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VII
ON THE ROAD
1
A griffin’s cough woke him. He sat up, instantly alert, but only with his second breath did he recall where he was and what he was missing.
“Liath!” he said sharply.
She was gone.
He jumped up, wrestled on his tunic, and pushed out past the tent flap.
“Your Majesty!”
“Where is—? Ah. Be at ease, Benedict. Sibold.”
“Your Majesty.” The soldiers nodded as Sanglant walked past them toward the campfire set beyond the ring of tents. He heard them whisper to each other.
“I win! Told you he wouldn’t stay sleeping.”
“You did not win! We didn’t wager whether, but when.”
Liath sat cross-legged beside the fire, hands open and relaxed on her thighs as she stared into the flame. Hathui paced behind her. The Eagle glanced up as Sanglant walked up and nodded, acknowledging him. He halted behind Liath to wait.
The last few nights had been really cold, the first hard winter chill since the warm nights and overcast days after the great storm. That chill made him uneasy in a way he could not explain. It hurt in his bones the way a coming change in the weather might make a man’s joints ache, warning him of rain. The ground was cold and dry beneath his bare feet. It was, as always now, too cloudy to see stars or moon, but the heavens still bled an unnatural light, almost as bright as if there were a full but bloody moon.
“How long have you been out here?” he asked Hathui in a low voice.
“Too long, Your Majesty.”
“Still nothing?”
“Nothing. If Liath cannot see within the flames, then I think no one can.”
He and Hathui waited in companionable silence. Liath had a remarkable capacity to focus; she did not once shift, not even to brush the hair away from her cheek as the wind stirred it, which surely must distract her. He twitched, wanting to smooth back her hair, wanting to touch her. She seemed blind and deaf to their presence, although they stood just behind her. He could never be so close to her and ignore her so thoroughly. She was a roaring fire to him, a force impossible to shut out. The heat of her smote him, although he doubted anyone else noticed it. He was the one who burned.
“Isn’t she cold?” he asked, but Hathui only shrugged, and because he couldn’t stand not doing something he went back to the tent and fetched a cloak, which he draped over Liath’s shoulders. She did not thank him; if she noticed the thick cloak at all, she gave no sign.
He paced. Twice Hathui added wood to the fire. Neither time did Liath alter her intent stare, as if the Eagle’s movement and the hot lick of fresh flame did not register. After some time the darkness lightened, heralding dawn, and as a wind rose off the Alfar Mountains now south of them, she finally sighed and sat back, rubbing her eyes.
“Ai, God. No matter how deeply I search—” She looked up, then, and smiled, seeing him. “Aren’t you cold?” she demanded. “You’re practically naked!” She shuddered, drawing the cloak more tightly around her shoulders. “I’m freezing.” She laughed. “Where did this come from?”
He shook his head, a little disgusted, if truth be known. Resigned. Amused. She was not the woman he had believed he married.
“What news?” he asked instead, offering her a hand.
She took it and let him pull her up, dusted off her tunic and leggings, and blew on her hands to warm them. Her fingers were red from cold. “It matters not how deeply I search. It’s as if my Eagle’s Sight has vanished. There are twenty Eagles with this army, yet none of us can see through the flames. We are blind.”
“I am no blinder than I was before.”
“True enough, my love, but I am blind, and I don’t like it because I don’t know what it means.”
“What it means to be blind? Like those of us who are not as gifted as you?”
She looked sharply at him, hearing the pinch in his words. “That isn’t what I meant at all! Eagle’s Sight gives us an advantage, nothing more. It gives a sense of surety that perhaps makes one overconfident. It’s as if a curtain has fallen across our vision, and we can catch only fragments and glimpses through a rip in the cloth. Was it the cataclysm that blinded us? Is it the haze and the clouds? Is it magic, woven by the Ashioi to cripple us? Was the Eagle’s Sight woven into the great crown in ancient days, and is it clouded because the crowns are fallen? I don’t know, and what I don’t know I can’t solve.”
“Are the crowns fallen?”
