The Gathering Storm (Crown of Stars 5)

Light shone in a thread whose unwinding ran right across the spot where he had crouched beneath the bush during the hailstorm. That pale ground was part of a path no wider than his outstretched arms, glittering now with sorcerous light. Shadowy figures appeared on the old road, marching south. He slid his sword from its scabbard and pushed Hathui backward, staying between her and the gleaming path.

The shadows walked at a steady pace, not quickly, not slowly, but with the certain stride of folk who have walked a long way and mean to reach their destination. As they walked they sang in a lost language, the rhythm of their song timed to the fall of their feet on the ground. The words were unknown to him, yet the meaning seemed clear, as if he had absorbed this secret out of his mother’s body during that interval when he had existed not as a self but as part of her.

They sang of a land lost, which was their home; they sang of families never forgotten, of love unfulfilled. They sang of war, and of vengeance unsated. Yet a note of hope twined through their song, as if they had sung it for a very long time but believed that a final cadence would soon signal its end. Although he hadn’t Liath’s salamander eyes, he saw them clearly as they passed him in a line that straggled along the path. Old men led children. Strong warriors both male and female masked with animal faces strode proudly, armed with bows or spears or strange swords forged not of metal but rather edged with black glass. Stout old women balanced on their hips baskets woven of reeds and jars decorated with spirals and hatch marks, white paint on red fired clay. They were all of them shadows walking amid shadows; they weren’t real, they hadn’t substance, not as he did. Yet they were as perilous a people as he had ever met.

They were the Lost Ones, the Ashioi. His kinfolk.

For a long time he watched them pass. Hathui spoke no word. He could not even hear her breathing because the unearthly hush that had fallen over the wood muffled all earthly sound. It seemed he and the world slipped into shadow as the shadows marched. They passed, one after another after another and on and on, so many he could not count but certainly more than a tribe, more than a town. They were a host, journeying southeast on the gleaming path.

The stars wheeled above on their appointed round as the night wore on. The world lay still, waiting, as did he. He had a wild notion that he could fall in at the end and join that line, although none seemed to notice him—he might as well be a shadow to them, as they were to him. Was he only dreaming? Would he see his mother among them?

He did not see her. As the first gray tiding of dawn filtered through the trees, the last of the line passed him, brought up, in the rear, by a proud young man of stature very like to his and a face that seemed eerily familiar, a man’s face molded out of the lineaments of his own mother. He was clad in a cuirass molded of bronze whose surface shimmered. The young warrior halted and stared at the prince. His hip-length white cloak swirled in an unfelt breeze. Leather tasses clacked softly about his thighs.

“Kinsman!” he called. “How is it you watch us pass and do not join us? It is near. It is close. Can’t you feel it?” He faltered, shifting his entire body as a shudder passed through him. “How can it be?” he demanded, voice changed. “You are not one of us, yet I recognize you. Who are you?”

This was no language Sanglant knew, yet he understood it anyway. It melted into him like the heat of the sun, which shines on all folk whether they know to call it the sun, or whether they are blind.

“I am Sanglant,” he replied, taking a step toward the path. “I am son of Henry, king of Wendar. I am son of Uapeani-ka-zonkansi-a-lari.”

The other man lifted his spear in a gesture of warding, or astonishment. Beaded sheaths covered his forearms and calves, and in the twilight they flashed, catching the attention of the warriors who had gone on and now paused, turning.

“Hasten! Hasten!” they called. “The time is near! We must hurry.”

“I know you!” cried the young warrior, tense with frustration. “Yet who are you? How do you claim descent from a name that cannot exist? Uapeani-kazonkansi-a-lari is the name my brother’s daughter would have carried had he ever sired a girl child, but he is many lifetimes gone, lost to me. Who are you?”

“Are you dead or are you living?” demanded Sanglant. “To my eyes you are a shade, a ghost. Yet you speak as if others have died while you survived.”

“We are dead and we are living. We are caught in the shadows, torn out of Earth yet not killed when the witch Li’at’dano guided the hands who wove the great spell that exiled our land and our people.”

“I am your kinsman! I am trying to help you—”

“It is too late. What is done cannot be undone. The exiled land will return.”

“Nay. Another cabal of sorcerers seeks to weave that ancient spell a second time, to cast the land back into the aether.”

“Do they still hate us? Does the witchwoman still brood over our ancient war?”

“She aids me. She is no longer your enemy.”

The other man laughed. “If she says so, then she lies to you, or you are foolish enough to believe her. How can she even be alive? We have seen ages pass. No one who lived in the time of the Exile can still be alive!”

“You are alive!”

“I am a shade, but I hope to live once more so that I can take my vengeance. Enough!” His comrades, a dozen masked warriors waiting a bow’s shot away, called again to him. The rest of the procession had vanished into the trees and dawn’s twilit haze. The man followed.

“Heed me!” called Sanglant angrily. “Do not turn your back on me! I do not lie. You know less than you believe you do. I have met the Horse shaman you call Li’at’dano. I have spoken with her. She still lives. She spoke freely of the ancient weaving, which she now regrets. She strives to prevent those who would banish the Lost Ones again. We must act as allies—!”

The warrior heeded him no more than had Lady Wendilgard. From down the path his comrades called to him, but their voices were too faint even for Sanglant to hear.

“I must go,” the warrior said. “The day dawns.” A strange note changed the timbre of his voice. He looked once more, piercingly, at Sanglant, then jogged away on the ancient road to join the others. As light rose to scatter night, they faded into the trees.

Hathui collapsed to the ground in a dead faint, completely limp, and he gaped, taken by surprise, then heard a clamor of voices as his escort fought their way through the forest to reach him. He knelt beside her, and she opened her eyes just as Sergeant Cobbo ran up with a worried expression on his face and a big dent in his helm.

“My lord prince! We’ve been searching for you all night. We thought we’d lost you when that gale blew through! That wasn’t anything natural! What’s amiss with the Eagle? Was she struck down?”

She rubbed her head and groaned, sitting up. “I got hit in the head by hail. I don’t remember anything after that.”

The prince looked toward the path, but he saw only butcher’s-broom and buckthorn beneath a spreading canopy of ivy-covered oak. The trail that had glimmered so clearly last night was invisible, and when he walked over to the bush he believed he had sheltered under, he found no trace of those chalk-white grains nor, when he kicked aside layers of matted leaf litter, did he uncover an old stone roadway. The drought had baked the dirt until it was as hard as rock. “My lord prince?”