Elliott, Kate - Crown of Stars 1 (20 page)

Together, as well, they proceeded slowly through the lessons in
The Acts of the Magicians.
Once he made a candle light without touching flame to it. Once he predicted a storm. She remained deaf and mute to all but the sense of the words. She translated the Jinna for him and began to puzzle out letters and words in the column written in Arethousan. On this she concentrated her being. All else passed in a haze, especially the time they were together in the night. She felt so utterly detached from herself that it was as if she were two people, one to whom all this was happening, one watching from her safehouse within the frozen tower.

Sometimes he was called away to give last rites, to bless a newborn child or perform a healing. The first time he was gone overnight she crept out in the morning, past Dorit baking bread in the brick ovens built outside the kitchen, and went into the yard. But the cold blast of air and the heaping snow struck such fear into her that she escaped back into the church and did not venture forth again.

Every Hefensday the folk from the village gathered to hear the gospel. Before, she had never shirked from attending. Now she dreaded it. But the first time she had refused to go, he had slapped her hard and threatened to leave her out with the pigs, so she gave in. He wanted to display her; she understood that well enough. He had hidden her old clothing, forcing her to wear the fine gowns. She was afraid to speak to anyone and, with her silence, feared they all thought her prideful of her new consequence.

At those rare times she was granted solitude, she knelt in the empty chapel, not praying, usually not thinking at all, just resting in the silence of God. Sometimes she dreamed memories of Da.

"Liath, you may let your fancy play with the letters. Treatises have been written about the various schools of calligraphy in old Dariya. But when you learn the old patterns, when you draw the Rose, it must be drawn as exact, each time, as at its creation. There are no elaborations. What you draw with your hand is simply the pattern to which you exercise your mind, until you need no physical link to bring the Rose into your mind. Or, for a sorcerer, to make it manifest at will." He spoke at times with such confidence, such clarity. But now his expression fell and his shoulders hunched, and he looked weary again. "Anne would have taught you better than I can. "

Liath rested her hand on Da's white hair, gone white so early. "Don't say so, Da. You said yourself must learn for the sake of knowing these things, for passing them on, perhaps, but never to expect to have these powers myself."

He sighed. "Do you wish you did?"

She shrugged self-consciously. "I suppose so. I wish you had begun to teach me sooner, Da, about the arts known to the sorcerers, at least. Why did you wait so long?"

"You aren't strong enough yet. It isn't safe, child. It will be a long, long time before I can know we are safe."

Only they hadn't been safe.

"Liath!" The whisper was soft but sharp.

Liath started, banging her knees on the hard floor, then scrambled to her feet and whirled. Stood for a moment, registering this stranger. "H
—Hanna?"

"You're so ... well, not pale, but so gray." Hanna strode forward. She wore a frown on her face. Her energy radiated like heat in the stillness of the cool chapel, warmed only by the brazier of coals which Liath had brought out, for she could no longer bear cold. "Old Johan is passing up through the spheres this time for certain, they say. I saw Hugh ride off. He'll be gone at least 'til evening, so I came over. Mama said I might, and I haven't talked to you since
—" She hesitated. Liath simply stared at her. She was having a hard time understanding words spoken by a voice other than Hugh's. "Since that day he struck you outside the inn. Do you remember that man who was there that day? He was traveling through to Freelas. He asked about you, after Hugh took you back to the church. He asked about your Da."

"I don't remember him," said Liath tonelessly. Hanna's words had no real meaning, except perhaps to someone else, someone who was no longer here. "You shouldn't be here."

Hanna stiffened. "Do you want me to go?"

Liath shook her head. That wasn't what she meant, but she hardly knew how to speak anymore, only how to recite aloud words written down by others. "No. But you shouldn't be here." Suddenly nervous, she looked back over her shoulder, toward the archway that led into the nave. "He'll come
—

"He's ridden down to River's Bend. He can't possibly be back until evening."

"He'll know. He'll come back. He'll know I'm seeing someone. He always knows."

"Liath. Sit down. You're shaking all over." Hanna touched her. That touch was like fire sparking up Liath's arm. She could move but only found the strength to do so when Hanna steered her toward a bench and sat down beside her, pressing an arm around her back. Liath gave in to sudden exhaustion and rested her head on Hanna's shoulder. "Lars is gone to visit his old mother, and Dorit is down at the inn gossiping with Mama, so Hugh can't possibly know. Dorit says you're silent as a ghost, slipping around this place. Says you never speak unless the frater speaks to you, and then half the time in some devil's tongue. Or at least, that's what she says." Hanna fell silent and stroked Liath's arm, a rhythmic caress. They sat this way for some time.

Suddenly Liath flung up her head. "What day is it?"

"Ladysday Eve."

"No. What month? What day? What season? Is it still winter?"

Hanna gazed at her, and Liath realized abruptly that Hanna was uneasy, even frightened, but by what, or whom? "It's a month at least to the thaw. Midwinter has come and gone. So has the Feast of St. Herodia. It was a good harvest and there's none in want even at this late season. Most of the rye sown last autumn survived the winter."

"Then Mariansmass, after the thaw," said Liath, struggling to remember something important Da had once told her. Or was it her mother? Yes, it had been her mother. They had been in the garden, on the very day of Mariansmass, pinching off new growth in the garden, thinning, but why were there shoots so early? And her mother, with her pale hair and elegant carriage, a proud woman . . . but even as she recalled the scene, the memory of what her mother had told her fled. "I'll be seventeen," she said, grasping at the only thing she could make sense of.

"Liath. Look at me." With an effort Liath lifted her head and turned it to look at Hanna, whose expression was torn with anguish. "My parents want to betroth me to young Johan. At Mariansmass. I told them I would think about it." Now she sounded bewildered. She was pleading. "What should I do? I don't want to marry him and live out working his land, and bearing his children, every year until I die. I know that is what the Lady has granted us, in our span of years, that I should be proud enough to be a freewoman, but that isn't what I want. Even though I be marked for it. But I don't know what else to do."

Hanna needed her. The shadow door drawn into the great north door in her sealed chamber opened a crack, admitting Hanna past the wilderness, the wasted lands, to her stronghold. "Oh, Hanna." A sudden fire burned in her. "If Da and
—if we could only go back to Autun, that's where we lived before we came here, or to Qurtubah and the Kalif's court, or to Darre, where we lived first, then we could take you with us."

"Darre! There are devils in Darre!"

"Devils? Under the eye of the skopos herself?" Liath chuckled. "You mean elves. They aren't truly devils, Hanna. Or even daimones."

"But Deacon Fortensia says they're the product of intercourse between fallen angels and the daughters of men. That's why they're devils."

"That isn't what the blessed Daisan taught. Da always said that elves were born of fire and light, tainted only by the darkness that came into the world in the time of chaos, and that they existed before humankind was ordered by the Holy Word."

Hanna regarded her in horror, as if Liath had revealed that she herself was a devil, born of unnatural congress between a human woman and an angel who had forsaken the Lady and Lord. "You know so many strange things," she muttered finally.

"It's only because I learned to read, Hanna. You could do so, too, if you wanted to."

"If I was in the church!"

"In Darre. I remember, Hanna!" These memories, born fresh out of the cloud in which she had been wandering, were like a thawing in the frozen northlands. "Da said that it was in Darre that King Henry met the elvish woman who bore him the prince that secured his succession."

Hanna still looked doubtful and a little worried by this ungodly talk, but she squared her jaw and forged forward gamely. "Is it really true that the prince is half elvish? But it must be. Inga says her husband's cousin's wife was in Freelas the day the Dragons rode through, and she saw them. The Dragons, that is. She said there couldn't be any doubt but that he wasn't but half of human kin, he was so terrible and splendid to look upon. He had hair as black as night, skin the color of bronze, and green eyes."

Liath laughed. Stuttered to a halt, having not heard that strange sound for so many months: her own simple laughter. "How could Inga's husband's cousin's wife have been close enough to the prince, much less the Dragons, that she could see what color eyes he had?"

"He does have green eyes, and he is half elvish, poor bastard. His mother deserted him before he was two months old."

Liath spun round so quickly she collapsed to the floor, huddling on her knees. Vaguely she realized that, behind her, Hanna rose. Brave Hanna. For there he stood, poised in the archway that led into the church. Of course he had known.

"She never knew Wendish or Varren, only Dariyan and a bit of Aostan, which is like enough to Dariyan that she might understand the one if she knew the other. They say she came out. of Alba, which is known as a place where the Lost Ones still walk abroad in secret places and under the moon. But the tongue she spoke most easily was Salian, and it was in Salian she named the child." He smiled, as if he was perfectly aware that she knelt rigid, frozen, at Hanna's feet only because of

his presence. "She called herself Alia, which of course means 'other' in Dariyan, though Prince Henry as he was then never seems to have understood the riddle. My old nurse was one of those who attended at the birth, for they had need of many witnesses, since Henry's fertility was proven by this child. This is what my nurse told me: That Alia stared at the afterbirth and the newborn child and the blood that necessarily attends such events and said, 'These are bloody fields I have been brought to. Take it away.' So he was called Sanglant, for that is the name they heard her speak."

His tone changed, and his eyes, so hard, were riveted on her. "Liath. From now on you will ride out with me. You can ride, can you not?"

She nodded mutely.

"Then come."

"But it's so cold out there."

"You will come. Now."

She rose and went.

W irlij
U even looking up at Hanna, without acknowledging her, Liath stood. She walked down the chapel aisle as stiffly as if strings moved her limbs for her, walked past Hugh and out into the church.

In the instant after she passed out of sight, Hugh looked right at Hanna, really seeing her. He studied her as if trying to decide if she posed a threat to them. Then, with an unconscious, deprecatory toss of his fine head, he dismissed her from his mind and turned to follow Liath out.

"You fool," said Hanna under her breath, watching his form fade into the unlit gloom of the church. And yet, how could she look upon
him
and then turn without loathing to meet young Johan, with his pox-marked face and dirty fingernails and heavy, deliberate speech, on the marriage bed?

"You fool," she said again, just to make sure she understood perfectly well what she was. Satisfied, she knelt on the padded cushion where Liath had knelt, warmed by the brazier. And she thought, long and hard, about what she had just seen.

When she left the church, she did not set off for the inn but rather on the long walk to Count Harl's holding. Possibly, just possibly, she could talk her way in to see Ivar where his father was holding him in isolation until the spring journey to Quedlinhame. She knew a hundred ways to coerce him
—however bitter he might be, for everyone knew now that the southern girl was the frater's concubine—into taking a message with him when he went south.

That man, passing through town three months before, had worn no clothing, no badge, that might identify him. But late that night as she stoked the fire, she had watched him writing on parchment. A letter, perhaps, although he was clearly not a churchman; he had a beard. What kind of soldier knew how to write?

She had edged closer, trying to get a look, and by chance and luck had seen him inscribe a symbol at the bottom of the parchment. She could not read, of course, but an innkeeper's daughter recognized many symbols. This symbol she knew well, although they saw it rarely enough as far north as Heart's Rest.

It was the badge of the King's Eagles.

V THE INNER HEART
FOR
it is said, in the Holy Book," preached Prater Agius, "that our suffering is the penance we endure for our sins."

And it was true, reflected Alain as he stood for the final prayer. He had never been as happy, and yet as utterly miserable, as these last two seasons: autumn passing into winter and now, with the thaw approaching, winter promising to circle round, as all of life passed time and again along the Circle of Unity, into spring. He was learning the craft of the man-at-arms, like the warriors in old tales, just as he had been promised in the vision on Dragonback Ridge and just as he had always hoped he might. Yet, because of the hounds, because he had in his heart turned away from service to the Lord and Lady as he had been sworn by his father to give, he was shunned by every man and woman in the holding except for Lackling.