Crown of Stars

  “It is strange to me that small parties of Ashioi mask warriors strike in Wendar. They come unheralded and without any trace of how they have arrived and where they go after. Yet if a mathematicus had allied with the Ashioi, he might weave gateways through the crowns for such raiding parties. How would that be aiding Wendar?”

  “My plan is deeper than it seems. I will destroy Feather Cloak.”

  “So you say. Many innocent souls have lost their lives.”

  “But the rest will live in peace because of it.” He fell silent, awaiting her response.

  What flowered within her was an astonishing sense of peace.

  Hugh had no power of his own except what he could wreak against others, a man armed with a sword who must stand on the field against disciplined ranks of archers and cavalry. This made him no less dangerous. A man with a sword can still kill anyone who comes within arm’s reach. As long as Hugh could twist others to do his will, he could, and would, harm his enemies and every innocent soul who got in his way.

  He was the bastard child of a powerful noble who had used him poorly, giving him education and desire without any way to wield it or the strength of will to rein it in. Margrave Judith had put him in the church, where he could rise to be presbyter, as he had done by a circuitous route. But becoming presbyter was not enough for Hugh. He wanted a different sort of power, and he had no way to obtain it except through sorcery. He had wielded power through Adelheid’s agency, by ensorcelling Henry, because he had no power in his own heart.

  Any person with the will to do what is right has power of a kind, however frail a reed that may seem when it comes time to stand tall against the storm. But in the end, in God’s heart, it is the only power that matters.

  He had seen, before anyone but Da and those who knew what she was, that she had power he wanted to possess. But it was the fire at the heart of her that he desired, not her. Never her, that person whom Sanglant was perfectly willing to argue with, cajole, irritate, and love.

  She had what Hugh wanted. She was what Hugh wanted to be.

  “What is your plan?” she asked him.

  “I have a rope. I’ll throw it down to you, and haul you up. We can escape through the crown that stands near here.”

  “Where is it?”

  “A few days’ walk, beyond the White Road.”

  “Very well. Throw down the rope.”

  She heard it uncoil with a scraping slither. Its final lengths thumped lightly on the cavern’s floor. She fished for and found the greasy wool, tossed it high into the air, and called fire into this cloud. It blazed.

  There! Alongside the smooth cavern wall dangled the rope, with no more than a single coil remaining on the ground. She reached it before the wool burned itself into nothing.

  She jerked hard on the rope, but it held.

  “I’ve made it fast. You must hurry. Tie it around your waist, and I’ll haul you up.”

  “How did you come to find me?”

  “You’re imprisoned in a secret place in the midst of their great city.”

  “I know. How did you find me?”

  “The priests are in a rage, claiming they are owed a sacrifice. A raiding party had taken a powerful captive, rumor said, but the members of that raiding party would not speak of it. The Feather Cloak need answer no questions.”

  “Feather Cloak?” She recalled Feather Cloak, that stern and pregnant leader who had banished her from Ashioi country.

  “Sanglant’s mother is Feather Cloak.”

  She caught a surprised laugh, making a kind of a snort. Sanglant’s mother had grasped the reins of power among the Ashioi. What had happened to the other Feather Cloak?

  “It was Feather Cloak who told you I was here?”

  “It was not. I am her prisoner, but I have other sources of information.”

  No doubt a woman—some flint-eyed warrior girl who spilled the truth to him in the hope of gaining his smile and, perhaps, a kiss. Women could be stupid, that was certainly true. Liath did not hope to be one of those women today. Hugh was certainly lying, she just wasn’t sure what part of his story was false, and which truth.

  Blessing is recovered. Alive. Living.

  “I want a knife before I’ll come up,” she said, “to defend myself with. I have no reason to trust you.”

  “If you don’t trust me, you’ll remain their prisoner. At their mercy. Do you know what the priests do to their sacrifices? Why they are called the blood knives?”

  “I want a knife. Or I won’t come up.”

  “If I drop it, it might hit you.”

  She slid backward along the wall ten paces, and called. “A knife, or I won’t come up.”

  “I pray you, Liath. If we wait too long, we may be discovered.”

  “A knife.”

  He wanted her so badly that he betrayed himself. An object rasped along rock. Silence swallowed its fall, then it rattled on stone.

  What manner of fool gave a knife to a prisoner?

  How had Hugh of Austra come to be allied with the Ashioi?

  She moved forward in darkness, knelt, and patted the ground until its cool blade came under her hand. Good iron, this. The hilt bore an embossed crest which she read by touch: the letter ‘A’ surrounded by a circle.

  “Liath, you must hurry,” he said.

  She rose, gripped the rope, and looked up. The rock clouded her vision, and the vision that lay beyond those things seen with the open eye. Rock was heavy and slow moving, but there was something there, a presence. It was as if she could smell the edge of Hugh, like smelling a perfume: lavender for beauty, wolfsbane for deadliness, and something less tangible, twisted and rotten.

  She could not quite grasp him, but she forged with her awareness as high as she could reach up the rope to a place where it tightened against a curve in the ceiling, perhaps a narrow vertical tunnel. There, where the rope receded into oblivion, she kissed the sleeping fire within it, and told it to burn.

  His shout woke fire. The rope burned hard, far above her, just out of her sight. The red glow spit flakes of ash, and she yanked. The rope tumbled down around and on top of her, the fraying end smoldering and blackening at the tip.

  “Ai, God! Liath!”

  No need to answer. She had what she wanted. The glow gave just enough light for her salamander eyes. She coiled the rope over and under around shoulder and torso like a bulky sash, holding the slowly burning end out away from her, and tested the knots of the complicated arrangement of food and drink tied up against her body. It would hold.

  She pushed into the darkness. When she approached the black spire, she found what she had prayed for: a stairway into the depths.

  10

  IN the late afternoon he rode into a clearing ringed by stately beech trees just coming into leaf. Beyond lay a tangle of mixed woodland with many massive trees listing sideways or fallen to the ground and slender saplings and a thick layer of shrubs grown up in a profusion that blocked all lines of sight. An ancient wall formed a crumbling pattern within the clearing. No place along the wall was more than knee-high, but it provided a barrier of sorts where otherwise they must lie open to whatever the forest might bring them. Within this ruin he found canvas tents being erected and fires burning and the deer being skinned and butchered and prepared for spit roasting over the remains of stone hearths. The offal was thrown to the hunting dogs, to keep them strong, although in any village such fare would have been served up as a stew. Alain had put aside some bones saved out from yesterday’s dinner, and these Rage and Sorrow gnawed on while he walked through the camp speaking here and there to servants and soldiers.

  He came at length to the cloth screens set up on poles that divided the main portion of the camp from the smaller camp where the nobles would eat and sleep. No guards patrolled this gate, situated where a second inner ruin lay within the first.

  Servants and soldiers moved about freely, but none lingered where the nobles sat on stools at their leisure while waiting for their roasting s
upper. The lords and ladies laughed and chatted, at their ease. He went to pee, leaving camp behind and stepping under the trees for a little privacy. The dogs lifted their heads and beat their tails one two, growling to warn him that he was being followed. Finished, he greeted Duke Conrad, who came accompanied by a swarm of nobles, servants, and faithful soldiers. Half of them followed the duke’s lead in taking a piss, a social activity on any noble’s progress, but when the duke was finished, he waved his retainers away and gestured toward a mossy stretch of thigh-high wall thrust up from the dirt and grown about with honeysuckle and crocus.

  “A pleasant bench,” Conrad said amiably, but in his smile Alain saw the expectation of obedience.

  They sat, and considered the woods around them, oak and hornbeam with a scattering of ash and this one proud circle of beech, obviously planted decades ago for an unknown purpose. Ivy had worked its way along the shadowed folds. Sorrow and Rage settled at Alain’s feet, staring fixedly at Conrad.

  “You’re a quiet one,” said the duke, “most of the time.” A servant approached, Conrad dipped his head slightly, and the man retreated. The swarm had spread out of earshot, leaving them a measure of peace. “What do you think of, Lord Alain? What goad whips your mount? Do you envy me my wife?”

  “Do you believe I must?”

  He smiled as he glanced away from Alain, then back again. “It would be natural to envy the man who holds the treasure you once possessed yourself.”

  Alain waited. Conrad, by all appearances a restless and energetic man, had the unusual ability to sit without the least appearance of becoming impatient. Men walked out in the woods, and over by the unseen fires singing broke out, a lewd song relating the amorous adventures of a young man peculiarly afflicted with a member whose size varied depending on the weather. “But when the sun came out, oh! When the sun came out!”

  Conrad smiled slightly, but did not stir as the impromptu verses ground on.

  Realizing that neither Conrad’s silence nor the song was likely to end soon, Alain felt obliged to answer. “I was sorry to disappoint Count Lavastine, who hoped for an heir.”

  Conrad bent to pluck a plant out of the dirt. “Bastard balm.” He crumbled the leaves in his big hand and tested the scent its oils left. “Not to my taste, the flavor of this plant. Did Lavastine believe you to be his baseborn son? Or was that only a lie? Not that it matters to me, mind you. I’m content with matters as they stand between you and me. But I’m curious.” He indicated the hounds. “These give you a powerful claim. The tale was well known, that the black hounds answer to none but the rightful heir of Lavas County. That they would kill any other person who sought to claim them.”

  He whistled softly, extending his hand palm up. Both Rage and Sorrow whined piteously and thumped their tails on the ground as they looked at Alain for permission.

  “Go on,” Alain said, and the hounds crept closer to Conrad, snuffled at his knees, and groaned a little, not quite a growl, allowing him to rub their huge heads and fuss a bit over them.

  “I like dogs,” Conrad said. “They are more faithful than men—with the natural exception of my good retainers.” His grin charmed effortlessly. “I trust my dogs not to turn on me. What about you?”

  “Am I your dog?”

  Conrad laughed. “A hard question. Yet again I must say, I don’t know. You came to Autun with some purpose. We offered you Lavas, and you have not precisely turned us down. We spoke of your marriage to my daughter Berengaria, which might bring you to rule Varre at her side. Yet I see in you no grasping servility, seeking our favor in this scheme. I see no testing of bonds with the other lesser lords, whom you may one day hope to command. No clawing and biting and growling for precedence.”

  “I am sorry,” said Alain. “I am not what you think I am.”

  “So it would seem,” said Conrad as the hounds moved away from him to flank Alain. “Yet these hounds puzzle me. You puzzle me. What do you want?”

  “Healing.”

  “Healing for the scar in your heart? From the marriage gone wrong? The lady torn from you and given to another? The loss of your father? The loss of Lavas County, and its riches?”

  “I am but one man. Observe the world, Duke Conrad, and you will see what I mean.”

  “I have taken the measure of the world, Lord Alain. It is a cruel abode, containing many pits for the unwary. So do I act.”

  “So must we all.”

  Conrad looked closely at him. “You do not speak of Lavas County, or the woman who was once your wife and is now mine. You do not speak of my sweet daughter, Berengaria, who might possibly become your wife. You do not speak of a consort’s chair.”

  “I do not.”

  Conrad folded his arms across his chest. Alain was tall, but Conrad had bulk in addition to height, arms made thick by many years riding to war and wielding the reaper’s scythe. Alain had met few men more formidable than the duke of Wayland. He had a sword, and Alain only his crude staff, and his hounds.

  Conrad made no move, although his frown suggested his displeasure. “A spy might speak so, sent into my ranks to learn my secrets. Yet it’s also said that wise men speak in riddles. Seek you revenge for the wrong done to you when Henry took Lavas County out of your hands?”

  “Was it wrong to cast me out as the count of Lavas?”

  “I cannot answer that question! Lord Geoffrey has a legitimate claim in the name of his daughter. In his own name, truth to tell, since he is the great grandson of the last countess, Lavastina, and the grandnephew of Lavastine’s grandfather, Charles Lavastine. Still, Geoffrey preferred to push his daughter forward instead of himself, since she is a girl and the old countess ruled by the ancient law.”

  “The ancient law?”

  “Still held to in Alba, I might add, and in much of Varre. The identity of a woman’s children is always known, since they have sprung from her womb. That of a man’s offspring—well, no matter what anyone says, in the end it is always a matter of faith. Therefore, by that custom, a daughter will always hold precedence over a son because her heirs are assuredly the descendants of her foremothers. Geoffrey chose to ally himself with the old custom, while Lavastine chose you, a boy of uncertain parentage. No doubt that influenced Henry’s decision. Yet, for Geoffrey, the rule of Lavas County comes to the same thing, as his daughter is still a child and he must therefore be her regent for many years.”

  “She is an invalid now. Lamed in a fall from her pony.”

  Conrad had a ready sympathy for daughters. “Poor creature! What incompetent taught her to ride? Or gave her the wrong mount?”

  “Perhaps it was only an accident.”

  “Or justice served on her because of the sins of her father.”

  “An innocent child? I do not believe so.”

  “Do you know God’s mind, then?” Conrad chuckled. “I ask my clerics every day, and they remain blind. Only my wife insists that she speaks with God’s wishes brimful on her tongue, and in truth, Lord Alain, I despise her. She is a sniveling, lying, whining weakling, no better than a … a … God know there is no creature I despise as much!”

  “She deserves respect from the man who married her.”

  “So the church prattles, but they are not wed to her—although they were once, and cast her out because of all her puling and moaning! She brought me only one good thing, and that is Berry. Tallia is like to ruin the child if she got her way, which I will not let her do.”

  “Tallia brought you an alliance with Lady Sabella and a claim to the throne of Varre for your daughter.”

  “Yes, it’s true. I am hasty in condemning her. A duchy for Ælf and a throne for Berry. Ai, God. My poor Elene.”

  “Who is that?”

  “Never mind,” he said so curtly that both hounds stiffened, coming to stand, and growled, ears going flat. “Something I gave away, because I am an obedient son.”

  Amazingly, he wept. Alain was too surprised to speak because the duke’s grief was so stark and expansive that it s
eemed the heavens themselves must weep in sympathy, although no rain fell and only the wind’s rattle through late blooming leaves and the distant clatter of the company about its twilight business accompanied Conrad’s tears.

  He sighed but did not wipe away the remaining tears. He was a man who need never apologize for any strong emotion.

  “I pray that which you cherish be restored to you,” said Alain, unexpectedly moved by the display.

  “Do you so? She is dead. I was warned it would be so, and I feel it in my heart. How, then, can she be restored to me? Even a miracle cannot bring her home.”

  “Who is she?” he asked again.

  Conrad rose. He wore a light cloak against the cool evening. Its hem slid down to lap at his hips, and he moved away, answering only when he had gone several paces out, and even then casting the words over his shoulder as though they were a dart meant to wound. “My eldest child. My own beloved daughter. My chosen heir, who will not now sit in my place when the time comes. Henry had that advantage over me, did he not? I feel inclined to spoil his wishes.”

  “Who could have taken this beloved child from you?”

  “My mother. To whom I owe my life.”

  Alain bowed his head.

  Sorrow growled, and Rage lifted her ears. A familiar figure walked toward them, accompanied by a trio of young men whose handsome faces were illuminated by the lit lamps they carried.

  “Here you are, Conrad.” Despite her age, Sabella moved as easily as a much younger woman. She marked Alain, seated, and Conrad, standing, and the hounds with their alert if not quite threatening posture on either side of Alain. “I wondered where you had gone. Is there anything I should know?”

  A suspicious woman will see intrigue flowing on all sides. No doubt the duchess of Arconia drank deeply at that river.

  “You know everything I know,” said Conrad, wiping his face before turning to face her.

  She snorted. “I doubt it. Had you kept no secrets from me, I would not respect you.”

  Conrad gestured toward Alain. “As for this one, you know what I know. He makes no claims, no demands, no refusals.”