“You, child,” she said, indicating Alain. “Walk beside me.” Of course he obeyed. “I saw you yesterday in the church with Frater Agius.”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
“Are you kin to him?”
Surprised to be compared in such a casual way to a man of obviously noble birth, Alain blurted out a denial. “No!” At once he was ashamed of his rudeness. “I am a fosterling, Your Grace. I was raised in Osna village.”
“Freeborn?”
“Yes, Your Grace. Or so my father told me, and so was I raised. My father and aunt and cousins are free-born back to the time of Emperor Taillefer. There is no half-free blood in that family.”
“But you are a fostered child.” She said it so kindly that although the attention of so great a personage as a biscop rather frightened him, he could not help but want to confide in her. And she was old and therefore worthy of respect. As the saying went: “White hair is earned through good deeds and a good life.” And she did so remind him of Deacon Miria at Osna village, a woman to whom all went willingly to confession, knowing the penance imposed would be just, and never too harsh to bear.
He bent his head, flushing, flattered by her interest. “My father is a merchant, Henri of Osna village.”
“Your foster father, you mean?”
He hesitated. Bastard child of a whore. But Henri had loved Alain’s mother. Who was to say Henri was not truly his father? And yet, how could he know? Henri had never spoken of the matter.
When he did not reply, she went on. “I have heard it spoken by the common folk of Lavas Holding that the black hounds are devil’s get, and only a person born of the blood of their ancient masters or of the Count Lavastine may handle them without danger. Yet I noticed yesterday that you are left in charge of the kennels and that the hounds obey you as loyally as they do Count Lavastine.”
He gulped down a lump in his throat. “Hounds obey those who treat them firmly and without fear, Your Grace. It is nothing more than that.”
“Do you fear the Eika prisoner?”
“No, Your Grace. He is bound by chains.”
Agius looked back sharply. Alain clamped his mouth shut. He had a sudden feeling that Frater Agius did not want him to speak about the Eika prisoner to the biscop. Agius had his own secrets and, evidently, his own plans. But the Lady smiled on him: Biscop Antonia did not ask any further questions about the prince.
“You are a well-spoken boy also. Quite unlike an untutored country lad.”
“I know my letters, Your Grace. Frater Agius has been kind enough to teach me to read, and I knew something of numbers from my aunt, who manages a large household.”
“She is a well-bred woman, I take it.”
He could not help but smile. “Yes, Your Grace. My Aunt Bel is a very fine woman, and mother of five living children and as many grandchildren born so far.” Perhaps more, since he had been gone; with the blanket last winter had come a verbal message that Stancy was pregnant again. Had the child been born yet? Did it live? Was it healthy? Had Stancy survived the birth? He was swept with such a sudden wave of homesickness that he almost faltered. He did not expect to miss them all so very much. Henri would be setting out again after Holy Week, as he did every year. Who would repair the boat this year? Who had tarred it last autumn? No one did as careful a job as Alain did. He hoped Julien was devoting as much time to helping Henri with the boat as he was to courting the young women in the village. And what of the baby? It must be well grown by now, if it had survived the winter. But surely it would have survived the winter; it was a healthy child, and Aunt Bel took good care of her own.
They walked for a time in silence. When they came to the clearing they halted to look out over the ruins, bare stone tumbled in a spring meadow strewn with yellow and white flowers. A broad stream ran along the other side of the clearing: He had not seen it on Midsummer’s Eve, but now the running water flashed in the midday sunlight as it flowed swiftly past the grass, bordered by a low rim of white stone, and vanished into the farther edge of forest.
“The Emperor Taillefer is said to have possessed a pack of black hounds,” said Biscop Antonia suddenly, her gaze on the ruins but her voice far away, as if she had been thinking about this during the long silence. “But so much is said about the Emperor Taillefer that one can scarcely know which is truth and which a story spun by the court poets for our entertainment.” Then, like an owl striking abruptly, she turned her gaze on Frater Agius. “Is that not true, Brother?”
“As you say, Your Grace.”
“Surely you have sterner views of truth than that, Frater Agius.”
He looked, oddly enough, ashamed. “I follow the Holy Word as well as I can, Your Grace, but I am imperfect and thereby a sinner. It is only through God’s unselfish love that I may be redeemed.”
“Ah, yes,” said the biscop. She smiled sweetly, but Alain suspected she and the frater had just conversed about something else entirely. “Shall we go down?”
They circled the clearing to find the original entrance, where a fallen gatehouse still stood sentry. Crossing into the ruin, Alain was struck by how different it looked now: No glamour gave the stone an unnatural gleam; shadows lay foreshortened on the ground, patches shading grass and overgrown paving. Once fine buildings had stood here. Now this was only a graveyard, the markers of a lost and forgotten time. He followed the biscop as she walked down the roadway, heading into the heart of the complex. She paused now and again to examine the carvings left on the stone: a double spiral, a falcon, its wings feathered with pockmarks, an elaborately dressed woman in a gown of feathers whose head was a hollow-eyed skull.
The clerics murmured, seeing these traces of the pagan builders. Lackling stubbed his toe on a half-buried block of stone and began to cry.
“There, there, child,” said the biscop, comforting him, though he was as grimy as only a stableboy could be. Agius stood with his hands folded at his waist and his gaze fixed disapprovingly on the altar house.
“Come along,” she said to Lackling. His sobs ended as soon as the pain faded, and he sidled away from her and dogged Alain’s heels. They arrived at the altar house. The clerics hung back, but Biscop Antonia crossed the threshold without the least sign of uneasiness. Alain followed her inside. Lackling would not enter.
“You came to these ruins,” said the biscop without turning round. She examined the white altar stone. “Or so I have heard the report, from Chatelaine Dhuoda, from Count Lavastine, and from the testimony of the half-free girl, Withi, who is to marry the young soldier. The girl told me she saw black hounds running in the sky but that you did not see them. She said when she first caught sight of you, you were looking toward this building and talking to the thin air, where no person or no thing stood. Did you see a vision?”
Alain had his back to the entrance, but he felt Agius enter, felt the frater’s presence behind him. What could he say to her? He could not lie to a biscop! Yet if he confessed, might he not be branded as some kind of ungodly witch? Suddenly being the bastard son of the shade of a long-dead elvish prince did not seem quite so advantageous, not if he could be condemned for it; just as the bastard son of Count Lavastine might become the pawn in a struggle to gain power over the count’s holdings if the count had no other direct heirs.
Alain touched his hand to his chest where, under the wooden Circle, his rose rested, warm and somehow bright under cloth. As he shifted, both Agius and Biscop Antonia turned to look at him expectantly, as if they could sense the hidden rose. Suddenly being the child of Merchant Henri and the nephew of Bella Adelheidsdottir, respectable householder of Osna village, seemed a much safer alternative to his other more grandiose dreams.
Yet neither was it right to lie.
“I have had visions, Your Grace,” he said reluctantly, lowering his hand, then added, “but I am pledged to the church.” Hoping that might explain it.
“It is true,” said the biscop calmly, “that many who are sworn to serve Our Lady and Lord are also granted
visions, if they serve faithfully, but there is yet a taint of darkness in the world that may bring on false visions and false beliefs.” She looked again, pointedly, at Agius.
The frater was beginning to look angry.
“I believe this building is known as the altar house?” She bent to run an age-spotted hand over the marble surface of the altar stone. “This might be the Hearth of Our Lady, might it not? You see, I detect traces of old burning here, in the center.” With one finger she flicked dirt out of the runnels carved into the stone. These runnels traced a spiral pattern similar to the pattern carved into the walls outside, but here four spirals led into a fist-sized hollow sunk into the center of the white stone. She smiled, still looking at the altar stone. “It is a terrible burden to carry an inner heart that does not live in harmony with the outer seeming, is it not, Frater Agius? If we each one of us know what we ought to do and act as is fitting, then by our outward seeming Our Lady and Lord will know that we follow the faith gladly and with an honest heart. To profess belief in a heretical doctrine and yet conceal it from all but those who think as you do seems to me to be hypocrisy of the worst sort.”
“It is not a heretical doctrine!” cried Frater Agius. His face had gone bright red. “It is the skopos who denies the truth! It was the Council of Addai which denied the redemption and concealed the truth!”
Unshaken by this outburst, Biscop Antonia straightened. She surveyed the circular walls; next to the ground, half concealed by moss and weeds, carvings decorated the white stone, curled snails graven in stone surrounded by delicate rosettes. Counting out her steps, the biscop paced around the altar, measuring it. Then she walked past the frater, who stood as if rooted to the ground by his own passion, and went outside.
Alain hesitated.
Agius threw himself to his knees on the ground. “I will proclaim it,” he said, muttering as if to himself or as if to the heavens. “I must speak the truth aloud so those who linger in the twilight of the false belief can come into the true light granted to us all by His sacrifice and redemption.”
These were strange and troubling words. Alain sidestepped past the frater, but Agius, forehead resting on clasped hands, did not notice him. Outside, Biscop Antonia was helping Lackling stack loose stones into a pile. She looked up and smiled at Alain.
“He is devout but misguided. I will pray that Our Lady and Lord will bring him back into the Circle of Unity.” She turned to her clerics. “There is good stone here. It could be used to improve the wall of Count Lavastine’s stronghold, do you not think?”
“The local people refuse to walk up here or indeed to disturb these ruins,” said one of the clerics.
“Yet these ruins were surely once greater in extent than they are now. Someone must already have taken stone from here, for these walls to be as low as they are now. There is not enough fallen stone to rebuild them to what I might guess to be their former height. What do you think, Brother Heribert? You have studied masonry and building for the church at Mainni.”
“I must agree with you, Your Grace. Unless these were only half walls of stone and the rest built out of timber, but I doubt that. I have seen other ruins from the old Dariyan Empire, and they are without exception buildings of stone with perhaps a timber or thatched roof.”
“Let us go, then, and I will ask you to speak of this to the count.”
They bowed to her and began to walk back up through the ruins. Alain glanced back toward the altar house.
“Let Frater Agius pray, child. He has need of prayer. Come with me.”
So he walked back to Lavas Holding with Biscop Antonia. Lackling trailed three steps behind, shying like a frightened pup at every flutter of the wind through the trees. The biscop sang hymns to the glory of Our Lady as they walked, and although Alain was far too much in awe of her to presume to join his voice to hers, her clerics did so gladly and with vigor.
For the next two days, Alain saw Agius in the same place, as if he did not or could not move: on his knees in the church, head bowed, clasped hands pressed against his forehead, praying in a low murmur that sounded rather like a stream’s whisper heard from far off.
Alain served at table. Count Lavastine was polite to Lady Sabella, as of course he must be, but Sabella herself began to grow restive, even to look obviously annoyed … as if she was not getting something she wanted.
Twice daily a slaughtered sheep was thrown into the shrouded cage by the scarred and silent man who was its keeper. Once, while out running the hounds, Alain heard the sounds of a creature eating, much like a hound gnawing on bones. But no one dared peek inside, not even the youngest, brashest men-at-arms.
On the evening of the sixth day of the Ekstasis Alain fed the hounds as usual, fed the Eika prisoner, who suddenly lifted his head as if he meant to howl but instead growled low in his throat and shook his chained hands at Alain. The hounds barked and raced to the gate, snarling. Alain quickly ran over to control them, but they milled around him, barking so loudly it was only by chance he heard soft voices from the other side of the gate. He set a hand on the ladder and began to climb, then froze, listening, as the hounds circled and whined below him. Because the stockade was sturdily built of logs lashed together with rope, each log the thickness of a man’s leg, they could not see him through it, and he had not gotten high enough that those speaking on the other side of the gate could hear him.
But he could hear.
“He has agreed, but reluctantly, and only because I let it be plain that I would not leave until I received the creature as a present in return for our moving on. Now you must win me the other promises I need.”
“It is all arranged for tomorrow night, after the Feast of the Translatus, Your Highness. We will remove the prisoner and convey him to the ruins, and there perform the rite. Strong blood will attract the spirits and draw them under my control.”
“What of the hounds?”
“You will request tomorrow at the feast that they be tied up before nightfall.”
“I see. Ulric brings news to me that the guivre is restless. It needs nourishment. We cannot afford for it to break out of its cage as it did two months past when it grew overly hungry.”
“We must be patient, Your Highness. If anything remains after the sacrifice, we will transfer it to the cage. But what the guivre most needs we cannot procure for it here, as you know. Too many questions would be asked.”
“I leave this in your hands, then. Do not fail me.”
“I will not, Your Highness. Our Lady and Lord look favorably upon your appeal.”
“So you say. But the clerics of the royal schola who walk in attendance on my brother’s progress would not agree, I think. They interpret the ruling of the Council of Narvone differently, do they not, my dear biscop?”
“It is true they and I disagree on the use and benefit of sorcery within the church. So do you and I act together, Your Highness, as befits those whose claims have not received a just hearing.”
“We leave day after next?”
“Yes, all will be accomplished by then, Your Highness.”
The hounds barked halfheartedly a few times as the speakers walked away. Alain felt their absence as much by a cessation of the crawling prickling feeling along his skin as by the lack of their voices speaking out loud. His fingers were wrapped so tightly around one rung of the ladder that they hurt. He uncurled them and shook them free. He barely had time to collect his thoughts before Master Rodlin arrived to call him to evening service.
At the church, Alain knelt with the others, but he fixed his gaze first on the biscop and then on Frater Agius. Had Biscop Antonia truly spoken such strange and awful words? Strong blood will attract the spirits and draw them under my control. He could not be sure he had heard them correctly, or understood. She spoke Wendish with an accent; Antonia was a foreign name. Perhaps he should ask Frater Agius, but the frater appeared, as usual, wrapped in an inner tumult of his own. Alain did not know what to do.
He fretted all night,
waking at every grunt made by the sleeping hounds, at every gust of spring wind that rattled the door of his lean-to, at every distant shout drawn by the breeze from the kitchens, where the preparations had already begun for the Feast of the Translatus. Once he rose and crept outside to check on the Eika prince, who was, as always, awake.
“Halane,” came the whisper, soft on the night air. “Go free.”
But Alain fled back to the lean-to and shivered in his blanket the rest of the long, long night. Strong blood. Whose blood? But he knew very well whom they meant.
He could not concentrate at the morning service. At the great feast, begun at midday, he served as always, but his hands and body moved as if separate from his mind. He could not make sense of anything the people around him were saying. He could not follow the play, performed by southern players who marched in Lady Sabella’s retinue, depicting the journey and trials of St. Eusebē and the visions she was granted of the great mystery of St. Thecla’s witnessing of the Ekstasis and the final miracle of the Translatus: the brilliant light that is the glory of God that rests on the wings of angels, which transformed chapel and Hearth into a vision of the Chamber of Light.
So proclaimed the actor playing the part of St. Eusebē, in rapture. “And on the wings of angels the mortal body of the blessed Daisan was lifted up to the Chamber of Light where His spirit had already taken up residence with Our Lady and Lord.”
The meal went on for hours. Agius stood by the door and did not eat.
When at last he was free, Alain ran back to the stockade. He had purposefully left the hounds loose, though Rodlin had asked him to chain them. The Eika prisoner still resided, silent, in his cage.
Did she mean to kill him? What was the Council of Narvone? Church business, obviously. Alain knew nothing of church business and ecclesiastic councils, nor anything at all about sorcery except that the deacons warned them all against false sorcerers and the taint of darkness that wandered the land in the guise of handsome men and women, seducers of the spirit and body, who promised much, took more, and gave nothing in return.