The Gathering Storm (Page 361)

One glimpse only she caught of the smoking gap in the stockade, of Anne’s soldiers pouring through the opening in pursuit of her own people. Rain swept over them. Hail burst, thundering over the ground. Lightning flashed to display in one sharp vision the broad expanse of sea, waves churning up as a storm drove down on them from across the waters. Whitecaps foamed.

A wall of men blocked the gap in the stockade. Anne’s net brushed the skin of her trailing hand, leaving bloody welts.

“This way!” cried Mosquito, but his voice was liquid; the second arrow had punctured his lung and blood frothed on his lips.

They wavered on the edge of the cliff, poised there, staring down and down to the water below. There was no beach, only the sheer face of the cliff and a scattering of rocks showing above the waves. Out in the sea, mer creatures swarmed, their ridged backs parting the choppy waters as if they sensed the battle, or the magic, above and wished to discover what was going on.

“There is no other way,” murmured Gnat. “It is better if they do not have the chance to mutilate our bodies.”

He leaped, and his brother jumped after, and she did not think or hesitate as she followed them over the edge, springing out as strongly as she could so that she might not fall straight down to the deadly rocks below.

Her wings of flame shuddered, flared and unfolded, and for two breaths she had lift. Gnat hit the water and vanished under the waves. Mosquito was gone an instant later, swallowed by the sea. The wind blasted her sideways. Thunder crashed.

Her aetherical wings had not the strength to hold her. Their substance collapsed as the wind battered her. The inexorable weight of the Earth was like grief, dragging her down.

I’ll never see my beloved, or my child, again.

She plunged, wingless, lost, and tumbled into the sea.

2

HAMMERS rang. Axes thunked into wood. Shovels scraped into dirt followed by the spitting fall of earth thrown up onto the growing ramparts, the sound like hail spattering against the ground. The music of these labors accompanied Stronghand as he toured the new fortifications at Medemelacha. Eika and men worked together if not always side by side.

With his escort of the five dour merchants whose families controlled most of the commerce in the town, a dozen men-at-arms, and his most faithful attendants—the two hounds—he walked down to the strand where the shipyard bustled. Axes and adzes rose and fell. Men hammered wedges into a huge trunk to cleave it in two. Four boats lay propped up on stumps and posts, the newest no more than a keel while the most complete was being fitted with a side rudder. Soon it would be ready to launch.

Medemelacha had doubled in population in the last six months as folk swarmed to the trading town to get work in the shipyards and on the fortifications. Barracks had been built for the workers and to house the garrison. The farmland for a day’s walk on all sides lay under his control, enough to feed the population as long as the harvest was good. He had given up inland strikes in favor of consolidating his position on the Salian coast and in Alba.

Yet the failure of his rescue gnawed at him. He had no peace; he could not savor his triumphs.

“There are three men in the customhouse who await your pleasure, my lord,” said Yeshu as they lingered in the shipyards and the merchants began to fidget.

He tore his gaze away from a young Alban man, his pale hair tied back with a strip of leather, who under the hot harvest sun had stripped down to a loincloth as he carved out a stem with an ax. It was sweaty work. He worked in tandem with an Eika brother, a handsome, brawny fellow whose skin gleamed with silver and who had taken to wearing a tunic in the human fashion, covering him from shoulders to knees. They worked easily together, making a comment now and again, picking out splinters, blowing away sawdust; laughing once, as comrades do. A young woman came by with a skin of ale; he could smell it from here. She had her hair concealed under a scarf and her skirt robed up for ease of movement so that her pale calves and bare feet were exposed. They joked with her, Alban and Eika alike, although it seemed she was Salian and could barely understand them. Yet she did not fear them. She, too, laughed.

This was prosperity—that folk laughed while they worked because they did not fear hunger or war.

“My lord,” repeated Yeshu.

He returned his attention to his companions. The merchants murmured among themselves. One was a veiled Hessi woman; she stood away from the others, who were Salians once beholden to other noble protectors. Out in the bay, a longship was being rowed toward shore, and its oars pulled in as the sailors made ready to draw up on the beach. It flew Rikin’s banner. He sighed, and as he turned to address the others, he stifled a nagging sense of regret that he could no longer stand where the Lightfell plunged down the mossy rock face, far down into the still, blue fjord. Hadn’t he known peace there once?