Child of Flame (Crown of Stars #4)

The clash of arms and the jerk of her horse woke her as if from sleep. On her left side the begh, with his fearsome griffin feathers gleaming from the wings fastened to his armor and his iron visor making a mask of his face, urged their line forward. His standard billowed in a stiff wind, the rake of the snow leopard’s claw that marked the proud warriors of the Pechanek clan. They charged and she, like her chief, lowered her lance. The banner of the Dragons amidst a mass of mounted Wendish and Ungrian soldiers surged forward to meet them.

The King’s Dragon led the charge. Sanglant, older now, drove straight for her chieftain, his ax raised. With a deft shift of his point, the griffin rider slid his spear around Sanglant’s shield and caught the prince just where his coif gapped to expose his throat.

The young prince fell back across the rump of his warhorse but still, somehow, managed to drag himself back up. He clung to the saddle, blood from the wound pouring down over his Dragon tabard, as the steed charged through the crowd and broke to the rear of the Quman charge. Behind, his Dragons raised a cry of alarm and fury.

Liath fought her horse back through the chaos to catch up to Sanglant. His helm had fallen askew and he was as pale as if all his blood had drained out through that horrible wound. He lay like a dead man over the withers of the horse. Tears streamed from her eyes as she called out to him and brought her mount up alongside his. He convulsed once, like a man spitting-out his death, and heaved himself up to strike with the speed of a snake.

A crushing force came down on her head and for a moment she could actually see along either side of the ax blade protruding from her forehead, but all she really saw was the desperate look in her lover’s eyes. Red seeped into her vision. She slid limply from the saddle.

Slipping in the blood and stink of one of her fellows, she scrabbled to gain purchase on the stone floor. The man creature had one hundred small wounds, one hundred rivulets seeping blood. The scent of his blood made her wild with hunger. She thrust aside the others, biting at their flanks so that they gave way, and trod on his chest, pinning him.

A glimmer of sentience sparked in her tiny mind. Was this man creature part of her pack? But hunger ate at her belly and he smelled so sweet. She lunged for the kill.

He was too fast for her. He caught her under the throat and like a dog bit down on her windpipe. Thrashing, fighting, she felt the wind crushed out of her, the air choked, the rich smell of blood and death fading, dulling, until the world was cold iron and for an instant she remembered the waters of her birth softly lapping around her and then even that sensation fled.

And she was fleeing Gent with the other RockChildren, running behind Isa’s banner, but a figure that stank of captivity rode her down and with the strength brought about by madness clove her head from her shoulders.

And she had no body, not here where the perfume of flesh and blood made her thirst, an aching, ragged, raw pain. She had not wanted to come here. Torn from the halls of iron, she swayed in the hot blast of wind and sighed the name of the one she sought. “Sanglant.” His blood would release her to return to her home. That alone she knew. But as she advanced with her sister galla, tasting his blood on the wind, he attacked, piercing her with the stinging tip of a griffin’s feather. The sorcery that bound her to the halls of earth burned and snapped, and she was flung into agony.

And she shrank back in terror as the mounted man charged through her motley companions, cutting them down like reeds. She cried out, begging for mercy, as her last arrow spun uselessly to the ground.

Ai, Lord, why had she left her mother’s house? She’d been a fool to argue with her brother, and a bigger fool to let anger drive her away, and the biggest fool yet to allow Drogo to convince her that there was wealth to be made and supper to be had by picking on hapless travelers. But she’d been desperate by then, and too proud to go home. She’d been so hungry, and Drogo had offered her bread if she’d join his miserable pack of bandits.

Sage and fern halted her backward stumble. “Mercy!” she cried. Then he was on her, death in his eyes.

Sanglant.

His sword came down, and pain obliterated everything else.

“Nay, Welf!” cried Ekkehard, stopping him with the point of his lance. “You’ll not desert me now.”

She wept in her young man’s body. She had never known fear could hurt so much. “I’ll never desert you, my lord prince. You know that. But it isn’t right that we fight on the side of the Quman against our own countryfolk. It’s treason.”

Ekkehard flushed. “We’ve dirtied our hands too much to ever go back. Better to die in battle than hanging from the gallows.”