Kate Elliott - Crown of Stars 7 - Crown of Stars

VIP免费

2024-12-19 0 0 999.53KB 299 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

CROWN OF STARS

Crown of Stars Book 07

Kate Elliott

ARETHOUSA

PROLOGUE

BEYOND Gent, moving into the east toward the marchlands, the king's progress journeyed slowly

because of the immense damage caused by the great winds of autumn. Along the roads and in every

village they passed through the regnant heard the same desperate complaints: the farmers dared not plant

because frost kept coming long past its accustomed time; there was no sun; too little rain fell despite the

haze that covered the sky.

They ate on short rations and collected a meager tithe from the estates and villages they passed

through, but none among the king's progress complained, because they ate every day. Each afternoon

when they set camp and gathered wood for fires, folk approached the camp, materializing out of

woodland, out of the dusk, out of the misty night air.

"I pray you," a ragged child might whisper, clutching the hand of an emaciated younger child, both

barefoot although the ground had a sheen of frost. "Have you bread? Any crust?"

Haggard young women and youths beckoned from the twilight. "Anything you want, for a bite of

food. Anything."

Peddlers made the rounds. "Rope. Cloth. Nice carved bowls. For a good price. Very cheap. I'll

take food in trade."

Exhausted stewards and villagers begged to see the regnant. Noble lords and ladies grown lean with

hardship asked for an audience.

"A plague of rats, Your Majesty. They ate all of our grain. Even that we had set aside for seed.

Gnawed through half the leather we had tanned and worked. They came out of nowhere, a flood of

them. Horrible!"

"It's this frost. We daren't plant because it will kill the seedlings. Yet if we wait, there'll not be

enough season for the crops to ripen."

"Have you seen the sun on your travels, Your Majesty?"

"Wolves carried off a child, Your Majesty, and killed two of our milk cows. We hunted them, but

they attacked us when we tracked them to their lair. They killed four men. I'm an old man. I've never

seen them so bold as they are now."

"My husband and sons were killed, Your Majesty. They were only walking to market. I have no

one to plow the field. My daughters are just now barely old enough to be married. My husband's cousins

claim the land and wish to turn me and the girls out homeless, with nothing."

"Bandits, Your Majesty. No one is safe on the roads without an armed escort. I have but a dozen

milites in my service. The rest were called to serve King Henry, may he rest in peace in the Chamber of

Light. They never returned from Aosta."

Their desperation gave Liath a headache, but Sanglant would sit for hours and listen even and

especially when there was nothing he could do for them except listen.

"I have been told," he might say, "that if you cover the fields with straw it protects seedlings from

frost. There lies plenty of deadwood because of the tempest. Set bonfires at night to warm the air along

the rows."

"Here is a deed to the land, signed by my schola. If you have no nephews or kinsmen who can help

with the land, then here are a pair of crippled soldiers in my retinue who agree to marry into your house.

They can't fight, but together they can manage the fieldwork."

"Speak to Lady Renate of Spelburg. She is also plagued by bandits, no doubt the same group. Her

estate lies only two days' march east of here. You must pool your resources. If you have lost this much

of your population, then for the time being you must consolidate in one place. Offer protection there for

the common folk who rely on you. Combine your milites. If you do not cooperate, you will certainly

drown."

"The sun will return. Be patient. Act prudently until the crisis has passed. Do not abandon those who

will turn on you if they have no other way to save themselves."

These pronouncements his audience absorbed with an almost pitiable gratitude, but in only one case

could he act immediately. A guide led them to the wolves' lair. Liath called fire down within the warren of

caves where the wolf pack laired, and the soldiers killed over a dozen as the beasts tried to escape

flames and smoke. The wolves were dangerous predators, but they were beautiful, too, in the way of

dangerous things, and she hated to see them slaughtered like sheep. Yet afterward they found the

much-gnawed bones of several children in the outer cave. The wolves had grown too bold. Such a pack

could not be allowed to keep hunting.

"A small act in a desperate time," Sanglant said the next day, when they were riding again. His

voice was hoarse with apprehension and the helpless anger of seeing so much trouble that could

tear the realm asunder, but then, he always sounded like that. "I am ashamed to have them fall at

my feet with such praises. If the weather does not improve, half of them will be dead by next

spring."

"Eventually I must go to St. Valeria," she said. "What sorcery raised may possibly be

dispelled by sorcery."

"Stay with me a while longer, into the marchlands, at least."

"I will. But eventually I must go."

He nodded, although his expression was grave. "Leaving me with the dogs biting and growling

at my heels as I settle once and for all who is regnant in Wendar and Varre. Eventually you must

go. But not yet."

PART ONE

DEATH AND LIFE

TRAVELERS

ALL morning Alain and the hounds walked east and southeast as they had done for many days.

Lavas Holding lay far behind them. Their path this day cut along an upland forest, mostly beech although

what seedlings had thrust up through the field layer were fir. The view through the woods was open but

because of the clouds the vista had a pearly sheen to it, as though he were staring into a lost world just

out of reach. Into the past, or into the future.

Yet the present had an inevitable way of intruding into the finest-spun thoughts. Sorrow barked to

alert him. A massive beech had fallen over the path in such a way that although Alain might climb with

difficulty over its barrel of a trunk, he could not hoist the hounds up and across. Nor was there room for

them to squeeze through the hand's-width gap below. He beat out a track along the length of the trunk

upslope only to find that a score of other huge trees—more beech together with silver fir—had fallen

parallel so close that he was fenced in. Returning to the path and the waiting hounds, he ventured the

other way, skirting the thicket of branches at the crown, and discovered that here, too, more fallen trees

barred his path.

All had fallen in a northwesterly direction, snapped by a gale out of the southeast, the same tempest,

no doubt, that had swept Osna last autumn. That tempest had changed the world, and created a vast trail

of debris.

He pushed through the branches at the crown of the tree—a difficult path to break but one on

which, at any rate, the hounds could follow. Dry leaves crackled under his feet and dragged at his hair

and skin. Twigs poked him twice in the eye and prodded his limbs and torso. Sorrow whined, ears flat

and head down, and Rage picked her way with surprising delicacy for such a huge creature, very dainty

as she set down each paw into dying wood rush and the splintered remains of the tree.

The trunk was crowded with branches, a maze to confound the hounds, but the bole was negotiable

at this point, not as big around as the thicker trunk lower down. With his help they scrambled their way

through clumsily. Branches rattled. They were as noisy as an army of blundering farmers lost in the

woodsman's domain.

A sound caught him. A strange croaked cry made his limbs go stiff with apprehension. He heaved

Rage by the scruff past the worst of the inner branches, and there the hounds stood frozen within the

shelter of the branches. They did not bark. A large creature passed by, but they could not see anything

clearly through the screen of leaves and brittle branches, only hear its heavy tread, a snorting

under-cough, the uncoiling disturbance as branches were pressed back and either cracked, or sprang

back with a rattling roar. A smell like iron made him wince. Unbidden, he recalled Iso, the crippled

brother at Hersford Monastery. Had Iso survived the tempest? Did he work there still as a lay brother

under Father Ortulfus' strict but fair rule?

The noise subsided. Sorrow's tail beat twice against branches as he lifted his head, eager to get on,

but neither hound barked nor made the slightest noise. They struggled out of the branches and Alain beat

a way back to the path. About a hundred strides ahead he found the ground disturbed as at the wake of

a monster pressing through the forest. He knelt beside a scar freshly cut into the ground by claws as long

as his forearm and traced the curve of the imprint.

"A guivre," he said to the hounds. What they heard in his voice he did not know, but they whined

and, flattening their ears, ducked their heads submissively.

Sorrow sniffed along the trail left by the creature and padded into the forest, back the way it had

come. Rage followed. They vanished quickly, moving fast, and Alain went after them but soon fell

behind. He found them several hundred paces off the path, nosing the carcass of a half eaten deer. Like

him, they had eaten sparsely on their journey, dependent on what they could hunt in the woodland and

beg in whatever villages and farmsteads they passed through. Now, they tore into the remains. He sat on

a fallen tree and gnawed on the last of his bread and cheese. He trimmed mold from the cheese with his

knife and contemplated the buds on the standing beech. Frost had coated every surface at dawn, and he

still felt its sharp breath on his cheek although it was late spring and late afternoon. The cold chafed his

hands. An ache wore at his throat, as if he were always about to succumb to a grippe but never quite

managed to. The trees had not yet leafed out, although they ought to be bursting with green at this time of

year. A spit of rain brushed over them and was gone. Its whisper moved away through the forest.

At first hidden by the rustling of branches and forest litter stirred by raindrops, another sound took

shape within the trees. The hounds were so hungry that they cracked bones and gulped flesh and took no

notice, but at the moment he realized he heard a group of men, they growled and lifted their massive

heads to glare down the trail, back the way the monster had come from originally. He walked over to

stand beside them with staff in hand, listening.

"Hush, you fool! What if it hears your nattering?"

"We thunder like a herd of cattle as it is. We'll never sneak up on anything."

"Ho! Watch that shovel. You almost stove in my head."

"You should go in the lead, Atto. You've got the good spear."

"Won't! I never wanted to come at all. This is a stupid idea! We'll all be devoured and to no

purpose."

"Shut up."

He saw the men in the distance past fallen trees and shattered branches. They had not yet noticed

him, so he whistled to get their attention and called out before they could react in a reckless way that

might cause someone harm.

"I'm here," he said, "a traveler. The creature you seek passed by some time ago. I and my hounds

heard it pass."

They hurried forward. They were what he expected: a nervous group of local men armed variously

with spears, staves, shovels, and scythes and driven by one scowling big-boned man who walked at the

back of the group holding the only sword.

"Who are you?" he demanded, pushing forward through the rest but halting when he saw the size of

the hounds.

"I'm a traveler called Alain. I hope to find shelter for the night and continue my journey to Autun in

the morning."

"You saw the beast, yet live to tell the tale?" He indicated the carcass and the bloody muzzles of the

hounds. "Pray excuse me, friend, if I doubt your tale. None who see the beast live to tell of it."

"Has it killed human folk, then? What manner of beast is it that you stalk? Are you not feared to

stalk a creature that will kill you once you see it?"

Several of them scratched their beards, considering these questions.

The one called Atto was young, with but a scrap of a beard and an anxious way of glancing from

one side to the other. "That's right, Hanso. We just found the one dead man, and him stark naked and so

thin he more likely starved to death."

"He'd been gnawed on."

Atto shrugged. "Anything might gnaw on a dead carcass. A bear. Wolves. Wild dogs. Rats and

crows and vultures."

"What about the missing sheep and cows, then?" asked the leader belligerently. "How do you

account for those? We must protect ourselves."

"And get killed in the bargain?" Atto shook his head. "This is a fool's errand. I'm not going any

farther."

"Then you won't be marrying my daughter."

That arrow hit home. That the two men disliked each other was apparent in their stiff posture and

jutting chins, in the way the other seven men hung back as if fearing that a fistfight was about to erupt.

"Try and stop us!" said Atto with a smirk. "We'll walk to Autun. The lady is taking in men for

soldiers. They say she'll feed any man willing to carry arms in her service. We'll manage, and you'll not

be able to run after us and drag her back like you did last time. She's two years older now, old enough

to choose for herself."

"And pregnant with your bastard!"

Feet shifted, scuffing the dirt as each changed position. Hanso drew a fist back.

Rage trotted forward and sat down showily between the two. Her growl drew such a hush down

over the assembly that Alain clearly heard the tick of one of last autumn's dead leaves fluttering down

through branches as it fell at long last to earth.

"It's settled between us," finished Atto, flicking an uneasy glance at the hound.

"It will never be settled," muttered Hanso. But he lowered his fist and turned his scowling glare on

Alain. "What did you see?"

Alain described the encounter, and the men listened respectfully. "Have any of you seen the

creature?" he asked.

Nay, they had not, but rumor grew like a weed. The corpse of an unknown man discovered by a

holy spring. Missing ewes and cows since the autumn tempest that had blown down the trees and torn

the roofs off a dozen sheds and houses in the hamlets hereabouts. Both strong ploughing oxen, owned in

common by the villagers, gone and never recovered. The roof of their tiny church had cracked and fallen

in, and the deacon had been killed. Then noises echoed out of the forest, dreadful cries and frightful

coughs. The carcasses of deer, such as this one, had been found along animal trails disturbed by the

passage of a huge beast: more than twenty such dead animals and all of them crawling with maggots and

worms spat from the monster's mouth. Two months ago a party of refugees had staggered out of the

forest along the path and told of four of their number turned to stone and lost.

"Yes, but later that night we found them counting the sceattas they'd stolen from their dead

companions," noted Atto sarcastically, "so I'm wondering if they didn't just kill them and blame it on

something else."

"You think there's no beast out there?" Hanso demanded.

"There's a beast," said Atto with that same cutting smirk, "but it's as likely found in men's hearts as

stalking in the forest."

"You're a fool!" Hanso spat, but he kept an eye on Rage and did not attempt to brawl.

Some of the other men clearly agreed with this assessment of Atto's character, but Atto had the

good spear and a sarcastic tongue, enough to keep even the furious Hanso at bay. He had the pride of

youth and the reckless heart of a young man who is sure of himself, whether or not he is wrong. He had

gotten a woman pregnant, and sometimes that is enough to make a man feel that nothing can defeat him.

"It's a guivre," said Alain, noting how their gazes all leaped to him as though they had forgotten he

was there. "A guivre will do you no harm as long as you do not injure it. Leave it be, and it will hunt only

in the forest. Attack it, and you'll find yourselves turned to stone."

"You're as crazy as he is!" Hanso spat again, his anger turned easily from the one he could not

control to a new object. "Come!" he ordered his fellows. They were staring at Alain as though at the

beast itself, and with grumbling and muttering they shouldered their tools and set off back the way they

had come, kicking at debris, cursing the rain.

Atto lingered, studying the hounds. "Those things bite?"

"They do, if they're provoked. They'll defend themselves, that's all. Otherwise they're as mild as

sheep."

He snorted. "A good tale! Who are you?"

"I'm called Alain. I'm a traveler."

"So you said. Where are you from?"

"Osna. That's west, at the coast. It's five or ten days' walk from Osna to Lavas Holding. I've been

on the road ten or fifteen days since I left Lavas Holding."

"Never heard of it. What are you going to Autun for? To join the militia, like me? If you'll wait until

morning, me and Mara will walk with you. We know part of the way. Not that we've ever been there,

you understand. Have you?"

"I've seen Autun, yes."

"They say it's got so many houses you can't count them all. And a big wall, to hold them in. And a

cathedral tower so tall that up at the top you can rake your fingers through the clouds. They say it's a

holy place, where the old emperor died, the Salian one. I can't remember his name."

"Taillefer."

"That's right! Are you a learned man? A frater, maybe?" He rubbed fingers through his own coarse

stubble. "Nay, you've got a bit of a beard. You'd have to be clean shaven to be a churchman. Still." He

shrugged. "Bandits travel in wolf packs, and thieves skulk. So maybe you're just what you say you are.

A traveler. A pilgrim."

The hounds had settled down to demolish the dregs of the carcass. Alain had a bag woven of reeds

slung over one shoulder, and into this he placed some bones, still messy with bits of flesh and tough

tendon strings.

"Too bad you didn't get any of the meat," said Atto. "We could have roasted it. Deer are hard to

come by this spring. We're all afeard to go into the forest, not knowing what we'll find there. Can't

slaughter what livestock we have left, and even so we had a poor lambing season, no twins at all."

"This beast. Has it killed your cattle and sheep?"

"It hasn't come into our pasture and byre. Maybe it got those that wandered off. No one's

brave enough to track it to its lair." He coughed out a laugh as he gestured toward the north. "And I

won't be the one to find out! There's rough land that way. Deep forest. Wolves, they say. A lake,

though I've not seen it, and a ravine. That's where it hides." He had thick lips, blue eyes, and a funny

way of looking at other people, as if he didn't want to like them. "So they say. They don't really

know. They just talk and talk and do nothing but complain about their bad fortune and how ill luck

dogs the village and the frost still comes and the crops won't grow and how it'll be worse before it

gets better."

"Perhaps they're right. Have you seen the sun since last autumn?" The comment startled Atto.

He glanced heavenward, but there was nothing to see except the canopy of branches and the

leaden silver of the sky. "I'm not waiting around. I'm going to Autun, me and Mara. Things will be

better there."

WHERE the road forked, an impressive barrier made up of downed trees and the detritus of

shattered wagons lay across the northeasterly path. Hanna rode at the front of the cavalcade beside

Lady Bertha. They pulled up to survey the barrier.

"That's been built, however much it might resemble storm fall," said Bertha.

"There's a village down that path," said Hanna. "I recall it. They welcomed me when I was

riding for King Henry."

Bertha glanced at her, then at the barrier with branches sticking out at all angles and brittle

leaves rattling in the spatter of rain.

"Seems they're less welcoming now." Her gaze ranged farther afield, past the tangle of dense

thickets and an unexpected stand of yew that lined the roadside. Farther back one could tell that the

field layer lightened where tall beech formed a canopy. Drizzle dripped on them. Everything

dripped. Hanna wiped the tip of her nose.

"Ho! You there! In the tree!" Bertha had a strong high tenor, suitable for cutting through the din of

battle.

Hanna was not more startled than the lad in the yew, who slipped, grabbed branches, and gave

away his position where needles danced.

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

CROWNOFSTARSCrownofStarsBook07 KateElliott ARETHOUSA PROLOGUEBEYONDGent,movingintotheeasttowardthemarchlands,theking'sprogressjourneyedslowlybecauseoftheimmensedamagecausedbythegreatwindsofautumn.Alongtheroadsandineveryvillagetheypassedthroughtheregnantheardthesamedesperatecomplaints:thefarmers...

展开>> 收起<<

Kate Elliott - Crown of Stars 7 - Crown of Stars.pdf

共299页,预览60页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Kate Elliott - Crown of Stars 7 - Crown of Stars

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: