Crown of Stars (Crown of Stars #7)

The flames lit the mask warriors in such a way that they looked like beasts indeed, less than human but more than animals. While she searched fruitlessly, they had already set up sentry posts and sleeping stations and kindled another five campfires.

“My trackers have other ways of searching, but we must have light. We will not fail. Have you any idea where we are?”

“We are in Wendar, I’m sure of it,” said Liath. “That being so, if we find no sign of Hugh or my daughter in the morning, all we can do is try to find Sanglant.”

“You may do so. If the search for the Pale Sun Dog is abandoned, we will return to our own country if you will weave us a passage.”

Liath looked at Sharp Edge, as did he.

The young Ashioi apprentice grinned defiantly. Like Anna and the four masks sent with Liath by Eldest Uncle, she had not been injured in Hugh’s attack. “I don’t want to go back,” she said.

“She has joined me of her own free will,” Liath said. “I have accepted her and put her under my protection.”

“So I see. What path she chooses falls on her own head. I will not force her—or any of my people—to return with the rest of us.” He shrugged—the movement cost him some pain—and turned away to talk to his fox-masked lieutenant. Now that they had settled down for the night, most of the warriors pushed their masks up on their heads, revealing more ordinary faces.

Liath and Sharp Edge moved away.

“He’ll make no trouble,” said Sharp Edge in a low voice. “I am free to do what I wish. I want to stay with you.”

“Then I am pleased to have you. You are the third.”

“The third of what?”

“The third of my nest of phoenix. That is what I will call you, no matter what others say.”

“Who are first and second?” Sharp Edge asked with a petulant grimace. “I like to be first!”

“So you do. In this case, you are the first among your people, if we do not count Secha.”

“I will not count her!” said Sharp Edge with a laugh. “What others claim a place in front of me?”

“A Kerayit weather witch and her slave, who is a cleric—a holy man—of my own people. Look here.” She stared at the crown, counting its stones and studying the burial mounds that rose as hillocks at the edge of the firelight. “I feel I should know this place, yet I do not remember ever being here before. Look how straight and true all the stones stand!”

In their haste to follow Hugh, they had marched without sufficient traveling gear. Even Zuangua’s warriors complained at length, but jokingly, about the cold. It was a form of companionship. Everyone complained except Anna, who took her share of the night’s waybread and ate alone away from the rest. The mask warriors shared out the watch according to Zuangua’s command, but in the end Liath sat all night staring at the blind sky, unable to sleep because when she closed her eyes she remembered the vision she had suffered, the vision of Blessing in the custody of Hugh. Blessing, wed to Hugh. She retched, but her heaving brought up nothing. It was only nerves.

“Bright One, are you sick?” Sharp Edge squatted beside her.

“Sick at heart,” she murmured.

Zuangua slept, or pretended to. The others huddled together for warmth. A night breeze moaned among the stones. In its voice she heard the groans of the forgotten dead long buried under earth. They were surrounded by the dead, those buried here in ancient graves and those in the world beyond thrown into new graves, the countless legions who had died in the aftermath of the cataclysm and the armies of the suffering who would die in the months to come.

“How did he call lightning like that? How did he call the storm?” whispered Sharp Edge. “Can you work such sorcery?”

Her jaw was tight, and her voice bitter. “I do not know how.”

2

DEATH has a smell and a taste, and it can be heard as a whisper and felt as a touch on the lips when that last breath sighs free of the abandoned flesh. What a man might see, walking through the dusk as it swallows the field of battle, is only a shadow of the full understanding of death. With his hounds, he may kneel beside first one man and then another, and he may wish he had the means to heal them all, but another figure rides beside him and among some of these wounded she has already severed the thread that binds the soul to the body. They are already dead, although those around them do not yet know. Although they themselves may still stare at the sky and at their companions, waiting for aid or water or a comforting word.

In this matter, on this day, the Lady of Battles will defeat him. Her hand has swept the battlefield before he reached it. He can only do so much in the aftermath. This evening as he leaves the council of nobles and walks out of Kassel into the surrounding fields, he knows who will live and who will die. Here is a young Wendishman with the merest scratch on his leg and a faint and confused smile on his pleasant face, but he has been trampled and badly broken inside. Here is a Varren youth crying, with his shoulder torn open and flesh glistening as a battlefield chirurgeon plies a needle and thread to close it up and her assistant holds a salve of woundwort ready to bind into the injury, and already the lad’s humors stabilize.