Empires of Moth (The Moth Saga, Book 2) (21 page)

The tall, armor-clad woman was
sharpening those throwing stars now, running their edges against a
stone again and again. Each stroke gave a hiss like a dying man. Her
white hair billowed in the breeze, a sheet like gossamer, and the
moonlight reflected against her armor of steel scales. Her back was
turned to Cam, for which he was grateful. Suntai was pretty enough,
what with her large indigo eyes, high cheekbones, and pale skin, but
whenever she gazed upon him, her face spoke only of scorn.

She
thinks Linee and I are weak,
Cam thought, watching her.
And
maybe she's right. We're no warriors like her.

It didn't help that Suntai—who
was almost as tall as Bailey—towered above him and Linee. Standing a
humble five feet and three inches, Cam had rather enjoyed his stay in
Pahmey; many Elorians there had been his height, even some of the
men. Back in Fairwool-by-Night, Cam had been the shortest man
around—shorter than most of the women too. On the streets of Pahmey,
he had almost begun to feel confident about his height.

Ferius
just had to destroy the only place where I felt good,
Cam thought with a sigh.
And
now I'm stuck here with these two—one who terrifies me, the other
who barely stops crying.

As if to confirm his thoughts,
Queen Linee began to weep again. Cam had lost count of how many times
she had burst into tears along the Iron Road. The wolves, hearing her
whimpers, raised their heads from their bowls.

"I'm scared and I'm cold
and I want to go home." Linee tugged at Cam's sleeve. "Please,
Camlin, please can we go home? Can you take me back to Kingswall to
my gardens and pet puppies and flowers? Please. This place is just .
. . just horrible."

On their journey so far, Cam had
rolled his eyes so often he was surprised they hadn't fallen out. He
rolled them again. "First of all, I told you—nobody calls me
Camlin but my mother. Call me Cam like everybody else. Secondly, you
know we can't go back. You know we have to keep you hidden. What do
you think would happen if you returned to Kingswall, your husband
dead and Sailith running the show? Do you think they'd let you play
with your puppies and flowers?"

Linee only cried harder. "They
have to. I'm their queen, I—"

"You
were
their queen," Cam said. "And Ceranor was their king, and
you saw what happened to him."

Linee stared up at him with
huge, horrified eyes. "I . . . Camlin— I mean, Cam, how . . ."
She covered her face and wept silently.

Cam cursed himself, guilt rising
through him. Maybe he shouldn't have said those words. It couldn't
have been too pleasant for Linee to see her husband slaughtered,
after all, especially not with her so young and naive. Linee was
perhaps two or three years older than Cam, but internally she was
still a child. He awkwardly touched her shoulder.

"I'm sorry, Linee. Please
stop crying. Look around you—it's not that bad out here. The stars
are pretty once you get used to them, don't you think?"

Linee only shook her head and
kept her face hidden. With a sigh, Cam looked around him. He himself
had thought the Iron Road frightening at first, but he'd come to see
its beauty. Black plains of rock sprawled into all horizons, shining
silver where the moonlight hit them. Hills rose in the east, nearly
invisible in the shadows. The sky spread like a great bowl, strewn
with millions of stars, some bright, others small and clustered like
clouds of dust.

Between earth and stars
stretched the Iron Road, the great south-to-north highway of the
Qaelish Empire. When Cam had first heard of the Iron Road, he'd
imagined a road like the ones back in Timandra, wide and smooth and
cobbled, only maybe the cobbles would be forged of iron rather than
stone. But in truth, it was barely a road at all, just a string of
milestones running endlessly north and south. Each milestone rose
several feet tall, smoothed and topped with a glowing blue rune.
Suntai now sat upon the nearest milestone; others stretched beyond
her. Cam could count seven stretching north; the eighth lay beyond
the horizon, but Cam knew it would be there. They had passed many
already. Each milestone they rode by, he would peer at the glowing
rune, struggling to understand the source of its light.

"Magic," Suntai had
once said—one of the only words she had spoken on the journey. Cam
had tried to ask how the magic worked, but she had only shot him a
withering glare, and he'd dared not ask questions since.

A falling star streaked across
the sky, then another, then a third. Cam touched Linee's shoulder and
spoke softly.

"Some stars are falling,
Linlin. Want to see?"

She
shook her head mightily and finally removed her hands from her face.
"No! And I told
you
,
don't call me Linlin. That's a stupid name for babies, and I'm not a
baby." Her voice rose and her cheeks flushed. "My name is
Queen Linee or Your Highness. I'm
still
your queen, Camlin Shepherd, and—"

Her voice died and she paled.

Cam turned to see Suntai
stomping toward them.

Rage twisted the tall Elorian's
face. She growled, revealing very white and very sharp-looking teeth;
her canines almost looked like fangs. She seemed like a nightwolf,
and she clutched the hilts of daggers.

"Lower your voices!"
she said in her tongue; Cam spoke enough Qaelish by now to
understand. "You disturb the nightwolves. When you cry, it makes
them nervous." She glared at Cam. "Tell the little girl to
be quiet, or I will cut her tongue from her mouth and feed it to the
wolves."

Cam gulped and turned to look at
the former queen. Linee perhaps did not speak Qaelish, but she seemed
to need no translation. Face almost as pale as an Elorian's, she
covered her mouth with her palms. She trembled and a tear streamed
down her cheek, but she made not a sound.

"Good," Suntai said.
"And keep quiet. Now stand up. We've rested long enough. Onto
the wolves. We ride again."

Suntai spun away, stepped toward
her white nightwolf, and stroked the beast's fur. She whispered
soothing words into the animal's ear and then climbed into the
saddle. She stared down at Cam and Linee, hand caressing her katana.

She
thinks us weaker than pups,
Cam thought, gulping.
And
maybe she's right.
As strange as Suntai was to him—with her fierce ways, oversized
eyes, and many weapons—they must have seemed just as strange to her,
darker and weaker and prone to laughter and tears.
We
must seem like children to her.

Reluctantly, Cam rose to his
feet and stuffed his emptied bowl into his pack. He approached his
own nightwolf—or at least the one Suntai let him ride. It was a
shaggy gray beast, its withers the height of Cam's head. It took
several attempts—Linee pushing him—to climb into the saddle. He
reached down, grabbed Linee's hand, and helped her climb into the
saddle before him. She wriggled into place, and he placed his arms
around her waist.

Looking over her shoulder at
them, Suntai spat and shook her head sadly. "Like children you
two ride." She spurred her nightwolf. "Now follow."

The three nightwolves began to
move—Suntai ahead upon her white wolf, Cam and Linee sharing the
gray one, and the third animal bringing up the rear. This last beast,
a scarred male with brown fur, carried sacks of their supplies. At
first Suntai had insisted that nightwolves were not pack animals but
noble beasts; the Elorian warrior had tried to place Linee upon the
brown male, but the former queen kept squealing, weeping, and falling
off. Finally, with a string of curses, Suntai had given up on ever
teaching the young woman to ride. Since then, Cam and Linee had
shared a mount.

For a while they rode in
silence. Cam heard nothing but the wind and the occasional wolf's
snort; their paws padded silently upon the rock. Cam had ridden a
pony once and remembered bouncing in the saddle, but the nightwolf
moved as steadily as a boat upon smooth waters. If not for Linee's
hair which kept entering his mouth, he would have enjoyed the ride;
the damned saddle was too small for two, and he could barely breathe
with the back of her head pressed against his face. He tried to
distract himself by looking up at the stars, counting the blue ones
that shone among the silver specks.

"Camlin,"
Linee whispered, wriggling in the saddle; Suntai now rode too far
ahead to hear. "Camlin? All right—
Cam
!"

"What?" He spat out a
strand of her hair. "I can hear you."

She twisted in the saddle and
looked at him. "Do you think . . ." She bit her lip,
lowered her head, and twisted her fingers. "Do you think when we
finally reach the kingdom of Leen, they'll let me be a queen there? I
mean . . . not queen of the whole island. Maybe just . . . a small
part of it?"

Cam's jaw dropped and he raised
an eyebrow. "Are you serious?"

Her eyes watered for the
thousandth time. "No! Well . . . maybe. I don't know. I guess I
kind of thought that . . . well, that if I joined you on the journey
to Leen, and if they learned that my name is Queen Linee—it sounds
like their kingdom!—they'd . . . I don't know . . ." A teardrop
hung from her nose. "I guess that's just stupid and it can never
happen."

Cam gaped. "You didn't
actually think that—" He blinked. "I mean, you really—"

She
spun away from him and crossed her arms. "Forget it,
Camlin
.
Just don't talk to me. Look at your stars."

He shook his head in
bewilderment, sighed, and looked back up at the sky. Most turns upon
the road, Cam didn't know who frustrated him more—Suntai with her
glares and blades or Linee with her nonsense. He missed his friends.
He wished Hem could have come with them—lumbering, stupid Hem with
that ridiculous appetite of his, that mellifluous singing voice, and
pockets full of treats. He missed Torin—quiet, wise Torin who could
always make sense of things that confused the rest of their gang. He
even missed Bailey . . . a little.

I
hope I see you again,
he thought, feeling alone and cold even with Linee pressed against
him, her mane of hair tickling his face.

Loneliness in his belly, Cam was
about to strike up another conversation with Linee when roars sounded
ahead.

He tensed up, leaned around
Linee, and stared north along the road.

"Camlin?" Linee began.
"I—"

"Hush!"

The roars sounded again, deep
and rolling across the plains, still distant but closer this time.
Suntai had heard them too; riding a hundred yards ahead upon her
nightwolf, she drew her katana. She looked back at them and gestured
urgently, then doused her lantern, disappearing into the shadows.

"What—" Linee began
again.

"Shh!" Cam reached
forward, grabbed her lantern, and extinguished its flame.

Darkness fell.

Nothing but the stars and
crescent moon lit the night.

Cam gave a tug to the reins, and
his wolf fell still beneath him and Linee. He could no longer see or
hear Suntai ahead. The night became a silent, black cloak wrapping
around him. Linee began to shiver, and Cam wrapped his arms around
her and held her close, not even minding her hair in his face now.

For a few long moments, he heard
and saw nothing.

Then the roars rose again,
inhuman and definitely closer now. Laughter and the language of men
rose among them; the sound was still too low for Cam to make out the
words. Lights gleamed ahead—torches, he thought. People were moving
southward along the Iron Road toward him.

As the lights grew closer, the
voices grew louder, deep and raspy. Cam frowned. He knew that
language. These men were from Verilon, a sunlit kingdom north of his
homeland of Arden. Torin's father had fought the Verilish in the war
years ago; the man would often tell stories of barbarians riding upon
bears, their bodies nearly as hairy as their mounts, wielding war
hammers that could shatter steel like clay. Cam had even met a
Verilish man once—a bearded peddler, clad in old furs, who'd come to
Fairwool-by-Night to swap pelts for barley and wheat.

More
enemies,
he thought, clinging to Linee.
The
northern invasion of the night.

Something rustled to his left,
maybe two feet away, and Cam nearly leaped and fell from the saddle.
Two blue orbs glowed in the dark. For an instant, Cam was sure a
ghost or spirit was lunging to rip out his innards, but it was only
Suntai upon her wolf. He could make out nothing more than her eyes,
the twin stare of her wolf, and her finger pointing east. Then she
was riding off the road. Cam didn't even have to heel his wolf; the
beast followed its alpha. Behind them, their third
nightwolf—Telshuan, the shaggy brown animal who bore their
packs—followed silently.

Suntai led them to a group of
boulders; Cam only saw them once they were a couple feet away, but
Suntai's large eyes had always seen better in the darkness. They led
their nightwolves around the boulders and stood still, waiting and
watching the road.

The sounds of conversation grew
louder, and another roar rose, pealing across the land. When Cam
peered around the boulder, he saw them approach, and his heart sank.

There were five of
them—Verilish warriors just as Torin's father used to describe them.
Each rode a bear, beasts Cam had only seen in bestiaries; spiked
armor hung around the animals' necks and helmets topped their shaggy
heads. The five riders were almost as shaggy, their beards thick,
their hair long and brown. Each held a lamp, and war hammers hung at
their sides. Two were drinking from tankards of ale.

They conversed as they rode.
Their language was similar to Cam's own. A thousand years ago,
Verilon and Arden had been parts of Riyona, an empire stretching
across the north of Dayside. Even now, so many generations after that
empire's fall, the kingdoms of Old Riyona shared many words. Cam was
able to understand most of what these men said. They were speaking of
an attack on Eeshan—a port city in the north of Qaelin—and how many
Elorian "savages" they had slain with their hammers.