Crown of Stars

She was not Wendish; she had a flat, reddish-brown complexion and wore stiff skirts and heavy boots very like those of Kerayit women. A scrap of dried vegetation fell from her neck. It hissed where it struck the stones.

“Berda!” A young male voice called out of empty air. Hanna heard scratching sounds, like squirrels scrabbling on rocks, but she saw no one nearby.

Below, Wendish riders pushed their horses up to the road, following their king. Above, the woman who had appeared out of nowhere dashed up the ramp.

Hanna shouted after her. “Come back! There are Eika—”

A pair of Eika strode into view at the top of the ramp. They paused to observe the battle with the kind of leisurely posture that a man might wear in contemplation of a pleasant run of hunting in a field overrun with grouse. One held a spear and the other a banner pole fixed with a crosspiece and hung with strips and strands that waved in the wind tearing along the heights. Storm clouds rose like a wall behind them, black towers piled high in the heavens. The woman ran straight up the broad ramp toward the invaders.

“Hanna!”

She recognized that voice.

She turned.

Wolfhere stood behind her.

She shrieked and jumped backward, ramming into another body. They both fell in a tangle. Now that she was touching him, she saw a young man dressed in lordly manner in a fine linen tunic dyed green and trimmed with handsome embroidery, leggings, and handsome calfskin boots well worn from walking. Laid flat on the slope just below the rim of the road were two other young men, one Wendish and the other—she could never mistake those looks—born to the Quman tribes.

“Where did you come from?” she demanded of Wolfhere.

“G-g-got to get out of here!” the youth said raggedly. He was out of breath. Blisters had blossomed around his neck, which was curbed by a crudely woven necklace of dried leaves and fern fronds. “But where do we go now, Berthold?”

She pulled away from him and pushed to her feet. Eika above, battle on all sides, and below a tableau that fixed Hanna’s gaze as though she looked down a tunnel. A man wearing blackened armor and riding a black horse charged solo against the dragon-helmed king, the two closing along the road, weapons raised.

In one breath, they would collide.

“It is time to go, friend,” said Wolfhere as though talking to himself. “Go find him.”

One breath caught in a gasp of exhalation as, beside Wolfhere, a cleric fell to his knees with gaze lifted heavenward and mouth open. Light spun in the air, like the flash of a mirror catching the sunlight, but when she blinked to protect her eyes, it winked and vanished. The cleric crumpled to the ground.

The crash of men meeting resounded. One horse stumbled, but came up with rider still on its back, while the other horse staggered and fell, tumbling its rider onto the ground. Men cried out in fear, while others shouted “huz-zah!” or called frantic commands.

The young lord crawled whimpering back to his fellows, off the road. “For God’s sake, let’s get out of here. We’re right in the middle of the worst of it, and we have no weapons! We’d be better hiding in the byre!”

Wolfhere knelt beside the fallen cleric and shook what appeared to be little more than skin and bones wrapped in tattered robes.

“What’s happened to him?” Hanna knelt beside him.

“He’s dead.” Wolfhere grabbed the body by the ankles and dragged him off the road.

“What are you doing?” cried Hanna. She was stuck there, standing and staring first at Wolfhere, whose behavior made no sense and then at the appalling sight of Sanglant alone on the road, unhorsed, with only a shield and sword and no more than a score of riders to protect him against hundreds of mounted riders armed with spears and lances under the command of Conrad the Black.

Maybe if she could reach the duke before he struck the killing blow.

She took a step, and a second. A hand closed on her ankle and tugged her so hard she felt flat and barely caught herself on her hands before her face smacked into stone. The impact jarred up through her wrists and arms.

She shouted in pain. “What are you doing? Let me go help him.”

“I cannot,” Wolfhere said, his grip like iron chains. “I swore an oath long ago. Now, at last, I must pray it is fulfilled.”

Stronghand’s men cut a path through the barricade wide enough to allow the Eika army to pass through four abreast, and wide enough to admit the little wagon that bore the Kerayit shaman in whose body was woven a spell that killed. Stronghand pressed through the van and, together with Last Son, paused where level road hit the impressive ramp that carried the road down into the valley.