PART TWO

THE TURNING WHEEL

VIII

T WHICH L

"HERE comes the young lord!"

Alain heard the shout rise up as his entourage rounded the forest path and came to a halt in a clearing. Ten huts stood along the path with narrow garden strips stretching out behind each one. A score of cows grazed along the forest's verge. Fields of winter rye sprouted beyond the village. He dismounted and gave his reins to a groom.

"This is the disputed land?" he asked his steward, but already the village folk swarmed forward and in the old tradition began clamoring all together to get his attention.

A steward brought his stool, and he sat down, although that did nothing to mitigate the outcry. So he just sat, calmly regarding them with Sorrow on one side, Rage on the other, and Fear flopped down at his feet, and after a while one and then another stopped shouting and gesticulating as, one by one, they realized he did not intend to speak until there was silence. In time, because he was patient, they all stood respectfully before him and waited.

"It has come to the attention of my father, Count Lavastine, that certain disputes have disrupted the peace of this village and that several men have been injured in fighting. It is my father's will that no feuding be allowed on his lands, so I have come to settle the matter. Let those with an interest each come forward— No!" He had to raise his voice as several crowded forward at once, arms raised to get his attention. "Each person will have opportunity to speak, no matter how long it takes."

Their testimony took a while to give, and it was cold work, especially since he was obligated to sit still and listen under a chill autumn sky. But he had a fine, fur-lined wool cloak, and, in addition, he never wanted for hot cider brought to him by the village children. He listened, because he was good at listening, and after a while as the village folk saw they would truly each be heard, a certain temperance settled over their speech and they began to accuse less and explain more. Once he had sorted through their complaints of each other and the petty injustices and quarrels over the meadowland, grazing rights, division of rents paid to their lord out of the common rye fields, how to parcel out the remaining fallow lands, and how often to let the fields lie fallow, he lifted a hand for silence.

"This is the root of what I hear you say: that you have all prospered so well under the rule of Count Lavastine that there isn't enough land for your children to inherit so they can each have a portion as large as the one you have worked in your time." They dared not quarrel with his opinion, but he saw the idea take hold in their minds. Once he had seen the pattern emerge, he knew how Lavastine and Aunt Bel would answer it, and he wanted to do the best he could.

In truth, he could have sent a steward to deal with the problem, but with Lavastine ill he needed to be seen. And anyway, staying busy kept his mind off Tallia.

"It is my will as heir to these lands that you be rewarded, not punished, for your hard work, but it is also necessary that these disputes end. Therefore, in the name of my father I will allow you to cultivate clearings within the forest, which has up to now been reserved for foraging, pigs, and hunting. But you must take only two harvests from any field there, and then move on to clear new fields, and you must not return to any field previously cleared for at least ten years. For every five measures of grain reaped, one shall be given to the count's granary. For one plowing a year you shall have the use of an iron-sheathed plow from Lavas Holding. In the name of my father, and in my own name, I have spoken."

They were satisfied. He saw it in their expressions as they bent their knees to him, as they said, "Bless you, my lord." No doubt details remained to be worked out, but those could be left to the stewards. Quarrels would -$till erupt because they always did. But he was content that he had done his best.

"What of our good Count Lavastine, my lord?" called one of the elders. "We heard he'd taken ill."

Any satisfaction he felt drained from him in an instant. "Pray for him," he replied. "Pray to God for Their healing grace."

They returned to Lavas Holding by early afternoon, and as Alain followed the hounds up the stairs to Lavastine's chamber, he heard a woman's muffled weeping. He entered the room to see Tallia kneeling beside the count's bed in prayer, her shoulders trembling and her cupped hands covering her face.

"I pray you, Son," said Lavastine, seeing Alain as he chained Fear and Rage to an iron ring set into the wall close beside the bed. The expression that crossed his face was clearly one of relief. "Escort your wife to your chambers. She has prayed over me all morning, and I fear she needs rest."

Alain paused to caress Terror; by Lavastine's order the old hound had been allowed to lie on the bed beside him, and there he rested, quieter each day but somehow still alive. He whined, pressing his hot, dry nose into Alain's hand. He could not thump his tail, or move his legs, but he kept his dark gaze focused faithfully on his master.

"Come, Tallia." She did not resist as Alain took her elbow and raised her up. Behind, servants helped the count sit up in bed, then flinched back as Fear jumped up onto the bed to lie across Lavastine's dead legs. Alain looked away and hurriedly led her upstairs. Sorrow followed him as far as the threshold; then, whining, she turned back into the room to remain with the count.

Upstairs, Alain sent Tallia's servingwomen from the room. She was still sobbing softly. Her sorrow for Lavastine touched him deeply. He thought he had never loved her as much as he did now, when her compassion was made evident by her tears.

"Don't despair, beloved," he whispered into her ear. She was limp with sorrow; he held her close.

"How can I not?" she said faintly. "He remains stubbornly blind. That's why he's turning to stone, because he refuses to accept the true word, the holy death and life of the blessed Daisan, who died that we might all live unstained in the Chamber of Light. He will fall into the Abyss. If only God had given me the strength to make him see!"

He was too startled to reply. This was not what he had expected.

Then she looked up at him; a spark of passion lit in her eyes, a hundred unspoken promises. It dazed him, torn with grief and sorrow for Lavastine, yet wanting her so badly. He sighed and gathered her closer, waiting for what she would say to him while she allowed him to hold her so intimately.

"After he's dead, you will let me build a convent, won't you? You'll put no obstacles in my path, I know it. It's only he who is trapped by his old allegiances to the word of the false church. We can build together a church dedicated to Mother and Son, and we'll dedicate ourselves there, in perpetual virginity, in Their Names. In this way we can free ourselves from the burden of mortality!

We'll bless any children we might have had by never condemning them to the prison of existence on this earth!"

"No!" He flinched, let go of her as he recoiled. How could she talk like this when every soul in this holding mourned their good lord who lay dying? "You know Lavas County must have an heir. You know it! It's our duty."

"Nay, it's our duty to break the chains of this world, to escape the flesh that traps us." She shuddered. "Everything that is most distasteful, all that binds us to the Enemy, darkness, desire, bestial mating, all that pumping and panting—

Was she mocking him? Out of patience, he grabbed her shoulders. "But we must make a child, Tallia! That's our duty." She tried to pull away, but he was too angry to feel compassion for her fear, if it was fear at all. Maybe it was only selfishness.

"Never! I'll never defile myself so! I've dedicated myself to—"

"Do what you will, build what you will, dedicate yourself as you will—after you've given Lavas County an heir!"

She swayed, eyes rolling back, and fainted.

He stood there stupidly with Tallia limp in his arms as her servingwomen crossed into the chamber, alerted by their raised voices. They stared at him like frightened rabbits. With a cry of frustration, he surrendered her into the care of Lady Hathumod; i the only sensible one among them, and fled to the chapel. He knelt before the Hearth, but although the frater who attended the chapel touched his lips with sanctified water from a gold cup, still he could find no words. After a while, the frater left him alone in the silence of God's chamber, and as he knelt there, he thought he had never felt more alone ib his life. He wanted to weep, but he had no tears. He wanted to pray, but he had no eloquent words. Yet did good God ever demand eloquence? How many times had Aunt Bel told him that God preferred an honest heart to a clever tongue?

Finally he gripped the tasseled end of the altar cloth in one hand and pressed the cloth against his forehead. "God, I pray you," he whispered. "I beg you, heal my father."

For the longest time he listened, but he heard no answer.

"I beg you, come, my lord," said the frater quietly, reenter-ing the chamber. "The count is asking for you."

He followed the frater quietly, and so quietly did they come that he paused at the threshold to Lavastine's chamber without at first being noticed. Fear still lay on the bed, and Sorrow and Rage sat within reach of the count's hand, should he wish to pat them. As unnaturally still as Terror, they ignored the folk crowded around the bed, and Alain did, too. He could not take his eyes from Lavastine.

No casual observer could possibly have guessed that the count was anything but a late riser, sitting comfortably in his bed with a hand on the head of his favorite hound as he disposed of the business of the day before getting up to go hunting or hawking. No casual observer could possibly have guessed that the legs hidden under the blanket now felt like stone, and that the bed had already been reinforced once underneath to take the extra weight.

Was he terrified as the poison crept inexorably day by day up his body?"

"Be sure that the second best bedspread goes to your daughter, Mistress Dhuoda, for her dower. Of my second best tunics, be sure that one goes to the captain's window for her eldest son and the others to each of my loyal servingmen." The slightest of smiles graced his mouth as he nodded toward a rotund steward who waited at the foot of the bed. "Except for Christof, here, for I fear he would need two to cover him." There was a hearty laugh from everyone in the room, but Alain could see the tears in their eyes; in every eye, except for Lavastine's. "But there is a good piece of linen in the weaving house that should be ample for him, I trust."

A frater sat at the table, writing everything down as Lavas-tine went on.

"Once the weaving house is done with the new tapestries for the hall, I wish the ones hanging there now to go to Bativia."

"But haven't you assigned that manor to your cousin's daughter?" asked Dhuoda from her seat beside the bed.

"To Lavrentia, yes, when she comes of age. I will not have it said that I left her with scraps. Those tapestries will do very nicely there. It's a small hall but well built and warm in the winter. Has there been any word from Geoffrey yet?"

"No, my lord count," said Dhuoda with a frown. She looked at the frater who had come in with Alain, but he only shrugged.

Lavastine followed the direction of her gaze rather more slowly, as if his neck was stiff and it was hard to move. He managed to lift his right arm to beckon Alain, but it clearly took some effort. "I want Lord Geoffrey's sworn word that he will support my son in every way he can once I am gone."

Several servants drew the Circle at their chests. Alain threw himself down beside the bed.

"You won't die, Father! See how slowly it grips you—you'll recover. I know you will!"

Lavastine struggled to get his arm up and with a grimace of satisfaction rested it on Alain's bowed head. Already it weighed far more than it ought to.

"The poison creeps higher every day, son. I can only imagine the creature had expended most of its poison upon my faithful hounds and so had little enough for me. I suppose it is possible that the poison will only paralyze me, but I do not feel any such hope in my heart. Do not despair. I am at peace with God, and I have left precise instructions." He looked toward the table where the frater had paused in his writing, then back at Alain, his gaze cool and calm. "My wishes and commands are clear in this matter. You need only to prove your worthiness by producing an heir."

ALL the Ungrians smelled funny, but they looked powerful and warlike in their padded coats, fur capes, and tasseled caps as they assembled for the wedding feast in the great hall of the biscop of Handelburg's palace.

Prince Bayan was a man in his prime, stocky, sun-weathered, with a fair bit of silver in his black hair and a habit of twisting the drooping ends of his mustaches. He had brought his mother, but she remained concealed in a palanquin, hidden by walls of gold silk. Four male slaves—one with skin as black as pitch, one as ice-blond and fair as Hanna, one golden-skinned with strangely pulled eyes, and one who looked much like the Ungrian warriors surrounding them—braced the litter on their shoulders so that it never touched the ground.

The feast had started at noon and yet by late afternoon not one platter of food had passed behind the concealing silks.

Princess Sapientia had made up her mind on the long trip to Handelburg to like her betrothed, but in truth he was an easy enough man to like.

"When Geza beloved of God is still the prince, not the king yet, then he fight the battle with the majariki—" He turned to his interpreter, a stout, middle-aged frater who had only one hand; where the other should be he had a stump ending at the wrist. "What they call in Wendish? Ah, the Arethousans. Yes?" He spun the tail of one of his mustaches between fingers greasy from eating meat.

"Gold hats and much strong smell of perfume, the majariki."

"Prince Geza defeated the Arethousans in battle?" Sapientia asked.

"So he become king of the Ungrians. He fight against his uncles, his mother's brothers you would say, who say they must be king, not he. They ride to majariki and promise no raids and bow to majariki God if majariki army fight on their side. But Prince Geza beloved of God win this battle and he is king."

"God do not favor those who pray to Them only for their own advantage,"

observed Biscop Alberada from her seat between Bayan and Sapientia. As Henry's illegitimate, and elder, half sister, she had taken the biscopric allotted her with a firm hand and always supported her brother here on the eastern fringe of his kingdom.

"Did you fight with him, too, against your uncles?" asked Sapientia, less concerned about spiritual matters than glorious stories of battle.

"They not my uncles," Bayan explained. "I am son of third wife of King Eddec, our father. I am still young in that day, sleep in my mother's tent."

A new course was brought, served by his warriors and certain clean-smelling clerics from the biscop's staff. Biscop Alberada presided over the carving of an impressive haunch of pork. As robust as her legitimate half brother in health, in looks she evidently resembled her mother, a Polenie noblewoman who had been taken captive in some nameless war and become Ar-nulf the Younger's first concubine before his marriage to Beren-garia of Varre.

After the meat was distributed, Alberada regarded Prince Bayan with a sour gaze. "I believed that the Ungrian people had ended their custom of a man marrying many wives when they accepted the Holy Word of the Unities.

According to the Holy Word, one woman and one man shall cleave each to the other in harmony, and exclusivity, in imitation of God Our Mother and Father."

The biscop's speech had to be translated, and Bayan listened intently and then nodded enthusiastically. "This my brother proclaim when he take the circle of God. I follow his rule. I put aside my wives when I come to marry Princess Sapientia." He grinned at her. He had one tooth missing but otherwise a strong mouth, although his teeth were somewhat yellow, perhaps from the copious cups of steaming hot, pungently-scented, brown-colored brew that he downed after finishing each cup of wine set before him.

"You had other wives?" asked the biscop.

"All at once?" demanded Sapientia.

"Many clans wish alliance with house of Geza and send daughters as gift.

Too many for him and his sons to marry, so some come to me because I am only king-brother alive. It make insult to send them back." Then he leaped up suddenly, lifting the cup he shared with Sapientia, and called out in his own language, gesturing with the cup. A young man outfitted in a gaudy tunic trimmed with gold braid jumped up, answered him, and drained his own cup of wine, then sat down. Bayan took his seat. "That one is younger brother of my second wife. She very angry to be turned away, but I give her much gold and let her marry prince of Oghirzo." He laughed. "I tell her he make better husband."

"You are not a good husband?" But Sapientia had a glint in her eye, and after a moment Hanna realized with some astonishment that Sapientia_was actually jesting with her betrothed. She would never have jested with Hugh.

Prince Bayan found the comment uproariously funny, and he leaped again to his feet, called every man in his retinue to stand, and led them in a toast to his bride. One table of men, still on their feet, sang a boisterous song while the rest kept time by pounding their cups on the tables. After this, Bayan declaimed in his own language a long and tedious paeon to his new bride, punctuated by the translation of the interpreter: "She is as beautiful as the best mare. As robust as the rabbits in wintertime. Her grip is as strong as an eagle's, her sight as keen as a hawk's, she is as fecund as the mice," and so on until Sapientia burst out laughing.

"Your Highness," whispered Hanna, bending low over her. "If you give offense—"

"You do not like my poem?" cried Bayan, plumping down in his chair. "It is my own words I craft, not speak another man's."

Sapientia choked on her laughter and turned red. "I am sure, Prince Bayan, that it is only the words your interpreter gives to those you crafted in your own language—"

"No, no!" he cried cheerfully. "Always I make these poems that others say is no good, not like the true poets. But I do not mind their laughter. These words is from my heart."

"Ai, God," said Alberada under her breath. "A bad poet. It is as well he is a good fighter, Your Highness."

But Sapientia was glowing. "You crafted that poem yourself, for me? Let us hear it again!"

He was happy to oblige, and this time was not interrupted by the princess'

laughter. The poem had some kind of refrain, and each time it came around, the Ungrians would all jump to their feet, cry out a phrase with one voice, and drain their wine cups. While this went on interminably, Hanna ate the scraps off Sapientia's platter, shoved forgotten to one side. She was terribly hungry, although now and again Sapientia would offer her own cup to drink from. The hall stank of wine, and urine.

The poem was followed by a display of wrestling, clearly meant to inflame female desire because the young Ungrian warriors stripped down to less clothing than Hanna had ever seen on a grown man in such a public place, just breechclouts covering their groins, and then oiled their skin until they gleamed, all moist and slippery. Did the curtains of the palanquin part slightly? Did she see a hand, fingers studded with rings, part the silk, and a suggestion of movement behind, someone peeking out to observe?

She leaned down to speak into Sapientia's ear. "I wonder if you ought to offer to share food with Prince Bayan's mother, Your Highness. I haven't seen a single platter taken to her."

Sapientia seemed startled by this oversight. "Will your mother not take supper with us, Prince Bayan?"

He changed color, kissed the tips of the fingers of his right hand, and made to throw something invisible over his left shoulder. "Not proper." He glanced nervously toward the palanquin and the sheet of gold fabric that concealed the woman within. "My mother a powerful sorcerer, I think you name it, of the Kerayit peoples, very strong in magic they are. They are the enemies of the Ungrian people, that is why my father marry her. In our language we call her a shaman. For her it is not allowed to share meat with people not of her kin."

"But you and I are to be wed! That makes me kin to her."

He grinned. "Not wed until man and woman join in the bed. Yes?"

She flushed. "That is the custom in my land, yes."

"Has your mother accepted the Holy Word and the Circle of Unity?" asked the biscop tartly.

He blinked, surprised. "She a good Kerayit princess. Her gods will take her power if she do not to them give the sacrifice. That is why she cannot be seen in this company."

"A heathen," muttered Alberada. "But you worship at the altar of God, Prince Bayan."

"I am good worshiper," he agreed, glancing at the frater as if to be sure he had said the words correctly. The man leaned down and whispered into his ear, and Bayan nodded, then turned to the biscop and spoke again, more emphatically. "I follow the Holy Word of God in Unity."

As if these words gave a signal, men lit torches and set them into sconces along the walls. The biscop rose with regal grace; although not tall, she had a queenly breadth of figure. Like her illegitimate nephew, Sanglant, she wore the gold torque that marked her royal kinship, although, like him, she could not aspire to the throne—unless the rumor was true that Henry himself conspired to place his illegitimate son on the throne after him. Hanna was not a fool: she listened, and she observed. Why would Henry marry his daughter to a man who, although renowned as a strong fighter, was unlikely to command respect and loyalty in Wendar itself? Only Sapientia seemed unaware of the implications of her father's choice for her marriage partner. Face bright and eyes glittering, she rose to stand beside Alberada as the biscop called the company to order.

"As night falls over this hall, let God's will be worked in this matter."

There were the usual pledges, an exchange of marriage portions: a disputed border region made over to Prince Bayan, a tribe whose tribute would henceforth grace Wendish coffers instead of going to the Ungrian king, many precious vessels from King Henry of Salian and Aostan manufacture, and from the east two wagons heaped with gold that Bayan's men pul ed into the hall.

Hanna had never seen such an astounding display of pure gold, not even on Henry's progress. It gleamed with a muted, almost ominous presence, heaped up like so much casually discarded debris.

The biscop spoke words of blessing over them, and there were toasts to their health, to Bayan's virility, and to Sapientia's womanly strength.

" 'Let us contest with swords not with words,'" cried Bayan, " 'and if not in battle with worthy opponents then in the bed of a handsome woman.'" He laughed as he tossed off another cup of wine. He had an amazing capacity to drink and had only had to leave the table twice to pee. He turned to his betrothed with a grin. "These words is teach to me by your brother, the famous warrior Bloody Fields, who makes the land to run red with the blood of his enemies. But you name him differently in your own tongue." He spoke to the frater, grunted, and tried the word on his tongue but could not make it come out like anything intelligible.

"Do you mean Sanglant?" demanded Sapientia. "You have met Sanglant!"

"Hai—ai! We fight the Quman together these five years past. It is a good battle! They run, and do not to come back. He is alive still, your brother?"

"He is still alive," said Sapientia curtly, and seemed about to say more when shouting rose from the far end of the hall.

"Make way! Make way!" Two men in soiled clothing came forward and knelt before the high table.

"What is this?" asked the biscop. "Is the news you bring so urgent that it cannot wait until morning?"

"I beg your pardon, Your Grace," said the elder of the two. He had a reddish beard and a scar above his left eye. "We have had news of several raids beyond the town of Meilessen. There have been more than a dozen such raids, villages burned, many people killed and some beheaded, so it is said. It is hard to know how long ago this began, twenty days or more, but the raiders are moving west. We thought it best to tell you as soon as we entered Handelburg."

The frater had been translating, and now Prince Bayan got to his feet and gestured for a servant to take wine to the two men. "Who does this raiding?" he asked, but he seemed already to know the answer.

"It is the Quman, my lord," said the man, startled as he now took in the assembly of Ungrian warriors mixed together with Wendish folk.

Bayan set his teeth in a vicious smile, an expression quite at odds with his usual jolly demeanor. "What mark do they bear, these Quman?"

The spokesman consulted with his companion, then looked toward the biscop for permission to speak. Sapientia stirred restlessly, then rose, too, a pallid echo of Bayan's movement. The spokesman acknowledged her with a bow, but it was obvious he did not recognize her as Henry's eldest daughter and putative heir.

"They wear the mark of the claw's rake." The messenger took his three middle fingers and made a raking gesture down his arm. "Like so."

Bayan spat on the floor, then leaped up onto the table with raised cup. He shouted out a name, and the hall rang with the shatteringly loud reply of his assembled men as they, too, all cursed a name and spat on the floor in response. He cried out again, and they answered him, then all drained their cups dry to seal their bargain.

"The snow leopard clan," translated the frater. "Bulkezu, son of Bruak."

Bayan had launched into another one of his poems, which Hanna recognized by its distinctive cadences, and by the awkward translation of the frater, who no doubt did what he could to make the words pleasing.

"Hard rjdes the fighter. Strong are his sinews. Many days in the saddle."

"What is the snow leopard clan?" demanded Sapientia, still glaring at the messengers, who, poor souls, looked quite taken aback at being surrounded by a host of shouting Ungrian warriors who were most likely still half heathens themselves—and pungent ones at that. She beckoned to the frater, who faltered, stopped translating, and answered her.

"The snow leopard clan is one of the many Quman tribes."

"There is more than one Quman tribe?"

The frater looked at her with ill-concealed surprise. "I know the clan marks of at least sixteen Quman clans. They are numberless, and as merciless as any of the tribes who live out beyond the Light of God."

"Are they the ones who took your hand?" she asked.

He laughed. "Nay, indeed. They'd have taken my head."

"Who is this Bulkezu they all speak of, and spit at?"

"The war leader who in battle killed Prince Bayan's only son, eldest child of his first wife. She was a Kerayit princess like Bayan's own mother."

"And these Kerayit—" Sapientia pronounced the word awkwardly. "They are a Quman tribe as well?"

"Nay, Your Highness. They live far to the east, beyond even those peoples who pay tribute to the Jinna emperor. It is well enough that his first wife is dead, for she'd not have given him up. She'd have hexed you."

"Hexed me!" Sapientia pressed a hand over the gold Circle of Unity that hung at her throat, and glanced sidelong at the palanquin. The gold silk walls did not stir. There might have been no creature inside at all, only air.

He bent closer. His breath smelled of exotic spices. "They are terrible witches, the most unrepentant of heathens." He bent his elbow to display the stump of his right wrist. "They thought writing was magic, so they cut off my hand." He faltered, glanced like Sapientia toward the motionless palanquin as if he thought that the hidden mother could hear his words even at such a distance and over the howling of Bayan's warriors as they called out the refrain. "That is how I came to Prince Bayan's service. He is a good man, Your Highness, I have nothing but praise for him."

"Is he truly faithful to God's word, Brother?" asked Biscop Alberada, who was not afraid to listen in to her niece's most private conversations.

"As faithful as any of the Ungrians can be."

"And his mother?" asked Sapientia without looking again toward the palanquin. But the frater only gave a tiny shake of his head. "She is a powerful woman. Do not anger her."

Hanna could not help but look, but the palanquin remained undisturbed both from within and from without. How the slaves could stand for so long without staggering amazed her. And wouldn't the woman inside begin to feel cramped, closed up in a sitting position for so long? Hanna wasn't sure she could stay still for such a long time. Even waiting on Princess Sapientia, she had freedom of movement; she could excuse herself to go out to the privies, could pace, laugh, sing when appropriate, and eat and drink what the princess herself did not want. The leavings off a princess' plate were far better fare than anything she had eaten in Heart's Rest.

No, indeed: being a King's Eagle was a good life, even with the dangers involved. Danger walked beside every woman and man no matter what their circumstances. It wasn't often that you could walk through life well fed, well shod, and with new things to see 'round every corner.

Prince Bayan was still going on, stamping one foot for emphasis with each line of verse; cups and platters rattled. As the volume of noise in the hall increased, the frater had to bend close to explain: "He is singing the death song of his son, to remind his men of the boy's glorious death, and of the unavenged spirit that still walks abroad."

"A heathen belief," observed Biscop Alberada.

"To get to any place, Your Grace, we must still take one step at a time."

She chuckled. "Brother Breschius, you have gained wisdom in your time among the heathens, despite the suffering they have caused you."

"I have learned to be tolerant, which comes to the same thing. God will be victorious in the end. We need only be patient and trust to Their power."

"War!" roared Prince Bayan, a word echoed by his men in their own tongue. "Swear to this battle we will ride!" he called out, then repeated himself in his own language.

His men clamored in_ answer. Hanna had to clap her hands over her ears.

That quickly, thejf drained their cups and with a flood of movement the hall began to empty.

"Where are they all going?" demanded Sapientia. Biscop Alberada had also risen, watching the milling crowd intently for any sign of trouble. Drunk and excited young men were likely to get into fistfights, or worse; Hanna knew that well enough from evenings at her mother's inn.

"We ride in the morning," cried Bayan enthusiastically. He jumped down from the table, still remarkably agile for a man who was close to Sapientia's father's age. "Now, to bed we go!

Sapientia smiled sharply. Their escort to the bedchamber set aside for them this night was ample: fully thirty people of various stations, but in the end Hanna found herself together with two servingwomen alone in the room with Sapientia, Prince Bayan, and a single male retainer, a sleek, unbearded young man who wore a thin iron torque at his neck that looked suspiciously like a slave collar.

Bayan drew his sword, and for an instant Hanna grabbed her own knife while Sapientia stood, frozen, at her side of the bed.

"No woman," proclaimed Bayan as he laid the sword down the center of the bed. "I swear before my men to have no woman until I kill a man in battle.

This the men of my people swear, to give ourselves strength. If we break the oath, then we lose our luck. If it is hard with you to have no man, I have this one—" He gestured to his manservant. "He is one of these ma-jariki men who have no, what do you call it? They have the man part but not the seed. They can give you this pleasure without the seed, for now that we are betrothed, you may take no seed but that I give to you. Yes?"

What glinted in his gaze belied the pleasant smile on his lips and the congenial tone. It flashed, a bone-deep core of unfor-givingness, startling to glimpse in a man who seemed as easy going and pleasant as the warm glow of the summer sun—until you were caught out under its heat for too long.

"Your children will be my children. Yes?"

"That is the agreement!" retorted Sapientia, looking affronted. She reached across the bed to touch the sword, caressing the blade. It was a handsome piece of metal, slightly curved; letters had been carved into the blade, but Hanna could not read them. Gold plated the hilt. "But I am a warrior, too! I will swear no less an oath than you do!"

"Then you and your fighting men will ride beside me when we go in the morning, to hunt these Quman raiders?" The unforgiving glint had vanished. He laughed out loud. " 'Strong is my woman. She is hunter like the lion queen!'

Together, we ride to war!"

PRINCE Ekkehard's servants managed to conceal Ivar and— more importantly—Baldwin from old Lord Atto for ten days during which Ivar had either to trudge alongside the wagons with a cowl over his head like a comman laybrother or be jolted about in the back of one of those same wagons. In a way, it was a relief to be discovered, despite Lord Atto's explosive reaction.

"Lord Baldwin must be sent back to Autun at once! What were you thinking, my lord prince? This is a grave insult to Margrave Judith. Feuds have destroyed whole families on lesser grounds than these!"

Ekkehard did not quail before this onslaught. "She need never know, and I and my people certainly won't be the ones to tell her." He did not really have the stature to stare down Lord Atto, who had the burly physique of a man who has fought in many battles, but he was free of the schola, young, and out on his own for the first time. "Baldwin stays with me!"

"He'll be sent back in the morning, my lord prince. It's what your father would command."

But Lord Atto wasn't as young as he used to be, and his left leg and right arm had sustained enough damage over his years of fighting that no one thought it particularly odd when, in the morning, he slipped while mounting.

Maybe the mild paralysis that sometimes afflicted him chose that moment to reappear. Ekkehard and Baldwin hurried over to assist the poor old man, fussing around him and his horse, and by the time anyone thought to check the saddle, the girth was good and tight.

Atto was left at the manor house to recover from the fall, with two servants in attendance. Prince Ekkehard rode on with his party otherwise intact and Baldwin/riding at his right hand. No one mentioned the matter againfBut they rode at a good clip, always aware that the news w^uld get back to King Henry eventually.

Yet such a pace couldn't tire them. They were young, and reckless, and happy to be free of restraint. Happy, that is, except for Ivar.

At first he didn't join in at their nightly revels at whatever manor or guesthouse put them up. They drank heavily, wrestled, sang, and entertained themselves with whatever young female servants were on hand and more or less willing; if no women were available, they entertained themselves with each other.

Ekkehard took to calling him "my prim frater," and it became a joke among them that of all of them, Ivar stayed "pure," just like a good churchman. But Baldwin was always pestering him, and on those nights when Ivar and Baldwin shared a blanket for warmth, Baldwin had a discomforting way of rubbing up against him that aroused thoughts of Liath. He was tired of thinking of Liath.

Sometimes he hated her for the way her memory surfaced again and again in his mind. Maybe Hugh was right: maybe Liath had cast a spell over him. Why did the thought of her grip him bodily with such violence? He could hardly think of her at all anymore without embarrassing himself, and then they would all notice.

They would all know he wasn't any purer than they were.

But he wasn't pure. No one was, nothing could be, trapped in the impure world. Alone, he couldn't even find the courage to preach the True Word, and he resented Baldwin—now free of Judith, after all—for not joining him in prayer.

There wasn't any satisfaction in praying alone. Indeed, after enough days in their company, he began to wonder why he should stay sunk in pain and grief when he might as well be as careless and fickle as they all were.

A terrible rumor greeted them when their party rode into Quedlinhame: Queen Mathilda was dying. Ekkehard's steward found Ivar and Baldwin lodging in the house of a Quedlinhame merchant, since they dared not risk them being recognized at the monastery itself, where the prince would stay with his aunt.

But the merchant spent all his time at the town church praying for the health of the old queen. They had no fire, and it was cold and miserable with an autumn drizzle shushing on the eaves above them.

"I hope the prince doesn't take long." His teeth chattered. He had been shivering all day, and knowing that the prince and his official retinue would be better housed, and given more than lukewarm gruel for their supper, only made it worse.

"He must do what is proper, for his grandmother," retorted Baldwin primly.

He had a mirror and was checking his face to see if his shave was clean enough.

"Come under the blanket with me, Ivar. It'll be warmer."

"I won't!" he said with more heat than force. "You know I've taken vows as a novice. It wouldn't be right."

"Prince Ekkehard and all his companions have taken vows as novices. That doesn't stop them."

"But I don't want to be like them," retorted Ivar. Yet he wondered in his heart if the person he most despised was himself. Baldwin sighed and went back to his shaving.

That evening bells began to toll, the somber roll of the Quedlinhame cathedral bell blending with the lighter ring of the town bell.

"Someone's died," observed Baldwin wisely. "Come on!" He tugged on his cape and pulled the hood up to conceal his face.

"But if we're seen by someone at the monastery who knows us—'

"Why should they look if they think we're townsfolk? I can't abide staying shut up here any longer." Like the wind, Baldwin had enough energy to pick Ivar up like a leaf and carry him along with him outside and into the crowd.

"The queen is dead." The wail started on the edge of the crowd as they flowed up the steep road that led to the monastery gates. By the time they reached the gates, the crowd had an edge of hysteria, weeping and wailing, a wild noise like beasts gone mad.

"They'll never let us in," Ivar shouted. It would be better so. The walls of Quedlinhame monastery scared him. He'd escaped once; if he went inside again, maybe he'd never get out.

But laybrothers did open the gate, and crossing that threshold had a miraculous effect on the crowd. Once they stepped through onto holy ground, they calmed. A baby squalled, but otherwise the huge crowd—hundreds of people, more than he could count—went forward in as much silence as so many shuffling footsteps and smothered sobs could grant it. Many of them clutched Circles and prayed soundlessly. As the crowd filed into the cathedral under the watchful gaze of half a dozen elderly nuns who looked as fierce as watchdogs, Ivar kept his hood pulled forward so that no one would see his red hair. Baldwin used his elbows, hips, and one well-placed pinch to squeeze them forward and in the end they found room just inside the door, far away from the altar. The stone pillars, carved with dragons, lions, and eagles, loomed over Ivar. Once he had prayed under their vigilant eye. He began to shiver. What if they bore some magic within them, what if they could see and recognize him for what he was?

Hadn't he betrayed the church by running away from Margrave Judith? Hadn't he rebel ed against the very authority of the church by listening to Lady Tallia's preaching?

Baldwin put an arm around him to warm him. Townsfolk stamped their feet and rubbed limbs leached of heat by the rain. The smell of so many unwashed winter bodies gave off its own heat. His fingers hurt as warmth flooded back.

When the nuns and monks marched in, all the townsfolk knelt. The stone floor was, predictably, hard and cold; his knees hurt. In an awful silence frayed only by a child's cough and the whispering of cloth as people shifted position to see better, the body of Queen Mathilda was carried in on a litter. She was tiny, frail, and shrunken, dressed in the plain robe granted to the humblest sister of the church. But she wore rich rings on her fingers, and a slim gold coronet circled her white hair. Mother Scholastica and Prince Ekkehard walked behind the bier, and once the dead queen was laid in state, the abbess came forward to kiss her bare feet. Then Prince Ekkehard, too, was allowed this privilege. The novices filed in silently to kneel at the base of the stairs that led to altar and bier. Ivar stared, hoping to pick out Sigfrid among their number, but their hoods and bowed heads concealed them too well.

Mother Scholastica stepped behind the altar. At her side, Brother Methodius began to chant the opening prayer for the Mass for the Dead.

"Blessed is the Country of the Mother and Father of Life—"

"Lies!" On the steps a slight figure leaped up to address the townsfolk caught in the opening cadence of prayer, at their most responsive before the flow of the liturgy lulled them into a stupor. "You have all been made blind by the darkness spread over this land because of their lies. The true course of Her miracle and Her Holy Word has been hidden away. For God found a worthy vessel in the holy Edessia. God filled her with the blessed light, and in this way she gave birth to the blessed Daisan, he who partakes both of the nature of God and of humankind. He brought God's message to all of us, that he would suffer and die to redeem us from the stain of darkness that lies within all of us—

A shriek of frustration burst from the schoolmaster. Three monks leaped up, scuffled with the young novice, and hauled him away while he still shouted, his words muffled by a hand pressing his mouth closed. Ivar stood stunned while around him people burst into frenzied talk, pointing and questioning.

"That was Sigfrid," whispered Baldwin. "Is he gone mad?"

"That's what's become of him without us to protect him."

"We'll have to get him free."

"How can we get him free?" Ivar's laugh left a bitter taste. He dragged Baldwin back by the elbow. "Let's go. What if they find us here?"

He knew that look on Mother Scholastica's face as, slowly, the multitude quieted in the face of her anger. She looked mightily displeased as she spoke to Brother Methodius. He nodded, knelt by the bier, kissed the dead queen's robe, then left the church by a side door.

Mother Scholastica lifted her hands. "Let us pray, Sisters and Brothers. Let us pray that God forgive us our sins, and that through prayer we may follow the example of the blessed Daisan,he who was the child of God brought forth into this world through the vessel of St. Edessia, he who through his own efforts found the way to salvation that we all may follow. Let us pray that we may not be stained by those desires which the Enemy casts upon the ground like jewels, tempting us to pick them up for they glitter so brightly and their colors attract our eye. Let us be humble before God, for Their word is truth. All else is lies."

"We must stay and listen!" hissed Baldwin. "Prince Ekkehard will be able to get Sigfrid free. His aunt can't refuse him anything."

"Do you think so? I know better." He,was bigger and stronger, and he was shaking with fury and helplessness as he hauled Baldwin backward.

"We'll look more suspicious if we run away!"

At the threshold, the people who hadn't found room inside pushed forward, trying to see what had caused the commotion, and those disturbed by Sigfrid's outburst or by the squeeze inside pressed outward. Ivar followed their tidal flow, two steps forward, one back, two forward, until they came out into a drizzle and the finger-numbing chill of a mid-autumn day.

Baldwin pouted all the way down the hill. But for once Ivar wasn't minded to give in to his pretty sulk. The only thing worse than abandoning Sigfrid was to be caught themselves. Mother Scholastica would not be merciful.

They stumbled down the road churned muddy by the crowd, slipped more than once until their leggings and sleeves and hands dripped mud. They had nothing to wash with, and so huddled in the loft while mud caked and dried, then crumbled with each least movement. Baldwin sulked with the only blanket wrapped around him. Ivar paced because he could not sleep, and it was too cold to be still.

Why had Sigfrid done it? Had he bided his time all this while only to burst like an overfull winesack at the sight of so many willing ears? Would he, Ivar, have done anything as courageous— and so blindly stupid? Was he brave enough to act on what he believed, to preach, as Tallia had, as Sigfrid had, and accept the consequences?

It was an ugly truth, but it had to be faced: He was nothing but a cold, miserable sinner.

"Oh, Ivar," said Baldwin. "I'm so cold, and I love you so much. I know you're just shy because you've never—

"I have so!" he retorted, face scalding. "That's how my father always celebrated his children's fifteenth birthday. He sent me a servingwoman—"

"To make a man of you? It's not the same. You were just using her the way Judith used me. You've never done it just for yourself and the one you were with. That's different."

"I did after that, when I—" When I thought about Liath. And she had thrown him away.

"Just doing it once won't matter. You'll like it. You'll see. And you'll be a lot warmer."

It really didn't matter, did it? That it did matter was the lie he'd been telling himself al along: look what had happened to Sigfrid. At least Baldwin cared for him, in a way Liath never had. He dropped down beside Baldwin and, cautiously, nervously, touched him above the heart. Baldwin responded with a sudden, shy smile, the touch of a hand on his thigh, sweet breath at his ear.

And then, after all, it proved easier to live only in sensation.

In the morning, Milo arrived out of breath, nose bright red from the cold.

"Go out of town now," he said, "and wait on the road to Gent."

Beyond the gates they walked a while to warm themselves; as the traffic along the road began to pick up, Ivar got nervous. He used a stick to beat out a hiding place within the prickly branches of an overgrown hedge. There, with the blanket wrapped round them, they waited.

"We could have done something for Sigfrid," muttered Baldwin.

"Just like you could have done something when Margrave Judith came to fetch you? We're powerless against them. Or do you want to go back to your wife? It was certainly warmer with her!"

Baldwin only grunted.

Wagons passed, then a peddler on foot and, later in the morning, clots of pilgrims dressed in rags, weeping and wailing the name of Queen Mathilda. No doubt word had already been sent to King Henry, by horse, but these humble pilgrims would spread the news among the common people in return for a bit of bread and a loft to sleep in.

Something stirred in Ivar's gut, a feeling, an idea—or maybe just hunger.

"Look!" Baldwin jumped up, got his hair caught in the hedge, and swore as the branches yanked him to a halt. By the time Ivar had freed him, Prince Ekkehard's cavalcade had come up beside them.

"How did you get so muddy?" said the prince with a frown for Baldwin.

"We had to walk here, my lord prince. What news of our friends?"

Prince Ekkehard had a habit of blinking two or three times before he replied, as if it took him that long to register words. He was all sun and light when happy but as sullen as a rainy day when annoyed. Right now he glowered.

"It is no easy thing' to question my aunt, I'll tell you that. That comrade of yours is quite mad, and disrespectful, too. Imagine treating my grandmother's memory in such a way! I didn't like him, and my aunt said there's some terrible punishment in store for him, so it's no use to pine over him. He's lost to us."

"But you promised—

"Enough! There's nothing I can do." Then he grinned. "But I got in a good kick to my awful cousin, Reginar. I told my aunt that the abbacy of Firsebarg has come free now that Lord Hugh is being sent to the skopos for punishment, so she's sending him there. He was so grateful that he promised to do me a favor, so I told him there was a novice there called Ermanrich whom I'd seen in a vision, and that I wanted him to come to Gent to serve me." His young attendants giggled. "Come now, fair Baldwin." He turned coaxing, seeing that Baldwin still pouted. "I did what I could."

"You could have got Sigfrid as well."

"There's nothing I could do against my aunt when she was in such a rage!

He'll deserve whatever punishment she metes out. What a terrible thing—" The young prince faltered, seeing Baldwin's expression. "But I did everything else just as you wished, Baldwin. You do love me, don't you?"

"Of course I do," said Baldwin reflexively, then muttered, "as long as you keep me away from Margrave Judith." Ivar kicked him, and he startled like a deer seeking cover. "I am grateful, my lord prince."

"As well you should be. Come, ride beside me, Baldwin."

A horse was brought. Ivar found a seat in one of the wagons, and there he brooded as he jolted along, listening to the chatter of the prince and his loyal retainers. He had heard the refrain often enough: That young men were reckless and feckless and untrustworthy by reason of lacking a steadying womb and the knowledge that they would give life to daughters, who would inherit after them.

It was no wonder that women, like the Lady before them, held the reins of administration while they tended the Hearth. What could they expect from feckless men? Headstrong Prince Ekkehard? Pretty, spoiled Baldwin?

Was Ivar, son of Harl and Herlinda, any better? Trapped by desire for a woman who had never even wanted him. A coward, unlike Sigfrid, who however stupidly and disrespectfully had at least shouted the truth out loud, no matter the cost to himself.

He wept, although the day was bright.

"WHITE-HAIR! Snow woman!"

A dozen Ungrian warriors sat cross-legged on the ground, sharpening their curved swords, but they had all paused to look up as Hanna passed. She had almost grown used to being the center of attention whenever she walked through camp, on account of her blonde hair and light skin. Except for Prince Bayan, the Ungrians knew no Wendish, but it seemed like every soldier in his retinue had all learned these few phrases, and they were completely unashamed when it came time to call them out to her in their atrocious accents.

"Beautiful ice maiden, I die for you!" cried one young man with black hair and a long, drooping and exceptionally greasy mustache. He had sweet eyes, and was missing one of his front teeth. Like all the other Ungrians, he wore a padded leather coat over baggy trousers.

"My greetings to your wife, my friend," she called back in Ungrian. They all laughed, slapped their thighs, and began to talk volubly among themselves—

probably about her. It was disconcerting, and tiring, being the object of so much attention.

Beside her, Brother Breschius chuckled. "Softer on the 'gh,'" he corrected,

"but otherwise it was a creditable attempt. You have a better head for languages than your mistress."

Hanna let this gentle criticism pass unremarked. "They flirt terribly, Brother, but not one has propositioned me. I feel perfectly safe walking about the camp."

He grunted amiably. "For now you are safe. When they swear an oath, they keep it, and they are still barbarians in their hearts, which means they are superstitious. They truly do believe that if they waste their strength on carnal play before a battle, they will surely die at the hand of a man who did not waste himself in such a manner."

"But some who hold to that vow will die anyway."

"True. Such is God's will. In their minds, such deaths will be blamed on other things they did or did not do: stepping on a shadow, the chastity of their wife a hundred leagues away, a fly that landed on their left ear instead of their right. They profess to worship God in Unity, but they have not yet given their hearts fully into God's care. You, too, come from a land only recently brought into the Light, I believe, my child. On the first day of spring do you place flowers at a crossroads to bring you luck in your journeys for the rest of the year?"

She looked at him sharply. Then she grinned, because she liked him, with his missing hand and his tolerant heart. "You have traveled widely, Brother. You know a great deal."

He chuckled. "We are all ignorant. I do what I can to share God's Holy Word with those who live in night. But mind you, Eagle, be cautious after the battle. It is the custom of those who survive to behave wildly. At that time I advise you to remain close to your mistress."

She glanced up at their destination: a stone tower set on a ridge overlooking the long valley of the Vitadi River. Half a palisade of wood had been built a generation ago and then abandoned. Now, at Princess Sapientia's order, a levy of men from the surrounding settlements labored to complete the fort.

Men dug out a trench, hauled logs, swore, and sweated as she and Breschius climbed the path that led to the palisade gate and then inside, up a trail hacked into the rock face of a cliff, through a roughly-hewn tunnel where she had to duck her head, and into the fortress itself.

Within the inner rock wall she heard Prince Bayan's jovial laugh echoing among the stones. He stood at the threshold of the tower, laughing with the Wendish captain who commanded the fortress. Turning, he saw Hanna and beckoned her forward.

"The snow woman arrives!" he exclaimed. "Soon winter comes in her trail."

He had a pleasant habit of wrinkling up his eyes when he spoke, and even when he didn't smile, his eyes laughed. Life was good to Prince Bay an because he made it so. "To where is my royal wife?" he asked.

Hanna glanced toward Brother Breschius who, mercifully, saved her the awkward reply. Lady Udalfreda of Naumannsfurt had arrived with twenty cavalry and thirty-five foot soldiers, and Princess Sapientia felt obliged to entertain her fittingly.

In truth, Hanna suspected Sapientia, for all her love of fighting, did not have the stomach for what she had sent Hanna to witness in her stead.

Bayan merely shrugged good-naturedly. The Wendish captain led the way down a narrow flight of stairs to the root cellar. It was very cold down here.

Water dripped along the rough-hewn rock and made puddles for unwary boots.

Beside the cellar door a brazier glowed red with coals; a soldier thrust an iron rod in among the coals to heat it. In the dankest corner, lit only by a dim lantern, lay a savage so heavily chained, wrists to ankles, that he had been forced to lie in his own filth. He stank. Two soldiers grabbed him by the shoulders as Bayan entered the room and jerked him upright. He only stared at them with stubborn eyes dulled by pain. A weeping sore marked his cheek. When he saw Bayan, he spat at him, but he could make no fluid pass his lips.

"This is the one we captured when they raided here two days ago," said the captain. "We burned him with an iron rod, but he would only speak in his language, and none of us understood him."

Jovial Prince Bayan had vanished somewhere on those stairs. The man who stared down at the Quman prisoner frightened Hanna because of his merciless expression. He dispensed with his crude Wendish and spoke directly to Breschius, who translated. "Bring me a block of wood and an ax." When that was done, he had them unchain the prisoner's left hand and haul the man forward.

The prisoner had no weapons, of course, but he still wore his armor, which resembled nothing Hanna had ever seen before: small pieces of leather sewn together to make a hard coat of armor, and a leather belt studded with gold plackets formed in the shapes of horses and griffins. A small object swung from the belt, resting now on his bent legs, but she couldn't make it out. He wore a strange harness on his back, a contraption of wood and iron and, strangely enough, a few shredded feathers.

Hanna was beginning to feel sick to her stomach. Waves of stench accompanied the prisoner. He made no sound as the Wendish soldiers held his left hand, fingers splayed, against the block of wood. Prince Bayan drew his knife and with one sharp hack cut off the man's little finger.

A sound escaped the prisoner, a "gawh" of pain caught in as blood flowed.

Bayan addressed him in a language Harma-diChhot recognize, but the man merely spat again in answer. Bayan cut off the next finger, and the next, and then Hanna had to look away. She thought maybe she was going to vomit.

Bayan questioned the prisoner in a calm voice that did not betray in its tone the torment he was inflicting; she hung on to that voice, it was her lifeline. The man screamed.

She looked up to see him lolling back, handless now as blood pumped from the stump of his wrist. Thrown back as he was, she could see clearly the object that hung from his belt: black and wizened, headlike in shape with a dark mane of straw hanging from it, it had one side molded into the grotesque likeness of a face. Then the hot iron rod was brought forward to sear the wound, and as he screamed, she stared and stared at that ghastly little thing hanging from his belt so that she wouldn't have to watch his agony and after forever she realized that it was, in fact, a hideous little human head, all shrunken and nasty, with a glorious mane of stiff, black hair.

"I'm going to be sick," she muttered. Brother Breschius moved aside just in time and she threw up in the corner while, apparently oblivious to her, Prince Bayan got back to work on the right hand. He broke the fingers first, one by one, then cut off the little finger, then the next, then the middle finger; but the prisoner only grunted, stoic to the end.

Bayan finally cursed genial y and slit the man's throat, stepping back nimbly so that he wouldn't get any blood on him.

"Once sword hand crippled, he never speak because he have nothing to go back to in his tribe, because he no longer a man," he explained. He shrugged.

"So God wills. These Quman never talk anyway. Stubborn bastards." Then he laughed, an amazingly resonant and perverse sound in the stinking cellar. "That a good word, yes? Taught to me by Prince Sanglant. 'Stubborn-bastards. '"

He chuckled and wiped at his eyes. He did not even give the corpse a second glance. It meant as little to him as a dead dog lying at the side of a road.

"Come," he said to Hanna. "The snow woman must wash away this smell and be clean like the lily flower again, yes? We go to the feast."

They went to the feast, where Bay an entertained Lady Udal-freda and her noble companions with charming and somewhat indecent tales of his adventures as a very young man among the Sazdakh warrior women who, he claimed, could not count themselves as women or warriors until they had captured and bedded a young virgin and then cut off his penis as a trophy. Hanna couldn't touch a bite, although Brother Breschius kindly made sure that she drank a little wine to settle her stomach.

In a way, she was relieved when two scouts came in all dust-blown and wild-eyed with a report of a Quman army headed their way.

The Ungrian warriors slept, ate, and entertained in their armor. They were mounted and ready to ride so quickly that they made the good Wendish soldiers in Sapientia's train look like rank, newcomers, awkward and fumbling. Even the colorfully painted wagon of Bayan's mother rolled into line and waited there like a silent complaint long before Princess Sapientia finished arming, and mounted.

"Prince Bayan's mother will ride with us?" demanded Hanna Breschius nodded toward the wagon, his gaze alert. With its closed shutters and curtained door, it resembled a little house on wheels, and it would have looked rather quaint except for the clean white bones hanging from the eaves like charms, although they were, mercifully, not human but animal bones. At the peak of the roof a small wheel decorated with ribbons turned in the wind, fluttering red and yellow and white and blue as it spun. "The shamans of the Kerayit tribe do not carry their luck in their bodies as the rest of us do. Their luck is born into another person, someone born on the same day at the same time. It is said that Bayan's mother's luck was born into the child who later became Bayan's father, a prince of the Ungrian people, which is the only reason she agreed to marry him. But he died on the day Prince Bay an was born, so by their way of thinking her luck passed from father into son. That's why she must stay close by Prince Bayan, to watch over him." He smiled as if laughing at himself. "But she is in no real danger. Not even the Quman would harm a Kerayit princess, for they know what fate awaits the clan of he who touches a Kerayit shaman without her consent.

You will see. She is useful."

They rode out at last, and Hanna was grateful to leave the stone tower behind. The chill autumn air and the dense odor of grass and brittle scrub brush drove the last vestiges of that terrible stink out of her nostrils. But an image of the hideous shrunken head seemed to ride with her, burned into her mind's eye.

They forded the river, running low here after summer's heat and autumn drought. The cold water on her calves made her breath come in gasps. Sapientia rode just ahead of—hefTteside Bayan, and the princess laughed merrily as they came splashing up the shoreline, more like a noble lady riding to the hunt than to a battle. Behind, the oxen drawing the wagon forged stolidly into the water, led forward by two of the handsome male slaves. And it was very strange, and most certainly a trick of the light running over the water, because it seemed to Hanna that the river receded somewhat, that the waves made of themselves a slight depression around the wheels of the wagon so that no water lapped into the bed. Behind the wagon marched the Wendish infantry; without horses, they were soaked to the hips, joking and laughing at those among them who showed any sign of sensitivity to the cold.

Soon everyone had crossed, and their army—perhaps two hundred soldiers in all—made ready to move on. Hills rose from the valley floor about half a league north of them. They turned east to follow the river. Clouds moved in from the east as the wind picked up. The Wendish soldiers began singing a robust hymn.

A sudden shrilling call rang down the line and, with it, that tensing of line and body that presages battle. The Ungrians shifted position, flanks spreading out, Bayan moving to take up the center as he called out orders to his men in his strong baritone. About half the Ungrian riders broke off from the main group and swung away into the hills. The Wendish infantry fell back to form a square on a rise.

A strange whirring sound grew in the air, building in strength. It seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere at once: eerie, troubling, like the sensation of a spider crawling up one's back. Hanna's horse shifted restlessly under her; she reined it hard back to its place beside Brother Breschius where they waited behind Sapientia and Bayan, and leveled her spear. Bayan's solders began to keen, like a sick wolf's howl, but even that noise was better than the awful disembodied whirring. She squinted eastward, trying to make out the source.

Clouds darkened the eastern horizon. In the distance, a rumble of thunder rolled away into the hills. Even above the dust kicked up by the army, she could smell rain.

Abruptly Prince Bayan turned around, saw her and Breschius, and snapped an order at them. Sapientia objected. Husband and wife exchanged perhaps four tense sentences, Sapientia all white fire and Bayan utterly focused and without any patience.

Abruptly, Sapientia gave in. She turned. "Go!" she called to Hanna. "You and the frater. Go, and observe all that occurs!"

Riders made way for them as they rode back through the line.

"What is that awful sound?" cried Hanna above the din of thrumming and howling.

Breschius smiled but did not reply as the outer line of foot soldiers parted to let them through into the center of the infantry square. Here, beside the painted wagon, Hanna turned her horse just as the Wendish soldiers let out a great shout of alarm and surprise, which the Ungrians answered with a howl of glee as they charged.

She saw the Quman, then, beyond the Ungrian line, advancing along the river plain with dark clouds scudding in their wake. They weren't human after all.

They didn't have faces, and they had wings. Feathers streamed and pulsed, shuddering in the air, flickering shadow and light in the huge wings that curved forward over their heads. Beneath helmets, their flat, metal faces shone with dull menace as the westering sun broke through the cloud cover and lit the Wendish and Ungrian army with a mellow glow. The Quman warriors made no sound except for the spinning and singing of their wings as they rode.

The Ungrians charged, all disorganized in uneven lines like a pack of starving dogs gone mad at the sight of fresh meat. Their shrieks and whoops almost drowned out the thunder of hooves and the whir of wings. Even from a distance Hanna had no trouble seeing Sapientia waiting impatiently beneath her banner. The princess began to move out after the Ungrians, but Bayan stopped her by resting the length of his spear across her chest as he waited and watched his own men ride rashly and without order at the enemy.

"They'll be picked apart!" cried Hanna, suddenly wondering what would become of the Wendish after their allies foolishly threw away their strength in this manner. Breschius smiled with the calm of a man who has long since made peace with God and no longer fears death.

A curtain made of beads rustled as an ancient, yellowing hand pressed a few strands aside, peering out. Hanna glanced there, surprised, but she saw only deeper shadow within. She heard a hiss, soft words in an alien language, and then a single puff of white was blown out from between two strands of limbeF

>eads. A feather of goose down drifted lazily to earth.

"Ho, there!" cried one of the infantrymen. "They come!"

The Quman charged in good order toward the attacking Ungrians, closing the gap.

The mad Ungrians suddenly wheeled around and shot so many arrows into the Quman ranks that the whistle of arrow flight hummed in tandem with the whirring wings. The eastern sky darkened with rain as the Ungrians fled back toward the Wendish line all in disorder, some lagging, some way out in front.

The entire center around Bayan swayed, shifted, and began to disintegrate.

Bayan cried out something unintelligible from this distance as the Wendish line, too, fell back, retreating toward the infantry square. Only Sapientia tried to pull her cohort forward, shouting to her men, trying to rally them.

Again, Bayan intervened ruthlessly by placing his spear between her and her sword, and suddenly the entire center collapsed and all of them fled back in a complete rout.

Beside Hanna, Breschius grunted.

Hanna stared in horror at the debacle. She couldn't speak. On the plain behind the Quman army, rain pounded the ground to mud, and yet where she stood, where Bayan's soldiers fled in disorder, the sun still shone and it was dry.

The plain ran with movement like ants whose nest has been trampled. An Ungrian soldier, lagging behind, went down with an arrow in his back, and his body vanished beneath a score of hooves and whistling, winged riders.

At that moment, she knew she was going to die. The knowledge burst within her like a flower opening, a transforming beauty imbued with the fleeting perfume of mortality and the revelation of God's eternal presence.

The strong Quman line began to dissolve as some of the young warriors couldn't contain their impatience and broke forward. As they split away from the rest, she saw them clearly for the first time: not winged creatures at all but only men wearing wings strapped to their back in imitation of birds. Even the flat, metal faces were only part of their helmets.

And then, of course, the Ungrian flank that had ridden away into the hills thundered in to hit the Quman flank, which was now all strung out in pursuit of the retreating banners. A shrill hooting cry rang out along the retreating Ungrian line and as tautly as if they were all pulled by the same string, they wheeled around again and in almost perfect formation charged back at the Quman center.

"Haililili!" cried Hanna exultantly, in echo of her mistress. She watched as Sapientia's banner followed and then caught up to Bayan's, as together prince and princess plunged into the fighting. Caught between two hammers, the Quman didn't have a chance. Those who finally broke and tried to flee got caught in the soggy ground farther east along the river plain.

Bayan withdrew from the melee back to his mother's wagon and, from that vantage, he surveyed the scene with a frown, not troubled, merely measuring.

He did not seem to notice Hanna, but he called Brother Breschius to attend him.

At intervals one or two of his men would ride up and speak to him, or hand him a scrap of cloth, or a knife, or a broken feather, or, once, a trampled face mask broken off from a helmet. Each item he examined with care and then he would resume watching as the Wendish and Ungrian armies set upon their enemy.

They killed until it was too dark to see.

At last, lanterns were brought from camp. Sapientia emerged from the slaughter with her face bright with excitement and her sword dripping blood. A lantern hung from her banner pole, lighting the banner that now rippled in a wind blowing from the west.

"Haililili!" she crowed, saluting her husband. "A victory! We have brought them to battle and defeated them soundly!"

Bayan lifted his own sword in answer. It, too, was stained with drying blood. "I have killed my man!" he cried. "Now, I bed my woman!"

Sapientia laughed ecstatically. She had a kind of thrumming energy about her, like the charge in the air just after lightning strikes. Indeed, as the entire army gathered around the lantern-lit rise, Hanna felt the tension rising within them, more dangerous, perhaps, than that which had come before the battle.

With banners flying ahead and torches surrounding them, Bayan and Sapientia moved down through the army and back toward camp. Hanna made to follow them, but Breschius stopped her.

"Touch the wagon," he said sternly. "Do so!"

Hesitantly, she touched the corner of the wagon. It felt like plain wood to her, nothing magicked about it. A moment later, it jolted forward, following Bayan, and she obediently followed in its wake with Breschius beside her. The armyT de n formation alongside, and she felt now that many of the men in the Ungrian army watched her, stared at her, ogled her. The Wendish soldiers no doubt did so as well, but to them she was a King's Eagle. They knew her oaths, and they understood that she had the king's protection: "You are safe beside the wagon," said Breschius. "When we return to camp, you must stay close to me."

"What do you think might happen?"

He shrugged.

But her mother hadn't raised a fool. Her heart had stopped pounding so hard, and she could think more clearly. "That wasn't really a battle," she said finally. "It was more like slaughtering pigs there at the end."

"That wasn't an army. I have seen a Quman army and it is a fearsome sight, my child. That was a raiding party. Those were young, restless men sent out in advance of a real army to gather glory to themselves, or act as a warning flag to those behind them if they do not return. You saw how they fought. They were foolish enough that they couldn't see before their noses a trick as old as these hills. I think it likely they had no older, wiser head who could prevail when they got the killing fever in them."

"The way Prince Bayan intervened to stop Princess Sapien-tia from getting herself killed."

He glanced at her, but she couldn't read his expression in the dim light. A lit lantern had been hung from each corner of the wagon, and these lanterns swayed seductively as their party splashed back over the river and climbed the opposite shore. Oddly, the river ran more shallow now; Hanna's boots barely brushed the water on this crossing. Ahead, in the torchlit camp, she could already hear singing, cursing, and half-wild laughter. Around her, men drank heavily from the leather pouches tied to their saddles, some kind of potent brew.

Its fermented scent permeated the air as they cried out and howled to each other, sang snatches of song, or danced in lines to the twanging accompaniment of odd-looking lutes. They were overexcited, flushed with easy killing, and ready to get into trouble.

"My grandmother once told me that to kill is only half the act," she said finally.

"A wise woman, your grandmother," replied Breschius. "What did she say is the other half of the act?"

She smiled nervously under the cover of night. "Ah, well. My grandmother still worshiped the old gods. She said that if you take blood, you owe blood, but that most people forget the old law when they kill in war or in anger. But then that blood still stains their hands and curdles in their hearts."

"Indeed. When you sunder spirit from body, there is energy left over. If it is not contained by means of prayer or forgiveness or even an act of creation or a gift of commencement, then the Enemy may creep into the heart of the one who did the killing. That is why many terrible acts accompany war, and why those who have partaken in battle should always be cleansed by prayer afterward."

"Will you lead a prayer here, tonight?"

"For those who choose to attend. But, alas, my master and most of the others still live in their bodies in the old ways, even while with their tongues they praise God in Unity. Prince Bayan will consumate his marriage and in this way cleanse himself, although the church does not approve of such ancient methods.

But do not stray far from Princess Sapientia's tent tonight. Her presence in camp may not be enough to protect you from any insult offered your person by one of these young men who are drunk on both wine and blood."

"I will be cautious," she promised. They came then to the royal pavilion.

Bayan and Sapientia still stood outside, toasting their followers, but it quickly became apparent that Bayan had only waited for his mother. Her wagon rolled to a stop about twenty paces from the pavilion, and at once he deserted his guests to go to the wagon. He waited, head bowed, as four steps were unrolled from the tiny door. The three old, wrinkled handmaidens who attended the Kerayit princess clambered down the steps, carrying with them the usual trays and leavings of food and a covered chamberpot. Then an astoundingly beautiful young woman emerged through the bead curtain, which shimmered and danced behind her as she descended the steps. She had creamy skin a shade darker than Liath's, sensuous lips, broad cheekbones, bold eyes, and hair like black silk.

Her gown might have been spun of sunlight. She wore laced at her waist at least a dozen gold chains, and a profusion of gold necklaces draped from her neck. A gold ring pierced one nostril, and she wore three gold earrings in each ear, shaped as dangling bones. Every finger bore a ring, each one studded with precious gems.

"Who is that?" Hanna whispered, amazed. In the days since the wedding feast, she had never seen nor even suspected the existence of this woman. She had only ever seerrthe^three old handmaidens come and go from the wagon.

"I do not know her name," said Breschius softly. "She, too, is a princess of the first degree among the Kerayit peoples. She is the apprentice to the old woman. She hasn't found her luck yet, which is why she can still appear before people who are not her blood kin."

Prince Bayan climbed the stairs and ducked into the wagon. Sapientia tried to follow him, but the young Kerayit woman set an arm across the threshold. For an instant, Sapientia began to protest, but the other woman simply stared her down, not threatening, just flatly negating, and at last Sapientia made a show of deciding to step back to the pavilion to wait. The Kerayit princess watched her go under heavy-lidded eyes, like a modest woman watching her beloved.

Ai, Lady. There was something about her...something familiar in the way Liath had always seemed familiar to Hanna, some kind of inchoate power she could not name but which Liath had held like a captive eagle inside her, waiting only to be freed—

Breschius hissed as the Kerayit woman swept her gaze over the assembly.

He began to tremble. Hanna could feel his apprehension, he who had stood straight at the battle without a trace of fear. Every soul there, even to the drunkest, rowdiest young soldier, quieted in deference to her measuring eye; she possessed the imperious indifference of the sun, which never questions its own brilliance because it simply is.

In the silence, Hanna thought for an instant that she could hear the murmuring of Bayan's voice and, in reply, the cricket-like whisper of another person. Then she met the gaze of the young princess, and the woman's beautiful almond eyes widened in surprise as she stared at Hanna. Fair hair, pale eyes; Hanna knew how different she looked out here on the frontier. Few of the Wendish soldiers were as startlingly light as she was and, anyway, they were even more dust-covered from battle.

Prince Bayan shook the beaded curtain aside and clumped down the stairs, laughing. "Now! To the bed!" he cried, and everyone cheered, and when next Hanna could look past the people who suddenly swirled around her, the young Kerayit woman had vanished. The steps into the wagon had been drawn up.

"Eagle! Hanna!"

She had to go. She attended Sapientia to her bed, waited with the others until the covers were drawn back. As Eagle, she had to witness that husband and wife were put properly to bed together. Then, with the others, she discreetly withdrew.

She had a blanket, and it seemed more prudent to her not to step away from the awning that night. It was hard to sleep because it was so noisy, laughter and grunting and pleased exclamations from the tent within, singing, drumming, shouting, and, once, a scream of terror from the camp without.

Breschius also had a blanket, and he snored amiably beside her, all rolled up and comfortable on the old carpet laid out beneath the awning. A few other servants slept peaceably as well over to one side.

She was cold and restless. She was waiting, but she didn't know for what.

At last, she dozed off.

And she had the strangest dream.

All the clouds have blown east vard to harass the Quman, to bleed away the trail left by their young brothers who rode out to find the enemy but never returned. The stars stand so brilliantly in the heavens that they shine each one like a blazing spark of light, the souls of fiery daimones who exist far beyond the homely world of humankind. Stars have never shone as brightly as these, as if they have somehow bowed the great dome of the heavens inward by the force of their will, because they are seeking something lost to them, fallen far far below onto the hard cold earth.

At night, the wagon of the Kerayit shaman blazes with reflected light from the stars, and only now does the magic shimmer in its walls: marks and sigils, spirals and cones, an elaborate tree whose roots reach far below the earth and whose branches seem to grow out of the oof

r

itself and reach toward the sky. A

glimmering pole more light than substance thrusts heavenward from the smoke hole at the center of the wagon: seven notches have been carved into its branchless trunk, and the top of the pole seems to meld with the North Star around which the heavens revolve.

Beads clack and rustle as the steps unroll from the wagon's bed. The young princess steps out, and she beckons to Hanna. Come to me.

Hanna sheds her blanket and goes. The lintel of the tiny door brushes her head as she ducks inside. But inside is not as outside. The wagon is tiny, and yet inside she seems to be in a pavilion fully as large as that in which Bayan aruLSapientia now sleep. The walls ripple as if stroked by wind; there are-two elaborate box beds, a low table, and beau itfully embroidered pillows on which to sit. A green-and-gold bird stirs in its cage, eyeing her. She sits on a pillow, and one of the ancient handmaidens brings her a cup of hot liquid whose spicy scent stings her nostrils.

"Drink," speaks a cricket voice, and then Hanna sees Bayan's mother sitting veiled in the shadows, the suggestion of a face visible behind translucent silk. A tapestry hangs on the tent wall at her back: the image of a woman standing on earth and reaching toward the heavens where hangs a palace that magically glides in the aether: from the woman's navel stretches a cord which attaches to a tree in the courtyard of the floating palace: an eagle flies between, and two coiled dragons observe through slitted eyes. "What comes from earth, returns to earth," says the old woman as Hanna obediently d in r ks. "What have you brought

me, sister's daughter? She is not my kin."

Gold flashes, and the young princess steps forward. "I have found it at last," she says. "My luck was bom into this woman."

"Ah," says the old woman, the exclamation like the rasping of crickets.

There is another noise from outside, a keening moan that sends shudders down Hanna 's back, and Hanna thinks that probably they aren't in camp anymore, they have gone somewhere far away where dangerous creatures stalk the night grass because it is in the nature of dreams that one may travel quickly a long distance without moving.

"Ah, " repeats the old woman. "She will come with us, then."

"No. She will not come wi h

t me yet. She must find the man who will

become my pura, and then she will return to me, with him."

The young princess turns to look at Hanna, and Hanna thinks maybe she can see through the dark irises of those beautiful almond eyes all the way back to the land where the Kerayits live and roam, among grass so tall that a man on horseback can't see over it, where griffins stalk the unwary and dragons guard the borders of a vast and terrible desert strewn with grains of gold and silver.

There waits a woman in that place, not a true woman but a creature who is woman from the waist up and from the waist below has the body and elegant strength of a mare. She is a shaman of great power and immense age, with her face painted in stripes of green and gold and an owl perched on her wrist. She draws her bow and looses an arrow spun of starlight. Its path arcs impossibly through the North Sta , and wit

r

h a high chime it pierces the heart of the young

princess, who gasps and falls to her knees, a hand clasped to her breast.

Hanna leaps up at once to aid her, but as soon as she touches the young woman, she feels the sting of the arrow in her own breast, as though a wasp has been trapped inside her. It hurts,She woke up suddenly as a hand touched her, brushing her breast. She sat up fast, and hit heads with the man who bent over her. Then her eyes adjusted to the graying light that presages dawn.

"Your Highness!" she exclaimed, scooting backward as quickly as she could.

Prince Bayan smiled charmingly as he rubbed his forehead. He wore his rumpled trousers, but nothing else, revealing much of his strong, attractive body.

She smelled wine on his breath. "Pretty snow maiden," he said winningly, without threat.

"Bayan!" Sapientia appeared at the entrance to the pavilion, clad only in a shift.

"She is awake!" cried Bayan enthusiastically. He staggered back inside and, after an annoyed glance at Hanna, Sapientia followed him.

Several of the servingwomen had woken and now hastened in to assist their mistress. They came out moments later, giggling, carrying the chamber pot, and Hanna felt it prudent to go with them down to the river. They washed among the rocks, finding safety in numbers, but in any case with the morning the carousing had died down, and about half of the soldiers seemed to be sleeping it off in a stupor while the other half had returned to the battlefield.

When they returned to the tent, Brother Breschius asked Hanna to accompany him, and she did so reluctantly, only because she liked the old priest. In the hard glare of morning, the battleground was an ugly sight: vultures and scavengers had to be driven away, and the bodies were beginning to smell. More and more soldiers arrived to loot the enemy, but Hanna couldn't bear to touch them even when she saw a good iron knife stuck in the belt of one dead man. He, like the others, wore slung at his belt one of those ghastly tiny human heads.

A buried detail was organized. Wendish soldiers dug mass graves, stripped the bodies, and rolled them rrr~a§ Brother Breschius blessed each dead soul.

But what the Ungrians did to their own honored dead was hardly less awful than the disregard with which they looted the enemy. Every corpse of their own kin was mutilated before being buried: a finger cut off, a tooth pried out of the jaw, and a hank of hair hacked off. These treasures were carefully wrapped up and given to certain soldiers, who carried them away together with the salvaged armor and weapons.

"Why do they do that?" Hanna asked finally as she and Breschius returned to camp. "Aren't they given a proper burial and laid to rest as is fitting?"

"Oh, yes, as you saw. But they also believe that some portion of the spirit resides after death in the body, and each year at midwinter they burn the remains of their relatives in a bonfire. They believe that in this way the spirits of all those who died in the previous year are sealed away into the otherworld so that they can't come back and cause mischief in this world."

"But don't they believe that their souls ascend to the Chamber of Light?

How can they worship God if they don't believe j that?"

Breschius laughed kindly. "God are tolerant, my child. So should we be.

This is all Their creation. We are sent to this earth to learn about our own hearts, not to judge those of others."

"You aren't like most of the fraters I've ever met." Then she flushed, thinking of Hugh. Beautiful Hugh.

Breschius chuckled, and she had a sudden feeling that he could read her heart well enough but was too humble a soul to judge her for what she knew was a foolish and sinful yearning. "Because we are none of us the same, we must each learn something different in our time on this world."

"I had such a strange dream," she said, to change the subject. "I dreamed I went inside the wagon of Prince Bayan's mother, and that the young princess said that her luck had been born into my body."

He stopped dead and his face blanched.

She felt suddenly as if a butterfly fluttered in her throat, cap- j live, never to be free again.

"But it was only a dream. It had to be a dream. I could understand what they were saying."

"Do not discount their power," he said hoarsely. "Do not speak of it again, ever. They will know."

"How can they know? What if I'm a thousand leagues away from them?"

He shook his head stubbornly. Such a change had come over him, he had become so tense and troubled, that she, too, felt frightened. "Will you answer one question, then? What is a pura?"

He flushed. Sweat broke on his neck and forehead although it wasn't warm. The camp swarmed with movement in front of them; behind, the river murmured over smooth rocks in the shallows and on the far bank a line of soldiers reached the ford and set out across.

"A pura," he said in a hoarse voice, "is a word in the Ker-ayit tongue for a horse."

"Then why would the Kerayit princess say in my dream that I would find the man who would become her pura?"

He shut his eyes as though to shut out—or to see more clearly—some dim and ancient memory. "A horse can be ridden. It can carry burdens. If it is male, it can be bred to mares. Its blood, drunk hot from a vein, can strengthen you. A fine, strong, elegant horse can be a source of pride and amusement to his owner. A pura means also a young and handsome man who serves any young Kerayit princess who has been called to become a shaman. The shaman women of the Kerayit tribe live in utter seclusion. Once they have touched their luck, they may never be seen in front of any person who is not their own kin, or who is not a slave, whom they do not count as people. Shamans do not marry, as do their sisters. Prince Bayan's mother did so only because—well, I have spoken of that before. You do not take your luck as your pura. A pura is not a real person, but only a slave."

"Then why do these women take a pura at all?"

He had recovered enough to look at her with amusement lighting his eyes.

"You have sworn oaths as an Eagle, my child. But do you never look at young men with desire stirring in your heart? Even Prince Bayan's mother was young once. A Kerayit woman chosen by their gods to become shaman is young, and her path is a difficult one. Not all survive it. Who would not want a horse on such a long road?"

His flush had subsided, and for the first time she really looked at him as a woman looks at a man. The ghost of his younger self still lived in his lineaments.

Once he had been a young and handsome man, a bold frater walking east to convert the heathens. It was easy to imagine a Kerayit princess taking a fancy to such an exotic young man.

"And are puras set free," she asked, "once their mistress no longer needs them?"

"Nay," he said softly. "No shaman willingly gives up her pura."

Had she misunderstood? "I beg your pardon, Brother. I thought by your words and expression that perhaps you had once been— Now she was too embarrassed to go on. "I did not mean to wrong you. I can see you serve God faithfully."

"You have not wronged me, Daughter." He touched her fleet-ingly on the elbow. "She did not willingly give me up. She died. I was blamed for it because I was teaching her the magic of writing. It was her aunt, a queen of her people, who cut off my hand. Later, Prince Bayan came to hear of my captivity because that queen was his wife's aunt's cousin, and he asked for me as a present. That is how I came into his service. God forgave me for my disobedience, for the truth is I loved Sorgatani freely and would have remained in her service for the rest of my life. But it was not to be." He smiled wryly, without anger. "So now I serve God's agent, who is Prince Bayan, whatever his other faults. Do not think ill of him, child. He has a good heart."

Hanna laughed, at first, because she hadn't been scared or felt at all in danger in the predawn chill when Bayan had accosted her. But then she sobered.

Liath had suffered terribly, pursued by Hugh. Hanna did not relish spending her nights fending off the attentions of a prince far more powerful than she would ever be, and especially not when she remained so very far from the king who was her only protection. Prince Bayan wouldn't be blamed for the seduction of an Eagle; she would be, and lose her position in the bargain. And she wanted to remain an Eagle. Maybe that, more than anything, made it hard for her to understand Liath's choice. How could Liath walk away from the life offered those who swore the Eagle's oath to their regnant? Hanna could no longer imagine being anything other than an Eagle. It was as if she had been one person before Wolfhere arrived in Heart's Rest that fateful date and another person after, as if she had simply been waiting her whole life up until then for him to offer her an Eagle's badge and cloak.

"I'm an Eagle," she said out loud. "And I want to remain one. Advise me, Brother. Will it happen again?"

He could only frown. "I don't know."

Bayan and Sapientia emerged just before midday looking well satisfied.

Brother Breschius led a prayer service for the living and a mass for the dead. A war council was called, and the disposition of forces discussed, what signs seen where of activity beyond the border, where the Quman had last attacked, and how big a force might be lurking, waiting for opportunity. The sentries reported that they had killed half a dozen lurking Quman warriors in the night. Lady Udalfreda confided that at least ten hamlets out beyond her town of Festberg had been burned and refugees fled to the safety of her walls. Other Wendish lords and captains gave similar reports, and the Ungrians had other news as well, tribes driven southwest by drought or fighting, raids along the border with the Arethousan Empire, certain portents seen in the midwinter sacrifice that presaged disaster.

Sapientia called Hanna forward. "There has been much rumor of a large force of Quman moving in these marchlands, and now we have confirmation that it is so. But we do not have the forces to withstand an invasion, should it come.

You, my faithful Eagle, must return to my father, King Henry, and report our situation. I beg him to send troops to strengthen the frontier, or else it is likely we will be overwhelmed."

Prince Bayan watched Sapientia proudly, as any praeceptor regards with pride his pupil as she makes her first steps by herself. But he also glanced now and again at Hanna, and once he winked.

"Eagle, I would speak in your ears a private message." Hanna had to lean forward to hear the princess, who dropped her voice to a murmur. "I like you, Hanna. You have served me faithfully and well. But I remember what happened with that witch who seduced Father Hugh. You knew her, and maybe she made some of her glamour rub off on you, even though I'm sure you would never try such witcheries yourself. You must go. When you return, my husband will have forgotten all about this morning."

Yet Hanna wasn't so sure.

The truth was, she wasn't sorry to be going. Yes, he was an attractive man, charming and good-hearted. No doubt he was a pleasant companion in bed. But she would never forget the cold, casual way in which he had tortured that Quman prisoner and then, afterward, casually mentioned that IreM-knpwn all along that the man wouldn't tell them anything. What was the point, then, except that he hated the Quman? He was getting his revenge for the death of his son, one man at a time.

At dawn the next day she took her leave of the princess and said farewell to Brother Breschius, who blessed her and said a prayer for a good journey on her behalf. She hesitated beside the Kerayit wagon, but she had seen no sign of the shaman and her young apprentice since the night of the battle. Even now, the door remained closed. Did the bead curtains sway, parting slightly so someone inside could look out? Maybe they did. She raised a hand in greeting, and farewell, just in case.

Then she rode west, with the rising sun at her back. It was a good day to be riding, crisp, clear, and pleasantly chill. As she left the camp behind, she began to sing, and her escort joined in with her in good harmony.

"/ will lift up my eyes to see the hills, for Their help shall come to me from that place. Help comes from the Lord and the Lady They who made Heaven and Earth. The Lord shall preserve us from all evil. The Lady shall preserve our souls."

But she couldn't help thinking of the Kerayit princess. Had it been a dream?

The wasp sting burned in her heart.

IN the evening, Alain left the chapel in the pause between Vespers and Compline to walk through the silence until he reached the great hall. Sorrow and Rage padded after him. At the other end of the hall, two servants swept rushes out the door. They jabbed their brooms at the ground outside, shaking off straw, and because they had their backs to the hall they did not see! him but spoke together in low voices as they shut the doors behind them on the bitter gloom of an autumn twilight.

Some light was left him, as little as the hope left him. The hall had been set in order, tables and benches lined up neatly, but nevertheless he banged his shins on a bench and bruised his hip on the corner of a table before he stumbled on the first step of the small dais behind the high table. He hit his knee on the second step and cursed under his breath. Sorrow whined. He groped, found one leg of the count's chair, and hauled himselfj up, then just stood there feeling the solid square corners under his hands, the scrollwork along the back, the arms carved like the massive smooth backs of hounds, each ending in a snarling face.

Not even rats stirred in the hall. He heard the whisper Compline, muted by distance, stone walls, and the ripening comprehension of the Lavas clerics.

This morning, for the first time, Lavastine had not been able to be sat up in his bed. His body was now too heavy to move. Prayers and physic, all to no avail.

For the first time, Alain sat in the count's chair.

The hall lay shrouded by twilight, but it was easier to test this seat in private, without the stares and bows, the expectations and petitions, that would greet him later when everyone assembled to see him take the seat of power.

This way he could get used to it slowly—if he could ever get used to it.

He started up guiltily out of the chair as a procession entered the hall: Tallia with several attendants. They lit her by torchlight so she could cross to his side unmolested by benches and table corners.

"You didn't stay for Compline." She had certain secretive habits left over from her childhood, and now, touching the count's chair, she leaned closer to him in the manner of a thief planning mischief with an accomplice. "I prayed for this...for God to strike him dead as an unbeliever. You see, don't you, that it is best this way? God answered my prayers in this way because She wishes me to build a chapel in Her honor." She faltered, pressed a hand over his as if to seal his approval.

Alain could only stare. Behind, a servingman hurried into the hall.

"My lord Alain!" The servant was weeping. "He's very bad, my lord. You must come quickly."

Alain left Tallia to the ministrations of her fluttering attendants. He took the steps two at a time. A servant held the door open as he strode into the chamber where Lavastine lay in his curtained bed as still as stone. Fear kept watch at his bedside.

Alain knelt at his side and took hold of one of the count's hands: it had the grain of pale granite. It stirred only because Alain lifted it. Lavastine's eyes moved; his lips parted. That he still breathed Alain knew because he still lived: His chest gave no telltale rise and fall, God's breath lifting and descending to feed his soul.

A musky odor permeated the room, fleeting, gone. He looked up to see Sorrow, Rage, and Fear cluster around Terror, who lay at the foot of Lavastine's bed.

Lavastine murmured words. His voice was almost inaudible, a thin wheeze, but Alain had spent many hours beside him these past fifteen days, and he could still understand his few, labored words. "Most faithful."

It struck Alain as sharply as any blow had ever shuddered his shield in battle: Terror was dead, had died in the last hour, passed beyond mortal existence. That was why the others sniffed at him, seeking the smell of their father-cousin and not finding it. His spirit had fled. Ai, God! Lavastine's would soon follow.

He pressed a hand to the count's throat, but there was no warmth, no pulse.

"Alain." By some astounding force of will he still lived, although he was by now completely paralyzed. "Heir."

"Father. I'm here." It tore his heart in two to watch Lavas-tine's suffering, although in truth it wasn't clear he was in any pain. His brow remained as unlined as ever, even as it took on that grainy, stonelike cast, as if he were transmuting into an effigy carved from rock.

But Lavastine was nothing if not stubborn, and determined. Had he had more expression left him, he would have frowned. One eyebrow twitched. His lips quirked ever so slightly. "Must. Have. Heir."

From the chapel in the room below, the clerics began to sing a hymn from the Holy Verses: "A remnant restored in an age of peace."

"On that day, say God, We will destroy all your horses among you and break apart all your chariots. We will raze h

t e cities of your land and tear down

your fortresses. We will ruin all your sorcere s, and no more augeres shall walk r

among you to part the veil that allows them to see into the future. We will throw down al the works made by your own hands. In anger and fury will We take vengeance on al nations who disobey Us."

Alain was weeping, He could not bear to let Lavastine go in hopelessness.

"She's pregnant," he whispered, too softly for anyone else to hear. Hearing himself speak, he said it again more boldly. "Tallia is pregnant."

Was that a stirring in Lavastine's face, the breath of an expression across skin made marble by poison? Was that a swallow at his throat, a spark of joy in his eye? A smile on his lips?

Surely God would forgive Alain the lie. He only meant it to make his father happy, in his last hour.

"We're to have a child, Father," he continued. It got easier as each word slipped out. "There will be an heir, just as you decreed."

"Children of Sais, you shall shepherd you

r foes with the sword, the sacred

pillars shall be raised from their ruins, and all who hate you shall be destroyed."

A breath escaped Lavastine, a last shaping of words. "Done. Well. My.

Son." As Alain watched, his eyes began to glaze over, a stippling, granules speckling the white of his eye as his iris turned to sapphire. After the long struggle, it was all going so quickly now, but perhaps his soul had been tethered to faithful Terror, and with Terror gone, he sped, too, on the final journey.

Perhaps he had only waited for news of this.

Silence reigned.

Alain wept bitterly. His tears soaked the coverlet and ran like rain off stone down Lavastine's arm. The hounds growled softly but did not interfere as several servingmen came forward, and the steward pressed a finger against the count's cold lips.

"God have mercy," the steward said softly. "He is gone."

Alain leaped up and grabbed a candle, held it before Lavas-tine's lips. The flame stirred, the merest flicker.

"He still lives!" he cried. A servant took the candle from him gently. He flung himself down beside the bed, still weeping, still gripping the cold hand, and prayed with all his heart in it and his own hands wet with tears. "I pray You, God. Spare my father's life. Heal him, and I will serve You."

"My lord Alain. Come away. He is beyond us now. He has gone to our Lord and Lady."

"The flame moved. He stil breathes."

"That was your own breath, my lord. He is gone."

He shook off the hand impatiently, and Sorrow growled, echoing his mood.

The servants moved back as he bent to pray. Surely God had power to heal any poison, any injury. This was only a trifle, compared to Their power. "I will do as Tallia wishes, or as You wish. I will swear my life to the church, forever, gladly, if only You heal my father. Lady. If only You give my father back his strength and his life, Lord. I will sire many strong children if that is Your will, or remain celibate, if You so choose, but please, I beg you, God, heal him. Don't let your loyal servant die. Give me a sign."

The tapestry on the wall rippled lightly as though a wind had stirred it, except the shutters were closed up against wintertide. It shuddered again as if a hand shook it and, shaking, shook him. His vision had gone all tight until he could only see the scene depicted in the tapestry: A prince rides with his retinue through a dark forest. A shield hangs from the prince's saddle: a red rose against a sable background.

And there: hidden in the shadows of h

t e tapestry. Why hadn't he seen

them befo e

r ? Black hounds trailed alongside, a trio of them, dark and handsome.

He could hear their footsteps padding on the earth, could hear the creak of harness and the steady clop of horses' hooves. Wind made the branches dance, and because it had just rained, they were showered with drops from the leaves like the tears of watery daimones. He rode among the servants, innocent, invisible because he was one among many. He felt protected by the darkness and the shadows, by the wall of forest that towered on either side of the road. It made him bold, and he pressed his horse forward. As he came up beside the prince, he saw with a shock that it was no prince at all but a woman dressed as a man, as if in disguise. She was older than he had first guessed, with a cold, stubborn expression. The brooch that pinned her cloak shut was a fine jeweled replica of the red rose painted on the shield hanging at her thigh. What noble house bore the red rose as its sigil? She turned, unsurprised o t see him ride up

beside her, and said: "How fares the child?"

But there is torchlight coming up beside him, blinding him for a moment, and he no longer rides along the forest path but instead rocks in the breeze that is not a breeze but rather the timber of a ship beneath his feet, swaying gently on the water. Headland blots out the stars along the eastern horizon. Along the dark shore torches bob, massing, darting forward. He hears the schiiing of metal ringing against metal as a skirmish spreads up the twilit vale toward the great house built two generations ago by the famous chieftain Bloodyax of the Namms tribe.

Another war leader has arrived at Namms Dale before him.

A small boat ties up alongside his ship, and a scout—Ninth Son of the Twelfth Litter—scrambles on board to give his re

port. "It is Moerin 's tribe, nineteen ships, come to settle an old feud against the Nammsfolk. "

"Moerin's chieftain is old Bittertongue, is he not?" asks Stronghand, still staring at the unfolding battle made bright by the last gleam of the sun on trusting spears and the flowering of torches all along the path of the fighting.

"Nay, old Bittertongue died in a raid last spring. There is a new chief who has taken advisers from the island known to the Soft Ones as Alba. He has named himself Nokvi in the style of the humanfolk."

"Look!" Tenth Son of the Fifth Litter stands at Stronghand's side, one of his standard bearers by reason of his sharp eyes and unusual strength. He raises an arm and points up into the darkening vale. "Where the great house stands. Look there."

Flame flowers into life as bold as fire can be when let loose. Stronghand sets a foot up on the lip of the uppermost plank and leans out, staring into the twilight as the great house goes up in a towering blaze of fire. To c r hes ring the

burning hall. He smells oil, quick to flame. "Listen!" says Stronghand, and all the men within sound of his voice quiet and listen.

Nokvi, chieftain of the Moerin tribe, has trapped Namms' war leader and his fighting men inside the hall, coated the hall with oil, and set it alight, burning them alive. Not even the tough hides of the RockChildren can withstand such an inferno.

"Do we attack?" asks Tenth Son.

"With eight ships?" Stronghand cuts down sharply with his left hand, to signify "no." "I came to make an alliance with the Nammsfolk, not tofight them.

We must learn more of this 'Nokvi' before we fight him Winter is

.

coming on, and

soon no ships will sail. But there are other ways to gather our forces even against a leader who has allied with the humans of Alba."

He hates to turn away without that alliance he came for. It smacks of cowardice. But he is not a fool. He is not blinded by the lust for glory. He seeks something harder, and colder, and longer lasting than the brief if brilliant fla e of r

battle glory.

He lifts the warhorn to his lips and blows the retreat.

The sound brought Alain sharply back to himself, a mewling that seemed remotely familiar and yet utterly strange. "My lord count!" Alain bolted up to lean over Lavastine, but the count might as well have been a stone statue. He didn't move. He didn't breathe.

He was dead.

A weight nudged against Alain's leg and abruptly he remembered the chamber he stood in, and he realized that Sorrow, Rage, and Fear had collapsed to the ground and lay beside Lavastine's deathbed like helpless pups, whimpering. It took him a moment longer to register the waiting attendants, who all stared nervously at the hounds, awaiting their reaction. The steward who had just spoken had not been addressing Lavastine.

"My lord count. Come away. There's nothing you can do."

The words struck like the tol ing of a bell. But it was the bell, which had begun to ring at the old church, tolling the dead soul up through the seven spheres to the Chamber of Light. He stood, although his legs did not really feel like his own legs.

There was nothing he could do. He rested a hand on Lavas-tine's cold forehead, then bent to kiss it. He might as well have been kissing stone. He touched the eyes, to close the eyelids as was customary. But he could not close them. They were frozen that way; hardened open, perhaps. Ever vigilant, even in the grave.

There was truly nothing more he could do here. The servants parted before him, a whisper of movement away as the hounds heaved themselves up and fell in behind him, who was now their master. But they did not growl or even seem to notice the servants around them. They walked at his heels as though they were sleepwalking, as meek as lambs.

He walked silent, down the tower steps and along the dark corridor to the great hall. Where a door opened to the courtyard, a breath of crisp air stung his face, and the taste of it brought him a vivid and painful memory of autumn afternoons toiling outside Aunt Bel's longhouse with his foster father, Henri, making rope or repairing sailcloth. But that life had fallen behind him. God had marked him out for greater things. He walked past the open door and into the dense and anticipatory silence of the great hall.

There he sat in the carven chair reserved for the count of Lavas. Sorrow, Rage, and Fear sat at his feet.

After a while, Tallia ventured into the hall with her attendants. With lips drawn white and hands shaking, she took her seat beside him.

Slowly, from hall and hut and stable, from village and kitchen, from field and courtyard, servingfolk, soldiers, farmers, and attendants gathered in the hall in ranks alongside the tables. Torchlight made their expressions fitful, shadowed now by hesitancy, lit now by respect, made constant by a certain wariness toward the hounds and, perhaps, toward him. At last the bell finished tolling.

"My lord count," said their spokeswoman, chatelaine of this holding, Mistress Dhuoda.

For an instant he did not reply, waiting for another to answer. But that voice never came.

"Come forward," said the count of Lavas, "and I will honor your oaths, and make my own to you in turn."

MATHEMATICI

THEOPHANU made cunning use of the information they had gained from Wolfhere: She used the lay of the hills around Vennaci to conceal the numbers of her troops and in this way pretended to lay in a countersiege with a large force that, so it appeared, surrounded the force mustered by John Ironhead.

He quickly called for a parley. Theophanu went in state with twenty attendants; Rosvita served as interpreter, since the language spoken in Aosta was intelligible to any person who understood Dariyan.

Ironhead was blunt and impatient. He no sooner had his servants bring round a chair and wine than he started in. "King Henry wants to marry Queen Adelheid himself."

Theophanu eyed him over her wine, which she sipped at her leisure under the shelter of a fine canopy woven of scarlet cloth. "God be with you, Lord John," she replied finally. "The weather is very fine here in the autumn in Aosta, is it not?"

Once out of the mountains, the rain had stopped and the skies were cleared. The light was so bright that at midday every person and thing, the tents, the banners fixed to spears, the rank of guards, the distant line of tethered horses, seemed sharpened in outline.

"I see no point in pfeasantries, Princess Theopfianu. I have reinforcements coming. The lords of Aosta support me. They do not want a foreigner to rule over them."

"Yet you are not the only prince of Aosta who wishes to marry Adelheid. It is obvious, Lord John, that the man who marries Queen Adelheid can lay claim to the vacant kingship."

Ironhead had a face as blunt as his tongue, undistinguished except for the scar on his cheek, and his prominent Dariyan nose. The depth and brightness of his dark eyes saved him from being ugly; certainly he looked determined, and he stuck stubbornly to the topic that interested him most. "Henry wants to marry Adelheid himself," he repeated.

Theophanu replied before Rosvita translated, since she could understand somewhat of his words. "No, indeed, that is not the intent of King Henry."

"Then why are you here?"

"Merely to pay my respects to Queen Adelheid. If you will give me an escort through your lines, I will enter the city and leave you alone."

"Impossible. I cannot allow it." "Then we are at an impasse, Lord John."

"So we are, Princess Theophanu." A servant refilled his cup as he waved forward a captain who had come up at the head of a group of soldiers chained together as prisoners. Most of the prisoners were short of stature, broad through the shoulders, and even darker in hair and face than the Aostans.

"These are the ones?" Ironhead asked of his captain. "Yes, my lord, the veryi ones captured yesterday when they attacked out the eastern gate."

Ironhead looked them ovey contemptuously. His own soldiers, rough-looking men who wofe a ragtag assemblage of tabards and armor that they had probably scrounged off many battlefields, spat at the prisoners.

"Well, then, take care of them, but be sure it is within sight of the walls, as usual."

"What will be done with these prisoners, Lord John?" asked Theophanu.

"Surely they have served their mistress faithfully. That is no crime, not in Wendar, at any rate."

He snorted and called for more wine. They had not, point edly, been offered food, but it was possible that the siege weighed as heavily on John's supplies as it must on those besieged within the city's walls.