Crown of Stars (Crown of Stars 7)

They look at him. Blood splashes their armor and their exposed skin, mixed with dirt and exhaustion. They don’t say what they saw and suffered this day, but after a moment they find a span of canvas—once the awning of a tent—and roll the man onto it. With one holding each corner, they trudge across the encampment and find a cluster of Saony tents under the command of a captain whose right arm is bound up in a blood-streaked sling.

“God be praised!” cries the captain. “That’s Johan! I thought we’d lost him. My thanks to you. Here’s a sack of ale for your trouble.”

The man’s gratitude discomfits the Wayland soldiers, but they accept the ale and turn away, and they move back toward the nearest cut of ditches and scramble down to keep looking. Alain lingers as the young soldier is carried off toward the chirurgeon’s tent. Campfires flare up in a hundred places, tight rings where companies and militias have grouped themselves within the encampments and along the fields. Farther away, a line of campfires marks the Eika line at the forest edge. The air is strangely quiet, smelling of rain, but no rain falls. The storm threat has faded as a stiff wind pushes the weather away toward the west. The heavens are cloudy once more, and it seems likely to be an unusually chilly night although they are well come into the height of summer, days that should be long and lazy and hot bleeding into sticky warm nights. Men will shiver tonight under a dark sky, with moon and stars shrouded like the dead.

“Brother,” says a soft voice out of the darkness.

He turns to see the pair of Eika soldiers who have been shadowing him for the last hour. One is a brawny blond Alban youth with a lurid scar on his cheek; the other is a tall, muscular Eika with the bronze-skinned sheen common especially in Rikin Tribe.

“Need you an escort back to the hall?”

“Has Stronghand set you on me?” he asks them, amused by their earnest and stolid companionship.

“So he has, Brother,” says the Eika.

pes this terrible burden will lift soon, that he will wake in the morning restored to blindness, but possibly he will always be so cursed. So be it. He accepts the path God has given him to walk.

The hounds tug at his sleeves and lead him past a row of cooling bodies and a contingent of soldiers digging a long grave under the supervision of a weary cleric reciting psalms. There is a tiny chapel built here atop an old foundation; oak saplings push up around it. A few graves are marked with lichen-covered stones, now unreadable, as though this cemetery was used a century ago and then abandoned. Many will populate it tonight.

The hounds pad past tents marking the Varren encampment and into the entangling siege works that protected the southeastern flank of the Varren camp. They sniff up to a half-finished ditch. Water seeps into the dirt. With the shadows drawing long, it is easy to overlook soldiers fallen where pickets have collapsed. In the ditch, a man lies with his legs pinned by a log and his face inches away from being submerged in the rising muddy seepage.

“Here! Here!” Alain shouts, getting the attention of a trio of filthy soldiers wearing the stallion tabards of Way land who happen to be walking past.

They do not know who he is, but they respond as soldiers do. When they see the man caught, they scramble down beside him, and with all four of them slipping and sliding and grunting and cursing and the hounds barking, they get the log lifted and the man—he is husky, no lightweight—dragged out of the ditch.

“Tss!” says one man, with the grizzled look of a veteran. “A Saony bastard, all right.”

So he is, with a crude representation of Saony’s dragon stitched to his dark tabard. When Alain wipes away the mud crusting his face, he is seen to be young, and the Wayland soldiers mumble and mutter and scratch their heads and finally, with a certain practical fatalism, check him for injuries. He’s been cut low, just above the hip, and one foot is broken. The gut injury, especially, is likely to turn black with imbalanced humors, although the youth so far smells no worse than the rest of the dead, dying, and wounded.

He sees her: the Lady of Battles rides across camp, coming into view between a pair of campfires. She is heading in their direction.

“What do we do with him?” asks one of the Wayland soldiers.

The veteran says, “There’s the Wendish camp. They can fetch him when their folk make a sweep this way.”

“Might not find him till morning,” says the youngest of the three. “Because of the dark.”

“Best we take him over there now,” says Alain. “As you’d wish done if it was one of your men found by the Wendish. He needs care right away.”

They look at him. Blood splashes their armor and their exposed skin, mixed with dirt and exhaustion. They don’t say what they saw and suffered this day, but after a moment they find a span of canvas—once the awning of a tent—and roll the man onto it. With one holding each corner, they trudge across the encampment and find a cluster of Saony tents under the command of a captain whose right arm is bound up in a blood-streaked sling.

“God be praised!” cries the captain. “That’s Johan! I thought we’d lost him. My thanks to you. Here’s a sack of ale for your trouble.”

The man’s gratitude discomfits the Wayland soldiers, but they accept the ale and turn away, and they move back toward the nearest cut of ditches and scramble down to keep looking. Alain lingers as the young soldier is carried off toward the chirurgeon’s tent. Campfires flare up in a hundred places, tight rings where companies and militias have grouped themselves within the encampments and along the fields. Farther away, a line of campfires marks the Eika line at the forest edge. The air is strangely quiet, smelling of rain, but no rain falls. The storm threat has faded as a stiff wind pushes the weather away toward the west. The heavens are cloudy once more, and it seems likely to be an unusually chilly night although they are well come into the height of summer, days that should be long and lazy and hot bleeding into sticky warm nights. Men will shiver tonight under a dark sky, with moon and stars shrouded like the dead.

“Brother,” says a soft voice out of the darkness.

He turns to see the pair of Eika soldiers who have been shadowing him for the last hour. One is a brawny blond Alban youth with a lurid scar on his cheek; the other is a tall, muscular Eika with the bronze-skinned sheen common especially in Rikin Tribe.

“Need you an escort back to the hall?”

“Has Stronghand set you on me?” he asks them, amused by their earnest and stolid companionship.

“So he has, Brother,” says the Eika.

“And charged us to be sure that you return safely to the hall,” adds the Alban youth, who is eyeing him with curiosity. “How comes it that you speak the Alban tongue? Not many among your nation do so.”

“It’s in my blood,” says Alain. “What are you called, you two?”