The Gathering Storm

Sanglant laid his father’s body gently on the ground. He rose, shaking ash from his shoulders. Henry’s blood streaked his hands. His sword, shield, and lance were gone, but his father’s last gift to him had been the most powerful weapon of all.



“The storm is upon us,” he said, letting his voice carry. Ash and grief and exhaustion made him hoarse—but then, his voice always sounded like that. “I do not know what else we will have to endure to gain victory.”



What I will have to endure, he thought, if Liath and Blessing are dead.



“We have allies.” He looked at Zuangua, but the Ashioi prince only shrugged, unable to comprehend his words, holding himself aloof. I hope we have allies.



“We have enemies. Some of them are those we trusted in the past.”



And some, like Adelheid and Hugh and Anne, don’t yet know what they have lost.



“Who follows me?”



“Your Majesty,” said Duchess Liutgard and Duke Burchard. Said the noble companions who remained. Said the captains still living. Said Lewenhardt, speaking for his own faithful soldiers.



Henry’s army echoed them, every one. They were his. He ruled them now.



5



ANNE ruled the heavens. Her net of magic spanned the Earth as the exiled land belonging to the Lost Ones shifted out of the aether in its attempt to return to its earthly roots. That net quivered under so much weight, but it held. Even lacking three crowns it would hold, it would cast the Aoi land back into the aether, but beneath the weaving the first intimations of doom swept across the land as lightning torched the sky and earthquakes shuddered across the entire continent of Novaria. What the Seven Sleepers did not understand and refused to understand and cared nothing for was that by dooming the Lost Ones they were dooming Earth. They could not change their course now. They would not. They had won.



Anne’s triumph was as palpable as sand—and like sand, it could be washed away with one tidal surge.



Liath called fire from the deeps.



The eruption of molten rock exploded straight up through the heart of the stone circle that was itself the heart of the weaving. Liath felt Anne die. She felt Anne’s life ripped from her. The skopos hadn’t time even for a single startled exclamation. Between one breath and the next she was dead.



The souls of all of Anne’s retinue and Anne’s army were torn from their bodies as the power of the blast vaporized every living thing that stood or moved within a league of the crown. It stripped away the topsoil to expose the rock beneath. Ash and pulverized stone sprayed upward. The rock hammered to earth in a hail that struck up and down the coast and made the Middle Sea foam for leagues outward. The ash rose into the heavens as a churning plume that soon covered half the sky. Lava poured over what remained of the cliff face into the waters, where clouds of steam boiled upward to meld with ash and smoke.



Inside the shelter of her wings Liath witnessed all this and more, the massive destruction she and the WiseMothers had wrought in order to rip apart the spell. The stone crown was obliterated. Anne and her retinue were dead, utterly gone.



And this was only the beginning. This was not even the worst of it. As you sow, so shall you reap. Humankind and their Bwr allies had sown two thousand seven hundred and four years ago and now their descendants faced a bitter harvest.



The storm was coming.



Now.



She bound her wings tightly around her as the impact reverberated through the earth. Shock waves coursed deep through the ground. Out of the ruptured sea rose a vast wave that radiated outward in all directions and which crashed against the cliffs of the erupting coastline in a blast of hissing vapor which at once cooled and heated and poured yet more impetus into the towering plume rising above the land. In a short time, or in hours, the wave would reach the other shorelines. There was nothing Liath could do to warn the thousands who would drown.



The displaced air from the impact swept outward in a vast ring that rolled over land and sea on all sides, uprooting trees, burning grass, and what close by resounded in an eerie silence was heard as a roar of bangs and knocks and booms far away and even in so distant a place as Darre itself. Folk stopped in the streets in terror and fear only to see a worse horror as the earth began to shake and the volcano long smoking and rumbling to their west erupted with a slurry of ash and mud. Down the western coast of Aosta other sleeping volcanoes shuddered into life. There was nothing Liath could do to warn those living too close to this rim of fire, now woken.



I had no choice.



No doubt Anne had spoken such words, too, as she convinced herself to take on the task that had led to her destruction, although she had believed herself all along to be the righteous one. To stop Anne, Liath had made herself into Anne.