In the Ruins (Crown of Stars #6)

In the Ruins (Crown of Stars #6) Page 24

She smiled sleepily, remembering the pigs: Hib, Nib, Jib, Bib, Gib, Rib, Tib, and the sow, Trotter. Silly names. It seemed so long ago. She conjured Hugh in her mind, but he did not frighten her. All that fear and pain was part of her now, woven into her bones and heart in the same manner as her mother’s substance. It did not make her less than she was. The streaming waters cut a channel in the earth that humankind named a river, and each winter and flooding spring that channel might shift and alter, but the river remained itself.

She dreamed.

The aether had once been like a river, pouring from the heavens into Earth along that deep channel linking Earth to Ashioi country adrift in the heavens. But now that channel lies breached, buried, and broken, and the aether flows instead as a thousand rivulets, spreading everywhere, penetrating all things but as the barest trickle.

She walks along a stream of silver that flows through the grasslands, but there is no one waiting for her, only the remains of the Horse people’s battered camp and a few hastily dug graves.

Morning came with no sunrise, a lightening so diffuse that it wasn’t clear it came from the east at all. It was quiet, not a breath of wind. A branch snapped, the sound so loud she scrambled to her feet just as the silver male called a challenge. A half dozen men appeared at the other side of the clearing, carrying staves and spears. They had the disreputable and desperate appearance of bandits. They stared at her for a long time, measuring what she offered and what danger she posed. She held her bow tight, but she had no arrows. Her quiver had burned away like all the rest, even her good friend, Lucian’s sword.

At last, one stepped forward from the rest and placed his weapon on the ground. He spoke in a dialect of Dariyan, the local speech. She could follow the gist of it. “Are you angel or demon? Whence are you come?”

“I am as you see me,” she answered boldly. “No more, and no less.”

“Has God sent you? Can you help us?”

“What manner of help do you need?” They were desperate, certainly, but as she studied their callused hands and seamed, anxious faces, she realized they were farmers.

“We have lost our village,” said the spokesman. “Our houses torn down by the wind. A lord with soldiers came by then, three days past. He took what stores we held by us. Now we have nothing to eat. We could not fight. They had weapons.”

The spears were only sharpened sticks, and the staves were branches scavenged out of the forest. One had a shovel. Another carried a scythe.

“Be strong,” she called, knowing how foolish the words sounded, but she had nothing to give them.

“Whuff!” coughed the female, rising, and the men scattered into the trees.

“Let’s go.” Better the pain in her shoulders than the knife of helplessness held to her throat. Whose army had stolen their grain? She hoped it was not Sanglant’s.

It took the griffin two tries to get enough lift to get up over the trees, and if the clearing hadn’t been so broad they wouldn’t have accomplished it at all. They made less distance this day but still far more than she could have walked. As the afternoon waned, more a change in the composition of the light than anything, they came to earth on a wide hillside better suited for the griffin’s size. The silver male had fallen behind and at length appeared with a deer in his claws.

She had nothing to cut with and so waited until she could pick up the scraps left by their ripping and tearing. She gathered twigs and fallen branches and stones and dug a fire pit with her hands as well as she could. To call fire into dry kindling took only a moment’s concentration: seek fire deep within the parched sticks and—there!—flames licked up from the inner pile, neatly stacked in squares to give the fire air to feed on. The scraps of meat cooked quickly skewered on a stick, and she ate with juice dribbling down her chin.

The griffins settled away from the fire, too nervous to doze. She licked her fingers and studied the darkening sky. The cloud cover made it difficult to gauge sunset.

Sanglant. Blessing. Hanna. Sorgatani. Hathui. Ivar. Heribert. Li’at’dano. Even Hugh. She sought them in the fire with her Eagle’s Sight, but all she saw was a crackling blur of flames and shadow.

IV

TALES TO SCARE CHILDREN

1

“REFUGEES,” said Fulk as he reined in beside Sanglant where the regnant rode in the vanguard of the army.

They had begun the climb into the foothills through dreary weather with scarcely a drop of rain and not a single glimpse of the sun. They had lost a hundred horses in the last ten days and still had the crossing over the mountains ahead of them with winter coming on. It had, at least, been unusually warm, but in the past two days the bite of winter had strengthened.