Crown of Stars (Crown of Stars 7)

When they told him, he rubbed his clean-shaven chin with the stump of his right arm as if he had momentarily forgotten that he lacked the hand.

“Do we send out a search party?” asked Sergeant Aronvald.

By now night had swept in. Beyond the halo lent by the campfire it was impossible to see anything except the wall of darkness that marked the distant line of trees.

“They can see our campfire,” said Lady Bertha. “They can shout, if they are injured.”

She was a hard commander. Hanna had seen her drive her men over mountain paths more suitable to goats, had seen her set her own noble shoulder to pushing the wagons where the road became nothing more than a series of dry rills dug into earth by runoff. She had suffered an injury in the infamous battle against Anne’s forces that no one would talk about in detail, and had lost most of the range of motion in her left arm, but if the injury pained her day in and day out she never complained. Yet she never smiled, and her frown dug deep as she faced her muttering retainers.

“If they have been ambushed, then sending out a search party will only offer our adversaries more swift kills. If they are lost, and in no danger, they can find us by the light of the campfire or at dawn.”

“There’s some rough ground back there,” said Brother Breschius. “A defile, a few drops where the ground falls away. This palace was built to take advantage of the high ground. They might have fallen.”

Her expression did not change. “They might have. If so, it is unlikely in this darkness we will find them. We’ll search at dawn.”

She looked at Sister Rosvita. After a moment, with genuine reluctance, Rosvita nodded to show she agreed. Hanna looked past the two women to the fire where Sister Petra had gotten her charge seated and was fussing to get her to drink broth out of the stewpot.

Princess Sapientia stared into the flickering fire. She did not look as if she had lost her mind. She did not act as would a madwoman, babbling and cursing and flailing her arms in the manner of the moon-mad who had lost their wits, or spitting and frothing at the mouth as might a soul possessed by a demon. She just did not speak and did not respond and seemed to have cut the thread that binds one person’s actions to those of her companions, which threads are all that stitch the world of living things into a single fabric of being. She acted as if she were already dead.

“Pull the two cargo wagons across the open side,” Bertha was saying. “Fix shields to cover what they can. Set men up where they can watch along the height of the wall on the other sides. Yes, even up there, in those rafters that can take their weight.”

“Eagle.” The sergeant addressed her. “First watch, if you will, out at the second line of wall. Keep a particular eye out for will-o-the-wisps, any strange glamour of light. Listen hard.”

The other Stephen joined her about fifty paces out from the opening of the chapel, where a low stone wall made a protected vantage point. He was a good dozen or more years older, pale-haired, blue-eyed, steady, smart, patient, and tough.

They braced themselves a body’s length apart to get the broadest view of the slope of the fore hill and the lower ground, all lost in night. In good weather they might have marked the passing of time by the rise and fall of the stars, but as it was they just sat, watching and listening. Now and again a shimmer of rain passed over, but it always faded. It was silent and cool. He shifted occasionally, feet scraping on the ground. For some reason her hands ached, and twice she inhaled a curious scent of charred wood melded with the acrid flavor of juniper.

Stephen said, “did you hear that?”

“No.”

Night noises, nothing more: a brief hiss of rain, the crackle of branches where the wind stroked them. The shifting and settling of the earth as it cooled. A cold breeze poured out of the heavens, seeming to drop right down on them from the height of the sky.

We are alone in the world, she thought.

And then: All things are alone, yet nothing is alone, it is all tangled together, woven as in a weir to create an obstacle or diversion or as in a tapestry to make out of its parts a vision of a greater whole.

She felt Stephen’s presence, how he shifted to find a more comfortable position for his right knee, how he stifled a cough by turning it into a grunt. She felt the pool of air beyond where the land sloped away downward. She smelled the sparks and ash of the wood fire and the aroma of horsehair and horse piss and horse manure. A man coughed, back in the shelter of the chapel.

She yawned, swaying, and slipped into that semi-alert twilight state that is neither waking nor sleep.

The wind picked her up as if she were a downy feather, and she spun away across the ruins, across a river, across forest and distant hamlets and stretches of meadowland and woodland farther and farther still, uncounted leagues flashing beneath her until the landscape that fell away under her feet was grass and only grass, pale in the dawn twilight. There comes blindingly and amazingly a glimpse of the rising sun tinted blue behind a veil of dust as it shoulders up over a golden-green horizon of grass. A procession moves at a steady pace through this grass, strange folk with almond-shaped eyes and eastern complexions. Some are Quman, wearing feathered wings attached to their armored coats; some are women whose hips flow into and become the bodies of horses. One is a shaman stippled with the tattoos of his kind, the spirit companions whose magic he can call on at need. She follows them. They are taking her where she needs to go.

Where a silver river ribbons in long looping curves across the golden landscape, the land sinks into a marshland of tall reeds and shallow pools of standing water. Beyond, paler grass grows in clouds like mushrooms, but these are, after all, tents sighing in the wind. The camp wakens. Its inhabitants crowd onto the margins to mark the group that approaches them.

Far above, a shrill cry reverberates. A woman who is also a mare turns and sights and points, calling to her companions to warn them, then raises her bow and releases an arrow into the sky. It burns, and Hanna tumbles. Tumbling, she sees griffins spinning above her, one gold and one silver, flying east toward the dark spires of distant mountains. They pass over her, and she twists and finds herself wading in ankle-deep water, pressing through reeds, scratched by blades of grass as she pushes up out of the shallows onto dry land that at first sinks beneath each step and then dries and stiffens to dusty earth and a sheen of green-gold grass so fresh and new that it smells of spring.

o;There’s some rough ground back there,” said Brother Breschius. “A defile, a few drops where the ground falls away. This palace was built to take advantage of the high ground. They might have fallen.”

Her expression did not change. “They might have. If so, it is unlikely in this darkness we will find them. We’ll search at dawn.”

She looked at Sister Rosvita. After a moment, with genuine reluctance, Rosvita nodded to show she agreed. Hanna looked past the two women to the fire where Sister Petra had gotten her charge seated and was fussing to get her to drink broth out of the stewpot.

Princess Sapientia stared into the flickering fire. She did not look as if she had lost her mind. She did not act as would a madwoman, babbling and cursing and flailing her arms in the manner of the moon-mad who had lost their wits, or spitting and frothing at the mouth as might a soul possessed by a demon. She just did not speak and did not respond and seemed to have cut the thread that binds one person’s actions to those of her companions, which threads are all that stitch the world of living things into a single fabric of being. She acted as if she were already dead.

“Pull the two cargo wagons across the open side,” Bertha was saying. “Fix shields to cover what they can. Set men up where they can watch along the height of the wall on the other sides. Yes, even up there, in those rafters that can take their weight.”

“Eagle.” The sergeant addressed her. “First watch, if you will, out at the second line of wall. Keep a particular eye out for will-o-the-wisps, any strange glamour of light. Listen hard.”