It was dark and still overcast, but after the blackness of the crypt, the night did not seem heavy. The Eika drums sounded louder now; they usually reached their peak at midnight.
As they walked swiftly back toward the mayor’s palace Liath recalled Wolfhere’s broken sentence. “You said the presence of an enchanter might explain something.”
“Ah.” For the space of twelve steps, clipped and hard and rapid on the plank walkway, he considered. “When we rode into Gent, I cast a spell to attempt to delay the advance of that group of Eika who were coming after us. Nothing more than an illusion. My skills are not great, and I am only adept at certain arts of seeing. I warned you to ignore what you saw.”
The flight to Gent was still graven in her mind with the vivid colors of a freshly painted mural. What he spoke now made her suddenly understand that which she had almost forgotten, because it had made no sense at the time.
A flash, a glittering of light like a fire’s light seen from inside a dark room. Her horse had almost thrown her, and Manfred had flung a hand up to cover his eyes, as it to protect himself from a much fiercer vision.
A tingling on her back. The tiny winkings of fireflies.
But that was all she had seen. Either Wolfhere’s magics were indeed very small, or else …
“I knew there must be some kind of sorcery at work,” he continued. “Now I know it is more powerful than I feared. To dissipate my illusions is one thing. To cloud my seeing is entirely another.”
Or else she had seen only the faint edge of his magic—or not his magic at all, but the barest trace of the enchantment that had protected the Eika against it.
“You’ve thought of something,” Wolfhere said.
“No. Nothing.” Until she understood it herself, she would not confess this mystery to him. It would give him power over her, more power than he already had. “Only what Da said: ‘To master knowledge is to have power from it.’”
“True words,” commented Wolfhere.
The palisade marking the inner fortress, the mayor’s palace, rose before them in the gloom. She heard the distant buzz of many voices speaking at once.
Were they true words? When Da said, “trust no one,” had he meant her to include himself? She was deaf to magic, yet he had begun to teach her the arts of the magi. She was deaf to magic, yet she had some kind of power; she had seen it manifested twice, once when she had burned the Rose of Healing into the table in Hugh’s study and this night in the crypt, when she had caused the torch to light.
“Is that all you have thought of?” he asked.
She remained mutely silent.
“Have I made any attempt to harm you, Liath?” he asked gently, if a little accusingly. “To bring you to harm?”
“You brought me to Gent!” But she said it with a wry smile, hoping to distract him.
They came though the wooden gateway into the courtyard of the mayor’s palace. The stone-paved courtyard was awash in torchlight, smoke and flames setting a yellow haze over the people gathered like so many bees swarming. This was a new crowd, smaller than the one this morning, and agitated in a completely different way.
“Alas that I did,” he murmured. Then he grabbed her by an elbow and with a grim expression pulled her through the crowd, shoving Dragons and rich merchants and the mayor’s retainers ruthlessly aside so that he and Liath could get to the center.
There, they found the mayor, Manfred, and Prince Sanglant—and an Eagle, battered beyond belief, his cloak torn, his head wrapped in a bloody, dirty cloth, one arm hanging useless at his side, and his horse dying at his feet.
He looked up, saw Wolfhere emerge out of the crowd, and tried to get to his feet, but staggered. Manfred steadied him.
“Find a healer,” Prince Sanglant ordered, signing to his Dragons. “Bring a stretcher, and wine.” His closest attendants, the scarred-face woman and the man with the limp, hurried off.
Mayor Werner’s complexion had a ghastly white cast under torchlight. But it was not only the light but also his expression. He looked like a man who had seen his own grave.
“Lie down, my son.” Wolfhere knelt beside the Eagle and lowered him onto Manfred’s bundled cloak. “What is your news?”
Liath crept closer. Blood soaked the Eagle’s tunic, and he breathed in ragged bursts. The broken end of an arrow protruded from his chest. She caught in a gasp and took an involuntary step closer. The next instant, a hand caught her by the shoulder.
She knew before she looked, felt in her whole being, that she had come up beside the prince and that it was he who had stopped her from going forward. His hand seemed to burn her shoulder even through the cloth, though she knew it was only the shame of her desire that made her feel his presence so keenly. She risked looking up at him because it would be cowardly to do otherwise. But when their eyes met, he was the one who looked away. He let go of her and even took a half step away. She had a sudden uncomfortable notion that her presence troubled him.
The Eagle coughed, spitting blood. Ai, Lord, the arrow had caught him in the lung. It was only a matter of time.
“Bad news.” His breath came in bursts now. His skin flushed a deep red as he struggled to speak. “Count Hildegard. Riding to Gent. Many troops. We were ambushed. I escaped to—”
“He came to the east gate less than an hour ago,” said Sanglant. “These folk brought him here.” He gestured toward the crowd, which by dint of glares and simple force from the prince’s everpresent escort of Dragons, had finally moved back, giving the rest of them air. “Though he would have gotten through the streets more quickly had they stayed in their beds and not swarmed out into the streets to get in his way.”
“What of Count Hildegard?” Wolfhere asked.
The man coughed again, this time clots of blood, and when he spoke, Liath had to bend forward to hear him. “I don’t know. Perhaps she won free. Our Lord—”
He went into convulsions. Liath threw herself forward and helped hold his shoulder down, Manfred opposite site her, while Wolfhere leaned on a leg and Sanglant grasped the other. As if from a distance she heard Mayor Werner wailing and the cries and sobbing of the crowd.
The Eagle went lax. Liath sat back, looked up to find Sanglant staring at her, his hands resting on the man’s left leg. The prince stayed there, poised like that, for a long breath. Wolfhere muttered a curse and hunched over, ear to the injured man’s chest.
“No need,” said Sanglant, not taking his gaze off Liath. “He’s stopped breathing. There is no pulse of blood. He’s dead.” That strange hoarse scrape in his voice lent a verisimilitude of grief to his words that she did not see in his expression; not that he was pleased, either, just that death no longer grieved or surprised him.
She looked away in time to see Manfred cover his eyes with a hand. Wolfhere remained bent over the body for a long while, his face hidden. Finally, he straightened.
“He is dead.” He sat on his heels while beyond Mayor Werner wept copious tears, although not, Liath suspected for the dead man but rather for the loss of hope.
Sanglant lifted a hand. The Dragons drove the onlookers out of the courtyard. “This is no time to weep,” the prince said, rising and turning to Mayor Werner. “He was a brave man, and he deserves this honor: that we not lose heart because of the news he paid his life to bring us. Count Hildegard may yet win through.”
“If she does not?”
“If she does not,” replied the prince, “if her force is utterly broken, then we will ration food more strictly and settle ourselves in for a long siege. We have good water supplies here. There is yet hope that Wolfhere’s companions will reach King Henry. Some of my own men still reside outside the walls, and they will harass the Eika until we can either break out or another force comes to break m.”
Finally Wolfhere moved, but only to unpin the brass badge the dead Eagle wore at his throat. It was wet with blood and drying spume. He wiped it off on the tatters of the dead man’s cloak. Then he rose, and Manfred and Liath rose with
him. Wolfhere extended a hand, open, the badge lying on it, winking in the torchlight.
“What are the precepts which govern the conduct of an Eagle, Liath?”
They were simple enough. She had memorized them easily. “Serve the king and no other. Speak only the truth of what you see and hear, but speak not at all to the king’s enemies. Let no obstacle stand in the way of your duty to the king, not weather, not battle, not pleasure, not plague. Let your duty to your kin come second, and make no marriage unless to another Eagle who has sworn the same oaths as you.”
She could not help it. She glanced toward Sanglant, who had turned back to watch her, or to watch Wolfhere, she could not tell which. His gaze was steady and a bit imposing, but he made no sign or sound.
Yet as she took a breath, to finish, she saw that Manfred also watched her, but with an odd expression, as if he was watching to see what she would do or how she would react. Had she been blind? Was his affection for her something more than that of comrades? She dismissed the thought quickly and with impatience; to believe so was vanity, nothing more. Just because Hugh had desired her and no other woman in Heart’s Rest did not mean every man desired her.
Manfred smiled sadly at her. She smiled back and continued.
“Aid any Eagle who is in need, and protect your comrades from any who might harm them. And, last, abide by your faith in Our Lady and Lord.
“Do you swear to abide by these?” Wolfhere asked.
It was quiet now that most of the crowd had been chased away. The mayor had stopped wailing. He huddled behind Sanglant, his servants clustered round him with solemn faces and hands clasped in prayer. Torches flared, and as the wind shifted it blew smoke into her nostrils, stinging and bitter. From the east, stronger now, she heard the Eika drums.
“I do so swear,” she said quietly, understanding now what was going on.
Manfred knelt and pulled the remains of the dead Eagle’s cloak across his slack and bloody face, concealing it. Wolfhere leaned forward across the body, lifting the badge. But Sanglant stepped in and set a hand between them.
“As the king’s representative, it is my right,” he said.
Wolfhere hesitated only a moment. What choice did he have? He relinquished the Eagle’s badge to the prince. And Sanglant fastened it to Liath’s tunic, his fingers at her throat. His lips were turned up slightly, but Liath could not be certain if the expression was meant to be a smile. She only knew that she was flushed. He kept his gaze where it belonged: on the sharp pin as he fastened it through the cloth of her tunic. But when he had finished, he did not immediately drop his hands away. He met her gaze and mouthed three words which, with his back to Wolfhere and Manfred and all the others drawn back or gone, only he and she knew:
“‘Make no marriage.’”
Then he turned and walked away and soon was lost in the darkness beyond the torch-lit haze. She watched him go, then, self-consciously, dropped her gaze away. But it came to rest on the dead Eagle. She touched the badge at her throat. The metal was cold and still slick with the effluvia of his dying.
“Now you are truly an Eagle,” said Wolfhere softly, not without triumph.
3
LIATH woke at dawn, stiff and shivering. It was colder than it had been the night before, and as she slipped her wool tunic on over her shift she noticed the light was of a different quality as well. Throwing her cloak over her shoulders, she went outside.
The clouds had blown off, and from the parapet she saw the glittering cold disk of the sun, bright but with the breath of old winter on it, a last reminder of snow and ice and the grip of cold weather. She stamped her feet and rubbed her arms. She refused to let memories of Hugh spoil this day, her first as a true Eagle. She touched the brass badge at her throat. Surely this badge protected her from him. Surely not even a noblewoman’s bastard like Hugh would attempt to make her break her oath that had now been given to the king’s service. Or at least she told herself that. It was too clear and fine a morning to taint with fear.
The eastern shore was shrouded with fog that the sun had not yet burned off. She could not see the Eika camp and only the suggestion of earthworks, dark forms shouldering through the white blanket of fog. To the west she saw clouds. Licking a finger, she held it up. The wind was coming from the east; those western clouds, then, were those that had covered Gent last night. She smiled, slightly; Hathui would merely snort at this profound observation and point out that a child could have made it.
But thinking of Hathui made her think of Hanna. Where was Hanna now? Had she escaped the Eika? Had she found safety? Had they reached the king, and was he even now marching to raise the siege? She missed Hanna so badly. The bite of cold made it worse because cold wrenched her mind back to Hugh, to that night when she had chosen not to die, when the light had bobbed an erratic course out to her where she huddled in the pig shed only to reveal itself as Hugh, with a lantern. Hugh, who had taken her back inside—
But there was no point dwelling on that. “No point thinking only of what troubles you,” Da always said. But Da had been a master at ignoring the trouble that stalked him, whether it be debt or whatever had finally caught and killed him. She wiped away a tear with the back of a hand, then clapped her hands together, rubbed them briskly, trying to warm them.
“Liath!”
She turned. Below, in the courtyard, Wolfhere waved at her. She climbed down the ladder and jogged over to him.
“I must prepare the body for burial,” he said. “But in my surprise and haste last night I forgot my flask in the cathedral crypt.”
She nodded. “I’ll fetch it for you.”
“Come back here after,” he said. “We’ll bury our comrade after Terce.”
The city was more restless than usual, this day, this early. People wandered the streets as if looking for lost relatives. The hammering of blacksmiths sounded a steady din from the armory, and a constant stream of men and women carried loads on their backs—metals, leather, anything that could possibly be made into weapon or armor—down to the warehouses where the armories had been set up. There were, Liath noted, no children on the streets at all.
When she reached the cathedral, she heard the final psalm of the office of Prime.
“‘God, Our Lady and Lord, have spoken and have summoned the world from the rising to the setting sun.’”
She hurried up the steps and through the open doors. The cathedral was packed: with refugees, with townspeople, with the Mayor and his entourage. At the front, in the place of honor, knelt Prince Sanglant, his blue-black hair and the wink of gold at his neck a beacon for her gaze. He wore mail and his fighting tunic, and fifty Dragons knelt with him, all arrayed for battle, helmets tucked under their arms. The biscop stood before her gold biscop’s chair, set behind the Hearth; she raised her arms as she led the congregation in the final verses of the psalm.
“‘Our Lord is coming and will not keep silence: fire runs before him and wreathes him closely round.
Our Lady summons heaven on high and Earth to the judgment of the people.
Think well on this, you who forget God,
or you will be torn in pieces
and no one shall save you.’”
All were kneeling. Liath knelt in the side aisle, at the very back of the crowd, and spoke the final Kyria with the congregation.
Lord, have mercy. Lady, have mercy.
Then, in the hesitation as the final prayer died into the air and the congregation waited for the biscop to dismiss them, Liath stood and slipped along the wall to the shadowed corner of the vestibule where a heavy wooden door barred passage to the crypt. It creaked as she opened it. She glanced back, but the hum of the crowd, rising, stretching, waiting perhaps for a word from biscop or mayor about last night’s message, covered the noise. She left the door ajar behind her.
A thin line of light marked the door as she descended, and at the first sharp corner it glanced off stone and illuminated a bead of water caught on a delicate spiderweb. Turning the
corner, she lost sight of the door, though the suggestion of daylight still trailed after her. She went as silently as she could, not wishing to disturb the peace of the dead. She reached the bottom, foot slamming into level floor where she thought there was another step down, and paused to let her jolted shoulders recover.
Strange, that the light from above still gave a steady if faint radiance, just enough that she could see the shape of her hand if she held it up in front of her face. Last night—but of course, last night it had already been dark when she and Wolfhere had descended; that was why it had been pitch-black. Abruptly, she heard a noise above, from the stairs. She froze, listening.
Footsteps descending. They were heavy and accompanied by a fine rattling and shaking, many small chains muffled in cloth. The pale ghosts of tombs watched from the gloom. She was, she discovered with surprise, not afraid at all. Indeed, without knowing why, she was expecting him.
“Liath,” he said. She could only see his shape, bulky in armor, only feel the air shifting as he stopped five steps above, his body blocking the narrow passage.
“You heard the door creak,” she said, “even above the noise of the congregation.”
“Below the noise of the congregation,” he corrected. She felt that he smiled or perhaps only wished that he did. In any case, he walked down the rest of the stairs. He stumbled on the floor, not expecting it so soon, and swore. “Damn, it’s dark down here. How can you see anything? What are you doing here?”
“Fetching something left behind.”
“An answer worthy of Wolfhere. I am not your enemy, Liath.”
“No,” she said. Her voice shook. “I never thought you were.”
Seeking, his hand found her shoulder; he was like a blind creature groping by sound. The crypt echoed strangely, and even the faint harmonics of his mail, rippling and clicking with his every least movement, got caught and distorted among the tombs and the vast breathless cavern, all air and stone.