"That the day is lost is an illusion," he said hoarsely. "An illusion cast by Bloodheart, who is an enchanter." Blood streamed from his head, matting his hair, and one of his hands was streaked with blood trickling from a wound on his arm. "We must have faith."

"Faith!" Geoffrey cried. "Prudence would have served us better! If only we had waited for the king at Steleshame!"

"For how long? With what provisions? Our supplies run low, and this land is exhausted by war and neglect. Nay, Geoffrey, I took the course that seemed wisest to me then. Now we must take the only course open to us. We must strike from behind or all is lost, including that which is most precious to me." He glanced again at the hill, where the fighting ran thick and the standard was lost, then deliberately away as if to shut it out of his thoughts. Only by that small gesture could Liath see how much his son meant to him. Lord Geoffrey flinched back as at a rebuke.

"Lord Dedi," continued Lavastine. His voice had the brisk confidence of a man without a care in the world- and no time to waste. "Take your men and ride 'round to join with Saony. Do not allow the Eika to return to the gates of Gent. Geoffrey, take half the men of Lavas, the i standard, and those of Fesse that you can muster and join Lord Dedi. The rest, with me." His gaze, taut, like a bowstring strung tight, met Liath's. "Eagle, how long must they keep the Eika at bay for us to take the gates from within?" i She glanced at the sky, judging the height of the sun. j "To midday, at least."

"So be it. Watch for us at the gates. If we do not appear, then save those you can and join with Henry. God be with you."

The sound of the riders shifting to their new order rushed around her like the flow of the river that night on the Veser.

"Eagle," said Lavastine. Blood mottled his face and hair. Bruises stood out on the sharp plane of his cheek. Behind, the pound of the drums throbbed over the field while the clash of arms and the wail and shout of men and Eika alike rose like an unholy, intangible wraith off the battleground. The count lifted a hand to ready his troops, those splitting off with him, but he did not take his gaze from Liath.

"Lead on, Eagle. To your sight we now entrust our victory."

SOON after midday a message eddied down through the column that was Henry's army, and in its trail ran an audible buzz of excitement and fear.

"Hai! Hai!" shouted the messenger, none other than Henry's favored Eagle, Hathui, as she pulled up her mount beside the wagon that held the clerical paraphernalia. She had a strong voice that carried easily over the train of wagons now shuddering to a halt as their drivers slowed oxen and horses and bent to listen. Rosvita's servingman stopped walking and set a hand to the nose of the mule she rode. The other clerics, mounted on donkeys or walking beside her, also came to a halt.

"Word has come from an outrider that battle has been joined outside Gent. The train is to travel on as far as it can before dusk while the army marches ahead."

"Eagle!" Rosvita caught her attention before she could ride on. "How far are we from Gent?"

The Eagle's sharp gaze measured the cleric, and then suddenly the marchland woman grinned grimly. "Too far, I fear. The scout who rode in had taken a horse from her comrade, so that she could switch from one to the other and make better time. Even so, both horses foundered when she reached us. The battle was joined about the hour of Terce, she guesses, and it has taken her since then-with two horses-to reach us." The Eagle glanced reflexively up at the sky. Rosvita squinted, wincing at the high glare of the sun. Sext had passed, though they had not halted to sing the proper psalms. "Over three hours ago," she murmured; and the daylight hours in summer were long.

"I wielded a wicked staff when I was a girl!" said Sister Amabilia suddenly. She twirled her walking stick in her hands quite convincingly for a woman who had spent the last ten years as a studious cleric.

"Then it's well you'll remain behind with the train" said the Eagle, already looking ahead, trying to sight the reserve that marched behind the halted wagons. "If by some evil chance the Eika escape our net and swing wide to attack those of you left behind the main army, the infant Hippo-lyte will need stout defenders. I must go, Sister." She nodded to Rosvita and rode on.

All was in an uproar as drivers, servants, and guard talked at once. But eventually the line got going again. Soon the Eagle came thundering back toward the head of the line. After her rode Villam and the cavalry reserve. He paused as he came alongside Rosvita, and once again her servant stilled her mule so that she could speak with the margrave.

"My infantry, about one hundred men, I leave behind to guard you. Pull your wagons into a circle if you haven't reached Gent by dusk. Then move on in the morning. Under no account keep traveling in disorder. Princess Hip-polyte will be placed under your care."

"Go with God, Lord Villam," said Rosvita, making the sign of the Unities to bless him and his soldiers. "May we see victory before the sun sets."

"May we get there before the sun sets," muttered Villam. He signed to his captain who called out the order to advance. Soon Villam and his cavalry, too, vanished into the forest ahead as the wagons trundled on. The reserve infantry jogged up and their captain deployed them around the wagon train much as Rosvita imagined stock-drovers might surround a large herd of cattle in the wild lands, protecting them from wolves.

Soon the solitude grew eerie and disturbing. In two days of travel beyond Steleshame, she had stopped hearing the distant sounds of the host ahead and the reserve behind. Now, when she could no longer hear the distant sounds of their passage before and behind, she noticed their lack.

"Ho!" A shout carried from the forward scouts. "Party ahead!"

An anxious group of servants waited for them alongside the track. By this means Rosvita could see how far ahead Duchess Liutgard and Princess Sapientia had pushed their groups even in the course of the regular march. The men and women clustered here greeted them with relief and explained that they consisted of those noncombatants who had for one reason or another ridden ahead with the main army.

Most importantly, they included Sapientia's personal servants with her traveling pavilion and her baby, the precious child whose existence conferred on Sapientia the right to rule after Henry.

Father Hugh was not among them.

Rosvita found one of his servingmen at once, a monk called Brother Simplicus who had come with him from Firsebarg Abbey. He leaned against a tree a bit away from the others and combed a hand nervously through his thinning hair. A beautifully carved chest rested on the ground at his feet with a stone wedged under one corner so he could grip one side easily when it came time to pick it up.

"Brother," she called, indicating that he should come over to her. He started, surprised at her notice, and hefted the chest. It took some effort for him to lumber over to her; not a big man, he had also the rabbity eyes of a man made nervous by small worries.

"Where is Father Hugh?" she asked kindly.

With a grunt he set down the chest again, grimacing as he tipped it up on one foot. "He rode out with the army." His nose was running. He glanced around, then wiped it on his sleeve and twitched nervously under her gaze. "I begged him not to, good Sister. I am well aware that a man of the church ought to walk in peace and..." Here he faltered, evidently coming to the conclusion that she did not mean to rebuke him for his failure to keep his noble superior from doing what the man had clearly already determined to do. "B-but he armed himself in mail and helm and with sword strapped over his back rode out beside the princess."

"No doubt Father Hugh has training at arms," she said, meaning to comfort him. With some difficulty she kept her gaze off the chest. "Even in battle his presence may provide ballast for the princess, should she need counsel. Many a good churchman or woman has fought when desperate need arose."

But her thoughts were not on battle, not right now. For some odd reason Sister Amabilia's comment, made months ago, popped into her head: "A bird's feathers may change in color, but it's the same duck inside!"

And she smiled. "Brother Simplicus, bide with us as we travel. Set your chest in the wagon so that you may walk more lightly. It looks to be a heavy burden."

Ah, he was tempted. She recognized the look. He glanced at the chest and winced as it shifted more heavily onto his foot, the other end pressing deeply into the loamy ground. First he ran a hand through his thin hair, then scratched at his shaven chin nervously as he swept the woods with a wary gaze, and finally toyed with the two thin gold chains at his neck.

"I wonder," commented Rosvita casually, "if those trees conceal Eika scouts. Alas, I fear they might spring out from the woods upon us at any moment."

He started, almost comical in his fear; not, she chided herself, that he didn't have good reason to feel afraid. "Nay, I dare not, Sister," he said at last. "Father Hugh charged me not to let it out of my grasp."

"Well, then," she said, and signaled to the captain. The train lurched forward.

But of course he tired after a while. He didn't look to be a strong man, pampered perhaps by the light service set on him as Hugh's personal servingman. Finally, as he staggered along with his eyes darting from one side to the other and his face blazoned with an understandable fear that if he lagged, he might simply be left behind to suffer a terrible death at the hands of Eika or bandits or such creatures as lurk in the woods at night, she coaxed him to set the chest into the wagon. There he walked close beside with one hand always clutching the rim, sometimes to test that the chest had not vanished, sometimes to rest his weight and gain some respite as he puffed along. She did not offer to let him ride in the wagon or on one of the ponies, although there were a few ponies to spare for riding.

On they went, at a steady pace, but the track was neglected and narrow and, after all, wagons cannot move as quickly as soldiers and horses.

Dusk came, and the captain found a decent clearing. He supervised the wagons as the drivers brought them into a circle, making a rough fortress of them. The livestock were driven inside and in these cramped quarters rank with the smell of ox and horse manure and crowded with drivers and grooms and servants terrified at being left this far behind and yet relieved at being in a relative vale of peace, they set up a spartan camp. Rosvita led the clerics in Vespers.

Princess Sapientia's servants worked efficiently and quickly to set up her pavilion. In this shelter they installed the baby. In the brief interlude between Vespers and Compline, Rosvita went in to pay her respects.

Little Hippolyte rested in the arms of her wet nurse with perfect equanimity. She had a bright gaze for such a young baby, dark hair like her mother, and eyes as blue as her father's. She had a happy gurgle compounded half of fat contentment and half of spit-up. In particular, she liked to grasp things: fingers, jewelry, rolls of cloth, the hafts of spoons and, once, that of a knife-quickly taken away but not before she could wave it lustily about while her wet nurse squealed, her servingwomen crowed with laughter, and Rosvita finally and gently pried the dangerous knife from her chubby little fingers.

"Aye, she'll fight off the Eika for us!" chuckled the servants.

"Let us pray for her safety," said Rosvita sternly, which made them frown and grow serious. They were glad enough to kneel with her as she sang a brief Compline service over the baby to give it the protection of God's blessing for the night.

Then she excused herself and retired to find that her own orders had been carried out and her small traveling tent had been erected. A servant had lit a lantern and hung it from the central pole where its light cast distorted shadows over the cloth walls and the carpet pressed down over the meadow grass.

Sister Amabilia had already lain down on her pallet and was now snoring softly. The other clerics, sitting outside the tent reserved for the men among their number, sat or stood around the wagon while they chatted softly-and not without an edge of nervousness in their voices.

Rosvita made her way to the healers and begged an infusion of one of the herb women, something to calm nerves and bring sleep. It took only a few words to coax Brother Simplicus into drinking it, and there was even some left over for Brother Fortunatus. She regretted the deception of Brother Fortunatus but, unlike Amabilia and Con-stantine, he was not a sound sleeper.

She returned to her tent and knelt before her pallet for a long time while she prayed to God to forgive her for what she was about to do.

When at last she emerged from the tent, the camp lay as quiet as any camp could be around her and the bright moon rode high above in the night sky.

Brother Simplicus had chosen to sleep outside next to the wagon, lying on his mantle on the ground. It was a warm night and pleasant. Gingerly she knelt beside him and teased out his two necklaces: One was a fine silver Circle of Unity, the other a tiny cloth pouch tied with a sprig of elder and smelling of licorice and a spice whose fragrance bit at Rosvita's nose but whose name did not come to mind. Why would a monk in the Daisanite church be wearing a heathen amulet? She tucked both objects back under his robe.

There was no key. Hugh had kept the key himself.

The chest was indeed heavy, but Rosvita was a robust woman still even if her back was no longer as supple and strong as it once had been. She lugged it inside her tent and half-dropped it down on her pallet; the thick batting absorbed the thunk of a heavy weight hitting the ground.

She glanced behind her. Sister Amabilia snored on. Then she tested the haft. It was locked, of course, but she had expected that.

Under the light of the lantern she wedged her knife between haft and lock. It didn't budge. With a grimace, she examined the keyhole. A sprig of juniper had been thrust into it, like a key. She scrabbled at it with her fingers, getting a grip on the slick needles, and pulled it out. Its touch stung her fingers and she dropped it with a soft curse and touched her smarting fingers to her lips, licking them until the pain subsided.

She undid the brooch from her cloak and probed into the lock with the pin. She was patient and at last found the right point to put pressure on. It unlocked with a soft pop. At once she glanced back, but Amabilia slept on, not even stirring. Rosvita lifted the lid. The book.

Nested in a cowl of undyed linen, it lay on top of the rest of the chest's contents: a man's fine embroidered tunic and a woman's pale gold silk overdress-a curious item for a churchman to carry with him-as well as two other books. But she did not have time to puzzle out their titles in the dim light afforded her by the lantern. At this moment, in this place, she could not afford to be curious. She lifted the book out and turned it so the lettering on the spine glinted in the lantern light: The Book of Secrets.

Amabilia snorted and shifted in her sleep. Rosvita jerked back, startled. With a grimace, she wrapped the book in the linen cloth and thrust it under her pallet, then closed the chest and slipped a glove over her hand before she picked up the sprig of juniper and crammed it back into the keyhole.

Was it magic, hastily performed? She knew something of magic and of herbs but not enough to know if Father Hugh employed their power. God have mercy if he had.

Then she chastised herself for thinking such a thing of a good churchman like Hugh. He had proved himself, if not chaste, then at least a good adviser. He was learned and well-spoken.

And he had stolen a Book of Secrets.

"No better a soul than mine," she murmured. She braced herself, legs bent, and grunted slightly as she picked up the chest and staggered outside. For some reason it seemed heavier now.

She replaced it in the wagon, brushed her hand over lock and wood to make sure there were no obvious signs of entry-such as Brother Simplicus might think to look for- and then retreated back to her tent.

Of guards she saw none, but they would be set out along the perimeter. The camp lay silent, brushed by the noises that attend any forest at night: the sigh of wind through the trees, the chirping of crickets, the eerie hoot of an owl.

The moon alone witnessed her sin.

When Rosvita reentered the tent, Sister Amabilia blinked up at her and rubbed bleary eyes as if to clear them. "What are you about, Sister?"

"I am merely restless," said Rosvita. "And with a full bladder now emptied. Go back to sleep.

We'll need our strength tomorrow."

Amabilia yawned, groped to find her walking staff laid on the ground beside her, and then, reassured by its presence, she went back to sleep.

Merely restless. Merely a liar.

Merely a thief.

She had spent more than half her life in the church and served faithfully and well, only to find herself now shaking in the shadow of a lantern, in a tent in the wilds of a forest night. Was it only her imagination or could she hear the howls of Eika and the screams of dying men on the wind that fluttered the tent flaps and twined round the tent poles?

"Sister Amabilia?" she whispered; but there was no reply.

She eased the book from under the pallet and opened it on the blanket, just where the light streamed with its honey glow. It was hard to see, especially with eyes no longer young and sharp as they once had been, but with her hands, leafing through the book, she discovered at once that the binding contained not one book but three, bound together. The third and last book was written in the infidel way, on paper, and in the language of the Jinna-which she could not read. The second book, bound into the heart of the volume, was of such brittle papyrus that she hesitated to touch it for fear it would crumble under her fingers. It, too, was composed in a language she could not read, but in this case she did not even recognize the letters. "Hide this" was written in Arethousan at the top of the first page of the middle manuscript, and there seemed to be other glosses, also in Arethousan, but the ink was unreadable in this light.

She turned back to the very first page of the first book, a good quality parchment leaf-and written in Dariyan, she noted even before she noted the substance of the words or the strange handwriting. Whoever had written this had been church-educated, certainly, for the lettering paraded down the page with a trace of Aostan formalism. But the "q"s curled strangely, and the "s"s had a Salian bent, while the "t"s and "th"s had the stiff, strong backs of a cleric trained in a Wendish institution. With most calligraphy she could read in the script where the scribe had gotten her training; this person wrote in such a hodgepodge of styles that she-or he-might have come from anywhere, or everywhere.

It was very strange.

But nothing like as strange, and disturbing, as the words themselves. With mounting horror, she mouthed the first sentence.

"Through the art of the mathematici we read the alignment of the heavens and draw down the power of the ever-moving spheres to work our will on the earth. I will now set down everything I know of this art. Beware, you who read this, lest you become trapped as I have in the snares of those who seek to use me for their own ends. Beware the Seven Sleepers."

A twig snapped outside and she started violently, slapping the book shut and shoving it under the blanket. God have mercy. She trembled like a sinner afflicted through God's just judgment with a palsy.

The art of the mathematici.

The most forbidden of sorceries.

THEY left the horses with a half dozen of Captain Ulric's men, the light cavalry from Autun. A few of the light cavalry had torches among their equipment; Lavastine ordered other branches collected from the brush, enough that each man carried two stout sticks.

Liath stepped into the cave mouth and took hold of a torch. There was no longer time to agonize over the gift she held within her, that Da had protected her against. Alain's life-if he even still lived-hung in the balance.

Wood burns. The torch flared to life, flames licking and smoking with a resiny smell. Lavastine had come in behind her, and now she turned to see him staring at her.

"It's a trick," she said quickly. "An Eagle's trick."

"Not one I have heard tell of before now," he replied, but he merely called to the forty soldiers who followed him, mostly light cavalry pulled off the field, and every fourth man lit torch or stick from the one she carried.

She set foot on the stairs. Lavastine followed directly behind her, then some of his men and, last, young Erkan-wulf and the other Autun soldiers. Captain Ulric brought up the rear. With each step downward the light of day faded, dimmed, grayed into oblivion. The rough stone gripped her boots though now and again a trickle of water slipped under her feet, welling up from some untraceable crack of moisture dripping through a seam in the rock. She kept the torch thrust forward to see the steps below her. They were so evenly spaced that she had to stop herself from trotting down them, from gaining too much speed. Ai, Lady, was Alain alive yet on the hill or were he and his troops destroyed by the fury of the Eika assault? Once she heard a man stumble and cry out behind her, and the slowed down, waiting, as did Lavastine, who matched her step for step. Tension coiled on him like a second skin, and he hissed between his teeth with impatience but said nothing as the man behind caught up and they descended again.

But after a hundred or more of such evenly placed steps even the most cautious man became bolder and their pace increased as they descended down and ever down.

They came to the base of the stairs, and the tunnel forged forward into a blackness so profound that it seemed alive. She walked out far enough to give them room to assemble behind her, forming up into twos. There was some jostling and whispering, and after a moment Erkanwulf appeared, wan in the light of her torch.

"I've been given leave to walk scout beside you," he said, "since it's well known I have keen eyesight."

"I thank you."

"Ai, Lord, but I can't see a thing in front of us! Are you sure there're no ditches or abysses to swallow us up?"

"There were none before. But that's not to say none could have opened up since."

He snorted. "I thank you, Eagle, for setting my heart at peace."

"Forward," said Lavastine behind her. "Let our pace be swift. Keep some distance between you-but not too much-so if we are attacked, we are not caught up the one upon the other."

She went cautiously at first, but the way lay silent and pitch-black before her, a weight of still air stirred and lightened by their passing but by no other breath of life. All lay around her in the flickering gaze of the torches as she recalled it: the smooth walls, the beaten earth floor as though thousands had passed this way in some long ago time, the ceiling a hand's reach above. Now and again she heard the scrape of a metal spear point on the rock, and a low curse from its bearer, shifting it down. Her bow and quiver rode easily on her back. She held the torch in her left hand and her good friend Lucien's sword in her right. The torch burned without flagging, as did all the others. Erkanwulf walked on her left so the torch illuminated the way evenly between them. But after a while she began to forge ahead of him, sure of her path. Behind her, Lavastine strode swiftly, and his troops kept up by sheer force of his will if nothing else.

"Ai, Lord," whispered Erkanwulf. "It's sorely dark down here, Eagle. What if all that rock caves in on us?"

But she smelled only the metallic tang of earth, a distant whiff of the forge, and the dank moisture of a place long hidden from the sun. "Why should it fall now? If it's lain here for so long?"

"The torches burn so strongly," added Erkanwulf. "It's uncanny, it is."

"Hush," said Lavastine from behind, although the tramp of so many armed men through the tunnel could not be hidden-or at least not by any gift she possessed.

They walked steadily and, like the torches, without flagging. She realized now that the journey out of Gent had taken so long for the most part because they had gone so slowly, and because the refugees had been mostly frightened children or the weak and the wounded. With forty robust soldiers behind her, she could lead at a brisk pace.

"What's there?" muttered Erkanwulf even as she realized that in the far distance ahead she could see a dull lightening cast of fire. And as they neared she saw that, indeed, it was fire: A wall of it stretched from floor to ceiling, wall to wall, leaping and burning in the tunnel with all the frenzy of a gleeful pack of fire daimones at their dance.

"Defended!" said Lavastine angrily.

Liath stared. Defended. But why, then, had the Eika not used the tunnel as a way to ambush Lavastine's army when it first arrived?

"Stay back," she said to Erkanwulf. She strode forward with her torch outthrust to make a barrier, but as she neared the wall of flame, it faded in her sight to become a whisper, a haze, a memory of fire, nothing more.

"Eagle!" She felt Erkanwulf dart forward to grab at her as she stepped into the blaze. He screamed. She stopped and turned round to order him back only to see the look on their faces, as much as she could see expressions in the torchlight. Only Lavastine watched impassively. Erkanwulf staggered back, a hand thrown up to shield his face from the heat. The rest murmured or cried out, or covered their eyes to hide them from the horrible sight of a young woman burned alive.

"It's an illusion," she said.

Erkanwulf fell to his knees, gasping and coughing.

Lavastine stepped up beside him. What courage it took him to do so she could not imagine.

Would she do the same, if she had only another's word to go by? Around her, the ghost fire shimmered and leaped, burning rock no less than air.

"If Bloodheart has guarded this tunnel with illusion," asked the count, "doesn't that mean he must know of it?"

"Perhaps. But then why wouldn't he have used it for an ambush? Nay, Count Lavastine, I think there is fire above, on the plain, and his illusion is all of one seam. Have you ever seen an orrery? A model of the heavenly spheres?"

"Go on," said Lavastine curtly.

"As above, so below. His illusion may be one seamless part, and thus exists below the ground as well as above it. It's possible that these illusions would be seen by anyone attempting to approach the city, that Bloodheart cast them without knowing they would extend here, too."

"Or perhaps his soldiers wait for us, beyond."

In answer, she stepped through. A man shrieked, was brusquely ordered to be silent. Beyond the wall of fire lay the silent tunnel, dark and quiet. She turned and could not see the fire from this direction at all, only a misty haze and the men waiting on the other side.

"Nothing," she said. "Unless Bloodheart ordered his men to wait for us on the stairs. It would be very hard to fight up those stairs and win."

"Making it a better place to set an ambush, then," said Lavastine. "But what choice do we have but to go forward?" He nudged poor frightened Erkanwulf with the toe of a boot. "Come. She has the true sight. We must trust in her."

"We must trust in St. Kristine," she said suddenly, "for without her intercession we would never have found the tunnel. The heat will not burn you."

"I can't go through," sobbed Erkanwulf, still with a hand flung up to protect his eyes.

"Nay, boy!" said Ulric from the back of the group. "Think of Lord Wichman and his stories. They saw illusions at Steleshame, but that was all they were."

"I will lead." Lavastine gripped his sword more tightly and walked forward into the fire.

Even so, Liath felt him trembling slightly as he halted beside her. One by one, with increasing confidence, his troops came along after. Only a few shut their eyes as they passed through the illusion.

They went on.

After a time, she stumbled on a bottomless abyss, too wide across to jump. But even as she stared, the gulf of air solidified into the rock floor, littered with pebbles and scored by old footprints unstirred for months by the passage of wind or any other traffic, even the tiny creatures of the dark, over them.

This time, when she moved forward across the gaping abyss, Lavastine walked right beside her-though when he took the first step out over the yawning chasm, she noticed that he shut his eyes.

She called back over her shoulder. "Shut your eyes! Shut your eyes and walk forward. Your feet will not lie to you."

In this way the soldiers followed, shuffling behind until the chasm lay behind them. With mounting confidence they went on. The torches burned steadily without consuming themselves.

"Are you a mage?" asked Lavastine softly, beside her. "Why do you possess this power to see through illusion? Where comes it from?"

How can I use it to my advantage? He did not say the last words aloud, but she heard such calculation in his tone.

"My father laid a-a mage's working on me," she said, hoping that she spoke the truth nearly enough that God would forgive her for lying.

Lavastine made no reply. She could not even imagine what he was thinking; she understood him less than any person she had ever met.

They went on, pressing into the darkness that would lead them to the crypt-and to the Eika. And to Bloodheart.

Liath led them and did not look back.

PRESSED back and back, Alain held his place in the second rank of shields, keeping low so that the spearmen behind him could thrust over him. He braced hard with his feet to shore up those in the front rank who bore the brunt of the Eika assault. His strength was all he had, for surely it must be obvious to all by now that he could not fight.

The Eika sagged back, and in the brief lull, he surveyed the hill. The west and south lines still held at the wall, but to the east, facing Gent, and at the north gate where Alain had thrown in his reserves, the army had fallen back and now presented a wall of flesh and steel instead of earthen ramparts to face the Eika stone. Alain hoped that someone would take his place in the ranks so he could gain a vantage point to observe the field below and the progress of his father, but those with shields were already at the fore and none stepped up to relieve him.

The Eika gathered their strength. They, too, presented a line of shields, rounds painted with cunning blue or yellow serpents twined into interwoven spirals. Twenty paces separated the two lines.

Aside from an occasional arrow or thrown stone, or the Eika stooping to stab some poor wounded man left behind in the retreat, or the dogs feeding hideously on corpses, the Eika remained still.

Lord have mercy. One black hound sprawled in an awkward heap and, even as he stared in horror, dogs leaped upon it to savage its corpse. Which one it was he did not know. He felt the press of the other hounds around him, but he dared not take his eyes off the enemy to count their number. Eika drummers had moved up to the second rank of their line and they beat a rhythm like a slow heartbeat. It quickened, and the Eika became restless, just as hounds would, scenting their prey but still held on a tight leash. The beating of the drums boomed louder and faster and then, like thunder, it broke with deafening claps as the Eika charged.

The soldiers around Alain braced themselves with wide stances. Spearmen shouldered up beside Alain, wedging spears in between the foremost shields, a line of points to impale the charging Eika on their own momentum.

The Eika hit. Alain staggered, caught himself, and sank back. He reinforced his shield with the pommel of his sword, but even so he, with the others, gave ground at a slow grind. Round Eika shields pressed into the fray, first overlapping him to his left, then to his right. He struggled as he caught an Eika shield with the corner of his own. If he could only draw the strength of the earth up through his legs...a hound leaned against him, adding its strength, but despite everything, his boots skidded on the dirt as he was forced back. The hound scrabbled and whined and retreated.

Over his head axes and spears did their work, but the huge shields of the Eika served them well.

The line gave back, back toward the center of camp, back until the banner of black hounds on silver, placed near the top of the hill, vanished in the press.

Now the Eika overran the edge of camp and strangely this gave them some respite, since a number of the Eika would simply stop and pull back from the fighting to loot through chest and bag.

The east and north lines met and melded, and out of the din Alain suddenly heard the captain's voice as he shouted orders. The captain carried the standard, now that the banner was lost, and he rallied the troops with it by raising it high wherever the fighting was fiercest and the cause seemed lost.

"Hold the line!" Alain cried, but only those men right round him could hear, and surely they were already conducting themselves as best they could to keep their lord alive.

At last the standard signaled the captain's approach. "Lord Alain!" he cried. "Let him back, let him back! Now close it up, lads. Form up to the right-" As Alain staggered out of the press into the dusty reserve ground-what little remained-the captain turned on him. "I lost track of you! Ai, Lord, what your father the count would say to me-

"Where's my father?" Alain shouted.

The captain waved vaguely to the east. "Out there. I saw Lord Wichman's banner, but a host of Eika ran between them and the hill and the sun shines so as to hide the land. We must trust to our swords and to the Lady."

From this vantage, Alain looked out over the plain. Eika swarmed like flies across the land. Off to the right a small band of horsemen carrying the raven tower of Autun formed up-or made ready to retreat. Of Lord Wichman and the gold lion of Saony, of the Lavas banner, he saw no sign.

An unearthly dome of fire concealed Gent, as bright now as the sun that rode high above them.

Already it had passed midday while they struggled on the hill, and the sun had begun its steady descent toward the western horizon. But a long afternoon and an endless high summer twilight stretched before them.

He whistled and even over the din of battle the hounds heard him and came to huddle at his feet: Sorrow and Rage, both cut and bleeding but whole, thumped their tails into his legs; Fear strained forward, barking wildly while blood streamed from a cut on his hindquarters; Bliss had an ugly gash on his back and one of his ears had been ripped to shreds; Ardent limped, old Terror's jaw dripped with the greenish-tinted blood that belonged to the Eika. Oddly, Steadfast had not a mark on her. But Good Cheer was missing. And Graymane was gone.

There was no time to mourn.

He gave them all a quick pat, and they licked him vigorously. Who was reassuring whom? As he straightened, he tried to make sense of the field.

The east and north lines were gone and those ramparts given up to the Eika advance. For the moment only flurries of fighting raged to the south and west, where the Eika had had little luck up to now.

Here, down off the top of the hill, Alain and his company waited and watched as Eika looted Lavastine's camp. Where the night before the commanders had discussed strategy, the enemy now reveled. Alain could pick out individuals, Eika somewhat larger than the rest and clad in glittering gold and silver mail girdles that draped from hip to knee, flashing and glinting in the sunlight. Each of these-and there were not many- walked through the carnage with an easy lilting step. Each had a standard beside him, a grotesque pole festooned with feathers and bones and skins and other unknowable things. These were princelings like Fifth Son: Bloodheart's many sons.

They howled and the slow roll of the drums quickened. The Eika gave up their looting, the dogs were kicked and slapped into obedience, and they formed up again.

With a howl, they attacked. A huge Eika princeling j hefted his obsidian-edged club and sprang forward at their head. Lavastine's captain bolted forward to brace the line for the impact, but it was no use. The line of men split asunder as two shieldmen were bowled over by the massive Eika. The captain thrust with the banner pole and stuck the Eika princeling in the brow, the point lodging in the scaly forehead. The creature flailed and smashed its club into the banner pole, breaking it, then grasped the splintered end, tugged, and heaved the captain bodily forward and struck him to the ground. With the point of the pole still thrust out from its forehead and the Lavas banner drapped over its shoulders like a cloak, the Eika plunged on, roaring.

Men screamed and retreated and the line dissolved into chaos. But Alain stepped up to meet him with a blow swung with all of his strength. The Eika caught it with his bare hand, the sword's point splitting the skin but doing no more damage than that, and then wrenched Alain forward, and down, and lifted his club for the death blow.

Alain tried to shift his shield, but it was too late. It was too little. More Eika swarmed past toward the crumbling troops. The hounds had vanished into the maelstrom.

I am with you Alain. You have kept your promise to me.

The club arced down, but he was a shadow and she the life that lived within the light. She was there, a thing of effortless and terrible beauty as she wielded the sword that is both war and death.

She rolled and the princeling's killing blow struck earth, spitting clods into the air, into Alain's teeth. She cut to the back of the Eika's leg, hamstringing it, and the Eika fell. It seemed no more than a dance as she rolled up to her feet, and with a second blow, as fast as the lightning strikes to herald the coming of thunder, she beheaded the savage.

With her, Alain retreated, but only to form up the line around him-around her. Where the shields parted, where the line buckled or men's spirits wavered, he had only to go, the shadow to her light, and she would go there as well. In her wake men's spirits lifted, and they fought with renewed ferocity, shouting his name: "Lord Alain! Lord Alain!"

For where she stood, where Alain was, no charge could succeed. But even the Lady of Battles could not succeed against the thousands, the endless onslaught of savage Eika and their ravening dogs.

The Eika surged forward. Drums pounded until he could hear nothing above them, not even the clash of shield and sword, not even the screams of the wounded or the howling of dogs. He could not be everywhere at once, and where he was not, the line gave way.

The Eika came on and on up the hill from all sides, and soon all sides were hard-pressed. The drums boomed. With a sudden shift of rhythm, the force of their reverberation deafened him, and the very hill beneath trembled as the shield wall failed in a dozen places and the battle no longer had order.

It became a melee as men clumped together fighting desperately just to stay alive. Eika flowed in from all sides. Fear clutched at Alain's throat as he realized how few were still afoot-and those who fell had no chance against the dogs.

Even the Lady stilled, staring. The hounds boiled up to him then, yipping. Sorrow took his tattered tabard in his teeth and dragged him westward and in this way, with the Lady at the point and Alain right behind her, they drove westward step by agonizing step down the hill toward the distant shelter of the western forest. Men fell in beside him and behind him, seeking shelter, seeking safety in what numbers they had left to them, a wedge of men thrusting through the Eika onslaught. With each step they struggled as Eika raged forward. They had no choice but to escape to the woods, for their hill and their camp-and the day-was lost.

All was lost.

He could no longer see the plain, only the horde of Eika surrounding them.

At the point of their wedge, the Lady cut a path westward until they were at the west "gate," its wagons smashed and dead bodies littering the gap. The drumbeat increased, and with each beat the determination of the Eika to stop them from retreat grew. There, at the ruined gate, their wedge ground to a halt. The sun beat down with the hammer blow of heat.

With a great breath, like a beast so immense that its voice was that of a thousand and more mouths, the Eika shifted, steadied, and howled until the roar of it drove men to their knees under the merciless bright eye of the sun.

Only the Lady blazed bright in answer. And only Alain could see her as, behind her, he lifted his sword in desperation.

"Hold fast!" he cried. "God is with us!"

But no one could hear him.

SHE did not count the stairs, only cursed each clank and rustle and whisper from the men behind her. But no Eika waited for them where the stone steps curved upward and opened into the crypt. She stumbled on a gravestone and fell to one knee as the rest came up behind her, emerging one by one into black silence.

Erkanwulf helped her up.

Each least movement or murmured comment fell heavily, weighted by the dampening earth and magnified by the stillness of the waiting dead.

"Hush," said Lavastine. "Listen."

They listened but heard nothing but their own breathing.

"Now." He did not need to speak loudly. In the dim light afforded by torches, ears became keen of hearing. "We must open the gates of Gent. And we must kill Blood-heart, if we are able. My experience of the Eika tells me that they follow a war chief and will fight like dogs among themselves if that leader is dead."

The tombs lay in dense silence around them. Torchlight made a haze of the air. In the curve of shadow beyond the smoky glow Liath saw a glint of white, recognizable but indistinct.

"Captain Ulric, you will take fifteen men. I will take fifteen men. We must take separate routes for the western gates of Gent. Eagle." She nodded. "These seven men I leave under your command. As the old stories say: Send a mage to kill a mage."

"My lord count-!" she protested.

He lifted a hand to silence her. "It is your job to hunt down and kill Bloodheart."

"Yes, my lord count," she said obediently. At that instant a torchbearer turned and the glow of the torch spread wings and illuminated the far doorway of this vaulted corner.

Bones. Not safely interred in the sanctity of a tomb but scattered like leaves on the forest floor, the bones littered the far vaults of the crypt, all tumbled together. As she moved cautiously into the next chamber, she knew they were the bones of Dragons. The smell of lime stung her nostrils. The Eika knew to cast lime over the remains. Little putrefaction remained because of clay soil and moisture...and because it had been over a year since the fall of Gent. Skulls grinned at her; open eyes bled pools of blackness. Ribs showed white under tattered tabards and padded gam-besons chewed to pieces by rats.

Skeleton fingers clutched at her boots and a thighbone rolled under her so she slipped and almost fell.

"Lord have mercy!" breathed Erkanwulf beside her, "Look! The badge of the King's Dragons!"

Reason enough to kill Bloodheart.

They picked their way through the terrible remains of the king's elite cavalry. At least the Eika, for unfathomable reasons of their own, had dragged them down to decay among the holy dead.

She dared not look too closely for fear she would see the dragon helmet that marked the remains of Sanglant. Her memory of him was so clean, so strong, of his living face watching her in the silence of the crypt, his chin as smooth as a woman's under her fingers; of him standing proud and confident in the midst of the crowd that had threatened to mob the palace; of his last dash into the fight, when all had seemed lost. She could not bear to see his beauty reduced to dust. So she stopped looking at the remains around her except to place her feet with care so that she did not step on too many of them, poor dead souls.

With each step, purpose weighed more heavily on her: She could become the instrument of vengeance for what had been done to him and to his Dragons. It gave her heart as she neared the steps that led up to the cathedral.

When her boots nudged the bottom stair and she peered upward where spiderwebs wreathed the canted wall and glittered like a silvery net of moonlight above her torch, she turned back. "Let me scout ahead," she whispered.

"Your group will file up behind you," said Lavastine. "We dare not be caught here."

"Let me just scout first alone," she said. "Should I be caught, and if they guess where I have come from, then you are on an equal footing. Eika see in the dark no better than a human man-" Although not as well as she did, but she could not say so out loud. "-and you will have a better chance of fending them off...and of escape back through the tunnel."

"What of the dogs?" whispered Erkanwulf. "What if they smell us?"

"Then again you are safer to remain here, where the smell of lime and damp will somewhat cover your trail."

"And if they don't know of the tunnel," said Lavastine quietly, "then they would have no reason to look down here. If they discover you, they'd be as likely to look elsewhere and thus give us time to get out and move for the gates." He nodded curtly. "Go on."

Go on. So coolly he considered her death and resolved that it might benefit him.

But Liath only smiled grimly, gave her torch to Erkanwulf, and set off up the stairs.

The curve soon took her out of sight of the soldiers waiting below, but even the memory of torchlight was enough to light her way. She heard the delicate tread of men coming up after her. Soon a thin line of light limned the door that led out onto the nave, but she passed it by and crept on up a narrower set of stone steps that led to the choir.

Here, in a cramped landing, she set her hand on a thick door ring and rested her ear against the rough planks. What she heard from beyond was faint, a teasing melody as light as air. Dust coated the iron ring, slick under her fingers. She gave a nudge with her shoulder. The door cracked open. Daylight blinded her and she had to stand for the count of twenty until her eyes adjusted even to the thin line of light that now edged the stone column around which the stairwell wound. From the nave she heard the sound of flutes.

She tucked her sword against her and eased open the door. The choir walk ran empty, a balcony no wider than an arm outstretched, all the way to the opposite end of the nave. A layer of dust blanketed the floor. Tapestries whose brightly woven stories were muted by dust hung on the walls beneath the huge second tier of windows through which the sun shone, motes of dust everywhere streaming and dancing in the light. Where a few of the tapestries brushed the floor, sagging or half fallen, their bases had been nibbled into ragged ends by rats or mice.

She set a foot forward and eased herself into the quiet walk. A dart of movement startled her, and she froze. But it was only a mouse, bold enough enough to prowl the choir in broad daylight. The sight of it gave her courage. If mice skittered about so freely, then it was not likely anyone lurked up here.

She stepped farther out, hugging the wall, and eased the door closed until it stood with only a crack. Each step left a distinct print behind as she crept forward.

She crouched and made her way along the solid railing. Above, the ceiling vaulted high to span the nave. Flute music echoed below and beside and beyond her. She dared not look at the windows for fear one glimpse of sunlight would ruin her eyes when she needed to look below. Her quiver brushed the rail, and she rose slightly to peer over.

And there, in a shaft of sunlight streaming in through the western windows, sat Bloodheart on his throne.

He played music on flutes crafted of bone, and she shuddered to hear him as the music wafted into the air and twined and curled around as if it were a living thing. And she knew, then: He wove with his flute, wove the very illusions that protected him.

Next to him, almost in his shadow, crouched the skinny Eika priest she remembered. Naked except for a loincloth, he rocked back and forth on his heels in time to the melody. A wooden chest sat tucked against his feet, and one of his clawed hands rested protectively on its painted lid.

And there were dogs, packs of dogs all here and there, panting, lying in heaps, tongues lolling and saliva dripping onto the flagstone floor. Beside the holy altar Bloodheart had let a midden grow, a low mound of garbage, rags and trash and bones and old rusting chains piled up against the most sanctified place in the cathedral. She winced to see the holy Hearth defiled in such a fashion, but no doubt Bloodheart pleased himself by desecrating the blessed Hearth of the Lady.

She knelt, laid her sword down on the dusty walk, and with her heart afire with fear and with an implacable burning determination, she slipped out Seeker of Hearts. In a moment she had an arrow free and loosely nocked to the string.

Light streamed down all around her, the blessed Daisan walking through his seven miracles, each one outlined in glass. Light splintered everywhere, rainbows dancing in the air of the nave, yet if she shifted slightly they would vanish only to reappear if she leaned back. She rose again from her crouch, as silent as the breath of morning-or of fate's unyielding hand.

The memory of the beauty of the cathedral hit her with doubled force. There the biscop had led Mass. There the congregation had gathered, standing, to sing. There San-giant and his Dragons had knelt, before the altar, that morning in their last brief moments of life before they rode to their deaths.

Voices. She froze, canting her head back to listen. Let Lavastine and his men not come out yet!

Into the cold emptiness of the nave, below, an Eika strode into her line of sight. He wore the distinguishing marks of a princeling, a skirt of mail fashioned of gold and silver links that draped from hips to knees, winking in and out of the light as he walked the floor between shafts of sunlight, and a torso painted with an elaboration of the same swirling cross pattern that graced Bloodheart's chest. Strangely, he wore a wooden Circle of Unity around his neck.

Alain's prince! Could it be?

In her surprise, she must have scuffed her boot on the floor.

The Eika princeling faltered, and for that instant she panicked, not moving and yet with her mind shut like a door, blank and empty. But he only faltered because he stared at the heap of garbage beside the altar, which now stirred, woken by that scuff or by the perfume of her secrecy or by the music of the flutes, to reveal dogs and some kind of ghastly creature, surely not human, heavily chained and clothed in the tattered remains of a tabard marked with a black dragon. Yet it had substance and weight, unlike a daimone; it had unkempt black hair as tangled and ratted as that of a filthy ascetic who has sworn off the trivial clothing of human grooming. It had arms and legs, hands and feet, very humanlike, and a cast of skin made dark by grime. It was a hideous thing, so matted and foul that it might as easily have been a grotesque illusion born out of Bloodheart's vile magic. Or so she hoped. Then it swung round, shoulders bracing as against an attack, and she saw its face.

"God have mercy," she whispered, the sound forced from her by a shock so profound that she forgot everything, everyone, and even her purpose for being here: The Eika chieftain who sat, unwitting, below her, an easy target. "Sanglant."

He uncurled completely from the midden and in that instant with his head flung up like that of a hound tasting a scent on the air, she knew he had heard her.

She knew he recognized her voice.

Lady and Lord have mercy. Trapped. Bloodheart's prisoner for over a year.

He looked more like an animal than a man.

Her throat burned, and she thought she was going to be sick.

She rose.

"No!" he cried, lunging forward to the limit of his chains, lunging toward Bloodheart, or toward the priest, she couldn't tell. The priest grabbed the chest and hopped backward just as Sanglant was brought up short by the chains, jerked back painfully by the force of his lunge. His dogs growled and leaped forward into the nave. They were not chained.

Bloodheart lowered his flutes and barked out a command in his harsh language. Several Eika soldiers jogged toward the prince, howling and jeering with their inhuman voices.

She lifted Seeker of Hearts and drew down on Blood-heart, string drawn tight, her eye sighted along the arrow to the swirling cross of paint that marked his chest over his heart.

One shot was all she had.

From behind and below she heard the eruption of shouts and pounding feet, the clang of steel and a man screaming, then the howling of Eika calling to battle.

Lavastine had not waited for her-or perhaps he had heard Sanglant's shout. It no longer mattered.

One shot. She poised, made ready to release, a perfect target, a perfect kill there at his heart-The bow tugged leftward.

For that instant in which a breath is drawn and released by a person panting under the threat of danger, she resisted.

And then she gave in to it.

"Seeker of Hearts, guide my hand," she murmured. She let it pull her aim as it willed, and she sighted again as the point of the arrow slid away from Bloodheart, past the little wooden chest resting on the priest's knees, and rose slightly to fix on the left center of his wizened, scaly torso.

There.

She loosed the arrow.

The point buried itself in flesh. The priest clapped both hands to his chest and tumbled backward as the wooden chest on his knees spun forward and cracked on the stone floor.

With a great, ear-shattering roar, Bloodheart lurched out of his throne, staggered, and stumbled to his knees. His bone flutes scattered around him. One splintered and broke.

"Priest! Traitor!" He roared again, a cry of pain and fury that echoed and hammered in the nave, resounding and rebounding off the vault. One window cracked and shattered, and shards of glass rained down from on high.

"Nestbrother!" he cried. A greenish fluid trickled from his mouth as he fell forward and crawled, trying to reach the wooden chest-or the old priest, both of which now lay within the limits of the prince's chains. But Sanglant reached them first only to have the old priest stagger to his feet, snap off the haft of the arrow embedded in his chest, and scramble out of reach of prince and enchanter alike. Sanglant kicked the wooden chest out away from Blood-heart's groping hands.

"Nestbrother!" The Eika chieftain's voice was ragged now with a liquid lilt as though blood drowned him in his unmarked chest. Dogs bolted in to nip and bite at him, sensing his weakness, but he slapped them away and jerked up to his feet as bubbles of blood frothed on his chin. "By the bond between us I call on you to avenge me. Let your curse fall on the one-"

He clawed at his throat, staggered forward again while the old priest scuttled backward and made some kind of averting sign with his hand as he spoke words Liath couldn't hear. Dust swirled on the choir floor, caught up in a sudden whirlwind, and a swarm of unseen creatures like stinging gnats spun around her, then sheared away as though wind had blown them off. Flailing blindly, Blood-heart made one last desperate lunge - Only to drop, dead, at Sanglant's feet.

And there on the westward flank of the hill, as the Eika horde took breath to make their final charge and annihilate the last of Lavastine's infantry, the drums clapped once. And not again.

XVI THE UNSEEN CHAIN CAPTAIN Ulric, to the gate!" shouted Lavastine above the sudden outbreak of howling and keening that shattered the silence made by Bloodheart's death. At once, the sound of fighting reverberated through the nave as Lavastine and his men bolted out of their hiding place.

She drew another arrow in time to see Lavastine himself cutting frantically, shield raised, as a trio of enraged Eika bore him backward. A soldier fell beside him, struck down. Lavastine was next, battered to his knees by their attack.

Sanglant lunged forward at the sight of the nobleman trapped and struggling. Liath winced, bracing herself for the jerk when he hit the limit of his chains, then gaped.

There were no chains. All but the iron collar rattled to the ground, lay crumbling there as if they were a hundred years old and turning to dust. Dust they became, sagging in heaps around Bloodheart's corpse.

She nocked the arrow, but Sanglant and a half dozen Eika dogs hit the melee before she could get a shot off. He had nothing, only his hands, to fight with. Without thinking, she swung a leg over the railing, meaning to drop down, to save him-His attack was as swift and as brutal as that of the Eika dogs. He had laid two Eika out flat and ripped one's throat out with his own teeth while she gaped in horror. An Eika swung hard at him, but a dog leaped between them and took the cut meant for the prince while the rest of the pack swarmed the would-be killer, bearing him down to the flagstones. The other Eika retreated. The dogs gorged on the corpses-three Eika, one human. Lavastine jumped to his feet and he and Sanglant vanished from her line of sight as they ran toward the great doors. She swung her leg back and stood, panting, half in shock, trying to steady herself.

"Eagle!" Erkanwulf called to her from the door. "You must run! We're sore outnumbered, and we're to retreat through the tunnel!"

"Down!" she screamed as she drew-Erkanwulf dropped to his hands and knees-and shot the Eika who loomed behind the lad. The Eika fell with a surprised grunt and tumbled backward down the stairs. She ran, tugged Erkanwulf to his feet, and drew her sword, keeping Seeker of Hearts in her left hand.

"After me," she said. They had to clamber over the dead Eika soldier to get down the curve of the stairs. She did not know what awaited them below, but as they came around the last curve before the door that let onto the nave her nose caught a whiff of it.

Just beyond the open door, Lavastine and his men had formed up. A line of Eika waited beyond among the litter that carpeted the vast nave, but no one moved. They made a broad curve to cut off access to the cathedral doors as well as leaving Lavastine and his men no room to maneuver out in the expanse of the nave itself.

Next to the door the creature that was Sanglant beat back five dogs, cuffing them until they lay down, whining, and bared their throats to him. Blood from their gorging dripped from their muzzles.

The prince stank. There was no kinder way to put it; the reek hit her like a tangible substance, something you could put your hands into. He started back at her appearance in the door. Blood rimed his lips. His clothes, or what remained of them, hung in tatters on him, cloth pressed into mail, stiff with grime; she had seen poor folk and beggars aplenty in her travels but never anyone as wretched as this. It was hard to believe he was a man, still, or to recall that he had ever been one. He was so foul that she had to look away, but even so she caught a glimpse of his expression. Whatever he was, now, he was ashamed of it.

"God have mercy," whispered Erkanwulf, behind her. "What is it?"

"Hush." She slipped out the door. The dogs growled at her but kept their distance, nipping at Erkanwulf as he dodged past. Sanglant slapped them down but said nothing. Could he even speak?

"We retreat," said Lavastine. "There are a hundred or more of them beyond the door. But Captain Ulric and his group got out ahead of me. We must hope they win through to the gates."

"Bloodheart is dead," said Liath.

Lavastine only nodded curtly. "Make ready to move," he said to his men. Already she noticed three faces missing, but she could not see beyond the Eika line to count them among those who had fallen in the initial skirmish. "Prince Sanglant, you must go first, with the Eagle. We must get you to safety."

The Eika line stirred and parted to reveal the Eika princeling who wore the Circle. In the harsh tongue of the Eika, he barked an order and the line faded back by several steps as the princeling stepped forward into the gap.

Erkanwulf handed Liath another arrow from her quiver and she drew on the princeling, sighting at his heart.

He spoke again, still in the Eika language, and the Eika soldiers began an orderly withdrawal from the cathedral. Liath stared, utterly bewildered. Slowly, cautiously, Lavastine took one step forward.

"Both of you I have seen in Alain's dreams," said the princeling in perfect Wendish, pointing with the tip of his spear first at Lavastine and then at Liath.

"Fifth Son!" breathed Lavastine.

"You captured me once-but he freed me. For that reason, I spare your life now." He set the butt of the spear on the flagstones and canted his head arrogantly, or as at a sudden and compelling thought.

Compared to Sanglant, he was a glorious beast, not handsome-for Liath supposed she would never be able to find beauty in their sharp, metal-bright faces-but striking. His eyes had the clarity of obsidian.

Gold armbands curled around his arms like snakes. He grinned at them, jewels winking in his teeth, and with each least shifting of his weight the mail girdle he wore made a faint shimmering like distant high bells whispering secrets. "Tell me, Count of Lavas. Did Alain lie to me? King Henry did not come, nor did you intend to wait for him as you told him you meant to."

Lavastine hesitated, but he did, after all, owe the Eika princeling something in return for their lives. "Visions can't lie. I did not tell him everything I intended."

"Ah." Fifth Son whistled and his dogs bounded over to crowd at his heels. They, too, had been feasting on the corpses, perhaps even on Bloodheart. Scraps of clothing stuck to their tongues, and the saliva dripping from their jaws had an ocherous tint. Most of his soldiers had cleared the cathedral, leaving it empty except for the ravaged corpses. "You're a wise foe, Count of Lavas. Alas for you that Henry's army did not come sooner."

He did not turn to leave; he did not trust them that much. He edged sideways while never letting his gaze leave them until he was at the great doors, awash in sunlight. Then he was gone.

Sanglant bolted. Lavastine started after him, but the prince ran not after the fleeing princeling but rather to the altar where lay Bloodheart's corpse. The old priest had vanished; only the broken arrow haft remained. Sanglant upended the wooden chest and a downy spill of feathers wafted into the air as a cloudy haze. What in God's Names was he about? He coughed and pawed through the clot of feathers desperately, finding nothing, then gave up and knelt instead beside Bloodheart's body. With a howl, he wrenched the gold torque of royal kinship from the dead enchanter's arm.

The five dogs, crowded at his heels and sniffing and scrabbling at the corpse, raised their heads and howled wildly in answer.

"We had best be gone," said Lavastine. "We will head for the gates."

"Is that . . . creature . . . truly Prince Sanglant?" asked Erkanwulf, and several other men muttered likewise.

"Quiet!" snapped Lavastine, and then they hushed of their own accord because the prince now walked toward them with his retinue of dogs nipping and barking at his heels. He now held a spear and a short sword, gleaned from the corpses. Liath could not bear to look at him, and yet she kept looking at him. She could not believe he was alive, and yet, even if he was, could that . . . thing . . . truly be the man who had fallen at Gent over a year ago?

He broke away before he reached Lavastine and his men, as if he didn't want to get too close, and came to the huge, open doors of the cathedral. There, he stopped short as if chains had brought him up. As if he dared to go no farther.

"Come," said Lavastine to the prince as he led his party up beside-but not too close to-the dogs.

A few of the men held their hands up over their noses, those who could reach them under the nasals of their helms. The count crossed out onto the steps that fronted the cathedral. The square beyond lay empty under the hazy afternoon sunlight. "We must make haste. My son-But he broke off, unable to speak further. In the far distance, Liath heard the sound of horns and the frenzied shouting of Eika.

That Sanglant had stepped out from the shelter of the cathedral she knew without looking, because of the stench. But now he spoke. His voice was hoarse, as if it had grown rusty from disuse-but then, his voice had always sounded like that.

"The horns," he said, head flung back to listen. "They belong to the king."

STROKE after stroke felled the Eika. As the Lady cleaved through them, some looked into Alain's eyes, sensing the doom that came upon them, and others simply dropped their weapons and fled.

Even their savage fury could not stand long before the Lady's wrath-and surely not without the throbbing beat of the drums, now silent.

But there were yet more of them, even in disorder, than remained of Alain's contingent. When an Eika princeling rallied his forces and drove his soldiers back into the remaining wedge of infantry, she pursued that princeling through the thick of fighting and slew him. His forces faltered and broke and ran from her while Alain's men howled in glee and set back to their work, but even so, Eika kept coming on, and on. There were so many, and their scaly skin so tough to penetrate.

We can't hope to win through.

Then the call came, resounding from the last rank higher up upon the hill.

"Fesse! the banner of Fesse!"

And then they heard the horns and the thunder of cavalry.

"Henry!" cried another man, and they let out a great cheer: "The king! The king!"

With new spirit they pressed forward, cleaving and hacking at the Eika. Eika banners wavered and retreated-or fell. Eika soldiers hesitated. Some withdrew in an orderly fashion, some fought on, but slowly the hill cleared of them, and Alain struggled free of the press and got to higher ground.

It was true! There, sweeping across the field, came the banner of Fesse and the personal standard of Duchess Liut-gard herself. Farther, a line of cavalry under the standard of Princess Sapientia cut wide toward the east, retreating toward the river's shore pursued by those Eika who fled to their ships. Long shadows from the afternoon sun hatched the western road. Yet another mass of soldiers emerged from the forest under King Henry's banner.

Alain's legs gave out from under him and he staggered, dropped, and was only caught by the sudden flurry of hounds that pressed against him, licking him, whining. He slipped on a clod of dirt and fell hard on his rump.

"My lord Alain." A soldier gripped his arm and bent with concern over him. "My lord! Here, here! Water for our lord!"

They swarmed around him and for once the hounds sat quiet and allowed the soldiers to bring Alain water, to slide his helm off and wipe his face in cool liquid.

"I never saw a man fight so fiercely!" cried one of his soldiers.

"Aye, we would have been dead if not for you, my lord. You shone with the battle lust, you did!"

He winced and thrust himself up.

"A victory!" they cried, celebrating around him with their cheers. Alain squinted, but most of the fighting was now out of his view. The Eika were routed.

And the Lady of Battles had vanished.

"Come," he said to the hounds. He began the hike to the top.

"Victory!" sang his soldiers as the horns sounded distantly to announce the king's arrival on the field.

Eika corpses littered the hillside, but for every Eika who lay dead, one of his own men did, too.

Some few lived, some stirred, groaning, and some few would be dead soon enough, not having been granted the mercy of a quick passage out of life. His hounds pressed round him, Sorrow, Rage, Terror, Steadfast, Ardent, Bliss, and Fear; battered and bloody, they yet lived when so many others had perished, including poor Good Cheer.

He gained the height of the hill at last to find the camp in utter carnage, tents torn down and ripped by the passage of feet and the swell and ebb of uncaring battle, chests burst open, bags whose contents lay strewn across corpses and churned-up ground alike. Nothing remained of Lavas-tine's pavilion. Of the rough wooden observing platform, constructed so hastily yesterday, only a few logs still stood. Alain clambered up on them.

From this vantage place at the top of the hill, Alain could see the banners of Henry's armies, but none from among those which had marched out beside Lavastine at dawn.

"I pray you, come down from there, my lord!" called one of the soldiers. "There are still Eika lurking, and they have bows."

As Alain jumped down he stumbled on a spear haft. He caught himself, grabbed for purchase and gripped the cloth of a tabard. A dead man rolled limply into view. It was Lavastine's captain. The Lavas standard lay trampled by his side.

Alain pried it out of the dirt and hoisted it high into the air, but as his men cheered around him, he could only weep.

THEY rode like demons, but the vanguard commanded by Duchess Liutgard stayed ahead of them and thus had the honor of thundering onto the battlefield first.

But Princess Sapientia was not to be deterred from her fair share of the glory. After their first awful pass through the battlefield when it seemed that every Eika fell beneath their horses' hooves with no resistance, Sapientia reined her horse around and for a mercy took an instant to catch her breath and survey the chaos.

For chaos was all that met Hanna's eyes. She had never seen so many people in one place at one time, nor heard such a din of screaming and howling melded together with the clash of weapons. Sticking tight to Sapientia's side, she could at least consider herself well protected. Father Hugh as well as certain oath-bound retainers kept close to the princess' side in a ring meant to protect her from death.

Hanna was not sure at that moment whether it was worse to witness the gruesome work of a battle from afar or to be thrown into its swirling, deadly currents. She would have gladly forgone both and risked another avalanche in the Alfar Mountains instead.

"The ships!" cried Sapientia suddenly and with a sudden gloating triumph in her voice. "To the ships! We shall stop them there!"

And off they went, pounding across the battlefield again. Distant banners marked the line of other units, some faltering, some pressing forward, but Sapientia paid no heed to the rest of the battle. She wanted to stop the Eika from reaching their ships. And, indeed, as they came up alongside the river they waited well out of the main fighting, which flurried round a distant hill and the flat stretch of plain beyond it, and had only isolated groups of fleeing Eika to contend with. These they slaughtered easily.

Ships lay beached on both the eastern and western shore, but it was the western shore-the one they guarded-which concerned them now. Eight ships were already launched into the water, steadying for the flight downstream. A half dozen bodies floated downstream in their wake.

"Send men to burn any ships they can reach!" ordered the princess, gesturing toward one of her captains.

"Your Highness!" shouted Father Hugh. "Is it wise to break up our formation? And we must not let the horses get pinned up against the river. We'll lose our mobility."

"But they are all so disordered," retorted Sapientia. "What matters it, as long as we outnumber them?" It was done as she commanded. Melees broke out around the ships and, soon after, smoke rose from a handful, fire scorching up the masts.

A warning, the touch of a horn to lips, sounded from the outer ranks. Hanna stood in her stirrups to get a look, but what she saw chilled her and she shuddered despite the heat of the sun over the battleground.

Eika did indeed flee the battle now in disorderly groups-but not all of them, not those who were wounded, dead, or dying, not those who had kept their wits about them in the face of disaster. Pressing briskly and with purpose toward the river's bank marched a host of Eika, several hundred, in good order and with several standards borne before them. With shields raised in a tight wall and the gaps between bristling with spears, they held off the human soldiers who harried them from behind. Were those bones swaying from the standards? Mercifully, from this distance, she could not tell for sure.

"Form up!" cried Sapientia, but it was too late; in her overconfidence she had allowed her troops to scatter.

"Send the Eagle for help!" shouted Hugh. "If they can be struck from behind while we charge from this side-"

"Nay!" cried the princess, glancing back over her shoulder to see how many riders remained with her. Others hastily mounted and galloped back from the shoreline. One man took an arrow from the ships and fell tumbling down from his horse. "I won't have it said I begged for help at the first sign of trouble. May St. Perpetua be with us this day! Who is with me?" With sword raised she spurred her horse forward straight toward the Eika line. Battle-trained, it did not shy away from the glittering ranks of spears and stone axes.

"Damn!" swore Hugh as her retainers followed her. He caught Hanna by the arm before she could ride after them. "Go to the king!" Then, sword drawn, he raced after the princess into the thick of the fight.

Already the Eika line had swung north along the river, cutting off Hanna's escape in that direction.

Princess Sapientia vanished into a maelstrom of battle as the Eika host swallowed her troops. Some riders fled the skirmish, abandoning her; others bore down after her into the Eika tide, both sides caught in a desperate struggle-one for life, one for honor. In a moment Hanna, too, would be trapped by the flood tide of the battle as it reached the river's bank.

She kicked her horse to the south, down along the shoreline toward the ruins of Gent, and as she rode, her spear scraping up and down along her thigh, she began to pray.

SANGLANT led them through the streets at a steady jog. Fifth Son had withdrawn his troops, but other Eika scurried through Gent, fleeing the battle now that the drums were silent and Bloodheart, and his illusions, dead.

Under the unsparing eye of the sun, the prince appeared perhaps more pathetic than appalling.

Yet he was a shocking enough sight with the five monstrous dogs in attendance as if they were all that remained of his proud Dragons. " King's Dragon he had once been. Now, except for his shape and the princely authority of his bearing, he was scarcely different from those dogs.

But he had not forgotten how to kill.

Their skirmishes were brief, and though Lavastine had lost three men in the fight within the cathedral, he lost none now, not with Sanglant at their head. Eika were as like to run from them, seeing the prince in his madness, as join the fray.

The gates lay open and they found Ulric and most of his party on the bridge, staring at the river plain beyond where the battle still raged. Clouds of dust as well as the lay of the land obscured the fighting.

"My lord count!" cried Captain Ulric when he recognized their group.

"Beware!" shouted one of his men. A volley of arrows showered into them. Two soldiers dropped, one with a hand clasped to his thigh, another pierced in the throat.

Sanglant growled and leaped, dogs after him, into a stand of brush that moments later Liath saw contained four skulking Eika. She made ready to shoot...

But there was no need. Sanglant struck down two even as his dogs bowled over and rended the others, although one of the dogs was slashed so badly that its fellows immediately turned on it and bit through its throat.

"There!" shouted Lavastine. Liath wrenched her gaze away from Sanglant to see a troop of horsemen riding out Doos of the dusty murk that was the battleground. At once men shouted and waved, and within moments Lord Geoffrey reined up. He had but twenty men remaining as well as some extra horses following along.

"Cousin!" he cried, and he flung himself off his horse to clap Lavastine vigorously on the shoulder.

"Ai, Lord! I thought you dead, surely."

"Any news of those who remained behind on the hill?"

Lord Geoffrey could only shrug. Then, eyes widening, he stared at the apparition that, silent but all the more frightening because of that silence, now commandeered one of the riderless horses and swung up onto it. "Lady have mercy!" he breathed. "What is it?"

The prince flung away the spear and galloped northwest toward the thickest cloud of dust.

"Eagle! Take a horse and ride after him. The king will have my head if he gets himself killed. I doubt he is in his right mind." With this cool assessment, Lavastine turned back to his cousin. "Has the king arrived?"

"I know not, cousin. It is madness out there, and most of our people long since lost."

"You've done well to survive this long." But Lavastine did not seem to mean the words as praise, any more than he meant his earlier comment, calling Sanglant out of his right mind, as censure. "Eagle!"

His gaze tripped over her where she still stood, gawping, frozen, unable to act. "Go!"

It was easier to obey than to think. She took the mount offered her and left them just as a party of Eika came running and a new skirmish was joined.

Chaos.

Through the streaming battle she rode on the trail of Sanglant, who was himself all movement.

Eika fled in confusion or retreated in disciplined groups, and cavalry charged through and reformed and charged back, scattering them, cutting down those who ran and pounding again and again those who held steady.

Sanglant drove his horse wherever the fight was thickest. Certainly he was brave; perhaps he was also insane. After he rallied a group of horsemen who had gotten cut off from their captain, she heard his name called out above the riot of noise like a talisman. She tried merely to keep away from Eika, for in this tempest she had few clear shots and plenty of chances to get hacked down from behind, though most Eika seemed to be running for their lives. It was all she could do to keep Sanglant in her sight.

Through the haze of dust she caught a glimpse of Fesse's banner. Then it vanished, whipping against the wind as its bearer galloped away in another direction with Fesse's duchess and troops.

They had come so far over the ground that she did not know where she was. Her eyes streamed from the dust kicked up and the glare of the westering sun. Ahead, a soldier leaned from his horse and struck down one of the dogs following Sanglant and rode on, spear ready to pierce the next which, loping after the prince, was unaware of the threat to its back.

But Sanglant was not unaware. He reined his horse hard around and brought the flat of his sword down against the soldier's padded shoulder. The man tumbled to the ground and the dogs leaped forward, only to be brought up short. Liath could not hear what the prince shouted, only saw the terrified soldier scramble back onto his horse.

Then, horns. "To the princess! She's surrounded!"

"To me! Form up!" the prince cried, his hoarse tenor ringing out over chaos. Shining with the heat of battle on him, he was not as frightful a sight as he had first appeared when he was Bloodheart's prisoner, a wild, chained beast. Men came riding to form up around him, and as his company gathered, they shouted jubilantly, sure of victory. Where Princess Sapientia's banner had gotten trapped in a strong current of Eika battling their way to the river, Sanglant and the newly regrouped cavalry drove in and scattered the enemy before them.

"The king! King Henry comes!"

Liath could not see the princess, for the entire flank had crumbled. But as the Eika line dissolved into rout, she saw Sanglant struggle free of the crush and ride northwest out beyond the fighting to where neglected fields lay drowsy under the afternoon sun. She fought her way out of the press and galloped after him.

He rode on, not looking back. Three Eika dogs pursued him as he left the battle behind, and she was too far away to shout a warning. At her back she heard horsemen, and she glanced behind to see a dozen or so men wearing the tabards of those he had rallied on the field.

Ahead, a line of trees and scrub marked the course of a tributary. There she lost sight of him as he crashed in among the trees. When she found his abandoned horse, she dismounted and prudently waited until her pursuit came up beside her.

"My God, Eagle!" said the man, a captain by his bearing and armor. "Was that Prince Sanglant?

We thought him dead!"

"Taken captive," she said.

"And survived a year." Around him, his men murmured. She heard in their voices the melody of awe, composing now the beginning, she supposed, of another story of San-giant's courage and cunning and strength. "But where's he gone?"

They followed his track, made manifest by a litter of filthy shreds of tabard and tunic and leggings, things that had once been clothing but now were only foul rags. He had dropped the sword and the gold torque by the water's edge. The current still bore sticks and grass and, once, a bloodied glove quickly carried along the far bank, but where a bend in the stream and a fallen tree made somewhat of a pool he had gone headlong into the water.

When they reached him, he was methodically tearing off every last piece of clothing that still hung on him, some of it adhered to his skin. The three Eika dogs had thrashed out after him and now ferociously worried at the odorous remains, such as they could grab in their jaws before it swirled downstream.

"My lord prince!" The captain strode forward, and at his exclamation the dogs howled and made for shore.

Sanglant barked at them. There was no other word for it; it was not a spoken command. They obeyed nonetheless and contented themselves with sitting half in and half out of water on a bank more pebble than sand, growling at any who came too near while the prince took handfuls of sand and scoured his skin and then his hair as if he meant to scrape himself raw.

"Lady bless us," murmured one of the soldiers as if for all of them, "he's so thin."

But as if in the coarse river sand lay the property of truth, something emerged from the scouring, something recognizable: the man she remembered, although he was clothed only in water and that only up to his waist.

"/ will never love any man but him."

Said so long ago, spoken so recklessly, what had she bound herself to when she made that declaration before Wolfhere?

He turned. If he saw her among those who waited for him, he gave no sign of it. He extended a hand. "A knife."

But the captain stripped off his own armor and his own tunic, and with tunic and knife he advanced cautiously. The dogs nipped at him, but Sanglant waded out of the deeper water and called them away.

Liath could not help but look. Now that he was somewhat clean she could see that although his hair was long and tangled, he still had no beard even after a year without any means to shave it clean. He had no hair on his chest, either, but lower down he resembled his human kinsmen in every respect. She looked away quickly, for this was not like the work she and Fell's soldiers had done at the river's mouth, all of them equals in labor and none of them having the leisure to be shy about what needed to be done.

He was not a curiosity to be stared at, or at least ought not to be.

When she looked up again he had the tunic on, a plain garment of good, strong weave and stained with sweat along the neck and under the arms, but compared to what he had worn before it looked fitting for a prince. It hung loosely around his frame, though it was a little short: He stood half a head taller than the robust captain, and despite his thinness he was still a big man. Now, taking the knife, he began to hack at his hair.

"I beg you, my lord prince," said the captain. He had a kind of weeping plaint to his voice as if he were about to burst into tears out of pity. "Let me cut it for you."

Sanglant paused. "No," he said. Then, and finally, as if only when he had scrubbed himself clean of the breath of his captivity dared he acknowledge her, he looked up to where she stood half hidden among the rest. He had known she was there all along. "Liath."

How could she not come forward? The knife had a good sharp edge and she had trimmed Da's hair many a time, although this was utterly different.

He knelt suddenly and with a sharp sigh. A tang of the old smell, the reek of his imprisonment, still clung to him and no doubt would for some time, but standing this close was no punishment. Ai, Lady, his hair was coarse and too matted to be truly clean yet, but when sometimes she had to shift him to get a better angle for cutting, she touched his skin and would bite her lip to stop herself from trembling, and go on.

"What is this?" She scraped the back of her hand on the rough iron collar that ringed his neck.

Under it, the skin had been rubbed raw countless times and even now began to leak blood.

"Leave it."

She left it. No one dared go forward to pick up sword and torque, not with the dogs guarding these treasures.

The long rays of the sun splintered into glitters on the rippling current of the stream. Black mats of hair littered the ground as she cut. Made cautious by the noise and the thrashing in the water, the birds had fallen silent, all but a warbler among the reeds who sang vigorously to complain about the disturbance. Far away, a horn lifted its voice and fell silent. Horses shifted and snorted. A man whispered. Another peed, though she could only hear him, not see, for he had faced into the trees to do his business.

"His heart," Sanglant whispered suddenly. "How did you know he had hidden his heart in the priest's body? Whose heart lies hidden in Rikin fjall, then? It must be the priest's."

"I don't understand." But perhaps she was beginning to. She said it more to keep him talking, to hear his voice. She had thought never to hear that voice again.

"He couldn't be killed because he didn't have a heart. He hid it. He-" Then he halted as suddenly as if he had lost his power of speech between one word and the next.

"It's done," she said quickly, to say something, anything, torn as she was between the promise of this intimacy he had thrust upon her and her complete ignorance of what manner of man he now was and how much he might have changed from the man she had fallen in love with in besieged Gent. "It will have to do, unless you'd like me to comb it out, for I hope I still have my comb in my pouch." Then she flushed, cursing her rash words; only mothers, wives, or servants combed a man's hair if he did not do it himself.

Instead of replying he stood and turned-but not to look at her. Belatedly she turned as well when she heard the crashing in the trees. Another party approached.

The soldiers were already kneeling. She was too stupid, too astounded, to do so, and only at the very last moment, when the king broke from the trees, did she drop down as was fitting.

The king strode forward and stopped dead some ten paces from the prince. There was silence except for the rushing mutter of the stream and the gurgle of water tumbling over the fallen log-and an echoing whisper from the king's retinue, who followed him out from the trees and stood staring at the scene before them.

The sun eased below the highest trees. All lay bathed in the mellow glow of midsummer's late afternoon, the opening hour of the long twilight. As the silence drew out, the warbler quieted but now other birds, made bold by the quiet, began to call and sing: a thin "zee-zee-zee" among the treetops and the monotonous "chiff-chaff" song in the scrub. A woodpecker fluttered away, rising and swooping down and rising again, yellow rump a flash against the green foliage. Liath still held the knife in one hand and a last hank of Sanglant's hair in the other.

At last the king spoke. "My son." It had a harsh sound, startlingly so, but when she saw the tears start from his eyes and course down his cheeks, she understood that the harshness stemmed from the depth of his remembered anguish and the fresh bloom of joy.

He said nothing more, but he removed his finely embroidered short cloak from his own back, unfastening the gold-and-sapphire brooch, and wrapped it around Sanglant's shoulders with his own hands, like a servant. This close, Liath could see his hands shaking under the weight of such a powerful emotion: the incredible and almost overpowering pain of seeing alive the beloved son he had thought dead.

Sanglant dropped abruptly to his knees, exhausted or overcome by emotion, and laid his damp head against his father's hands in the way of a sinner seeking absolution or a child seeking comfort.

"Come, son, rise," said the king raggedly. Then he laughed softly. "I have already heard many stories about your courage on the field and how you rallied troops who had fallen into disarray."

The prince did not • look up, but when he spoke, there welled up from him so much enmity that the force of his emotion alone might have felled an entire company of Eika. "I would have killed more of them if I could."

"May God have mercy on us all," murmured Henry. He took Sanglant by the elbow and helped him rise. "How did you survive?"

As if in answer-the only answer he knew how to give- Sanglant turned his head to look at Liath.

THE hounds smelled him coming first. They broke away from Alain-all of them, even Sorrow and Rage-to bound down the hill with happy barks, their tails whipped into a blur. Beyond, a company of mounted soldiers approached the ruined camp. Alain picked his way down through the dead and dying to meet Count Lavastine.

Along the ramparts where Eika dead lay in heaps and the few survivors dug among the corpses to find any wounded who might yet have a hope of living, Alain handed the ragged standard to Lavastine.

"I thought you must be dead," he said, then burst into tears.

Lavastine raised one eyebrow. "Did I not say I would return to you through the Eika host and meet you here? Come now, son." He took him by the arm and led him down, away from the terrible work yet to be done, stripping and then burning the dead Eika and giving a decent burial to the hundreds who had fallen. The river plain beyond held a scene just as dismaying to look upon: as if high waters had overtaken the fields and ditches, washing in a flood tide of corpses and depositing them in eddies or along invisible streams where strong currents had once flowed.

"Good Cheer is dead." Alain choked back tears in order to have breath to confess his weakness.

"And the good captain besides. I lost Graymane. We were overtaken by Eika. So few are left-"

"That any are left is astonishing. Now, Alain, do not speak so. We will settle the captain's widow very richly, I assure you, and mourn him as he deserves. And you see, Graymane was found on the field and returned to me unharmed. As for Good Cheer-" He busied himself patting the hounds, rubbing his knuckles into their great heads, and letting them lick him as they jumped around and, finally, settled down around him. Was there a tear in his eye? But a wind had picked up from the river and the spark of moisture vanished-or was only a trick of the light.

Now those who remained of Lavastine's infantry came forward to praise Alain and speak of his great feats in driving back the Eika when all was lost, how he had single-handedly struck down a huge Eika princeling, how he had shone in battle with an unearthly light, surely granted to him by the Lord's Hand.

Alain was ashamed to listen, but Lavastine nodded gravely and set a hand possessively on his son's shoulder. Only Lord Geoffrey fidgeted, for he had also dismounted and now attended his cousin.

"We must ride to where the king sets up camp," said Lavastine. "We have much to accomplish."

"Isn't this work enough?" Alain gestured about them.

"That we killed Bloodheart and routed the Eika? It was what I hoped for, and indeed all has fallen out as I wished."

"As you wished, cousin!" Lord Geoffrey stepped forward. The remnants of Lavastine's cavalry, some hundred and fifty men when they had marched onto the river plain two days ago, loitered behind him. Alain counted not more than thirty men as blood-spattered and dirty as was Lord Geoffrey himself.

Lavastine's face was smeared with dust and on one cheek ragged circular cuts and a ring of tiny bruises tore the skin where his mail coif had been crushed into his face. He found an empty helmet on the ground and set a boot up on it. The wind skirled through his hair and made the Lavas standard rustle and rise briefly, as if the black hounds embroidered there had taken a scent. He picked a twig out of his light beard and with an expression of distaste tossed it to the ground. With the wind came the scent of blood and death. In the air carrion crows circled, but there were too many soldiers still roaming the field seeking out wounded or stripping Eika of their mail skirts for the birds to land and feast.

"Not my good soldiers," said the count, musing. "Their lives I regret, as I always do. But we took Gent without Henry's aid. Thus it will be my privilege to present Gent like a gift to Henry when we meet."

"What ambition is this?" demanded Geoffrey.

"Not ambition for myself. For my son."

No one would have missed Geoffrey's blanch, but he made no reply.

"My army took Gent," continued Lavastine. "That gives me a claim to it."

"But surely the children of Countess Hildegard will inherit these lands," protested Alain.

"If she has children. If they have survived the winter with the Eika raiding in their lands. If her kin are strong enough to sway the king in his judgment. But if Henry is beholden to me, Alain, then why not take Gent-which you will recall lies within his purview-and grant it to Tallia as dower? Thus it will come into our hands, as part of the marriage settlement-or the morning gift, should she make one to you.

Remember, Alain, as the daughter of a duchess it is her right to gift you, as the son of a mere count- Here any waking soul could hear the irony. "-with a morning gift. Although you may, of course, gift her with some smaller token as well. Is that not so, Geoffrey?"

Geoffrey simply gave a curt bow in acknowledgment, since his wife Aldegund's lands and inheritances were of a higher degree than any he could expect to receive-unless he inherited, as he had once hoped to do, the county of Lavas from Lavastine.

"Many a blood feud has started when a bride and groom of equal rank tried to outdo each other in an elaborate morning gift. It can be considered an insult for a noble of lesser degree to make a richer gift to his newly-wedded spouse than that which she gifts him, if her position and kin are superior to his.

That is why we will not ask for Gent outright. But through Tallia we can still make a claim on these lands and on our rights to a portion of the tariffs taken from the merchants and the port."

They made a ragged procession, thirty riders, perhaps sixty infantry, but a proud one. In this way in the long lingering twilight of midsummer they picked their way across the battlefield to the place where the king had set up camp. The royal banner snapped in the evening breeze from atop the king's pavilion.

In front, tables had been set up and on them a victory feast laid out-such as it was: mostly mutton and beef from some among the many herds of cattle and sheep which under the protection of the Eika had flourished on farmlands gone to pasture in the past year. But there was also bread, not too stale, brought from Steleshame, and a few other delicacies preserved for such a moment. A king must reward his followers, especially on the field after such a triumph.

With Alain at his side, Lavastine knelt before the king and brashly, even presumptuously, offered Gent into the king's hands-Lavastine's to offer because his troops had won through at the gates. But Henry had anticipated Lavas-tine. The chair to the king's right sat empty, and it was to this chair that Henry waved the count, giving him pride of place.

An unfamiliar man with a thin, haunted face and bron-zish skin sat to the king's left. He was dressed as richly as any noble there, and Alain heard the servingfolk whisper that this was the king's lost son. Instead of the gold torque marking royal kinship, he wore a rough iron slave collar around his neck.

He did not speak.

To Alain was given the signal honor of standing at the king's right shoulder and pouring him wine.

From his place, Alain could see-and hear-the nobles arguing among themselves, made irritable by hunger and the relief of a battle won at great cost.

From her place to the right of Lavastine, thrust out from her usual seat of honor, Princess Sapientia complained to her distant cousin. Duchess Liutgard. "He stole my glory!" "That's not how I heard the tale! I heard your entire flank crumbled . . . and that he arrived in time to rally your forces when you could not!"

Of Sapientia's adviser and Liath's tormentor, Father Hugh, there was no sign. Liath stood in the shadows next to one of her fellow Eagles, a tough-looking woman who came forward, now and again, to whisper messages received from scouts into the king's ear. Liath had an arm draped around the shoulders of a straw-haired young Eagle Alain recalled from the battle at Kassel. She and her companion surveyed the assembly as if to see who was missing.

Henry's army had taken light casualties, all but the flank commanded by Princess Sapientia which had apparently had the misfortune to hit a ferociously vicious Eika attack when they had come between a retreating princeling and his ships.

Besides Lavastine and his cousin, there were few noble survivors of the army Lavastine had brought to Gent. Lord Dedi was slain; Lady Amalia's body had not yet been found. Lord Wichman had been pulled, alive, from a veritable maelstrom of corpses, the detritus of his final stand, but he lay sorely wounded in a tent and it was not known if he would live. Captain Ulric, of Autun, had won through with most of his company of light cavalry intact.

But it was the fate of the common men, nameless and unmentioned in this assembly, which gnawed at Alain. Raised in a village, he knew what grief would come to their homes in the wake of this news, all invisible to the sight of the great lords who marked it as a victory. Who would till their fields?

Who would marry their sweethearts now? What son could take the place of the one who had fallen, never to return?

There was still light to see as platters were brought and set before king and company, but in the background the first torches were lit. The moon had risen in the east above the ruins of Gent, and now as dusk settled over the land, the moon spilled its sullen light over the distant fields where the nameless dead lay, men and Eika alike.

A platter was set down before the king and his lost son.

Without warning, the prince bolted down the food as if he were a starving dog let free with the scraps. Gasps came, and giggling-quickly stifled-from the assembly. From behind, dogs began to bark and howl furiously, and in answer the Lavas hounds, which had been staked out some way off, growled and barked in challenge.

At once, the prince leaped up. Grease dripped from his lips. The king placed a hand, firmly, on his sleeve. Alain felt such a terrible surge of pity for the prince that he moved between Henry and Sanglant and made much of pouring more wine so as to draw attention to himself and away from them.

That was all it took. With an effort made the more obvious by the way his hands shook, the prince commenced eating again, only very, very slowly and with such painstaking care that anyone would know he could barely stop himself from gobbling down his food like a savage.

"Your Majesty," said Lavastine, catching Alain's eye and indicating with the tilt of his head that the young man could now move back. His ploy had served its purpose. "With great cost to myself and my people, I have freed Gent from the Eika and killed the creature who held your son prisoner for so long."

"So you have," said the king, with some difficulty turning away from his son to regard the count.

"We have spoken of a match between my son and Lady Tallia."

"You are frank with me, Count Lavastine."

"I always will be, Your Majesty. You know what I want and what I have paid to gain it."

"But do you know what I want," responded the king, "and what I need from you in order to achieve it?"

"Nay, Your Majesty, I do not know, but I am willing to listen..."

The king glanced up at Alain. "A good-looking lad. I have heard great praise of his courage and skill at arms this day. That he held that small hill against such a tide of Eika is incredible. I have no objection to a marriage between him and my niece Tallia... ifitis accompanied on your part by an oath that you and your heir will support me faithfully in all my undertakings."

Before Lavastine could reply, the prince stumbled up from his chair and fled into the darkness.

The king made to rise.

"Nay, Your Majesty," said Alain, who had a sudden idea of what was wrong. "I'll go after him, if you permit."

The king nodded. Alain followed.

He had not gone six steps when Liath appeared beside him.

"What happened?" she whispered, as anxious as a hound in a thunderstorm.

"It's nothing serious," he said quietly, gentling her with a touch on the arm. "It's best if I go alone.

Do you think he would want you to see him when he's not well?" Here he trailed off.

After a moment she nodded and returned to her post.

Alain and a few men-at-arms found the prince just beyond the edge of camp, vomiting. When he had done, he began to shake, resting on his hands. "Ai, God," he muttered as if to himself. "Don't let them see me."

Alain ventured forward and laid a hand on his shoulder. At once the prince started up, growling, just like a dog.

"Hush, now," said Alain firmly, as he would to his own hounds, and the prince shook himself and seemed to come to his senses. "If you've been starved, then you can't put rich food in your stomach all at once, or at least, that's what my Aunt Bel would say." He still winced when he said the name. "She who used to be my aunt," he added to no one except his smarting conscience.

"Who are you?" said the prince. He had an oddly hoarse voice which made him seem stricken with grief when in fact he was likely only exhausted and ill. But he had calmed enough now to wipe at his mouth with the back of a hand.

"I am Lavastine's son."

Dogs began to bark again, and the prince lifted his head to scent, then started back and became a man again. "God have mercy on me," he muttered. "Will I never be rid of the chains Bloodheart bound me with?"

"It is the collar." Why he spoke so freely Alain did not know, only that-unlike the king-this half wild prince did not awe him. "As long as you wear it at your neck, then surely you will not be free of Bloodheart's hand on you."

"As long as I wear it, I am reminded of what he did to me. I am reminded of what I was and what he called me." His voice was so bitter. Alain ached for him, and what he had suffered.

But even Alain was not immune from curiosity. "What did he call you?"

The prince only shook his head. "I'll go back now. I won't forget this kindness you've shown me."

They returned to where the king sat sipping at his wine and the company ate with the self-conscious assiduousness of people who chafe with curiosity but know that their regnant will not tolerate questions. The prince sat with exaggerated care and with even more exaggerated care sipped sparingly at the wine and ate the merest scrap of meat and bread. But sometimes his nostrils would flare, and he would lift his head and search into the assembly as if he had heard a whispered comment that angered him. The rest of the feast passed without incident. They ate lustily and drank without stinting on what was left of the wine.

"You acquitted yourself well, son," said Lavastine afterward when they had retired to a tent commandeered from lesser nobles in Henry's train. "I am proud of you. Ai, Lord, Prince Sanglant is more like to one of the hounds than to a human man. But I suppose it is his mother's blood which stains him."

He scratched Terror's ears and the old hound grunted ecstatically. Alain tended the gash that had opened up Fear's hindquarters. He had already bound up Ardent's leg and washed the cuts on Sorrow and Rage.

Steadfast was asleep, while Bliss waited patiently for his turn under Alain's hands.

Now that Lavastine's wounds had been tended to, Alain and Lavastine and the hounds were alone in the tent. From outside he heard the low rumble of activity as wounded were carried in, scouts came and went, men looted and burned the Eika dead under the moon's light, and sentries called out challenges.

"He must have suffered terribly," said Alain, scratching Fear under his jaw.

"But he is alive. They say he came attended by Eika dogs, as faithful to him as his Dragons once were. What do you think of that?"

Alain laughed. "Ought I to think something of it when I sit here with these faithful beasts?"

Lavastine grunted. "True enough." He stretched, wincing. "When I was your age, I would have felt no ache in my bones, even after a day such as this. What a strange creature the Eika princeling was, to let us go like that in the cathedral when he could have killed us all. How fore-sighted of you to free him, Alain."

"Even if meant sacrificing Lackling in his place?" The old shame still burned.

"Who is Lackling?" Lavastine yawned, stretched again, and tied up the hounds, then called for a servingman to take off his boots. "What happened to the Eagle, do you know?"

Alain saw there was no point in reminding his father about Lackling. "She went back to her duties."

"You were wise to gain her loyalty, son. It seems to me that when you marry, Lady Tallia's consequence will allow you to count Eagles in your retinue. You must ask for that one. There is some power at work within her. It would be well to have it for our use, if we can."

Marry Tallia. All else that Lavastine said swirled round him like the night's breeze and faded into nothing. Marry Tallia.

Lavastine went on to discuss Henry's plans to send for Tallia and have her brought to his progress, but the words passed in a haze. When the hounds were settled and a rough pallet was set in place, Alain lay down beside his father and closed his eyes to see the terrible images of battle bursting like fire against his eyes. The rose burned at his chest like a hot coal. But slowly the pain faded. With the snoring of the hounds beside him and his father's even breath on his ear, the awful images faded into a vision of Tallia, her wheatpale hair unbound and her solemn face turned toward him. His wife. Bound to him by their mutual oaths sworn before witnesses and blessed by a biscop. He slept, and he dreamed.

Both current and wind aid him this night. He can smell the sea and the estuary before he gets too close. He beaches his eight ships on the western shore and sends scouts westward to guard against an incursion of the Soft Ones' soldiers, should they have sent any in this direction to seek out the fleeing RockChildren. No doubt they are too busy killing those who fled in disorder.

No doubt they are too busy burying their own kind, for they are distractible in their grief.

The disaster brought on by Bloodheart's death will hurt the RockChildren, certainly, but only a fool would not find advantage in it. No one of Bloodheart's ambitious sons could have killed the enchanter without bringing down on himself Bloodheart's vengeance. Now that fate is reserved for another.

Now, after the rout, how many of Bloodheart's sons survive? How many had taken their followers to raid eastward and did not fight at Gent at all? All this he must consider before he knows how and when to act.

The old priest sits in the belly of the boat and sings nonsense as he wipes blood from the oozing wound in his chest and licks it off his fingers.

"How did you do it?" he asks the old wizened creature. "Why did you do it?"

"Why are you curious?" asks the old priest, who talks mostly in questions.

"Bloodheart found your heart hidden in Rikin fjall. He forced the bargain on you, to hide his heart in place of your own."

"Will anyone ever find my heart now?" cackles the priest. No doubt he is half mad. His kind usually are; it is the price they pay for their power. "What happened to your heart?" he asks again. "How did you manage to hide Blood-heart's heart in your own chest when it was meant to be hidden in the fjall?"

"Did he think he was cleverer than I?" The old priest snorts, and for an instant cunning sparks in his rheumy eyes. The creature is very old, the oldest male he has ever seen. "Did he think I would take my old heart to where there might be battle? I could have been killed!"

"Do you fear death, then? The curse of the nestbrother-" "The curse! The curse! Do I look like a hatchling? I turned the curse. I stole Bloodheart's voice and finished the speaking for him.

Hai! Hai!" He begins to sing, but the song has an unsettling flow, like a river running uphill. " 'Let this curse fall on the one whose hand commands the blade that pierced his heart.' Ailailai!"

There is no more sense to be gotten from the old creature, so he only tests the chains with which he had bound the old priest before giving orders to his soldiers. Of those cousins remaining to him, he leaves half to guard the ships. The other half he takes with him as he trots north just above the bluffs to the very mouth of the river.

Fifth son of the fifth litter, he knows how to make use of a lesson: He was captured once by this male named Count Lavastine when his ship got bottled up at the mouth of the Vennu River. It will not happen again. If a trap lies in wait at the mouth of this river, he will be ready for it.

He smells human soldiers long before he sees the telltale lines of a small fort set upon a bluff and somewhat hidden by a cunning layer of branches and scrub. Some of the plants woven into the log ramparts still live, though he can taste the brittle decay of the others on his tongue when he licks the air.

His cousins stir and growl restlessly behind him, for they were granted no leave to fight when they fled Gent. He can taste their dissatisfaction, but they have not learned patience.

They will learn it from him tonight, or they will die.

He lifts a hand and gestures to them to fan out. The ground slips beneath his feet, sand and coarse grass and such plants as can stand the ever-present blast of the wind. He bangs spear on shield and from the depths of the fort he hears the frantic rustling of men struggling to ready themselves for battle.

"Hear me!" he calls. "Send your leader to talk, for my force outnumbers yours." He tastes the air, scenting for their essences. "You have but some thirty of your kind, and I have over one hundred of mine. I give you this choice: Fight us and die, this night, or retreat from your fort south and west to the camp of your kin, and live."

"How can we trust you?" shouts one of them, appearing only as a dark shadow of helm against the sky and a certain tang of stubborn resiliance in the air.

"I am the one whom Lord Alain freed at Lavas Holding. By the honor of that lord, I swear I will do you no harm . . . as long as you retreat at once and leave this place to me." The man spits, though the spray cannot travel so far. "You, an Eika, swearing by our good Lord Alain's honor!" Stubborn creature! He has no time to waste. Soon the other ships will come.

"Then if you have a brave man among you, send him out and I will stand hostage under his knife while the rest leave. When they are -well away, he may follow unmolested. But you must act now, or we will attack."

They confer. He can't hear them, but their fear is a bracing scent on the breeze, pungent on his tongue. By now they must know they are surrounded and outnumbered.

In the end, of course, they agree. They have no other choice except to die, and Soft Ones always struggle to live even when they must live like dogs to do so. Like the old priest, they fear death and the passage to the fjall of the heavens, and that fear can be used against them.

One of them emerges. He goes forward and lets the man stand with knife poised at his throat while the others march in a swift but orderly fashion into a night made gray by the lowering moon. His own soldiers storm the fort after them and circle down to the strand. They bark to him. There are machines within the fort, and with some impatience he stares at the man before him, who at last withdraws the knife and retreats slowly.

"I remember you," says the man, and then turns and runs as if expecting an arrow in the back. At once, one of his cousins raises his bow and nocks an arrow for the easy shot. He springs forward and bats bow and arrow down.

The rash cousin swears. "You are weak to let them run!" It takes only a moment to kill him for his disrespect. Then he turns on the others. "Question me if you must, but do not disobey me. I intend to accomplish what Bloodheart could not accomplish because he was not willing to use the lessons of the WiseMothers to guide him."

He waits as blood leaks onto his feet and the fire that animated the cousin spills onto the earth and soaks into the ground. No one speaks.

"Then, go," he orders, for he has already seen what the count set in place here. A cunning man, the count, a worthy foe.

Soon the other ships begin to come, fleeing the death of Bloodheart and the collapse of his army and his authority. He watches dispassionately as they founder on the black tide. Soon the mouth of the Veser is awash in wreckage as some swim free of the chain and the piles to cast up on the western shore. Those who will not bare their throats before him his soldiers kill.

Soon he will have to dismantle the chain so he can sail through safely himself and return to Rikin fjord with his prize, but for this night, at least, he will destroy as many of his rivals as he can.

There will not be many survivors from those who gathered at Gent- and those who survive will belong to him.

His followers do their work well, and efficiently. He climbs to the little fort and from this vantage point he watches as the heart of Old-Man, the moon, sinks into the west and the stars, the eyes of the most ancient Mothers, stare with their luminous indifference upon the streaming waters and the silent earth. In the fjall of the heavens, the vale of black ice, only the cold holds sway and their whispering conversations take lifetimes to complete. But they are nonetheless beautiful.

IT was night, but Liath could not sleep.

She had sent Hathui to sleep and offered to stand middle night watch, as one Eagle always did, over the king's pavilion together with the guards.

With the moon one day past full, only the brightest stars were visible. But she could not even concentrate enough to watch those stars and read their secret turnings in the language Da taught her, the language of the mathematici.

Sanglant was alive.

Alive.

Yet so changed.

Yet not changed at all.

"Eagle."

The whisper came out of the shadows, twisted from the steady breath of the night breeze on the many pavilions staked out around her. She stiffened and turned to seek out the voice.

Two guards with torches appeared out of the gloom. A third man led a mule, and there, on the mule's back, sat a woman in the robes of a cleric. But she did not venture in far enough that the guards beside the king's tent could see her face.

Cautiously, Liath walked out to meet her.

It was Sister Rosvita, looking drawn and anxious.

"Aren't you with the train?"

Rosvita allowed her servant to help her dismount and then waved him and her guards away. They retreated and stood a few paces off. "I was, but I had to leave and come here, and the moon gave enough light for the journey."

"But some Eika may still haunt the woods!"

"It was not as far as I feared it would be. We saw no Eika. I must speak to you, Eagle. It is by the Lady's grace that my path brought me directly to you."

To Liath's amazement, the cleric took a bundle wrapped in linen from a bag tied to the mule's saddle and held it up before her. Liath knew immediately what it was.

"How did you?" she whispered, scarcely able to force the words out.

"Do you know what is in here? Nay, do not trouble yourself to answer. I see that you do. I know you can read Dariyan..." The cleric spoke in a rush, clearly agitated though Liath had never seen her anything but calm before. "Why should I give this back to you?"

She was half the cleric's age. She could easily snatch the book from her and run. But she did not, though neither could she compose an eloquent or compelling reply. "It's all I have left of my da!"

"Was your da a mathematicus?"

There was no use in lying. Rosvita had obviously read in the book. "Yes."

"And what are you, Eagle?" the cleric demanded.

"Kinless," she said flatly. "All I have are the Eagles. I pray you, Sister, I am no threat to anyone."

Rosvita glanced up at the stars as though to ask them if this was truth, or a cunning dissemblance.

But the stars only spoke to those who knew their language, so she did not. "I dare not keep this," she said in a low voice.

"How did you get it?"

"That does not matter."

"Can you-how much did you-?" But she was afraid to ask. She shifted. Beyond, the three servants who had escorted the cleric huddled close, sharing something from a leather bottle. She thought she smelled mead, but there were so many smells mingling and unraveling in the air around them that she could not be sure if it was honey's fermented sweetness or the aftertaste of drying blood.

"I cannot read Jinna, although you can." It was not a question. "And the fourth language is unknown to me. I had only a moment to look at the Arethousan and the Dariyan, but I needed no more than that to recognize what I was seeing. Lady protect you, child! Why are you riding as a common Eagle?"

"It is what was offered me."

"By Wolfhere."

"He saved me from Hugh."

The moonlight bleached Rosvita's face of expression, but she shook her head and then simply offered the book to Liath.

Liath grabbed it and clutched it against her chest.

"I think it properly belongs to you," said Rosvita softly, hesitantly. "Pray God I am right in this.

But you must come speak to me, Eagle, of this matter. Your immortal soul is at risk. Who are the Seven Sleepers?"

"The Seven Sleepers," Liath murmured, memory stirring. "Beware the Seven Sleepers." Or so Da had written. "I only know what he wrote in the book."

"You've never heard the story as related in Eusebe's Ecclesiastical History?"

"Nay, I've not read Eusebe."

"In the time of the persecution of Daisanites by the Emperor Tianothano, seven young people in the holy city of Sal's took refuge in a cave to gain strength before they presented themselves for martyrdom. But the cave miraculously sealed over, and there they were left to sleep."

"Until when?"

"Eusebe doesn't say. But that is not the only place I have heard that name. Do you know of a Brother Fidelis, at Hersford Monastery?"

"I do not."

" 'Devils visit me in the guise of scholars and magi,'" quoted Rosvita, recalling the conversation vividly, " 'tempting me with knowledge if only I would tell them what I knew of the secrets of the Seven Sleepers.'''

"Were they the ones-?" Liath broke off. Wind rustled the canvas of tents, and she was suddenly reminded of the daimone who had stalked her on the empty road. She shuddered. "I don't know what to do," she murmured, afraid again. Da always said: "The worst foe is the one you can't ) j see.

Rosvita extended a hand in the fashion of her kind, a deacon about to offer a blessing. "There are others better able to advise you than I. You must think seriously about making your way to the convent of St. Valeria."

"How can I?" Liath whispered, remembering her vision of stern Mother Rothgard. "The arts of the mathematici are forbidden."

"Forbidden and condemned. But it would be foolish of the church not to understand such sorcery nevertheless. Mother Rothgard at St. Valeria is not a preceptor I would wish to study under. She has little patience and less of a kind heart. But I have never heard it whispered that she is tempted by her knowledge. If you cannot bring yourself to trust me, then go there, I beg you." She glanced behind toward her servants. "I must return to the train, or they will wonder why I am missing. Morning comes soon."

She paused only to stare at Liath, as if hoping to read into her soul. Then she left.

Liath was too stunned to move. Her arms ached where they clasped the book, and one corner of the book pinched her stomach, digging into her ribs. She stood there breathing in and out with the breath of the night. A flash of white startled her and she spun to see a huge owl come noiselessly to rest on the torn-up ground just beyond the nimbus of lantern light that illuminated the awning of King Henry's pavilion. It stared at her with great golden eyes, then, as suddenly, launched itself skyward and vanished into the night.

"Liath."

Of course he knew.

She didn't turn to face him. She couldn't bear to.

"You've stolen the book," he said, astonishment more than accusation in his voice. "I left the field as soon as it was clear we'd won the battle and rode all the way back to the train, only to find it missing.

How did you manage it? What magic did you employ?"

She would not turn to face him, nor would she answer him, so he grabbed her by the shoulder and spun her round to slap her so hard that guards looked up from their station by the awning.

But they knew the silhouette of a noble lord by his bearing and his clothes, and they knew she was only a common Eagle. With a few coughs, they looked away again. It was none of their business.

Furious, he took her by the elbow to drag her away, but her feet were rooted to the earth. She could not struggle, she could not fight, she could not flee. Her cheek stung.

Ai, Lady, was he using sorcery on her? But then what had Da protected her from, if not against this? He had protected her against other forms of magic. Why had he never protected her against Hugh?

"Damn you, Liath," he said, sliding down that slippery slope to anger. "It is my book and you are my slave. Tell me so. Repeat it back to me, Liath. 'I am your slave, Hugh.' You will never escape me."

Had Hugh plumbed her soul far enough down, had he imprisoned her heart so tightly in the frozen tower, that he could control the rest of her at his will?

She was helpless. She would never break free.

As his grip tightened, her boots shifted on the ground, failing, falling; she began to slide into the darkness.

"Say it, Liath."

Too stupified by fear even to weep, she whispered the only word that she could force out of her throat: "Sanglant."

THE rats came out at night to gnaw on the bones. The whispering scrape of their claws on stone brought him instantly out of his doze.

But he did not want to open his eyes. Why did God torment him in this way, giving him such dreams? Why had his mother cursed him with life? It was better to die than to dream that Bloodheart was dead and he was free. In this way, Bloodheart chained him more heavily, weighted with despair.

The dogs whined nearby, tails thumping against the ground. One growled.

"Hush, son," said a voice like his father's. A hand touched his hair, stroking it gently as his father had done years ago when he was a child and delirious with grief at the loss of his nursemaid, the woman who had nursed him and helped raise him. She had died of a virulent fever, and though he had sat at her bedside for days despite her whispered pleas and the commands of his father that he must leave her or risk catching his death, he had not left- and he had not gotten sick.

" 'No disease known to you will touch him.' '

The hand stroking his hair now had weight and warmth.

He bolted upright, growling, and then flinched back from what he saw: not the cold nave of the cathedral but the interior of a pavilion, its contours softened by the warm glow of a lantern. His father sat in a camp chair beside the pallet on which he had been sleeping. Two servingmen slept on the ground; otherwise they were alone.

The king did not withdraw his hand but held it extended and brushed a stinging end of hair out of Sanglant's eye. "Hush, child," he said softly. "Go back to sleep."

"I can't sleep," he whispered. "They'll kill me if I sleep."

Henry shook his head slightly, a tiny gesture in the gloom. "Who will kill you?"

"The dogs."

Now the king sighed deeply and set a hand determinedly and firmly on Sanglant's shoulder. "You are Bloodheart's prisoner no longer, my son."

Sanglant did not reply, but his hand touched the iron collar. Henry took hold of that hand and drew it away from the harsh touch of the slave collar.

"Nay, nay, child. We'll have it taken off." He wet a clean strip of pale linen with his own spit and dabbed at the raw scrapes along the curve of Sanglant's neck where the collar rubbed and pinched. At his own neck the gold torque he wore glinted as he bent closer and then faded into the darkness at the curve of his neck as he leaned away, examining his son. But it flashed in Sanglant's eyes like a blinding stroke of lightning: symbol of the royal kinship that had given Henry the right to try for the throne, just as Sanglant's person, his actual safe delivery into the world, had given Henry the right to rule after his father, the younger Arnulf.

"Come, then," said Henry. "If you can't sleep, then eat a little bit. I had food brought in-"

"That I might feed in private and not embarrass myself?" But he hadn't meant to snap in the way of dogs nipping one at the other. He groaned and sank head in hands.

But Henry only laughed quietly. "Sometimes you weren't so different from this as a child, Sanglant. It isn't so bad, after all, to be as alert as a hound. Sometimes I think the princes are no better than those dogs who followed you out of Gent, fighting among themselves. They'd tear my throat out, some of them, if they thought they had the chance or if I showed any least sign of weakness before them."

"A fine lord with his handsome retinue," said Sanglant bitterly, remembering Bloodheart's taunt.

"Although we might as well cut their throats now that they're safely chained down-

"No!" He started up. At his full height, he towered above his father. "They were faithful to me.

Like my Dragons."

"Sit!" commanded Henry. Sanglant staggered, still exhausted, still disoriented, and sank down in the other chair. A small table stood at his elbow with a basket of bread and a bowl of berries, freshly picked. "But we won't kill them, for if we can keep them chained-they chew through leather, so my servants tell me-then they can serve as a reminder to you."

Sanglant picked up the bowl and brought it to his nose, but the lush fragrance of the berries made his stomach clench. He set down the bowl and tore off a hank of bread. Ai, Lord, he was so hungry, but he must not gorge. He must take small portions at first and teach his stomach how to eat again. "Remind me of what?" he asked, to stop himself from bolting the hank of bread.

"Of the princes and nobles of the realm."

"Why should I want to be reminded of them?" Still he twirled the bread through his fingers. It fascinated him: the sight of food that was his to take or leave as he wished.

Henry leaned forward and dropped his voice for all the world like a conspirator. Sanglant stilled, bread caught halfway to his mouth. "We must move slowly and plan each step with great care if we are to make you king after me."

Sanglant set down the bread. "Why would I want to be king?"

Henry began to reply, but the wind brought a different and more distracting sound with it: Liath's voice, her fear, her desperation. She was calling for him.

He started up so violently that the chair tipped and overbalanced. He was outside before he heard it, like the echo of his passing, thud on the ground. The guards jumped aside, startled, but he knew where he was going.

Some noble lord had laid hands on her.

Sanglant had grabbed his arm and ripped him off her before, at her gasp, he took hold of himself and stopped to see who it was.

It had been years, but he would never forget that face. "Hugh." He opened his hand, and the other man shook him off and took a hasty step backward. He was furious; Sanglant could smell his rage.

"I beg your pardon, my lord prince. This Eagle serves Princess Sapientia, and I was just escorting her back." "By dragging her against her will?" The other man's voice changed, gentled, soothed, but the tone only raised Sanglant's hackles. "No, she wants to come with me. Doesn't she? Doesn't she, Liath?"

In answer she slid sidewise to nudge up against Sangiant's chest. The bundle she carried pressed painfully against his lower ribs.

"Liath!" said Hugh, a command. But then, even in the old days in the king's schola, young Lord Hugh had expected obedience and resented those who would not, or did not have to, give it to him.

"Liath, you will come to me!" She made a sound in her throat more like a whimper than a plea and turned her face into Sanglant's chest.

He could not help himself. It rose in his throat and was echoed from the three dogs who remained to him, back behind the king's pavilion: a low growl.

Hugh, startled, took another step back, but then he caught himself and smiled sweetly. "You know what they call you now, some of them, don't you? The ."

"Stay away from her," said Sanglant.

But Hugh merely measured him and arched one eyebrow sardonically. " 'Do not give what is holy to the dogs.' " He turned with an arrogant shrug and walked away.

She did not move. Without thinking he set a hand on her shoulder, drawing her closer into him.

Startled, she looked up.

He had endured hunger for a long time. He had dreamed of her, but she had been a shade, a remembered shadow given brightness by his own despair and need. Now he touched her on the cheek, as she had once touched him in the silence of the crypt. She did not respond, she did not draw back, but he felt the rhythm of her breathing. His was not so steady.

"Marry me, Liath," he said, because it was now the only thing he knew to say to her. Hadn't she cut his hair, back there by the stream? Hadn't she freed him from Blood-heart's chains? Hadn't his memory of her been all that kept him from drowning in madness?

The entrance flap to the pavilion stirred and the king emerged into a night suddenly shadowed with the first intimations of dawn: a whistling bird, a tree edged gray instead of black against the night sky, the lost moon and the fading stars.

Henry halted just as Liath saw him and started back, taking a big step away from Sanglant.

"Your Majesty!" she said in the tone of a thief caught with her hand in the royal treasure chest.

His face froze into a mask of stone. But his voice was clear, calm, and commanding. "Eagle, it is time to notify my son Ekkehard and those of the king's schola left behind at my palace at Weraushausen that we are safe and Gent retaken. You may leave now."

"My lord king," began Sanglant.

But she stirred and took yet another step away. "It's my duty. I must go."

He let her go. He would not hold her against her will, not when he had been a prisoner for so long. He hated himself fiercely at that moment for what he had become. : that was what they were calling him now, that was what Bloodheart had called him. Why should she remember anything she had felt before, or what he supposed she had felt, when they had first met in Gent?

He had always been an obedient son.

She hesitated still, glancing once nervously toward the king, and with a sudden impulsive lunge she thrust the bundle she carried into his arms.

"Keep it safe for me, I beg you," she whispered so only he could hear. Then she turned and walked into the dawn twilight.

He stared after her. She lifted a hand to flip her braid back over her shoulder and there it swayed along her back, so sinuous and attractive a movement he could not keep his eyes from it.

"Come back inside, son," said Henry, an order and yet also a plea. There was a tone in his father's voice he could not at first interpret, but slowly old memories and old confrontations surfaced to put a name to it.

Jealousy.

"No," he said. "I can't go back inside. I've been inside for so long-" How long had it been since he had heard the fluting and piping of birds at dawn? Seen the brightest of stars fade into the sleepy gray dawn? Smelled fresh air, even if this was tinged with the distant aroma of burning and death?

Just before she passed out of sight beyond the distant tents, she paused and turned to look back at him, then vanished into the awakening bustle of the camp.

"I've forgotten how bright the sun is," he said without taking his gaze from where he had last seen her. "How sweet the air tastes."

"What is that she gave you?" demanded Henry.

A promise. But he did not say it out loud.