“Truly, he cannot.” Villam knew this ploy as well. “Do you mean to join his retinue, such as it is?”
“Nay, my lord. I have not followed him with any such intention, nor have I at any time known of any plan to revolt. My interests lie not in earthly struggles but with the composition of the heavens and the glory of creation. In truth, my lord, I have never spoken with the prince.”
“Then why did you come to Angenheim asking about his whereabouts?”
“I merely come to ask a boon of him.”
Villam laughed delightedly. “I am smothered in words. Yet you trouble me, frater, with your talk of the heavens. Do you know what manner of man Prince Sanglant is?”
“What do you mean, my lord?”
“I pray you, do not play the innocent with me. You look rather less artless and more disreputable, and you speak with a cunning tongue. Prince Sanglant is no man at all but a half blood, born of a human father and an Aoi mother. What manner of aid might you wish to ask from such a creature?”
This struck Zacharias as dangerous ground. Nor had Villam betrayed any knowledge of Kansi-a-lari’s whereabouts, even though Zacharias knew she had walked north with her son.
“Very well,” he said after a long silence. “I shall tell you the truth. I walked east to bring the word of God to the Quman tribes, but instead they made me a slave. I dwelt among them for seven years and at long last escaped. This is the tale I bring to you: the Quman are massing an army under the leadership of the Pechanek begh, Bulkezu, and they mean to strike deep into Wendish territory. Already raiding parties burn villages and murder and mutilate our countryfolk. You know how the Quman treat their victims. I have seen many a corpse without a head. Your own lands in the east are at risk, my lord.”
“Princess Sapientia was sent east with an army together with that of her new husband, Prince Bayan of Ungria.”
“That I had not heard, my lord.”
“Yet we’ve had no news from them, so perhaps it goes ill with their campaign, although I pray that is not the case. This chieftain, Bulkezu, has plagued Wendish lands before. Yet why seek Prince Sanglant? Here is the king and his court. Surely your plea is best voiced before the king.”
“Truly, it is,” said Zacharias, thinking fast. “But I have heard much talk during my travels about the king’s ambitions in Aosta. The king cannot march both south and east. At the same time, I have heard many stories about Prince Sanglant’s prowess in battle. Is the regnant’s bastard firstborn not raised to be captain of the King’s Dragons? If the king himself cannot take the field against the Quman, then it would take such an army, commanded by a man second only to the king in courage and reputation, to defeat them.”
“A fine tale. It is true that you speak with the accent of the eastern border, and certainly you look as if you’ve walked a long way with nothing more than the clothes on your back and, so I hear, a goat. But a fine tale may be nothing more than a brightly woven tapestry thrown up on the wall to conceal an ugly scar which lies hidden behind it. The Quman brand their slaves with a mark.”
Shaking, Zacharias stood. He turned, pulling the torn shoulder of the robe down to reveal his right shoulder blade and the brand, healed badly enough that skin still puckered around it, marking him as slave of the Pechanek begh. Releasing the cloth, he turned back to confront the margrave. “So stands the mark of the snow leopard’s claw, my lord.”
“A desperate man can have himself cut to lend credence to his story,” remarked Villam pleasantly.
“Would a man cut himself in this manner, merely to lend credence to his tale?” Zacharias demanded, boldly lifting his robe.
At the sight of Zacharias’ mutilated genitals, Villam actually gasped out loud, lost color, and groped for his wine cup. He gulped it down, and then signaled to his steward, the slender man who had stationed himself at the door. “Bring wine for this man, if you please. He must be desperately thirsty.”
Zacharias drank deeply. The wine was very good, and he saw no reason to waste it. Perhaps the shock of his mutilation would throw Villam off the scent.
But the margrave was too old and too crafty, he had played the game for too long, to be thrown off his attack even by such a vicious strike. Once he had taken a second cup of wine, he gestured to his servant. “Humbert, bring me the man’s pack.”
Resigned, Zacharias watched as Villam emptied the pouch and, of course, picked up the one thing that would condemn any man. He displayed, for Zacharias’ edification, the parchment scrap covered with Liath’s writing, the scribblings of a mathematici.
Zacharias drained the last of his wine, wondering what he would get to drink when he languished in the skopos’ prison damned as a heretic. “You’re holding it upside down, my lord,” he observed after Villam said nothing.
Villam turned the scrap over and studied it again. “It means even less to me this way.” He looked up with the sharp gaze of a man who has seen a great deal of grief and laughter and trouble in his time. He was getting impatient. “Are you a sorcerer?”
No such interrogation could end happily, but Zacharias refused to collapse in fear as long as his tongue seemed safe. “Nay, my lord, I am not.”
“Truly, you do not resemble one, for I have always heard it said that a sorcerer has such magnificent powers that she will always appear sleek and prosperous, and you, my friend, do not appear to be either. Why are you seeking the prince?”
“To find out where that parchment came from, my lord. I have reason to believe that he knows who made those marks on that parchment. That person must know some portion of the secret language of the stars. I have no wish to be a sorcerer, my lord. But I was vouchsafed a vision of the cosmos.” He could not keep his voice from trembling. The memory of what he had seen in the palace of coils still tormented him; he dreamed at night of that billowing cosmos, rent by clouds of dust and illuminated by resplendent stars so bright that, like angels, they had halos. His loss of faith in the God of Unities no longer troubled his sleep, because the desire to understand the workings of the universe, a dazzling spiral wheel of stars hanging suspended in the midst of a vast emptiness, had engulfed his spirit and consumed his mind. “That is all that I fear now, my lord: that I might die before I understand the architecture of the universe.”
That I might die before I see another dragon. But that thought he dared not voice out loud.
Villam stared at him for a long time. Zacharias could not interpret his expression, and he began to fidget nervously, waiting for the margrave’s reply. He had told the truth at last. He had no further to retreat except to reveal the one thing which would damn him most: that he had traveled as a servant with the Aoi sorcerer and witnessed her humbling and frightening power. Once they discovered that, they would not care that she had, in the end, discarded him as thoughtlessly as she would a walking stick she had no further use for.
“I am at your mercy, my lord margrave,” he said finally, when he could bear the silence no longer.
“So we come to her again,” murmured Villam. “Can it be true, what the prince said of her ancestry? Is it not said of the Emperor Taillefer that ‘God revealed to him the secrets of the universe?’ The virtues of the parent often pass to the child.”
“I do not understand you, my lord,” he stammered, temporizing. Villam would mention Kansi-a-lari’s name in the next sentence, and the trap would be sprung.
“Do you not?” asked Villam, looking honestly surprised. “Did Prince Sanglant not marry the woman named Liathano?”
Relief hit like a fist to his gut. “I do not know her, my lord.”
Villam smiled wryly. “Had you seen her, you would not so easily forget her.”
“That one! Was she young and beautiful, my lord, not in the common way of beauty but like a foreign woman with skin of a creamy dark shade? Had she a child in her or newly born?”
“That one.” Villam sighed, considered his wine cup, and took a hank of bread to chew on. “What became of her?”
“You d
o not know? Angels took her up into the heavens.”
“Angels?”
“We might also call them daimones, my lord.”
“I do not know what to make of these tidings,” said Villam thoughtfully, looking troubled. “Is she an agent of the Enemy, or that of God? Is she of humble origins, or of the noblest birth? Did she bewitch the prince, or is her favor, bestowed upon him, a mark of his fitness to rule?”
“My lord margrave,” said the servant Humbert so sharply that Villam blinked, thrown out of his reverie by those words. “The King’s Eagle waits outside. She bears a message for you.”
Villam said nothing for a while, although as he mused he drew his fingers caressingly over the curve of an apple. “I will need a rider to carry a message to my daughter,” he said at last, “a trustworthy and loyal man, one from the home estates. Waldhar, perhaps. His father and uncle served me well against the Rederii, and his mother is a good steward of the Arvi holdings. Let him make ready to leave and then come to me.”
The servant nodded. He had a tidy manner, efficient and brisk. “Will you need a cleric, my lord margrave, to set the message down on parchment?”
“Nay. It is to go to my daughter’s ears alone. Give him an escort of three riders as well.”
“I would recommend six, my lord margrave, given the news of Quman raids.”
“Yes.” Villam had been margrave for many years, with the habit of command and the expectation that his servants would run to do his bidding at once, and effectively. “See that this frater is given food and drink and then send him on his way. Best that it be done quietly.”
“So will it be done, my lord margrave.” Humbert looked Zacharias over with a look compounded half of curiosity and half of disdain. “Would you prefer that those who serve him are like to gossip or to remain silent about which direction the prince rode out in three days ago?”
“Alas, people are so wont to chatter. That is why I keep a discreet man like yourself as my steward, Humbert.”
“Yes, my lord margrave.” Humbert gestured to Zacharias. He did not have a kindly face, but he looked fair. “Come, Brother. You will not want to linger long here at the king’s court, for it will go hard with you, I am sure, should your quest become generally known.”
“I thank you for your hospitality, my lord,” said Zacharias, but Villam had already forgotten him as the doors opened and a woman strode in. She wore fine clothing and, over it, a cloak trimmed with red and pinned at one shoulder with a brass brooch shaped as an eagle.
Zacharias knew her at once, that familiar, fierce expression, her hawk’s nose, and the way she had of sauntering with a little hitch in her stride, noticeable only because he knew to look for it, that she had developed after falling from an apple tree when she was a child.
He hurriedly stepped sideways into shadow, hoping his hood would obscure his face. She had the habit of a good messenger, looking around swiftly to mark the chamber and its inhabitants. When she saw him, she faltered, puzzling over his shadowed face. He knew her well enough to interpret her expression, for it was one she’d worn as a child: seeing something that she knew was familiar but could not quite put her finger on.
Annoyance and curiosity tightened her mouth, and she seemed about to speak when Villam spoke instead.
“Eagle, you bring me a message from the king?”
“Yes, Margrave Villam,” said Hathui, her well-loved voice deepened by maturity and altered by a woman’s confidence and pride. At once, she turned her attention to the margrave.
How different their fates had turned out to be, the admired elder brother and the doting young sister. She had become a respected Eagle, standing beside the king’s chair, while he had been marked forever as a slave, hunted and desperate.
He slipped out the doors before her attention drifted back to him. He was so ashamed. He didn’t want her to recognize him, to see what a poor wretch he had become, no longer a man at all, used and discarded many times over. He remembered the pride shining in her face on that day years ago when he had left their village to walk as a missionary into the east. She must never know what had really happened to him. Better that she believe he was dead.
He took the food and drink offered to him, took his goat and his worn pack and left the palace complex as quickly as he could in case she should come looking, to assuage her curiosity. West, Humbert told him, the road toward Bederbor.
So he walked, alone, nursing his despair. What he had seen, what had been done to him, what he had himself acquiesced to, had opened a chasm between him and his family that could never be bridged. All that was left him was the secret language of the stars, the clouds of black dust and the brilliant lights, the silver-gold ribbon that twisted through the heavenly spheres, the beauty of an ineffable cosmos in whose heart, perhaps, he could lose himself if only he could come to understand its mysteries.
Determined and despondent, he trudged west on the trail of the prince.
2
USING a stout stick as his sword, Sanglant beheaded thistles one by one, an entire company hewn down by savage whacks.
“You’re in a foul mood,” observed Heribert. The slender cleric sat on a fallen log whittling the finishing touches into the butt of a staff. He had carved the tip into the likeness of a fortress tower surmounted by a Circle of Unity. Behind them, half concealed by a copse of alder, Captain Fulk supervised the setup of a makeshift camp among the stones of an ancient Dariyan fort long since fallen into ruin.
“The king was right.” Sanglant kept decapitating thistles as he spoke. He could not bear to sit still, not now, with frustration burning through him. He felt as helpless as the thistles that fell beneath his sharp strokes. “How can I support a retinue without lands of my own?”
“Duke Conrad’s chatelaine made no protest. She put us up in the hall at Bederbor for a full five days.”
“And Conrad did not return, nor would she tell us where he had gone or when she expected him back. Thus leaving us to go on our way. We’re dependent on the generosity of other nobles. Or on their fear.”
“Or their respect for your reputation, my lord prince,” said Heribert quietly.
Sanglant lifted his free hand in a gesture of dismissal. He did not stop whacking. The thistles made good enemies, plentiful and easy to defeat. “Nevertheless, my reputation cannot feed my retinue forever. Nor will my cousins and peers feed me forever, knowing it may bring my father’s wrath down upon them. He could accuse them of harboring a rebel and call them to account for disloyalty.”
“Then it will only bring his anger down on them twofold if they listen to your words. What are you speaking if not of rebellion, my friend?”
These words brought his hand to a halt. Battered thistles swayed and stilled. What, indeed? He turned to consider Heribert.
“What is it you want?” Heribert continued. “What is it you intend? You know I will follow you no matter where your path leads you, but it seems to me that you had better know in your own mind where you are going before you walk any farther down this road.”
Just in this way, a wineskin full to bursting could be emptied with a single precise hole stabbed into its side. He sank down onto the log beside Heribert. “Thus am I reminded of the burdens of ruling,” he remarked bitterly as Heribert continued his carving. “It was easier to do what I was told, back when I was captain of the Dragons.”
“It’s always easier just to do what you’re told,” murmured Heribert. His hands stilled as he lifted his eyes to regard the distant trees, looking at a scene hidden to everyone but himself.
Sanglant hadn’t the patience to wallow in self-pity. It made him too restless. He jumped up and began pacing. “If Eagles came with a report of a great invasion, and my father did not believe them, it would be left to me to counter that invasion, would it not?”
Heribert’s gaze shifted abruptly back to the prince. “Would it? If you could find safety for yourself and your people—”
Sanglant beheaded seven thistles
with one blow. Then he laughed. “Nay, friend, you know me better than that. How can I rest if Wendar is in danger? I swore to guard the realm and every soul who lives under my family’s rule.”
Heribert’s smile was soft, but he did not reply.
“But I also have a duty to my mother’s people. My mother claims the Aoi who were exiled will all die if they do not return to Earth. Yet Sister Anne wants to deny them their rightful return.”
“Sister Anne claimed that the Aoi would bring in their wake a great cataclysm.”
“Sister Anne claimed many things, but she also would have let Blessing starve to death. She spent years hunting down her own husband, and in the end she killed him because she wanted to get her daughter back. No one has ever explained to my satisfaction why a man like Bernard would run away with Liath in the first place, or hide her so desperately. What if he knew something we do not? Nay, Sister Anne may say many things, and twist the truth to serve her own purposes, and in the end we cannot know what is truth and what is falsehood, only that she is heartless when it comes to those she would use to advance her own objectives.”
“You’ll hear no argument from me on that score,” murmured Heribert. “I built her a fine hall, yet I do not doubt that she would have disposed of me without a second thought once I was of no further use to her.” He sighed suddenly and sheathed his knife. Running his fingers over the finely carved tower which now crowned his oak staff, a crenellation, arrow slits, a suggestion of stonework etched into the wood, and the Circle of Unity rising from the center, he spoke softly, his voice shifting in tone. “All ruined, so you said.”
“Everything. The hall burned like kindling.” He lowered his stick and set a companionable hand on Heribert’s shoulder. “You can’t imagine their power.”
“The power of Anne and her sorcerers?”
“Nay, although truly Sister Anne commands powers greater than anything I can understand or have ever seen before. I spoke of the fire daimones who stole Liath away. Everything their gaze touched burst into flame. Even the mountains burned.” Just as his anger burned, deep in his heart, fueled by helplessness and frustration. The words came unbidden. “I could do nothing to stop them.” Grief made his voice hoarse, but then, after the wound to the throat he’d taken in battle five years ago, his voice always sounded like that.