Crusader. Novel by Sara Douglass

to leave the column alone.

Next morning, a sentry had alerted Axis to StarLaughter’s silent, ghostly presence in the snow some

hundred paces beyond the treeline.

She’d just stood there, ever silent, staring with unblinking eyes at the convoy as it prepared to move

for the day.

Axis had had her moved again, further this time.

Next morning she was back again.

Urbeth had roared and snarled, but StarLaughter had not blinked, nor moved, and after a

week of trying to drive her away, Axis had been forced to admit that nothing would work.

StarLaughter would use whatever power she had to return herself to her silent (hate-filled) vigil

a hundred paces away from the column.

Staring, staring, staring.

Stars knew what horror she’d bring down on the column! Axis did not know if

StarLaughter was still working in league with the Demons and the Hawkchilds, or if she had embarked

on a solitary quest for revenge. One night a sentry had reported that a strange shape — half bird, half

woman, strangely lumped and as black as the night itself — had been spotted stumbling its way through

the snow towards StarLaughter, but when Axis and a unit of men had ridden out to investigate,

StarLaughter was once more alone in the snow.

Albeit with the ghost of a smile on her face.

So Axis had done what he could within the convoy itself. There were always several units of men

detailed to keep an eye on StarLaughter — and for whatever horror she might call down out of the sky.

WolfStar and Zenith had finally been forcibly separated — to WolfStar’s fury — but Axis was not

leaving Zenith with WolfStar when StarLaughter, in all probability, had his daughter’s murder in mind.

Thank the Stars StarDrifter had not blurted out her name!

As Axis had men watching StarLaughter, so he also had an equal number of men watching Zenith, as

also WolfStar. Zenith to protect her; WolfStar to keep him away from Zenith.

WolfStar was incandescent with rage, Zenith was unhappy, StarDrifter spent his days in a turmoil of

guilt at the danger he’d placed Zenith in, and Axis was damned glad to spend the days hunting down

insane cows in the snow rather than spend time with his family!

“Gods, Azhure,” he muttered one day as he urged Sal into her slide through time and space, “I

miss you more than you could ever know. What a muddle our family has got itself into!”

From the edge of the Icescarp Alps Axis led the convoy ever south, Sal’s power sliding them across the

landscape at incredible speed. The Avarinheim was no more, obliterated by Qeteb’s rape of the land

when he’d first been resurrected, and Axis almost wept at the destruction. He had never been close to

the Avar, although they’d aided him in his final quest against Gorgrael, and he’d never been at

home in the forests, but the massacre of the trees deeply saddened him.

At night, when they camped, the trees surrounding the column murmured and shifted,

remembering not only what had been lost, but the pain they’d endured during their death.

And they whispered of revenge and of an accounting.

Here, in this drifting plain that had once been a forest full of song and enchantment and fey creatures,

the snow thinned and eventually disappeared, and the going became somewhat easier and, unbelievably,

even faster. In only two days Axis found himself approaching the valley that connected the Skarabost

plains with the Avarinheim (or what had once been the Avarinheim).

Axis reined Sal to a halt, his war band still some distance behind him, and sat, staring and

remembering.

Here he had chased Azhure and Raum, when he had still thought himself a BattleAxe.

Here he had seen the woman he’d later discovered was his mother.

Here he’d had his first real inkling that he was more, far more, than just BattleAxe.

Now? Now he was just a man carrying too much responsibility leading another war

band, and with yet more people to nurture and protect.

With a twist to his mouth, Axis waited for his war band and their accompanying trees, and led them

through the valley.

In the eastern Skarabost plains, the numbers and ferocity of the demented Demonic creatures were far

worse. Axis and his war band had been attacked by a force of some nine or ten thousand large creatures

— cattle, horses, bulls — almost the instant they’d emerged from the mouth of the valley alongside the

still-rushing Nordra River.

Without the trees, Axis knew they could very well have been overwhelmed.

His men fought well, but it was difficult to kill a cow or a bull, even with the sharpest of swords,

before it had a more than good chance of killing you, and Axis lost several score of men before the trees

roared in.

It was the only verb Axis could find to describe their action.

One moment they were fighting desperately, surrounded by a sea of maniacal livestock which had

grown horns and teeth far sharper than nature ever intended, when there was a rumbling and

roaring such as Axis had never heard before.

He’d twisted in his saddle, staring back towards the valley, and had been so amazed that he’d

left himself vulnerable to deadly attack from a cream and brown bull. If it hadn’t been for Zared’s

quick pike thrust, Axis would have died.

But at the time, Axis had no idea of what was going on behind him. All he could see were

the thousands of ethereal trees pouring through the gap of the valley mouth.

They were literally roaring, waving their branches wildly about the air in a crackling cacophony of

snapping twigs and leaves.

In an instant they fell upon the mob of animals, seizing them with hungry woody fingers and tearing

them apart with a crackle of snapping joints and rib cages.

Axis had time only for a few more strikes against the creatures himself before they were all

dead.

And when the animals were all dead, the trees stood there, literally shaking with emotion that was,

Axis thought, a sadness so deep that outsiders could only barely comprehend it.

Within the hour the column had joined them, and even Urbeth had stood shaking her head

at all the slaughter.

Ur had simply stood there, clutching her terracotta pot, and grinning from ear to ear.

Once Axis had buried the dead, he moved the war band and column to Sigholt.

The primary purpose for travelling to Sigholt was to collect Gwendylyr — Theod was a mass of

nervous impatience for the day it took them to move across the WildDog Plain and

through the Holdhard Pass — but there was more to it than that.

Gwendylyr had undoubtedly attracted hordes of creatures to Sigholt, and thus there would be good

exterminating there, as there had been at the valley mouth.

Sigholt was also Axis’ home, and he wanted to see it again … see if it had managed to survive the

Demons’ attentions.

What he eventually found made him bow his head and weep.

Sigholt had been utterly destroyed. Sigholt! Axis could not believe it. All the magic, the laughter, the

happiness, the memories; all had been turned to dust and rubble.

The bridge was gone.

The town of Lakesview was gone.

The lake itself was a dry, dusty bowl. (Axis was not to know that Gwendylyr’s victory at the Lake of

Life had at least turned the putrid virulence into more palatable dust.)

Everything had gone.

The war band had hung back as Axis slowly rode forward, tears streaming down his face. Even

Pretty Brown Sal hung her head as if in sorrow.

Axis let Sal pick her own way as she walked towards the pile of rubble that had once been

the enchanted castle. Gods, the memories! It hurt so badly Axis was not sure if he could bear it, and

just as he thought that, he became aware there was a woman standing at Sal’s shoulder.

So lost was he in his grief, Axis gave a great start, thinking it was StarLaughter come back to deal

him a mischief.

But it was Gwendylyr, one warm, comforting hand resting on his leg as she looked up at him.

“Trust in your son, and in my other four companions,” she said, “and you never know what

happiness we may achieve.”

Axis opened his mouth to say something, but then there was a thunder of hooves from behind him,

and a whoop, and then Theod was flinging himself down from his horse and grabbing Gwendylyr into his

arms.

Axis turned his head away, and stared at the rubble.

Chapter 54

A Troubled Night’s Dreaming

In the hour before dawn they had lifted from the cliffs and the heaps of rubble where they’d roosted

during the night, and they’d flown north, harking to StarGrace’s call.

He is here. He is here. He is here.