In the Ruins

Page 105

“I’m just wondering,” she said into their silence, “if the strange weather is an artifact of Anne’s spell. It might even be an effect of the spell woven in ancient times under the Bwr shaman’s supervision that rebounded on us. The Bwr shaman are tempestari, so the legends say.”
“So we observed ourselves,” said Hathui. “It was her magic that stemmed the blizzard that swept over us when we were in the east.”
“Or created that blizzard.”
Because she had power over the weather.
In a still forest, an unexpected wind may agitate the leaf litter, unearthing hidden depths and items long concealed by layer upon layer of detritus. She rose, tucking fiber and the short length of rope into a pouch. Thoughts skittered like mice fleeing across a church floor suddenly illuminated by a lamp. There was a pattern there, a plan, a potential action. All at once she was too restless to sit, troubled and stimulated by a hundred threads any one of which, teased out to its end, might give her an answer.
“I’ll come with you,” said Hathui.
Liath laughed as they crossed out into the drizzle, which was already fading into spits and kisses. “Did Sanglant set you on me, to be my guard?”
“Something like that.”
“Walk with me. Let me think.”
They walked.
Time had passed unnaturally for her. It was strange to be walking in the Wendish countryside after she had traveled to such distant lands. A damp breeze stiffened her hands until she tucked them inside her sleeves and promptly stumbled on uneven ground, tripped, and had to flatten her palm on the ground to avoid pitching headlong into a mire of slimy grass and mud. She swore as she wiped her hand off. Hathui laughed.
They had set up camp beyond the fields that ringed the hilltop fortress, in scrub country used sometimes for cultivation and sometimes for pasture and sometimes left fallow. Stands of young beech grew in neat copses that had recently been trimmed back by woodcutters. Sapling ash grew in soggy hollows, everywhere surrounded by honeysuckle or fescue. She knelt beside a tangle of raspberry vines and brushed a hand over its thornlike hairs. Too tiny to light. She could not focus that tightly.
Yet.
From out in the woodland cover, they heard a horn.
“They’ve caught a scent,” said Hathui. “Why didn’t you go with him?”
“It reminds me too much of my life with Da. Look. There are the griffins.”
They glided so far above that for a moment Liath imagined them no larger than eagles.
“They must be very high,” said Hathui. “There they go.”
The specks vanished into the south, toward hills and wilder forest lands.
Crashing sounded in the brush and they turned just as a dozen riders emerged laughing and shouting excitedly, a pack of hunters separated from the main group. She recognized Sanglant among their number. He rode over to them.
So often in these last months he had looked worn by the burden of ruling, but this moment he had that same reckless, carefree attractiveness she had fallen in love with back at Gent so many years ago. Not so long ago in her memory, not nearly as long as in his.
“What are you hunting?” he asked. “You have that look on your face.” He nodded at Hathui, marking her presence, and she inclined her head in answer to his unspoken message.
“I am thinking,” Liath said, “about the weather.”
He regarded her curiously before turning in his saddle to give a signal to his retinue. They rode back toward camp. He dismounted and handed the reins of his horse to Hathui.
“What?” he asked.
“Even the sages and the church mothers did not understand the vagaries of the weather. Only God know why there is drought, or why fine growing weather. Why famine strikes, or plenty waxes and wanes across the years. But what if this weather—” She gestured toward the sky. “—is not natural weather, rather than another pattern in the unknowable pattern woven by God? What if these are unnatural clouds caused by the spell and the cataclysm? By the return of the Ashioi land? When a rock is flung into the sky and falls to earth, a puff of dust may rise where it strikes. Volcanoes blast smoke and ash into the air. So many rivers of fire ran deep in the earth on that day. So much was shaken loose. What if we made this ourselves?”
He considered, then shrugged. “If we did so? What then?”
“There are tempestari.”
“Ah.” He tilted back his head to look for a long while at the sky. Then he began to pace. “If only you had ridden east to Blessing. Li’at’dano might have helped you. If she lives.”