A call chased along the horizon.
The hatchling twisted its neck to stare toward the north.
Somewhere, out there, another has been born.
As soon as the thought took form, he understood how foolish it was. Not one, but a hundred and more, one for every tribe, for every circle of WiseMothers, who for this span of time had incubated the eggs of the FirstMothers, the ones who in ancient days bred with the living spirits of earth and gave birth to his kind.
So the story was told among the Eika.
It leaped. The pressure of its fledgling wingbeats battered him supine against the ground. It caught an updraft, and yet it beat those flashing wings as though to churn the still day into a gale. The clouds tore apart as it vanished into them. Lying stunned on the ground, he saw revealed the hard blue pan of the sky and felt—so briefly!—the melting warmth of an early summer sun.
The wind whirlpooled around him as though trying to suck him up into the heavens. Pebbles scooped up by the gale pummeled him. Lichen and moss writhed in strips through the air. The wind poured into him, blowing right through his skin and into every part of him, enveloping him, drowning him.
Alain stands at the wall staring toward the north, although he isn’t sure how he has come to be out here with the evening settling in and the wind pouring through him. He burns as if the wind is fire on his skin.
He hears their calls, even though they rise so far away that he should not be able to hear them. They raise a clangor, deeper than bells, that resonates in his body until he weeps without knowing why. The hounds whine, licking his hands, but he cannot stop the tears.
A puny, cold, fragile creature moves up beside him, only it is after all the servant assigned to make him comfortable in the palace. “My lord? I pray you, my lord, is there something the matter? How can I help you?”
It hurts, but he doesn’t know why. He listens for the last echoes whispering out of the north.
Their voices came to him, a thousand, a myriad, but all familiar to him and beloved in their way.
“Good. That. You. Are. Strong. Of. Hand. Son. Fare. Well. Be. Wise.”
The tempest quieted. A ragged wisp of lichen settled out of the air and onto his face. He brushed it aside, shook himself, and jumped to his feet. Above, the clouds were knitting themselves together again. The wind had failed utterly, and the day became silent and colored With the pearl-gray filter of a clouded sun. The fjall lay empty. Nothing moved, nothing spoke, nothing breathed, except him. He might have been the last creature alive in the entire land.
Certainly he stood alone here.
Altogether alone.
He sensed it at once, greater than emptiness: an abyss where once earth had lain firm beneath the feet of his people. A strange dullness afflicted the ache of the wind and the whisper of sand where grains rolled down the steep sides of the new sinkhole into a shallow chamber half filled with the birth sands that had once covered it. A few tiny ice-white forms lay tumbled in the collapse: the ice wyrms that had long protected the treasure that the WiseMothers had incubated. They, too, lay as still as death.
He was surrounded by death, although life had sprung from it.
He stepped forward and pressed a palm against the nearest WiseMother. It felt only of stone. No consciousness animated its core. They were absent. Gone.
Dead.
“Can you hear me? Can you answer me?” he called to them, who were the life of their children. They had for so long guided them with the foresight of the ancient, who saw farther than their short-lived children could ever do.
He waited, and he listened.
But all he heard was the wind.
V
OLD GHOSTS
1
AS they rode west along the Osterwaldweg, an Eagle met the king’s progress where dappled shadow met open road at the edge of a wide forest wilderness.
“Rufus,” said Sanglant.
The redhead had been with King Henry in Aosta and lately left behind in Saony together with a few other Eagles when the king had ridden east into the marchlands.
“Your Majesty. I am sent ahead by Mother Scholastica to let you know she intends to meet with you in Osterburg. I did not expect to meet you on the road.”
Once, a well trained Eagle could have looked through fire to discover the king’s whereabouts by means of observing landmarks glimpsed through the flames. No longer.
“We shall meet my aunt in Quedlinhame, before she expects us.” He liked the thought of surprising her, anything to put her at a disadvantage.
“She has already left. I rode ahead to alert the stewards in Osterburg. You’ll meet her on this road, Your Majesty.”
Outflanked. Still, two could play that game. “Take drink and food, Rufus. You’ll get new mounts, and return to her. Tell her to await us at…” He paused, considering the route.