The Gathering Storm (Crown of Stars #5)

The Gathering Storm (Crown of Stars #5) Page 376

The Avarian defection dealt the siege a grievous blow. Men frowned as they dug the ditches that would protect them. Soldiers muttered and fell silent as he passed. They gazed north, toward home. They argued about who had the camp next to the Quman contingent although Fulk had already assigned places, and Gyasi was forced to order his nephews to stake out a rope to encircle the Quman encampment and bind it with charms and bells to keep Wendish and Quman apart.

Worst of all, the griffins flew off suddenly, and although they had done so before in order to go hunting and had always returned, this time their departure smelled of defeat. Men watched them go and turned muttering back to their tasks. On the rocky shoreline, five dead dolphins washed up, their corpses half decayed and infested with tiny worms. In the wake of this omen the seawaters began to retreat as though draining away into a sinkhole. Fish flopped and gasped in shrinking hollows on the exposed seabed, and his soldiers waded out into the muck to retrieve them in baskets—yet one man wandered too close to the walls and three arrows pierced him before his comrades could drag him to safety. He died shortly after, as the sun was setting, and no sooner had the one piece of ill news made the rounds than two horses suffering from colic had to be slaughtered.

Sanglant took Hathui aside as the camp settled in for an uneasy night punctuated by curses and jeers from Estriana’s walls and the too-distant sigh of the sea, whose waters receded finger’s width by finger’s width although by now the tide—if there even were one in the sheltered Middle Sea—ought to be turning to come back in. Drought on the land and an uncanny ebb tide at sea. What next?

“Saddle a mount. I’m riding after Wendilgard.”

She began to speak, but after making that first sound—no recognizable word—she shut her mouth.

“You know I value your advice. I pray you, Eagle, say what you think.”

“Only this, my lord prince. Best that you persuade her to return. The Avarians make up a fifth part of the army. Lady Wendilgard commands respect because she, too, rode south not for glory but because of loyalty to her father. Now folk are reminded that you are a rebel. They do not like to think of fighting against the regnant they love.”

“How is it, then, that you dare think of it, Hathui?”

Her steady gaze matched his. She held her ground. “I witnessed what they did to the king. Who is to say they have not ensorcelled Duke Burchard in the same manner? Isn’t it a form of sorcery if he doesn’t know the truth and instead remains faithful because of a lie? How is it rebellion to raise weapons against false dealing?”

By the time they rode out along the road that cut into the wooded hills left of the bluff, it was night with only the waxing crescent moon to light their way and a wind blowing in hard off the water. He took fifty men, half of them dismounted and walking on foot with torches. The road plunged into a pine-and-oak forest open enough that they could see the stars twinkling through the foliage. Wendilgard had ridden farther than he expected, and the moon had set by the time he called his soldiers to a halt and went on with only Hathui.

The Avarian sentries heard him coming and let him pass into the center of the encampment, which had been hastily thrown up in the lee of a solitary hill with the slope at their backs and a ravine, not much more than a ditch, protecting their left flank. Wendilgard had set up her tent beside a jumble of boulders and dressed stones as big as a man’s torso. These had once rested higher up on the hill where the face of a long abandoned fortress was being eroded by degrees. She greeted him with reserve. Wind tossed the branches of the trees, and they heard a roar of wind sweeping in from the east.

“Come,” she said, beckoning him into the tent as her men raced for cover under the trees or where fallen walls made a windbreak.

A gust raced through camp so swiftly that men had just begun yelling by the time the wind abated and Wendilgard and Sanglant came out of her tent to see half a dozen tents flattened. Horses had bolted free of their lines. Men scattered to search. Distantly, they heard the rumble of thunder, but no herald of lightning lit the sky. There was no rain.

“So,” said Wendilgard as they stood by the ruined fire her stewards had lit earlier. Its coals were scattered, and servants stamped out sparks. “What do you want, my lord prince?”

“I want you to come back.”

“Impossible. I cannot fight against my sire.”

It was too dark to see her face well. All of the torches that had earlier lit the camp had been doused by the wind, and the soldiers searching for the lost horses had claimed the first to be refit. The glimmer of their flames winked and vanished and reappeared like the dance of will-o’-the-wisps in a summer forest in the north, spirits that would lead a man astray if he followed them into the dark.