by Kate Elliott
“What of the prisoners?” asked Wolfhere when he turned back to the others.
The abbot himself came forward. He had been soothing the presbyter, who had already sent his servants to the stables to make ready to leave. “We cannot find their bodies,” he said. “This is most distressing. The rocks have buried them utterly. We will try to dig them out, but—”
“No matter.” Wolfhere surveyed the huge scar, the trail of the avalanche, that now scored the side of the ridge. Something shifted in the rubble and a few pebbles bounced down to land at his feet. He backed away nervously. “Search only if it is safe. The prisoners are lost to us now.”
“What will you do?” asked the abbot. “What of the two injured men? Brother Infirmarian says this poor man must not be moved any distance, and the other will not be able to walk for many weeks.”
“Can they remain here until they are healed?”
“Of course.” The abbot directed his monks to move the injured men away.
“Come, Hanna,” said Wolfhere. He walked back toward the stables, leaving the Lions to help.
“Why did you say it in that way? That the prisoners are ‘lost to us.’ Not that they’re dead.”
He looked at her curiously. “Do you think they are dead? Do you believe she lies there under the rocks? That someday, if the monks can dig the building out, they will find their two crushed bodies or their shattered bones?”
“Of course they must be dead. They were locked in the cell. How could they have escaped—” Seeing his expression, she broke off. “You don’t think they’re dead.”
“I do not. That was no natural storm.”
No natural storm. A blizzard blown up in the midst of mild summer weather. Strange unnatural creatures he had named galla walking abroad, stinking of the forge.
“Where will she go, Hanna? That is the question we must ask ourselves now. Where will she go? Who will shelter such as her?”
“I don’t know.”
“Sabella might, if she could reach Sabella. But Sabella is herself in prison, so Wendar and Varre are closed to Antonia, for now.” He sighed sharply and stopped at the stable door, turning back to look up at the mountains, so calm, so clear, above them. “I should have known. I should have prepared for this. But I underestimated her power.”
“Where will we go?”
He considered. “Alas, I fear we must split up. One of us must continue on to Darre to lay the charges against Biscop Antonia before the skopos. That way we remain prepared, whatever Antonia means to do. One of us must return to Henry and warn him, and hope he believes us.” He smiled suddenly then, with a wry expression that made Hanna remember how much she liked him. “Better that one be you, Hanna. You will take four of the Lions, I the other two—when I journey back this way, I will pick up the two who remain here, if they survive.”
She had grown used to Wolfhere and now, abruptly, was afraid to travel without him. “How long will it take you? How soon will you return to Wendar?”
He shrugged. “I cannot say. I may be able to get back across the pass this autumn, but most likely I won’t be able to return until next summer. You must convince Henry, child.” He touched her, briefly, on her Eagle’s badge, newly made and still as bright as if the memory of Manfred’s death lit it. “You have earned this, Hanna. Do not think you are unequal to the task.” He went inside the stables.
Hanna lingered outside, staring up at the three great peaks so beautiful, so silent, so at peace in their vast strength, their sheer living force, that it seemed impossible to believe at this instant that three—brief—human lives had been extinguished in the shadow at their feet. What was it the bard had called them? Youngwife. Monk’s Ridge. Terror. She shaded her eyes against the rising sun and looked for the hawk, but no birds flew in the sky this fair morning.
She would return to Wendar, to the king’s progress, without seeing the city of Darre and the palace of the holy skopos. Without seeing, perhaps, a few elves or other strange creatures not of humankind. And yet, this also meant she would return to Liath sooner.
Thinking of Liath made her think of Hugh, though she did not want to think of Hugh. Beautiful Hugh. And thinking of Hugh made her remember what he had done, and so she thought of Ivar. Ai, Lady, where was Ivar now? Had he reached Quedlinhame safely? Did he like it there? Was he resigned to his fate? Or did he still fight against it?
III
THE CLOISTER
1
IVAR hated Quedlinhame. He hated the monastery, he hated the daily round of monotonous prayer, and most of all he hated the novices’ dormitory, which was a narrow barracks of a building where he spent all of his nights and much of his day in miserable silence along with the other novices. Worst, because of the careful reckoning of days at Mass and in prayerbooks, he knew exactly how many days he had been imprisoned here.
One hundred and seventy-seven days ago, on St. Bonfilia’s Day, he had knelt before the postern gate in a cold rain and after a night of utter wretchedness had been admitted onto the grounds of Quedlinhame. They did not even give him a tour of the famous church. Instead, his new keepers immediately led him to the novitiary and locked him in with the rest of the poor souls consigned to this purgatory.
The poor male souls, of course. Quedlinhame was a double monastery; the abbess, Mother Scholastica, ruled over both monks and nuns who lived apart but prayed together. The novices’ dormitory let out onto a small cloister, a courtyard marked off by trim columns. A high wood fence ran down the center of this cloister, dividing it into two smaller courtyards, one for the male novices and one for the female novices whose dormitory lay on the opposite side.
Ivar prayed briefly at that fence every day unless the weather was awful, once in the morning just after the service of Terce and once in the afternoon before Vespers. Or at least, he appeared to be praying. In fact, in these, his only unsupervised moments of the day, he studied the wood planks. In the last five months, he and the other three first-year novices had examined that fence finger’s breadth by finger’s breadth, each upright plank, each horizontal beam, each crack and warp and weathered knot. But he could not find any chink through which to see onto the other side.
Were the female novices young? Almost certainly. Like him, most of them would have been put into the church—most willingly, some not—by their families when they reached adolescence.
Were they pretty? Perhaps. This goal he had set himself soon after he arrived: to identify each female novice by name and face. It kept him from going crazy, even though he knew it was wrong and against the rules. Or perhaps because it was against the rules.
Right now, his fellow first-year novice, Baldwin, had finished digging dirt out from under his nails with his shaving knife and now he stuck that knife into the minute gap between two warping planks. He wiggled the blade back and forth in what Ivar supposed would be a vain attempt to try to widen the gap enough to peer through. Baldwin, however, would not give up. In all things, fair-haired Baldwin knew that eventually he would get his way.
Ermanrich lumbered up and plopped down beside Ivar. He shivered in the cool autumn wind, which Ivar found pleasant after a hot summer confined within walls, but Ermanrich, though stoutest in body of their band of four, was also most susceptible to fevers and runny noses. He coughed now and wiped running eyes and squinted at Baldwin’s handiwork.
“There must be a weak spot,” Ermanrich muttered. He picked at his nails, which were dirty from turning over soil in the garden now that all the vegetables were harvested. “Hathumod says the first years all think Baldwin is very handsome.” Hathumod was Ermanrich’s cousin and in her second year as a novice. She and Ermanrich had mysterious ways of communicating which Ivar had not yet divined the nature of.
“What does Hathumod think of our Baldwin?” Ivar asked.
“She won’t say.”
Baldwin glanced at them and grinned, then went back to his work.
He had every reason to be vain of his looks, but of course, according
to his own account, it was those looks that had landed him in the monastery. He was, indeed, the handsomest fellow Ivar had ever laid eyes on … with the exception of Frater Hugh.
Ai, Lady! Even thinking of that bastard Hugh made Ivar angry all over again, trapped by helpless fury. He had tried to free Liath but had been made to look a fool and then gotten condemned to this life in the bargain. All of it Hugh’s fault, that damned arrogant handsome bastard. What had happened to Liath? Was she still Hugh’s concubine? At least, if reports were true, Hanna was with her.
Ivar could not begrudge Hanna her choice—service with Liath rather than with him. Liath needed Hanna more than he did, and anyway here at Quedlinhame he was not allowed to converse with any woman except Mother Scholastica. He had brought two male servants with him, and they tended to his clothing and his bed and with the other servants tidied the dormitory and in general did whatever manual labor he himself did not have time for, since as a novice his main duties were to pray and to study. Had he brought Hanna, she would have been sent to work as a laundress or cook, and he would never have seen her. Better that she stayed with Liath.
He sighed heavily.
Ermanrich touched a hand to his elbow, though novices were not supposed to touch, to form bonds of affection and sympathy. They were meant to devote themselves only to God. “You’re thinking of her again,” said the stout boy. “Was she really as pretty as Baldwin?”
“Utterly unlike,” said Ivar, but then he smiled, because Ermanrich always made him smile. “She was dark—”
“Dark like Duke Conrad the Black?” asked Baldwin without looking up from his scraping at the fence. “I met him once.”
“Met him?” demanded Ermanrich.
“Oh, well, not met. I saw him once.”
“I don’t know if they look anything alike,” said Ivar. “I never saw Duke Conrad. How did he get to be so dark?”
“His mother came from the east. She was a princess from Jinna country.” Baldwin had a treasure trove of gossip about the noble families of Wendar and Varre. “She was a present to one of the Arnulfs, I forget which, from one of the sultans of the east. Conrad the Elder, who was then Duke of Wayland, took a fancy to her and because King Arnulf owed him a favor, he asked for the girl. She was just a child then, but very pretty, everyone said. Conrad had her raised as a good Daisanite, for she came of heathen fire-worshipers. When she was old enough, he took her as a concubine, but of all his wives and concubines only she conceived by him, so perhaps she knew some eastern witchery, for the rumor went round that Conrad was infertile because of a curse set on him by one of the Lost Ones he raped when he was a young man.”
Ermanrich coughed again and cocked one eyebrow up.
“You don’t believe me?” demanded Baldwin, cheek ticking as he tried to suppress a grin.
“Which part do you wish to know that I believe?” asked Ermanrich.
“And then what happened?” asked Ivar, trying to imagine this Jinna girl but only able to see Liath in his mind’s eye. The thought of her made his heart ache.
“She gave birth to a baby boy, the second Conrad, whom we now know as Conrad the Black. He succeeded to the duchy when his father died. She still lives, you know, the Jinna woman. I don’t know what her old name was, her heathen name, but she was baptized with a good Daisanite name, Mariya or Miryam. Something like that.”
“They let a bastard inherit?” asked Ermanrich, looking skeptical.
“No, no. At the end of his life, when it came time to name his heir, Conrad the Elder claimed he had been married to her all along. The first tame deacon he got to say she was present at the ceremony then turned out to have been only ten years old when the marriage was supposed to have been solemnized. So Conrad finally made a huge bequest of land to the local biscop and she agreed that God had sanctified the union before the child’s birth. Look! I’ve made a crack!” He leaned down and stuck his perfectly-proportioned nose up against the wood, closed one eye, and peered through the tiny gap with the other. Then he withdrew, shaking his head. “All I can see is warts. I knew they would have warts.”
“Dearest Baldwin, doomed by warts to a life in the monastery,” said Ermanrich in a sententious voice. “Now move and let me try.” They changed places.
“Hush,” said Ivar. “Here comes Lord Reginar and his dogs.”
Lord Reginar had a pack of five “dogs”—the other second-year novices—and a thin face made ill-featured mostly because of its habitual sour expression.
“What’s this?” he said, pausing beside the three first-year boys. He touched a scrap of very fine white linen to his lips as if the stench of the first years offended him. “Are you at your daily prayers?” That he meant to insinuate something was clear, though what exactly he meant was not.
Ivar stifled a giggle. He found Reginar’s conceit so pathetic, especially compared to that of Hugh, that he always wanted to laugh. But a count’s son never ever laughed at the son of a duchess and one who, in addition, wore the gold torque around his neck that symbolized he came of the blood of the royal family and had a claim—however distant—to the throne.
Ermanrich clasped his hands tight and leaned against the fence, covering the telltale signs of cutting. He began to murmur a psalm in the singsong voice he used at his prayers.
Baldwin smiled brightly up at the young lord. “How kind of you to deign to notice us this day, Lord Reginar,” he said without any obvious sign of sarcasm.
Ermanrich made a choking sound.
Reginar touched his lips again with the linen, but even he—youngest son of Duchess Rotrudis and nephew of both Mother Scholastica and King Henry—was not immune to Baldwin’s charms. “It is true,” he said, “that two marchlanders and a minor count’s son are unlikely to receive attentions from such as myself every day, but then you are entitled to sleep near me, as are all these others.” He gestured toward his sycophants, an indistinguishable collection of boys of good family who had had the misfortune to be dedicated to the monastery last year, together with Reginar, and had by necessity—or by force—fallen into orbit around him.
“Pray you,” said Baldwin sweetly, “do not forget our good comrade Sigfrid, Mother Scholastica’s favorite. I am sure he, too, is not insensible to the favor you show us.”
Ermanrich fell into a fit of frantic coughing. One of the boys hovering at Reginar’s back tittered, and the young lord turned right around and slapped him hard. Then he spun and stalked away, his “dogs” scurrying after him.
Fittingly, at that moment Sigfrid came running out of the dormitory, his sharp face alight, his novice’s robes all askew. He did not notice Reginar. He never did. And that was the worst insult of all, although Reginar never understood that Sigfrid noticed nothing except his studies, his prayers, and—now—his three friends.
“I heard the most amazing news,” Sigfrid said as he halted beside them. He knelt with the practiced ease of a person who has spent years moving into or out of a kneeling position, as indeed Sigfrid himself cheerfully admitted he had, having come at age five to his vocation: monk-in-training.
“That was cruel,” said Ermanrich.
“What was?” asked Sigfrid.
Baldwin smiled. “Poor Reginar. He can’t abide that his own dear aunt, Mother Scholastica, favors a mere steward’s son and lavishes her favor—and her private tutorials—on that lowborn creature instead of on her nephew.”
“Oh, dear,” said Sigfrid. He looked concerned all at once. “I do not mean to make anyone envious of me. I have not striven for Mother Scholastica’s attention, and yet—” His face took on an expression of rapt contemplation. “—to be privileged to study with her and with Brother Methodius—”
“You know what they say.” Baldwin cut in before Sigfrid could launch into a long recitation—by heart, of course—of whatever horrific matristic text written centuries ago he had studied today in Mother Scholastica’s study.
“Why, no,” said Ermanrich. “What do they say?”
�
�That Lord Reginar was put into the monastery only because his mother detests him. Had she allowed him to become ordained as a frater and then be elevated to the rank of presbyter, he would have had to visit her every three years as is traditional, as long as she lives, and she decided it was better to put him in the monastery where she’d never have to see him again if she didn’t wish it.”
Ermanrich snorted, gulped, and began to laugh helplessly.
Sigfrid gazed sorrowfully at Baldwin and only shook his head, as if to remind the other boy that the Lord and Lady looked ill on those who spoke spitefully of others.
“I believe it,” muttered Ivar.
“I’m sorry, Ivar,” said Baldwin quickly. “I didn’t mean to remind you of your own situation.”
“Never mind,” said Ivar. “What’s done is done. What was your news, Sigfrid?”
“King Henry’s progress is coming here, to Quedlinhame, for the Feast of St. Valentinus. They expect the king today or tomorrow!”
“How do you know this?” Ermanrich demanded. “Not even Hathumod knows, for if she did, she’d have told me.”
Sigfrid blushed. He had a sensitive face, his expressions made interesting by the conflict between his studious nature and solitary soul on the one hand and the very real and passionate liking he had taken to his year-mates on the other. “Alas, I fear I overheard them. It was ill-done of me, I know—but I couldn’t wait to tell you, for I knew you would want to hear! Imagine! The king!”
Baldwin yawned. “Ah, yes. I’ve met the king.”
“Have you really met him?” demanded Ermanrich, laughing.
The schoolmaster appeared under the colonnade and they all leaped guiltily to their feet and with contrite faces made their way to the line. As first years, they took their place at the end, matched up in pairs. Before them walked Reginar and his sycophants, and in front of Reginar—although Reginar hated anyone to walk in front of him—stood the humble third years.
As they marched out of the dormitory and made their way along the path that led to the church, Ivar craned his neck when the brown-robed female novices came into view. For his pains he got a sharp whack on his shoulders from the schoolmaster’s willow switch. It stung, but in a way the pain helped him. The pain helped him remember that he was Ivar, son of Count Harl and Lady Herlinda. He was not truly a monk, not by vocation as Sigfrid was, nor was he resigned to his fate as was Ermanrich, sixth of seven sons of a marchland countess who, to her horror, had never given birth to a girl and had perforce made her eldest son her heir and after that hastily dedicated the superfluous boys to the church so they would not contest their brother’s elevation to the rank of count after her death. Unlike Baldwin, he had not escaped an unwanted marriage by begging to be put in the church.