PROLOGUE

All spring they managed to stay alive by hiding in the abandoned tannery quarter, coming out only at night to scrounge for food. After a few nights, running from the dogs, hiding in the pits, they became accustomed to the stink. Better to stink like the tanners, Matthias pointed out to his sister, than be torn to pieces by dogs.

Anna reflected silently on this. It gave her some small satisfaction to know that if they were caught by the Eika savages, if they were run down by the dogs and rent arm from shoulder, leg from hip, at least they would smell so badly of chicken dung that surely not even those hideous dogs would eat them. Or if the dogs did eat them, then maybe their flesh, immersed so many times in oak bark tannin that their skin had begun to take on a leathery cast, would poison the creatures; then, from the Chamber of Light where her spirit would reside after death in blessed peace, she could watch their writhing, agonized deaths.

All spring there was food to be scrounged, for those who had escaped the city had fled without having time to fetch anything and those who had not escaped were dead. Or so at least observation told them. Half-eaten corpses lay strewn in the streets and alleys, and many houses stank of rotted flesh. But they found stores of vegetables in root cellars and barrels of ale in the common houses. Once, they foolishly ventured to the kitchens of the mayor's palace where they found sweet meats that made Anna, who stuffed herself with them,violently ill. Matthias forced her to run, gagging, with a hand clapped over her mouth to keep it in and in such pain she thought her stomach was going to burst, all the way back to the tanneries so she could throw it up into the puering pits, a stew of chicken dung mixed with water that would, he prayed, hide the smell of fresh human vomit.

No dogs came 'round the tanneries for a long while after that. Perhaps the Eika had given up hunting their human prey or deemed there were none left worth hunting in the empty city. Perhaps they'd sailed down the river to hunt in greener pastures. But neither child dared climb the city walls to the parapet to see how many Eika ships lay beached along the river's edge. Now and again they saw Eika walking those parapets, staring north toward the sea. Now and again they heard the keening and howling of the dogs and, once, the screams of a human, whether man or woman they could not tell. They kept to familiar haunts and stayed mostly in the little shed where Matthias had slept after he had been apprenticed to a currier the winter before the Eika attack. Left behind, forgotten, in the confusion of the attack and the hopeless street-by-street defense of the city, he had had the wits to take refuge with his younger sister in the foul tannery pits when he saw the dogs hunting through the city. That was why they had survived when so many others had died.

But come summer, they used up their last stores and had to dig in untended gardens for those half-grown vegetables that had fought past the weeds. They learned to hunt rats, for there were rats aplenty in the empty buildings, fat ones well fed on dessicated corpses. Anna found herself with a talent for stone throwing, too, and brought down seagulls and complacent pigeons and once a feral cat.

Come summer, more Eika came, and these Eika brought human slaves with them, gleaned from a distant harvest.

When one fine summer's morning the Eika returned to the tanning quarter with slaves brought to work in the tannery, the two children fled to a loft and cowered behind tanned hides which had been hung to dry from the crossbeams. When they heard voices, the creak and scrape of a body climbing the ladder, Matthias boosted Anna up to one of the great beams. Her terror added strength to her tugs, and with him scrambling on the uneven plank wall and her pulling, they got him up beside her. There they huddled, clinging to the beam and shaking with fear. The stink of the tannery protected them no longer.

The trapdoor opened at the far end of the loft.

Anna sucked down a sob when they heard the first whis-pery soft words-an Eika speaking a language they could not understand. A dog yipped and growled outside. As if in reply a human voice-below, from over by the puering pits-yelped in pain, then began screaming and pleading pointlessly and unintelligibly, screaming again until at last, mercifully, the screams cut off with a gurgle. Matthias bit his lip to keep from crying out. Anna's eyes filled with tears that slipped down her cheeks; she grasped the wooden Circle of Unity that hung on a leather cord at her thin chest-her mother's dying gift to her-and traced her finger around its smooth circle in silent prayer as she had seen her mother do many times, though this wordless prayer had not availed her mother against her final illness.

Footsteps shuddered on the rungs. A body scraped, half metal, half cloth, heaving itself up and over onto the loft floor. A man grunted, a human sound, curt and yet familiar in its humanity.

The Eika spoke again, this time in recognizable if broken Wendish. "How soon these is ready?"

"I will have to look them over." The man enunciated each word carefully. "Most likely all are ready if they've been here since-" He broke off, then took a shuddering breath. Had he witnessed that killing just now, or only listened to it, as they had? "Since spring."

"I count, these," said the Eika. "Before you come, I count these skins. Less than I count come to me when they ready, I kill one slave for each skin less than I count. I start with you."

"I understand," said the man, but the children could not see him, could'only hear, and what emotion they heard in his voice they could not interpret.

"You bring to me when ready," said the Eika. The ladder creaked, and this time they recognized the slight chime of mail as the Eika left the loft and climbed back down, away, to wherever Eika went when they were not hunting and killing. Still the children clung there, praying the man would go away. But instead he moved slowly through the loft, jostling the hides, rubbing them, testing them. Counting them. A loose plank creaked under his foot. The quiet rustle of a hide sliding against another marked his progress, and the huff and stir of leather-sodden air in the dim room, spreading outward from his movements, shifted and swirled about them like the exhalation of approaching death, for discovery would indeed mean death.

Finally it was too much for Anna, who was three winters younger than Matthias. The sound got out of her throat, like a puppy's whimper, before she could gulp it back. The man's slow quiet movement ceased, but they still heard his breathing, ragged in the gloom.

"Who's there?" the man -whispered, then muttered a Lady's Blessing.

Anna set her lips together, squeezed her eyes shut, and wept silently, free hand clutching the Circle. Matthias groped for the knife at his belt, but he was afraid to pul! it out of its sheath, for even that slight noise would surely give them away.

"Who's there?" the man said again, and his voice shook as if he, too, were afraid.

Neither child dared answer. Finally, thank the Lady, he went away.

They waited a while and climbed down from the beam. "I have to pee," whimpered Anna as she wiped her nose. But they dared not leave the loft and yet, sooner or later, they would have to leave the loft or starve. She peed in the farthest darkest corner and hoped it would dry before anyone came back up. There were other chores for the new slaves in the tannery-hides to be washed and hair and flesh scraped from them, new pits to be filled for puering or drenching, hides to be layered in with oak bark, saturated in the tannic acid, or, tanning completed, rinsed off and smoothed before drying. There were other lofts where hides waited, drying, in silent darkness, until they were ready for the currier. No reason anyone should come up here again this day.

But that evening they heard steps on the ladder. No time, this time, to scramble up on the beam.

They huddled behind the far wall, wrapping themselves in a cow hide.

They heard, instead of words, the soft tap of something set down on wood. Then the trap closed and footsteps thumped down the ladder. After a bit Matthias ventured out.

"Anna! Quietly!" he whispered.

She crept out and found him weighing a hunk of goat's cheese in one hand and a dark, small, misshapen loaf of bread in the other. A rough-hewn wooden bowl sat empty beside the trap. She stared at these treasures fearfully. "If we eat it, then he'll know we're here."

Matthias broke off a piece of cheese, sniffed it, and popped it in his mouth. "We'll eat a bit now,"

he said. "What difference does it make? If we don't get out of here tonight, then they'll discover us sooner or later. We'll save the rest for after we've escaped."

She nodded. She knew when to argue, now, and when to remain silent because argument was pointless. He gave her a corner of cheese; it tasted salty and pungent. The bread was dry as plain oats, and its coarse texture made her thirsty. He divided the rest of the food into two portions and gave half to her. Both carried leather pouches, tied to their belts, for such gleanings as this. Such necessities the ruined city provided in plenty, taken from empty houses and shops or-if valuable enough-pried from the dead.

Water, clothing, knives or spoons or even an entire timbered house furnished with fine painted furniture and good linen, none of this they lacked; only food and safety.

They waited until no crack of light gleamed through the plank walls onto the warped floorboards, until gray shadow became indistinguishable from black. Then Matthias eased open the trap and slid over the edge as quietly as he could.

"Lady!"

A man, not Matthias, spoke. Anna froze. Matthias grunted and dropped to the ground.

"There now," said the man, "don't pull your knife on me. I won't hurt you. Lady Above, I didn't think any soul had survived in this charnel house. You're just a child."

"Old enough to be apprenticed," muttered Matthias, stung, as he always was, because this man's voice was like their uncle's and his taunt the same one. Only perhaps, Anna thought, this man had spoken with awed pity, not with contempt, when he called Matthias a child. She had a sudden rash intuition that this man could be trusted, unlike their uncle, and anyway, if Matthias was now caught, it was better to die with him than to struggle on in a fight she could never win alone. She swung her legs out and climbed quickly and quietly down the ladder.

Matthias swore at her under his breath. The man gasped aloud, then clapped a hand over his mouth and stared furtively around, but they remained alone. No one moved through the tanning grounds this late. The quarter moon lit them, and thin ghostly shadows cut the pits with strange patterns. Anna grabbed her brother's hand and held on tightly.

"Ai, Lady, and a younger one still," the man said at last. "I thought you was a cat. Are there more of you?"

"Only us two," said Matthias.

"Lord in Heaven. How did you survive?"

Matthias gestured toward the pits, then realized the man might not be able to see his movement.

"There was food enough to be scrounged, until now. We hid here because the dogs couldn't smell us."

The man squinted at Anna in the dim light, stepped forward abruptly, and took her chin in his hand. Matthias started forward, raising his belt knife, but Anna said, "No," and he stopped and waited.

After a moment the man let go and stepped back, brushing his eyes with a finger. "A girl. You're a girl, and no older than my little Mariya. The Lady is merciful, to have saved one."

"Where is your daughter?" asked Anna, bold now. This man did not scare her.

"Dead," he said curtly. "In the Eika raid that took my village not a month ago. They killed everyone."

"They didn't kill you," said Anna reasonably, seeingjhat he looked alive and not anything like the shade of a dead man-not that she had ever seen such a thing, but certainly she had heard stories of them such as come back to haunt the living world on Hallowing Eve.

"Ai, they killed me, child," he said bitterly. "Killed all but this husk. Now I am merely a soulless body, their slave, to do with as they will until they tire of me and feed me to the dogs." Though he spoke as though living exhausted him, still he shuddered when he spoke of the dogs.

Anna sorted through this explanation and thought she understood most of it. "What will you do with us?" she asked. "Won't the Eika kill us if they find us?"

"They will," said the man. "They never leave children alive. They only want grown slaves strong enough to do their work. But I heard tell from one of the other slaves that there are no children in Gent, no bodies of children, simply no children at all. It's a tale they whisper at night, in the darkness, that the saint who guards the city led the children away to safety or up to the Chamber of Light, I don't know which."

"It's true," muttered Matthias. "All the children are gone, but I don't know where they went."

"Where are your parents, then?" asked the man. "Why were you not taken to safety, if the others were?"

Anna shrugged, but she saw her brother hunch down as he always did, because the misery still sank its claws in him although she did not recall their parents well enough to mourn them.

"They're dead four summers ago," said Matthias. "Our da drowned when he was out fishing, and our ma died a few months later of a fever. They were good people. Then we went to our uncle. He ran, when the Eika came. He never thought of us. I ran back to the house and got Anna, but by then there was fighting everywhere. You couldn't even get to the cathedral where most folk fled, so we hid in here.

And here we stayed."

"It's a miracle," murmured the man. Out of the night's silence came sudden noise: dogs barking and a single harsh call, a word neither child understood. The man started noticeably. "They come 'round in the middle night to count us," he said. "I must go back. I won't betray you, I swear it on Our Lady's Hearth. May Our Lord strike me down with His heavenly Sword if I do any such thing. I'll bring more food tomorrow, if I can."

Then he was gone, retreating into the night.

They relieved themselves quickly in one of the stinking pits filled with dung and water, and paused after to look up at -the strangely clear sky, so hard a darkness above them that the stars were almost painful to look upon. They heard the dogs again and Matthias shoved Anna onto the ladder. She scrambled back up, and he came up behind her and closed the trap. After a hesitation, but without speaking, they devoured the rest of the cheese and bread-and waited for tomorrow.

THE next night, long after sunset, the man came again and tapped on the door softly and said, "I am your friend."

Cautiously, Matthias opened the trap and peered down. After a moment he climbed down. Anna followed him. The man gave them bread and watched silently as they ate. She could see him a bit more clearly tonight-the moon was waxing, and its quarter face slowly swelled, bubbling toward the full. Not particularly tall, he had the broad shoulders of a farmer and a moon-shaped face.

"What are you called?" he asked finally, hesitantly.

"I am called Matthias, and this is Anna, which is short for Johanna. Our ma named us after the disciplas of the blessed Daisan."

The man nodded, as if he had known this all along or perhaps only to show he understood. "I am called Otto. I am sorry the bread was all I could bring. We are not fed well, and I dare not ask the others for a share of their portion. I don't know if I can trust them, for they're no kin of mine. Any one of them might tell the Eika in return for some reward, more bread perhaps."

"It is very kind of you to help us," said Anna brightly, for she remembered that their ma had always told her to' be polite and to be thankful for the gifts she received.

The man caught in a sob, then hesitantly touched hei hair. As abruptly, he backed away from her.

"Or perhaps like me, the others would gladly help, if only it meant find ing a way to see two more brought free of the savages. It isn't as if the Eika play favorites. I've never seen them seek to turn their slaves against each other by handing out special treatment. They despise us all. All are treated the same Work or die."

"Is it only here," asked Matthias, "in the tanneries, thai they've brought slaves?"

"They've opened up the smithies, too, though they've no one trained here in blacksmith's work.

But we're slaves and expendable." His voice was hard. "It's fortune's chance I was sent here to the tanneries, though it stinks like nothing I've smelled before. It's whispered that at the forge men are burned every day and the Eika as likely to slit a burned man's throat as to let that man heal if he can't get up and keep working. I saw those Eika. I saw one pushed into a fire. It didn't burn. The heat left no scar on its body. They don't have skin, not like us. It's some kind of hide, like a snake's scales but harder and thicker. Dragon's get." He hawked and spat, as if to get the taste of the word out of his mouth. "The spawn of dragons and human women, that's what they say, but I don't see how such an unnatural congress could take place. But we should not speak of this in front of the child."

"I've seen nothing she hasn't seen also," said Matthias softly, but Anna felt at once that the man's simple statement, protecting her, confiding in the boy, had won over her brother's trust.

She finished her bread and wished there were more, but she knew better than to ask. Perhaps he had given them his entire ration. It would be rude to demand more.

"Fortune's chance," the man whispered bitterly. "Fortune had smiled more sweetly on me had she let me die with my children. But no." He shook his head, shifting, casting a glance back over his shoulder nervously, for surely he had reason to be nervous, as did they all. "For every-i thing, a reason. I was spared so that I might find you." He took a step forward, clasped Matthias by the hand and with his other hand touched Anna's hair gently. "I will find a way for you to escape here, I swear it. Now I must go. I tell them I use the privies each night at this hour, so I must get back. The Eika are strange creatures.

Savages they are, surely, but they are fastidious; but perhaps that only goes to show that 'the path of the Enemy is paved neatly with well-washed stones, for the waters cleansing them are the tears of the wicked.' We may make soil only in one place, no pissing even except where they tell us to or on the new skins. That is why we may come out for a few moments' freedom in this way, even at night, for they cannot bear the stink of our human bodies near their own. But I dare not stay longer."

He came again the next night, and the next, and the next after that, bringing them pittances of food but enough to stave off starvation. Ale he brought also and once wine in a flagon, for there was little water to be found in and about the tanning pits and all of it foul-tasting.

He quickly discovered that Matthias had more knowledge of the tannery and its workings than any of the slaves set to work here; in three months' apprenticeship, Matthias had learned the rudiments of currying and tanning, enough to know what went on at each station and with each tool. The boy he treated politely, even kindly, but it was Anna he truly doted on. She sat on his lap and he stroked her haii and once or twice forgot himself and called her "Mariya."

No one disturbed the hides in their loft. Otto explained that he was in charge of overseeing them, and no slave had time to look into another's business. After several more nights passed, he began bringing more food.

"The Eika have increased our rations. They brought in more slaves to work the bakeries, but also, my boy, what you have told me and I have told the others is helping us work. They are pleased with us, so they feed us better." The moon was full, now, and Anna could see his expression, which was, as always, grim. "No good fortune for those taken to the smithies, or so I hear. As many are dragged out dead as walk in alive. Beasts!" He hid his eyes behind a hand, but she could see the anguished line of his mouth. "Soon the hides will be dry and they will be cartet off, and then there will be no place for you to hide."

"They'll hang up more hides, won't they?" asked Anna "Ah, child." He pulled her tight against his chest. "Tha they will, but I can't hide you here forever. I've asked her and there, but I don't know how to get you out of the city except-"

"Except what?" demanded Matthias, for he, too, Ann knew, had been talking to her about any possible way fo them to escape from the city. Perhaps they could have don it during the spring, had they not been so frightened, bu they had been frightened, and the dogs had roamed th city every night. Now, with slaves in the city and all th gates watched-or so he assumed-it would be even hard to escape.

"I don't know. It's just a story, and I don't know whether to believe it." But he clutched Anna, his lips touching he hair, a father's kiss. "I've heard some say there's a creature, a daimone, held prisoner in the cathedral. They say the Eika enchanter lured it from the heavens above where such creatures live and imprisoned it in a solid body like to our own. He keeps it chained to his throne."

Anna shuddered, but she felt safe on Otto's lap; he was holding her so securely.

"I am thinking," continued the man slowly, "that the magi say daimones know secrets hidden from human ken. If it is true the saint beloved of this city saved the children, if it is true she led them by hidden ways out from the cathedral to safety, then might not this daimone know of that hidden way? For can daimones not see into both the past and the future, farther than mortal eyes can see? If you offer the creature some gift, and if it hates the Eika as much as we do, might it not tell you of this secret way? It is a small chance, surely, but I can think of no other. The gates are guarded day and night and the dogs roam the streets." He shuddered, as they all shuddered, at the thought of the dogs. "You are children.

The saint will smile on you as she did on the others."

"You will come, too, won't you, Papa Otto?" Anna rested her head on his chest.

He wept, but silently, tears streaming down his face. "I dare not," he said. "I dare not attempt it."

"You could escape with us," said Matthias. "God will show you mercy for your kindness to us, who are no kin of yours."

"God might, but the Eika will not. You don't know them. They're savages, but they're as cunning as weasels. They mark each slave, and if one slave goes missing, then others ret staked out in front of the dogs and the dogs let loose » them. That way if any slave tries to escape, he knows what will happen to those left behind. I will not cause the death of those I work beside. I could do nothing to save my family.

I will not save myself and by so doing kill these others who are as innocent as my dear children. But you two might escape, if you can find and speak to this daimone."

"But what could we bring it?" Matthias asked. "We have nothing-" Then he halted and Anna saw by his crafty look hat he had thought of something. He reached into his boot and drew out the prize of their extensive collection of knives, secreted here and there about their bodies. This one, looted from the corpse of a stout man richly dressed in the kind of clothes only a wealthy merchant or a noble could afford, had a good blade and a finely wrought hilt molded in the shape of a dragon's head, studded with emeralds for eyes. By this measure Anna saw Matthias trusted Otto fully; the knife was too valuable to show to anyone who might covet it and easily take it by force from a lad and his young sister.

Otto's eyes widened, for even by the moonlight the knife's quality was evident. "That is a handsome piece," he said. "And a worthy gift, if you can get so far."

"But how will we get into the cathedral?" asked Matthias. "The Eika chieftain lives there, doesn't he? Does he ever come out?"

The slow quiet brush of summer's wind, the night breeze off the river, stirred Otto's hair as he considered. Anna smelted on its wings the distant tang of iron and the forge, a bare taste under the stench of the tanning pits so near at hand. The man sighed at last, coming to some conclusion. "It is time to trust others. This information I cannot gain on my own. Let us pray, children, to Our Lady and Lord. Let us pray that we weak mortal folk can join together against our heathen enemies, for now we must trust to others who are no kin of ours except that we are humankind standing together against the savages." With this he left them.

The next night he brought a woman, stooped, scarred, and weary. She stared for a long time at the children and said at last, "It is a miracle they could have survived the slaughter. It is a sign from St.

Kristine." She went away again, and he gave them their nightly ration of food.

The next night he brought a young man who had broad shoulders but such a weight on them that he looked as bent with age as a man twice his years. But seeing the children, he lifted up and became a man proud of his youth and strength again. "We'll show those damned savages," he said in a low voice.

"We'll never let them have these. We'll beat them in this. That will lend us strength in the days ahead." The next night Otto brought a robust woman who still wore her deacon's robes though they were now stained, torn, and dirty. But she nodded, seeing the children-not surprised, for surely she had by now heard tell of them. She bent her head over clasped hands. "Let us pray," she murmured.

It had been a long time since Anna had prayed. She had forgotten the responses, but she traced around the smooth wood of her Circle of Unity carefully with a finger as the deacon murmured the holy words of God, for that was the prayer she knew best. Otto watched her, as he always watched her: with tears in his eyes.

"This is a sign from God," the deacon said after her prayer. "So will They judge our worthiness to escape this blight, if we can save these children who are no kin of ours and yet are indeed our children, given into our hands, just as all who live within the Circle of Unity are the children of Our Lady and Lord." Otto nodded solemnly.

The deacon rested a hand on Matthias' shoulder, as if giving a blessing. "Those who get water from the river and bring it here have spoken now with those who get water for the smithies, and of those in the smithies some carry weapons to the cathedral, where the chieftain sits in his chair and oversees all.

Other slaves who sweep and clean the cathedral meet at times with those who carry weapons from the smithies, and this information they have given us." She paused at a noise, but it was only the wind banging a loose shutter. "The chieftain leaves the cathedral four times each day to take his dogs to the necessarium-" "The necessarium?" asked Anna.

This question stirred the first faint smile Anna had seen on any of the slaves' faces, even on Otto's. "Pits. Holes dug in the ground where such creatures relieve themselves, for even such as they are slaves to their bodies. As are all of us bound to mortal matter. Now hush, child. Though it was a fair question, you must listen carefully to my words. Once each day all Eika leave the cathedral, with their dogs and the few slaves who attend them there. They go to the river to perform their nightly ablutions-"

She raised a hand to forestall Anna's question. "Their bath. At this time, which is the time Vespers would be sung each evening, the cathedral is empty." "Except for the daimone," said Otto.

"If such a creature truly exists. So say the slaves who clean there, but it may be that their minds are disordered by their proximity to the savages, for none has been allowed close to this creature, which is said to be chained with iron to the holy altar. By their description it seems to be more of a dog than a man. One man said it has human speech, but another said it can only yip and howl and bark. To this plan, if the saint grants us a miracle, we must trust. Now do you understand?" She asked this of Matthias and studied him carefully in the moon's waning light as he nodded, once, to show he understood. Anna nodded also and took Matthias' hand because she was so frightened.

"Tonight," said the deacon. She looked at Otto and he nodded, though his hands clenched.

"Tonight?" asked Anna in a whisper. "So soon-?" Impulsively she darted forward and clasped her arms round Otto's body. His clothes hung on him, a once stout man made thin by privation and grief, yet still he felt sturdy to her. He held her tightly against him, and she felt his tears on her cheeks.

"We must move immediately," said the deacon. "You might be discovered any day. It is indeed a miracle you have not been found before this." She frowned, and the moonlight painted her face in stark, suffering lines. "We know not if some fool will betray us all, thinking to gain favor in the eyes of the Eika.

But there is no favor to be gained with the savages. They are no kin to us. They have no mercy for their own kind, and less than that for us, and so shall we have no mercy for them. Now. Make your farewells, children. You will not see Otto again."

Anna wept. It was too hard to leave him behind, the only person besides Matthias who had shown her kindness since her parents died.

"Take news," said Otto. He still held Anna, but she knew he spoke to Matthias. "Take news to others that some are yet alive in this city, that we are made slaves. Tell them the Eika are massing and building their strength, that they are using us to forge weapons and craft armor for them."

"We'll come back for you," said Matthias, his own voice choked with tears. Anna could not speak, could only cling. Otto stank of the puering pits, but they all of them stank of the tannery; it was a good scent to her now, a familiar one that promised safety. Out beyond the tanning pits lay the great wide world which she no longer knew or trusted. "Ai, Lady," whispered Otto. He kissed Anna's hair a final time. "Perhaps it is worse this way: that you have given me hope. I will wait for you, as well as I can. If you live, if I survive, if we are reunited, then I will be as your father."

"Come, children," said the deacon, taking their hands after gently prying Anna free from Otto's grasp.

Anna cried as she was led away. She looked back to see Otto staring after them, hands working at his sides, opening and closing, and then his face was lost to her, hidden by night and distance.

The deacon took them to the edge of the fetid trench where the slaves relieved themselves. "Wait here," she said. "A man will come for you."

She left and returned to the building where the slaves slept. Somewhat later, the young man they had met before arrived.

"Come," he said, hoisting Anna onto his back. "We must run all the way to the forge." So they ran, hiding once for the man to catch his breath and a second time when they heard the howling of the dogs nearby, but they saw nothing. Only ghosts walked the city at night. It had been so long since Anna had ventured out into the ruined streets that the open spaces and angular shadows, the simple emptiness, made chills crawl like spiders up and down her skin.

The young man left them, quite unceremoniously, by another trench, this one equally filled with the stink of piss and diarrhea. But it was yet a good, decent, human smell, not like the dry metallic odor of the savages.

A woman found them there. She stared at first, then handled them, touching their lips, their hair, their ears.

"You are real," she said. "Real children. They murdered mine. Come. There is no time." She led them at a loping run farther into the labyrinth of the city, on to another trench, another group of slaves. By this way, from trench to trench, they passed through the city.

"That is our only freedom," said the man who took them at last within sight of the cathedral even as they saw the first stain of light in the eastern sky. "They are savages, the Eika, but they cannot stand the least stink of human piss or shit near them. I've seen a man killed for loosing his bowels where he was not meant to, though he could not help himself. So we may come out to relieve ourselves, one by one, and if we say we are having the cramping, then we are allowed a little more time. Now. This is as far as I or any of us can take you. Hide here, under these rags next to the trench, for the Eika never come near these trenches. Do not move, do not stir, even if you hear the dogs. Perhaps they will discover you and kill you. We,all will pray that they do not. Be patient. Wait out the day. You will know by the light and by the horn they blow and by the great size of the procession when they go down to the river. Be careful, though, for they do not all go; some remain behind to guard the slaves who sleep in that building across the way, which they call the mint. For all I know, some may remain behind here in the cathedral as well.

What is inside the cathedral I do not know. That you must discover for yourselves. May God go with you."

He clasped their hands in his, first Anna and then Matthias, as the sign of their kinship. Then he directed them to lie flat and covered them with the stinking, filthy rags. Anna heard his footsteps recede.

Something crawled over her hand. She choked off a gasp. She dared not move, hardly dared breathe.

But for the first time in so many days and weeks she held an odd, light feeling in her heart. It took a long time to decide what it was, and finally she recalled Otto's last words to them:

"You have given me hope."

Amazingly, even almost smothered as she was by the foul-smelling heap of rags, she slept.

Howls woke her. She jerked up and at once Matthias shoved her down to keep her still. She made no sound.

Rags slipped, giving her a view of the steps of the cathedral and avenue. Not five paces from her, a man stopped, turning his back to the pile of rags, and pissed into the trench. Then, straightening his clothes, he edged closer and crouched down. Of all the slaves she had seen he looked best kept; his tunic was not encrusted with dirt, though it was not precisely clean either. He toyed with the rope belt hung low on his thin hips and glanced back once over his shoulder, toward the cathedral steps. Through the gap in the rags Anna could see on those steps another slave. This person-she could not tell if it was a man or a woman- washed the gleaming white stone steps with rags and a bucket of water.

The man cleared his throat and spoke in a rush. "As soon as all have gone down the road, run inside into the nave. Stay in the shadows if you can and go to the end, where you will find the altar. There you will find the dai-mone. Approach it softly. It can be violent, or so we have seen. None of us speaks to it. That is forbidden."

He stood and walked away, and that was the last they saw of him, for first he vanished from their restricted view and then, coming back into sight on the steps, he was suddenly engulfed by dogs.

A horn blasted, a sharp, painful sound. A swarm of dogs surged down the stairs, growling and barking and yipping and howling like mad things. Anna whimpered and then stuck a hand in her mouth, biting down hard, to stop herself from crying out loud. They were monsters, huge hulking things as tall at the shoulder as she was, with long lean haunches and massive shoulders and yellow eyes that sparked with demon's fire. Their mouths hung open perpetually to display their great teeth and red, lolling tongues.

They bowled over the two slaves, overwhelmed them until all she could see was a frenzy of dogs, roiling and leaping and biting each other and only God knew what else. She shut her eyes and groped for her Circle. Matthias choked down a sob; his grip on her tightened. She dared not look. She did not want to see.

A voice roared, a great bellowing powerful shout. She squinched her eyes shut as hard as she could, but Matthias tugged on her and her eyes opened. Eika strode down the steps now, sickly things with their scaled hides. Yet each one, though a savage with nothing of humankind in it, had a brutish strength and the gleam of animal cunning in its bearing and in its sharp ugly face. They grabbed the frenzied dogs by their back legs and yanked them away, struck them hard blows with their clawed hands or the hafts of their spears. The Eika yipped and howled at the dogs as if they were kin and could understand each other in their beast's language.

Behind them came the oddest looking pair of Eika she had yet seen. The first was a huge brawny creature dressed in gold-and-silver chains studded with bright gems, and its companion was an Eika as scrawny as the human slaves and itself clothed only in a single rag tied about its hips. A leather pouch hung from the belt around its waist; it carried a small wooden chest braced against one scrawny hip. The huge Eika waded into the seething mass of dogs and proceeded to strike about himself, roaring and laughing as he tossed dogs aside and beat them away from their prey.

One dog at last broke away and bounded down the steps. Many of the Eika warriors followed after it. As if this defection signaled their defeat, the rest of the dogs retreated from the Eika chieftain's wrath-or his humor, for why else would he station slaves on the steps right then, knowing what the dogs would likely do to them?-and loped away down the steps, turning to follow the others down toward the river. As they cleared the steps, their passing revealed two ravaged, red heaps of-This time she clamped her eyes shut and did not look, willed herself not to look, and heard only Matthias gulping under his breath, trying to keep silent because any noise would doom them.

Finally he whispered, "They've gone. They've carried the two-them-away. Come now, Anna.

Don't lose heart now when we're so close."

He scrabbled at the rags, dug himself free, and jumped to his feet, then yanked her up. He ran and she ran behind, stumbling, gasping for breath because she was so scared and because she had almost forgotten how to run and because her legs were stiff from so many days lying still. They came under the shadow of the cathedral wall and ran up the steps. Blood still stained the stone next to an overturned bucket of water, and runnels of pink water seeped down the steps toward the avenue below.

Rags were strewn everywhere, stained with blood.

The great doors stood open, but because the sun set behind the cathedral, little light penetrated the interior by this, the eastern entrance. They ducked inside, and at once Matthias threw himself against a wall and tugged Anna down beside him. He put a finger to his lips. They stood there in shadow and listened.

And heard . . . the music of chains, shifting, whispering, as some creature tested its bonds and found them as unyielding as ever.

Matthias crept forward to hide behind one of the great pillars of stone that supported the great roof. Here, in the side aisle, they remained in shadow. The nave itself, the vast central aisle of the cathedral, was brighter, lit by windows built high into the towering walls that faced north and south.

Brightest of all was the altar, lying in a wash of light from seven tall windows set in a semicircle at the far end of the church, encircling the Hearth. A heap of refuse lay next to the altar. Matthias slipped forward to the next pillar, using it as cover to get close to the altar. Anna followed him. She wanted to grab hold of his belt, to cling, but she did not. This she had learned: They must both be free to move quickly.

It was silent. The stone muffled sound, and the outside world seemed far away in this place-once a haven but now the camp of savages. She felt their musty scent against her the way dry things dragged against the skin cause a tingling in fingertips and neck; she smelled it the way a storm announces itself by a certain feeling in the air long before the first rolling peal of thunder is heard and the first slash of lightning seen in the dark sky. They ruled this space now, which had once been sacred to God.

She caught up to Matthias and leaned on the cool, stippled stone. He touched her briefly, then darted forward to the next pillar. *The refuse heap by the altar stirred and came to life.

Not rags but dogs, starting out of sleep, scrambling up, alerted.

"Run," moaned Matthias. He shoved her back, toward the door, but it was too late, the door was too far away. They could never run as fast as the dogs, only hide from them. And there was no place to hide here.

The dogs bolted toward them. Anna ran, stumbled, jerked herself up.

"No!" she screamed, for Matthias had run out into the nave, out into the path of the dogs to try to distract them so that she could run free.

"Go! Go!" he shouted.

But she ran to him. It was better to die with him, torn to pieces by the dogs, than live if he were dead. Ai, Lady. What did it matter? There was no way to live in this city except as a slave of the Eika, if that could be called life.

She reached him just before the dogs did, the hideous dogs. She flung her arms around her brother and braced herself for the impact, for death. Please, Lady, let it be quick.

A hoarse cry-not human words, not any words she recognized-came from the direction of the altar, punctuated by noises that sounded like growls and yips. The dogs clattered to a halt, nails slipping and sliding on the stone paving, and they stopped a body's length from the children, growling, glaring with sparking yellow eyes. Then, when more of those hoarse words came, they slunk away, tails down, still growling but now submissive to the creature that rose out of the heap of rags by the altar, a heap which was not rags after all but the daimone itself.

Not human, certainly not that. This much Anna saw easily in the fading light that penetrated the cathedral nave. It was tall and human-shaped, but the Eika were human-shaped and they were no kin to humans. It had covered itself modestly with clothing, though cloth and tunic were shredded by teeth marks and as ragged as if strips had been torn off at random. Gold cloth bound its forearms, this also torn and ripped in many places as though the dogs had gnawed and worried at it, seeking flesh underneath. It wore an iron collar around its neck; to the collar was fastened a thick iron chain, and that chain was fastened to the heavy block of stone that was the altarstone, the Hearth of Our Lady.

It stared at them with eyes as inhumanly green as the emeralds that studded Matthias' fancy dagger, and as if that stare reminded him of the chosen gift, Matthias slipped the dagger out from his boot and held it forward, hilt first, in offering.

"Come," said the daimone in its hoarse voice.

They dared not disobey, for it spoke in the tone of a creature used to obedience and, in any case, it controlled the dogs by some daimonic magic. And why not? It was not human, it was an aetherical creature, something that flew bodiless through the vast impenetrable heavens far above the mortal earth, far above the changing moon; it would not fear human children nor hesitate to command them.

They crept closer, and this time Anna held tight to Matthias' belt with one hand and her Circle with the other, chewing at her lower lip. She sniffed back tears, but she did not flinch as the dogs circled them, smelling their feet and nipping forward only to be brought to heel by the harsh words of the daimone.

Closer yet, then close enough that Matthias could reach out and hand the knife to the daimone. It took it and with sudden furtive haste glanced around the shadowed nave, peering into the colqnnades, then tucked the precious weapon in among the filthy rags it wore to cover itself. It stood there silent, listening, and they grew silent as well, but Anna heard nothing and Matthias made no sound.

Anna stared. She thought that, perhaps, when the enchanter had called the daimone down from the heavens and when the magic had imprisoned it in a body made of earth, the daimone had tried-given now no choice-to form itself into a human body. For it was very like a human: human eyes though they were of a stark green color and somewhat pulled at the corners, as if distorted; human skin though it had the tint of bronze as if the metals hidden in earth had leached out to the surface; a human face though with broad, prominent cheekbones; and no trace of beard though it was clearly male. But had not God made humans both male and female? Why should They not make daimones likewise?

And it spoke human speech, though slowly, as if not much practiced at it. To the dogs, in that other language of beasts, it spoke more fluidly.

"Why have you given me this knife?" it asked. Its voice likewise, she thought: a human voice but with that hoarse edge to it, not quite formed.

Matthias dipped his chin for courage and faced the creature squarely. "In trade for the secret of St. Kristine, who led the other children to safety." "Who led them to safety," it echoed. It stared at them for what seemed forever until Anna thought it had not understood what Matthias said, only mimicked the sounds. The dogs sniffed at her feet, and a hundred prickles ran like poisonous creatures up and down her back. The Eika procession would return at any moment. The creature flung up its head as a dog does at a sudden sound. "Quickly," it said. "Beyond the tower stair lies a door to the crypt. In the crypt lies the path you seek. Go free." That fast, it changed before their eyes to a mad thing. It grabbed the heavy chain that bound it and yanked violently. It threw back its head and howled, and the dogs set up such a yammering and howling and barking that Anna was deafened.

Matthias grabbed her hand. Together they ran into the shadow of the colonnade and all the way back along the nave while the daimone hammered the chain against the stone paving like a wild beast and the dogs leaped and barked around it, some nipping in at its body to be met by elbow or fist.

"God help the poor creature," muttered Matthias. They came to the end of the colonnade and into the long en-tryway which ran perpendicular to the nave, itself now draped in shadows as the sun set outside and the interior darkened and the poor mad daimone finally ceased its frantic and useless efforts to free itself. Magic it might have, to control the dogs, but not magic enough to free itself from the Eika enchanter.

The door that opened onto the stairwell which led to the crypt stood before them, dark, somber wood scored with deep scratches as if someone had clawed at it, trying to get in. Matthias set a hand on the latch, jiggling it tentatively to make sure it wasn't stuck or squeaky.

In the new silence Anna heard the noise first, the scuff of a foot on stone. She whirled and then, because she could not help herself, let out a low moan of fear. Matthias looked back over his shoulder.

She felt him stiffen and grope for the knife he always tucked in at his belt.

Too late.

An Eika stood in the shadows not ten strides from them, next to the great doors. It stepped out from its hiding place and stared at them. It was tall, as most of the savages were, but more slender than bulky; its body winked and dazzled in the last glint of sun through the high windows because it wore a girdle of surpassing beauty, gold-and-silver chains linked together and bound in with jewels like a hundred eyes all staring at them, who were at last caught.

She was too terrified even to whimper. She loosened her hand from her Circle and traced it, a finger all the way around the smooth wood grain, the Circle of God's Mercy, as her mother had taught her many years ago: the only prayer she knew.

The creature moved no farther, not to retreat, not to charge.

But Anna saw the strangest thing she had yet seen in her entire life, stranger than slaughter and death and the horrible dogs and rats feeding on a bloated corpse. The creature wore a necklace, a plain leather thong knotted in several places as if it had broken more than once and been tied back together, and on that leather thong, resting against its gleaming copper-scaled chest, hung a wooden Circle of Unity, the sign of the church. Just like hers.

Still it did not move, nor did it raise its head and howl an alarm. But, just like her, it lifted a single finger and traced the round shape of the Circle, as she had done.

Matthias shook himself as if coming out of a dream. He lifted the latch, grasped Anna by the arm.

"Don't look," he said. "Don't look back. Just follow me."

He dragged her inside, shutting the door after them though there was no light to see by. Together they stumbled down the stairs into the black crypt.

No one-no thing, no creature, no sound of pursuit- came after them.

"It's a miracle," she whispered, and then stumbled as she took a step down only to find there were no more steps; the impact jarred her entire body. She lost hold of Matthias and groped frantically, found him again, and clutched his hand so tight he grunted in pain, but she would not lessen her grip on him. She could see nothing, not even her hand in front of her face.

"Look," whispered Matthias, and his whisper faded into the blackness, and she heard it filter away into some vast empty unknowable expanse.

She saw it first as luminescence, a faint glowing light. Then, as her eyes adjusted, she gasped and gagged, for the crypt before them was filled with skeletal corpses and all of them in the same stage of decay although they no longer stank of rotting flesh.

"Look there," whispered Matthias. He pointed, and she could see his arm lifted in the gloom and see beyond it a throbbing light as faint as the soul's breath might appear if it were visible to the human eye. "Come!" he said urgently, and they began the gruesome task of picking their way through the litter of corpses.

"Fighting men, these were," he said. "Look. Some are still wearing surcoats, what you can see of them."

Some indeed wore gold surcoats bearing the sigil of a black dragon. Anna did not know what this meant, only that the one time she had seen a procession go by, bearing a banner to mark the passage of a noble lord or lady, it had not been this one but some other creature, a hound perhaps or a horse.

This mystery-who were these soldiers? Had they died in the last battle, when the city was overwhelmed?

How had they come to be dumped in this holy crypt like so much refuse?-she could not answer.

Gaping skulls grinned up at them, but Anna no longer feared them. They were dead; they had fought to save their kin, their human brothers and sisters, and so they would not disturb her and Matthias now. In this way she was able to find a path through their bodies, to nudge them gently aside when necessary. Once, when she saw a knife protruding from a rib cage, she carefully pried it out and took it for herself, thanking the poor dead soul who had in this way saved it for her. You never knew when you might need another knife.

Beyond the dead soldiers they followed the light farther into the crypt, past the gravestones of the holy dead, those who were once biscops and deacons and good men and women who labored for the church, until they came to a secret corner and found there what the daimone had promised them: a staircase leading down into the earth, illuminated by the whisper of light that had led them there.

Anna felt hope swell in her heart, of itself a light against the darkness of despair and dread.

Matthias hesitated and then, not looking back, started down the stairs, testing each one carefully before he set his full weight on it. Because he still held her hand, because she feared more than anything else in the world losing him, she had to follow. Yet she looked back over her shoulder- though she could see nothing but darkness behind them- and spoke a solemn vow:

"We'll come back for you, Papa Otto, for you and all the others but especially for you."

The stairs led down a long way and all of it in darkness. They felt their way along, groping along the wall with the flats of their hands, and when at last the stairs ended and the wall curved and then straightened, a breeze caught her lips and she tasted something strange on it, something she had not tasted for many months: fresh air untainted by a city's death, and green things growing in plain good earth, not in the crevices between fallen stones.

They walked for a long while, resting a few times although never for long.

When they emerged from the tunnel, it was dawn.

They came out of a cave's mouth to see a field of oats run wild and a few buildings that looked abandoned. Behind the narrow cave mouth rose a ridge of rock and up this Matthias scrambled, Anna right behind him. From the ridge they looked back over the empty countryside to the city below, resting like a jewel on an island in the middle of the broad river. From this distance one would never guess what lay inside. It looked like a perfect toy model of a city, untouched, gently gleaming in the early morning sunlight.

"I should have killed it," said Matthias.

"Killed what?" she asked. "The Eika?" Without thinking, she clasped her Circle of Unity. She could not stop thinking about the Circle of Unity that had hung at its chest.

"The daimone," he said. "I should have killed it with the knife. Then it would have been free of the mortal body and able to go home to the heavens. Wouldn't that have been a better trade?"

Anna shook her head. "I don't think any human can kill a daimone. They aren't like us, they don't have our blood, and maybe they don't have blood at all the way we do. You would just have made it mad."

He sighed. "Maybe so. But I pity that poor soul. If it has a soul."

She hesitated, but then she asked, "Do Eika have souls?"

"Of course not!"

"But that one-it saw us, and it let us go. It wore a Circle, Matthias. If it wore a Circle, isn't it kin of ours because it also believes in God?"

"It just stole it from a body and wears it as a trophy. I don't know why it let us go. Maybe St.

Kristine watched over us and blinded its eyes." He turned his back on the city and began to climb back down the hill. "Come, Anna. I don't know how far we'll have to walk before we find people."

But St. Kristine, while surely saving them, had not blinded the Eika's eyes. Anna knew that. It had seen her touch her Circle, and it had copied her movement. It had let them go, knowingly, deliberately. Just as every human slave in the city had conspired to set them free, which was only what they would have done for their own kin.

It was a beautiful summer's day and they walked free through bright woods and drank from free-flowing streams and ate, carefully, a few moist berries. At dusk Matthias saw a campfire. The astonished woodsmen-set here in the forest to hunt and to keep an eye out for Eika incursions- gladly traded them food for one of the extra knives, and let them sleep huddled by the coals. In the morning one woodsman escorted the children to the nearest village.

"Let me give you some advice," said the woodsman, who was small and wiry and cheerful, and who had lost one finger on his left hand. "There's little room in Steleshame these days, with all the refugees. But you've value in the news you bring, so don't sell it cheap, and you might get to stay there.

Ask for an apprenticeship, lad, and something to keep your sister busy with and cared for until she's old enough to marry. Lady's Blood! It is a miracle. We never thought to see any other folk walk alive out of the city. How did you survive? How did you get free?"

Matthias told a brief version of the story, but when he got to the end, he didn't mention the Eika.

For the Eika was not part of Matthias' story. And yet the Eika puzzled Anna most. But she kept silent.

All humans hated the Eika. They had every reason to, for the Eika were savages and their dogs the most hideous creatures living.

"Your brother will no doubt find work with a tanner, child," the woodsman said to Anna. "Have you any skills?"

She did not mean to say it. It popped out unbidden. "When I'm old enough, I'll travel like the fraters do. I'll bring the Holy Word and the Circle of Unity to the Eika. They can't be meant to be savages."

He laughed, but not unkindly, only shaking his head as adults did when children said something they considered silly. Matthias shushed her and made a face.

But the day was very beautiful, and they were free, and perhaps if they brought news that slaves still lived in the city, someone-some noble lady or lord-might lead an expedition to free the others. If only Papa Otto and the rest could hold on for that long.

She thought for a long while as she walked through the woodland. She and Matthias had lost both father and mother and been given into the callous care of their uncle. Yet it was not their uncle-their only remaining kinsman- who had saved them. He had tried only to save himself and she supposed she would never know if he still walked among the living or rotted among the forgotten dead. It was Papa Otto-no blood father of theirs-and the other slaves who had saved them. If they, who were not her true kin, could act as kin, then was it not possible that even an Eika could become kin? This thought she held like a gift in her heart. Matthias had given the daimone the knife, which it could use to defend itself or free itself if such were possible, and in exchange it had given them freedom.

But in the end, after all that had happened, it was the solitary Eika who had stayed its hand and let them go.

PART ONE DIVINATION - THE MUSIC OF WAR

He smelled the storm coming before the first rumble of thunder sounded far in the distance. The dogs stirred restlessly and nipped at him, but he slapped them aside until they whined and hunkered down at his feet.

Bloodheart appeared not to have heard the distant thunder. The Eika chieftain sat on his throne, just out of reach of his captive's chains, and measured leg and arm bones that had been scraped clean of flesh. Tossing aside those he did not want, he sawed off the knobby joint ends of the bones until he had half a dozen smooth white lengths of various sizes collected in his lap. With a sharp stick he hollowed out the bones, cleaning out the marrow. Then, using a stone burin mounted on a stick, he drilled holes down the length of the hollow bones. All this he worked in silence, except for the hasp of the obsidian saw, the rasp of wood scraping, and his muted grunting breaths as he twirled stick between palms to drive the drill through.

Beyond, other sounds made a counterpoint to Blood-heart's task: The old priest crouched on the marble floor as he tossed out finger bones into a random pattern read and swept aside; outside, Eika soldiers played a game on the cathedral steps which involved a head in a sack; thunder muttered far away, and the Veser River, a low roar too faint here for human ears to hear, sang its constant familiar chant.

The dogs, slinking away, gnawed at the discarded bones, cracking them open for the marrow inside. The most faithful brought a few bones back to drop at his feet, his portion as their lord. God knew he was hungry all the time now, but never let it be said he had stooped to this: eating human remains.

He fought back the shattering despair. It came on him in waves as out of nowhere, out of the shadows or out of Bloodheart's enchantment that shackled him here, bound by more than iron. Caught in a sudden fit of uncontrollable snaking, he clutched chains in his hands and scraped them violently against the marble floor until his skin was rubbed raw and the chains polished to a shining gleam but with no least weakening of their heavy links.

Only then, when the dogs began to growl around him sensing his weakness, when his blood dripped on the pale marble to form little rosettes of agony against cold stone, did he remember himself, cuff them into submission, and look up.

Teeth bared, Bloodheart grinned down from his chair. " ," he said, his voice as whispery as the flutter of birds in the eaves. "Shall I make a flute out of your bones when you are dead?"

"You will never kill me," he replied in his hoarse voice. Some days, these were the only words he remembered how to say.

But Bloodheart was not even listening. Instead, the Eika chieftain lifted the smooth white tubes one by one to his lips, testing their tone. Some breathed high, some low, and on them, switching from one to the next, he played a rag eed melody while at last lightning flashed, seen through the great cathedral windows, and thunder broke overhead, and the Eika soldiers outside laughed uproariously in the sudden drenching rain and continued their game.

' months!" King Henry paced under the awning while rain drizzled beyond the overhang, dripping down the sides of his tent, curling down tent poles in slow streams. "I have wasted two months on these damned stubborn Var-ren lords when we could have been marching on Gent!"

Liath had taken shelter under a wagon; with night watch ahead, she had been permitted an afternoon's nap. Thank the Lady the rain had not drenched the ground. She was still dry, and now she listened as Henry's advisers rallied around him, soothing his temper.

"You could not have left Varre behind that quickly," said his favored cleric, Sister Rosvita, in her usual calm voice. "You have done the right thing, Your Majesty, the only thing you could do. Your anger toward the Eika is justified, and when the time is right, they will suffer your wrath."

"The time will never be right!" Henry was in one of his rare sour moods. Liath could see only legs and torsos from this angle, and while any soul would have known Henry by the belt he wore embossed and painted with the badges of each of the six duchies whose princes owed allegiance to him as king regnant, on this day he was also recognizable by the sheer irritable energy he projected as he paced from one corner of the carpet to the other. "Five sieges we have laid in, in the last two months."

"None of them lasted more than five days," said Margrave Judith with disdain. "None of these Varren nobles had any stomach for a fight, knowing Lady Sabella was defeated."

"Your Majesty." Now Helmut Villam weighed in, and the others paused to listen respectfully to the words of a man whose age and experience of hard campaigns eclipsed even that of the king. "Once Lady Svanhilde surrenders to your authority, we can turn east. You have sent what Eagles you can to the Wendish dukes and nobles, to raise the alarm. But do not forget that after the battle we fought near Kassel, your forces are too weak in any case to attack the Eika at Gent. It will take time to assemble a new army." "Damn Sabella," said Henry. "I was too lenient with her."

"She is our sister, Henry," said Biscop Constance. Though the rebuke was mild, only one of Henry's powerful younger sisters would have dared utter it.

"Half sister," muttered the king, but he had stopped pacing.

"She is safely confined under my authority in Autun, where I will soon return," added Constance, who despite her youth had the grave authority of a much older woman. He grunted, acknowledging this truth.

They began to talk about the disposition of this latest siege, invested yesterday afternoon, and what route they would take when they at last marched east through northern Arconia back into Wendar.

The rain slackened and stopped. Liath wormed out from under the wagon, strapped on sword and quiver and draped her saddle-bags over her shoulder, then went hunting for food. Rations had been scarce the past several weeks. Hard as it was to feed the king's progress, it was more difficult still in these days of summer before the harvest came in. That they marched through lands hostile toward the king did not help matters any. Although the former kingdom of Varre was by right of succession under Henry's rule, the number of recalcitrant nobles and reluctant church leaders in Varre amazed even Liath, who had long ago gotten used to being an outsider.

Yet despite the hardships, she was as content as she could be. She had food, most of the time, and such shelter as a wagon or tent awning afforded. She was free. For now, it was enough.

The camp sprawled in a ragged half circle around a wooden palisade, the outer ring of Lady Svanhilde's fortress. The two siege engines and three ballistas sat just out of range of an arrow's shot from the wall; hastily dug ditches protected their flanks, and a wall of mantelets shielded the men who guarded and worked the machines. On either side of the mantelets a picket of stakes stood, protecting the camp from a charge of cavalry. The first line of mud-streaked tents, some listing under the weight of rain puddles caught in canvas, stood somewhat back from these stakes, and the tents of nobles and king yet farther back, almost intone trees. The patchwork of tents and wagons left many gaps and wide stretches of open ground, but Henry had been careful to avoid trampling the ripening fields. He needed grain to feed his retinue.

Certain of the camp followers had set up stalls or brought wares from nearby villages to sell.

Indeed, the army's camp resembled a large disorganized autumn market more than it did any other army Liath had ever seen.

In Arethousa, a precise order of march prevailed and every tent had its specific site rated in order of proximity to the emperor.

In Andalla, the Kalif had his own compound made of manteletlike frames draped with bright fabric. Only the favored few were allowed inside this compound, and the Kalif himself from his place of seclusion ordered the generals who led his troops into battle.

In that almost fatal passage across the deserts west of Kartiako, so many years ago now, she remembered a silent and deadly army whose robes were the color of sand and who seemed to move as with the wind's speed and sudden gusting shifts of direction. She and Da and a dozen others were all that had survived of the one hundred souls who had started the trek in a vast caravan. She had been so hungry, and too young truly to understand why there had been no food toward the end of that terrible journey.

Now she stared, caught by the enticing smell of a rack of pig meat roasting over a fire. The robust woman tending it looked her over.

"Any coin?" she demanded. Her accent had the broad Varren lilt. "What do you have to trade?"

Liath shrugged and made to move on. She had nothing, only her status as a King's Eagle.

"Here, friend." A Lion halted beside her. Ragged around the edges of his well-worn tunic, still, he had a friendly smile. "Don't just walk away. We serve the king, and such as her must feed the king's servants."

The woman spit on the ground. "If I feed the king's servants all that I have, for no return, then I'll have nothing to feed my own kin."

"You came to take coin off of us, good woman," said the Lion with a laugh, "so don't complain if you must feed those of us who have no coin. We only came heje because your Varren lords rebelled against the king's" authority. Otherwise we'd not have been graced with the vision of your beautiful face."

This was too much. She smiled at his smooth flattery, then recalled her irritation. "It isn't my fault the nobles quarrel. And it wasn't Lady Svanhilde that followed the king's sister, it was her reckless eldest son, Lord Charles. Poor woman. She had only boy children and loved them too well."

"My mother had only boys," retorted the Lion, "but we none of us gave her reason to be ashamed. Come now, give this loyal Eagle something to eat."

Grudgingly, the woman did so, a fresh piece of pork spitted on a twig. The Lion handed her a round of flat bread, coarse flour mixed with a paste of dried berries, their usual rations when all else was gone. It was still warm from baking.

"Thank you," she said, not quite knowing how to respond to his kindness except to identify herself. "I'm called Liath."

"I'm known as Thiadbold. You're the Eagle who rode in from Gent," he added. "We remember you. Those of us who serve the king, and who don't have noble kin-" Here he grinned. He had a shock of red hair and part of one ear missing, the lobe sliced cleanly off and healed now into a white dimple.

"-must watch out for each other as we may. Will you drink with us?"

The camp of Lions, sited near the king's tent, was much reduced. The first King Henry .had commissioned ten centuries of Lions. In these days, at least five of those centuries served in the eastern marchlands, protecting market cities and key forts from the incursions of the barbarians. Two Lion banners flew at this camp, marking the two centuries who marched with the king. But even considering those men who stood watch at this hour, Liath could not imagine that more than sixty men out of two hundred had survived the final battle with Lady Sabella.

"I can't," she said with some regret. She was not used to sitting and chatting in the company of soldiers-or anyone else, for that matter. Even some of the other Eagles thought her aloof and had told her so, being by nature an independent group of souls who had no reluctance to speak their minds when in the company of their own kind. "I stand watch tonight."

He nodded and let her go.

In the woods beyond she heard the bleating and lowing of livestock, kept well away from the tempting fields. Some soldiers, too, had been commandeered from those recalcitrant Varren lords who had fled home after Sabella's defeat and hoped to avoid the king's notice. These sat sullen in their own camps, watched by the king's men. A few brace of young noble lordlings and a handful of their rashest sisters had come along as well, some as hostages, some for the hope of war and booty at Gent or farther east in the marchlands. At least some of these had gear and horses but, all in all, Henry's army had lost much of its strength.

By the time she got back to the king's tent, she had licked every last spot of grease off her fingers. The king had gone to his bed and his noble companions had retired to their own tents.

Hathui handed her a skin filled with ale. "You'll want this," she said. "If we don't take this damned city by tomorrow, we'll be forced to drink water. Now I'm to bed." As the king's favored Eagle, she slept just inside the entrance to his tent, along with his other personal servants.

Liath got the night watch because she could see so well in the dark, but she also liked it because it left her alone with her thoughts. Some nights, though, her thoughts were no fit companion.

Gent.

She could not bear to think of Gent and what had happened there. Sometimes, at night, she still dreamed of the Eika dogs. It was better to remain awake at night, if she could.

With the sky overcast, she could not observe the heavens. Instead, she walked through her city of memory. Only standing alone through the night, freed from Hugh and no longer under the eye of Wolfhere, dared she risk the intense concentration it took to order her city and remember.

The city stands on a hill that is also an island. Seven walls ring the city, each one pierced by a gate. At the height, on a plateau, stands the tower.

But on this journey into the city, she crosses under the threshold of the third gate, which is surmounted by the Cup of Boundless Waters. She enters the fourth house to the left, passing under an archway of horn.

Here resides her recollection of Artemisia's Dreams, and here she walks into the first hall and enters the second chamber, first book, second chapter. Why do these dreams of the Eika dogs torment her? Do they mean something she ought to interpret, or are they just the memory of that awful last day in Gent?

But Artemisia gives her no respite, once she has read the various symbols installed in the little chamber, each one a trigger for some portion of the words written in the book.

" 'Let me tell you that if you want to make sense of your dream, it must be remembered from beginning to end, or you cannot interpret it. Only if you remember it completely, can you explore the point to which the vision leads.' '

But she never recalled beginning or end to the dreams, only the sudden madness of the dogs feeding among the pale tombs of the dead, in the darkness of the crypt at the cathedral in Gent.

Wind soughed through the trees. She shook herself and shifted. Her knees ached from standing so stiffly. Down by the siege engines several campfires burned. Figures shifted, a change of guard. She watched as a man's figure stooped, adding wood, then straightened and moved out of her sight into darkness. Drizzle started up, pattered for a little while, and gave way to a weighty night's stillness, more sticky than hot. One of the servants emerged from the tent, staggering with sleep, relieved himself, and went in again.

Slowly the clouds began to break up. Stars shone here and there through the rents, ragged patterns formed and concealed as quickly as she could recognize them. The waning crescent moon appeared in a gap, then vanished. Above, the wheel of the heavens turned and winter's sky rose-the sky seen in the late autumn and early winter evenings, here marking the advent of late summer's dawn. The first hint of light colored the tents and palisade wall a murky gray, gaining tone as, above, the faintest stars faded from view.

A man's figure moved down by the siege engines, scurrying along the wall of mantelets. One of the campfires was doused. She started forward in surprise, then saw half a dozen shadowy figures heave themselves over the mantelets and drop to the ground behind.

Raiders from the fortress.

"Hathui!" she cried, then drew her sword and dashed down the slope, shouting the alarm as she ran.

A horn sounded, and men began to yell. "To arms! To arms!"

As she ran through the foremost tents, soldiers fell in beside her or hurried before, all running to protect the front line. Below, a man screamed in pain. Swords rang, the clash of arms and the pound of blade against shield. A sudden fire bloomed at the base of the leftmost siege engine and by its unruly light she saw the skirmish unfold and spread as men leaped forward to beat down the flames while others took up blazing brands to look for their enemy-or start new fires.

Dawn grayed the horizon. As if in answer to the call to arms now ringing through camp, the gates of the fortress swung open. More than a score of mounted riders, pennants held high upon their up-raised spears, galloped through the yawning gate and drove down toward the engines.

Liath saw them coming, heard voices beyond her shout warnings, heard the shrill of horns from King Henry's camp as they blared a warning, but she had more pressing matters before her.

The raiders had put one ballista to the torch with a flaming pitch that refused to yield to water or blanket. A solitary Lion-one she didn't recognize except by his tabard-defended another ballista from three of the raiders. With torch and sword he held them at bay. Another raider lay dead, nearly decapitated, at his feet. They had not yet trapped the Lion against the ballista, but they would in a moment.

"Eagles don't fight, they witness." So Hathui always said. But he would die without her help.

She plunged in, parrying blows, and took up a position to his left. He greeted her with a slurred

"gud morn'n." Despite the odds, she sensed he was smiling. The raiders hesitated, faced with two where there had been one. She shifted, feinting to attack, when the Lion changed position beside her and his face fell within her view. His cheek had been split by a slash; a permanent toothy grin showed through the rivulets of blood. For an instant too long the ghastly grin caught her eye. One of the raiders rushed her from the left. She turned, catching his blow on her quillons, but the weight of his charge drove her to her knees. She strained up, locked in a test of strength as the man tried to force her down. The injured Lion thrust his lit torch into a second raider's face, stunning him, and then two more Lions ran up.

One was Thiadbold. She recognized him by his red hair; he had not had time to put on a helmet.

That fast, he drove his sword to its hilt through the abdomen of the raider who grappled with her. They stood embraced above her, the impaled man flushing and twitching, his sword arm pinned to his side by the body of the man who killed him. Thiadbold had wrapped his free arm tight around his prey, holding him as he would a shield, until he was sure that all of the fight had drained from the body. The raider's sword fell from his limp hand. Thiadbold stepped back to let the corpse fall, twisting his own sword free.

Liath rolled out of the way of the body, then jumped to her feet as the two remaining raiders gave ground-but not fast enough. Cut down, they dropped, screaming, and lay still.

The injured Lion turned to beat again at the fire that scorched the ballista. Blood dripped down his tabard.

"Fall back!" cried Thiadbold, his words underscored by a heavy drumming throb, the pound of hooves and the ominous call of a low-pitched horn. "To the camp! To the king!"

She saw at once what the ruse had been. The raid on the siege engines had diverted their attention from the picket of stakes that protected the flanks of the camp. The horsemen from the fortress pressed forward at full charge and with spears lowered. With the stakes now uprooted or cut down, they had a clear sweep into camp.

"We have too few to repel the charge!" cried Thiadbold "Eagle! Fall back!"

She obeyed, and they made room for her behind them, for of all the men hacking around at the remains of the raiding force, falling back to set a position against the charge of heavy horse, she was the only one without some kind of armor.

The injured Lion had salvaged bolts from the ballista and these he handed to his fellows. "Brace with these," he shouted, his voice heavily slurred. "It's our only chance to stop the charge. Eagle!" He nodded toward her, his sliced cheek still seeping blood. "Shoot into the faces of the horses. That might hurt their charge."

Men stumbled forward through the dawning light, forming a line where once the pickets had stood. New raiders, emboldened by the defensive posture of the king's troops, set to work on the now undefended engines.

"The king!" voices shouted far behind her. "The king rides forth!"

She hunched down behind the line of Lions and men-at-arms, a few of whom held the long ballista bolts inclined forward like spears. While the others braced themselves, spear butts dug into the ground, she sheathed her sword and readied her bow. Her mind had gone still and quiet; empty. She nocked, drew, and shot, but lost sight of the arrow in the gloom. The pounding of hooves drowned her; she could not even hear the Lions next to her speaking. Beyond, the fortress lay still. No footmen or archers had followed the lord's charge out the gates. She nocked another arrow, drew-The horsemen were upon them. She had only an instant to register their tabards, sewn with the device of a swan. The lead horseman, made bright by his shining mail and gleaming helm and the white coat of his horse, cleared them with a great leap. His fellows broke through, some of the horses jumping, some simply shattering the line with their weight. Only one horse faltered, screaming in pain as a spear caught it in the chest, and went down. A Lion dragged the rider from his horse.

She followed the charging horsemen with her nocked arrow but could not release it for fear of hitting the king's people. By now, all was chaos in the camp. The lord leading the charge had little interest in the infantry who hurried forward. His milites behind him, he headed for the tent that flew the king's banner: a huge red silk pennant marked with an eagle, a dragon, and a lion stitched in gold. His charge carried him through camp, scattering the disorganized troops who lay in his path.

King Henry had not waited for his lords. With a quilted jacket and steel cap he had mounted, taken up St. Perpet-ua's holy lance, and now, with no more than a dozen mounted riders at his back, he raced toward the fray. The king broke from a cluster of tents into the small parade that separated the high nobility from the rest of the camp. Henry drove his horse into a charge, lance lowered, and galloped forward in a headlong fury. Others, shouting, tried to divert his charge, but the king's horse was evidently possessed by the same fury that, smoldering for so long, had finally burst into full flame. These riders would feel the wrath that Sabella, as his kinswoman, had been spared.

From the opposite end of the parade, the lord and his retinue approached, also at full gallop. As they passed the last tent of the lower camp, the right leg of the lord's mount caught the guy rope, toppling the tent and throwing lord and horse to the ground with terrific force.

"Up, you!" cried Thiadbold, jerking Liath to her feet. A few men lay moaning or quiet on the ground around her. The rider, pulled from his horse, was dead.

She ran up the hill with the others.

Henry barely had time to pull up his charge as the lord's companions scattered in confusion. The king laid his lance against the man's chest. The lord's face was hidden by mail that draped down from the nasal of his gold-trimmed helmet.

"Yield!" cried the king in a voice that carried across the camp and caused a sudden stilling hand to press down on the battle. The man did not stir but, one by one, his companions were slain, disarmed, or forced to surrender.

"Liath! To me!" Liath ran over to Hathui and stood panting beside her. "Eagles don't fight," added Hathui in an undertone. "They witness. But you did well, comrade."

Henry did not move, simply sat his patient horse with the lance point pressed up under the mail, hard into the lord's vulnerable throat.

In this way he waited as his Wendish lords hurried to form up around him, the crippled Villam chief among them. Margrave Judith directed the mopup: prisoners herded into a group, horses tied up, the fires put out-although two of the ballistae had already collapsed into ashy heaps.

As the sun rose, the gates of the fortress yawned open again. A great lady, mounted on a brown mare whose trappings had as much gold and silver woven into them as a biscop's stole, rode between two deacons dressed in simple white and two holy fraters in drab brown. Her retinue, all unarmed, crowded behind her. Already a wailing had risen from the back of their ranks, keening and mourning.

Henry gestured with his free hand and his men parted to let Lady Svanhilde through his lines. She approached, was helped to dismount by one of her stewards, and knelt before the king.

"I beg you, Your Majesty," she said, her voice shaken with grief. "Let me see if my son yet lives.

I beg you, grant us your mercy. This was no plan of mine. He is a rash youth, and has listened too long to the poets singing the music of war."

"You would have been better served to come before me yesterday, when first we arrived," said the.king, but he withdrew his lance from the body.

Lady Svanhilde unbuckled the helm and drew it back. Her sudden gasp made clear what was not yet apparent to all. The young man was dead although no mark of war stained his body. He had died in the fall from his horse. His mother began to weep, but in a dignified way.

"This gives me no pleasure," said the king suddenly in a voice made hoarse by remembered grief.

"I, too, have lost a beloved son."

She pressed a hand to her heart and stared down for a long time on the slack face of the young man. She was an old woman, frail, with thin bones. When she stood, she needed help to rise. But pride shone in her face as she regarded the king who sat above her, still mounted, his holy lance given into the care of Helmut Villam. "He followed Lady Sabella, although I counseled against it."

"And your loyalties?" demanded Biscop Constance, who had come forward now that the fighting was over.

"Your Grace." Lady Svanhilde inclined her head, show ing more respect to the biscop than she had to the king. "We bow to the regnant."

Margrave Judith snorted. "Now that you are compelled to!"

"Necessity breeds hard choices," said the lady without flinching. "I will do what I am commanded, because I must."

"Let her be," said Henry suddenly. "Feed us this night, Lady Svanhilde, give us the tithe I ask for, and we will be on our way in the morning."

"What tithe is that?" Several Wendish lords gasped to hear a defeated noble question terms.

"I need men, horses, and armor to retake the city of Gent, which has fallen to the Eika. This is the tax I set upon you and all the other Varren nobles who followed Sabella. Her fight cost me much of my strength, which you and your countryfolk will return to me."

Lady Svanhilde poured the king's wine and served him with her own hands at the feast. Her children served his children, the two margraves, the biscop, and certain other high nobles whose rank demanded they be served with equal honor to the rest. Liath, standing with Hathui behind the king's chair, tried not to listen to the rumbling of her own stomach. As one of the lucky ones, she would get leftovers from the feast fed to the nobles.

As usual, Lady Tallia had pride of place beside her uncle, King Henry, but the young princess merely picked at her food, contenting herself with so little that Liath wondered how she could keep up her strength.

"As you see," said Henry to Lady Svanhilde, indicating Tallia, "Sabella's only child rides with me."

He looked carefully at the three children serving at the feast. One, a girl of about twelve years of age, had a face pale from crying; as her aunt's heir, she served the king's children, Theophanu and Ekkehard.

Svanhilde's two sons served the other high nobles. One was a boy of no more than eight, so nervous that a steward hovered at his elbow, helping him to set platters down without breaking them and to pour without spilling. The other was a boy somewhat older than Ekkehard, not yet at his majority. His manners were perfect and his expression grimly serious.

"These are your remaining children?" asked Henry.

Svanhilde gestured to a steward to bring more wine. "I have a son in the monastery my grandmother founded. This boy, Constantine-" She indicated the elder of the two boys. "-is to join the schola at Mainni next spring, when he turns fifteen."

"Let him join my schola instead," said the king. "Sister Rosvita supervises the young clerics and the business of the court. She would be glad to attend to his education."

"That would be a great honor," said the lady without emotion, glancing toward Lady Tallia. She, like everyone else there, understood that her son was now a hostage for her good behavior and continued support.

Hathui cleared her throat, shifting to stretch her back. "Indeed," she murmured so that only Liath could hear, "the king's schola has increased vastly in numbers in these last two months, so many young lords and ladies from Varre have come to join us. They almost make up for the lack of Princess Sapientia."

These sudden and occasional outbursts of sarcasm from Hathui never failed to surprise Liath. But since Hathui always grinned after speaking them, Liath could not be sure whether she disliked the nobles or merely found them amusing.

Liath followed the movements of young Constantine as he was brought before the king to kneel and be presented to Henry. He was even allowed to kiss the king's hand. Would she have wished for such a life? To be given into the king's schola, where she might study, write, and read all she wished-and be praised for it? If Da hadn't died-But Da had died. Da had been murdered.

She touched her left shoulder, where, when she wasn't riding, she usually draped her saddlebag.

She felt light, almost naked, without it, but she had to leave her gear wrapped in her cloak in the fortress stables. She hated to leave the bag anywhere, for fear someone would steal both it and, more importantly, the precious book hidden inside, but she'd had no choice. At least this time one of the Eagles had been left behind to guard all their various possessions while the others came to stand attendance on the king and remind these Varren lords of the king's magnificence and his far-reaching strength.

Lions stood here, too, ranged along the walls. She caught sight of Thiadbold, by the door that led out of the great hall to the courtyard and kitchens. He was chatting with one of his comrades.

Above the buzz of conversation she heard Margrave Judith address the king. The imposing margrave terrified Liath even though Liath was certain that Judith could not know who Liath was and had no reason to connect an anonymous Eagle with her own son. Hugh was abbot of Firsebarg now, which lay west of here in northern Varingia. He had no reason to attend the king's progress. At first, she had been afraid that Henry's progress through Varre might take them that far, but it had not because on this journey, Henry did not need to visit a place loyal to him.

"I will take my party and ride east to my marchlands," Judith was saying. "I will raise what levies I can, Your Majesty, but with the harvest coming, with winter after and then the spring sowing, it will be next summer before I can march on Gent."

"What of this marriage I've heard you speak of?" asked the king. "Will that delay you?"

She raised her eyebrows. A powerful woman of about the same age as Henry, she had borne five children, of whom three still lived, and had outlived two husbands. Unlike Lady Svanhilde, these travails had not weakened her, and she could still ride to battle, although she had sons and sons-in-law to do that for her now. Despite herself, Liath had to admire Judith's strength-and be grateful that strength wasn't turned against her.

"A young husband is always eager to prove himself on the field," she said. This statement produced guffaws and hearty good wishes, to which she replied, in a stately manner, "I see no reason he can't fight at Gent, once we reach there. But I must return to Austra to marry, and I promised I would collect my bridegroom this past spring." Her lips quirked up, and she looked rather more satisfied at the prospect than Liath thought seemly. "The delay brought on by Sabella's rebellion was unexpected. I hope his kin have not given up on me." "It's hot in here," muttered Liath. "And not just because of the conversation," retorted Hathui with a grin. "Go outside for a bit. You won't be needed."

Liath nodded and sidled away from the high table. Pressing back along the wall, she got caught in an eddy of servants bringing the next course, roasted pheasants arranged on platters with their feathers opened like a fan behind them. From this vantage she could hear the conversation at the nearest table, where Sister Rosvita sat with her clerics. "I hope he's as handsome as they all say her first husband was,"

one woman was saying.

"Her first husband wasn't handsome, dear Sister Amabi-lia," said the plump young man sitting beside her. "He was heir to considerable lands and wealth because his mother outlived her sisters and gave birth to no daughters. It was the margrave's famous Alban concubine who was so handsome. Isn't that right, Sister Rosvita? You were with the court then, weren't you?"

"Let us keep our minds on Godly subjects, Brother For-tunatus." But after uttering this pious sentiment, Sister Rosvita smiled. She was famous at court for her great learning and wise counsel, and for never losing her temper. After two months with the king's progress, Liath could not help but admire her from afar-especially having heard Ivar sing her praises so often in Heart's Rest. "I can't recall his name now, but in truth, he was memorably beautiful, the kind of face one never forgets."

"High praise from you, Sister Rosvita," said the one called Amabilia. "Even if you do remember everything."

The stream of platters and pheasants passed. Liath hurried on and made it to the door.

"Thiadbold." She stopped beside the red-haired Lion. "What of the man this morning, whose cheek was cut so horribly? Will he live?"

"He'll live, though he won't be charming any of the women with his handsome face, alas for him."

"Will he still be able to serve as a Lion? What will happen to him if he can't?" She knew all too well what it meant to have neither kin nor home.

"A Lion who is unfit to serve because of a wound in battle can expect a handsome reward from the king, a plot of land in the marchcountry or fenland."

"Aren't those dangerous and difficult places to farm?"

uat; the "In some ways, but you're free of service to the lordlings who demand tithes and labor.

The king only demands service from you to man the marchcountry watchforts. Even a man as scarred as poor Johannes will be can find a wife if he has a plot of land to pass on to their daughters. There's always a strong woman to be found, a younger sister, perhaps, who'd like to forge out on her own and will overlook an unsightly scar." He hesitated, then touched her, briefly, on the elbow. "But mind, Eagle, we Lions will remember that you came to his aid."

Behind them, at the table, the king rose and lifted his cup, commanding silence. "In the morning we march east, toward Wendar," the king announced. Several of the younger lords cheered, happy at the prospect of marching nearer to those lands where fighting might be expected. "But let us not rejoice in a hall of mourning. Let us remember the lesson of St. Katina."

Since St. Katina had been tormented by visions of great troubles lying in wait for her village in the same way a beast of the forest lies in wait for an innocent fawn, Liath wondered that King Henry would want to remind his retinue of her story. But this was her feast day, and her visions had proved truthful.

" 'Do not let fear draw a veil across your sight,' " said Biscop Constance.

" 'Do not forget that which troubles you.'" The king stared past his cup toward a vision only he could see. "It has been sixty-seven days since I learned of the death of-" Here he faltered. Never could he bring himself to say the name out loud. Better that he never do so, thought Liath bitterly, so as not to bring pain blooming fresh out of her own heart. "Since the Dragons fell at Gent."

Certain of the young lords in the back of the hall called out a toast to the bravery of the fabled Dragons. Some of them, no doubt, had hopes that Henry would name a new captain and form a new troop of Dragons, but he had not once spoken of such a thing in Liath's hearing. They drank, toasting the dead Dragons, but Henry only sipped at his wine.

Villam changed the subject at once, discussing the road back. They would ride southeast until they linked up with Hellweg, the Clear Way, that began in easternmost Arconia, then cut through northwestern Fesse and from there into the heartland of Saony.

"It is too late to hope to reach Quedlinhame for Matthi-asmass," the king said, "for the harvest will be over. But we may reach there in time to celebrate the Feast of St. Valentinus with my mother and sister."

Quedlinhame. Wasn't that where Ivar had been sent? Liath glanced toward Sister Rosvita, who was smiling at some comment made by Sister Amabilia. Thinking of Ivar made her think of Hanna.

Where was Hanna now? How did her journey prosper, she and Wolfhere? Once Hanna had spoken of Darre as if it were a city built from a poet's song, all breath and no substance. Now Hanna would see it herself.

"Then," the king was saying, "we will swing south, to hunt."

"What are we hunting?" asked Villam.

"Troops and supplies," said King Henry grimly. "If not for this year, then for the next." The thought of Gent was never far from his mind.

ANNA had to walk farther into the forest than she ever had before in order to find anything to harvest. The woods nearest to Steleshame had been picked clean by the refugees from Gent. Matthias didn't like her to go out into the woods alone, especially as the border of the forest itself steadily shrank back as refugees culled what they could in berries and roots, let their livestock graze away the undergrowth, and then cut down the trees themselves for shelter and fuel.

She and Matthias had survived in Gent for a long time, all alone. Surely she could survive a few expeditions into the forest, where the worst predators were wolves and bears-if any still roamed here now that the forest had been hunted clean by the foresters who guarded the pathways against Eika scouts and who supplied Mistress Gisela and the refugees in Steleshame with fresh meat.

But there was not enough for everyone. There was never enough for everyone.

She used a stick to beat a pathway through the leaves and undergrowth. Burrs stuck to her skirts. Sharp thistles pricked her feet. She had a welt on one cheek and a tear in her shawl where it had gotten caught on a dead branch. Fearful of losing her direction, she scored a line in the trees she passed so she could follow this trail back; she and Matthias had plenty of knives, four of which they had so far traded for canvas and a steady supply of eggs. But stopping to score every third or fourth tree made slow going- and her feet hurt from stones and stickers.

Ahead, a dense thicket glistened with berries, bright red balls no bigger around than the tip of her little finger. She bit into one carefully; its sour bite made her wince, and a sharp tang burned her tongue.

But she picked every last one nevertheless, dropping them into the pouch she had brought along. Maybe they were poison, but certain wise-women in the camp knew which could be eaten raw, which eaten if cooked, which could be used for dye, and which were simply useless. Scrambling through the thicket looking for more of the berries, she found the real treasure. A tree had fallen and left space and enough sun for a garden of wild onions.

She got down on hands and knees to dig them up. Matthias would be so proud of her.

When the twig snapped, old reflexes kept her still. She dared not even raise her head. Only that stillness saved her. They walked past on the other side of the thicket, and when they whispered, one to the other, she knew by the whispery flute of their voices and the harsh unintelligible words that Eika stalked these woods. Ai, Lady. Were they hunting for Steleshame? Would they never let the refugees rest? Would they find her? She knew what they did to children. But she kept her hands buried in the dirt, the smell of onions sharp in her nostrils, and prayed to the Lord and Lady, lips forming unspoken words.

If she could only stay still, and hidden, they would pass by without seeing her.

Then she could run back and warn Matthias-and all the others.

She heard the snick, like a nail flicking against a kettle, heard a hiss of air and then a sudden grunt. A howl of rage pierced the air not ten paces from her, at her back. She dared not move. She stifled a sob, grasping onions and dirt in her hands as, behind her, foresters converged on the Eika and a bitter fight ensued.

"Don't run," Matthias had always counseled her. "If you run, they'll see you." And anyway, if she ran, she'd probably never find this trove of onions again.

A man shrieked. Branches snapped and splintered in a wave of sound, and a heavy weight hit the ground so hard and close behind her that she felt the shudder through her knees. An arrow thunked into wood. Metal rang, meeting another blade. A man shouted a warning. Many feet crashed through the undergrowth and someone cursed.

Then came many voices raised at once, running feet, undergrowth torn and broken, and a drumming like many blows thrown down upon the earth-or on some object. Silence.

She dared not raise her head. A thin liquid puddled by her left hand, lapping over and wetting her little finger. It stung like the kiss of a bee. Moving her head a bare fraction, she risked a glance back over her shoulder.

An outflung hand reached for her. Eyes stared at her, and lips pulled back from sharp teeth, a mouth opened wide in a last grimace. Every part of her that was not her actual physical body bolted up and fled, screaming in terror-but her training held. She did not move, and after an instant of such terror that her stomach burned, she realized the Eika had fallen, dead, almost into her hiding place. Farther away, she heard foresters talking. "I only saw two." "They scout in pairs." "Where's their dogs?"

"Ai, Lord, have you ever seen their dogs, lad? Scout with them dogs and you tell everyone where you're passing. They never scout with their dogs, and it's just as well for us. I swear the dogs are harder to kill than the damned savages."

"What do we do with these two, now?" "Leave them be and let the maggots and flies have them, if such creatures can even eat Eika."

Shuddering, she picked herself up, wiping her fingers clean of the greenish liquid that had oozed from the wound where an arrow had embedded itself in the Eika's throat. She had harvesting to do. The onions came up easily, but she trembled as she worked, even knowing the Eika couldn't hurt her now.

"Hey there! What's this?".

Men thrashed through the undergrowth and she glanced up to see two of them hacking at the thicket, then peering over the broken and crushed leaves, at her.

"Ai, I know you," said one of the foresters. "You're the child what came out of Gent early summer." He didn't ask what she was doing; he didn't need to. "God's blood, but you came close to having your throat slit, lass. You'd better get back to town." He waved his companion away. "What have you found there, child?"

"Onions," she said, suddenly afraid he would take them away from her.

But he merely nodded, pulled a colored stick from his belt, and stuck it beside the tree to mark the find. "Don't take them all, now. That's the problem with you folk, you take everything and don't leave anything to go to seed for next year. You must husband what you find, just as a farmer saves seed to sow and doesn't use it all for bread."

She stared at him, waiting for him to move off, and he sighed and stepped back. "Nay, child, I'll take nothing from you. We're better off who live out here than you poor orphans nearby the town. That Gisela, she's a cunning householder and would indenture you all if she had room for it. Go on, then."

She jumped up and scuttled away, clutching the precious onions against her. After she could no longer see the foresters, she stopped to make a fold in her skirt, laying the onions in the fold and tucking the fabric up under her belt, a makeshift pouch for her new treasure. She peered up through leaves at the sky. It was hot, if not unpleasant, but well past noontide-time to be heading back so that she would not be caught out after dark. She arranged her shawl on her back to drape over one shoulder and around the opposite hip. With a practiced backward motion she filled this sling with firewood: anything loose, dry, and not too heavy for her to carry.

Thus laden, she arrived back at camp in the late afternoon. She drew her sling of firewood over the lump in her skirt, hiding her trove of onions as she cut across the camp on her way to the tannery.

Once this stretch of ground had also been woodland, harvested under the supervision of Gisela, mistress of the holding of Steleshame which sat on the rise above. Now Anna saw only stumps where there had once been scrub forest. Goats had eaten the last of the greenery except in the carefully fenced and hoarded vegetable patches. All the scattered seeds had long since been eaten by chickens and geese, and any least stick or twig had gone to cookfires. When the rains fell, mud washed every pathway into a river of filth that wound through the maze of shelters and huts.

Here, at Steleshame, many of the refugees from Gent had encamped last spring, washed up like sticks and leaves after a flood. News of so many children had excited the concern or greed of folk living west of the holding, and about a third of the orphans had been taken away to towns and villages, some to good situations, some, no doubt, to bad.

But hundreds remained behind. Most had nowhere else to go. Some refused to leave the vicinity of Gent, while others were simply too weak to attempt to walk to more distant settlements. Not even Mistress Gisela's displeasure could force them to move on.

Into this camp Anna and Matthias had wandered just after midsummer. Matthias had been lucky to trade intelligence about Gent for employment at the tanning works, which lay outside the Steleshame palisade next to the sprawling refugee encampment.

Now as late summer heat became stifling, a sickness afflicted the weakest in camp. Certain wisewomen called it a flux, a curse brought on by the enemy's swarm of malevolent helpers. Others called it a spell called down on them by the Eika enchanter, while yet others blamed the presence of malefici-evil sorcerers-hidden in their own camp. Every day a few parties of desperate souls trickled away, seeking their fortune elsewhere. Yet for every person who left, another would likely wander into the camp a day or week later telling tales of Eika atrocities in some other village within reach of the Veser River.

At the tannery, where Anna and Matthias slept in a crude shelter strung up behind the drying sheds, the sickness had not yet taken its toll. But they had cider and bread as well as eggs to eat every day, and Anna supposed the stink of the tannery drove away evil spirits.

As she scurried through camp, she prayed the pungent smell of earth and onions would not give away her secret good fortune. She was not big enough to fight off any but a smaller child, if it came to that.

"Settle down, now, children. Sit down. Sit down. My voice isn't what it used to be, alas, but if you will all be quiet, I will tell you the tale of Helen."

Anna paused despite knowing she ought to hurry right back to Matthias. With the aid of a stout walking stick, an old man shuffled forward and laboriously seated himself on a stool set down behind him by a girl. Many young children crowded 'round with gaunt faces upturned. She recognized him, just as she recognized the children: They, too, were refugees from Gent, the only ones who had escaped the Eika attack. No older children sat here; like Matthias, they had taken on the responsibilities of adults or been adopted by farmers to the west. They worked the tanneries and the armories, assisted the blacksmiths, chopped and hauled wood, built huts, broke virgin forestland to the plow, sowed and tended fields, and hauled water from the stream. It was children Anna's age or younger who were set to watch over the very smallest ones, even those toddling babies whose nursing mothers had to spend all of their day working to make food and shelter.

The old man had been an honored guest at the mayor's palace in Gent; he was a poet, so he said, accustomed to sing before nobles, Yet if this were true, why hadn't the mayor of Gent taken him along when he had traded some part of the wealth he had salvaged from Gent to Mistress Gisela in exchange for her allowing him to set up housekeeping within the palisade wall of Steleshame? The old man had been left behind to fend for himself. Too crippled to work, he told tales in the hope of gaining a pittance of bread or the dregs from a cup of cider.

He cleared his throat to begin. His voice was far more robust than his elderly frame.

' 'This is a tale of war and a woman. Fated to be an exile not once but twice, first from her beloved Lassadaemon and then from her second home, red-gated Ilios, she suffered the wrath of cruel Mok, the majestic Queen of Heaven, and labored hard under the yoke of that great Queen's fury. High Heaven willed that she walk the long path of adventure. But in the end she succeeded in founding her city, and thus in time out of these tribulations grew the high walls and noble empire of Dariya.' "

The poet hesitated, seeing his audience grow restless, then began again-this time without the stiff cadence that made the opening hard to follow. "Helen was heir to the throne of Lassadaemon. She had just come into her inheritance when usurpers arrived. Ai, ruthless Mernon and his brother Menlos marched with their terrible armies into the peaceful land and forced poor Helen to marry that foul chieftain, Menlos."

"Were they like the Eika?" demanded a child.

"Oh, worse! Far worse! They came out of the tribe of Dorias, whose women consorted with the vile Bwrmen."

He coughed and surveyed the crowd, seeing that he had their attention. Anna liked the story much better told this way. "They made Helen a prisoner in her own palace while Mernon went off to conquer-well, never mind that. So Helen escaped and with her faithful servants fled to the sea, where they took ship. They set sail for Ilios, where her mother's mother's kin had settled many years before and built a fine, grand city with red gates and golden towers under the protection of bright Somorhas. But Mernon and Menlos prayed to cruel Mok, the pitiless Queen of Heaven, and since she was jealous of beautiful Somorhas, she cajoled her brother Sujandan, the God of the Sea, into sending storms to sink Helen's ship. 'How quickly night came, covering the sun! How the winds howled around them! How the waves rose and fell, first smothering the bow of the ship, then sinking so low that the very bottom of the sea was exposed!' '

Beyond the old man's shoulder Anna could see the palisade and heavy gates of Steleshame proper. The gates were always shut, even during the day. Some in the camp grumbled that it was more to keep out the refugees than to guard against an Eika attack, for everyone in camp knew that within Steleshame they ate beans and bread every day, even the servants. Now, one of the gates to this haven of plenty opened, and five riders appeared. They rode out on the southeast track, along which part of the refugee's settlement had sprawled.

The poet's story-even as the storm-tossed ship ran aground on an island filled with monsters-could not compete with such an unusual event. Anna followed the others as they ran to line the road, hoping for news.

"Where are you going?" children shouted to the riders as they passed through the camp. "Are you leaving?"

"Nay," shouted back a young woman outfitted in a boiled leather coat for armor, with a short spear braced against her stirrup and two long knives stuck in her belt. "We're riding to the stronghold of Duchess Rotrudis, down to Osterburg where it's said she holds court at Matthiasmass."

"Will she come to rescue us?" demanded several children at once.

The other riders had gone on, but the young woman lingered, eyeing the crowd of children with a frown, shaking her head all the while. "I don't know what she'll do. But we must ask for help. More Eika scouts are sighted every day. More villages are burned. Their circle is growing wider. Soon they will engulf all of us. There are too many people here already. Mistress Gisela can't support them all."

Her comrades called to her and she urged her horse forward, leaving the camp behind.

Most of the children wandered back to the old poet and told him what the rider had said.

He snorted. "As if Mistress Gisela supports any but her own kin and servants, and those with coin to pay for food and protection. Alas that there is no biscop here to feed the poor." Anna noticed all at once how thin he was. A film of white half-covered his left eye, and his hands had a constant small tremor.

"Who is Duchess Rotrudis?" she asked.

Trained as both listener and singer, he found her in the crowd and nodded toward her, acknowledging her question. "Rotrudis is duchess of Saony. She is the younger sister of King Henry.

Alas that the Dragons fell. That was a terrible day."

"Why hasn't the king come to rescue us?" asked a boy.

"Nay, lad, you must recall that the world is a wide place and filled with danger. I have traveled over its many roads and paths. It takes months to get news from one place to another." Seeing their expressions shift from hope to fear, he hurried on. "But I have no doubt King Henry knows of the fall of Gent and mourns it."

"Then why doesn't he come?"

He only shrugged. "The king may be anywhere. He may be marching on his way here now. How can we know?"

"Have you ever seen the king?" Anna asked.

He was surprised and perhaps taken aback by her question. "I have not," he answered, voice shaking and cheeks flushed. "But I have sung before his son, the one who was captain of the Dragons."

"Tell us more of the story," said a child.

"Tell us something that happened to you, friend," said Anna suddenly, knowing she ought to return to the tannery but not quite able to tear herself away.

"Something that happened to me," he murmured.

"Yes! Yes!" cried the other children.

"You don't want to hear more of the lay of Helen?"

"Did it happen to you?" asked Anna. "Were you on the ship?"

"Why, no, child," he said, half chuckling. "It happened so long ago that-"

"You were a child then?"

"Nay, child. It happened long before Daisan received the Holy Word of God and preached the truth of the Unities, bringing Light to the Darkness. It happened long, long ago, before even the old stone walls you see in Steleshame were built."

"I've never been inside Steleshame," Anna pointed out. "And if it happened so long ago, how do you know it's true?"

"Because it has been passed down from poet to poet, line for line, even written down by the ancient scribes so it would be remembered." Then he smiled softly. Amazingly, he still had most of his teeth, but perhaps a poet took better care of his mouth, knowing that his fortune rested there and in what he could recall from his mind. "But I'll tell you a story that happened to me when I was a young man. Ai, Lady! Have you ever heard of the Alfar Mountains? Can you imagine, you children, mountains that are so high that they caress the heavens? That snow lies thick upon them even on the hottest summer's day?

These mountains you must cross if you wish to travel south from the kingdom of Wendar into the kingdom of Aosta. In Aosta you will find the holy city of Darre. That is where the skopos resides, she who is Mother over the Holy Church."

"If the mountains are so high," asked Anna, "then how can you get over them?"

"Hush, now," he said querulously. "Let us proceed with no more questions. There are only a few paths over the mountains. So high do these tracks rise along the rugged ground that a man can reach up and touch the stars themselves at nightfall. But every step is dangerous. No matter how clear at dawn, each day may turn into one of blinding storm-even at midsummer, for summer is the only season when one may cross the mountains.

"Yet some few attempt the crossing late in the season. Some few, as I did, try it even as late as the month of Octumbre. My need was great-" He raised a hand, forestalling a question. "It had to do with a woman. You need ask no more than that! I was warned against attempting the crossing, but I was a rash youth. I thought I could do anything. And indeed, as I climbed, the weather held fair and I had no trouble..."

He leaned forward, his voice dropping to a whisper that still carried easily over the crowd. Every child hushed and leaned forward, mirroring him. "The blizzard hit without warning. It was the very middle of day, a fine day, a warm day, and between one footstep and the next I was engulfed in storm. I saw nothing but howling white wind before my eyes. The cold pierced me like a sword, and I staggered and fell to my knees.

"But I would not give up! Nay, not when she awaited me in distant Darre. I staggered forward, crawled when I could no longer walk, and yet the storm still raged about me. The cold blinded me, and I could not feel my feet. I stumbled, fell, and tumbled down a slope to my death."

Here he paused again. Anna edged forward, hand tight over the bulge of onions. No one spoke.

"But alas, the fall hadn't killed me. I tried to open my swollen eyes. As I groped forward, I felt grass under my hands. A stream ran not a man's length from my body, and there I crawled and drank my fill of its clear water. I splashed it on my face and slowly I could see again. Above me, beyond the steep slope down which I had fallen, the storm still raged. A few flakes of snow drifted down on the breeze to wet my face. But in the vale it was as warm as springtime, with violets, and trees in bloom."

"Where were you?" Anna demanded, unable to keep still.

But now memory made him look down. His old shoulders hunched, and he sighed heavily, as if sorry to have remembered this tale. "I never knew. Truly, it was a miracle I did not die that day. There was a ring of trees, mostly birch, and a little grassy meadow, but beyond that I never managed to go. A hut stood at the edge of the meadow. There I slept and recovered my strength. Every morning I would find food and drink outside the door, sweet bread, strong cider, a stew of beans, tart apples. But no matter how I tried to stay awake, I never could. I never saw what creature brought me the food. When I was strong enough, I knew it was time to leave, so I went."

"Didn't you ever find it again?" asked Anna. Other children nodded their heads, marveling at the thought of an enchanted place where food appeared miraculously each morning.

"Nay, though I traveled three times more over that pass. I searched, but the way was closed to me. Now I wonder sometimes if it was only a dream."

"Could we take him in?" she demanded at dusk as she and Matthias feasted privately on onion stew and roasted eggs. "He's just a frail old man. He can't eat much, and he hasn't anyone else to take care of him. There's room for him to sleep here." With the flap pulled down snug to protect them from wind and rain, their little lean-to did indeed have room for one more to sleep-just barely.

"But what good would he be to us, Anna?" Matthias had gulped down his portion more like a dog than a boy, eating the egg first and the stew after. Now he wiped the sides of the blackened pot clean with a dry hunk of bread he'd saved from his midday meal.

"We weren't any good to Papa Otto!" she retorted. "Oh, Matthias, he knows the most wonderful stories."

"But they're not true." Matthias licked the last crumbs off his lips and eyed the old pot with longing, wishing for more. Then he took Anna by the wrist and shook her. "They're just tales he made up.

He as good as admitted it was a dream-if the whole thing even happened at all! That's how storytellers make their stories sound true, by pretending it happened to them." He shook his head, grimacing, and let her go. "But you may as well bring the old man here to us, if he's no other place to sleep. It's true enough that Papa Otto and the other slaves in Gent helped us for no return. We should help others as we can.

And anyway, if you have him to care for, maybe you won't go wandering out into the woods and get yourself slaughtered by Eika!"

She frowned. "How do you know his stories aren't true? You never saw such things or traveled so far."

"Mountains high enough that their peaks touch the sky! Snow all the year round! Do you believe that?"

"Why shouldn't I believe? All we've ever seen is Gent- and now Steleshame and a bit of forest."

She licked the last spot of egg from her lips. "I bet there's all kinds of strange places just as fantastic as the stories the poet tells. You'll see. I'll bring him here tomorrow. I bet he's been to places no one here has ever heard of. Poets have to do that, don't they? Maybe he knows what the Eika lands look like.

Maybe he's seen the sea that Helen sailed across. Maybe he's really traveled across the great mountains!"

Matthias only snorted and, as the last daylight faded, rolled up in his blanket. Exhausted by his day's labor hauling ashes and water and lime, he quickly fell asleep.

Anna snuggled up against him, but she could not go to sleep as easily. Instead, she closed her eyes and dreamed of the wide world, of a place far from the filth of the camp and the lurking shadows of the Eika.

IN THE SHADOW OF THE MOUNTAINS

THE, hawk spiraled far above, a speck against the three mountain peaks that dominated the view. It sank, then caught an updraft and rose, wings outstretched, into the depthless blue of the sky.

Here, where human paths arched closest to the vast and impenetrable mystery of the heavens, Hanna could believe that anything was possible. She could believe that the distant bird, hovering high overhead, was no hawk at all but a man or woman wearing a bird's shape-or else that it was a spirit, an angel disguised in plain feathers, surveying earth from the heights. Or perhaps it was only a hawk, hunting for its supper.

A thin crest of breeze touched her ears, and she thought she heard the bird's harsh call; its slow spiral did not alter. As she waited, the heavens shaded from the vivid blue of afternoon into the intense blue-gray of impending twilight. Shadow crept up the stark white peaks as the sun sank in the western sky.

Where had Wolfhere gone, and why was he taking so long to return?

The path wound farther up into heather and gorse, sidetracked by heaps of sharp boulders and the high shoulder of a cliff face. Beyond, the dirt track lost itself in a narrow defile. Wolfhere had bade her wait here while he walked on ahead, disappearing through the narrow gate of stone and crumbling cliff into the vale that lay beyond. Through the gap Hanna saw the rippling tops of trees, suggesting a cleft of land that ran lush with spring-fed plants. She had seen other such valleys in these mountains, sudden gorges and startlingly green vales half hidden by the jagged landscape. Beneath the scent of gorse she smelled cookfires and a distant whiff of the forge.

Why had Wolfhere wanted her to accompany him this far, and no farther?

"Stay here and watch," he had said. "But on no account follow me and let no other follow me."

What was he hiding? What other did he expect to follow them up here, on this goat track he called a path? She turned to look back the way they had come. At first she thought they had been following a goat track along the heights towering above the ancient paved road that marked St. Barnaria Pass. But no goat's track sported a thin trail of wagon wheels, although how a wagon could possibly be dragged up here was more than she could imagine.

It was very strange.

A few steps back, an outcropping gave her a good view down onto the pass below. The road had been built during the old Dariyan Empire by their astoundingly clever engineers. In the hundreds of years since then, not even winter storms had washed it away, although many of its stones were cracked or upturned by the weight of snow, the thawing power of ice, or the simple strength of obstinate grass. Its resilience astonished her.

The hawk wafted lazily above. She blinked back tears as her gaze caught the edge of the sinking sun. Specks swam before her eyes; then she realized that two more birds had joined the first.

Her neck hurt from staring upward for so long, but in her seventeen or so years of life she had never imagined there might be a place like this. She knew the sea and the marsh, rivers and hills and the dark mat of forest. She had now seen the king's court and the glittering parade of nobles on his progress.

She had seen the Eika raiders and their fearsome dogs so close she could have spit on them. But to see such mountains as these! The peaks were themselves presences, towering creatures hunched in sleep, their shoulders and bowed heads covered by drifts of snow deeper than anything Hanna had ever seen.

Last winter she would have laughed at any poor soul foolish enough to suggest that she, Hanna, daughter of the innkeepers Birta and Hansal, would herself journey across those mountains wearing the badge of an Eagle. Last winter her mother and father had arranged for her betrothal to young Johan, freeholder and farmer, a man of simple tastes and no curiosity, his gaze fixed on the earth.

Now, as summer flowers bloomed alongside the high mountain pass, she-mercifully wnbetrothed-was on her way south across the Alfar Mountains, an agent of the king on an important errand to the skopos herself. Truly, her life had taken a sudden and surprising turn. How distant Heart's Rest seemed now!

From the outcropping she could see down to the road and, farther back, partially hidden by the thrusting shoulder of a ridge, the hostel where their party had halted for the night. The stone buildings nestled into the ridge's spine. Under the protection of the skopos, the hostel was run by monks from the Order of St. Servitius. According to Wolf-here, those monks stayed up in these inhospitable heights through the winter. A merchant in their party had been snowed in one terrible winter, or so he claimed, and he had regaled the party with a horrific story of fire salamanders, cannibalism, and avenging spirits.

The story sounded so true when he told it, but Wolfhere had stood in the shadows of the campfire that night, shaking his head and frowning. She had seen heaps of snow in shadowed verges beside the road and huge fields of ice and snow on the slopes above, giving credence to the tale, but she had also seen flowers aplenty, pale blue, butter yellow, scarlet and orange, scattered across tough grass and ground-clinging shrubs. She had seen sky so deep a blue that it shaded into violet as if brushed with a stain of beet juice. She laughed at herself. Their party included a bard journeying to Darre to make his fortune, and he never used such prosaic images as beet juice to describe the sky.

No one traveled the mountains alone, not even King's Eagles. They had found a party assembling in the city of Genevie and joined it. Now they counted among their companions the bard, seven fraters, a high and mighty presbyter returning to the skopos with an important cartulary and his train of clerics and servants, and a motley assortment of merchants, wagons, and slaves-and the two prisoners she and Wolfhere and ten of King Henry's Lions escorted to the palace of the skopos in Darre.

A breeze skirled down from the heights, and the sun slid behind a low-lying ridge. The moon's pale disk gleamed softly against the darkening sky. Dusk. She shuddered.

Where was Wolfhere? How was she to make her way back down that path in darkness? What if he had fallen and hurt himself?

A bird called. She had a sudden, awful feeling of being watched.

She spun and there, perched on a stub of rock jutting out from the cliffside that demarked one side of the narrow defile, sat a hawk. She let out a nervous chuckle and fanned herself, abruptly flushed though the day was cooling fast. The hawk did not stir. Uncanny, with eyes as dark as amber, it stared unblinking at her until she felt chills run up her back.

And there was something else...a suggestion of something hovering just where the path dipped out of sight. Something there and yet not there, a figure glimpsed out of the corner of her eye, a pale woman creature whose skin had the color and texture of water. But when she looked directly, she saw nothing, only shadows sliding along the rock like the ripple of water over pebbles in a stream.

The hawk launched itself up in a flurry of wings. She ducked instinctively and heard a gasp. Was it her own or someone else's, someone hidden?

The hawk was gone. A light bobbed into view. Wolfhere, whistling, came up the path around the shoulder of the cliff face.

"Lady Above!" she swore. "I thought you weren't coming back."

He stopped and looked around, then cocked an eyebrow and resumed walking past her and down the path toward the hostel. To keep in the light she had to hurry after; the moon was not yet half full and did not give enough illumination for her to negotiate the hillside track.

"Where did you get that lantern?" she demanded, angry that she had waited for so long but would evidently get no explanation.

"Ah," he said, hoisting the lantern a little higher.

He did not intend to answer her. Fuming, she followed him down the path, stumbling now and again over a rock or a thick tuft of grass grown untimely in the middle of the track. By now the hostel appeared below them only as a dark encrustation against the blacker ridge; a single lantern burned at the enclosure's gateway. So did a light burn all night, every night, a beacon for any lost traveler caught out and struggling toward safe haven just as after the body's death the soul struggles upward to the Chamber of Light- or so the bard had said, thinking it a poetical conceit.

"Where did you go?" Hanna asked, not expecting an answer. Wolfhere gave her none. She watched his back, his confident walk, the gray-silver gleam of his hair in the twilight, his ancient, seamed hand steady on the lantern's handle.

Hanna did not distrust Wolfhere, but neither did she precisely trust him. He kept his secrets close by him, for secrets he clearly had. Starting with the one he had never answered: How had he come so fortuitously this past spring to the inn at Heart's Rest just in time to save her dear friend Liath from slavery? He had freed Liath and taken her away from the village, made her a King's Eagle like himself.

Like a leaf drawn in the wake of a boat, Hanna had been dragged along also. She, too, had been made a King's Eagle, had left the village of her birth to begin these great adventures. Wolfhere was not a man of whom one asked questions lightly, but Hanna was determined to see Liath remain safe. So she had asked questions, which was more than Liath was willing to do. How had he known Liath was in Heart's Rest and in danger? From what was he protecting her? Wolfhere had never taken offense at those questions; of course, he had never answered them either.

They left the narrow defile and mysterious valley behind and, soon enough, the hillside path deposited them on the smooth stone of the old Dariyan road a few hundred paces from the enclosure's gateway. Stars bloomed above, a sudden harvest of bright flowers; ahead, a lantern flared as it swung back and forth in the breeze.

On a bench beside the gateway sat a monk, brown-robed, hooded, and silent. The lantern hung from a post, illuminating him in a pool of soft light. He lifted a weather-roughened hand at their approach and without speaking opened the gate to let them in. Because she was a woman and thus could not be admitted to the innermost cloister, she had seen few of the monks. Of those, only the genial cellarer- the monk in charge of provisions-and the guest-master seemed willing, or permitted, to speak to visitors.

Many monks and nuns took a vow of silence, of course. The brothers at Sheep's Head were rumored never to speak at all once they had passed out of the novitiate, communicating only with hand signs.

Wolfhere opened his lantern and blew out its flame. Together, they trudged in pale moonlight past the ripe-smelling dung heap. A fence scraped her thigh and she smelled the rich tang of plants as they walked alongside the garden. Beyond this enclosure stood half a dozen squat beehives. Finally, they came in among the outbuildings: stables, kitchen, bakery, kiln, and forge-dark and empty at this hour except for a single form sitting beside the dull red coals, tending the fire. The hostel of the monks of St.

Ser-vitius was famous, Wolfhere had told her, not just because some of them lived here the winter through, despite snow and ice and bitter cold, but also because they kept a blacksmith.

As they came up to the guest house, a young monk, unhooded, hurried out the door and away to the right, toward the infirmary. His reddish-pale hair and coltish gait reminded Hanna abruptly and painfully of her milk brother Ivar.

Was he well? Had he forgiven her for choosing to stay with Liath rather than go with him?

Wolfhere sighed suddenly and squared his shoulders. Shaken out of her thoughts, Hanna heard shrill voices from the entryway. They mounted the wood steps into the entry chamber, now lit by four candles, and right into the middle of an argument.

THIS guest house is reserved," said a sallow man Hanna immediately identified as the insufferable manservant to the presbyter, "for those who arrive on horseback. It is quite impossible that these common soldiers be stationed here."

"But the prisoners-" This objection, raised by the inoffensive guest-master, was quelled at once by the presbyter himself, who now stepped out of the shadows.

"I will not let my rest be disturbed by their shuffling and muttering," said the presbyter, his Wendish marred by a thick accent. He had a thin, aristocratic voice, fully as imperious as that of the nobles she had observed during her weeks attending King Henry's progress. But of course he, too, was a man of noble birth; with a perpetually curled-down lip, soft, white hands, and the imposingly portly demeanor of a man who feasts more days than not, one could never have mistaken him for a farmer or a hard-working craftsman. "The two guards who are standing watch over the prisoners must be moved. If that means the prisoners must be moved, so be it."

Wolfhere responded blandly. "Are you suggesting Biscop Antonia and Brother Heribert be quartered in the stables with the servants?"

The presbyter's eyes flared, and he looked mightily irritated, as if he suspected Wolfhere of baiting him. "I am suggesting, Eagle, that you and those you are responsible for do not disturb my rest."

"Your rest is of supreme importance to me, Your Honor," said Wolfhere with no apparent irony,

"but I swore to King Henry of Wendar and Varre that I would deliver Biscop Antonia and her cleric to the palace of the skopos, Her Holiness dementia. This building-" he gestured to stone walls and tight shutters-"grants me a measure of security. You know, of course, that Biscop Antonia is accused of sorcery and might be capable of any foul act."

The presbyter grunted. "All the more reason to remove her from this guest house." He signed to his manservant, turned with a swirl of rich fabric, and climbed the steps into the gloom above where another servant waited to light him to his chamber.

Wolfhere turned to the guest-master. "My apologies for inconveniencing you again, good brother.

Have you any other chamber that might serve our purpose?"

The guest-master glanced at the presbyter's manservant, who sniffed audibly, steepled his fingers, and tapped his thumbs together impatiently. "At times it happens that a brother or traveler is disturbed by evil spirits who have insinuated themselves into his mind, and at those times we must isolate him in a locked chamber in the infirmary until an effusion of herbs or a healing can extricate the creature from his body. It is not what I would choose for a biscop, even one accused of such, urn, undertakings, but-" He hesitated, perhaps fearing that Wolfhere's reaction would be as explosive as that of the presbyter, but in the end he glanced again toward the manservant. Worse to insult a presbyter than one of King Henry's Eagles, especially considering-Hanna reminded herself-that they were not in Henry's kingdom now.

"That will do very well," said Wolfhere easily. "But will it inconvenience the Brother Infirmarian?"

"I think not. At this time we have only one aged brother resting there who is too feeble for our daily rounds."

"Hanna." Wolfhere nodded at her. "Go fetch the other Lions. Once the Brother Infirmarian has made all ready, we will transfer the prisoners to their new cell."

Satisfied, the manservant hurried up the stairs to deliver this news to his master. The guest-master grimaced, then quickly smoothed the expression over as he retreated out the door. Hanna moved to follow him, but Wolfhere said her name softly. She turned to see him open the lantern's glass shutter and reach inside. He murmured a word under his breath, and the touch of his fingers to the dark wick ignited a flame. She started back, surprised, but he merely handed the lit lantern to her and waved her away.

Outside, Hanna hoisted the lantern to light her way to the stables.

The guardsmen had already bedded down for the night on the straw in the loft, wrapped in their cloaks. They rousted easily enough. King's Lions all, they were used to night alarms and swift risings for an early march, and they followed her back to the guest house without grumbling. They served the king and did not complain at the tasks given them. Such was the strength of the oaths they had sworn to Henry.

At Hanna's entrance, the guest-master nervously shook his ring of keys and led the way into the back passage where two Lions stood guard at a locked door. Inside the chamber, Biscop Antonia sat, wide awake, in the room's only chair while Brother Heribert sat on the edge of one of the two beds, fingering the silver Circle of Unity that hung on a chain at his chest. A carpet, thrown down as a courtesy, covered the plank floor; the windows were closed and shuttered, barred from the outside.

"Your Grace," said Wolfhere. "I beg pardon for disturbing you, but it has become necessary to move you to different quarters."

A stout woman of respectable age, Biscop Antonia wore her episcopal dignity with gentle authority and a benign expression. "No unbearable hardship afflicts the faithful," she said mildly, "for is it not said in the Holy Verses that 'thy daughters and sons did not succumb to the fangs of snakes?''

Wolfhere did not reply but merely signed for her and the cleric to precede him out the door.

Heribert rose and went out first. A quiet, attractive, neat young man, he had the soft, delicate white hands of an aristocrat born, one who had never put those hands to labor more taxing than prayer, the folding of vestments, and the occasional writing of a deed or royal capitulary. All the monks here in the hostel of St.

Servitius had, like Hanna, work-roughened hands, but Heribert was a cleric whose duties were to pray, read, and act as scribe in the episcopal chancellery or the king's chapel. With her hands folded quietly in front of her, Antonia followed after him, smiling and nodding first at Wolfhere and then at Hanna.

The single mild glance she gave Hanna made the young Eagle horribly uncomfortable. Biscop Antonia appeared as kindly and wise as an old grandmother who had lived her life in perfect harmony with the God of the Unities and been blessed with a prosperous family and many surviving grandchildren.

But she was accused of base sorcery, such as even the church could not countenance, and Hanna herself had heard the biscop speak words of such searing contempt at the parley before the battle between King Henry and his sister Sabella that she knew Antonia's kindly mien disguised something dark and unpleasant beneath.

Better not to be noticed by such folk. Or, as the saying went in Heart's Rest, "Let well enough alone and turn over no rock unless you care to be knowing what's underneath it."

But after one glance, Antonia no longer appeared to notice Hanna. As the guards escorted them out of the building and down the stony path to the infirmary, she kept up a one-sided conversation with Wolfhere. "I have been reflecting on the words of St. Thecla, in her Letter to the Dariyans, when she speaks of the law of sin. Is not God's law higher than the law of sin?"

Wolfhere grunted. His lips twitched as if he were restraining words. He turned so that the lantern light hid his expression in shadow.

"And yet do we not, in our ignorance, in our flesh, remain slaves to the law of sin?" she continued. "By what means do they judge who have not wholly united themselves to the life-giving law of the God of the Unities and the Holy Word?"

Wolfhere made no answer. They came to the infirmary steps. Here the Brother Infirmarian met them, lantern in hand, and showed them to a small cell where he had hastily erected a cot next to the single pallet. He bowed several times, bobbing up and down so that the lantern light rose and dipped nauseatingly; he was clearly distraught at the idea of closing a holy biscop into such mean quarters, but he obeyed the commands of his superiors-and Wolfhere carried letters from both King Henry and Biscop Constance as proof of his authority to carry out his mission.

Antonia and Heribert walked into the cell. The Brother Infirmarian shut and locked the door behind them and hung the key on a ring at his belt. Two Lions stationed themselves on either side of the door. Wolfhere directed two more Lion? to sleep outside on the ground beneath the shuttered and barred window that let air into the cell.

"On no account," Wolfhere finished, looking sternly at the Infirmarian, "is any person to enter into that cell without me beside him."

Then he and Hanna and the other six Lions returned to the stables. In the loft, Hanna kicked hay into a pile, threw her cloak over the prickly mound, and pulled off her boots before lying down and shaking her blanket open on top of herself. Wolfhere bedded down in the hay beside her. Already she heard the snores of the soldiers from the other end of the loft.

She waited for a long while but was not sleepy. The loft door stood open to let in air. Through it she saw the black hulk of mountain, a blot against the night, and a single patch of sky brilliant with stars.

"You don't like her," she whispered finally, thinking that Wolfhere, too, did not sleep.

There was a long pause and she began to think the old man was in fact asleep, that she had mistaken his breathing.

"I do not."

"But if I didn't know what she had been accused of, if I hadn't heard her speak that one time, at the parley with Lord Villam, then I would never suspect she was-" She hesitated. Wolfhere made no comment, so she went on. "It's just hard to imagine she could do such terrible things-murder a lackwit in cold blood so she could raise creatures to control Count Lavastine's will, cast a spell on the guivre to put it under her power, and send her servants to catch living men for it to feed on. It's just that she seems . . .

such a good and generous soul, so mild and compassionate. And she is a biscop besides. How can the Lady and Lord allow a person with such an evil heart to be elevated in Their church?"

"That is indeed a mystery."

This answer did not satisfy Hanna, who frowned and shifted on her makeshift pallet. Under the cloak, hay poked through the cloth against her back, tiny blunt pinpricks. She wiped the dust of old hay and last summer's straw from her dry lips. "But you must have some idea!"

"She is related on her mother's side to the reigning Queen of Karonne, and her kin on her father's side had land near the city of Mainni, where she was some years ago elevated to the episcopal chair. Do you suppose the skopos nominates only the most worthy?"

"I thought women and men who entered the church entered to serve God, not their own desires and ambitions. Deacon Fortensia cares faithfully for our small village though she herself resides a half day's walk farther north, at the church of St. Sirri. The monks at the monastery at Sheep's Head are-

-were-" For had not Eika killed them all? "-famed for their devotion to Our Lady and Lord."

"Some do enter the church to serve God, and do so faithfully throughout their lives. Some see in the church an opportunity for advancement. Others are put in the church against their will."

As Ivar had been.

"Are all who serve in the church faithful to God alone?" Wolfhere continued. "What of Frater Hugh? You were acquainted with him, I believe."

Hanna shut her eyes and turned her face away, ashamed to remember so clearly and with still a betraying warmth in her throat. Only Wolfhere's unheralded arrival had saved Liath from a lifetime of servitude to Hugh. Beautiful Hugh.

Wolfhere grunted, but he might simply have been settling himself more comfortably on the hay.

He said nothing more and for once she did not want to ask any more questions. He had an odd, perhaps a deliberate, way of turning questions back on the one who asked them. She set her cheek against the folds of her cloak and shut her eyes. The light snores of the men-at-arms, the rustling of mice scurrying on their nightly rounds, and the quiet noises of the horses stabled below lulled her to sleep.

the rats came out at night to gnaw on the bones. The whispering scrape of their claws on stone alerted him, brought him instantly out of his doze. Most of the dogs slept; one whined in a dream and thumped his whipcord tail against the cathedral floor. The Eika slept, sprawled across the stone as if it were the softest of featherbeds to them. They loved the stone the way a nursing child loves its mother's breast, and nuzzled near it whenever they could.

Only he did not sleep. He never slept, only napped, caught moments of dream and then bolted awake as a muzzle nudged him, testing, or as Eika laughed and poked him with their spears, or if he heard a human voice cry out in agony and hopeless pleading. That was the worst, the slaves-for he knew the Eika had brought human slaves into the city when summer came and that he could do nothing to help those poor souls.

Gent had fallen, and he would have died protecting her, only he could not die. That was the curse his mother had put on him at his birth: "No disease known to you will touch him, nor will any wound inflicted by any creature male or female cause his death."

He could not sleep, and when he was lucid, he wondered if the periods of madness, the shaking, the fits of insensibility when he would come to suddenly and realize it was night when last it had been dawn, were a mercy set on him by the Hand of Our Lady. An educated man might have known disciplines of the mind with which to combat this prison that was as much of spirit as of chains. But he had only been trained for war. That was his lot, the bastard son of the king, the child whose birth gave Henry the right to be named Heir to the throne of Wendar and Varre: to become a fighter and defend his father's realm.

He had always been an obedient son.

Would his father send soldiers to rescue him? Yet surely Henry thought him dead. It was Gent they must rescue. No king could leave such an important city in barbarian hands.

And even if he were rescued, what if his father no longer wished to acknowledge him, seeing what manner of creature he had become?

He vaguely recalled a dream in which two children had visited him-except there were no children in Gent, not any more. She had led them to safety, long ago.

Once children had flocked to him, but these two children had been afraid of him. They had seen not a prince but an animal; he had seen their reaction in their eyes. Were they only mirrors created in his mind? A vision through which he could see himself and what he had become? Or had they really been here?

As rats scurried through the refuse, he searched under the rags that were all that was left of his clothing-and found knife and badge. Their knife. Her badge, the badge of the Eagles. Only it was not her badge, it was another badge, that of a man who had fallen and whose name he could not recall. But it represented her, it held her warmth, for she had been like a warm thing, like a star fallen to earth and trapped in a human body as he was trapped in these chains.

The rats scrabbled among the bones. Slowly, he eased the knife out from under his torn and ragged tunic. This knife had been a gift, of sorts, an exchange-though he would have told the children the secret of the saint's tunnel without any gift. He would have told them because it was his duty to aid them, to aid all of the king's subjects. He was captain of the King's Dragons and obliged by his oath to the king, his father, to protect and defend the king's possessions and everything and everyone that the king ruled.

Rats were not subject to the king.

The bones lay within reach of his chains, and he was quick and silent but for the scrape of chains as he moved, sticking one on the point, grabbing another by the tail. It squeaked wildly and scrabbled helplessly at his fingers. He killed them. The dogs stirred, waking. The Eika slept on.

He growled the dogs down, and they subsided. They fed better than he did, because they did not scorn human flesh. He skinned the rats and, because he had no fire, ate them raw.

No better than the Eika, less than a man, more than a dog, he would have wept at his own savagery, but he had no tears. He never got enough to drink. Sometimes the priest remembered to set out water for him. Once a slave had done so, and been killed for her pains.

The Eika slept on. He sawed at the chains with the knife, but the work only dulled the blade. At last, he tucked it away again and curled up among his chains. The iron collar at his neck chafed his skin, and he shifted to ease the raw ache. The Eagle's badge lay cool against his skin, next to his heart.

Ai, Lady, if only he could sleep for one night, soundlessly and without dreaming, without interruption. If only he could rest. But the dogs panted, wakeful now, smelling death.

AWAKE.

Something was wrong. Hanna knew it instantly, but it took her three breaths to identify what it was. A cold hard wind blew into the loft, scattering hay and chilling her limbs, and a soft cold thing settled on her lips. Without thinking, she licked it. Snow.

More snow settled on her face, blown in from outside as the wind rose and moaned in the beams. The unlatched loft door banged incessantly. A dog barked. Distantly she heard voices shouting an alarm, and then the wind gusted so hard it shook the very timbers of the stables and jarred the Lions awake.

She rolled up onto her hands and knees, groping in the blackness for her boots. She found Wolfhere's blanket with her hand.

He was gone.

A bell began to toll, a dull reverberating sound that shook through her. It seemed to call in a thick oppressive voice: Fire! Storm! Attack! Awake! Awake!

She got hold of her boots and tugged them on, then crawled, found the trapdoor and the ladder by touch, and eased herself over and climbed down. Above, one of the soldiers called to her, but the wind howled and screamed at such a pitch outside that she couldn't make out his words. She found the floor and stood, clutching the ladder, trying to get her bearings. The horses had gone wild with fear; the voice of the monk in charge of the stables was a murmur running beneath the roar of the storm as he attempted, in vain, to calm them. The bell tolled on and on as if for a hundred newly dead souls being rung up through the seven spheres of Heaven to the Chamber of Light above.

"Hanna."

She jerked around but could not see Wolfhere, for it was utterly black inside.

"I'm at the door," he said.

Gingerly, she crossed to him. Bitter cold air streamed in through the cracks in the plank door.

With each gust the door shuddered and shook and even, once, bent inward as if the wind were trying to break it down. Wolfhere had to lean hard against the door to keep it closed. Upstairs the loft door stopped banging abruptly.

A heavy object slammed against the stable door. Wood ripped and splintered, but the door did not give way, though she felt Wolfhere press farther into the door to hold it shut. Then, like the whisper of mice in the walls, she heard a voice from outside.

"Please. I beg you, if any are inside, let me enter." It was the guest-master.

At once Wolfhere unlatched the door. Wind blew the door open. It smashed into Hanna, a haze of pain all along her right side, and as she stumbled back, it slammed all the way open and hit the inner wall so hard the top hinge tore free. A hooded figure staggered in, propelled by the tearing wind.

No wind, this. No storm either, not as she knew storms. Half stunned, Hanna stared in disbelief.

Outside she could not even see the shadows of the other outbuildings or the cloister. She could see neither sky nor moon. The world was a ghastly gray-white. They stood isolated in the middle of a howling blizzard. She could no longer hear the bell. Snow spun into the stables, blasting her face. Within, in the darkness of the stables, a horse broke free. She heard the swearing of the stablekeeper as he fought the animal back to its stall.

"Hanna!" Wolfhere had to shout to be heard above the gale. "Help me!" They grasped the shattered door and together yanked it back to the broken hinge to shove it closed against the cold hand of the wind. Despite the cold, she was sweating with fear and exertion. Her hand slipped on the weathered wood, and a splinter jabbed in just as Wolf-here grunted and put the pin through the latch.

"I can't risk light," he said, turning. "A broken lantern in this storm would burn this place down around us."

The guest-master had crumpled to the floor, and now Hanna could faintly discern his shape, made manifest more by the thin coating of snow on his robe and hood than by his own substance. He was muttering a prayer in Dariyan, the language of the church. She could not follow the words. He sounded half delirious, like a man raving with fever.

A man cursed above; one of the soldiers, a bulky shadow in armor, came down the ladder, swearing with such a foul string of curses that it took her a few shocked moments before she realized he was not angry but terrified.

"Did you see them?" he demanded as he thudded into the ground. Outside wind screamed, and hail peppered the walls like pebbles flung in volleys; the stables, the very wood structure of them, groaned under the onslaught.

"Things," said the guest-master in a terrified voice as the wind battered at the stables and hail pounded on the roof and walls. "Ai, Merciful Lady protect us from such visions. Protect us from such creatures. Such creatures as must be conceived in feculence and expelled from their dam's soiled flesh in base darkness. So came they down from the mountainside. So fell they down upon the wind. And such a stink they had to them that the hair on the back of my neck stood on end and my body shook with terror and the guests came rushing out of their chambers all crying and sobbing and one indeed could only babble like a child and he glowed as if he had been lit afire."

"Brother, take hold of yourself," said Wolfhere sternly. "Tell me what you saw."

"I have told you! They were living beings and yet like no creature I have ever seen. They had no limbs but only a thick dark body like an incorporeal staff as thick around as my own poor flesh. They sang in dire voices but in a language most foul-sounding if it was language at all. The wind bore them down from the mountain and the storm came with them as if they had raised it out of the air or from corrupt magics, for it is like no storm I have ever seen and I have lived here at this hostel for almost twenty years and served God in Unity faithfully, so help me. Ai, Lord in Heaven. That this terrible sight had never been given me for I have not the strength..."

"Hush," said Wolfhere. He shifted. "Lion. Watch over this good brother. Hanna. Dare you walk outside with me?" Her shoulder and hip throbbed from the pain of being struck by the windblown door.

Shifting to her right leg brought stabs of pain bad enough to make her wince.

"Hanna?"

"I can go," she said.

First Wolfhere found rope hanging on the wall, which he tied round his waist and then, by touch, round hers. The Lion braced himself against the door as Wolfhere unlatched it, but even so, the wind flung the soldier backward, and he skidded back, dragging his heels against the dirt floor. Wolfhere tugged Hanna after him. Together they forged out into the blizzard.

They staggered under the press of wind. Not six steps out Wolfhere began shouting at her, though she could scarcely hear him over the roar of the wind. She looked behind. She could not see the stables; night and storm buried them in darkness. Panic gripped her. She could not breathe. Her hands curled tight, so cold so fast she could no longer feel them.

Wind struck. She had to lean, hunched over, in order not to be thrown down by the force of wind and snow and- more than that-a peppering against her skin, stinging and harsh, as if the gale were stripping the mountains themselves of all their earth, scraping soil and rock off them to reveal the bones beneath.

Something brushed her. She screamed. She could not help herself. Some thing, some creature, but like no creature she ever seen or dreamed of. Then it was gone, vanished into the night, but there was another, and a third, streaming past her, borne on the gale. Towers of darkness, they were blacker even than the night itself, like a glimpse of the Abyss, the pit of the Enemy in which the wicked fall endlessly, never reaching bottom. With them, of them, around them swirled the stench of burning iron. Hanna heard their voices like the muttering of bells beneath the tearing wind, wordless and yet sentient.

From out of the blackness she heard a low rumbling roar that surged and swelled to a terrible crashing booming shuddering thunder that went on and on.

The rope at her waist pulled taut as Wolfhere reeled her in and shoved her back toward the stables. "Go!" he cried. "We dare not-"

She stumbled back. Groping, she found the door; shak ing, she fumbled with the latch, and at last they got it open and fell inside. The soldier slammed the door shut and latched it behind them. The roar deafened her; it filled the air as if it were itself part of the air. Then, slowly, it subsided, faded, until once more the wind was all the sound they heard, the endless tearing wind and the hail of rain and snow and pebbles against the wood walls.

Inside, it was warm and dark. The nervous horses stamped; the stablekeeper spoke in a soothing voice. Hanna heard, also, others of the Lions moving 'round the stable, calming the animals. The guest-master sobbed softly.

"What was that noise?" she asked as the building creaked and groaned and the wind shook the rafters and the low throb of bells numbed her down to her boots. Her hip and shoulder ached. She rubbed her hands to warm them.

"Avalanche," said the guest-master through his tears. "Ai, Lady, I know that sound well, for I have lived in these mountains twenty years. And close by, it was. I fear me that the cloister-" No farther could he go. He began to weep again.

"What were those creatures?" she asked.

Wolfhere untied her. "Galla," he said. The word had a hard, foreign, ugly sound, the "g" more of a guttural "gh."

"What are galla?" she asked.

"Something we should not speak of now, with them walking abroad, for they might hear their name spoken a third time and seek us out who know of them," he said in such a tone she knew he meant to say no more. "We must wait out the storm."

It was a long night. She could not sleep, nor did Wolf-here, though perhaps some of the Lions did. That the guest-master did sleep, fitfully, she knew because his weeping slackened at last.

Just as the gale slackened at last. Come dawn, Wolfhere ventured out with Hanna right behind him. It was a cloudless morning, the sky a delicate, washed-out blue. The mountains stood in all their glory, white peaks gleaming in the pale new sun. There was not a breath of wind. But for the debris scattered everywhere, the gate and much of the fence enclosure knocked down, the woodpile torn apart and scattered, shutters torn from hinges, and goats milling in confusion in the middle of the garden, she would never have guessed there had been a storm at all. Oddly, the beehives stood unscathed.

But the infirmary was gone.

There monks and merchants scurried, a swarm of them buzzing round the huge pile of boulders and earth that covered what had once been the infirmary. Built of stone and timber, it was obliterated now, melded with the great bank of mountain that had slid down on top of it.

They hurried over. The monks had managed to pull from the rubble the bodies of their ancient brother and of two Lions. Of the other two soldiers-Hanna recognized these as the two who had been posted outside, along the wall behind the cell that had imprisoned Antonia and Heribert-one had a broken leg and the other lay on the ground, moaning, his skin unbroken but something broken inside him.

The Brother Infirmarian knelt beside him, probing his abdomen gently. Tears wet the monk's face.

"It happened so fast," the monk said, looking up when Wolfhere knelt beside him. "I ran outside, hearing the noise, and then saw-nay, I did not see it but felt it, felt its power. Then the avalanche came.

Lady forgive me, but I ran. Only when I saw it was too late, only when I saw the infirmary would be overwhelmed, did I recall poor Brother Fusulus, who was too weak to save himself."

"You were spared," said Wolfhere, "because you have yet work to do in this world. What of this man, here?"

The Infirmarian shook his head. "God will decide if he is to live."

Wolfhere rose and paced over the edge of the avalanche. Hanna followed him but kept back, not wanting to venture too close. She could see the bones of the infirmary underneath rock and rubble, mortared stones torn up by their roots, planks strewn like so much offal, a bed overturned but its rope base untouched, a three-legged stool with one leg broken, dried herbs once tied in bundles now scattered every which way on the torn grass.

"What of the prisoners?" asked Wolfhere when he turned back to the others.

The abbot himself came forward. He had been soothing the presbyter, who had already sent his servants to the stables to make ready to leave. "We cannot find their bodies,"

he said. "This is most distressing. The rocks have buried them utterly. We will try to dig them out, but-

"No matter." Wolfhere surveyed the huge scar, the trail of the avalanche, that now scored the side of the ridge. Something shifted in the rubble and a few pebbles bounced down to land at his feet. He backed away nervously. "Search only if it is safe. The prisoners are lost to us now."

"What will you do?" asked the abbot. "What of the two injured men? Brother Infirmarian says this poor man must not be moved any distance, and the other will not be able to walk for many weeks."

"Can they remain here until they are healed?"

"Of course." The abbot directed his monks to move the injured men away.

"Come, Hanna," said Wolfhere. He walked back toward the stables, leaving the Lions to help.

"Why did you say it in that way? That the prisoners are 'lost to us.' Not that they're dead."

He looked at her curiously. "Do you think they are dead? Do you believe she lies there under the rocks? That someday, if the monks can dig the building out, they will find their two crushed bodies or their shattered bones?"

"Of course they must be dead. They were locked in the cell. How could they have escaped-"

Seeing his expression, she broke off. "You don't think they're dead."

"I do not. That was no natural storm."

No natural storm. A blizzard blown up in the midst of mild summer weather. Strange unnatural creatures he had named galla walking abroad, stinking of the forge.

"Where will she go, Hanna? That is the question we must ask ourselves now. Where will she go?

Who will shelter such as her?" "I don't know."

"Sabella might, if she could reach Sabella. But Sabella is herself in prison, so Wendar and Varre are closed to Antonia, for now." He sighed sharply and stopped at the stable door, turning back to look up at the mountains, so calm, so clear, above them. "I should have known. I should have prepared for this. But I underestimated her power." "Where will we go?"

He considered. "Alas, I fear we must split up. One of us must continue on to Darre to lay the charges against Biscop Antonia before the skopos. That way we remain prepared, whatever Antonia means to do. One of us must return to Henry and warn him, and hope he believes us." He smiled suddenly then, with a wry expression that made Hanna remember how much she liked him. "Better that one be you, Hanna. You will take four of the Lions, I the other two- when I journey back this way, I will pick up the two who remain here, if they survive."

She had grown used to Wolfhere and now, abruptly, was afraid to travel without him. "How long will it take you? How soon will you return to Wendar?"