The Gathering Storm

  “Lavastine!”

  Hanna winced at the sharp tone, but that slight movement alerted the hound, which scrabbled out from under the throne to loom over her. The growl that rumbled in its throat was so low as to be almost inaudible. She shrank back. With only a word’s command, it would rip her face off.

  “Lavastine.” The word was whispered with the calculation of a general about to embark on a holy campaign. “Sister Abelia, you will leave tomorrow to seek out Brother Severus. I want the one called Alain found and brought to me.”

  “Yes, Holy Mother.”

  The skopos rose and left the room with her attendant. The hound click-clacked after her; its nails needed filing. Hanna wondered, wildly, idly, who dared groom it.

  “Do you know where Liath is, Hanna?” asked Hugh once the curtain had fallen into place behind the skopos and her attendant. “Have you seen her in the flames?”

  “I have not, Your Excellency.”

  “Do you know what happened to her, Hanna?”

  “I have heard the tale Prince Sanglant tells—that fiery daimones stole her.”

  “Do you believe it?”

  She fixed her gaze on the mural. The temblor had shaken open a crack that split the plaster base right through the blessed Daisan’s left foot. “For what reason would Prince Sanglant lie, Your Excellency?”

  “Indeed, for what reason?”

  A glance told her everything she needed to know: he was not Bulkezu, who savored the battle of wills. He was not even looking at her; he had dismissed her already. The monster Bulkezu had seen her as a person of some account, almost as a peer, because she was the luck of a Kerayit shaman. Because she dared stand up to him. To Hugh she was only a servant. He recalled her name because of her bond with Liath. She did not matter to him at all; only Liath did, then and now.

  Which gave her a measure of freedom she had never had with Bulkezu.

  “Prince Sanglant is no poet, Your Excellency. It is poets who make up tales to confuse and beguile their listeners. I do not think he could have concocted a false trail to lead his enemies astray. That is not his way.”

  He gave a slight noise in assent. “No, he is not an educated man. There is a child as well. Does she live still?”

  “When I last saw the prince, she did.”

  “Does she look like her mother?”

  Strange that a cold draft should twist through the hall, chilling her neck. “In some manner, Your Excellency. She resembles both her mother and father. She is very young still.”

  “Very young still,” he agreed, as if to himself, as if he had forgotten Hanna was there, “and soft, as youth is soft and malleable. It is too bad Brother Marcus failed. Still, there may yet be a way….”

  She braced herself, expecting more questions.

  None came.

  He had forgotten her already. She shifted her weight to her heels to take some of the pressure off her knees. Outside, the raking started up again. As Hugh’s silence dragged on, she began to count the strokes.

  She had reached four and ninety when Hugh spoke.

  “Yes. That is the way to do it.” He walked toward the doors, paused, turned back. “Come, Hanna. You must make your report and a cleric will write it down.”

  “Your Excellency.” She stood. “It is an Eagle’s duty to report to the regnant directly.”

  He waited in a stripe of sunlight. “Your loyalty is commendable. But it will not be possible for you to give your report to the king today. He will be far too busy to see you.”

  “Then I will wait. It is by the regnant’s own command that we Eagles report to him alone, when we come to his court. I dare not go against the king’s express command, Your Excellency. Pray do not ask me to go back on the oath I swore to King Henry.”

  The quirk of anger twitched on his lips, and he clenched his right hand, the one he had most often struck Liath with. But this was not the reckless, arrogant young frater who had suffered the indignity of ministering to the half-pagan common folk of the North Mark with barely concealed contempt. This man had a presbyter’s rank, the respect of his peers, the love of the common-born Aostans, and an unknown wealth of power made palatable by his modest demeanor and undeniable beauty. He spoke easily with the Holy Mother herself and stood at the right hand of the king and queen who would soon be emperor and empress.

  “Nay, nor should you,” he said at last with perfect amiability. “Your oath to the king is what gives an Eagle honor. You were taken prisoner by the Quman alongside Prince Ekkehard, I believe?”

  “I was, Your Excellency.”

  “Then how are we to know that you did not turn traitor against your countryfolk as well, if this tale of Prince Ekkehard’s treachery is true? How can we be sure that any of these stories you bring to us are truth, and not lies? Do you support the rightful king? Or do you support those who rebel against him?”

  God, what a fool she had been to think she could outmaneuver him.

  He smiled sadly. The light pouring over him made him gleam, a living saint. “So it is, Eagle, that the king must consider you a traitor as well. You know how he feels about Wolfhere, whom he banished on less account than this. How can he treat a traitor otherwise? How can he even bear to speak to one of his own Eagles if he believes that Eagle has betrayed him together with his dearest children?” Although he had not moved, he seemed to have grown even more imposing, a power which, like the sun, may bring light to those trapped in darkness—or death to those caught out under its punishing brilliance.

  “I will do what I can to see that you are not imprisoned outright for treason, Hanna. I have done that much for you already. The dungeons here are not healthy. The rats grow large. Yet if you do not cooperate with me, then there is nothing I can do, no case I can make before the king. If that happens, I do not know what will happen to you then. Do you understand?”

  2

  GASPING, he came to himself as everyone around him rose. The service had ended. The two Lions no longer sat on the benches to his right. Maybe he had only hallucinated them. He was dreaming, confusing past and present.

  Only Adica seemed real—she, and the bronze armband bound around his upper right arm that he could not pull off.

  “F-friend.” Iso had a limp and a stutter. Abandoned by his parents, he had been a laborer at the monastery for half of his life. Although he didn’t act any older than sixteen, he looked aged by pain and grief and an unfilled childhood hunger. “It’s a—uh—it’s a—uh—a hurt one. Come.” He had bony fingers that no amount of porridge could fatten up, and with these he tugged at Alain’s sleeve as the laborers waited for the monks to file out before them. The abbot sailed out with a fine stern expression on his face and his guests quite red with consternation behind him, but Iso kept pulling on him and his quiet pleading dragged Alain out of his distraction.

  “I’ll come.” He let Iso lead him out of the church and, with the hounds following, to the stables.

  Iso didn’t have many teeth left, which was why he could only take porridge and other soft foods. Sometimes his remaining teeth hurt him; one did tonight. Alain knew it because now and again Iso brushed at the lower side of his right jaw as though to chase away a fly, and a tear moistened his right eye, slipping down to be replaced by another. Iso never complained about pain. Maybe he didn’t have the words to, and anyway it was probably the only existence he knew. Perhaps he had never experienced a day in the course of his entire life without physical pain of some kind nagging him, the twisted agony of his misshapen hip, the withered ruin of his left hand, burned and scarred over long ago, the nasty scars on his back.

  Yet for all the pain Iso lived with, and maybe because of it, he hated to see animals suffer. More than once he had taken a rake from a furious cat when he’d saved a mouse from its clutches, or risked being bitten by a wounded, starving dog at the forest’s edge when he offered it a scrap to eat.

  The beech woods had been so heavily harvested in the vicinity of the estate that the nearby woodland was do
minated by seedlings and luxuriant shrubs. The hounds smelled a threat in the undergrowth beyond the stable, and they bristled, curling back their muzzles as they growled. Twigs rattled as a creature shifted position. It sounded big. The twilight gloom amplified the sense of hugeness.

  Alain gripped Iso’s shoulder, holding him back. The smell of iron tickled his nostrils, and a taste like fear coated his mouth. Although he saw only the suggestion of the shape where young beech trees struggled with honeysuckle and sedge for a footing, his skin crawled.

  In the east, a waning gibbous moon, just two days past full, was rising.

  “Th—they’ll kill it if th—they f-find it.” Tears slipped from Iso’s chin to wet the back of Alain’s hand.

  “Hush now.” Alain signed to the hounds and they sat obediently, although they didn’t like it. Cautiously, he stepped forward to part the brush.

  The creature lying under the shadow of sedge flicked its head around, and where its amber gaze touched him, torpor gripped his limbs. Iso whimpered. Sorrow yipped. The creature was as big as a pony, with a sheeny glamour. It scrabbled at the earth with its taloned feet. Leaves sprayed everywhere. It had the head of an eagle with the body of a dragon, and a whiplike tail that thrashed against the bole of the sedge behind it. Awkwardly, it heaved itself backward. It was meant to fly, but its wings were still down, not yet true feathers.

  “What i-i-is it?” whispered Iso. “M-my feet feel so slow.”

  “It’s a guivre.” Its hideous shape should have frightened him. “It’s a hatchling.” The torpor wore off. It hadn’t the full force of an adult’s stare, that would pin a man to the ground. The nestling stabbed forward with a stubborn “awk” but couldn’t reach him because it dragged one leg under its body. It feared him more than he feared it and what it would become. “It can’t even fly yet. Do you see the wings? They don’t have their feathers yet. It should still be in the nest.”

  “I—it’s a m-monster. Th-they’ll kill it if they f-find it.”

  “So they will.”

  Maybe they should. One shout would bring an army and with staves, shovels, and hoes they could hammer it to death, staving in its skull. But it was so young, and it was free, not chained and brutalized like the one that had killed Agius. In its own way it was beautiful, gleaming along its scaly skin where the last glow of sunlight and the silvery spill of moonlight mingled to dapple its flanks. Only God knew how it had come to be here.

  Then he saw the wound that had crippled it, opening the left thigh clean to the bone.

  “Iso, get me combed flax and a scrap of linen soaked in cinquefoil. Do it quickly, friend. Don’t let anyone see you.”

  Iso mumbled the words back to himself, repeating them. He had a hard time remembering things. He lurched away with a rolling gait, for on top of everything else, he had one leg shorter than the other.

  Alain eased into the brush and crouched as the hatchling hissed at him to no avail. It couldn’t reach him, nor could it retreat. Leaves spun in an eddy of wind, fluttering to the ground as the breeze faltered. Distantly, voices raised in the service of Compline, the last prayer of the day. The monks’ song wound in counterpoint to his own voice as he spoke softly to the hatchling. He spoke to it of Adica, of the marvels he had seen when he walked as one dead in the land where she lived. He spoke to it of dragons rising majestically into the heavens and of the lion queens on whose tawny backs he and his companions had ridden. He spoke of creatures glimpsed in dark ravines and deep grottos and of the merfolk and their glorious undersea city.

  Guivres were unthinking beasts, of course, but the hatchling listened in that way in which half-wild creatures allow themselves to be soothed by a peaceful voice. The hounds lay in perfect silence, heads resting on their forelegs and eyes bright.

  Iso returned with his hands full. The young guivre kept its amber gaze fixed on Alain but remained still as he pulled the lips of the wound together, pressing linen over the cut, and bound it with flax tightly enough to hold but not so tight that it cut into flesh.

  “Harm none of humankind,” he said to it, “but take what you must to survive among the beasts of the forest, for they are your rightful prey. May God watch over you.”

  As he backed into the spreading arch of a hazel, the hatchling came to life. It spread its wings and, beating them, rattled branches as though calling thunder. Sorrow and Rage barked, and the creature lurched away into the forest, using its wings to help power it along since it couldn’t rise into the air. With a great deal of noise, it vanished from sight.

  Behind, the last hymn reached its final cadence. Services were over. This was the time of day when the worshipers returned to their final tasks before making ready for bed.

  Iso hopped anxiously from foot to foot. “Th-they’ll hear and th-they’ll come.” He wasn’t frightened of the beast but of what Brother Lallo might do to him for missing Compline.

  A stone’s throw away, the stables remained oddly quiet, although now was the usual time for laborers who had no cot in the dormitory to make a final check on any animals stabled within before finding themselves a place to sleep in the hayloft. For a long time Alain couldn’t bring himself to move away from the forest’s edge, although he knew he ought to get Iso back to the dormitory. Instead, he listened to the progress of the beast and after a while couldn’t hear any least tremor of its passing. Would it grow into a fearsome adult, preying on humankind? Had he spared it only to doom his own kind to its hunger?

  He remembered the poor guivre held captive by Lady Sabella, tormented by starvation and disease, fed dying men and, in the end, used by her as ruthlessly as she used the rest of her allies. He could not regret saving one after having killed another.

  Sighing, he turned away from the forest and walked back to the dormitories with Iso hobbling, gasping and whispering, at his side. It would be hard for Iso to keep silent about the guivre, but who would believe him?

  Alain laughed softly. Maybe disbelief could be a form of freedom. For the first time since he stumbled out of the stone circle with the memory of Adica’s death crushing him, he felt a lightness in his heart, a breath of healing.

  As they passed the stables, they almost ran into old Mangod, who had labored here for more years than Alain had been alive. Like Iso, lie was a cripple with a withered arm that, once broken, never set right. When he lost his farmstead to his sister’s son, he retired to the monastery.

  He had an excitable voice and a way of hopping from leg to leg like a child needing to pee. “Have ye heard?” he asked in his western accent. “There come some holy monks this morning to the abbot, and a couple of king’s soldiers. They say they’ve seen sleepers under the hill with the look of old Villam’s son, the lad who got lost up among the stones a few years back. Terrible strong magic, they say. And a revelation, too, to share with us brothers.”

  His words made Alain nervous; they pricked like pins and needles in a foot that’s fallen asleep. As he and Iso walked up past the stables, he saw most of the day laborers clustered on the porch although they would normally be in their cots by now. A dozen of the monks stood among their number, straining forward, and at one corner of the porch huddled six pale-robed novices who had escaped from the novices’ compound where they were supposed to live and sleep in isolation until the day they took their final vows.

  “‘His heart was cut out of him! Where his heart’s blood fell and touched the soil, there bloomed roses.’”

  “Th-that’s a woman!” stammered Iso as they pressed forward into the crowd gathered on the dormitory porch.

  The guivre’s eye could not have struck such sluggish fear into Alain as did her voice. He knew that voice.

  “‘But by his suffering, by his sacrifice, he redeemed us from our sins. Our salvation comes through that redemption. For though he died, he lived again. So did God in Her wisdom redeem him, for was he not Her only Son?’”

  “Heresy,” murmured a monk standing at Alain’s elbow.

  “This one comes from the
east, from the Arethousans.”

  “All liars, the Arethousans,” whispered his companion. “Still, I want to hear her.”

  “Do not let others frighten you. Do not let them tell you that the words I speak are heresy. It is the church that has concealed the truth from us—”

  “To what purpose?” An older monk stepped forward. “Were the ancient mothers dupes and fools, to be taken in by a lie? Do you mean to say they were schemers and deceivers who conspired to damn us all by hiding’ the truth of the blessed Daisan’s true nature and his final days on earth? You haven’t convinced me with this wild talk!”

  Alain pressed through the crowd until he was able to see the speaker. It was Hathumod. Somehow she had escaped the battle in the east and reached Hersford. He hung back. He didn’t want her to see him.

  A frown creased her rabbitlike face as she examined the scoffer. She appeared the most innocuous of interlocutors. No one could look more sincere than she did. “Brother Sigfrid will answer you,” she replied.

  Four young men stood beside her: the handsome blond and the redhead whom Alain had seen at services, as well as a stout fellow who resembled Hathumod and a slight young man no larger than Iso though apparently sound in all his limbs. The two Lions, Dedi and Gerulf, stood behind them, arms crossed as they surveyed the crowd with practiced vigilance. As Dedi glanced his way, Alain ducked down behind the shoulder of one of his fellow laborers, and when he glanced up, the slight young man had climbed up on a bench to address the crowd. He was dressed in a tattered monk’s robe, but despite his disreputable appearance, he responded in a voice both rich and sweet.

  “Truly, Brother, I dare not set myself higher than the Holy Mothers out of whose words flowered our most sovereign and holy church. Yet you and I both know how few of their writings have come down to us, and how many have been lost. What might the ancient mothers say to us now, were they here and able to speak freely? What fragments have we been left to read, despite the best efforts of our brethren, brothers and sisters who copied and recopied the most holy texts? Has it always been the most holy who have worked in the scriptoria? In whose interest has it been to conceal this truth?”