Crown of Stars

“Soon it will be too late to plant!” called a woman from the crowd.

“I pray the weather turns soon.” Sabella was already mounted, and impatient to depart. Her stewards would finish their provisioning and follow after the forward party. “I have need of these stores for the sake of the duchy.”

The man grimaced anxiously and spoke again, gaze fixed on the ground. “If we’ve nothing to plant, we’ll have no harvest. We’ll starve.”

“If we lose this war, if Wendish and Salians and bandits and Eika invade our shores and there is none to defend you, then your corpses will be rotting in your fields before you starve! Do not trouble me further!”

“I pray you,” said Alain, for all the company remained silent and the villagers knelt in the dust, “let them keep half of their stores. There is truth in what they say.”

She glared at him—she was a woman who did not expect or appreciate being questioned—but he did not cower.

At length he said, more softly, “Their sweat and toil makes you rich.”

Her expression tightened. Her courtiers hunched their shoulders, waiting for the blast, but it did not come.

Unexpectedly, she chuckled, not so much because he had amused her but because she was unused to being challenged. “Spoken like a frater. Very well. Let them keep half the stores. The rest we take.”

3

LIATH woke into darkness. Her thigh throbbed. When she rolled to shift position and ease the pressure, her stomach spasmed and she retched, although she had nothing to throw up. Not even bile.

She hurt all the way down to the bone. Her lungs felt as ragged as if she had been breathing smoke, and perhaps in some way she had. She was burned clean, made weak and thirsty, but she was still alive—or so it seemed to her, because she could feel the rise and fall of her chest with each inhalation, because she could feel the gritty rock under the palms of her hands, because there was dried blood on her cheek where she had scraped her face. She possessed nothing except her clothes and her life. Her bow, quiver, book, knife, sword—all this was gone.

She rested until her stomach quieted and risked sitting up. For a while after that, she had to swallow convulsively and repeatedly as she struggled to control the nausea. She was so exhausted that the simple act of sitting seemed impossible, but she braced herself on her arms and hung on until she could think. Even with her salamander eyes she could not penetrate the darkness. She must listen, and seek with her mind’s eye, but all she sensed was air and rock.

I am buried alive in a vast cavern.

She had not the strength to grasp the tendrils of fire that slept within the rock, so she lay back down and rested. She probed the rent in her leggings and touched dried blood. Tracing the contours of the blood led her inward to the wound itself: a shallow, ragged hole that hurt to press anywhere near it.

She grunted and withdrew her hand, thinking of those who waited for her: Sanglant. Blessing. Hanna and Sorgatani. A grandmother!

She slept.

Woke, hearing a noise, a stealthy murmur, a foot sliding along the ground. She sat up. She was still weak, but the nausea had lessened. She heard the sound again, although now it sounded more like someone sweeping, two scrapes, a silence, and a rapid series of scrapes.

Was it better to remain silent and hope to escape notice, or to assume that whatever creature made the noise already knew she was here? She chose prudence, and therefore silence.

Once more she heard the scraping but this time, after the second scrape, it did not resume.

Cautiously, she probed the wound, and while it remained tender and painful, it was already drying out and knitting. She rolled carefully onto hands and knees and found she could crawl without pain overwhelming her. She felt her way forward. The rock floor proved unnaturally level. No abyss gapped. No loose stones impeded her path. She counted each hand fall so she could gauge the distance, and at two hundred and eight the feel of the air changed markedly and in ten more hand paces she reached a wall. It rose sheer out of the floor, almost perpendicular. Its relatively smooth face and the curve where wall joined floor suggested that man-made effort had helped form it. Her thigh ached and her knees hurt and her hands stung, but the darkness made her too nervous to stand and walk. After a rest she felt around for anything to mark her place but could not find even enough loose pebbles to construct a marker. Finally, she eased down her drawers and peed, like a dog. She hadn’t much; she desperately needed water, but waiting in the middle of the pit was no way to go about getting it.

She crawled. She was too weak to crawl quickly, so it was possible to taste the air and run her right hand up the rock face as high as she could go to search for an opening. She forced herself to pace a hundred hand falls before resting, and to rest no more than a hundred slow breaths before going on. Her knees became bruises and one of her palms bled, but the wound in her thigh did not reopen, so she kept going.