Elliott, Kate - Crown of Stars 3 (2 page)

At once the whirring began again as all the riders kicked into a gallop and charged, some from the left, some from the right, some from the other side of the circle. Wings hummed; hooves pounded; otherwise they came silently except for the creak and slap of their armored coats against the wooden saddles.

With the rising sun bright in his eyes, Zacharias saw Bulkezu as iron wings and iron face and gleaming strips of iron armor. The two feathers stuck on either side of his helmet flashed white and brown. The griffin feathers fletched in the curving wooden wings that were fastened to his back shone with a deadly iron gleam. Where the ground leveled off, just beyond the eastern portal, he galloped toward the waiting woman, lowering his spear.

Zacharias hissed out a breath, but he did not act. He already knew he was a coward and a weakling. He could not stand boldly against the man who had first mocked him, then violated him, and then wielded the knife.

He could not stand boldly—but he watched, at first numb and then with a surge of fierce longing for the woman who waited without flinching. With an imperceptible movement she opened her fingers. From within her uncurling hand mist swirled into being to engulf the world beyond. Only the air within the stone circle remained untouched, tinted with a vague blue haze. An unearthly fog swallowed the world beyond the stones.

All sound dissolved into that dampening fog, the whir and hum of spinning feathers, the approach of the horses, the distant skirl of wind through grass.

With a sudden sharp exclamation, the woman leaped to one side. A horse loomed, became solid as griffin feathers cut a burning path through the mist. In stillness the horse jumped out of the fog and galloped into the ring of stones, hooves clattering on pebbles. Bulkezu had to duck so that his wings did not strike the lintel stone above.

The other riders could be seen as fleeting figures searching for a portal to enter, yet they were no more substantial than fish swimming beneath the cloudy surface of a pond. They could

not leave their fog-enshrouded world. They could i circle.

The war leader quickly scanned the interior of the oiuiie ring, but the woman had vanished. As he turned his horse in a tight circle the griffin feathers left sparks behind them in the blue haze. Of all things in this place, those feathers alone seemed immune to the witchcraft that had been brought to life.

"Dog!" he called, seeing Zacharias through the haze. "Crawling one! You have not escaped me!" He nudged his horse forward, tucked his spear between leg and horse's belly, and drew his sword. Zacharias shrank back, trapped against the stone. He had nowhere to run.

But the horse had taken no more than three steps when the earth began to shake and the huge stones groaned and creaked and seemed to swing wildly from side to side, although Zacharias felt nothing at his own back except solid, unmoving stone. Bulkezu's horse stumbled to its knees, neighing in terror, and Bulkezu himself was thrown. Stones swayed as if whatever spell had set them in place was at this moment unweaving itself, and Zacharias shrieked, flinging up his hands to protect himself, although mere flesh could not protect him against stone.

This was more than witchcraft.

The woman appeared again in the center of the circle, surefooted and unshaken by the earth's tremors except for the flashing shimmer and sway of beads dangling among her gold necklaces. Bulkezu struggled up from his hands and knees behind her. Zacharias tried to call a warning, but the breath sucked into his lungs congealed there and he could only gasp and choke and point.

With a grunt, the woman swung around to bring the flat of the obsidian blade down between the two arched spines of Bulkezu's wings, onto his head. The blow laid him flat on his stomach, and his helmet canted awkwardly to one side, almost torn off. Blood swelled from the base of his skull to mat his black hair. The shaking subsided, but the haze remained. Outside the circle the other riders flitted by this portal and that, still searching for an entrance.

The woman stepped closer to Bulkezu—that fast he rolled to one side and jerked himself up and back around in a half turn. The tips of his deadly wings hissed through the air to slice her across the abdomen and through her sheath of necklaces. Beads of jade and turquoise, pellets of gold, rained onto the ground around her. He leaped backward, up to his feet, sword held before him. His helmet he slapped down, and again when it would not settle right around his eyes, and then, with an angry grunt, he wrenched it off and flung it to one side so that, finally, his face was exposed—proud and handsome in the Quman way.

Ugly red welts bloomed on the woman's bronze-dark skin. Blood welled from the cuts and snaked down in vermilion beads to lodge in the waistband of her skirt.

They faced off, each wounded, each warrior now. In this way they measured each the other: the Quman warrior made fearsome by the glint of the griffin feathers bound into the wings at his back—only a man who had killed a griffin could wear such wings; and the foreign woman, not of human breed or birthing, with her bronze cast of skin and hair, her own blood seeping unheeded down her belly. Her gaze on her opponent was as unyielding as the stone behind Zacharias' back.

Bulkezu sprang forward, batting at the spear with his sword and closing the distance between them. Zacharias gasped aloud. But her spear circled around Bulkezu's blow, and as she stepped aside, she caught him with the haft, a strike behind his knee. She was neither frail nor slender; the force of her blow dropped him to his knees, but he sat down hard, locking the haft beneath him, and lashed out with his sword. She leaped back, abandoning the spear. But as he rose to pursue her, the spear
moved.
Like a serpent come to life, it twined around his legs. He fell, catching himself on his hands, but where his sword struck earth, it sank into the dirt as if hidden claws dragged it down into the depths. No matter how hard he scrabbled, he could not grab it.

She raised her arms again, chest naked now except for a single strand of gold that curved along the swell of a breast. The shaking resumed, more violent than before. The great lintel stones rocked and teetered and began to slide. Wind battered Zacharias to his knees. With his dagger Bulkezu hacked at the magicked spear wound around his legs, but to no avail. With each cut it merely grew spurs and flourishes, and these spurs sprouted roots that embedded themselves into the ground until its many-limbed net pinned his calves to the dirt and twined up his arms. In frustration he threw his dagger at her. With her arms outstretched and blood trickling down her breasts to pool in the folds of her skirt, she merely stared.

But the dagger slowed—or was that a trick of the haze and the trembling earth? As the shaking subsided, the dagger froze, suspended in the air.

Impossible. Zacharias staggered up to his feet, leaning on the stone for strength.
What was she?

"Damn you, witch, what do you want?" cried Bulkezu, but she did not reply; she did not appear to understand him, and neither did she appear to care. In the seething fog beyond the stone circle, riders still quested back and forth and around the ring of stones for some way to get inside.

Bulkezu struggled on the ground but could not free himself from the rootlike tangle that bound him hand and foot. His sword had vanished into the earth. He looked furious. Brought down by a mere woman, and one armed with the most primitive of weapons! But Bulkezu's hatred could not be more tangible than Zacharias' exultation.

Zacharias actually crowed, the rooster's call. He had lived to see Bulkezu brought low.

"Sorcery is a weapon more powerful than a blade," Zacharias cried in the tongue of the Quman people. "What matter that she is a mere woman and you are a strong warrior? What matter that the tribes sing your praises because you slew a griffin, the first warrior in a generation to do so? You may be adept at war, mighty one, but she is armed with something more dangerous than brute strength. Her sorcery binds you. You can only kill her, never compel her to your will as she does to you now. And the truth is, you can't kill her either."

"Dogs can bark, but it is all noise," snapped Bulkezu without looking at him. He did not look away from his opponent. "As for you, you who are only a woman, you have made an enemy this day."

But the woman only smiled, as if she found his threats so insignificant as to be laughable. At that moment Zacharias fell in love with her—or with what she was, and what she had: She was no coward, and her gods walked with her. What matter that he no longer possessed that portion of a man that some considered to be all the measure of manhood? Hadn't the blessed Daisan himself said that the peace of true love lasts until the end of days, and has nothing to do with carnal desire? She was everything he was not.

"I beg you," he called hoarsely in the Wendish tongue, "let me serve you so that I may teach myself strength."

She looked at him, then turned away to catch the horse and hobble it. To one side of the fire lay a basket and a quiver. She unearthed bow and arrows, and with some care she approached the furious warrior and plucked a griffin's feather from the wooden frame which, like two shepherd's crooks, arched over' his head. Her fingers bled at once, and profusely, but she only licked her fingers and murmured words, like a prayer, under her breath.

"Nay, I beg you, let me do it." Zacharias stumbled forward as Bulkezu cursed out loud. "Let me do it. For he has shamed me, and in this way I may return shame upon him threefold."

She stepped back to regard him with narrowed eyes. He had never seen eyes of such green before, fathomless, as luminous as polished jade. Measuring him, she came to a decision. Before he could flinch back, she nicked his left ear with her obsidian knife, and when he yelped in surprise, she licked welling blood from his skin—and then handed him the knife and turned her back on him as she would on a trusted servant.

"Strike now!" cried Bulkezu, "and I will give you an honorable position among my slaves!"

"There is no honor among slaves. You are no longer my master!"

"Do you not recognize what she is?
Ashioi,
the tribe of gold. The ones who vanished from the bones of earth."

A chill from the stones seeped into Zacharias' skin and soaked through to his bones. It all made sense now. She had come from the spirit world. She was one of the Aoi, the Lost Ones.

Bulkezu grunted, still struggling. Only a man who never ceased striving could stalk and slay a griffin. "I will lay a blood-price on her. My riders will track you, and kill her, and bring you back to grovel at my feet."

Zacharias laughed, and at once his fear sloughed off, a trifle compared to the prospect of victory over the man who had humiliated him. "You bargain and then threaten, Bulkezu, mightiest son of the Pechanek clan. But what you took from me is nothing to what I am about to take from you, because the flesh is given by the god to all men but your prowess and reputation can never be returned once they are taken from you. And by a|

dog, a piece-of-dung who was used as you use slave women!" He reached for a feather.

"I curse you! You will never be more than a slave, and always a worm! And I will kill you! I swear this on Tarkan's bones!"

Like an echo of the threat, the iron-hard feathers sliced Zacharias' skin with each least touch until his palms and fingers were a mass of seeping cuts. Blood smeared his hands and made them slick while Bulkezu struggled and cursed but could not free himself from his bindings as Zacharias denuded his wings.

He took everything, all but one, and when he was finished, his hands bled and his heart rejoiced. "Kill him now!" he cried.

"His blood will slow me down." She said it without emotion, and by that he understood there was no possible argument. "Nor will you touch him," she added. "If you will serve me, then you will serve my cause and not your own."

She grasped Zacharias' hands and licked them clean of blood, then let him go and indicated that he should stow most of the feathers in the quiver. She fletched several of her stone-tipped arrows with griffin feathers, afterward hefting them in her hand, testing their weight and balance. When she was satisfied, she went to the eastern portal and began to shoot, one by one, the riders who circled her sanctuary. At once they sprayed a killing rain of arrows back into the stones. She had downed four of them before they truly understood that although neither they nor their arrows could get into the circle, her arrows could come out. At last they retreated out of arrowshot with their wounded. As from a great distance Zacharias saw them examine the arrows and exclaim over them while one rider galloped away eastward.

"My tribe will come soon with more warriors," said Bulkezu, even though he knew by now that the woman did not understand his words. He had recovered himself and spoke without malice but with the certainty of a man who has won many battles and knows he will win more. "Then you will be helpless, even with my feathers."

"And you will be helpless without them!" cried Zacharias.