"This is the truth! Heed me! Many heresies have troubled the church since the living body of the blessed Daisan was lifted up into the Chamber of Light. But in these dark days there are two we must guard against most assiduously.

"The first is known as the Redemptio. This is the belief that the blessed Daisan was martyred by the Empress Thaissania, She of the Mask. That only after his death by flaying and his supposed resurrection did he ascend to the Chamber of Light. This heresy was eventually squelched and forbidden. As it deserved!

"The second, and greater, heresy concerns the constitution of the blessed Daisan himself. The elders of the church ruled that the blessed Daisan was no different than any other human, claiming only a divine soul made up of pure light trapped in a mortal body admixed with darkness. The adherents of the greater heresy claim otherwise and declared that the blessed Daisan alone among humankind was half divine and half mortal. In the year 499, the Emperor of Arethousa turned his back on the skopos in Darre and abandoned the truth because of his belief in this half divinity. So was the holy word of the blessed Daisan wounded by the Enemy's sharp arrows."

She drew the Circle at her chest and turned to bow to Sanglant.

"How does this affect the tale?" he asked.

"Heresy must affect us all," retorted Sister Elsebet. "Right belief is what sustains us! It would be a greater tempest even than the one we suffered in Aosta should these heretical beliefs take hold and drown the foundation on which all our lives rest! On what we and the church mothers know to be true! Perhaps this tempest is not merely the playing out of an ancient sorcery but a warning sent to us by God!"

He looked at Liath.

She lifted her chin, squared her shoulders, made herself visible again, the center of attention. Yet this was not the charisma that allows a commander to lead men to their death in battle. This was, purely, control over the unnatural fire that burned within her.

"It may be, Sister Elsebet," she agreed without any evidence of insincerity. "Yet I know this. The land of the Ashioi returned to Earth because those who wove the sorcery in ancient days did not understand fully the consequence of what they did. The land returned because it could not do otherwise. It was bound as if in a great circle, necessarily returning to the place it started."

"Indeed," agreed the cleric stoutly. "For this same reason the church mothers have always disapproved of sorcery."

"Yes, so it was. Sorcery was restricted by the church in two separate rulings. Certain of the magical arts were allowed to be taught under the supervision of the church, but others were condemned, specifically those that related to foreseeing the future and controlling the weather as well as knowledge of the mathematical properties of the stars and planets. In truth, although this was unknown to the church councils that condemned them, these were the very arts used in ancient days to weave the spell that cast the Ashioi into exile."

Elsebet nodded, as if her point was now proven. She did not step aside. Liath kept talking.

" 'Between the Bwr invasion and the troubled church, the creaking edifice of the old empire at last collapsed.' "

"So wrote Taillefer's chronicler, Albert the Wise."

"Indeed he did, which is where I got the phrase. The last of those who believed in the Redemptio, in the east beyond Arethousa, vanished when the Jinna Empire conquered those lands in the name of their god."

"Fire worshipers!" muttered the wit.

"I hear they worship naked," said Wichman suddenly. "I'd like to see those Jinna women dancing around the flames!"

"Enough!" snapped Sanglant. "I pray you, go on."

"I pray you," Liath said, surveying the assembly, "I am nearly done."

"Which is what she said before," added the wit, and there was a smattering of chuckles.

She smiled and waited for quiet before she went on. "These Jinna conquered the southern shore of the Middle Sea as well. The lands around the old imperial capital fell into chaos for many decades, but at length various princedoms and duchies and counties arose. These folk called themselves Aosta. They called their capital Darre, and it was in Darre—once the capital of the Dariyan Empire—that one regnant or another pretended to rule Aosta."

This slighting comment was appreciated. A few distant soldiers cheered.

She acknowledge them with a lift of a hand. "Only in the northwestern kingdom of Salia did a ruler consolidate enough power to extend his reach. The Salian king, Taille, renamed himself the Emperor Taillefer and crowned himself with a seven-pointed crown that he called his 'crown of stars.' As part of his imperial policy, Taillefer sent missionaries for the Daisanite Church into the lands east of Salia. Heathen tribes embraced the Circle of Unity. Chieftains sent their own sons and daughters out into the more distant wilderness to convert yet more peoples. So came the Wendish into the Circle."

"This history of empire any good scholar knows," said Sister Elsebet. "That good woman, Sister Rosvita, was writing her history of the Deeds of the Great Princes. Yet she—she, too—" She faltered. She Wept.

"A woman firm in her scholarship," said Liath. "I believe she would understand that it is necessary to see the tapestry as a whole in order to understand the consequence of the spell. If you will, I will go on.

"Taillefer's empire disintegrated after the emperor's death. At that time, King Arnulf the Elder of Wendar annexed lands formerly allied to Salia by marrying the heirs of Varre to his own children. When these heirs died without issue, he named himself king of Wendar and Varre. In time, the regnancy passed to Arnulf the Younger, and then to his son, Henry, the second of that name. So might we learn from Sister Rosvita, were she here to teach us!

"Henry married an Arethousan princess named Sophia. She bore him three children, Sapientia, Theophanu, and Ekkehard. The king struggled against his own older sister, Sabella, but he triumphed over her at Kassel, in the duchy of Fesse."

She nodded at Liutgard, who lifted a hand and touched her own brow, as if remembering those lost in that battle: brother against sister.

"Henry's own cousin Conrad, too, it seemed, chafed at being a duke, but his ambitions are as yet unknown. Some years after the death of Queen Sophia, Henry married Princess Sapientia to Prince Bayan, the younger brother of the Ungrian king, Geza. He hoped, it seemed, that this alliance would protect his eastern marchlands from marauders. Soon after, Henry married an Aostan princess of noble birth, called Adelheid, and traveled south to Aosta with the intention of having himself crowned Emperor and of driving all Jinna and Arethousan interlopers out of lands that ought to belong to the holy church and its imperial champion. And this he did, as you know, because you rode beside him. You triumphed, because he triumphed."

Those who had survived the expedition were still proud of seeing their king crowned as emperor.

Sanglant saw the memory of victory in their expressions, but he also saw their grief.

"Many disturbances were rising in the lands beyond Wendar. They struck hard. From the east, the Quman barbarians led by their prince Bulkezu plundered the marchlands and Avaria. Some among you will remember his defeat."

This got cheers as well, and Sanglant heard his name rise out of the crowd. She waited, and went on when she could.

"In the north, the Eika savages raid along the coast, united under a single chieftain. Reports suggest that civil war plagues the kingdom of Salia. In Arethousa, there is always corruption and intrigue, as the poets and historians tell us. But this was not all. Strange creatures out of legend walked abroad. Across the lands people began to whisper that the end of the world was at hand."

"So it is!" called a voice from the crowd, and many cried out in agreement.

Liutgard rose unexpectedly, looking angry. "Was this, that we suffered, the end of the world? We are still alive, although many dear to us are dead. Henry is dead—may he rest at peace in the Chamber of Light. But the world is not ended."

Liath raised a hand to show that she had heard and understood her objection. "Earth still holds beneath us, although I think we may find much in the land has been altered. I pray you, Duchess Liutgard, hear what I have to say. How is it that the woman who called herself Anne and who ruled over you as skopos knew of the Ashioi? How did she know about the ancient spell which would come to fruition on that night, that one night, when the crown of stars crowned the heavens? At midnight on the cusp of the tenth and eleventh days of Octumbre, in the year 735, as we measure the years after the proclamation of the Holy Word. How is it she knew this?"

It was a sorry satisfaction for Sanglant to recall that he had warned Henry's court and no one had listened to him.

'After the death of Emperor Taillefer, his empire fell into disunion because there was no male heir. He left three daughters and a few bastard sons. One of these claimed the throne and was later killed by his rivals." She glanced at Sanglant. He nodded, having heard this story before. Its existence did not threaten his hold on the throne.

"Two of Taillefer's daughters were married to princes of the realm and they vanish from our history. But his daughter Tallia was placed in the church as a biscop. There she studied the ancient arts of the mathematici together with her most intimate and faithful servant, a woman named Clothilde. These two and their adepts discovered that the ancient story of the Ashioi was a true story. They discovered that within a few decades—well, almost a hundred years—there would be a second cataclysm. They thought they could prevent this cataclysm with a second weaving. They believed that the Ashioi, now in exile, were scheming to return to Earth and conquer humankind. But the truth is that it was the spell which was flawed. The land of the Ashioi was flung outward on such a path that it would inevitably come back to where it had begun. We have all ridden such trails, thinking we are going elsewhere only to end up where we started!"

She hoped for a chuckle but did not get one. Her audience listened intently, but they did not, necessarily, believe what she was saying. Sanglant could see in each posture the extent of their belief: Sister Elsebet with her head bent skeptically; Sergeant Gotfrid scratching his beard as if puzzled; a woman fitted with a steward's tabard staring raptly with mouth parted as she fingered the knot that tied her scarf beneath her chin.

"The other Salian clerics at that time believed that Biscop Tallia had gone too far in studying the malefic arts of black sorcery. The Council of Narvone was convened and all sorcery associated with the mathematici as well as malefici was placed under ban. As was Biscop Tallia. Yet she did not cease her efforts. In time she discovered what she had long sought: a child born to Queen Radegundis, the last wife of Taillefer. This infant was raised in the church and became a monk.

Soon after his birth, Tallia died, leaving her handmaiden, Clothilde, to continue her work.

"Clothilde was patient. Late in life, Taillefer's son was tempted by a very young woman, a novice. On her he got a child. Afterward, he fled. But the child was taken from its mother and raised by Clothilde."

"What became of the father and mother?" asked Sister Elsebet, listening intently now, as if she had heard some portion of this story before.

"Taillefer's son? I think that he remained in the church. But the woman who gave birth to his child? I don't know. I know only that Anne was the granddaughter of Taillefer, the child of Taillefer and Radegundis' lost son. She was raised by Sister Clothilde as a mathematicus among a band of mathematici who called themselves the Seven Sleepers. They were asleep, they told themselves, waiting quietly until the time came to act. Anne was to be the agent of that act: to cast the Ashioi once and for all time away from Earth."

"Would it not have been better had she done so?" asked Liutgard. She gestured toward the ragged army gathered around. "Would it not have spared us this?"

Liath shook her head. "No. You saw what tides of destruction the spell wrought. That devastation would have rebounded on Earth tenfold had Anne's spell succeeded. It would have been far worse. Earth is not meant to be sundered from Earth. The ancient ones— our ancestors—meant to save themselves. But by their own act they doomed us. I think they were ignorant. They did not know. Yet we are left with the consequences nonetheless."

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswijk/Mijn%20d...lliott%20-%20Crown%20Of%20Stars%2006%20-%20In%20the%20Ruins.html PART TWO

IN THE RUINS

V

Salvage

1

ANNA clawed awake from a terrible dream. She lay with eyes closed, aware of the rise and fall of her breathing, and let the threads of that awful nightmare fade. An endless trek across a wilderness of grass under the hammer of a brutal winter cold. A blizzard turning to flowers.

Bulkezu's hand tightening on her throat. Blessing as limp as a corpse, wasting away, dying.

Buried alive deep within an ancient tumulus. Worms crawling over and swallowing her body.

With each exhalation the images became more tattered until at last they dissolved into nothing, and with a sigh of relief she opened her eyes. It was still night. Clouds hid the stars. She couldn't see anything, not even her hand in front of her face.

Even a moonless night was never this dark.

Her heart thundered. She whimpered, afraid to move or speak lest speaking and moving reveal her nightmares as truth. If she wished hard enough, it would all go away and she would be back in Gent sitting cozy by the fire in Mistress Suzanne's weaving hall.

A voice mumbled a curse. Stone snapped on flint. A spark glittered, faded, then a second snap struck and its spark caught a wick. As light bled into their grave, memory returned in a rush.

Prince Sanglant's army had marched east in search of griffins and sorcerers. He had found them and much more besides, but Blessing had fallen ill with an aetherical sickness and had to be left behind close to death. Six attendants stayed with her. In the hope that the spell woven by Princess Liathano through the stone crown would miraculously preserve Blessing in a kind of stasis, they had crawled into the grave mound between the stones. There they had waited until blue fire engulfed them and all sensation ceased.

Anna groaned and raised up on her elbows, staring around in shock. Brother Heribert had lit the lamp, and he, too, stared slack-jawed at their surroundings. Thiemo, Matto, the Kerayit healer, and the young Quman soldier still slept, each in his place in the ring around Princess Blessing.

But the low, cramped chamber in which they had taken their place had vanished . . . and so had Blessing.

"Ai, God! Lord protect us! Lady have mercy!" Anna scrambled to her feet.

"What's happened?" As Heribert rose, he almost lost his footing as a temblor rumbled through the ground. The flame wavered. A web of blue fire shuddered into existence around them, hot and bright.

"Something's coming," said Heribert. "Can you feel it, Anna? It's like a weight descending. We're not safe here."

She stared at the high cavern in which they stood. Stalactites glittered under the net of fire.

Thiemo snored softly, one hand cupped at his throat. Matto lay with mouth agape and eyes and hands fast shut. It was all true. They had crawled into the ancient burial chamber to protect Blessing and possibly to die, but they hadn't died and indeed they were no longer where they had started out. The burial chamber had been dirt; this place was stone. In the burial chamber there had barely been room to stand upright in the center; this place could hold a council of twoscore nobles and their horses. In the burial chamber there had been a single entrance, a tunnel that led to the outside. Here, at least four passageways left the chamber at different directions. They might be anywhere.

She, too, felt a stiffening in the air, a tension in the earth, like the breath of a huge monster about to lunge out of darkness onto its hapless prey.

"Come quickly!" Blessing's voice pierced the silence, although there was no sign of her in the chamber. "No! This way! You're so slow! I said this way!"

"What a brat!" said a second voice, laughing.

"I am not a brat! I'm not!"

"You are!"

"I'm not!"

Blessing's companion laughed merrily, and before Anna or Heribert could react two figures trotted into the cavern, the smaller grasping the larger by his wrist. Blessing dropped her grip and clapped her hands to crow in triumph.

"Look what I found, Brother Heribert! And not just that, but a pile of treasure!"

The earth shook violently. The net of blue fire sparked and dazzled, and began to pulse.

"Lord have mercy," said Heribert, staring at Blessing, who looked painfully thin but otherwise emphatically alive and vital. Anna didn't know whether to be giddy with joy or annoyed that Blessing after all hadn't changed one bit and probably hadn't a thought to spare for the sacrifice her attendants had made so willingly for her.

"I'm Berthold," said the youth, a nice-looking boy most likely a little younger than Anna, fifteen or sixteen or so. He wore a handsome pale blue tunic of an excellent weave trimmed with yellow embroidery, a hip-length cape lined with pale fox fur, and soft leather boots bound up with laces.

He held calfskin gloves casually in one hand, and at his waist rode a sword in a richly tooled sheath bearing the mark of the silver tree.

"Lord have mercy," repeated Heribert, shifting his stunned gaze away from Blessing. "You must be Villam's son."

"So I am," said the lad, not one bit surprised at being recognized. A noble youth out of a house as important as Villam's expected to be known. "We crawled in here to explore but must have fallen asleep. The rest of my companions are still asleep. I could only wake up Jonas. He's trying to get the others awake. I don't know where this chamber came from!" He gestured toward the high ceiling, and the four sleeping men. "It wasn't here when we explored under the tumuli yesterday.

How did you get here?"

The earth shook once again. The pulse of the light had begun to shift in pitch until Anna could actually hear a melodic rise and fall shot through with an unearthly harmony. The temperature was beginning to rise.

"I want to get out of here," said Blessing. "Something very very bad is about to happen." She turned on Berthold. He stood a head taller than she did, although he wasn't as tall as her father.

"Help me wake them up!"

Berthold's expression twisted, eyes opening in mock horror, mouth opening to an "o" of pretend fear. "Of course, my lady!" He spoiled the moment by laughing again. "Who made you regnant?"

She stamped her foot. "My father is Prince Sanglant. I am the great granddaughter of the Emperor Taillefer. You have to do what I tell you to do!"

He snorted with amusement, glanced at Anna to estimate her station and importance, and nodded at Brother Heribert. "Who are you, Brother?"

"I am called Brother Heribert. I am a cleric in Prince Sanglant's schola."

"Is it true this brat is Prince Sanglant's daughter?"

"I'm not a brat!"

"She is indeed, my lord."

"How can she be the great granddaughter of Emperor Taillefer? Henry's forebears have no connection to that noble house."

Heribert hesitated just long enough for Berthold to go on, impatient as his thoughts skipped ahead.

"Prince Sanglant has a schola? How can he? He's the captain of the King's Dragons. I didn't even know he had a daughter this old, but I suppose it's no surprise given what everyone says about him and women. Heh! I wonder what Waltharia will have to say about that! She thought she walked that road first!"

"What road?" demanded Blessing.

Heribert flung up a hand as if to say, "stop." "I pray you, Lord Berthold. We must untangle these lineages later. Princess Blessing is right. We'd best flee." He wiped sweat from his brow. "I don't like being trapped in here."

"Nor do I," admitted the youth, looking around. 'Although it is the most amazing thing! Who could have dug such caverns? You should see the treasure back there! Golden helms and mounds of emeralds and garnets! Jeweled belts. Necklaces. I told them not to pick anything up, but they would cram their sleeves—all but Jonas, he's the only one who listens to me—"

A temblor shook the earth so hard that Anna had trouble keeping her feet. The Kerayit healer moaned, fighting sleep but not quite able to wake. Thiemo and Matto didn't stir at all. The blue fire had become so bright she had to squint. The cavern shone, walls gleaming. The stone sweat as heat swelled. It was like being trapped inside a box that had been thrown onto a fire.

"No one is listening to me!" shrieked Blessing. She pounced on Thiemo and shook him. "Wake up! Wake up!"

Without warning, the Quman soldier leaped to his feet, knife in hand as he assessed his surroundings. Over the last months Heribert had picked up the rudiments of the Quman speech.

He spoke now, and the young man nodded abruptly, lowered the knife, and knelt beside Matto, shaking him. The Kerayit healer opened her eyes and, with a grunt, scrambled to her feet. She pointed to the fiery blue net whose brightness by now made the light in the cavern almost unbearable.

"Sorcery," she said in halting Wendish. "Go now. Go quick."

"Do you know the way out?" asked Heribert.

"I don't," said Berthold. "It's all changed. It wasn't like this at all yesterday when we crawled in here—"

"I know how to go!" exclaimed Blessing.

"Take her," said Heribert to Anna. "We'll have to carry Thiemo and Matto if we can't wake them up."

"Do you really think she knows anything?" demanded Berthold, more in disbelief than in anger.

He had begun, finally, to appear nervous.

"I do know! I do!"

"Have you a better plan?" asked Heribert in his mildest tone. "I haven't. One is as good as another. We'd best hurry."

Thunder shook the cavern, a stalactite shuddered loose from the ceiling, crashed to the floor, and shattered into stinging shards. Anna caught one on her cheek. Blood trickled down her skin.

"Lord Berthold!" A young man no older than Villam's son staggered out of a passageway. He shaded his eyes, brought up short by the blinding net of light. Another tremor shook them. A second stalactite cracked and fell, and the poor youth leaped aside and shouted out loud as he flung up his arms to protect himself. Dust and debris scattered.

"Where are the others?" demanded Berthold. He, too, was pale now. He, too, looked frightened.

"I can't wake them!" said poor Jonas, who had been crying. "I don't know what's wrong!"

"This way!" cried Blessing, who had run to a different passageway, one opposite the tunnel that Berthold's companion had just emerged from. "I said this way! We've got to hurry! The storm is coming. It will crush us if we're in here!"

She shot off a quick command in the Quman language, surprising both Heribert and Anna, who hadn't known she could speak any language other than Wendish. The Quman soldier got Matto under the arms and began dragging him.

"Here!" Galvanized, Anna ran forward and got hold of Matto's ankles, heaving him up, but after ten paces his limp weight was too much for her, and she wasn't weak.

"Help us, I pray you, Lord Berthold," said Heribert. "Let's carry these two free and come back for your companions."

Berthold hesitated, then fixed his mouth in a grim line and ran over to Thiemo. "He looks familiar," he mused, grabbing him under the arms. "Here, Jonas. Help me!"

The Kerayit healer came to Anna's rescue, taking Matto's ankles, and Anna after all had to pursue Blessing, who had already vanished up the passageway. The floor was seamless, swept clean of debris, pebbles, dirt. Threads of light pierced the stone itself, woven entirely through the underground labyrinth. With each tremor, with each pulse, tiny cracks fissured the stone. At any moment the entire place might splinter and collapse. This was not the fate she had expected.

Panic lent her wings, and she raced on Blessing's trail and would have plunged to her death had Blessing not screamed out loud just in time for Anna to stumble to a stop beside the girl, at the edge of an abyss.

The passageway ended in a wide, deep hole. It was as if a giant had stuck a spear far down into the earth and drawn it up again, leaving this empty shaft behind. The net of light that illuminated the labyrinth did not penetrate into its depths. There was no way across, and no obvious way down or up.

"Look," said Blessing, pointing to the cliff face opposite them. "There's a ledge there, and a passageway."

"No way to reach it, Your Highness," said Anna, barely able to speak. She couldn't catch her breath. "We'll have to go back and find another route."

"Is, too!" Blessing ran to the edge where the walls of the passageway met the sheer curve of that huge shaft. She reached, she gripped, and between one breath and the next had clambered out along the wall toward the far side.

Fear strangled Anna's voice. She was helpless, terrified, still woozy. She still could not believe that she was awake and in this terrible predicament. Ai, God. If only she could wake up and find herself back in Gent! The earth shook, and although Anna shrieked out loud, Blessing did not fall; she had too good a grip; she was fearless, that girl. Impossible. Already halfway across, clinging like a lizard to the rock face.

'Anna? Anna! Ai, God!" Heribert came up behind her, not far ahead of the rest.

"I'll have to follow her." Without waiting for his reply, because if she waited she would lose her courage, she ran to the edge and brushed a hand over the rock wall, finding handholds and narrow brims easily. Someone had carved these here. They couldn't be natural, placed so cunningly and conveniently. She crept along the wall, knowing better than to look down. As long as she didn't look down, she could believe that the ground lay one step below. It was easier that way to move across the rock face. It was easier that way not to panic.

"Princess Blessing, come back!" cried Heribert.

"Won't!" Blessing leaped to the far ledge just as another tremor shook them. A rock fell from above, and Anna shut her eyes and held on, listening, but she never heard it strike bottom. She was by now breathing so hard that she was dizzy, and when she opened her eyes she saw that Blessing had disappeared into the far passageway.

"Go on, Anna!" shouted Heribert. "You've got to get her back! We can't carry the rest across this!"

She heard the others arrive, heard their shocked exclamations and the buzz of discussion, but she could not concentrate on them to pick out words. She had to pick a path across the face, one handhold and toehold at a time, and at last she swung onto the far ledge which by now resembled a grand broad field, it looked so inviting and safe although it wasn't more than an arm's span in width. She landed there, panting, sweating, mouth dry, just as a horrible grinding roar shuddered up from the depths. In the passageway behind Heribert and the others, dust roiled, punched outward by a tremendous rockfall back the way they had come.

"Go, Anna! Go!" shouted Heribert before the dust engulfed him.

Despite the brilliant web of sorcery, she could not see Thiemo and Matto through the haze. She saw the blur of movement, glimpsed a Oilman bow case and a Kerayit headdress, heard voices yell and shriek, but nothing more. Nothing more.

Far away, down that dark passageway lying behind her, Blessing called out impatiently. "Come!

Come! Hurry!"

She ducked down, banging her head once on stone before getting the hang of the low ceiling. It was dark as the grave. No net of sorcery wove light to guide her footsteps. Twice she stumbled and bruised herself, and the third time she tumbled to hands and knees and yelped in pain.

A warm hand fastened on her shoulder. "Hurry! Where are the others?"

"They can't cross, Your Highness." She coughed. Dust had scoured her lungs. Grit abraded her palms. "They can't carry Lord Thiemo and Matto across that wall. We've got to go back."

"I can't leave them behind!" cried Blessing, with a fury that caused her hand to tighten on Anna's shoulder until it hurt. She should have been weak after her illness, but she wasn't. "Papa says you never leave your companions behind. We have to rescue them."

"I think there was a rockfall." She coughed again. It hurt to cough. "We can't go back the way we came. Ai, God. What if they're all dead?"

The earth groaned and rumbled beneath them, around them, everywhere. They were trapped in a tomb and it was too late to save themselves. They would die here—

A body slammed into Anna, tripped over her, and went sprawling, knocking Blessing down.

"Highness!" Anna smelled the Kerayit healer, whose peculiar scent of sour milk and an unidentifiable musk always tickled her nose.

She sneezed. The others piled up behind them, trapped in the low tunnel. A cloud of dust blasted past them, choking the passage.

"Move! Move!" said Lord Berthold from out of the dust. "The whole place is collapsing."

Anna scrambled forward, grabbing Blessing's arm and pulling her along with her. They raced blind, tripping, stumbling, staggering, but the passage ran true, without turns or branches, until at length they stumbled onto stone steps, and climbed up them. Just as Anna realized that she could see through her stinging eyes, they emerged into a shallow cave carved out of a hillside by a massive collapse of dirt, as if half the side of the hill had fallen away. Dust puffed and billowed around them. Beyond, a sickly gray light bled color out of the air.

Anna crept to the opening. One by one the others joined her: Princess Blessing, Lord Berthold, his companion Jonas, the Kerayit healer, and last the young Quman soldier supporting Brother Heribert, who fell to his knees, hacking as though he meant to cough his lungs out. All of them wept blood from scrapes and cuts. All were covered with dust and dirt. Lord Berthold cursed and muttered, while Jonas tried to soothe him.

"They're dead! Dead! I abandoned them! Ai, God, I've no honor left! I ran for my life. Better to have died—"

"Look!" shouted Blessing, and at the same moment the Kerayit healer cried, "Down!"

They dropped to their knees, but Anna stared anyway. She couldn't stop staring. They looked out over a valley nestled between high peaks. Once the valley had boasted a fine rich forest along its slopes, but now the trees were tumbled and snapped, shorn down as though by a giant's scythe. A vast creature hung suspended in the air, stretched across the hazy sky. It was there only for an instant, a flash of gold scales, before the sound of its wings thundered and it vanished beyond the peaks. Snow and ice crashed from the summit in a distant avalanche. The boom echoed on and on and on.

A pall of dust shrouded the sky. It was dim, but not dark; twilight, but not day. Now and again lightning stabbed through the cloudy haze, unseen except as a ghostly glimmer, quickly gone.

Once the noise of the avalanche faded, they heard no answering thunder. A monstrous orange-red glow rose along one horizon. Maybe it heralded the rising sun, but if so it was no sun she ever wanted to see.

"Is it day or night?" asked Anna.

No one answered her. Berthold wept with anger and shame, and his companion Jonas tried in vain to comfort him. The Kerayit and Quman cowered, covering their eyes and muttering prayers, each in their own language. Heribert wheezed, struggling to breathe. Even Blessing stood in shocked silence.

Something very bad had happened, just as Blessing had predicted.

As they stared, a light rain began to fall, hissing where it struck ground. It wasn't rain at all but hot ash, so fine that it drizzled like rain only to burn and sizzle where it touched the earth. The ashy rain darkened the sky until that orange-red glow faded and Anna could no longer see the snowy peaks beyond. Dirt spit on her from the roof of the overhang. A huge weight fell right on top of them. The impact shuddered through the hill, and the overhang crumbled in on itself as a second crash sent a shower of fine dirt and clods of earth and rocks spilling over them.

Anna grabbed Blessing's wrist and yanked her out into the ash fall. They ran, stumbling through loose dirt, sliding as the ground gave way underneath, coughing as ash burned their lungs. Only when they came to rest on ground that didn't shiver beneath their did they turn. They had sheltered beneath a mound atop which stood a stone crown, and both hill and stones had collapsed. Two of the great menhirs leaned crazily, not yet fallen. The others had crashed down.

One had smashed onto the slope just above the overhang, causing it to give way.

"Must . . . get . . . out ... of ... the . . . rain," gasped Berthold.

"Where's Brother Heribert?" Blessing wrenched her arm free from Anna's grasp and floundered up through slippery dirt. "Brother Heribert! Brother Heribert!"

She found an arm sticking out of dark earth. The rest of him was buried.

Sliding and cursing, they struggled up along the unstable ground and with their hands dug him out and dragged him to firm ground. He was limp. He had already stopped breathing. The earth had choked him. Blessing howled in rage.

"No! No!" She flung herself down beside his body. "You aren't dead! I don't allow it!"

A numbness took hold of Anna. She no longer felt she was here, up to her knees in dirt and roots and crawling things and slimy, hot ash, but only watching herself and the others from a distance.

Thiemo and Matto were gone. There was no possible way they could have survived the collapse within the tunnels, and even if they had somehow miraculously been spared, they had no way to climb free because the stone crown here was destroyed and thereby their path to the outside world.

As for the rest of them, they had traveled, all unknowing, a great distance. They could be anywhere. Any when, if what Hathui and the others predicted was true. If time ran both swiftly and slowly within the crowns.

They stood gasping and weeping in a desolation, no longer able to distinguish sky from mountain because of the shroud of ash. It was growing cold. A wind moaned down from veiled heights. A glimmer of light flashed around them. A breeze curled around Anna's shoulders before kicking up dirt in a line that led straight to Blessing, who was still sobbing and shouting by Heribert's body, slamming her fists into his chest over and over while the rest stood too stunned and overwhelmed to move.

For an instant Anna thought a pale shimmer of light illuminated the frater's slack face, pouring over him as water pours over rocks in a stream. Blessing shrieked and scrambled backward.

Heribert's body jerked. His eyes snapped open. He sat up, folding forward and coughing dirt out of his mouth. He wiped dirt from his face and, wondering, shook it from his hands.

"Where?" he said hoarsely. "Where is he gone, the one I have been for? His husk is here, but he is lost."

They all stared at him.

"You were dead," said Jonas.

"Was I?" he asked. He got his feet under him, slipped once, and Blessing dashed forward and helped him stand.

"I said you couldn't die! I did! I did! You're not dead. Are you?"

He covered his eyes with a hand. Blessing clung to his other arm, wiping her filthy face on his tattered sleeve.

"The rest are dead," said Berthold suddenly. "Ai, God."

"There was nothing you could have done," said Jonas desperately Berthold shook his head. "I know!" he said bitterly, gesturing toward the fallen stones and sunken hill. "It was in God's hands, not ours. We'll die if we stay here. My lungs hurt. There's nothing to drink. This ash covers everything. I can't tell if it's day or evening or morning. I don't know where we are, but we must leave this valley and find a place of safety."

Brother Heribert turned, still awkward as he gained control of his limbs. He stared at Berthold for a while as if sorting through what possible meaning his words might have. Anna was still too numb to speak, but she did notice how very blue his eyes were, startlingly so in contrast to his pale, dirty face. She'd never noticed his eyes before.

"I know how to leave this valley," he said, his voice still hoarse, not really like Heribert's voice at all. "Follow me."

2

IVAR had never experienced rain like the downpour that drowned them now. If he turned his head up, he wouldn't be able to breathe. He and Erkanwulf huddled under the spreading boughs of an oak tree in the great forest called the Bretwald as the storm churned the path first to mud and then into a stream of boiling, frothing water. They had nowhere to shelter, no one to beg for help, and plenty of trouble keeping their mounts from bolting.

"Look there!" cried Erkanwulf, shaking as he pointed.

Out in the forest lights bobbed, weaving among trees obscured by the pounding rain and the curtain of night. The young soldier took a step forward, meaning to call out to them, but Ivar grabbed his cloak and yanked him back against the tree.

"Hush, you idiot! No natural fire can stay lit in this downpour! Don't you remember who attacked us before?"

'Ai, God! The Lost Ones! We're doomed."

"Hush!"

It was too late. The lights turned their way.

"Come on!" Ivar splashed out onto the path, jerked up hard when his horse refused to budge. He grabbed the reins with both hands and yanked and tugged and swore, but in an argument of weight, the horse won, and it refused to leave the shelter of the tree.

"What do we do?" gasped Erkanwulf.

'Abandon the horses."

"We can't!"

"Is it better to be dead?"

The lights wove a new pattern, circling in toward their prey, and he heard a shout, a very human shout, and then the most horrifying and peculiar and inhuman sound that had ever assailed him.

"What is that?" Erkanwulf whispered.

A beast's vast cry rolled over them. The sound made Ivar's heart freeze, and Erkanwulf's mount reared up, then slipped and staggered sideways, dragging Erkanwulf with it away down the slope.

The gale hit so hard and unexpectedly that Ivar actually was blown off his feet, and only his mount's stubborn footing saved him from washing away down the foaming canal of water that the path had suddenly become. Wind cracked through the forest, splintering trees everywhere.

Trunks crashed to the ground, giants falling to earth. The noise was a hammer, its echo ringing on and on as he cowered on his knees under the oak tree. All he could do was pray. Boughs shaken loose tumbled everywhere. Leaves whipped him in the face.

A crack splintered through the howl of the wind. A huge branch split off the oak tree and plummeted to earth, striking Erkanwulf's horse on the head. The beast went down as if flattened.

Erkanwulf slipped in the mud as the reins jerked taut, and somehow got caught under the horse's shoulder as the ground gave way.

Ivar crept over to Erkanwulf, but because of the slickness of the mud and the angle of the ground and the thick tangle of branches and leaves, he couldn't budge the horse. The poor animal was dead, killed instantly.

The gale roared past and faded, although the treetops still shook and danced. It was no beast after all, merely an unnatural blast of wind. The rain eased a little.

'Ah!" Erkanwulf managed something like a grin; his face was a smudge against the darkness. "It hurts!"

"Damn. Damn." It seemed everyone he traveled with ended up in worse trouble after knowing him!

"I should have known better," continued Erkanwulf through gritted teeth. "I had a cousin who was killed by a falling branch in a windstorm. Ah! Eh! Leave it be a moment!"

Ivar got to his feet and wiped moisture from his brow, trying to clear his sight. His hair was soaked. His leggings sagged and slid as the strips of cloth loosened, and his boots made a stropping sucking sound with each step as he came around the tree and peered into the darkness.

The lights were strung out not twenty paces from him. He shrieked because he was so surprised, and pressed the ring Baldwin had gifted him to his lips, praying.

"Who are you?" called a voice out of the night. It spoke Wendish.

"I'm just a messenger. No one who means any harm. My companion is hurt. I think his horse is dead. I can't shift it off him. I pray you. Help us. Or leave us alone."

The lights circled in like wary dogs and resolved into lanterns cunningly protected from the rain by caps of bronze and walls of a bubbly glass that made the flame within dance in weird distortions. Hooded figures carried the lanterns. There were four of them, whether men or shades he could not tell because they wore cloaks drawn tightly around their bodies. Most strangely, they were all barefoot.

"Have you any weapons?" their leader asked. "Throw them down, if you please. We don't mean to hurt you. We're not bandits, not like those we're hunting."

"I can't fight one against four!"

"If you won't throw down your weapons, we'll leave you here in peace, but we won't help your companion." There was a pause as the one who spoke raised his lantern higher to get a look at Erkanwulf and the two horses, one down, one holding still with head up and eyes rolling white.

Erkanwulf had either fainted or was playing at it. "Good mounts. Pity about that one, but if it's dead or broke a leg, it'll make a good stew."

"Who are you?" Ivar didn't dare surrender his precious weapons to bandits.

"We're King Henry's men. We got a charter some years back to keep this road through the Bretwald free and clear. He made us free of service to any lord or lady. We've kept our word to him. That's why we were hunting bandits. There was a problem a month back. Honest folk got attacked. It's not a good time to travel."

'Aye, Martin," interjected one of his companions. "And no better to be standing out here in this rain and storm, you lackwit! What if that wind comes howling back and kills the rest of us like it killed that horse? This rain and storm are bad enough, but that gale was something out of the Abyss! I'm not waiting out here any longer! If there's just two of them, they're scarcely that mob of bandits what set on those merchant wagons, can they be?"

It was a woman who spoke, and a woman who set down her lantern with a grunt of disgust and walked over to the fallen horse's head and knelt beside it, pulling back one eye. "It's dead. Here, you!" She gestured impatiently to Ivar. "Come help me get your friend loose."

She was strong. Together, they shifted the shoulders of the horse enough for Erkanwulf to scoot free. When her hood fell back, Ivar saw she was young, with old scars on her face suffered in a battle or a burning.

"Ahow!" yelped Erkanwulf, but although bruised and in a great deal of pain he stood on his right leg and gingerly moved all the joints in his left one by one—hip, knee, ankle—even though his ankle hurt so badly he couldn't stand on it. The curve of the ground had kept the horse's full weight off him, and the dense cover of leaf litter and debris had offered enough cushion that he evidently hadn't broken anything.

The horse, however, was quite dead.

"If we leave it out here," said the one called Martin, "the wolves will eat it before we can get back to butcher it. There's a fair bit of riches in that horse!"

"It's my horse!" said Erkanwulf. "Given me by Princess Theophanu's steward!"

Martin had the confident bearing of a young man accustomed to working all day at things he was good at. 'A princess' steward, eh? Is she one of King Henry's children? I can't recall them all.

We'll put you up until your leg is better, and make a decent trade to you for what we take of it.

We could use horsehair. No one in the village owns a horse. The froth meat'll go bad if it isn't used at once. And the wolves'll take it all if we don't get moving. We'll have to cut it up and hang it after."

Although he, too, was no older than Ivar, he acted as the leader, gesturing toward his other two companions. "Bruno, you take the injured one, put him on the horse, and lead them back to the village. Tell Nan we're coming, and then come back yourself with sacks or netting, whatever you can find. The cart. I'm sure Ulf and Bait will help you."

"I don't like to be separated from my comrade," said Ivar.

Martin shrugged. There wasn't threat in the gesture, just reality. The light on his face showed good health and clear eyes, and he had a way of examining Ivar that made Ivar want to grin, although he wasn't sure why. "We'll need your help here. Two to hold the lanterns and keep their eyes open for wolves, and two to cut. Uta and I will do the cutting, unless you've skill in that direction."

"I'm better with a sword."

"That's how it looks to me," agreed Martin. "It's why we approached you so cautiously. You're noble born, I'd wager, but I don't think this fellow is."

"Oof!" swore Erkanwulf, accidentally putting weight onto his left foot. 'Ai! That hurts."

Ivar's mount had to be led aside and calmed, and when he was ready, Erkanwulf got a heave up into the saddle.

Bruno shied away from leading the horse. "It's so big! What if it steps on me?"

"I can ride this fellow well enough," said Erkanwulf to Ivar, although it was clear that pain was biting deep. "He and I get along just fine, you know. Let's go, I pray you."

Bruno led them away, a single lantern swinging to and fro in rain and darkness.

"You're not feared of bandits attacking them?" Ivar asked as they faded into the stormy night.

"Not in that direction. It's past here to the east where there's been trouble. Anyway, I don't know what to think. I've never stood a storm like this one. It's not natural. Only a fool would stay out in weather like this."

Ivar laughed, and Martin grinned, handing him the lantern.

The fourth in their group was a speechless lad whom Uta and Martin never referred to by name.

While Ivar held the light as steady as he could, the others got to work, with the lad alternating between working and holding a light.

"Think we can hang it?" Uta asked.

"Don't trust those branches," said Martin, looking upward at the rattling mass of oak boughs. The wind kept steady and strong, and the rain beat over them. "Can we shift it up on its back?"

In the end they used rope to tie up its hindquarters a bit. Uta cut the hide from anus to throat, the insides of the legs and a circle above the fetlock, all done with surprising speed and gentleness.

No intestines spilled. With Martin's help she peeled the hide off and finished the cut at the neck.

The nameless lad set down his lantern and rolled the bloody hide up so it would be easy to carry.

"There!" said Uta, pointing down the road with her dripping knife.

A trio of lanterns approached, resolving into the youth called Bruno and three men, one trundling a handcart, one carrying a pair of baskets lined with canvas, and the third hauling a net and a handsaw.

"What damage at home?" Martin asked.

"Roof tore off the new weaving shed," said one of the older men, "but all else held. Still, it'll be the Enemy's own work to clear up when it conies light again."

They looked Ivar over as if they thought he might have had a hand in the destruction, and then got to work. Blood melded with rain on the ground. The hot smell of intestines, finally freed by a deeper incision, cut through the chill night air and the scent of rain as they captured them in one of the baskets. They pulled out the precious inner meats. Working quick and dirty as the rain continued to fall, they dismantled the horse into manageable pieces.

"I'll be glad to get out of this," said Martin as they got everything loaded up and balanced. They were leaving nothing behind.

It was an oddly cheerful procession, although it was so cold and miserable. Ivar could not talk; he was too tired. The others laughed and joked as they squelched along, sticking frequently in mud, cursing and swearing as they dug out the wheels for the third time, stumbling and once losing the kidneys entirely when the nameless lad lost hold of his side of one basket. But Uta groped around in the underbrush and found them both, gleaming wetly, still warm. The carcass steamed in the cold air, its soul dissolving upward, if horses had souls. Had the scholars at Quedlinhame ever discussed such a question? Ivar could not remember. His old life seemed impossibly distant. All he knew now was that his feet were numb and his nose was running and there was an unfathomable amount of debris fallen just within the halo of the lanterns although fortunately no great trunk had fallen across the road.

A dozen folk waited for them at the gateway of a palisade dimly seen in the murky night. A cluster of buildings huddled within its safety, but it was too dark to note more than shapes scattered across a clearing. He was hustled into the blessed warmth of a long hall while his companions took the carcass elsewhere to hang. Erkanwulf sat on furs beside the hearth fire, talking to a wakeful child crouched beside him.

"Ma!" The child called to a woman who had led Ivar in from the gate. She pushed back her hood to reveal a face more handsome than pretty. She had an infant bundled against her chest in a sling. "He says he was at Gent! Just like Da!"

"You're out of Gent?" asked the woman in surprise.

"Nay," replied Erkanwulf, "I was only there one time, when there was a big battle. That was years ago. I was just a lad."

"My husband was a refugee out of Gent. Mayhap after that big battle you speak of, the one with the Dragons."

"They all died!" cried the child happily. 'All those Dragons! All but one! That was the captain.

Nothing can kill him!" he added confidingly to Erkanwulf. "He's a great warrior, the best who ever lived."

Ivar was too cold and wet even to work up a smoldering burn at the mention of Prince Sanglant, that most noble and attractive of creatures. It just didn't seem important.

Erkanwulf smiled at the child, then nodded at Ivar. "You're a sight, my lord cleric," he said with a mocking lift of his head.

The woman stopped dead, and turned to Ivar with her jaw dropping open. She had all her teeth and good, clean, healthy eyes. Her grip, when she caught his elbow, was uncomfortably strong.

'Are you a churchman? We haven't had a deacon, or a frater even, out our way for years and years. We've been wanting. . . ."

Laughing, Martin and Bruno came into the hall, pausing in the dug-out entryway to take off their boots.

"Martin!" she called, and Martin looked up at the sound of her voice and grinned at her. What they shared, Ivar felt as a joyful Presence, like the perfume of the first meadow flowers of spring, that penetrated even in this dank and fetid winter hall. The hall had stood up to the gale; the presence glimpsed in their shared gaze had withstood the storms of life. "This one is a cleric!

Maybe he could give us God's blessing on our marriage."

"Surely we have God's blessing already," said Martin as the child ran over to him and leaped up into his arms, cuddling there.

"Hush!" She made a sign with her hands, and spat, and then looked embarrassed. "Begging your pardon, my lord cleric. Old ways die hard. I mean nothing by it. But it's bad fortune to say what might attract the evil eye. Would you do it? We've nothing to offer but a place to sleep and something to eat and drink for as long as you must bide here until your companion is healed and you can go on. And these unnatural rains end. Can you speak God's blessing over us? We've been handfasted these six or seven summers but never had God's blessing spoken over us."

/ can't.

But as she stared at him, eyes wide and a hopeful smile on her lips, he could not say "no" to her.

He didn't know the words. He'd forgotten most things and learned little to begin with. He hadn't paid attention because he hadn't wanted to. He'd wanted everything else. Anything out of his reach had seemed so bright and ripe to him, like the perfect apple dangling from a branch too high to ever reach.

"I'll sing God's blessing over you," he said, "in the morning."

Ai! She was so happy as the rest stamped in and by lantern light stripped down to shifts and cozied into the pallets and platforms tucked up under the eaves that they slept on, all snugged together for warmth. They offered him an honored place close to the hearth, and he lay down beside Erkanwulf and the little lad, who had taken a liking to the rider, but although he closed his eyes, he could not sleep.

After a while Erkanwulf stirred, and whispered, "I've never heard you sing a blessing, not once in all this time. You're just a heretic, not a real churchman, aren't you?"

"Is there any harm in it?" Ivar murmured. "I served as a novice at Quedlinhame. It isn't as if a frater or cleric is likely to wander through here. Anyway, they've served us a good turn."

Erkanwulf grunted softly. "I suppose there's no harm in it. Funny, though. That one, called Martin, he came out of Gent years ago, so I hear. He was a lad then and he settled here and married a local girl. This is their boy." The child was snoring softly on the other side of Erkanwulf. "The wee lad has never heard of Autun or Lady Sabella or Biscop Constance, but he knows all about Gent and roads east." His voice got rough, or perhaps his leg was paining him.

"What will we do? We've only one horse now. You know as well as I do that we've nothing but empty promises to carry back to Biscop Constance."

"Let me think. Something strange is abroad in the world, don't you suppose? That wind ... it sounded liked the cry of a living soul.

Made me shiver right down through my skin. It made me think of a verse from the Holy Book, only I can't remember it right, something about the seas boiling and the wind tossing down trees."

Erkanwulf snorted. "Every deacon and cleric and frater I've ever met has a better memory than you, Lord Ivar, most noble cleric."

He spoke mockingly, but the words didn't sting. It was Erkanwulf's way to tease. A year ago, a month ago, Ivar would have stewed and simmered, turning those words over and over, but not now.

"The verses spoke of the end of the world," he said instead. "I feel we have been touched by a terrible, grand sword, a weapon wielded by God, or by those among humankind who don't fear what they should fear. Did you ever see trees fall so? Like sticks kicked over by a boy!"

"I did not. Never in my life, and I've stood in forests when the wind howled on winter nights. I thought I would piss myself, I was so scared."

Rain still drummed on the thatch roof of the hall, steady and ominous.

"That's right," agreed Ivar. "It wasn't natural. Nor were those shades we saw before either. We have to keep our eyes open and be ready to act. We have to get back to Biscop Constance no matter what. And go quickly, as soon as the weather breaks."

But in the morning, it rained. In the afternoon, it rained. All the next night, it rained. For five days it rained without letting up. The villagers kept busy with many tasks around the long hall and within the warren of huts and hovels and sheds they had erected within their log palisade. They ate the froth meat out of the horse in a series of soups that stretched the meat so that it would feed the two dozen or so folk across several days. Every evening as the light faded they gathered around the hearth fire and demanded Erkanwulf tell them the tale of Gent, or that Ivar regale them with the story of the ill-fated expedition east into the marchlands under the command of Princess Sapientia and Prince Bayan of Ungria.

"Look here, I pray you, my lord cleric," said Martin late on the sixth day after he'd come in from outside. He stank of smoke. He'd been curing horse meat. He rummaged in a chest and brought out a Parchment tied with a strip of leather. This he rolled out on the table. Folk crowded around, whispering as they stared at the writing none of them could read. "It's our charter! From the king himself, may God bless him and his kin. Do you see the seal here?" He touched the wax seal reverentially. "We just heard it the once, read by that Eagle that rode through here, the one with a dark face. She had to take it away so it could get the king's seal. Another Eagle, a red-haired one like to you, rode through a year or so after and brought it back to us. But he couldn't read. Can you read it for us, so we can hear it again?"

How they all gazed at him with hopeful expressions! They were such a sturdy group, healthier than many because the forest provided so much, all but a steady supply of grain and salt which, they'd told him, they traded for. Even in lean years they could survive with less grain. They hadn't any horses, but three milk cows. They had forage for their goats and sheep as well as certain plants and tubers out of the forest that could be eaten by humankind in hard times even if they weren't tasty. They ate meat often, and they were proud of it, knowing that folk beyond the forest never fared so well.

He bent over the diploma. The lantern light made the pen strokes waver. He'd never read well nor did he like to, but the months in Queen's Grave and the unrelenting supervision of Biscop Constance had forced him to labor over Dariyan, the language used both by the church and by the king's schola for all decrees and capitularies.

They waited, so quiet that the sound of dripping rain off the outside eaves made him nervous. He kept expecting the rain to start up again. Luckily, it was not a long document. He stumbled through it without utterly shaming himself. King Henry's promise was straightforward: the foresters would be free of service to any lord or lady as long as they kept the king's road passable for himself and his servants and messengers and armies.

"The Eagle read it better," murmured Martin's wife to her husband, then blushed when Ivar looked at her.

"Eagles can't read," he said. "They learn the words in their head and repeat them back. That's what she must have done."

"Nay, she read it all right," said one of the older men. "I recall that well enough. She touched each word as she spoke it. How could she know which was which if she weren't reading? Strange looking girl, too, not any older than my Baltia here." He set a hand on the head of an adolescent girl perhaps sixteen or seventeen years of age. "I don't know if she were pretty, but she sure caught the eye."

"She was at Gent, too," said Martin. "She was the one what saved us, those of us who escaped."

"I know who you mean!" said Erkanwulf from his seat on the bench. "We rode with her, Captain Ulric's band out of Autun, that is She was riding with Count Lavastine's army, but she was a King's Eagle, after all. I'd wager it was the same one."

Ivar sat down, clenching his hands. He shut his eyes, and at once they fussed around him and Martin's wife, called Flora, brought him ale to drink to clear his head.

"I will never be free of her." He hadn't meant to say it out loud. He laughed, seeing them stare at him. Erkanwulf looked skeptical. Martin looked puzzled. Flora's mouth had turned up softly, and her gaze was gentle, as though she had guessed it all. She touched her young husband on the shoulder, and he started, glanced at her, and reading something in her expression—words weren't the only marks that could be read!—he rolled up the diploma and stashed it away in the chest beneath the community's other precious possessions.

"You said you'd give us your blessing, Lord Ivar," he said. "Will you do so?"

"I'll do so."

He rose. Old memories clung. They were a stink he would never be rid of. Liath had never been his, and she would never have chosen him. She sure caught the eye. He wasn't the only man to have thought so. But it no longer mattered. The world had changed in a way he did not yet understand.

"Stand before the hearth fire with clasped hands," he said to Martin and Flora. He'd never witnessed a commoner's wedding. Rarely did a deacon officiate in any case, since the law of bed and board made a marriage. He dredged for scraps of verse, God's blessings for fecundity, the wedding of church and humankind as bride and groom, the necessity of holding fast to faith.

"For healthful seasons, for the abundance of the fruits of the earth, and for peaceful times, let us pray. Have mercy upon us, now and ever, and unto ages of ages."

Flora wept. Martin sobbed. Their son skipped around them in glee while the baby waved its chubby arms. Balt and his daughter broke out a flute and a fiddle, and the others took the table down and cleared a space for dancing. Erkanwulf tested his healing ankle by spinning Uta round and round, and he came back, laughing, to sit and rest and grimace.

"Don't be so grim," he said to Ivar. "Standing there with your arms crossed and a frown like my grandmam's! Heh! She never smiled one day in her long life! My da used to say that a spell had been put on her when she was a young sprite that she'd drop dead if she was ever happy, so there you are. She was the oldest person I ever saw till the day she dropped dead."

The story teased a grin out of him. "Was she smiling?"

"She was not! It wasn't the curse that felled her. She got hit in the head by a piece of wood that flew free when one of my uncles was chopping up a log. A little like my poor horse, now I think on it."

"Erkanwulf! How can you speak so disrespectfully of the dead?"

"She was a mean old bitch. That's just how it was. No one was sorry to see her go except the dog."

Like me. But he shook himself. It was a lie he told himself, and he didn't know why. He had told himself that lie for years, ever after Hanna had chosen to go with Liath over him. But he had seen how false the lie was the day Sigfrid, Ermanrich, and Hathumod had cried to see him risk his life for Biscop Constance. He had seen how false it was the day Baldwin had given up his freedom for the rest of them. He had seen how false it was the day Baldwin wept, believing him dead.

Maybe Hanna, and Liath, had scorned him, but there were others who needed him. Who were waiting for him.

He grabbed Erkanwulf's shoulder. "As soon as the road's clear enough that the horse isn't at risk, we'll go."

"If you wish," agreed Erkanwulf. "You've got a strange look on your face. Has an imp gotten into you?"

"It's time. We've got to act while we have the chance."

"Time for what?"

"Time for Captain Ulric and all the men loyal to him to choose whether to act, or to give way.

Princess Theophanu can't help us. It's up to us to free Biscop Constance. There's only one way to do it."

3

A burning wind struck with such ferocity that every tent in camp was laid flat. A hail of stinging ash passed over them where they huddled under whatever shelter they could find. After all this, after the rumbling and groaning of earth faded, the terrible glare of lightning gave way to a sickly gleam that Hanna at long last identified as dawn. She crawled out from under the wagon into the cloudy light of a new day in which everything had changed. She had taken shelter with Aurea, Teuda, and poor, addled Petra with her perpetually vacant expression.

"Stay there," she whispered to the others. Their pale faces stared out at her.

"Do you see Sister Rosvita?" Aurea looked ready to scramble out, but Hanna waved her back.

"Stay there! You can't imagine—just stay there."

It was impossible to think such a day could ever dawn. It was impossible to imagine a world that resembled the one she surveyed now. The great traveling camp made up of the combined armies of King Geza of Ungria and Lady Eudokia of Arethousa looked like a field of rubbish. A few brave souls staggered to and fro uttering aimless cries into the dawning light. Clouds covered the sky. The air, especially to the south and west, was yellow because of a dragging haze that obscured her view in every direction beyond an arrow's shot. Only to the east was it vaguely lighter. A layer of ash covered everything, and it seemed most of the animals on which the army relied had fled. She had grit on her lips and in her eyes, and a skin of ash over every part of her body, even beneath her clothing, even under her eyelids.

"Hanna!'

She stumbled forward over a broken tent pole to grasp the arms of Sister Rosvita. "God be praised, Sister! Where are the others?"

"I have them all accounted for except Aurea, Teuda, and poor Sister Petra."

"They are with me. What of Mother Obligatia?"

"She lives." Rosvita shut her eyes as she exhaled, a sigh that seemed to shake the ground. Hanna found that she had tears in her eyes, knowing they had survived.

Thus far.

A bubble of canvas stretched and shifted like a living creature as Fortunatus emerged, wiping grime off his face. Beyond, not one tent remained standing. A body lay unmoving on the ground, but Hanna could not be sure the person was dead.

"I pray that was the worst of it," said Rosvita as she lowered her hand. "We must find water and food."

"We must decide what to do next, Sister. It will take days for this army to recover, if it ever does.

There should be twice as many people. Are they all still hiding, or have they fled?"

Or died?

Rosvita glanced toward the collapsed tent in which she had sheltered. Fortunatus lifted up the heavy canvas as Ruoda and Gerwita crawled out. Gerwita, seeing the camp, burst into tears.

"We are faced with a difficult choice, Eagle. Do we flee on foot, knowing we may perish from hunger and thirst?" She gestured toward the hazy south and west. "I do not like the look of that. I would not turn my steps in that direction unless I had no other choice. But by traveling north and east we remain in Dalmiakan country, under the suzerainity of the Arethousan Empire. Yet in such circumstances, is it better to be a prisoner so we can be assured a bowl of gruel each day?"

"I don't think there are any assurances any longer, Sister. I pray you, let me scout the camp while you get the rest of our party ready to move out. Perhaps there is a bit of water or food you can find in the wreckage."

"Who will accompany you?"

'Alone, I may pass unnoticed in this chaos. I'll see what I can see. See what has become of kings and queens and noble generals."

Rosvita nodded grimly before kissing Hanna on either cheek. "Go carefully, Eagle. We will be ready when you return."

Hanna had lain all night on top of her staff and her bow and quiver. She had a bruise down her chest and abdomen from their pressure into her flesh, but she hadn't dared lose her weapons to the wind. She grabbed them now as Aurea crawled out from under the wagon and helped silent Petra emerge into the dusty air. She slung bow and quiver over her back and walked into the camp with her staff held firmly in her right hand, gaze flicking this way and that, but the people she saw crawling through the debris or standing with hands to their heads seemed too stunned to think of doing her harm.

A slender hound whimpered in the dirt; its hips were bloody, and though it kept trying to rise, it could not stand on its hind legs. A man scrabbled in the ruins of a wagon that had, somehow, completely overturned.

"Help me!" he said, to no one. "Help me!"

She came over and with her help he heaved up the heavy wagon, just enough so he could look underneath.

"No! No! No!" he cried in Arethousan, and he leaped back, releasing his hold on the wagon. The abrupt increase in weight caught her off guard. She barely released the slats and jumped back herself, scraping her fingers, as the wagon's bed crashed back onto the ground.

"Hey!" she called, but he ran off through the camp, still crying,

"No! No!"

"Ai, God!" she swore, sucking on her fingers. She had picked up two splinters, one too deep to pry loose. "Oh, damn! Ouch!"

She wasn't eager to see what lay under the wagon, so she walked on through the ruins of the camp. As she neared the central compound, she saw more signs of life, soldiers hurrying about their tasks, some of them leading horses. A line of wagons was being drawn into position. A handsome bay so spooked that it shied at every shift and movement was being calmed by a stolid groom. Even here, the royal tents lay in heaps and mounds, fallen into ridges and valleys over whatever pallets and tables and benches sat inside. A rack of spears had toppled to spill all over.

She glanced around to see if anyone was looking, bent, and snatched up one of the spears. No one stopped her. A gathering of some hundreds of people milled and swarmed in a clear spot beyond the collapsed tents. She edged forward into the crowd and wove and sidestepped her way far enough in that she could see what was going on.

Nothing good: A storm of nobles arguing. That didn't bode well. She used her hip to nudge her way past a weary soldier and her height to see over the heads of the shorter, stockier Arethousans.

No one seemed to notice her in particular; the ash had turned her white-blonde hair as grimy as that of the rest.

"But you promised me!" Princess Sapientia was saying. She had weathered the night better than many. Her face was clean and she didn't have dark circles under her eyes.

King Geza had not fared so well. He was pacing, hands clenched, and his gaze touched his wife's figure only in glances. He was looking for something; Hanna wasn't sure what.

"I have five adult sons. Any one of them may believe this disaster is a sign from God for him to usurp my place."

"They would not have done so before, after you left?"

"No. My officials were in place. Who knows what has become of them? This was no natural storm. The priests will speak in many tongues, all arguing among themselves. The Arethousans will scold the Dariyans. The old women will creep from their huts and start scouting for a white stallion. I must go home and see to my kingdom lest it fall to pieces."

"This storm may not have touched Ungria! It's so far away."

Geza stopped for long enough to look at Sapientia with disgust. "Only a fool would not recognize this storm for what it is. As soon as my soldiers are ready, we march."

"But you promised me—!" She choked on the words. She could not get them out of her throat. "I married you!"

"Come with me, then. Once Ungria is safe—"

"What of my kingdom?" she exclaimed.

"By the blessed Name of God, woman! All that lies south of here is blasted, so the scouts say. To the west, toward Aosta—who can see for the smoke and fire? Do not be blind. I will not ride to Wendar. I turn my back on Aosta, just as God has."

"You promised me!"

Hanna wanted to shake her, but King Geza was faster, and less patient than Prince Bayan to be sure.

"Then I divorce you, Sapientia. Go on your way as you please."

"Divorce me?"

"I divorce you. Must I repeat myself? Ah! Captain! What news?"

"We're ready, Your Majesty."

"Then we go." He gestured. The captain shouted a command in Ungrian, and half the men milling around scattered so swiftly that Hanna felt spun in circles although she didn't move.

"But what about me?" cried Sapientia plaintively.

"I divorce you. It is done. Feh!" He strode off, talking in a low voice to his captain. He didn't even look back as the handsome bay was led up for him to ride.

Sapientia stood gasping, her hands opening and closing although she had nothing to grasp onto.

Hanna whistled under her breath and began to retreat out from the chuckling, staring crowd of Arethousans, softly, slowly, taking care not to draw attention to herself, just a quiet hound slinking off to do its business, nothing worth noticing. Off to the right she heard the shouts of men and the jangling of harness as a large troop moved out. Lord protect them! Geza had abandoned his bride and his allies without a moment's hesitation. She knew she had to get back to Sister Rosvita quickly. She knew what the answer was, now, to their predicament.

Move fast, and get out of the way.

"There!"

She spun, but it was too late. Sergeant Bysantius strode up with a dozen guards at his heels.

"Eagle! Come with us."

They had already surrounded her. She saw, around them and beyond them, the steady tidal flow of troops and servants toward a distant goal. Bysantius grabbed her elbow and towed her along with him.

"They're wanting you," he added.

"What about my companions?"

"They're not wanting your companions."

Lady Eudokia was seated on a stool under a torn awning fixed in place by four men holding up poles tied to each corner of blue silk. The fabric echoed the clear heavens they could no longer see. Her young nephew clung to her robes, face hidden in her lap. She sipped from a cup while Lord Alexandras spoke to a trio of captains, all of them pale with ash and looking as dour as any farmer who has just seen his field of rye marred by the black rot. Beyond, wagons rumbled into place in a line of march. A rank of mounted soldiers trotted past, heading for the front of the line, which was obscured by haze. The Arethousan army was moving out.

"Exalted Lady." Sergeant Bysantius dropped to both knees, bowed, and rose. He shoved Hanna forward. "The Eagle, as you requested."

She tripped over her feet and barely had time to right herself before the general whistled, listening to the report of one of his captains.

"Geza's gone already? Hsst! We'll leave a small rear guard behind to bring any who scattered in the night. Bring the horses!" He saw Hanna, but nodded toward the sergeant. "That was fast."

"I found her wandering, Your Excellency."

"She's too valuable to lose, as we agreed before. You'll be in charge of her, Bysantius. It will be your head if she escapes." He turned away and walked to his horse.

It was strange how easily she understood Arethousan now, as if the scent of camphor tossed into the flame to let the lady and the general see what she saw had at the same time opened her mind and let it steal words out of theirs.

"I pray you, Your Excellency," she cried, starting forward. "Exalted Lady. I pray you, ray companions ... I know where they are. If you'll just let me go and make sure they're with one of the wagons—"

He paused, turning back to frown at her. "You misunderstand us. We do not need your companions anymore. They are of no use to us because our circumstances have changed so greatly."

"Surely you don't mean to abandon them!"

He shrugged and walked away.

"Sergeant! Exalted Lady!"

Lady Eudokia sipped at her cup and ignored Hanna's cries.

"No offense," murmured Bysantius, gripped her arm, "but you'd do better to come quietly."

"I can't abandon them! They'll die!"

"It's out of your hands, Eagle. You are the prisoner of Lord Alexandras now."

She ripped her arm out of his grasp and bolted, but two of the guards tackled her. She went down hard, but kept fighting until they pinned all her limbs. They stripped her of her weapons, tied her hands and feet with rope, and threw her in the back of a wagon as it lurched past in the train of Lord Alexandras. Scraped, bloody, and bruised, she wept with fury, hating herself for her helplessness.

4

HANNA did not return. They waited for hours at the edge of camp, hoping not to be noticed, and indeed it was as if they had become invisible. No one paid them the least mind. There was no telling what hour of the day it was, or what service they ought to sing, because the clouds never lifted and the light kept its smoky, sullen glow, scarcely enough to read by.

At intervals they watched vague shapes that seemed to be troops moving in the distance, perhaps a line of march receding toward the northeast, but the haze obscured most movement beyond an arrow's shot. Their eyes stung and their noses ran from the constant irritation of falling ash and blowing grit. Yet the patter of ash-fall eased by the time Fortunatus sighed and turned to Rosvita.

"What if she is not coming back, Sister? Should one of us go look for her?"

"We will not split up. What happens to one, happens to all."

"We have waited here long enough," said Mother Obligatia. They had set her litter across the wagon and shielded her with a canvas awning so that the ancient nun could ease up on her elbows and survey the scene. "Night will come and find us standing like dumb beasts in the field."

Rosvita smiled, feeling how stern her heart had become. Smiles meant something different here in the aftermath; they betokened not happiness or laughter but determination. "You are right. We must make a decision, or others will choose for us."

They had taken turns circling out from their position, venturing only to that point where they could still see back to the group as they searched in the wreckage for food and water. They had found five corpses, put one dreadfully injured dog out of its misery, and managed otherwise to collect a small store of provisions and, most importantly, a score of sacks and leather bottles filled variously with wine, sweetened vinegar, and a nasty-tasting liquid that stank of aniseed but was something they might be able to drink in dire need.

The wagon under which Aurea had sheltered was too heavy to drag, but Hilaria discovered a handcart in decent shape, needing only a small repair to the axle because it had tipped over and spilled its load of bundled herbs.

"Some peddler following the army," said Aurea as she helped the girls gather up what could be salvaged: lavender, mostly, sage, tufts of bay and basil, and feverwort. 'A bag of chestnuts! Why would anyone abandon such treasures?"

"Perhaps the peddler is dead," said Ruoda sharply. Gerwita began to snivel.

"We'll stay together," said Rosvita, seeing that tempers would run high with exhaustion and fear driving them. "Take turns hauling the cart."

They set off with Rosvita in the lead beside Diocletia. Behind them, Fortunatus and Teuda carried Mother Obligatia's litter. Heriburg followed with the precious books slung over her back. Ruoda and Gerwita shepherded Petra, while Jerome and Jehan took turns pushing the cart. Tireless Hilaria paced up and down the line to spell those who needed a rest, and Aurea set herself as their rear guard. They had no particular destination but made their way through rippling lakes of torn and crumpled canvas, past discarded shoes and forgotten harness, an iron kettle, a red cap, and a broken leather strap affixed to a bronze Circle of Unity in the Arethousan style with crossed bars quartering the interior. The armies had left an eerie silence in their wake but for the wind grumbling through scraps of canvas and a dog snuffling at an overturned wagon, trying to dig its way in to something caught underneath.

But for the wind and the dog, nothing and no one moved in the haze. Those folk the armies had not taken with them had, evidently fled the scene, fearing worse to come. It was difficult to imagine what could be worse than what they had suffered during the night.

"Look!" murmured Diocletia. "There's someone—there!"

A figure huddled in a clearing notable for the lack of debris on all sides except a single expanse of splotched canvas that had once been a grand tent and a scattering of spears tumbled on the ground. The creature crouched with its head buried in its dirty riding skirts and its arms wrapped around its knees, like a child.

Rosvita gestured for the others to halt. She ventured forward cautiously with Diocletia beside her.

The nun paused to pick up a spear, and Hilaria and Aurea hurried up beside her to gather up the rest. They walked softly, but even so, the person seemed utterly lost not to have heard their approach. They halted a body's length from her—it was now obvious it was a woman—and Diocletia moved sideways so that if the woman was armed and dangerous she might not strike them both dead with one blow. How had it come to this, that a holy nun should think like a soldier, weighing tactics? Was this to be the fate of all humankind in the weeks and months to come?

"Friend," said Rosvita in Arethousan, as gently as she knew how. "We will not harm you."

At first, she gained no response. But at last that dark head stirred and a woman raised a tearstained face to stare at her with an expression of such hopelessness that Rosvita felt tears in her own eyes drawn out by that naked anguish.

She was stunned as she recognized the other woman. "Your Highness," she said in Wendish. "I am Sister Rosvita. Do you remember me? Where is King Geza?"

"I divorce you," said the princess, each word formed so precisely that it seemed she was repeating a phrase spoken by someone else. Her gaze was bleak, and her hands were dirty, as if she had been digging.

'Are you alone, Your Highness?"

Sapientia's laugh was that of a madwoman, quickly cut off. "A prince without a retinue is no prince!"

"We are your retinue, Your Highness."

Sapientia stared at her for a long time without answering. Rosvita began to doubt the princess had heard her.

Fortunatus crept up beside Rosvita and leaned to whisper in her ear. "There is no one left, Sister.

She's been abandoned, just as we were." He sounded as shocked as she felt. "She is King Henry's daughter! What will we do?"

"We must take her with us."

A robed person swept past them and heedlessly knelt down within range of the princess. "Come, little lamb," she said in Dariyan. "You've strayed far, but we'll take care of you now."

It was Sister Petra. Her expression was calm, almost blank, but her voice had a soothing gentleness. If Princess Sapientia understood her coaxing, spoken as it was in Dariyan, she made no sign, but she allowed herself to be helped to stand, she allowed herself to be herded along without protest. She said not one word more as they made their way through the wreckage of the camp, always moving upslope and away from the distant ocean, until they came at long last to a pine wood whose sparse canopy gave them a measure of shelter as the light changed and became rather more dense. Night was coming on, although a glow remained in the sky, painting the heavens a deathly orange-red. They rigged up a serviceable shelter and dined sparingly on a stew of leeks and turnips flavored with a bay leaf and cooked over an open fire in the kettle they had found in the deserted camp.

"We are well set for a hike in the woods," said Fortunatus, attempting levity although there wasn't much to be had.

Rosvita smiled gratefully at him. They had a single spoon, which they passed around between them to eat out of the kettle. "We have provisions, and freedom. It is more than we had before."

"Best be grateful for each least blessing God grant us," agreed Mother Obligatia. She was so tiny and so frail that the power of her voice always amazed Rosvita. She was actually sitting up for the first time in many days, as if the terrible night had strengthened her.

Her words awoke someone else. Sapientia had let the spoon pass by without acknowledging that it, or anything, existed. She had walked in a trance, pressed along by the constant attentions of Sister Petra, whose entire being was focused on her helpless charge. The glow of the fire painted shadows on the princess' face, making of her a mask whose expression could not be fathomed because it was so empty. But the mask spoke.

"A prince without a retinue is no prince," she repeated.

Rosvita knelt beside her. "We are your retinue, Your Highness."

After a long silence, Sapientia turned her head and looked straight at the cleric, although Rosvita at first wasn't sure the princess knew who she was. Behind her, Jerome slurped at the spoon.

"You love my father, Sister Rosvita," Sapientia said.

"I love him and serve him, Your Highness."

"Do you love me, Sister?"

"Nay, child, not in the same way. I have known your father for a very long time. He has my heart, but you have my loyalty. I will not abandon you."

Sapientia slammed fists into the ground and again, and again. "Not like all the others! My father!

Bayan! Sanglant! The Pechanek mothers! Geza! Every one of them deserted me!" The storm broke over her. She sobbed in great heaves, trembling all over. Petra stroked her shoulders, murmuring words that made no sense, and after a while the princess calmed.

Wind crackled through limbs. Among the trees a branch snapped and crashed down to the ground. Otherwise it was so quiet. Too quiet. They had seen no birds all day. No telltale rustling marked the comings and goings of the little nocturnal creatures who ought to be scuttling about their nightly rounds.

Sapientia's reaction was such a brief window, opened to show a light within and perhaps soon to be shut. Rosvita had to ask, although she feared the answer.

"Your Highness. Did you see Hanna? The Eagle who was with us?"

Sapientia did not raise her head. Her voice was hoarse and ugly. "She's dead."

"Ai, God," Rosvita whispered. "You saw her dead? You saw her body?"

Sapientia refused to answer, only stared at the ground.

"What will we do?" they asked, one by one, all but Mother Obligatia.

"I should never have let her go off alone!"

"Nay, Sister," said Mother Obligatia, scolding her. "The Eagle did what she had to do. That was her duty. She knew it was dangerous."

Guilt burned. Rosvita thought of Hanna as one of her charges, now that they had traveled so far together. She could not find any ease in her heart by prating about duty. She rose and paced around the fire, examining each one who had followed her so far: Mother Obligatia with her ancient sorrows and dangerous past; the abbess' three stout attendants in the persons of Diocletia, Hilaria, and the lay sister Teuda; poor Petra, now cooing and stroking the unresponsive Princess Sapientia; Rosvita's faithful servant Aurea, with her strong arm and steady head; that gaggle of young clerics who admired her far too well, timid Gerwita, stubborn Heriburg, clever Ruoda, and the two young men, Jerome and Jehan, still youths in so many ways. Last of all, she met the gaze of the one who was her secret strength: Brother Fortunatus. He nodded at her. He would never waver.

"We rest as well as we can, for we will need our strength. It seemed to me that the light was better in the east, but that way lies Arethousa. Unless tomorrow brings an unexpected change, we

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswijk/Mijn%20d...lliott%20-%20Crown%20Of%20Stars%2006%20-%20In%20the%20Ruins.html must try our luck to the northwest. We must try to reach Wendar. God help us."

God help me, she thought, as they made ready to rest on the cold ground, arranging cloaks and canvas and blankets over themselves, a jumble of treasures they had salvaged out of the camp.

They had provisions to last for perhaps five days. God help me, I pray you. I do not want to lose another one.

Out in the forest, a twig snapped. All of them looked up, startled and anxious. They waited, but no further noise beyond that of the wind rattling in the boughs disturbed the evening silence.

"What if there are bandits, Sister Rosvita?" asked Gerwita. Her voice was so soft it almost vanished under the sound of the wind. "We have no weapons to defend ourselves. We can't use those spears."

The girl looked scared. The others stared at Rosvita, waiting for her answer.

She caught Fortunatus' gaze. He smiled bravely.

"We have our wits, child. Let us pray they are weapon enough."

VI

THE ENEMY'S

HANDIWORK

1

"LOOK Your Excellency. Can that be Darre?"

The soldier shifted impatiently as his comrade led Antonia's mule the last few paces to the top of the ridge. From this vantage point the plain of Dar could usually be seen in all its glorious expanse: the river, the towers rising on the palace rock, the domes of the two great cathedrals, the manifold streets as twisty as the Enemy's minions, the western hills that blocked the path to the sea, the thousand fields on which the ancient city had first taken root and grown into an empire.

Antonia's eyes hadn't stopped stinging since that awful night when the wind had torn the thatch off the cottage in which she sheltered, and ash had started to fall. She rubbed them now as they halted.

"God help us," added the soldier, voice choked. "The western hills are all on fire. And the plain of Dar—look!"

"I see nothing," said his companion.

It was a foul soup of air, like the congealed breath of the Enemy: smoke and brimstone, the stench of the Pit. For the space of one breath, a shift in the wind stripped the worst layer of haze off the land and she glimpsed the distant towers and walls of Darre before they were swallowed up again in the fog.

"We must descend," she said, and she heard the two guards whistle hard between teeth. They were frightened because they were weak, although they had guarded her faithfully enough on their journey. She had lost count of the days.

"Who knows what kind of creatures might be lurking down there in that smoke," said the taller one, called Focas. "They could have claws as long as my arm. They might rip us to pieces."

"God will protect us," said Antonia. "Have we not met dangers? Have we not survived?"

Pietro spoke less but said more that was to the point. "What if we can't breathe that fouled air?"

"We must go down," repeated Antonia. "We must reach Tivura, to see if the princesses have survived. As for the rest, I fear God have punished the wicked most decisively."

The soldiers looked at each other, a glance that excluded her, as they had always excluded her.

They served her faithfully, it was true, but out of loyalty to Empress Adelheid. Still, no matter how irritating it was that they could not recognize her worth and God's favor, she endured it because she had to, because it was another test thrown in her path. God honored the righteous, but They did not always spare them trouble and ingratitude.

"The princesses," said Pietro. "That's what the empress would want."

Focas nodded. "The princesses," he agreed. "We must see if they can be rescued, if they are indeed trapped down there, although we must hope they are not. If their stewards have any wits about them at all, which I doubt, they would have fled to a safe place."

"No one can flee God's wrath," said Antonia sternly. "There are those who have done what they ought not." She gestured toward the hazy landscape below. "Thus are they rewarded with chastisement and death."

Focas rubbed his forehead, looking anxious.

Pietro hefted his spear. "No use waiting."

They started down the road, which was utterly deserted although the day wasn't far gone. It was difficult to measure the hours because the cloud cover never lifted and the light had a sameness to it that made noon seem like twilight and morning no different than afternoon. Ash squeaked under their feet. Pebbles rolled and crackled, and more than once Focas or Pietro slipped and, swearing, caught themselves before they fell. Fortunately, the mule was a sure-footed creature, stolid and companionable and not particularly stubborn.

As they descended, the light changed and deepened to a queer yellow fog that painted their skin the color of parchment. The hollows of their eyes darkened until the two soldiers looked like walking corpses as they strode along. Down and down they walked, as into the Pit. The world had emptied. They saw no one and no thing. Even the grass had withered into dry stalks. Now and again they crossed a stream running down from the circling heights, but a sour taste choked the water although they forced it down anyway. It sat heavily in parched stomachs. Antonia felt sick. Her head pounded and her throat burned. Each breath scraped as she wheezed along.

In time twilight faded to night. They set up camp off the road but not so far that they would lose sight of it and thus find themselves lost in the morning. The mule ate its lean dinner; they had only two days of grain left and certainly there was little enough to graze. They had bread and cheese and wine for themselves. The soldiers took turns on guard duty. She slept on her cloak under a canvas lean-to. She did not mind the hardship, although her old bones ached and her head never stopped hurting.

At dawn Pietro hissed. "Focas! Rouse you! Do you hear that?"

She rose and came to stand beside them, fingering the amulet at her chest.

She heard the jingle, too, and touched each man on the elbow. "Stand you as still as mice when the owl swoops. Say nothing."

They, too, wore amulets, as did the mule. She had woven them with her own hands out of wolfsbane and turnsole, and still nursed blisters on her palms and fingers.

The procession emerged out of the haze: a line of sobbing, hacking, coughing men and women coffled in a line and guarded by a crew of men who in another life might have been soldiers as honorable as the ones who stood on either side of her. The soldiers wore cloth tied over mouths and noses to protect themselves from the air. The prisoners had nothing but the rags on their backs. A few were naked. As they shuffled past, she counted them: eight, sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four. Over one hundred in all, a remnant.

Although their guards were alert, looking from side to side and pointing here and there into the gloom, they marked no watchers, even those standing in plain sight a stone's throw off the road.

As the last man, a brawny, swaggering fellow, faded from sight, Pietro let out a great sigh that was more of a hoarse choke, and touched his chest where the amulet lay.

"Lord be praised," he said.

Focas choked down a hysterical laugh. "Didn't you recognize him? That was Sergeant Hatto there walking last of all. Do you think those were slaves they were herding away?"

"Slaves now, whatever they were before." Pietro knelt, touched his hand to the dead earth, and kissed his fingers. "I pray you, Your Excellency, let us go swiftly."

"This land is a charnel house," said Focas. "I can smell it."

They walked again that day, and the stench of sulfur got worse. Antonia's headache got worse.

Her eyes wept from the burning, in time, they saw off to either side glowing cracks spewing ghastly yellow smoke. It was as though the Earth itself was breaking apart. Once Pietro almost fainted when the wind caught him full on with a streamer of air off one of the fumaroles, but he staggered forward gasping and vomiting until he was out of danger. After that they were careful to keep cloth tied tightly across mouth and nose.

They walked as though in a tunnel, since they could see no great distance to any side. The haze clouded everything, making the world seem by one measure very small indeed and by another like a vast unknowable wasteland that could never be crossed but only suffered. Trudging on in this way they missed the crossroads where they might turn aside to Tivura and came at the end of the second day to the walls of Darre. In all that time they had seen not a single living creature except that one sad procession. No birds flew; no sheep blatted; no goats disturbed their rest, seeking scraps to eat. The mule was not faring well, but it had a strong sense of self-preservation and refused to fall behind. Even so, Antonia walked rather than rode for fear it might buckle and toss her to the ground. If she broke a leg, she, too, would be trapped in this purgatory.

That was what it was, of course. She recognized it as they saw the gaping gates rise out of the fog in front of them and beheld the tumbled ruins of the fairest and most magnificent city humankind had ever built. Had they unwittingly crossed through a stone crown into the world where galla roamed? Had Anne's magic brought down the destruction? Or had the Lost Ones returned with plague and fire to defeat their ancient enemies?

"We'll go to the palace, camp there tonight, and after take the road to Tivura."

"I don't like to go into the city," said Focas as Pietro stroked his beard. "It scares me. I don't mind saying so. It scares me."

"None will see us. I think the city deserted in any case."

Pietro hesitated. Even after all this time he did not trust her; he did not look to her as a servant ought to obey his master. Still, in the end he turned to Focas and said, breath whistling as he spoke, "The empress. She would want it, would she not?"

The empress. They were all Adelheid's faithful soldiers, every one of them.

Fuming, she followed them into the empty city. Twice, they saw does slink away around corners, tails tucked tight and heads down. Of dead folk there were none, but human bones they saw aplenty scattered across avenues and the open squares. Fallen apartment blocks and tumbled columns lay like dead beasts in the rubble. Each entryway was a dark mouth; each was silent.

Wind swirled dust up from the streets to blend with the haze. Once, from far away, they heard a shout. Their footfalls scraped ominously, echoing off the walls. But they saw no one.

"How many days since that wind blasted us?" Focas whispered as they reached the paved ramp that led up to the two palaces built atop the central hill. "This happened then, don't you think?

The storm brought destruction with it. I could smell it in the air, like it was diseased."

Pietro scratched his nose, then sneezed. "I wish we'd stayed with the empress. No telling if she lives, or is dead."

Close by, a dog growled, and both soldiers whirled, raising their spears, to be greeted by a heavier silence.

"Come," said Antonia. "It will be dark soon. Let's find shelter."

They made their way up the ramp past broken-down wagons abandoned in haste and in one case with the remains of a horse scattered around the traces where dogs had ripped it apart. Focas counted swords, and had reached the astounding total of fifty-five before they reached the top.

"Who would throw down their good iron swords like that?" he muttered to Pietro. The two men stood a stone's throw away from Antonia, but she overheard them nevertheless.

"Dead men. We'll be dead, too, if we don't get out of here. This is a fool's errand."

"Hush!"

From the top of the ramp they surveyed the city. Nothing moved but for a tumbling scrap, hard to say what it was but probably a bit of cloth, rolling down a distant avenue. The fog obscured even the towering walls and distant gates. Of church towers, she saw none Perhaps they had all fallen.

Off to the west in the hills bordering the sea, streaks of fire that marked red flowing rivers pierced the sullen haze despite the distance.

Surely even the Pit smelled sweeter and nourished more life!

Surely not. This was the Enemy's handiwork.

"Come," she said.

They ventured into the broad courtyard that fronted the twin palaces. The imperial palace had burned. It still stank of charred wood, a sharp scent overlying the reek of brimstone and decay.

The skopos' palace had many more sections built entirely of stone, and these had survived with less damage.

"I had thought to examine the regnant's schola and library," said Antonia thoughtfully as they stood in the courtyard that separated the two palaces. "But it appears too dangerous to walk there."

She advanced nevertheless into an alcove where a sooty face peered at her out of the stone: a woman's visage wreathed with snakes that were also her hair. A viscous green puddle had collected in the basin below her open mouth, once a fountain where travelers might splash water on dusty faces before entering the great hall to meet the regnant. The mule strained toward the water. Pietro hauled it back.

"Perhaps there is something left in the barracks, if the rats haven't eaten it all up," said Antonia.

"Go carefully, see what you can find. Seek grain and water for the beast, and provisions for ourselves. Also, a place to shelter for one night."

"Yes, Your Excellency. I'll go, and Focas will stay and attend you."

"Nay, best you go together. I will attempt the skopos' palace and meet you here by this fountain."

"If there are dogs, or madmen . . . ?"

She nodded. "Do as I command."

"Yes, Your Excellency."

Impertinent man! She crossed under the shadow of a vast arch and found, in the usual niche, a brace of lanterns that, amazingly, had not been tampered with, together with flint and scraps of linen. These she carried as she walked quietly along the old familiar corridors. It was utterly silent. In here, she could not even hear the wind. Now and again she glimpsed withered gardens through open windows and doors. The fountains, of course, had all stopped running-Dust scraped under her feet.

She almost did not recognize the double doors that led into the audience chamber. The gold leaf that had once covered the relief carved into those doors had been pried off and taken away by thieves or by faithful servants. Who could know? One door sat askew, having lost two hinges.

She did not touch it but tugged on the other, which opened with a groan into the empty hall.

Her footfalls echoed softly as she walked. The ceiling arched high above, dimly perceived. The mural washed across the far wall, depicting the Translatus of the blessed Daisan, had splintered with a thousand cracks, and the Earth beneath his feet had vanished into a pile of fragments on the floor. Up on the dais, the skopos' chair was broken into pieces and all the gems pried out. A single amethyst had been left behind, dropped in haste, no doubt. She picked it up, turned it, but there wasn't light enough to catch the glints within. Still, in a pinch, it might serve her. She tucked it into the pocket sewn into her sleeve, then pushed past the curtain at the far right and came into the private sanctum of the skopos.

A room, whitewashed, with paintings of noble saints gracing the ceiling. There was a single table, a battered chest whose lock had been broken, and a shattered ceramic bowl at the foot of the bare pallet where, once, the skopos had rested. Anne had not scorned luxury, but neither had she coveted it.

The thieves had skipped over the single locked cupboard, sealed with an amulet. She studied it, careful not to touch its knot in any way: wolfsbane, which was poison to the skin, for invisibility, lavender for chastity and thereby to keep locks unbroken, and thistle for strength. Cunningly woven, certainly, but she recognized the pattern as one she had taught to certain of Anne's clerics.

A brief murmured spell, a douse of oil over the dry herbs from the lamp's reservoir, and she snapped flint, got a spark, and set a scrap of linen burning. The amulet flared so brightly that she stepped back in surprise, shading her eyes. After so many days under a veiled sky, she had forgotten how brilliant light could be. The amulet vanished in a swirl of ash.

She used the point of her knife to cut the binding rope off the latch. Steam hissed along the blade and it glowed white hot, then spat sparks. The latch fell free, and the right side cabinet door swung open, moaning like the wail of the damned.

Anne had cared little for earthly things. This truth was never more in evidence than now. Anne had abandoned everything in her desire to destroy the Lost Ones. Everything.

She had left behind the holy vestments, the golden cup, although not the staff of her office. But there were other treasures as well: wrapped in a layer of greased leather and under that cushioned in lambskin was an ancient, degraded spear which Antonia recognized as the Holy Lance of St.

Perpetua, once carried by Emperor Henry into battle. Henry would never have left such a holy relic behind; its protection was worth more than a thousand soldiers. But Henry, after all, had been ensorcelled; he hadn't needed or wanted such things; hadn't noticed they were missing, because the daimone had obeyed only what commands its master gave it, disregarding the rest.

He had even disregarded the most potent symbol of imperial power, which was bundled up so casually in plain linen that anyone might be excused for believing it was nothing important. How Anne had come to possess it Antonia did not know, but when she unwrapped it, she knew she had gained something important indeed:

Emperor Taillefer's seven-pointed golden crown, adorned with seven jewels—the crown of stars.

2

THEY reached the villa Tivura two days later, having lost their way twice because it was so difficult to navigate in the haze. The mule trudged on without complaint, but it was clearly ill; gunk wept from its eyes, and its breathing, like that of its human masters, was labored. Each breath she took scraped in Antonia's chest. If they did not leave the plain of Dar soon, they would all succumb to the foul air.

"Is this the right stream?" Pietro asked for the fourth time, breaking off to cough again. He hacked incessantly.

"We are on the right road. It rises." Speaking hurt, so Antonia spoke little.

The mule tugged at its reins, trying to get to the water. Focas knelt at the bank and scooped up water, tasting it. He spat it out, then wiped his lips. "Not as bad as before. It might be safe to let the poor beast drink. It doesn't taste of rotten eggs like it did downstream. It isn't warm."

The two soldiers looked at her. She nodded. "Let it drink, then, but not too much. I'll go ahead."

"Your Excellency!"

"I do not fear bandits."

"You should, Your Excellency!" exclaimed Focas. "Dogs, too. We had to beat off that pack last night. They smelled us."

She hesitated. She hated showing fear, but in truth the dogs had been starving and therefore dangerous. At last she settled down on the ground and waited while the mule drank and Pietro washed his hands and face in the streaming water. It seemed clear. Although the constant rain of dust out of the air had certainly fouled it, it didn't stink the way it had down by its confluence with the Greater Tivur, whose course led through Darre and thence south through rolling hills to the sea.

Those hills were on fire. At intervals the haze lightened, and since they were moving slowly upslope as they walked northeast, she caught glimpses of the red rim of fire that scorched the western horizon at all hours, easiest to see at night, of course, but visible during the daytime as well.

Her legs ached and her hip shot through with pain as she rose, but she closed her lips tightly as they moved on. In a hundred paces more the famous lady columns ghosted out of the fog: stone columns carved into the shapes of dour women, escorting them into the garden of the long-dead emperor who had built the most beautiful paradise known on Earth, so it was said. Some called it a replica in stone of the garden that grew at the entrance to the Chamber of Light, but Antonia knew better. The Dariyan emperors had scorned the truth. They had worshiped idols and demons.

Therefore, everything they had built, while sturdy, was irrevocably tainted by the kiss of the Enemy.

Still, Empress Adelheid's grandfather had refurbished the domed hall, and one of her great-aunts had built stables where once the emperor had housed his guests. The stone ladies glowered at them, faces half obscured, but they were only stone and could not therefore impede their progress.

"Look!" said Pietro, and coughed. Coughed again. 'A light!"

Focas looked at Pietro. Together, without exchanging words, they nodded. "I'll go ahead, Your Excellency. In case it's bandits."

Her chest hurt. She was too tired to complain. She just wanted to rest her feet. Focas strode ahead. Truly, it was remarkable how well he had held up. He was as strong as a bull, and far more tractable than his companion. His form faded into the haze, although by now they could see the curved facade of the grand court that greeted visitors. They paused where the paved road gave way to the broad forecourt. Turning, Antonia looked into the haze over the plain, but it was impossible to see anything. On clear days, one could see Darre away in the distance, surrounded by fields.

She choked, coughing. The mule wheezed.

"Hsst!" whispered Pietro. "Do you hear?"

"Where did the light go?" she asked, scanning the wide court and the semicircle of columns, but no lantern or torch burned now.

"Hsst! Look!"

Ghosts advanced out of the fog, wreathed in trailing haze, formless and faceless although about the height of men.

She was ready. She had always been ready, knowing how little surety there was in traveling with such a small party. She unsheathed her small knife and grabbed at the mule, pressing the point to one of the veins in the side of its neck. A trickle of blood flowed over her fingers as she spoke the words that would raise a galla. The air hummed. Where blood beaded on the mule's hide the haze coalesced as though forming a rope out of darkness. The tang of the iron forge drifted up from the earth.

"Your Excellency! See what I have found!" Focas strode into view, easy among the ghosts. "We have found what we sought! They have been sheltering here in the catacombs. This good captain says the princesses are alive and in his care."

Too late! The spell had gone too far and must be released or else rebound upon her. The stink of the forge gusted on the breeze. A shadow spilled into the ground beside the pooling blood. The mule brayed and jerked away from the knife, then collapsed as its blood pumped onto the ground.

"What—?" cried Focas, as the men behind him drew their weapons.

It was a small galla, appetite whetted by the taste of blood, but it would demand more before it could be dispatched. It would turn on her, or on anyone. Its substance thrummed in the air as it materialized into this plane. Its muttering words— pain pain pain—ghosted in the air like the sound of tolling bells. The air of this world burned it. It was angry, and trapped, and panicked.

She had to act quickly.

She sealed the spell with a name.

"Pietro of Darre!" she whispered without hesitation.

"Your Excellency!" cried Focas, hanging back as the others cried out loud in fear. "What foul creature plagues us?"

"A traitor among us! One who does not serve the empress has brought a demon into our midst to murder the princesses!" She flung up her hands; her sleeves slid down her arms as she cried out.

"St. Thecla save us! Matthias, Mark, Johanna, Lucia! Marian and Peter! Deliver us from evil!

Seek the one whose spirit has fallen to the Enemy! Seek the one who would destroy us! Take him! Take him! Drive his soul into the Pit! And then begone!"

The shaft of darkness that formed the body of the galla in this world writhed like a chained soul seeking release. The stink choked her, but she kept her arms raised; she did not falter. The galla had the gift, or curse, of sight. They could see into the souls of every man and woman. The darkness lurched, spinning sideways.

Its bell voice rang dully. "Pietro."

Pietro screamed. He, and the darkness, vanished, and only his bones remained.

The galla had escaped back to its own sphere. That whiff of iron dissipated, subsumed in dust.

Men shouted and wept but gathered most pleasingly around her as sheep flock to the shepherd when they fear the assault of the wolf. Focas fell to his knees, sobbing. The mule struggled to its feet, but collapsed again.

"Your Excellency! I am Captain Falco."

"I know you, Captain Falco. You are the empress' most faithful captain."

He nodded, acknowledging what was to him not compliment or flattery but the breath that allowed him to exist. He appeared unshaken by Pietro's death, but it was difficult to judge.

"You have done well to guard the princesses. Where are they?"

"Safely in the catacombs, Your Excellency. What news of the empress?"

Always the empress! Yet there would be time to mold these soldiers to her will, and those who refused her could be disposed of, as God desired. The disobedient, after all, were doomed to the Pit.

'Alas, I do not know what has become of the empress. She sent me ahead but remained herself on the coast, in the town of Estriana. She had set an ambush for the northern prince, the rebel, the one who sought to kill his own father, the Emperor Henry."

"Patricide!" Falco was a stolid, competent soldier of medium height, with the broad shoulders of a man who has swung a sword and carried a shield since he was a lad. "I had heard the Wendish were barbarians. Now I know it to be true!"

In Antonia's opinion, the Wendish were simple, honorable folk in their own crude way, without more than a finger's weight of the capacity for greed, backstabbing, and treachery that thrived among the sophisticated Aostans. The southerners plundered and robbed each other, cut each other's throats, and whored with their own sons and daughters. Still, it was best not to mention that to Captain Falco, who might take offense even though it was only the truth. God would overwhelm the wicked and reward the righteous, and Antonia would see justice done while she was waiting for Them to act on Earth.

Focas crept forward and poked at the scatter of bones with the butt of his spear. "Can it be?" he croaked. "Can Pietro have been harboring a foul demon in his soul this entire time? I did not see it! I did not see it!"

"Hardship blinds us," she said kindly.

"It is well you are here to protect us," said Falco, but his tone was bland and his gaze without passion.

"Indeed," she agreed. "We must go swiftly. The land here is poisoned by the Enemy. It is best we move north in haste."

Still, he hesitated. "What if the empress comes seeking her daugh-ters, Your Excellency? They are her treasure. She will not abandon them."

She nodded. "We must leave a few men behind. You pick them, Captain."

"It is likely that the men I leave behind will die."

"We will all die in time. That is God's will. They will only ascend sooner to the Chamber of Light, where the righteous find peace."

He frowned. In the silence, as he considered, some of his men coughed. The claws of the Enemy sank deep. So many had been infected with the taint that had gripped Pietro, and that she struggled against with every breath.

"Darre is lost, Captain. Best we move quickly before we are overtaken by the Enemy as that one was." She gestured toward the bones.

His frown deepened, and he stiffened, clenching his hands. "Very well, Your Excellency. It is past time we carry the princesses away. Both suffer from a grippe. I will leave Terence and Petrus, and this man of yours, Focas."

He was testing her, but she was equal to the challenge. "Very well. See that it is done, and that the rest make ready."

"Where do we go?"

"This question, indeed, I have pondered on my long journey. We met refugees who say the coast is awash and many towns destroyed. West, as we see, is all on fire. We must go north."

"Where?"

"There is one whose loyalty we can count on, who will shelter us. We must march north past Vennaci and take the road to Novomo."

VII

ON THE ROAD

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswijk/Mijn%20d...lliott%20-%20Crown%20Of%20Stars%2006%20-%20In%20the%20Ruins.html

1

A griffin's cough woke him. He sat up, instantly alert, but only with his second breath did he recall where he was and what he was missing.

"Liath!" he said sharply.

She was gone.

He jumped up, wrestled on his tunic, and pushed out past the tent flap.

"Your Majesty!"

"Where is—? Ah. Be at ease, Benedict. Sibold."

"Your Majesty." The soldiers nodded as Sanglant walked past them toward the campfire set beyond the ring of tents. He heard them whisper to each other.

"I win! Told you he wouldn't stay sleeping."

"You did not win! We didn't wager whether, but when."

Liath sat cross-legged beside the fire, hands open and relaxed on her thighs as she stared into the flame. Hathui paced behind her. The Eagle glanced up as Sanglant walked up and nodded, acknowledging him. He halted behind Liath to wait.

The last few nights had been really cold, the first hard winter chill since the warm nights and overcast days after the great storm. That chill made him uneasy in a way he could not explain. It hurt in his bones the way a coming change in the weather might make a man's joints ache, warning him of rain. The ground was cold and dry beneath his bare feet. It was, as always now, too cloudy to see stars or moon, but the heavens still bled an unnatural light, almost as bright as if there were a full but bloody moon.

"How long have you been out here?" he asked Hathui in a low voice.

"Too long, Your Majesty."

"Still nothing?"

"Nothing. If Liath cannot see within the flames, then I think no one can."

He and Hathui waited in companionable silence. Liath had a remarkable capacity to focus; she did not once shift, not even to brush the hair away from her cheek as the wind stirred it, which surely must distract her. He twitched, wanting to smooth back her hair, wanting to touch her. She seemed blind and deaf to their presence, although they stood just behind her. He could never be so close to her and ignore her so thoroughly. She was a roaring fire to him, a force impossible to shut out. The heat of her smote him, although he doubted anyone else noticed it. He was the one who burned.

"Isn't she cold?" he asked, but Hathui only shrugged, and because he couldn't stand not doing something he went back to the tent and fetched a cloak, which he draped over Liath's shoulders.

She did not thank him; if she noticed the thick cloak at all, she gave no sign.

He paced. Twice Hathui added wood to the fire. Neither time did Liath alter her intent stare, as if the Eagle's movement and the hot lick of fresh flame did not register. After some time the darkness lightened, heralding dawn, and as a wind rose off the Alfar Mountains now south of them, she finally sighed and sat back, rubbing her eyes.

"Ai, God. No matter how deeply I search—" She looked up, then, and smiled, seeing him. 'Aren't you cold?" she demanded. "You're practically naked!" She shuddered, drawing the cloak more tightly around her shoulders. "I'm freezing." She laughed. "Where did this come from?"

He shook his head, a little disgusted, if truth be known. Resigned. Amused. She was not the woman he had believed he married.

"What news?" he asked instead, offering her a hand.

She took it and let him pull her up, dusted off her tunic and leggings, and blew on her hands to warm them. Her fingers were red from cold. "It matters not how deeply I search. It's as if my Eagle's Sight has vanished. There are twenty Eagles with this army, yet none of us can see through the flames. We are blind."

"I am no blinder than I was before."

"True enough, my love, but I am blind, and I don't like it because I don't know what it means."

"What it means to be blind? Like those of us who are not as gifted as you?"

She looked sharply at him, hearing the pinch in his words. "That isn't what I meant at all! Eagle's Sight gives us an advantage, nothing more. It gives a sense of surety that perhaps makes one overconfident. It's as if a curtain has fallen across our vision, and we can catch only fragments and glimpses through a rip in the cloth. Was it the cataclysm that blinded us? Is it the haze and the clouds? Is it magic, woven by the Ashioi to cripple us? Was the Eagle's Sight woven into the great crown in ancient days, and is it clouded because the crowns are fallen? I don't know, and what 1 don't know I can't solve."

'Are the crowns fallen?"

She rubbed her eyes, yawned, and he caught her under the arm. She leaned against him, eyes shut.

'Anne is dead. That's all I know. Anne and everyone with her are gone." Her sigh shuddered through her body. "I felt those who wove the other crowns until the moment Anne died and the crown she wove was destroyed. I cannot say if the others survived the fire and the storm. They may have, or they may be dead, too."

"You don't think every person at the other crowns died, too?" asked Hathui. "You said that you . . . that you destroyed everything—all life—within a league of the crown where Anne was."

Liath pushed away from Sanglant, and when he reached for her, she shook her head, needing to stand alone. "I don't know if the fire reached through the weaving to touch the others. Without Eagle's Sight, I may never know. I am sorry for the sake of Meriam. I liked her."

"She treated me with respect," muttered Sanglant, "unlike the rest of them."

Her gaze flashed to him, and a smile lifted her lips. "It is true, my love, that they did not treat you as you deserved. Yet consider that they are likely dead now, while we have survived."

"I cannot regret their deaths, considering all we have suffered."

"Nay, that's not what I meant. Only that I never thought about what would happen afterward.

Aren't we blind in that way, all of us? We march toward the gate, but it's the gate we see, not the land lying beyond. We can't see that landscape until the gate is opened and we've stepped through. Then it's too late to go back."

Around them, folk stirred as they rose and made ready to march. They had crossed the Brinne Pass in fifteen days. The northern air had invigorated the sullen and the exhausted, who could see how much closer they were to home. Certainly, less dust plagued them. In the early days it had filtered down constantly to coat hands and faces with a film of grit that they hadn't the leisure or water to wash off.

Soldiers rolled up blankets. Sentries called out a challenge to men trudging into camp with full buckets drawn from a nearby stream, while grooms led the horses to water in groups of twenty.

As ragged and weary as his men looked, he knew the horses managed worst of all. The army was almost out of grain, a meager ration to begin with, and the grazing was poor. At least, here on the northern slopes of the mountains, the water was clear, unclouded by particles and ash. Yet it still hadn't rained, despite the clouds, and both villages they had passed as they came down out of the mountains had been deserted, houses and huts blown down by the great storm.

"I can't stop seeing them," she whispered. "The way they burned. I can't stop hearing them scream."

He knew better than to touch her when she was in this mood. "They were your enemies." He'd said the same thing a hundred times in the last fifteen days. "They would have killed you."

"I know. But I still feel unclean, as though I'm stained with the Enemy's handiwork."

He waited. As the light rose, the world came into view: hills, forest, wilting trees. Drought and lack of sun, unseasonable heat followed by this sudden cold winter blast, had taken their toll on the vegetation. To the north the land was too hilly to see far. The road twisted away past a ridgeline, lost to sight. To the south, on a clear day, they would have been able to see the mountain peaks, but there was yet a haze dusting the air, ever present. Even at midday the light lacked strength. It was uncanny. Indeed, it scared him more than anything else. He was no farmer, but he knew what farmers needed: rain, sun, and seasonable weather. After years of civil strife, invasion, drought, famine, and plague, he could not imagine that any Wendish noble or biscop held plentiful stores in reserve. They had already suffered hard times. How long would these clouds linger?

"Death in battle is not the worst we may see," he said at last. "Those deaths may be the most merciful ones, in the end."

She had shed a few tears, but she wiped them away. She examined him as she might study a manuscript, that look that devoured, so rarely turned on him! He did not understand her yet. He wasn't even sure what she thought of him. That she was willing to love him passionately he knew.

Of the rest, of what lay beyond lust, he had to unfold piece by piece.

"I'll keep trying," she said, and it took him a moment to realize she meant that she would keep trying to find her Eagle's Sight. "The crowns, too. If they're all fallen, then we have no advantage over our enemies. But no disadvantage either as they have nothing we do not also possess. Unless there are those still who can see with Eagle's Sight while denying it to us."

"Do you think there might be?"

She looked at Hathui. Hathui shrugged, without expression. The two women trusted each other in a way that, annoyingly, excluded him.

"I don't think it likely any other person born of humankind has survived who can see if I cannot."

Liath said the words without vanity or arrogance. "Eagle's Sight ran through the world on the river of aether. That element is bound into my being, so I should be more sensitive to its ebb and flow than most of my father's kinfolk. Yet it also seems likely to me that a sorcerer whose skills are honed to the finest pitch might be able to discern things I cannot. And I know nothing of those ancient ones who spoke to me, or the Ashioi, or the Horse people. They may still possess the sight, while we've gone blind. And anyway, I am so young, so ignorant, compared to someone like Li'at'dano—"

"See who comes," interrupted Hathui, lifting her chin.

The centaurs had proved hardiest of all his soldiers. Like goats, they seemed able to eat almost anything, although he had never seen any of the Horse people eat meat. Capi'ra's fine coat was discolored by streaks of grime, but she looked perfectly able to trample him on the spot if he gave offense.

He nodded, acknowledging her. She stamped once.

"It is time." She gestured toward the east. "We turn east and follow the hills on our own path. We come to northern plains of Ungria and from there east to home. Our alliance is finished. Now we leave."

"I am sorry to see you and your people go," he said, "but I know I cannot hold you here."

"That is right."

He smiled. She did not smile in reply, but neither did she frown. "What of the future?" he asked.

"What of our alliance?"

"I report on all we witness to the council, as you would say. The ones who lead us will discuss all that happened. The strong minds will decide. We, the rest, will follow."

"What of our daughter?" asked Liath.

"I have not forget your daughter, Bright One. See who comes with me." She flicked a hand up.

There were some of the steppe-dwelling Kerayit among her dozen attendants, but to Sanglant's surprise the shaman, Gyasi, had also come, together with a pair of Quman captains. He hadn't noticed them at first because, not mounted, they weren't yet wearing their wings, and judged by facial features alone they did not look so very different from the Kerayit tribesmen.

The shaman and his companions knelt before Sanglant, tapped knuckles to foreheads as they acknowledged Liath's presence.

"We beg you, master," said Gyasi, "let us return with the Horse people to our homeland. I will be your messenger. I will seek news of your daughter. I will bring her back to you if she still lives.

My clan owes her our service, for as long as she lives."

Liath looked away, wiping a tear off her cheek. "She lives," she muttered. "I saw her." She swung back to face Sanglant. "I should go."

"No. I grieve for Blessing as well. I fear for her. But it serves no purpose for you to travel east on a journey that could take years. 1 weep for my daughter. I miss her. But if you go, it will not bring her back more quickly. And if she is dead—"

"She is not dead!"

"She is not dead if our wills make it true, but we don't know. I trust Gyasi to find her and bring her home. Heribert is with her. That must be enough. There is too much at stake elsewhere, and I.

Need. You."

She lifted a hand. She could not answer in any other way. It was not acquiescence, precisely. She was herself torn and indecisive.

"Take what supplies you need, Gyasi. You take as well my heart, for my daughter is precious to me."

Gyasi nodded. "She saved my life and that of my nephews, Majesty. This obligation I owe to her.

I am not a man unless it is discharged."

Even so, even knowing he did what was necessary, he found that he, like Liath, could not speak because of sorrow and fear choking the words in his throat. He, too, lifted a hand. The gesture must speak where he would otherwise break down. So much loss; Blessing might be the least of it.

The shaman rose, but paused before he turned away. The centaurs and their attendants were already moving toward the pathless forest while Gyasi hummed a queer little tuneless melody under his breath. A twisting track opened between the trees, not quite seen, not quite felt, but present as mist rising from the hills at dawn. The fall of hooves, the rattle of harness, the soft conversations among men all vanished, bit by bit, as the party moved onto that path and vanished into the woodland. Behind Sanglant, the army made ready to leave, but men stopped in their tasks, hearing that uncanny music, and stared as the forest swallowed the centaurs and their companions. Last of all, Gyasi stepped onto the path, and the trees closed in behind him. At once, the forest appeared as an impenetrable tangle of fallen logs and stands of beech and fir grown among brambles and thickets of sedge and bilberry.

"Their path will be swift, I'd wager," murmured Hathui.

"Let us leave this behind," said Liath, more quaver than voice. "I will cry."

Every man and woman was eager to get moving, to reach home. To discover if home had weathered the storm. Many, like Liutgard and Burchard and what remained of their armies, had been away from Wendar for years, having marched south with Henry in his quest to restore Taillefer's fallen empire. That was all gone now.

So much else was gone, he thought, brooding as they rode at a steady pace along the road. Often they had to halt while those in the vanguard cleared the road. The storm had torn through this countryside, leaving debris everywhere. No one would lack firewood for burning this winter, had they any game to roast over the flames.

"You are quiet, Your Majesty," said Hathui having given up her attempts to get Liath to speak.

"What have we left?" he asked her. "What was once an alliance is now, again, only loyal Wendishmen and marchlanders."

"Isn't that for the best?"

"Is it? Did we not have strength in numbers? Did we not have strength because we reached across the old boundaries? My father was not foolish in thinking that empire would make him strong."

"It killed him."

Hathui's tone surprised him, but as he examined her face, he saw neither anger or resentment, only sadness.

"Did it? That he marched south to Aosta—perhaps. Yet any of us might die, on any day."

"Perhaps not you, Your Majesty."

The barb had a sharp hook. "That may be, yet I pray you consider that my father might have died in his bed, or fighting against his enemies in Wendar, as easily as he was captured by the queen's plots."

"Do not forget Hugh of Austra, Your Majesty."

Ah.

He glanced at Liath, but she seemed far removed from their conversation. She had light hands on her mount, a submissive mare who was content to follow where the rest led. She was far beyond him, a world away, judging by her frown and the unfocused nature of her gaze, not quite lighting on tree or earth or cloudy sky.

"I have not forgotten him, Hathui. Where he is now, I cannot say."

"Dead, I hope," muttered Hathui. "I saw him murder Villam with his own hands. I will never forgive him that, although my forgiveness is not a thing a man of his station cares about. If he lives, he will have found refuge. I hope he is dead."

"I would just like to know." He laughed. "Better to know that there's a man in the dark stalking you with a knife. Even if you can't see him. Yet what do you make of it, Hathui?"

"Of Hugh's plots and Queen Adelheid's treachery?"

"Nay. Of this new alliance."

"What alliance, Your Majesty?" She looked around, as if expecting a pack of wolves to lope out of the surrounding woods. As they moved down into the bowl of a valley, beech and silver fir gave way to spruce. The dense boughs of spruce had absorbed the heavy winds better than most trees. Although the road was darker, often shaded and dim, few broken branches and fallen trees blocked their path.

"That between the Quman and the Horse people."

"Is there one?" Liath had been listening, after all. She spoke as if the question had been addressed to her. "The Horse people are few, so they say. If they do not make allies of the Quman, they will end up fighting them. So they have done for generations, surely, with the aid of sorcery."

"So they have done, but it is not clear what will become of sorcery now; or how the balance of power will change with the return of my mother's people. If I were one of the leaders of the Horse people, I would seek allies. It may be they will seek an alliance with the Quman. It may even be they will seek an alliance with the Ashioi."

"The Horse people and the Ashioi were enemies."

"Long ago."

"I have met Zuangua, as have you, Sanglant. To him, to the many who lived in the shadows all that time, it is not long ago but yesterday. Even to the ones who were born in exile, it is within the living memory of your grandfather, who can tell the tale."

Sanglant had only the vaguest memory of his father's father, Arnulf the Younger, but Henry's mother, Queen Mathilda, had patted and cosseted her young grandson as affectionately as could so reserved a woman. All her love was held tight for Henry. She had admired Sanglant, but his birth had meant most to her, he suspected, because it gave Henry his claim to the regnancy.

So it was strange to think of having a grandfather, so old a man that he had seen the world almost three millennia ago. He could not grasp such an expanse of time. He had never been one to hoard grudges or dwell on the past. He refused to live in Bloodheart's hall forever, chained down with the dogs.

"That may be true," he replied, "but enemies can become allies if a greater threat rises."

"Who would that be?" demanded Hathui. "If the stories are true, humankind and the Horse people moved heaven and earth in truth to cast away the Ashioi. If I were one of the Lost Ones, I'm not sure I could forgive that. If I were one of the Horse people, I'm not sure I would expect to be forgiven."

He laughed. "We are not the Horse people. They are not like us. Li'at'dano said so herself. She said that humankind have driven them far into the east, and decimated their herds through disease and conflict."

"The Quman did that," said Hathui, "who hate and fear them."

'And others. But Capi'ra and her troop have seen the west, now. Wendish folk defeated the Quman. Anne and her sorcerers raised this great storm. If I were one who leads among the Horse people, then I would fear Wendar."

"There is another power that you neglect," said Liath suddenly. 'Anne did not raise the storm. The ancient ones did. Li'at'dano did. The Ashioi land would have returned in any case. Anne meant to exile them again, to destroy them for all time. That she did not, that worse destruction did not overtake us all, is due to the voices from the north. There is power there we must not ignore."

"The Eika?" Hathui asked. "They are barbarians. One chieftain might strike and lay waste along the coast, but I recall how Count Lavastine held them off with his local milites. A strong Wendish and Varren resistance will beat them back."

"Perhaps," said Sanglant. "It bears watching."

"There is so much we do not know," murmured Liath, "and it will be more difficult to learn now that we are blind."

2

WHEN they stopped at nightfall, Hanna left her guards while they argued over whether or not to set up a tent for the night, and staggered over to a trickling stream. In the midst of a crowd of hot, thirsty, complaining Arethousan soldiers she splashed water on her face and slurped down as much as she could hold in her cupped hands. Soon the water became murky from so many stamping through the shallows. A man slammed into her shoulder as he pushed forward toward the stream. He muttered a curse, looked at her once, then a second time, and called to his fellows.

"The Wendish bitch! See here! She's slipped her leash."

All at once a half dozen of them pressed back from the water to encircle her. She had overreached because her thirst had driven her forward rashly. She turned her wrists in toward her body to grip the chain, ready to use it as a weapon.

Sergeant Bysantius appeared beside her with a quirt. "Back! Back!" he cried as he slashed left and right, driving the soldiers away from her.

Her heart was still racing, and her mouth had gone dry, so she pretended to a calmness she did not feel as she sat back on her heels and wiped her forehead as well as she could with her wrists manacled. "I thank you, Sergeant."

He raised one eyebrow, then pointed behind her with the quirt. "I didn't come for you. See, there.

General Lord Alexandras waters his horses."

They marched these days through dry, hilly countryside devoid of habitation. This stream poured out of a ravine. Except at this ford, its banks were too steep for horses to drink. Muttering, the soldiers headed back to camp.

"Up!" Sergeant Bysantius grabbed her elbow and pulled her upright. "Out of the way."

She shook her arm out of his grasp before he could lead her away. The chain that bound her ankles allowed her to walk but not run, and she was unable to avoid the rush of horses brought to the stream by the general's grooms. Alexandras himself rode a chestnut mare with a pale gold coat. His entire string had chestnut coats, most pale and a few richly dark in shade. He pulled up, dismounted, and tossed his reins to a groom before walking over to Sergeant Bysantius.

"Sergeant, bring the Eagle to me at my tent."

"Yes, my lord general."

He strode away with a dozen men swarming in attendance.

"He has no need to crawl for a taste of water as the rest of us do," she said bitterly to the sergeant.

"He has wine to drink while his soldiers go thirsty."

Bysantius scratched his cheek. "He has earned his rank and his privileges. He's no better born than half these men."

She laughed. "How can that be? He is a lord."

"A man who commands an army is likely to be addressed as 'lord,' I'm thinking. Even by those who were born under a canopy boasting the imperial star. Especially if they need the men and weapons he can bring to their cause."

"The exalted Lady Eudokia needs him in order to raise her nephew to become emperor?"

He shrugged. "A strong hand rules where weaker hands sow only chaos. Come."

She followed up along the dusty ground on the trail of the lord general, now vanished into the glut of wagons, horses, milling troops, and canvas tents that marked the camp. Every night the camp was set up in the exact same order, every tent sited in relation to the emperor's tent according to its inhabitants' rank, position, and importance to the royal child. This night, they had halted in the middle of what had once been a village.

Three brick hovels stood in the midst of a dozen ancient olive trees, but the tiny hamlet appeared abandoned, perhaps yesterday, perhaps one hundred years ago. In this dry country it was impossible to tell.

Bysantius paced himself so as not to get ahead of her. Over the last ten or so days she had accustomed herself to the chains so that she could walk without stumbling.

"I thank you," she repeated.

"For what kindness?" he asked, almost laughing.

"For saving me from whatever unkindness I might have suffered from those soldiers."

"The general wants you unharmed. You're no use to him dead."

She was, apparently, no use to him living, but she forbore to say it, knowing it foolish to remind her captors that they might be better off saving for their own men the bit of food they fed to her each day. "Is it true of all of you, that you serve the lord general and not the exalted lady?"

Now he did laugh. "The priests teach us that we serve God, is that not so? God served humankind by walking among us for a time so He could lead us into the Light."

"That is a heresy."

"Nay, you Darrens are the heretics. You say that the blessed Daisan was only a man like you and me." He spoke without heat. He was not, apparently, a man made passionate by religious matters.

"The deacons of my own land taught me that the blessed Daisan prayed for seven days and nights and was lifted up to the Chamber of Light by the Mother and Father of Life. You don't believe the tales of his martyrdom, do you?"

"No, not his martyrdom." Yet he frowned. "The blessed Daisan holds two natures within him, for how else could he have been translated into the Chamber of Light while still living? Still, folk do talk of this martyrdom, how his skin was flayed from his body."

"I've met more than one person in the west who whispers the heresy of the Redemption. I didn't know folk spoke of it here, too."

He slapped his quirt against his thigh and glanced first left, then right, as they made their way through camp. Exhausted, men sat on the ground or reclined on blankets or cloaks. 'Anyone might hear. The Patriarch has spies among the troops."

If that were so, it must mean that the Patriarch feared the power of the heresy. Why spy out what you did not fear? Yet surely the heresy Ivar professed had come from somewhere. Why not from the east? It was the most likely story. Despite what Bysantius said, they were heretics here anyway with their talk of "two natures." Once that door was opened, as Deacon Fortensia used to say in Heart's Rest, any shameless layabout could creep in and pretend to be a holy saint.

"You ever put thought to what you've hope for, if the lord general grants you your freedom?"

asked Bysantius as they approached the general's big tent, just now shuddering into place as soldiers and servants raised the canvas over the frame and staked it down. "What I've hope for? I hope to go home! I serve the emperor,

Henry."

"Scouts say the land is blasted west of here. That ash and dust and fire parch the air. I don't think the Wendish king has an empire left. You'd do better to stick it out in civilized country."

Her eyes burned. She wiped away tears as she struggled with dismay. "I hadn't heard those reports." In her own country, she would have. Eagles talked to each other and knew everything, as much as anyone could know. They knew almost as much as the regnant, because they were his eyes and ears.

"You're a prisoner," he replied, gaze bent on her, "but you might be otherwise."

"Otherwise?" She sniffed back her tears, hating to show weakness.

"I'd marry you, if you were willing."

"Marry me?" The incongruity of the comment dried her tears and her anger, then made her laugh.

"Marry me?"

"You're strong, capable, smart. The exalted Lady Eudokia tells me you're still a virgin. You'd make a good wife. I like you. You haven't given up."

Now she burned but for other reasons. How could the exalted lady know?

"I haven't given up. I'm not accustomed to these chains yet."

His sidelong gaze was measuring, not angry. "It was fairly asked. I might hope for the same courtesy in an answer."

"I am still a prisoner. Ask me when I am free to leave or stay as I wish."

"Huh," he said, half of it a laugh and the rest nothing she could interpret. With his quirt he indicated the entrance to the general's tent. "Go in."

"You're not coming in?" she asked, and had to stop herself from grabbing his arm as at a lifeline.

She could not bring herself to speak the thought that leaped into her mind: Alone, I fear the general's anger, but if you were there I might hope for someone to protect me against it.

He brushed a hand through his dark hair as would a man preening for a lover's visit. "Go in," he repeated, and lifted his quirt. "I've a few guards to speak to. They've gotten careless."

Careless about her.

He nodded, dismissing her, and walked away. General Lord Alexandras' guards moved their spears away from the entrance and let her pass. Inside, a servant unrolled a rug to cover the red-gray earth, but otherwise the general had dispensed with the opulent furnishings that had surrounded him before the great storm. No green silk draped the bare canvas walls. Chairs and rich couches were ban-ished, replaced by a bench, a pallet, and a pitcher of water set in a copper basin, placed on a three-legged stool. He was sitting on the bench wiping dust off his face with a square of linen while a captain dressed in a red tabard gave his report. This man had an unusual accent and spoke at such a galloping pace that she had trouble understanding him.

"... a day ahead of us ... refugees . . . the city. They fled . . . the sea. These folk are the ones . . .

the storm in the sky ..."

The general glanced up, noted her, and beckoned to a servant. "A fire," he said softly to the man, who slipped out as the captain kept speaking.

"... They fled to the hills . . . the sea . . . the city . . . they are lying ... it is true ... do you wish to speak to them?"

"No, not yet. If their story is true, we will meet others who tell the same tale. If it is false, then we will soon know. Put out a double sentry line. Stay on guard against bandits and thieves."

As the captain left, the servant returned with a brazier heaped with glowing coals. A second man walked behind him carrying a cloth sling filled with sticks. They set up a tripod on the dirt and cradled the brazier in it.

Alexandras gestured toward the brazier, but said nothing. She knelt in the dirt because she had not been given permission to touch the rug. One of the servants fed sticks to the coals. They blazed. She bent her attention to the flames, seeking within for those she knew: King Henry, Liath, Ivar, Prince Sanglant, Wolfhere, Sorgatani, Sister Rosvita and her retinue, Captain Thiadbold, and even her friends among the Lions, one by one.

She saw nothing in the flames except flickering shadows. Perhaps every soul she knew had died in the storm. Possibly Ingo, Folquin, Leo, and Stephen were well and truly dead, lost in the cataclysm or in a battle she did not yet know they had fought. Probably Rosvita and the other clerics had died of thirst and starvation or been slaughtered by bandits.

The entrance flap shifted. The movement of light across the ground startled her so much that she sat back on her heels, blinking, to see a pair of servants carry in the litter on which Lady Eudokia traveled. A trio of eunuchs placed four stools on the rug and stepped back as the servants placed the litter on this foundation, well off the ground. The eunuchs bathed the lady's face and hands in water, then retreated.

"What news?" the lady asked Alexandras.

'As you see, no different than last night or the one before or every night before that. Either she lies, or she is telling the truth and has lost her Eagle's Sight."

"If so, is it a temporary blindness or a permanent one?"

He scratched his neck, grimacing, then rubbed his eyes as if he were exasperated. "What else do you know of this sorcery, Exalted Lady?"

"Nothing I have not already told you. Its secrets are not known to us. I will attempt the camphor again, but it is the last I possess."

"See!" He fixed his one-eyed gaze on Hanna. A knife held to her throat could not have frightened her more. How could a common-born man rise to be called a "lord"? Either he was in league with the Enemy, or the Arethousans were stranger than any folk she understood. That he was ruthless she knew; he had done nothing to succor Princess Sapientia; he had abandoned his other hostages without, apparently, a second thought. He drove his men forward at a difficult pace and left the stragglers behind.

"See."

Lady Eudokia tossed three tiny twigs onto the fire. The choking scent of camphor filled Hanna's lungs and made her eyes water and her head pound. She saw flames, burning and burning, and although the smoke and incense made her eyes sting, she kept staring into the dance of fire.

Let them believe she was only a breath away from success.

"Nothing," said Lady Eudokia, but she sounded curious more than disgusted. "We may as well cavort naked with the fire worshipers as stare at these coals."

The general had not moved, but Hanna felt his presence as a threat. "Is she lying, Exalted Lady?"

"I think she is not lying. I see only flames."

"If we do not need her, then ..."

"Let us not be hasty, General. You are thinking as a soldier in battle. Think rather that those who brought this storm down upon us may have survived. I do not know what powers they hold to themselves. If they have the ability to cloud Eagle's Sight, we must consider what is best for us.

Hold the Eagle in reserve, in case matters change."

"What if it takes years?"

She lifted a hand in a lazy gesture of disinterest. "I have an aunt who has for twenty-eight years resided in the convent of St. Mary of Gesythan. It is better for the family that she remain alive than that she be killed. None leave that isolation once they are banished within. This one can be placed in the convent as well."

"She is a westerner and thus a heretic."

"True enough. She need not receive every comfort, as do the others."

He scratched his neck again, leaving a trail of rashy red. "A good enough plan. But I agree only on the condition that she remain in my custody until that time, and that I be granted leave to visit her there whenever I wish."

"If my nephew becomes emperor, General, then these are no obstacles."

He nodded. She clapped her hands, and the eunuchs wiped her face again before moving back so the servants could carry her away. As the tent flap closed behind her retinue, the general turned to the soldiers waiting respectfully behind him. He pointed. A captain dressed in a blue tabard came forward and began delivering his report, but Hanna was too dizzy with fear to catch more than scraps of phrases:

"... may be the same bandits who shadow us ... may be another group . . . scouts can never find them . . . nay, never a trace ..."

She ought to memorize each utterance, to hoard them like the treasures they were. She was an Eagle. What she heard, she remembered. What she remembered, she could report to her regnant just as this man reported to his. But she could not concentrate because she could not banish from her mind a vision of whitewashed walls surrounding her, too high to be climbed and without any gate for escape.

A pair of servants trudged in bearing buckets of water. They set them down and busied themselves with the pitcher and basin. Her eyes were still stinging. As much as she swallowed, she could not get all her fear and frustration and anger down.

Is this all her life came to? Had she somehow angered God so much that she was to be passed from one hand to the next as a prisoner? The general might call her an Eagle, but she was no such thing. It would have been better to have stayed in Heart's Rest and marry Young Johan even with his smelly feet and braying, stupid laugh. A cow or goat was not precisely free, but at least it wasn't caged within narrow walls. She knew better than to let self-pity overwhelm her, but the temptation just for this moment was to fall and fall.

One servant poured water from pitcher into basin. Because the scent of water hit her hard, she looked at them. They were both middle-aged men, wiry and strong, with stern expressions. They were the kind of men who have risen far enough to receive a measure of comfort and security as retainers of a powerful lord. One was, indeed, handsome enough that she might have looked twice at him if he hadn't been old enough to be her father. Bysantius' unwanted but flattering proposal had woken old feelings in her. It wasn't so bad to be desired or at least respected. Ivar was lost to her. She had admired Captain Thiadbold, but held loyal to her Eagle's vows. Rufus had, momentarily, tempted her, but in the end she had chosen the easier path. She had held herself aloof. She had never succumbed.

Not as Liath had.

In a way, she was envious of Liath, who had embraced passion without looking back, despite the trouble it had brought her.

/ am not so impulsive.

Yet it wasn't so. She had left Heart's Rest to follow Liath. She had walked without fear into the east. She had wandered in dreams into the distant grasslands seeking the Kerayit shaman who had named Hanna as her luck.

The good-looking servant winked at her, then rubbed at his dirty forehead with the stump of his right arm, cut off at the wrist and cleanly healed. The position of his arm concealed his mouth from his companion. His lips formed a word once, then a second time, soundless but obviously meant to be understood.

Patience.

She startled back. Had she imagined it? Was he speaking in Wendish?

He and the other servant, carrying the emptied buckets, walked out the door, keeping silence as a new captain droned on with his report. She heard, in the wake of their passing, a faint tinkling like that of tiny bells shaken by a breeze.

Five breaths later she knew, and was surprised it had taken her so long. He hadn't been wearing a churchman's robes but rather the simple garb of an Arethousan peasant. He had looked different, somehow; harder and keener and even, strange to say, more like a man who might want to be kissed, not a celibate churchman.

Yet he had loved once, and passionately. Like Liath, he had leaped and never regretted.

The rank perfume of the camphor faded, but air within the enclosed tent seemed to rush in a whirlpool around her as though stirred by daimone's wings. Why was Brother Breschius working as a servant in the camp of his enemy's army?

The wasp sting burned in her heart.

3

SANGLANT'S army bedded down in and around yet another deserted village. The signs of abandonment did not tell a clear tale: had all the inhabitants died? Had they only fled, hearing the approach of an unknown army? Or had they fled days ago in the wake of the storm? Had some other force driven them away or taken them prisoner?

In these distant marchland borderlands, empty wilderness stretched wide, and villages were without exception bounded by log palisades, which protected mostly against wild beasts both animal and human since a true army would make short work of such meager fortifications. This one had not burned, but the gates sat wide and the vanguard had marched in without seeing any living crea-ture except for a pair of crows that fluttered away into the trees, cawing.

"I miss birdsong," Liath said. "Even in winter, there should be some about."

Sanglant was out on his evening round of the army. Hathui had gone with him, leaving her with a trio of Eagles who regarded her with wary interest. She did not feel easy with Sanglant's noble brethren and preferred the company of the messengers.

"Hanna spoke of you," said the redheaded one called Rufus.

"Hanna! When did you last speak with Hanna?"

"Months ago. More than that, perhaps. A year, or more. She came south with a message from Princess Theophanu. Hathui says that she and Hanna met on the road, in Avaria or Wayland—I'm not sure which—and that Hanna knew the truth of what had happened to the king but she never confided in me or anyone."

"Why not?"

"She was watchful. That's all I know. I liked her."