King's Dragon (Crown of Stars #1)

King's Dragon (Crown of Stars #1) Page 216

Alain gasped, then clapped a hand over his mouth. Of course, he could now see what was coming.

“She tried to run away with the child. The hounds broke loose that night.”

Even the hounds were silent, as if listening. Sorrow and Rage were young, not more than three years old. Ardent and Terror were the eldest of the hounds. Had they been there that night? Had they pursued the fleeing pregnant woman and her bastard child? Had one of them been the first to catch up to the fugitives?

Lavastine spoke so softly Alain had to strain to hear him. “On her dying breath she cursed me. ‘You will have no heir of your own body. Any woman you marry will die a horrible death. I swear this by the old gods who still walk abroad and whose spawn these hounds are.’ The next year I did my duty and became betrothed to a young woman of good family. One week before the wedding she was drowned when her horse inexplicably collapsed while she was fording a river, on her way to our wedding feast. The year after, I married a young widow. She sickened at the feast itself and died of the flux two days later.

“I have not tried to marry again. I want no more deaths on my conscience. But now…”

Now? Alain said nothing, but he waited.

Lavastine crossed the carpet to stand in front of Alain’s chair. The dim light made him loom above, more shadow than living man. “I began to wonder last autumn, after I returned from the campaign against the Eika raiders, but I forgot everything under the compulsion. Now, isn’t it as obvious to you as it is to me?”

At first Alain did not understand what the count was trying to say. But then he realized the hounds were lying every which way about the tent, some by Alain, some by Lavastine’s chair, some shifting as Lavastine moved. Alain touched the hem of his new, fine tunic, sewn with embroidered ribbon so rich even as prosperous a householder as Aunt Bel would have to trade a child in exchange for an arm’s length of such an exquisite piece of fabric.

Lavastine took one of Alain’s hands in his and lifted him to his feet. His mouth was set in a thin, determined line, and when he spoke, his tone allowed for no argument.

“You are my son.”

5

LIATH had nightmares. Every night, the dogs came and tore at her flesh, ripping her, tearing her limb from limb. Every night she would wake, sweating, heart pounding, and bolt upright in her blanket until the cool night air washed the stain of fear from her. But it could not wash away her grief.

Then she would weep.

Always Wolfhere slept through these episodes, or pretended to be asleep. She could not tell which. She did not want to know which it was. He was deeply preoccupied, spoke only when spoken to or when it was absolutely necessary to get supplies or new mounts. Only once, in an unguarded moment, did she hear him whisper a name.

“Manfred.”

They rode many days. Liath did not keep track of them. Though the skies were clear and perfect for viewing, she did not follow the course of the moon through the Houses of the Night, the world dragon that bound the heavens. She did not trace the courses of the planets through those same constellations. She did not repeat the lessons Da had taught her over and over again. She did not walk in the city of memory, so laboriously built, so carefully maintained for so many years.

She mourned and she dreamed.

Sometimes, if she chanced to stare into a hearth fire or campfire, she would get a sudden feeling she was peering through a keyhole, watching a scene that unfolded on the other side of a locked door.

There are spirits burning in the air with wings of flame and eyes as brilliant as knives. They move on the winds of aether that blow above the sphere of the Moon, and now and again their gaze falls like a blazing arrow, like the strike of lightning, to the Earth below, and there it sears anything it touches, for they cannot comprehend the frailty of Earthly life. They are of an elder race and are not so fragile. Their voices have the snap of fire and their bodies are not bodies as we know them, but the conjoining of fire and wind, the breath of the fiery Sun coalesced into mind and will.

“But are we not their cousins, then? Were we not born of fire and light? Is our place not here out beyond the sphere of the Moon, as theirs is?”

The first speaker shifts, studying the flames, for he, too, stares into the fire, and across some doorway impossible to touch he watches Liath. He seems to know she is listening, that she can see him. But he speaks to the woman who stands out of sight in the shadows behind him.

“We are not as old as that, my child. We were not born of the very elements themselves, though they wove themselves into our shaping. We are the children of angels, but we can no longer live cast out from the Earth which gave us birth.”