Child of Flame

by Kate Elliott

  “Judith,” she whispered, “Margrave of Olsatia and Austra.”

  Another of the night guard rode up to deliver a report. Bulkezu listened intently, eyes crinkling as he concentrated. He had already forgotten the head. Slowly his expression changed. The only thing worse than his smiles and laughter were his frowns, and he frowned now as night fell and a warm breeze brought the fetid smell of camp to her nostrils, choking her. She could not bear to look at Bulkezu, not with Margrave Judith’s head dangling there.

  One of the guards lit a torch. Back at the army, more torches blazed into life like visible echoes of the one snapping brightly next to her.

  Out of the night, screaming rose like a tide.

  “What’s going on?” she whispered, horrified. It sounded as if the Quman had turned on their helpless prisoners and begun killing them.

  “What is the name for this thing that has crept into the ranks of the prisoners, this thing we must drive out lest it infect my troops?” He mused aloud, absently fingering the point of the arrow as he cocked his head to one side, listening to the distant slaughter. Snow dusted his black hair as a last shower rained from the pine tree under which he sheltered. “First the demons slip invisibly into the body. Then the body turns gray and shakes. Then the noxious humors explode out of the mouth and the nose and the ears and the asshole, all the snot and blood and shit and spittle bursting forth. Zach’rias taught me the name for this thing.”

  She already knew. A cold worm of fear writhed in her heart, numbing her. She had thought the shadow elves the only thing more terrifying than the Quman. But she was wrong.

  He nodded to himself, remembering the word.

  “Plague.”

  Back in the camp, the killing went on.

  3

  THEY came down out of the Alfar Mountains into a summer so golden that it seemed to Rosvita that the sun itself had been poured over the landscape. In the north, the light was never this rich and expressive.

  When they stopped to water the horses and oxen at midday, Fortunatus took off his boots and dabbled his toes where the cold mountain water frothed and spilled over exposed rocks.

  “Ah!” he said delightedly as he wiggled his toes under the water. “I’d forgotten how pleasant it is to have feet that are hot and dry for a change. After that tedious winter and spring, I thought I would never be comfortable again.”

  With relief, Rosvita dismounted from her mule and found a flat-topped boulder to sit on. From this seat—no harder, really, than her saddle—she could survey the stream where the clerics of the king’s schola had gone to wet their faces, drink, and stretch. Although the king preferred that she attend him at all times, she had obtained permission to travel with the schola, the better to keep an eye on her precious books and young clerics.

  Servants brought soft cheese from the wagons. She nibbled at this delicacy as she watched animals being brought up in bunches to water downstream, where a fallen log dammed enough of the current that a watering hole had been hollowed out of the earth. A hawk drifted overhead, spiraling on the winds that brushed down off the high peaks, now hidden by forest and foothills. A woodpecker drummed nearby, and she saw its white flash among pine branches.

  “The months weren’t wasted entirely, Brother. At last I was able to make a great deal of progress on my History of the Wendish People.”

  He smiled sadly, not looking up from the play of the water around his feet. “So you did, Sister. I only wish Sister Amabilia were here to copy your words in a finer hand than that I possess.”

  “Truly,” she echoed, “I wish she were not lost to us. I miss her.”

  Fortunatus sighed. He had never gained back the healthy stoutness that had made his features round and jolly; their adventures crossing the Alfar Mountains three times in the last two years had taken a lasting toll on him. “Will we ever know what became of her?” he asked wistfully.

  “Only if we can trust dreams. I fear they lie as often as they tell the truth.”

  As she finished her meal of cheese and bread, she called to her servingwoman, Aurea, and bid her bring her pouch from her pack mule. Aurea brought both pouch and travel desk, which unfolded easily to make a stout surface on which to set the History. Rosvita wiped her hands on a cloth and only then turned the unbound pages to her final entry, made three weeks ago on their last day at the palace of Zur, originally a villa built in the times of the Dariyan empresses and now a way station where a royal party could break its journey for a day or a week.

  Some said that fully two hundred thousand Rederii barbarians were slain that day, either cut down by the sword or drowned in the marsh when they tried to make their retreat. After this, the young margrave Villam moved his army against the city mentioned above, but the inhabitants now feared to stand against him and therefore they laid down their arms and asked for safe passage. In this way, the city and all its wealth and all the household furnishings fell into the possession of King Arnulf the Younger.

  When the margrave and his companions returned to Saony, King Arnulf received them with gratitude and praised their victory. It so happened that the king’s favored Eagle returned at this time from Arethousa with the news that the king had obtained what he most desired: an Arethousan princess who would stand in marriage to his son, Henry, a most radiant and worthy young man. When the glorious Sophia arrived with her splendid retinue, the royal wedding was celebrated with largess and rejoicing.

  To Henry and Sophia were born these children: a daughter named Sapientia, a woman of merit, justly dear to all the people, who married Bayan, Prince of the Ungrians, and also a daughter named Theophanu, wise in all matters and of a cunning disposition, as well as a son named Ekkehard, who was invested as the abbot of St. Perpetua’s in Gent.

  Here she had stopped. The rigors of a mountain crossing, even in the fine weather that God’s favor had at last granted them after several unsuccessful earlier attempts, had not allowed her to write more. Truly, the long winter and dreary spring had been inconvenient and uncomfortable, but she had had the leisure to work because they had stopped for as many as ten days at a time at various estates and palaces. What lay before them in Aosta she did not know, but she didn’t suppose that war would bring many peaceful interludes during which she might have the freedom to work without interruption. It was very difficult to work while on the move.

  At times like this, she remembered why so many of her spiritual sisters, women devoted to their books, preferred to stay in the convent rather than traipse about the countryside as part of the retinue of their noble relatives.

  “Sister Rosvita!”

  She looked up to see the king’s favored Eagle at the side of the road.

  “If you will, Sister Rosvita, Brother Eudes is taken ill again, and the king requests your presence.”

  Fortunatus padded over barefoot and took the unbound sheets carefully off the travel desk so that Aurea could fold it up. “I’ll care for these, Sister,” he said.

  The mule was brought, and Rosvita mounted with a grimace. Her bones creaked and popped constantly these days. With Hathui as escort she rode forward along the lines, passing knots of soldiers and stands of dismounted horsemen like copses of trees. The road led down a steep valley, walled here by cliffs ribboned with slender waterfalls whose spray made little rainbows in the air, quickly seen and as quickly vanished.

  Carefully, they picked their way down the path until they reached a broadening in the valley where the royal party had stopped to take advantage of a pleasant meadow as a haven for their noontime rest. The king and queen waited at their leisure while servants watered the horses and brought their sovereigns ale, cheese, and bread as well as greens plucked from the hillsides. Adelheid sat on a blanket, so big-bellied in her pregnancy that she found the ground a more comfortable seat than her throne.

  Henry conducted business a short way away from her, consulting with his captains and stewards and noble companions and dispensing judgment over disputes that had arisen in the train. Occas
ionally he would refer two quarreling parties to Adelheid, and they would hasten over to kneel before her. A steward hurried forward to Rosvita and, taking her travel desk, set it up at Henry’s side. She sat on a stool, trimmed her quill, and readied her ink as Henry listened to the complaints of a wagoner who had gotten into a fight with a Lion over a chicken looted from a farmer’s shed. A knife fight had ensued, and both men had been wounded.

  “Yet what of the injury you inflicted upon the householder whose chicken you stole?” demanded the king. “Made you any recompense to her for the loss of the chicken?”

  “Nay, but, Your Majesty, she was just an Aostan woman, not of our people at all.” On this point both men agreed.

  “Yet were she a Wendish woman, would you have treated her so disrespectfully? Will the Aostans rally to our cause if we treat them as we would our enemies? They are not meant to suffer as our enemies but to prosper as our subjects. Let both of you make her some restitution. I will send an Eagle back to the village with this fine. As for the two of you, you will dig privies side by side for a week, so that you may learn to work together.”

  He dismissed them, then beckoned to a steward. “Here is Sister Rosvita, Wito. Make your report.”

  Rosvita duly cataloged the steward’s report. It had taken them three weeks to cross the mountains, moving at not more than five leagues a day. The weather had held fair, for the most part, and they had lost only twelve horses, eighteen wagons, and twenty-five soldiers, seventeen of them to an outbreak of dysentery that had luckily been confined to the rear guard.

  When the steward finished, Henry’s captains came forward to discuss the route, and Rosvita looked back over the hapless Brother Eudes’ precise entries that in spare language told the story of the abortive attempt to cross the mountains last autumn, when the weather drove them back to the north and they spent a miserable winter moving from one palace to another pursued by sleet, snow, spoiled food, and a scarcity of ale and wine. It had been either too cold to travel or else not cold enough to freeze the ever-present mud slop that turned roads and stable yards into mires. The army had lost seventy-nine horses and forty-two cattle to foot rot alone, and ninety-four soldiers to lung fever and dysentery, mostly from that first awful outbreak. Indeed, Brother Eudes himself had barely survived that first outbreak of dysentery, and since then he had suffered several relapses, the worst after their second failed attempt to cross in the spring.

  Henry sent his captains away, and for a moment peace reigned. Rosvita closed her eyes and listened to the murmur of Adelheid’s noble companions and the laughter of Henry’s personal retinue, most of whom had wandered down to the stream to cool their faces.

  For an instant, Rosvita’s hearing sharpened so intensely that she could hear Queen Adelheid speaking. “Yet a wealth of sun does not bode well. I do not like the sere golden color of the grass. There should have been more rain over the winter and spring. I see too little green.”

  “Sister Rosvita.” Henry spoke in a voice that carried only to her ears. “What if it is true that his wife is the great granddaughter of the Emperor Taillefer? She could claim the empire.”

  Startled, Rosvita dropped her quill. Henry sat with his chin resting on a hand, elbow propped up on the arm of his throne. He stared into the distance, at the pine forest or perhaps at his fears and doubts. Marriage to Adelheid had lifted years from his face, but it also meant that he was even more rarely alone than during the years of his widowerhood. He rarely had opportunity these days to open his most private thoughts to her.

  “The young woman has not proved herself fit to rule, Your Majesty, nor has she any retainers. A queen without a retinue can scarcely be called a queen.”

  “Yet according to my Eagles and other messengers, Sanglant rode east, gathering an army about him.”

  “The Quman lie east. Do you think he means to make allies of them?” She didn’t mean the words to be sarcastic, but Henry glanced at her sharply, jolted out of his reverie.

  “Nay, I do not believe any Wendish noble will make peace with the Quman. I think he means to fight them. But the Quman are not the only people in the east who have an army. It has been months since we had word of Sapientia and Prince Bayan, nor has Margrave Judith sent word nor any representative to my court.”

  “To what purpose would they revolt against you? How can Taillefer’s lost grandchild be a threat to you? Queen Radegundis made no effort to put her son on any throne. She gave him to God’s service, not to the trials of the world. Nor did his child ever make any claim to Taillefer’s imperial throne, if she even survived infancy.”

  “But you believe a child was born to Taillefer and Radegundis’ son.”

  “I do believe that, Your Majesty.”

  He frowned, regarding the trees again with an intent gaze. Rosvita realized all at once the main difference between Henry and Sanglant: Henry had the gift of stillness, and Sanglant could never be still.

  “This bodes ill,” he said softly. “I fear Sanglant has been bewitched.”

  “That is a serious charge, Your Majesty, and one that Prince Sanglant has already denied.”

  “He must deny it, if he lies under a sorcerous spell. Do you know for certain that he was not enchanted, either by Bloodheart or by that woman’s influence?”

  “Nay, Your Majesty, you must know that I cannot say for certain. We all saw that Prince Sanglant was much changed by his captivity in Gent. It is true that the woman Liathano held some kind of power over him, even if it was only the power of lust.”

  “Then you do not think him bewitched?”

  Yet how could she answer? She, too, had seen the daimone suckling his child. She shuddered, remembering that abomination, and Henry smiled slightly, although the expression seemed more of a grimace.

  Just as he seemed ready to comment further, a steward hurried up, followed by an outrider still dusty from the road. The man presented himself first to Queen Adelheid and then to the king. Adelheid got to her feet with the assistance of her servants and came to stand beside Henry.

  “I am come from Lavinia, Lady of Novomo, to bring you greetings.” The man spoke only Aostan, but Henry could understand it well enough as long as the speaker chose his words carefully and spoke slowly. “She rides to meet you on the road, and show you honor.”

  Henry rose. At his signal the army began its ponderous gathering up, like a great beast getting its legs under it in order to rise and stagger forward.

  The valley began to broaden noticeably, hitting a stretch as straight as though a giant had gouged it out with her hand. Cliffs became ridgelines peppered with rock ledges and outcrops, slick with overhanging ferns, brown from lack of rain, crisp moss, and oleander bushes whose white flowers hung like falling water down steep hillside clefts. Farmers had found room to plow fields and plant orchards, and the landscape began to be cut through with fields, clusters of huts, and neatly-kept orchards.

  The captain of the vanguard shouted out the alarm, and an instant later a horn rang out. Below, a party ascended along the road to meet them. Banners flew in a stiff spring breeze flowing down off the foothills, gold and white, matched in splendor and number only by the bright pennants and banners of the king’s army. Adelheid’s personal banner bearing the crowned leopard at rest below the royal sun of Aosta flew at the center of a six-pointed constellation of pennants. These pennants bore the sigils of Henry’s rule over the six duchies that made up his realm: Varingia’s stallion, Wayland’s hawk, Avaria’s lion, Fesse’s red eagle, Arconia’s green guivre, and the red dragon of Saony, the duchy out of which his grandfather Arnulf the Elder had taken control of the kingdoms of Wendar and Varre. Behind these paraded the banners of his noble companions, those who had chosen, or been commanded, to accompany his expedition: Duchess Liutgard of Fesse, Helmut Villam, Duke Burchard of Avaria, and a host of other lords and ladies. His army wound back up the valley, lost finally around a bend. Strung out along the road in marching order, it was an impressive sight.

  The kin
g’s vanguard formed a protective wall in front of him as Lady Lavinia advanced and, finally, dismounted in order to approach Henry and Adelheid on foot. She looked as if she had aged ten years in the year since Rosvita had last seen her. The line of her mouth was grim, and her hair had gone white. She knelt in the middle of the road in the dirt, opening her hands in the manner of a supplicant.

  “Your Majesties, I pray you, I give myself and all the lands and people I control into your hands. My fighting men are yours to command. You must take what you need from my storehouses, although we are sorely pressed in these days by drought.”

  Henry seemed ready to speak, but Adelheid made a slight gesture that drew his attention, and he nodded, giving way to her. With assistance, the young queen dismounted. She walked forward to offer her hand to Lavinia.

  “I pray you, Lady, rise. Do not kneel here in the dust. We have come as I promised you last year.” Lavinia took her hand but did not rise. She seemed incapable of speech, caught in some strong emotion that made her lips work silently. The calm, decisive woman who had aided Adelheid last spring had vanished. “What ails you, Lady?” continued Adelheid gently. “You are much changed.”

  Lavinia’s voice was coarse with fury. “You know that Ironhead took my daughter to Darre to serve as a hostage for my good behavior. Now he has taken her against her will as his concubine. She is only thirteen. I will have revenge for the insult given to my family.”

  “So you will.” It was always odd to hear such a steely voice emanate from that sweet, pretty face, but Adelheid had been raised in a hard school and had survived a forced marriage, a siege, Ironhead’s pursuit of her, and an escape managed only with the aid of forbidden magic.

  “She is not the only daughter of a noble house used in such an ignoble fashion,” continued Lavinia. “Others have come to Novomo, hearing of your approach. We beg you to let us support you. Ironhead has brought dishonor to our families. Yet we brought the shame upon ourselves by not rising against him when he pursued you, Your Majesty. You see that we are repaid by God for our sins, for there was not enough rain this past winter. I fear there will be famine if no rain falls soon.”