PROLOGUE (31 page)

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In the morning she rose with Matthias at the first light of dawn and in the cold dawn began her daily haul of water. The stream ran with a bitter ice flood over her bare fingers, but its chill was nothing to the cold fury that seized her upon returning to their little shelter.

Helvidius and Helen were gone and with them the old poet's stick and stool and her precious leather bag of dried herbs, onions, four shriveled turnips, and the last of the acorns. No sooner had she stuck her head under the canvas, searching to see what else the old man had taken, than a spear butt prodded her in the back and a harsh voice ordered her to come out.

"I thought we'd cleared this place," said a soldier to his companion, eyeing Anna with disgust. "These children are as filthy as rats, each and every one." She gaped at the two soldiers
—well fed, well brushed, and warmly dressed—who confronted her. "Go on, then, girl—or are you a boy?" "Go where?"

"We're clearing out the camp," he said. "You'll be marching east, where we can find homes for you orphans. Now go on, get your things or leave them behind." "But my brother
—"

This time when he jabbed her with the butt of his spear, his touch wasn't as gentle. "Take what you need, but only what you can carry. It's going to be a long march." "Where
—?"

"Move!" His companion walked on, poking a spear through hovels and the other pathetic shelters the refugees from Gent had put up beyond the tannery, but they were already empty. Indeed, the camp itself was far more quiet than usual, but now that she listened, she heard the nervous buzz of voices from down by the southeast road.

Though she had five knives tucked here and there inside her clothes, she knew it was pointless to resist. She scrambled back inside the canvas shelter, grabbed the pot and bowl, nesting the one inside the other, rolled up their blankets and tied them with a leather cord, and bound up her shawl to make a carry pack. She began to take down the canvas shelter.

"Here, now, leave that!"

"How can I leave that?" she demanded, turning on him. "What if it rains? We'll need to shelter under something!"

He considered this, hesitating. "We're to shelter at church estates, but there are so many of you . . . perhaps it's wisest to have some shelter of your own. If the weather turns colder, or there's snow . . ." He shrugged.

"Is everyone leaving?"

But he wouldn't answer more of her questions, and she sensed that time was short. The rolled-up canvas was an unwieldy burden, and together with buckets, blankets, and pot she could barely stagger along under the weight.

The sight of the refugees made her sick with terror. Herded into a ragged line along the road, she realized suddenly how very young they all were. For every twenty children there was, perhaps, a single adult
—even counting the soldiers, all of them grim as they held spears to prevent any child from slipping out of line. The sheer amount of bawling and wailing was like an assault, a wave of fear spilling out from the children who had escaped Gent and now were being driven away even from the meager shelter they had made here at Steleshame.

Anna spotted Helvidius. He leaned heavily on his stick and little Helen, beside him, sat on the stool with the precious bag of food draped over her lap. She cried without sound, and yellow-green snot ran from her nose. The old poet's face brightened when he saw Anna.

"Where's Matthias?" she asked as she came up beside him.

"I don't know," said the old man. "I tried to tell them I'm a great poet, that the young lord will be angry at them for sending me away, but they drove me out and didn't listen! I think they mean to march these four hundred children to the marchlands. I suppose there's always a need for a pair of growing hands in the wilderness."

"But this isn't everyone."

"Nay, just those deemed useless and a burden. When we first got here from Gent last spring, some third of the children were taken away by farming folk who live west of here, for a strong child is always welcome as a help to work the land. And those who work now for Mistress Gisela, like the blacksmiths
—they'll stay. And a few families who hope to go back to Gent in time, but only those which have
an adult to care for the children. Nay, child, all the rest of us will be marched east to Osterburg and farther yet, past the Oder River and into the marchlands
—"

"But how far is it?" Helen began to cry out loud, and Anna set down the pot and hoisted the little girl up onto her hip.

"A month or more, two months, three more like. Lady Above, how do they expect these children to walk so far, and how do they intend to feed them along the way?"

Three months. Anna could not really conceive of three months' time, especially not with winter coming on. "But I don't want to go," she said, beginning to cry, beginning to panic. "It's better to stay here, isn't it?"

Someone had managed to get a flock of goats together, and in truth the goats milled no more aimlessly than did the frightened children. Pinch-faced toddlers whined and wriggled in the arms of children no older than eight or twelve. An adolescent girl with a swelling belly and her worldly goods tied to her back held tightly onto two young siblings who could not have been more than five or six; they, too, carried bedrolls tied to their thin shoulders. Two boys of about Anna's age clung together. A girl tied cloth around the feet of a small child to protect it against frost and mud. A little red-haired boy sat alone on the cold ground and sobbed.

"Saved by a miracle," murmured Master Helvidius. "And now what will become of us?"

The young lord and his retinue waited beside the gate to Steleshame. They only watched, mounted on their fine horses, but the sick feeling in her chest curdled and turned sour. They only watched, but they would enforce this order. Any child who ran into the forest would be hunted down and brought back. Mistress Gisela stood beside them. Anna imagined she surveyed the chaos with satisfaction. Soon she would be rid of most of the refugees who had been such a burden on her, and if Helvidius was right, she would keep exactly those people who would do her the most good. Ai, Lady. Where was Matthias?

"I have to go find Matthias!" she said to Helvidius. "Keep watch over
—" She set Helen down and the little girl set up a howling.

"Don't leave me!" he gasped, suddenly white and leaning on his stick as if he might fall the next instant. "If they go
— I don't believe I can walk so far alone, me and the child—"

"I won't leave you!" she promised.

"Anna!"

Matthias came running with one of the men from the tannery. They conferred hastily with a sergeant, who stepped back from the pungent smell that clung to their clothes. Quickly enough, Anna, Helvidius, and little Helen were called out of the line.

"Yes," said Matthias, "this is my grandfather and my two sisters."

"You're to stay here, then," said the sergeant, and dismissed them by turning away to order his soldiers into formation, a group in the van and one at the end and some to march single file on either side of the refugees. Anna could not tell whether this was meant to protect the refugees or to keep them from escaping the line.

"Come on, then, lad," said the tanner with a frown, glancing toward the mob of children and away as quickly, as if he didn't like what he saw. "Let's get back to work." He walked away.

Anna started after him. She had no desire to stay and watch.

"Anna!" Matthias called her back. "We're to get a hut. Give the canvas over to those poor souls, and the pot, too. And you may as well give over the food as well, what poor scraps there are. There's so few of us left here that we won't want for so much, not until late in the winter, anyway, and those scraps will help them better than us."

She stared as the soldiers at the van started forward. Slowly, like a lurching cart, the line of children moved forward, and the wailing and crying reached a sudden overwhelming pitch. "I can't do it," she said, sobbing. "How can you choose? You do it." She blindly thrust canvas, pot, and food pouch into Matthias' arms and then grabbed Helen up and ran as well as she could back toward the tannery precincts. She could not bear to watch the others march away into what danger and what uncertainty she could not imagine, only dreaded to think of walking there herself. Ai, Lady, what would they eat? Where would they shelter? What if the cold autumn winds turned to the cruel storms of winter? How many would even reach the distant east, and what would become of them, saved from Gent and yet driven away from this haven, such as it was, by the greed of householder and duchess working in concert?

And yet perhaps it was too hard to shelter so many here with no rescue for Gent in sight
—for surely no one expected the young lord and his retinue to drive the Eika away on their own.

Helen had stopped bawling and now clung to her in silence. She paused on the rise and stared back as the mob of children, hundreds of them, started walking reluctantly, resignedly, toddlers stumbling along in the wake of elder children, thin legs bare to the cold, their pathetic belongings strapped to backs already bowed under the weight. They had so far to go.

Tears blinded her briefly as a glint of sun struck out from a rent in the clouds and shone into the midst of the line of children. She blinked back a blurring vision of a bright figure walking among them, a woman robed in a white tunic with blood dripping down her hands, and then the vision vanished. Anna turned away to look toward the young lord who surveyed this exodus with dispassion.

Master Helvidius hobbled up beside her, so exhausted from the morning's excitement, his legs buckling under him, that she and Matthias had to half carry him back to the tannery. Little Helen walked beside them singing a tuneless melody, and by the time Master Helvidius and Helen were settled in the shelter of a lean-to set up against the tannery fence, and Matthias sent back to work, and Anna gone out again to the stream to haul water, the line of refugees had vanished from sight.

Only the deserted camp remained.

ANNA had never seen a noble lord so close before. Nor had she ever imagined that a table could groan under the weight of so much food. She had never seen people eat and drink as much as these did: Lord Wichman, eldest son and second child of Duchess Rotrudis, his cousin Lord Henry
—named after the king—and their retinue of young nobles and stalwart men-at-arms. The young nobles boasted about the battles they would fight with the Eika in the days to come. The men-at-arms, who drank as lustily as their noble masters, were wont to get into fistfights when their interest in Master Helvidius' lengthy and complicated court poems waned.

It had not taken long after the departure of the refugees for the mayor of Gent
—desperate to find amusement for Mistress Gisela's noble guests—to remember that he had left a court poet out among the refugees and to wonder if the old man had remained behind.

"You'll go to his summons?" demanded Matthias that next afternoon, amazed and appalled, "after he deserted you here when he took the rest of his servants inside the palisade?"

"Pride hath no place among the starving," said Master Helvidius. So each evening he took Anna with him to carry his stool and help support him on the long walk up the rise that led to the inner court, and of course Helen had to tag along as well, for there was no one else to watch over her with Matthias working until last light each day. The tanners and smiths and foresters worked long hours and harder even than they had before, for they now had over seventy men and thirty horses to care for, feed, and keep in armor and weapons besides those they had brought with them.

Over the next many days Lord Wichman's force marched out every day, searching for Eika, fighting a skirmish here, burning a ship there, each feat of arms retold in great detail at the night's feast. Helvidius quickly became adept at turn
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ing the details of these expeditions into flattering paeans to Lord Wichman's courage and prowess, which the young Lord never grew tired of hearing.

Anna grew equally adept at grabbing half-eaten bones off the floor before the lord's dogs could get them, or at begging crusts of bread from drunken soldiers. Master Helvidius, fed at the high table, slipped her food from the common platter, delicacies she had never before tasted: baked grouse, black pudding, pork pie, and other savories. Helen was content to sit sucking her thumb in a corner, by the hearth, eating what was offered her; the rest Anna saved in her pouch and took back to Matthias in the mornings
—she, Helen, and the poet had to sleep in the hall because once night fell, the gates to Steleshame remained shut.

Sleeping on the floor of the newly built longhall in Steleshame was a more luxurious bed than any she had slept on before. It was never bitter cold inside even as autumn eased into winter and the days grew short and gray. Little Helen got roundness back in her cheeks, and Master Helvidius' legs got stronger, although he still needed his staff to walk.