The Gathering Storm (Crown of Stars 5)

“Enough of that!” called Sergeant Cobbo. “Get to work. We’ll need tents set up, and you lot haul whatever you can find over to that gate to build a barrier.”

Anna was helping Den post rope lines to keep horses from straying into the tented area when the last of the advance force arrived: a dozen horsemen who had to dismount by the gate in order to lead their horses across the plank bridge over the pit. It wasn’t precisely a true gate. The old gates had long since fallen down and, evidently, been carted away, and only the deep ditch protected the entrance, although a fair bit of debris—posts, planks, discarded wheels—had been dragged over to form a makeshift wall on the inner side of the pit.

Was that Thiemo among them? She shaded her eyes to get a better look.

“Hey!” said Den. “Don’t let the rope go slack!”

She went back to work, but as it began to get dark, there was no point in doing more. She wandered over to the horse lines but did not find him there. What was she thinking? Usually she shared a bed with Blessing every night. She wasn’t used to so much freedom.

She could not stop thinking about finding him, yet she didn’t want to appear to be seeking him out. She climbed a narrow staircase that led up to the walkway along the wall, to survey the camp. A pinkish-purple glow rimmed the western horizon, although the east lay in darkness. The town revealed itself as glimmers of distant lamplight. Below, campfires burned and Sergeant Cobbo began singing. A footstep scuffed on the wall, but it was the watchman in the corner watchtower.

“Anna.”

When he took hold of her arm, out of the dark, she gasped, and he slipped an arm around her, pressing her close. He was a head taller than her, broad through the shoulders but with a young man’s slenderness in the torso and hips.

“I have something to show you,” he whispered, breath sweet against her ear. “Come with me.”

“I have to go back—” she began, suddenly nervous. Suddenly elated.

“We’re stuck here for the night, Anna. There’s no one else who needs us. Come this way.”

“I can’t see.”

“Shhh. We’ll go slowly.”

In the dark it wasn’t easy to retrace their path along the wall, where they could have tumbled off the inner side at any moment and fallen two man-lengths to the hard-packed dirt below. It took a fair bit of groping, and tangling, and holding on to each other, to negotiate the worn steps, and by the time they reached the ground they were both giggling yet trying not to, fearing that Cobbo or some other soldier would find them.

“This way.”

Thiemo still had hold of her hand, but as he started along the base of the wall, she hesitated. He turned back to her, ran a hand up her arm to her shoulder to caress the curve of her neck.

“Anna? I found a place where no one will find us. It’s clean, too. I left a blanket there.”

She wanted him so badly. Even to touch him made her hot in a way the sun’s heat never did.

“What will happen then?” The future opened before her like the wide waters of the sea, fathomless.

His lips brushed hers, light as a butterfly’s kiss at first, suddenly insistent. When he finally pulled back, they were both breathing in gasps. Anna clung to him.

“We could be dead tomorrow,” he murmured.

What about Matto? But she could not speak Matto’s name out loud. Matto would be in Thiemo’s place now, had Prince Sanglant sent one and not the other. And if it were the prince himself, holding her in the darkness?

She dared not walk down that path. Thiemo was a lord, but only the eighth child of a minor count. That was why he had been sent to ride in Prince Ekkehard’s retinue, to make his own way as a noble servant to a higher born man. He was disposable, the kind of boy sent into the Dragons. Maybe that was why he wasn’t as haughty as the other nobles, because he was assured of so little.

“Death is sure,” she whispered, and if not now, then later. Someday. None of them knew what kind of trouble the prince was leading them into. Maybe the prince himself did not know. Anything could happen.

Anything.

“Thiemo.” The top of her head barely came to his chin, but it wasn’t difficult to wrap her arms around his neck and pull him down to kiss her again.

What would she be sorry for, the day she died?

Not this.

V

SORDAIA