The Gathering Storm

Heribert sat beside her for a time, the only person who knew how to bide in silence. He held Blessing’s limp hand and wept silently. Outside, the soldiers followed their round of work, although once she heard a griffin’s shriek and hard after that the sounds of crunching and tearing as the creatures set to work on a meal.



After some time, the sleeping Jinna woke and traded places with his companion, who crawled over to Liath.



“What is your will, Bright One? May this miserable worm bring you food?”



“What is your name?”



“Whatever name you wish to call me, Bright One.”



“I wish to call you by the same name your comrade addresses you by.”



“He calls me ‘brother,’ Bright One.”



She smiled. “Are you brothers in truth, then?”



“We are, Bright One.”



“Was it your father or mother who named you at your birth?”



He recoiled slightly. “It would be against God to name a baby before it lives through three summers and can speak like a human being.”



“Then what name were you given when it was time to give you a name?”



He glanced up at her and as quickly averted his gaze. Like his brother, he was not nearly as tall as the average Wendishman. He had a complexion darker than her own and eyes so brown they were almost black, with thick lashes and heavy black eyebrows. She did not know how long he had been a slave, but something in the way he and his brother persistently insisted on serving her had a certain irritating charm.



“My child name was Mosquito, Bright One, and my brother was called Gnat. We bothered our aunts greatly, and so won these names from them. But when we were sent to the men’s house to be sealed by fire—” He brushed the mark branded across his brow. “—we were given our men’s names, which I may speak aloud to no woman, not even one of God’s messengers.”



“Then I will have to call you Mosquito and Gnat, after the fashion of your aunts.”



“That would be well, Bright One.”



She chuckled, but her amusement only pleased him.



“I will take broth and heated water.” She consulted with the healer. “These herbs can be steeped in water, so that I may wash my daughter.”



All was done as she wished, but the tincture rubbed over her skin made no difference to Blessing’s deteriorating condition. Sanglant slept all day, and Liath was driven outside in the afternoon to get fresh air, to survey the restless griffins and their nervous keepers, to walk for a while along the hills outside camp so that she might have solitude. The big griffin—Domina—paced a stone’s toss behind. Grass raked along its legs, and now and again the touch of its feathers sent sliced stalks fluttering into the breeze, spinning and tumbling. Only its threatening presence kept Mosquito and Gnat at a distance; they seemed eager to stick as close as the bugs their aunts had named them after.



All these tents, soldiers, comradeship, and the seemingly incessant desire of every person there to chat about the most inane subjects, never leaving a person free simply to ponder without interruption, was driving her crazy. How did Sanglant endure it? How did anyone?



So much needed to be done as they prepared their counterattack against Anne, and she needed time to think. There was no paper to be had, so that she might make calculations, a tremendously difficult task even for a mathematicus and practically impossible if it had to be done all in the head, even for a person trained in the art of memory. How did one get anything done with these constant interruptions?



“Liath!” Hathui this time, returned from her errand. Only belatedly did she recall that Liath, once her comrade among the Eagles, was now something entirely else. “My lady! If you will.”



“What news, Hathui? You need stand on no ceremony for me.”



“Do I not? You are changed, Liath.”



“So I have been told,” retorted Liath a little bitterly. “What news?”



“This. That the centaurs will meet us just after dawn.”



Liath looked out across the encampment with its circle of tents, makeshift corrals made by rope strung into fences between squares of wagons, and a stretch of empty ground around the slumbering griffin. Farther out and well upwind of the griffins, soldiers kept a tight check on grazing horses, taken out in shifts so as to minimize the likelihood that the griffin would decide to steal a snack from among them. There were so many people, more than had lived in the neighborhood of Heart’s Rest, certainly, and all of them loitering or working or gossiping or drilling. It was a king’s progress, for wasn’t Sanglant king among them in all but name?