The Burning Stone (Crown of Stars #3)

The Burning Stone (Crown of Stars #3) Page 327

“Hurry,” said Kansi-a-lari. Her breath came in short bursts. Sweat had broken, streaming, on her brow. She hooked her spear haft between his body and the rose gate, and he now realized that he was flattened against it all along the length of his body, as if suction held him there. The haft pressed into his ribs, broke him free, and he stumbled back.

“Hurry,” she repeated. As she turned to run down the path between the high walls, she was already getting her bow ready, and she drew out the first of the arrows fletched with griffin feathers, whose touch dissolves magic.

He had to run to keep up. The tide dragged against him, but the horse, and her urgency, pulled him forward against the flow.

Then the ebony gate shone before him. Through its glamour, he saw the sea lapping at its base, a white-capped storm surge. The path gleamed underneath his feet, rimed with a frostlike gleam. He knelt, entirely out of breath, and even with both hands to brace himself on the ground, he could barely hold himself up.

“Grandson.” Her voice shook through the earth.

But he had no time to answer her. Kansi-a-lari had already cut one of her palms and smeared the blood over the black stone. She cut his palm in the same manner, with more haste than care. As he swiped his bleeding hand over the stone she nicked the horse on the shoulder and wiped its blood there, too, dark smears soaking into the slick obsidianlike surface. Sweating now, grunting with desperation and anger, she laid both hands against the ebony gate. She spoke one word.

The gate swung open on silent hinges. Water poured in to swallow their feet, and he followed her across the threshold into the maelstrom.

XIV

THE SOUND OF THEIR WINGS

1

HANNA had just about had enough rain for one summer, and she was one of the lucky ones: riding, her feet weren’t perpetually damp. Unlike half the Lions, she didn’t have foot rot. In the woodlands, low ground shone with a sheet of shallow water, ponds that bred mosquitoes so persistent and numerous that every soul in their party scratched constantly. They were plagued by spiders. Any helmet left on the ground would soon swarm with the nasty creatures; any tent, unrolled and set up, would rain spiders from its ceiling all night. By Aogoste they had lost all the whores and beggars.

At the fortress of Machteburg, dysentery hit their ranks. Lady Fortune still marched with them: only one Lion died, although the disease devastated the camp followers and at least a dozen of the cavalry’s servants had to be buried by the roadside. They lost ten days before Captain Thiadbold and Lord Dietrich proclaimed them ready to march on. They were ferried across the Oder River on barges, and then they headed east on a grassy track. A dozen stubborn camp followers boasting two handcarts between them plodded in their wake. She couldn’t understand why they would follow the Lions into the wilderness where nothing awaited them except war. But perhaps those dozen souls had nothing to go back to, and no place else to go.

It was still raining.

Three abysmally slow days of marching later, on a soggy summer’s day in early afternoon, they came to a village of ten longhouses and a dozen more pit-houses and sheds. Ringed by an inner palisade and ditch, the village lay at a crossroads and was prosperous enough to boast a tiny church built just beyond the inner ditch. A second ditch surrounded the gardens, fields, and a half-dozen corrals, and within this second ditch a fair number of folk labored. But as soon as they caught sight of the host approaching, they hoisted their tools and ran to the safety of the palisade even though they all could see the Wendish banner that marked this as an army marching under King Henry’s personal seal.

Thiadbold halted his Lions beyond the outer ditch and sent Hanna in with an escort of a dozen Lions. The cavalry was content to disperse in the surrounding meadowland so that their horses could graze.

The gate remained stubbornly closed as they approached. “Nay, you cannot come in,” said the young man keeping watch there, peering down at them from a square wooden tower. “I pray you, we’ve had enough trouble. I’m under orders not to let in any armed men.” He spoke Wendish with an accent, hissing his “p”s and “t”s. “But the Eagle, now. She can come in with her news.”

Ingo was with her. “As like they’re bandits themselves in this town,” he grumbled. “I don’t know if we can trust them.”

“Nay, I’ll go,” said Hanna. “They’re only being cautious. Why would they harm me with an army of two hundreds of Lions and thirty cavalry outside?”

Ingo and the others moved back, the pedestrian gate was opened, and she walked through into the village. It stank because most of their livestock had been driven inside. There were a few gardens, and a fair number of dirty children underfoot. A stream muddied by the summer rains, or by sewage, ran down a narrow canal with reinforced stone walls. There was a well at the center of the village; a pair of young villagers, one girl and one boy, stood guard over the stone housing, monitoring the flow of buckets. A child appeared, wiped its runny nose, and beckoned to her. She followed it to the longhouse that lay closest to the well. Three men and three women waited for her, seated at a huge wooden table much pitted with knife scars and burns. It had one leg freshly fixed on, of a lighter shade than the others. They greeted her politely. After she sat, a girl dressed in a remarkably clean linen gown brought her a fine strong mead.