In the Ruins

  “He’ll elude your searchers,” said Liath, shaking her head.

  “So be it. If he flees to Varre, we’ll catch up to him. If he flies to Aosta, then he cannot trouble us here in Wendar, can he?”

  “So we can pray,” said Hathui grimly, “for I would like to sleep soundly at night. I have a boon to ask of you, Your Majesty.”

  “What is that?”

  “If he’s caught, I want recompense for the harm he’s done to me and my kinfolk. A grant of land, perhaps, to add to what they already claim.”

  Sanglant smiled. “I so swear, Hathui. You will have satisfaction.”

  “Your Majesty,” she said, head bowed, and kissed the royal seal ring on his right hand, the one he had taken off his father’s body.

  He stood in unusual stillness for a long time, unwilling to break into her grief, but at last she shook her head and rose.

  “There is wine,” he said. “Captain Fulk will see you get anything you wish. We’ll keep a close watch, but I expect Hugh is gone. And that you are safe from him for the time being. Still, we must be cautious.”

  “Your Majesty,” she said. She nodded at Liath, and left the tent.

  He remained still for a shockingly long time, and she watched him, curious and also not at all recovered from the unexpected memory of the weaving that had risen like a tide to engulf her. It had troubled her. It had roiled the waters.

  “What is it?” she asked him finally.

  “Did you touch him? In the library?” His voice was hoarse, but then, he always sounded like that.

  “Are you jealous of him, Sanglant?”

  “Of course I’m jealous of him! I know he—” He faltered, grimacing. “I know he … possessed your body.”

  “He took what he wanted. I didn’t go to him willingly.”

  “I know! I know! It just … gripes me to think of him touching you. That isn’t all of it. He has all the skills you treasure. He can read and write and puzzle over the mysteries of the heavens, just as you do.” He waved toward the walls, the ceiling, the lantern. “He knows sorcery. He’s more like you than I am.”

  “That’s true,” she agreed, smiling as he got to looking more agitated. “It’s a terrible thing to imagine that a man as evil as Hugh can be compared to me in so many ways.”

  “That’s not what I meant!” he answered, laughing but still worrying at it. “He’s just so damned beautiful.”

  “That’s true,” she agreed.

  “How can the outer seeming so ill match the inner heart?”

  “I don’t know. Yet in the end even his beauty has failed him. His own half siblings ought to trust and embrace him, but they hate and distrust him instead. He betrayed those who did trust him. He is a fugitive, a man without kinfolk or retinue to aid him. Perhaps God have set him before us as a lesson.”

  “What sort of lesson? I am not well versed in these clerical riddles.”

  He was amused, and no doubt a little relieved, but in her own heart laughter had fled. “‘Chaos in the world is the result of disorder in the human soul.’ I didn’t say it,” she added. “I’m just quoting. I read it in a book.”

  “Which doesn’t make it any less true. Did you touch him?”

  She thought of Waltharia, a nice enough woman, someone she had liked perfectly well. Someone who had shown her a moment’s surprising, and genuine, compassion.

  “Why should I tell you?” she asked him, and when he winced, she was glad of seeing him pained. She hadn’t known she harbored so sharp a sting in her inner heart. Flame trembled. She had learned how to contain it, but maybe she was more like Hugh than she knew, wanting to hurt what she could not control.

  “Nay,” he said raggedly, “I have no right to question you on such matters, God know. I trust you. Let’s leave it at that.”

  “I would as soon touch Hugh as lie in a bed of maggots,” she said, relenting. “Let’s leave it at that. There’s much to be considered these next two days and not least of them is what royal garments can be found for your investiture. Waltharia has said she will help me in finding suitable clothing.”

  “Waltharia?”

  “Oh, indeed, we are quite close, she and I.”

  She was doubly pleased, and ashamed of the pleasure she took in it, to see him look askance at her, and frown, and scratch one shoulder in a way that showed he was quite discomfited by these tidings, wondering what they meant and what the two women might have said to each other. He took refuge in pacing, and she let him pace as she allowed the turmoil in her heart to simmer in an alarmingly smug manner.

  In time, he came to rest beside the bench. He picked up the book, opened it with the exaggerated care of a man who rarely touches such things, and shook his head as he stared at one of the pages. From this angle, she could not see which one.

  “I haven’t the patience for this,” he muttered at last as he closed and set it down with proper reverence.

  “I haven’t the patience for court life.”

  “No,” he agreed. “You will always say the wrong thing at the wrong time.”

  “Even if I’m right!”

  “Especially if you’re right,” he said, laughing. “But court is a battlefield, nothing different. You must choose not just how you arrange your forces but when and in what order you attack, when to make a strategic retreat, when to make a flanking action, when to stand your ground.”

  “Its own form of scholarship.”

  “Perhaps. I would not say so.”

  “We each received training in our youth. That can’t be changed. I wouldn’t have it otherwise. Because of that, there is much we can learn each from the other. I’ve been thinking about Gent, and strategy, and excommunication.”

  “The nobles support me. As long as they support me, the church is limited in how far its influence can reach.”

  “That may be, but I do not wish to remain an excommunicate in the eyes or heart of the church. Of course it didn’t affect me at Verna or when I was with the Ashioi because I didn’t even know of it. In the final march against Anne it mattered little. Now it matters a great deal. I know what I must do.”

  “What is that?”

  “You won’t like it.”

  “Is that meant to encourage me to dissuade you?”

  “I mean to do it, because I know it’s right.”

  “So am I threatened! I pray you, if we are to be allies, we must know what the other intends.”

  “Very well,” she said. “You are not the only one who must hold a vigil.”

  XI

  SHADOWS AND LIGHT

  1

  “I don’t like you,” said Blessing, “so go away.”

  Although Lady Lavinia’s enclosed garden had not yet begun to bloom, Antonia found a measure of peace there when she was not tutoring Princess Mathilda or receiving petitioners and penitents in the great hall beside Queen Adelheid. She had been sitting in solitude on a stone bench considering the nature of evil and the punishments and penance most fitting for oath breakers. Hearing the shrill voice of her enemy’s child, she leaned forward to peer through the foliage that concealed her. A screen of clematis grew alongside the picturesque ruins of a tiny octagonal chapel, a remnant from the old Dariyan palace that had once stood here. Beneath her feet a mosaic floor, swept clean, displayed an antique tale involving two hounds, a huntress, and a half naked man. She had often encouraged Lady Lavinia to destroy the floor, but while the lady was otherwise all compliance, in this matter she refused most obstinately.

  “You can’t make me go. You’re my mother’s prisoner.”

  “I can punch you in the face.”

  “Bastard of a bastard!”

  “Am not!”

  “Are so!”

  “Brat! Leave off!” A masculine voice entered the fray. Antonia parted the leaves with her hands so she could see. She had succumbed once to a man of that line. It was a bitter failing to know that a youthful face and laughing, generous features might warm her still, although he was young enough
to be her grandson. Berthold Villam sauntered up from the far end of the garden along the paved pathway that paralleled the irrigation channel. He was conversing amiably with his Aostan guards.

  The two girls faced each other like two young furies, although Blessing looked years older. Yet their expressions and stances were remarkably similar. It was difficult to remember, seeing a woman budding out of the girl, that Blessing was very young despite the age of her body. She looked ready to spit or bite, as little hellions may do, but Berthold’s command fixed her to one spot where she fumed and got red and then white as her temper flared.

  Princess Mathilda spat at Blessing’s feet before bolting for the safety of the colonnaded porch where two of her servingwomen waited in the shadows. As they led the girl away, their chatter faded out of earshot.

  “… and Meto said what? Here, now, Your Highness, your mother said you weren’t to speak to the child for she’s not of your station and a wild thing indeed. Let’s go in. So, go on. What did Meto say to her when he found out she meant to marry Liutbold?”

  “Marry Liutbold! Is that what that was about? That’s the first I heard of it. What can she have been thinking?”

  “She’s stupid,” said Blessing.

  Berthold halted beside the girl, scratching at the peach fuzz he had been growing for the last three months. “Princess Mathilda is a royal princess just as you are, Your Highness. You’d do better to make her an ally than an enemy.” He had switched to Wendish, which the guards did not, perhaps, understand.

  “She’s an enemy.”

  “Perhaps. But she keeps stumbling into you when she isn’t supposed to see you at all.”

  “That’s because she hates me.”

  “She might. Or she might wish for a child her own age to play with. She might want to like you, and act like this because she doesn’t know how else to get your attention.”

  How had this youth come to be so wise?

  “She’s not my own age! I’m older!”

  “You look older, brat. But you don’t act it!”

  “I do!” She bit her lip. She pouted. But she shut up and fixed a stare on Berthold that would have eaten another man alive.

  “Come, brat,” he said more fondly, extending a hand.

  She laid her head against his arm as a dog rests its muzzle lovingly along its master’s thigh.

  “Here is Brother Heribert. He’s found you a green apple left over from last season. Isn’t that amazing?”

  “It’ll make me puke!”

  “Anna can stew it up with herbs and make it all tasty. He found some flowers, too, a kind I’ve never seen before. Maybe you can dry them and press them to make something pretty.”

  “I don’t want to. Papa let me fight with swords. I want to fight with swords!”

  One of the guards made a noise halfway between a hiccup and a cough.

  “I can so! I can so!”

  “Blessing!”

  She shut her eyes and to Antonia’s amazement did not burst into tears, as she would have done just two months ago. She struggled, that dusky face mobile in all its expressions, flashing quickly from thwarted anger through innocent bewilderment into a determination that showed itself by the way she jutted out her jaw.

  “Your Highness, I have found you an apple.”

  Antonia looked away, letting the branches ease back into place. It was bad enough to hear his voice. She could not bear to look at him as well.

  “Thank you, Brother Heribert.”

  “Properly spoken, brat,” said Berthold with a laugh. “We’ll teach you manners yet.”

  “I hate you,” said Blessing in a tone that meant exactly the opposite. “Come, Brother Heribert,” she added grandly. “We’ll go up to Anna. We don’t need him anymore.”

  “It’s time for your lessons,” he said in the voice that sounded like Heribert but not like him.

  “I hate books!”

  “You must learn. It is what he wanted.”

  “Go on, brat. Learning is a weapon as sharp as steel.”

  “You’ll come too, Berthold?” she asked plaintively.

  “In a bit.”

  Her sigh seemed loud enough to rattle the leaves. She tromped off. Antonia from her concealment saw the pair as they climbed the steps onto the long porch that looked over the enclosed garden. A trio of bored guards dogged their heels. One held the chain bound to Blessing’s left wrist, a necessary precaution after her first two escape attempts. On the third step Heribert paused and glanced back over the garden, and for an instant Antonia thought he looked right at her, although surely she was safely hidden in the bower.

  “That child has a terrible liking for you, my lord,” said the older of the two guards attending Berthold. He spoke in Dariyan.

  “Do you think so?” Berthold had taken to Dariyan so easily that it was likely he had some prior knowledge of the language, although nothing Antonia knew of the Villam clan suggested an earlier link to Aosta.

  “Surely enough, for I’ve two daughters close to her in age and I know the look they gave those lads they took a liking to.”

  “Poor thing,” said Berthold.

  “Think you so?” asked the younger guard. “She is a brat. Princess Mathilda is a nobler child.”

  “I pray you, Philo, I will not hear Princess Blessing spoken of in that way.” The tone was gentle enough to make the older guard chuckle and the younger one truckle.

  “I beg pardon, my lord. I meant nothing disrespectful. Yet it’s her father killed our lord, the queen’s husband. His own father! Surely the stain of his patricide marks her somehow. She hasn’t the look of proper people. What if that’s the influence of the Enemy?”

  “I’m no cleric to answer such troubling questions. Princess Mathilda is a fine young lady, indeed, as she must be with such royal parents. What say you we go find those pastries you were speaking about?”

  “Is it the pastries you lads are wanting a closer look at, or the cook’s helpers?” said the elder, and the younger two chortled.

  They walked away in good charity with each other. Queen Adelheid had no idea how thoroughly Lord Berthold had cozened his guards and what freedom they allowed him, none of which she had approved. He had the run of the castle, as long as he kept out of the way of those who would get his guards in trouble. Antonia watched the three men retreat down the length of the garden between the serried ranks of fruit trees only now leafing and budding as the warmth of spring tried to penetrate the clouds. There was a brilliance in the sky today that gave her hope that the sun would break through soon. If not now, when?

  Berthold could have escaped a hundred times in the last three months, but he had not, because Blessing could not. Like Villam, he was loyal to Wendar and, despite Mathilda’s superior claims, it was obvious to Antonia that Berthold had made his choice. Adelheid might believe otherwise, but she had allowed herself to be blinded by his youthful charm.

  Nay, Heribert was the cause of it all. He had turned Berthold’s heart, although it wasn’t clear with what inducements. Blessing, too, had a hand in it, however unwitting. Mathilda had many fine qualities, including Henry’s infamous temper and openhanded generosity and Adelheid’s devious mind, but she did not shine, not as Blessing did. The child was without question an abomination, intermingling the blood of three races, but she had power that could be molded and used as a tool, either by the Enemy or by the righteous.

  Adelheid knew that. It was the only reason she hadn’t killed Blessing in revenge for Henry’s death.

  Antonia sat down on the bench to resume her meditations, but peace had fled. It was dry and cool and the air had a dusty bite to it. No breath of wind rustled leaves. Even the poplars that lined the far wall stood in silence, although normally any least breeze caused them to murmur. There hadn’t been rain for a month although usually the dry season commenced much later in the year. These signs seemed bad omens.

  Worse yet to come, as the holy prophets said, although how anything could be worse than what sh
e had seen and the reports that filtered in from the provinces of Adelheid’s blasted realm she could not imagine.

  When she rose, her knees popped, and her back hurt. These days she was always out of breath and battling a nagging cough. By the dry fountain, two clerics and one attendant waited for her. Few had survived the destruction in Darre, but that was just as well.

  “Your Grace,” said young John.

  “Your Holiness,” said elderly Johanna.

  The servingwoman, Felicita, took her arm and assisted her up the steps, which had gotten steeper in the last month.

  “We will go first to the queen’s chamber and then to my audience hall for the afternoon’s petitioners.”

  “Yes, Your Holiness.”

  At midday, Adelheid usually sat for an hour beside Berengaria, but she was not in the nursery today. Antonia sank down on the couch beside the bed where the tiny child tossed and turned in fitful sleep. Her face, normally pale, would turn red when she coughed. She had not spoken a word for three weeks now, and it was supposed by everyone except Adelheid that she was dying.

  Had Berengaria been innocent, or guilty? It seemed she had been guilty, although it was difficult to know how a child so small could have offended God. Perhaps she was being punished for her mother’s sins, as in the ancient days of the prophets when God smote the unrighteous for their failings, great and small, old and young, female and male, and even the cattle.

  So be it.

  “Poor thing,” murmured Felicita. Antonia smoothed sweat-soaked hair back from the child’s face as the nurse looked on with resignation.

  “Has the queen been in to see her daughter today?” Antonia asked.

  “No, Your Holiness,” said the nurse. “I heard her in the corridor with her attendants, but then Captain Falco came with some news and they went away again.”

  “What news?”

  “I’m not sure, Your Holiness. There was some talk of prisoners, but you know how the guard do bring in all kinds of folk these days, most of them beggars wanting a loaf of bread and nothing more.”