The Starless Crown, page 47
“What?” Rhaif snapped at him.
“The elder’s words. Whispers of the old gods…”
He shrugged, nearly losing his hold. “I don’t know what she’s talking about. The old woman’s probably addled by age.”
“And what about her final words, about the singer being hunted?” Pratik said. “Du’a ta.”
Rhaif frowned. “Like I said, the ravings of a madwoman.”
It certainly made no sense to him. Du’a ta meant both of them. He tried to picture another like Shiya. Impossible.
The path grew rougher, thrashing the wagon all about, silencing any further talk. Low branches whipped at their heads. It took all their concentration not to be thrown off the back of the bucking wagon.
Rhaif’s teeth rattled in his head as he clenched both hands to the seatback. Then a furious scolding rose from above. He glanced up to a swirl of small birds bursting from branches or hanging nests. They darted through the air in shades of copper and gold, flitting and diving at the noisy trespass below.
He knew those birds, even named a bronze mystery after them.
“Shiya…” he whispered.
The wagon suddenly slowed, throwing Rhaif and Pratik hard against the seat. The wain bounced and battered to a final stop. With the clattering wheels silenced, the thunder rose around them again, still booming, sounding even closer now.
Rhaif straightened from the wagon’s bed. A knot of Kethra’kai gathered near the bole of a large Reach alder. Its roots kneed out of the leafy mulch, covered in moss. As the tribesmen shuffled with whispers of amazement, Rhaif spotted a brighter glint buried at the tree’s base.
With his heart in his throat, Rhaif leaped from the wagon and rushed forward. He joined Llyra as she slipped out of her saddle. Pratik followed. They all pushed through the Kethra’kai.
Pratik grabbed Rhaif’s arm as the sight opened. “I’m sorry,” he whispered.
A bronze figure lay on her side, half buried in leaves. Glassy eyes stared straight back at him, dull and dead. A leg lay crooked, bent the wrong way.
No, no, no …
Rhaif rushed forward. “Shiya…”
Xan was already there, down on her knees, her palms hovering over the top of Shiya’s crown of bronze hair.
Rhaif stared up, as if raising his face in supplication to the gods. Instead, he studied the fan of branches, leafed in alder gold, climbing up into the clouds. He pictured Shiya plummeting through those limbs, but it looked like not a leaf or twig had been disturbed up there.
The cold coal in his heart warmed.
She hadn’t fallen here.
He turned to the forest, only now noting a path of broken bushes and bent branches. He pictured Shiya stumbling through there, grabbing at those limbs to keep moving—until finally succumbing to her injuries.
Pratik stood nearby, wayglass in hand. He wore a deep frown and caught where Rhaif was looking. The Chaaen drew nearer.
“I was wrong,” Pratik said. “Her path was not toward the cliffs of the Shrouds. She was heading away from them.”
Llyra had her arms crossed. “No wonder we couldn’t find her.”
“Then where was she going?” Rhaif asked.
Pratik turned to the forest. His gaze followed where she seemed to have been headed. Thunder rumbled from over there, lit by bursts of light. Each blast brightened the fog, enough to reveal a greenish cast to those mists.
“She was trying to reach the Eitur,” Pratik said.
“Why?” Llyra asked.
“Maybe she was trying to rejoin us,” Rhaif offered, pain lancing through him as he imagined her struggle to return to his side.
Pratik dispelled such romanticism. “Her damage may have been too severe, draining her vigor too quickly. If so, she might have sought to stoke the fires inside her with the heat of the sun before resuming her trek.”
Llyra glowered at her broken form. “And now she is gone forever.”
“No,” Xan said, still warming her palms over the cold bronze. “She still sings, faint though it be.”
Despite Shiya’s glassy eyes and broken form, Rhaif realized Xan must be right. How else could the elder have led them here? The embers of hope inside him warmed brighter.
Xan turned to them. “We must get her into your wagon. Quickly now.”
Rhaif balked, afraid to move her.
Then a shattering boom drew their attention toward the lake. A burst of fire bloomed, bright enough to dazzle the eyes before wafting out. The concussion rattled leaves all around and blew the mists toward them, shredding the fog.
Rhaif caught a distant shine of emerald waters before the mists closed again.
Xan pointed her cane at the wagon. “We have no more time.”
Her words proved true as the clouds darkened to the west. A massive storm cloud rolled off the poisonous lake and swept high over them. The forests dimmed all around. The enormity of it felt like a great weight pressing down on them.
But it wasn’t a storm cloud that cast such a mighty shadow.
With her face craned up, Llyra identified what hung over the forest. “A warship…”
* * *
WRYTH RUSHED ACROSS the forecastle toward the wheel of the Pywll. “Stop!” he shouted to both the pilotman and the warship’s commander, a boulder-shouldered Vyrllian named Brask hy Laar.
The commander’s crimson face turned to Wryth with a deep scowl. “Why? We have orders to sweep to the end of the lake, then close our side of the noose toward Havensfayre’s mooring field.”
“Unless instructed otherwise,” Wryth reminded him firmly. “Liege General Haddan has given me leeway to pursue an artifact stolen from the kingdom, a weapon of great power.”
Brask gave an exasperated shake of his head, but he waved to the pilotman. “Do as he says. Bring us to a stop.”
With a sharp nod, the pilotman called out orders, passing the command around the forecastle. In moments, the ship’s flashburn forges roared outside, fighting their momentum forward.
Brask turned to Wryth. “How do you hope to find anything down in that misty sea?”
Wryth lifted what he held. “With this.”
In his palms, he cradled a crystal orb. Skerren had fabricated this instrument back at the Shrivenkeep, designed specifically for this journey. The globe of polished crystal was filled with heavy oil. Pinned and suspended within it was a ring of tiny lodestones, each wrapped by a coil of copper threading. He pictured a larger version of a similar construction. It enshrined the bronze bust back at the Shrivenkeep. Each lodestone was sensitive to the emanations given off by such holy artifacts.
Unfortunately, Skerren’s smaller design required it to be close to the source before its lodestones could respond. While en route here, Wryth had been using the tool like a wayglass, trying to discern any flow of energies in the area. It was only once they neared Eitur’s eastern shores that a few of the lodestones had begun to shiver in the oil, disturbed by unseen winds. As they continued along, the slivers slowly swung and settled, pointing east of the Eitur, just as Skerren’s earlier calculations had assessed.
Wryth’s grip tightened on the orb, his heart pounding.
Then, just a moment ago, something had changed. All the lodestones had unsnapped from their positions and spun dizzily in place. He showed the same to Brask. Wryth held the orb with the ring of copper-wrapped stones positioned horizontally with the ground.
“I was following a trail,” Wryth said, “when I lost the signal, but watch…”
He rolled the globe until the ring of lodestones was perpendicular to the forest. As he rotated it, the tiny slivers halted their lazy spin and snapped into position again, all the slivers pointing down. He stared across the orb at the dawning awareness in Brask’s crimson face. Even Pywll’s commander understood the implication.
“The weapon is below us,” Brask mumbled.
“It must be ours,” Wryth added. “Even if it means burning down this entire forest.”
46
RHAIF CURSED AS the shadow of the warship settled to a stop overhead. He hauled Shiya toward the waiting wagon. He gripped one of her stiff arms. The bronze was deathly cold to his touch. He could not fathom how there could be any life inside this shell.
Pratik supported her other arm, while another four tribesmen bore her legs and torso. The Chaaen’s face was pinched as he stared up toward that dark cloud of the warship. “Somehow they must know Shiya is here.”
“All the more reason to get her into the wagon,” Llyra said, dancing her mare behind them.
Pratik looked little encouraged by this plan. “If they traced us here, they could do the same with Shiya on the move.”
“We’ve no other choice,” Rhaif grunted.
He pictured a rain of firebombs blasting this area.
Still, they made it to the wagon, and with much effort, slid and hauled her stiff form aboard. Rhaif climbed in after her. As he did, he flashed back to a corpse being dragged out of an alley in Anvil. The poor man’s throat had been cut, but his limbs were rigored and held forth stiffly, as if he were still trying to ward off his attacker.
Shiya reminded him of the same, a figure frozen in death.
Xan climbed into the wagon with the help of a tribeswoman, someone named Dala. She and another three women followed Xan. Pratik was the last to clamber in. They all crowded around Shiya’s bulk.
Shouts and whistles spread through the Kethra’kai, and the entire group set off through the woods. Rhaif winced at the clatter and rattle of the wagon. He knew warships had sharp ears. He prayed that the bombing had deafened the ship above.
As if the gods heard this thought, a fresh series of booms erupted to the south, in the direction they were headed. From the sharper staccato of those blasts, it was not bombs this time.
Pratik looked across Shiya’s body. “That was cannon fire.”
It was easy to read the worry in the Chaaen’s face.
Did that bombardment herald the presence of another warship ahead?
As they fled through the woods, they tracked alongside the green glow of the nearby Eitur. They aimed toward the only destination in that direction—Havensfayre—that might offer a measure of shelter.
But not if another warship was already over there.
Rhaif called to Xan, waving east. “We should turn and make for the deeper woods.”
The elder ignored him, lifting her palms over Shiya’s face.
Pratik argued against Rhaif’s plan. “If they’ve tracked Shiya here, they’ll continue to do so through these woods. Our only hope is to make it to Havensfayre and seek a way to bury her somewhere safe, where they might not be able to discern her presence. And if we hurry, maybe they won’t know we’ve fled there.”
Rhaif looked doubtfully above. They still hadn’t escaped the warship’s shadow. It looked to be drifting closer to the Eitur. He pictured it descending and offloading a hunting party. Before long, he and the others could be pursued by air and by land.
He stared down at Shiya.
And what about her?
He knew Pratik was right. Plainly those aboard the warship had a means of tracking her, as surely as Xan had done in leading their group to Shiya’s broken form.
He looked over to the elder, who sat back on her heels in the rocking wagon, as if she had already given up on Shiya. Instead, Xan lifted an arm. The other four women in the wagon did the same. The elder started singing, which was picked up by the others. It was a wordless melody, just a lyric of resonance and chorus, rising from throats and fashioned by lips into something even grander.
As he listened, the old lullaby sung by his mother rose again in his head, as if stirred forth by the women’s chanting. Around him, all the Kethra’kai lowered their palms to the bronze form of Shiya. Where each hand touched, the dark bronze melded into lighter hues of copper and gold. The magick spread outward from their fingers, pooling across Shiya’s chest.
It was as if the women carried sunlight in their touch, but Rhaif knew the power wasn’t so much in their hands as it was in their singing, raised by voices that were strong enough to pierce bronze skin and burnish the cold forges inside her, to warm them back to life.
Thin, strong fingers—Xan’s—grabbed his wrist and drew his hand to the center of the swirling pool. She lowered his palm between Shiya’s breasts, as if inviting him to feel a heartbeat he knew was not there.
As his skin touched bronze, the singing grew louder, heard not with his ears, but with his own heart. His mother’s old lullaby echoed there, too, rising and falling, finding home in that greater melody. Then something new arose. It was a golden strand of warm bronze that threaded through all, joining everything together. But it wasn’t entirely new. It was more like his mother’s lullaby, there but nearly forgotten. Only this song existed within him and without. It shone brightly enough for him to follow its threads down into Shiya and back into his own heart.
He remembered wondering why he was so connected to this bronze woman. Back in Anvil, he questioned whether she had bound him up in some silent version of bridle-song. He now recognized he was right—but also wrong. What tied them was not a song of command and entrapment. It was a melody forged as much by his own loneliness and despair as it was by Shiya’s solitude and displacement. They had needed each other and found each other. Here was not a song of bridling, but one of companionship, of two spirits sharing one another.
Warm fingers found his hand and pressed his palm more firmly to Shiya’s chest.
While he was still lost in the song, it took him a breath to see that it was not Xan who held him.
He stared at the bronze fingers resting atop his.
“Shiya…”
He turned to find glassy eyes upon him. They were still cold but with the barest flicker of warmth there now.
“I’m here,” he whispered.
The tribal song rose around him, but he sensed the others weren’t trying to revive Shiya further. He suspected their singing did not have the fiery power of the Father Above. It only had enough strength to stir her, to sustain her for a time.
Instead, the new crescendo served another purpose. The combined voices swelled higher, slowly hiding the brightness beneath their greater song.
Soon Rhaif could barely discern those golden threads any longer. But he knew such masking was not meant to blind his eyes. He stared up as the wagon cleared the warship’s giant shadow and rode back into sunlit mists. He squinted against the glare, watching that dark moon setting toward the glow of Eitur’s green waters.
He understood.
It is those eyes that must stay blind.
* * *
STANDING ON THE shore of Eitur, Wryth shook Skerren’s orb, then held it steady again. He studied the jostling spin of lodestones, waiting for them to stop, to point where he should go. But they just wobbled and twirled in the oil, some even going in opposite directions. He tried rotating the globe and turning himself in a circle.
Still nothing.
Brask watched his frustration from the end of a ramp that extended from the hovering mass of the Pywll. The commander’s crimson features had darkened. Wryth had urged him to lower the warship over the lake and drop a ramp to shore. A trio of trackers with chained thylassaurs had already left, scouting the forest ahead. But the main hunting party, which consisted of a dozen knights on horseback, led by Brask’s second in command—his brother Ransin, another Vyrllian—awaited instructions from Wryth.
“Do you have any further guidance?” Brask asked, his impatience worn thin. “I can’t have my brother and the others traipsing in circles out there.”
Wryth lowered the orb, ready to admit defeat. Maybe I need to be in the air to pick up those winds again. Perhaps this close to the forest, some natural emanation masks the artifact’s location.
He faced Brask, prepared to leave the search on the ground to the trio of trackers and their thylassaurs. Until he could reestablish contact, he feared he would be wasting resources and further irritating the Pywll’s commander. But before he could admit as much, a commotion drew their focus back to the woods.
One of the trackers burst out, winded, clearly having run all the way back, leaving his beast with the others. “We … We found some encampment. An area scuffed by a great number of feet, rutted with wheels, and trampled by hooves. The mud there is fresh.”
Brask looked to Wryth.
But the tracker was not done. “It appears whoever was there fled to the south.”
“Toward Havensfayre,” Brask mumbled.
Wryth breathed harder.
It has to be them.
If so, he realized it might explain his loss of the signal. Maybe the thieves took the artifact beyond the reach of Skerren’s orb. He stared off into the mist-shrouded forest, anxious to follow that trail. He dared not lose it again. More importantly, he had to stop the others from reaching Havensfayre, where it would be much harder to root them out.
He turned to Brask and told the commander what he wanted done, what else he needed for this hunt. The man scowled but passed on his instruction. In short order, a low hissing growl rose behind him. He turned as two massive black-furred scythers stalked down the ramp. The steel-helmed cats, each the height of a Gyn, bared fangs longer than their jaws. They came with a pair of bridle-masters, the rare songsters who could control such massive beasts.
Wryth turned to the tracker. “Take the cats to the encampment you found.” He then faced the bridle-masters. “Have your charges pick up the scents there, then loose them on the trail. They’re to run down and slay anyone they find.”
He had no fear for the bronze woman. She cast no scent of sweat and blood, and her metal body could certainly withstand the ravaging of such beasts.
With nods all around, the others took off.
Wryth turned to Brask. “I will accompany your brother and his men.”
Brask looked happy to oblige, plainly ready to rid his forecastle of an overbearing Shrive. But as the man turned to his brother, the blasting of a horn cut through the mists, coming from the south. It blared three long notes of distress.
