by Kate Elliott
“Now, child,” the old queen was saying to Henry. Though her body was weak and her voice tremulous, her spirit clearly had not quailed under the burden of her illness. “You will dry these tears. It has been half a year since the boy died—and an honorable death he had, did he not? It is time to let him go. Is this not the eve of hallowing? Let him go so that his spirit may ascend, as it must, through the seven spheres to come to rest at last in the blessed Chamber of Light. You bind his soul to this world with your grief.”
“These are heathen words,” said Mother Scholastica abruptly.
“It is a heathen holy day, is it not, though we have given it a Daisanite name?” retorted the queen. Married young, she had borne at least two of her ten children before she was Liath’s age, or so Liath calculated. She was at most fourteen years older than Henry, who was her eldest child. Her hair, uncoifed in the privacy of her cell, had a few brown strands still woven in among the white. Whatever sickness ravaged her came not only from the assault of time but also from a more physical malady. “We speak of Hallowing Eve still and pray to all the saints on these days when the great tides of the heavens bring the living and the dead close together—bring them so close that we might even touch, if our eyes were open.”
Liath caught in a sob. As she listened to the old queen speak, she recalled Da so vividly that it was almost as if she could see him standing beside her, glimpsed out of the corner of her eye.
“It is a form of respect,” continued the old woman, “that I think God will not begrudge us.”
Mother Scholastica bowed her head obediently, for although she was mistress of Quedlinhame and Mother over all the nuns, including Mathilda, she was at the same time this woman’s daughter. Mathilda had been queen once and was a powerful woman still, queen by title though she no longer sat upon a throne.
“Henry, you must let him go, or he will wander here forever, trapped by your grief.”
“What if he can’t die as we do?” asked Henry in a rasping voice. “What if his mother’s blood forbids him entrance to the Chamber of Light? Is he then doomed to wander as a shade on this earth forever? Are we never to be reunited in the blessed peace of the Light?”
“That is for Our Lord and Lady to judge,” said Mother Scholastica sternly, “not for us to trouble ourselves over. Many books were written by the ancients on this question—whether the Lost Ones had souls—but this is not the time or place to debate that issue. Come, Henry. You are tiring our mother.”
“No,” said the old queen. “I am not tired. If you speak to me of your grief, Henry, perhaps that will ease it.” She looked up, her gaze sharper than Liath had expected from a bedridden woman. “Villam is here.”
It struck Liath suddenly that Helmut Villam was as old as Queen Mathilda. Despite his crippling injury, he had far more vigor, the energy of a much younger person. The margrave came forward, kissed her hand, then retired to the door. The queen acknowledged Rosvita next, clasped the cleric’s hands in her own in the sign of fealty. “My History?” she asked with a gentle smile. “How does it progress?”
The cleric’s smile in answer was brief but sweet. “I hope to complete the First Book this year, Your Majesty, so that you may have it read to you and learn of the illustrious deeds of the first Henry and his son, the elder Arnulf.”
“Do not tarry too long, my sister, for your words interest me greatly, and I fear I have not too many more days upon this earth.”
Rosvita bowed her head, touching her forehead to the old queen’s wrinkled hands. Then she stood and retreated.
“Who are these?” the old woman asked, looking at the two Eagles.
Henry glanced back. At first he appeared surprised. Then he registered Hathui. “My faithful Eagle,” he said wryly. He looked beyond Hathui—Liath flinched when his powerful gaze focused on her. For an instant it was like Hugh’s gaze, penetrating, absolute; like the strike of lightning, it could obliterate her. But Henry only marked her and looked away without further interest. “This other Eagle was at Gent. Together with Wolfhere she witnessed the destruction of the Dragons and the death of—” His voice broke, unable to speak the name of his dead son.
“Together with Wolfhere,” said the queen thoughtfully, as if the name meant something to her. Liath stared at the gray stone, at its uneven surface and rough grade. No polished marble or fine granite blocks graced this common nun’s cell. “Come forward, child.”
One did not disobey a queen, even one who now professed to be a nun, not when she used that tone of voice. Liath hooked a foot under her body, stood, took seven small steps forward, and knelt again. Only then did she look up.
Gray eyes as cool as winter storm clouds and yet with a deep calm beneath them met Liath’s gaze. “You are some relation to Conrad the Black, perhaps?” Queen Mathilda asked. “I have seen such coloring nowhere else, except perhaps in—” She made a tiny gesture with one hand, a scissoring of fingers quickly made and quickly vanished. Mother Scholastica rose and left the cell. Henry still gripped his mother’s other hand, the one that lay so still upon the rough wool blanket. Mathilda had the most delicate wrists Liath had ever seen on an adult. Her small hands were weathered with work, for Queen Mathilda was famous for serving in common with the other nuns, such was her humility. “You are no relation?”
Liath shook her head, not trusting herself to speak.
“You were in Gent?”
Liath nodded. Lady Above, please let her be satisfied with this knowledge; please let her not demand that Liath tell the entire awful heart-wrenching tale again, so that she had to live through it again: that last vision seen through fire, Sanglant struck down by an Eika ax and Bloodheart gloating above his fallen body, holding aloft in his bare bloody hand the golden neck torque that signified the prince’s royal kinship.
At that moment Liath realized Queen Mathilda did not wear the golden torque, though her son and daughter did. But she was not born of the royal lineages of Wendar and Varre. She had only married into the family. At this moment, under that calm gray but utterly penetrating gaze, Liath could not remember where Mathilda came from, of what kin, of what country—only that she had ruled as queen beside Arnulf the Younger, his second wife, and that she now examined Liath with keen interest and not a little understanding.
“You knew Sanglant,” she said.
Liath nodded, dared say nothing in answer. I loved Sanglant. But the prince was not for her; even Wolfhere had warned him away from her. “Down that road I dare not walk,” Sanglant had said to her, for was he not an obedient son? “Be bound, as I am, by the fate others have determined for you. That way you will remain safe.”
But the fate that had bound Sanglant, captain of the King’s Dragons and bastard son of a king, was nothing like the fate she struggled against, whose bonds she could not even recognize. Just as well, she thought bitterly, that he was killed. It was only safe to love someone who was already dead.
Her expression betrayed her.
“The last,” said the queen, comprehending the whole, “if not the first. Pretty enough that any might understand why he was tempted. That is enough, child. You may go.”
Liath was mortified. To be discovered, to be seen through so easily, and by a woman who did not even know her! Henry was staring morosely at the far wall, idly twisting the signet ring on his right hand, not paying attention. Villam had gone outside to the sun. Only Hathui and Rosvita witnessed. Perhaps the queen had spoken too softly for them to hear. Liath dipped her head obediently and retreated, still on her knees, back to the safety of the door and Hathui’s shadow.
But a queen—a girl brought from foreign lands to marry an older and possibly indifferent man—surely must learn to study faces and puzzle out intrigue from every line and utterance. After all, she had gotten her son onto the throne of Wendar and Varre despite the claim of the elder half sister—Arnulf’s only living child from his first and some said more legitimate marriage. It would not do to underestimate a woman like Mathilda, no matter how wea
k she looked now.
Liath was allowed to leave, although Hathui remained with the king and the king appeared determined to remain for some while with his mother. Outside, no one asked her to run errands or carry a trifling message. She couldn’t enter the innermost cloisters, of course, but when the king’s progress had come to Quedlinhame it was impossible to stop visitors from wandering the grounds and gardens of the monastery. She climbed the outer wall and found a vantage point from which to look down over the foundation.
All monasteries—whether housing monks or nuns—were built on the same general plan, one laid out three centuries ago by St. Benedicta, founder of The Rule. Liath had seen plans of various monasteries, and once she had seen a thing and committed it to memory, it was the work of a moment to dredge it up again. Mathilda. She searched in the city of memory. Past the gate surmounted by the Throne of Virtue stood the halls of the kingdoms. She found the one inscribed with the Dragon, Lion, and Eagle of Wendar and went inside. On the dais Henry sat alone now that his queen, Sophia, had died. Behind him, through a curtain, lay the chamber of Arnulf the Younger, flanked on the right by his first wife, Berengaria of Varre, and on the left by Mathilda. This seated statue of Mathilda held in its right hand a scroll bearing the names of her nine children and in its left, signifying her descent, a small banner embroidered with the sigil of the kingdom of Karrone.
Liath backtracked to the hall of Karrone. There among the gathered dead and living nobles of the royal house, all cast in stone, she found Mathilda. Granddaughter of Berta, princess and later Queen of Karrone, the first Karronese prince to defy her Salian overlords and style herself regnant. Daughter of Berta’s only son, prince and later King Rodulf, the last of Berta’s five children, all of whom had held the throne, each in succession. Having seen the chronicle of the monks of St. Galle, Liath could even recall the dates of their reigns and their deaths. Rodulf had reigned from 692 until 710. His death had brought forth two claimants to Karrone’s throne: his niece Marozia and his grandson, Henry. Marozia had seized the throne by right of proximity, and Henry, newly crowned king of Wendar and Varre, was too young in power to contest her. Instead he had married his younger brother Benedict to her daughter, also called Marozia; these two now reigned in the mountainous kingdom of Karrone as Queen Regnant and King Consort.
All of this Liath remembered, and much more besides. It was only in the central tower, the highest point in the city itself, that a door stood which she could not unlock—behind it rested Da’s secrets, all he had kept hidden from her. She shook her head impatiently and scanned the monastery, searching for a small building with its own cloister, set apart from the others: the novitiary.
Eventually the novices would have to emerge from the novitiary, to pray, to attend to their bodily needs, to perform manual labor. The Rule enjoined that all nuns and monks spend some part of each day in labor, “for then are they truly laborers for God when they live by the labor of their hands.”
She hunkered down to wait, finding a patch of warm autumn sun and tugging her cloak tight around her. The sudden cold autumn wind on her neck made her shudder, and she was abruptly seized with an unreasoning panic, heart pounding, breath caught in her throat and her hands trembling as if with a palsy. But Hugh wasn’t here. He wasn’t here. She still had the book, and other weapons besides. To calm herself, she touched them one by one, like talismans: Her short sword rested easily on her left hip; her eating knife nestled in a sheath; the weight of her bow, quiver, and arrows made a comforting presence on her back.
Ai, Lady! Surely she was safe from Hugh now.
The door to the novitiary opened and a double line of brown-robed novices, heads bowed humbly, emerged from the novitiary and walked in strict columns by paved paths, then dirt ones, out to the gardens. Liath jumped up to follow them. Certain of the noble lords and ladies lounged at their leisure on the withering autumn grass or admired the late flowers in the herb garden; unlike Liath, they ignored the novices—all, that is, except the wheat-haired girl Liath recognized as Lady Tallia.
As the column of novices passed Tallia, she knelt on ragged grass and bowed her head in prayer. Liath found the girl’s piety grating and excessive, but others praised her for it. Liath had been on the road for too long to find it admirable that Tallia ruined her gowns by using them to wash the Hearths of churches, scraping her pale fine hands raw in the process. That was all very well for a noblewoman who could replace such fine stuffs, but something else again for those who had little to spare. Tallia might fast at every opportunity and turn away fine meats and soft breads and rich savories, but at least she had such food to turn away. Liath had traveled the roads with Da for eight years. She had seen faces gaunt with starvation because the last harvest had run scant; she had seen children scrabbling in the dirt for precious grains of wheat and rye and oats.
Some among the novices did not ignore the nobles. Some looked up, curious—as she would have been curious, in their place. The watching schoolmaster scurried down the line and applied his willow switch to shoulders. They plodded out to the gardens where a ridge of soil lay dry and crumbling on one side from a summer under the sun and fresh and moist on the other where the novices had turned it up the previous day. With hoes, pointed sticks, and shovels, they commenced digging the unturned earth.
Liath picked her way down the steep stone stairs and took a circuitous route across the grounds. Lady Tallia had ventured to the edge of the garden and Liath saw her pleading with the schoolmistress—for both male and female novices worked in the gardens this day, though at separate ends as was proper. After a bit, the schoolmistress relented and handed the girl a stick. With this in hand, she promptly climbed over the little stone fence that served to keep vermin out of the vegetables and with more enthusiasm than skill commenced digging beside the other female novices, oblivious to the stains that now accumulated on the hem and knees of her gold linen gown.
Liath circled in and took up a stance east of the novices, where she pretended to study the towers of the church. She busied herself with her cloak, flashing its scarlet trim.
Of a sudden she saw him, caught with his astonished gaze on her and his hoe frozen in the dirt. He nudged the boy next to him. Ai, Lady! Even from this distance Liath could see that his friend was remarkably handsome. The handsome boy elbowed another and that one the next until four faces stared at her while she stared back.
Ivar! He gaped at her for long stunned moments, then straightened, yanked his hoe out of the earth as if he meant to run over and greet her—and suddenly hunched over again to strike his hoe back into the dirt. All of them did, dutiful novices attending to their labor just in time for the schoolmaster to pass them by, willow switch in hand, and glower first at them and then, briefly, at the Eagle who was making a spectacle of herself so close by sheltered novices.
It would be impossible to speak to Ivar.
Impossible.
At that moment she noted the long narrow shed with many plank doors which sat out away from the cloister: the necessarium. Even holy church folk must attend to the needs of the earthly body. She looked back toward Ivar. He was chopping the hoe onto the dirt with one hand, pointlessly but enough to make it look as though he were working, and with his other hand making signs. Though Da had taught her the silent hand language used by nuns and monks, she stood too far from Ivar to read what he said, and she dared not move closer since the schoolmaster had already marked her. Instead, knowing Ivar watched her, she ostentatiously stretched one arm up over her head and slowly lowered it until her hand pointed toward the necessarium. She turned her back on the gardens and walked over to the long shed.
Picking a door at random—not at the very end, not in the middle—she pulled it open, paused so that Ivar had time to mark her, then stepped up onto a rough raised plank floor and closed herself into the gloom.
Lady Above! It stank of piss and excrement. But there was room to turn around and also, because this was a royal monastery, a sanded wood bench with a ho
le cut in the middle on which to sit. She sat on the edge of the bench, extremely careful to make sure no trailing end of cloak snaked down the hole to the pit below, and covered her nose and mouth with an edge of that cloak. In this way, shielded somewhat from the ripe smell of human waste by the honest scent of good plain wool, she waited.
She waited for a long time, so long, in fact, that the smell began not to bother her as much, and the occasional sounds as doors banged open or shut and folk—monks, nuns, and courtfolk alike—went about their business in the long shed began to have a kind of monotonous lulling pattern to them. Suddenly, a hand scraped at the rope handle. She shrank back into the corner as the door opened.
As quickly, a brown-robed figure slipped inside and closed the door behind him. She stood up, and because the space between bench and door was so narrow and because her left foot had gone numb, she staggered. He embraced her, steadying her, and clasped her hard against him. His hood fell back. She stood there, stiff and dumb, and he began muttering her name over and over as if he knew no other word and kissed first her neck and, as he got his bearings, her ear, her cheek and finally her mouth.
“Ivar.” She slid a hand between them. He was taller than she remembered, filled out, broader in the shoulder. His embrace—so unfamiliar and yet utterly familiar—reminded her of long-ago nights in Heart’s Rest when she and he and Hanna would run laughing out of a rainstorm and huddle together in the shelter of the inn stables. But they had so little time. “Ivar!” she said urgently, pulling away.
“Say you will marry me,” he said softly, lips moist against her skin. “Say you will marry me, Liath, and we will escape from here somehow and make our way in the world. Nothing will stop us.” He took in a sharp breath to speak more passionate words yet, then grunted. “Ai, Lord! What a stink!”