The Gathering Storm (Crown of Stars #5)

The Gathering Storm (Crown of Stars #5) Page 211

The Alban queen is here.

He can smell her. Her power and the magic of her tree sorcerers has a scent as sharp as smoke.

“Look!” whispers Ki, pointing.

The low summit of the third island bristles with teeth—or so he thinks until he realizes that a stone crown rises from the hill. All of the undergrowth has been ruthlessly cut back away from the circle of stones, and men labor with ropes and levers and earth ramps to raise a fallen monolith into position.

“What goes on there?”

She shakes her head in dismay. “When our family watched over the holy place, we left it in peace. No good will come of this, I am thinking. They’ll stir up the old spirits. Men have come from over the sea.”

“Ones like me?”

“Nay, not like you,” she says boldly. “None of you dragon-men. You would not touch the holy place, I am thinking. These are circle priests who have come from the east lands across the sea. Elafi saw there was a fight between the circle priests and the tree priests, for the queen’s favor.”

“How saw he this?”

“There’s a place to come up close without being seen, right up inside the crown. Only our family knows about it, because we got the secret from the grandmothers.”

“Can you take me?”

Ki has a pup’s grin, full of sharp teeth and playful expectation. “Not till the dark of the moon. It isn’t safe otherwise.”

Out of the still waters a majestic heron takes flight, wings wide as it glides low over them with its head tucked back on its shoulders and its legs dangling low, brushing the reeds. Its shadow covers them briefly.

Ki murmurs a blessing or a spell and ducks her head. “It’s a sign of the goddess’ favor,” she whispers.

Perhaps.

The gods seem fickle to Stronghand, offering favor or withdrawing it according to unknown and unpredictable whims. The RockChildren have never been burdened by meddling gods. They are masters of their own destiny.

But still, only a fool casts dirt in clean water when he is thirsty.

“If your goddess smiles on us, then truly we will meet with success.”

“What do you mean to do?”

He looks up at the gray sky. He smells a change in the weather, the wet taste of the east wind. A misting rain approaches. He can actually see the shadow of its passage over the pools and dark waters as it nears them.

“We will wait until the dark of the moon,” he says. “Then you will show me this secret place inside the crown.”

The girl is sharper than most of his advisers. She has never lived under the heel of a lord who holds over her the threat of life and death. That is why she is not afraid to question him. That is why she does not fear taking him out into the fens. “And then?”

Stronghand bares his teeth, a startling flash that, for an instant, takes the youth aback. Maybe, for the first time, she understands the threat he poses. Ki’s hand tightens on her knife, but she does not move at all, only stares back at him, eye for eye.

“I would like to know who these circle priests are, and what they are doing to the stone crown. Once I discover that, I will know what to do next. I have dreams, too.”

Ki pinches her lips together, eyes drawn tight. “Dreams are dangerous, my lord. My mother says that dreams have killed men and brought low those who were once queens and those who wished to rule after them.”

The rain front washes over them, hissing in the waters. Through the curtain of rain it is hard to see farther than a spear cast; the islands lie obscure and veiled, but he feels the presence of the stone crown as a throb deep in his bones. A shout carries over the waters. A cheer.

A stone has been raised, and sunk in place.

“Dangerous,” he agrees, “but it is more dangerous still to ignore them.”

That humming whisper vanished, and Alain found himself back in the dirt with mud slipping through his fingers and his knees cold and wet. The deep awareness that lived in the core of the stone was overwhelmed by the noise of the waiting camp: the scrape of a grindstone milling grain to flour, the steady stroke of a hammer, clucking chickens and complaining goats, a shout of excitement as the newcomers met their allies. The sound of a woman’s weeping.

He blinked, trying to shake off the flood of sounds and images, but he could not shake his vision.

Long ago he had dreamed of the WiseMothers, seen through Stronghand’s eyes, and in those dreams they had spoken of a great weaving that bound the Earth together. They knew of the great cataclysm because it had created them. The eldest among them were impossibly old.

Sorrow and Rage whined, licking his face, as he sat back on his heels. The WiseMothers, in their slow and patient way, also sought to mitigate the furious storm that was coming. The stone crowns were the key. If he could reach Stronghand and the WiseMothers, then maybe, for once, he could act. His knowledge might aid them. Adica’s death would not have been in vain if by having witnessed he could save others.