The Gathering Storm (Crown of Stars #5)

The Gathering Storm (Crown of Stars #5) Page 357

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.