot as the supple branches shushed over them, tickling their skin and faces with the touch of new leaves half unfurled all along the tree. With night came a hazy glamour hanging over the waters as though the clouds had drifted down to meet the fens. It was hard to see. Yet Elafi knew where he was going, and Stronghand felt the shift in current where it was slowed by beds of reeds or the smell of salty streams running beneath the smoother fresh water of the surface. The ebb tide had reached its lowest point.

A pintail swished past. Ki bent to the cage sitting at her feet in the bottom of the canoe. Beside it rested a hollow branch. Deftly—heard more than seen—she eased a coal from a hollow with copper tongs and set spark to wick, then released the two pigeons. They fluttered up on the trail of the pintail, and the scraps of candles tied to their feet swayed, slipped loose, and spun down to the water below. Most sputtered and died in the water, but a pair tipped and bobbed, still burning.

“Swamp lights,” whispered First Son of the Tenth Litter, who had taken his turns on sentry duty at the borderland where Weorod Holding sank away into the fenlands.

“A good trick,” agreed Last Son of the Fourth Litter, turning to watch the lights behind them.

Elafi lit a tiny lamp and held it beyond the prow of the ship to light their way, while Ki lit other candles and set them on the water, tag ends that guttered as the wake jostled them, flared, and died. Out beyond the willow a true swamp light flickered and vanished. Stronghand had to admire the cleverness of their use of misdirection.

They skirted the edge of a bed of reeds that gave them cover as they came right up under the crumbling cliff face. There rested an ancient willow tree, hoary with age, its trunk as thick as a giant’s leg and its lowest expanse exposed by the ebb tide. This close, and with mist spreading its blanket over the landscape, the noises of the island carried easily: a horse’s whinny, a barking dog, the rumble of a handcart over broken rock, the laconic call of a sentry to his companion, a shrill pipe accompanied by the patter of a drum and men singing in harmony. The music spun through the fog like a thread winding around him, drawing him into the haze.

Rope chafes his wrists and ankles as he shuffles along, tugged awkwardly at intervals when the wagon to which he is tied speeds up. Once he slams into the back, not anticipating that it has stopped. Sharp rocks cut his feet, and he shifts in the hope of finding gentler ground.

A man curses him; a whip stings his backside more in annoyance than because he has hindered the line. The pain makes him flinch, but he does not cry out.

He has no voice. He cannot see. Blind and mute.

The canoe bumped up against the willow’s trunk as Stronghand threw his head back, searching the mist, but like the swamp lights the vision was already gone. Vanished.

What had happened to Alain? Where were the hounds?

He hadn’t the luxury for questions. They were vulnerable to attack here at the foot of the island cliff; a sentry moved far overhead. “What’s that light?” the sentry called.

Elafi grasped the trunk of the tree. He eased his fingers under the peeling bark and pried a piece of the trunk open to reveal a gaping hole large enough to admit the boat. The willow was rotten inside but cunningly disguised so as to seem whole. Elafi and Ki pushed them through as, above, a second sentry replied to the first.

“Swamp lights. See, that one just winked out.”

They glided under the willow’s gnarled roots and came into a chamber awash in mud and stinking of decay. Rocking the canoe, Ki leaned precariously out over the stern to close up the opening behind them.

“From here we must climb,” whispered Elafi.

They left the canoe, careful not to tip it, and waded through knee-deep sludge to a rock embankment. The air seeped like liquid into Stronghand’s lungs; the mud oozed around his shins, slurping and sucking. He had never smelled anything so vile, and he was careful to keep the standard entirely out of the muck lest some poison in the sludge contaminate its magic.

Elafi’s lamp illuminated the young man’s face as he scrambled up the embankment. He lifted the lamp to reveal a maw ridged with huge teeth. The jawbone and teeth of some huge creature, yawning, made the archway through which they must pass into a low tunnel.