In the Ruins

by Kate Elliott

  “I might be, it’s true, although I’m not.”

  Erkanwulf scratched his head. “I’m minded to believe you, although I don’t know why. How will you stop them?”

  A second jangle of noise rang closer. The first had been a trick of air and leaf, but this grew steadily in volume.

  “Go,” said Alain.

  Erkanwulf hesitated only a moment, biting his lip, before he dismounted and lead his horse down the track that cut off toward Ravnholt Manor.

  Alain set himself in the middle of the road with a hand on his staff and the other hanging loose at his side. He waited, breathing in the loamy air. The battered roadbed gave beneath his right foot where a trickle of groundwater seeped up to dampen the leather of his boots and creep in through the seams. A fly buzzed around his left ear. A bee wandered into the shadow of a copse of withered honeysuckle grown up along a patch of open ground. He waited, content to let the time pass. He felt the barest glimmer of sun above, like the kiss of a mouth through cloth. If the weather didn’t change, then crops wouldn’t grow or would grow weakly. The thought stuck with him and gave him courage.

  In time, the first outriders appeared out of the east as shadows lengthened on the road. It was a good long straight stretch of track, open enough that he soon saw most of the company moving along. He faced about threescore riders. Half were mounted, dressed in surcoats bearing the sigil of the guivre of Arconia. A dozen of the infantry wore a tower sigil that he did not recognize. The others wore any kind of leather coat or tough jacket, men brought quickly into service for a specific task but not serving in the duke’s milites on a permanent basis.

  Their captain rode in the third rank behind a double line of anxious-looking younger men bearing small shields and short spears. He was a fearsome-looking man, grim with anger and horribly scarred. He was missing an eye, healed as a mass of white scar tissue, and old gashes scored his forehead and jaw. Now and again a man in the first rank would lift an arm to point out yet another mark of the passage of a significant cavalcade. They knew what they followed. They could not be turned aside through misdirection. They had marked Alain already and now sent scouts on foot into the underbrush, seeking to forestall an ambush. The shing of swords leaving sheaths cut the air. Shields were raised, and spears wavered. Some had bows, and these men set arrow to string and scanned the woodland for movement.

  “Tammus!” shouted Alain. “Keeper!”

  The captain started, and around him his men muttered. Slowly, the war band moved toward Alain as toward a trap they must spring.

  “I am alone except for one witness, hidden in the trees,” continued Alain, “and farther back two hounds guarding a criminal who consorted with bandits.”

  “A likely story,” said the captain. “How do you know my name? Are you one of the biscop’s men?”

  “I am not.”

  “To what lord or lady do you owe allegiance?”

  “I serve God, Captain Tammus. Whom do you serve, God or the Enemy?”

  They murmured angrily at that, like bees stirred up by smoke, and one rash fellow actually rode out ahead of the front rank brandishing his sword.

  “Fall back!” snapped the captain.

  The man obeyed. The rest halted an easy spear’s toss from Alain. A branch snapped in the woods.

  “What do you want?” asked the captain. “I’ve no patience. We’re close to our quarry and you’re in our way.”

  Alain was close enough to see Tammus’ eye flare as he reacted to a bold stare. The captain had but one hand. The other arm ended in a stump at the wrist, seared by fire.

  “To pass, you must kill me, keeper.”

  One among the guard sniggered.

  “Hush! Why do you call me that? How do you know my name?”

  “You kept the guivre for Lady Sabella. I saw you feed a living man to it, once. That’s how you kept it alive. I think you might have called yourself by a different name, then.”

  Tammus’ gaze flickered, losing touch with Alain’s as he traced the reaction of his men. Soldiers looked one at the other; hands fluttered as in sign language; a murmuring passed back through the ranks.

  “Hush!” said the keeper. “I am Lady Sabella’s servant. I do as she bids me. You are in my way. We’ll ride right over you. You have no weapon.”

  Alain caught his gaze again and held it. He challenged him as a hound might, with a stare from which one must back down and the other emerge triumphant.

  “With your own hand you must kill me,” he said, “or with your own voice you must command one of your men to slay me because you refuse to spill my blood with your own weapon. Either way, your hands are stained.”

  “I am the lady’s servant,” growled Tammus. “I do as she bids me.” He could not now look away without losing face, not with every man among his company watching him.

  Alain said nothing, only kept his gaze locked on the captain’s. He remembered the night he had stumbled upon the guivre’s cage, how it had been shrouded in canvas to conceal the monster within. He recalled the slack body of the drugged man who woke up too late to the fate that would consume him. He knew in his heart and in his limbs the touch of the guivre’s gaze, which struck like the sword of God, for he had felt it that night. So did the creatures of God teach humankind what they needed to know.

  “I’ve killed lots of men and in worse ways than cutting a man down on the road,” muttered Tammus hoarsely.

  “I know,” said Alain, remembering that great eye and its power. “For I am the one who aided Brother Agius in killing that poor beast at Kassel. With a sword I killed it, and Lady Sabella’s army was routed. Do you think you can kill me?”

  A breath was the only sign; lips parted. Wind curled in leafless branches.

  Tammus lost his nerve. He froze. Every man there felt it, heard it, saw it, knew it with the same instinct hounds have for weakness. It took only that one breath for the advantage to shift, for the battle to be lost.

  Alain did not move. It was they who fled back the way they had come.

  4

  “YOUR Grace.”

  Alain knelt in the spot indicated by Captain Ulric.

  “I don’t know how he did it!” Erkanwulf was saying off to one side. Because of his mounting exasperation, his voice carried. “He just looked at them. They turned tail and ran. That was before I saw those monstrous black hounds!”

  “I know who you are, or who you once were.” Biscop Constance had aged horribly. Lines marked her face as deeply, in their own way, as Tammus’ scars had disfigured him, and she favored her right side over the left as though it was agony to shift her left hip at all. But her gaze was calm and her voice was mild. “Beyond what I witnessed myself, and what I learned when I ruled Arconia, I have heard just these last few moments such tales as make my head spin. You are a count’s bastard son. A count yourself. A cheat and a liar and thief. A whore’s son. A faithful Lion who died in the east in battle. You are, it appears, a man who commands the loyalty of fierce beasts. Who can turn back a war band on a forest lane with his gaze alone.”

  “I am the son of a Salian refugee, Your Grace. I was raised in an honest household of merchants out of Osna Sound. That is all that matters.”

  “Perhaps. Why are you come, Alain of Osna? What do you want from me?”

  “I ask you to bring justice to the folk murdered at Ravnholt Manor, including four young women who were raped and murdered. Find their bodies, and bury them. Bring to trial the bandits who killed them.”

  As many as could crowd in around her shelter had come to see; everyone surely had heard the tale of the encounter on the road by now. They were silent, but their stares had an unexpected force, as powerful as that of the guivre.

  “Is that all? I think there is more.”

  “I am looking for a woman.”

  She smiled, misunderstanding him. Hathumod touched the back of a hand to her mouth, repressing a sound. She stared at Alain with a remorseful gaze. There were others behind her whom Alain rec
ognized from court, and from his sojourn at Hersford Monastery: among them the handsome young man who had once been Margrave Judith’s husband. How long ago it seemed that he had walked up on that porch to interrupt a fight between Prior Ratbold and a ragtag collection of five clerics and two Lions! How these heretics had fetched up in Biscop Constance’s train he did not yet know.

  “The woman I am looking for was an Eagle,” he continued, “and then afterward I heard a story that she ran off with Prince Sanglant.”

  “Liath!” A red-haired young man stepped forward so angrily it seemed he meant to strike.

  “Brother Ivar!” Constance’s tone was a reproof. Ivar shrugged a shoulder, shifted his feet, but did not move back to his former place beside the beautiful bridegroom whose name, Alain abruptly recalled, was Baldwin. The beauty was now, incongruously, dressed as a cleric. His eyes were wide, and his right hand fingered a gold Circle of Unity whose surface was chased with filigree. He wore a ring, bright blue lapis lazuli.

  Alain’s breath caught; words vanished. He knew that ring, once most precious to him.

  “Go on,” said the biscop.

  “I pray you,” he said, finding his voice. “Where did you get that ring, Brother?”

  There was a moment of confusion. Then Baldwin looked toward the red-haired Brother Ivar, who answered.

  “In a tomb buried deep in a hillside, a heathen grave far east of here. What matters it to you?”

  “Ivar,” said the biscop softly, “I will suffer no disrespect toward those who come honestly before me.”

  “It was the same place we got the nail,” said Hathumod, “and the Lion’s tabard and weapons. How came these things there, to such an ancient grave?”

  To touch again the gift she had given him! The thought coincided with a curious look on the handsome cleric’s face as the man clutched his other hand possessively around the one on which he wore the ring.

  Fingers may brush, and yet after all two people may be separated by a gulf that cannot be bridged. “Never mind it,” Alain murmured. Adica was gone. Taking the ring from a man who cherished it would not bring her back. Yet it was nevertheless difficult to speak through the pain in his heart.

  “Liathano is indeed the one I seek. Have you news of her whereabouts?”

  “Why do you wish to know? What business do you have with her?” demanded the redhead.

  “Hush, Ivar!” Hathumod punched his arm. He shot a glance at her that pierced, but she only made a face at him.

  “I would know the answers to these questions likewise,” said Constance, “although I must tell you, in truth, Alain of Osna, that I do not know what has become of the Eagle. I have been held as a prisoner by my half sister Sabella for over five years. What news we have is scant, gathered by Brother Ivar and young Erkanwulf. King Henry has lingered many years in Aosta seeking an imperial crown. Sabella and Conrad between them have usurped the governance of Varre. Who can blame them, when Henry abandons his people? Princess Theophanu bides in Osterburg, protecting Saony, which is the ancient seat of my family’s power. Prince Sanglant defeated a Quman army at the Veser River and afterward rode east seeking griffins and sorcerers with which to battle a mysterious cabal of sorcerers who he claimed intended to destroy the world. He is said to have ridden south to Aosta in pursuit of his father and the sorcerers. More than that I do not know.”

  “Ah,” said Alain. “Some knew, then, of the coming storm. It was not in vain that the Old Ones spoke to me.”

  “The storm? The one that swept over us last autumn?”

  “It was the final closing of a spell set in motion centuries ago.”

  He surprised her, who was a woman not easily startled. She touched her left ear as if she were not at all sure she had heard those words spoken. “What mystery is this you speak of? Have you some hidden knowledge of events lost in the past in the time of the blessed Daisan?”

  “This took place long before the time of the blessed Daisan. They are hidden from us only by the passage of years. Only by death, which hides us all in the end. I pray you, have you any news of the one called Liathano?”

  “Of her, no. She was lost in a haze of fire.”

  “Truth rises with the phoenix,” murmured the beauty, and Alain felt the pinch of those words in his heart as though some unnoticed hand were trying to get his attention.

  “What did you say?” he asked him.

  “‘Truth rises with the phoenix,”’ the young man repeated patiently, and his smile made the folk nearby murmur and point as if he had just done something extraordinary. “We who believe in the truth and the word speak so, to acknowledge the sacrifice made by the blessed Daisan, who died so that our sins might be forgiven.”

  “Agius’ words are seeds grown in fertile soil,” said Alain.

  Constance shut her eyes, touched a finger to her own lips as she might touch the mouth of a lover.

  “‘His heart’s blood fell to Earth and bloomed as roses,”’ Alain added.

  She looked at him, just a look, that was all. That gaze, met and answered, nothing more, until her expression shifted, grew puzzled, almost intimate, and she extended a hand and beckoned him closer. She sat in a chair at the rear of the wagon in which he had earlier seen her riding. Her breath fogged the cold air. When he stood next to her, she touched his cheek.

  “You are marked as with a rose,” she said. “A curious birthmark. I’ve never seen such a one before.”

  “It is not a birthmark but the memory of a false oath,” he said. “It serves to remind me of my obligation, something I cannot see except in the faces of other human beings.”

  “Who are you?” she asked him, and looked at Baldwin as if for an answer, but Baldwin did not speak. He was staring at the sky and he raised a hand and pointed.

  “Is that the sun? See there. It’s almost gone below the trees, but it has a bluish cast. As though haze screens it, not clouds.”

  First a soldier turned, then an elderly woman. Others, facing west like the biscop and Lord Baldwin, raised hands in supplication. A flood of crying and rejoicing lifted from the assembled cavalcade as a covey of quails flush in a rush of wings up from the brush.

  “The sun! It shines!”

  It was more a shimmer than the actual disk of the sun. No person could stare at the sun without going blind. Everyone knew that. But along the western sky the cloud cover had altered in some manner to reveal the sun’s long hidden shape as if veiled behind only one layer of cheesecloth, not ten.

  “A miracle!”

  “This is the work of the Holy One!”

  “Truth rises with the phoenix!”

  They cried and pointed and stared, all shaken into such a tumult of excitement that Alain walked away, slipping from one gap to the next as he squeezed out of the crowd with no one paying him any mind. They stared at the western horizon. He walked east to the edge of the camp strung out along the road and into the trees. Close to the eastern end of the camp, three soldiers had been set to guard Heric.

  Alain whistled softly, but no one noticed him. Word had raced more swiftly than he could walk and they were all gazing westward. Some began to sing a song he had never heard before.

  “Truth rises with the phoenix,

  Truth rises like the sun.”

  Sorrow and Rage bounded up and trotted alongside as he settled into a long stride, heading east along the road. He hadn’t much light left. He’d need to make good time, to get far enough that no one would come after him.

  But after all, just as he got out of sight of the trailing end of the cavalcade’s encampment, he heard slip-slapping footsteps and labored breathing.

  “My lord! My lord Alain!”

  He paused and turned halfway back, waiting. Sorrow whined. Rage yawned to show teeth. She did not run, precisely, but loped in an awkward, determined way, then stumbled to halt a few steps away. The hounds made her nervous, but she was brave enough to come close despite her fear.

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

>   “East on the trail of Prince Sanglant. If any know where she is, he will.”

  “Do you love her, my lord?” Tears streamed down her face.

  “I hope that God have taught me to love all of humankind. But the kind of love you mean—no.”

  “If I could go with you…. Will you take me with you?”

  He shook his head. “I pray you, Sister. Serve where you are needed most. Every storm leaves destruction in its wake. There is much to do.”

  “Yes,” she said, bowing her head obediently. “I will do as you say.” The words were thin, spoken through tears.

  “You are brave and good, Hathumod. Your hands will do God’s work if you let them.”

  She choked down a sob as she nodded. She had gone beyond speech and now could only stare as he gave a sign of farewell and walked away down the road. Where the road curved, he paused to look back. Eager to get on, the hounds wagged their tails.

  She still stood there, fading into the twilight. She hadn’t moved at all, as if caught in the guivre’s stare.

  XV

  THE IMPATIENT ONE

  1

  BECAUSE she was Feather Cloak, the blood knives insisted that she be carried in a litter when she traveled. The sacred energy coiled within her body must not be allowed to escape through the soles of her feet by touching the earth.

  She did not like the blood knives. They were officious and grasping, set in their ways and bloated with self-importance, and it was obvious to her that they liked her less than she liked them. She did not follow the ancient laws in the manner to which they were accustomed.

  Yet she was Feather Cloak. She had been elected, according to the custom of the land. Let them chew on that gristle!

  For the time being, however, she thought it best to humor them in ceremonial ways. Thus she found herself on the road in a jolting litter carried by four men, with another eight walking in front or behind to take a turn when the current group needed a rest. They traveled in procession from the Heart-of-the-World’s-Beginning to the city on the lake, called We-Have-No-More-Tears by the exiles but Belly-Of-The-Land resting on the Lake of Gold by those who had lived in the shadows, because that was the name they had called it in the days before exile. The turning wheel spun at the front, announcing her presence. Her son had come with them as well. He was ripe for adventure but not yet old enough to “put on the mask.” He had the other baby slung to him, but he had dropped back to talk to one of the mask warriors, a young woman he fancied might see him as older than he was. In addition, she was accompanied by mask warriors, merchants, and judges come to witness the opening of the market, and a “bundle” of blood knives wearing scarlet tunics and the bright blue feathers of the death bird in their hair. Twenty of those blood knives in one place seemed like a lot.