The Gathering Storm
Page 187

Finally, she risked stepping away to gather sticks and rushes from the brush that grew alongside the river. She hadn’t got far when she heard the heavy tread of one of the griffins, and she dashed back to Sanglant just in time to find the female griffin stalking close, lifting a claw to rend his helpless body in two. She leaped between them, raising her sword.
“Mine!” she cried. “He is mine! Don’t touch him!”
The griffin huffed in surprise and retreated. Two feathers shook loose from its wings as it backed away, and these she grabbed and tucked into her quiver. The fire she had first called hadn’t entirely died away. Bits of burned grass spun in the air. A fine ash settled on her clothing and hair before the last of it was dissipated by the wind.
At last her hands stopped shaking enough that she could bind rushes and grass and twigs into little torches. After she laid a sixth torch beside her, she seated herself next to Sanglant. The griffins prowled at the edge of her vision.
When she concentrated, emptying her mind of all that distracted it—and that was quite a bit—she could believe that she saw the glamour of the spell woven into his flesh and blood and bones. His mother had bound a great working into his body to protect him from harm and to grant him unnatural powers of healing. Now, as in the past, he would suffer agony because of it, but he would also, probably, survive as he had survived a half dozen times before from fatal wounds taken in battle. In the realm of Jedu she had lived through death a dozen times, dealt at his hands. She had seen him struck down.
Yet this was not the reunion she had expected.
The sun set. The sky turned red-orange and darkened to a hazy purple before the first stars appeared with the waxing quarter moon already near the zenith. A few clouds concealed patches of the sky, but she could see most of the span of the heavens, the most beautiful sight in all of creation. Had it only been seven or eight days since she had left Verna, torn away by her kinfolk? Yet what she had seen of the landscape surrounding her tallied in no way with any place she had ever visited—and she had traveled more widely than most: Aosta, Kartiako, Aquila, Salia, Varre, and Wendar. According to her father’s lore, broad grasslands lay east beyond the border counties, many months’ ride into the wilderness. Sanglant could not possibly have traveled so far in seven or eight days.
She settled back with a hand resting lightly on his throat to track the beating of his heart and so that she might, now and again, brush her fingers over his beloved lips.
The brilliance of the night sky staggered her. The River of Souls streamed across the western quadrant of the sky, dense with light. How could she have forgotten this stunning beauty? The sight of it never failed to quiet her soul.
Bright Somorhas hung low on the western horizon but sank quickly after the sun, leaving fiery Seirios as the first star that stayed visible as dusk deepened to night. She searched the heavens for clues.
It was spring, certainly, with the Dragon rearing up in the east and the Child lying down to sleep in the west. Aturna stood in the Lion, close to zenith, the only other wandering star visible to her, but there were many of the heavens’ most brilliant stars fixed up in the sky: the yellowish glare of the Guivre’s Eye; the bright head of the elder Sister; the bluish Eye of the Dragon; Rijil, the Hunter’s brightly-shod foot, and Vulneris, the red wound on his shoulder.
She brushed her hand over Sanglant’s shoulder and brought her fingers to her lips, tasting the blood. He lay frighteningly silent, not even murmuring as he was wont to do in sleep. Blood oozed but not with that same horrible gush she had seen when she first reached him.
Her helplessness wore at her as a constant ache, but she possessed no healing magic. She carried no cache of herbs for a poultice. She was not strong enough to carry him and had no horse. In the morning, when she could see, she would attempt to build a sledge to drag him.
Where could she take him?
The stars continued on their appointed rounds as the night spun onward. Where was she? When was she?
The Sapphire and the Diamond skated low along the northern horizon, and in the south, although the Bow and Arrow were visible, the Huntress who wielded them was not. She was about as far north as she had been in Wendar and likely a little farther south than Heart’s Rest. North and south were easy to calculate because of the altitude of the individual stars.
She sat with her mortally wounded husband in the midst of a vast wilderness, guarded by griffins, as the night wind played in her hair and whispered through the grass. The moon sank westward, followed by Aturna, the Red Mage. New constellations rose and with them the planets Jedu and Mok. The Angel of War gleamed balefully in the Serpent while the Empress of Bounty journeyed with the Unicorn.