PROLOGUE (58 page)

A covey of partridges took wing, a sudden flurry, startled out of their hiding place. She stared into the undergrowth but saw nothing. But the crawling sensation grew: Someone
—or something—watched her from the shelter of the trees.

She urged her horse forward as fast as she dared. With the next town so far ahead, she couldn't risk exhausting her horse, and anyway the road was cut here and there with gashes, holes of a size to trap a horse's hoof. Nothing appeared on the forest road behind her, nothing ahead. In the forest, all she saw was a tangle of trees and little sprays of snow where wind rattled branches.

Abruptly, dim figures appeared in the shadows of the forest, darting around the trees like wolves following a scent.

A
whoosh
like the hiss of angry breath brushed her ear, and she jerked to one side. Her horse faltered. An arrow buried itself into the trunk of a nearby tree. As delicate as a needle, it had no fletching. Pale winter light glinted off its silver shaft. Then, in the space of time it takes to blink, it dissolved into mist and vanished.

The scream came out of nowhere and seemingly from all directions: a ululating tremor, more war cry than cry for help. It shuddered through the trees like the coursing of a wild wind.

Maybe sometimes it
was
better to run than to stand and fight.

Galloping down the forest road, she hit the opening in the trees before she was aware that trees had been hacked back from either side of a wide stream. At the ford, a dilapidated bridge crossed the sluggish waters.

A party of men blocked the bridge and its approach. They raised their weapons when they saw her. She pulled up her horse and while it minced nervously under her, she glanced behind, then ahead, not sure what threatened her most. The men looked ill kempt, as desperate as bandits
— which they surely were. Most of them wore only rags wrapped around their feet. A few wore scraps of armor, padded coats sewn with squares of leather. Only the leader had a helmet, a boiled and molded leather cap tied under his scraggly beard. But they stood in front of her, surly and looking prepared to run; they were tangible, real. She had no idea what had let loose with that scream.

"I am a King's Eagle! I ride on the king's business. Let me pass."

By now they had guessed that she rode alone.

"Wendar's king," said the foremost, spitting on the ground. "You're in Varre now. He's no king of ours."

"Henry is king over Varre."

"Henry is the usurper. We're loyal to Duchess Sabella."

"Sabella is no longer a duchess. She no longer rules over Arconia."

The man spit again, hefting his spear with more confidence. He cast a glance at his comrades, who were armed with clubs fashioned from stout sticks. Two came off the bridge and began to circle around on either side to flank her. "What the false king says of Duchess Sabella don't mean anything here. It's his mistake to send his people here and think his word protects them. We'll treat you better, woman, if you give up without a fight."

"I've nothing worth anything to you," she said as she raised her bow, but they only laughed.

"Good boots, warm cloak, and a pretty face," said their leader. "Not to mention the horse and the weapons. That's all worth something to us."

Nocking the arrow, she drew down on the leader. "Tell your men to pull back. Or I'll kill you."

"First rights," said the leader, "to the man who drags the rider off the horse."

The two men charged. The one to her right made the mistake of reaching her first. She kicked him, hard under the chin, and as he reeled back she turned just as the other man reached her. Her string drawn back, she held her arrowhead almost against his face as he grabbed for her boot. And loosed the string.

The arrow drove through his mouth. He staggered and dropped.

No time to think. They had no bows. She could outrun them.

As she pulled her mount around, she saw shadows in the forest. They moved like hunters and yet at once she knew they weren't men, no kin of these bandits come to aid them. They carried bows as slender and light as if they had been woven from spider's silk twisted and folded together a thousandfold to make them as strong as wood.

Caught between the one and the other. She had no reason to trust either side.

The man she had kicked struggled back, grunting, and jumped for her.

Living wood in damp winter cold burns poorly . . . she reached for fire and called it down on the old bridge.

The logs and planks caught fire with a burst, a snap and
whuff
of flame. The men on the bridge screamed, jumping to safety into the river's cold waters, floundering there or leaping for the shore. Her horse screamed and bolted. A thin silver arrow gashed its flank and fell to the ground. The man coming after her yelled in terror, then crumpled as he groped at a silver needle embedded in his own throat.

She rode for the river. Men scrambled away, fleeing from her
—or from what pursued her, half hidden in the forest behind. The cold water came as a shock, coursing past her thighs as she urged her horse across the stream. The animal needed no pressing; it, too, was smart enough to run. The water flooded its rump and washed away the thin stream of blood that ran from the cut made by the arrow. For a moment, Liath felt the horse lose its footing; then they were struggling up the far bank, breaking through the film of ice that rimed the shoreline.

From behind she heard screaming; she did not pause to look. In the center of the road, stunned into immobility, stood one of the bandits. He stared in horror at the burning bridge and at his comrades falling on the other side or thrashing their way down the cold stream.

"Do you think King Henry leaves his Eagles unprotected?" she cried. He bolted into the woods, running from her
—or from what lay behind her. She turned.

The burning bridge flared like a beacon. No shadows emerged from the forest, and the bandits had scattered. The bridge would be ruined. As she stared, she realized she could not put the fire out
—she did not know how. She tried reaching, imagined a fire dying to embers and embers dying to dead coals, but the bridge burned on with the glee of a raging fire. It terrified her. She had no way to control it.

Then
they
came out of the forest. They had bodies formed in human shape, even the suggestion of ancient armor, hammered breastplates decorated with vulture-headed women and spotted lions without manes. But she could see the trees through them. They were more like a dense smoky fog forced into an alien shape, humanlike and yet not human at all
—and they were coming after her. One raised its bow and shot at her, but the silver arrow, a wink against the sun, vanished in the flames. They came to the stream's bank, well away from the scorching flames that devoured the old bridge, but they did not attempt to cross the water.

She turned her horse and fled.

She rode, walked beside her horse, rode again, then trotted again alongside her tired mount. But though a winter's day was short, this one seemed to drag on and on. The forest would never end.

At dusk, at last and amazingly, it gave into scrub and overcut woods. Pigs scattered away from her. Fields which cut into stands of trees like gaping scars lightened her way. She was still shaking with reaction when she reached the town of Laar as the waxing gibbous moon rose behind her.

At the closed gates she called out. "I beg you. I am a King's Eagle riding on the king's business. Give me shelter!"

The gate creaked open, and they let her in. Good Varren villagers, they were not sympathetic to Henry, but she was a lass riding alone and, when it came down to it, they were eager to hear what news she had.

I The village deacon led the horse away at once and applied a salve of holy water, dock, and stitchwort to the elfshot gash while singing psalms over the wounded beast. "It is clear you have been at your prayers, daughter," said the deacon, "for surely the intervention of St. Herodia
— whose feast day this is—saved you from harm this day."

Liath left the horse in the deacon's care and let herself be escorted to a longhouse where the whole village gathered to watch her eat a cold supper. The villagers knew of the bandits and were glad to be rid of them, and it was clear that Laar's townsfolk had long ago resigned themselves to the depredations of the nameless creatures who lurked in the forest.

"Do you know what they are?" Liath demanded.

"The shades of dead elves," said the householder who had taken her in.

"They are doomed to wander the earth," said a village elder, "because they cannot ascend to the Chamber of Light."

"My wise aunt told me the Lost Ones ruled here once," added the householder. "Their shades can't bear to leave the scene of their great glory. So they haunt us and try to drive us away so that their kin can come back and rule again."

One tale led to another, and of course they wanted to know what message she took to Count Lavastine, whom they had heard tell of; his southernmost holdings lay not ten days' ride from here. A few of the villagers had even seen the count and his army when they had returned this way last summer after the battle at Kassel.

"He had his heir with him," said the householder. "A good-looking boy, tall and noble. What does the king want with Count Lavastine? Him being Varrish, and all, and the king Wendish. Maybe the king don't like Varrish counts."

So she told them about Gent.

"Ai, the Dragons!" said one old woman. "I saw the Dragons years ago! Very glorious, they was."

That night, lying rolled in her cloak before the hearth fire, she dreamed of the Eika dogs.

II READING THE AS winter dragged on and the Eika left in Gent grew bored, Sanglant began to lose his dogs. Like his Dragons, they fought for him when he was attacked. Like his Dragons, they died. He did what he could to save them, but it was never enough.

Eika needed to fight and the combats they arranged against slaves were terrible to watch. The few combats they arranged against
him,
they lost. It was beneath their dignity to fight him many against one or with a weapon while he stood unarmed, and he had honed his skills so well over the months that none of them, however stout or bold, could best him.

That some Eika still raided he knew when one of the restless princeling sons brought in a few pathetic slaves or a handful of baubles to parade in front of Bloodheart, but the pickings in the region around Gent were pitifully thin by now after three seasons of raiding. Others hosted gatherings during which one or another of the savages would tell a tale of butchery in their harsh language that sometimes included horrible reenactments with living slaves, poor doomed souls.

Such shows impressed Bloodheart not at all. He, too, was restless. He played his bone flutes. He played with his powers, such as they were
—Sanglant had little experience with sorcery and did not know how to measure what he saw: webs of light caging the cathedral with brightness; keening dragons that filled the vast nave with slashing tails and searing fire before they dissolved into mist; glowing swarms of mitelike bees that tormented Sanglant, stinging him until his hands and face swelled—only, all at once, to vanish together with the swelling when Bloodheart grew tired of the game and put down his flutes.

When the madness threatened to descend, he took refuge in his manor house, built as painstakingly over the winter as if he had sawed the logs arid raised the roof with his own hands. The vision of the manor house saved him from the black cloud more times than he could count.

But it was never enough.

He smelled smoke on the wind, fires burning in the city, and then the acrid stench of charred wood. He heard the Eika play their game, day in and day out, in the square that fronted the cathedral. Always the winning team howled and laughed as they threw their trophy, the sack containing its gruesome burden, down in front of Bloodheart. Perhaps they moved more sluggishly in the cold, but neither heat nor cold, not the bitter hard wind or the silence of a dense snow, not the lash of freezing rain or the dull ache of a cold that chills down to the bones affected them adversely, no more than it did a rock.

As winter eked its way toward spring and the days grew longer, he noticed a change in their appearance. More of them now wore leather armor cut from the tanneries of Gent or carried spears and axes and iron-pointed arrows forged in Gent's smithies. The cries of the slaves came to his ears day and night, but there was nothing he could do to help them.

There was nothing he could do but watch, and think. Spring was coming. The river would soon flow at floodtide. Few ships would sail upstream until late spring. But Bloodheart was mustering an army. Any fool, even a mad fool, could see that. Daily, Eika came and went. Some
—for Sanglant could now tell certain ones apart from the rest—did not return, as if they had died on their errand or, perhaps, gone a much longer way away. Surely not even Eika dared to cross the northern seas in winter, but who could know? They were savages, and savages might try anything.