Child of Flame

by Kate Elliott

  “What does Prince Sanglant know but war? Did Henry not fight against his own sister? Why should we expect otherwise in the next generation?”

  “Unless good counsel and wiser heads prevail,” murmured Fortunatus.

  Behind them, voices raised as the company who had been seated in the adjoining chamber flooded into the one in which Rosvita and Fortunatus still stood. Rosvita moved away from the window just as Hathui came up to her.

  “I pray you, Sister Rosvita,” said the Eagle, “the king wishes you to attend him, if you will.”

  “I would speak with you in private council,” Alia was saying to Henry as she looked around the chamber.

  Henry merely gestured to the small group of courtiers and nobles and servants attending him, no more than twenty-five people in all. “My dear companions and counselors Margrave Villam and Sister Rosvita are privy to all my most private councils.” Deliberately, he extended a hand to invite Adelheid forward. She came forward to stand beside him with a high flush in her cheeks and a pleased smile, quickly suppressed, on her lips. “Queen Adelheid and my daughter, Theophanu, of course will remain with me.” He glanced up then, looking around the room. He marked Hathui with his gaze. She needed no introduction nor any excuse; she simply stood solidly a few paces behind him, as always. The others slid back to the walls, making themselves inconspicuous, and he ignored them. “If Sanglant chooses to hear your words, I am sure he will come in from outside.”

  “You have changed, Henri,” Alia replied, not with rancor but as a statement of fact. “You have become the ruler I thought you might become in time. I am not sorry that I chose you instead of one of the others.”

  He rocked back on his heels as at a blow. Adelheid’s small but firm hand tightened on his. “What do you mean? Chose me instead of one of the others? What others?”

  She seemed surprised by his outburst. “Is it not customary among humankind to be making alliances based on lineage, fertility, and possessions? Is this not what you yourself are doing, Henri?” She indicated Adelheid. “When first I am coming back to this world, many of your years ago, I go seeking the one whose name is known even to my people. That is the man you call Emperor Taillefer. But he is dead by the time I am walking on Earth, and he has left no male descendants. I cannot be making an alliance with a dead man. It is to the living I must look. I am walking far in search of the living. Of all the princes in these lands it is in the Wendish lineage I am seeing the most strength. Therefore I am thinking then that your lineage is the one I seek.”

  Henry had color in his cheeks, the mark of anger, but his voice betrayed nothing of the irritation that sparked as he narrowed his eyes. “I seem to have misunderstood our liaison. I had thought it was one of mutual passion, and that you were gracious enough to swear that the child you and I got together was of my making as well as yours. So that the child would seal my right to rule as regnant after my father. Do I understand you instead to say that you had another purpose in mind? That you actively sought me or any young prince of a noble line and chose me over the others because of the strength of the kingdom I was meant to rule?”

  “Is it different among you, when you contract alliances?” Alia seemed genuinely puzzled. “For an undertaking of great importance, are you not sealing bargains and binding allies who will be bringing the most benefit to your own cause?”

  Henry laughed sharply. “Had you some undertaking in mind, Alia, when first you put yourself in my way in Darre? How well I recall that night!”

  She gestured toward the garden, dark now except for the light of moon and stars. Inside, the stewards had gotten all the lamps lit. St. Thecla’s many figures on the tapestries shimmered in the golden light; her saint’s crowns had been woven with silver threads, and the lamplight made them glimmer like moonglow.

  “What other undertaking than the making of the child? Was this not our understanding?”

  “Truly, it was my understanding. I understood why I needed to get a child, even if the getting of the child came second to my passion for you. But never did I understand that you wanted a child as well.” He spoke bitterly. “You abandoned the two of us easily enough. What could you have wanted a child for if you were willing to walk away from him when he was still a suckling babe?”

  She walked forward full into the light from the four dragon-headed lamps that hung from hooks in the ceiling to illuminate the center of the chamber. Despite her tunic, she could not look anything but outlandish, foreign, and wildly unlike humankind. “In him, my people and your people become one.”

  “Become one?”

  “If there is one standing between us who carries both my blood and yours, then there can be hope for peace.”

  Fortunatus stirred beside Rosvita, and she pressed a hand to his wrist, willing him to remain silent while, around them, Henry’s attendants whispered to each other, puzzling over her words.

  How could Alia’s people seek peace when they no longer lived on Earth, and perhaps no longer lived at all? Of all their fabled kind, Alia alone had walked among them once, some twenty-five years ago, and then vanished utterly, only to reappear now looking no older for the intervening years.

  But the years had not left Henry unscarred. He pulled out a rust-colored scrap of cloth and displayed it with angry triumph. Alia recoiled with a pained look on her face, as if the sight of the scrap physically hurt her.

  “I held this close to my heart for all these years as a reminder of the love I bore for you!” In those words Rosvita heard the young Henry who, coming into his power, had not always known what to do with it, and not the mature Henry of these days who never lost control. “You never loved me at all, did you?”

  “No.” His outburst might have been foam flung against a sea wall for all the impact it had. “I made a vow before the council of my own people that I would sacrifice myself for this duty, to make a child who would be born with the blood of both our peoples.”

  Finally, as if his voice had at last reached his ears, he schooled his expression to the haughty dignity worthy of the regnant. “For what purpose?”

  “For an alliance. A child born of two peoples has the hope to live in both their tribes. We are hoping that the boy will be the bridge who will be bringing your people into an alliance with mine. We knew you would not be trusting us. That is why I left him with you, so that you and your people would come to love him. I was thinking he would be raised to be the ruler after you, in the fashion of humankind. In this way our task would be made easy. Now I return and I find him as an exile. Why were you not treating him as you promised to me?”

  “I raised him as my own!” cried Henry indignantly. “No man treated a son better! But he was a bastard. His birth gave me the right to the crown, but it granted him nothing save the honor of being trained as a captain for war. I did everything I could, Alia. I would have made him king after me, though everyone stood against me. But he threw it back in my face, all that I offered him, for the sake of that woman!” He was really angry now, remembering his son’s disobedience.

  Sanglant walked in from the garden. Folk parted quickly to let him through their ranks. He came to rest, standing quietly between the king and the Aoi woman, and all at once the resemblance showed starkly: his father’s forehead and chin and height, his mother’s high cheekbones and coloring and broad shoulders: two kinds blended seamlessly into one body. But he had nothing of Alia’s inhuman posture and cold, harsh nature. In speech and gesture he was entirely his father’s child.

  “Liath is the great granddaughter of the Emperor Taillefer.” Without shouting, Sanglant pitched his voice to carry strongly throughout the long chamber. “Now, truly, my father’s people, my mother’s people, and the lineage of Emperor Taillefer, the greatest ruler humankind has known, are joined in one person. In my daughter, Blessing.” He indicated Brother Heribert, who had come in behind him carrying Blessing. “Is that not so?”

  Henry lifted a hand, a slight movement, and his Eagle stepped forward to answer the prin
ce. “What proof have you that the child is born of Taillefer’s lineage?” Hathui asked.

  “Do you accuse me of lying, Eagle?” he asked softly.

  “Nay, Your Highness,” she replied blandly. “But you may have been misled. Sister Rosvita believes that a daughter was born to Taillefer’s missing son. Any woman might then claim to be the lost grandchild of Taillefer.”

  “Who would know to claim such a thing?” He shook his head impatiently. “This is an argument that matters little. If proof you will have, then I will get proof for you, and after that no person will doubt Blessing’s claim.”

  “Son.” How strange to hear Alia’s voice speaking that word. It made Sanglant seem a stranger standing among them, rather than a beloved kinsman. “It is true that I was hoping when first I crossed through the gateway into this country to make a child with a descendant of Taillefer. But it was not to be. That you have done so—” She had a fatalistic way of shrugging, as if to say that her gods had worked their will without consulting her. “So be it. I bow to the will of She-Who-Creates. Let proof be brought and given if humankind have no other way of discerning the truth. But proof will be mattering little if all of you are dead because of the great cataclysm that will fall upon you.”

  Most of Henry’s retinue still seemed to be staring at Blessing, who had stirred in Heribert’s arms, yawning mightily and twisting her little mouth up as she made a sleepy face and subsided again.

  But Henry was listening. “What cataclysm do you mean?” He regarded her intently.

  “You are knowing an ancient prophecy made by a holy woman among your people, are you not? In it is she not speaking of a great calamity?”

  Rosvita spoke, unbidden, as words came entire to her mind. “‘There will come to you a great calamity, a cataclysm such as you have never known before. The waters will boil and the heavens weep blood, the rivers will run uphill and the winds will become as a whirlpool. The mountains shall become the sea and the sea shall become the mountains, and the children shall cry out in terror for they will have no ground on which to stand. And they shall call that time the Great Sundering.”’

  “Are you threatening my kingdom?” asked Henry gently.

  “By no means,” retorted Alia with a rare flick of anger. “Your people exiled mine ages ago as you know time, and now my people are returning. But the spell woven by your sorcerers will rebound against you threefold. What a cataclysm befell Earth in the long ago days is nothing to what will strike you five years hence, when what was thrown far returns to its starting point.”

  “Like the arrow Liath shot into the heavens,” said Sanglant in a soft voice. He seemed to be speaking to himself, mulling over a memory no one else shared. “Shot into the sky, but it fell back to earth. Any fool would have known it would do that.”

  “What mean you by this tale?” demanded Henry. “What do you intend by standing before me now, Alia?”

  Alia indicated her own face, its bronze complexion and alien lineaments. “Some among my people are still angry, because the memory of our exile lies heavily on us. After we have returned to Earth, they mean to fight humankind. But some among us seek peace. That is why I came.” She stepped forward to rest a hand on Sanglant’s elbow. “This child is my peace offering, Henri.”

  Henry laughed. “How can I believe these wild prophecies? Any madwoman can rave in like manner, speaking of the end times. If such a story were true, then why do none of my studious clerics know of it? Sister Rosvita?”

  His outflung hand had the force of a spear, pinning her under his regard. “I do not know, Your Majesty,” she said haltingly. “I have seen strange things and heard strange tales. I cannot be sure.”

  Theophanu spoke up at last. “Do you mean to say, Sister Rosvita, that you believe this wild story of cataclysms? That you think the legendary Aoi were sent into a sorcerous exile?”

  “I recall paintings on the wall at St. Ekatarina’s Convent. Do you not remember them, Your Highness?”

  “I saw no wall paintings at St. Ekatarina’s save for the one in the chapel where we worshiped,” replied Theophanu with cool disdain. “It depicted the good saint herself, crowned in glory.”

  “I believe the story,” said Sanglant, “and there are others who believe it as well. Biscop Tallia, the daughter of Emperor Taillefer, spent her life preparing for what she knew would come.”

  “She was censored by the church at the Council of Narvone,” pointed out Theophanu.

  “Don’t be stubborn, Theo,” retorted Sanglant. “When have I ever lied to you?” The barb caught her, but she recovered quickly, smoothing her face into a passionless mask as Sanglant went on. “Biscop Tallia instructed the woman who raised Taillefer’s granddaughter and trained her as a mathematici. Taillefer’s granddaughter gave birth to Liath. She already works to drive away the Lost Ones again, and to destroy them.”

  Henry spread his hands wide. “How can it be that Taillefer’s granddaughter has not made herself known to the great princes of these realms? How can she live in such obscurity that we have never heard any least rumor of her existence?”

  “She is a mathematici,” Sanglant observed. “The church condemned such sorcery at the Council of Narvone. Why should she reveal herself if it would only bring her condemnation?” He nodded at Theophanu.

  “Where is this woman now?” continued Henry relentlessly. “Where is your wife, Sanglant?”

  “Ai, God!” swore Sanglant. “To tell the whole—!”

  “How can I believe such a story if I do not hear the whole?” asked Henry reasonably. “Wine!” He beckoned, and a steward brought twin chairs, one for Henry and one for Adelheid. “I will listen patiently for as long as it takes you to tell your tale, Son. That is all I can promise.”

  2

  THERE was to be no more feasting that night, although servants brought delicacies from the kitchen and folk ate as Prince Sanglant told his story haltingly, backtracking at times to cover a point he had missed. He was more disturbed than angry, impatient in the way of a man who is accustomed to his commands being obeyed instantly. A wind had got into the chamber, eddying around the lamps so that they rocked. Shadows juddered on the walls and over the tapestries like boats bobbing on water.

  The silence and the jittery shadows made Sanglant’s tale spin away into fable. A woman calling herself Anne had approached Liath at Werlida, claiming to be her mother. He and Liath had left with Anne. They had traveled by diverse means and in the company of servants who had no physical substance, no earthly body, to a place called Verna, hidden away in the heart of the Alfar Mountains. There, Liath had studied the arts of the mathematici.

  “Condemned sorcery,” said Henry, his only comment so far.

  “It is her birthright,” retorted Sanglant. “You cannot imagine her power—” He broke off, seeing their faces. Too late, he remembered, but Henry had not forgotten. Henry still had not forgiven Liath for stealing his son.

  “The Council at Autun, presided over by my sister Constance, excommunicated one Liathano, formerly an Eagle in my service, and outlawed her for the practice of sorcery,” said Henry in his quietest and therefore most dangerous voice. “For all I know, she has bewitched you and sent you back to me with this tale of Taillefer’s lost granddaughter to tempt me into giving her daughter a privilege and honor the child does not deserve.” He did not look at the sleeping Blessing as he said this.

  “What of me?” asked Alia, who had listened without apparent interest. “I am no ally of this Liathano, whom I do not meet or know. I am no ally of these womans who are sorcerers, who mean to do my people harm. That is why I come to you, Henri, to ally against them.”

  Henry drained his cup of wine and called for another. Beside him, Adelheid sat with the composure of stone. Only her hair moved, tickled by a breeze that wound among the lamps hung from the ceiling. “If I send an embassy to your people, then we can open negotiations.”

  Alia’s jaw tightened as she regarded him with displeasure. “None among your
kind can pass through the gateway that leads to our country.”

  “So you say. But you are here.”

  She opened her left hand, palm out, to display an old scar cut raggedly across the palm. “I am what you call in your words a sorcerer, Henri.”

  “Do we not already harbor mathematici among us? They might travel as you did. We are not powerless.”

  “Father!” protested Theophanu, although she glanced toward Adelheid, “you would not allow condemned magic to be worked for your advantage—?”

  Henry lifted a hand to stop her. She broke off, looked at Rosvita, then folded her hands in her lap and regarded the opposite wall—and the tapestry depicting St. Thecla’s draught of the holy cup of waters—with a fixed gaze.

  “You do not understand the structure of the universe, Henri. I was born in exile, and for that reason I can travel in the aether. I have walked the spheres. None among you would survive such a journey.”

  Sanglant’s lips moved, saying a word, but he made no sound.

  Henry shook his head. “How can I believe such a fantastic story? It might as well be a fable sung by a poet in the feast hall. I and my good Wendish army are marching south to Aosta to restore Queen Adelheid to her throne. You may march with us, if you will. A place at my table is always reserved for you, Alia.” He turned to regard Sanglant, who stood with hands fisted and expression pulled down with impatience. Hereby lay the danger in giving a man command for all his young life; soon he began to expect that no person would gainsay him, even his father. “You, Son, may march with my army as well, if you will only ask for my forgiveness for your disobedience. I will show every honor due to a grandchild of my lineage to your daughter, as she deserves. There is a place for you in my army. If you ask for it.”