“It’s God’s will if the sun don’t shine, or the rains don’t fall,” said Artald. “So Deacon teaches.”
“That storm last autumn was not made by God,” said Alain. “That was made by human hands, in ancient days.”
They looked at him, as they always did, as if they did not know if he were a madman or a prophet, and then looked at each other and away again, at the trees, at the clouds, at the startling appearance of a robin hopping along the ground under the skeletal branches of an oak.
“Look there!” cried Stancy. “Look at that!”
“Mayhap spring will come after all,” said Henri.
The others kept walking, but Alain halted and with a gesture commanded the hounds to move away down the road. Blanche hovered beside him as he moved slowly forward until he was close enough to kneel and stretch out his hand. He breathed, finding the rhythm of the wind in the weeds and the respiration of the tree. The bird hopped toward him, then onto his palm, turning its head to stare at him first with the right eye, then the left. That gaze was black and bright, touched with a shine.
“Come quietly and slowly, Blanche, and kneel beside me. No fast movements.”
Scarcely breathing, she crouched next to him and held out her hand. After a moment, the robin hopped onto her fingers, gave her that same piercing examination, and abruptly spread its wings and flew away.
She burst into tears. “How do you do that?”
“Just be patient, little one. If you find what is quiet within yourself, even the wild creatures will trust you.”
“No one trusts me.”
“That robin did.”
She sniffed, wiping eyes and nose.
“Best come now,” he said. “Let’s hope we see more birds this spring, for it’s an ill portent to have them all vanish like that.” He tilted his head back to look up into the bare trees. “For so it was then. An ill portent.”
“Here, lad, are you having another headache?” Henri had returned, leaving the others waiting up the road. “Let me help you up if you’re not feeling well. No need to go on today if you’ve a mind to go back home.”
“No, no, Father. I’m well enough. Just remembering a forest once where all the birds had fled. But there was a terrible black heart alive in that place. That was why they fled. They feared evil.”
Henri looked around nervously as Blanche whimpered. “Think you we’re haunted?”
“Here?” He patted Blanche tenderly on the head. “Nay, I think it was the wind blew the poor creatures so far that it’s taken them this long, those that survived, to find their way back home.”
“So it may be,” said Henri, still holding his arm and gazing at him. “So it may be. A poor creature may be blown a far way indeed before it turns its gaze toward home.”
They caught up to the others, who set on their way without question or comment. They smelled the tannery before they saw it, and marked the square steeple of the village church rising above trees. In the common ground and meadow in front of the church, an assembly had gathered by the chair and table where the count’s chatelaine held court to choose young folk to serve for a year at Lavas Holding and to receive the tithes and taxes the village paid to the count in exchange for his protection in times of war. Alain did not at first recognize the old woman who sat at the table. It was not until she looked up and saw him walking among his kinfolk, and turned her face away in shame, that he realized this woman was Chatelaine Dhuoda, but so aged with white hair and wrinkled face that anyone might be excused for mistaking her for a woman twenty years older.
She rose and, bracing herself on a cane, came around the table. As the crowd parted to let him through, she dropped to her knees.
“I beg you, my lord, return to Lavas Holding. Forgive us our sins. Come back.”
Henri whistled under his breath. Sorrow barked. The chatelaine, noticing the two black hounds, wept quietly.
“Does Lord Geoffrey know you are here?” Alain asked.
“He does not, my lord. He is the false one. He lied to gain the county for his daughter.”
“Did he? Is he not descended legitimately from the brother of the old count, Lavastina, she who was mother of the first Charles Lavastine and great grandmother of Lavastine?”
“He is, my lord.”
“How has he lied?”
“If he had not lied, then why do we suffer? He abused you, my lord, because he feared you. Why would he fear you if he did not believe that you were, in truth, Lavastine’s rightful heir?”
He nodded. “I’ll go, Mistress Dhuoda.”
“To Lavas Holding?”
“I’ll go, because I must. But I pray you, do not address me as ‘my lord.’ It isn’t fitting. I am not the heir to Lavas County.”
“Yet the hounds, my lord!” Angry, she gestured toward the hounds, who sat one to his right and one to his left. “The hounds are proof! They never obeyed any man but the Lavas heir!”
“Is that the truth?” he asked her. “Or are you only looking at it from the wrong side? Any man but the Lavas heir, or any man but the heir of the elder Charles?”
“I don’t understand you, my lord. The hounds themselves are the proof.”
“I am ready to leave,” he said, “as soon as you are able to go.”
It took her only until midday to collect what little Osna village could afford this year in taxes, and as Lavas Holding hadn’t the wherewithal, so she said, to feed any more mouths, she took no young folk out of the village to serve the count for the customary year. The cleric with her filled in the account book that listed payments and shortfalls, and there were far more of the latter than the former.
“It seems you will leave us again,” said Aunt Bel to Alain, “and it grieves me that you go. I do not know when we will see you.”
“I do not know,” he told her. “My path has been a strange one. I know only that our way must part here.”
She wept, but only a little. “There is always a place for you with us, Alain, though I think you are not really ours.”
He kissed her, and she hugged him. The others, too, gave him in turn a parting wish and a kiss or an embrace, depending on their nature.
“I pray you,” he said to Stancy and Artald, “stay strong, and keep the others well. Do not let the family splinter.”
“Be temperate,” he said to Julien, and to Agnes, “Don’t wait forever. Marry again in another year, if you’ve had no word of your lost husband.”
“I should go to Medemelacha myself!” she said fiercely, but in an undertone, so the others wouldn’t hear. “But Uncle won’t let me. He says it’s the place of women to guard the hearth and men to do the dangerous traveling, as it says in the Holy Verses. Everyone says I should just marry Fotho, but I don’t want to! I want to go to Medemelacha and see if there’s any news of Guy.”
“Then make a bargain. If they let you go this spring, when the sea is passable, and if you find no word of him, you’ll make no objection to marrying as Aunt Bel wishes.”
All this time Blanche clung to his arm, lips pinched together and expression so curdled that it would turn sweet milk to sour.
He came to Henri last of all.
“I am sorry to see you leaving, Son. But I know you must go. You were never ours, only a gift we held for a time until it was reclaimed.”
At last, what calm had sustained him shattered. Alain could not speak as he embraced the man who had raised him. Blanche began to wail.
“No! No! I won’t let you go!”
Henri looked both amused and annoyed, as they all did when dealing with Blanche. “You’ll have a hard time scraping that barnacle off.”
“Perhaps.” Alain did not try to dislodge her, although the others came swarming to scold at her and tug at her. “Perhaps best not to,” he said, which made them all regard him in surprise.
“What do you mean?” Aunt Bel asked.
Julien was flushed, looking ashamed, and Agnes rolled her eyes in disgust.
“She doesn’t
thrive,” said Alain. “She’s like a tree growing all twisted, and not straight. Let me take her with me as far as Lavas Holding.”
“Who will care for her?” demanded Agnes. “Who would show kindness to a creature as unlikable as she is?”
“They’d as like turn her out with the chickens as keep her in the house,” said Stancy. “Poor mite.” She looked at Julien, who only ducked his head. “If you’d speak up for her more, Jul, and scold her when she’s deserved it, then she might not be what she is.”
“No! I won’t let you leave!” Blanche shrieked, too caught up in her tantrum to listen.
“I can see that she is taken care of.”
“I don’t like it,” said Aunt Bel. “Lavas Holding hasn’t enough to take in young folk for their year of service, the chatelaine said so herself. I won’t have it said I turned out my own grandchild and sent her to scratch with the chickens.”
“Do you trust me, Aunt Bel?”
“Well, truly, lad, I do.”
“Let me see what can be made of her in fresh soil.” That they none of them liked the child made them too ashamed to agree. “Blanche! Hush!”
She quieted, but kept her arms locked around his waist. Tears streaked her dirty face as she looked first up at him and then at the others.
Aunt Bel looked at each member of her family in turn, but they only frowned or shrugged. “Very well, Alain. It may be for the best.”
“What for the best?” muttered Blanche, with a distrusting sniff.
“You will come with me as far as Lavas Holding,” he said to her, “as long as you behave and do exactly as I say. Which you will.”
The words stunned her. She stuck her thumb in her mouth and frowned around it.
“But she’s no clothing, nothing. I’ll not send a pauper—!”
“It will be well, Aunt Bel. Best we go now, and let it be swift. The chatelaine is packing up.”
They wept, as did he. Blanche did not weep, not even when her father kissed her, not even when Agnes gave her the fine blue cloak off her own back that had been part of her wedding clothes.
It was hardest for Alain to let go of Henri, and in the end it was Henri who broke their embrace and set a hand on Alain’s shoulder to look him in the eye. “Go on, then, Son. You’ll do what’s right.” He brushed a finger over the blemish. “Do not forget us.”
“You are always with me, Father.”
Alain kissed him one last time. He slung his pack over his back and, with Blanche clutching his left hand, he followed Chatelaine Dhuoda and her skeletal retinue out of Osna village and back into the world beyond.
2
AT first, Anna wasn’t sure what noise had startled her out of sleep. Blessing breathed beside her, as still as a mouse and all curled up with head practically touching bent knees. There was a servingwoman called Julia, a spy of the queen’s, who slept on a pallet laid over the closed trap, but her soft snoring kept on steadily. Then the scuff sounded again, and after that a single rap of wood against stone.
Anna raised up on one elbow to see Lady Elene leaning out the window, looking ready to throw herself to her death. Anna heaved herself up and stumbled over to her, stubbing a toe on the bench, cursing.
“Look!” said Elene. As Anna moved up beside her, Elena’s hair brushed her skin, a feather’s touch, and Anna shivered and gulped down a sob for thinking so abruptly of Thiemo and Matto, whose hair might have brushed her in such a way.
“What lies off there?” Elene pointed. “See those lights?”
From this vantage, in daylight, one might gaze south over countryside falling away into rolling hills. Not a single candle burned in Novomo. The town was as dark as the Pit. Closer at hand, Anna inhaled the strong scent of piss from that spot along the curve of the tower where the soldiers commonly relieved themselves.
But distantly, like a show of lightning along an approaching storm front, she saw a shower of sparks and an arc of light so radiant that her breath caught as she stared.
“What is that, my lady?”
“There must be a crown out there, although Wolfhere never spoke of it. Someone is weaving in that crown. Yet how could they do so, with no stars to guide them?”
“Why do you need stars, my lady?”
“It’s the secret of the mathematici, Anna. I can’t tell you. But I can say that it is weaving, of a kind. You must have stars in sight to guide your hand and eye.”
Anna liked the way Lady Elene talked easily to her. She was proud, but not foolish, and she had taken Anna’s measure and measured her loyalties and while it was true that the daughter of a duke did not confide in a common servant girl, she did not scorn her either. Indeed, the more it annoyed Blessing when Lady Elene paid attention to her particular attendant, the more Lady Elene showed her favor to Anna, which Anna supposed was ill done of her, but in truth it was nice to have a mature companion who did not sulk and shriek and throw tantrums at every least provocation. It was pleasant to speak to a person whose understanding was well formed and who had a great deal of wit, which she did not always let show to those she did not trust.
“Yet look!” She was more shadow than shape, but with a sharp breath she shifted and Anna felt the pressure of her hips against her own as Elene stretched out her hand again. “That’s someone come through the crown from elsewhere. Who could it be? Who might have survived?”
Anna shivered again, mostly from the cold. “Who else knows the secrets of the crowns, my lady?”
“Marcus and Holy Mother Anne and my grandmother are dead, as is that other woman out of the south. Sister Abelia, they called her.”
“How do you know they are dead?”
“I wish to God I had not witnessed, but I did. They are dead. Yet one of the others might have survived. The ones in the north I could not see after the weaving was tangled.”
“If it’s true, could you trust them, my lady?”
“Not one of them, so Wolfhere says.”
“Can you trust Wolfhere, my lady?”
“So you have asked before!” Elene laughed, although her amusement was as bitter as her tone. “He is the only one I would trust. Well, him, and my grandmother, and my poor dead mother, may she rest in the Chamber of Light, but she can’t help me now.”
“What of your father, the duke, my lady?”
She shrugged, shoulder moving against Anna’s arm. “He gave me up, knowing I would die. He did as his mother asked, and I obeyed.”
Daring greatly, Anna placed a hand over Elene’s as comfort, and Elene did not draw her hand away. They watched until the spit and spark of light vanished, and for a long time after that they continued watching, although there was nothing to see.
“Holy Mother! I pray you. Wake up.”
Antonia had the habit of waking swiftly. “What is it, Sister Mara?”
“Come quickly, I pray you, Holy Mother. The queen has sent for you.”
She allowed her servants to dress her in a light robe and a cloak. For so late in spring it was yet cool as winter when it should have been growing steadily warmer as each day led them closer to summer. Lamps lit her way, although a predawn glamour limned the arches and corners of the palace.
A score of folk blundered about on the open porch before the queen’s chambers. They parted to let her through, and she made her way inside to find another score of them cluttering the chamber and all of them dead silent, even those who were weeping. Within, Mathilda slept. Adelheid sat on her own bed with Berengaria limp in her arms.
Only the dead know such peace.
Adelheid looked up. “So it has come, Holy Mother. She has breathed her last.” Her eyes were dry, her expression composed but fixed with an inner fury caged and contained.
“Poor child.” Antonia pressed her hand on the cold brow, and spoke a prayer. The tiny child had lost almost all flesh during its long illness. With its spirit fled, it seemed little more than a skeletal doll, its skin dull and its hair tangled with the last of the sweating fever that had consumed it. ??
?Even now she climbs the ladder that leads to the Chamber of Light, Your Majesty. You must rejoice for her, for her suffering has ended.”
“Mathilda is all I have.”
Antonia found this shift disconcerting, although she admired a woman who had already thought through the practicalities of her situation. “You are yet young, Your Majesty. You may make another marriage.”
“With what man? There is no one I can trust, and none whose rank is worthy of me.”
“That may be, but you will have to marry again.”
“I must. Or Mathilda must be betrothed, to make an advantageous alliance.”
“Mathilda!”
“Hush, I pray you, Holy Mother. I do not want her to wake.”
“If no suitable alliance exists for you, how should it exist for her, Your Majesty?”
She did not answer. From the other chamber they heard the ring of a soldier’s footsteps. A woman came running in.
“Captain Falco has urgent news, Your Majesty.”
“I’ll come.” Adelheid handed the dead child to the nurse, who accepted the burden gravely but without any of the tears that afflicted the rest of them. Her eyes were hollow with exhaustion, that was all.
Adelheid rose and shook out her gown. Strange to think of her dressed when she ought to have been sleeping, but she often watched over the child at night these latter days since everyone knew that the angel of God came most often in the hour before dawn to carry away the souls of the innocent.
Captain Falco waited in the outer chamber. He was alert, his broad face remarkably lively. “You will not believe it, Your Majesty! Come quickly, I pray you.”
Only one fountain in Novomo’s palace still played, with a splash of water running through its cunning mechanism. In this courtyard, where there was also a shaded arbor and a fine expanse of lavender and a once splendid garden of sage and chrysanthemums, Lady Lavinia hovered under the arcade and wrung her hands, looking flustered as she stared at a man washing face and hands in the pool.