The Gathering Storm

  Throughout this discussion Mother Obligatia had remained silent. Hanna had even thought her asleep. One of those shivering tremors shifted the ground beneath them, so that Gerwita cried out, then giggled nervously as the quake subsided as quickly as it had arisen. As if the earth had roused her, Obligatia lifted her head and braced herself up on her elbows. Sister Diocletia came to her aid, supporting her. They all turned respectfully to hear her.

  “The old can be blinded by sentiment.” It was always a surprise to Hanna how strong a voice could issue from so frail a form. “I know this, for I have seen it. I have regretted it. Yet I do believe that I saw my son Bernard’s daughter, and that she saved us against the galla, although she was too late to spare Sister Sindula.”

  “Liath!” whispered Hanna.

  The abbess nodded toward her before continuing. The tent grew dim as shadows lengthened, as the sun set and the blazing temperatures abated with the coming of twilight and the promise of night. They had no lamps.

  “If this woman, this skopos, who calls herself Anne is truly Liathano’s mother, then that is where Liath will go. Seek out the Holy Mother Anne, and we will find the one we seek. That is where I wish to go.” Tears glistened on the old woman’s cheeks, and Diocletia tenderly wiped them away. “I am content with this turn of events, my friends. I am old, at the end of my life. The world will end for me whether a storm comes or not, and now I see that all along I have been selfish.”

  Although outside the tent’s walls the camp grew lively as night fell, inside a hush contained them. The twilight wind fluttered along the canvas.

  “I want to meet my granddaughter before I die.”

  XXIX

  THE TRAP SHE HAD LAID

  1

  IN Verna, Liath used an arrow to weave a net of magic through the crown. The threads pulled down from the heavens thrummed through her arms. This was joy. She felt transported and alive; her body hummed with the touch of the stars and the music of the spheres, the ever-turning wheel of the cosmos singing through her from top to toe.

  Lady Bertha rode in the van, leading her thirty mounted men-at-arms in ranks of two through the blazing portal. Sorgatani followed, her wagon driven by the two slave women who attended her while her Kerayit guard rode behind. Last of all, Gnat, Mosquito, and Breschius paused, glancing back at her, and she willed them to forge forward. She dared not speak or move for fear of shifting the portal as the stars spun slowly westward, tugging at the threads.

  The subtleties of direction and distance were harder to control than she had imagined, but with practice—indeed! With practice she could master this skill. The stars could speak through her; she could sing with them. She could dwell on Earth among those she loved and still touch the heavens.

  As long as they defeated Anne.

  The three men dashed forward through the archway at last. The ethereal threads quivered as if in a gusty breeze as the men passed under them and vanished, and as she pulled the threads in behind herself she paused on the threshold and looked back. The daimone waited in the valley, hiding itself, but she could see its pale form quavering against the fading night. It had hovered nearby all night.

  “Who are you waiting for?” she asked, but it did not answer, so she turned her back on Verna and stepped through as light cascaded around her. It seemed in that passage as if all those threads drew the spheres in behind them, the entire cosmos—stars, the sun, time itself—swirled as the light from one body blurred into the next.

  She sees Sanglant marching out of the mountains at the van of a great army. He rides at the front on Resuelto with Hathui behind him and noble ladies and lords surrounding him. On either side pace the two griffins. The male no longer wears a hood. It lifts its eagle’s head and shrills a call that echoes down the valley. No clouds soften the hard blue glare of the sky. The view is glorious, and the road lies clear before them, all the way down to the coastal plain.

  An Eika prince sails on choppy seas, brooding at the stem of his ship. He stares across the gray waters, hand clenched around the haft of a standard laced with bones and beads and feathers. Two black hounds lie at his feet. Behind him, a deacon prays.

  Ivar rides along a woodland path beside a young man who looks startlingly familiar. Erkanwulf? Wind ripples through the leaves, turning her down a new path.

  She sees Hanna steeping.

  Hanna!

  The threads whip and crack her sight down new passageways, a maze that pulls her in a hundred directions as it splinters into manifold paths.

  She has lofted far above the world, and she sees how the threads of each life are intertwined with all the others, a chain linking every soul and every thing and every place.

  A filthy beggar with hands and feet chained is shoved into a cage. Shadow obscures his face.

  A creature half-man half-fish swims in calm waters, hair writhing like eels.

  Sister Venia wipes her brow, standing among two score corpses. She has blood on her hands, and a disfiguring anger suffuses her expression.

  In the depths of the earth, a wizened beast crouches before a sheet of metal and runs its fingers across a glowing sequence of lumps and etchings. Others cluster behind it, clicking and humming, tapping the ground.

  Snakes hiss. A phoenix stirs in its deep cavern. The ground trembles.

  An owl hoots. She turns to see Li’at’dano looking right at her through a stone burning with blue fire “Beware!” the centaur cries. “Beware the trap she has laid!”

  Seven crowns of seven stones form the loom on which the great spell was woven in the long-ago days, laid out across the land to make the points of a vast crown. She glimpses each circle in turn, and she sees:

  Meriam.

  Hugh.

  Marcus.

  Severus.

  A middle-aged woman in presbyter’s robes, completely unknown to her. A stranger.

  An arrogant young man wearing the robes of an abbot. His face looks vaguely familiar with a family resemblance to Duchess Rotrudis.

  Where is Anne?

  Why can’t I see Blessing?

  She hears the surge and suck of a sea as waters rise and fall against rock close by.

  She stepped through.

  “At them again!” Bertha’s voice rang out above the clash and clamor of arms.

  Liath stumbled out of the circle and into madness. In the light of the waning sun it seemed that beyond the stones on all but one side stood a forest, tightly packed and denuded of branches, ringing them in like a rank of men with a tightly linked shield wall. Scattered in no particular pattern on three sides were tents and a profusion of campfires. Torches glared. Men, most on foot, charged back and forth, shouting, and because she was staring at them in shock and amazement, she did not watch her feet. She tripped and fell forward over a dead man who had been killed by an arrow in his throat. Blood eddied into the dirt. Two more dead faces grimaced at her, one by each of her outflung hands. The first she recognized as one of Lady Bertha’s soldiers; the other wore a tabard sewn with a gold Circle of Unity on a black field: the sigil of the guardsmen who protected the skopos.

  Now she understood what she saw. They had come through the crown into the middle of an armed, fortified encampment set up to protect the stone circle.

  “To me, to me!” Bertha’s voice sang above the din. Again she drove her small force against a knot of footmen who had formed up but were not yet ready to receive a charge. They scattered, some falling, but some taking horse or rider down with strokes at a horse’s legs or clever thrusts to the rider’s exposed rib cage. There wasn’t enough room for Lady Bertha to swing her cavalry around and get the full weight of their horses behind them. More infantry surged up from behind to attack them. Arrows whistled out of the twilight. They were surrounded.

  Ai, God. She struggled to her feet and readied her bow, but they were hopelessly outnumbered. She drew, shot, and took down a valiant sergeant who had just then gripped the stirrup of Bertha’s charger. A second man fell, mortally wounded, w
ith her second shot.

  “Push that way!” cried Bertha. “There! Where the stockade is unfinished!”

  Had the Austran lady already lost half her men? Liath fell in behind Kerayit guardsmen as they pushed to make a path for Sorgatani’s wagon to the breach in the wall. Breschius ran at the back, a dagger glinting in his hand. She couldn’t see Gnat and Mosquito. She grabbed a pair of arrows off the ground and shot, and Lady Bertha got her surviving soldiers pulled in around her and threw them forward to support the retreat.

  Gnat and Mosquito appeared out of the stones and sprinted for the wagon, bent low, dodging arrows and spear thrusts with astonishing agility.

  “Here!” she cried as she leaped over bodies and fell in with the others. She looked around for a spare horse, but too many soldiers pressed forward against them. She hadn’t time to do more than grab arrows off the ground, to duck away from a sword blow that swept past her head. She shot a man in the gut not a body’s length from her, and he jerked backward, screaming, carrying two of his fellows with him as he flailed.

  Yet as they closed on the south end of the camp, toppling tents and cutting down stray soldiers, they seemed as one to realize that in fact the stockade was finished. It ringed the camp. The sound of water grew, but the open ground did not expose the side of a steep hill but rather became the edge of a cliff that plunged far down to the sea below. The stockade finished at either end with a pile of stone and earth; beyond that, only air. They were trapped. No one could climb down that cliff.

  The Kerayit guards reached the stockade first, and one hacked in vain at green logs as his fellows formed up around Sorgatani’s wagon and Lady Bertha called on her soldiers to dismount and make a shield wall. Arrows fell among them, some chipping up the dirt; a few thudded into the logs. She felt one whoosh past her cheek; another found its mark, and a man shrieked. A horse bucked and spilled its riders.

  They were trapped.

  She reached out and called fire. First the canvas of tents burst into flame, then, brushed by billowing, roaring canvas, a hapless soldier who had boldly stepped forward to urge his men to advance caught fire. He spun screaming as flames wrapped his body.

  She had no time to regret his death. She reached into the green logs of the encircling palisade. Fire slumbered deep within. She pricked it, and again, harder, until flame exploded up from a dozen logs in the stockade right where the Kerayit soldier stood chopping at the wood. The fire blackened and consumed him in an instant; he didn’t even have a chance to scream. The other guards dragged the wagon back one turn of the wheels, but they understood what she meant to do. They braved the heat, waiting for their chance as the logs burned from inside out.

  Fire was the only thing that would keep them alive. The enemy had fallen back away from the burning tents, and now with her party clumped next to the blazing wood, easily seen, the archers set arrow to string and began to shoot at will.

  She set her will to the bows the archers held, one by one, and yet for each man who cast his bow aside when flame licked along the curve, the next might find his arm ablaze, his tabard streaming with fire. Their screams burned her, yet she could not flinch.

  Wasn’t this war?

  Didn’t men die just as horribly stuck deep in the guts by spears or their heads sliced open by swords?

  She was too slow. She could not stop every archer, not quickly enough. Arrows peppered the ground. Lady Bertha’s soldiers hid behind their shields, but the horses were easy targets and their enemy happy to cause havoc among them by shooting for their bellies. The poor beasts kicked and screamed and half a dozen bolted for the enemy line. It was not the battle but the fire that panicked them. She still held her own bow, but where she aimed, she called fire. A flight of arrows burst into flame above and rained ash down over their party.

  The stockade roared.

  The enemy pushed forward step by step, calling out, readying a charge.

  “Go, Arnulf! Go!” cried Bertha.

  Liath glanced back. They were twenty still standing, no more. One of Bertha’s soldiers, a giant of a man with massive shoulders and thick arms, threw a cloak over his head and braved the flames with ax in hand, hacking at the wood. The cloak began to burn, but the logs crumbled into flaming splinters. The heart of the wood had burned away.

  “Move!” screamed Bertha. “Go! Go!”

  “Charge them, men!” bellowed a captain among the enemy. More massed behind that front line. Archers with burning hands wept. A horse thrashed on the ground beside her, pierced by a dozen arrows.

  The Kerayit slave women drove the wagon headlong into the burning wall, their horses frantic with fear as they plunged through the fiery gap. Under the press of the wheels, logs crumbled like burning straw, and the flames that licked along the painted wagon guttered and failed as Sorgatani’s magic killed them. The wagon was through! A cheer rose from the survivors as they pressed forward in its wake, seeing escape.

  A roar unlike that of fire rose from the enemy.

  “Forward!” The captain took a step, then a second. “Forward, you cowards!”

  The line doubled, swelled, gathering strength for the charge.

  “You must go, my lady!” cried Bertha, coming up beside her, still mounted. Her horse’s eyes were rolling with fear, and it was streaked with ash and flecks of charcoal, but it held its ground. An arrow dangled from its saddle, fixed between pommel and seat. Bertha’s shield had been lopped in half, and she cast it away.

  “Mount up behind me!” she cried.

  “Go on!” shouted Liath. “I’ll hold the rear. Hurry!”

  Bertha did not hesitate as Liath delved into the iron rimming of shields; she sought deep within swords for sparks of fire bound tightly within. Boot and belt, hair and bone, all bloomed as fire scorched through the front line, and yet they came on and on, screaming, shrieking, while those behind them yelled and cursed and some ran toward her all over fire like torches.

  I am a monster.

  One passed by her and threw himself on a Kerayit who hung back with a few others to protect her back. She saw their faces change shape as fire ate flesh down to bone. Their eyes were black pinpricks, bursting open at the moment of death. The tents within arrow shot burned so bright it seemed like day. Yet nothing touched her. She was the center, the sun.

  “Fall back, my lady!” cried Bertha far behind her. “Or we shall all surely die waiting for you!”

  Had they all gone so quickly? She retreated, step by step, holding the enemy at bay simply because she existed. More than two score men lay in ruin around her, some dead, their fingers and arms curling like charred twigs. A few, the unfortunate, writhed on the ground, whimpering, moaning, skin melted off or hanging like rags. Smoke, sweet with scorched flesh, drifted in a haze around her so it seemed she moved backward into a miasma.

  So I do.

  She fought an urge to run. To turn her back would be certain death as arrows still rained around, many burned away within an arrow’s length of her body. Hundreds of furious, fearful men kept their distance but moved with her, pace by pace. She saw her death in their gaze. They hated her for what she was.

  “Liath!” cried Breschius from far away, but not so far, where moments might seem like an hour, where three strides might seem like three leagues The stockade still burned; she heard the rattle of the wheels of Sorgatani’s wagon crunching away over dirt. Had she taken more than ten breaths between the collapse of the stockade and now?

  She was almost there. The heat of the burning logs whipped along her back.

  “Bright One! Run quickly!”

  Gnat’s voice came from the wrong direction. She lost track of her footing. With her next step she tripped over the leg of a fallen horse.

  She was able to catch herself as she rolled onto the body of the beast, but before she could rise, an arrow struck through her thigh, piercing her flesh and burying its head deep in the horse’s belly.

  She screamed. Pain bloomed. Flames spit up from the earth. As she twisted, seei
ng fletchings protruding from the leg, a second arrow hit through the same thigh, at a different angle.

  Mosquito appeared, dodging through burning tents, ducking behind a fallen horse. “Mistress! I come!”

  Fire shot up in a wall, driving her foes back. Horsehair singed, its scent stinging her.

  “Go!” she screamed. “I command it, all of you. Gnat! Mosquito! Retreat! Save Sorgatani!”

  She grabbed one of the arrows, but her touch on the shaft sent pain shooting up her spine and down her calf. She choked down a scream; she knew what she had to do.

  Let them run, she prayed. Let them retreat and save themselves.

  She grabbed each shaft, closed her hands around them, and called fire. The pain inside her thigh flared; it bit; it flowered. It stunned her with its ferocity, eating at the flesh from inside. She wept. Tears spattered her face with cold fierceness. There was a terrible strong wind blowing in off the sea. Thunder rumbled.

  Or was it the earth trembling beneath her?

  Fire guttered as rain splashed, yet it wasn’t the rain that cooled the flames but the sparkling wings of butterflies, a thousand winking shards. Where they fluttered, flame died.

  The first arrow crumbled away into ash. Blood from the wound gushed down the belly of the horse. Ash and blood in a muddy mixture dripped onto her feet. She tugged on the second arrow and almost passed out, but it did not break. It had not burned through.

  “I’ve got it, Mistress! I’ll put it out.”

  Mosquito was the one with the round scar on his left cheek and a missing tooth. Gnat had broader shoulders, a broader face, and was missing the thumb on his right hand.

  And, damn him, there he was, scuttling in beside his brother. He shoved a knife between her thigh and the horse, levering it in until it hit the shaft.

  She thought the pain of that movement alone would kill her. The heavens dazzled; stars spun webs, and Mosquito yelped with fear as Gnat sawed and she moaned. A glittering net drifted out of the sky an arm’s length above them. Butterflies skimmed across her cheeks.