She thought of ten answers, but there was no point in speaking words that were meaningless or, worse, lies. She could not lie to Ivar in order to try to lie to herself. She said nothing.
“Listen.” Carefully, like a man approaching a wounded dog, he crossed to her and, gently, took her hand. “It’s a fool’s notion about the Dragons. I know that. But Father must send a levy next spring to King Henry, and if he does, he’s sure to send me. Perhaps … well, if the Dragons really have ridden north, there must be some Eagles with them, to carry messages back to the King. I’ve heard it said that the Eagles will take any strong-minded person into their ranks as long as they’re free-born. And you are freeborn. Gero is riding up to Freelas tomorrow. I’ll see what he can find out.”
“But you won’t tell him what you plan?” It was an idea made more horrible because she began to hope again.
“He guesses enough. We can trust Gero. He hates Hugh worse than you do. Here Gero is my father’s heir and Hugh insulted him to his face last spring, treated him no better than a common potboy.” Clearly the insult still stung. Ivar flushed and his tone grew quite heated. “My father is a count of the land, and just because we’re so far north that the king’s progress never comes here nor has any child of our line served the king except my sister as a cleric and a great uncle who died as a Dragon at the Battle of Lenzen. But no matter what Frater Hugh said, there was nothing Gero could do unless he wanted to raise his hand against a brother of the church.”
She scarcely heard him. “I always wanted to be a King’s messenger.”
“But the Eagles ride alone. It’s very dangerous, even with the King’s seal to protect you.”
“It wouldn’t be so different from the life Da and I lived. And I’d be free, Ivar. Not bound. The Eagles are beholden to no one but the king.” She choked down a heartsick laugh. “Freeborn or not, they couldn’t take me anyway. I’m not free. Hugh bought me for two nomias. I’d never seen nomias in my life before the auction.”
Ivar released her hand and began to pace. “Your father had four books. They must have been worth a nomia at least.”
“Hugh took them and never paid for them. He said they belonged to the church now. He stole them.”
For once Ivar did not share her indignation. “Deacon Fortensia says all books pass to the church. Anyway, they’re no good to you if you can’t read. Liath.” He stopped in front of her. “Promise me that if I can find a way to take you out of here, you’ll come with me.”
He looked so young, a boy pretending to be a man. He hadn’t even begun to grow a beard yet. Liath felt infinitely older, wiser, felt so very tired, struggling against Hugh. Still, Hanna had gotten the book safely away. Ivar might yet discover an escape. “I promise. Thank you.”
He flushed. Leaning forward, he kissed her, but he was inept and their lips did not meet squarely. He flushed more deeply yet, excused himself, and fled, leaving Liath alone in the kitchen.
Unexpectedly she felt heartened. She had touched the book. If there had been Eika raids in the west, then perhaps the Eagles would even take someone like her to fill their ranks. Perhaps Count Harl would need volunteers for his levy, to support King Henry against the Eika raiders. Perhaps the winter would be mild. She could outface Hugh. She would.
Five days passed too quickly. She was nervous, afraid Hugh would return at any moment, that every sound was the track of his boots. But he didn’t come back. She slept in the kitchen, lingered at the inn and helped Hanna with her chores, and even, once, terrified and shaking for fear Hugh would appear out of thin air beside her, crept to the inn stables and leafed through her precious book. Hugh remained blessedly absent.
On the first Ladysday Eve, she stared up at the lowering sky and let herself embrace a brief contentment. Though it was cool and cloudy, so she could not observe the heavens while she had solitude to do so, still she had seven days until he returned. She poured a bath for herself, hauling the water, heating the water. As from down a long distance she recalled the old Dariyan baths in the villa where she had lived with Da and her mother. Remembering those times she luxuriated in the hot water, head back, hair floating on the ripples made by her body as she shifted in the great copper tub. The roaring hearth poured warmth over her. She heard the light patter of rain from outside. After she had soaked to her heart’s content, she washed every piece of her clothing—something she dared not do when Hugh was around—and hung it to dry on chairs in front of the hearth. Wrapping herself in a blanket, she hesitated, then with a determined grimace walked to Hugh’s cell.
The chamber was cold and empty. Empty. She poured a bucket of hot coals into the brazier and while it warmed the little room she knelt on the soft carpet and opened the chest. A rich emerald robe lay folded on top. Underneath it lay three fine linen undershifts. She lifted one out and pulled it on. The cloth felt so very soft against her skin. She sighed with pleasure and dug farther down to find cool silk beneath. There was a man’s fine tunic and a woman’s overdress of pale gold silk. She admired it for a long time. Had it been a gift to him from his mother? What was he keeping it for? She folded it up again and placed it back in the chest. Dug farther down yet …
And found books.
The first four she knew at once: Da’s books. She felt down, seeking the astrolabe, but it was gone. Hugh must have taken it with him. At last she lifted out the fifth book. It had a frayed binding, but it was stamped in gold, and the spine was encrusted with pearls, some of them missing. She opened it.
The Acts of the Magicians. For the longest time her hand could not move, even to touch the words. Da had spoken to her of this book.
“Chaldeos was a minister to the Empress Thaissania, she of the mask. At her order he wrote a lesson for her three children, so that they might learn the magics by which the Aoi ruled their empire.”
At last she managed to turn the first page. A neat scribal hand had written in three narrow columns on each page. The first was Dariyan, the second the graceful bird tracks of Jinna, and the third was Arethousan. Glancing at the Dariyan and Jinna, she saw that each column reproduced—translated—the others. If she could puzzle out the letters of Arethousan, comparing them to the other two languages, she could learn how to read it as one unraveled a code.
A spray of hard rain pounded on the shutters. A storm was blowing in. It had become much chillier and the coals had burned away. Her hands were numb with cold. Setting the book on the bed, she wrapped herself in the blanket and hurried back to the kitchen to stoke the fire, light a lamp, and bring more coals for the brazier. Back in the chamber she looked at the chair and then at the featherbed. Surely, just this one afternoon, she could allow herself this luxury: to read until dark in this soft and gloriously warm bed. She could not decide. It seemed indecent somehow, and yet, the book, lying open to the first page of text, beckoned her. The Acts of the Magicians. Secrets her father had only begun to teach her the month before he died.
Why not? Why not be reckless this once? She settled herself in the marvelous soft bed and propped herself up on one elbow to read.
And lost herself.
Book One. The Courses of the Stars and the Spheres of the Heavens, how they may be divined according to the ancient Babaharshan magicians to lend strength to the Art.
Dariyan she knew so well that she could read it mostly with her eyes, her lips shaping the words but not speaking them aloud. To read the Jinna was a more laborious process, though she had once spoken it easily. She must sound out each letter and, melding them together, create the words.
But at least much of this material was familiar to her. The stars follow a fixed course, and the pole star, Kokab, is the axle around which the great wheel of the stars spins on its infinite round. The lesser wheel is known as the zodiac, the world dragon that binds the heavens. It is a circle of constellations, each representing one of the Houses of Night, and through these houses move the Sun and the Moon and the wandering stars known as planets. The ancient Babaharshan magicians gleaned
this knowledge from a thousand years of observation and mastered sorcery by drawing on the powers of the stars and the planets as they waxed and waned.
A scuffing sound. Then a low laugh. Utterly startled, Liath gasped and jerked her gaze up from the book. Froze, terrified. She had no idea how long she had been reading or how long he had been standing there, watching her scan the pages and turn them, watching her form the difficult Jinna words and speak them out loud. Thus did she betray herself to him.
Hugh walked into the cell. He was travel-worn and damp, his riding cloak slung over one shoulder and his frater’s robe spotted with rain. His golden hair was wild in disarray, there was a smudge of dirt on his pale cheek, and he looked completely satisfied.
“What’s this?” he asked. She could not move. He took the book from her nerveless fingers and scanned the pages that lay open. “Not only can you read, but you can read this edifying work. I am impressed, but not entirely surprised, that you know Dariyan, even in this antique form. Surely you do not know Jinna as well? Even I, with my court education, do not know Jinna, although of course I can read the Arethousan as well as I can read Dariyan.”
“You know Arethousan?” she demanded, torn by such an acute desire to know that she forgot herself. Then she broke off, grabbed her own worn blanket, and wrapped it tightly around her torso. The linen undershift was far too light to wear alone, in front of him.
He smiled. He set the book down on the table, casually, loosened each finger of his gloves and drew them off slowly. He rested his hands on the bed, close to her, bending down right next to her, his face a hand’s breadth away from hers. “I like your hair unbound.” He lifted a hand and ran it up along her neck, then drew his fingers back down through her hair. “And so clean. Have you changed your mind, my beauty?” His voice changed timbre, taking on an odd, hoarse note.
“No.” She turned her head away, out of his touch, and waited for him to hit her.
He straightened. “It is a comfortable bed. You’ll share it with me soon enough. I want a bath. You may keep the undershift, as long as you promise me you will care for it properly. Fine cloth is too precious to be treated carelessly. And dinner will be tonight, instead of Ladysday next. You’ll wear the gold overdress for dinner.” He glanced down at the open chest. “Which you’ve already found.” He smiled again. Liath could not imagine what had transpired to put him in such good humor.
“There will be much finer things than these, Liath. The abbot of Firsebarg has died at last. My mother has duly overseen the election of his successor. When shall we ride south? You’ll like Firsebarg. I think you’ll even like my mother. She was convent educated, so she can read, though not, I think, as well as you or I. And certainly she can’t read Jinna, which is never taught in the church schools.”
Ride south. Liath stared up at him. She had not really considered before that she might be torn away from the last people she knew and trusted, from her last link with Da. How could she possibly carry the book on such a journey without Hugh finding it? He must know she would take it with her. In Firsebarg, knowing no one, she would be entirely within his power.
Hugh watched her, enjoying her discomfiture. “Not until spring, I think. There’s no hurry. I do hate traveling this late in the year.”
She said nothing, only held tight to the blanket, gripping it around her as if it could protect her.
“Must we keep up this pretense? I know you are educated. You betray yourself constantly, with words, with the way you speak, with knowledge you ought not to have. I am bored, Liath. I have never been so bored as these last two years, wandering here in these northern wilds tending to my blessed sheep. Ai, Liath, we might at least call a truce so we can converse like the educated people we are. I will even offer you a trade.”
He paused, to let her consider his generosity. “I will teach you Arethousan. If you will teach me Jinna. Queen Sophia, while she lived, was very firm that all of us in the king’s schola be taught Arethousan. She was the Arethousan Emperor’s niece, as I’m sure you know, a marriage prize brought to these benighted lands by the younger Arnulf for his heir. And although our praeceptor, Cleric Monica, thought it acceptable that those few of us chosen for her special tutoring should indeed learn Arethousan, should any of us ever be called upon to lead an embassy to that distant land, she cuffed me hard and well the one time I asked if she might teach us Jinna as well. ‘A language fit only for infidels and sorcerers,’ she said, which only made me wish to learn it the more, although I never said so to her again. But I never met anyone who knew it until I met your father. And now you, my treasure. What do you say?”
There was something very wrong with all this, and Liath knew it. As long as she gave him nothing, she was safe from him. But a small doubt had arisen. Perhaps he was owed some sympathy, flung from the bright center of the king’s progress into these hinterlands, where there was no one like him. No wonder he had gravitated toward Da.
And if she could learn Arethousan, she could translate the glosses in the oldest text of The Book of Secrets. Perhaps she could even puzzle out the unknown language, written in that ancient hand. …
“I don’t know,” she said in a low voice.
He smiled. She understood at once that she had lost something important, that he had won this battle and was on his way to winning the war. She slid off the bed, pressing herself against the wall to keep as much distance between herself and him as possible, and ran out of the cell and down to the kitchen, to the safety of rougher work.
Behind, incongruously, she heard him begin to sing.
“The Lady is glorious in Her beauty.
The Lord is mighty with His sword.
Blessed are we, Their children.
Glory, glory, rests where Their eyes linger.
Glory sleeps on Their hearth.”
He had a beautiful voice.
3
ON the morning of the first hard freeze, Liath woke from a fitful sleep at dawn. It hurt to stand up. With her blanket pulled tight around her, she shuffled to the woodpile. It hurt to uncurl her fingers and touch any surface. A thin shell of ice covered the wood, and she bit at her dry lips to cover the pain of wrenching the logs free. She had to struggle with the latch before she could get it open and make her way into the kitchen. In here the change in temperature was abrupt. It hurt almost more than the cold did.
She stoked up the fire and simply stood before it, shuddering and coughing. After a while she bent to ladle warm water into her mouth. The water slid down her throat, warming her. She looked around, although certainly there was no one else here, then plunged her hands into the kettle of water and just stood there, letting her hands thaw. The fire snapped and burned so close her face felt seared, but she did not care. She heard something, a voice, a footstep, and she jerked her hands guiltily from the kettle and bent to scoop out rye flour for flatcakes.
Hugh appeared in the doorway. “It’s cold. It’s damned cold and I hate cold. I hate this frozen wasteland, and I damned well don’t want to winter here. We should have ridden south last month when I got the news, but it’s too late now.” He strode across the room and gripped her chin, wrenching her face around so she had to look up at him. “You look like hell. You look like a damned land girl burned brown from doing a man’s work in the fields all day long, with a chapped face and a running nose. Go make my chamber warm. Make me breakfast. Then get out of here. I can’t stand to look at you.”
He cuffed her on the cheek. It stung the worse because her skin was still chilled. She shrank away, trying not to cry. In his cell it was warmer even than in the kitchen. She heaped glowing coals into the brazier and crouched next to it, soaking in the heat. On the table rested a single neatly-trimmed piece of parchment with fresh writing in a graceful hand damp across the top. She craned her neck to read the words.
“Out! Out!” Hugh came up behind her and slapped her casually on the back of the head. “You’re filthy. Get out!”
She fled back to the kitchen. She da
wdled as long as possible, making porridge and flatcakes and then serving them to him. But she could only draw out the work for so long; soon he emerged from his cell and drove her outdoors. She tucked her hands into her armpits and set off briskly for the inn. She had to fetch meat, after all, from Mistress Birta. It was excuse enough. But she had scarcely gotten there, had only two heartbeats lingering in front of the hearth, surreptitiously watching a lone traveler eat his solitary meal at a table a few paces from her, when Hugh burst in through the front door.
He did not even have to say anything. She would have died rather than cause a scene. Mistress Birta emerged from the kitchen with the meat, dressed and wrapped since it was the frater’s portion. She greeted Hugh but he replied with a monosyllable. Hanna appeared from the back room and watched as Liath took the meat from Birta and then retreated toward the door. Hugh walked two paces behind her, as if he was driving her. The traveler looked up. He was a grizzled, weather-beaten man wearing a fur-lined riding coat. He studied the scene with interest. Liath felt his gaze on her back as she left.
Outside, Hugh hit her. At least he was wearing gloves, so the blow did not sting quite so badly. “Did I give you leave to come down here?”
“I had to fetch the meat—”
He slapped her again. Unable to help herself, she covered her cheek with a hand. Lady, it hurt. From the shadowed eaves of the inn came a movement, stifled; someone was watching them.
“You will ask my permission. Any time you go anywhere. Wait here.” Hugh went back inside. Liath waited.
Hanna crept out from the side of the inn: “Liath—”
The door opened and Hugh came out, Mistress Birta following behind him as if she were his bonded servant. “Of course, Frater,” she was saying with her hands placed just so and her expression as fixed with good cheer as any image carved into wood, “I’ll have my boy Karl deliver everything from now on.” She cast a piercing glance toward Hanna, and Hanna retreated hastily back around the corner of the inn.