Crown of Stars
CROWN OF STARS
Crown of Stars Book 07
Kate Elliott
PROLOGUE
BEYOND Gent, moving into the east toward the marchlands, the king's progress journeyed slowly because of the immense damage caused by the great winds of autumn. Along the roads and in every village they passed through the regnant heard the same desperate complaints: the farmers dared not plant because frost kept coming long past its accustomed time; there was no sun; too little rain fell despite the haze that covered the sky.
They ate on short rations and collected a meager tithe from the estates and villages they passed through, but none among the king's progress complained, because they ate every day. Each afternoon when they set camp and gathered wood for fires, folk approached the camp, materializing out of woodland, out of the dusk, out of the misty night air.
"I pray you," a ragged child might whisper, clutching the hand of an emaciated younger child, both barefoot although the ground had a sheen of frost. "Have you bread? Any crust?"
Haggard young women and youths beckoned from the twilight. "Anything you want, for a bite of food. Anything."
Peddlers made the rounds. "Rope. Cloth. Nice carved bowls. For a good price. Very cheap. I'll take food in trade."
Exhausted stewards and villagers begged to see the regnant. Noble lords and ladies grown lean with hardship asked for an audience.
"A plague of rats, Your Majesty. They ate all of our grain. Even that we had set aside for seed. Gnawed through half the leather we had tanned and worked. They came out of nowhere, a flood of them. Horrible!"
"It's this frost. We daren't plant because it will kill the seedlings. Yet if we wait, there'll not be enough season for the crops to ripen."
"Have you seen the sun on your travels, Your Majesty?"
"Wolves carried off a child, Your Majesty, and killed two of our milk cows. We hunted them, but they attacked us when we tracked them to their lair. They killed four men. I'm an old man. I've never seen them so bold as they are now."
"My husband and sons were killed, Your Majesty. They were only walking to market. I have no one to plow the field. My daughters are just now barely old enough to be married. My husband's cousins claim the land and wish to turn me and the girls out homeless, with nothing."
"Bandits, Your Majesty. No one is safe on the roads without an armed escort. I have but a dozen milites in my service. The rest were called to serve King Henry, may he rest in peace in the Chamber of Light. They never returned from Aosta."
Their desperation gave Liath a headache, but Sanglant would sit for hours and listen even and especially when there was nothing he could do for them except listen.
"I have been told," he might say, "that if you cover the fields with straw it protects seedlings from frost. There lies plenty of deadwood because of the tempest. Set bonfires at night to warm the air along the rows."
"Here is a deed to the land, signed by my schola. If you have no nephews or kinsmen who can help with the land, then here are a pair of crippled soldiers in my retinue who agree to marry into your house. They can't fight, but together they can manage the fieldwork."
"Speak to Lady Renate of Spelburg. She is also plagued by bandits, no doubt the same group. Her estate lies only two days' march east of here. You must pool your resources. If you have lost this much of your population, then for the time being you must consolidate in one place. Offer protection there for the common folk who rely on you. Combine your milites. If you do not cooperate, you will certainly drown."
"The sun will return. Be patient. Act prudently until the crisis has passed. Do not abandon those who will turn on you if they have no other way to save themselves."
These pronouncements his audience absorbed with an almost pitiable gratitude, but in only one case could he act immediately. A guide led them to the wolves' lair. Liath called fire down within the warren of caves where the wolf pack laired, and the soldiers killed over a dozen as the beasts tried to escape flames and smoke. The wolves were dangerous predators, but they were beautiful, too, in the way of dangerous things, and she hated to see them slaughtered like sheep. Yet afterward they found the much-gnawed bones of several children in the outer cave. The wolves had grown too bold. Such a pack could not be allowed to keep hunting.
"A small act in a desperate time," Sanglant said the next day, when they were riding again. His voice was hoarse with apprehension and the helpless anger of seeing so much trouble that could tear the realm asunder, but then, he always sounded like that. "I am ashamed to have them fall at my feet with such praises. If the weather does not improve, half of them will be dead by next spring."
"Eventually I must go to St. Valeria," she said. "What sorcery raised may possibly be dispelled by sorcery."
"Stay with me a while longer, into the marchlands, at least."
"I will. But eventually I must go."
He nodded, although his expression was grave. "Leaving me with the dogs biting and growling at my heels as I settle once and for all who is regnant in Wendar and Varre. Eventually you must go. But not yet."
PART ONE
DEATH AND LIFE
I
TRAVELERS
1
ALL morning Alain and the hounds walked east and southeast as they had done for many days. Lavas Holding lay far behind them. Their path this day cut along an upland forest, mostly beech although what seedlings had thrust up through the field layer were fir. The view through the woods was open but because of the clouds the vista had a pearly sheen to it, as though he were staring into a lost world just out of reach. Into the past, or into the future.
Yet the present had an inevitable way of intruding into the finest-spun thoughts. Sorrow barked to alert him. A massive beech had fallen over the path in such a way that although Alain might climb with difficulty over its barrel of a trunk, he could not hoist the hounds up and across. Nor was there room for them to squeeze through the hand's-width gap below. He beat out a track along the length of the trunk upslope only to find that a score of other huge trees—more beech together with silver fir—had fallen parallel so close that he was fenced in. Returning to the path and the waiting hounds, he ventured the other way, skirting the thicket of branches at the crown, and discovered that here, too, more fallen trees barred his path.
All had fallen in a northwesterly direction, snapped by a gale out of the southeast, the same tempest, no doubt, that had swept Osna last autumn. That tempest had changed the world, and created a vast trail of debris.
He pushed through the branches at the crown of the tree—a difficult path to break but one on which, at any rate, the hounds could follow. Dry leaves crackled under his feet and dragged at his hair and skin. Twigs poked him twice in the eye and prodded his limbs and torso. Sorrow whined, ears flat and head down, and Rage picked her way with surprising delicacy for such a huge creature, very dainty as she set down each paw into dying wood rush and the splintered remains of the tree.
The trunk was crowded with branches, a maze to confound the hounds, but the bole was negotiable at this point, not as big around as the thicker trunk lower down. With his help they scrambled their way through clumsily. Branches rattled. They were as noisy as an army of blundering farmers lost in the woodsman's domain.
A sound caught him. A strange croaked cry made his limbs go stiff with apprehension. He heaved Rage by the scruff past the worst of the inner branches, and there the hounds stood frozen within the shelter of the branches. They did not bark. A large creature passed by, but they could not see anything clearly through the screen of leaves and brittle branches, only hear its heavy tread, a snorting under-cough, the uncoiling disturbance as branches were pressed back and either cracked, or sprang back with a rattling roar. A smell like iron made him wince. Unbidden, he recalled Iso, the crippled brother at Hersford Monastery. Had Iso survived the tempest? Did he work there still as a lay brother under Father Ortulfus' strict but fair rule?
The noise subsided. Sorrow's tail beat twice against branches as he lifted his head, eager to get on, but neither hound barked nor made the slightest noise. They struggled out of the branches and Alain beat a way back to the path. About a hundred strides ahead he found the ground disturbed as at the wake of a monster pressing through the forest. He knelt beside a scar freshly cut into the ground by claws as long as his forearm and traced the curve of the imprint.
"A guivre," he said to the hounds. What they heard in his voice he did not know, but they whined and, flattening their ears, ducked their heads submissively.
Sorrow sniffed along the trail left by the creature and padded into the forest, back the way it had come. Rage followed. They vanished quickly, moving fast, and Alain went after them but soon fell behind. He found them several hundred paces off the path, nosing the carcass of a half eaten deer. Like him, they had eaten sparsely on their journey, dependent on what they could hunt in the woodland and beg in whatever villages and farmsteads they passed through. Now, they tore into the remains. He sat on a fallen tree and gnawed on the last of his bread and cheese. He trimmed mold from the cheese with his knife and contemplated the buds on the standing beech. Frost had coated every surface at dawn, and he still felt its sharp breath on his cheek although it was late spring and late afternoon. The cold chafed his hands. An ache wore at his throat, as if he were always about to succumb to a grippe but never quite managed to. The trees had not yet leafed out, although they ought to be bursting with green at this time of year. A spit of rain brushed over them and was gone. Its whisper moved away through the forest.
At first hidden by the rustling of branches and forest litter stirred by raindrops, another sound took shape within the trees. The hounds were so hungry that they cracked bones and gulped flesh and took no notice, but at the moment he realized he heard a group of men, they growled and lifted their massive heads to glare down the trail, back the way the monster had come from originally. He walked over to stand beside them with staff in hand, listening.
"Hush, you fool! What if it hears your nattering?"
"We thunder like a herd of cattle as it is. We'll never sneak up on anything."
"Ho! Watch that shovel. You almost stove in my head."
"You should go in the lead, Atto. You've got the good spear."
"Won't! I never wanted to come at all. This is a stupid idea! We'll all be devoured and to no purpose."
"Shut up."
He saw the men in the distance past fallen trees and shattered branches. They had not yet noticed him, so he whistled to get their attention and called out before they could react in a reckless way that might cause someone harm.
"I'm here," he said, "a traveler. The creature you seek passed by some time ago. I and my hounds heard it pass."
They hurried forward. They were what he expected: a nervous group of local men armed variously with spears, staves, shovels, and scythes and driven by one scowling big-boned man who walked at the back of the group holding the only sword.
"Who are you?" he demanded, pushing forward through the rest but halting when he saw the size of the hounds.
"I'm a traveler called Alain. I hope to find shelter for the night and continue my journey to Autun in the morning."
"You saw the beast, yet live to tell the tale?" He indicated the carcass and the bloody muzzles of the hounds. "Pray excuse me, friend, if I doubt your tale. None who see the beast live to tell of it."
"Has it killed human folk, then? What manner of beast is it that you stalk? Are you not feared to stalk a creature that will kill you once you see it?"
Several of them scratched their beards, considering these questions.
The one called Atto was young, with but a scrap of a beard and an anxious way of glancing from one side to the other. "That's right, Hanso. We just found the one dead man, and him stark naked and so thin he more likely starved to death."
"He'd been gnawed on."
Atto shrugged. "Anything might gnaw on a dead carcass. A bear. Wolves. Wild dogs. Rats and crows and vultures."
"What about the missing sheep and cows, then?" asked the leader belligerently. "How do you account for those? We must protect ourselves."
"And get killed in the bargain?" Atto shook his head. "This is a fool's errand. I'm not going any farther."
"Then you won't be marrying my daughter."
That arrow hit home. That the two men disliked each other was apparent in their stiff posture and jutting chins, in the way the other seven men hung back as if fearing that a fistfight was about to erupt.
"Try and stop us!" said Atto with a smirk. "We'll walk to Autun. The lady is taking in men for soldiers. They say she'll feed any man willing to carry arms in her service. We'll manage, and you'll not be able to run after us and drag her back like you did last time. She's two years older now, old enough to choose for herself."
"And pregnant with your bastard!"
Feet shifted, scuffing the dirt as each changed position. Hanso drew a fist back.
Rage trotted forward and sat down showily between the two. Her growl drew such a hush down over the assembly that Alain clearly heard the tick of one of last autumn's dead leaves fluttering down through branches as it fell at long last to earth.
"It's settled between us," finished Atto, flicking an uneasy glance at the hound.
"It will never be settled," muttered Hanso. But he lowered his fist and turned his scowling glare on Alain. "What did you see?"
Alain described the encounter, and the men listened respectfully. "Have any of you seen the creature?" he asked.
Nay, they had not, but rumor grew like a weed. The corpse of an unknown man discovered by a holy spring. Missing ewes and cows since the autumn tempest that had blown down the trees and torn the roofs off a dozen sheds and houses in the hamlets hereabouts. Both strong ploughing oxen, owned in common by the villagers, gone and never recovered. The roof of their tiny church had cracked and fallen in, and the deacon had been killed. Then noises echoed out of the forest, dreadful cries and frightful coughs. The carcasses of deer, such as this one, had been found along animal trails disturbed by the passage of a huge beast: more than twenty such dead animals and all of them crawling with maggots and worms spat from the monster's mouth. Two months ago a party of refugees had staggered out of the forest along the path and told of four of their number turned to stone and lost.