King's Dragon
“Liath!”
Wolfhere stood on the palisade. He practically jumped down the ladder, he was in such haste to get to her.
“No hope!” she cried. “The Eika have breached the gate. Everyone must arm and fight, or go to the cathedral.”
“How—?”
“An enchanter.” She remembered, suddenly, that strange exchange. Someday it might be important that more people than she and Sanglant knew that name. “He calls himself Bloodheart.”
Wolfhere nodded once, sharply. “Then go, Liath. Go. If you win free, you must get word to the king.”
She did not wait to ask him what he meant to do. She did not have time. Already smoke rose in thick clouds, heavy, black, and forbidding, from the eastern part of the city, and flames licked the roofs of houses near enough to see. Perhaps the mayor’s guard had already run to the eastern gate.
But when she crossed out through the arch and started down the main thoroughfare of Gent, she found utter confusion. The street was packed, every soul there wild with fear. Half of them seemed to be headed to the western gate. Some few, armed with butcher knives and staves and shovels and hatchets and any object that might be used as a weapon, shoved their way toward the east. But not as many ran east. Mostly, the people of Gent had forgotten everything and completely panicked.
Liath pushed and elbowed her way through the crowd. At first she tried to yell, every third step, “To the cathedral!” but there was no point to it. Her voice simply could not be heard above the roar of shouting, donkeys braying, chickens squawking, children wailing, fire snapping, and untold feet slapping down on plank and stone roadway—all headed every direction and none.
But she needn’t have worried. Pushing her way along the length of the palace palisade, crossing the square, and reaching the broad steps and inviting facade of Gent Cathedral proved the easiest part of her journey.
The cathedral was packed.
People were shoved together on the steps, crowding in, crying and pleading, lifting their children high over their heads so the infants might be granted sanctuary inside if not their own selves.
“Make way!” Liath cried, although their noise drowned out her words. She drew her sword and used its hilt to knock hard into the people. When they turned, angry or sobbing, they gave way before her Eagle’s badge.
In this fashion, though slowly, she got up the steps. If possible, it was more crowded inside. All of them had shoved inside until she could not understand how anyone could breathe pressed up toward the Hearth, the haven, the holy space. Surely not even savages like the Eika would profane the holy space of the God of Unities.
They stank of fear and sweat. It was impossible, absolutely impossible, to imagine getting through this crowd to the Hearth where she might hope to find the biscop. She sheathed her sword.
And then, amazingly, she heard a shift in the tone of the crowd. Like a muting blanket drawn bit by bit across the congregation, the wordless mutter and yelling and weeping took on form and flow. Creeping back from the front, a hymn slowly took hold.
“Lift me up!” Liath commanded.
Half to her surprise, two men did so, grabbing her by the legs and hoisting her up. There, at the Hearth, the biscop presided, arms lifted toward the heavens as she led the congregation in a psalm.
“‘You that live in the shelter of Light,
you who say, ‘The Lord is my safe retreat,
the Lady the fastness in which I trust,’
He will cover you with His pinions.
She will grant you safety beneath Her wings.
You shall not fear the arrow that flies at night
or the spear that stalks by day.
A thousand may fall at your side,
ten thousand close at hand,
but you it shall not touch.’”
Liath sang with them. When the psalm finished in a somber Kyria, the biscop turned her hands, palms outward, and the mass of people quieted so all were listening. Only the hiccuping sobs of terrified children broke the silence.
“Pray, let us have silence,” cried the biscop.
In that moment, while silence trembled and the roar of fire and battle and distant drums leaked in through the walls and the open doors, before the panic of the people outside could overset this tenuous peace found here, Liath raised her voice. She called attention to herself in the very way Da had warned her against.
“Never be noticed. Never stand out. Never raise your voice.”
“Biscop, I pray you, listen to my words. I am a King’s Eagle!”
The men holding her shifted, and she had to steady herself, one hand on each of their shoulders. Every head in the cathedral skewed round, faces bleached white with fear. The biscop lowered her hands and signed to her to continue.
“Your Grace, please believe my words. I have seen a sign. St. Kristine appeared to me—” Liath faltered. She could see she was losing their attention, their belief. “St. Kristine of the Knives appeared to Prince Sanglant! It was a true vision. There is a catacomb beneath the cathedral, a tunnel, leading west. By this way—”
That was all she had time for.
A shout rose from the gathered crowd outside.
“The Dragon! The Dragons have broken!”
Liath clapped her hands over her ears just as the two men lost their grip on her. She fell but could not land hard because the people were packed so tightly in the cathedral. Even shoving, panicking, trying to move one way or the other, no one could shift more than half a step to right or left.
The next instant a horn call blasted through the space, echoing off stone, deafening her and every other soul inside. But it silenced the crowd long enough, just long enough, that the biscop could be heard.
“This I say!” she cried in her powerful voice. “This I say to you, my people, that I will not stir from this Hearth until all have reached safety or the Eika have been repulsed. So must all who are fit take up any weapon you can find and fight to save this, our city. In the name of Our Lady and Lord, in the name of St. Kristine who, though she suffered and died in this holy place, did not forsake us.”
She drew breath, but such was the power of her voice and the tense expectation that none spoke or filled the void with clamor.
“So has St. Kristine appeared to the prince, he who even now fights with his own body to spare ours pain and desecration. This is my word, and you my people shall obey it. Let those who are children or who are nursing children follow this Eagle into the crypt, in an orderly fashion. Gather the children, for they and the holy relics of this Hearth are the treasures of our city.
We must save them, if it is so willed by Our Lady and Lord and the saint who watched over us. Let the elder children shepherd the younger, and let the infirm wait with me at the Hearth. Let us put our trust in God. Lord, have mercy. Lady, have mercy upon us.”
Her deacons brought torches. With the crowd parting before her, Liath took a torch and led the way down into the crypt. As she descended the steps, all the din and tumult was lost to the muffling encasement of stone and earth, to the cloak of death and the pale tombs of the holy dead. The torch burned steadily, heat blowing in her face, stinging her eyes.
She stood while deacons carrying the holy relics of St. Kristine crowded behind her and the stairs filled with softly weeping children, pressing, waiting. She felt them at her back like a weight: on her all depended.
“Save all you can,” Sanglant had said. And others, crying out: “The Dragons have broken.”
She had no idea where the saint’s tomb was. Everything looked changed. The crypt opened out before her in silent mystery, taciturn, unwilling to give up its secrets.
Then, on a whim, she knelt where her footsteps and Sanglant’s, so short a time before, had scuffed the earth. She cast about, and—there!
On the dirt perhaps two strides away she saw the flecking of dried blood.
She followed this trail left by the bleeding saint. It led her to the sinkhole and the stairs that yawned into
the black earth beneath. The crypt quickly filled behind her. Deacons whispered, frightened. An infant sobbed and was muffled.
Of the battle in Gent, she could hear nothing. She did not know whether Sanglant yet lived; she had no idea what had happened to Wolfhere and Manfred.
She could at least hope that Hanna had made it away from Gent alive. It seemed ironic now that Hanna, forced to flee, had been granted the safer path, though it had not seemed so at the time.
She could not delay. What lay there in the dark earth could not be worse than the fate awaiting those who faced the Eika onslaught. She took in a deep breath and started down the steps.
She counted as she went, aware always of the press of refugees at her back though she never turned to see them, to help them, to make sure they did not stumble. She had to walk the unknown path. She counted eighty-seven steps, because counting gave her the courage to go on, speaking the numbers aloud so she couldn’t hear, so the blackness didn’t seem so utterly enveloping. The air was close, smelling of mildew and earth. Once, or twice, hand brushing the wall, she thought her fingers touched worms or other moist creatures that live only in the night. But she did not have time to flinch. She had to press forward.
The steps ended and the floor leveled out and turned sharply. It widened to the width of her outstretched arms. She paused then, but only that one time. The torch illuminated rough stone walls and a low ceiling hewn out of rock. The floor here was also rock, strewn with small stones and pebbles that rustled under her boots. But it was fairly smooth, as if water had once streamed through here or many feet marched back and forth, grinding it down under the weight of years and passage.
She could not see far ahead of her, but she felt the air had a flavor untouched by burning and war and death. She smelled oats, a touch caught on a bare wisp of a breeze borne down from distant hills. That gave her heart. The deacons pressed up behind her, the wooden chest which contained the saint’s relics jutting into her back. A child said, in a high, wavering voice: “But it’s so dark. Where is my momma?”
She walked on into the darkness. She led them, counting until it became ridiculous to count, past one thousand and two thousand and beyond that. The tunnel ran straight, like an arrow toward its intended victim.
She wept as she walked, plain good tears, quiet ones. She could not afford to sob. She could not afford to be blinded by grief. Behind, she heard those who followed, the thin wails of infants and the helpless weeping of children who could not understand what was happening to them. The deacons murmured in soft voices to the rhythm of their step, the words of the psalm they had sung in the cathedral:
“‘For She has charged Her angels to guard you wherever you go, to lift you on their hands.’”
On she walked, leading them. On and on, away from the fall of Gent. So few would be saved.
“We will hold them as long as we are able.” His last words.
He was not meant for her, of course. It was foolish, an infatuation, not love, surely, for love is built on ties of blood or of shared work and companionship, not on a glance or the stray wanderings of stubborn and insistent desire. Never meant for her, even if he had lived. It was not only the difference in their births, for she believed what Da had told her, that she need only bend her knee before the king. They were freeborn, of an old lineage, so Da always said, though he had never given her more information than that. Of a lineage that had gained lands in return for lordship over themselves, beholden to no count or duke but only to the king. As Hathui’s people had, in these times, in the eastern marches.
No, it was more than that, and utterly different.
“Be bound, as I am, by the fate others have determined for you.” So Sanglant had said. Was it not the duty of the captain of the King’s Dragons to die in the service of his king? And hers to live, if she was able?
Was she not bound by that other mystery, of Da’s death, of her mother’s death eight years before, of the treasure-house, the secret, that she both carried in her saddlebags and even perhaps in her own person? Of her own person? She had been made a slave because of another man’s desire to possess what was hidden within her. She was now always and ever marked by that slavery, just as she was marked by Da’s murder and by the mystery of the white feather she had found next to his dead body. Deaf to magic—or guarded against it. But bound to it, whichever was true.
Some destinies cannot be escaped.
So she walked and left Gent behind. She felt nothing in her body, not truly. She could not afford to be crippled with grief, and during those long months with Hugh she had learned how to put strong emotion away from her, locking it away behind a sturdy door.
But she allowed herself tears. She wept for Sanglant and for what could never be. She wept for Da, for her mother, for Wolfhere and Manfred, for the dead Eagle whose badge she had inherited. For all the souls, the brave biscop and her people, who would die. Liath had seen the Eika enchanter who named himself Bloodheart. She did not believe he would show mercy or respect the sanctity of the Hearth. Why should he? He had not been brought within the Circle of Unity. He had slaughtered Count Hildegard and then used her banner as part of an unscrupulous trick. He wanted Sanglant for reasons she could not fathom. But he and Sanglant were engaged in a duel set in motion before they had ever set eyes on one another.
Her torch burned steadily and did not go out or expend its substance. She held it in front of her as a beacon; it was the only light left to her.
Not the only light. She had to believe Hanna was alive. She would find Hanna again.
She reached up without thinking and touched her badge, felt the eagle embossed on brass. Hanna was all, except for the Eagles. She truly was one of them now. And that, perhaps, gave her a place where she might find safety.
So she walked. The tunnel ran on and on and on. If those behind her faltered, she did not know. She led them and did not look back.
5
THE Eika had breached the eastern gates just after dawn. It was midday by the time Liath emerged, blinking, half-blinded, and exhausted, from a narrow cave mouth into the glaring light of a fine spring day.
Behind her, the refugees from Gent staggered out, stumbling after a steep climb up several hundred steps. The tunnel itself had been long and made arduous because of fear. But Liath feared the final climb, up steps carved into rock, would prove too much for the smallest and weakest of the refugees, thus holding up those who tried to escape behind them.
They came so slowly. First the anxious deacons emerged, carrying the holy relics from the cathedral. Then came a long line of children, younger carried by elder, infants in the arms of their mothers. There were women in all stages of pregnancy, including one who had gone into labor. Here and there, other folk appeared—a blacksmith with his hammer and tongs, his skills too precious to waste in a hopeless fight, the two lanky girls who had performed as acrobats in Mayor Werner’s palace, the elderly bard who had mangled the Heleniad and produced his own atrocious imitations of old Dariyan verse at the many feasts in the great hall.
Too slowly. A clump of a dozen would stream out, and then there would be a pause, so long Liath would catch her breath and pray this was not the end of the line. Then more would emerge, stumbling, halt and lame, or a child collapsed and no longer able to walk on its own. The trickle would as suddenly turn again into a steady stream as those held back behind the knot hurried out and dispersed onto the hillside.
Liath could not bear their grief. Hers was heavy enough. She walked out away from the cave, which lay half hidden by shrubs and trees in a great jutting ridge of hill.
It was just as Sanglant had said. There was a field of oats here, straggling along the hillside.
Stumps of trees edged the ripening oats, and beyond them the forest climbed back into wilder lands. Two huts sat in the shadow of the trees. As she watched, a man came out from behind the closer of the huts to stare. Then, waving his arms, he ran over to the deacons. They began to talk all at once. Liath edged closer, then
recalled that as King’s Eagle she had every right to listen to their conversation.
“—but … but it is a miracle!” the man was crying, hands clapped over his cheeks. “The cave narrows and ends in a rock wall one hundred paces back. We have hidden in there, now and again, when Eika scouts rode too close by. A company of Dragons sheltered there five nights ago. But never have I seen steps or a tunnel leading east!”
Though the sky was clear, they heard a low rumbling like distant thunder. Liath hurried back and scrambled up the ridge that sheltered the cave. From its height the hill dropped away precipitously to the river plain below, stretching eastward, green and gold patched with earth, to a stark horizon. From here she could see the river winding like a dark thread through the plain. The sky was so clear the sun’s light had leached away the most intense blue at the zenith, washing the land in brightness. Distant Gent looked like a child’s toy, tiny carved blocks fashioned in the model of a city.
Arnulf’s city, some called it, where King Arnulf the Elder had joined his children in marriage to the last heirs of Varre.
The city was on fire. Liath stared for a long time. Smoke stained the horizon, reaching in streaks toward the heavens. There was so little wind this day that the smoke rose straight up in thick columns, obscuring her view. The city lay too far away for her to identify buildings, but she could not even pick out the cathedral tower.
On the plain, ants crawled. The Eika had come to feast on the leavings. She shook her head. She felt by turns numb and then suddenly engulfed with a crushing grief. No matter how she tried she could not push it away any longer.
She abandoned her position to three boys who came scrambling up behind her. They stared and pointed at the view, and one gaped at her. His thin face appeared familiar, but she could not place him. Perhaps he had been a servant at the mayor’s palace.
He said, “I lost the horse,” and then burst into tears.
She fled. She had nothing to say to him, or to any of them. As she climbed back down, careful to find good footing among the loose scree and wiry roots, she watched the refugees emerge from the cave mouth. Children and yet more children, a dark-haired plump child of indeterminate sex carried in the arms of a thin pale-haired girl who did not look strong enough for such a burden, a few older people now, some of them carrying bundles on their backs, a few precious possessions, or else nothing at all, only themselves. Some fell to their knees to praise God for this deliverance. Others merely sank onto the ground and had to be helped away, to clear the path that led out from the cave’s mouth.