Elliott, Kate - Crown of Stars 3 (100 page)

Ahead, grass dies away into hillocks of sand and fields of rock, boulders tumbled into odd, veined shapes by some ancient cataclysm. Ahead, the ground gleams all silver and gold. The creature descends until she sees that the plain opening before her is a desert strewn with sands that resemble seas of golden granules interwoven with channels of silver dust. The sun sets, bathing the glimmering sands in rose light. Abruptly, darkness comes but for a single light, a campfire. She sees no moon.

That suddenly, they dip, and the claws release her. The creature screams, and she is deafened, she falls with her hands clapped to her ears and her spear lost, and she hits the ground. Her knees drive into her chest and she can't breathe, clutching at anything, finding her spear jammed up against one elbow. The coarse sand burns on her skin, still hot after hours baking in the sun. The grains are oddly shaped, unlike any sand she's ever seen before: they 're disk-shaped, flat and round like a baby's petrified fingernail. What ocean deposited this sand here? Where is the shore?

Firelight illuminates a figure walking toward her, but she knows that form as she knows her own heart, always, for her, an easy depth to fathom.

"/
called you, " says the princess, giving her a hand and helping her rise.

"What was that creature?" Hanna demands as she brushes off the knees of her trousers. In an odd way, she has become used to these meetings.

"That was a
griffin,"
says the princess, emphasizing the word as though she thinks Hanna won't understand it even though every word they speak, two who share no common language, is completely intelligible in her dreams.

"Do you control it?" she asks, feeling faint.

"Nay, I only asked for its help. Just as I ask for your help." Hanna sees her clearly now with firelight and starlight and the princess' own shroud ofmagelight to guide her. Four huge bear claws hang heavily from a leather thong around her neck. Several miniature pouches hang from a belt at her waist, each one cleverly tied closed with thread as fine as spider's silk. Her felt conical hat is missing, and she wears no covering at all on her head; her braids have been tied back behind her neck to keep them out of the way. She has a healing cut across the knuckles of one hand, and her leather coat has a huge rent in it, as though it was recently slashed and mended. Meat is cooking, and fat is boiling. Her nose is smudged with soot.

"How can I help you?" asks Hanna. "This is only a dream."

"How can I find a dragon's scale? All the dragons are gone. They vanished when the Lost Ones fled, so the old stories tell us."

Hanna laughs. Maybe in dreams the truth is easier to find because it isn't obscured by waking blindness. She drops to her knees and gathers up a handful of sand, lets the odd golden grains pour down through her fingers. The heat of them soaks her skin in dreamy warmth, like the kiss of magic. "Couldn't these be dragon's scales?"

The Kerayit princess laughs out loud, a whoop of joy. For all that her expression and demeanor are exotic and somber, still, she is barely a woman, no older than Hanna herself. She is no different than any other child, gleeful as she turns the trick back on a wily old teacher. In her excitement, she grasps Hanna by the shoulders, not unlike the monstrous griffin, and kisses her on either cheek, then slaps her under the chin with the back of her hand, an odd endearment. Her breath smells of sour milk. Her lips are dark, as if stained with berry juice.

"Hai ai!" she cries. "Stay with me, luck, and we will hunt down the others together. Seventeen items she said I must bring her, and have five now. So I will prove myself worthy of becoming her apprentice."

A bass rumble vibrates along the earth, felt through the soles of her feet more than heard. The princess suddenly grasps Hanna's arm, and together they sway, only it isn't them, it is the earth that is shaken and they only move with it. The land shudders and jerks as if dragons buried beneath a millennium of shed scales have woken and are trying to dig free.

The tremor drags at her, and she feels the ground slide away under her feet, spun not by sorcery or some monstrous flying creature but by a sudden disturbance cutting through the earth itself. She is torn away, but she is still dreaming. She hasn 't left the land of dreams, she has only been displaced.

The earth slides under her and the heavens are black. Neither star glints nor moon shines, but the breath of dawn licks at her face; she can see it in the graying scene unfolding before her, and she knows she has traveled a long way, thrown off course by the trembling earth. She is somewhere she has never been before. She feels another mind and another soul tangling with hers as she dreams, and he has brought her here, unawares, perhaps. No malice oppresses her, but the heart that beats inside her is unlike anything she has ever known, unlike her own simple and apprehensible heart, more cruel than merciful, more just than kind, yet in its contradictions unfathomable.

She walks among them and she falls inside.

Spring came early, as foretold by the merfolk who can taste the weather in the salt of the sea. No pounding storms troubled the fjords over the winter. Now he stands in the stem of his ship and the sea slides underneath as smoothly as melted grease coats a hot pan. The pull of the land is almost enough to draw them in. Scarcely does any oar touch the water.

Victory can be had in many ways, and this victory will be taken at dawn on a foe who lies sleeping.

Nokvi is, no doubt, shrewd and strong, and the magic of his allies can undo many an enemy. But that magic cannot harm the host of Stronghand, and Nokvi's strength will not avail him in the confusion brought on him by a dawn raid.

The ships beach silently on the far side of the land's finger,where a steep ridge thrusts out into the sound. His warriors disembark as mute as stones; for this raid, they have left their dogs behind. They begin the hike that will take them over the ridge and down into Moerin 's vale, where Nokvi rules. As they climb, pine and birch grow increasingly thick about them, and the host speeds silently between the trees until, cresting the ridge, they see the watch fires marking Nokvi's long hall burning crisp and clean below them. All lies quiet.

As they move down the slope, their noise increases, and he feels a stab of misgiving, but it is already too late. His warriors are beginning to howl, full of their cleverness, ready to slaughter, and as they break from the woods and course over the fields he knows that even with this brief notice Nokvi's people will be easy prey, bewildered by the early hour and the unexpected attack.

Still no movement comes from the hall.

Distantly he hears a shriek, like a raven, suddenly cut off.

They reach the hall in a thundering roar, and it isn 't until the first of them strikes down the door and heaves it aside that he understands the worst. Outside, the watch fires bum. Inside, the hearth fire burns but warms no one, because no one stands or sits or leaps up in astonished and enraged surprise. The hall is empty.

Blow the retreat," he cries to his standard bearer even as he knows it is already too late.

Perhaps this will be his harshest test.

"Set the hall on fire," he calls, "and light every torch we have."

A new force emerges out of the trees, leaping in a wild ecstasy, and their ululations rise like the flames now streaking up the walls of the long hall. They are Soft Ones, but their skin is the color of the night sea and without clothing or adornment save spears and clubs spiked with iron they race toward the Rikin warriors shrieking and laughing like madmen. They plunge forward without fear, and in the instant before they fall upon his warriors, he sees robed humans walking among the trees with staffs upraised: sorcerers. His own staff he grips tightly, but their magic does not afflict his warriors, only their own, who hit the Rikin line with howls first of battle fever and then of agony.

"Retreat! " he cries again, and this time he wrenches the horn from his standard bearer and blows the call himself, sharp, imperative.

"Nay, nay," his warriors cry, "let us slaughter them. They are weak as calves. "

But he drives his troops forward. They know to obey him. They know he is more farsighted than they are. And by now, some of them can see that they have been tricked. With spears and fire they beat their way forward through the throng of naked men, headed for the ridge and the trees. Only the stupidest are left at the hall when Nokvi 's troops come racing out of the dark from the other direction. It's a clever plan. Nokvi hoped to catch Rikin's army from behind while it wasted itself killing ensorcelled men.

It is a hard and humiliating run back up the ridge and down to his ships. Only four of the ships are burning so fiercely that the fires set on them can't be stemmed. He kills one of the arsonists himself, a naked human man who gibbers and pokes ineffectually at him with a knife before the creature falls, doubled over, from a thrust to the guts.

Four ships lost, as well as a third of his men. One ship has to be scuttled in the sound, and ten more warriors dumped overboard when they die of their wounds.

But he counts himself lucky. He has underestimated Nokvi and his allies. It could have been much worse.

It is not in victory that you learn how strong you truly are.

Sorrow licked him, and he startled up like a hare bolting and found himself weeping at Lavastine's bier.

It is not in victory that you learn how strong you are.

Ai, God. He could not weep for himself, not truly. He was weeping for what they had done to his father's hopes and dreams, shredded now. Thrown to the dogs.

Not my father any longer.

Nay, King Henry had not yet judged the case. Yet if Henry ruled in his favor, could he ever truly call himself Lavastine's son again without wondering if it were a lie to say so? Couldn't it be true, as Cook said, that Lavastine had lain with the young woman as well? Might he not have walked to the ruins one night and succumbed to temptation as Alain had almost done so long ago with that girl, Withi? How could they ever know one way or the other? How could one tell?

What had linked Lavastine and poor Lackling, who were so unlike that it seemed impossible they could be father and son, even after Cook's testimony? Nothing had linked them, except blood, except perhaps the way the hounds had whined and whimpered at both their deaths.

Geoffrey's blood claim to the count's chair was stronger than Lackling's merely by reason of competence. But if fitness was the only standard, then couldn't he argue that he would be a better steward than Geoffrey? Under his rule, the people would do better than under Geoffrey's rule. Was it pride to think so? No, it was truth. Lavastine had recognized that truth and he had made his decision based in part on sentiment and emotion, certainly, but in equal part on reason, because Lavastine took seriously his duty to the land and people under his rule.

What was blood, anyway? It was everything, all that you had to mark kinship, and yet the bond he had shared with Lavastine was no less real whether or not blood had tied them together. He and Lavastine had been woven together in some way evident to them both.

He loved him still, and he had a bitter intuition that had Cook reluctantly brought her testimony before Lavastine, the count would have smiled in his terse way and told her that it made no difference to
him.

Nay, the failure had not been Lavastine's. He had always known what he was about.
He had known what would happen, and he had made every effort to prepare for it.

But Tallia wasn't pregnant. Alain had failed and, worse, he had lied to the man who trusted him most.

The knowledge lay in his heart as bitterly as the accusation that he might be nothing better than the ill-gotten child of a whore and her father, born out of incest and cruel poverty. Ai, Lady. No better than the poor beggars who had sheltered in hovels on his land and pleaded for food for their starving children.

Yet did God love them any less than They did the fine nobles who never wanted for elegant clothing and full platters?

But you're nothing so noble as a beggar's child.
The voice scraped at him like a finger picking at a fresh scab. Did God love whores, too? The shame of having it spoken out loud in front of everyone still gnawed at him. It would never cease gnawing. His foster father Henri had protected him from the truth of what she was all this time. He had only ever said one thing about her, that she was beautiful. As if that was all that mattered. And maybe, in God's heart, that was all that mattered.

Rage whined, butting him, and he scratched her around the ears, buried his face in her massive neck as he patted her and ' she grunted contentedly. What about the testimony of the hounds? Yet where had Fear gone? Would he ever return?