by Kate Elliott
Ai, Lady, was he using sorcery on her? But then what had Da protected her from, if not against this? He had protected her against other forms of magic. Why had he never protected her against Hugh?
“Damn you, Liath,” he said, sliding down that slippery slope to anger. “It is my book and you are my slave. Tell me so. Repeat it back to me, Liath. ‘I am your slave, Hugh.’ You will never escape me.”
Had Hugh plumbed her soul far enough down, had he imprisoned her heart so tightly in the frozen tower, that he could control the rest of her at his will?
She was helpless. She would never break free.
As his grip tightened, her boots shifted on the ground, failing, falling; she began to slide into the darkness.
“Say it, Liath.”
Too stupified by fear even to weep, she whispered the only word that she could force out of her throat: “Sanglant.”
7
THE rats came out at night to gnaw on the bones. The whispering scrape of their claws on stone brought him instantly out of his doze.
But he did not want to open his eyes. Why did God torment him in this way, giving him such dreams? Why had his mother cursed him with life? It was better to die than to dream that Bloodheart was dead and he was free. In this way, Bloodheart chained him more heavily, weighted with despair.
The dogs whined nearby, tails thumping against the ground. One growled.
“Hush, son,” said a voice like his father’s. A hand touched his hair, stroking it gently as his father had done years ago when he was a child and delirious with grief at the loss of his nursemaid, the woman who had nursed him and helped raise him. She had died of a virulent fever, and though he had sat at her bedside for days despite her whispered pleas and the commands of his father that he must leave her or risk catching his death, he had not left—and he had not gotten sick.
“‘No disease known to you will touch him.’”
The hand stroking his hair now had weight and warmth.
He bolted upright, growling, and then flinched back from what he saw: not the cold nave of the cathedral but the interior of a pavilion, its contours softened by the warm glow of a lantern. His father sat in a camp chair beside the pallet on which he had been sleeping. Two servingmen slept on the ground; otherwise they were alone.
The king did not withdraw his hand but held it extended and brushed a stinging end of hair out of Sanglant’s eye. “Hush, child,” he said softly. “Go back to sleep.”
“I can’t sleep,” he whispered. “They’ll kill me if I sleep.”
Henry shook his head slightly, a tiny gesture in the gloom. “Who will kill you?”
“The dogs.”
Now the king sighed deeply and set a hand determinedly and firmly on Sanglant’s shoulder. “You are Bloodheart’s prisoner no longer, my son.”
Sanglant did not reply, but his hand touched the iron collar. Henry took hold of that hand and drew it away from the harsh touch of the slave collar.
“Nay, nay, child. We’ll have it taken off.” He wet a clean strip of pale linen with his own spit and dabbed at the raw scrapes along the curve of Sanglant’s neck where the collar rubbed and pinched. At his own neck the gold torque he wore glinted as he bent closer and then faded into the darkness at the curve of his neck as he leaned away, examining his son. But it flashed in Sanglant’s eyes like a blinding stroke of lightning: symbol of the royal kinship that had given Henry the right to try for the throne, just as Sanglant’s person, his actual safe delivery into the world, had given Henry the right to rule after his father, the younger Arnulf.
“Come, then,” said Henry. “If you can’t sleep, then eat a little bit. I had food brought in—”
“That I might feed in private and not embarrass myself?” But he hadn’t meant to snap in the way of dogs nipping one at the other. He groaned and sank head in hands.
But Henry only laughed quietly. “Sometimes you weren’t so different from this as a child, Sanglant. It isn’t so bad, after all, to be as alert as a hound. Sometimes I think the princes are no better than those dogs who followed you out of Gent, fighting among themselves. They’d tear my throat out, some of them, if they thought they had the chance or if I showed any least sign of weakness before them.”
“A fine lord with his handsome retinue,” said Sanglant bitterly, remembering Bloodheart’s taunt.
“Although we might as well cut their throats now that they’re safely chained down—”
“No!” He started up. At his full height, he towered above his father. “They were faithful to me. Like my Dragons.”
“Sit!” commanded Henry. Sanglant staggered, still exhausted, still disoriented, and sank down in the other chair. A small table stood at his elbow with a basket of bread and a bowl of berries, freshly picked. “But we won’t kill them, for if we can keep them chained—they chew through leather, so my servants tell me—then they can serve as a reminder to you.”
Sanglant picked up the bowl and brought it to his nose, but the lush fragrance of the berries made his stomach clench. He set down the bowl and tore off a hank of bread. Ai, Lord, he was so hungry, but he must not gorge. He must take small portions at first and teach his stomach how to eat again. “Remind me of what?” he asked, to stop himself from bolting the hank of bread.
“Of the princes and nobles of the realm.”
“Why should I want to be reminded of them?” Still he twirled the bread through his fingers. It fascinated him: the sight of food that was his to take or leave as he wished.
Henry leaned forward and dropped his voice for all the world like a conspirator. Sanglant stilled, bread caught halfway to his mouth. “We must move slowly and plan each step with great care if we are to make you king after me.”
Sanglant set down the bread. “Why would I want to be king?”
Henry began to reply, but the wind brought a different and more distracting sound with it: Liath’s voice, her fear, her desperation. She was calling for him.
He started up so violently that the chair tipped and over-balanced. He was outside before he heard it, like the echo of his passing, thud on the ground. The guards jumped aside, startled, but he knew where he was going.
Some noble lord had laid hands on her.
Sanglant had grabbed his arm and ripped him off her before, at her gasp, he took hold of himself and stopped to see who it was.
It had been years, but he would never forget that face. “Hugh.” He opened his hand, and the other man shook him off and took a hasty step backward. He was furious; Sanglant could smell his rage.
“I beg your pardon, my lord prince. This Eagle serves Princess Sapientia, and I was just escorting her back.”
“By dragging her against her will?”
The other man’s voice changed, gentled, soothed, but the tone only raised Sanglant’s hackles. “No, she wants to come with me. Doesn’t she? Doesn’t she, Liath?”
In answer she slid sidewise to nudge up against Sanglant’s chest. The bundle she carried pressed painfully against his lower ribs.
“Liath!” said Hugh, a command. But then, even in the old days in the king’s schola, young Lord Hugh had expected obedience and resented those who would not, or did not have to, give it to him. “Liath, you will come to me!” She made a sound in her throat more like a whimper than a plea and turned her face into Sanglant’s chest.
He could not help himself. It rose in his throat and was echoed from the three dogs who remained to him, back behind the king’s pavilion: a low growl.
Hugh, startled, took another step back, but then he caught himself and smiled sweetly. “You know what they call you now, some of them, don’t you? The prince of dogs.”
“Stay away from her,” said Sanglant.
But Hugh merely measured him and arched one eyebrow sardonically. “‘Do not give what is holy to the dogs.’” He turned with an arrogant shrug and walked away.
She did not move. Without thinking he set a hand on her shoulder, drawing her closer into him. Startle
d, she looked up.
He had endured hunger for a long time. He had dreamed of her, but she had been a shade, a remembered shadow given brightness by his own despair and need. Now he touched her on the cheek, as she had once touched him in the silence of the crypt. She did not respond, she did not draw back, but he felt the rhythm of her breathing. His was not so steady.
“Marry me, Liath,” he said, because it was now the only thing he knew to say to her. Hadn’t she cut his hair, back there by the stream? Hadn’t she freed him from Bloodheart’s chains? Hadn’t his memory of her been all that kept him from drowning in madness?
The entrance flap to the pavilion stirred and the king emerged into a night suddenly shadowed with the first intimations of dawn: a whistling bird, a tree edged gray instead of black against the night sky, the lost moon and the fading stars.
Henry halted just as Liath saw him and started back, taking a big step away from Sanglant.
“Your Majesty!” she said in the tone of a thief caught with her hand in the royal treasure chest.
His face froze into a mask of stone. But his voice was clear, calm, and commanding. “Eagle, it is time to notify my son Ekkehard and those of the king’s schola left behind at my palace at Weraushausen that we are safe and Gent retaken. You may leave now.”
“My lord king,” began Sanglant.
But she stirred and took yet another step away. “It’s my duty. I must go.”
He let her go. He would not hold her against her will, not when he had been a prisoner for so long. He hated himself fiercely at that moment for what he had become. Prince of dogs: that was what they were calling him now, that was what Bloodheart had called him. Why should she remember anything she had felt before, or what he supposed she had felt, when they had first met in Gent?
He had always been an obedient son.
She hesitated still, glancing once nervously toward the king, and with a sudden impulsive lunge she thrust the bundle she carried into his arms.
“Keep it safe for me, I beg you,” she whispered so only he could hear. Then she turned and walked into the dawn twilight.
He stared after her. She lifted a hand to flip her braid back over her shoulder and there it swayed along her back, so sinuous and attractive a movement he could not keep his eyes from it.
“Come back inside, son,” said Henry, an order and yet also a plea. There was a tone in his father’s voice he could not at first interpret, but slowly old memories and old confrontations surfaced to put a name to it.
Jealousy.
“No,” he said. “I can’t go back inside. I’ve been inside for so long—” How long had it been since he had heard the fluting and piping of birds at dawn? Seen the brightest of stars fade into the sleepy gray dawn? Smelled fresh air, even if this was tinged with the distant aroma of burning and death?
Just before she passed out of sight beyond the distant tents, she paused and turned to look back at him, then vanished into the awakening bustle of the camp.
“I’ve forgotten how bright the sun is,” he said without taking his gaze from where he had last seen her. “How sweet the air tastes.”
“What is that she gave you?” demanded Henry.
A promise. But he did not say it out loud.
EPILOGUE
THEY came not just from Steleshame but from farther afield, folk who saw an opportunity to rebuild in Gent or farm the empty fields that lay around it. They began to trickle along the roads as soon as word spread that the Eika enchanter was dead and his army defeated. And when victory—and the chance to make one’s fortune—was the rumor, word seemed able to spread as quickly as a bird could fly, trilling its message to all and sundry.
“We’ll go back,” said Matthias. “They’ll need workers in the tannery. Lord and Lady Above, I don’t know what we’re to do with you and Helen! Two mutes!” Then he hugged her to show he wasn’t angry about it. He was scared; Anna knew that, just as she knew he was right. They had to go back to Gent. They had to find Papa Otto who had saved them so long ago.
“Master Helvidius will speak for you, won’t you, Master?” continued the young man. “It won’t matter that you can’t talk.”
But the old poet fidgeted.
They sat on a log—the ruins of an outbuilding half burned and left to rot after the Eika raid on the holding last autumn—and watched the traffic on the road. Men dragging carts, women burdened by heavy packs, two ragged deacons, laden donkeys, and now and again a rich woman with oxen drawing her wagon and a small retinue of servants following behind. Now indeed Mistress Gisela’s claim that Steleshame had once been a bustling holding along a main road seemed like truth and not an exaggeration built upon her own thwarted desire for status and wealth.
Their own small bundles leaned against the log to their right, but Matthias, for all his eagerness, could not quite make the first step onto the road, and Master Helvidius had not even removed his meager possessions from their hut.
“The army will march back by,” said Helvidius. “There are many noble lords and ladies among them who heard me declaim not four days ago. Surely they’ll wish for a poet of my skills in their retinue.”
“You’d leave us! You won’t come with us!”
Anna set a hand on Matthias’ tattered sleeve.
“What ever will I do in Gent?” whined Helvidius. “The mayor and his kin are dead. I don’t know what lady will demand the right to collect the tolls there, or if the king keeps them for himself. I heard it said that the king intends to found a royal monastery there and dedicate it to St. Perpetua, the Lady of Battles, in thanks for the deliverance of his son. Monks won’t wish to hear me sing of Waltharia or proud Helen!” He pried Helen’s grubby fingers off his knee and transferred her to Anna, but she lost interest and squatted in the dirt to rescue a ladybug about to be crushed by the old poet’s wandering sandals. “Nay, Gent won’t be the same place. I must seek my fortune elsewhere.”
“And what about us!” demanded Matthias, jumping to his feet. “You would have died over the winter if we hadn’t taken you in!”
Anna grabbed his hand and made a sign with her free hand. No. One of the lowly clerics in the retinue of Lord Wichman had seen her plight and taught her a few simple hand signs, those used among the monastics, with which to communicate.
Matthias grunted and sat back down, looking sulky.
They heard a new voice. “Go, then! After all I have done for you, raised you when your dear mother died, taught you all I know of spinning and weaving, fed you with my own—!”
“Whored me out when it suited your purpose!”
The scene by the gates of Steleshame had all the volume, and drama, that was lacking when Helvidius sang The Gold of the Hevelli before an ill-attentive and drunken audience.
“I will no longer claim kinship with you, ungrateful child! Expect no hospitality in this hall! Stealing from me!”
“I have taken no more than what my mother’s inheritance brought me.” With those words, Gisela’s niece turned her back on her aunt and started down the hill. She carried a rolled-up bundle of cloth and clothing on her back and she, unlike most of the travelers, commanded an entourage: three women whom Anna knew came from the weaving hall and a young man who had recently married one of them. The young man hauled a cart laden with a dye vat, sheepskins, beams for a loom, and a number of smaller items tucked away in pouches, pots, and small baskets; the women carried, variously, an infant, some of the small parts of the loom, and rolled fleeces.
“You’ll starve!” Gisela shouted ungraciously after them.
Anna had a sudden instinct that now was the time to leave. She got up, grabbed her bundle, and beckoned to Matthias to do the same. He was so strong now that it was no trouble for him to carry a bundle as well as little Helen, who for all her cheerful smiles and gangling limbs still weighed next to nothing. Perhaps, somehow, Anna thought, she’d given her voice in trade for his crippled leg; it wasn’t such a bad exchange.
Helvidius did not follow th
em. Helen began to cry.
The little girl’s cry brought the niece’s attention, who walked a short way ahead of them. She halted her group and turned, surveying the children.
“I recognize you,” she said. “You were the last to escape from Gent. Come, walk with us.” She addressed Matthias. “Perhaps you know Gent well enough to advise me.”
“Advise you in what?” Matthias asked cautiously.
“I mean to set up a weaving hall. There are good sheep-farming lands east of the city, so it will be easy enough to trade for wool. And ships have always sailed in and out of Gent, trading to other ports.”
Matthias considered. “I could help you,” he said at last, “but you’d have to give some kind of employment to my sister, Anna, and let our little one, Helen, free with the other children in the hall.” Here he gestured toward the sleeping infant, cradled in swaddling bands and tied to its mother’s back.
Anna tugged furiously on Matthias’ arm, but he paid no attention to her.
But the niece only smiled. “And yourself, Master Bargainer? No, I recall now: You work in the tannery.”
“So I do.”
“Very well, then. I think we can make a fair bargain that will benefit each of us. Will you walk with us?” She smiled so winningly at Anna that Anna could not help but smile back. She was certainly a pretty woman, but she had something more than that inside, a certain iron gleam in her eyes that suggested a woman who would make a way for herself despite what obstacles the world threw into her path.
Matthias glanced, questioningly, at his sister. Anna merely signed a Yes.
But she could not stop her tears as they walked away from Steleshame. Despite everything, she was sad to leave Master Helvidius and his stories behind.
On the second day as they trudged along the forest road, they heard a song rising from the east.
“It is good to give thanks to God.
Their love endures forever.
When I was in distress I called on the Lady,