The Gathering Storm

  Anne stepped out of the line of soldiers and halted a stone’s toss in front of her. The skopos was crowned and robed in the splendor of her office, wearing white robes embroidered with red circles. No ash marred the purity of that linen. A gold circlet rested on her brow, mirroring the gold torque that circled her neck, the sigil of her royal ancestry.

  Anne regarded her in silence for some moments. Because the light of the burning tents blazed behind her, her face was in shadow, half obscured. Yet Anne had always been obscured; if there was passion beneath that cool exterior, it, like coals, had always been buried beneath a layer of ash.

  “Shoot the servants,” she said.

  Five arrows flashed out of the burning night. Three thudded wetly into flesh: two into Mosquito and one into Gnat, just above his collarbone. He fell back, choking. Mosquito had collapsed without a sound.

  “I am disappointed in you, Daughter,” Anne said in that mild, flat tone. Anne never raged. “You cost me so much. Yet now I have nothing to show for it.”

  “Did I cost you so much?” The agony awash in her thigh, the sting of the blade’s edge pinching her mangled flesh where the knife was still wedged between leg and horse, was nothing compared to the pain in her heart. “I cost you nothing. My mother and father are both dead. What cost was there for you in my conception? In my mother’s death? In my father’s murder? Except that you had to lie to the others all these years, pretending that I was born from your womb.”

  “Ah.” Even with the truth cast on the ground for them both to consider, with the charred bodies of men smoldering around them, Anne did not flinch or falter; she showed not the least tremor of emotion. “Well, then. Certainly there is no hope of a rapprochement if you have discovered the truth. Yet I wonder. How do you know these things?”

  “Well, then,” echoed Liath, mocking her. Mockery was all she had, surrounded by the ruin of her hopes. “It seems you have told me more than I have told you, since you have now confirmed what I only guessed at. I have nothing further to say.”

  The first strands of that net brushed her hair and settled over her shoulders. The fire that burned inside her, her mother’s spirit, shrank from its cold touch.

  “You need not speak, Liath. Your plans are an open book to me. You may have a fire daimone’s heart, but you are weak, as Bernard made you. You were easily captured and will be easily held in my power. With this same net of sorcery I caged your mother.”

  The net was a cage for fire. But she was only half born of fire. The rest of her was common human flesh, Da’s heritage.

  She grabbed the arrow and wrenched. The pain blinded her, but only for an instant. Gnat’s knife had done just enough work, weakening the shaft, which snapped, half charred, half splintered. She rolled sideways over the smoking body of the horse to fall between her wounded servants.

  She grabbed their arms and, of a miracle, they scrambled up although it was impossible to know how they could still walk. They ran, staggering, bent over, while men shouted and gave chase.

  One glimpse only she caught of the smoking gap in the stockade, of Anne’s soldiers pouring through the opening in pursuit of her own people. Rain swept over them. Hail burst, thundering over the ground. Lightning flashed to display in one sharp vision the broad expanse of sea, waves churning up as a storm drove down on them from across the waters. Whitecaps foamed.

  A wall of men blocked the gap in the stockade. Anne’s net brushed the skin of her trailing hand, leaving bloody welts.

  “This way!” cried Mosquito, but his voice was liquid; the second arrow had punctured his lung and blood frothed on his lips.

  They wavered on the edge of the cliff, poised there, staring down and down to the water below. There was no beach, only the sheer face of the cliff and a scattering of rocks showing above the waves. Out in the sea, mer creatures swarmed, their ridged backs parting the choppy waters as if they sensed the battle, or the magic, above and wished to discover what was going on.

  “There is no other way,” murmured Gnat. “It is better if they do not have the chance to mutilate our bodies.”

  He leaped, and his brother jumped after, and she did not think or hesitate as she followed them over the edge, springing out as strongly as she could so that she might not fall straight down to the deadly rocks below.

  Her wings of flame shuddered, flared and unfolded, and for two breaths she had lift. Gnat hit the water and vanished under the waves. Mosquito was gone an instant later, swallowed by the sea. The wind blasted her sideways. Thunder crashed.

  Her aetherical wings had not the strength to hold her. Their substance collapsed as the wind battered her. The inexorable weight of the Earth was like grief, dragging her down.

  I’ll never see my beloved, or my child, again.

  She plunged, wingless, lost, and tumbled into the sea.

  2

  HAMMERS rang. Axes thunked into wood. Shovels scraped into dirt followed by the spitting fall of earth thrown up onto the growing ramparts, the sound like hail spattering against the ground. The music of these labors accompanied Stronghand as he toured the new fortifications at Medemelacha. Eika and men worked together if not always side by side.

  With his escort of the five dour merchants whose families controlled most of the commerce in the town, a dozen men-at-arms, and his most faithful attendants—the two hounds—he walked down to the strand where the shipyard bustled. Axes and adzes rose and fell. Men hammered wedges into a huge trunk to cleave it in two. Four boats lay propped up on stumps and posts, the newest no more than a keel while the most complete was being fitted with a side rudder. Soon it would be ready to launch.

  Medemelacha had doubled in population in the last six months as folk swarmed to the trading town to get work in the shipyards and on the fortifications. Barracks had been built for the workers and to house the garrison. The farmland for a day’s walk on all sides lay under his control, enough to feed the population as long as the harvest was good. He had given up inland strikes in favor of consolidating his position on the Salian coast and in Alba.

  Yet the failure of his rescue gnawed at him. He had no peace; he could not savor his triumphs.

  “There are three men in the customhouse who await your pleasure, my lord,” said Yeshu as they lingered in the shipyards and the merchants began to fidget.

  He tore his gaze away from a young Alban man, his pale hair tied back with a strip of leather, who under the hot harvest sun had stripped down to a loincloth as he carved out a stem with an ax. It was sweaty work. He worked in tandem with an Eika brother, a handsome, brawny fellow whose skin gleamed with silver and who had taken to wearing a tunic in the human fashion, covering him from shoulders to knees. They worked easily together, making a comment now and again, picking out splinters, blowing away sawdust; laughing once, as comrades do. A young woman came by with a skin of ale; he could smell it from here. She had her hair concealed under a scarf and her skirt robed up for ease of movement so that her pale calves and bare feet were exposed. They joked with her, Alban and Eika alike, although it seemed she was Salian and could barely understand them. Yet she did not fear them. She, too, laughed.

  This was prosperity—that folk laughed while they worked because they did not fear hunger or war.

  “My lord,” repeated Yeshu.

  He returned his attention to his companions. The merchants murmured among themselves. One was a veiled Hessi woman; she stood away from the others, who were Salians once beholden to other noble protectors. Out in the bay, a longship was being rowed toward shore, and its oars pulled in as the sailors made ready to draw up on the beach. It flew Rikin’s banner. He sighed, and as he turned to address the others, he stifled a nagging sense of regret that he could no longer stand where the Lightfell plunged down the mossy rock face, far down into the still, blue fjord. Hadn’t he known peace there once?

  Maybe not. Maybe he had never known peace from the day he was hatched and began his struggle to live.

  “What matter needs my attent
ion in the customhouse? Is there not a council of elders to consider such things?”

  “Yes, my lord. But it seems two of these men are suspected of being smugglers, and the other is a merchant from north up the coast, out of Varre. It’s thought you might wish to speak to him. He may know something of the disposition of Duke Conrad’s forces.”

  “Very well.” He whistled the hounds to him. They came obediently. They suffered him, but they pined for their master, and so each time he patted their heads he was reminded of his failure.

  They walked past the new jetties to the customhouse, an old long hall that had once belonged to a Salian lord, now dead, who had taxed the merchants and sent a tithing to the Salian king while keeping the balance for himself. He hadn’t been well liked. Indeed, his skull was stuck on a post out in front beside the door, stripped of most of its flesh and trailing only a few tatters of straggling brown hair.

  Inside, the hall had been cleared of its old furnishings and transformed into something resembling a cleric’s study with shelves, tables, benches, and a single chair set on a dais. He sat in the chair. The hounds settled beside him, Sorrow draping his weight right over his feet, but he didn’t have the heart to move him.

  “Bring them forward.”

  All work ceased, clerics scratching and scratching with pens, women and men arguing over the worth of their trade goods, merchants counting by means of beads. They feared him, as they should, but he found their fear wearying. He tapped his free foot, waiting.

  Two men were dragged forward. Their hands had been tied behind them; they were cut, bruised, and terrified. Four witnesses came forward to testify against them: they’d been caught north of town in an inlet setting out in a rowboat laden with cloth that had been reported stolen two days before from the house of Foxworthy, a respected merchant.

  The thieves begged for mercy. They were young, they were dirty, and they looked hungry and ill-used, shorn of hope, but the penalty for stealing trade goods from the merchant houses was death and all men knew it. He called forward the scion of the house, a middle-aged man with red hair and beard dressed in a fine linen tunic whose border was embroidered with fox faces half hidden amidst green leaves.

  “What is your wish in this matter?” Stronghand asked. “They do not deny the charge. Do you wish to make a claim against them?”

  The merchant considered thoughtfully. “There’s always need of labor in the mines, my lord. If they are sold to the mines, then I will take whatever price they fetch as recompense for the crime. The cloth was recovered in good condition. No permanent damage was sustained by my house.”

  “Very well.”

  Rage heaved herself up and nudged his hand. He remembered the mines. He wanted those mines. But not yet.

  Not yet.

  Patience had served him well. It would have to continue to serve him. If he moved too quickly he would overreach and lose everything.

  The criminals wept, but they had sealed their own fate by becoming thieves.

  “Bring the other man forward,” he said, feeling the curse of impatience draining into him, although he fought it.

  Where was Alain?

  Sorrow barked, just once, like a greeting, a demand for attention. Rage whined.

  There!

  He rose, he was so startled, but an instant later realized he was seeing things. It wasn’t Alain at all; it was the shadows within the hall that had tricked him. This was an older man of middle years, dark hair well streaked with gray, who walked forward between an escort of two soldiers. He looked nervous, but he had a proud carriage and an alert gaze. If he was shocked to come before an Eika lord, he showed no measure of his surprise on his face.

  He knelt before Stronghand as though he were a petitioner, not a prisoner. He spoke Wendish, not Salian. “I am called Henri, my lord. My sister is a householder in Osna Sound. I carry her goods to market once a year. We came late this year due to the troubles, and I find myself held as if I am a criminal although all my dealings among the merchants here have been fair and perfectly ordinary. I pray you, my lord, I am a simple man. No merchant complained of the goods I traded. I had quernstones, very high quality, and good quality wool cloth woven in my sister’s weaving hall. That’s all. I am taking home wheat and salt in exchange. Nothing more.”

  He looked at the hounds, expression clouded with doubt, and after a moment tore his gaze away from them to meet the dark eyes of Yeshu. He nodded, to show he was done speaking, and waited for the translation to begin.

  “Have we met before?” Stronghand asked in his perfect Wendish.

  The man started visibly as if he had not thought an Eika could form human words. “I-I think not, my lord. Many years ago Eika burned the monastery near our village.” He stammered again, realizing that he might have offended. “The-the count as was then drove off another group of invaders that year. He captured one of them, rumor said, but the creature later escaped. My foster son was at Lavas Holding at that time, but we heard the story from others. I’ve met no Eika face-to-face. Not in all my years.” He twisted his fingers through his beard in an anxious gesture, realized that he did so, and lowered his hand. “My lord.”

  “Have you heard other news of Eika this summer? Have you heard news of Duke Conrad? Of the Salian war?”

  His hands were clenched, and he nodded in a manner so suggestive of resignation, of a man who has given up hope of a successful enterprise, that Stronghand felt a stab of compassion. “In truth, my lord, we at Osna have been beset by our own troubles for the last year or two. We’ve heard nothing of the world.”

  “What troubles have plagued you?”

  “Harvests have failed. It’s rained too much. There’s no trade at our little emporium, none at all these last two years, although we showed signs of prosperity before. Refugees from the Salian wars have overwhelmed us. There were four murders in the village last year. Unthinkable!” He shook his head. “Lads have gone off to join the war and never returned. Laborers beg for a crust of bread. There’s been a sickness among the outlying farms and among the poorest—they call it ‘holy fire’ because their limbs burn and the poor afflicted souls see rivers burning with blood. Our new count has deserted us. He hides in his fortress, fearing enemies on all sides. Some say he’s not our true count, that the rightful heir was disinherited, cheated of his place.”

  “Do you think that’s true?” asked Stronghand, intrigued by the man’s complex expression which grew yet more grim, leavened by sadness.

  “Nay, my lord. If any man cheated, it was him who claimed to be the rightful heir. Yet I’ll not say the new count has courted God’s favor either, for his folk fare ill in these days.” He shifted on the plank floor, setting his left knee on the floor to give his right a rest. “I pray you, let me go. I am no spy. I have no grand knowledge to reveal to you. If we eat once a day, we count ourselves fortunate. It’s true we’ve heard tales of troubles along the coast and seen sails passing, but they did not stop. I sailed south this year to Medemelacha because we have become desperate. I pray you, my lord, let me return home.”

  “Let him go on his way!” said Stronghand brusquely. The man’s speech had shaken him, although he wasn’t sure why. “I see nothing suspicious in his arrival here. Are there any here who have a complaint of him?”

  There were none. The man was known as one of those who traded once a year at the market, bringing in a few goods from the countryside which lay north up the coast. He had always dealt honestly over the many years he had come to Medemelacha. He had only been detained today while loading his small boat to leave, because it had occurred to someone that he was a foreigner and might therefore be a spy.

  “He has nothing of importance to tell us. Go!”

  The man hurried out, although when he reached the doors, he glanced back toward Stronghand. As if in answer to an unspoken question, Sorrow heaved himself to his feet and barked again, and he and Rage trotted over to the door as if in pursuit. The sunlight streaming in through the doors hid the man
in that haze of light as soon as he stepped outside.

  “Osna Sound,” Stronghand murmured. He whistled, but the hounds did not return.

  Because he was seated, others came forward to press him for a decision on trifling matters, disputes and arguments that a strong council ought to have disposed of. Yet they tested him; they wanted to know if he was as clever as rumor made him out to be. He had to listen, to ask questions, and to judge.

  Yet the name teased him as petitioners came forward and retired in pairs, as trios, in groups, now and again a single person. A disputed fence that marked the border between two fields; a bull that had gored a child; stolen apples; a knife fight between feuding suitors.

  Osna Sound.

  He had heard the name before. Wasn’t that where Alain had come from? He wasn’t sure; he didn’t know the Varren coast well, not as he had learned the Eika shore and the settlements and roads and landscape of Alba or the fields around Gent. In Varre, when he had been captured, he hadn’t been quite awake; he had only vague memories of those days when he was little more than a ravening beast like his brothers. The cage had changed him. It had woken him, and Alain’s blood had quickened him, and since then he had been plagued by this restlessness, this lack of peace, and yet he could not wish for it to have transpired in any other way.

  “Where is that man’s boat laid up?” he asked Yeshu when the tide of petitioners ebbed.

  “Which man, my lord?”

  “The one from Osna Sound who was brought forward to be questioned.”

  “Most of the local merchants beach their boats up by the north wall, my lord. By the mill. They do most of their trading at Weel’s Market.”

  “Go find him. bring him to me. I’ve a mind to visit this market and see what goods he brought with him.”

  He rose, and his escort gathered behind him as he strode to the door. He hadn’t asked the right questions. He had missed an important clue. Had this man known Alain? Hadn’t he said his name was Henri? For a long time Stronghand had assumed that Alain was the king’s son, for the king of the Wendish was called Henry, but Alain could not be both a king’s son and a count’s heir, could he?