"You are free of Hugh," she whispered, if only to stop this pointless endless fruitless speculation.

Thunder cracked and rumbled on and on and on, directly overhead. She shuddered, seized by a sudden intense wave of fear, as if fear were a living being, a daimone that had set its claws into her and tightened them, drawing blood and entrails and sucking all the spirit out of her. Rain drummed on the roof.

Abruptly the doors to the stables opened and servants and horses flooded in. They talked all at once, chattering, excited, exuberant. She shrank back into the stable where her and Hathui's gear lay together. Hiding in shadow, she listened: Sapientia, sent off on her heir's progress after the battle at Kassel, had returned to the king's progress triumphantly pregnant with the child who, if born alive and healthy, would guarantee her claim to become ruler after her father.

On the heels of their arrival the hunters returned, escaping the full force of the storm. Every stall was needed to stable horses. Liath gathered up her and Hathui's meager bundles and hauled them up to the loft where she arranged them in a safe corner. It took time. It kept her out of the way. It made her just another anonymous servant, someone who would be overlooked. But not, alas, forever.

Hathui, wet through, came up the ladder and onto the plank floor. She wrung water out of her cloak. Her hair lay matted to her head and in streaks down her neck. "You're back!" she said with surprise. "I am."

"You should have been waiting for the king," scolded Hathui. Then, distracted by the stamp and bustle of folk below, she added, "I hear Princess Sapientia has returned, though I haven't seen her."

"I haven't seen her either," said Liath. "She and her party must have been riding just behind me."

"They came in by the western road." Hathui gathered her saddlebags and bedroll. "I'm off to Quedlinhame to announce the news to Queen Mathilda and Mother Scho-lastica. You must go now and attend the king. At once."

Liath nodded dutifully. She nudged her saddlebags into the corner and threw her bedroll over them to conceal them. Hathui hoisted her bedroll over her shoulders and, with a brisk nod at Liath, climbed back down the ladder. Liath followed.

Rain pounded outside. She paused as Hathui got a new horse, freshly saddled. Ducking out by a side door, she hesitated under the eaves as water coursed down from the thatch roof and puddled at her feet, as rain pummeled the dry-packed earth of the courtyard into a shallow sea of mud. Hathui, coming outside by the main stable doors, swung onto her horse and forged out through the open gate into the teeth of the storm. Liath gazed across the courtyard at the whitewashed wall of one long side of the great hall, where all the living and feasting and sleeping went on. It looked no different than it had an hour ago, when she had entered hoping to find solitude there. But now, as if brought by the storm, she felt that wave of fear again, such a hideous swell of dread that her knees almost gave out under her.

She must not give in to the old fear. She touched the hilt of her sword, her "good friend," and shifted her shoulders to feel the comfortable weight of her bow, Seeker of Hearts, and her quiver full of arrows.

She braced herself against the wall, then thrust forward into the storm, dashing as fast as she could across the sloppy ground. She reached the other side without being too thoroughly drenched, and a Lion standing guard under the protection of the eaves gave her a smile for her trouble and opened the door. Warmth and smoke roiled out. She stepped up to enter the hall.

It was much changed now. The industrious clerics had been overwhelmed by loud, wet, laughing, bragging courtiers, noble folk newly ridden in from the hunt. Though a large chamber, the hall seemed cramped, reeking with the smell of wet wool and sweaty, jovial men and women. Liath weaved her way through them toward the hearth at the other end of the hall, where the king's chair stood. With each step, dread clawed in her, a sharp-fingered hand digging through her soul, groping up the paved streets of her city of memory on the track of her sealed tower. She had to force each foot forward, one step after the next.

What was wrong with her? Why had this fear come on her?

How much easier it would be to turn and flee. But that was what Da had done, and in the end it hadn't saved him. In order to live, she was going to have to do better than Da.

They parted before her, making way for the King's Eagle. Henry sat in his chair, looking tired.

With one hand he toyed with a hound's leash, knotted and tangled. His other hand rested on a thigh; he opened and closed it over and over. He looked distracted, staring without seeing toward his two younger children who sat on stools beside the fire. Sapientia stood beside him, shifting restlessly from one foot to the other, glancing again and again toward a knot of people kneeling to her left. These, her courtiers, stooped over a finely carved chest in which she probably had stored her fine clothing as well as mementos of her sacred progress, whose successful outcome would mark her as fit to rule as Queen Regnant after Henry's death.

Thunder boomed, rattling the timbers and shaking the barred shutters, and hard on top of that came a second crash, resounding through the hall, stilling their chatter. The princess' courtiers rose and transformed themselves into a new'pattern, one made bright and focused by the man who stood at their heart, the man at whom Sapientia stared, her gaze fixed avidly and jealously on his face.

His beautiful face.

As the thunder faded, Liath heard the gentle snap and rustle of the hearth's fire.

Hugh.

WIND scours his skin but he minds it not. Mere cold, mere sting of blown snow, cannot drive him from the stem of the ship. He sails on the wings of the storm, driving down on the northcountry to tear out the throats of those warlead-ers who have refused to bare their throats to his father, Bloodheart. This was the duty given him.

His nestbrothers laughed and howled their derision, for they see this as his punishment.

Did he not prove himself weak when he got captured by the Soft Ones? Does he not further display his weakness because he wears the circle at his chest, the circle that is the mark of the God of the Soft Ones?

He knows that Bloodheart meant the duty as punishment.

Sent back to the northcountry, land of OldMother and the WiseMothers, he will not gain booty and glory by raiding all winter into the lands that lie near the city the Soft Ones call Gent but which Bloodheart has renamed Hundse, "to treat like a dog."

But his nestbrothers cannot think more than two steps before their eyes. They do not understand, and he does not tell them, that he wears the circle not because he believes in the God of the Soft Ones but rather as a mark of his link to Alain Henrisson, the human who freed him.

They do not understand that their brother, who returns in disgrace to the northcountry, will be the one who holds his claws to the throats of the rebellious warleaders.

Someday, somehow, Bloodheart will die. It is the way of males to die. It is the way of the OldMother to stiffen and grow old and climb at last to the fjall of the WiseMothers. There, with her mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers unto uncounted generations, she will dream of the past and of the future and of the stars that lie like thoughts strewn across the fjall of the heavens far above, too steep a climb for mortal legs.

And when Bloodheart dies, who will the warleaders of the northcountry remember? The ones who raid and burn in the southlands, far away from the homelands? Or the one who drove into their halls and plundered their gold and stole and slaughtered their slaves? The one before whom they bared their throats?

The mewling and sobbing of a slave disturbs him. The dogs are restless, but he no longer lets them feed on obedient slaves. This lesson he learned from Alain: Impulse must not govern action. The other RockChildren, rowing, glance his way with their bitter eyes; they want to challenge him but dare not. They did not fight their way to a man's form out of the nestlings sired by Bloodheart. They come from other nests, other valleys, other dams. They serve Bloodheart and his litters. They do not contest him.

But they still watch. He dares show no sign of weakness in front of them, or else they will not fight for him when it comes time to bring the rebellious warleaders to heel, the independent ones who raid as all the RockChildren did before Bloodheart's hegemony: as they wish, with no coordination, with no greater vision leading them. They are no better than dogs! How they matured into men puzzles him sometimes, but he does not worry himself about it. That is a question only OldMother and the WiseMothers can answer.

He steps down from the stem and makes his way across the rocking ship. The beat and rise and fall of the waves is like a second breath to him; he does not falter although the swells are steep here where the seas sing with the joy of coming storm.

He stops at the stern where the slaves huddle. Miserable creatures. One- bearded as all the older males are- stares defiantly at him for a moment; then, remembering, the male drops his gaze swiftly and hunches his shoulders, waiting for the death blow. Another would kill the male simply for that glance. But he knows better.

Nurture the strong ones. In time they can become useful tools.

He leans down and presses the tip of a claw gently but firmly into the edge of one soft eye of the defiant male, as if to say. "I have noticed you."

Then he shoves aside the others to find the one who moans and mewls and groans. This one has the stink of blood and feces about her. She is a female of middle years, haggard of face, thin, her skirts stained with blood and diarrhea, the sign of an illness he has learned to recognize.

Every Soft One he has ever seen excrete such a foul combination of blood and pus and stink dies after a day or three of agonizing pain. Some of his nestbrothers in Gent would wager over how many days one stricken by the disease could live. But he has also noticed that this disease can pass itself on to others if not eradicated quickly. What good does it do the miserable creature to lie there in pain and her own fetid mess?

He does not, of course, want to stain his claws with her tainted fluids. He fetches a spear, its iron point honed into a fine instrument of death. He places the tip of the spear against the female's breast. She whimpers and sobs, still clutching her belly, and the others draw away, but no one tries to stop him. They fear him. Surely they know she is doomed. Not even the prayers they mouth to their god can save her.

This is the other lesson he learned from Alain: to be merciful. With a single thrust, he pierces her chest.

Alain started up, gasping, hands clutched to his chest. The pain that stabbed into him faded as Rage and Sorrow stirred, woke, and licked his hands until he calmed. The dream had been so real. But all the dreams of Fifth Son seemed this real. Somehow the blood they had exchanged so many months ago linked them now irrevocably. He saw with Fifth Son's eyes and knew his thoughts. He lived, in those sleeping hours, in Fifth Son's metal-hard skin.

Shuddering, he let the two black hounds nuzzle him until the wave of revulsion passed. The revulsion brought in its wake shame. What right had he to judge another creature, even an Eika?

A flame lit suddenly, seen through the gauzy veil that separated his side of the tent from his father's. My father.

The veil was pushed aside. Count Lavastine looked in, candle and holder gripped in one hand and the other still caught in the thin fabric of tent wall. "Alain? I heard you cry out."

Alain swung his legs off the cot and looked up at his father. If he stood, he would top Lavastine by half a head; at this vulnerable time of night, with the count dressed in shirt and linen drawers, he remained seated. Lavastine let the fabric wall fall behind him and crossed to Alain.

"Are you well?" He placed the back of his hand against the boy's cheek. It was not precisely a tender gesture- Lavastine did not have tender impulses-but the simple display of concern moved Alain deeply. "I am well. I had a bad dream."

Terror padded in from the other room and nipped at Rage. Lavastine cuffed them gently, almost absently, and they both settled down comfortably together, a quivering mass of black hounds. "You are concerned about the battle." Ai, Lady, the dream had been so vivid that Alain had forgotten about the work they meant to do at dawn.

"No," he said truthfully. "I am troubled by dreams of the Eika prince."

Lavastine began to pace. Terror yawned, stretched, made as if to rise and pad after his master, and then bared teeth, nipped sleepily at Rage again, and settled back to sleep.

"Do not fear my anger, Alain. You were honest with me, and I have forgiven you for freeing the savage. Is it the Eika you fear? Perhaps you're afraid the prince you let go will be among them and you don't know if you can kill him, if it comes to that?"

"He isn't among them. He's sailing north. He was sent back to his own country by his father to bring to heel all the warleaders who haven't yet accepted Bloodheart as chief over all the Eika. King, I suppose we might say."

As soon as he spoke, Alain realized how strange this statement must sound. Lavastine turned and, in the warm light of the candle, he gave that grimace which was his smile, not an expression of warmth, precisely, nor yet of amusement. "Son." Always, these past months, he savored the word, son.

"If it is true you have dreams that are also true visions, I wish you never to speak of them to anyone but me. Never to a deacon or any person in the church."

"Why not?"

"They might claim you have been touched by God and try to take you away from me. I will not let you go, not as long as I am alive."

Alain shivered. "Don't say that," he whispered. "Don't speak of death."

Lavastine reached, hesitated, then touched the boy on his dark head, laying his hand there almost tenderly, certainly possessively. "I will not let go of you, ever, Alain," he repeated. With a shake of his head as a dog shakes off water, he pulled away and crossed to the other side of the tent, hooking the fabric wall up over a post. "I smell morning," he said. "Come, son. It is time to arm for battle."

The hounds roused and with their waking roused the servants, who hurried to bring lit lanterns and clothing. They dressed the count and his heir in padded jackets to cushion their bodies from the weight of their armor. Alain had spent the summer training in armor, becoming accustomed to its weight and feel along his body: heavy mail hauberk, soft leather hood over which a servant slipped and tightened a mail coif and, on top of that, a conical helmet trimmed with bronze. Another servant bound his calves with leather strips wound from ankle to knee. This was far better armor than anything he could have hoped to wear as a man-at-arms.

He did not think about battle-if it came to that-as the servant hung belt and short sword at his hips. Outside, he took a spear from the rack set up beside the tent. The long haft of oak was strengthened by a twining ribbon of blue leather that wound from butt to lugs, the "wings" projecting out on either side just below the blade. Grooms brought their horses. Without too much trepidation, Alain swung up on his. He was a natural rider-Lavastine had stated more than once, in his emphatic way, that this was clearly a sign of Alain's noble blood. He might well have been born to the saddle, but he had truly only learned to ride after that day in the month of Sormas when Lavastine had acknowledged him as son and heir. He was untried and inexperienced, especially when it came time to ride into a skirmish where he might see actual fighting. But a count's son did not walk into battle. So he would ride.

Lavastine mounted his fine gray gelding, Graymane, and nodded at Alain as if to say: "Are you ready?"

Alain nodded in turn. He would not disappoint his father.

Wasn't riding to war what he had dreamed of all his life? His foster father, Henri the merchant, and his Aunt Bel had pledged him to the church, to live out his life as a monk at the Dragon's Tail Monastery. But the Lady of Battles had appeared that stormy spring day when Eika had burned the monastery and slaughtered all the monks. She had given him a rose that never wilted and could never be crushed, a rose he kept wrapped in a little cloth bag and wore on a leather thong around his neck. She had taken a pledge from him. "Serve me." He had sworn to serve her in order to save Osna village from the Eika attack but also because what she promised him was his heart's desire. For that, knowing that the man who raised him had promised him in good faith to the church, he still felt guilty.

Birds chirped, and the gray light that heralds dawn rose around them, etching the skeletal lines of trees against the seamless expanse of sky. Above the trees stars shone. Trained by a navigator, Alain could not help but note stars and constellations and wonder at their omens. The wandering stars moved on the backdrop of the sphere of the fixed stars, the highest of the seven spheres beyond which lay the Chamber of Light. Their threads wove power that guided Fate and could be wielded by hands trained in that craft. Or so it was claimed, though such teaching was condemned by the church.

The pale rose beacon of Aturna, the Magus, shone near the zenith in the constellation known as The Sisters, and Mok, planet of wisdom and bounty, made her stately way through The Lion. Beyond Aturna to the west, the jewel of seven stars clustered closely together and known as "the Crown"

glittered so brightly he thought he could see the mysterious seventh sister among her six bolder siblings.

Bow and Arrow, the arrow tipped with the bright blue brilliance of the star Seirios, pointed toward the Hunter with his belt of gems and his left shoulder tipped with red- the star called Vulneris. But as Alain stared, recalling the knowledge taught him by his foster father, the stars faded with dawn. Soon the light of the rising sun would obliterate this sight, as Lavastine meant to obliterate the Eika camp.

Lavastine lifted a hand for silence. His men-at-arms quieted to gather around him. These were the cavalry, some twenty experienced men, the best of his fighters. The infantry was already in place. The scouts, by now, would be creeping down to the shoreline to do their duty.

Lavastine left nothing to chance, not when he could help it.

They started out slowly, each armed servant holding on to a horse's bridle and leading them across the rough ground. It grew lighter as they crossed down through forest, picked their way across a blackened field that had once been ripe oats, and came out on a sandy hill that overlooked sea and shore. There, on a rocky rise just above a river's mouth, Eika had built a winter camp.

The sea shone and glimmered in the east where the first line of light touched it, spreading over the waves. From the beach down by the river, as if it were an echo of the sun's light, fire sprang up among the ships "Forward," said Lavastine calmly. He was always calm.

Alain was sweating with excitement. Someday, perhaps, the bards would sing of this battle. He followed his father down, the other mounted soldiers ranged around them, protecting them. No nobleman sent his soldiers into battle alone; that would be dishonorable as well as disloyal. So must his son-his bastard son, only recently proclaimed as his legitimate heir-be seen capable of riding to war and fighting in battle.

Lavastine glanced, just once, toward Alain, as if to say: "Don't fail me."

An alarm shrieked-the howling of dogs and the blast of a horn-from the Eika camp. Like hornets, Eika rushed from their shelters and out of their palisade to save their ships.

Archers hidden in the brush on the steep slopes of the ridge lit arrows from coals concealed in hollow tubes they had carried with them and began to shoot into the enclosure. The infantrymen, who had waded out along the shore, closed in on the surprised Eika from the river's mouth. And from behind, the claw that closed the pincer's mouth, rode Lavastine with his cavalry.

It took every ounce of skill Alain had to keep his horse running with the rest, to keep his balance, to simply stay with them and keep hold of his spear-not be jounced off or have his attention wrenched away by a hundred distractions. The cloth shelters in the enclosure burned with a spitting, furious flame.

The ships did not burn as brightly, but shapes swarmed over them, dousing the flames and howling their rage while the lightly armed scouts scuttled away to safety.

Then the cavalry hit the first rank of the Eika, those who had seen them coming and turned to fight. Alain rode right over one. He did not even tuck and thrust with his spear, did not even parry, just rode, hoping the horse knew what it was doing. He did not. He was dimly aware that beside him Lavastine thrust and stuck with his spear, striking home into an Eika chest, tugged, then gave up the spear and rode on. Soldiers pounded after them, leaving behind a mass of trampled Eika. Beyond, a larger clot of Eika struggled with the infantry. On foot the Eika had the advantage over the smaller, weaker men.

With axes hacking and shields used like weapons, striking and punching, Eika clawed and fought their way through the foot soldiers. But even in the fury of battle some turned, alerted by the cries of their brothers and the pounding of hooves.

He was upon them. Skin of copper, of bronze, of gold or silver or iron, they resembled creatures poured out of metal into a human mold, and yet they were not human at all. One cut at him, its teeth gleaming sharply white, its hair the dead color of bleached bone. He parried with his spear, felt the ax blade cut and hang up in the leather-bound haft. He tugged, suddenly frantic, and the Eika dropped its shield and drew its knife. Horrified, Alain released his hold on the spear and, as the creature staggered back with its lips frozen in a ghastly grimace, he jerked his sword from its sheath, lifted it high-

-and in that moment, with the Eika off-balance before him, with the skirmish swirling forward as other horsemen pressed Eika back and Lavastine shouted to urge them on, in that instant before his father looked around, before his father would see him frozen, a coward, he knew he could not do it.

He could not kill.

The Eika cast away ax and spear and leaped forward with its knife, a wicked obsidian blade.

Alain tried to lift his short sword to parry, but he was paralyzed with that revelation.

He could not kill.

He was not worthy. He would never be a soldier. He had failed his father.

He was going to die.

The sun flashed fire in his eyes, blinding him. Or was it death that he did not yet feel, a knife buried in his eye or throat, that blinded him? He dropped his reins and instinctively held up a hand to shield his eyes from the sun. A shadow swooped down over him. An iron-gray broadsword cut down across his sight. The Eika fell, cut down in mid-leap, and collapsed to the earth.

Alain gasped and groped for his reins before the horse could feel he had lost control; but this was a trained war-horse. It moved forward with the others. Who had come forward? Who had saved him?

Who had witnessed his cowardice?

He turned. Her gaze was at once distant and utterly piercing. The rose burned at his chest like a hot coal pressed against his skin.

She spurred her horse forward, his horse responding not to his limp control but somehow to hers, though she did not touch it, though she did not hold its reins.

"Stay beside me," she said, whether words spoken through her lips or ringing in his mind he could not tell. / am the Lady of Battles. She had a terrible beauty, seared by hardship and agony and the wild madness of battle. She drove her white horse, and with him beside her, surged forward through the Eika, striking to each side, so smooth in her movements that he knew she had ridden to war for so many years that she no longer had to think in order to kill.

Beyond her rode Lavastine, face grim and focused on his task. He took no pleasure in battle; this was duty. He parried a blow and cut in his turn, striking down a silver-scaled Eika; in that instant, as the Eika fell before him, Lavastine looked right past the woman and with that glance marked Alain and went back to the fight.

Now the cavalry drove the Eika back into the waiting line of infantry. Crushed between foe and foe, the Eika fought with hopeless fury or struggled to run free. But Alain, with the Lady of Battles at his side, remained untouched. She struck down any of the savages who lunged at him or hacked at him with ax or spear. He managed to stay seated on his horse. On her other side, Lavastine fought with the same steady imperturbable calm.

Alain jerked his horse left to avoid trampling an infantrymen. The two lines had met at last.

Lavastine peeled aside and with a shouted command led Alain and a dozen others down toward the shore. Some Eika ran flat out for the ships; others fought as the horsemen came up behind them. But the savages were broken now. Each one fought only for its own life, or for death. Down at the beach one ship was halfway into the water; Eika jostled each other for a place in its belly, grappling for oars, shoving it out into the current. The other two ships burned with an oily smoke that stung Alain's nostrils, bringing tears to his eyes and a cloudy haze over his vision.

"Rein in!" cried Lavastine.

Alain blinked back tears and passed a hand over his eyes.

"Well done," said the count.

Alain wiped tears from his checks and looked at his father with surprise. Well done? To whom was he speaking?

Soldiers circled them, weapons held at the ready. They waited on that verge where sandy soil turns into grassy beach and watched a single ship as it hove to into the cur rent, watched as oars beat the water and the ship was swept out to sea. A few arrows, shot harmlessly from the rocking belly of the boat, splashed in the shallows or skittered away into the reeds.

The Lady of Battles was gone. At his chest he felt only the cool, soft lump that was the little leather pouch.

The soldiers ranged 'round as they shook themselves free of the last eddies of skirmishing. A few Eika had plunged into the river to swim after the receding ship. Most lay dying on the ground. A few men were wounded, one or two with mortal wounds, but Lavastine's tactics had worked with that same blunt effectiveness with which Lavastine himself approached life.

"Well done, my son," repeated Lavastine. He lifted his sword; a viscous fluid the greenish-blue color of corroded copper stained the blade. With it held high, he addressed his soldiers, "My trusted companions, now you have seen this boy prove himself in battle."

One of the cavalrymen spoke. "I saw him strike down four with his own hand, my lord. He had the battle fury on him. He shone with it. I will follow Lord Alain gladly." To Alain's horror, he saw respect in the soldier's eyes.

As soon as this was spoken, others began to talk. Others, too, had seen a kind of unearthly glow around the lad.

"But I did nothing," he protested. "I was afraid. It was the hand of the Lady of Battles which protected me, which struck down those Eika."

As soon as the words passed his lips, he wished he had not spoken. They misunderstood him utterly. They none of them had seen her. They took his words as modesty, and as piety. They believed he had accomplished those deeds when in fact he had proved himself unworthy and only been saved by her intervention.

Some of the men drew the Circle at their breasts. Some murmured with awe and amazement.

Others bowed their heads. Lavastine stared at him hard, and then, as if he could not help himself, he gave that grimace which to him was a smile.

"God in Unity have set Their Hand on you, my son," he said with pride. "You are meant to be a warrior."

LAVASTINE and his retinue celebrated the Feast of St. Valentinus at the holding of Lord Geoffrey's wife, Lady Aldegund. All summer Lavastine had drilled Alain in the art of war and the rules of proper conduct, both of which were necessary-more than necessary, given the particulars of Alain's birth-for Alain to impress those noble families and other stewards and servants who gave allegiance to the counts of Lavas. Wealth Alain would inherit from his father, but there were many other virtues he must display in abundance in order to rule as count after him. All of these virtues Lavastine had and to spare: shrewdness, military prowess, boldness, liberality, and a stubborn and dogged determination to defend his possessions and prerogatives.

"They are treating you well?" Lavastine asked that evening as they made ready for the feast, which would be held in the great hall.

"Yes, Father." Alain stood very still, admiring the fine brocade that trimmed Lavastine's indigo tunic while a serv-ingman wrapped strips of linen around Alain's calves, binding his loose hosen tightly against his lower legs. A buckle worked of tiny panels of cloissonne interspersed with garnets mounted in gold cells clasped the narrow leather belt he wore to hike his tunic up around his knees; its richness still stunned him. The tunic itself, woven of wool, was dyed with woad to a rich afternoon blue. He recognized the color from cloth dyed and woven in Osna village by his Aunt Bel and old Mistress Garia, both of whom had daughters and distant kin and servantwomen trained in weaving.

But she's not my Aunt Bel, not any more. She's only the common woman who raised me.

So had Lavastine decreed. Alain had heard nothing from his old family since the count had sent a reward of sceattas to Bel and Henri, payment for the years they had fostered Alain. Had they forgotten him so quickly, not even to send word of how they and Stancy and Julien and little Agnes and the others fared?

This thought, and the traitorous wrench of sorrow it produced in his heart, he kept to himself.

All was ready at last; in the company of kin they need wear no weapons. The hounds had been penned outside, since it was not safe-to the others-to bring them indoors in an unfamiliar hall. Alain followed Lavastine down the stairs from the loft where they, as honored guests, would sleep with their servants this night. Together, he and his father came into the long hall. Every tapestry in the holding had been aired and now hung to decorate the walls. Fire burned in the central hearth where six months ago Lavas-tine-under Biscop Antonia's spell-had set his hounds on his own kinsman, Geoffrey, and on Geoffrey's young wife.

Now, Alain felt that every eye there turned to measure him. Lavastine they had forgiven for the madness set on him by another, but Alain did not think Lord Geoffrey and the others quite believed that Lavastine truly intended to make this unknown and illegitimate boy his heir.

They were all terribly polite as he took his place on his father's right side. That place, the one of greatest honor, had once been given to Lord Geoffrey; of all Lavastine's kin, Geoffrey was his nearest blood relation-or had been, until Alain.

Lady Aldegund, as hostess, sat on Lavastine's left. After a prayer, she directed her servants to pour wine at the upper table and cider to those at the lower tables. She handed Lavastine the cup that she, as hostess, and he, as honored guest, were to share; he bowed his head and offered it back to her, so she might have the first taste.

"Let us give this toast," said Lord Geoffrey with that same polite smile fixed on his face, "to the newly discovered son and heir of my cousin, Lavastine." He drank and handed his cup to Alain.

Lavastine's men-at-arms toasted heartily, with cheers. From Aldegund and Geoffrey's people the salute was subdued, even perfunctory. Lavastine studied the assembled crowd-quite fifty people-with narrowed eyes and his habitual half-frown, but he made no comment. He was no fool. He must know that many folk would not gladly accept the illegitimate son over the legitimate third cousin. Servants brought in the first course, a variety of fowl, chickens, geese, moorhens, and quail, all steeped so heavily in spices that Alain feared he would get sick to his stomach.

"You found no more winter camps?" asked Lord Geoffrey, leaning past Alain to address Lavastine.

Lavastine lifted his cup to lips and made a small gesture with his free hand.

Alain started. "Why, no, Lord Geoffrey," he said dutifully, seeing that his father meant for him to answer, "we found no more. It is not usual for the Eika to winter in these lands."

Geoffrey's mouth twisted into a smile. "Indeed not, Lord Alain. This is the first time we have seen any Eika on our shores after Matthiasmass, and yet my own men burned a winter camp a month ago.

Now you bring news that not one week ago you destroyed another. I wonder if the Eika mean to begin a new campaign. What if they want our land as well as our gold?"

"Do they farm?" asked Alain.

Geoffrey blinked. Aldegund took the cup from Lavastine and answered for her husband. She was a year or two younger than Alain, and her first child lay asleep in a cradle upstairs. "I would suppose that savages know nothing of farming. My kin have held estates in these lands since the time of the Emperor Taillefer. All the Eika ever want is gold and whatever other wealth-slaves, iron, coins, jewelry-they can carry away."

"But why would they want land, if not to farm it?" asked Alain. "Or to pasture sheep and cattle?"

He saw at once he had asked the wrong question. He had asked the sort of question Aunt Bel would ask. The other noble folk ranged along the table turned to listen-to see him make a fool of himself.

He refused to oblige them. And he refused to be ashamed of the common sense Aunt Bel had taught him. "If the Eika are now making winter camps, then we must ask ourselves why they do this now, this year, when they did not before. Isn't it true that there is one who stands as king among them, this Bloodheart? They have always been raiders before. Each ship is ruled over by a separate war-leader.

Now one Eika unites many tribes, and he has taken Gent, the very city where King Arnulf the Elder crowned his children and laid his claim for them to be rulers over Wendar and Varre together."

The nobles grumbled, forgetting their distrust of Alain when reminded of their grievance at old King Arnulf, grandfather of the current king, Henry. Once, as princes and counts and noble ladies and lords of Varre, they had crowned their own sovereign ruler and fought their own private battles for influence in the Varren court. Now, outsiders in a court dominated by nobles of Wendish blood, they waited, discontent. Some of these men had ridden with Sabella in her rebellion against Henry. Some of these women had sent supplies and gold to enrich Sabella's war chests and maintain her army. Now Sabella was a prisoner and her rebellion ended; Lavastine had pledged himself loyal to King Henry, and in return Henry had acknowledged Lavastine's bastard son as the count's heir.

The bastard son who had to prove himself worthy, in their eyes. "Now some of the Eika acknowledge a king," he continued, "while others build winter camps in Varren lands. What does this mean?"

"Indeed," said Lavastine. "What does it mean, Lord Geoffrey? Have you thought on this puzzle, cousin?"

By his expression, Geoffrey clearly had not. He took a gulp of wine to cover his discomfiture and set the cup down hard on the table. A few soldiers, at a lower table, laughed; Lavastine's men, they had seen Alain in battle and now seemed as willing to follow where he led as were Rage and Sorrow and the other black hounds.

I am not worthy.

And yet, if the Lady of Battles had appeared to him and not to the others, was that not a sign of his worthiness? Did he not carry the rose, the mark of her favor?

A servingwoman refilled Lord Geoffrey's cup and lingered just long enough to look over Alain impertinently but with obvious interest; he flushed, suddenly warm. And why shouldn't he be? The hall was certainly warm enough to suit the coldest heart.

"Have you formed some opinion yourself as to the Eika's reasons, Lord Alain?" asked Aldegund with a sharp tinge to her voice, like malice. A sweet-faced woman, scarcely more than a girl, Aldegund had not accepted Alain and, except for her marriage to Geoffrey, Lavastine had no claim over her. Her kin had their own lands and estates, their own connection to Varren nobility and to the Wendish kings.

She made a gesture and the servingwoman moved away to tend to other cups.

"I have." His flush deepened as he heard his own words. It sounded so very- proud. But a count's son was allowed some arrogance; indeed, it was expected of him.

"Go on." Lavastine gestured with his cup.

Alain allowed himself a drink of wine for courage-such very fine wine, carted in from Salia, and so much of it- before he continued. "I think Bloodheart means to make of himself a king to rival King Henry, or King Lothair of Salia. But when a king or queen is made, there are always princes who chafe under this rule. Some of these warleaders might not like being under the hand of another Eika, even one said to be a powerful enchanter. Yet if their own people wish to gain Bloodheart's favor, those warleaders and the men loyal to them might be driven out of their own lands because they are rebels.

Perhaps that is why they winter here. They may have nothing to go back to."

"It is possible," said Geoffrey grudgingly, finishing their shared cup. His wife sent a servant at once to refill it.

"Is it not just as likely," asked an older man whom Alain identified as Meginher, one of Aldegund's many maternal uncles, a fighting man who had a considerable reputation, "that these winter camps have been built at the order of this Bloodheart?"

"Why do we suppose," asked Aldegund sharply, "that these Eika behave in any manner like ourselves? They are savages, are they not? Why should they act as we do? What do we truly know of them?"

/ know what I see in my dreams. But he could not speak of those dreams out loud. His father had forbidden it. He bowed his head before her superior wisdom, for though she was young, she was a woman, lady of this estate and fashioned in the likeness of Our Lady, who orders the Hearth of Life.

Men were fashioned for rougher work, and though certainly they were usually skilled beyond women in combat and hard labor, everyone knew, and the church mothers had often written on, the greater potential of women for the labors of the mind and the arts. These blessings, like that of childbirth, were granted to them by the grace of Our Lady, Mother of Life.

"We know little of the Eika," said Lavastine curtly. "While we still have good weather, however, myself, my son, and these of our men-at-arms who accompany us will patrol the coasts for as long as we can. We will march west to Osna Sound next. The last and worst incursion of the Eika came there two springs ago, as you know."

"Ah." Lord Geoffrey leaned forward with new interest. "There is a village at Osna Sound. Isn't that where you were fostered, Lord Alain? I remember when you came to Lavas town along with the other laborers who owed their year's service."

"You do?" asked Alain, surprised that as important a man as Geoffrey had noticed an insignificant common boy like himself.

But Geoffrey looked down swiftly, and Alain glanced at his father to see that Lavastine had fixed an expressionless-yet for that very reason intimidating-stare on the other man.

Meginher snorted and turned to his cup, taking a swig of wine. Servants staggered in under the weight of a roasted boar and several haunches of venison decorated with pimentos. Alain could not help but think of Lackling, who had eaten gruel all his life with a few beans or turnips if there were extra. Poor bastard . . . just like Alain, only how different Lackling's fate had turned out to be. He had never been given leave to eat food this rich, except the last scraps taken from the table if he could grab them before they were thrown to the pigs.

"Of course," said Lavastine, relinquishing the cup to his hostess, who had it filled once again with wine, "any person would have noticed your quality at once, Alain, for it was preordained that you take your place among the magnates and potentes, was it not? Twice now you have distinguished yourself in battle." He said this firmly and clearly so that every person in the hall heard him. He gestured toward the captain of his cavalry. "Is it not true, Captain?"

The soldier stood. He, like the others, had bent his knee before Alain four days ago after the battle-and not just because Lavastine wished them to do so. "I have fought for the counts of Lavas since I was a lad, and I have never seen anything like this. I remember when the boy killed the guivre at the battle outside Kassel. Even so, to see him ride through his first battle as a true soldier, to see him strike to either side with no sign of fear, with such strength, with such fury that it shone from him as if he had been touched by the saints and God Themselves, to see him slay Eika on his right hand and on his left, I could see he had been born to the life of a warrior." The other men-those of Lavastine's soldiers who had survived the battle-pounded cups and knife hilts and empty platters on the table as they roared their approval.

Alain leaped up. "It was the hand of the Lady of Battles, not my own," he insisted, "which killed those Eika."

"Sit," said Lavastine softly and, as obedient as the hounds, Alain sat.

The others murmured, but Lord Geoffrey made no more comments about Alain's service as a laborer at Lavas Holding, and Lady Aldegund turned the talk to more innocent subjects: the year's harvest, the new wheeled plow, and how the mild summer and autumn presaged a good growing season which would, in turn, presage a rich harvest of taxes. A third course was brought in, veal and lamb spiced with cumin and pepper and other exotic flavors and condiments. A poet, trained in the court chapel of the Salian king and now singing for his supper at the lesser courts of nobles, sang from an old and lengthy panegyric in praise of the Salian Emperor Taillefer as Alain picked at his food.

"As did the mariners of old, I set sail to test my weary limbs against the storms of the sea, to try my ship against the ocean waves. I set my gaze to that beacon which gleams from afar.

That light is the name of Taillefer. Look! The sun shines no more brightly than the emperor, who illuminates the earth with his boundless love and great wisdom."

The poet went on in this manner, extolling the virtues of the long-dead emperor while Alain wondered how the noble lords and ladies could possibly eat as much food as they were stuffing into their bellies at this feast. He had gone hungry from time to time-everyone did-but he had never suffered; Aunt Bel was prosperous enough to be able to set aside some portion every year against a catastrophi-cally bad harvest. But he had seen the poor who lived from hand to mouth, their children in perpetual want, begging at the church with legs and arms as thin as sticks and faces bleak with hopelessness. In good years, of course, such people found day labor and managed, but in bad years even the prosperous stared into the gaunt face of hunger.

"For although the sun knows twelve hours of darkness, Taillefer, like a star, shines eternally. He enters first among the company, and he clears the way so that all may follow. With heavy chains he binds the unjust and with a stiff yoke he constrains the proud. With a stern hand he teaches the impious to love God."

The servants brought in a fourth course of clear soup together with a bread so white and fine it seemed to dissolve on Alain's tongue.

"Taillefer is the fount of all grace and honor. His achievements have made him famous throughout the four quarters of the earth. He is generous, prudent, just, pious, affable, handsome, outstanding at arms, wise in conciliation, compassionate to the poor, and gentle with the weak.

Never before did there speak such an eloquent lecturer; the sweetness of his words surpasses those of Marcia Tul-lia, the orator of ancient Dariya. He alone has penetrated the hidden paths of knowledge and understood all its mysteries, for to him God revealed the secrets of the universe.

He has discovered every secret of the mathematici and the secret hidden words and the ways of the stars in their courses and the means by which their powers may be drawn down into the hands of humankind. No navigator has studied the heavens with greater keenness."

After the soup came apple tarts, pears steeped in honey, and a custard. The creamy mixture of milk, honey, and eggs melted on Alain's lips like nectar, and he thought that perhaps he could endure another entire poem cataloging the dead emperor's virtues if only he could make room in his belly for several more helpings of custard. Mostly, however, he wanted to go to sleep. It was well into night now; candles and torches burned, illuminating the feast and the faces of women and men eating and drinking their fill, passing cups from mouth to mouth, sharing bites of apple tart, getting up to stretch their limbs. A constant stream of people went to and from the forecourt, so sodden with wine that they had to relieve themselves. Some of the soldiers, made restless by the long court poem, called for a stanza from the Gold of the Hevelli. Instead, the learned poet launched into a long digression-evidently part of the poem-in which Taillefer oversaw the construction of a new palace at the city of Autun, where he had most often lingered with his court. His workers labored eagerly, raising straight columns and a high citadel, digging into the earth to find hot springs for the baths the emperor loved; the most favored workers built a church fit for a hallowed king. "They labor as do the bees in summer"-at which point the poet went into a second long digression, this one on the nature of bees.

It was time to go outside. Alain excused himself and left the hall. As he came out into the cold autumn night, he sucked in a deep breath of clean air. Inside, smoke from hearth and torches had wreathed the air with a heavy perfume; he was dizzy from it and from the wine. Aunt Bel had never served such wine at her table! Or such a plethora of dishes, each one as exotic as if it had been itself carted to this land from the fabled East. But he was becoming accustomed to feasts.

Feeling suddenly guilty for his good fortune, he walked farther out into the night and relieved himself against a tree. The chill air had the effect of sharpening his senses, and he heard the crack of a branch under a foot and the long scrape of cloth pulled across twigs before he saw the shadow slip toward him. He hastily tied his hosen and stepped back, then let out a breath; it was only one of the servingwomen who had lost her way or also come out to relieve herself.

"My lord Alain," she said. She stumbled and gave a little cry. He started forward and put out an arm to catch her. She pressed herself against him. She had firm breasts and a provocative swell of belly and hip beneath her long gown. "It's a cold night. The hayloft is much warmer than it is out here."

He was suddenly much warmer than he had any right to be on such a cold night. Somehow, her moist lips nuzzled his neck; her breath smelled of sweet custard. Somehow, her hand slipped around the curve of his buttocks.

"My-my father expects me inside."

"Inside you shall be, my lord, if you wish it."

The sudden heat that transfixed his body scared him, and yet, the more she stroked his body, the more he felt it. He fumbled at her shoulders as she maneuvered him back, pinning him up against the tree.

"You're very handsome," she murmured.

"Am I?" he asked, surprised. No woman except the bored Withi had ever shown interest in him before he became Lavastine's heir. But the thought vanished as does mist under the sun when she kissed him, moving her body against his and taking hold of his hands, guiding them.

If this was the fire of lust, then it was no wonder people succumbed to it. But, kissing her, he made the serv-ingwoman in his mind into an image of Tallia, and the thought of kissing her, of being free to do so, of meeting her in the marriage bed . . .

"Ah!" sighed the woman. "That's better. Not as inexperienced as you look, my lord." She deftly slid her hands along his belt and unfastened the buckle. "I've a brother who will be ready for service next spring. He's a good strong boy." The belt, and extra length of tunic held up by it, slipped down to around his knees. "He'd make a fine man-at-arms."

At this moment, she could have asked for anything and he would have given it to her. She took his hands and helped them slide her own tunic up, to her knees, to her thighs, baring pale legs, to her hips

. . .

From the kennels erupted a sudden uproar of barking and maddened howls and men's shouts, punctuated by a scream. Alain knew those howls: Lavastine's hounds. His hounds.

"I beg you," he said, so out of breath he might as well have been running. He tried to slide out away from her, caught his back on a branch that stabbed in just below his shoulder blade. He stumbled, took a step, tripped over his not-quite-fastened belt, and fell hard to his knees. The jolt brought tears to his eyes. His skin was on fire.

"My lord Alain!" She came to his rescue, helping him up, fumbling with the belt. "I don't mean-I'm sorry-but the hounds- Her face was a flash of pale skin and dark eyes in the light of a thin crescent moon.

"Of course you must go." She had remembered the hounds, and what he was. Now she was frightened of him, she who had held all the power moments before.

He hastily tucked his tunic in over his belt so he wouldn't trip on its length, then ran for the kennels, which lay out behind the great hall in the lee of the stables.

The hounds had gone mad, ravaging a man who lay like a rag doll in their midst. Alain waded in and dragged them off the poor man, who by now bled from a score of bites and ragged tears.

"Back! Back!" Made strong by anger and fear and the still coursing memory of the servingwoman's caresses, Alain hoisted the man up and hauled him out of the kennel, kicked Terror back, scolded Rage and Sorrow, who slunk together to a corner and hunkered down as if ashamed of themselves. As they should be! One of the handlers slammed the gate shut behind him. He let the man down onto the ground and examined his legs and arms, which had taken the worst of it from the hounds.

The man writhed on the ground, moaning and crying and begging for mercy. It was one of Lord Geoffrey's men. "How did this happen?" he demanded, looking up at the others, a ring of Lavastine's soldiers who were obviously drunk.

"He said such things, my lord," said one, young enough and drunk enough to be brash. "He said things about you, my lord, but he never saw you in the battle against the Eika. He never saw you kill the guivre and save Count Lavastine's life. He had no right to say such things and he wouldn't believe us, what we said, so it came to-Those weren't shadows on the soldiers' faces, but bruises. "It came to a fight?"

"Yes, my lord."

"How did he get into the kennel? Ai, by our Lord! You." He gestured to one of the handlers.

"Run and get the herb-woman who lives here. There is such a one, surely? Ask at the stable." The handler obeyed, dashing off.

The soldiers did not answer at once. But he could guess how it had all happened. While he allowed himself to be seduced, this other game had unfolded here. Even now, watching the man weeping with pain before him, watching as blood pooled on the ground, running his hands over the man's skin to find the gaping wounds, he knew this man could die. If he did not succumb to loss of blood or the simple trauma, he might well die later of infection.

"Ai, Lady!" He hated himself at that moment. Slowly the encounter by the tree unwrapped itself from the heat of lust and he saw it more clearly. Perhaps the woman really had thought him handsome.

Certainly, he had found her desirable. But she would never have thrown herself against him if he hadn't been Lavastine's heir. She had wanted something from him-a position for her brother in his retinue. This coin she had to offer in trade. Had he been simple Alain, foster son of Henri the merchant, he would have had nothing to give her in return. She would not have looked twice at him, just as the girls at Lavas Holding had never looked twice at him before this summer except that one time, on a dare. And this summer, under stern orders given by the count himself to Cook who had delivered those orders to all the servingwomen in Lavas Holding, none had dared approach him for fear of the count's wrath. The man who had made a bastard intended that illegitimate son to make none of his own.

"My lord, I beg you, forgive us." The three soldiers knelt before him. The stench of mead on their breath was almost enough to stagger Alain where he crouched beside the ravaged man. "But he made such claims! He said any boy could claim to be a bastard, that any noble lord might tumble a woman or two and think nothing of it-" As he had been about to do, without thinking at all! "-and so we said we'd see how well he did, claiming to be Lavastine's heir."

Alain let out a breath. "So you threw him into the kennel."

They didn't answer, nor did they need to. Men from the stables came running up, and there was shoving and angry words. The man on the ground ceased his muttering and lapsed into quiet. "You've killed him!"

"Bastard lovers! Our lord Geoffrey is a true nobleman!" "You wouldn't know a noble lord if he bit you in the- "Quiet!" cried Alain, standing. He set a hand on the gate and shook it, and that shut every one of them up and brought Rage and Sorrow to the gate, panting to be let out. He opened it, chased the others back, and let Rage emerge. Sorrow whined at being left behind and thumped his tail against wood, barking once.

"Take this man and give him care. All who witnessed, come with me. This will be settled."

They followed like sheep, the handlers-some Lavas-tine's, some Geoffrey's-the three soldiers, and a pair of Geoffrey's men-at-arms who had been comrades to the injured man and who now admitted to having goaded him on. Except for the handlers, they were all drunk. Rage herded them to the doors which led into the hall. Alain stepped across the threshold and was assaulted at once with a haze of smoke. The annoying buzz of whispering voices made an undertone beneath the ringing tenor of the poet.

Lady and Lord Above! The poet was still going on. It was no wonder the Salian king had thrown him out to make his fortune elsewhere.

"In the woods every manner of wild beast makes its lair. Through these glades the admirable hero, Taillefer, would often go hunting and give chase with hounds and spears and arrows. At the very dawn of day, when the sun first rises to spread its light upon the fields and the great city, a band of nobles waits at the threshold of the emperor's bedchamber, and with them wait the emperor's noble daughters. A clamor arises in the city, a roar lifts into the air, horse neighs to horse, and hound strains at its leash. At length all set out. The young men carry the thick hunting spears with sharp iron points, and the women carry linen nets fastened with square mesh.

A throng encircles the emperor, and he and his daughters lead their black hounds with leashes round their necks, and in their excitement the hounds snap at any person who comes near them except for their master and his children, for even the dogs in their dumb loyalty bow before such bright nobility... "

The poet was last to see and last- finally-to stop talking.

Lavastine rose from behind the long table at the far end of the hall. "What does this mean, Alain?"

Alain walked forward with Rage padding obediently at his side. Every soul in the hall shrank back from the hound who panted with mouth open, revealing her teeth. "There has been a fight outside.

One of Lord Geoffrey's men-at-arms was thrown into the kennel and badly torn. He may yet die."

Geoffrey leaped to his feet. A moment later, Lady Alde-gund rose together with her uncle. At a sign from her, Geoffrey sat down; the uncle did not. The girl set a hand briefly on his hand as if to remind herself that she had the weight of his arm to back her up.

"How did this happen?" she asked.

"I believe," replied Alain calmly, "that they had all drunk too much."

"It is my man who may die!" exploded Lord Geoffrey, jumping again to his feet.

"Sit down, cousin," said Lavastine in a cool voice. Geoffrey sat. Aldegund and her uncle did not.

"If he dies," said Aldegund, "there will be a price to pay."

"And so shall those men responsible pay it," said Alain, halting just before the table like a supplicant. Except that, with Rage at his side and, indeed, a growing anger in his heart, he did not feel one bit as if he had to beg anyone's pardon. "They will pay the proper fine to the man himself if he is crippled or to the man's kin if he dies. But the man, or his kin, must also pay a fine."

Geoffrey gasped. "Why is that?" demanded Aldegund.

This, here and now, was the test of wills-and of whether the illegitimate son deserved what he had been given.

"All of these men took part in the fight or witnessed the fight, and they will swear before your deacon and Count Lavastine's clerics that the man involved spoke words disloyal to Count Lavastine, lord of his lord."

At that even Lady Aldegund blushed, for every person there knew what sort of things a tongue loosened by too much mead might have said: not against the count himself-no one disputed Lavastine's deeds or prerogatives or virtues-but against the count's judgment.

There was a long silence.

At last Lady Aldegund inclined her head, acquiescing to Alain's judgment in the matter. Her uncle sat down and, after a moment, she did as well. Lavastine sat, too, and took the cup she offered him.

Alain bowed his head. Rage snuffled into his palm, smelling something of interest there-perhaps the lingering scent of the servingwoman. Ai, Lady; as if the thought made her appear, there she stood beside Lavastine, filling the count's cup. She glanced up, briefly, at Alain, and then away. She did not look at him again. The feast proceeded without incident, and the poet-whose diction and voice were decent enough-was encouraged to sing something more popular.

Only in the morning when they had ridden away from the holding and lost sight of it past hills and forest did Lavastine comment on the incident.

"I am pleased with your cleverness."

“But-”

Lavastine lifted a hand, which meant he had not finished and did not yet wish for Alain to reply.

Dutifully, Alain waited. "But you must not be unwilling to boast of your accomplishments, Alain. To display prowess in battle is a fine thing for a man in your position. You must not boast immoderately, beyond what you deserve, but it is just as bad to claim false humility. Modesty is a virtue for churchmen, not for the son and heir of a count, one who will lead these same men and their younger brothers and cousins and their sons into battle. They must believe in you, and they must believe that your good fortune will lift them as well and keep them alive and prosperous. That the Lady of Battles, a saint, has given you her favor-that will weigh heavily with them. But you must not mire yourself in humility. You are not a monk, Alain."

"I was meant to be one," he murmured.”

"Not any more! We will no longer speak of this, Alain. A good man remembers and honors his oaths. In time, when you are an old man and have an heir who is ready to take your place, then perhaps you can retire to a monas tery and live out the rest of your years in peace. But that oath was made for you by others, before it was known who you were and what role you have to play. You never stood before the monastery gate and pledged yourself to the church. That you think of this obligation at all is to your credit. But it is not to be spoken of again. Do you understand?"

Alain understood. "Yes, Father," he replied. The hounds, on their leashes, padded obediently alongside.

Lavastine took in a deep breath of the autumn air. "No need to hasten to Osna Sound." He turned to survey his retinue. "We've heard no reports of Eika wintering there. I think we may take a few days to go hunting."

VI THE CHILDREN

OF GENT

SPADES stabbed into loose dirt. From where she stood, Anna caught flecks of soil on her cheek, spray thrown out as the gravediggers filled in the latest grave. They had buried twelve refugees in a mass grave this bitter cold morning, including a young mother and her newborn babe.

Anna had been on her way to the stream, but it was hard not to stop and stare. A few ragged onlookers huddled in the wind. Rain so cold it felt like droplets of ice spattered down, and she tugged her tattered cloak tighter about her shoulders. Here in the camp, corpses went naked into the grave since the living had need of the clothes off their backs.

A child no more than two or three winters old bawled at the lip of the pit. It had straggly hair that might have been blond once, a face matted with filth, a dirty tunic, and nothing covering its feet. It also looked about to fall into the pit with the dead folk. She set down her buckets and hurried forward just as the child slipped and fell to its rump on the crumbling slope.

"Here, now," she said, grabbing it by the arm and pulling it back. "Don't fall in, child." Looking around, she hailed one of the diggers. "Where's the child's kin?"

He pointed into the grave, where woman and infant lay bound together by shreds of old cloth, all that the folk in the camp could spare to make sure they weren't separated in death. With a stab and a heave, he tossed another spadeful of earth onto the grave. A shower of dirt scattered across the waxy faces of mother and child.

"Isn't there anyone here to look after it?"

"It was crying when we came to carry away the corpse," he said, "and it's crying still. Ach, child,"

he added, "perhaps it was a blessing that the children of Gent escaped the city, but most of them are orphans now, as is this poor babe. Who's to care for them when we can't even care for our own?"

The child, safe away from the rim, had now fastened onto her thigh and it snuffled there, smearing her tunic with snot as it whimpered and coughed.

"Who, indeed?" asked Anna softly. With a finger she touched the Circle of Unity that hung at her chest. "Come, little one. What's your name?"

The child didn't seem to know its name, nor could it talk. She pried its arms off her leg and finally, with some coaxing, got the child to drag one of the empty buckets. In this way, with the baby toddling along beside her, they made it to the stream, where they waited in line to dip their wooden buckets into the water.

"Who's this?" asked one of the older girls, indicating the child who stood fast at Anna's heels like a starving dog. "I didn't know you had a little brother."

"I found him by the new grave."

"Ach, indeed," said an older boy. "That would be Widow Artilde's older child."

"Widow?" asked Anna. "But she was so young." Then she realized how stupid the comment sounded as the older children snickered.

"Her husband was a militia man in the city. I suppose he died when the Eika came."

"Then you know her?" Anna tried to draw the child out from behind her, but the child began to bawl again.

"She's dead," said the boy. "Had the baby, and they both of them caught sick and died."

"Doesn't anyone want this child?"

But having filled their buckets, the others were already walking away, hauling the precious water back to camp or to Steleshame. So she let the child follow her back to the shelter she and Matthias called home. Indeed, the child seemed unlikely to let her out of its sight.

"God forfend!" exclaimed Helvidius when she ushered the child into the shelter of the canvas awning. A fire burned brightly in a crude hearth built of stones, and the old poet sat on his stool watching over the pot in which they kept a constant hot stew made of anything edible they could scavenge. Today it smelled of mushroom and onion, flavored with the picked-over bones of a goose. The remains of yesterday's acorn gruel sat in their one bowl next to the fire. Anna handed spoon and bowl to the child.

The spoon dropped unregarded from its hand and it used its dirty fingers to shovel down the lukewarm gruel.

"What's this creature?" demanded Helvidius.

"One more helpless than you!" Anna had taken the buckets of water around to the tanners in exchange for scraps of leather. "Can you help me make it something to wear on its feet?"

"You're not taking this brat in, are you? There's scarcely room for the three of us."

But Anna only laughed. The old poet was always grumpy, but she didn't fear him. "I'll let him sleep curled at your feet. It'll be like having a dog."

He grunted. The child had licked the bowl clean and now began to snivel again. "Dogs don't whine so," he said. "Does it have a name?"

"Its mother's dead, and no one else claimed it. You watch over it while I go haul more water."

She made four more trips down to the stream. At this time of year, with the winter slaughter underway, the tannery was busy with many new hides, so Matthias had seen to it that she could take his place hauling water and ash for the tanning pits or collecting bark from the forest. He had taken on more skilled work scraping or finishing skins which had cured over summer and autumn. She didn't mind the work. The activity kept her warm and gave them a certain security that many of the other refugees, dependent on what they could scavenge from the forest or on Mistress Gisela's charity, did not have.

Yet although the winter slaughter went on, and meat was salted or smoked against the season to come, little of that meat reached the refugees. Once a day a deacon distributed a coarse oat bread at the gate, but there was never enough to go around.

Now, when Anna returned to their shelter from her last trip to the stream, it was to find the child wailing, old Helvidius vainly singing some nonsense tune with all the enthusiasm of a woman proposing marriage to a dowerless man, and Matthias glowering over the stewpot.

"What's this?" Matthias demanded as she shoved the canvas awning aside. The canvas didn't really keep out the cold as much as it kept in some of the heat in the fire and their massed bodies. It did keep off rain tolerably well. Still, her toes and fingers ached from the chill and her nose was running.

"Where did this come from?"

"It's a child, Matthias," she said.

"I can see it's a child!"

"It had nowhere else to go. I couldn't just leave it to die! Not after St. Kristine saved it from death at the hands of the Eika." The child sniffed and babbled something unintelligible but did not let go of the old man's knee.

"And it stinks!" added Matthias.

It certainly did. "Master Helvidius-'

"I didn't know it couldn't take care of such things itself!" the old man wailed. "I'm a poet, not a nursemaid."

"Well, you must learn how to watch over the child, since it will be under your care all day," she said tartly.

"Under my care all day!" he cried.

"You mean to keep it?" Matthias looked appalled.

There was a sudden silence.

"We must keep it," said Anna. "You know we must, Matthias."

He sighed, but when he did not reply, she knew she had won.

"Well, then," said Helvidius grudgingly, "if we keep it, we must name it. We could call it Achilleus or Alexandras, after the great princes of ancient Arethousa. Or Cornelius, the Dariyan general who destroyed proud Kartiako, or Teutus of Kallindoia, famous son of the warrior-queen Teuta."

She had coaxed the child over to her and, by the door flap, was now peeling off the soiled cloth that swaddled its bottom. She laughed suddenly. "You'd best find a girl's name, Master Helvidius. We'll call her Helen, for didn't Helen survive through many trials?"

"Helen," said the old poet, his tone softening as he regarded the child. "Fair-haired Helen, true of heart and steadfast in adversity."

Matthias snorted, disgusted, but he was careful as always to share out the stew equally between them as they each took turns spooning stew out of their shared bowl.

It was dusk outside, almost dark, when they heard shouts from the roadway. Anna thrust little Helen into Helvidius' arms and ran outside with Matthias. They heard a great commotion and hurried to where the southeast road ran alongside the tanning works in time to see an astonishing procession ride past-noble lords on horseback and more men-at-arms, marching behind them, than she could count.

Even in the twilight their arms and clothing had such a rich gleam that she could only gape at their finery. They laughed, proud, strong young lords, a handful of women riding in their ranks, and appeared not to notice the ragged line of people who had gathered to watch them arrive.

The gates of Steleshame had already opened and there, lit by torchlight, Anna saw the mistress of Steleshame and the mayor of Gent waiting to welcome their guests.

"Where are you from?" Matthias shouted, and a man-at-arms called back, "We've come from Osterburg, from Duchess Rotrudis."

When they returned to the shelter and gave their news, Helvidius was beside himself. "That would be one of the duchess' kinsmen," he said. "They'll want a poet at their feasting, and where there is feasting there are leftovers to be had!"

In the morning she rose with Matthias at the first light of dawn and in the cold dawn began her daily haul of water. The stream ran with a bitter ice flood over her bare fingers, but its chill was nothing to the cold fury that seized her upon returning to their little shelter.

Helvidius and Helen were gone and with them the old poet's stick and stool and her precious leather bag of dried herbs, onions, four shriveled turnips, and the last of the acorns. No sooner had she stuck her head under the canvas, searching to see what else the old man had taken, than a spear butt prodded her in the back and a harsh voice ordered her to come out.

"I thought we'd cleared this place," said a soldier to his companion, eyeing Anna with disgust.

"These children are as filthy as rats, each and every one." She gaped at the two soldiers-well fed, well brushed, and warmly dressed-who confronted her. "Go on, then, girl-or are you a boy?" "Go where?"

"We're clearing out the camp," he said. "You'll be marching east, where we can find homes for you orphans. Now go on, get your things or leave them behind." "But my brother-"

This time when he jabbed her with the butt of his spear, his touch wasn't as gentle. "Take what you need, but only what you can carry. It's going to be a long march." "Where-?"

"Move!" His companion walked on, poking a spear through hovels and the other pathetic shelters the refugees from Gent had put up beyond the tannery, but they were already empty. Indeed, the camp itself was far more quiet than usual, but now that she listened, she heard the nervous buzz of voices from down by the southeast road.

Though she had five knives tucked here and there inside her clothes, she knew it was pointless to resist. She scrambled back inside the canvas shelter, grabbed the pot and bowl, nesting the one inside the other, rolled up their blankets and tied them with a leather cord, and bound up her shawl to make a carry pack. She began to take down the canvas shelter.

"Here, now, leave that!"

"How can I leave that?" she demanded, turning on him. "What if it rains? We'll need to shelter under something!"

He considered this, hesitating. "We're to shelter at church estates, but there are so many of you .

. . perhaps it's wisest to have some shelter of your own. If the weather turns colder, or there's snow . . ."

He shrugged.

"Is everyone leaving?"

But he wouldn't answer more of her questions, and she sensed that time was short. The rolled-up canvas was an unwieldy burden, and together with buckets, blankets, and pot she could barely stagger along under the weight.

The sight of the refugees made her sick with terror. Herded into a ragged line along the road, she realized suddenly how very young they all were. For every twenty children there was, perhaps, a single adult-even counting the soldiers, all of them grim as they held spears to prevent any child from slipping out of line. The sheer amount of bawling and wailing was like an assault, a wave of fear spilling out from the children who had escaped Gent and now were being driven away even from the meager shelter they had made here at Steleshame.

Anna spotted Helvidius. He leaned heavily on his stick and little Helen, beside him, sat on the stool with the precious bag of food draped over her lap. She cried without sound, and yellow-green snot ran from her nose. The old poet's face brightened when he saw Anna.

"Where's Matthias?" she asked as she came up beside him.

"I don't know," said the old man. "I tried to tell them I'm a great poet, that the young lord will be angry at them for sending me away, but they drove me out and didn't listen! I think they mean to march these four hundred children to the marchlands. I suppose there's always a need for a pair of growing hands in the wilderness."

"But this isn't everyone."

"Nay, just those deemed useless and a burden. When we first got here from Gent last spring, some third of the children were taken away by farming folk who live west of here, for a strong child is always welcome as a help to work the land. And those who work now for Mistress Gisela, like the blacksmiths-they'll stay. And a few families who hope to go back to Gent in time, but only those which have an adult to care for the children. Nay, child, all the rest of us will be marched east to Osterburg and farther yet, past the Oder River and into the marchlands-"

"But how far is it?" Helen began to cry out loud, and Anna set down the pot and hoisted the little girl up onto her hip.

"A month or more, two months, three more like. Lady Above, how do they expect these children to walk so far, and how do they intend to feed them along the way?"

Three months. Anna could not really conceive of three months' time, especially not with winter coming on. "But I don't want to go," she said, beginning to cry, beginning to panic. "It's better to stay here, isn't it?"

Someone had managed to get a flock of goats together, and in truth the goats milled no more aimlessly than did the frightened children. Pinch-faced toddlers whined and wriggled in the arms of children no older than eight or twelve. An adolescent girl with a swelling belly and her worldly goods tied to her back held tightly onto two young siblings who could not have been more than five or six; they, too, carried bedrolls tied to their thin shoulders. Two boys of about Anna's age clung together. A girl tied cloth around the feet of a small child to protect it against frost and mud. A little red-haired boy sat alone on the cold ground and sobbed.

"Saved by a miracle," murmured Master Helvidius. "And now what will become of us?"

The young lord and his retinue waited beside the gate to Steleshame. They only watched, mounted on their fine horses, but the sick feeling in her chest curdled and turned sour. They only watched, but they would enforce this order. Any child who ran into the forest would be hunted down and brought back. Mistress Gisela stood beside them. Anna imagined she surveyed the chaos with satisfaction. Soon she would be rid of most of the refugees who had been such a burden on her, and if Helvidius was right, she would keep exactly those people who would do her the most good. Ai, Lady.

Where was Matthias?

"I have to go find Matthias!" she said to Helvidius. "Keep watch over-" She set Helen down and the little girl set up a howling.

"Don't leave me!" he gasped, suddenly white and leaning on his stick as if he might fall the next instant. "If they go- I don't believe I can walk so far alone, me and the child-"

"I won't leave you!" she promised.

"Anna!"

Matthias came running with one of the men from the tannery. They conferred hastily with a sergeant, who stepped back from the pungent smell that clung to their clothes. Quickly enough, Anna, Helvidius, and little Helen were called out of the line.

"Yes," said Matthias, "this is my grandfather and my two sisters."

"You're to stay here, then," said the sergeant, and dismissed them by turning away to order his soldiers into formation, a group in the van and one at the end and some to march single file on either side of the refugees. Anna could not tell whether this was meant to protect the refugees or to keep them from escaping the line.

"Come on, then, lad," said the tanner with a frown, glancing toward the mob of children and away as quickly, as if he didn't like what he saw. "Let's get back to work." He walked away.

Anna started after him. She had no desire to stay and watch.

"Anna!" Matthias called her back. "We're to get a hut. Give the canvas over to those poor souls, and the pot, too. And you may as well give over the food as well, what poor scraps there are. There's so few of us left here that we won't want for so much, not until late in the winter, anyway, and those scraps will help them better than us."

She stared as the soldiers at the van started forward. Slowly, like a lurching cart, the line of children moved forward, and the wailing and crying reached a sudden overwhelming pitch. "I can't do it,"

she said, sobbing. "How can you choose? You do it." She blindly thrust canvas, pot, and food pouch into Matthias' arms and then grabbed Helen up and ran as well as she could back toward the tannery precincts. She could not bear to watch the others march away into what danger and what uncertainty she could not imagine, only dreaded to think of walking there herself. Ai, Lady, what would they eat? Where would they shelter? What if the cold autumn winds turned to the cruel storms of winter? How many would even reach the distant east, and what would become of them, saved from Gent and yet driven away from this haven, such as it was, by the greed of householder and duchess working in concert?

And yet perhaps it was too hard to shelter so many here with no rescue for Gent in sight-for surely no one expected the young lord and his retinue to drive the Eika away on their own.

Helen had stopped bawling and now clung to her in silence. She paused on the rise and stared back as the mob of children, hundreds of them, started walking reluctantly, resignedly, toddlers stumbling along in the wake of elder children, thin legs bare to the cold, their pathetic belongings strapped to backs already bowed under the weight. They had so far to go.

Tears blinded her briefly as a glint of sun struck out from a rent in the clouds and shone into the midst of the line of children. She blinked back a blurring vision of a bright figure walking among them, a woman robed in a white tunic with blood dripping down her hands, and then the vision vanished. Anna turned away to look toward the young lord who surveyed this exodus with dispassion.

Master Helvidius hobbled up beside her, so exhausted from the morning's excitement, his legs buckling under him, that she and Matthias had to half carry him back to the tannery. Little Helen walked beside them singing a tuneless melody, and by the time Master Helvidius and Helen were settled in the shelter of a lean-to set up against the tannery fence, and Matthias sent back to work, and Anna gone out again to the stream to haul water, the line of refugees had vanished from sight.

Only the deserted camp remained.

ANNA had never seen a noble lord so close before. Nor had she ever imagined that a table could groan under the weight of so much food. She had never seen people eat and drink as much as these did: Lord Wichman, eldest son and second child of Duchess Rotrudis, his cousin Lord Henry-named after the king-and their retinue of young nobles and stalwart men-at-arms. The young nobles boasted about the battles they would fight with the Eika in the days to come. The men-at-arms, who drank as lustily as their noble masters, were wont to get into fistfights when their interest in Master Helvidius' lengthy and complicated court poems waned.

It had not taken long after the departure of the refugees for the mayor of Gent-desperate to find amusement for Mistress Gisela's noble guests-to remember that he had left a court poet out among the refugees and to wonder if the old man had remained behind.

"You'll go to his summons?" demanded Matthias that next afternoon, amazed and appalled, "after he deserted you here when he took the rest of his servants inside the palisade?"

"Pride hath no place among the starving," said Master Helvidius. So each evening he took Anna with him to carry his stool and help support him on the long walk up the rise that led to the inner court, and of course Helen had to tag along as well, for there was no one else to watch over her with Matthias working until last light each day. The tanners and smiths and foresters worked long hours and harder even than they had before, for they now had over seventy men and thirty horses to care for, feed, and keep in armor and weapons besides those they had brought with them.

Over the next many days Lord Wichman's force marched out every day, searching for Eika, fighting a skirmish here, burning a ship there, each feat of arms retold in great detail at the night's feast.

Helvidius quickly became adept at turn ing the details of these expeditions into flattering paeans to Lord Wichman's courage and prowess, which the young Lord never grew tired of hearing.

Anna grew equally adept at grabbing half-eaten bones off the floor before the lord's dogs could get them, or at begging crusts of bread from drunken soldiers. Master Helvidius, fed at the high table, slipped her food from the common platter, delicacies she had never before tasted: baked grouse, black pudding, pork pie, and other savories. Helen was content to sit sucking her thumb in a corner, by the hearth, eating what was offered her; the rest Anna saved in her pouch and took back to Matthias in the mornings-she, Helen, and the poet had to sleep in the hall because once night fell, the gates to Steleshame remained shut.

Sleeping on the floor of the newly built longhall in Steleshame was a more luxurious bed than any she had slept on before. It was never bitter cold inside even as autumn eased into winter and the days grew short and gray. Little Helen got roundness back in her cheeks, and Master Helvidius' legs got stronger, although he still needed his staff to walk.

"They've turned all the lands round Gent into pasture, I swear," said Lord Henry, Wichman's father's sister's son. He was a young man, not much older than a boy, with dark hair, a fresh scar on his cheek which he wore as proudly as his sword, and a boastful tongue. "There's enough cattle out there trampling good fields to feed an army a thousand strong!"

"Why have none wandered back to us?" demanded Gisela.

"They're tended by slaves and guarded by Eika."

"Do the Eika have so many soldiers still wintering there?" asked the mayor nervously.

"We haven't ridden close enough to the town to count them," said Lord Henry, glancing reproachfully toward his elder cousin. "But we might still do so, //we dared more."

Young Wichman merely belched in reply to this appeal and called for Mistress Gisela's pretty young niece to fetch him another cup of wine. He had, as Master Helvidius said, "an itch between his legs," though she didn't quite understand what that meant except that he pestered the young I woman in a way the niece didn't like, yet no one else seemed inclined to prevent.

Helen had already fallen asleep. Anna curled up beside her, smoke and warmth a haze around them, and closed her eyes while Master Helvidius droned on, his slightly nasal voice intoning the lay of Helen. Neither he nor the young lord ever seemed to tire of the long poem-and what the young lord wanted the young lord got.

"...Now the servants removed the tables, and while the second course was brought, as much talk sprang up among the banqueters as echoed in the hall like the din of battle. But King Sykaeus raised his cup and called silence to the hall. Huge bowls were brought and filled to the brim with wine, and out of these the king himself filled the first cup and this he passed among the company.

"Thus he entreated Helen for the story of Ilios. 'Fair and noble guest, tell us your tale from the beginning . .

A dog nosed Anna awake, sniffing her face and licking the dried juice of meat off her fingers. She could tell by the somber gray of light within the hall that dawn was close at hand. Helen lay fast asleep on a heap of dirty rushes, her breath a liquid snore. Helvidius had fallen asleep still sitting, head draped over the table; he would regret that later, when his muscles stiffened.

She had to pee.

She got up and picked her way over the sleeping servants, tiptoed around the men-at-arms who reeked of ale and piss and sweat. Outside, in the open dirt yard, she crept around to where a line of privies had been dug up against one palisade wall, well away from hall and longhouse. The sky grayed toward twilight and the last stars shone faintly, fading into the growing light of dawn.

The stone keep stood like a stolid, faithful servant, its shadow blunt against the lightening sky.

Outbuildings were scattered about; she saw a flash of coals, bright red, from one of the open huts. Smiths and tanners worked outside the palisade wall now, so their stink wouldn't disturb the sleep of the householder, her kin, the mayor of Gent and his retinue, and their noble guest.

Here, by the privies, the noble guest was clearly disturbing Mistress Gisela's niece.

"I beg you, Lord Wichman," said the young woman, twisting away as she tried to hurry back to the safety of the hall, "I have much work to do."

"What better work than what I can give you, eh?"

"My lord." She tugged out of his grasp and slipped sideways, trying to escape into the gloom.

"Forgive me, but I can't stay."

Angry, he grabbed at her cloak, jerking her up short. "I hear it said you thought yourself good enough for my bastard cousin Sanglant. Surely you're good enough for me!"

At first, Anna thought the slow hiss came from the niece, preface to an angry outburst. Then she saw a pale stream of light trailing above the distant treetops, undulating in languid curves. A great golden beast rose into the sky, and as the sun's rim pierced the bowl of the horizon, its roar shuddered the air.

The niece screamed and bolted. Young Lord Wichman, still groggy from a night of drinking, gaped at the sky, groping at his belt to draw his sword. He staggered back and Anna shrieked as the dragon, its golden scales more blinding than the sun, flew directly over the holding. Gouts of flame boiled upward into the clouds, the hiss of fire meeting ice. Anna had never seen anything so beautiful or so terrifying.

"Dragons!" shouted guards from the wallwalk.

Lord Wichman sheathed his sword and cursed. His bland face suddenly creased with delight, and he spun and ran toward the stables, shouting. "To arms! To arms!"

The alarm sounded, horn blasts piercing the quiet of dawn.

"Dragons! Dragons!" The cry lifted again as men-at-arms scrambled out of the hall and servants brought horses from the stables.

She had to get back to Master Helvidius and Helen. Ai, Lady, she had to get back to Matthias who, with the other tanners and laborers, slept outside the main palisade in little enclosures sheltered with mere fences, more to keep livestock out than to protect against fearsome beasts. But could anything protect against a dragon?

The huge creature rose sluggishly, each flap of its wings like a sheet of gold thrumming and throbbing in the air. Slowly it banked and turned for a second pass. Before she knew what she meant to do, she ran for a ladder and climbed up to the wallwalk to get a better look. It was madness; ai, Lady, indeed, she was crazy and Matthias would say as much, but even Matthias must be astonished by the sight. This seemed more uncanny, more miraculous, than the daimone chained in the cathedral. She had to get a better look. And perhaps from this angle she could see the tannery.

She had to hop and scramble up, hooking her arms over the top of the palisade and brace herself on the logs, in order to see over. What she saw caught her breath in her throat.

The guards at the gate yelled again: "Dragons!"

But they were not pointing at the sky.

Through the deserted camp, strewn now with the remains of hovels and shelters, littered with garbage and beaten to dirt churned muddy by yesterday's rain and frozen by the last night's frost, rode a hundred horsemen. Their helmets gleamed, fitted with polished brass. Their gold tabards shone as brightly as the dragon's scales, each one marked with a menacing black dragon, miniature hatchlings that rippled and moved as the Dragons approached.

As from far away she heard a man shout in a thin, hysterical voice: "Don't open the gates! Don't open the gates!"

Fire sparked from the hooves of the Dragons' horses as they pounded through the empty camp.

There, by the stream, fire leaped into the scatter of buildings that marked the tanning works. Anna screamed, pointing, but it was useless. No one could hear her. No one would hear her.

They weren't Dragons at all. She saw now the gaping holes in the tabards, the gleam of bone where ragged mail parted to reveal a skeletal jaw or flesh scored deep from a putrefying wound. Empty eyes stared from beneath nasals. Skin peeled away from bone where the morning wind whipped them clean. They made no sound.

Yet they came on.

Months ago she had seen them lying dead in the cathedral crypt at Gent. They were not Dragons at all, only the remains of them, only the memory of that force that had fought against the Eika. What terrible magic had raised them from the dead?

The gates yawned open, and out from Steleshame rode young Lord Wichman and his retinue.

They shone as bright as their enemy, and they charged with abandon.

"Anna!"

She fell, caught herself on the lip of the walk, and half slid down the ladder.

"Anna!" Fright made Master Helvidius able to walk without his staff. "Child! Child! Come in! The Eika are attacking! Come to shelter!"

"Where's Helen?"

"In the hall. Still asleep." The old poet wept with fear. "Go get her and then come to the keep, but make haste, Anna! Hurry! There's not enough room-"

"Matthias-!"

"There's nothing we can do for him! Go!"

She ran across the yard. A spinning ball of flame hurtled past and smacked into the dirt: a torch cast from outside. It guttered and failed, but she heard more torches thunk onto the roofs. Most slid down the slope of roofs, plummeted to earth, and were stamped out, but a few caught and began to burn.

As she came to the great doors that opened into the long hall, she saw Mistress Gisela's niece slap a ladder against the side of the house. Climbing to the top, with another woman halfway up behind her, she took buckets of water drawn from the well and threw water onto the roof, wetting it down. To the left, half hidden by the bulk of the hall, Anna saw other people struggling to save the old longhouse whose thatch roof had caught fire.

She had to shove and elbow to get inside, for people ran every which way, some in, some out, some no place at all but frozen in terror or dithering in circles. A table had been knocked over; dogs gulped down the remains of food, lapped at puddles of ale.

Helen had retreated to a corner beyond the great hearth and there she sat, utterly silent, thumb stuck in her mouth. Anna hoisted her up to her hips. She was such a tiny thing that she was no burden.

But it was harder to get out than in. The mayor and certain of his servants crowded the door, seeking shelter, and Anna could not fight past them. Their press against her caused her to stumble and fall to one knee, and for a horrible instant she thought she and Helen would be trampled.

Smoke stung her nostrils, and suddenly the cry arose: "Fire! Fire!"

She found a wedge through which to shove herself, got herself to the wall, and hurried down the hall's length past the open hearth to the far wall where stood the single window, now shut against winter.

She set Helen down, dragged a chest over and, getting up on it, pounded the shutters open. Tugging the little girl up behind her, she swung a leg over the sill, and dangled there. Together they dropped, hitting the ground hard just as a shower of embers floated down from above. The little girl began to cry. Anna scuttled backward, jumped up, and lifted Helen to her back.

In this way, with Helen fairly choking her with thin arms vised round her neck, Anna threaded her way through the chaos of the yard up the rise to the stone keep. Inside, the storerooms were pungent with barrels of salted meat, with ale and wine, with baskets of apples and unground oats and moldering rye. Master Helvidius cowered behind a chest, weeping softly. Anna thrust Helen onto his lap and climbed the ladder to the second level. There she found six grim-faced men laying arrows, point down, against the wall on either side of the six arrow slits.

"Here, child," said one, beckoning to her. "Stack these neatly." He left without ado, and she hurried to carefully place the arrows in a line, pausing once to lean into the slit and peer out.

Her view gave her a vantage of the ground just beyond the gates. There, in a melee more like the frenzy of market square on the busiest autumn day in Gent, Lord Wichman, Lord Henry, and their riders battled Eika, cutting about themselves, parrying ax blows. A line of men-at-arms struggled forward, shields held high against the press. Eika swarmed everywhere. The huge Eika dogs darted through the swirling fight, ripping and rending. Of the horrible Dragons there was no sign, nor any remains.

An ax hooked over Lord Wichman's shield, dragged, tugged, and there was a sudden titanic struggle as the young lord grappled with an Eika soldier braced at his horse's shoulder. Then-sliding, gripped, tugged-he fell from his horse and vanished under a hail of flailing arms.

Anna gasped out loud and jerked back, bumping into the careful rack of arrows. With a clatter, they fell, but the sound was drowned out by a howl sent up from outside- the young lord's riders had gone mad with fury.

Anna began to cry.

A man shoved her away roughly and began to set up arrows again. A woman called up from below.

"The longhouse is burning! We're getting a flood of people in here. What shall I do?"

"Squeeze in as many of the young and weak as you can!" shouted the man next to Anna. "But any who are able-bodied must take to the walls. It'll be slaughter if the Eika get through those gates.

Anything they can fling down- anyone who can lift a hoe or spade or shoot a bow or stab with a spear-"

He spun round. "Girl! Don't be ham-handed again. Now set these arrows upright for those who will need them later!"

He climbed down the ladder.

She did as she was told. Such a din of wailing and shouting had arisen from within the holding-the squawking of chickens, the barking of dogs, the screams of horses and men-that she could only stay moving by pretending nothing was happening, by hearing nothing at all. She concentrated on each arrow as she leaned it with fletching upright against the stone wall.

Smoke billowed in from outside, but she could not, dared not, look again out through the arrow slit. A hugely pregnant woman came up the ladder, blood streaming from a gash on her forehead. With a grunt, she heaved her ungainly bulk up over the lip, got to hands and knees, then with a shove from foot and hand got herself up. She stationed herself with a bow by one of the slits. The man whose place she took scrambled down, disappearing below.

Soon, other women and one adolescent boy had stationed themselves by the arrow slits, each with a bow. The boy played nervously with an arrow, rolling it through his fingers. More people clambered up the ladder and cowered, some weeping, some stunned, against the walls and then along the floor until there was scarcely room for anyone to move. And yet more tried to come up, and more yet.

Such a noise swelled up from this mass of terror-stricken people and from the battle raging outside that Anna could only hunker down, clap hands over ears, and pray. The sting of burning timber and thatch made her eyes burn, and the fear made her heart thud hard in her chest. Her breath came in gasps.

"Come, child," said a woman's brusque voice. Anna looked up into the heat-seared face, blackened with soot, of Mistress Gisela's niece. Dozens of tiny burns and charred holes from flying embers pitted her clothing. "Hand me arrows as I shoot."

"Who are you shooting at?" she breathed. Horror rose in her throat until it choked the breath out of her and she thought she would fall and faint.

But the woman only took careful aim and loosed the arrow and, without thinking, Anna handed her another. She nocked and aimed and shot while screams pierced above the clamor of battle and fire roared and dogs howled and a horn blared long and high and distantly a man's voice shouted: "Form up to my left! Form up to my left!"

One by one Anna handed her the arrows, and as each one was nocked and loosed, the young woman's expression wavered not at all from blank concentration. Only once did she grunt with satisfaction, and once she whimpered, suddenly made afraid by some sight in the yard beyond. But she gulped down her fear as everyone had to, or die through being helpless. That was the way of war.

One by one, Anna handed up the arrows until they were all gone.

IN the end the Eika retreated, but by that time Steles-hame lay in shambles, a quarter of the palisade wall burning or battered down, the longhouse in flames and the outbuildings in ruins. Only the newly built hall still stood, though it was scorched. Some of the roof tiles had fallen in where the smoke hole opened and both doors had been wrenched off their hinges.

It was a miracle anything at all had survived. Of the Dragons there remained no sign, but everyone agreed they, like the flying dragon, had arisen from the Eika enchanter's magic, a false vision used to strike fear into their hearts and render them incapable of fighting.

It had not worked, not this time.

"That is the weakness of illusion," Master Helvidius said when the people hiding in the stone keep ventured out to the horrible scene opening before them in the yard. "Once you know it is illusion, it is easier to combat."

Anna held little Helen tightly on her hip as she picked her way through the rubble to the gate. She kept her eyes fixed on her feet, so she wouldn't have to see the dead bodies. There were a lot of dead, human and Eika alike. If she didn't look, then maybe it would be as if they weren't there.

Soldiers staggered through the gates, leading wounded horses, carrying their dead or injured comrades. Some of their number wandered the killing field, sticking Eika through the throat to make sure they would not rise again. A sudden shout rose from their midst as a figure armed in mail, his tabard rent and bloody, shoved himself up from the ground where he had been pinned down by a dead Eika.

It was Lord Wichman himself, by a miracle unharmed except for the battering his mail and helmet had taken. But he had not gotten far before he dropped to his knees and wept over the body of his young cousin, Henry, who had fallen by the gates. Mistress Gisela appeared beside him. Roused by her appearance, the lord rose and began directing the soldiers as they methodically looted the Eika corpses of weapons, shields, and whatever fine mail armor the creatures wore round their hips, mostly silver and gold wrought into delicate patterns.

Anna spied a knife lying in a pool of muck and blood. She knelt quickly, grabbed it, and tucked it into her leggings. Its blade pinched her calf, but she went on.

Beyond, both smithy and tannery burned. A few men had begun to cast dirt onto the fires.

"Here, now, child," said a soldier, coming up beside her. "Get back inside. You don't know how far the Eika have run. They might come back any moment."

"Were those truly Dragons? All dead and rotting?"

"Nay. They were Eika. They only looked like Dragons until they got close. Then we saw through the enchantment."

"Did we win?"

He snorted, waving a hand to indicate the destruction. "If this can be called winning. Ai, Lord, I don't know that we beat them. Rather, they got what they wanted and left."

"But what did they want?" she demanded. "My brother-" She faltered when she saw the flames that raged round the row of small huts abutting the tannery fence. She began to snivel and Helen, catching her fear, started to cry.

"They drove off the livestock." The soldier grimaced as he raised his left arm, and she saw a gash running up the boiled leather coat he wore, a slash running from waist to armpit. Underneath a thin stream of blood seeped through his quilted shirt, but he seemed otherwise unharmed except for a cut on his lip and a purpling bruise along his jaw. "I saw them myself. I'd guess they were raiding for cattle and slaves more than to kill my good Lord Henry, namesake of the king, bless them both." He drew the Circle of Unity at his breast and sighed deeply. "Come, child, go on in."

"But my brother worked at the tannery-

He clucked softly and shook his head, then surveyed the scene. The old camp looked as if it had been flattened by a whirlwind. A single chicken scratched diligently beside a hovel. Two dogs cowered under the shelter of a single straggly bush. "Thank God the refugees had already left.

Come, then, we'll go down and see, but mind you, child, you'll go up again when I tell you."

By the time they got down to the stream the tannery fire was under control, though still burning.

She saw a body, charred and blackened, over by the puering pit, but it was too large to be Matthias.

This body alone remained; of the other inhabitants of the tannery, none could be found.

"There's nothing here, child," said the soldier. "Go on back where it's safe. I'll ask about. You say his name is Matthias?"

She nodded, unable to speak. Helen sucked her thumb vigorously.

With this weight on her, the walk back up the rise to the wrecked palisade seemed forbidding and it exhausted her. Helvidius found her sobbing just inside the gate, and he took her into the hall just as a cold drizzle began to fall.

He brought her heavily watered cider and made her drink, then fussed over Helen, complaining all the while. "The livestock stolen! Food stores trampled or spoiled or burned! What will we do? How will we get through the winter without even enough shelter for those left? What will we do? Without fodder, the young lord will ride back to his home, and then who will protect us? We should have gone with the others."

But by the hearth Mistress Gisela had called a council. A stout woman, she gripped an ax in one hand as if she had forgotten she held it. Blood stained her left shoulder, though it did not appear to be her own. Beyond, in the farthest corner of the hall, the pregnant woman who had been shooting from the keep leaned against the wall, panting, then got down on her hands and knees as several elderly women clustered around her. A boy carried in a pot of steaming water, and Gisela's niece hurried forward with a length of miraculously clean cloth.

"Lord Wichman! I beg you," Gisela was saying, "if there is not enough fodder for those of your horses which remain..."

But the young lord had a wild light in his eyes. With his helmet off and tucked under one arm, he warmed his free hand over the fire while a man-at-arms wiped the blood from his sword. He had a fine down of beard along his chin, as fair as his pale hair. "Did you see the dragon?" he demanded. "Was it a real thing, or another enchantment?"

Master Helvidius hobbled forward, Helen dragging on his robes. "My lord, if I may speak-But the young lord went on, heedless. "Nay, Mistress, I won't let the Eika drive me away! Are there no old wise-folk here, who can braid a few spells of protection into being? Give us those, Mistress, and we'll raid as the Eika do, like a pack of dogs harrying their heels!"

"But we've lost full half our livestock, or more! And I hear now from those who escaped into the trees that a good half of my laborers were herded away to be slaves!"

"Or eaten by the dogs!" said a sergeant.

Mistress Gisela set down the ax and looked about for support. "Is Mayor Werner not here? He will advise as I do. How can I support my own people and yours as well, Lord Wichman?"

"The mayor is dead, Mistress," said Wichman. "Or had you not heard that news yet? How can you not support me? I am all that stands between you and another Eika raid. And let that be an end to it!" He handed his helmet to the sergeant, stomped his boots hard to shake dirt off them, and sat on a bench, beckoning to Gisela's niece to serve him drink.

Anna began to shake. All of a sudden the cold struck her, and she could not stop trembling.

Helvidius limped over and threw a bloodied cape, trimmed with fabulous gold braid embroidery, over her shoulders. "Here," he said. "Him as owned this before won't be wanting it now."

She began to cry. Matthias was gone.

In the far corner, the pregnant woman's grunting breaths, coming in bursts, transmuted into a sudden hiss of relief. The thin wail of a newborn baby pierced the noise and chaos of the hall.

"It's a boy!" someone shouted, and at once Lord Wichman was applied to for his permission that the woman might name her son Henry in honor of his dead cousin.

Ai, Lady. Matthias was gone.

He did not appear that day or the next among the dead pulled from fallen buildings nor among the living who crept out one by one from their hiding places. Amid such disaster, one boy's loss made little difference.

BISCOP Antonia had a high regard for her own importance. Granddaughter of Queen Theodora (now deceased) of Karrone, youngest child of Duchess Ermoldia (now deceased) of Aquilegia, daughter of two fathers, Prince Pepin (now deceased) of Karrone who had sired her and Lord Gunther (now deceased) of Brixia who had raised her, most favored cleric of King Arnulf (now deceased), she had been ordained twenty years ago as biscop of Mainni when the previous biscop had suddenly died.

Antonia did not like to be kept waiting.

She was being kept waiting now, and in the most unsightly hovel, a small shepherd's cottage with a bare plank floor, unwashed walls, no carpet, and one narrow bench. On that bench she sat while Heribert stood by the single window and peered out between the cracks in the barred shutters. There was not even a fire in the hearth, and it was bitterly cold. Heribert shivered, thin shoulders shaking under an ermine-lined cloak and two thick wool tunics.

"Come away from the window," she said.

He hesitated, and she frowned. "It's growing late," he said. "Rain has started falling again. It looks as if it's more ice than rain. If someone means to come, then they must do so soon or we will be left here in this Lady-forsaken place to face nightfall."

"Heribert!"

"Yes, Your Grace." Nervously, he touched the holy relics hanging in a pouch at his neck and backed away from the shutters.

The roof was, thank the Lord, sound enough. No rain leaked through to drip on the uneven plank floor. A single lantern that hung from a hook by the hearth gave light to the single room. Antonia had not failed to notice that it had burned for hours now with no change in the level of oil. So, she supposed, their mysterious confederate meant to put them on notice that she-or he-had arts of magic at her disposal.

Someone not to be trifled with.

As they are trifling with me!

Antonia did not like to be trifled with. Only disobedience in those sworn to obey her annoyed her more. She glanced at Heribert, watched him pace back and forth before the cold hearth, now rubbing his arms. He sneezed and wiped his nose, and she hoped he was not getting sick. This frustration also nagged at her: Some of the magi knew arts by which a sorcerer could bring heat or cold. These were not arts she had mastered or even discovered the secrets of. The irritating thing about hidden words was that they were hidden, and difficult to dig out of whatever cave or ciphered manuscript or reluctant, stubborn mind she found them in.

Wind shook the cottage and rain lashed the walls and roof. Surely no one would venture out to this isolated hillside in such weather. Why had she responded to the summons? For weeks now they had been led through the hinterlands of Karrone and northernmost Aosta like idiot sheep. Lured by signs as elusive as sparrows, she found at each turn that these mysterious messages fluttered away just when she thought she might grab hold of them. But she had nowhere else to go. She could not return to Mainni, not yet, not now. The courts of King Henry of Wendar and Varre and Queen Marozia (her aunt) of Karrone were closed to her; they would only detain her again and send her south to Darre to await trial before the skopos. Many lesser nobles might take her in for a month or two, not yet knowing of the accusations made against her, but she hated living on the sufferance of others.

If she could not clear herself, if the false and misguided testimony of others was to be used against her, then she would simply have to bide her time until she could rid herself of her enemies. Until that time, she followed such will-o'-the-wisps as had led her here, to this Lady-forsaken cottage on a windswept barren hillside on the southern slopes of the Alfar Mountains. They had only reached the spot with difficulty; poor Heribert had had to walk alongside her mule up the rugged path that led here.

Technically, she supposed, this cottage rested in the queendom of Karrone or perhaps on the northern boundaries of one of the Aostan principalities. But it was so isolated that in truth no princely jurisdiction reigned here, only that of wind and rain and the distant mercy of God in Unity.

The latch snicked open. A gust of wind slammed the old door so hard against the wall that one of the door planks splintered. Heribert yelped out loud. He lifted a hand to point.

She rose slowly. Biscop Antonia, granddaughter and niece of queens, did not show fear. Even if she were afraid. A thing loomed outside the door, not one of the dark spirits such as she had learned to compel but something other, something made of wind and light, shuddering as rain rippled its outlines and wind shredded its edges into tatters. It wore the form of an angel, of which humankind is but a pale wingless copy, and yet there was no holy Light in its eyes. By this means Antonia knew the creature was a dai-mone coerced down from a higher sphere to inhabit the mortal world for a brief measure of time.

If a human hand could control such as this, then certainly she could learn to compel such creatures. She gestured Heribert to silence, for he was mumbling frantic prayers under his breath as he clutched his holy amulet.

"What is it you want?" she demanded. "Whom do you serve?" The thing stretched as if against a hidden mesh of fine netting. / serve none, but I am bound here until this deed is accomplished.

It had no true mouth but only the simulacrum of a mouth, a seeming, as its corporeal body was obviously more seeming than physical matter. The rain, now waning, fell through it as through a sieve.

Beyond it, through it, she saw the stunted trees and wild gorse as through thick glass, distorted by the curves and waves of its form. It was as restless as the wind, chafing in a confined space. Antonia was entranced. Into how small a space could such a creature be bound until it screamed with agony? Would fire cause it to burn? Would iron and the metals of earth dispel it or obliterate it entirely? Would water wash it away or only, like the rain, pour through it as a river pours through a fisherman's net?

"Do you not serve that person who has bound you?" she demanded.

/ am not meant to be trapped here below the moon, it answered, but not with anger or frustration such as she understood. Such as humankind felt. It had no emotion in its voice she could comprehend.

"Ai, Lady," murmured Heribert behind her, his voice made delicate by terror.

"Hush," she said without turning to look at him. His sensitivity irritated her at times; this was one of them. Sometimes boys took too much of their nature from their father's transitory and fragile seed and not enough from their mother's generative blood. "It cannot hurt us. It does not belong to this sphere, as any idiot can see. Now come forward and stand beside me."

He obeyed. It had been a long time since he had failed to obey her. But he shook. Those pale, soft, perfectly manicured hands clutched at her cloak and then, sensing her displeasure, he merely sniveled and twisted the rings on his fingers as though the fine gems encrusted in gold-gems dug from the heavy earth-could protect him from this aery being.

"What is it you wish, daimone?" she asked the creature, and it swayed at the utterance of the word, "daimone," for any being, mortal or otherwise, is constrained by another's knowledge of its name and thus its essence.

/ wish to be free of this place. It stretched again. The rain had passed and the wind lulled, but still its shape was blown and whipped by unseen and unfelt winds, perhaps not earthly winds at all but a memory of its home in the upper air, above the sphere of the moon. Come. I will lead you to the one who awaits you.

"Dare we go with it?" whispered Heribert, nearly on his knees with fright.

"Of course we dare!"

In this way she had been punished for the one sin, the one occasion of weakness. She had been younger and not- then-immune to the desires of the flesh, though she had rid herself of such desires since that time some twenty-six years ago. And to have succumbed to his blandishments, of all people! His concupiscence was legendary. He simply could not keep his hands off women, of any station. Someday that desire would be his downfall, she sincerely hoped.

The child gotten of the union she loved immoderately- she recognized that-but she also despised him, because he was weak. Yet he was hers, and she would take care of him. She had in the past, and she would in the future.

"Come, son," she said sternly. Without more than a squeak, Heribert followed her over the threshold. The sky was clearing rapidly. The glowering front receded to the east, tearing itself to shreds against the imposing heights of the mountains. Behind it, ragged bands of high white clouds striped the sky.

Like the storm, the daimone receded before her. It did not walk; neither did it fly. Like the wind, it simply moved across the land. Its humanlike shape bulged and shrank in conformity to its own nature or to the weather in some far-off clime. It moved up the hill on a muddy footpath, though it left no imprint of its passage except the disturbance in the air that was its presence. She followed, wondering what had become of the mule and the old laborer who had led her and Heribert up to this abandoned cottage. It was very very cold, far too cold to stay in the heights overnight. The laborer, cowed by her importance, had asked no questions and had himself no answers to give her, though she had compelled answers from him; he was as stupid as the beasts he shepherded.

They walked until Heribert coughed as he labored upward and even Antonia felt winded. The daimone, of course, showed no sign of strain; it could easily have outpaced them, but did not. Antonia wondered if such creatures felt impatience. Was it without sin, as all humanfolk were not? Or was it beyond salvation, soulless, as some in the church claimed?

They crossed a field of rubble.

"It's an old fort," said Heribert, his words more breath than voice; he coughed more frequently as they climbed higher. But she heard spirit in his voice. Old buildings were his passion; had she not forbidden it, he would have left her to train as an architect and builder in the school at Darre or traveled even as far as Kellai in Arethousa to become an apprentice in the schools there. But if he went so far away from her, then she could not watch over him. Now, of course, he never questioned her at all.

He paused, leaning on dressed stone tumbled to the ground, and surveyed the ruins. "It is an old Dariyan fort. I recognize the pattern."

"Come," she said. The daimone had not waited; it coursed ahead like a hound that has scented its prey. "Come, Heribert." With a wrench, he pulled himself away from this strange ruin, an old fort lost-or abandoned-in such desolate country.

They climbed and, in the odd way of slopes in such country, ground that seemed level ahead proved to be the crest of a hill. Coming over it, they saw in the vale below a ring of standing stones.

"A crown!" breathed Heribert. He stared.

Antonia gazed with astonishment. Broken circles she had seen aplenty; they were well known in the border duchy of Arconia at whose westernmost border stood the city of Mainni-across the river to the west of the cathedral lay the kingdom of Salia. But this circle stood upright, as if it had been built yesterday. It did indeed have a superficial resemblance to a giant's crown half buried in the earth, but that was peasant superstition, and Antonia despised the credulity of the common folk.

The daimone surged down through bracken; bare twigs whipped at its passing as if a gale had torn through them. She sent Heribert to find a trail, and on this paltry track- the poor lad had to beat back as much undergrowth as if there had been no path at all-they descended into the vale. Down in the bowl the wind slackened to silence, and the undergrowth gave way to a lawn of fine grass clipped as short as if sheep had grazed here recently.

The daimone circled the standing stones and paused before a narrow gateway made of two upright stones with a lintel placed over them. Air boiled where the creature stood, like a cloud of translucent insects swarming. Antonia halted just far enough away from it and looked in through the flat gateway toward the center of the stone circle. She felt, in her bones and as a throbbing in the soles of her feet, the power that hummed from the circle. The ground here was impossibly flat, as if it had been leveled by human labor-or some other force.

Heribert gazed at the sky, then at the circle, and whispered, "It's the eastern-facing doorway.

Does that mean something?"

"Of course it means something," she said. "It means this doorway looks toward the rising sun, perhaps at midwinter or midsummer."

He shuddered. As the sun set behind the hills opposite them, west across the eerie architecture of stones, it threw long shadows out from the stones that made weird patterns, almost like writing, on the short grass. The rising moon, its pale face lifting above the distant mountains, heralded night.

Enter by this gate, said the daimone.

"Certainly," said Antonia graciously. "I will follow you."

/ go no further. I cannot enter the halls of iron. My task is done once I have guided you here.

"If we choose not to go?"

It vanished. One moment its disturbance roiled the air, the next the sun slipped down below the hills and the moon breathed paler light across a landscape empty of wind or the pulsation of air that had marked the daimone's presence.

"What do we do?" whimpered Heribert, shivering harder. "We don't know what's in there. How could anyone drag such huge stones up these foothills?"

"We enter," said Antonia calmly. "We have no fire, no food, no shelter. We'll freeze out here. We have chosen to put ourselves at the mercy of our mysterious correspondent. We must go forward." And take our revenge for this insulting treatment later, she finished in her own thoughts. Such sentiments she could not share with poor, weak Heribert.

She did not wait for him to go first. They would be here all night while he gathered up his courage. "Take hold of my cloak," she said, "so that we can by no means become separated."

"But it's only a stone circle. We'll freeze-!"

THERE are spirits burning in the air with wings of flame and eyes as brilliant as knives.

They move on the winds that blow above the sphere of the moon, and now and again their gaze falls like the strike of lightning to the earth below, where it sears anything it touches. Their voices have the snap of fire and their bodies are the conjoining of fire and wind, the breath of the sun coalesced into mind and will.

All this she sees inside the vision made by fire. Here she runs as would a mouse, silent and watchful, staying in the shadows. She braves the unknown passageways and the vast hidden halls where other creatures lurk. This skill alone- that of seeing through fire- Da did not strip from her, or perhaps the skill manifested only because Da died. It may be all that saves her, if she can learn to use it to spy on those who seek her out, to hide herself from whatever- whomever- murdered Da.

It may even be that someone who also can see within the vision made by fire can help her.

Can save her.

Ai, Lady, no one can save her. Hugh has returned, as he promised he would. How foolish she was to think she had escaped him. All this time she thought she had at last won free of him, but she cannot now and never will be free of him on the realm of earth where his power is vast and hers insignificant, only here, in the vision made by fire, where he cannot follow her. And in the vision made by fire, other things stalk her.

She needs help so desperately and she does not know where to turn.

Through the endless twisting halls she seeks the gateway that will lead her to the old Aoi sorcerer.

There! Seen in shadow, in a dark dry corridor walled in stone, she sees two people walking, searching as she is.

There! A boy sleeps with six companions, heads pillowed on stone, feet and knezs covered by heaps of treasure, armbands of beaten gold, rings, gems, vessels poured out of the silver of moonlight, and smooth scarlet beads that are dragon's blood turned to stone with exposure to the air.

There! Creatures move and crawl among the tunnels, misshapen knuckles tamping down soil clawed from the dank walls. Like the Eika, they seem fashioned more of metal and soil than of the higher elements, trapped forever by the weight of earth that courses through their blood and hardens their bones.

When she at last finds the burning stone that marks the gateway to the old sorcerer, he no longer sits beside it rolling strands of flax into rope against his thigh. He has left that place, and she does not know where to find him. But she has to keep looking. Because he is one of the Lost Ones, he is not human and surely therefore not bound to human concerns, to human intrigues and jealousies, to human lusts for power and possession. He might know the answer. He might know the pattern of the paths she must unravel.

Perhaps Da left her a message here, secreted in the labyrinth in such a way that she alone can find it. He must have prepared for this, knowing he might be gone and that she yet lived.

Behind the locked door in her tower in her City of Memory there burns a fiery light; is it Da's magic, hidden away? Is it the living manifestation of the spell he cast over her? If she had the key, could she open the door? Did Da hide the key here, somewhere in these halls whose pathways she cannot trace unless she explores them?

And yet, what will happen if she does unlock the door?

A whisper of breath touches the back of her neck. She shudders. Her back stings as if, simply by closing in on her, the creature blisters her with its poisonous intent. Is this what Da felt?

Some thing always getting closer, always coming up behind him? Did he know it would kill him in the end?

She begins to run through the halls seen in the vision made by fire, although on the realm of earth her body sits silent and still in front of a roaring camp fire. But the creature is stronger than she is, here, in this place. It knows these paths, and it is looking for her.

"Liath."

It knows her name. She flees, but there is nowhere to go. Da used his magic to conceal her from their eyes on the realm of earth, but here she is vulnerable to their sight-

and there, where she is hidden from them, she is vulnerable to Hugh.

Fear leaps and burns in her heart like wildfire. She is lost. Gasping, weeping, she forces herself to stop. She turns to face what stalks her, but she sees no thing, no shadow, no creature or human form; yet she knows it has marked her and that it closes in. It wants her. The air itself carries the sound of her breathing, the simple heat of her being, to the ears of that which listens for her.

This- one creature or many working in concert- killed Da.

She feels their breath like air stirred by an arrow, an arrow whose sharp point seeks her heart. In this place, she has no weapons.

Nay, she has one weapon here: the gift given to her by the old Aoi sorcerer.

"Ai, Lady," she breathes, a prayer for strength. Closing her hand around the gold feather, she escapes the maze.

SIDE paths fainter than the breath of a dying baby teased Antonia's vision, but she could catch only glimpses of what lay down their paths: halls piled with treasure; a sleeping boy; a young woman running in fear; the fading image of an old, old monk with one hand laid tenderly upon a book while the other lifts to ward off the clutching fingers of daimones whose insubstantial hands reach right inside his body for whatever secret he has hidden within his heart. A hound barked. An owl hooted and struck in the depths of night. A man-no man, but an elven prince armed in the style of the ancient Dariyans-fought to save a burning fort from the assault of the savage Bwrmen and their human allies. A dragon slept in enchanted sleep beneath a ridge of stone. A young man sat in sunlight and surveyed the quiet sea. Did she recognize him? The vision was too brief for her to look more closely.

Were these glimpses of the past or the future or the present?

She could not know. She was entirely lost; she knew that she existed only because her son dragged at her cloak. At least his terror was so great that he was mercifully silent rather than gibbering prayers and psalms.

God would see them to safety, or God would see them dead.

If the first, then certainly she would discover the secrets of this place and bind to herself the knowledge of how to coerce daimones down from the upper air and lead unsuspecting souls into a prison as torturous as this. She fully expected the Abyss to open at her feet at any moment and give her a gratifying vision of the punishment of the damned.

If the second, then she was content to know that her soul-and that of her son, of course-would ascend as did the souls of all the righteous to the Chamber of Light beyond the seven spheres.

Stairs opened before them. Wind brushed her face. The pale round moon wavered before her eyes, high above, and she realized with a start that she was looking up the stairs to the world above, to an actual night sky now shot through with stars. Behind her, Heribert moaned slightly as she had heard laboring women do when the child was, at long last, finally and safely birthed.

She shook him off brusquely and climbed the stairs. He came up so close behind that his boots clipped her heels but, this once, she did not berate him for his carelessness. She sensed that at long last they had come to the place where she would learn what she wanted to know.

The stairs brought them up out of the earth into the center of a small stone circle, seven stones placed equidistant from each other on a grassy sward. Beyond, like hulking beasts against the heavens, three mountains loomed. They had not returned to the first stone circle, that was obvious, but Antonia guessed they still walked among the Alfar Mountains.

Her second thought, unbidden and unwelcome, was that it was surely no longer late autumn. The air was clement, the night mellow and almost warm. But the moon remained full, much farther gone in the sky than it had been when they entered the first stone circle. They had walked beneath the earth, guided by the moon's distant light, for many hours-and it was nearing dawn.

The stone circle stood on a low hill. Beyond, down the slope and half hidden by trees, stood several buildings. The sinking moon still gave enough light that she could make out the rest of the little valley: a copse of lush trees, a few neat strips of cultivated field, a vineyard, squat boxes for bees, a chicken shed, and the leaning wall of a stable set into the steep side of a mountain. A single lantern burned by the gate that led into the enclosure. A stream whispered, murmuring, in the distance. High cliff walls enclosed them, shutting out half the night sky in which stars dazzled, uncloaked by any sign of cloud.

A hand brushed her cheek and she started. "Heribert."

He stood three steps behind her, too far away to have touched her. He seemed to have been struck dumb.

"Biscop Antonia." The speaker stepped out from behind one of the stones and made the gesture that in the sign language of the convent signified Welcome. She gave no obeisance. "I am glad you chose to follow my messenger."

"Who are you?" demanded Antonia, annoyed by her lack of deference. "Are you the one who has led us this far?" She had many more questions, but she knew better than to ask them all at once.

"I am the one who has brought you here, for I have seen your promise."

Promise! Antonia snorted, but held her tongue.

"You may call me Caput Draconis."

"The head of the dragon? A strange name, or title, to give oneself."

"A strange road has brought us all here, and we must tread stranger and more dangerous paths yet if we are to succeed. You are not trained as a mathematicus?" The question was, in fact, a statement, waiting on Antonia's acknowledgment.

"I know that the constellation known as the Dragon is the sixth House in the great circle of the zodiac, itself called the world dragon that binds the heavens." Antonia did not like to be toyed with in this manner. She did not like to be reminded that others might know things she did not.

"So it is. And it wields its own power. But the stars do not in their movements gather as much power as do the seven erratica, which we know as the planets: Moon, Ef-ekes, Somorhas, Sun, Jedu, Mok, and Aturna. I speak of the ascending and descending nodes of the moon, where that vessel crosses the plane of the ecliptic. The ecliptic is the path on which the planets move, which we also call the world dragon that binds the heavens. South to north the moon ascends across the ecliptic, and that is the caput dra-conis, the head of the dragon. North to south she descends, and that is the cauda draconis, the tail. Every twenty-seven days, in the sphere above us, the moon moves from caput to cauda and back again. In every movement we observe in the heavens, there is power to be taken and used."

"And these are the secrets hoarded by the mathematici? By such as you?"

The woman lifted her hands, palms up and open, empty, to reveal that she needed no weapon cast of brute metal or grown out of earth in order to triumph over her adversaries.

"The teachings of the mathematici are forbidden by the church," Antonia added.

"And you were being sent to Darre to stand trial before the skopos on the charge of maleficent sorceries whose use is forbidden by the church. I know of you, Antonia. I know your skills. I need them."

"I tire of this portentousness," said Antonia bluntly. "Did you compel the daimone? Can you teach me such power?"

"Indeed I can, and more besides. Your great talent is for coercion. I need that talent, for I only possess it in small measure."

"You have drawn down and trapped a daimone! Is that, to you, possessing only a 'small measure' of talent?"

"For compulsion, yes. With the others I can draw down such creatures, but our ability to coerce them is sorely limited. The one you met we could only command to a single task-to find you and guide you to the circle by whose path you then came here. But I cannot, as you evidently can, command spirits and beasts to kill-unless it is already their own desire to do so."

"Is that what you want? To kill someone?"

The other woman smiled slightly.

"At what do you wish to succeed, Caput Draconis?" Antonia said, curious now. She hated being curious. It put her at a disadvantage.

"I want only that we might all become closer to God," murmured the woman.

"A worthy goal," agreed Antonia. The moon set, and with its passing came the first glimmers of dawn. A bird sang. Stars had faded. Clouds massed now at the second of the three snow-covered peaks that guarded one side of the little valley. Thin streamers of mist rose from the ground and seemed to coalesce into shapes with human limbs and human hands and half-formed human faces. But that surely was only a trick of the light.

"But I must know if you have the strength and the will to aid us," continued the woman, looking past Antonia to what stood behind her. "Some offering. Some sacrifice . . ."

Antonia knew at once, and a small fire of anger bloomed inside her. Such presumption! "Not that," she said. "Not him." She refused to show weakness by turning to make sure Heribert was still in one piece.

Now there was enough light for Antonia to see the other woman's face: pale of complexion, it had a certain distant familiarity about it-but, as with the sparrows, she could not grasp how she knew it.

She could have been as old as Antonia or as young as Heribert; no obvious sign of age, or of youth, marked her. Her hair remained tucked away in a scarf of gold linen. She wore a fine silk tunic dyed a rich indigo and leather shoes trimmed with gold braid. At her throat she wore the golden torque that signified royal kinship in the realms of Wendar and Varre and Salia. Though the granddaughter and niece of queens, Antonia had no right to such a symbol of her royal kinship. Karrone had been a principality allied to Salia not three generations ago, in the time of Queen Berta the Cunning. Berta had been the first of its rulers to style herself "Queen." Neither did the petty princes of the many warring states of Aosta wear the torque. They, too, could not trace their royal blood back to the forebears of the legendary Emperor Taillefer.

"Very well," said the woman. "Not him. But let that, then, be your first lesson. That is why you are neither caput nor cauda draconis but rather seventh and least of our order. You can only take as much power as you are willing to give of yourself."

Antonia did not agree, but she was too wise to say so out loud. She gestured to Heribert, and he crept up beside her. She noted with some approval that, though he was silent and certainly quite frightened, he held himself straight and with the pride of a man who will not bow before fear. Or perhaps he had been stricken dumb by a spell thrown on him by this woman. He was not, as was his habit when nervous, murmuring a prayer.

"What do you want from me, then?" asked Antonia.

"I need a seventh. I need a person who has strong natural powers of compulsion, as you do. I am trying to find a certain person and bring that person here, to me."

Antonia thought about power. Imagine how much good she could do with greater powers, with the ability to compel others to act as she knew they truly wanted to. She could return order to the kingdom, return herself to her rightful place as biscop and Sabella to the throne that was lawfully hers.

She could go farther even than that: She could become skopos and restore the rule of God as it ought to be observed. "Let us imagine that I agree to join you. What happens then?"

"To come into our Order you must give something."

"What is that?"

"You would not give me the young man. So give me your name, the secret, true name your father whispered in your ear as is every father's right when a child is born of his begetting."

Antonia flushed, truly angry now. This was impertinence, even from a woman who wore the golden torque. Although by what right she wore that torque Antonia, who knew the royal lineages of five kingdoms as if they were her own names, could not guess. "My father is dead," said Antonia icily. "Both of my fathers. He who sired me died before I could walk or speak."

"But you know."

She knew.

And she wanted the power. She wanted the knowledge. She could do so much with it. So much that needed to be done.

She spoke it, finally. After all, Prince Pepin had not lived long afterward. His spite could not haunt her, for it had fallen with him into the pit.

"Venenia." Poison.

The woman inclined her head respectfully. "So shall you be called Venia, kindness, in memory of that naming and to honor a new beginning. Come, Sister Venia." She stepped outside the circle of stones.

They followed her out onto grass moist with dew. Heribert gaped and knelt to touch, wonderingly, a violet.

"Come," repeated the woman as she set off along a well-worn path that wound down the gentle slope toward the buildings below. A man dressed simply in a tunic and drawers came out to the gate and snuffed the lantern. Goats left the shed and moved in a mass-herded by what manner of creature Antonia could not tell-up into the gorse and heather.

"It's so beautiful," breathed Heribert.

It was beautiful as the sun rose and light washed over the little valley, all greens and rich browns, with a rushing stream bubbling and boiling through pastureland. The woman smiled at the young cleric, then continued down. Heribert hurried after her. Antonia lingered, staring at the peaks as the sun, rising in the east, set their proud heads glaring, ice glinting fire. She recognized them now, those three high peaks: Young Wife, Monk's Ridge, and Terror. Just over the steep, impassable ridge on which the goats grazed so peacefully rested the hostel run by the monks of St. Servitius, hospitable souls making shelter for those travelers who braved St. Barnaria Pass.

VIII THE HARVET ALAIN sat on Dragonback Ridge, halfway down the spine of the Dragon's Tail, and watched the surge and fall of waves on the shore. Rage and Sorrow sat beside him, tongues out to catch the wind off the bay. Two men-at-arms loitered at a discreet distance. A seagull circled in the wind over the water; a tern took careful steps through the surf on the gravelly beach below. To the left, along the curve of the beach where it grew sandier, ships lay at their winter's rest, set up on logs. Out in the surge, dark heads bobbed in the swells: seals...or mermen.

He scanned the distant islands, studded like jewels along the horizon, where fishermen and merchants might take refuge in times of storm if they were out on the open sea. He had survived a storm, caught out on these heights. That storm had changed his life.

After hunting, Lavastine and his retinue had ridden to the ruins of Dragon's Tail Monastery. Alain could not imagine what his father expected to find there. Surely the villagers had gleaned from the wreckage every last un-scorched bench and table and scrap of cloth, beehives, paving stones, spoons, knives, bowls, lanterns, candle wax and candles, salt basins, pickaxes, spades, hatchets, sickles, pothooks, baskets, shingles, all the fine small tools of the scribe's trade, parchment leaves scattered from books whose jeweled covers had been ripped off and carried away by the Eika raiders. Anything that could be hauled would have been taken away and put to use, or shipped to Mede-' melacha for trade.

But the sight of the destroyed monastery had upset Alain so much that Lavastine had allowed him to go on ahead. Alain could have walked the long path along the rocky ridge all the way to Osna village but now, as he stared at the sleeping ships below, he knew he was afraid to meet the man he had called

"Father" for most of his life.

He shut his eyes. The wash of late autumn sun was not warm enough to heat his fingers. The hounds whined; Sorrow stuck her moist nose into Alain's palm. He set that palm down on gritty rock. In the old story, a Dariyan emperor versed in magic had come to this land and turned a dragon into stone, into this very ridge that swelled from the head up across a great back and down to the tip of the tail-where lay the now-burned monastery. Was there a dragon lying in enchanted sleep beneath this rock? If he stayed still enough, could he feel the pulse of the dragon's heart-or only the fine grains of rock ground by wind, rain, and time into granules that crunched under a man's boot?

As a boy, he had climbed this ridge many times, seeking a sign of the dragon's presence. He had never found any, and Aunt Bel had told him more times than he could count that he dreamed so much he was as likely to stumble off the edge of the path and into the waters below as make his way safely through the world. "The world is here, Alain" she would say, knocking on the tabletop with her knuckles, then doing the same, sharply, to his head, "not here, though I think sometimes this table and your head are made of the same thing." But she would smile to take the sting out of the words.

But if he only had the hearing of Fifth Brother, the keen hound sense of Rage and Sorrow, could he not hear the dragon's breath under the weight of earth? Sense the contour of its spine under rock, the texture of its scales under dirt? Touch its dreaming mind, so like to his own?

The earth shuddered and moved beneath him.

He jumped to his feet, shaken and frightened. Rage barked and Sorrow howled, as if baying at the absent moon. The two men-at-arms hurried forward.

"My lord Alain, are you well? What is it?" They kept well clear of the hounds, who snuffled at rock and dirt, ignoring the soldiers.

"Did you feel it?"

"Ah, yes." The men turned as the faint jingle of harness, the clop of hooves, and a murmur of jovial voices drifted up to them. "You've good hearing, my lord, as good as those hounds, I'd wager.

There come my lord count and the others."

Count Lavastine and his company emerged from the winter forest and made their way up the path to the high ridge. Even after two months on the road fighting Eika and mopping up ragtag packs of bandits, and after a week of hunting in the dense forest a day's ride east of here, the count and his retinue still looked impressive with banners flying and dressed in tabards dyed bright blue and embroidered with two black hounds-the mark of the Lavas counts. Count Lavastine let none of his personal guard go into battle unarmed, and each man had at least a helmet decorated with blue ribands, a spear and a knife, and a padded coat under the tabard. Some, if they could afford it or had been lucky enough to glean such winnings from the field, had more armor: a boiled leather coat or a scale hauberk, a leather aventail, even leather bindings on their arms and legs. Like any good lord, Lavastine was generous with his winnings and always gave his men-at-arms their fair share of the spoils.

Alain mounted his horse and rode dutifully alongside his father. They crested the dragon's back and started down the slope of shoulders and neck. A jutting boulder at the base of the ridge, lifting the height of three men, was commonly called the dragon's head; it was crowned with a scraggly yew tree and the stubble of old climbing roses, planted years ago.

By this boulder the people of Osna village waited to greet Count Lavastine. Osna village was an emporium- a trading port-and as such it needed protection. Count Lavastine provided that protection...at a price levied in goods and services. And in any case, as Aunt Bel used to say, "It's wisest to greet politely those as have better weapons than you do."

Everyone stared at him. Embarrassed, he fixed his gaze on the reins twisted across his palm, but he still heard whispers, his name a mutter in the background.

They rode through the palisade gate and past the fields, halting in front of the church made proud and handsome by the contributions of Osna's wealthiest families. But their wealth was nothing compared to the wealth he had seen at Biscop Constance's palace and at the king's court, or to that he enjoyed every day as heir to a count.

The rough-hewn longhouses, built of undressed logs patched with mud and sticks, looked shabby compared to the palaces of the nobly born. Yet weren't they good houses built of good timber by the willing hands of good people? He had always thought himself well off when he lived here-though he had forgotten how strongly the village smelled of fish.

Was it pride that made him see modest Osna village differently now? Or only the experience of the wider world? Deacon Miria declaimed a formal welcome. Count Lavastine dismounted, and Alain hurried to do the same, handing his reins to a groom but keeping a firm hold on the leashes of the hounds.

He looked about him, then, and saw many familiar faces, people he had grown up with, people he knew well...

But he saw not a single member of his family. Not my family any longer. Not one of them stood among the crowd. "Come, my lord," said Deacon Miria. "I trust you will find the lodgings here in Osna village not beneath your notice." She led them away...to Mistress Garia's long-house. The men-at-arms remained behind to be dispersed into other households.

Why were they not honoring Aunt Bel with their presence? Their path gave him a view of the entrance to Aunt Bel's longhouse. A woman stood in the threshold, a ladle in one hand and the other holding a toddler on one hip. It was not Aunt Bel.

Why was old Mistress Garia's daughter standing in the entrance of Aunt Bel's house as if she lived there?

Afternoon eased into dusk. Garia and her daughters laid out a feast at which her own sons and grandsons served the count, his heir, and his most honored retainers.

Though a feast by Osna standards, it was poorer fare by far than the feast celebrated at Lady Aldegund's manor. The bread was dark, not white; besides the ubiquitous fish, there were only two kinds of meat, pig and veal, and they were spiced only with pepper and such herbs as could be found locally; there were apples baked in honey but no sweet custard to melt on his lips. He blushed, thinking of the servingwoman and what she had wanted.

At a remove between courses, Mistress Garia came forward to offer Count Lavastine her eldest grandson as a retainer, to serve the count as a permanent member of his guard. "It is hard, indeed, my lord, to find places for all my grandsons. Our Lady has blessed my line with many healthy children, but the girls will inherit the workshop, and we do not yet have the means, as some do-" For the first time, her gaze darted to touch on Alain's face, then away. "-to build another ship. Meanwhile, the boy is almost sixteen. I hope you will honor us with your notice."

Your notice.

At those innocuous words, every person present turned to stare at Alain. "I-" he started to say.

Lavastine raised a hand. Alain fell silent. "In the spring, I will know my requirements. I will send word with my chatelaine, Mistress Dhuoda, when she comes around on her usual progress."

Terror stood, baring his teeth, and Mistress Garia drew back, frightened. Alain quieted the hound and got him to lie down. Sorrow nudged up against him, sticking his head under Alain's hand for a caress.

The company returned their attention, firmly, to the table.

After the main courses, instead of entertainment, Count Lavastine questioned the townsfolk of Osna about the Eika.

Two Eika ships had been sighted the summer after the monastery had been sacked, another three this past summer, but they had all sailed by Osna Sound, keeping out beyond the islands. No reports had come of villages nearby being burned; no one had heard any rumors of winter encampments. A forester-one of Garia's cousin's sons who ranged wide looking for game and exceptional stands of timber-had seen nothing along the coast for two days' walk in either direction, nor had he heard tales from those he met on his travels.

Lavastine questioned the merchants in greater detail, and from them he heard more varied stories.

None had himself run afoul of Eika, but merchants traded not just goods but gossip. Four Eika ships poised along the coast just north of the rich emporium of Medemelacha had suddenly turned north and sailed away. A noble's castle in Salia had been the scene of a vicious attack; one city had held out two months against a siege; refugees from a monastery burned on the island kingdom of Alba had arrived in a skin boat in Medemelacha late in the summer with an awful tale of slaughter and looting.

Alain sat dutifully and listened, but what he most wanted to ask he dared not ask: Where was Henri? Why did he not sit among the Osna merchants? What had happened to his family?

Not my family any longer.

Mistress Garia's bed, the best in the house, was given to the count and his heir for the night. Their servants commandeered pallets or slept on the floor around them, and, in the warmth of the longhouse with a hearth burning throughout the cold late autumn's night, all were comfortable. The smell of old timber, the wreath of smoke curling along the roof beams, the smell of babies and sour milk nearby and of livestock crowded into the other end of the hall comforted Alain; they reminded him of his childhood.

He had slept in such a house for many years, and his dreams had been good ones.

In the morning he drew Deacon Miria aside as the grooms saddled the horses and the soldiers made ready to leave. "Where are Bella and Henri? What has become of them and the family?"

"Alain!" Lavastine had already mounted and now gestured impatiently for Alain to join him.

"You're a good boy, Alain, to ask after them," she replied with a look compounded of sympathy, distaste, and amusement. Then she recalled to whom she was now speaking. "My lord."

"But where are they?"

"At the old steward's house. They come to Mass each week faithfully, but many of the others can't forgive them their good fortune."

"Alain!"