"Queen's Grave" on account of an old burial mound with a ruined stone crown at its height. Their retreat, it seemed, had succeeded only on account of Prince Bayan's steady nerves and canny tactics. There had been trouble in Handelburg.

“And through no fault of her own, I will tell you," he said harshly, "that Eagle, Hanna, was sent out to her death. For that I blame ..." He faltered, looked right at Lady Theucinda, and with some effort made an obvious decision to be prudent rather than bold.

"She didn't die," said Liath, suddenly cold.

"Nay, so we discovered later. Her tale is no good one, though. We met up with Prince Sanglant—His Majesty, that is—at Machteburg. There we recovered a few of our men, a handful, nothing more. They'd turned heretic. Yet I tell you, I think in a time as troubled as now it should not matter if a man is a heretic but whether he can fight."

Theucinda looked at him and seemed about to say something. But she did not.

"You'll hear no argument from me," said Liath, "but the church mothers will say otherwise."

"I pray you, then, do not repeat what I have said."

"I will not. After Machteburg?"

“After Machteburg, we sought out the Quman. They had pressed far into Wendar. They burned and looted and killed as they went. It was a terrible thing, that brought us in the end to the battle at the Veser."

"You saved my daughter in that battle."

He shrugged. "It was a hard fight."

"I know."

He looked at her, puzzled by her words, and she fell silent. She could not tell him that, as she walked the spheres, she had glimpsed the fight on the knoll and stayed her hand. She had not loosed her one remaining arrow to save her own daughter. Even so, assailed with guilt, she knew she had made the right choice. The necessary choice.

Perhaps that was why she often felt like a monster.

"Yet we did win it in the end," he added. "We did win."

"Tell me."

Thiadbold was a good observer, and he had the knack for recounting the worst episodes with a kind of wry humor and the best with modesty. He described the battle quickly and with a remarkable sense for the movements of the various groups. "Just as we thought all was lost, that we'd be slaughtered to a man—and child, too, I'm sorry to say—the prince came. His Majesty, that is. A better sight I have never seen!" He laughed, but his laughter was leavened by sadness. "Good men I lost. Too many. Still, that's the way of it. We won, and they lost."

"You did not march east afterward with Sanglant."

"We did not. His Majesty took only mounted troops. We were sent West to escort an Eagle—well, Hanna, again."

"She did not ride east with Sanglant?"

"She was very ill. She'd been held captive by the Quman, by the beast himself." He hesitated. "I hear he's dead now."

"He's dead."

He paused, as if expecting her to say more, but she did not, so he went on.

"Well. We escorted the Eagle to Gent. Afterward, she was sent south to Aosta. That's the last I have heard of her. We were sent by order of the prince—His Majesty, that is—to serve Princess Theophanu while he was in the east. That we did. Here in Osterburg mostly, repairing the walls as well as those expeditions I mentioned before." He traced his Circle, which dangled at his chest. "Full circle, I suppose you would say. Now we will serve the regnant again."

"Is that what you hope for?"

He grinned. "What must I say to the woman who knows him best? Of course it is what I hope for!"

She laughed. It was easy to fall into the companionable banter she'd known before. It was easier to be an Eagle than a queen.

He sobered. "He's a fine commander. The best, after his father the king."

She wanted to talk about Hanna, but Theucinda still stood there. She had turned her back to them and was staring east into the haze.

"Why are you out here, Thiadbold? Is this your watch?"

He indicated Theucinda with his chin, then gestured toward the old tower where Theophanu had taken up residence. Sanglant had placed Theucinda in Theophanu's custody. The girl had a mouselike exterior, petite, fine-boned, with a delicate prettiness that could easily attract the notice of a stubborn, spoiled, and disaffected youth like Ekkehard. She had not wailed and wept when Sanglant's hunting party had caught up with her and Ekkehard outside Walburg. It was difficult to tell if she had wanted to be caught, or if she saw that weeping would do her no good and so did not indulge herself. In either case, her lack of tears made her interesting.

Thiadbold waited.

"I pray you, Lady Theucinda," said Liath. "Do you come here often, so early in the morning?"

The girl looked at her as if deciding whether she wanted to speak. At last she shrugged one shoulder. "At times. We have only been here seven days. They watch me." She glanced at Thiadbold, not meeting his gaze. "They think I'll run again," she said bitterly.

"Will you?"

"Where would I run? Gerberga won't have me back, and Ekkehard is gone with her. Even so, with no retinue I could never hope to ride all the way to Austra to find him. Therefore, why should I try?" She shrugged again.

"I would have done it," said Liath. 'And farther yet."

"So you say! If all the stories I hear of you are correct, then you are nothing except a frater's by-blow, or else you are an emperor's lost heir. You are the king's concubine, or his queen. You are an excommunicated sorcerer, or else you were touched by the hand of a holy saint. You can cause the heavens to burn, or men's hearts to be swayed by lust for you. A simple Eagle, or a soulless daimone. How easily it comes to you to say such words! Why do you think it should be so simple for me?"

The bitter words took Liath aback. Thiadbold coughed and looked away, as if he wished he had not heard.

"Forgive me!" the girl whispered. Tears brimmed. Her mouth trembled, and she clutched the railing as if she expected to be blown off the ramparts in a gust of furious wind. "Don't burn me!"

Liath felt sick. That look of terror was its own judgment.

"Don't fear me," she said raggedly. "I do not mean to hurt any person."

"I'll go now, Captain," said the girl in a choked voice. She swept up her skirts in one hand and clambered down the ladder.

It took all Liath's courage to look Thiadbold in the eye. Would he reject her as well?

His gaze remained steady. He brushed a finger along the dimpled scar where he had lost part of an ear. "You fought with us. We Lions don't forget our friends."

"I thank you." It was difficult to get the words out without bursting into tears.

He nodded gravely, and left to follow Lady Theucinda.

Liath rested her elbows on the railing and studied the beauty of the land and the hazy pearllike glamour of the early morning light. Maybe the clouds had lightened. Maybe the sun would break through soon. But her pleasure in the day had vanished.

How could Sanglant ever hope to make her his queen when such rumors spun through his own retinue? Especially when many, even most, were true. And did she really care? She had no wish to be queen, to be saddled with the burdens, duties, obligations, and intrigues that any consort must shoulder.

Yet to be his concubine, to share him with another woman—because the regnant must wed— Was unbearable. To leave him was unthinkable.

What a fool Theucinda was! That girl could never understand that it had been easy to leave the Eagles and ride away with Sanglant, back when Sanglant had been nothing more than captain of the Bang's Dragons.

"I will not be defeated by this," she said, and she listened, hoping the wind had an answer for her, but naturally it did not.

IV

FOOL'S ERRAND

1

WHERE they first caught sight of the cathedral tower the road bent through the remains of an old oak wood, now eaten in from all sides by clearing and felling.

"God spare us!" Atto exclaimed. "Mara! Look!"

She stopped obediently and lifted her head. Midway through pregnancy, she was also weary and dirty. 'Are we there yet?" she asked as she squinted into the distance.

"Look how tall!" exclaimed Atto. "How can a person build so high and not have it fall? All of stone!"

"Yes, truly," she said in a bright voice as her gaze tracked over the tops of trees and the wash of sky without stopping on the tower. Finally she looked at Atto, waiting for him to give the word to start walking.

The cathedral was easily seen in a gap between trees. Smoke drifted out of the cover of wood, but those streamers could not conceal the massive block of stone that marked the bell tower, fully three stories tall. The clouds lay in a high gray-white sheet across the heavens; maybe it was brighter today than it had been yesterday, although it was certainly no warmer.

"Can you see the tower, Mara?" Alain asked in a low voice that Atto, still exclaiming, would not notice.

She shrugged, but he had learned enough about her in the past few days to understand that she never contradicted Atto and never said one word that might displease her betrothed. It was strange to Alain that Atto took no notice of the way she could not see things far away.

Atto sniffed. "What's that up ahead? I smell woodsmoke. And shit."

Alain smelled it, too, and more besides, a pall in the air that he had come to associate with despair.

He started forward, but Mara did not walk until Atto told her to, and she hung between the two men, nervous of the hounds and shy of each footfall. She had brown hair pulled back away from her face and mostly covered by a scarf, and a pleasant face at its liveliest when she was exclaiming over the beauty of flowers, but her shoulders were hunched all the time. She was like a dog wondering if it is about to be scolded. Alain pitied her, caught between two strong-minded men, yet he also wondered what would happen if she ever spoke up for herself.

The hounds, ranging ahead, loped back with ears raised and noses testing the breeze. Where the path bent under the trees they came upon a haphazard ring of settlement, hovels built out of crooked branches and roofed with patched canvas or tightly woven saplings smeared with leaves mixed into mud, now dry. The woods had been hacked back around the shantytown, leaving gaping holes in the canopy.

There must have been three-score people squatting here, huddled in threadbare cloaks, staring at the travelers with the numbed anger of folk leached of hope and weakened by hunger. It stank, and it seemed people had done little more than move a few steps away from their ragged shelters to relieve themselves, not even digging pits or designating one spot for refuse. What possessions they owned sat in baskets or chipped pots. In one cage, guarded by a young man with a sharpened stick, rested a scrawny hen. Children crouched in the dirt and did not scamper along the path as healthy, curious children do when travelers pass by. This lapse caused even Atto to look nervous. He slammed the butt of his spear showily on the ground with every other step so everyone would see they were armed. Mara covered her nose and mouth with a hand and was stifling either cries or retches.

The people watched as they passed. None spoke or moved to disturb the lonely crackle of fire in the single pit dug into the ground and fueled by smoking green wood. Their silence was its own voice, telling him that these ragged folk had given up hope. They did not stir until they heard a new sound.

It came first as a hollow rat-a-tat, as if a distant woodpecker drummed its spring call. Alain was so surprised to hear bird life that he halted and tilted his head, seeking the direction of the sound. All around the hush deepened. One woman gasped audibly. Goaded by that noise, people stumbled up, grabbing children and sacks and baskets. They bolted for the shelter of the woods. By the time the band of cavalry swept around the bend, shouting and laughing, the clearing was empty, the shelters and fire pits abandoned. One forgotten little child sat on its naked rump with hands balled into fists and face red as it bawled in terror.

"We should have run," whispered Mara, trembling as she clutched Atto's arm.

"Hush!" he scolded her. "We're nothing to do with them. Stand your ground!"

Alain whistled the hounds in close as four men challenged them. Other soldiers ranged through the camp cutting ropes and beating down roofs with spears and knives. There was no point to the destruction; they were just enjoying themselves. Two carried lanterns, and they set fire to the hovels, which burned quickly as the child continued to scream.

"Shut that thing up!" said the sergeant without looking toward it. His men wore leather jerkins, but he had a mail shirt and a real iron helm with a brass nasal and leather sides. He waited on his mount two horse lengths from Alain, eyeing the hounds with the squint-eyed interest of a bored fighting man who has at last seen something he considers dangerous.

One man dismounted and cuffed the little boy, but his shrieks doubled in their piercing shrillness.

"Eh!" cried the man, snorting and coughing in an exaggerated manner. "He stinks! Whew! This is no boy, but a sow's get!"

"Stay!" said Alain to the hounds.

"Hold! There! You!" said the sergeant, as Alain pushed past the outthrust spear and strode over to the terrified child.

The soldiers looked curiously at him and did not interfere as he knelt beside the child. The little boy did stink. He was a stick figure, skin and protruding bones, nose running, skin rimed with dirt and worse filth, and his face was covered with sores and the fading scars of cowpox. It amazed Alain that so frail a child had survived the contagion. He wondered where the boy had suffered the outbreak, and where the demons that spread the disease were traveling now.

"Hush," said Alain softly. "Hush, child. What is your name?"

The boy hiccuped. Where his gaze slid across Alain's regard he hesitated, stilled, calmed, and looked at him, as if transfixed by Alain's face.

"What is your name?"

"Dog," whispered the little boy.

"Your name is 'Dog'?"

"Dog." He lifted a whip-thin arm to point at the hounds.

"Yes, two dogs. Where are your father and mother? Your sisters and brothers? Where are your kinsmen, child?"

"Dog."

"Where is your mother?"

"Dog."

The soldiers had gathered to enjoy the spectacle. The sergeant grunted. "Certain it is! That child likely had a bitch for a mother!"

His men chortled at his wit.

The child's face pinched. His lips trembled, and he drew in breath for a cry.

"Hush," said Alain, although it was difficult not to speak in an angry tone that would frighten the child. Without standing, he turned to frown at the sergeant. "What sport is there, I pray you, in teasing a creature as helpless as this one is? Had you orders to drive off these poor folk?"

"These poor folk! You're not from hereabouts, are you? They say all manner of people have taken to the roads since last autumn. It's a sign of the end of times."

"Is it?"

"These poor folk! Swindlers and beggars and whores and thieves and murderers, each one of them.

We had to drive them out of Autun because they made so much trouble. Now they camp here and trouble honest travelers on the road and honest farmers in the fields. That brat is the bastard of some bitch who sold herself to any man who would pay. No one will miss him. Look!"

The sergeant's gesture encompassed the entire squalid encampment, now burning. Beyond, Alain saw a flash of movement out among the trees. Someone was watching from a hiding place.

"Maybe he's got no mother. Maybe she died. No one wanted him. They just left him here. What will you do with a filthy creature like that who has no kinfolk to take care of him? He's better off dead.

Can you say otherwise?"

"Do you mean to take God's place and judge the worth of the soul of another human creature? We are all equal in the sight of God."

"Are you a frater? With that beard? What matter, anyway? Who has bread for an orphan child? I don't."

"What of the lady who rules in Autun? Doesn't she feed the poor, as is her duty?"

The sergeant's amused expression soured. He beckoned to his men. "Let's go. We've driven them out."

"For today," said Alain. "Won't they come back? Where else have they to go?"

The sergeant turned his attention elsewhere. "What about you?" he said, indicating Atto. "Why didn't you run?"

"I'm nothing to do with the ones who were camping here," said Atto. Mara huddled beside him. "I come from my village to join the milites in Autun. I heard the lady seeks soldiers."

"Hoo! Ho!" Some of the soldiers jeered. "A country boy come to swing his spear in the town!"

Flames eating through a heaped mattress of dry leaf litter caught in a length of canvas and blazed.

Elsewhere, fires ebbed down to glow as they lost hold of good fuel.

"We share and share alike," said the sergeant. "How about your girl? Or is she your sister?"

"My betrothed," Atto said, measuring the look in their eyes and, by the expression in his own, not liking it.

The sergeant marked the hounds, who sat, and Alain, who knelt beside the silent boy. He marked the shadows out in the far trees, but it was obvious from his expression that he had no intention of striking into the woods although it would be easy to do so.

"I like the way you stand up for yourself," he said to Atto. "Can you ride?"

"I've ridden donkeys. We have no horses in my village. I'll learn."

"Maybe." The sergeant examined Mara, who shrank closer to Atto's side. "You rode that girl, I see.

Come on, then. If the captain will take you, maybe he'll set you up in the guard. They need men to police the streets and man the gates. Lots of beggars these days causing trouble when we don't have enough food for those who deserve it." He lifted his chin defiantly as he looked at Alain, as if daring him to contradict his judgment, but Alain only watched him, waiting to see what he would do next. He gestured, and his men fell into ranks for the ride back.

"Where do they come from?" Alain asked, rising. The hounds looked at him but did not move.

"My soldiers? Autun. Villages nearby. From the lady's estates, and elsewhere."

"I meant the beggars causing your lady so much trouble."

The sergeant raised a hand to command his men, and led them off at a walk. Atto and Mara abandoned Alain without a word, although Mara glanced back at him and seemed, perhaps, to be crying. But she made no protest.

He had not, in truth, come to like Atto as the three of them had walked the road together these past few days, and although he pitied Mara he could not manage to respect her, even if he was sorry to find himself so hard-hearted toward a person as anxious as she was. So it was that, scolding another man for being judgmental, he had already succumbed to the same fault himself.

Once the patrol was out of sight, Alain rose slowly so as not to frighten the boy and with his knife cut into the bottom portion of his cloak and ripped off a length of fabric. He had just tied this garment around the boy's scrawny shoulders when the first figure ghosted back into the clearing, clutching a stout stick and a precious bronze bucket dented on one side as if by the kick of a horse. They came in pairs and trios and now and again as a single form clutching a precious bundle, or a cracked bowl, or a ragged handkerchief knotted around an unseen prize. They scavenged through the camp pretending to take no notice of Alain and the boy and the hounds, looking once and not again, as if by ignoring the stranger he would vanish. They took what they could carry. They looked like scarecrows, awkward, pale, ridiculous except for the desperation visible in their scuttling walks, their pinched shoulders and lowered heads, their sharp gestures and the way their gazes darted toward the road and the trees at each snap or thump or whisper of branches when the breeze gusted into a moment of real wind. The boy took no interest whatsoever in the people among whom he had been living. He kept staring at the hounds.

"Where are you from?" Alain asked finally, wondering if anyone would answer.

His voice, not loud, sounded as a crack of thunder might on a sultry day. Most of the refugees scattered into the woods. Where they meant to go he could not imagine.

There was one bolder than the rest, a man whose age was impossible to guess because he was missing most of his teeth and was so thin his face had sunken in like that of an ancient tottering elder.

His skin was weathered. His hair was matted with dirt and therefore colorless, tied back with a supple green twig to keep it out of his eyes.

"Better not to go to Autun," the man said. "Honest folk lose their homes there. Beggars are beaten on the streets and tossed out the gates."

"Are you from Autun?"

"I am."

"Now you hide here in the woods. Why is that?"

"Driven out, when the milites needed places to barrack troops." He spoke in a level voice, as about the weather. Whatever outrage or grief he felt remained hidden. He looked too weary and weak to shout or cry. "We've nowhere else to go, so we camp here." He gestured, indicating the filthy campsite.

"Has the lady of Autun no barracks in her palace for troops?"

"Not for so many as serve her now."

"Why needs she so many soldiers?"

He flicked a fly off his arm and sank down into a squat. He was so thin that he looked likely to topple over if the wind came up. "How would I know?"

"You might guess. You might see things, and come to your own conclusions."

He blew his nose and wiped mucus away with a forearm already streaked with unnameable substances. "I might. She fears some will take from her the duchy as they did before. Her Wendish brother took it from her. I saw that, I did." He tapped himself on the chest. His ribs showed like bare twigs, his chest was sunken, yet he squared his shoulders a little, proud of what he remembered and what he had worked out, a common man never privy to the plotting and planning of his noble rulers. "Now she's gathering soldiers to fight, she and that one they call Conrad the Black. I've seen him, too. Him and his lady wife, the one they call our queen."

The one they call our queen.

There, in his heart, Alain felt the tremor, the pain of the affection and loyalty he had offered her which she had rejected. She had turned on him twice over. She had tried to kill him.

But the memory was only that. It no longer had purchase. It no longer dug deep. He was sorry for it, that was all, that folk caused pain because of their own fears. He was angry because folk did do so much damage to the innocent and guilty alike because of their own fears. On his own account, he was free of the burden of desiring revenge. That gave him a measure of strength.

"Lady Sabella. Conrad the Black. Tallia. Who do they mean to fight?"

The man shrugged. "How am I to know the comings and goings of the great nobles?"

"Why must they cast out the innocent folk who lived honestly in Autun, such as you and these others?"

The man said nothing. A rattle of illness sang in each of his exhaled breaths from a rot settled into his lungs. The child sat unmoving, fixated on the hounds, and that one word slipped again from him.

"Dog."

The hounds waited patiently, heads lifted as they sniffed the air. Out in the woods he heard the rustle and snap of movement, but no one joined them in the clearing. After a while Alain realized he would receive no answer.

"What of this child? Where are his kinfolk?"

The man picked at a scab below his lower lip. "Mother's dead. Has none else."

"None to take charge of him?"

A shake of the head gave him his reply.

"Who cared for him?"

"None cared. He ate what scraps he could reach. He'll be dead in a few days more."

"If none among you cared whether this child lived or died, then truly it's as if you have turned your back on humankind. We must be compassionate and look each after the other."

"There's not food enough for all." The man gestured with an elbow. "You've somewhat in your sack.

Do you mean to share it or keep it to yourself?"

"I've bones for my hounds, nothing more. I've myself not eaten since this morning."

"I'd eat what I could gnaw off a bone. I'm that hungry. I beg you."

Over the last few days he had fed all but two of the bones from the dead deer to Sorrow and Rage.

Alain rose and, crossing the clearing, gave one of these to the man. The strip of flesh and fat and tendon still attached gave off the odor of meat that is turning bad. The man grabbed it out of his hand, grunting and slobbering in his haste to choke down what he could. As he ate, half a dozen ragged souls crept out of the woods with gazes fixed on Alain as on a gold talisman held dangling before avaricious eyes.

"Please, please," they said.

The boy braced himself on his stick arms and, panting and snuffling, dragged himself toward Alain.

His legs trailed after him, and now it was possible to see both had been broken and healed askew, so he couldn't use them. Alain scanned the clearing. A trio of men crept up behind him and a woman approached with a stout stick raised in one hand.

"Told you," said the man with the bone. "Best give us the rest of it and your cloak and clothes if you want to walk out alive."

Desperate men cannot be shamed.

Rage and Sorrow rose, growling. Alain hoisted his staff.

"You may choose now," he said clearly. "I do not want to fight you, but I will not be robbed."

"If you will be merciful, then give us all you own for we need it, I pray you, master!" called the woman with the stout stick. She was so thin and ill looking that at first glance a decent person would pity her, yet she crept forward with lips pulled back in a rictus grin that was no smile.

Best to move swiftly.

He whistled. The hounds loped toward him, and once they moved the folk scattered back, fearing those teeth. He grabbed the little boy and hoisted him up and over his back, and with Sorrow and Rage at either side strode into the forest. All the way through the woodland he heard them shadowing him to either side, waiting for an opening, but none came; the hounds were vigilant.

The child said, "Dog. Dog."

He reeked, the poor thing, and as they came out of the woods and to the open fields striping the land around the distant walls, he peed. Warm liquid trickled down Alain's side. There wasn't much urine in the child, but the scent of it stung. Rage barked, swinging his head around to sniff Alain's hip.

Out here farmers ploughed, although it was late in the season for such work. A pair of soldiers patrolled on horseback. They cantered over, looking him up and down while circling clear of the hounds.

The younger was a freckled lad about sixteen and with a tentative grip on his spear. His companion looked tougher, twice his age, with darker hair and a scaly patch of skin on one cheek that had been scratched until it bled.

"Who are you?" the elder asked. "What's your business in Autun?" He indicated the child with the blade of his spear. "Beggars not allowed in Autun. Go elsewhere."

"I found this child abandoned in the woods. Has the biscop no foundling home? Is there no monastery nearby that takes in orphans?"

"I don't know," said the man, "but not likely, I'd say. Haven't grain enough to feed the lady's household and her army. Certain there isn't spare for a dirty crippled brat like that one. See you there Jochim," he said to the lad, "see his twisted legs."

"He's crippled," said the lad brightly.

"So he is, but was he born with the twisted legs? Or did his mam or uncle gave it a twist so as folk would pity him and give bread and coin?"

"Nay." The lad shook his head. "Nay, no mam would do that. Would she?"

"Some might. Or a handsome uncle, like this one who carries him. Look at his decent clothes, who leaves a babe wrapped in only a bit of torn cloth. He found a babe forgot in the woods? I know what lurks in the woods. All those driven out of town by my lady's order. Thieves and whores and murderers.

Nay, fellow." He lowered his spear to block the path. In the distance a pair of farmers looked their way.

"We want none of your kind in our town."

"His cloak is shorn off," said the lad. "See? That's what the babe is wearing. Why would he tear his own cloak, if it's true he cares nothing for the babe but only his own comfort? He could buy a rag from a peddler for nothing and save the cloak."

"Dog," said the child.

"Unless he were kicked out of town and the babe's rag lost in the wood."

Alain sighed. "I'm no beggar. If you'll tell me where I can find a foundling home, I'll take this child there."

They shrugged. The youth seemed eager to depart. The elder lingered. "Don't matter whether I believe you or think you're lying. You can't enter the city with that begging child. Everyone can see he's a beggar's child. No entrance."

"Are there no poor sitting in the lady's hall, fed by her stewards?" asked Alain. "Can it be she has forgotten the ancient custom? Did not King Henry feed a dozen beggars every day off his very own table?"

The elder spat. "Get on. Speak not of Henry, the usurper. Well! He's gone now. Some say he's dead."

"Did he so?" asked the youth. "A dozen beggars, every day?"

"Or more, on feast days," said Alain, standing his ground.

"How do you know?" demanded the elder. "How could a man such as you know? How could you have stood in the hall where noble folk took their supper?"

"I was a Lion, once." And more besides, but he would not speak of those days to this man.

"A Lion!" The youth whistled appreciatively, with a look of respect. "A Lion! They take some tough fighting, it's said. Duke Conrad takes in any Lions that come this way. Strays, like."

The gaze of the older soldier had shifted in an intangible way. "Were you now? Seen any fighting? Ever kill a man?"

Weary, Alain met his gaze. "I have seen fighting. I killed a man." One who was already dying.

"Huh. I believe you. Huh." He glanced toward the town walls where twin banners curled limply at the height of the tower, concealing their sigils. The clouds moved sluggishly overhead, although it often seemed to Alain that they did not move at all, not anymore. "The lady needs soldiers. There's a bed and a meal every day if you join up with her. Interested?"

"What of the child?"

"Is he some kinsman of yours?"

"I found him abandoned in the woods, just as I said."

"Then why burden yourself with him? Look at him! That child's half dead, crippled, useless.

Can it even speak?"

"Dog," said the babe.

"Dog!" snorted the youth. 'A good name, don't you think? We could clean him up and take him in the barracks as a mascot, Calos. Put him up on a chair by the door and teach him to say

'dog' every time one of Captain Alfonse's Salian braggarts comes past."

Calos choked down a laugh, but it was easy to see the notion amused him.

"The lady has Salian soldiers in her retinue?" Alain asked.

"Oh, plenty of them, the cursed snails!" said the youth with the good humor of a man who has suffered no real harm from disparaging his comrades. "Foul-tempered and gluttonous. They come with that Salian lord who is one of my lady's commanders but I don't recall his name. Lots of Salians. They've got no king now. All at each other's throats, so it's said. No wonder they come east, these ones. It's safer here."

"It wasn't for those driven out into the woods," said Alain, waving an arm back the way he had come.

"They brought their own trouble down on them," said Calos with a sneer. "What of the little lad? I'm liking this idea of Jochim's the more I think on it. Up their craw, and them not daring to hurt a tiny babe so crippled as this one is."

"Would you treat a dog so?" Alain asked, angered by their suggestion.

"We treat our dogs well!" retorted Calos indignantly. "What do you take us for? Any dog we take in, we treat well. Train it. Feed it."

"You'd treat this child as nothing more than that?"

Calos shook his head. "What are you thinking, friend?" he said, with a tilted smile and a narrowed gaze, as if he were scolding Alain or laughing at his naivety. "This poor child has never in his life been treated as well as us troopers under the command of Captain Lukas treat our good dogs. I'll swear to you he'll do as well. Better than he's done. We need a laugh in our barracks."

"What happens to the child when you go home to your villages?"

Both of them laughed, but the laughter concealed pain.

"I was born in town," said Calos. "The lady's service is my life, friend. As for Jochim here, he's got no village to go back to. Flooded out, it was, when the river went running backward last autumn. His whole family died in them floods and most of the other folk in the place likewise. The rest had to beg in the lanes and I suppose most of them died over the winter and early spring. He's lucky to get a meal every day and a bed to sleep in. He's lucky we took him in, seeing him a likely soldier. So will you be—lucky if we take you in. Or haven't you heard? Times are hard. If these frosts don't lift, if the sun don't come, if the crops don't grow, they'll get worse. Much worse."

"I pray you," whispered young Jochim, wiping a tear from his eye. "Don't speak such ill words. The Enemy hears us."

“Are you coming?" asked Calos. "Can we adopt the little lad?"

He wasn't afraid to meet Alain's gaze, dead on, searching as much as he was searched. An honest man, of his kind, not compassionate but not cruel either; he meant what he said. He did his job, and was loyal to those he had pledged his loyalty to. Maybe he was right about the child. Maybe the most a beggar's crippled and abandoned orphan son could hope for in these days was to be treated as well as a well-kept dog.

2

CAPTAIN Lukas was a hard-living man who found the idea of a child mascot who could only say the word "Dog" just as amusing as did his soldiers. That he hated the Salian interlopers need not be spoken out loud. The locals in Autun had always hated the Salians. It was in their blood. That the beloved Emperor Taillefer had been himself a Salian, had been emperor of Salia and Varre and much more land besides, and had built his famous chapel and palace in Autun and ruled from here as much as he ruled from any one place, was beside the point. That he had chosen to be buried here just went to show that Taillefer wasn't a Salian, not really. He'd been born on an estate in what was now Varingia, so the story went, so he was really of Varre and that meant that Varre had once conquered Salia, not the other way around.

"I like it," said the captain, laughing with his sergeants as Calos and Jochim looked on. He slapped his thigh. "Yes! Best keep him well fed, though, and get the dogs to guard him, so we can say he's just speaking to them. All innocent!"

Alain didn't like it, but he understood he had no viable alternative. The world could not be changed in one day or one year and it was possible it could not be changed at all. It was just possible that this trivial and even selfish act of kindness toward a crippled, illegitimate orphan outweighed a hundred more apparently momentous acts involving the great and powerful of the land. Dog, as they were all calling the boy now, was sitting in a corner slurping down porridge and had shown no fear in the barracks with men coming and going and talking in loud voices, jostling, coughing, laughing, and singing out crude jokes.

"Someone has got to wash him," added the captain. "Calos, you take care of it, as you brought him in."

"Jochim, you take care of it," said Calos. "What of this man, who says he was a Lion?" He gestured toward Alain, who stood quietly to one side.

"Let me see those dogs you say come with him," said Captain Lukas, and he strolled with exaggerated casualness over to the door and squinted along the porch. Sorrow and Rage regarded him with their dark eyes. When they saw Alain, they thumped their tails on the plank sidewalk but did not otherwise move.

The captain looked at those dogs for a long time. Then he looked at Alain. The captain recognized him. Alain saw it in the smile trapped on his lips, in the way he scratched at his forehead to give himself something to do while he considered, in the way he tapped a foot three times on the porch as he reached a conclusion.

"Best we go see the lady," he said to the air. He turned back to beckon his sergeants closer. "I'll need a dozen men. Sergeant Andros, you are in charge here while I'm gone."

"There's to be a sweep of the southwest quarter this afternoon, Captain."

"Proceed as usual."

"Yes, Captain."

"If you will." The captain indicated to Alain that they would walk together. "Surely you have come here in order to see Lady Sabella." Without allowing Alain a chance to answer, he began issuing orders to the dozen men hurrying out to accompany them.

They stood in the dusty forecourt of what had once been a merchant's warehouse complex but was now both barracks and stable. There were two long warehouses linked at their northern ends by a spacious hall. An open kitchen and small storage sheds fenced in the southern end of the compound. The men lived in one half of the hall, their horses in the other. There were three troops quartered here, one in each structure, about three hundred men in all if Alain's estimate of the size of Captain Lukas' troop was correct. Men lounged by the open doors of their living space keeping an eye on the comings and goings of the other soldiers, friends and rivals alike. Dogs slunk along at the base of each porch, looking for scraps of food or a friendly pat. They kept clear of Sorrow and Rage, but a rare bold bitch ventured up and sniffed them over. A cart laden with manure trundled past, pushed by a pair of soldiers headed out to the fields. The open dirt yard stank of sweat and shit and urine and dust and that peculiar intangible scent of men sizing each other up for weakness. A pair of men were joking in loud voices.

"Eh, those Varre boars! Look, there goes the ass-licking captain now!"

Alain glanced at the captain, but he took no mind of the words. In fact, Captain Lukas seemed not to have understood them at all. As if they were speaking in a language he could not understand, but one that Alain could. The swirl of movement, of men going about their business and dogs hanging back to allow the hounds to pass without challenging them and a horse backing nervously away from the entrance into the stables, so disoriented Alain that he felt the world spinning around him. He staggered and reached out to catch himself

they skate into Rikin Fjord across a skin of still water so clear that he dreams he can see fathoms into the deeps, down to the ancient seabed carved aeons ago out of glittering rock. But that is only an illusion. What he sees are the backs of a swarm offish schooling around his hull.

One surfaces.

No fish, these, but an entire tribe of merfolk. He leans on the rail, studying them. On deck, soldiers exclaim. Always, as they crossed the northern sea, they sailed with an escort of merfolk off their bow and behind the stern. These here, he thinks, are more like a ravening pack of wolves descending on a slaughter ground.

"Beware!" calls Deacon Ursuline, among his counselors.

Papa Otto calls from the stern. "A swarm has gathered here. I don't like the look of these! I think they mean to do us harm!"

As if the words are sorcery, the boat heels starboard. His heels skid backward and he grabs the rail to stop himself from falling onto the deck, but just as he gets his feet up and under him, the ship heels again, seesawing to port side so abruptly that he cannot stop himself. He pitches forward, loses his hold on the railing, and plunges into the cold blue water of the fjord.

Icy water splashed his face as he caught himself on a hitching post, finding his balance although the ground still seemed to tilt and rock.

Captain Lukas swore. "Bitch of a weather! Feel that rain! You'd think it was still winter, by how cold it is!"

Alain blinked rain out of his eyes and shook his head to clear it. The shower had taken them all by surprise as it swept across the courtyard. Dogs and men ran for shelter. The captain laughed and shamed his men into moving more slowly.

"What? Are you running at the first cold drop? What, are you prissy snails?"

The vision, come so fast and unexpectedly, faded as the sights and smells of the compound drowned him. They passed between the kitchens, which smelled of porridge and smoke, and a storehouse, whose door was propped open. Inside, a score of folk huddled in the interior around a cluster of beds, sitting, lying down, coughing: a sickroom, perhaps. A child at the door watched them walk by with wide eyes and a somber expression.

"You've been on the road too many days," said the captain. "The lady does not like the smell of the road. Baths first."

"Can I take the plunge, Captain?" asked one of the escorts.

"Eh! I'd like a good washing, Captain!" said another.

"There's some new wash girls at the baths, I hear," laughed a third. "Not like in the old days, if you take my meaning. More to our liking."

"Hush," Captain Lukas said, but he wasn't angry at his men. If anything, the comments caused him to lapse into a thoughtful silence.

These barracks lay near the southern gate and were not particularly close to the palace complex, which sat on a hill. The streets had little traffic considering the time of day Twice they passed warehouses, each one guarded by a dozen soldiers.

"What do they guard?" Alain asked.

"Grain. As precious as gold."

A few folk tended garden spaces in empty lots. Autun had not quite filled out the space between the walls built in the days of Taillefer, or else old buildings had fallen down and not been reconstructed, with the dirt around the foundations left to go to seed. A woman and man straightened from poking at freshly dug troughs to watch the soldiers pass. Like the child at the storehouse door, they called out no greeting, nor did the captain nod at them to acknowledge their presence. Their silence troubled Alain, who had an idea that relations between townsfolk and soldiers had once been easier.

The baths lay at the base of the palatine hill. The original structure was built by the old Dariyans, but it had been refurbished a hundred years ago and had not deteriorated overly much since then. Sorrow and Rage sat under a portico with a pair of nervous minders to guard them. Within the stone halls a pair of old women held sway, although it was true they were assisted by a quintet of younger, fairer lasses, banished to the back chambers as soon as the soldiers came in.

"This one," said Captain Lukas, pushing Alain forward. "I'll be back to fetch him."

They took him to a room where he stripped. The attendants examined him with the look of women who have seen every possible thing the world has to offer. They even pinched his buttocks and measured the span of his arms with cupped hands.

"Pleasing enough," the taller commented to the shorter in a murmur he was not meant to hear. "Too thin."

"Aren't they all these days?"

His clothes were taken away and two buckets of water brought by a gangling youth, who retreated as soon as he set the buckets on the stone floor.

"Raise your arms!" said the old woman.

Obedient, he raised his arms.

"Shut your eyes!"

He shut his eyes.

The water hits so hard he thinks his heart will seize. The cold sluices down his face, his neck. He is wet through in an instant and so cold he goes stiff, lips locked in a grimace, limbs in a rictus.

How can anything be so cold?

Then he remembers that cold causes him no injury, not as it does humankind. He is drowning in his vision. He must open his eyes, and quickly. Why did the ship surge in the waves so suddenly?

He opens his eyes as the water streams past, as a weight nudges him, then pushes, hard, and he flails through the water trying to get his bearings so he can reach the surface.

He is surrounded by merfolk.

They are circling, as for a kill.

They mean to kill him.

"Why?" asked the taller crone sarcastically. "Why? You don't think we're letting you get in the baths as filthy as you are? You wash that dirt off first. Then you can soak."

"So cold!" he said between gritted teeth. Goose bumps had erupted all over his skin, but he could not tell if it were the cold water or the upwelling of fear that made him shiver uncontrollably.

"We should heat it up for you? Well, if you'd split the wood and paid for it before-times, maybe we'd consider it!"

"Don't curse your fortune, young man. You're one of the lucky ones!"

They were both old and spry, well enough fed by the evidence of their plump cheeks and ample hips, cheerful enough to be amused by him but nevertheless watchful, glancing at frequent intervals toward the door as if expecting someone to come charging in. They went on chattering, and the flood of words calmed his trembling.

"Getting a bath at all! Used to be under the rule of Biscop Constance that the common folk in town might pay a sceatta for use of the baths on Hefensdays, Secundays, and Jeddays, but not now. Reserved for the lady's noble entourage and her captains."

"Will you stop it?" said the other one in that same undertone. "If they throw us out of town for speaking sedition against the lady my family will starve! You might speak, and I keep silence, and I'll be guilty same as you." She handed Alain a greasy lump of scouring soap. "Begging your pardon, my lord.

We mean no harm by our whispering."

"I'm no lord," he said, taking the soap gratefully, "and I thank you for your trouble." He scrubbed.

He was not as dirty as he might have been, not nearly as filthy as he had once been, but it felt good to feel the dirt loosen and come free.

They chortled, as if he had made a joke. The taller one left. The shorter swept water into the drain as he washed his hair.

"All done?"

He braced himself for the deluge. The water hit.

Ice. Gasping. The air leaves his lungs and bubbles to the surface. A shape looms out of the water, so close that those teeth seem about to close over his face. He finds his knife and draws it, but it catches infolds of his trousers.

"Too late," whispers the merman, and it is strange he can speak underwater in words Stronghand can understand. "It is too late for you, Stronghand. Now I am the victor, although you won at Kjalmarsfjord."

It is strange that he speaks with the voice of Nokvi, Stronghand's last rival among the Eika.

Gasping, he flailed.

"Hey, now! Hey!" said the attendant. She poked him in the ribs with the end of her broom, and the jab got him coughing. "If you're going to be violent, I'm calling the guards!"

"No, I beg your pardon. I just—" There was nothing he could say.

Nokvi, Stronghand's last rival for the overlordship of the Eika, was dead. Stronghand had himself struck the killing blow and pushed Nokvi overboard into the grasp of the merfolk. That battle at Kjalmarsfjord Alain had fought in between breaths as he had himself fought on the hill with the doomed Lions by Queen's Grave, when he had at the last been cut down and killed by the Lady of Battles. How was it that Nokvi spoke out of the depths?

"Yes," said the crone, amused now that she saw Alain would not act rashly, "it strikes all the healthy young men so, bawling like babes when the cold water hits them. On you go, to the hot baths."

She prodded him with the broom, the straw bristles harsh on the tender skin of his buttocks, and he yelped—and she chuckled—as he hurried into the next chamber. This vaulted stone chamber was taken up with a tiled bath smelling of mineral salts. Steam rose from vents in the floor.

He stepped in, sitting straight down onto a shelf resting a torso's height below the surface, but the intense heat took him by surprise. A wave of faintness swelled up into his head as might a surge in the sea, and he sank

water pouring over his face. This time will it be the end?

No.

Never.

Not this way.

He means to die peacefully in his bed, not taken by surprise in this ignominious manner by a vanquished enemy who is dead. Whom he killed.

It is only a merman, smarter than a dog and not as intelligent as a man. Nevertheless, a furious merman bent on revenge while his enemy drowns in the water remains a formidable opponent.

As the creature dives in for the kill, Stronghand rolls in the water and kicks, connecting with the torso of the merman. The move is sluggish, the reaction oddly muted, because the water causes all movement to become slow and ungainly— for humankind. The merfolk have no such restriction. The sea is their element, just as rock and fire and air are his.

There are a dozen mermen, or a hundred. He cannot see into the depths. Hulls block the light. Another Eika flails in the water nearby, trying not to sink, but that brother remains untouched as the merfolk swarm around Stronghand. In another moment Stronghand will black out and inhale seawater, and he will sink and drown. They will devour him, as they devoured all the others thrown into the sea. That was the bargain, made long ago.

Why would they desire man flesh and Eika flesh when there are, after all, so many fish in the sea?

The knife has twisted free of his trousers. He kicks upward and plunges it into the side of the merman, using the flesh of the merman as leverage to launch himself to the surface while his victim thrashes and others close in to feast on blood and entrails.

A hand grips his ankle. Teeth sink into the flesh of his calf. He breaks the surface, coughs and splutters, sucks in air

Alain gulped in a mouthful of water. Thrashing, he found himself underwater but too late. The water closes back over his face as he is dragged down by the leg. Harder than iron are the teeth of the merfolk, able to pierce easily the skin of the RockChildren. He has lost his knife, but he has other weapons.

His claws, unsheathed, rake through the writhing hair of the creature that has fastened onto him. Like eels severed in half they squirm through water now clouded by sheets of blood rising off the one that spoke in the voice of Nokvi. His leg is released. He swims up and breaches the surface again just as a hand gropes in his hair, grips, yanks, and drags him onto the ship The pain of being tugged up by his hair washed all other thoughts out of his head. He yelped and, all at once, heard the hounds barking madly and the sound of men swearing and shouting in alarm.

"What are you doing?" cried the crone. "Trying to drown yerself?"

A closer shriek startled her. She released his hair and turned, then yelled in fear. He was still gulping for air. He barely had time to register the clippity of nails on stone, the big shapes coming at a run, and they jumped and with a mighty splash shuddered the entire bath.

After that, the uproar erupted like battle with folk running in to stare, or roar, or laugh, or shriek complaints, each according to his or her nature. Alain could not help but laugh to see Sorrow and Rage swim to the lip of the bath, but they could not climb out and so he had to swim over to shove them, with great difficulty, out of the water. They sneezed, and shook themselves in a cascade of droplets, and sneezed again, disgusted with the taste and heat.

"Out! Out!" cried the taller crone, and the shorter one traded her broom for a many-tined rake to try to get dog hair out of the water. So much shed in so short a time!

Alain scraped his knee climbing out and was not even given a scrap of cloth to dry himself with before Captain Lukas yelled at him to hurry up, although the captain kept a safe distance. The hounds yawned hugely, displaying their teeth.

So they proceeded with Alain damp and dressed in a spare wool tunic furnished by an unknown donor; it smelled of dried cod. He wore his own worn sandals and, under the tunic, the loose linen shirt packed by Aunt Bel that he had so far kept clean. He walked without protest, climbing the steep stairs that led to the palace. A spitting rain started up, but a roof covered the stairs all the way up the hill; no sense in the emperor getting wet on his way to or from the baths. Stone pillars supported the timber roof.

There were no walls. As they climbed, the town opened up before them, alleys and courtyards and cisterns coming into view below in an orderly layout whose bones reminded the educated man that Autun had begun its days centuries ago as a Dariyan fort. Square, orderly, explicable. His thoughts, in contrast, churned like the disturbed waters of Rikin Fjord, still flashing in remembered bursts of vision before his sight.

Gasping, he spits out seawater and turns to confront his rescuer. It is Papa Otto who has grabbed him and hauled him free, while his Eika brothers thrust with spears at the swarming mermen in the water. Now that he is clear of the waters, the attack breaks off. The Eika brother swims, unmolested, to the third ship and is hoisted aboard.

He passed pillars carved in the likenesses of magnificent beasts: a phoenix, a guivre, a dragon. A noble griffin, staring at him with painted sea-blue eyes. A wolf, an eagle, and a proud lion.

The blue waters roil as a second swarm of merfolk surge into the fjord in the wake of Stronghand's ships. They circle the tiny fleet before diving into the abyss. Are they warring, one faction against the other? It is impossible to pierce the depths, now clouded and hazy like the heavens but with a darker veil of streaming blood released by battle joined below.

Stronghand stands at the stem of the ship staring down in the waters, but he can see nothing and he has only questions. His leg bleeds, the pale blood dripping onto the deck and diluted by the skin of salt water slipping back and forth over the planks with each slight pitch of the ship as it glides into the sound.

He calls to Papa Otto. "You saved me," he says. "How can I reward you?"

The man shakes his head. "My lord." He says nothing more.

"What do you want? You were a slave once. Now you speak on my council. What do you want?"

"My lord," says the man, trembling now, and it is evident that some strong emotion has overcome him. He will not speak. He cannot.

"Well, then, Otto. When you know, you must tell me. You have earned a reward this day."

"Yes, my lord," the man says obediently, but he weeps, as humans do when their emotions overwhelm them. And despite everything, Stronghand still does not truly understand them.

From ahead, he smells the fires of home. A faint hum raises the hair on the back of his neck.

His dogs yip.

OldMother is waiting for him.

"She's at prayer," said a guardsman to Captain Lukas.

Alain shook himself to a halt just before he slammed into the captain's broad back. Lukas had stopped at the top of the stairs, below a gate carved with Dariyan rosettes. Beyond lay the remembered courtyard, lined on one side by a stone colonnade and on the other just to their left, by a stone rampart that opened onto a spectacular view of the town below, although from this angle Alain saw only one corner of the cathedral tower. The graveled courtyard had recently been raked and tidied. Opposite stood the famous octagonal chapel with its proud stone buttresses. He heard hymnal singing and, from farther away and therefore harder to place by direction, male laughter.

"An odd time to be praying," commented the captain, "unless you're the queen."

The guardsman and Lukas were clearly old friends, and indeed the other man wore the badge of a captain as a clasp for his cloak. "True enough." He chuckled and said, with a smirk, "Praying in thanksgiving, the lady is. The queen gave birth at dawn."

"Is that so?" asked Captain Lukas, eyes widening as he leaned toward his comrade. "Girl or boy?"

"A lad, wouldn't you know it? It'll be proclaimed in three days if the mite survives that long. The other two didn't."

"Yes, I recall it, but the older girl seems likely to stick. Still." He glanced around to make sure none of the other guards could overhear, and leaned closer. "Still. How is the duke taking it?"

"Look there," said the other guard, pointing back down the stairs. "Here he comes. He went out hunting."

The stairs wound down the slope, switching back several times, and because they were sheltered under a roof, with no walls, it was difficult to see the procession the guardsman alluded to, but the lively clatter of their progress drifted on the breeze. The hounds had their ears up and were looking that way with interest.

"What are these great beasts?" added the guard, extending a hand toward Sorrow. "Here, boy.

Are you the friendly one? You're a big one, aren't you?"

Sorrow gave a warning growl, ears flattening, and the guardsman withdrew his hand. "I've seen the like of these beasts before, but I can't recall where. You'd think a man would never forget such monsters!"

"Come on," said Captain Lukas, beckoning to his men who were, after all, waiting on the stairs in the path of the approaching company. "Move along to the chapel, but keep at the back, and make sure you're quiet." He nodded at Alain. "The lady won't mind it if the hounds rest just inside the door. She often brings her coursers with her, as does the duke. His alaunts and whippets are usually with him. Will they fight with other dogs?"

"Only if they're attacked."

The captain took him at his word. It was a rare man who did not know his dogs well enough to understand and predict their behavior, and such dogs would never have sat still for long stretches; they would have been off and sniffing and snuffling into every crook and cranny they could find no matter how furiously their master called them back. Most folk did not have time for ill-trained dogs, and certainly would not go to the trouble to feed them.

A number of soldiers loitered under the colonnade, watching with interest but without initiative.

"There are many soldiers here in Autun," remarked Alain.

"Truly," agreed Captain Lukas good-naturedly as they crossed the gravel, footsteps shifting and grinding on the rocks. "More soldiers than commoners, it's said."

"How are the soldiers all fed?"

"Taxes. Tithes." He shrugged. "The lady takes what she needs. It's to the benefit of all to be protected."

"What if there's a poor harvest this year? It seems likely, doesn't it? So cold as it is still that folk can't risk planting for fear a late frost will kill the seedlings."

"That's not my concern."

"It might become so, if the lady can't feed her soldiers."

"She'll not turn us out. War's coming. Perhaps you haven't heard."

"Coming from where?"

"They say the Wendish mean to drag us back though we've no wish to cower under the yoke of the Wendish regnant. Not anymore. Not now we have a queen of our own."

To think of Tallia no longer hurt him. They entered the chapel and took a place at the back, under the ambulatory where the other servants and hangers-on waited.

This was prayer, of a kind. Lady Sabella knelt on a thick pillow, her chin resting on a fist. She stared not at the altar where a cleric intoned psalms but at the stone effigy of Taillefer. After a moment she leaned to her right to murmur to an attendant, a youthful man with the burly shoulders of a fighter and hunter. A dozen noble companions surrounded her, and the buzzing murmur of their conversation provided an undertone to the pious prayers of the clerics.

Alain had stood inside the famous chapel before. There was something missing. Alternating blocks of light-and-dark stone gave a pattern to the eight vaults opening onto the central floor. Above, the dome swept into the heavens, ringed by a second and third tier of columns. So might the faithful rise toward heaven, the righteous yet higher above, painted onto the stony piers, until at last the bright and distant Chamber of Light far above could be touched by the angels.

The chapel had not changed. The tempest had not shaken it. But something really was missing, and he had to search the chapel a second time before he realized what it was.

The hands belonging to the stone effigy of Emperor Taillefer were empty. The crown of stars was gone. The stone figure clutched at air. The sight struck Alain so strangely that he smiled. So often we grasp at the very thing we cannot keep hold of, and even after we have lost it, our life is shaped by that wish and the action of grasping. So it is with those who, like stone, are carved into an unchanging form.

We make ourselves into stone because we fear to change.

" 'How can I repay God for all that They have given me?' " sang the clerics. " 'I raise the cup of deliverance and speak my vows to God in the presence of all of Their people.' "

There came in a rush through the door a pack of hearty, laughing, chattering men still sweaty and dirt-stained from their ride. Sabella looked up. Even the clerics faltered, turning to see, but one nudged another while a third put pressure on a fourth's foot, and so the service lurched forward despite the unseemly interruption.

Conrad the Black knelt beside Sabella, pulled a dry stalk of grass out of his beard, and crumbled it into dust between his fingers.

"News from the borderlands." Perhaps he was trying to keep his voice low in deference to the prayers of thanksgiving, but the acoustics of the hall magnified his speech so every soul in the ambulatory could hear him although he was not, in fact, shouting. "We've got control of the mines again, but I need workers. That Eika raid last year cleaned out the countryside. They've got a throat hold all along the coast and some ways down three of the rivers."

"Haven't you workers in Wayland?"

"The roads are worse there than here, what with the landslides and fallen trees from last autumn.

Easier to march from Autun to the mines than from Bederbor to the mines, although it's a longer road from Autun."

Her fist had opened. Her stern and rather bored expression had altered to one of intense interest.

"Then Salian workers."

"Raid into the nest of hornets? That's a poor use of my soldiers. I might need them at any time."

"Nay, nay," she said irritably, "I meant you to take as many as you like from among the refugees.

That will get them off the roads and stop them from making themselves a nuisance. Round them up and drive them in a herd. There are folk in Autun, too—some we've already driven out, but others you may take as you wish. More than we need. Consult with my captains. Plenty of labor here for the mines. It will save us bread later."

"Yes," Conrad mused, "that will work. But it will still take a long time to get benefit from those mines."

"Better we control them than the Salians do. Better we control stores of precious metals against the coming battle."

"Will it come to battle?" he asked her. "If Mother Scholastica means to support our cause, then it need not come to battle."

"Do you fear the bastard?"

He snorted. "I am no fool. He's a strong commander. Call that fear if you want, Cousin. I call it prudence."

“Are you a dog unwilling to fight? I call that submitting."

"These are cheap tricks meant to goad me. I'll fight if I must, but not if the odds are against us."

"Shall we just hand Varre over," she asked sweetly, "and pray for our Wendish cousins to place their feet atop our backs while we wallow in the dirt? We might have everything, Conrad. Everything!"

He laughed curtly. "Then you lead the charge! If you're so eager."

"Do not speak disrespectfully to me!"

He glowered. He was flushed, hot, irritated. The clerics drew in breath and began a new psalm.

"I praise God, and God have answered me. God's love is steadfast. God's faithfulness is eternal."

Rage whined, ears flattening, and swung her head around to stare at the door.

"You're right to be cautious," said Sabella, "nor do I mean to mock you, Conrad. But I believe that my aunt is sincere in her communication with us. If we are bold, and clever, then we will rule Varre and Wendar. Just as I ought to have done all along, since I am eldest child of Arnulf."

Conrad's companions had settled themselves wherever they could find room, blocking many of the lines of sight beneath the vaults, although Alain could still see Sabella, Conrad, and Taillefer's carved visage. Conrad was a good-looking man, powerfully built, tall, broad, muscular. He had a dark face and a trim black beard and mustache around mobile lips.

"What's this?" He looked toward the doors. "Good God!"

His expression darkened. He rose, hands set on hips as he frowned.

The commotion spilled into the gathered worshipers as wind disturbs an autumn meadow, turning leaves and scattering branches. Folk exclaimed. One, unseen, cried out in fear. There came stewards in bold red tabards pushing open a path and behind them a litter borne by four servingmen. Behind these staggered a weeping nurse with a bundle swaddled in white linen nestled in her arms.

"Tallia!" said Conrad.

"What are you doing?" Sabella extended a hand, and two of her companions leaped forward to help her stand.

Yet, after all, to see her pained him. It was not an agony, only a pinprick, like a point of pressure that bit until, just piercing the skin, it drew a bead of blood. He had forgiven her. He had grown beyond her and had loved and been loved by a woman worthy of all these things. But the innocent love he had once offered Tallia was still a part of him, and that part, betrayed, could not help but remember.

Tallia reclined on the litter, propped up on pillows. She was pale, as if she had lost a great deal of blood, but her skin had a shining gleam, still swollen taut with pregnancy's aftermath. She moaned, shifting uncomfortably. By the curve of her limbs traced by the drape of the fabric pulled tight, he saw that all trace of her ascetic's starvation had been obliterated. Someone had made her eat, and eat well.

Her beautiful wheat-colored hair was slick with sweat, all in a tangle across her torso. She lifted her head.

"Pray!" she said in a low, tortured voice. "Pray for the child. Ai! It is too late."

Conrad struck the heel of his hand to his chest once, twice, and three times. 'Ai, God! So I feared!"

He wept, as a bereaved father should, and his companions wept with him.

"Bring it here!" ordered Sabella.

The nurse came hesitantly, but when she offered the child to Sabella, the noblewoman waved her away. "I can see! No need to touch it! Where is the midwife?"

No one knew.

"Hunt her down." Sabella snapped fingers, looked around, and caught sight of Captain Lukas at the back of the crowd. His height made him easy to mark among the mob. "Your hunt, Captain.

See that you find her."

"Stay here," he said to Alain. He gathered his men and hurried out, leaving two men, one on either side of Alain. The hounds whined, forced up against the back wall by the press of more folk crowding in to see what was going on. Tallia's procession had attracted notice outside. Everyone was whispering.

Her shriek cut through the rumbling. 'Ai! Ai! God save us!"

Lady Sabella turned to stare at her daughter. Conrad lifted his head in surprise. Tallia had pushed herself up on one elbow. With her other hand she pointed, forefinger extended, arm trembling. Her face was white, and her eyes flared in horror.

"A ghost!" she cried hoarsely. 'A spirit, sent by the Enemy to haunt me!" She pointed at Alain, where he stood in the crowd. "Begone! Begone! You have no power over me!"

Conrad wiped away tears with the back of a hand. "What are you babbling about?"

Lady Sabella had seen, and understood. "What is this?" she asked as she smiled. Alain didn't like that smile, but he did not fear it. "Come forward. I recognize you. Lavastine's by-blow who tried to steal the county from Lord Geoffrey."

With the hounds at his heels, Alain walked forward. Folk shoved each other to get out of the way.

He did not kneel. "My lady," he said. "My lord duke." And, last, although the words came harder than he thought they would: "My lady Tallia."

She screamed, covered her eyes with her arm, and collapsed onto the pillows as in a faint. The litter rocked, and the servingmen carrying it lurched a few steps to steady themselves. In all that crowd, no one spoke. Silence weighed over the mute effigy of Taillefer. Silence lofted into the dome as if to strike the heavens themselves dumb.

"Yet here you are," added Sabella, "and I admit I'm interested to know where you came from and why you are here."

This close to the nurse, he saw the bluish-white features of a baby peeping out from under the linen wrappings. So still, without expression or any least sign of animation. Sorrow barked, and the nurse shrieked and skittered back, slamming into the tomb. She lost her grip on the infant. It tumbled out of her arms.

He lunged forward and

On the shore of Rikin Fjord the good, strong folk of Rikin Tribe wait to greet him. Here are Eika warriors grown too slow to sail the seas and fight in foreign lands but strong enough, still, to build and labor and fight in defense of their home. Here are the home troops, doing their duty to protect the fiord until they are given a chance to sail. Here are Deacon Ursuline's flock looking healthy and eager, crowding forward as they would never have done in the days when they were kept penned and mute.

"What have you brought us, Mother?" they call when they see the deacon.

"What gifts will enrich us, Deacon?" they ask her. "You must see what we have built in your absence!"

"Ask your lord what he has brought with him to enrich the tribe," she tells them, and they see him and fall silent, heads bowed respectfully. They fear him, too, but fear is no longer the only spear that drives them.

"The riches of Alba belong to us," he tells them. "Silver brooches and spoons. Tin. Iron ingots. Shields. Swords. Glass beakers and jars and drinking horns. Wool cloth. Ivory arm rings.

Amber and crystal beads. And more besides. Let the cargo be brought ashore and into the hall."

He looks out onto the waters, but the surface lies still. The fight that exploded so suddenly has vanished into the depths and he still cannot explain it. Truth to tell, he hesitates before he disembarks, recalling that moment when he saw Nokvi in the flat face of the merman who attacked him. Nokvi is dead, devoured by his allies— some of whom are not, after all, his allies any longer. Or perhaps some of the merfolk were never his allies at all.

He comes ashore. First Son bears his standard behind him. His counselors move in a group, whispering among themselves.

The SwiftDaughters stand in their ranks by OldMother's hall. They wait, so beautiful in their sharp metallic hues: copper, silver, gold, iron. Snow lines the valley, a white tracery among the fields and rocks. Small ones race down from the main hall, shouting and laughing, and they tumble into place before him, some of them on two legs and some on four, nipping and snapping and pinching and shoving. They are born with the instinct to struggle and compete. Yet he notices that there are fewer four legs and more two legs than is usual among the litters.

Sensing his interest, they fall together into their packs and become silent. Watching him.

They are half his size but growing fast. In another year they will be full grown and in a year or two after that they will be what humankind would call adults: as smart and fast and strong as they will ever be, the new generation of Eika warriors. He has himself after all, only lived through ten or twelve winters since he hatched from the nests. Their life is short, but after all, a short life is all most creatures on Earth can expect.

"Answer me," he says to them sharply. "Brute strength and bright baubles will not give you victory."

At first they answer with silence. The old, fading warriors and younger home troops and the human tribe look on. This is the first time the sire has met the hatchlings.

One among them speaks up boldly. "Then what?"

"Who are you?" he asks.

"I am First Son of the Third Litter."

He nods.

"First," he says, "observe. After this, learn. And when this is done, think. These are the three legs on which we stand."

"We only have two legs," says First Son of the Third Litter. A different small one snickers.

"What is your name?" he asks the snickerer.

The small one flinches. Never a good sign. But after all, not all these will survive, nor should they. Some will never grow beyond a reliance on brute strength and swift running. It is those who observe, learn, and think who will thrive. Who will rule.

"Third Son of the Sixth Litter," says the snickerer. "There are four legs also. Three is between two and four, but there is no creature with three legs."

"Is there not?" He frowns at the hatchlings, yet after all they are a handsome looking group, not the biggest he has ever seen, but he does not have girth and breadth to give them.

He has given them something more valuable. "The third leg is your brother. Two legs only, if you stand by yourself. But if you stand with others, then you cannot easily be knocked down."

caught the corner of a linen band as the tiny body struck the floor. Cloth pooled around it in loops and heaps. He swooped down and grasped at it with a gasp of dismay.

It gurgled. Its lips smacked and pumped. It squawked out a feeble Wail, then hiccuped.

Would it name itself? First Son? Fourth Child? Nay, it was a helpless human infant, doomed to many years of childhood, not ready to run and fight within a pair or three of years after its birth. It was so tiny and feeble! No wonder the Eika thought that humankind were soft.

The nurse ripped the baby out of Alain's hands, pulled down the front of her bodice, and put the baby to her breast. It rooted for a moment, then got hold and sucked.

Such an uproar ensued that he had to grab the collars of the hounds and hold them to stop them from biting as folk swarmed, yelled, cried, gesticulated. The crowd surged in and out, right and left, until Sabella's ringing voice brought order and soldiers herded companions, attendants, and courtiers out.

"This way," said Captain Lukas, appearing at his side as if he had never left. "Come now, I pray you." He said the words urgently. His frown had a storm cloud's menace. Alain went along because it was easier to and because the sight of that infant's face troubled him. So quiescent. It had seemed to hit the ground so hard, but that was God's mercy, surely: some substance had clogged its breathing and the shock had jarred it loose . Newborns were such fragile creatures. Weiwara's twins—how could he forget them? The smaller one had been born, likewise, too weak to draw breath on its own. What had happened to that baby? Had it survived the great weaving or been consumed by the tempest? Had Adica known the spell would doom those she loved? Had she gone forward despite that knowledge?

He would never know.

"Wait here," said the captain, opening a door. Alain went gratefully into a dim room and sank down onto a bench. The tears caught him by surprise. He missed Adica so badly. The hounds licked him, leaned on him, pawed at him, and at length lay down on his feet being too big to settle in his lap as they wished to do. At length he calmed, lifted his head, and measured his surroundings.

This chamber housed a noble's luxurious furnishings: a fine burnished table and benches; two silk-covered couches for reclining and conversation; a backless chair that could be folded up and easily carried; tapestries on the walls; and a cold hearth. It was too dim to see the scenes woven in the tapestries. A single candle burned, fastened into a brass holder fixed onto the left of a sloped writing desk. Someone had abandoned a sheet of parchment, half inscribed with words he had lost the knack of reading. There he saw regnant, a word he knew because it also appeared in the Holy Verses. Below that he recognized "a strong driving wind" like to that mentioned in the story of the Pentekoste, and then a series of sevens: seven towns, seven days, seven portions of grain, seven nobles whose names he laboriously puzzled out. They were all Salian or western border lords, it seemed: Guy, Laurant, Amalfred, Gaius, Mainer, Baldricus, Ernalda.

The page bore no illumination. It was written in plain ink in the common script used by Lavastine's clerics when they wrote up contracts and cartularies. The inkwell had been stoppered.

Untrimmed quills lay in a box resting on the level top of the desk beside a closed book. All the shutters were closed. The chamber had the moldy smell of a room that hasn't been aired out all winter.

With some effort he pulled his feet out from under the hounds, which had the guile to rest heavily by not resisting him. A side door opened when he turned the handle. He stepped out onto a walk along the battlement wall. It was raining, cold, and miserable, an unrelentingly gray day. The clouds hung lower than ever. The main part of the town could not be seen from here. The river ran at the base of the bluff. There seemed no obvious exit from this narrow stone court, only a pair of low doors in the wall that most likely concealed a necessarium.

He turned back to enter just as the hounds rose, stiff-legged and ears flat. First, two stewards entered and took down the two shutters. After them came a brace of guardsmen, then Captain Lukas, and finally Lady Sabella. She sat on one of the couches and examined Alain for a while without speaking. In this light, he saw that the tapestries depicted the famous battle of the Nysa River in which young King Louis, the last independent king of Varre, had met his death.

"They say," remarked Sabella into the silence, "that no one knew whose hand struck the blow that killed Louis the Fair. In Wendar it is said he was killed by an Eika prince. But in Varre, it is said he was killed by a traitor in thrall to the Wendish king, who wanted all for himself."

"I've heard that tale. I grew up by Osna Sound."

"Within the lands overseen by the count of Lavas."

"Yes."

Her stare was meant to intimidate, but he accepted it placidly. The hounds grumbled very soft growls whenever she looked their way Outside, rain hissed on the stones.

"Why have you come here? What do you want?"

"I have promised to discover the true heir to the county of Lavas."

“Ah." She smiled without showing her teeth. "You have heard that Lord Geoffrey betrayed me."

Rage yipped as the door opened and half a dozen people flooded in, led by Conrad the Black.

His presence filled the room. He was laughing.

"Squalling like a rooster!" he was saying to one of his companions. "Good God! What can she have been thinking, to believe the little lad was dead just like that?"

"I hope you slapped some sense into her," said Lady Sabella.

Conrad looked at her with disgust, perhaps with loathing, and flung himself onto the other couch.

He noted Alain standing with his back to the cold hearth, and then the hounds in shadow to either side.

"Look at you!" he said in the tone of a man who loves and understands dogs. "What handsome creatures you are!"

Sorrow's tail thumped once. Rage's ears lifted, but neither hound moved one paw.

"He is the one," said Sabella to Conrad as though Alain could not hear them. "Lavastine's bastard."

"Yes, yes," he said impatiently, still admiring the hounds. "What matter to us?"

"Lord Geoffrey matters to us."

"Ah! What benefit to us?"

"Geoffrey has betrayed us. He is sheltering Constance. There are rumors of unrest and discontent in his county in recent years. This one might provide the excuse we need."

"I see. We ride to Lavas to restore Lavastine's rightful heir, the man he himself proclaimed as his successor but whom Henry deposed. Tallia will protest. She was weeping and moaning and in a mad rant when I just left her."

Sabella shrugged. "That makes no difference. She is shed of the child now. You can put her back in Bederbor, the sooner the better for my peace of mind."

He grunted. "Your distaste for her does you no credit."

"You like her?"

He shrugged. "I accept what is necessary. But my children will not grow up to become like her! I hope you will treat the little lad better, or I will have to take him away."

"Do not insult me, Conrad." Her hand tightened on a pillow, but she kept her tone cordial. "Or threaten me. Where are your daughters?"

"Admiring their new brother, since they will soon be leaving him. I admit, I have set them to guard him. I do not trust Tallia's ravings. She says he is tainted, polluted." He jerked his chin up to indicate Alain. "This one—what is your name?"

"I am called Alain."

"He touched the little fellow, in the chapel. Didn't you see it?"

"I saw it," said Sabella. "Tallia is insane, Conrad."

"Certainly she is weak-minded. So." He nodded at Alain. "That child might have been yours." He seemed about to say more but did not. He had an easy presence, dominating the room without needing to intimidate, as Sabella did. He studied Alain a while longer, and Alain watched him calmly in return. At last he grunted under his breath and nodded.

"You want Lavas County back, do you?"

"I am not the heir."

"That need not trouble us. We can set you in the count's seat easily enough."

"Why would you do so? I have no retinue and no army to support you."

"I want a loyal man in Lavas County," said Sabella.

"Rumor is the strong driving wind that rattles the branches," added Conrad. "They say civil war has broken Salia into a dozen warring factions. They say Henry and his favored child Sanglant have returned from Aosta and even now march on Varre to reclaim us."

"Is it true you reject the Wendish regnant? Although you are both descendants of that line?"

"We are descendants of the Varren royal line," said Sabella sharply. "This is our land to rule."

'And rule wisely, I trust," said Alain. "The tempest still rages. The storm is not yet passed."

"What babbling is this?" demanded Conrad, laughing. "I feel I am in the presence of a wise and mysterious oracle!"

"Last autumn a great storm passed over the land. You may believe that you survived the worst, but the worst is yet to come. Have any planted, although the season is late? Or does frost still kill seedlings every night? Have you seen the sun? When will the cloud cover lift? What are you doing to prepare, if the weather does not change?"

"Why would the weather not change?" asked Sabella. "Summer will come soon. We have stores to last a while—and more to be gained if our current venture prospers."

Conrad whistled softly, trying to lure the hounds, and although they whined a little and thumped their tails, they looked at Alain and, without receiving permission, refused to move. The duke sat back, letting them be.

"These are not unreasonable concerns," Conrad said in the mildest voice Alain had heard from him.

"As in battle, even the best laid plans may be overturned. One must expect a flanking attack, or disaster.

And act so as to overcome it." He nodded at Alain. "That is why we need Lavas County. That is how you can help us."

"Geoffrey has not ruled in a manner pleasing to me," said Sabella. "Lavas needs a stronger hand."

"What do you say, Lord Alain?" asked Conrad genially. "Are you interested? We can help each other."

"It's not why I came here."

"Nor need it have been," replied Conrad with that same hearty camaraderie. "Let it be a windfall.

You have acted boldly. Boldness can expect reward."

"He'll need a wife," said Sabella, shifting her pieces on the board. "We can find someone suitable.

Duchess Yolanda has a daughter. You yourself, Conrad, have a daughter almost of marriageable age."

There was a great deal in this vein Alain could hear without comment or reaction, but the sight of Tallia had singed him. He winced, thinking of her, of the baby she had given Conrad but denied him and by so doing denied Lavastine. That was the one thing that was hardest to forgive. The one thing that he had tried to conceal with a lie. He had failed Lavastine.

Briefly, the idea teased and flattered him: he might marry again, be count again, and fulfill his promise to the man he had called "Father."

"Or my granddaughter," added Sabella, as if the thought had just that moment occurred to her.

"Berengaria is—what? Four or five? She could be betrothed now, and married later, when she's older.

In another ten years she'll be old enough to bear children. It would repay him for the loss of Tallia."

"Is it not incest to marry a man to the daughter of a woman he once had to wife?" asked Conrad.

"Tallia claimed an annulment. They did not consummate the marriage."

He had to shut his eyes, but if he breathed, if he thought of Adica, these words had no power to burn him.

"That's so! In that case, it doesn't count as a marriage. Yes, it might serve. Berry will need a good marriage. She'll need a consort strong enough to support her regnancy. One whose power and lands give him respect in his own right."

Marry Tallia's daughter. Rule Varre as her consort. And perhaps rule Wendar as well.

These were serious temptations, indeed.

"I pray you," Alain began, but the door opened and a steward hurried in, windblown and red in the face.

"The rider has returned," he said, making way for a messenger who staggered in and knelt before the two nobles. He smelled of leaves and rain and wind and dirt, and of smoke, as though he had sat by many campfires and never washed afterward. He peeled gloves off his hands and accepted a cup of wine gratefully.

"What news?" Sabella demanded.

“Ai, God!" said Conrad. "Let him finish his drink."

Before he could speak, a second steward appeared at the door.

"My lady. The soldier you wanted is here."

She beckoned.

Captain Lukas entered with Atto. The young man was sweating, as pale as if he were ready to faint.

He dropped to his knees at once, caught sight of Alain, and started noticeably.

"You are the one who brought report of the guivre's trail?" Sabella had a way of looking over young men that made them squirm, but in this case she dismissed his physical charms.

"Y-yes, my lady. I come from a village along the West Way. We call it Helmbusch, for the ridge, you know. The rock juts up just above where the chapel sits. There are ten houses and three milk cows and we have our own pair of plowing oxen ..." He trailed off, licked his lips, and swallowed.

"Can you lead us to it?"

"To Helmbusch, my lady? Oh, yes, certainly, but I had no intention of returning. Things aren't so good there, now, with the weather and the livestock wandering off and the refugees bothering us along the road. I came from there to seek employment—"

"To the guivre!"

"To the guivre?" He had long since undergone the change from a boy's voice to a man's, but his voice shot up an octave nevertheless.

"The creature's lair. If you've seen its trail, you can guide my soldiers to its lair."

"But I don't know about that," he said desperately. "I came to serve as a soldier."

"So you will. You'll guide us to the guivre." She examined him as he shifted his knees on the floor and pulled nervously at his sleeve. He kept his head bowed, but his torso, leaning away from her, spoke as clearly as words. "When I command," she added, "my soldiers serve."

He did not answer.

"There is a young woman who came with him," said Captain Lukas. "His betrothed. I put her in the kitchens."

Sabella's smile was slight but chilling as she examined young Atto She did not suffer fools or cowards. She appeared to be the kind of woman who didn't like anybody very much. "Could she not serve us better in the brothels? We have enough servants in the palace."

Atto flung back his head, shifting forward onto one knee, with the other leg tucked up under as though he meant to push up to his feet. "She is my betrothed! She's pregnant! She can't—" Too late he recalled to whom he was speaking, and he broke off.

She nodded, satisfied that she had gotten the reaction she wanted. "If you serve me well, I will see she retains a protected position in the kitchens."

The threat had jarred Atto. He twisted, angry enough to be bold, and pointed at Alain. "He knows better. He saw the guivre. So he claimed."

"Did you?" asked Conrad with a jovial interest that barely masked his sudden intense attention. He set his elbows on his knees. "Saw it, and lived to tell the tale?"

"I heard it in the forest," said Alain, "although I did not see it. I was concealed within the branches of a fallen tree."

"He can guide you! Better than I could!"

"No, you'll guide us," said Sabella to Atto, who shuddered. She turned to Alain. "Perhaps you had best go also. I remember it was said of you when you were Lavastine's heir that you fought well in battle.

In fact, I recall it said that you helped Brother Agius kill my last guivre. In recompense, you can help me capture another."

"It seems a dangerous venture for small gain." Conrad shook his head.

Sabella turned her gaze to the waiting messenger, who had by now caught his breath and drunk his fill. "What news?" Then she settled back as if she already knew what he was going to say.

"I am come from Quedlinhame, my lady. Prince Sanglant was crowned as regnant in the presence of Mother Scholastica and at least five or six biscops, and many noble lords and ladies."

None murmured in shock or alarm. No one exclaimed out loud in surprise or indignation. This news was expected.

"You rode as quickly as you could to bring us this news?" she asked him.

"I did, my lady."

"Must we expect an attack soon?"

"We have yet some time. He turned east, to ride his king's progress through Saony and into the marchlands. So that the populace could see him and the nobles acclaim him. He will ride west once he has made himself king throughout Wendar by displaying his crown and his sword. Afterward, he will march west, into Varre."

"We must be ready," said Sabella. "Captain Lukas!" She gestured, and he came forward. "It is time to make ready our attack."

"Past time," muttered Conrad. 'As I've been telling you. We need Kassel's grain stores."

"There is one other thing, my lady," the messenger added, hesitant to continue. "Difficult to believe, yet I saw with my own eyes."

"Go on."

"Griffins, my lady."

"Griffins?" asked Conrad, sitting up. "What do you mean?"

"The prince marches with a pair of griffins, my lord duke. He captured them in the east. They follow him like . . . like dogs."

Courtiers glanced at Sabella to see if she would believe this outrageous tale.

She merely nodded. "Now you see, Conrad, why we need a guivre to counter this threat. A guivre will allow us to strike first, before Sanglant expects battle."

"We are already striking first, by allying with one he trusts."

"Perhaps. But a guivre will guarantee victory." She smiled bitterly as she shifted her attention. "Do you not think so, Lord Alain? Would this not be a wise strategy?"

Alain nodded. A sense of peace settled over him. He had done the right thing by coming here. He saw now what he had to do. "Yes," he said, "a guivre will grant victory."

3

ONCE. the necessary formal greetings were fulfilled at the shore, once folk began to unload the cargo of Alban goods, Stronghand climbed the slope of the valley. He walked into the shadow cast by the heights and across the skin of soft green grass that surrounded OldMother's hall. Late-blooming snowdrops speckled the ground. SwiftDaughters eyed him from where they stood by the mouths of their cave. Their hair swayed like a glamour, and he paused by the threshold, distracted by their beauty. Wind trembled against his back in an unexpected gust, and he shook himself and walked forward.

He crossed into a gulf of darkness too large to be confined in any finite space, much less the eaves and timbers visible as the outside dimensions of the hall. A tremor teased the ground. He heard as at a great distance a breathy piping like a wheezing breath. No stars shone; blackness veiled the heavens. It was as still as if wind had never been known in the world, utterly silent and cold as the skin of stone in the dark of winter.

She said, "Stronghand."

"I am here."

She said, "Go to the fjall. The WiseMothers await you."

The air twisted around him, spinning the staff he held in his right hand, and he staggered backward and found himself tossed out the doorway, surprised by the light. The SwiftDaughters had vanished.

Below, the ships rode high, or had been pulled up onto the strand, lightened of their load.

How had time passed so swiftly? Around the hall and the farther village, seen through a fence of pine and spruce, folk were busy sorting and accounting. Most had gone back to work now that the excitement of his arrival had faded.

They had not forgotten him. He walked among them to reach the trail that led up into the highest reaches of the valley, and as he bent his path in that direction he found himself with an escort, mostly children, none daring to ask what venture he'd set himself this late in the day.

The children loped alongside like a pack of overgrown puppies, all in a tangle that sorts itself out into pairs and triads before melding together again. Human children ran with the hatchlings he had sired.

They jostled each other like littermates, and the softer, weaker human kin whacked at the four-legs with stout sticks to keep their sharp teeth at bay when the nipping and tussling got out of hand. The sight of this extended pack caused a stab of foreboding. What strengthened the human children would surely weaken the children of rock, who did not leap to the kill as they would have done in the old days in such a crowd. They ran as one great many-limbed beast, so that he could scarcely tell one limb from another as they tumbled and shouted and galloped and giggled around him.

Perhaps it was too easy to condemn, he thought as he strode on tireless legs, as he inhaled the sweet scent of home flavored with burning charcoal, pine sap, and the cold bite of northern air. The old days, by the reckoning of his kind with their short lives, were easily swallowed by the longer span of years in which humankind revel and which they did not fully appreciate. To live seventy years, as some of them did! Even Deacon Ursuline, who claimed to have survived forty or fifty seasons, could boast of a life span unknown even to the sorcerers of the Eika tribes, the ones who schemed and stole hearts and souls and magics in order to extend their lives.

No matter. A flame may still burn brightly, though its wick is short.

Rikin Fjord prospered because it was now a many-limbed beast. Sheep grazed where meadows found purchase on level ground, although he noted few twin lambs among the ewes: harbinger of a hard year ahead. Goats scrambled nimbly along the steep slopes of the valley. Pens held pampered cattle, who needed a cozy byre to outlast the winter. It was winter still, with frost crackling under each step and snow heaped where shadows lingered longest. A late sowing might prove too short for a decent crop.

Still, the Eika could rely on raiding to fill their larders. Long had they honed their skills as the wolves of the sea. Now, it seemed, they must learn and change, so learn and change they would.

There was no going back.

The ground grew rockier as the path cut steeply toward the fjall. The children quieted. Many turned back although a few dogged his heels, too curious to stop. No adult followed him this far, although down the path he saw a dozen or more looking up after him. The trees became withered and stunted, and fell away altogether, leaving boulders and skirts of moss and a patchy carpet of lichen. He looked in vain for the youngest of the WiseMothers, climbing this path, but she had gone.

He crossed over the rim and onto the undulating plain that was the fjall. Snow dusted the open reaches, where the wind battered at all things. In the sheltered lee of boulders and along the uneven rise and fall of the earth, old snow had hardened. It was so cold that his footfalls resounded as his weight cut through the remains of last winter's snowfall.

In the distance, where the land dipped into a hollow, the WiseMothers congregated. One more stood among them: she had reached her destination who was most recently OldMother, the one who spawned him and his brothers. He crossed the plain, slipping once where the snow concealed loose rock debris along a slight incline. The wind's howl muted to a moan, and as he reached the edge of the circle the wind ceased altogether. The clouds cast a gray pallor over the day. Every object seemed muted and lessened. Even the WiseMothers looked, for an instant, like nothing more than big, unshapely stones fixed in an irregular oval around a sandy basin whose smooth surface was untouched by snow or stick or even a wrinkled scrap of torn lichen. The hummock that marked the center had altered. Once, its curve had borne a pearlescent gleam. Now it sat with a kind of menace he could not describe. Corruption had infested it, turning it as black as charcoal, as though it had rotted from the inside out.

He shuddered, afraid, but of nothing he could touch or smell or hear or see. It seemed stupid to make his way across the sands in order to stand on a place that looked as likely to hold his weight as the deck of a ship eaten away by fire. The smell of sulfur made his eyes water and his skin itch. The stench actually seemed to ripple off the ground. He began to think he could see the stink rising in waves. That smell made him reel, gulping air and expelling it as quickly as he coughed and gagged and, at last, calmed his breathing.

Of the ice wyrms, he saw no sign, not even a tracery under the glitter of sand.

He stood for a long time, trying to decide what to do, and after a while he heard the whisper of the wind among the stones and after a longer while he realized that the wind remained becalmed and that these were voices tugging at him, faint and far off, receding as a traveler recedes as he sails away from shore.

"Your. Brother. You. Owe. Him. A. Debt. Is. It. Repaid."

A life for a life. He knew what they spoke of.

"Go. To. Him. Now. Repay. This. Debt. Now."

Now.

A sound cracked, as explosive as a heated rock splitting asunder. Not meaning to, he ducked. The air had changed, thickened, hardened until he could scarcely draw in breath. Wave upon wave of heated air rippled out of the hollow.

Their voices were as faint as the hiss of a feather falling.

"Our. Task. Is. Ended. You. Are. Now. Alone. Our. Children. Our. Children. Born. Of. Mute.

Rock. Human. Flesh. Dragon's. Blood. You. Must. Make. Your. Own. Way. Without. Us."

A temblor eased through the earth. Its groan sighed like longing.

The surface of the hollow shifted. In branching lines no wider than his claws, the sands poured away as though, underneath, tunnels were caving in. The black hummock snapped fiercely, so loud that the sound echoed off the far mountainsides. He heard it as through a vast chamber, down along a far-reaching path, multiplied over and over as if he heard not one sound but a hundred cracks each one of which sent him plummeting into the ancient past:

Screaming rage and pain, the dragons plunge. Before they reach the shelter of earth their hearts burst from the pressure of the great weaving. Their blood rains down on the humans who shelter against the stones. The hail of scalding blood burns flesh into stone, melding them into one being, born out of humankind, dragon's blood, and mute stone.

A crack shivered across the surface of the hummock, widened, and without warning the slick black curve shattered into pieces. The hollow sagged and collapsed inward as a dark shape uncoiled out of the spilling sands.

Stronghand scrambled back from the brim, tripped over a rock, and fell to his rump as the hatchling reared up. It raised its golden head on a golden neck and with an effort unfurled moist wings, shaking them in the wind. It was as big as a warhorse, bigger, if more slender and equally graceful. Its eyes were like coals, black and fathomless. It swept its gaze over him without appearing to mark him as anything different than the stone and the sand and the tufts of lichen. It shook its wings, which spanned what was now a sinkhole. Flecks of an acidic spray spattered him, burning him, but he gulped down a cry of pain.

A call chased along the horizon.

The hatchling twisted its neck to stare toward the north.

Somewhere, out there, another has been born.

As soon as the thought took form, he understood how foolish it was. Not one, but a hundred and more, one for every tribe, for every circle of WiseMothers, who for this span of time had incubated the eggs of the FirstMothers, the ones who in ancient days bred with the living spirits of earth and gave birth to his kind.

So the story was told among the Eika.

It leaped. The pressure of its fledgling wingbeats battered him supine against the ground. It caught an updraft, and yet it beat those flashing wings as though to churn the still day into a gale. The clouds tore apart as it vanished into them. Lying stunned on the ground, he saw revealed the hard blue pan of the sky and felt—so briefly!—the melting warmth of an early summer sun.

The wind whirlpooled around him as though trying to suck him up into the heavens. Pebbles scooped up by the gale pummeled him Lichen and moss writhed in strips through the air. The wind poured into him, blowing right through his skin and into every part of him enveloping him, drowning him.

Alain stands at the wall staring toward the north, although he isn't sure how he has come to be out here with the evening settling in and the wind pouring through him. He burns as if the wind is fire on his skin.

He hears their calls, even though they rise so far away that he should not be able to hear them. They raise a clangor, deeper than bells, that resonates in his body until he weeps without knowing why. The hounds whine, licking his hands, but he cannot stop the tears.

A puny, cold, fragile creature moves up beside him, only it is after all the servant assigned to make him comfortable in the palace. "My lord? I pray you, my lord, is there something the matter? How can I help you?"

It hurts, but he doesn't know why. He listens for the last echoes whispering out of the north.

Their voices came to him, a thousand, a myriad, but all familiar to him and beloved in their way.

"Good. That. You. Are. Strong. Of. Hand. Son. Fare. Well. Be. Wise."

The tempest quieted. A ragged wisp of lichen settled out of the air and onto his face. He brushed it aside, shook himself, and jumped to his feet. Above, the clouds were knitting themselves together again.

The wind had failed utterly, and the day became silent and colored with the pearl-gray filter of a clouded sun. The fjall lay empty. Nothing moved, nothing spoke, nothing breathed, except him. He might have been the last creature alive in the entire land.

Certainly he stood alone here.

Altogether alone.

He sensed it at once, greater than emptiness: an abyss where once earth had lain firm beneath the feet of his people. A strange dullness afflicted the ache of the wind and the whisper of sand where grains rolled down the steep sides of the new sinkhole into a shallow chamber half filled with the birth sands that had once covered it. A few tiny ice-white forms lay tumbled in the collapse: the ice wyrms that had long protected the treasure that the WiseMothers had incubated. They, too, lay as still as death.

He was surrounded by death, although life had sprung from it.

He stepped forward and pressed a palm against the nearest WiseMother. It felt only of stone. No consciousness animated its core. They were absent. Gone.

Dead.

"Can you hear me? Can you answer me?" he called to them, who were the life of their children.

They had for so long guided them with the foresight of the ancient, who saw farther than their shortlived children could ever do.

He waited, and he listened.

But all he heard was the wind.

V

OLD GHOSTS

1

AS they rode west along the Osterwaldweg, an Eagle met the king's progress where dappled shadow met open road at the edge of a wide forest wilderness.

"Rufus," said Sanglant.

The redhead had been with King Henry in Aosta and lately left behind in Saony together with a few other Eagles when the king had ridden east into the marchlands.

"Your Majesty. I am sent ahead by Mother Scholastica to let you know she intends to meet with you in Osterburg. I did not expect to meet you on the road."

Once, a well trained Eagle could have looked through fire to discover the king's whereabouts by means of observing landmarks glimpsed through the flames. No longer.

"We shall meet my aunt in Quedlinhame, before she expects us." He liked the thought of surprising her, anything to put her at a disadvantage.

"She has already left. I rode ahead to alert the stewards in Osterburg. You'll meet her on this road, Your Majesty."

Outflanked. Still, two could play that game. "Take drink and food, Rufus. You'll get new mounts, and return to her. Tell her to await us at ..." He paused, considering the route.

For once, Liath was paying attention. "Goslar has a small palace."

“At Goslar. Is there more, Eagle? Sent she a message? What does she intend?"

"Nothing more, Your Majesty. Nothing she told to me, anyway." He was a good rider with an easy seat, but very serious, pacing alongside the king. If he meant his remark wryly, Sanglant saw no sign of it.

Liath fell out of line to ride with the young man back along the cavalcade to the supply wagons.

Sanglant listened as they moved away. It was always easy for him to catch her voice out of the multitude.

"When was it again that you first met Hanna? At Darre? Not earlier, then? You never met her before—did you ride east with Princess Sapientia? Oh, I see."

Her words faded into the creaks and clops and chatter of the procession.

Liutgard, at his right hand, glanced back, and he did as well. Although scouts, and a vanguard, rode in front, most of the progress rode behind him, a line of four riders abreast twisting back into a landscape of woodland, open ground, and the occasional farmstead. Half of these small estates and humble holdings were recently abandoned. One had been burned and looted. He and Liutgard had ridden somewhat forward of his other companions, who were bogged down by the incessant palaver of Sophie and Imma. The Saony twins always rode more slowly when they started in on one of their long harangues. They were, as always, being egged on by their bored brother. Their voices had a shrill tone that carried easily above the clatter of the army.

"Did you see Gerberga's face when Sanglant brought Ekkehard back to her? She was red. Red! To think of it!"

"How humiliating to find your husband has run off with your sister."

'At least," remarked Wichman, "neither of you need worry about that! No man would possibly run to either of you."

"How dare you! As if you could hope for better—!"

"You'll be murdered by the brother or husband of some poor woman you've raped, Wichman."

"Before or after I am installed as margrave of Westfall?"

“An insult to us, Sophie!"

"It is! It is! To offer him a margraviate, and us—nothing! Not even respectable husbands but only second and third sons of minor lords!"

"I had hoped," Sanglant said to Liutgard in a low voice, "that they would run to Conrad, but I fear they mean to stick." He grinned.

She did not. "I pray you, Cousin, forgive me for speaking bluntly."

He sighed.

"Henry was right after all. He intended to marry you to Queen Adelheid. That would have been a good match. All this would have been avoided."

"Not all of it." He indicated Rotrudis' squabbling progeny.

"Well." She smiled crookedly. "Not all of it."

"What do you mean to say, Liutgard? You have supported me faithfully. I know your worth."

"You must marry. Soon."

He waved away her question.

"Nay, do not dismiss me! You know I am right."

"I will not yield on this matter. I am already married."

She had endured much and complained not at all. She had not seen her own lands in more than four years. Her daughters grown apace while she was gone, her stewards in charge of Fesse, all this she had left behind because of her loyalty to Henry. She had lost half her men, and she had not complained. She had lost her heir, and she had not complained.

"There is a line even I will not cross, Sanglant. I have suffered too much to allow my lands to be laid under a ban because you have fixed on such a creature as that one."

"A creature—do not insult her!"

"Do not misunderstand me. I do not dislike her. But they whisper about her. They fear her."

"In Gent they placed flowers at her feet."

"So they did," she admitted. "Let the biscops and abbesses be content with her. Let the excommunication be lifted and the holy women offer their blessing. Then we shall see."

"Will you support me, in that case? In Autun, when the ban is lifted from her?"

"We shall see."

It was all she would promise. Her words worried at him as a dog Worries at a much chewed bone.

"What have you heard?" he said at last. "What whispers?"

She was a cool one, educated, strong, fertile, and confident, his peer, equal to him in rank.

Legitimately born, she needed no justification to hold her position and title as duchess of Fesse, the last descendant of Queen Conradina through the queen's younger brother Eberhard, who had been Liutgard's great grandfather.

"Do you listen to what you do not want to hear?" she asked him. "You ought to."

2

THE palace at Goslar was one hundred years old, built in the days of the last queen regnant, Conradina. It boasted a sturdy hall, a stable, and a motley collection of outbuildings including a kitchen and a smithy. A shoulder-high palisade surrounded the palace. Beyond it lay gardens, orchards, fields, and the estate whose inhabitants tended the grounds year round. Goslar belonged to the Wendish regnant, but, as Liath recalled, the steward who administered it was appointed by the abbess at nearby Quedlinhame.

Thus they arrived to find Mother Scholastica entrenched with her retinue. Although outriders rode ahead to alert her to the king's arrival, she did not emerge to offer Sanglant greeting but waited inside to receive him.

"She means me to appear as the supplicant," he said to Theophanu and Liutgard, who rode on either side.

Liath sat, mounted, away from the rest of the noble companions, examining the scene thoughtfully.

She appeared more interested in the layout of the buildings than in the architecture of court politics. For some reason she looked particularly beautiful today with her hair drawn back into a braid, her dusky face filled out and healthy, her blue eyes bright; that uncanny way they had of seeming now and again to spark with laughter or anger still startled him. She was no longer too thin, as she had been before: when he first met her; in their days at Verna; when she had returned to him after the cataclysm. Despite their constant travel and the occasional dearth of food on the trip north, she had gained flesh in all the right places. As he knew, and yet wanted to rediscover again and again and again.

Liutgard tapped his arm. "If you do not stop staring at her like a lackwit, then every soul in this army will continue to believe she has used her sorcerer's power to bewitch you."

Her sharp comment caught him off guard. He looked at her, then at Theophanu. Theophanu shrugged.

"Do you believe it?" he demanded.

"I do," said Liutgard. "It's said she ensorcelled Henry in the same manner."

"That wasn't her fault! Or her intent! She never had any interest in Henry. She'd already chosen me."

"A wise decision, since Henry would never have married her," observed Liutgard.

"What do you say, Theophanu?" he said, really irritated now.

She smiled as a cat might be said to smile, having the cream set before it. "I think you are famous for your weakness for women, Brother. It is remarkable that one contents you. Some might call that a form of magic."

"Do you?"

She raised a tidy eyebrow. "I do not. She is handsome in a way that attracts men. The question might better be, why does she care for you above all other men when, it seems, she might have had any of them?"

Liutgard laughed for the first time in weeks. 'Are you become a wit, Theophanu? Look at him! So brawny and handsome as he is. Women fall at his feet, and into his bed."

"This is not amusing."

"True enough," replied Theophanu to Liutgard. "But he is not so beautiful as Hugh of Austra. Hugh never cared one whit for any woman except his mother, or excepting if a woman could give him something he wanted. But he wanted that one."

'As for what Hugh wanted, I can't answer, although it's true enough that Hugh is quite the most beautiful man I have ever seen. May my poor Frederic rest at peace in the Chamber of Light, for I mean no insult to him. Yet if Hugh of Austra wanted her as well, does it not suggest sorcery to you, Theo?"

"Let her be," said Theophanu abruptly. "Leave her at peace, I pray you, Liutgard."

"She has certainly found a champion in you! Is there something you know that I ought to know to put my mind at ease?"

"I pray you, Liutgard, let it rest." A shadow of anger darkened Theophanu's placid face, and she gestured toward the palace and its phalanx of milites dressed in the tabard of the ancient Quedlinhame County: crossed swords on a green field. "What will you do Sanglant? Set up a siege as you did at Quedlinhame when you first returned to Wendar this spring?"

"If you will be patient, I ask you to await me here. I'll go in alone as a humble nephew asking for my holy aunt's blessing. That may content her."

He gave Fulk the order to set camp. Dismounting, he offered the reins to Sibold, then sought Liath, but she had wandered off. A few moments searching discovered her: she was chatting amiably and easily with a pride of Lions.

"Who is that?" he said to Hathui, who had come up as soon as Fulk departed.

"That is—I think—yes—Captain Thiadbold's troop."

"Yes. Yes. I see him now. His helm covers his red hair." He chewed his lower lip, then said, "She seems to know them well."

Hathui looked at him strangely. "I can't say, Your Majesty. An Eagle meets many folk upon the road. Eagles and Lions often depend on each other in a tight spot."

He frowned, but shook himself. “Attend me, if you will."

They crossed the grassy forecourt and walked up onto the porch. The guards opened the doors to let them through. Inside, clerics scribbled at tables set up along the length of the hall. Scholastica presided from the dais, although she was not seated in the ducal chair but rather in a handsome seat with a cloth back and pillows. She was making a show of reading, but it was obvious she was expecting him.

A nun whispered into her ear. She handed her the book and raised a hand, to give Sanglant permission to come forward.

"I pray you," he said to Hathui, "hurry to Theophanu and Liutgard and tell them I have mistaken the matter. If they will come at once, I will be grateful for their help. We'll need my throne as well as their chairs. Make haste."

She left.

From down the length of the hall, Scholastica regarded him with patience, or interest, or puzzlement.

She said nothing. He said nothing. Theirs was a standoff. The guards had closed the doors, but elsewhere all the shutters had been taken down. As he waited, he heard the noise of the army settling down for the day, goats complaining, men laughing, sergeants shouting, a hostler cursing, dogs barking as they would. Quills scratched indoors; outdoors, wind skimmed the branches of Goslar's orchard.

He heard them approach the porch and walk up the stairs. The door opened, and they entered, just the two of them, with Hathui at their back. Without speaking, he beckoned them forward and with one on either side approached his aunt. She looked stern and unbending, not even amused.

"I come with the Dragon of Saony and the Eagle of Fesse beside me," he said to her.

"What of Rotrudis' children?" she asked, dispensing with pleasantries.

Yes, she was annoyed.

Servants came forward to unfold the traveling chairs. Theophanu and Liutgard waited until he sat; then they sat. Now all four made a cozy little group, but three of them were young and one was getting old. She was holding on to the past when, in fact, the past had been demolished in one night last autumn.

"Rotrudis' children are not capable of ruling, Aunt. Theophanu is, as you know."

"If Theophanu is capable of ruling, then she should by right be regnant," said Scholastica. "Yet she is not. I have a proposition for you, Sanglant."

He nodded, but she was not waiting for his permission, only pausing to collect her thoughts.

"Theophanu is not the only candidate. There are others. If you accept retirement, you can retain your place as captain of the King's Dragons. The realm will need your strength. You can serve best where you are most suited."

"I am already crowned and anointed. At your hand. To what purpose do you raise these objections now?"

"I wish to prevent war, Sanglant."

"How will my stepping down prevent war? Who then would rule as regnant?"

"Conrad and Tallia."

"No!" cried Theophanu, standing up. She was furious.

"Conrad?" Liutgard's laugh had a mean heart. "Tallia? Do you mean Sabella's daughter? That wheat-faced creature who wept blood and moaned and cried?"

"She professed a heresy," said Theophanu. "You yourself threw her out of Quedlinhame, did you not?"

"I did not," said Scholastica coolly. "Henry took her to marry Lavastine's heir, the one who was a thief and a liar and a bastard."

"Conrad?" murmured Sanglant, but as hard as he could think this through, he could not figure how his aunt would be willing to throw the regnancy out of Henry's line. Her own line.

"Conrad has a claim. " Liutgard was white with anger. "And I have a claim, Mother Scholastica.

What of me? I am the last descendant of Queen Conradina. She, after all, did not give the crown to her younger brother but to her rival and ally, the elder Henry, who was then duke of Saony. Her words are famous. In truth, we learn them early in Fesse so as not to forget the stain upon our family's honor. 'For it is true, Brother, that our family has everything which the dignity of the regnant demands, except good luck.' Sanglant has brought us this far out of disaster. Who else could have done so? It was Henry's last wish that Sanglant become king after him. I witnessed Henry's last words."

Sanglant tapped one foot, waiting. The plank flooring of the hall was swept clean. No carpets covered the long boards. The scritching of quills continued unabated. Clerics bent their heads over tables, writing and writing and writing. He wondered that their hands did not begin to ache.

"Then a proper marriage," Mother Scholastica said.

"We settled this at Gent," he retorted.