“It is a story that will never get old for Hugh of Austra.”
That flash startled her. “Is it possible you are more clever than you seem, Wolfhere?”
“What answer can I give that will satisfy you? God are my witness, that I am only myself, and nothing more.”
“So you say. I am not done with you, Wolfhere.”
He winced, the first sign of weakness she had surprised from him. “I am the obedient servant of God and regnant, Your Holiness.”
“Servant of Anne.”
“Of God and regnant, Your Holiness. Then, now, and always. Nothing more.” He spoke with such finality that, for an instant, she believed him.
Hugh was discovered walking in Lavinia’s enclosed garden beside the poplars, chatting amiably with Brother Petrus, whom he had known in the skopos’ palace.
“Holy Mother,” he said, bowing in the manner of presbyters as she approached. “I beg your pardon, Your Holiness. I was restless, thinking on those things we spoke of yesterday.”
She was flushed from the annoyance of having wondered where Hugh had gone, and perhaps for this reason, Brother Petrus bowed and retreated hastily, leaving them to their talk.
“I have taken some trouble to find you, Lord Hugh.”
“Gardens give me solace, Your Holiness. Forgive me.”
“Did you not fear that Queen Adelheid would make true her threat to see you executed?”
“I was told that she slept, Your Holiness. Lady Lavinia gave me leave to walk in the garden.”
“And leave to go to the prisoners’ tower, and interview the Eagle?”
“I admit I was greatly surprised to discover Wolfhere in Novomo. What can it mean that he is here?”
“What did you hope to learn from him?”
“I’m not sure,” he admitted. “He was Anne’s servant. Surely he knows something of Anne—her plans, her sorcery, her history, her books—things that might be of value to us.”
“If he does, I have not yet discovered it! Despite my best efforts. He is a stubborn man!”
“He made some pact with Sister Meriam, it appears,” he mused. “Why?”
“As yet, that mystery remains unanswered. We can discuss it later, Lord Hugh. I must go to my audience chamber for the afternoon. Many supplicants appear before me. There is a great deal of trouble in the world that wants fixing, now that God’s wrath has fallen upon us.”
“Just so,” he agreed. “I feel myself weighted by trouble, as though the Enemy had gotten a claw into my heart.”
“Do as I ask, Lord Hugh, and you will gain that which you seek.”
It was cloudy, as always, but seemed brighter in this corner of the garden where he walked. He paused beside a clump of carefully tended vervain to run a hand over its pale spurs. “It is so difficult,” he murmured, “to gain that which one seeks. Have you ever wondered, Your Holiness, about these tales of a heresy sprung up in western lands. The tale of the phoenix—have you heard it?”
“Lies whispered by the Enemy’s minions! No doubt such calumnies are but one among many misdeeds that have brought God’s hand down upon us.”
“Truly, many speak who know nothing. Still, one wonders where such tales came from and why they arose.”
“I do not wonder! The Arethousans cast them at us, hoping they would fly among us like a plague. Let ten thousand fall to the contagion! In this manner they hope to weaken us, but it will not happen. We will remain strong as long as we remain in God’s favor.”
“And when I have cast away my vows and am wed to Adelheid, what then? Is she to be killed, Your Holiness, so that Mathilda may rule in her place and we as regents over her?”
“Even the walls may have ears, Lord Hugh! Be more discreet, I pray you!”
“I crave your pardon, Your Holiness. But I am confused as to the manner of the plan, its working out, and its fulfillment. Must I lie with her?”
“Is she not desirable? Other men call her so. She is deemed very pretty.”
“So is a rock polished by the river, before it is set beside a sapphire.”
“You will persist in your obsession.”
“How will my marrying Adelheid gain me what I seek?”
“Is that your only objection? I cannot promise you the thing you want, but earthly power may grant you weapons you do not currently have. What kinfolk will aid you?”
“None.”
“What princes will assist you?”
“None.”
“You have only me. I can use you, and if you aid me, then I will reward you. So God command us. Those who serve will be given what they deserve.”
He nodded, having wandered by this time to a stand of skullcap. He twisted off a leaf. “The queen trusted me once. She may not do so again, even though I gave her no reason to distrust me. Yet if she refuses to trust me, there are ways to encourage her.”
The garden was still in its ragged spring garments; a few violets bloomed late; deep blue peeped from close stalks of rosemary. “So there are, but cautiously, Hugh. Cautiously.”
“I am ever so,” he agreed humbly, gaze cast down.
Satisfied, she beckoned for her attendants. “I will call for you later. Do not come to the feast tonight. We shall begin our persuasion of the queen tomorrow.”
3
LADY Elene always woke before dawn to pray. Because she had taken a liking to Brother Heribert’s strange manners, she insisted he climb the ladder to pray beside her every morning. Of course if Elene would pray, then Lord Berthold would come up with Heribert to pray also, Lord Jonas trailing at his heels. Blessing sulked on her pallet. Anna always dressed and knelt behind the nobles. Because she did not know the verses and psalms by heart, she must repeat them after the others had finished. Elene always remembered, as a courtesy, to ask the cleric who attended them to allow time for Anna’s response. In fact, to include Brother Heribert she had to, because he had not been quite right in the mind ever since the collapse of the hill on top of him and could scarcely recall his own verses and prayers, which he had once known better than anyone.
The others knelt on soft carpet. Anna knelt on the hard plank floor with her hands covering her face, the better to concentrate on God’s will. The better to disguise her words when she spoke “She” for “They.” No one knew that the phoenix had touched her heart. No one but Blessing, who had learned to keep silent about this one thing after that time when Prince Sanglant had punished his daughter’s servants for exposing her to heretical words. Blessing hated to see her servants punished, knowing she would never be punished herself. It was the one thing about her that gave Anna hope.
“Blessed be You, Mother and Father of Life,” said Lady Elene.
“Blessed be You, Holy Mother,” whispered Anna into her hands.
“Blessed be You,” repeated Brother Heribert in his awkward voice.
Lord Berthold yawned.
Lord Jonas made no sound. He often fell asleep kneeling, eyes open.
Blessing gulped down a false sob, stifled under her blankets.
On the floor below, the trap thumped open, landing hard. Anna flinched, hands coming down. Berthold rose, and Blessing’s sniveling ceased.
“Blessed is the Country of the Mother and Father of Life, and of the Holy Word revealed within the Circle of Unity,” continued Elene stubbornly, ignoring the clatter of feet beneath, “now and ever and unto ages of ages.”
A cleric’s cowl appeared in the open trap. The woman climbed higher and revealed herself as Sister Mara, one of the Holy Mother’s faithful attendants. She looked around the room. After a moment, she climbed all the way up and spoke in whispers to Julia, who shook her head. They walked around the room and opened up both chests while Lady Elene kept praying as if they weren’t there. At last, Sister Mara left.
When prayers came to an end, Berthold said, “What was that all about?”
“Begging your pardon, my lady. My lord.” Julia rubbed her brow with the back of a hand, looking nervous. Normally she had a robu
st confidence, but she seemed tired after speaking with Sister Mara. “You’re to stay within today, all day. No garden.”
Elene raised an eyebrow and looked at Berthold, who shrugged.
Blessing popped up from the bed, unaware and unashamed of her nakedness, although by now she showed the signs of blossoming womanhood. “I don’t want to stay in.”
“Shut up, brat,” said Berthold gently. “Please cover yourself.”
“I don’t want—”
“Do shut up!” snapped Elene.
“I hate you!”
“I hate you, you evil creature! I’ll pinch your ears if you don’t stop whining.”
Blessing clapped hands over ears and huddled under the blankets until, sometime later, after the others had gone down to the lower floor to entertain themselves with chess and reading, Anna was able to coax her out.
“I don’t feel good,” whimpered the girl. “I got a cut on my leg.”
“How could have you gotten—” But it was no cut, of course. “Princess Blessing. Your Highness. Oh, dear.”
“Is anything amiss, Anna?” asked the servingwoman, Julia, from the window, where she sat and sewed.
“Sit down,” Anna said sternly, and Blessing sat cross-legged. A few drops of blood stained the bedding, but it wasn’t too bad. “I pray you, Julia, Princess Blessing is feeling poorly. Might you go down and ask the sergeant if we can have a posset, something to settle her stomach? It must be what she ate last night.”
Julia glanced sharply at her. Perhaps she suspected. Perhaps she had overheard, although Blessing had whispered. But she went, leaving Anna and the child alone.
“Now, Your Highness, listen closely and listen well.”
“My tummy hurts.”
“I know it does. And so it will do, about once every month, for a good long while now.”
“Why?”
“You know a woman’s courses.”
“That you get?”
“Yes, as you’ve seen, the Lady favored women by giving them the power of life, while men have only the power of death. That is why we can bleed every month and survive it. Now you have started bleeding.”
“What does that mean?”
She bit her lip, worried it, then plunged on. “It means you must be secret, Blessing.” How difficult a thing this was to get across to a child who had the understanding of a five or six year old but the body of a budding adolescent! “Among my people, a girl isn’t likely to be wed until she’s older and she and her betrothed have the wherewithal to set up a household. But among noble families sometimes girls are married as soon as they begin bleeding.”
“Why?”
“Why marry? To form alliances. To make treaties. To consolidate an inheritance.”
“Why not when they’re little, like me?”
“Girls are betrothed all the time when they’re children. But no man will bed a wife until that girl is a woman and can grow a baby inside her.”
“Is Lady Elene old enough? Why can’t she get married and leave us? I hate her!”
“We are all prisoners, Your Highness. Our captors may do with us as they wish, even kill us. That’s why you must be silent and secret.”
For as long a while as Anna had ever seen Blessing sit and think, the child frowned and considered. She was a lovely girl, with a complexion neither light nor dark and with shining thick dark hair falling halfway down her back that must be combed and braided and pinned up. Her eyes seemed sometimes green and sometimes blue and sometimes a hazel shading toward brown, a blend of her father and mother. Like both father and mother, she drew the eye; folk watched her; even the soldiers did, sneaking a look while pretending not to. Beauty is dangerous among the innocent, who might be ravaged when they least expect it.
“If I were Queen Adelheid,” Anna said at last, “I would use you, Your Highness, as a pawn in a game of chess.”
“I am the great granddaughter of the Emperor Taillefer! She can’t do anything without my permission!”
“She can do anything she wants, Your Highness! How will you stop her? If Queen Adelheid knows you are bleeding, she may think it worth her while to marry you off and be rid of you that way. Right now she thinks you’re still a child.”
Blessing stared at her hands, then drew a finger along her inner thigh and stared at the blood painting her nail.
“Think what a prize you are, Your Highness. Many men might desire to take you for a wife only because of who your parents are. Some may hope to reward themselves. Others might hope to punish your father or mother.”
Tears slipped down the girl’s face. “Why does my father never come, Anna?”
“He does not know where you are. We haven’t any way to let him know. If any of us escape, Holy Mother Antonia will hear of it and send horrible demons after us to eat us alive. That’s what Lady Elene says.”
“I don’t believe her! I hate her!”
“You should! You must! You will! She is like your mother, trained as a sorcerer. She knows. We are trapped, Your Highness. And you are more vulnerable than ever now! Do you understand me? Lady Elene is our friend. So is Lord Berthold and Brother Heribert. And Lord Jonas. And our servants, Berda and Odei. But no one else. We can trust no one else.”
Footsteps rattled on the ladder. Blessing folded her hands over her loins as soon as Julia’s head appeared and sat there stubbornly, refusing to budge, until Anna wrestled a shift on over her bare shoulders. A moment later, the healer appeared.
“Berda, come here!” said Anna.
“Small queen sick in her belly?” The healer knelt by the pallet.
Anna turned her back to Julia and lifted two fingers to seal her lips. The healer nodded. Blessing, still sitting cross-legged, pulled her shift up to her hips to show the blood streaking her thighs.
Berda nodded. “A drink calms the belly,” she said in her odd voice. Her broad hands smoothed the shift back over the girl’s legs. She touched the girl’s forehead, throat, and her collarbone on each side.
“Some sickness in the food,” she said. “Have you piss this morning?”
Blessing shook her head.
“Come, small queen.”
They went to the corner, where the chamber pot was tucked away behind a bench, and Blessing did her business. Julia came over to look, but after Blessing rose, Berda squatted quickly with her heavy felt skirt concealing this complicated maneuver, since the steppe women, Anna had seen, wore both skirts and trousers. She then peed in her turn, and rose with a grimace.
“Moon turns,” she said. “I am bleeding. Must move my bed to upstairs.”
It was a habit of the Kerayit healer to sleep downstairs with the men most of the month, and upstairs with the women during her bleeding, although it seemed to Anna that it had not been more than two weeks since her last sojourn upstairs. Never mind it. They would burn that bridge after they had crossed it. She looked at Berda, and the healer nodded, covered the pan, and offered it to Julia to dispose of, as was her duty.
“I fetch drink of herbs for the small queen. She rest this day.”
Rest she did. Berda found clean rags for her, to catch the blood, and pretended they were her own. It was not so difficult, once the ruse was begun; Julia, like the other Aostans, found the healer so peculiar that she didn’t like to get close to her.
Afterward, they went about their usual routine. Water must be brought up for washing, and the buckets taken downstairs and emptied and rinsed out. The morning chores broke up the monotony of the day, so Anna eked out each least errand, dawdling where she could. She didn’t even mind it when, after the upstairs was tidied and washed, she was sent down to empty the dungeon bucket. The old man didn’t scare her, although the stink was bad. After the first few weeks, the soldiers simply stopped going down with her because they hated the pit, and she was free to make quick conversation with the Eagle, mostly a detailed account from her of yesterday’s doings, and perhaps a few oblique sentences passed back and forth between him and Lady Elene.
/> This morning, though, the soldiers loitered nervously by the outer door, as if keeping an eye out for someone they expected to come along at any moment. Anna had a clean bucket in one hand as she reached the head of the steps that cut down into the gloom. The sergeant on duty glanced back into the chamber and saw her.
“Here, now,” he said, lifting a hand to get her attention.
But she was already descending along the curve of the stair with the cold stone wall brushing her shoulder and the bucket dangling over air as soon as she cleared the plank flooring. It was quite dark, but she knew the feel of the wall and the angle of each step by now. She could have gone down with her eyes closed, and indeed she paused partway down, in the shadows, and closed her eyes, because she heard voices.
The tower rose in levels, with the deepest chamber dug out of the earth and markedly colder than the ground floor and the other rooms stacked above. The space below was used to store beans and onions, and here also three small cells had been bricked in. From her place on the stairs, with the dampening of sound and the lack of any footsteps clomping above, she heard them speaking in low voices. One of those voices was familiar to her; the other had a strange, enchanting timbre that seemed to stick her feet right where they were so that she didn’t dare, or want, to move.
“You cannot escape because Antonia controls the galla.”
“I do not fear the galla.”
“You should.”
“Perhaps.”
“Then why do you not escape? If you can, why don’t you?”
“Is that not obvious? I have those to whom I am responsible. If they cannot run, then I cannot run.”
“Thus meaning, you cannot protect them from the galla. Is it Princess Blessing, or Conrad’s daughter, who holds you here?”
“Why can it not be both?”
“I heard the story once that you tried to drown Prince Sanglant, when he was an infant.”
“It’s a story that has been told many times, and on occasion in my hearing.”
“An interesting tale, and if true, a shame you did not succeed. Although it might make a man wonder what allegiance holds you to Princess Blessing. Is it her father you seek to serve? Her mother? Anne’s tangled weaving, still to be obeyed? Or do you merely have a weakness for these caged birds?”