Crown Of Stars 07 – Crown of Stars – Elliott, Kate

^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}

 

 

^I

TRAVELERS

 

1

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.”

2

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.

“We want shelter for the night. I am Bertha of Austra and Olsatia, daughter of Judith, margrave of Austra and Olsatia, may her memory live in peace. I’m sister of the current margrave, Gerberga. I have with me members of the king’s schola. We’ve been months on the road. We’ve traveled north out of Aosta, over the Brinne Pass, and through Westfall. It’s been a long road that brings us at last to Avaria, and Wendar. We need shelter, a fire, and a meal, if you will.”

The tree was still again, then branches swayed and pitched and a shrill horn call rose on the wind with a blat like that of a frightened goat. The goats in their retinue bawled in answer. Their three dogs barked madly, and Sergeant Aronvald quieted them with sharp commands.

Bertha raised her eyebrows. She beckoned, and the sergeant—the captain was dead—trotted forward on the skewbald gelding.

“Be alert,” she said.

“Yes, my lady.” He called out orders.

The rear guard moved up to set a shield wall behind the three wagons. The men marching behind Bertha fell back to protect their flanks as the clerics ducked under the bed of the cargo wagon to hide themselves. It was an old routine, honed over months of travel.

Only a dozen horses remained plus the three stolid cart horses who got the best of the feed because without them they would have no way to pull those wagons. Three dogs trotted alongside, having been adopted by the soldiers as mascots and guardsmen. On the road, they had expanded their herd of goats from three to eleven and acquired stray chickens here and there whose bones and meat leavened the wild onion stew they often ate. It was on stew and goat’s milk and cheese that they mostly subsisted. On their long journey, the horses had fared worst, goats best, and humankind somewhere in between.

“Beyond this village, what?” Bertha asked.

Hanna considered. “The village itself is at the end of that path. There’s a small river twenty or thirty leagues downstream, that feeds into the Veser. The village lies within a bend of the river on higher ground, so water gives it protection on three sides. They have beehives. An orchard. A bean field. Oats. Spelt. No church, but a good carpenter and shop.”

 “And this way?” She gestured toward the other fork, which led north-northwest.

Rain trickled into Hanna’s mouth through her parted lips. “Another day’s ride or more to the palace at Augensburg.”

“Best to go on, then? A palace sounds more appealing than a village walled with storm wrack.”

“It’s burned down, my lady.”

“What’s burned down? The village?”

Hanna shuddered. “The palace, my lady. It burned down a few years back.”

“There must be a settlement beside it, a town made prosperous by palace traffic?”

Hanna shut her eyes. She fought as memories surfaced. She was hot all at once, sweating, but it was only the drizzle hardening into rain. “I don’t know, my lady. There might be.”

“Did it burn in the conflagration, too? Eagle, what ails you? It’s not like you to—” Bertha was a steady commander, but she had a temper. “Give me the information I need!”

Hanna discovered that her hands were shaking on the reins, and she had to tighten her knees to hold her horse in one place as it caught her mood. “I pray you, forgive me, my lady.” She spoke in a rush. “That town fell into the path of the army of the Quman. I don’t remember. I don’t know if any survived.”

A drum of footfalls and a scattering of shouts alerted them that someone lived still in the village beyond. Bertha raised a hand to ready her archers and spearmen.

Along the path came a trio of hardy men, each armed with the kind of weapons farmers make for themselves: one bore a staff sharpened to a point, one had a staff with a scythe bound securely to one end to make of it a halberd, and the third held an actual iron sword of the kind a lady’s guardsman might wield. He also had a length of board cut into a teardrop shape and fixed to his left arm as a shield, crude but effective and unmarked by any heraldic sigil.

It was this man who climbed atop one of the logs and regarded them with no smile and no welcome.

“You can’t come here. We’ve blocked the road.”

“We need shelter,” said Lady Bertha. “We are loyal subjects of the regnant, good Wendish folk all. I am escorting these holy men and Women who served King Henry as part of his schola. We have been months on the road out of Aosta. We ride north to Saony.”

“You can’t come in,” he said. “You might be carrying the plague. What’s in those wagons?”

“Feed for the horses. Supplies. Most importantly, we carry with us a holy abbess, aged and weak. She needs shelter and a warm fire against the frost that afflicts us every night.”

“A plague-ridden beggar, no doubt.” He was a stocky man with the broad shoulders and thickset arms of a man who works every day with his hands. “Or men with animal’s faces, hiding under the canvas. We can’t chance it.”

“You’re the carpenter’s son,” said Hanna suddenly. “I recognize you. I am a King’s Eagle. I sheltered one night in your village a few years back. Do you remember me?”

He sized her up. He had dark brown eyes, eastern eyes, they called it in these parts, a memory of raiders out of the east who had come and gone but left something of themselves behind in later generations. He shook his head, and seeing that he did not know her, she pushed back her hood.

“I was here with four Lions,” she added. “We’d come from the east.”

“Ah!” he said. “I recall that hair. You’re out of the north, so you said.”

“That’s where I was born. I pray you, friend, do not forget what courtesy is due to clerics and Eagles. Let us bide just this one afternoon and night. We’ll go on our way in the morning.”

“No.”

Lady Bertha pushed Hanna aside. “Give us shelter this one night, and porridge and ale, if that is all you have. In the name of Henry and his son, Prince Sanglant, I command it.”

He gestured toward her with his sword as if to ward off an evil spirit. “We will not fall for that trick a second time!”

“What trick?” asked Hanna.

His gaze shifted past her face, and she turned in the saddle to see that Sister Rosvita and several of the young clerics had walked forward through the mud to see what was holding them up.

“These are only a few of the clerics we protect,” Hanna added. “This is no trick. I pray you—”

“No!” He gestured. That horn call blatted again from deeper within the trees. Feet clattered on the earth. Branches rustled. “Go on! Go on!” He seemed furious, or near to tears. A scar blazed his forehead. One of his comrades was missing a finger on one hand, and the other was painted with a startling red rash across his cheek
and down one side of his neck. “No one will come in. We can trust no one.”

“I am a King’s Eagle!” cried Hanna indignantly.

“Where is the king and the king’s justice? It’s vanished, that’s what! You’ll get no shelter from us. We’ll fight if you try.”

“I’ve never been treated so disrespectfully by Wendish folk! Can it be you are not Avarians after all but creatures of the Enemy come to inhabit the bodies of decent people?”

“You would know, would you not, who speak of Henry’s bastard son! Spawn of devils!”

“Aronvald, make ready!” Bertha called.

The sergeant signaled. The archers raised their bows. The carpenter’s son called back to unseen folk in the forest and out of sight down the track, but he did not move to take shelter from arrow’s flight.

Sister Rosvita moved up to take hold of Bertha’s reins.

“Let be, Bertha,” she said in a pleasant voice.

“They owe us shelter!” said Bertha, but she looked down at the cleric, frowned, and lifted a hand. Archers lowered their bows, but did not otherwise shift.

“Look at his face,” said Rosvita. “He means what he says. He is desperate, fearful, determined. Yes, your good soldiers will win the skirmish. We are armed in leather and mail and have good iron swords and spears and six fine archers. But what if we lose even one soldier, if even one of my faithful clerics is wounded or killed when we have come so far over such a treacherous road. If we lose this Eagle, who guides us. For the sake of one night’s shelter, I judge it not worthwhile.”

Bertha grunted an answer, too angry to agree but too wise to object. Hanna fumed, but she, too, said nothing as the soldiers fell back into marching order and they moved on. The villagers gathered on top of the roadblock, staring, until the fork in the road was lost behind the trees and the contour of the road.

“How could you?” demanded Hanna at last. “They owe us shelter. …” She sputtered, too angry to continue.

Rosvita paced alongside them. The entire cavalcade moved slowly enough to accommodate the wagons, which seemed always to be half mired in muck, but in truth Rosvita had not weakened on this journey. She had grown wiry, strong enough to walk all day without flagging. She often commented, with surprise, how much better her aching back felt, although she slept on the ground most nights.

“I know that look in a man’s eye, Eagle,” she said now. “This is not a battle worth fighting.”

“What can have made them so desperate?”

Bertha snorted, half laughing. “War between neighboring lords. The Quman barbarians. Plague. The great storm. What else may have afflicted them I cannot tell.”

“I am puzzled,” said Rosvita, “by what he meant by men with animal faces. Why he turned against us when Lady Bertha mentioned Prince Sanglant. It makes no sense.”

‘Any man may shake his fist at the regnant when he suffers, and love the king when he prospers,” said Bertha dismissively. “Yet I wonder. We have seen few enough folk in these last weeks when we ought to have seen more. Seven abandoned villages. Children hiding in the woods without their parents. Freshly dug graves. Solitary corpses. This is not just famine at work.”

“What, then?” asked Rosvita.

Bertha shrugged. Hanna, too, had no answers.

^II

ARROWS IN THE


DARK

 

¹

IN the end they camped along the damp road. The next day when they rode into the ruins of Augensburg, Lady Bertha insisted they set up camp where they had at least some shelter against the unrelenting mizzle that Hanna could not quite bring herself to call rain.

In some ways, theirs was an impressive procession, with fifteen horses, three wagons, one noblewoman, eleven ragged clerics, fourteen stolid soldiers, one sequestered Kerayit shaman and her slave, the goats, the clucking chickens, and the steadfast dogs. Many had died after the battle with Holy Mother Anne’s forces: all of the Kerayit guardsmen, Sorgatani’s two slaves, and sixteen of Bertha’s war band. But since that day in Arethousa when Hanna had joined them, they had, miraculously, lost no one else and had sustained only one permanent injury, to a soldier whose right foot had been crushed when the smaller wagon had slipped sideways down an incline at the side of a mountain path while he walked alongside.

Two men scouted for the water supply while Sergeant Aronvald set up a perimeter around the remains of the stone chapel attached to the palace. The wagon wheels were braced against rocks and the
horses taken out to graze, water, and roll. Soldiers tossed tiles out of the ruins of the chapel to make room for sleeping while some of the clerics rigged up canvas to shelter the apse where the altar had once stood. Brother Breschius emerged from the Kerayit cart. Carrying two covered bronze buckets, one riding light and the other heavier, he walked toward the rear of the palace compound where kitchens once stood.

Lady Bertha paused beside her. “Will you come with me, Eagle? Sister Rosvita and I mean to look through the ruins of the town to see if there’s anything we can scavenge.” A trio of soldiers loitered behind her, chafing their hands to warm them.

“I’ll walk through the palace ruins,” said Hanna. “If I may.”

“A good idea. No telling where the rats are hiding. Come!” The last was addressed to her retainers. They left.

After rubbing down her horse and turning it out with the others, Hanna walked through the ruins of the palace. Fallen pillars striped the ground. She traced corridors and rooms reduced to outlines on the ground. A strange feeling crawled along her skin, like fire that warmed but did not burn. She had walked here with Bulkezu and his brother Cherbu. In this place Cherbu had discovered the name of the woman whose sorcery had consumed the vast building.

“Liathano,” she said softly. She shut her eyes and listened, but all she heard was the hiss of a light rain on the ruins and the grass and the rattle of wind in the distant trees. This was a dead place.

“What happened to the town?” asked Brother Fortunatus, coming up beside her.

She coughed and jumped.

“I beg your pardon!” he said, chuckling a little as he touched fingers to her elbow. “I did not mean to startle you.” She offered him a false grin, but he narrowed his eyes. “What ails you, Hanna? Ghosts?”

From this vantage point they could see most of the town below, a skeletal presence rising in the midst of deserted fields and the outraged wreck of a substantial orchard. A number of trees had fallen, most likely torn down by the storm. Dusk-drawn mist drifted along the broken palisade.

“Not ghosts, but memories. Ghosts enough, I suppose, if memories haunt us.” She swallowed and found even that trifling movement caught and choked her.

“Memories are the worst ghosts of all.” His hand curled around her elbow, and the gesture gave her courage.

“Years ago. The Quman army rode through this place when I was their captive. There are no good memories for me here.”

“I’m sorry. Did they burn the town?”

Meadow grass and fescue had swept over the ruins, grown everywhere they could take root. Hawthorn and twining canes of raspberry had found a foothold as well. Nettles thrust up where the last stains of ash mottled the earth. Soon The Fat One would overtake what the princes had built and cover it in flowers, although only a few dusky violets bloomed now.

“It’s late in the season for violets,” she said, pointing to a spray of delicate petals.

He cocked his head, considered her, then followed where she led. “It’s the cloud cover. I fear we’ll face a late growing season. And a short one.”

“I forgot about the town,” she added. “I don’t know what happened to the town. After the palace burned, it was still standing. The flames never touched the town. We took shelter there that night, all of us in the king’s progress. King Henry stayed in the hall of a prosperous merchant, slept in the man’s own bed. How can that all be gone? Where did it go? Did Bulkezu burn it down? I don’t remember.”

An odd spark of color caught her eye and she knelt and swept aside chaff and dirt and ash and the detritus of years of abandonment to uncover a brass belt buckle shaped in the form of a lion.

“Look here! I wonder if it belonged to one of the Lions who died in the fire.” She looked up. Fortunatus was smiling sadly down at her. He had gotten leaner, cutting his face into sharper planes, but somehow more kind. If Bertha was the goad that drove them and Rosvita the sustenance that gave them heart to keep going, then Fortunatus was the arm that steadied Rosvita whenever she faltered.

“Liath burned down the palace,” she said, although he asked nothing. “Hugh attacked her. He meant to rape her. She was so scared. She called fire. She never meant to. Her fear burned down the entire palace. She killed a dozen or more people.”

“I know, Hanna,” he said gently. “I was here when it happened”

“Ai, God, of course. Of course. I forgot. I came late. We came over the hill, the Lions and I. We saw the smoke. That was, Ingo, Folquin, Leo, and young Stephen, who wasn’t a Lion yet but he wanted to become one. …” Once started, she could not stop herself, not even when the story wound into that terrible captivity among the Quman. She babbled on for a time while Fortunatus waited and
nodded and listened and murmured the occasional meaningless word to show that it mattered to him that these memories overwhelmed her.

In time as the drizzle melted away to become a gauze of mist ghosting up from low-lying ground, the rain of words abated.

“I’m sorry” she said.

He smiled in a way that warmed her heart, offered her a hand, and helped her to rise. “We all must speak sometime. You endured much.”

“Not as much as others. Not as much as those who died.”

“No use comparing, unless you were the one who chose who lived and who died.”

His hand touched her shoulder, but a ghost clutched her heart. She remembered Bulkezu’s voice as clearly as if he stood beside her. “Mercy is a waste of time. If I choose, I will leave ten behind for the crows.”

“It was always ten,” she whispered. “For them, life. And for the rest, death.”

“It was not truly your choice, Hanna. If you had not chosen, then ten more would have died. At least you saved ten where you could. You must forgive yourself. I pray you.” He had tears on his cheeks.

“Thank you, Brother.”

He kissed her on the forehead as a benediction. He was a cleric, after all, able to plead with God on behalf of those who have repented and those who suffer although they are innocent.

From here they could see the flickering light cast by the fire although not the fire itself, tucked away within the stone walls of the chapel. One of the soldiers laughed, another Stephen, an older man who had ridden for years with Lady Bertha. She knew all their laughs now, their favorite swear words and curses; she knew Ruoda’s confident way with the dogs and Gerwita’s fear of the big boarhound called Mercy, Jerome’s shy way of stammering when he had to speak with more than two people paying attention to him and the dry sound of Jehan’s constant nagging cough. She knew each silhouette, such as the one ambling along a fallen length of wall as aimlessly as a sheep.

“Strange,” she said.

“What is strange?”

“I never think to count Princess Sapientia, although surely she must be counted before all others in our party. Even Lady Bertha forgot to mention her when those farmers refused to let us pass.”

He turned to look where she looked. Sister Petra caught up with her charge and herded her back toward the safety of the chapel and the fire.

“What will become of her?” Hanna asked.

Fortunatus only shook his head, but she could not tell whether the gesture meant “I do not know” or “may God have mercy” or “all hope for her is lost.”

A shout rang out of the twilight. They turned to see five shadowy figures and the three dogs striding along the road that led from the town. The tautness of those shoulders and the cant of those heads told of trouble.

Hanna ran to meet them, but Lady Bertha brushed past her and hurried on toward the camp with the three soldiers. Sister Rosvita halted, took hold of Fortunatus’ arm, and bent to catch her breath.

“Whh!” She gripped her side as at a spasm, but when she saw Sister Petra shepherding Princess Sapientia within the walls of their makeshift fort, she frowned. “Best hurry. What of the men who went to the well?”

Without waiting for their answer she climbed on, and Hanna and Fortunatus followed, looking at each other. There was nothing to say. As they picked their way through the fallen remains of the portico, they heard Lady Bertha speaking.

“Bring the horses up. We’ll need a guard on them all night. I want those men sent to fetch water called in, and a double sentry all night.”

“What’s wrong?” asked Hanna.

From this angle the slope of the hill hid the town. It was by now too dark to see the fields as anything distinct, only alternating shades of gray in patches that ended abruptly in the darker line of trees.

“The orchard trees were chopped down, not blown down,” Rosvita said, still wheezing. “Fresh sawdust from the chopping, scattered everywhere. The mist hid the pockets of smoke. This fire and destruction is recent. The town might have been attacked yesterday.”

“God have mercy,” murmured Fortunatus, drawing the circle at his chest.

“Were there corpses?” Hanna asked. ‘Any survivors?”

“We did not search closely. If an enemy waits in the forest, they know we’re here. Morning will be soon enough.”

A whistle carried on the breeze, a silky, twisting tune Hanna had
never heard before. Soldiers came alert. Swords were drawn and arrows measured against bowstrings. A rank of spears lowered. Yet the dogs barked in greeting not in challenge. The figure who emerged out of the ruins carried two covered buckets, one sloshing with water and the other empty. Brother Breschius set his buckets down beside the painted cart and turned, seeking first one face then another.

“What is it?” he asked.

“You found the well?” asked Lady Bertha.

“I did. Set somewhat back where the hill is steep. I came through Augensburg many years ago. I recalled it because of a particular . . .” He shook his head. “What is it?”

“Laurent and Tomas went before you. Did you see them there?”

“No sign of them. Did they know where to look? They might be lost in the ruins.”

“Did you hear anything?”

“What is it?” he asked again.

When they told him, he rubbed his clean-shaven chin with the stump of his right arm as if he had momentarily forgotten that he lacked the hand.

“Do we send out a search party?” asked Sergeant Aronvald.

By now night had swept in. Beyond the halo lent by the campfire it was impossible to see anything except the wall of darkness that marked the distant line of trees.

“They can see our campfire,” said Lady Bertha. “They can shout, if they are injured.”

She was a hard commander. Hanna had seen her drive her men over mountain paths more suitable to goats, had seen her set her own noble shoulder to pushing the wagons where the road became nothing more than a series of dry rills dug into earth by runoff. She had suffered an injury in the infamous battle against Anne’s forces that no one would talk about in detail, and had lost most of the range of motion in her left arm, but if the injury pained her day in and day out she never complained. Yet she never smiled, and her frown dug deep as she faced her muttering retainers.

“If they have been ambushed, then sending out a search party will only offer our adversaries more swift kills. If they are lost, and in no danger, they can find us by the light of the campfire or at dawn.”

“There’s some rough ground back there,” said Brother Breschius. “A defile, a few drops where the ground falls away. This palace was built to take advantage of the high ground. They might have fallen.”

Her expression did not change. “They might have. If so, it is unlikely in this darkness we will find them. We’ll search at dawn.”

She looked at Sister Rosvita. After a moment, with genuine reluctance, Rosvita nodded to show she agreed. Hanna looked past the two women to the fire where Sister Petra had gotten her charge seated and was fussing to get her to drink broth out of the stewpot.

Princess Sapientia stared into the flickering fire. She did not look as if she had lost her mind. She did not act as would a madwoman, babbling and cursing and flailing her arms in the manner of the moon-mad who had lost their wits, or spitting and frothing at the mouth as might a soul possessed by a demon. She just did not speak and did not respond and seemed to have cut the thread that binds one person’s actions to those of her companions, which threads are all that stitch the world of living things into a single fabric of being. She acted as if she were already dead.

“Pull the two cargo wagons across the open side,” Bertha was saying. “Fix shields to cover what they can. Set men up where they can watch along the height of the wall on the other sides. Yes, even up there, in those rafters that can take their weight.”

“Eagle.” The sergeant addressed her. “First watch, if you will, out at the second line of wall. Keep a particular eye out for will-o-the-wisps, any strange glamour of light. Listen hard.”

The other Stephen joined her about fifty paces out from the opening of the chapel, where a low stone wall made a protected vantage point. He was a good dozen or more years older, pale-haired, blue-eyed, steady, smart, patient, and tough.

They braced themselves a body’s length apart to get the broadest view of the slope of the fore hill and the lower ground, all lost in night. In good weather they might have marked the passing of time by the rise and fall of the stars, but as it was they just sat, watching and listening. Now and again a shimmer of rain passed over, but it always faded. It was silent and cool. He shifted occasionally, feet scraping on the ground. For some reason her hands ached, and twice she inhaled a curious scent of charred wood melded with the acrid flavor of juniper.

Stephen said, “did you hear that?”

“No.”

Night noises, nothing more: a brief hiss of rain, the crackle of branches where the wind stroked them. The shifting and settling of the earth as it cooled. A cold breeze poured out of the heavens, seeming to drop right down on them from the height of the sky.

We are alone in the world, she thought.

And then: All things are alone, yet nothing is alone, it is all tangled together, woven as in a weir to create an obstacle or diversion or as in a tapestry to make out of its parts a vision of a greater whole.

She felt Stephen’s presence, how he shifted to find a more comfortable position for his right knee, how he stifled a cough by turning it into a grunt. She felt the pool of air beyond where the land sloped away downward. She smelled the sparks and ash of the wood fire and the aroma of horsehair and horse piss and horse manure. A man coughed, back in the shelter of the chapel.

She yawned, swaying, and slipped into that semi-alert twilight state that is neither waking nor sleep.

The wind picked her up as if she were a downy feather, and she spun away across the ruins, across a river, across forest and distant hamlets and stretches of meadowland and woodland farther and farther still, uncounted leagues flashing beneath her until the landscape that fell away under her feet was grass and only grass, pale in the dawn twilight. There comes blindingly and amazingly a glimpse of the rising sun tinted blue behind a veil of dust as it shoulders up over a golden-green horizon of grass. A procession moves at a steady pace through this grass, strange folk with almond-shaped eyes and eastern complexions. Some are Quman, wearing feathered wings attached to their armored coats; some are women whose hips flow into and become the bodies of horses. One is a shaman stippled with the tattoos of his kind, the spirit companions whose magic he can call on at need. She follows them. They are taking her where she needs to go.

Where a silver river ribbons in long looping curves across the golden landscape, the land sinks into a marshland of tall reeds and shallow pools of standing water. Beyond, paler grass grows in clouds like mushrooms, but these are, after all, tents sighing in the wind. The camp wakens. Its inhabitants crowd onto the margins to mark the group that approaches them.

Far above, a shrill cry reverberates. A woman who is also a mare turns and sights and points, calling to her companions to warn them, then raises her bow and releases an arrow into the sky. It burns, and Hanna tumbles. Tumbling, she sees griffins spinning above her, one gold and one silver, flying east toward the dark spires of distant mountains. They pass over her, and she twists and finds herselfwading in ankle-deep water, pressing through reeds,
scratched by blades of grass as she pushes up out of the shallows onto dry land that at first sinks beneath each step and then dries and stiffens to dusty earth and a sheen of green-gold grass so fresh and new that it smells of spring.

“We return,” says the centaur who leads the others. She stands in the center of camp, where the grass is flattened in a circle. “We have seen terrible things. Our ancient enemy has returned.”

“Where is the child?” asks the Quman shaman.

“Gone, gone,” the others sigh, shaking their heads. “Vanished from underneath the hill.”

“Where has she gone?”

They do not know.

“Where is the Holy One?” asks the centaur woman who leads the newcomers. “I am charged with a message for her.”

The Holy One walks slowly, favoring her hind legs in a manner that makes it obvious each step brings intense pain. She is not silver-white but rather so old that every hair has turned gray; she is so old that it is impossible she still lives. Magic has kept her alive all this time.

Her ears flick. “You have returned, Capi’ra, young one. What message? What news?”

The herd listens in intent silence as the story is told, and Hanna hears the news she has sought for so long: Liath is alive, traveling with Prince Sanglant. Except now he is king. Henry is dead.

She wipes her eyes, but the tears keep flowing. She touches to her lips the emerald ring he gave her, but even that gesture gives her no comfort.

King Henry is dead.

A great cataclysm has shaken the Earth.

“War is coming,” says Li’at’dano. “The ancient paths along the burning stone are closed to me now. The aether is too weak to hold those paths open for more than glimpses. So this is the first I have heard of these events. This changes everything. We are too distant to aid those who would be our allies.”

“I am here!” calls Hanna.

Li’at’dano’s head raises in surprise. At first, seeking, she does not find Hanna among the herd, but at last, spying her hidden in the grass, she nods. Hanna steps into the open.

“Luck of Sorgatani,” the centaur shaman says, but where she looks none of the others can see anything. Not even the Quman shaman can see her. He stares, he seeks. The others stare, they listen, but Hanna understands that only the Holy One can see and hear her because Hanna inhabits this land as a part of that dream known solely to the Kerayit sorceresses, who are bound to the Horse people by threads woven in the time long ago.

“What news?” Li’at’dano asks her.

Quickly, Hanna tells her what she knows: the battle between Anne and Liath fought by the standing stones and reported to her by Bertha and Sorgatani; the fiery tempest as seen by Bertha’s party and by Hanna and the clerics within the Arethousan army; the destruction along the coast that wiped out the imperial city of Arethousa; the little band that has trudged through mountains and forest across a vast distance to reach Wendar at last. She is an Eagle, trained to distill and to report.

“Why are you come to me? Where is my daughter, Sorgatani?”

“Sorgatani sleeps in her cart. I am on watch. We fear enemies may stalk us, robbers or outlaws. The wind carried me here. I don’t know why.”

“Hai!” The Quman shaman points to the heavens. “Beware!”

Smoke curls up into the heavens, dirty streamers against the white-blue sheen of the sky. Distant shouts ring. Horses trumpet in alarm.

“Raiders have set fire to the grass!”

“Where are they? What happened?”

“They wear the faces of animals!”

Li-at’dano staggers as if she has been shot. Horse people and their Kerayit clansmen bolt into action. The swirl catches Hanna, spinning her away as on a rising plume of smoke.

“Beware!” the Quman shaman cries again.

A hiss burns her cheek.

Aie! Unh!”

Stephen’s shout yanked her back into the night shadows. In the camp, the dogs barked furiously, whining and growling. At first, she could make sense of nothing except that it was night. The air tasted of rain, but no drops struck her.

A second hiss teased her ear. The air trembled, displaced, and as if it had sprouted there, an arrow quivered in the ground a finger’s width from her left knee.

That woke her.

“Unh! Unh! Ai, God! God!”

Stephen had fallen onto his back. She flung herself down alongside him. Blood coated his shoulder. A shaft protruded from his flesh. A third arrow whistled overhead.

Attack! Attack!” She jumped to her feet, got her hands under his good arm, and dragged him backward. He was a big enough man that he ought to have been difficult to pull along, but he pushed with his legs and anyway she was racing in her heart, every limb on fire and her face flushed and her breath catching in her throat. Lady Bertha shouted commands, barely heard above the clamor of the dogs, and not soon enough Hanna stumbled into what shelter the half fallen walls of the chapel offered. Other hands grabbed Stephen and hauled him away. She sank down on her knees, bent over her thighs, and tried desperately to catch her breath. Little thunks peppered the other side of the wall as the enemy shot at them from the safety of the darkness.

By the light of red coals simmering in the fire pit, she measured their position. The dogs swarmed around Lady Bertha’s feet, yapping and circling. A dozen soldiers were ranged around the chapel, a few fixed up on the wall, others braced behind the wagons or the shields. One man cut away at the arrow in Stephen’s shoulder.

“You’ve suffered worse, old friend!” the surgeon joked. “You’re just wanting a scar to impress new lovers—”

Stephen gagged, stiffened, and went into convulsions, twisting right out of the other man’s grasp. Hanna stumbled forward, dropped beside him, and held him down, but when the fit passed, he stopped breathing and fell slack.

Dead.

The other soldier—it was Sergeant Aronvald—looked up at her, eyes wide with disbelief. “That shouldn’t have killed him.”

Hanna touched the shaft where it met the skin. She circled it with her finger, then sniffed. “Poison, perhaps. Or magic.”

“Poison!”

She wiped her moist skin on the dead man’s leggings, then for good measure in the dirt, rubbing it and rubbing it to make sure it all came off.

On the wall, a man cried out. “Uhng! Damn. Scraped me, but I’m still good.” She saw him only as a shadow. He twisted the arrow in his hand and set it to the string.

“So far no sign of any but these damn arrows out of the dark,” said Bertha from the corner where wagon met stone wall. She hushed the dogs.

“Best smother what remains of the fire,” said Hanna, not realizing she had a voice.

The coals gave only enough light to distinguish one form from another. The horses had been moved back to the raised dais where the altar had stood. Their hooves rang on stone as they shifted nervously under the control of Bertha’s groom Geralt, Sister Ruoda, and Brother Jerome, who calmed and comforted them. The skewbald kept his head, nipping younger horses who wanted to kick up a fuss. Canvas had been rigged to form a measure of shelter against rain.

Sorgatani’s cart was set against the right-hand wall. Tracery gleamed on its painted walls, patterns that to Hanna’s eyes seemed to slowly unravel and knit together. The goats had been tied up on a line behind it, and they protested with a constant chorus of bleats.

Under the Kerayit cart they had shoved Mother Obligatia’s pallet. Others huddled there with her, as many of the clerics as could fit: sobbing Gerwita, Petra and Princess Sapientia, Hilaria, Diocletia, slight Jehan. Heriburg was wedged between cart wheel and stone wall stubbornly sharpening willow wands into pointed sticks which might be used as weapons in close quarters if all else failed. Hanna could not see Sister Rosvita or Brother Fortunatus.

“Let us pray they get bored and fade back into the woods,” murmured the sergeant.

“Ai! Ai! What fire burns me!”

The man up on the wall who had been scraped by arrow shot roared in pain, thrashed, and tumbled. He did not fall more than ten feet, but he fell hard and wetly and lay dead still. His bow smacked into the dirt beside his body. The terrier trotted over to him, sniffed the glistening tip of the arrow that had felled him, and backed away growling.

The sergeant looked at her, and she looked at him. He scrambled for the fallen man, pressed his own head down over the other man’s head. For a moment no arrows struck the stone; only the wind wept among the ruins.

He flung back his head. “My lady! Lady Bertha! I fear these points are poisoned. Any scrape, any strike, will kill us. Ai, God have mercy!”

An arrow clacked against the wall.

“I’m hit,” said Jerome, from among the horses.

Every person startled, as if his words were a blow. For the longest time, no one moved or spoke as from the night came no fresh
shower of arrows. Even the scrape of Heriburg’s knife ceased. Rain clattered in the trees.

Or was that rain? Pebbles shaken in a gourd might make such a sound. Whining, the dogs slunk under the wagons.

A man’s scream rose out of the night. No one moved. They were all afraid of exposing themselves to an arrow’s poisoned barb. The cry cut off. The rainlike sound ceased.

“That was Wilhelm,” said the sergeant. “At the first wall, twenty paces out.”

The men stared into darkness. They were nothing but silhouettes, barely visible. Spears and swords and bows had no more substance than branches. When the next flight of arrows poured in, anyone might be scratched, and die.

Hanna stood. “Under the wagons. Under shields. Under canvas, any cover at all. Cover your faces. No matter what you hear, don’t look. Be blind.”

“We can’t fight if we’re blind and hiding!” said the sergeant.

The enemy didn’t have their range quite right. Half the next volley snapped on stone and a dozen arrows skittered along the canvas awning, but one buried its point into the dirt an arm’s length from the sergeant and another skipped across Lady Bertha, but surely her mail had protected her.

“Ai, God!” cried the sergeant. “Are you hit, my lady?”

Bertha’s face was pale, but Hanna could not tell if the arrow had drawn blood. She did not answer.

Above, another soldier shrieked. “Ai! Ai! I’m hit!”

Two dropped out of the wall. “Peter’s touched! We’re like trapped ducks there, strung up for market day!”

“It burns!” screamed Jerome, and Ruoda began sobbing and wailing, “No, no, Jerome! God! I pray you! Spare him!”

“Down!” cried Hanna, and Bertha answered her.

“Down! All of you! Take cover! Cover your faces! Do as the Eagle says!”

Hanna ran to the cart, not waiting to see if they obeyed her, although she heard them scrambling. The shaking rain began again.

They are advancing.

She pulled open the door and shoved past Brother Breschius, who was poised a hand’s breadth from the threshold. Out of the darkness, cries rose from inhuman throats, but their battle cry was a name she recognized:

“Sanglant! Sanglant!”

“Sorgatani! We’re lost if you do not come now! We have no defense against their weapons. I pray you! I do not know what enemies these are—”

“I know who they are.”

The Kerayit shaman was bright in her golden robes, beautiful and terrible. Her expression was cold. In one hand she clutched an anklet of bells. She said nothing as Hanna stepped aside to let her pass.

“Hanna,” said Breschius. “Don’t ask this of her.”

“She must go, or we’ll all die.”

Sorgatani crossed the threshold and descended the stairs, shaking the slave’s bells like an amulet in front of herself. There was power in her. Her robes captured the fading light of the coals and shone with a dull gleam whose trail left a ghastly miasma along the ground, almost a living, breathing, crawling mist of shimmering copper intertwined with mottled patches of blood-red vapor.

“This is a terrible thing,” murmured Breschius. “I cannot watch.” He hid his eyes against a forearm.

Hanna went to the door. One of the horses had fallen, and in its screaming and thrashing had driven the other horses out beyond the aisle, where they milled about in the open chapel. Jerome’s body lay trampled under their hooves. Of the groom and Sister Ruoda, Hanna saw no sign, nor of anyone, not one except a half dozen pairs of feet and two rumps peeping out from beneath the canvas awning, pulled down on top of them, and shapes huddled under the wagons and the shields. Sorgatani whistled softly, and every horse quieted. The dogs fell silent. Even the goats ceased their complaining.

Movement flashed by the narrow gap where the cargo wagon met wall. At first, Hanna thought it was their enemy, come to fight at close quarters. Then, horribly, she saw otherwise.

Lady Bertha staggered into view, leaning against the wall, struggling although there was no sign of a wound on her. Her grin was lopsided, as though half of her face had already lost mobility and feeling.

“Ah! Ah!” she said, in gasps of pain as she tried to speak words to the golden presence approaching her. “Too late for me. Too late. Blooded. But I had to see. I always wondered what you looked like. So beautiful!”

She sagged, slipped down onto her knees, and slumped against the wall, eyes still open but staring sightlessly.

Sorgatani walked past without faltering, through the gap. Hanna ran to the sheltering line of wagons. Sorgatani walked into the darkness. She was her own lantern. The mist boiled out from under her
robes, streaming down the slopes in a flood that insinuated itself into every fold of ground, every crevice and gap of the ruins.

Their cries changed at first into those of unknown animals heard at a distance in a trackless forest: faint, clipped, despairing. A few arrows flew. None touched the Kerayit woman. Figures darted among the low walls, but they dropped in their tracks as Hanna watched in astonishment. They could not outrun the sorcery that stalked them. Where it touched them, they died, until that light washed the ruined palace and the slopes of its hill, everything Hanna could see, like the moonlight she had not seen for months but turned here into a curse not a blessing. The color was wrong, a haze of corruption.

Hanna stood at the breach. The wind had died. In all that world she heard each footstep as Sorgatani circled back and circumnavigated the chapel to flush out anyone hiding behind.

Even that noise failed, as if she had fallen deaf and the world gone mute.

She stumbled out, cautious of her feet, seeing shapes tangled on the ground where they had fallen, and sought through the weeds and stone until she found Sorgatani awash in a pool of pale light shrinking around her. She was kneeling. Retching. Braced on her hands, shoulders heaving as she coughed and spat.

Hanna crouched beside her but did not touch her. “Sorgatani?”

The light contracted, stealing back into her robes. Ribbons of angry brilliance twisted along the ground like brilliant snakes but these, too, faded. At last they waited together in night. A slight, copper gleam still shone from Sorgatani’s palms but otherwise shadow covered them.

“The curse is real,” Sorgatani said in a hoarse whisper. Hanna could make no sense of her expression. Was she resigned? Triumphant? Appalled? Detached?

“You saved us,” Hanna said.

The shaman rose, staring at her shining palms. “I am a weapon the Cursed Ones do not know and cannot remember. My kind was not yet bound to the Horse people, our mothers. Do you think it is for this we Kerayit were made?”

“It is only a few of you who are so cursed.”

“It needs only a few.” She did not look at Hanna. All the Eagle saw was her troubled profile, eyes and brow tightened with disquiet, lips pressed firm, and the golden net of wire and beads that covered her black hair gleaming uneasily where the light gilded its webbing.

“Can the Horse people have been planning for so long?”

Sorgatani looked at her, half laughing, half grim. “Can they not have been? The Holy One is as old as the exile of the Cursed Ones is long. She must have wondered if they would return, if the spell might weave itself with its own pattern, unknown to us until it was too late.”

“What will you do?” Hanna did not want to walk in the morning out among the dead. She did not want to make an accounting. Yet it would be done.

“Make sure ours are still hiding. I must go to my cart.”

Back to her exile. Her prison.

For the first time, Hanna really understood what it meant. Even Sorgatani’s slaves had more freedom than she did.

2

AT
first light they crawled out from under the wagons and gathered their dead: the archers Peter and Rikard; Brother Jerome; Aurea, Rosvita’s beloved servingwoman; Stephen and Wilhelm and Gund who had been out on sentry duty. It wasn’t clear if Gund had been killed by the enemy or by the curse, because he was quite a ways away, caught in the midst of a group of warriors as though they had captured him and dragged him off still alive.

It scarcely mattered now. Lady Bertha was dead, and their enemy wiped out. They gave up counting enemy dead when they reached nineteen. There was some talk of burning the corpses, but no one wanted to touch them because these were creatures who appeared scarcely human. They had bronze-colored complexions and frightening animal masks and bronze body armor, molded to fit the slopes of their bodies as good masons built cunningly along the contours of hills. In truth, no one wanted to take their weapons or steal even such a trove of armor. No one wanted anything except to leave as quickly as possible. Sister Rosvita told them that the convent of Korvei lay ten or twelve days’ journey from here, in the borderlands between the duchies of Avaria and southeastern Fesse. From Korvei they could head north toward Quedlinhame and Gent, or west to Autun.

Hanna helped dig two graves, one for the soldiers and Jerome and Aurea, and a separate pit for Lady Bertha. Sister Rosvita and the older nuns stripped her and wrapped her in her cloak; in this fur-lined shroud they buried her. Rosvita sang the blessings over the dead. Bertha’s seven surviving soldiers wept. Everyone wept, all but Hanna, who had no tears, and Mother Obligatia, who had seen too much death to be scoured even by this.

“How comes it that those who attacked called the name of Prince Sanglant?” asked Sergeant Aronvald.

“I do not know,” said Rosvita.

“They’re like him in looks. His kinfolk.”

“It’s true,” she agreed, looking troubled.

“Think you he has betrayed us?” asked the sergeant.

“You traveled with him last of all, Sergeant. What do you say?”

He stared at the mound of dirt. “My lady trusted him. Yet the creatures did call his name. How could they know it, if he was not in league with them? Yet my lady would not put her trust in one who meant to betray her.” He glanced sidelong at Princess Sapientia, who remained mute and emotionless, like a puppet dangling from slack strings. “Better if this one had died, than our bold lady,” muttered the sergeant, but he was careful to pitch his voice so only Hanna heard him.

Afterward, as they saddled and harnessed the horses, as they wedged their supplies into place and made ready to leave, Hanna saw how they looked at the painted cart in their midst.

They feared her, who had saved them.

“Eagle.” Rosvita beckoned her over, and they walked apart, shying away from a dead man masked behind a lizard’s snout. Fortunatus stood rear guard.

“What is it?” asked Hanna, although she already knew by the way their eyes shifted toward the cart and away again.

“I thought …” Rosvita sighed, frowned, touched her forehead as if her fingertips might coax out words. “Lady Bertha and I discussed, yesterday, that it might be time to send you ahead as Eagles ride, to carry news of our coming.”

“Where meant you to send me?”

She shook her head. “It no longer matters. Yesterday I did not know. What she is.”

“She is no Daisanite,” said Fortunatus. “She does not believe in God.”

Their expressions chilled Hanna. Anything might happen if Sorgatani were left alone among those who could not speak to her, those who could never look into her face.

“Trust her,” she said, hating the way her voice quavered, the way it betrayed her desperation and sudden fear. “I pray you. She saved us.”

“What if she turns on us?” asked Rosvita, not with anger or bitterness or suspicion but as a leader must ask, seeking information. “She is not our kind.”

“Trust her, and she will trust you. Distrust her, and she will distrust you.”

“Is that all of your advice, Eagle?”

“There is nothing else to say.”

“She is a terrible weapon. A curse.” The gray light of morning softened the lines on Rosvita’s face. The journey had aged her, yet she was not bowed. She led them now that Bertha was dead. She would hold firm.

“Terrible, yes,” said Hanna, thinking of Bulkezu and his Quman hordes, of lizard-snouted creatures shooting poisoned arrows at her out of the dark, of griffins and centaurs. Thinking of Hugh. “But it is better we hold such a weapon, is it not? Better that we do, than that our enemies do.”

Fortunatus looked at Rosvita, and she at him. Perhaps he raised an eyebrow so imperceptibly that Hanna could not quite mark it. Perhaps it was a slight movement of his lips. These two were intimate in the same manner as family fit hand in glove. Hanna knew they were communicating although she could not hear what it was they said.

“Yes,” replied Rosvita to the words he had not spoken. “Mother Rothgard is famous for her knowledge of sorcery. It might be we should consult her. To protect ourselves.”

“To protect her!” protested Hanna.

Fortunatus closed his eyes, looking pained and weary.

“So it might also be argued,” agreed Rosvita. “Alas it has come to this, that it is good for us that we grasp such a poisoned arrow to our heart.”

“She is what the Horse people and her own mothers made her. She is a good person!”

They looked at her. They doubted. They did not believe.

Maybe, in her heart, she did not believe either, but she remembered Sorgatani’s tears.

“God ask us to remember compassion, do They not, Sister?”

“They do. Why do you say so?”

“Think of her, then, no older than I am. Think of her imprisoned in that cart for all of her life except when she might wander in woodland or grassland where no one unsuspecting can stumble across her. Think of her, and feel compassion. Then you will trust
her.”

Fortunatus batted a fly away from his face, his mouth twisted, his gaze fixed on the dirt.

“What of this other whisper?” Hanna demanded, sensing that to press forward might distract them from Sorgatani. “Some of the soldiers are saying that the raiders must have been in league with Prince Sanglant.”

“As easy to say they were seeking Sanglant so they could kill him,” said Rosvita. “These are fears speaking. I do not believe it. Do you?”

Do I?

Hanna could not speak to refute it, or admit it. Rosvita smiled sadly and seemed ready to speak, but she paused, cocked her head, and listened.

There came an unspeakably faint rattle, like buckets clanging together. The dogs barked. Sergeant Aronvald shouted a warning. The men, made furious by exhaustion and grief, grabbed their weapons and cursed.

In silence, except for the dogs barking and wagging their tails, they waited.

Like a miracle, there came walking Laurent and Tomas up the road with buckets swinging They started as they came closer, seeing the wagons laden and ready to leave.

“Did you mean to leave us?” called Laurent cheerfully. “Can’t get rid of us so easily!”

No one moved, only watched them stride closer, as if they might be possessed by ghouls.

“What happened to you?” demanded the sergeant.

“We got lost, turned around entirely. Figured it was too dangerous to try to get back at night. Likely break a leg! So we bedded down in the woods. Whew! Had one damp spell when the rains came over, and fool Tom got a nettle sting on his left hand, but otherwise we survived without being eaten by wolves or swallowed up by . . .”

Laurent was a dark-haired lad with a round, rosy face unaltered by their travails. He was younger than Hanna and pleased at having played a practical joke even if he hadn’t meant to, but as he
looked around at their faces, his own expression shifted, darkened, and fell, and he shut up.

Tomas saw a corpse. Whitening, he nudged Laurent and pointed. His left hand was, indeed, blistered with the fading red rash of a nettle sting.

“Ai, God!” Laurent exclaimed. “What’s wrong? What have we missed?”

“Move along,” said the sergeant, not answering him. “Move along.”

^III

OLD FRIENDS

 

1

THE king’s progress came after many days to the Oder River and rode south to Walburg, reaching the fortress of the Villains in time to celebrate the Translatus at the holy cathedral begun by Helmut Villam and not yet complete. Here, in the east, his aunt, Biscop Alberada, left him to return to Handelburg in the easternmost march-lands. Here, three days later, Margrave Gerberga declared that it was her intention to take her leave of the progress and, together with her royal husband, ride southeast to her lands of Austra and Olsatia.

“There is trouble abroad,” she said in her matter-of-fact way as Sanglant’s intimate companions reclined at their ease in a large chamber set aside for their use by Margrave Waltharia. “I dare not remain away longer. I fear raids out of the wilderness. Anything might happen.”

The shutters stood open, admitting a cold breeze. By morning, every puddle in the forecourt would be iced over, but within the tower chamber the heat of so many bodies kept them cozy. A carpet insulated them from hard planks. Besides the fire, a half dozen braziers stood on tripods around the room, radiating warmth. Sanglant sat in the chair that had belonged to his father, the regent’s seat with its back carved to resemble a span of wings, its feet ending in a lion’s solid paws, and its dragon-faced arms. It had survived the tempest and firestorm on the shore of the Middle Sea. Each night his servants set it up and each morning, when they set out to ride, took it apart again. It was cunningly made, easy to handle, and impressive to see. But it was uncomfortable to sit in, even with a cushion placed on the seat. He often wondered if Henry had wanted it that way, to remind him of the dangers and difficulties of ruling should he ever begin to relax too much.

The nobles of the realm rested more easily on couches and well-cushioned chairs or on sturdy benches padded with feather pillows. Sitting cross-legged on the carpet, Prince Ekkehard played chess by the fire with Gerberga’s young sister, Theucinda. She was a pleasant enough girl, old enough to marry but young enough to giggle, as she did now when Ekkehard moved his Biscop to a vulnerable position and, too late, realized his mistake.

Theophanu was also playing chess. She sat at the table across from one of the clerics from the schola, but hers was a serious game, all maneuvering done in silence. Her gaze did not once leave the board as her opponent assessed the placement of red and white. Theophanu had left one of her Castles in jeopardy, but Sister Elsebet had lost one of her Eagles and looked ready to lose the second. Neither had the advantage, but either could win in five moves.

Duchess Liutgard was writing a letter with her own hand, supervised by a cleric of her household. Now and again she addressed a comment to Waltharia, who was seated beside her. Waltharia worked steadily with her needle as she embroidered the sleeve of a fine midnight-blue tunic sized, Sanglant noted, to fit a man. Obviously Waltharia was preparing to welcome the husband she expected to replace Lord Druthmar, the one she had asked Sanglant to find for her.

He sighed.

“I did not drop it.”

“You did!”

“No, you misplaced it. It wasn’t my fault, it was yours.”

“You’re always blaming me!”

This from the corner, where Rotrudis’ daughters, Sophie and Imma, sat and whispered. Despite hating each other, they were rarely apart. Their brother Wichman snored on a couch, an empty cup just about to slide out of his right hand.

Clerics, stewards, servants: he marked each one. He knew them
all. Those who were new to his retinue were revealing their quirks and temperaments to him, day by day. Naturally, the only one missing was his beloved wife. He frowned.

“Anything,” Gerberga repeated. Her gaze dropped briefly onto her husband, and she flushed and waved a hand in the air as if to fan away a fly.

Ekkehard looked up. “Why must ‘Cinda stay behind?”

That

got their attention. Every head lifted. After a breath, or three breaths, most looked away but everyone continued to listen. Even Wichman stirred, opening his eyes. On a quiet night such as this, they had to enjoy whatever entertainment came their way.

“You are too attached to her, Ekkehard.”

Theucinda looked up at her sister, trembled, and said nothing. She was the youngest of Judith’s brood. Coming after the beautiful Hugh, the forthright and commanding Gerberga, and the blunt and combative Bertha, it was no wonder that she was a mouse.

“She is like a sister to me!” objected Ekkehard. ‘Aren’t you?” he said, pressing Theucinda, although it was obvious the girl would have preferred to remain silent. ‘Aren’t you?”

Something shifted in her expression. Perhaps, after all, she hid her stubborn Austran streak beneath that fragile, freckled complexion and rosy mouth. A pretty enough girl, but not at all to Sanglant’s taste. Thank God he had escaped marriage to her!

The diminutive creature spoke in a soft voice. “I don’t want to enter the church, Gerberga.” The words came out as if she had learned them by rote. She looked at Ekkehard, then blushed.

“I said I’d marry her!” cried Wichman, rallying from his stupor. He scratched his crotch, burped, and stared with incomprehension into his empty cup.

Gerberga snorted. “Let your cousin Sanglant find a suitable husband for you, Theucinda, and you will not have to enter the church. He means to do as much for Waltharia, so why not for you?” She smiled at Sanglant.

A challenge! He lifted a hand off the arm of his chair to acknowledge her request.

Theophanu had, after all, been listening. Her hand, poised to move her Castle, froze in midair as she looked over. How cool her voice was, yet her words scorched. “If there are any suitable men to be found, a circumstance I doubt. Yet I pray you, Theucinda, do not despair. You may not have to wait long. Perhaps an institution could be founded for you, as it was for my dear brother Ekkehard. Thenafter you have said your vows, you will be sure to be called to marriage.”

“That is the end of it,” continued Gerberga, soundly irritated now. “Theucinda remains with the king’s progress. We leave in the morning, Ekkehard.”

“God, I have to pee,” said Wichman.

Rotrudis’ son had tactical flare. It was just possible that he rose and made a scene of departing in order to break up the gathering, to allow folk to retire to their beds without battle being joined. Or it might be that he simply had to pee after drinking five or ten cups of wine. He staggered out, and in twos and threes they followed him. Sanglant remained seated, waiting, and at last he was alone with Waltharia. She handed her embroidery to a servant and raised an eyebrow, waiting in her turn. Coals were brought. The serving-woman folded up the tunic and stored it in a chest. A man gathered up cups and took them away on a tray.

He found that solitude, with her, made him uncomfortable. Without meaning to, he touched the gold torque at his neck, the one she had persuaded him to wear, and he felt heat burn in his cheeks and knew he was blushing.

She smiled. She knew him that well.

“I know where Liath is,” she said, rising.

“I thought she came up with us,” he complained, “but she has not been here this past hour. How do you know where she is?”

She chuckled. “She asked me about a certain person living in retirement here.”

The words stung him. They had secrets, Waltharia and Liath. They confided in each other. It was disconcerting and, in truth, a little irritating. But he said nothing, only stood and beckoned to Hathui, who was waiting by the door.

They came down the broad stone steps of the tower and passed through the dark hall where so recently the crowd of nobles had feasted. The lamp carried by a steward illuminated alcoves and benches in flashes. Here rumpled shapes slept, crowded together for warmth. A pair of dogs nosed along the floor, seeking scraps lost in the rushes. Sanglant could still smell the tantalizing odor of roasted meat, just as the dogs could. They barked, seeing a rival, but slunk away.

A door led onto the courtyard where the kitchen buildings stood far enough away from the hall to protect it from the ever present danger of fire. Waltharia led them past these to a tiny cottage set
back by a well amidst a withered flower garden. She pushed the door open and they went inside. A pool of light created by a single lamp graced the room. Liath sat on a three-legged stool, bent forward to listen to an elderly woman who was propped up on pillows in her bed and dressed in a plain linen shift like an invalid. He recognized her lean, lined features, squared shoulders, and keen gaze at once, but the expression on her face as she spoke with Liath was not hostile, not as it had been when he had first met this old woman years before in Walburg. In those days, her hostility had been directed toward the old Eagle, Wolfhere.

She looked up first. As usual, Liath was so intent on what she was doing that it took her a moment to notice the arrivals. Not so with him; she could not enter any room he was in without him immediately being aware of her presence.

Ah, well.

“Sanglant,” she said, beckoning. She nodded to Waltharia, not needing to greet her. Somehow, it made the relationship between the two women seem more intimate than the one she shared with him.

“Here is Hedwig,” Liath added. “She was an Eagle.”

The old woman stirred, groping for a cane and looking quite startled—but not, he thought, because of his presence.

“I pray you, Eagle,” he said, “no need to rise. I recall your old injuries. I’ll sit here.”

There was a chair. He grabbed its back and swung it over.

“I thank you, Your Majesty,” she said with a hint of sour humor as she cast an accusing glare at Liath. She released the cane to rest against her bedding.

He sat beside Liath, facing the old Eagle. Waltharia remained standing at the foot of the bed. Hathui circled around to warm her hands at the hearth fire. Smoke swirled in the lamplight. A servant hurried forward to place more wood on the fire. It was so cold in the cottage, despite the blaze, that Liath’s breath steamed when she spoke.

“Repeat what you told me, I pray you, Hedwig.”

The old woman frowned, first at Liath and afterward upward at the loft of darkness that hid the ceiling. She was measuring her words in her mind before she spoke them. He almost laughed, because the look of her made him feel so young. She was exactly the kind of old woman who had frightened him most as a boy
because this sort were apt to scold a hapless child for stealing tarts from the kitchens when it was only hunger that drove him. This kind was merciless, even in the face of honest need. Even facing a royal prince who in other hands might expect a little leniency.

“Wolfhere brought the Eagle’s Sight to our order,” she said.

“Did he?” The statement surprised him.

“I thought this knowledge was handed down from regnant to heir. Before that time, we rode, and we observed, but we could not see or speak through fire.”

“No wonder King Arnulf made Wolfhere his favorite. Eagle’s Sight granted him a powerful advantage.”

“Yet Eagle’s Sight is closed to me now. I can see only snatches, glimpses.” She nodded at Liath. “This blindness affects all of us, so this one believes. The sight has been somehow damaged in the wake of the tempest that swept over us last autumn.”

“That’s what we were speaking of,” said Liath to Sanglant, “just now.”

“Explain it again, I pray you.”

Liath had a way of frowning that wasn’t actually a frown but more of a thoughtful grimace as she collected her thoughts, a task of undoubted complexity since she knew so many complicated things.

“I think that Eagle’s Sight runs on the threads of aether. Aether resides in the heavens, beyond the mortal Earth. Normally it is rarefied and weak here in the lands below the moon. The crowns channel and intensify these threads of aether, which is how they can be woven into a gate. But Eagle’s Sight touched the aether differently. It was drawn through a portal, which some of us saw as a standing stone burning with blue fire. That stone acted as a crossroads. The stone was itself the portal, between this world and the higher spheres. It was created by the spell woven in ancient days when the country of the Ashioi was torn from its roots and flung into the heavens. Through that portal aether filtered down to Earth in greater quantities than it normally would. So, once the portal between the aether and Earth was severed by the return of the Ashioi land, then the Eagle’s Sight was diminished, so damaged that it is as if we cannot see at all. The crowns were raised long ago, before the portal was opened by the spell in ancient days. The crowns should still weave, but our Eagle’s Sight is lost to us. Possibly forever. I don’t know.”

“My lady.” The old woman’s voice and demeanor had changed. She bent her head respectfully. “I thought you were an Eagle, one like me.”

“So I am! Well. So I was.”

“Now I see you are not who I thought you were. Else you would not address the king regnant with such familiarity. Who are you? Are you the one—?” She broke off.

“What one?” asked Liath.

Hedwig shook her head. “No need to ask. You are the one Wolfhere sought when he came back from his exile.”

“His exile?” asked Sanglant.

“Yes, Your Majesty. You must know of this, surely. When Arnulf died, Henry exiled Wolfhere. Or perhaps it was later, after the prince was born. That would be you, Your Majesty.” Her hands shook as she smoothed down the rumpled bedclothes. “Nay, nay. My memory weakens. You were a boy when King Arnulf died, Your Majesty. You had already been born and survived some years.”

“I was five or six,” he agreed. “I remember his passing and my father’s grief. I recall, too, that Wolfhere vanished for some years.”

“Yes, that was his exile, as soon as King Henry could compass it. But I knew Wolfhere was not dead. He’s the kind that’s hardest to kill—those who most deserve death! At intervals I glimpsed him through the fire, but I could not see where he was or what he was doing. Then—how easily we lose track of the time—he returned. The Eagles never cast any one of us out, you see.”

“I’m surprised he came back,” said Liath. “Or that King Henry allowed him to return.”

She chuckled, then coughed. “So you may be, my lady. I convinced King Henry to take him back.”

“You

did?” asked Sanglant with a laugh.

“I did,” she replied in the voice a woman of her kind used to remind a boy that he was not permitted to pilfer from the kitchen on such an important feast day. “Wolfhere was too valuable. He had done so much for the Eagles, and for Arnulf. King Arnulf trusted no one better than Wolfhere. The young prince—that would be you, Your Majesty—was old enough to be more easily protected. You were not at risk. But Wolfhere was indifferent to you in any case, perhaps because by then your sisters were born. He was seeking someone else.”

Liath nodded. “Yes, he was.”

“I pray you, Mistress Hedwig,” said Waltharia, “I’ve heard this tale before but not, I see, all of it. If you are the one who argued for Wolfhere’s return, then what made you and Wolfhere fall out later?”

It was difficult for the woman to lift her hands, but she managed to get one hand off the covers, indicating Liath. “This girl. Wolfhere felt no loyalty to Henry, to Arnulf’s son, not as he should have. He felt no loyalty to Wendar, not as he should have. He returned only to discover what news he might. Of this one. I soon realized that was the only reason he came back. So I no longer trusted him.”

She coughed again, and the steward found wine, and Liath helped her drink.

“Where is Wolfhere now?” asked Waltharia.

“No one knows,” said Sanglant. “He escaped me in Sordaia. Maybe he is dead.”

“What does it matter what has become of Wolfhere?” Waltharia asked.

Liath handed the cup back to the steward. For a while, she sat with hands folded on her lap, gazing at Hedwig.

Sanglant listened to the old woman’s labored breathing, with its telltale sign of a consumption eating at her lungs. She was ill. She was old. That she had survived so long with her crippled legs and body and failing health was entirely due to Waltharia’s care of her. What did this old woman mean to Waltharia? Why should the Villains give her shelter?

“This is what I understand of the matter,” said Liath. “Wolfhere sought me because my father stole me from the Seven Sleepers. It was their intent to wield me as a weapon against Sanglant, whom they considered to be a tool of the Lost Ones in their plot to conquer humankind.”

Waltharia eyed him sidelong. She seemed about to laugh, but did not. “A strong spear,” she said.

Liath snorted. Sanglant flushed.

“Wolfhere did not betray you, Liath,” said Hathui suddenly. “He protected you. Was it Wolfhere who led you back to the Seven Sleepers?”

Liath regarded Hathui with a curious smile. “He told them where I was to be found. So it was that Anne found me in Werlida and lured me to Verna. Do you think matters transpired otherwise, Hathui? Is there something you know that we do not?”

They all looked at the Eagle, even Hedwig.

“No man can serve two masters,” said Hathui. “I believe that there were two people that Wolfhere loved above all others: Anne, and Arnulf. In that way he is like the story of the man who at the full moon turns into a wolf, loyal to both parts of himself and yet unable to be whole. Torn between two bodies.”

“You speak truly enough,” said Waltharia. “No man may serve two masters. How can a man torn between two masters serve either one faithfully? He must choose one, or the other, because in time they will come into conflict.”

“What is his secret?” Liath asked. “He is the last of the Seven Sleepers who knew Anne well, who knew all or most of what she intended. If he still lives, I must find him, because I believe he has secrets yet to reveal.”

“What if he does not?” asked Hathui. “What if he is exactly what he seems, and nothing more?”

“A traitor?” asked Waltharia with an acerbic laugh.

“A wolf among men?” asked Sanglant, “loyal to no one?”

“A servant meant to carry messages,” retorted Hathui. “By all accounts, although I never saw him, King Arnulf was a kinder master than Anne.”

“Weary,” whispered Hedwig.

Liath leaned forward. “We have exhausted you. I pray you, pardon us.”

“He was weary,” Hedwig repeated, strengthened, it seemed, by a hint of annoyance that she was dismissed so easily when it was to her that Liath had come in the first place. “When I saw him here. The last time. Weary. Troubled. Sad. So might a man be who is at war within himself. Such a man can never be trusted. He can never trust himself.”

Her breath whistled. The speech had winded her. They waited, listening to her labored breathing.

Finally, Liath shook herself and rose. “I thank you for what you have told me, Hedwig.”

The old Eagle’s fingers stirred but she could not, it seemed, lift them off the blanket. Nor could she speak. She wheezed a little.

“I will send Clara to attend you,” said Waltharia.

They left, stepping out into the cold, dark night. The wind stung nostrils and eyes as they walked across the courtyard. At the entrance to the hall, servants were dispatched to take coals, a hot poultice, and an attendant to sit out the night with the old woman.

“Why do the Villains shelter her?” he asked. “Has she no family to take her in?”

Waltharia’s smile made him uncomfortable, and she glanced first
at Liath and only after that at him. “She was for a short time one of my father’s many, many mistresses.”

The Eagle was so old a woman that it was easy to forget that Villain, too, had lived a long life.

“My mother, before she died, made me swear to take her in if she needed shelter in her old age.”

“Your mother? Why would she trouble herself in such a way?”

She glanced at Liath. They looked. They smiled, each a little. They did not look at him. “Because my father would not. My father was a good man and a strong and canny margrave, Sanglant, but thoughtless in other ways. Hedwig was one of my mother’s young servants. She became an Eagle after—well, it was considered a disgrace in her family. They threw her out. Had my mother not made provision for her care, she would have died as a pauper.”

“This history surprises me,” said Liath. “I thought the Eagles took care of their own.”

“So they do. Not many survive to such a respectable age. When they are too crippled or old or ill to ride, they are pensioned off, just as old Lions are—those who survive their service. The Villains accepted the pension for the care of her.”

“It was a saying among the Dragons,” remarked Sanglant with an unexpected swell of bitterness, “that all Dragons died young, guarding the honor of the regnant.”

“Will you muster a flight of Dragons?” Waltharia asked him. “You must think of these things, you know. There are Eagles and Lions to be recruited, to strengthen your army. And Dragons, to fly swiftly to where the need is greatest.”

He frowned. “Who to lead them?”

“Sapientia has a daughter, does she not?”

“Still a child, not more than six or eight at the most. Nay. Let me see what noble youths are cast up at my feet. Then I’ll decide what to do.”

Liath had stepped out from under the eaves and stood staring up at the sky as if her gaze could pierce the clouds. He thought she wasn’t paying attention, but she spoke. “I will have my own mustering, of scholars.” She chuckled. “A nest of phoenix. That’s what I’ll call them.”

“Phoenix?” Waltharia was startled, and showed it.

“I think not!” said Sanglant.

Liath turned to look at them. He could only see her shape, but he knew that her vision, in such darkness, was much keener than his.

What she saw, seeking in their expressions, he did not know. “The phoenix flies, like the eagle. It is born out of fire, out of passion, and renews itself. Would the phoenix not be a fine beast for scholars?”

Sometimes she was so naive!

“I pray you, Liath,” he said, then faltered, hearing how annoyed he sounded and knowing it was not her but his memories of Blessing that hurt him.

Hathui stepped forward. “Perhaps you are not aware that the phoenix has become spoken of in the same breath as the heresy, the Redemptio. A story circulated—”

“If Wichman can be believed, it was true enough,” said Sanglant, “since he was among those who slaughtered the beast.”

“Slaughtered a phoenix?” Liath breathed, horrified.

“The townsfolk said it preyed on their cattle. But there was talk of a miracle, a mute man healed, and so on, and now—nay, Liath, no nests of phoenixes for you unless you are determined to turn heretic yourself.”

“I am not,” she said thoughtfully, “but it interests me to hear this tale. I must speak to Wichman.”

“When I am present!”

“If you wish. I do not fear him.”

“Prince Ekkehard witnessed the whole as well,” pointed out Hathui unhelpfully. ‘Although I admit most of those who were present in that party are now dead in the wars.”

“Ekkehard and Wichman!” Liath said, in tones of astonishment.

“Not now,” said Sanglant, “I pray you. Morning is soon enough.”

“Soon enough,” said Waltharia, backing him up, as was her duty as margrave. “My hands have turned to ice. Let us go in.”

2

LIATH was up as soon as night grayed with the early twilight.

He groaned and said, closing his eyes, “Neither Wichman nor Ekkehard will have risen yet, my love. Wait but a moment. Come back under the covers with me.”

“I can’t stop thinking about it.”

She dressed without servants to aid her, not calling anyone in, and he heard the door open, felt the draft of frosty air from the stairwell kiss his cheeks—better had she done it!—and the thud of its closing. A decent interval later the door opened and he heard the stealthy footfalls of four servingmen as they entered the chamber and busied themselves as quietly as they could with water, coals, clothing, and the rest of his gear and necessaries. He still thought of them as Den’s brother, Malbert’s cousin, Johannes’ uncle, and Chustaffus’ brother, although in fact their names were Johannes, Robert, Theodulf, and Ambrose. Warm air breathed along his skin as the one of them—that would be Johannes, who had an unevenness in his gait due to a deformity in his right foot—moved a brazier closer to the bed in preparation for his rising.

Outside, he heard voices raised to that pitch of intensity that betokens an upset bubbling into an emergency. He cracked an eye, but it was still dim in the chamber and would be until they had his leave to take down the shutters.

“No,” came Hathui’s voice from outside. “I’ll go in now.”

The door opened. He sighed and sat up, giving in to the inevitable. When he had been captain of the King’s Dragons there had been days when he’d had to move at first light, and swiftly, but there had also been days when he’d had no more pressing engagement at dawn than . . . well, never mind that now.

“What is it?” he asked.

She gestured toward the door, which meant that trouble was coming. “Margrave Gerberga.”

Robert handed him his under-tunic, and he slipped it on and swung out of bed as Ambrose took down first one shutter, then the next. The chill exhalation of the outdoors sighed in, bringing with it the smell of smoke, dung, and freshly split wood. A carpet insulated him from the plank floor, and it was just as well since he was still barefoot but decently attired when Gerberga stormed in, face red and braided hair pinned back for her night’s rest.

“He’s gone!” she cried. “Vanished!”

Only the peers of the realm or his intimate servants dared storm in without announcing themselves. After Gerberga came Theophanu, expression so blank that he marveled, wondering if she were furious or joyful.

“This is not the first time Ekkehard has acted rashly,” Theo said to Gerberga as if continuing a conversation begun earlier. “Do not forget that he stole Lord Baldwin from your mother.”

“Damn him!”

“And that he then debauched himself in Gent while pretending to be an abbot in a monastery founded by his own father,” added Theophanu with such a look of composure that Sanglant imagined her actually laughing inside—if Theophanu ever laughed. ‘And after that betrayed his own countryfolk and rode with the Quman monster.”

“When I find him …” Gerberga glared at Sanglant as if he had spoken and, without addressing another word to him, departed in the same manner as a summer squall, leaving a moment of sparkling clarity behind.

“Hathui,” he said, “go see that horses are saddled.”

She nodded and left.

“When you find him, then what?” asked Theophanu coolly. “I am surprised you allowed the marriage to Gerberga to take place without making it clear to Ekkehard that he must respect your wishes. By this act, he challenges your authority.”

“Theo,” he said mildly, seeing how everyone else there had gone very quiet indeed, “I do not for a moment suppose that Ekkehard has anything in mind other than his own gratification, since he has never appeared to have more than one thought in his head at a time.”

She watched him with an expression of calm consideration that made him stand to alert as though she had a knife she might pull.

“They love you,” she said.

“Who loves me?”

“All of them. These servants. The Eagles. The soldiers. The common folk. It’s you, the bastard, they look to, to save them, although I am the legitimately born child. There are a few who do love me, my dear retinue, but they are a trifle compared to the ones who love you.”

Since there was no answer to this, he said nothing.

“They stare at you so, Sanglant. I suppose I do, too.” Her smile sharpened her expression. “I know better, yet I can’t help myself. I’m no different than they are. I believe you can save us, if anyone can.”

“Perhaps. I am only first among equals. Without the strength of the duchies and the marchlands, Wendar will fall.”

“As Varre has?” she challenged him. “Fallen to Sabella and Conrad’s ambitions?”