In the Ruins

by Kate Elliott

  “No,” he repeated. “When you were an Eagle, you had no power and had to endure what was cast before you. Now, you have defeated Anne and her Sleepers. Nothing keeps you here except the memory of Blessing—and your love for me. Otherwise, I have nothing you want, as my aunt suspects.”

  “Does she?”

  “Perhaps not. She is the third child, after Henry and Rotrudis. She was placed in the convent early and invested as abbess by the time she was fourteen. Obligation and duty are the milk she has drunk all her life. She must believe you seek power or advancement. She may not be able to believe otherwise.”

  “What do you believe?”

  He shrugged. “I have nothing you want, Liath. Therefore, I believe you.”

  She smiled, so sweetly that he laughed, although the sight of her pained him now that he was so close to bearing the full weight of the burden his father had thrust on him.

  “With Da, I learned to run from place to place. Fugitives only want never to be caught. They never think beyond their next escape route. I set myself against Anne, and I defeated her—if what we have seen these past months can be called a triumph. What is left to me? I have outrun those who sought to capture me. I have lost my daughter.”

  “As have Liutgard and Burchard lost theirs.” He sighed. “And I will become regnant, as my father wished. Will you leave me? It is true you haven’t the patience for court life.”

  From this angle he could see, also, the hill on which the fortress and convent of Quedlinhame stood, ancient seat of his great great grandmother’s inheritance. Lucienna of Attomar had brought lands and wealth to the first Henry, together with allies enough to assure him of support when he reached for and took the throne of Wendar. Without Lucienna and her kin, the first Henry would not have become regnant. In honor of that connection, the old fortress had been turned into the most favored and wealthiest monastery in the land, shepherded always by a girl born into the royal line. Like young Richardis, his aunt, who had renamed herself Scholastica when she entered the church as a youthful abbess three decades ago. She was accustomed to wielding power, and to passing judgment. Henry had trusted her. But she did not trust Sanglant or his half-human wife.

  A torch shone on the distant wall, marking the gate. Otherwise, it was dark. As usual, clouds obscured the sky. He let the canvas fall and turned to look at his wife. She remained outwardly as calm as a pool undisturbed by wind or debris. Like the stars, she was veiled. But he no longer believed she was hiding anything from him. All artifice and concealment had been burned away, first in her journey into the aether and then, finally, in the cataclysm itself.

  “You said once—” To his surprise, he faltered with the words catching in his throat, but he drove himself onward. “You said that what you saw and experienced in the heavens, with your mother’s kin, gave you peace.”

  She nodded. “Yes, peace. More than that. I found joy.”

  Jealousy gnawed like a worm, as the poets would say, and poets had a knack for speaking truth. “Joy,” he said hoarsely, hating the sound of the word, hating the sound of his voice because he knew that on this field he was helpless. He had no weapons and no strategy.

  She caught his elbow and drew him close. “I did not stay there.” She pressed her lips into the curve of his neck.

  Once, this alone would have driven all thought of trouble from his mind. Now, there were many things he wanted to say, but he let them go.

  3

  FOR three days they remained encamped outside of Quedlinhame, waiting. Liutgard went into seclusion. By the second day folk came down from the town to trade with the soldiers, not that the soldiers had much to trade with. The men cleaned and repaired their gear, hunted in the woodlands despite the dearth of game, and herded the horses into meadowlands to graze and rest.

  With so much time on her hands, Liath flew with the Eagles, although she was no longer truly one of their nest. The twenty who had survived the trek north out of Aosta had gained another fifteen comrades, coming piecemeal into their ranks once the army reached Wendar. Most recently a very young Eagle named Ernst who had been chafing at Quedlinhame for several months had arrived at camp, proclaiming himself eager to be out of that cage. Now, in the afternoon, a dozen Eagles sat together under an awning that protected them from a drizzle. The sky had a grayer cast than usual. The fortress hill seemed colorless, set against the dreary sky. The soft light cast a glamour over the oak forest, while to the east the heavens had brightened to a pearllike gleam where the rain stopped and the clouds lightened. The sun never broke through.

  “Not much snow in the mountains when we were crossing,” Hathui was saying to Ernst. “Maybe more came after we crossed. But if there isn’t snow, then the melt won’t swell the rivers come spring.”

  “If spring ever comes,” said Ernst. “We had no snow at all. It was uncanny warm all winter. First, there was so much rain the fields flooded. In parts of Osterburg, streets and houses both ran underwater, all the way up to my knees! Nay, wait, that flood came in Askulavre. The bad rainstorms were earlier, back in the autumn. But now there’s only a bit of rain like this. And yet always cloud.”

  “My granddad said there was one winter when he was a lad they never saw sun, and all spring, too,” said another Eagle, a southerner out of Avaria with curly dark hair and big, callused hands. “He lost two of his brothers that next winter. It was worse the year after for they’d eaten most of their seed corn. He used to talk about that time a lot when he was blind and bedridden. I’d sit with him, just to hear the tale, for he liked telling it. Still, I wonder.” He gestured toward the heavens. “Crops can’t grow without sun and rain in the right measure.”

  “Too warm all winter,” said Hathui. “Too dry in the south last year, when we were down there. A terrible drought, so bad every blade of grass was brittle. Up here, everything is soggy. I’ve got mold on my feet!”

  Everyone laughed, and for a while they talked about how their feet itched and how their clothes and tents stank of mildew. Everyone had mold on their feet except Liath, who was never sick and never plagued by fleas or lice or rashes. She sat as usual in the back. The other Eagles were accustomed to her presence in a way no one else could be. They ignored her. For her part, she braided fiber into rope as Eldest Uncle had taught her. At intervals she played surreptitiously at setting twigs to burn, honing her ability to call fire into smaller and smaller targets. Mostly, she listened to their news and their gossip and their conclusions as well as the information they had gleaned speaking to the locals. She listened to Ernst’s earnest report of conditions in Wendar over the last six months or more, ever since that windstorm had swept over them. Folk even so far north as Wendar had felt and feared and marked this unnatural tempest, although they had no way of knowing the truth.

  The Eagles with Henry’s army had seen, and witnessed. Yet even they did not know the whole.

  “I wonder,” she said aloud, and noted how they all stilled and started and turned, then waited for her to speak. She smiled as she realized in what manner she fooled herself, wanting to believe they did not scrutinize her every least movement and word for hidden meanings. She was no longer an Eagle. That part of her life was gone.

  “I’m just wondering,” she said into their silence, “if the strange weather is an artifact of Anne’s spell. It might even be an effect of the spell woven in ancient times under the Bwr shaman’s supervision that rebounded on us. The Bwr shaman are tempestari, so the legends say.”

  “So we observed ourselves,” said Hathui. “It was her magic that stemmed the blizzard that swept over us when we were in the east.”

  “Or created that blizzard.”

  Because she had power over the weather.

  In a still forest, an unexpected wind may agitate the leaf litter, unearthing hidden depths and items long concealed by layer upon layer of detritus. She rose, tucking fiber and the short length of rope into a pouch. Thoughts skittered like mice fleeing across a church floor suddenly illuminated by a lamp.
There was a pattern there, a plan, a potential action. All at once she was too restless to sit, troubled and stimulated by a hundred threads any one of which, teased out to its end, might give her an answer.

  “I’ll come with you,” said Hathui.

  Liath laughed as they crossed out into the drizzle, which was already fading into spits and kisses. “Did Sanglant set you on me, to be my guard?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Walk with me. Let me think.”

  They walked.

  Time had passed unnaturally for her. It was strange to be walking in the Wendish countryside after she had traveled to such distant lands. A damp breeze stiffened her hands until she tucked them inside her sleeves and promptly stumbled on uneven ground, tripped, and had to flatten her palm on the ground to avoid pitching headlong into a mire of slimy grass and mud. She swore as she wiped her hand off. Hathui laughed.

  They had set up camp beyond the fields that ringed the hilltop fortress, in scrub country used sometimes for cultivation and sometimes for pasture and sometimes left fallow. Stands of young beech grew in neat copses that had recently been trimmed back by woodcutters. Sapling ash grew in soggy hollows, everywhere surrounded by honeysuckle or fescue. She knelt beside a tangle of raspberry vines and brushed a hand over its thornlike hairs. Too tiny to light. She could not focus that tightly.

  Yet.

  From out in the woodland cover, they heard a horn.

  “They’ve caught a scent,” said Hathui. “Why didn’t you go with him?”

  “It reminds me too much of my life with Da. Look. There are the griffins.”

  They glided so far above that for a moment Liath imagined them no larger than eagles.

  “They must be very high,” said Hathui. “There they go.”

  The specks vanished into the south, toward hills and wilder forest lands.

  Crashing sounded in the brush and they turned just as a dozen riders emerged laughing and shouting excitedly, a pack of hunters separated from the main group. She recognized Sanglant among their number. He rode over to them.

  So often in these last months he had looked worn by the burden of ruling, but this moment he had that same reckless, carefree attractiveness she had fallen in love with back at Gent so many years ago. Not so long ago in her memory, not nearly as long as in his.

  “What are you hunting?” he asked. “You have that look on your face.” He nodded at Hathui, marking her presence, and she inclined her head in answer to his unspoken message.

  “I am thinking,” Liath said, “about the weather.”

  He regarded her curiously before turning in his saddle to give a signal to his retinue. They rode back toward camp. He dismounted and handed the reins of his horse to Hathui.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Even the sages and the church mothers did not understand the vagaries of the weather. Only God know why there is drought, or why fine growing weather. Why famine strikes, or plenty waxes and wanes across the years. But what if this weather—” She gestured toward the sky. “—is not natural weather, rather than another pattern in the unknowable pattern woven by God? What if these are unnatural clouds caused by the spell and the cataclysm? By the return of the Ashioi land? When a rock is flung into the sky and falls to earth, a puff of dust may rise where it strikes. Volcanoes blast smoke and ash into the air. So many rivers of fire ran deep in the earth on that day. So much was shaken loose. What if we made this ourselves?”

  He considered, then shrugged. “If we did so? What then?”

  “There are tempestari.”

  “Ah.” He tilted back his head to look for a long while at the sky. Then he began to pace. “If only you had ridden east to Blessing. Li’at’dano might have helped you. If she lives.”

  “I think she does live. I’m sure of it. It’s as if she speaks to me.”

  “Can you ask her, then?”

  “I don’t know how to speak in dreams.” She shrugged, impatient with this train of thought. “Anyway, had I ridden east, I wouldn’t necessarily have realized how badly the weather is affected here in Wendar. We can’t dwell on ‘if onlys.’ God know I regret losing Sorgatani. She could help me. Without Eagle’s Sight, I can only wonder and wait.”

  Fest bent his head and snuffled among the raspberries, but finding no fodder to his liking he tugged toward greener pastures, and after a sign from Sanglant, Hathui let him lead her away.

  “It’s possible,” he said. “I have myself considered how far the ripples of this spell will spread. That the Ashioi land has returned is, I fear, the least of our troubles.”

  “I’m thinking …” She trailed to a halt.

  He smiled at her, touched her cheek, and she leaned against his palm for a few breaths. With that touch, she might imagine herself in a place where troubles did not wind around her and weigh so terribly on them all. She might imagine peace and a quiet chamber furnished with an orrery brought north out of Andalla. She might imagine forest and fields and the brilliant dome of heaven with stars as distinct as the flowers in a spring meadow and as numerous as the sand on a pale shoreline.

  Of a wonder, he did not move, content to stand with her as she dreamed.

  At last she sighed. “Sister Rosvita once spoke to me of a convent dedicated to St. Valeria, under the rule of Mother Rothgard. In that place they kept certain forbidden records of the sorcerous arts. If I went there—it isn’t that far from here—they might have the answers I seek.”

  “To make of yourself a tempestari? Do you mean to shake the winds loose and unveil the heavens?” He withdrew his hand, but he was laughing at her with such sweetness and pride that she felt tears fill her eyes, although they did not spill.

  “If I must. If I can. It is what I can do.”

  “It is,” he agreed, “if anyone can.”

  “I was named after her, the greatest sorcerer known to humankind.”

  “Who is not human.”

  “Perhaps that’s why.”

  “When will you go? Should I escort you?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t thought beyond wondering.”

  “Then favor me in this way, Liath. Wait until this matter with my aunt is resolved. Let me be crowned and anointed and you beside me as my queen. After that you will command a retinue of your own. It will be a simpler matter to send you to this convent on your own progress.”

  She shook her head, smiling. “In this way, we’re well matched, Sanglant.”

  “In what way?” he asked, shifting as might a hound that suddenly distrusts its master as she waves it toward a tub of bathwater.

  “Where I am ignorant, you are wise.”

  “And in like manner, in the other direction?”

  She laughed and kissed him. The day seemed at once hotter, brighter, brilliant, but she knew how fragile happiness could be and how swiftly it could pass, veiled by clouds.

  4

  THEY heard the horn midmorning the next day. Soon after, an Eagle cantered up to the royal tent, dismounted, and knelt before Sanglant. He was sitting, hearing the morning reports, but he waved the others away and they stepped back to make room for the Eagle.

  “You are Gilly, sent to Osterburg.”

  She nodded. She was at least a dozen years older than he was, and slighter than most of the women who became Eagles, but she was tough like a whipcord. “I have returned in the retinue of Princess Theophanu, Your Majesty. I rode ahead to tell you this news.”

  “What message from my sister?”

  She looked at Hathui, then back at the king. “She sends no message, Your Majesty. She herself rides to Quedlinhame. She’ll be here today.”

  Because of the way the camp was sited, set back about a league from the town wall and surrounded by a blend of scrub trees and open ground, they heard a flurry of horns at midday but saw nothing. Soon afterward, Lewenhardt noted a trio of banners flying over the tower next to the owl standard marking the presence of Mother Scholastica, but it was too far away for him to make out their m
arkings.

  Near dusk, with a wind whipping up out of the southeast, a sentry came running to announce that a party approached from town.

  “Let the men assemble.” Sanglant took his place in the chair that his father had used while traveling. He drew his fingers over the carved arms: here an eagle’s sharp beak, there a lion’s rugged mane running smooth under his skin, and under this the hollows and ridges of its paws. He set his feet square on the ground in front of him, although he had to tap his right foot.

  A host came, led by Mother Scholastica on her white mule who, as abbess of the venerable and holy institution of Quedlinhame, was as powerful as any duke. Four monks and four nuns walked with lamps held high, lighting her way.

  Behind her rode Theophanu on a gray mare. His sister wore a fine gown that appeared silver in the fading light, stitched with gold thread. There were other women with her. One he knew immediately, even with the lowering twilight and the distance, and he flushed and glanced at Liath, who sat frowning beside him, obviously uncomfortable but brave enough to stick it out. She was squinting, head tilted to one side, trying to see something. Her hands tightened. She took in a sharp breath.

  Waltharia, margrave of the Villams, had ridden to Osterburg and now come to Quedlinhame, no doubt because she had heard the news of his return. She wore a cloak. What she wore beneath he could not discern, but he knew well enough the feel of her, that old and pleasurable memory. Desire stirred, and he shut his eyes briefly to fight it. He was a little embarrassed, in truth, because he still felt an abiding affection for her, and he knew that while it was all very well for Liath to accept and dismiss the existence of women who no longer had any chance to get close to him, it was a different matter entirely to have to dine and laugh with a woman who had been his first and most famous lover. Whom he had, not two years ago—well, never mind that. Perhaps Waltharia would hate him because her husband Druthmar had died in the south, fighting in his army. Perhaps, but he doubted it. She would grieve, and then find another husband; that was the way of the world.