King's Dragon (Crown of Stars #1)

King's Dragon (Crown of Stars #1) Page 31

“Alain?” she said, her tone low and uneasy. “Is that you?”

Alain took one step forward. The shade took a step forward, mirroring him, and their gazes met.

Dizziness swept him. The distant roar of flames sounded in his ears. He smelled smoke thick and oily in his nostrils.

“Where has Liathano gone?” The shade now held in his hand a lance, pointed and deadly, but it was held upright, not threatening Alain.

“I—I don’t know,” Alain stammered. He could not break: his gaze away from the shade’s eyes. They gleamed, like the altar house, like the fine outline of the shade’s entire body, more gold than white. He heard the pound of horses galloping past, a haze of distant shouting, a faint horn caught on the wind.

“You are not of the blood,” said the shade abruptly, lifting the lance like a challenge. “And yet, how else could you be here? What is your name? Who is your mother? How have you come here?”

Though he could not look away from the shade, Alain saw with his peripheral vision the shapes of the buildings. They stood tall, beautiful, and surprisingly delicate for such massive stone structures, but even now the dull red of flame cast its color across them. Burning. Burning. Smoke swelled from the burning and wind swept the thick oily stench across his face. He coughed.

A lost prince, truly. For now Alain understood what was happening, what he saw: The final destruction of this fort. The sounds of fighting came inexorably closer, the terrible music of fate.

“My name is Alain,” he said, wanting desperately to help, yet knowing that this fort was already doomed. What could he possibly do? Who was Liathano? Was this shade his true father? “I don’t know how I came here. I don’t know who my mother is.”

“You are a man,” said the prince, and his eyes widened with elegant astonishment, “and yet marked. If only we had time to unravel this enigma.” But his chin lifted. He broke his gaze away from Alain as if he had heard his name called.

A voice shrieked in terror. Alain staggered and flung a hand up to press against his pounding temples.

“It is you, Alain!”

Through the pain in his head he heard her stumble toward him across the cracked paving. “Did you see it? Did you hear it?” She threw herself on him. He staggered back under the force of her fear and dropped the lantern. It sputtered out. “All black, they were, running through the sky like the count’s own hounds but screaming with hunger! If they had caught us, they would have devoured us.”

The heat of her body pressed against him drained the fog from his mind. He pushed her away though she was still babbling about red eyes and six-legged dogs, grabbed the lantern, and ran to the altar house. But the shade was gone.

“Don’t go in there!” she screamed as Alain crossed the empty threshold.

But there was nothing inside, nothing except the gleam of the ruined stone walls and an ovoid stone of pale marble—what those like Cook would call an altar—embedded in the earth at the center of the chamber. Nothing else except for grass and one scraggly bush whose waxy leaves left a trail of sticky ooze on his fingers. From outside he heard sobbing and then the sound of Withi running away down the broken avenue. He sat down on the altar stone.

This place, this outpost of the old Dariyan Empire, had stood here in all its glory so very long ago, for how many years he could not imagine, knowing only that the Lost Ones lived many more years than did men. Only in the end it had died, in its way, burning, while the lost prince searched for his Liathano and horses galloped away into a night drawn red with fire.

The gleaming stone faded to dull shadows. The stars lost their miraculous glamour and moved onward, ever westward on their endless round. He lifted a hand to his face and discovered his eyes were wet with tears. A shadow raced overhead, but it was only the owl, hunting in the night.

2

SUMMER passed. Alain did not have the heart to go back to the old ruins, knowing he would only find them empty. There was no answer for him there. Withi no longer spoke to him, and when he watched her, remembering her embrace, how she had clasped him close against her, he knew she was whispering of him to the others. Bitter, he kept to himself.

No other strange incidents disturbed the quiet of long summer days. Spelt was harvested. The oats were almost ripe. Chatelaine Dhuoda returned to the fortress with Lady Aldegund, wife of Lavastine’s cousin Geoffrey. A girl of about fifteen, she arrived at Lavas faint from exhaustion and from her advanced pregnancy. A wandering laborer, come to Lavas for the harvest work, had been one month ago in Osna village; he reported that Aunt Bel and her family were all well and had given him three days’ work hauling stone for quernstones from the quarry to Bel’s workshop.