“Under a compulsion, yes.” He made what was almost a spitting motion, as if the word, passing his lips, was distasteful to him. “I suppose Biscop Antonia would have denied everything and set her word against yours. Go on.”
“Well, then, my lord, it just seemed wrong. The battle seemed wrong, that Sabella should win by treachery and sorcery and that poor imprisoned creature—”
“The Eika prince? But he escaped.”
“No. I meant the guivre.”
“The guivre!” Lavastine barked a laugh. “I have no compassion for such a beast as that.” He set a hand on the head of the hound that sat at his feet; actually, the hound sat half on his boots. This one had white in its muzzle, a sign of age, and Alain recognized it as Terror. The hound lifted its head to get a scratch from Lavastine’s fingers.
“No, my lord,” replied Alain, because it seemed expected of him. But he had compassion for the beast, horrible though it was; it had suffered, too, and he had killed it as much to put it out of its misery as to save Agius. “And Frater Agius—”
“Yes,” said Lavastine curtly. “Frater Agius saved the king at the cost of his own life. And you, what reward would you have for saving my life?”
“I?”
“Since there is no one else here, I would suppose I mean you! When I ask a question, I wish for an answer.” “B—but I wish for no reward, my lord. I did what was right. That is reward enough in the eyes of Our Lord and Lady, is it not? But something for my family, perhaps—” “Ah, yes. Your family. This Henri, he is—?”
“A merchant, my lord. His sister Bel is a freeholder of some distinction in Osna village.”
“Yes. Near where the monastery was burned last year. What does Henry the merchant say about your parentage, Alain?”
Alain squirmed in the chair and took a sip of wine to cover his discomfiture. The wine was fine and smooth; he had never tasted anything as good before. Wine such as this did not come to the lips of common folk, not even the freeborn.
“He says—” He says. Alain thought, briefly, about lying. But Henry and Aunt Bel had not taught him to lie. They had treated him as kin, and it would dishonor them to twist their words now, even if the truth disgraced him before Count Lavastine. “My mother was a servant woman at your holding, my lord. My father Henri … had an affection for her. She was known to—” He bit at his lip. Ai, Lady, he could not simply call his mother a whore. “—to have consorted with men. She died three days after giving birth to me. The deacon gave me into Henri’s care in return for his promise to offer me to the church when I turned sixteen.”
“You are older than sixteen, are you not?”
“Seventeen now, my lord. I would have entered the church last year, but the monastery at Dragon’s Tail—”
“—was burned. Yes. That is the whole of the story?” “Yes, my lord.”
Lavastine sat in the gloom and toyed with his cup, turning it around and around until Alain feared he would spill it. From outside, Alain heard Lavastine’s captain speaking, something about Henry and Autun and the king’s mercy, but even with his sharpened hearing, he could not string the phrases together into intelligible sentences. Sorrow yawned a dog’s yawn, full of teeth, and threw himself against Alain’s legs, leaning there until Alain was practically tipped over. He adjusted the chair, and this movement stirred the count to a decision.
“Attend, child,” he said in his brisk, impatient way. “I must now tell you a tale and you must listen carefully, for this story I have never before confessed the whole of, and I will not speak it aloud again while I live.”
Alain nodded and then, realizing the light was dim, managed to whisper, “Yes.” The hounds snuffled and whined and grunted, eight fine black hounds, beautiful creatures, if vicious.
“I married once,” said Lavastine softly. “But as all know, my wife and daughter were killed by my hounds.” “But how could that be?” asked Alain, curiosity overcoming good sense. “Or the child, at least—”
“Listen!” snapped Lavastine. “Do not interrupt.” Fear, thwarted of a place at Alain’s side, had gone to the entrance and nosed aside the canvas flap. By this new stream of light, Alain saw Lavastine smile grimly. “How can that be? Even I don’t know the true story of how my grandfather got the hounds, whether he received them in exchange for some kind of pact—with whom, I don’t know—or whether they came to him as part of his birthright. But my father—the only surviving child— inherited them in his turn, and I—also the only child who survived to adulthood—in mine. So my father arranged a marriage for me at the appropriate time so I could beget children—more than one, it was hoped—to carry on the line.”
He drained the cup of wine suddenly and set the empty cup down on the carpet. “I was young, then, and I had taken a lover, a pretty girl from among the servingwomen. We often met up among the ruins, because I wanted to keep our meetings secret. But in time, as happens, she became pregnant and begged me to acknowledge the child so that she would not be branded as a common whore. But my bride was proud and covetous, and when she came to Lavas she told me she wanted no bastard child running about the hall. So I put aside the other woman and denied any knowledge of the child, and confessed my sin to the deacon, may her memory be blessed. The deacon promised to take care of the child and assured me I need trouble myself no longer. She was not even a freeborn girl.” He picked up the winecup, tested it as if he had forgotten he had drunk it all, and set it down again with some annoyance. “I was not, perhaps, without fault in this matter.”
Alain gulped air. He had forgotten to breathe. “Did she die? Giving birth, I mean.”
Lavastine jumped up and strode to the entrance. He slapped Fear lightly on the flank and the hound retreated; the flap fell shut. “You will remain silent while I speak, Alain.”
Alain nodded but Lavastine’s back was to him.
“No more wine,” muttered Lavastine. “Yes, she died in childbed.” He turned and spoke crisply and rapidly, as if to hurry the story to its ghastly conclusion. “My bride was young, strong-willed, impatient, and argumentative. Since I was of the same disposition, we did not suit. She rarely allowed me into her bed. I refrained from taking a concubine, but I soon suspected that she had taken a lover. I could prove nothing because her servingwomen were loyal and helped her hide this fact. When our first child was born, I did not trust her. I did not believe the infant was my child, and yet—” He made a sharp gesture and strode back to the chair, but did not sit. “Yet it might have been. She raised the child to distrust me, though I tried to befriend it. The child was often a sweet girl, or so I could see from a distance. And with a daughter to assure the succession, my wife gave up the pretense. She forbade me her bed completely and began to flaunt a lover openly, a common man. She might as well have slapped me publicly in the face. But she said, ‘what you had, a commoner in your bed, I may have as well.’ She became pregnant again and I knew that this child was not—could not have been—mine. I demanded she put our daughter to the test, to face the hounds.”
Alain gasped, then clapped a hand over his mouth. Of course, he could now see what was coming.
“She tried to run away with the child. The hounds broke loose that night.”
Even the hounds were silent, as if listening. Sorrow and Rage were young, not more than three years old. Ardent and Terror were the eldest of the hounds. Had they been there that night? Had they pursued the fleeing pregnant woman and her bastard child? Had one of them been the first to catch up to the fugitives?
Lavastine spoke so softly Alain had to strain to hear him. “On her dying breath she cursed me. ‘You will have no heir of your own body. Any woman you marry will die a horrible death. I swear this by the old gods who still walk abroad and whose spawn these hounds are.’ The next year I did my duty and became betrothed to a young woman of good family. One week before the wedding she was drowned when her horse inexplicably collapsed while she was fording a river, on her way to our wedding feast. The year after, I married a y
oung widow. She sickened at the feast itself and died of the flux two days later.
“I have not tried to marry again. I want no more deaths on my conscience. But now…”
Now? Alain said nothing, but he waited.
Lavastine crossed the carpet to stand in front of Alain’s chair. The dim light made him loom above, more shadow than living man. “I began to wonder last autumn, after I returned from the campaign against the Eika raiders, but I forgot everything under the compulsion. Now, isn’t it as obvious to you as it is to me?”
At first Alain did not understand what the count was trying to say. But then he realized the hounds were lying every which way about the tent, some by Alain, some by Lavastine’s chair, some shifting as Lavastine moved. Alain touched the hem of his new, fine tunic, sewn with embroidered ribbon so rich even as prosperous a householder as Aunt Bel would have to trade a child in exchange for an arm’s length of such an exquisite piece of fabric.
Lavastine took one of Alain’s hands in his and lifted him to his feet. His mouth was set in a thin, determined line, and when he spoke, his tone allowed for no argument.
“You are my son.”
5
LIATH had nightmares. Every night, the dogs came and tore at her flesh, ripping her, tearing her limb from limb. Every night she would wake, sweating, heart pounding, and bolt upright in her blanket until the cool night air washed the stain of fear from her. But it could not wash away her grief.
Then she would weep.
Always Wolfhere slept through these episodes, or pretended to be asleep. She could not tell which. She did not want to know which it was. He was deeply preoccupied, spoke only when spoken to or when it was absolutely necessary to get supplies or new mounts. Only once, in an unguarded moment, did she hear him whisper a name.
“Manfred.”
They rode many days. Liath did not keep track of them. Though the skies were clear and perfect for viewing, she did not follow the course of the moon through the Houses of the Night, the world dragon that bound the heavens. She did not trace the courses of the planets through those same constellations. She did not repeat the lessons Da had taught her over and over again. She did not walk in the city of memory, so laboriously built, so carefully maintained for so many years.
She mourned and she dreamed.
Sometimes, if she chanced to stare into a hearth fire or campfire, she would get a sudden feeling she was peering through a keyhole, watching a scene that unfolded on the other side of a locked door.
There are spirits burning in the air with wings of flame and eyes as brilliant as knives. They move on the winds of aether that blow above the sphere of the Moon, and now and again their gaze falls like a blazing arrow, like the strike of lightning, to the Earth below, and there it sears anything it touches, for they cannot comprehend the frailty of Earthly life. They are of an elder race and are not so fragile. Their voices have the snap of fire and their bodies are not bodies as we know them, but the conjoining of fire and wind, the breath of the fiery Sun coalesced into mind and will.
“But are we not their cousins, then? Were we not born of fire and light? Is our place not here out beyond the sphere of the Moon, as theirs is?”
The first speaker shifts, studying the flames, for he, too, stares into the fire, and across some doorway impossible to touch he watches Liath. He seems to know she is listening, that she can see him. But he speaks to the woman who stands out of sight in the shadows behind him.
“We are not as old as that, my child. We were not born of the very elements themselves, though they wove themselves into our shaping. We are the children of angels, but we can no longer live cast out from the Earth which gave us birth.”
He lifts a hand. Liath recognizes him; he has come to be familiar to her, but he frightens her, not because he looks threatening but because he is so utterly inhuman, so unlike Da or any of the other people she knows, those few she has come to care for, even unlike Hugh, who is an abomination but a fully human one. He is Aoi, one of the Lost Ones, old, surely—such is the authority of his bearing—although he looks neither young nor old by any sign she knows how to read. He has the look of Sanglant about him. That frightens her, too, that seeing this strangely clad male reminds her bitterly of Sanglant, whom she wishes only to forget. Never to forget.
“Who are you?” he asks with simple curiosity, neither angry nor frightened, not like her. “Who are you who watches through the fire? Where have you found this gateway? How have you brought it to life?” Across his bare thighs rest the strands of flax he is twining into rope, a longer length each time she sees him through the fire. But the rope grows slowly, a finger’s-breadth, a hand’s-breadth, while days pass for her as she and Wolfhere ride south and west, seeking King Henry.
She cannot answer him. She cannot speak through flame. She fears her voice will echo down unknown passageways and through vast hidden halls, that wind and fire will carry it to the ears of those who are listening for her, seeking her.
The sorcerer—for he must be such, to have knowledge and vision together—plucks a gold feather from the sheath that encases his right forearm and tosses it into the flames.
Liath started up, scrambling back as the fire flared up and then, abruptly, died down. She blinked back tears, streaming from smoke, and wiped her nose. Her face was hot. Behind her, the door slammed open and Wolfhere walked in from dark night outside.
She sat in the middle of a small guest house—such as the abbot granted to Eagles, not the best of his accommodations but not the worst either—at the Monastery of Hersford. The fire snapped and burned merrily, innocent of any sorcery. She might have dreamed … but it was no dream. When she dreamed, she dreamed of the Eika dogs.
“What did you find out?” she asked.
Wolfhere coughed and wiped his hands together, dusting something off them. “Henry and the court celebrated the Feast of St. Susannah here, but they were called away west. According to Father Bardo, Sabella raised an army and Henry had to ride west to meet her, before she entered Wendar. She removed Biscop Constance from the biscop’s chair at Autun and set another woman there as biscop in her place. And took Constance prisoner, as well.”
Liath set her elbow on her knee and her head on a hand. She was very tired, now, and did not much care for the troubles and intrigues of the noble lords. “Sabella would have done better to send her army against Bloodheart,” she muttered.
“Well,” said Wolfhere, “the great princes most often think of their own advantage, not that of others. Father Bardo does not know what happened to the king, or if it came to battle. Come now, we’ll sleep and ride out at dawn.”
She dreaded sleeping, but in the end her exhaustion drew her down, and down, and down…
… into the crypt at Gent, where corpses lay strewn among the pale tombs of the holy dead and the dogs fed so voraciously she could hear the cracking of bones…
She started awake in a cold sweat, heart racing. Ai, Lady! How much more of this must she suffer? Wolfhere slept on the other side of the fire, which lay in cold ashes, as cold as her heart. Only one wink of heat remained, a flash of gold among the gray.
Without thinking, she reached—and plucked from the dead ashes of the fire a gold feather.
6
HENRY held court in the great hall of the biscop’s palace in Autun, his three children sitting on his right side, his sister Constance and other trusted counselors on his left. Earlier, in the cathedral, Biscop Constance—restored to her position—had celebrated Luciasmass, one of the four-quarters masses of the year. Rosvita knew that the mathematici gave these other names, the spring and fall equinoxes and the summer and winter solstices, but she preferred to think of them as the masses celebrating the blessed Daisan’s four missionary disciples, those who carried the Holy Word to the four quarters of the Earth: Marian, Lucia, Matthias, and Candlemass, known to the old pagans as Dhearc, the dark night of the sun. This last was the feast of St. Peter the Disciple, burned alive as a sacrifice to the fire
god of the Jinna when he would not recant his faith in the God of Unities.
After mass, Henry and his court had returned to the great hall where feasting would continue late into the night, for this was midsummer and the sun stayed long in the sky, celebrating the triumph of the Divine Logos, the Holy Word, and the promise it offered of the Chamber of Light.
But Henry had business to conduct. He sat beside his sister and gathered his folk together. They waited in orderly lines, crowding in from outside, more even than the people who had marched with him, for many of the more prosperous natives of Autun had also come to see the king and pledge their loyalty.
On this occasion, Henry wore his cloth-of-gold robes of state, and in his left hand he held his scepter, symbol of the king’s justice, and on his right hand he wore the gold ring of sovereignty. On his silvering hair rested the heavy crown, studded with jewels. Biscop Constance blessed him and anointed him with oil blessed by the skopos herself and scented with attar of roses.
Thus was he confirmed in the eyes of his court and of the people of Autun as their king, chosen and approved by the divine wisdom of Our Lord and Lady.
“Let justice be served,” said Henry to the multitudes. He called before him the heirs of Duke Rodulf.
Rosvita felt some sympathy for the young man who came forward, his retainers cowering like frightened dogs at his heels. He had none of Rodulf’s bluff authority and was in any case barely past his majority. The duke had probably brought the boy along to get his first taste of war, only to have the poor child be forced to witness his father’s death.
“Who are you?” Henry demanded, although he knew perfectly well who the young man was.
“I am Rodulf, son of Rodulf and Ida.” The boy’s color was high, and his hands trembled, but he did not disgrace himself.
“Do you speak for the heir of Varingia?”
“I—I speak for my elder sister, Yolande, who was named heir by my father five years ago.”