Child of Flame

“He was weak,” said Stronghand at last, “and he was not loyal.” He regarded his captains calmly, baring his teeth in a grin meant to provoke the irresolute among them. “That storm was only the first magic that the tree sorcerers will cast at us. But I do not fear them. Do you?”

None stirred. None dared show weakness, or hesitation, now that they had seen what the magic of the tree sorcerers had wrought.

Perhaps the tree sorcerers were in fact capable of raising a storm that great, although he doubted it. He did not doubt the danger the Alban wizards posed to those unprepared to meet them, but he had seen for himself that their magic did not reach far beyond their physical bodies: a shrouding fog, a temporary storm front blasting through a line of ships drawn up for battle, a mist to dazzle the minds of men swayed by their power and guile. The gale that had scattered his fleet had encompassed a vast swath of the northern sea, according to his own observations as his ship had ridden out the gale and to the reports he had received as his loyal captains had straggled in to the Crackling Skerries afterward.

Perhaps the tree sorcerers had called up that storm, seeing his fleet poised at their shore. But whether it was born out of the sea or out of their magic, he knew just how to make use of such opportunities, blown to him on the wind.

That was why he had told the merfolk, in the aftermath of the storm, to hunt down Ardaneka’s ships and destroy them, each one. To bring him the chieftain’s body, drowned and broken.

Let the capricious ones fear that they might be next to suffer under magic’s cold claw.

Below, the red-and-yellow ship listed to one side. Seawater swamped the deck, and with a sucking sigh the ship sank under the waves, ropes slithering down until, at last, nothing could be seen except scraps of flotsam, bobbing on the swells. Waves battered the bloated corpse. One of the arms came loose, rotted away at the shoulder, and it rolled away like a lifeless slug. A ripple stirred its steady course; a ridged back sounded. Eels writhed, mouths snapping in eyeless faces, as one of the merfolk raised its gruesome head and, that fast, snatched the decaying arm. Limb and merman vanished beneath the gray-blue sea.

The headland emerged from a low-lying mist. Chalk cliffs gleamed invitingly where the sun lit them. Clouds scudded away northwards. Gulls screamed.

Stronghand raised his standard once more. The haft hummed against his palm as though a hive of bees lived within, but it was only the voice of the magic, always aware, always alert. Always awake.

The magic that protected him never slept, and never dreamed.

“Summer wanes,” he said softly, making his commanders strain to hear him above the pound of the surging sea against the rocks and constant blowing rumble of the wind. “Alba waits. And they can do nothing to stop us.”

6

IT all happened so fast: Henry’s and Adelheid’s triumphant entrance into Darre, Adelheid’s labor pangs and her delivery of a healthy daughter in the presence of a dozen witnesses on the sixteenth day of Cintre, a mere twenty days after their arrival. The queen was too exhausted to be moved; the rigors of the mountain crossing in the fullest months of her pregnancy had worn her down. Henry could not wait, nor did Adelheid counsel him to tarry in the palace while she recovered.

So it was that a month later Rosvita found herself once again at the head of a triumphal procession riding into Darre. King Henry had made a brief progress through the northern counties and dukedoms of Aosta, restoring daughters and sons that Ironhead had held hostage and allowing the ladies and lords to feed and house his impressive army. Every gate opened to admit him, although it was by no means clear that every count, lord, and duke was overjoyed at the prospect of Queen Adelheid restored to her throne at the hand of the Wendish king. But the northern lords did not want to fight.

“As long as they don’t want to fight this year, then we can hope for peace while Henry establishes his power in the south,” said Villam as they halted an arrow’s shot from the massive gates of Darre.

The magnificence of Darre still awed her. The city was built on five hills, with the two palaces—representing spiritual and temporal power—sitting at the height of Amurrine Hill. The city walls remained more-or-less intact from the time of the old empire, repaired and rebuilt over the course of the four hundred years since the last empress had died defending her throne from the invading Bwr horde. The Bwr army had left the walls intact and razed the temples instead, to show their hatred for the empire’s bloodthirsty gods. Cut from huge stone blocks quarried to the east, the walls rose to the height of ten men, and it was said that a person might walk five leagues on those parapets and not come to the end of them.