"That is right. You know of the struggle of Henry and Sabella for the right to sit on the throne of Wendar and Varre." Agius gestured, lips twisted in a frown, toward Biscop Antonia. She had begun to sing and as usual her clerics joined in with great sweetness of tone. Alain could not understand the words, since they sang in Dariyan.

But Agius, distracted, murmured words in time to their singing.

'These four Deacons were treasurers, Who held in their integrity, The key to the mystery. Four days did they open to us, Each one of them with her key. To Thee be glory, Who chose them wisely!' '

"Is that what the words mean?" demanded Alain.

"Yes. It is an old song, from the East. But never mind it. We must not be distracted from our purpose. Soon we will come to the walls of Autun and there will be an end to^your lesson. Now. What is the name of the king, and who are his siblings?"

"King Henry, of course!" Aware that he had spoken loudly, Alain ducked his head, embarrassed.

In Sabella's camp, one did not speak of Henry as king. "And Lady Sabella, who is his elder sister."

"His half sister," Agius corrected. "Queen Berengaria of Varre was her mother. When she died, the younger Arnulf married Mathilda of Karrone, who is Henry's mother. And then?"

"I don't know."

"These are the living children of Arnulf and Mathilda. Henry. Rotrudis. Richardis, known as Scholastica, who is Mother at Quedlinhame Cloister. Benedict. Constance. Brun. Henry also has a half sister who is the child of the younger Arnulf and a concubine. She is Alberada, now Biscop of Handelburg, but that is far to the east in the marchlands, and she has taken no part in the quarrels between Henry and Sabella. Now. Who are the six dukes?"

"I ... I don't know. Well. Duke Rodulf is one. And isn't Sabella's husband Berengar called a duke?"

"He is indeed. He is Duke of Arconia, although of course Lady Sabella administers his lands, as his wife. Rodulf is Duke of Varingia. The city of Autun lies on the border of those lands administered .by Rodulf and his wife, which we call Varingia, and those lands administered by Sabella and Berengar, called Arconia. Perhaps you wonder, then, why the Biscop of Autun is sympathetic to Henry's cause, though her city lies within that region controlled by Lady Sabella?"

Alain nodded dutifully.

"When Sabella first rebelled against her brother's authority eight years ago, the biscop of Autun was one of her principal supporters. So Henry removed the biscop of Autun and made her abbess of a small, isolated convent instead. He then convinced the skopos to install in her place his young sister Constance. The white deer. Of course Constance supports Henry."

"What of the other four dukes?"

"Three of the dukes support Henry. Henry's sister Rotrudis is Duchess of Saony and Attomar.

The duchy of Saony is the original seat of power of his family. Before they became kings, they were the dukes of Saony."

"How did they become the kings, then?"

"That you must learn another time, or read for yourself. Now attend." He looked ahead as they came out of the shadow of the trees into sun. A long downslope rolled out from their feet. Soon they would come within an arrow's shot of the city walls. Alain wondered how soon they would be noticed by the people within the city. "Burchard, Duke of Avaria."

"He is your father."

"Yes." Alain wanted to draw him out, but Agius spoke the word so curtly the boy dared ask no more questions. "And third, Liutgard, Duchess of Fesse, who is also of royal kin."

"The one you were betrothed to."

"I see you have listened more closely than I supposed."

"But your brother married her instead."

Agius looked away quickly, hiding his expression. Alain thought of the little girl who had clung to her uncle in Biscop Antonia's tent; clearly Agius's bond to his brother and thus his brother's children was very strong.

With sudden sympathy for Agius' grief and impotent fury in the face of his niece's captivity, Alain asked another question. "Who is the sixth duke?"

A hesitation. At last Agius spoke, although he still looked away, staring at the ground. "Conrad, Duke of Wayland, known as Conrad the Black. Sabella claims he supports her, but he has not brought his forces to march with hers."

"And the margraves?"

Agius had recovered his composure. He lifted his chincleanly shaven that morning, as befit a man dedicated to the churchand took in a deep breath of air, as if to fortify himself. "Chief among the margraves is Helmut Villam. Second, and almost as powerful, is Judith, margrave of Olsatia and Austra.

Werinhar, margrave of Westfall, is the other."

"You said there were four."

!

A shadow crossed Agius' expression, the same raw grief. Alain understood at once that this had something to do with his beloved brother. "The margrave of Eastfall and both her sons died three years ago in a battle fought against the Quman."

"Isis that the battle your brother died in?" A wild guess, but Alain knew he was right by the sharp glance Agius threw him and the frater's sudden grim silence.

They walked for a while. The biscop and her clerics were still singing; the hymn from the East evidently had many verses. He did not want to look at Agius or to ask him any more questions, whether about margraves or verses. Agius held such a store of pain in him that it hurt Alain to see it.

Agius whispered words in Wendish under his breath, in time to the voices of the others.

" 'Daughters ofNisibia, act as did your mother, Who laid a Body within her, And it became a Wall without her!

Lay in you a living Body, That it may be a Wall for your life.

To Thee be glory, Who chose most wisely.'

As the clerics finished the hymn, the biscop slowed her mule and the entire procession came to a halt. Antonia dismounted.

Autun was built on a hill that rose out of the plain of the Rhowne Valley. Hovels and huts stood outside the walls, but like the fields they were empty of any life except for a stray chicken pecking along the verge of the settlement. Antonia's party was as yet out of arrow shot of the city walls, but at the great palisade gate that marked the main entrance to the city a company had assembled. Two banners flew, and as the company descended the road, coming out to meet Biscop Antonia, Alain made out their devices: One, like the banner of the city of Mainni, showed a tower, this a gray tower surmounted by a black raven. The other banner, so

bright a gold it seemed to reflect the sun itself, depicted a white deer.

Agius moved forward to stand beside Biscop Antonia. He was sickly pale. Antonia, looking perfectly at her ease, had a magnanimous smile on her face as she waited for the group from the city to arrive and greet her.

As befit the daughter and sister of kings, the Biscop of Autun had a handsome and impressive retinue. Her clerics wore robes of fine linen dyed a rich burgundy, and each one held a book, a token of their station. Draped over their left shoulders they each wore a long, embroidered linen scarf. There were perhaps thirty clerics in the company; Alain had never seen so many books in one place before. Indeed, it had never occurred to him so many might exist in all the world.

Monks and nuns attended her also, carrying thuribles, round vessels of beaten brass in which incense was burned; the thuribles hung from chains, swinging slowly back and forth to the rhythm of the soft chanting of the company. "Kyria eleison. Kyrie eleison." Lady, have mercy on us. Lord, have mercy on us.

The Biscop of Autun rode a white mule at the center of the procession. Though she wore a biscop's rich vestments and mitre, Alain could see at her neck the golden torque marking her as born of royal kin. She was young, certainly younger than Agius, but she had a grave expression that made her look as steady and wise as a woman twice her years. Her complexion was healthy if pale, and when she dismounted and came forward on foot, hands outstretched to greet her sister biscop, Alain could see she was tall and of good stature, like her elder half sister Sabella. She had a light step and an elegant manner.

Alain saw immediately why she had received the name 'the white deer.'

She took Biscop Antonia's hands in hers and at once the soft chanting of her company ceased.

There was silence except for the scrape of shifting feet on dirt and the jingling of harness.

"I greet you, sister, and welcome you to my city," said Constance. She had a pleasingly high voice, full and clear. But she did not smile. "I am surprised to find you here, so far from Mainni and the Hearth over which you were ordained to watch."

"I give you greetings in return, sister," said Antonia with rather more sweetness. "I come in the peace of Our Lord and Lady."

"There are others with you." Constance looked back along the road down which Antonia and the others had come.

Of course, the road was empty. Sabella's army was safely encamped several hours' ride into the Duke of Varingia's territory. This was strange, certainly, in itself. The duchy of Arconia remained under the aegis of Berengar and Sabella. Yet a biscop's duties were twofold. She watched over the spiritual wellbeing of her charges and over the Hearth of the cathedral given unto her by the authority of the skopos. But a biscop must be consulted in worldly matters as well, just as the king or duke had a say in what noblewoman was most deserving of elevation to biscop when a see became empty by reason of death or dishonor. As Biscop of Autun, whose spiritual duty was to watch over the inhabitants of the central portion of the kingdoms of Wendar and Varrethe region known as Arconia Constance had the right to demand to be consulted on matters pertaining to the administration of the duchy of Arconia.

Perhaps Sabella's hold on the loyalty of the populace in her own husband's duchy was not as strong as that populace's love for their new young biscop, Constance.

"I fear there is strife in your family," said Antonia, sounding much stricken at having to be the bearer of bad tidings. "I have come as mediator. I beg of you to come with me to speak of these matters with Sabella and Rodulf."

"It grieves me to hear of such things," replied Con stance without any indication this was news to her, "but I fear the illwill of Sabella, for reasons you must know, and in any case I am loath to leave my people" Here she gestured toward the city, which lay quiet in the midday sun. "without my guidance, and without my presence to protect them."

Agius had remained in the background, hidden by the robes of Antonia's clerics. Now he stepped forward. The bleak dark stain of his frater's robes stoodout starkly against the brighter clothing of his more worldly brethren.

Constance's expression brightened. She looked delighted. "Agius! You have surprised me." She released Antonia's hands and reached and drew Agius to her as if he were her brother. The show of familiarity astonished Alain. "I did not expect to find you in such company."

Just barely Alain caught in Constance's tone a muted disgust for the company Agius was keeping.

If Antonia noticed it, she made no sign; she beamed as fondly on them as an elderly kinswoman might approve the reuniting of two feuding siblings.

"I travel where I must," Agius said. He looked torn between his obvious pleasure in seeing Biscop Constance and the dilemma that hung over him as the executioner's sword hangs over the neck of the condemned. "I follow the path which Our Lady has set before my feet."

"And that path led you to Sabella's camp?" asked Constance. If there was sarcasm in her utterance, Alain could not hear it.

"Worldly consideration led me to Sabella's camp, Your Grace."

"I thought you had turned your face away from worldly considerations, Prater Agius, when you refused marriage and took the brown robe of service instead."

He smiled grimly. "The world is not yet done with me, Your Grace. Alas."

"It is ever thus, that the world intrudes when we wish most devoutly only to contemplate God."

Constance folded her hands together and bowed her head slightly, as if in submission to God's will. Then she raised her head to look at Agius directly again. "But God in kindness endowed humans with freedom equal to that of the angels. For is it not true that the sun and the moon and indeed even the stars are so fixed that they can only move in the path marked out for them? Yet it is not so with those born of human mothers. Thus must our behavior be reckoned with that of the angels. The praise or blame which a man's conduct deserves is really his own." She turned to Biscop Antonia. "Do you not agree, Your Grace?"

Of course Alain recognized at once that the remark was like a barbed spear: meant to sink in with little hope to ease it out without great pain.

Biscop Antonia had impenetrable armor. She nodded. "It is as you say, Your Grace. Thus do Our Lord and Lady judge our actions, by what we do and by what we leave undone."

Agius made no reply.

This silence Biscop Constance took in stride. "Now that we are met on the road," she continued,

"I pray you will return with me to my hall, where my people will entertain you as is fitting with a good feast and a taste of Autun wine."

Agius shifted violently. "I have come to ask," he said quickly, "that you return with us to Sabella's camp, as Biscop Antonia requests of you."

"Surely it would be unwise of me to place myself in Sabella's power, although certainly I hold no personal enmity toward my sister."

"I will hold myself responsible, and none other, if any harm comes to you, Your Grace."

"Are you pledging me safe passage, Agius?"

"I pledge to escort you safely back to your city, Your Grace."

She was startled, though she tried to conceal it. "Then I will agree to go," she said. "Better peace than war, as the blessed Daisan said."

"I will go with you, then," added Agius, "to your hall while you gather anything you need to take to Sabella's camp."

"No need." She shrugged and gestured to her servants to bring her mule. "I am armored with my faith, Prater Agius, as are we all who have given our lives to Our Lord and Lady. And I am made strong by my brother's confidence in meas he is by mine in him."

"Then it is well we should go." Yet Agius hesitated as both biscops were helped onto their mounts. He came forward and took the reins of Biscop Constance's mule in the place of her servant.

"But did not the blessed Daisan say, he who spurns what is offered is all too often in want? It is past midday, and if we ride on now, we and the others of Biscop Antonia's party will have walked all day fasting."

Even Alain did not have to guess at Biscop Constance's reaction to this statement; she was delighted to be able to offer hospitality. Aunt Bel had said many a time within his hearing: "So does Our Lady judge us, by our generosity at table." Aunt Bel was so wellknown for feeding folk passing through Osna village that less magnanimous householders sometimes fobbed guests off on her. Never had she turned one away.

"Then certainly we must return to my palace and dine," said Constance with evident pleasure.

They returned, Agius still leading the mule, to Autun. It was the largest city Alain had ever seen, with a stone wall and a stone and timber cathedral and so many buildings all shoved together that he wondered how the folk who lived there did not choke on each other. They passed quickly through the gate and down a wide avenue flanked with timber houses built in a style quite unlike the longhouses of his village. The walls of the biscop's palace rose to the height of three men. He barely had time to catch his breath before they were led inside its imposing timber frame.

There, he was allowed to sit by the great hearth and eat bread so white and soft it was more like a cloud than what he knew as bread, heavy loaves with thick dark crusts. He was given leave to eat as much as he wished of the best cheese he had ever tasted and the leavings of the fowl and fish that made up the biscop's simple midday meal. All this while Rage and Sorrow gnawed on hambones still bristling with meat and fat. Probably poor Lackling had never eaten as much pork in his entire cold and lonely life as the hounds devoured in the course of the next hour. It was a terrible thing to sit and eat with such pleasure while Lackling had not even the peace of a marked grave.

But Alain could not help himself. Even helping to serve at Count Lavastine's table during the visit of Lady Sabella and her entourage he had not seen a meal as casually elegant as this. But then, Biscop Constance was the king's sister, born of the lineage of kings. The dark beams and tapestried walls, the bustling clerics and the fine linen worn by every least servant, served to remind him how small a place Osna village was. Certainly Aunt Bel and his father Henri were respectable and prosperous freeholders.

Of this they and their children could always be proud. Bel had lost children to disease but never to starvation, as many did. But sitting in this hall, even in the ashy corner by the hearth, that pride seemed little compared to the great state employed in the service of princes.

What the great ones spoke of he had no idea. He ate too much and then his stomach ached from the rich food, to which he was not accustomed. The long walk back to Sabella's camp seemed to take an eternity. Each step jolted him. He leaned, alternately, on Rage and then on Sorrow, to keep his balance.

The two biscops rode side by side, not giving pride of place to the other. Agius, evidently set on maintaining his pose as simple frater rather than duke's son, continued to lead Constance's mule.

Alain hoped he would make it to camp without throwing up by the side of the road.

But after an hour and with the day neither too warm nor too cold and the wind a pleasant touch on his face, he began to feel better. Of them all, only Agius looked steadily worse as they came closer to Sabella's camp.

Scouts had run ahead. As their party crossed the last rye field before the camp began its sprawl through pasture and light woods, soldiers and campfolk appeared to line their path, to stare at the royal biscop. Together, Antonia and Constance made a striking pair: cheerful age and stern youth. To see two biscops in the same cavalcade was a rare sight, and Alain wished suddenly and painfully that Lackling could be alive to see it, for he so loved all that was bright and lovely to look uponeven if only from a distance. But Antonia had brought death to the boy. How could she ride with such a smooth countenance, as if nothing troubled her conscience?

But was it not Agius who spoke of the inner heart? As Aunt Bel said: "A smooth countenance without reflects a calm soul within." So Alain had always believed. Now he wondered. How could any person make dealings with blood and dark shades and by that means bring about the death of an innocent simple boy, and yet show no sign of that terrible sin in her face?

Lady Sabella waited in front of the great tent surmounted by her banner. Her daughter Tallia stood beside her, looking pale and cold in a gown of silk the color of harvested wheat. Duke Rodulf and her other partisans stood at her side or a few steps back; Count Lavastine, in their midst, appeared wooden, drained of life. Sabella did not come forward to greet her half sister but rather waited for Constance to dismount and walk forward in her turn.

"Sister," said Constance mildly, "I give you greetings. It is my devout hope we can mend these troubles that have torn our family apart."

Sabella did not offer Constance her hands, the sign of kinship and safekeeping. Instead, she took a step back and signed to her soldiers. They swarmed forward to form a ring around the two women and their retinues. Antonia dismounted and came to stand beside Sabella. Tallia stared somberly at Constance, as if the young biscop were an apparition. Agius sank to one knee, head bowed, still holding the halter of Constance's white mule.

"You are now come to rest in my hands, Constance," said Sabella in the flat voice that disguised her emotions, if indeed she had any. "You are my hostage for Henry's good behavior and for his agreement to give precedence to my rightful claim."

Like a deer, startled by the sudden appearance of the hunter, Biscop Constance threw up her head, eyes wide, looking as if she were about to bolt. But of course she was surrounded. She drew her hands back and folded them in front of her. This gesture allowed her to regain her composure.

"I have been betrayed," she said in a loud, firm voice. She turned to gaze directly at Agius, who rose slowly to face her, his complexion white. "You promised me safe escort, Agius. Cousin." The word, said with emphasis and anger, was a weapon, meant to wound. Agius said nothing.

"He gave you safe escort," interposed Antonia. "He escorted you safely into your city, where we broke our fast. Then we came here, but he had already discharged the obligation. He did not promise you safe passage for a second time."

Constance did not even glance toward Antonia. "You have deceived me, Agius. I will not forget it."

"Nor should you," he replied, his voice rough. But he looked beyond Constance to Sabella. Alain was suddenly struck by the age of the two women: Sabella was old enough to be Constance's mother; as indeed she would have been, might have been, had she proven herself fertile on her heir's progress so many years ago, the progress that had resulted in her being passed over for the throne. Tallia, the late fruit of her marriage, looked like a frail reed out of which to create the staff that would grant her the authority of a sovereign queen.

"And so, Lady Sabella," said Agius harshly, "my part in this is finished. Release my niece and let us ride free, as you promised."

"As I promised, I will free your niece into the custody of the biscop of Autun, whom I now restore to the seat taken unlawfully from her by the decree of my brother Henry and with the connivance of my sister Constance." She gestured. An old, frail woman tottered forward, wearing biscop's vestments marked with the badge of the city of Autun.

"You will go against Henry's wishes?" Constance demanded. "/ am the biscop of Autun."

"And by what right did Henry remove this woman from her see?" Sabella's tone was mild but unyielding. "Helvissa was given the biscop's crosier by the authority of the skopos herself twenty years ago. Henry's worldly authority does not outrank the spiritual authority of the skopos in these matters. I merely restore Biscop Helvissa to her rightful place."

But looking at the old woman, whose hands shook with palsy, Alain could not imagine she would be anything except a pawn in Sabella's plans.

"She is Mother to a convent now," Constance said, "not biscop. / was invested"

"You were invested as a deacon in the church, sister. Your election to biscop can, I think, be treated as invalid. It is as a deacon you will remain in my custody."

Constance gasped. Looking furious, she shut her mouth tight.

A servingwoman came forward with the little girl, Agius' niece. The child had the expression of a cornered animal, gone still while waiting for the deathblow. She saw her uncle and leaned toward him as rashes lean in a stiff breeze, but she made no move to ran to him. It was as if a leash held her to her captors. Tears trailed down her cheeks, yet she made no sound though her chin trembled. A slender gold torque gleamed at her neck.

"The child will return with the biscop to the city of Autun," said Sabella, sounding satisfied with herself and the fruition of her plan. "But you may not leave me, Prater Agius. I may still have need of you."

"Then my niece remains in your custody." His voice was quiet, too quiet, perhaps. Alain had never heard him so subdued. Agius glanced toward the girl, then tore his gaze away from her. The child hiccuped down a sob in response.

Constance knelt abruptly, extending her hands. "Come, child," she said, more order than request.

The child looked to her uncle, got his bare nod, and took hesitant steps forward until Constance's hands rested lightly on her shoulders. "This is Ermengard, daughter of Duchess Liutgard and her husband Frederic of Avaria. She is destined for the church." Only then did Constance look back up at Sabella.

"Even our quarrels must not stand in the way of Our Lady's and Lord's will. Let one of my clerics escort her to Autun and put her into the care of my chatelaine, a woman of good birth and education."

Agius stood with hands clenched, gaze fixed on his niece with uncomfortable intensity. The new biscop staggered and had to be supported by a servant.

"I will allow this," said Sabella at last. "Constance, I leave you in the hands of Biscop Antonia.

Now." She turned to Duke Rodulf. "We march. Autun will comply with the wishes of her rightful biscop, although we will leave a garrison behind to make sure of their loyalty to us."

Alain caught sight suddenly of Sabella's husband, Berengar, sitting with a servant on the ground in front of Sabella's great tent. The two mennoble and servant were playing chess. Berengar laughed with great gusto, almost braying with pleasure, knocked over the servant's pieces, and proclaimed himself winner. Tallia flinched. Biscop Antonia set a steadying hand on the young woman's shoulder.

So it was done. The girlchild, Ermengard, was led away in the company of the new biscop of Autun. Constance was led away under guard, though she refused to relinquish her biscop's robes and mitre and scarf, and none there dared take these things from her by force.

"You have deceived me, Sabella," said Agius finally.

"It surprises me to hear you say such a thing," replied Sabella. "For we both promised safe passage and met our obligations. I do not hold it as deceit."

"I do."

"Yet reflect on this, cousin. Were Constance to remain in Autun, there would be war between her people and mine. What better judgment is there than that by which discord is dissolved and peace reestablished?"

"What better judgment? That of Our Lady, who looks within our souls and judges what She sees there."

Sabella lifted an eyebrow, the most expressive gesture Alain had ever seen her use. "I am as you see me, Prater Agius. By this must you judge me. I trust you will submit to the custody of Biscop Antonia."

"I will submit because I have no choice."

"Then he is yours, Your Grace," she said to Antonia.

"And this one as well," said Antonia. To Alain's horror, the whitehaired biscop turned her gaze on him.

"This one?" Sabella looked first here and then there and finally, with some confusion, found him with the hounds as if she had not truly seen him before. "He is a kennel boy, is he not? I recognize Lavastine's hounds."

"Not just a kennel boy, I believe," said Antonia. "I would be gratified if you would render him into my care."

Sabella shrugged. She did not even consult Lavastine, who in any case no longer spoke except when spoken to and then in that flat monotone which reminded Alain of Sabella's voice. "He is yours."

She turned away, leading Duke Rodulf and the others with her. Tallia trailed behind, looking back over her shoulder. Briefly, Alain met her eyes: They were palest grayblue, like the dawn sky on a cloudless day. Then she followed her mother inside the great tent.

Alain shivered. He dared not look up at Antonia. Sabella's indifference to his fate terrified him.

So easily was he abandoned. Outside of Lavastine's camp, none knew or cared what happened to him.

What if Antonia suspected, or even knew, he had witnessed Lackling's murder?

"Come," said the biscop in her usual kind voice. "You will serve at the feast tonight, Alain."

He shuddered. She even remembered his name.

"Prater Agius, I hope you are not too proud to serve as well."

"I will serve as I am bid."

But Alain heard the terrible pain welling up underneath the humble words.

Together they were escorted to the river and given some privacy to wash. Agius' expression had taken on such a cast of blankness that Alain feared for him. But the frater said nothing. He knelt on the bank and prayed silently while Alain washed his own face and hands, then, tentatively, peeled off his tunic and washed his chest and back. Finally, not sure when he would have such a chance again, he stripped and waded to the deepest part of the little river, up past his thighs, took a ragged breath, and went under.

He came up, spitting and coughing, into a boiling mass of hounds. They swam round him, their tails whipping against his skin. Rage nipped at him, and Sorrow swam on to the other side of the river and shook himself all over with such power that Alain, in the middle, felt the spray off his coat.

Unexpectedly, Alain felt a swell of simple joy. He laughed. Had not Rage and Sorrow chosen him as their companion? It seemed impossible for Biscop Antonia to harm him as long as the two hounds protected him.

He waded back to shore. Agius was still praying. If his eyes had lifted from his hands even once, Alain saw no sign of it.

"Wash yourself, my friend," said Alain finally. "Is it not what Our Lady would wish, that we appear before her cleansed?"

He was not sure Agius heard the words, so he shook out his clothing as best he could, let himself dry off, and dressed. The guards shifted at their positions, anxious to return their charges to the biscop's custody.

"You are right," said Agius suddenly. He took off his frater's robe. Under it, against his skin, he wore a coarse shirt woven of linen and horsehair. But Alain noticed at once that his leg, where Sorrow had bitten him, was dirty, red, and swollen. Before Alain could utter a word, Agius removed his hair shirt.

Alain could not restrain a gasp. Even the guards murmured in awe and horror.

The stiff cloth had rubbed Agius' skin raw. In places, the open skin was festering.

"Doesn't it hurt?" Alain whispered, feeling the pain like fire on his own back and chest.

Agius threw himself full length on the ground, hands clenched, awful tortured skin exposed. "It is no more than I deserve. I betrayed one for the other, only to find myself betrayed in return. Ai, Lady, I thought only to help the child, for the love I bore Frederic."

"But you saved your niece, surely?"

"Saved her from what? She still remains in Sabella's custody, since Sabella's creature now acts as biscop of Autun in Constance's place. I could not even take the child to safety, back to her mother's castle or to the king's progress. I pray that the king learns of these deeds soon, for they will make him very angry." He spoke more slowly now, almost savoring the words. "The king's anger is a terrible thing to behold." A slight moan escaped him, the sound of a creature mourning. "Ai, Lady, You will judge me harshly, as I deserve. I vowed to leave the world and enter Your service, and yet the world pursues me and grants no mercy from its burdens. Forgive me my sins. Let my belief in the true knowledge of Your Son's sacrifice grant me a measure of peace in my heart."

So on he went, back to his prayers. The guards muttered, listening and watching.

Alain did not know what to do. In an odd way, Agius reminded him of the piteous guivre: wounded and suffering in a cage made for it by others. Yet the guivre was of itself no pitiful thing; it had a fierce and hideous nobility, separate from human concerns.

After a bit, the hounds ventured closer, then nudged at Agius' prostrate body. The frater did not react to this threat. Perhaps Agius hoped, at that moment, they would tear him to pieces and have done with it. But instead, Sorrow licked at the wound on his leg and Rage licked the sores on his back.

Alain hurried forward to find Agius weeping silently. He knelt and whispered soothing words to him as he might to Aunt Bel's youngest daughter Agnes when she was caught in nighttime fears.

Finally, Agius let Alain help him into the water and wash.

But that night Agius did not eat, nor did he the next day as they marched on, leaving Autun behind. Only in the evening did Alain coax him to take a crust of old bread, scarcely fit for beggars.

Watched as they were, this piece of information was conveyed to Biscop Antonia. She took Alain aside the next morning and thanked him kindly for his care of Frater Agius.

"Although he professes a heresy," she said gently, "I hope to bring him back to his senses and into the church again."

But Alain feared, in Agius' silence and stubborn fixed stare, that the frater had taken into his head some kind of terrible idea, that he meant to do something rash or dangerous. Agius prayed incessantly, even while walking. At every halt in the march he spoke to a growing audience of the curious about the revelation of the Son, the blessed Daisan, through Whose sacrifice our sins are redeemed.

A MOUSE'S HUNGER LETus rest here," said Rosvita to her escort. She indicated a log that had, by the grace of Our Lady and Lord, come to rest like a bench just where the path broke out of the forest atop a ridge. From this plain but serviceable seat one could see the valley spread out below, the plaster and timber buildings of Hersford Monastery, the large estate, and the several villages strung like clusters of grapes along the Hers River.

She was not sure a magnate of Helmut Villam's stature would deign to sit on such a humble seat.

But she sat down and, after a moment, handing the reins of his horse over to his son, so did he.

The thin wail of a horn carried to them on the stiff wind that blew along the ridge top. They watched as out of a copse below the king and his company emerged, bright banners signaling their passage.

A white banner marked with a red eagle in profile now flew among the othermore familiarpennants.

Duchess Liutgard of Fesse had arrived at Hersford Monastery yesterday. Hersford lay on the border between the duchies of Saony and Fesse; it was traditional for the reigning duke to escort the king across into her domain. Liutgard had inherited her position at a very young ageand perhaps because of her youth she adhered strictly to the old forms.

"I fear you have missed the hunt," said Rosvita. What intrigues would be planted on today's hunt, their fruit to be harvested many months from nowfor good or forill?

Villam coughed, flushed from the exertion of toiling up the hill. A big man, he had spared his horse the last steep climb by leading it instead of riding. "The hunt is ever on, Sister Rosvita. Only the prey we hunt differs from chase to chase."

"Do you think King Henry is serious? That he intends to elevate the illegitimate child over the legitimate ones?"

Villam's smile was slight and selfmocking. "I am not an unprejudiced observer in this matter. If King Henry did indeed designate Sanglant as his heir, against all custom, then can it not be said / have a direct interest in promoting Sanglant's elevation?"

"How would that be so?" she asked, wondering if he would actually state outright what most people believed to be true: that he had stood by while his eldest daughter, Waltharia, carried on an affair of some months' duration with the charming Sanglant, an affair that had ended with her pregnancy by the prince and subsequent marriage to a sturdy young man of noble birth and pleasant manners.

But for answer, he only smiled knowingly. Behind, his son Berthold, standing close enough to listen in, gave a snort of amusement. It would be well to remember, thought Rosvita, that the lad had, as well as undoubted skill at arms, his father's ironical bent and a seemingly endless store of amiability.

"I think," said Villam suddenly, "the king must make up his mind to marry again. Queen Sophia has been at peace in the Chamber of Light for almost two years now, and the nuns have sung prayers in her memory through two Penitires. The king is strong, but it is always to the benefit of a man to be strengthened by marriage to a woman his equal in courage and wit."

She chanced to glance up at the son, who was obviously trying to suppress laughter. Since Villam was notorious even among the great princes of the realm for his weakness for comely young concubines, it was useful to know his children were aware of his fault and apt to judge him leniently despite it. She sighed. Now that King Henry had charged her with this errand, she knew she would be drawn more and more into the intrigues that journeyed along with the cavalcade of physical creatures and goods on the king's progress. The prospect gave her no pleasure. It would only take time away from her History.

"He must choose carefully if he marries again," she said, resigning herself to the inevitable.

"When he marries again. Henry is too shrewd to remain unmarried, and when a worthy alliance reveals itself, I am sure he will take advantage of it. Henry is a man like any other." Villam stroked his gray beard while he watched hounds and then riders vanish into a stand of wood. He wore his usual affable smile, but there was a certain reticence about his expression, a distance in his eyes as he contemplated the wood below, silent trees which concealed the hunting party within. "A man like any other. Except he has only the one bastard and wishes for no other. None can fault the king's piety."

"Indeed not," she hurriedly agreed. Certainly it was true.

"But it is not piety that stays him from that course."

"You are saying, Lord Helmut, that it is memory, not piety, that restrains him from taking a concubine. The events to which you refer occurred while I was still a novice at Korvei. You think he loves the woman still?"

"No woman. I am not sure I would call it love. Sorcery, more like. Understand this, Sister Rosvita. She

cared nothing for the rest of us." That same selfmocking smile teased his lips and vanished. "And I say that not only because I am a vain man and wished for her to acknowledge my interest in her, and was annoyed that she did not. Certainly, she was beautiful. She had also an arrogance worthy of the Emperor Tailiefer himself, were he to descend from the heavens and walk among us as she did then. But we were as nothing to her. Her indifference to the rest of us was as complete as ours is to He ran a hand along the smooth surface of the log, long since scoured free of its bark by wind and rain and sun. Picking up a tiny insect, he displayed it, let it crawl across the tips of his fingers, then flicked it casually away. It vanished among the weeds. "this least of Our Lord's and Lady's creatures. Perhaps it was only a man's vanity, but I always felt she wanted something from Henry, not that she felt affection toward him. But I have never figured out what it was she wanted," "Not the child?"

"Why leave the child behind if she wanted it? The infant was not more than two months old. No."

He shook his head. "Perhaps a sudden madness took her, and that was all. Perhaps, like the beasts of the field, her time came upon her, and Henry happened to be the bull at hand. Perhaps her kind do not think as we do and so we can never hope to fathom her actions and intent. Or perhaps, as some whisper, there are forces at work we are not aware of." He shrugged. "Sanglant is strong and brave, well versed in warfare, generous and loyal and prudent. But he is still a bastard, and a bastard he will always remain."

"So we are brought around again to our purpose here today. I have rested enough, Lord Helmut.

Shall we go on?"

He nodded assent. His son handed him the reins to his horse and Rosvita took up her walking staff. She had been offered a donkey to ride, but she preferred to approach a hermit of such holy reputation in the most humble manner possible, as St. Thecla was said to have approached the blessed Daisan when first she came to him begging to become his disciple.

On they went. In fact, she had put off the errand for several days, hoping Henry would change his mind and decide not to send her. But he had not changed his mind. Sympathy for Father Bardo's plight had forced her hand: As long as the king's progress remained at Hersford Monastery, the abbot had to feed them. Hersford was prosperous but not rich enough to host the king's entourage for longer than five or six days.

The broad dirt path soon became a thin weedy track that cut through undergrowth and in and out of stands of trees. Their party had to walk single file and the horses were much bothered by vegetation slapping into them. Rosvita, at the fore, apologized more than once for getting and letting a branch spring back directly into the head of Villam's son, but Berthold never complained. It was a still day, a little muggy, suggesting a hot summer to come.

The crown of the hill was not, as she had supposed, the same thick forest through which they had ascended. The path broke suddenly into sunlight and they emerged onto a level field strewn with great fallen stones and the scattered saplings and bushy undergrowth that marked this as a place once inhabited by people but now abandoned, being slowly overtaken by the forest beyond. Four mounds overgrown with lush grass and wildflowers rose in the great clearing.

"I never knew the old Dariyans built on hills as high as this," said Villam, obviously surprised to find ruins here.

Rosvita ventured farther into the clearing. She bumped up against a stone hidden by grass. It was a great block of stone, gray and weathered, with pictures or words carved into it, so worn away by weather, years, and the lichen grown into its curves and grooves that she could not make out what the longdead builders had chiseled into the stone. She followed the shape of the monolith with her hands, tearing grass away. The block of stone was huge, twice her height though it now lay full length on the ground. At its base she saw the deep hole where it had been sunk into the ground. Now the sinkhole sprouted a thick tangle of nettles.

"This is not a Dariyan ruin, I think," she said when Villam and his son came up beside her. "See.

These inscriptions or images here are much worn, and usually we can read those left by the Dariyan peoples. Also, all of the Dariyan forts I have seen were built to square lines. Look."

She turned to survey the clearing. From here the four mounds stood equidistant and at equal angles to the position of the base of the great stone block. The forest surrounded them, tall trees cutting off any view they might have of the lands below.

"It looks as if the other stones are laid in a circle around this one. And all of them contained by the earth mounds. This is not Dariyan work."

"Then whose might it be?" asked Villam. He was still puffing. "Giants must have carried this stone up here. Horses could not have dragged it, not up so steep and high a height as this."

"And with the trees so high," added Berthold, who was clearly intrigued by these ruins, "this serves no purpose as a fort. We can't see anything of the land around us."

Rosvita studied the mounds and the tree line. "I wonder." She used her walking stick to beat the undergrowth aside and made her way across the clearing to one of the mounds. Berthold followed her while Villam remained behind, still catching his breath. The menatarms had taken the horses aside to graze. As she walked and became more aware of the old stones around her, Rosvita felt suddenly that the menatarms might simply be reluctant to enter the old fallen ring of stones.

Since that certainly was what this was. A giant's ring, some called them; elf crowns, said others.

Some said they were the teeth of dragons who had fallen asleep and turned to stone when sunlight struck them. Others said that even before the Aoi, the Lost Ones, had abandoned Dariya under the onslaught of Bwrmen and their human allies from the east, there were other creatures who roamed and built here: giants, or the halfhuman spawn of dragons, or the descendents of angels. These creatures were said to possess a strength and knowledge now lost to humankind, just as the collapse of the Dariyan Empire some four hundred years ago had left the humans who survived that calamity with but a fraction of the knowledge and wisdom that had grown and flourished in the great union of elves and men known as the old Dariyan Empire.

She used her stick to help her climb up the steep slope of one of the moundsthe westernmost one, she judged by the position of the sun and the shadows. Her robes got in the way, and she yanked them free of her feet and of grasping bushes with a grunt of irritation. Berthold did not follow her up.

Rather, he ranged around the base of the mound, knocking at slabs of stone and shoving aside shrubby stumps of plants with the butt of his knife.

Breathing hard, cheeks flushed, she scrambled up to the uneven top of the mound and stared out with great satisfaction. Indeed, as she had suspected, from the mounds one could see" out over the trees, although the lines of sight did not bring her eye down into the valley but rather to the summits of other hills and to the heavens themselves. From where she stood she had a good view of the clearing, the footprints of fallen stones in the tangled undergrowth; as far as she could tell, they had been aligned in a circle.

"Look here!" Berthold sang out with sudden excitement. He stood below her at the base of the mound on the side that faced away from the stone circle. She made her way carefully down to him, arriving at the same time as his father.

He was pink with excitement. "I've seen old mounds like this before. There was a cluster of them out by the river at my blessed mother's estate on the Auras River. Always there is some kind of opening, a passageway.

And see. Here." He had found a sturdy stick and wedged open a fallen slab of stone. Rosvita knelt and peered in. A dark opening yawed there, black as pitch and with the scent of air and objects long uncovered to the light. She shuddered and drew back. Berthold, with all the enthusiasm of youth, took her place, shoving the opening a little wider.

"Do you think that wise?" asked Villam suddenly.

"We crawled into the other one." Berthold shoved his shoulders into the gap so far his voice was muffled. "There was nothing but a dry chamber deep inside. Some old bones and broken pots. And dirt."

Villam drew the Circle of Unity at his breast. "Is that the way to respect the remains of the dead?" he demanded. "Or at the least, to be prudent when dealing with" He broke off.

"Ai!" said Berthold with disgust, backing out. "It's too dark and we have no torch. Even if I could move this slab, there's a bend in the passage ahead, and there'd be no light to see by. But I could come back up tomorrow or the next day, with some of my men and torches." He glanced up over his shoulder, grinning sweetly. "With your leave, Father."

"And disturb what manner of creature?" asked Villam, looking appalled.

Rosvita could not help but nod in agreement. The old tomb, if tomb it was, was better left undisturbed. But Berthold had all the blithe enthusiasm of youth. He looked delighted.

"Do you suppose?" he asked. "No. If old sorceries were at work here, then certainly they have long since gone to sleep. There might be treasure!"

"Surely, Sister Rosvita," said Villam, appealing to her in the face of his son's excitement, "you believe, as I do, that it is better to leave the dead asleep and not to disturb them unless they themselves invite you in."

"I know little of sorcery, Lord Helmut. The sisters of St. Valeria are better known for their studies of the forbidden arts while we at Korvei have long labored over our chronicles. But any suggestion of sorcery is not to be taken lightly. Whether living or long dead."

She spoke sternly, hoping to make some impression on the young man, but Berthold merely nodded his head obediently and then went to investigate the other mounds.

Villam sighed. "He is a fine boy. But too curious, and lacking prudence."

"We will be riding on from Hersford Monastery soon, Lord Helmut. I will attempt to keep an eye on him until that time."

"I thank you."

Watching the young man pressing through the grass, her gaze traveled along the forest's edge.

And there, she saw a track. It was no more than an opening among trees, but it corresponded to the vague directions given her by Father Bardo. "Beyond the height of the hill follow the trail of the animals, or so I have been told." Father Bardo had not, evidently, seen fit to visit the most famous holy member of his own cloister. But then. Father Bardo enjoyed his comforts and did not like to leave the pleasant luxuries of the monastery.

Be not too proud, Rosvita, she chided herself, lest you be judged as harshly as you judge others in your turn.

"That is our trail," she said, turning full to face the forest.

At once, her back to the mound and the thin black opening that yawned from it, she felt something watching her.

She spun back. Immediately that sense of an unseen presence vanished. It was only an overgrown mound with a passageway blocked by stone slabs.

But Villam had a strange expression on his face. "I had a sudden feeling," he said, and shook himself. "As if something clutched at me, trying to find out what I was, just as a blind man might grope at what is before him because he can only see and recognize it with his fingers."

"Let us move away from here," said Rosvita.

"I will fetch my son," he said, "and meet you at the path."

He hurried away. Cautiously, she turned her back to the mound. Again, she felt the unseen presence, but more muted, as if it was keeping its distance. It took a great deal of resolve for her to walk away from the mound toward the trail without looking back over her shoulder.

Villam and Berthold and the menatarms met her at the trail, which was scarcely more than a parting of branches. It led into the trees. But she took not more than one hundred steps, sloping down, before she found herself at a rocky outcropping. There rose a spring from a defile. Set back against tree and rock was a tiny hut. It had fresh plaster on the outside walls. Moss grew on the roof, giving the thatch a coat of green.

She became aware of the wind soughing through the trees and the clack of branches against rock, of the chitter of small creatures, hushing as the horses stamped, and the singing of birds in the boughs above.

It had been completely, unnaturally, silent in the clearing of fallen stones. There had been no sound but what they had brought with them or made by their own efforts.

Here it was quiet but not silent. Villam and his men stood respectfully back while she approached the hut. A bench hewn from a log sat in front of the door, which was built of many branches lashed together. This crude door had no latch. A small opening, about the length and breadth of her arm from hand to elbow, was cut into the bottom of the door. She knelt and spoke in a soft voice. "Brother Fidelis.

I am Rosvita of Korvei. I am come to beg speech of you."

Nothing. No reply, no sound from within the hut. It was so miserably proportioned that Rosvita could not imagine that a man would ever truly be comfortable in there, never able to stand completely upright nor to lay down at full extension.

"Brother Fidelis?"

Nothing.

She had a horrible sudden fear he was dead. But that would be no terrible thing if the old hermit had died peacefully as he meditated and was then borne up to the Chamber of Light by angels. It would certainly be disappointing, for there was much she had hoped to learn from him. She smiled ruefully, aware her desire for learning caused her heart to be restless and thus not always able to singlemindedly contemplate the mercy of Our Lady's and Lord's Grace, as she ought.

Still, no sound. But what if the thing from the mound had taken him? What if some thing did live here on the height of the hill, an old thing, unused to company and jealous of its privacy, hating all things that still walked with confidence in the light of day?

But then, faintly, she heard a rustling.

"Brother Fidelis?"

His voice was like the whisper of leaves stirred along the forest floor by a searching wind. "Recite to me something from your new work, this history of the Wendish people that you labor over, Sister Rosvita."

"I have not brought it with me," she said, startled by this request.

"I am humbled for my curiosity." She heard amusement in that dry, quiet voice and a trace of a Salian accent in the way he pronounced the Wendish words. "But it is ever thus, my friend, that my heart seeks peace while my mind is yet restless." She smiled, and as if he had seen that smile, he continued.

"So is it with you, I believe, Sister. But you did not come here to receive my confession."

This surprised her even more. "Are you wishing to give a confession, Brother? Of course I will hear you, if you are driven to speak."

"I am full of sin, as are we all who live on this earth. I have been a faithful son of the church, but alas, my heart has not always been faithful to Our Lady and Lord. Devils have appeared to tempt me."

The door of lashed branches stared at her, revealing nothing except the smooth coat of wood worn clean by time. Of course at this moment she wanted nothing more than to know in what guise devils had appeared to tempt Brother Fidelis. He was as old as Mother Otta, of a great age, having passed nine or even ten decades, or so it was said in Hersford Monastery. But it was not usual for a woman to hear the confession of a monk; that was done by a male cleric or one of the fraters. Most monks turned away explicitly from the world and that included the ministrations of deacons, who were of course all women.

Behind the blank screen of the hut, Brother Fidelis coughed, a scraping sound made worse because he seemed to have so little strength to manage it. "We are like, you and I," he said finally when he had recovered his breath. "I know what you are thinking, for I would be wondering the same thing, were I out there, and you in here. I have taken a vow of silence for many years now and shut myself in this hut so I would not be distracted by the world, but I feel that my time on this earth is coming to an end. So I will speak to you now, and answer your questions."

She settled back onto her heels and set her hands on her thighs, letting him catch his breath. "I have come at the order of King Henry. He wishes to know if you have any knowledge of the laws during the reign of the Emperor Taillefer."

"I was given as an infant to the cloister founded and ruled over by St. Radegundis, she who was the eighth and last wife and then widow of Taillefer. I served at that cloister among the brothers in the monastic quarters until her death, which occurred some fifty years after the death of Taillefer." Here his voice quavered and she had to bend until her ear touched the wood in order to hear him. His labored breathing was louder than his words.

"That was a time of trial, and I did succumb, to my everlasting sorrow." He took in a deep shuddering breath.

There was a long silence. Rosvita waited patiently. Behind, horses stamped. A bird trilled. The menatarms talked in low voices between themselves. Not even Villam dared approach the hut though Berthold was wandering restlessly along the outcropping, testing the rock for handholds.

"After that time I left the cloister to wander the world. With my voice I said that I sought more evidence of the miracles wrought by St. Radegundis, who in her merciful kindness and openhearted generosity was the best and most pious among us. But in my heart I sought knowledge. I was curious. I could not find in me that detachment which we seek, those of us who are dedicated to the church.

Knowledge tempted me too much. In the end I came here, when I became too weak to walk many miles at a stretch. At last I left even the monastery behind and was carried to this hill, to seek and find detachment. But I have failed in that also." His voice was gentle, a little slurred. "It is well that Our Lady and Lord are merciful, for I pray they will forgive me these weaknesses."

"I am sure they will, Brother," she said, much touched by this vita, this brief history of his life.

"So I have some knowledge of the laws of Taillefer," he finished. "Ask what you will."

Here, she hesitated. But the king himself had charged her with this errand, and though she served the church, she also served the king. "King Henry wishes to know about the laws of succession among the Salians, during the time of Taillefer."

"Taillefer's influence once extended as far as these lands. But he died without naming an heir, as you must know, Sister, for you, like your sisters at Korvei, study the old chronicles. And without an heir, his great empire soon fell to strife between warring claimants for his throne."

"He had living daughters."

"Legitimate daughters, of whom three were in the church. But in the Salian tradition only men are allowed to be sovereign, and their women queen consort, not more than that."

"Yet Our Lady and Lord reign together in the Chamber of Light."

His breath whistled out, and she listened to him breathe for a bit, gathering strength again. "Did the blessed Daisan himself not say that 'people have established laws in each country by that liberty given them by God?' People do not lead their lives in the same manner. So is it with the Salians and the Wendish peoples."

"So did the blessed Daisan remind us that we are not slaves to our physical nature."

He wheezed out a soft laugh and then, again, she had to wait while he regained his breath.

"Some chronicles say," Rosvita added, "that Queen Radegundis was pregnant when her husband died, and that it was this childhad it been a boywhom Taillefer would have named as his heir. But no one knows what became of the child, whether it was stillborn, murdered, or not brought to term."

"Radegundis never spoke of the child. Of all those who were at Taillefer's court at that time, only one servingwoman by the name of Clothilde remained by St. Radegundis' side throughout her years in the cloister. Perhaps she knew the answer to the mystery, but she kept silence also. It is that silence which brought about the end of Taillefer's great empire. If a boychild had been born and acknowledged, that boy would indeed have reigned after him. If Queen Radegundis could have found support among the Salian and Varren nobility, for enough years, to raise the child to manhood."

Rosvita reflected gravely on Sabella, raising revolt against a king as strong as Henry. Imagine how much more likely the nobles would be to fight over a throne held by a child. No infant was safe from the intrigues of the great princes, all of whom sought power. According to the histories, Radegundis had been very young

when she had married Taillefer, more pretty than wellborn, for by his sixtyfifth year Taillefer could choose his wives as he pleased. No young queen without strong family connections could hope to guide her child safely through such a world, with so many dukes and counts set against her.

"In Varre or Wendar," continued Fidelis, "the one daughter who was not pledged to the church would have inherited and held the throne, if she was strong enough. But the Salians preferred a bastard boy to a legitimate girl. With my own eyes, when I still lived at St. Radegundis Cloister, I read a capitulary from that time, stating that an illegitimate son could inherit a father's portion. This is why the dukes and counts of Salia and the bastard sons of Tailleferfor he had as many concubines as wivesfought over the empire and brought it to ruin."

This, thought Rosvita sadly, was the message King Henry wanted to hear: "A capitulary stating that an illegitimate son could inherit." Yet she hesitated, for Brother Fidelis also spoke of ruin. "Then a bastard son could inherit throne and crown in Salia?"

"One did. He ruled for four years before he was murdered by the due de Rossalia under the flag of truce. And for his perfidy, the due de Rossalia was punished by the fitting justice of Our Lady and Lord: His lands were purged and plundered for twenty years by the raids of the Eika savages until no house was left unburned and all his people fled. But the throne passed to distant cousins of Taillefer, not his own seed, legitimate or otherwise, and his lineage vanished from the Earth."

Rosvita allowed herself a deep sigh. Four years. Not an auspicious or stable reign.

"This is not what you wished to hear?" asked Brother Fidelis. She felt that he could see her expression, indeed, practically see into her very soul.

"It is not what I wish that matters. But perhaps, Brother, it is this messageof ruin and the downfall of bastard sonsthat needs to be spoken to King Henry."

"Even I, in my hut, have heard whispers of the bastard son Henry got with an Aoi woman. The birds sing of this child, and at night when I am at my meditations the daimones of the upper air whisper to each other of the child's progress from infant to youth to man, so that I cannot help but hear them."

Was he jesting or serious? She could not tell. Nor did he elaborate. His breath whistled, a thin sound in the quiet afternoon, as fragile as the desiccated straw that had fallen from the thatch to the cold earth below. Rosvita felt the hard pressure of dirt on her knees. One of her feet was falling asleep.

"Speak to me of your work," he said.

And she heard in his voice the same yearning that ate away at her; a constant curiosity, like a mouse's hunger, insistent and gnawing.

"I am writing a history of the Wendish people, which will be presented to King Henry's mother, Queen Mathilda. She now resides at the convent at Quedlinhame where she has found peace, I trust, and where she watches over her son and her other children. Much of the history will deal with the reigns of the first Henry and the two Arnulfs, for it is by their efforts that the Wendish people rose to the power they now have."

She thought. He breathed, patient. The task of writing this history rose before her in her mind's eye, daunting and yet attractive exactly because it was a challenge. And this man, certainly, would understand what drove her, her curiosities, her fears, the need to investigate and discover. "I have worked as one who walks in a wide forest where every path lies covered deep in snow. I have had no one to guide me while I made my way forward, sometimes wandering devious paths, sometimes hitting the trail. There is so much you might tell me, Brother Fidelis. So much you must know! So much you must have seen with your own eyes or heard from those who did see!"

"I have little breath left to me." So weak was this utterance that she thought for a moment she had only imagined it. "Indulge me, Sister. As a child confesses to its mother, may I confess to you now?"

She was aware of bitter disappointment. But she could not refuse him. "I have taken orders as a deacon. I can hear confessions."

He spoke very slowly now, a few labored words with each wheezing breath. "I have sinned once, and greatly, for lying with a woman. That was many years ago, though I think of her still with affection. I have tried to be content. I have tried to still the anger that eats away at my heart. And so at last I have found peace of a kind. I have looked away from the world and seen that its temptations mean nothing compared to the promise of the Chamber of Light." He had such a kind voice, that of a man who sees his own faults and forgives himself for themnot arrogantly or leniently but with wisdom knowing that he, as are all humans, is hopelessly flawed. "But still devils visit me. Not in the guise of women, as they so afflict some of my brothers. Not even in the guise of she whom I recall so clearly." Now he paused. To hear him breathe, harsh rasps torn out of a weak and failing chest, was painful. "But in the guise of scholars and magi, tempting me with knowledge, if only ... if only I would . . ."

His voice failed. She could hear his breath, so faint the flapping of a butterfly's wings might have drowned it out. All at once she became aware of the world beyond her. The birds still sang. Were they singing of the deeds of Sanglant? But she could not understand their language. Berthold had clambered to the top of the outcropping and was surveying the lands below with evident pleasure. The vitality of youth sang out from his figure where he stoodnever completely stillat the edge of a sheer dropoff. Villam had stationed himself at the base of the outcropping and was clearly annoyed, or worried, but unwilling to raise his voice and thus disturb the holy man.

It was hot, though the sun was hidden behind clouds. Sweat had broken out under her wool robe, trickling down her spine. She restrained herself from wiping her neck. Any movement on her part might cover Brother Fidelis' next words.

She heard him shift within the tiny hut. "If only I would tell them what I knew of the secrets of the Seven Sleepers. But I swore never again to speak of these things. And yet. . ." She waited. He did not continue. From inside the hut she heard the sound of something being dragged, not something as heavy as a body, something light but solid. A shadow crossed the slit cut into the door, then a dark shape slowly emerged. Heart beating suddenly fast, Rosvita took hold of it and drew it out.

It was a book.

Laboriously bound, stitched out of parchment leaves, it was a book written in a clear, elegant hand.

"On this I have labored many years when I should have been meditating on the Holy Word of God in Unity. I pass it on to you, so that it will hold my spirit on this earth no longer. Godspeed, Sister.

May Our Lady and Lord watch over your labors. Do not forget what you have learned here. Fare you well."

She stared at the book. Inscribed on the cover were these words: The Vita of St. Radegundis.

Then, finally, his last words registered: Fare you well. "Brother Fidelis?"

The sun came out from behind the clouds, blinding her momentarily, its light was so unexpectedly bright.

"Go, then," his voice said, sounding in her ears. Spoken like a command, strong and firm, it was utterly unlike the frail voice with which she had conversed through the screen of branches.

She rose, keeping a tight hold on the book. "Fare you well, Brother. I thank you. I will keep your words locked in my heart."

Did she hear him smile? It was only her fancy. The hut stood in front of her, small and ragged, as poor a hovel as any beggar might build for himself to keep the rain off his back. She backed away, not wanting to turn her back on the old man, for fear of seeming disrespectful. Stumbled over the ground.

Villam caught her arm. "The interview is ended?"

"It is over." She looked back. No sign of life came from the hut.

"I heard nothing, and saw nothing," said Villam. "Except my son, climbing like a young squirrel trying to dash its brains out on the cliffs below."

"Let us go," said Rosvita. She did not have the heart to speak of their conversation.

Villam accepted her reticence. He signed to his men. Together they made their way back along the trail, this time skirting the clearing of fallen stones. Rosvita was too sunk in thought to observe the clearing or even think much of it, though Berthold tried to detour over to one of the mounds and was stopped by his father.

King Henry would not like what Brother Fidelis had said, not if Henry wished to name Sanglant as his heir. It was all very well to say a bastard might inherit the throne in Salia. But not when the price was death, civil war, and the extinction of a noble lineage. Perhaps Henry would see reason. He was a good man and a good king, and he had three strong legitimate children.

But that was not what ate at her. Like a hand scratching at a door, the question nagged at her.

Who were the Seven Sleepers?

In all her reading and study, preparing to write her work of history, she had come across a few references to the Seven Sleepers. It was an innocuous story, one of many set among the tales of the early martyrs; even Eusebe mentioned it, in passing, in her Ecclesiastial History.

In the time of the persecution of Daisanites by the Dariyan Emperor Tianathano, seven young persons in the holy city of Sai's took refuge in a cave to gain strength before they presented themselves for martyrdom; the cave miraculously sealed over them and there they were left to sleep until. . .

Until when? That Rosvita had never learned, or even thought to ask. As she had learned over twenty years of studying the chronicles and interviewing eyewitnesses to events fifty years ago, not all tales were necessarily true.

But something in the way Brother Fidelis had said the words, his hesitation, his suggestion that creatures who were not human worried at him in his solitude, plaguing him to make him speak of these

"seven sleepers," made her think this was more than just a legend.

"You are solemn, Sister Rosvita," said Villam, understandably trying to draw her out.

"I have much to think about," she said. He was too well mannered to press her.

ri AI night they celebrated the Feast of St. Susannah, saint beloved by cobblers and goldsmiths and jewelers. The king's retinue filled up the old monastery's guest houses and half the villages within an hour's walk of the cloister, in addition to those who stayed in tents pitched in the surrounding pastures.

The brother cellarer, in charge of provisioning the monastery, was actually heard to mutter that the king's retainers were too many and too fond of their food and wine.

Henry presented a sober face to the assembly. Only Rosvita and Villam knew why she had spoken to the old hermit. Only Rosvita knew the content of that interview and Henry's reaction to it when she had told him the whole.

He had thought for a long time while she stood, patient and silent, beside him. Although Father Bardo had offered his own study to Henry, to use as bedchamber and receiving room, Henry chose the upstairs room in the chief guest house. The room was spacious but boasted no ornamentation.

Here, with both shutters open to the spring air, she and King Henry were alone for a brief time.

Except on formal occasions, Henry always dressed in the style of his people, if more richly than most: kneelength tunic trimmed with gold braid; leggings and; at this time of year, soft leather boots worked with eagles and lions and dragons, the three pillars on which his power was built. The Eagles were his messengers, the Lions his faithful foot soldiers, and the Dragons his heavy cavalry, the pride of his army. But these were only his personal weapons.

His power as king of all Wendar and Varre rested on the submission of the great princes of the realm to his overlordship.

His black leather belt was embossed with the sigils of the six dukedoms, painted in gold: a dragon for Saony, a lion for Avaria, an eagle for Fesse, a guivre for Arconia, a stallion for Varingia, where horses were bred, and a hawk for Wayland.

He wore four gold rings, one for each of the marchlords: Helmut Villain, Judith of Olsatia and Austra, and Werinhar of Westfall. The margrave of Eastfall was dead now and the ring she had received in her turn from Henry lost on the battlefield or stolen away by looters to adorn some Quman lord out on the grasslands.

A fifth ring, bearing the seal of his sovereignty, he wore on a golden chain around his neck.

He wore no crown. It traveled, along with his robe of state, his scepter, and the Holy Lance of St. Perpetua, Lady of Battles, in an oak chest carved with griffins and dragons grappling in eternal war.

He listened to Rosvita's account of her interview with Brother Fidelis. He considered it while she waited. In his youth he had been more impetuous, blurting out his king's dragon first thoughts. Now, eighteen years after his election to the throne of Wendar and Varre, he had mastered the skill of sitting still.

"But Taillefer did not himself designate one of those illegitimate sons as his heir," he had said finally. "I need only look at my own family. Sabella was found unfit to rule, just as I would have been, had I not proven myself capable. In that case my father would have designated one of my sisters, or my brother Benedict, as heir. But he chose to present me to the dukes and margraves for their affirmation after my heir's progress. Taillefer did not single out any child, bastard or otherwise. If he had, events might have fallen out differently."

Rosvita was left none the wiser, for though she asked circumspectly, he offered no more insight into what he meant to do. His daughters Sapientia and Theophanu sat on either side of him at the great feast that night. His young son Ekkehard was prevailed upon to sing, accompanying himself on the lute; the child truly did have a sweet voice. If Henry chose to put Ekkehard in the church, his would be a fine voice raised in prayer to heaven.

At midmorning the next day two Eagles rode in, covered with dust, travelworn and weary. They brought grave news.

"Gent is besieged," said the senior of the two women, a grim woman who favored her left leg.

She was not reticent in addressing King Henry. "We were five Eagles, riding to Gent to see the truth of these rumors for ourselves. Within sight of the city but outside the walls, we were set upon by Eika. I was wounded in the attack. So my comrade" Here she indicated the other woman, who was young, perhaps the age of Berthold or Theophanu. "and I fled west to carry this news to you, Your Majesty. We rode part of the way with a company of Dragons. They escorted a deacon and a holy relic to safety. The rest of the Dragons, including Prince Sanglant, remain besieged within Gent."

"You say it is a raiding party?" asked Henry quietly.

She shook her head. "Not according to the Dragons who escorted us, Your Majesty. At last count there were fiftytwo Eika ships."

Henry was sitting on a bench in the unicorn courtyard, attended by his companions and courtiers.

This information sent up a murmur, quickly stilled when Henry lifted a hand to quiet them. "Do you think they mean to invade?"

"According to Sturmhe was the commander of the company we rode withthe Eika want the bridges that connect Gent to the east and west shore of the river thrown down. That way they can raid upriver at their leisure."

"And this Commander Sturm, where is he now?"

"He returned to the vicinity of Gent. He and his men hope to harry the Eika outside the walls, to aid their brethren trapped within."

Henry glanced to his right, where Helmut Villam stood. "Gent lies within the lands administered by Count Hildegard, does it not?"

Villam nodded.

"What of her forces?" the king asked.

"I do not know," admitted the Eagle. "They are not within the city. Certainly she must have news of the siege by now."

The king gestured, and a servant brought him a cup of wine. He sipped at it thoughtfully. "You said there were five Eagles?"

The woman nodded. Her companion, already pale, began to look quite white, the look of a person who has spent many sleepless hours in fruitless worrying; she had the light complexion that betrayed northern blood, light blue eyes and coarse wheatblonde hair twisted into braids. The older woman betrayed neither anger nor grief. "The others rode on. I don't know if they got into the city safely, but I believe they did."

"You did not see them enter within the walls?"

"I did not. But the man I rode with, Wolfhere, bound

my comrade Manfred and I to him with various small devices. Had he died, I believe I would know of it." "Ah," said Henry, one eyebrow arching. "Wolfhere." To Rosvita, mostly, one Eagle was much like another. Nobleborn boys and girls were given their own retainers when they came of age or, if circumstances warranted, they served with the Dragons. Service as a king's messenger or in the king's infantry was relegated to the children of freeholders, not those of noble birth. But every cleric in the king's chapel and schola knew Wolfhere by sight or at least by reputation. There was no Eagle senior to him, and it was sometimes whisperedthough not so often these daysthat he knew many things beyond the ken of human knowledge. He had been in favor during the reign of the younger Arnulf; some claimed he had too much influence over Arnulf, especially for a man not born into a noble family. That favor had ended within a year of Henry's ascent to the throne. Wolfhere had been banished from the king's presence.

Rosvita did not know why.

"Yes, Your Majesty." The woman had a strong gaze, and she was not afraid to look King Henry in the face. "I am proud to call him pracceptor." Instructor and guide. She used the Dariyan word deliberately. Rosvita guessed she knew something, at least, of Wolfhere's reputation at court.

Henry's lips turned up. Rosvita knew him well enough, after all this time, to see he admired the young Eagle's forthright manner. "How long have you served in my Eagles, and what is your name and lineage?"

"For seven years I have served in the Eagles, mostly in the marchlands. I joined as soon as I came of age. I am named Hathui, daughter of Elseva, a freeholder in Eastfall."

"And your father?"

"My father was called Volusianus. He was also born of free parents. But alas, Your Majesty, he was killed while in the service of King Arnulf, fighting the Redari."

The king glanced toward Villam, who gazed benignly at the young woman. Rosvita remembered well the last war against the Redari; it had taken place in the final year of Arnulfs reign and was mostly fought in the March of the Villams. Indeed, the lands over which the Villams held authority had greatly expanded after the capitulation of the Redari tribesmen and their conversion to the faith of the Unities.

"After his death, my mother and her sister and brother were among those who traveled east of the Eldar River with grants given them by King Arnulf, to take lands for themselves, under the authority of no lord or lady."

"Except that of the king."

She bent her head slightly, acknowledging the truth of his words. "Except that of the king," she repeated.

Henry lifted his left hand, signing her to rise. "You will travel with my court, Hathui, daughter of Elseva, and serve me." This signal honor was not lost on the gathered assembly, who were no doubt wondering how much the king intended to favor this commoner. Rosvita examined the courtiers. Who would be first to attempt to befriend the Eagle and who first to attempt to bring about her downfall?

Hathui seemed untroubled by this sign of favor. "And my comrade, Hanna, daughter of Birtha and Hanal? She is new to the Eagles and has little experience, less training, and no kin nearby."

"She may join us as well. You may act as her praeceptor."

It occurred to Rosvita suddenly that Henry was rewarding the two Eagles for another reason: for bringing him news of his son.

"We must consider an army," he said, turning to Villam. "How soon can we ride to Gent?"

A.JT JiJK. her initial shock wore off, Hanna found herself more frustrated than honored by her elevation to one of those exalted Eagles who waited in personal attendance upon King Henry.

Not because of Henry, of course. He was everything she had ever dreamed a king would be; stern but with the capacity for laughter; elegant in appearance and yet without the kind of vanity that leads men to wear fine clothes and jewels for the sake of showing off their riches; gracious without being friendly; unwilling to tolerate incompetence and delay.

But there was only so much a king could do when it came time to attempt to move his vast entouragethe king's progressquickly, or when it came time to raise an army from lands as far apart as the northwesternmost reaches of the duchy of Saony, the highlands far to the south of Avaria, and the distant marchlands to the east.

Raised by a briskly efficient innkeeper, Hanna was amazed at how slow everything moved and how many arguments there were between chatelaines and stewards and lordlings over fine points of status and honor that would make not one whit of difference to the people trapped in Gent if the Eika broke through the city's walls.

"At this rate they'll be dead before we leave this monastery," she muttered to Hathui that evening as she watched yet another noble lorda young woman in this casemaking excuses before the king as to why it would take her some unreasonable number of days to raise levies and then yet again longer beyond that to march those levies as far north as Gent. Lady bless! Beyond being maddening, it was also boring. She stifled a yawn and felt Hathui shift her weight. "How is your leg?"

"It will do." said Hathui. "Attend to your duties. Who is that?"

"What?"

"Who is that speaking before the king?"

Hanna stared, but she could not tell one noble lordling from another; they all ran together in her mind in their handsome embroidered gowns or tunics and goldbraided leggings and fine necklaces and rings.

"That is part of your duty, Hanna," said Hathui sternly, sounding much like Wolfhere. "You must memorize all the great houses of Wendar and Varre and learn the names of the lords and ladies of those lineages and their alliances by marriage and kinship and oaths, and which dislike whom and who wishes to marry for advantage where, and what estates have lost their lady and thus are being willed to the church or given to the king to reward to some family who has done him a signal service."

"Ai, Lady," swore Hanna under breath. "All that?"

"And more besides." But Hathui grinned, taking the threat out of the words. "That is Liutgard, duchess of Fesse. Because Fesse lies in the center of the kingdom, it is a long ride from there to Gent, which lies to the northeast. Also, the duchy of Fesse lies next to the duchy of Arconia, which is the duchy administered by Henry's half sister Sabella. Surely you have heard the minors that Sabella plans to rebel against the king?"

Hanna had heard so many rumors just in the eight hours since she and Hathui had arrived at Hersford Monastery that she had given up trying to sort one out from the next. "And? What difference does that make to Duchess Liutgard?"

"This difference: that Liutgard does not want to send away troops to Gent, which lies many days'

march north and east, when her own lands might be threatened by Sabella. Henry must balance the threat to Gent against the threat to Fesse."

Hanna sighed. "How do you keep this all straight?" "That is only the beginning."

But Hanna could see Hathui was laughing at her, not without sympathy. "Was it difficult for you, when you first came into the Eagles? Did it all seem like so many names that had no meaning attached to them?"

Hathui shrugged. "When Wolfhere is your praeceptor, you never admit you are struggling. But, in truth, it did seem difficult. After a time, though, I began to sort them all out. You must know the name of every villager in Heart's Rest, do you not? And in the neighboring farms and hamlets?" "Of course!"

"Well, then, think of the noble lords and ladies who move on the king's progress as a village.

Some remain in the village all the time; others come and go according to what duties they have on their family's estates. Truly, Hanna, they are no different from common men and women. I have observed they have their feuds and their secret lovers, their alliances and their disagreements, just as any folk do. They sleep and eat and pray and use the privies. I am not convinced that, if you were to put one of them in a simple freeholder's smock and any hardworking freeholder into an elegant tunic, you could tell who was the noble lord and who the farmer." "Hathui!"

But Hathui only smiled her proud marchlander's smile and signed that Hanna should attend to the proceedings again.

Attend Hanna did. For some odd reason, Hathui's shocking opinions .nade it easier for her to sort out one noble from the other. That thin glaze of intimidation had worn off, shorn away forever by Hathui's blunt observations. She noticed the old counsellorthe margrave Helmut Villamyawning as Duchess Liutgard promised she would ride out at dawn the next day with her retinue. But it would still take some weeks before a levy could be raised, and longer still to march that force across the kingdom.

The very young man standing beside Villamhis son, that was it, though Hanna could not remember what the boy's name was or if she had even heard it yetfidgeted and looked very much as if he wished to be somewhere else. Hanna's milk brother Ivar had that look sometimes when he was thinking about another prank to play or some expedition into the forest he wanted Hanna to come along for; Ivar was the sort of person who was either full of a manic energy or gloomily downcast.

How was Ivar faring now? Had he reached Quedlinhame Cloister yet, to begin his life as a monk? Hanna was a bit unclear on distances within the kingdom and where all the different cities and cloisters were. But one thing Hanna did know: Ivar would not take well to cloister walls. He was bound to get into some kind of mischief.

She sighed. Ai, Lady. There was nothing she could do for Ivar, not now. She had chosen Liath over Ivar and now, as if to punish her for her choice, the Lady had granted she be separated from both of them.

Duchess Liutgard finished her business with the king and moved back to make room for a noblewoman who appeared to be about the same age as Henry. This woman wore her years proudly.

Her hair was coiled into long braids and pinned back; though it was gray now, Hanna could see it had once been a rich brown.

Hathui leaned to whisper in Hanna's ear. "Judith, margrave of Olsatia and Austra."

The margrave informed Henry that she would ride immediately to her estates in Austra and raise at least two hundred men to ride to Gent.

"And do not forget that my son Hugh is abbot at Firsebarg now. If you will send word to him, I know he can send a contingent to reinforce yours, Your Majesty."

Hugh! Hanna did not breathe for a moment. She had almost forgotten Hugh, but staring at this imposing woman she was struck anew by memory of him. Judith was a woman of mature years, broad in girth and dignified of manner. She had delicate features not yet obscured by old age, and Hanna could see Hugh's features there: the sharp planes of his handsome face, the bright, deepset eyes, the haughty expression. But the margrave's hair had obviously been dark, quite unlike Hugh's light hair. Was it true that Hugh's father had been a slave from Alba, whose men were renowned for their goldenhaired beauty?

"Don't be a fool, Hanna," she whispered to herself. Instantly she wondered how Liath fared. Had they gotten into Gent safely? Was Liath well? Injured? Dead? Did Hugh think of Liath still? Of course he never thought of people like Hanna at all. What if he led a contingent of soldiers to Gent? Could Wolfhere protect Liath from Hugh when he did not understand what had taken place over that winter at Heart's Rest?

Hathui's fingers grazed her elbow, a reassuring touch, though surely Hathui couldn't guess what she'd been thinking. And Hanna had no desire to betray such feelings to anyone else, not when she was herself ashamed of them, knowing how viciously Hugh had treated Liath. This was no time for such nonsense, as her mother would say. She shook herself and attended to the business at hand.

Later, after the audiences were over, Hathui was sent to the king's physician and Hanna was sent to the guest house where the king's children made their residence.

Hanna paused inside the door while the two guards posted thereby their gold tabards sewn with a black lion members of Henry's Lion infantryexamined her curiously.

Hanna was more curious about the king's children. Ekkehard was young, still in the schola, not yet old enough to be given a retinue of his own and sent out into the world as an adult. Right now he sat beside one of his sisters, who accompanied him on a lute. He had a beautiful voice.

"When the ships came down from the north And he saw the gleam of gold in their belly, Then he plunged into the waters Though they were as cold as his mother's heart, Then plunged into the waters And swam until he reached them.

With his sword he killed the watchmenWith his knife he killed the steersmanAnd the oar slaves bowed before him And begged for him to tell his tale.

When he captured the ships, This was his song."

That was Theophanu, accompanying him. Though the king's court was in a constant hum, and had been since morning, she sat calmly and strummed a lute in time to her brother's sweet singing.

The other sister, small and dark and neat, was Sapientia. She paced back and forth, back and forth, like a caged animal. Hanna took a hesitant step forward. Sapientia saw her, began to rush toward her, then stopped short, recalling her position. She beckoned.

"Do you have a message for me, Eagle?" she demanded.

Without losing track of the song, Theophanu raised her eyes briefly to take in the scene and went back to her playing. Ekkehard sang on, oblivious.

Hanna dropped to touch a knee to the floor. "Yes. King Henry charges you to go now to the smith's quarters."

"Hai!" said Sapientia under her breath, exultant. She turned and gestured to her servingwomen, who sat sewing near the fire. "Come!" she said, and strode out so quickly they had to drop their sewing work on the bench and had not even time to grab cloaks before running out after her.

Hanna hesitated. Ekkehard was well into the song by now, a song within a song, really, wherein the hero Sigisfrid relates to the hapless oar slaves his many great deeds as well as revealing for the first time his forbiddenking's dragon love for his cousin Waltharia, the love that would doom them both.

Ekkehard had, in fact, an astonishing command of the epic. Hanna had heard old master bards sing from the great epic while taking a night's lodging at the inn, and while Ekkehard's rendition was clearly immature, it was still compelling.

Theophanu glanced up again to study Hanna. The princess' gaze was clear and completely unreadable. Suddenly selfconscious, Hanna backed away and ran right into one of the Lions.

He steadied her with a grin. "Begging your pardon, my friend," he said. "You rode in from Gent with the other Eagle, this morning." "Yes."

"You're new to the Eagles?"

She nodded. She didn't quite trust him: He was a goodlooking young man, and the few goodlooking men in Heart's Restlike her brother Thancmarwere, in her experience, full of themselves.

He opened the door, grinned at his companion guard, and followed her outside. "Where are you barracked tonight?" he asked. He did have a pleasant smile, and a pleasing face, and very nice shoulders, but Hanna loathed men who were full of their own selfimportance. All, except Hugh. She shoved that thought away.

"With the Eagles, I expect," she said coldly. "Wherever they sleep."

He considered. In the torchlit entryway, he did not appear downcast or offended by her rejection. In fact, she was not entirely sure he had taken her words as rejection. "Well, if we'll not be barracked together," he said quickly, glancing behind him. "I'm on duty, so I haven't time to talk. You were at Gent. Did you see the Dragons there?"

"We saw one company of them, but I never got inside the city. We turned back, Hathui and I."

"Was there a woman with them, do you know?" "A woman? With the Dragons? Not that I noticed."

"Ai." He grimaced, disappointed. Had he a sweetheart among the Dragons? Having misjudged him, she suddenly found him rather attractive. "My sister rides with the Dragons."

"Your sisterT He laughed outright. "You're thinking a common born lad like me has no business having a sister in the Dragons."

Since she was thinking so, she did not deny it.

"It's true most of them are nobleborn, bastards usually, or younger sons without a bequest to get them into the church. But my sister never wanted anything except to fight. She dedicated herself to St.

Andrea very young, before even her first bleeding, and couldn't be swayed. She joined the Lions, bludgeoned her way into them, more like. I followed after her."

Hanna remembered how her young brother Karl had looked at her the day she rode away from the Heart's Rest as a newlyhatched Eagle. Had this young man watched his sister ride away so? Had he followed her, years later, because of that admiration?

"She distinguished herself," the Lion continued, eager to talk about his sister in front of a new audience. "Saved the Dragon banner, she did. Some say she saved the prince's life, although others say no man or woman can do that. That he's under a geas, spoken on him when he was an infant by his mother, that he can't be killed by mortal hands or some such kind of thing. Ai, well. I say she saved his life."

"I didn't see her," repeated Hanna, sorry she hadn't. "What's her name?"

"Adela." He touched a hand to his chest and gave a little bow, a courtly gesture no doubt picked up from watching the noble lords. When he smiled, he had a dimple. "And I'm called Karl."

She laughed. "Why, so is my brother called Karl. I'm Hanna."

"Ai, Lady. That's a bad omenthat you might think of me as a brother." And, that suddenly, he had remembered it was night, and he was young, and she was

well, pretty, perhaps, but at the least desirable and a new face among so many familiar old ones.

She flushed and was angry at herself for doing so.

"And what does your sister say? About the prince?" she said, to say something.

He grunted. "Nothing but praise, which is tiresome in a woman when she's speaking of a man.

She's as loyal as a dog to him. They all are, the Dragons. don't see it myself." He ran two fingers down to a point at his chin, along his fine light beard, musingly. "How can you call him truly a man'when he can't grow a beard?"

Since Hanna did not know the answer to this question, she wisely said nothing.

The door into the guest house opened. "Hai! Karl! You've had enough time." His companion blinked into the night, saw their figures, and beckoned. "Come on. Back inside. You'll get nothing from an Eagle, you know how they are."

Karl blew her a kiss and went back to his post. "Lord, have mercy," she muttered and hurried back to the chamber where the king held court. But Henry had gone to bed, or so Hathui told her.

"Where do we sleep?"

"You haven't been propositioned yet?" asked Hathui and laughed when Hanna betrayed herself by blushing. But the older woman sobered quickly enough. "Attend to my words, Hanna. There is one thing that will get a woman thrown out of the Eagles, and that is if she can no longer ride because she carries a child. 'Make no marriage unless to another Eagle who has sworn the same oaths as you.' '

"That's a harsh precept."

"Our service is harsh. Many of us die serving the king. I'm not saying you must never love a man, or bed one, even, but do not make that choice lightly and never when it is only for a night's pleasure.

There are those old men and women mostlywho know the use of certain herbs and oils"

"But that's magic," Hanna whispered. "And heathen magic, at that."

Hathui shrugged. "I've seen a deacon use herbs and chants from the Holy Book to heal wounds, so if that's magic, I suppose some in the church don't frown on its use. I'm just saying, Hanna, that if the desire is strong enough, there are ways to prevent conception, though they don't always work. But every gift from the Lady is both burden and treasure. That is the lesson She teaches: Just as fire can both warm and kill, so can that feeling we call sweet passion bring as its fruit death or a blessing in the form of a healthy child." She smiled wryly. "Sometimes it is easier to devote yourself to a saint, as I did. I had no virginity to pledge to St. Perpetua when I became an Eagle, so I offered my chastity instead."

"You were married before you became an Eagle?" Hathui shook her head, one side of her mouth quirking down and an eye ticking shut as if she was trying to close up an old memory. "No. It was taken from me by a Quman raider. And if I ever meet up with him or his people, he will pay for what he stole."

Hanna felt her mouth drop open. "You'll catch flies," said Hathui, who had already recovered.

"II'm sorry."

Hathui snorted. "What do you expect, from barbarians? I had no lasting harm of it, not like my aunt, who was killed in that raid."

"Butbut does this mean I can never have a child?" Hanna considered this prospect without pleasure. It was not something she had ever thought about before. She was a woman, and not in the church. Of course she I would have children.

"Of course not, if you wish for children. But you must either leave the Eagles or marry within them. A child born to a woman who is married to another Eagle is I accepted. I have seen three such children."

"Have you seen a woman cast out of the Eagles for well, for bearing a child?"

"I have." Hathui touched her brass badge, her long fingers tracing the eagle embossed there. "This is her badge. She died of the birthing, alas, and the child, too."

Hanna made the sign of the circle at her breast. Death or a blessing. Those words seemed apt enough. It was the kind of thing her mother would say.

"Come, Hanna. Let's sleep. There's bound to be more and much more running to do tomorrow."

Hathui kissed Hanna affectionately on the forehead and took her by the arm. "We'll get our blankets. We can bed down here, at the foot of the king's chair."

"At the foot of the king's chair!" This was such a signal honor that Hanna wondered if her parents would ever believe it had actually been granted to their very own daughter.

"Indeed, he said so himself. He's a fine lord, is our king, and I am proud to serve him."

In the morning, just after the office of Tercethe third hour of the daywas sung, another Eagle rode in. He came from the west. He was faint with exhaustion; his horse had foundered.

Grooms took his horse. Hathui took him in hand and with Hanna following at her heels led him to where the king held audience with Helmut Villam, the margrave, Judith, and others of the nobles in attendance, discussing the final plans for their dispersal to collect armies that could ride to Gent. Henry broke off their conversation and rose.

The Eagle threw himself on his knees before the king. "Your Majesty." He could barely speak, his voice was so hoarse.

"Bring him mead," said the king, and mead was brought.

The man gulped down a cup of the honeyflavored wine, and it soothed his coughing. He apologized. "I beg pardon, Your Majesty."

"Your news?"

"It is terrible news, Your Majesty." Almost, the man wept. "I am come from Autun. I have ridden four days and five nights, stopping only to change horses." He shut his eyes.

The tension in the chamber became unbearable as everyone present waited for him to continue.

Hanna tried desperately to remember where Autun was, and what its significance might be. Wasn't it the seat of a biscophric? Yes! That was it: Henry's younger sister Constance was biscop of Autun.

As she remembered this, the Eagle took hold of himself and continued speaking. "I was able to escape Autun because of the aid of Biscop Constance's chatelaine. Autun is now in the hands of Lady Sabella."

Several of the courtiers spoke at once, then fell silent when Henry raised a hand. The king looked grave, as well he might. "The city has fallen?"

The Eagle spoke on a sigh. "By treachery, Your Majesty. Biscop Constance is a prisoner in the hands of Lady Sabella and her retainers. Sabella has installed Helvissa as biscop of Autun."

"Helvissa, whom I removed eight years ago with the consent of the others biscops of the realm?"

"Indeed, the same one, Your Majesty. Autun surrendered without a fight out of respect for the safety of Biscop Constance. Not one soul in Autun considers Helvissa their rightful lord. But that is not all. Sabella has an army, and Duke Rodulf of Varingia marches with her."

None moved or spoke, waiting for the king's reaction.

All Hanna could think of were those awful words: "Sabella has an army."

"What of Duke Conrad of Wayland?" Henry asked quietly.

Hanna did not recall how Duke Conrad of Wayland fit into the convoluted kinship surrounding the king's court and that of the great princes, but to everyone else, the question seemed fraught with meaning. All waited. Villam king's dragon wiped his lips with a knuckle. Duchess Liutgardwho had not yet left, though she was dressed for riding clasped and unclasped her hands nervously.

But the Eagle only shook his head. He looked utterly exhausted. "I do not know if he marches with her or if he does not. I had to escape in the middle of the night. I have no information beyond thatonly that Sabella marches east."

East. Even Hanna knew what that meant. East, to

Wendar.

"She swore me an oath," said Henry even more softly. He looked furious and his movements, as he turned to bee' n to those closest to him, were as taut as those of a lion's, waiting to pounce. But he did not rage out loud. "Wendar itself is in danger. Sabella rebels against my authority and that rebellion we cannot tolerate. We cannot ride to Gent."

The words struck Hanna like a hammer's blow.

"Ai, Lady," she murmured, her heart leaden in her chest. What was going to happen to Liath?

We cannot ride to Gent."

What cost to Henry to utter those words?

Rosvita glanced at Villam, saw him looking at her in that same instant, as though they shared a thought. Three legitimate children Henry had. For the sake of the kingdom, he must risk the loss of the fourth.

Henry's hands were clenched. He stared for a long while at the fine Arethousan carpet under his boots, a geometric pattern of imperial purple and pale ivory, floral circles encasing eightpointed stars. The rug had come as part of Queen Sophia's morning gift to Henry, for only she, daughter of an emperor and niece of the reigning Arethousan emperor, would dare to walk on purple. Some few of her possessions, as she had wished, had been sent back to Arethousa upon her death. Henry had kept this rug, perhaps against her wishes, for was it not also said of Henry that he believed he alone of all the reigning kings had the power to wear the mantle of the Holy Dariyan Emperor? Others had attempted to take on the title worn first by the great Taillefer. None had succeeded. The "new" empire, restored by Taillefer, had lasted a scant twentyfour years and had died with Taillefer. No king facing civil war could hope to make himself emperor, even with the support of the skopos herself.

"Make ready to ride," King Henry said at last. "We leave at dawn."

The Eagle, though he had ridden hard and through great danger, received no sign of the king's favor. He was dismissed to get food, drink, and rest. The king retired to his bedchamber. The others went out to their own retainers, and soon the king's retinue was in a great uproar as they prepared to march. Those nobles, like Liutgard and Judith, who had been ready to return to their estates were nowwith whatever soldiers they hadturned into Henry's army. There was no longer time for raising levies from faroff estates.

Eagles were dispatched to Rotrudis, Duchess of Saony and Attomar, and to Burchard, Duke of Avaria. Also, Eagles rode to the estates of lesser counts and lords. A great stock of grain and vegetables vanished from the monastery's cellars into the king's wagons, and chickens and geese were caged and the cages thrown on top of heaps of turnips and beans and baskets of wheat and barley and rye. Given the terrible news of Sabella's revolt, not even the cellarer complained when every cask of ale left in the monastery's wine cellar was rolled up the earth ramp and into wagons.

Just after Vespers, Villam came to Rosvita where she labored in the scriptorium, packing her notes and stylus and parchment, her quills and ink, into a chest for the journey. He appeared so close to panic that she immediately set aside her book and came to him.

"My son is missing," he said. "Have you seen him today?"

Guilt struck at her heart. So much had happened she had forgotten about her promise to keep an eye on the boy. At once she suspected where he had gone. "I have not seen him. His retainers?"

"Six are also missing, young men of his own age, none of the older ones. The others will say nothing." Clearly, Villam suspected the worst.

"Bring them to me."

With grim satisfaction, Villam left. She finished packing and left the chest in the care of one of her servants. She met them before the Hearth, the only place with any semblance of peace in the entire valley. Villam brought two men: a whitehaired man with the look of a faithful, battlehardened retainer and a much younger man, not above sixteen or eighteen years, who was flushed and had obviously been crying.

Rosvita studied them both. The old man she gave up on at once. He looked like the old praeceptor, the man who had been assigned many years back to train the boy at arms and whose loyalty would be fixed to the young lad he had half raised; he could not be swayed by fear. But the younger man could.

"You do not mean to lie to me?" she demanded of the young one. "Who are you, child? Who are your parents?"

Stammering, he told her his name and lineage.

"Where is Lord Berthold?"

He betrayed himself by glancing at the old man. The old retainer glared stubbornly ahead. The young one began to fidget, twisting his hands together, biting at his lower lip.

"Look in my eyes, child, and swear to me by the name of Our Lady and Lord that you do not know."

He began to cry again.

That quickly, as if to spare the young man the shame of lying or of betraying his master, the old armsmaster spoke. "He knew nothing of the expedition. I advised against it, but, once determined, Lord Berthold would not be swayed."

"Yet you did not go with him!" Villam lifted a fist as if to bring it down, hard, on the Hearth, and only at the last instant remembered where he was. He slapped the fist against an open palm instead. It was getting dark. Her ability to read the subtleties of their expressions was already lost to her. Two monks entered the chapel, brands burning in each hand; they began to light the sconces. Soon the office of Compline would be sung and the monks would take themselves to their beds for the night.

"So did he order me, my lord. I am his obedient servant. And in truth, I feared no mischief. They are only old ruins. I have seen such with my own eyes and feared nothing from them. I made sure he took six of his best menatarms with him when he left this morning after Prime."

"Yet he has not returned."

The old armsmaster hung his head. Even in the inconstant light of torches she could now read clearly his guilt, his recognition of his own bad judgment, written as plainly as if he had spoken aloud.

"Take torches, picks and shovels, whatever you need, and ten of my menatarms and the rest of my son's retainers. Go now."

They did as Villam ordered.

Rosvita joined the prayers at Compline. It was crowded, for not only the king but every noble who could command room crowded into the monastery's church. But when the others filed out, Villam remained, and he knelt on the cold ground, hands clasped in prayer, for the rest of the night.

The monks sang Nocturns, then, at first light, Lauds. King Henry arrived for the office of Prime fully arrayed king's dragon for riding, wearing a coat of mail. Sapientia walked behind him, also fitted for riding; she carried her father's helm under one arm and she wore the badge of St. Perpetua, Lady of Battles, on her right shoulder. Theophanu would remain in the train, behind the main army, with those like Rosvita who did not fight.

As soon as Prime was sung and the last prayer spoken over the Hearth, Henry left the church and crossed to where his horse waited, already saddled. It was just dawn. No men had returned from the night expedition to the old ruins.

"We must ride," said King Henry. Villam bowed his head, for of course he knew the king spoke truthfully. He splashed water on his face to refresh himself and then, with the others, set forth.

That morning the army did not range out ahead of the cavalcade of wagons and animals that constituted the people and goods of the king's progress. At midday, a party from the monastery caught up to them.

Rosvita hastened forward from her place in the train in order to hear the news. Berthold was a good boy, full of promise. She felt herself responsible. She had not watched over him as she had said she would.

But she read no hope on the face of the old armsmaster, who came forward as spokesman for the others. "It is a grievous tale I have to tell, my lord." His voice was even, but his eyes betrayed the depth of his distress. "My son is dead," said Villam, as if voicing the words would cause the worst of the pain, of a father's loss of his favored son, to be over with quickly, to fade that fast into the dull ache of a loss suffered years before. Better that than the raw grief that cut to the heart.

The armsmaster bowed his head. "No, my lord." But his tone was not encouraging. He caught breath and could not for a moment go on.

Rosvita slipped into the crowd. Folk made way for her as she came up beside Villam. He saw her and set an arm on the sleeve of her robe, steadying himself. King Henry, now, had come from his place at the front of the army. People made way for him so he could stand beside Villam.

"I have seen strange things I cannot explain. This is what happened."

This, St. Ambrose's Day, the second day after the Feast of St. Susannah and the third day of the month of Sorrnas, had dawned clear and fine and the weather looked to continue that way. Surely this was an omen that the Lord and Lady favored their expedition. And Rosvita noted, as the man told his story, that the weather did not shift, nor did the fine down of clouds that lined the northern horizon spread to engulf the sky. The sky remained clear; the sun remained warm. What this meant she could not be sure. If sorcery was awake, it was not at this moment directed at them.

"It took us many hours to climb the slope," said the armsmaster. "Even with the moon's light and though we followed the path, it twisted and turned in such a confusing fashion that we lost our way several times. We came to a stand of wood, tall northern pines, which none of us had seen from below.

At first light we came to a rocky outcropping which we had not known was above us, though one of your menatarms, my lord, recognized it as that place where the holy man had retired to meditate.

"To our amazement, as the light rose and we could see more than an arm's length in front of us, we saw two lions resting at the height of the rock. When they saw us, they sprang away into the rocks and we lost sight of them. Fearing for the" life of the holy man, we hastened to his hut."

Now he drew the Circle of Unity at his breast and then touched knuckles to lips softly, as if giving a kiss to the Lady.

"When I touched the door, it fell easily aside, revealing what lay within." He blinked several times as at a sudden blinding light. "A miracle! There sat the holy man, upright in that tiny space yet not touching the side of the hut. He smelled as fresh as if fields of flowers had bloomed there inside with him, but there was nothing except him, the thin white loincloth in which he was dressed, and the dirt floor. And when we ventured to touch him, to wake him, for he appeared to be asleep, he was cold as stone. He was dead." His voice shook.

Rosvita bowed her head and said a silent prayer for the dead man. His name would be added to the prayer lists which were sung in full every Penitire. Yet she could not mourn Brother Fidelis; he had ascended to the Chamber of Light. And she had something of him with her still, the book he had given to her.

"Ten of the men I sent ahead to search for the ruins you spoke of, my lord," continued the armsmaster, "While I remained behind with the others to give a proper burial to the holy man. I cannot explain . .. some other force watched over us, for as we dug the grave in the hard ground the lions appeared again on the outcropping above. But they made no move to approach us. Indeed, they appeared to watch over us, that is all, and when the holy man was decently laid to rest, they vanished.

"Then we found the track and soon after dawn we came out into the ruins at the height of the hill.

But what a strange sight met our eyes! You said they were ruins, but they were nothing of the kind! There lay before us a circle of standing stones with a huge stone placed at their center."

"Upright?" demanded Villam, jerking forward as if he had been yanked.

"Upright and perfectly placed, with lintels across. I have seen such ruins in my years, which were surely the work of giants, but never one as perfectly preserved as this."

"Impossible!" cried Villam. "They were fallen to pieces just three days past."

The armsmaster bowed his head until his forehead touched his clasped hands. He remained in that position

for some time while King Henry drew Villam back and spoke soothingly to him.

"We marveled," said the armsmaster finally, in a whisper. "The mounds were open. Each one had an entrance framed by stone slabs. We lit our torches and walked inside, somewhat hunched over, it is true, but the walls were so cunningly laid together with flat stone that they were more like the corridors of a stronghold than of a tomb. But each mound was the same. We entered by a passageway which led in a straight line to a round chamber that lay at the center of the mound, buried under dirt. And in that chamber, nothing. No other passages. No sign of graves or of the bones of giants or sacrifices. No sign of treasure. Nothing. Except a single footprint, caught in the dust. And this."

He extended his right hand and unfolded it, like a petal opening to the sun. In his hand lay a gold ring.

Villam groaned out loud and snatched the ring out of the old man's hand. He turned it over, and over again, but there was no doubting the look on his face. "His mother's ring," he whispered, "which she willed to him on her deathbed."

After that he wept, and the others wept with him, the armsmaster and young Berthold's retainers.

By not protecting him, they had failed their young lord. Henry, quick to tears, wept as well, as befit a king showing sympathy for the pain felt by others and soas was a kingly virtueby himself on their behalf.

Rosvita could find no tears. The tale had overset her. It had astonished her, and yet set her mind racing. Strange forces were at work. How could stones of such size be lifted and returned to their places? From where had come the lions which the men had seen? Why had Brother Fidelis given her the book at just that time, as a man might dispense of his possessions when he knew death was upon him?

What had he meant by his reference to the Seven Sleepers?

What had prompted Berthold to go exploring with six young companions?

king's dragon Rosvita did not believe in coincidence.

At last, Villam mastered his grief, though surely it would haunt him in the months to come. He had, after all, a duty to his king, and a war to fight.

With somber faces and heavy hearts, they rode west to meet Sabella's army.

BLOODHEART THE streets of Gent were chaos and only the misting slant of rain over rooftops and roadways kept them from boiling with clouds of dust in the pandemonium. Mud and dirt were everywhere; no one dared use precious water to clean. The wells continued to supply water and with the river on both sides were unlikely to run dry, but no one cared to take that chance. It was still possible to wash by the river's bank on the island's shore, but the Eika had primitive bows and even stonetipped arrows could kill.

Liath had seen many places in her life; she had lived in the skopos' city of Darre, visited villages built on the ruins of the magnificent ancient cities of Sirraqusae and Kartiako, resided near the Kalif's palace in the fine clean Jinna city of Qurtubah, passed through the seat of the Salian kings, Pairri, taken ship at the emporium called Medemelacha along the coast, and walked among the proud, bustling townsfolk of the cathedral city of king's dragon Autun. She and Da had passed through villages recovering from famine, avoided towns flying the red banner that warned of plague; she had prayed at churches small and vast, including the great basilica dedicated to St. Thecla the Witnesser in Darre. In eight years she and Da had traveled as much as a thousand people might in an entire lifetime.

But she had never seen anything like Gent: a prosperous cathedral city crammed with twice or three times its usual population, the refugees fled within the walls from the countryside, and living constantly on the edge of terror. Siege was an ugly business. Now she walked through this chaos every day. Mayor Werner was a vain man, spoiled by his mother and accustomed to getting his own way. He was overjoyed at the opportunity to have a King's Eagle at his beck and call. In the evenings, Werner expected Wolfhere to attend him at the feasts he held every night. Werner wasreasonably enoughterribly impressed by Wolfhere's age and knowledge and reputation as a man who had once been King Arnulf the Younger's most favored counsellor. So in the evenings Wolfhere could not question Liath about the life she and Da had led for the last eight years.

Liath made sure she came to Werner's attention, and so during the day she waited on Werner and ran messages here and there within the walls of Gent. Most of the messages were pointless, but it gave her something to doand it kept her out of Wolfhere's way. She had many questions she wanted to ask Wolfhere, but as Da said, "Always measure the ground before you jump the stream." She was not fool enough to think she could outwit Wolfhere and she did not yet feel confident enough to face him. So she avoided him.

But, running messages for Werner, she could not avoid the city. This day she felt an undercurrent of madness running like ground lightning through the streets. On her way to the armory to get the daily count of swords forged and spears readied and to find out how their fuel was holding out, she had to shove her way along the plank walkways despite that she wore the redlined cloak of a King's Eagle. Folk crammed the streets, some of them carrying their earthly belongings on their backs as if they had no place to rest them. Others spoke, gesticulating, shouting, in pockets at corners or under the shelter of overhanging houses or bursting out of alehouses.

"Make way!" she said, trying to force her way through a knot of men gathered at the corner of the marketplace. "I am an Eagle."

"Cursed Eagle!" shouted one of them, lifting a staff threateningly. "You're well fed enough, up there at the palace!" He was ragged and thin, stooped by hunger, but anger is its own food. And Liafh became aware at once that his many companions, at his back, stared at her with hostile expressions. One fingered a knife.

"Come now, my friend." Another man stepped forward, a stout artisan with smudged hands and a grim face. "This Eagle is but the King's messenger. She is not responsible for the mayor's faults. Let her by."

Grudgingly the other man stepped back, his comrades with him, muttering.

"I thank you," she said to the artisan. "I think you will find it better to avoid the marketplace," said the artisan, "for there are many angry folk gathered there. There is an alleyway back by here. Go, and when you return to the palace tell the mayor from me, a good citizen of Gent, that he should beware the inner beast as much as the outer one, if he will not feed it properly."

"I will," she said, puzzled by this reference. She took the side route gladly but even here she had to make her way through refugees huddled with all their belongings what they could carryagainst wooden walls, some of them without even a bit of cloth to cover their heads against the rain. Babies cried.

Children whimpered. An old woman sat wrapped in a filthy shawl whose fancy embroidered edge peeked out beneath a caking of mud.

king's dragon She tried to bake flour and water mixed to a muddy paste into flatcakes over a steaming fire placed hard up against the back of a house.

Ai, Lady, thought Liath. How easily a fire could start, in drier weather. Maybe it was for the best that it rained. But then, she had a roof over her head.

"I pray you! Eagle!" The man's voice was soft, thickened with the congestion of a grippe.

Surprised, she halted in the shadow of a pile of garbage. It stank. The bones and skin of rats lay littered at the base of the pile; the flesh had been gnawed from their small remains. She smelled urine and feces. A man wearing the heavy tunic of a farmer emerged from the shadows; he had a thin, desperate face and mucus running from his nose. She stepped back, startled, away from him.

"I pray you," he repeated. "Take me to the mayor." "I cannot. I only run errands."

"Please," he begged. Then he tried to grasp her hand, to pull her. She bolted back and yet something in his manner stayed her from running away. "Please. There must be something you can do.

My daughter." "Your daughter!"

"She's ill and she hasn't enough to eat. Here. See." His daughter. Her grief at Da's death choked her anew and tears flooded her eyes. Numb, she followed the man into the tiny garbagestrewn alley, a fetid corner where he had made shelter for them. The girl was perhaps eight or ten years old; it was hard to tell. She coughed incessantly, half in sleep, but when she heard her father's footsteps she raised her arms piteously toward him.

"Da?" she whispered. "Da, I feel such a pain in my chest. I'm sorry, Da, I meant to be stronger."

Then she saw Liath. Her eyes widened and she went into a spasm of coughing.

The man knelt beside her and petted her, soothed her, until she calmed and quieted. Then, with an agonized expression, he looked up at Liath. "We are not poor folk, Eagle. I was a good farmer and paid my rents faithfully to Count Hildegard. I lost my wife two winters ago to the lungfever, and the babe she'd just born died with her. This child, my Miriam, is all I have left. But we have nothing here and no kin, no one to help us and I can find no work. Please, can you help us, Eagle. They say in the marketplace the mayor feasts every night, but out here we have nothing. I am feared she will" He broke off and buried his face in the girl's hair.

Liath gulped down a sob. It hit her, then, again and so sudden, so unexpected: Da was dead. He was dead and he was never coming back, never going to walk beside her again or comfort her again or teach her again. No matter what his flaws were, for they were many, he struggled with the darkness as do all of humankind, yet he did his best and he was a good man and he had always, always, taken care of her. Tears and rain mixed on her face. The girl gazed at her in awe, the man in desperate hope.

"Can you not go to the cathedral?" she asked. "The bishop has allowed many of the refugees to camp in the nave and I believe she tries to feed them as well."

"I have tried," he said, hope dying in his eyes, "But there are so many. We were turned away even before we could reach the steps. The mayor's guard beat us back."

She took her Eagle's ring off her finger and held it out. "Take this," she said, trembling, "to the palace and ask for entry to the stables. Tell the Dragons there that I mean for you to have employment from them. You can care for horses, can you not?"

He swallowed. "I had sheep and goats and chickens, but never a horse."

"Chickens, then," she said recklessly. "Take your daughter. This will gain you entrance. You must do it, for I need the ring back and so I will fetch it from you there."

"Da!" whispered the girl, and then coughed.

The man began to thank her so profusely she was king's dragon afraid he would draw attention to them, even here behind the midden. She could not save them all.

"I must go," she said. "I have an errand." She fled gratefully into the rain and cried the whole way to the armory and back.

Werner kept her busy for the rest of the day, and that night, to assauge his fretting, he called for a lavish feast which she had no appetite for. Afterward she took a turn on watch late into the night and then lay down to sleep just before dawn only to sleep fitfully and then be woken midmorning by a distressed servant. He begged her to come to the hall at once.

"Eagle!" Werner paced in his hall, frantic. "Have you heard? Have you seen?"

"I beg your pardon, Mayor Werner," she said. "I have just woken. I was on watch last

"Lady and Lord! What have we come to!" He threw up his hand and called for a tray, popped a sweetmeat into his mouth as if that could comfort him in his distress. "I have already sent Wolfhere and the other Eagle down to the tannery, so now what shall I do? What shall I do?"

She waited as he snapped at a passing servant. That seemed to calm his nerves enough for him to speak coherently. "A crowd of people has gathered outside the gates. Outside these gates, as if / were their enemy! What a calamity this is!"

"Have they said what their purpose is, Mayor Werner?"

"Bread and beans!" he snorted. "Bread and beans! The good citizens of Gent would never act this way if these country people were not acting as a bad influence upon them. There is at least one deacon whoimagine this!has inflamed them with tales of feasting here in my own hall going on while their children starve! No child starves within the walls of Gent. The biscop sees to that. They are calling me a glutton and say I feast while their children starve! Imagine! Can you imagine?"

She waited, but unfortunately he appeared to expect

an answer. Carefully she said, "I am here to serve you, Mayor Werner."

"Someone must go out and placate them," said Werner, eyeing her with a mixture of craftiness and doubt.

"They are asking for you, my lord." said the steward cautiously.

Werner smoothed down his fine wool tunic nervously, twining his fingers into the soft leather belt.

Its gold buckle was studded ostentatiously with lapis lazuli. "I can'tit would be too dangerous" His distracted gaze caught again on Liath and his expression brightened. "Eagle, fetch Prince Sanglant. He will attend me. After all" He began twisting the rings on his fingers, a habit Liath had seen him indulge in before. They were stunningly beautiful rings, one set with tiny rubies, one with an amethyst, one with an engraved stone of lapis lazuli of a particularly intense blue; the fourth was a thin circle of cunninglyworked cloisonne so delicately done Liath could not imagine how human fingers could have wrought it. "After all he is here to protect Gent, and if the crowd were to grow angry or vengeful, or to threaten me . . ."

She nodded obediently and withdrew from the hall. Outside, the sun shone. From the safety of the great courtyard, bounded by the palace and great hall on one side, the kitchens and outbuildings on the second, the barracks and stables on the third, and the palisade gates on the fourth, she could hear the crowd that had gathered on the other side of the palace compound gates. They spoke in many voices, but their murmuring was edged with fury and with that kind of desperation past which there is nothing left to lose.

Werner could not afford to have riot within and siege without; abruptly she realized what the artisan in the marketplace had meant by the inner beast. She straightened her tunic and twisted the end of her braid in a hand, then cursed herself for caring what she looked like. Perhaps it was true Prince Sanglant looked at her now and again, but he looked at every remotely attractive woman he came within sight of. Liath only noticed because she would watch him, and try not to watch him, when they were in the hall at the same time or passing in the courtyard or around the stables.

But this was not time to reflect on such trivial concerns. As Da always said, "No point in worrying at a loose thread while the sheep are being eaten by wolves."

She steadied herself and strode to the stables and then down the long dim passage. She saw no sign of the man and child she had tried to help. Beyond the actual stables, but within the palace stockade, was a stableyard with its own gate. In this yard the Dragons took their ease in the fine spring sun ormost oftenpracticed with sword and spear. So did they now.

She paused at the doors, brushing straw dust off her nose and trying not to sneeze. Two men sparred with staves. Several of the younger men pounded dutifully on a sturdy wooden pole set upright in the ground. An older man sat on a bench, repairing a pair of boiled leather greaves that had been oiled to a fine brown sheen. Sanglant laughed.

His laughter was so sharp and bright that it rang on the air. She found him half hidden behind a line of laundry hung out to dry in the warm morning sunlight. He came out from the shadow of the laundry, head flung back. Sweat beaded on his forehead. He held a sword wrapped in cloth in one hand and his teardrop shield painted with the black dragon device in the other. He wore not his mail but only the padded gambeson that went underneath armor. After him came two othersthe woman and a young man with light hair and a yellow beardsimilarly armed; they had obviously been at sword practice.

Sanglant wiped the sweat from his face and turned to look directly at Liath, across the stableyard. He lifted a hand. All activity ceased and every Dragon there turned to look at her. She bit down a sudden impulse to flee, lifted her chin, and walked across the yard to the prince.

"Mayor Werner wishes you to attend him," she said boldly and clearly. "There is a crowd

"Ah, yes," said the prince interrupting her. "I was wondering when Mayor Werner would send someone to fetch me. They've been gaining in numbers since dawn." He seemed more amused than angry or worried. He handed sword and shield to the woman, got a spear in exchange, and gestured for Liath to precede him. No one else came, only him. As they walked back through the stables, she felt his gaze on her back.

He said, "I've never seen you use that bow. It's of Quman make, is it not?"

"It is."

"It's a strange pattern, the deer who is vanquished and yet whose antlers are giving birth to griffins."

The observation startled her, but she dared not slacken her pace or turn around.

"You have such brilliantly blue eyes," he added, as if it was an afterthought. "Like the heart of fire.

Or that fine lapis lazuli stone on Mayor Werner's finger."

Her cheeks burned. She did not know what to say.

They passed out through the stable doors into the courtyard to find Mayor Werner and a number of palace stewards and servingfolk huddled together in an anxious band.

"Open the gates," said Sanglant, striding past Liath.

"But!"

"Open the gates!"

Werner could not bring himself to give the order until he had been helped to the safety of the palisade wall, out of reach of the ravening hordes should they decide to swarm inside. But once on the parapet, he could be seen by the crowd beyond. Liath climbed up after him and saw people below. They were, indeed, country folk and poor people, frightened, thin, and desperatethe same sort of people she had pressed through yesterday. See

king's dragon ing the mayor above they began to call out, some with anger, some pleading, some cursing. One man lifted a tiny child above his head as if willing the mayor whose round red face clearly betrayed that he never wanted for foodto see the hunger on the child's face. A few had staves or scythes, and these shook them angrily while Werner tried to shout out a few conciliatory phrases but got nowhere; nor could he be heard above their noise.

The gates opened. Sanglant walked out, spear in his left hand, right hand raised, open, and empty. He had no escort. Suddenly nervous, Liath got out her bow, nocked an arrow, and drew down on the prince so she could get the first shot in if anyone assaulted him.

He glanced up as if he had heard the creak of the string rubbing against the bronze caps as she drew it back. He smiledhis charming smileup at her, as if her protection amused or flattered him, and for an instant she forgot where she was and what she was doing there. Then he looked away, out into the crowd, and lifted his spear. The people moved restlessly, their attention shifting suddenly from the mayor to Sanglant. He waded out into their midst, obviously unafraid; he was easy to follow because he was half a head taller than the tallest person there. They parted to let him through, and at some point he found a box or a block of stone to stand on and with this platform he held the spear up over his head and with his right hand gestured for silence. To Liath's amazement, the crowd quieted. "Oh dear, oh dear,"

murmured Werner, and then, suddenly, realizing Sanglant was not about to be set upon and rent limb from body by the mob, he stopped muttering.

"You must pick three of your number," said Sanglant without preamble, "and they will be brought before the mayor to speak your grievances. Choose them quickly and do not argue. The rest of you must go to your homes or to wherever you are staying. I will request that the biscop mediate." He paused.

His voice sounded so hoarse Liath was astonished it carried so well, but his voice always sounded like that. He shifted, and the sunlight caught on his gold torque, winking. Liath lowered her bow.

She could not concentrate, not looking at him. Did not the ancients write that desire was a curse? She found that her hands were shaking, and she let the arrow go slack. The prince was in no danger.

Although perhaps she was.

"Let me tell you," he went on, "that Gent is a city under siege. The enemy who waits outside the walls is more implacable than your hunger, for there are stores enough in this city if they are rationed fairly but there is no mercy in his heart, if he even has one. We cannot fight among ourselves, for that way lies death for everyone. You are within your rights to demand food if your children are hungry, but none can expect feasts

"The mayor feasts every night!" cried a woman in a shrill but carrying voice. She wore deacon's robes.

"Then you, good deacon, may come before him and tell him what you think of that. You are the first. Let two more be chosen."

His brisk command stilled the crowd. Already the people on the fringes were drifting away. After a brief flurry of talk, two men came forward with the deacon, and they followed Sanglant inside. Liath recognized one as the artisan who had aided her in the marketplace. The gates closed behind them; only then did Werner venture down from the parapet. Once brought inside the great hall, the three commoners appeared subdued, perhaps cowed by the mayor ormore likelyby Sanglant's imposing presence.

"Eagle," said Werner, "you will find and bring the biscop to me. Beg her to attend me, that is."

Sanglant moved, and almost Liath thought he was going to offer to escort her. But he did not.

Instead, with a sigh, he went to sit in the chair beside Werner. Ai, fool! She cursed herself as she hurried away. The king's dragon gates were opened to let her out, and this time the folk dispersing from the square parted to let her through as she jogged from palace to cathedral. Maybe Da had been right; he usually was. "Are you so vain?" he had asked her. But he had been speaking of Hugh, and she had been right about Hugh. Da had not understood what Hugh truly wanted.

But she did not want to think of Hugh now. She never wanted to think of Hugh again.

Gent's biscop was a woman who wasted little time; Liath was sent back with a message that Werner could expect her within the hour and that a solution to this difficulty would be found before nightfall or else she would impose one.

When Liath returned to the hall, the deacon and artisan had, evidently, spoken already. Now the third representative, an elderly man in the good linen tunic of a person of wealth, regaled the mayor at length about the positions of the stars in the heavens and the fate they foretold for Gent in general and the mayor in particular. Werner listened with such rapt attention that he did not acknowledgeor perhaps he did not noticeLiath's return.

"For in the writings of the church mothers, and in the calculations of the Babaharshan mathematici," intoned the man in that sonorous voice only the truly selfimportant can manage, "it is written that the passage of Mok into the sign of the Healer, the eleventh House in the lesser Circle, the world dragon that binds the heavens, betokens a period of healing and hope whose emanative rays are only intensified by the passage of Jedu, the fierce, the Angel of War, into the same sign, as will happen very soon, very soon indeed, for fierce Jedu soon will move out of the Unicorn and into the Healer. So should you take heart that the heavens grant us hope at this dark hour, and you should be generous in relieving the burdens of those of us trapped inside your fair city."

"Oh, spare us this nonsense," muttered Liath under her breath. She regretted saying it at once.

She had forgotten how well Sanglant could hear.

Sanglant glanced at her but said nothing.

"Say on," said Werner to the man, who continued, oblivious to everything except Werner's rapt attention.

"Yes, the heavens give us hope. You must not expect disaster for no comet has flamed in the sky and only such glowing swords portend ruin. Therefore, we may all feast and celebrate for our rescue is at hand Werner was, indeed, beginning to look more cheerful. "and if gold is laid out in a pattern known only to me, then I can read by various diverse and secret means the exact hour and day of our liberation!"

"Ah," sighed Werner ecstatically.

Ai, Lady! This man would do more harm than good. But Eagles had no opinions. Princes might, however. She had to risk it. "He's a fraud," she muttered under her breath.

At once, Sanglant lifted a hand for silence. "Where did you learn this knowledge of the heavens?"

he asked the old man. "How can you assure us this is true?"

The man clapped hand to chest. "Noble prince, you honor me with your notice. I was trained at the Academy of Diotima in Darre, under the shadow of the skopos' palace itself. In the Academy we learned the secrets of the heavens from the writings of the ancients and also how to foretell the fates of man and the world from the movements of the stars."

"For a price," said Liath. "Usually in gold."

Then was aghast she had spoken out loud. But how could she help it? In all their wandering, Da had never passed himself off as an astrologus or haruspexone of those men or women who claimed to be able to divine the fate of "kings and other folk." Frauds, all of them, Da claimed, though he was learned enough that he could have made a decent living for them both had he been willing to do so. But Da respected the knowledge he had and, perhaps, feared it as well. It was nothing to trifle with. It burned in her heart that the knowledge he had

paid for so dearly should be treated as merely another form of commercea lucrative trade visited upon the ignorant and gullibleby such people as this charlatan. The old man frowned imperiously at her.

"Mine is a proud trade, and though some in the church have frowned upon it, it has not been condemned"

The deacon interrupted him. "At the Council of Narvone, the casting of horoscopes was outlawed. Only God and the angels may have foreknowledge of our fate."

"Well, I" he sputtered. "I do not cast individual horoscopes, of course, but I have great knowledge and none dare scorn me, for I know the ways of the heavens. I have studied the very Astronomicon of Virgilia and" Liath snorted. "Virgilia wrote the Heleniad. It is Manilius who wrote the five books called the Astronomicon that I suppose you speak of. And the Academy founded by Diotima of Mantinea rested in the city of Kellai, not in Darre."

Sanglant coughed, but he was only stifling a laugh. She faltered. Every person in the hall stared at her as if she had suddenly begun speaking a foreign tongue, like the disciples at the Pentekoste, touched by the Holy Word.

Ai, Lady. She had let her impatience with fools and that old slowburning anger at Da's death get the better of her. She had betrayed herself to them all.

"What?" said the mayor, mouth popped open with the look of a fish on a platter. "What? I don't"

"I am outraged!" said the man who claimed to be an astrologus, and the deacon, too, stepped forward, staring with interestor was it surprise? or was it suspicion? at Liath.

"Mayor Werner," said Sanglant, cutting into this so sharply that all of them drew back from Werner's chair. "I have need of this Eagle, messages to be run to those of my men who are posted along the walls. You have this business in hand, I believe, and the biscop will arrive soon." Werner opened his mouth.

"Good," said Sanglant. And to Liath: "Come."

She followed him outside. Her heart hammered hard in her chest. But for some strange reason she was not afraid but instead relievedand even elated.

He halted in the great courtyard, full in the sun, and stretched shoulders and neck like a great beast settling itself after a triumphant struggle. Then he studied her, and because she had already betrayed herself, she was not afraid to look directly at him in return.

"I have heard the Heleniad, of course," he said, "or parts of it at any rate. In the king's progress many poets have sung the epic to entertain the court, and of course you have heard the poet who resides in Werner's palace recite it over these past ten nights."

"Mangle it, more like."

He smiled. "Perhaps you would render it more pleasingly."

She shook her head sharply. "I am not poet or bard, to sing in public."

"No, you are not. You are something altogether different, I think. Is there truly such a book as this . .. Astronomicon ?"

"I have heard of such a book, but never seen it. There is a reference to it in the Etymologies of Isidora of Seviya where she comments on" She broke off. Lord in Heaven! Was she trying to impress him?

"You are truly Wolfhere's discipla, are you not?"

"I don't know what you mean by that."

"I don't know what I mean either," he said sharply, and frowned and looked abruptly away from her. It was almost painful to have him look away; she had not realized how much his gaze warmed her, or at least how much she wanted his attention. Like bread given to a hungry child.

She winced, for was it not a true enough comparison? She was alone and he was here He was like no one she had ever laid eyes on.

Sanglant lifted a hand, and she tensed, but only be

cause half of her willed him to touch her while at the same time the other half feared what his touchthe tangible and irrevokable sign of his interest in herwould unleash. How could she even feel this way after what had happened with Hugh?

But Sanglant was not trying to touch her; he opened his hand to reveal her Eagle's ring. "A man brought this to me yesterday. I believe it is yours?"

He waited. Finally, as carefully as one might pluck a jewel from the coils of a snake, she picked it up off his palm. "It is mine. What happened to the man?"

"We gave him shelter and employment of sorts." His eyes glinted. She could not read his expression. "His daughter I sent to our healer. She may yet live."

"I thank you," she said softly. The ring was still warm from his skin.

"Let me," he said, and he took her hand and slipped the ring onto her finger. He glanced up over her shoulder, released her abruptly and stepped back. "Here is your praeceptor." Acknowledging Wolfhere, he allowed himself a brief, selfmocking smile. "She is yours," he said to Wolfhere. "Though perhaps you should watch her more closely." He spun and left them.

Wolfhere crossed his arms over his chest and frowned at her. She twisted the ring and, blushing, said nothing. The stench of the tannery clung to his clothes. "Prince Sanglant is right," he said finally. "I should indeed be watching over you more closely." He gestured. "Come." She dared not disobey.

WERNER detained them again, but in the end Liath found herself seated opposite Wolfhere in the empty stall that had become both bedchamber and storage room for her and Wolfhere and Manfred.

"Now," said Wolfhere in the quiet tone of a man who intends to brook no disagreement, "for twentyfive days we have bided here in Gent and you have avoided me except when I have demanded your time to teach you about the duties of an Eagle."

"Mayor Werner has need of my services as a messenger."

"Mayor Werner thinks too much of his own consequence and is perfectly willing to enhance it by having a King's Eagle to carry his messages for him on trivial errands. You would be more useful running errands for the Dragons . . . and their captain."

She flushed.

"He is a king's son, Liath. What is commonplace for him would be disastrous for you." She flushed more deeply, mortified. "Remember the precepts I have taught you, and understand that you must hold to them once you are fully an Eagle." She tried to nod but could only manage a slight jerk of the head. Mercifully, he changed the subject. "In any case, this evening I have excused myself from the feast, which apparently will be much reduced now that the biscop has stepped in to set up rations for the city.

Manfred will attend Mayor Werner. You will attend me. It is time for you to witness the workings of the magi, even one as weak in the craft as I am."

"Da said was deaf to it," she blurted out. Anything to delay.

"Deaf to what?"

"To magic." There, it was spoken out loud.

"So he did teach you magic. You must trust me, Liath. You cannot conceal the truth from me. I know your background too well."

Better, it appeared, than she herself knew it. She shrugged, trying to appear nonchalant, but Wolfhere's gaze was too keen. She could not fool him. And yet. . .

Wolfhere lifted an eyebrow, waiting for her to speak.

She brushed a piece of straw off her leggings and king's shifted her seat. She was by now thoroughly sick of straw; it poked through everything and tickled her nose all night. Behind her, her saddle provided reasonable support. But she felt the presence of the book, hidden beneath the saddle and within the leather saddlebags. Could Wolfhere feel the book's presence as well? Was he only biding his time?

"What do you mean to do?" she asked.

"I mean to seek a vision of this intelligence Prince Sanglant speaks of, whatever creature it is that directs the Eika siege." He rose. Because she no longer had a choice, she rose with him and followed him out of doors.

It was dusk in Gent. Clouds had come in after that glorious morning sunlight and now it was again a dreary, overcast, damp spring evening. St. Melania's Day, Liath thought, named for the saint who had admonished the patriarchs of Kellai when they refused to accept the supremacy of the Lady and Lord of Unities. It was also the seventeenth day of the month of Sormas. Because cloud covered the sky, she could not orient herself by the stars. And dared not. It was bad enough Wolfhere knew her father and mother had studied the forbidden arts. She had only made it worse by speaking so rashly in Mayor Werner's hall.

This night the streets were mostly empty. Perhaps the morning's excitement had exhausted everyone. Their footsteps were swallowed in the greater hush of a city turning over from day to night, from activity to restless sleep, haunted always by the presence of the Eika outside the walls. A thin sheen of moisture from the afternoon's shower covered the plank walkways that kept them above the muck of the streets. The drums that always pounded in the Eika camp were, thank the Lady, muted this night, though still audible. Even so, she found her footsteps falling into beat with them; she skiphopped, trying to walk off the rhythm.

Wolfhere smiled and they turned past the old marketplace and skirted the edge of the royal mint, which was heavily guarded. The wind shifted, bringing the stink of L

the tanning works up from the western bank of the river. There, work went on into the night at adjacent warehouses where armor and weapons were being turned out from iron and wood and leather that had been carted in from the countryside by the refugees.

He led her across the central square of Gent and up the steps of the cathedral. Built all of stone, its massive front stood like the shield of faith in Gent's center. They slipped inside easily, since the doors had no locks.

And in any case, some of the refugees from the countryside had taken up residence in the nave.

Liath hesitated in the entryway, hearing the shuffle of bodies within, coughs and whispers. No light was allowed after sunset, even in a stone building, for fear of fire, but she could see blocks of shadows, awnings and blankets thrown up as walls between the benches to separate one family from the next.

Everyone had settled down to sleep. Wolfhere touched her on the arm and she followed him silently to the stairs that led down to the crypt.

Liath had never been afraid of the dead or the darkness. As Da always said: "Those who rest in the Chamber of Light are at peace; the others have no power to harm us." Even so, it soon became so dark as they descended stairs made first of stone and then, as they descended still deeper, of bare earth, that even she with her salamander eyes could not make out the walls but had to feel her way by touch.

Wolfhere, ahead of her, stopped, and she steadied herself, one hand on his shoulder. It was utterly black. The crypt smelled of clay and lime. It was damp. At the edge of her hearing came the sound of the slow drip of water.

It nagged at her, that uneven sound, a droplet of water shattering to pieces on stone, then, finally, another. It reminded her of the water in the crypt of the church where Marshal Liudolf had locked her up after Da's murder. It had been dark there, as well, and she had been imprisoned. Until Hugh came.

Her chest was tight with fear and she clutched convulsively at Wolfhere's shoulder, suddenly terrified. What if Hugh lurked in these shadows ? "Call light, Liath," said Wolfhere. "I can't."

"Seek in your mind for the memory of light, and call it forth."

She shook her head. She was sweating now, although it was cool in the vaults. Strange noises caught in the air. She knew Hugh was far away and yet felt him as if he was just about to touch her.

Wolfhere continued, as calm as ever. "If I remember, there is a torch here. Think of flames, then, and call fire to it."

"I was not taught these things!" Air stirred behind her neck. Light! She shut her eyes, though it was hard to find the courage to do so, even when she couldn't see. She formed a picture of light, the chamber illuminated, sunlight streaming in through the windows of her memory tower to limn the four doors of her tower that led to nowhere and to everywhere, to cover as with a gold wash the fifth door, set impossibly in the center of the room. Light.

But nothing came. In the frozen tower, the light was as cold as midwinter's kiss and though it illuminated, its touch did not bring life. A tendril, like a spiderweb come loose from its moorings, brushed the nape of her neck. She flinched and batted it away, but there was nothing there. And yet there was something behind her, always stalking her.

She could stand it no more. "Better to go forward," Da always said, "than to look behind at what's creeping up on you." She shoved past Wrolfhere, stumbled on level flagstone floor, and groped along the wall. Her hand came to rest on the stem of a torch. She wrenched it free and spun, holding it out like a weapon, but it touched nothing. There was nothing, except her own fear.

And that sparked anger. What right had Hugh to plague her like this? Would she never be free of him?

His was the dark presence always at her back, and yet there was another, which she could not name, whatever had stalked her father and herself for all those years.

"Leave me be!" she cried. The stone walls of the crypt sucked her voice away, muffling it. "Now, Liath" Wolfhere began. Ah, but she was furious by now, a raw anger that throbbed through her like fire.

The torch in her hand caught flame and burned with a strong, uncanny light. She started back, blinking away tears. Wolfhere looked sickly pale, but then her eyes adjusted and she saw he was smiling wryly.

"That's better," he said.

Liath was horrified. She had called fire, by what means she did not know. Now Wolfhere thought she knew the arts of sorcery.

And yet, if she could call fire, why should she not learn the arts of sorcery? Why should she not become magus and mathematicus? Was it not her birthright?

Wolfhere made no more mention of the blazing torch, nor did he ask her how she had accomplished the deed. He crossed the crypt floor and because she did not want to be alone in this buried chamber, she followed. LInder the broad stone arches that held up the crypt he paused to study the famous tomb of Biscop Mariana, predecessor of the current biscop. Nestled between her grave and the heavy stone wall of the crypt lay another tomb. Carved of less imposing granite, it nevertheless displayed a more elaborate epitaph.

Here lies Flodoard, presbyter of the Holy Church, servant of Our Lord and Lady, guide and instructor to Louis, king ofVarre. Devout in practice and humble in spirit, he was the best among us. So does he rest in the light of truth above.

Liath became aware all at once of the space opening behind her, the vast womb of the cathedral, and the monuments that marked the graves of the women and men who had served within these precincts. Best among us. She felt at peace, here among the holy dead. She might not be safe with Wolfhere, or any other mortal man or woman, but surely these holy ones remained her guardians as they guarded all who kept faith.

"I have heard it said a saint's tomb lies hidden in the crypt of Gent Cathedral." Wolfhere surveyed the dark cavern. The hush was profound. She could hear not even the least sound from above, though several hundred refugees crowded the church and beyond the doors the city of Gent certainly lay restless in its uneasy sleep, one eye always open toward its besiegers. Tombs faded into the darkness, marking distance by their shade of gray in the torchlight. Liath could not see the far walls or even the opening that led to the stairs. Gent was an old cathedral, its foundations laid, some said, in the last years of the old empire by a halfelvish prince who had converted to the faith of the Unities as the empire collapsed around him.

Wolfhere walked farther into the crypt, into dark chambers and down a short flight of steps, and Liath followed him. The deeper they went, the fresher the air smelled, tinged with the dry sweetness of some kind of grain. She sneezed.

"But it is also said," added Wolfhere, "that only those of great holiness, great innocence, or great need ever find that grave."

"Whose grave is it?" Liath asked, casting about, looking for any least gleam of silver light or hidden corner of stone concealed in the shadows, but she saw nothing besides the tombs of biscops and presbyters, holy deacons and robed mayors, and one count of Gent whose effigy showed her holding a scroll in one hand and a knife in the other.

"St. Kristine of the Knives, she who endured unspeakable tonnents in the last days of the old empire rather than yield her place to the invaders. It is said of her that though an empire might fall from grace, she could and would not fall because of her great strength."

But they found no saint's tomb.

They returned to the halfflight of stairs and passed into a dim corridor and thence into a side chapel that contained two tombs so ancient their inscriptions were almost rubbed away, as well as a single slab of black stone that glinted when she brought the torch up beside it.

She knelt and ran a hand along its surface. It was smoother than glass. "This is obsidian," she said. "Though some say that this is not stone at all but the remains of dragon bones that have been exposed to sunlight."