Elliott, Kate - Crown of Stars 3 (106 page)

"Ah! Liath's scribbling." He displayed a parchment covered with diagrams and equations, then set it aside to pick up an old, cracked leather sole, turning it over to see if he could find a craftsman's mark. He had Blessing tucked into one elbow. She, too, had fallen asleep, and Sanglant took her and settled her tenderly in the crook of Liath's elbow. Liath murmured something, shifting position to pillow the baby against her. With her eyes shut and her lips brushing Blessing's thick black hair, you could almost see a resemblance, but the baby's face was still too unformed.

"Liath's stronger," said Heribert softly, glancing back to make sure that Jerna hadn't followed them inside. "How much longer will you keep her innocent of that which you've discovered?"

"Lord help me, Brother, but I've only confided in you because I can't stand not to talk!" He grinned to take the sting out of the words. "But as long as we have no way free of this place, and she's still this weak, I choose this way of protecting her. Even if it makes me no better than Sister Anne."

Heribert grunted good-naturedly. "A damning comparison, my friend. Yet if she doesn't know the secret of the stones, then how can we run?"

"I would think that if I were them, then that would be the last thing I would teach her. It's an odd thing in her, that she's wise in some ways and so ignorant in others."

"I don't suppose everyone has had your wide experience of life, my lord prince."

He said it jestingly, but Sanglant shuddered. "Nor would I wish it on them."

"Hush," said Heribert, echoing Sanglant's own admonition to Liath, and for an instant Sanglant thought the cleric was comforting him. Then, looking at the cant of his head, he realized Heribert was listening.

Jerna was singing. But it wasn't a song, it wasn't even really a tune but more like the brook's voice.

He slipped outside, Heribert right behind him.

He didn't see her at first, only water slipping over the huge wall of boulders that blocked one edge of the meadow. Heribert tugged on his sleeve and drew him forward, pointing, face flushed and sweating with excitement.

She was singing her way into the rock fall, not gouging a path but opening one that had lain closed and invisible where the brook cut down through the rock.

He waited only long enough to stake down the dog on a long lead by the cottage door before he followed her into the rock fall. Heribert dogged him, clipping his heels once, once grasping at his salamander sword belt when he slipped on a slope of pebbles. But the path was obvious and clearly marked, once you knew you were on it, winding up beside the brook through a spill of boulders as big as cottages and skirting the edge of ragged cliff faces until it speared up a narrow defile and ended on a ledge that looked down into another place. Jerna would come no farther than the last tumble of stones, but Sanglant walked all the way out until the wheel-rutted path turned into a thin trail more like a goat's path. He didn't see any goats although two little gray birds flitted along a nearby rock face, probing in crevices with their slender bills. It was almost a different season here: snow still covered half the hillside although here and there, on the sunniest slopes, gorse bloomed. He took a few steps farther on, kicking snow off the path, and came to rest on an outcropping from which he could view the vista beyond.

Below, a road wound through a steep-sided pass bounded by cliffs and shadowed by three monumentally high peaks that gleamed in the sun. Mist shrouded the highest peak, but the others rose stark and clear against the blue vault of sky, so white that their glare hurt his eyes.

"God preserve us," whispered Heribert, coming up beside him. "This is St. Barnaria's Pass."

"The Alfar Mountains!" breathed Sanglant. "I've never seen them except their foothills in the north. I've never ridden them, though I've heard tales." He was astounded by the high peaks. He had seen them before, of course, from Verna: one had a distinctive crook, as though the summit had slipped slightly to one side. But from this angle, they seemed just so much more massive, and he hadn't before appreciated the vast sheer face of the big middle mountain plunging down to the steep defile that cut into the land below, marking a pass. The road struck straight through the pass, engineered out of stone. Farther along, partially hidden by the thrusting shoulder of a ridge, he saw a cluster of buildings that resembled a monastery and was probably some kind of traveler's hostel.

And indeed he saw travelers on the road, a retinue fit for a grand lady or a nervous merchant hauling spices and silks from the east: a half dozen wagons and a troop of some thirty mounted soldiers and perhaps as many on foot. They were coming from the south in a line that had gotten rather strung out along the way, in part because heavy snow still blocked portions of the road and the wagons were having a hard time getting through. Now, the vanguard turned in to the hostel, and several tiny figures emerged from one of the buildings to greet them.

A banner opened in the breeze, revealing the lion, eagle, and dragon of Wendar. "Lord and Lady!" He heard his own voice tremble as he examined the riders making their way below. "It's Theophanu. Ai, God, look there! It's Captain Fulk and his men."

He had learned to make quick decisions. In battle, how swiftly and resolutely you moved often meant the difference between victory and defeat.

"This may be our only chance," he said, "for it's clear they've hidden the path and we can't come through without Jerna's aid. You go on, Heribert. I have to go back to get Liath and Blessing."

"What do you mean?"

One thing he loved about a troop of good soldiers was that once they trusted you, they knew better than to ask stupid questions. "This is our chance to escape. You descend now, go to Theophanu, and tell her that I'm coming. If we're pursued, we may have to fight."

"But—but I can't go! I'm an outlaw! I'm under censure by the church."

"I don't care what you've done in the past, Heribert. You've been a good friend to me, and I trust you. Throw yourself on Theophanu's mercy. Tell her that I sent you and that I mean for you to reside under her protection, no matter what. Give her— But he had nothing to give, not even a ring, nothing that she would know was incontrovertibly his, that he would never give up except in death. He had nothing, except their life together as children. "Remind her of the time we saved the robin's eggs from Margrave Judith's cat, and got that bastard Hugh a whipping for almost letting the cat drown." He shoved Heribert forward. "Go!"

No soldier had ever resisted that tone. Even a cleric might find his feet moving before his mind had fully agreed.

Heribert stumbled down the path, fetched up in a drift of snow, arms waving like those of a jellyfish, slave to the currents he was caught up in. "I hate to leave you, my lord prince," he called, looking as if he meant to turn around and come back.

"Heribert," he shouted, almost beside himself, knowing when action was needed and talking of no use, "if it's true about the Lost Ones, that they're to return in an avalanche of fire and blood, then King Henry needs to know! He needs to know that my daughter is the great-great-grandchild of Taillefer! Damn it! Just use your wits. Go!"

Maybe Henry wouldn't believe such an outrageous story, but it didn't matter. Sanglant knew an opportunity when he saw one. He waited only long enough to see Heribert stagger on down the path. Then he turned and sped back up into the rocks. Jerna followed at his shoulder, agitated, plucking at him as if to haul him back, but he was in too much of a hurry to heed her now. He knew what burned in his heart: he was restless; he had recovered. His entire life he had lived as movement, striking when his enemy's line was weak, training new Dragons, hunting, whoring—in all honesty he could scarcely call it anything else—riding from one skirmish to the next to protect his father's kingdom. He wasn't used to inaction, and it felt now as if he had finally woken up from a long, long sleep.

"Liath!" he cried as he slipped out from the hidden crevice with Jerna whimpering behind him, and burst into the meadow. Flowers bloomed in such profusion that the meadow seemed more like a garden, a peaceful paradise.

Except for the ugly stench of blood.

His Eika dog lay by the cottage, throat cut. Green-copper blood soaked into the grass.

Anne was waiting for him, standing patiently by the door with her hands clasped before her exactly in the manner of those of her namesake, St. Anne the Peaceful, whose image he had seen painted on one pier of Taillefer's chapel in Autun. Her hound sat beside her, scratched up around the muzzle, skin stained with copperish fluid, but otherwise unharmed. It stiffened, growling when it saw Sanglant, but Anne stilled it with a touch on its head.

"Brother Heribert will have to take his chances," she said, "but I was rather hoping you might run, too."

He used a word so crude that at first he thought she hadn't understood him, until she spoke.

"Wicked there are in plenty, but you are right in your conclusions. The daimone acted under my orders. You will not find that path again. I had not counted on your loyalty to wife and child, although perhaps it should not surprise me. Dogs often go to the death protecting their own."

He was too angry at his own mistake to do more than gesture toward the dead Eika dog, his last and most faithful follower.

"It would not let us pass. Sister Zoe overcame her abhorrence and carried Blessing down to the tower. Brother Severus led down the horse. Liath still lies asleep inside, since none of us have the brute strength to carry her and she would slip right through the servants' arms." She stepped aside so that he could pass by her, and he tried to draw his sword, but the servants swarmed about him and so clotted the air about his wrist that he could not move it up or down. "She is not meant for that world, Prince Sanglant. Did we neglect to tell you that she has been excommunicated and outlawed by a council presided over by your own father? Nay? That she has dwelt here and learned more of the secrets of the mathematici would only seal her fate. In Darre, they execute mathematici. Go then, leave us. I will still let you depart, alone. It is better this way."

Never let it be said that he did not fight until the last breath, or that he abandoned his own.

He needed to say nothing. They both knew it was war.

He walked past her, into the cottage, to get his wife, and with Anne at his heels and Jerna trailing skittishly behind, he returned mute and furious to Verna.

THE chapel at Autun commissioned by Taillefer and built by his craftsmen was the most beautiful building Hanna had ever seen, eight huge pillars separating eight vaults, each arch made of alternating blocks of light and dark stone. On the second level, slender columns rose higher yet, with a third tier of columns above them, illuminated by tall windows. Behind this grandiose octagon lay the ambulatory where hangers-on and servants like Hanna waited, able to see into the central space where the regnant might conduct his ceremonies or wait to be admitted to the apse beyond the eastern vault, where the altar lay.

Taillefer's tomb lay at the center, under the dome. The huge stone coffin was topped by a lifelike effigy, a stone portrait that despite his legendary craftsmen did not quite rival the effigy of Lavastine at Lavas Church. But jewels encrusted his stone robes, formed into stylized roses, and he held in his marble hands a gold crown with seven points, each point set with a gem: a gleaming pearl, lapis lazuli, pale sapphire, carnelian, ruby, emerald, and banded orange-brown sardonyx. A crowd of saints painted onto the stocky piers watched over him, each one so distinctive that Hanna felt that she knew them all, like old and familiar relatives.

But almost everyone else was not observing the saints or the crown but rather the scene unfolding on the dais that held Taillefer's remains.

"No!" Tallia had flung herself at her uncle's feet and was now clutching his ankles with her bony hands. "I beg you, Uncle, if you love me at all, do not leave me here with my mother." Her sobs echoed liquidly in the chapel.

If the scene had not been so embarrassing, Hanna would have laughed outright at the expression on Henry's face. He rarely showed his true feelings so nakedly. "I pray you, Constance," he said to his sister, who reigned as biscop and as duke, "remove her from my sight, if you will. I tender her into your care."

Biscop Constance had the reserve of a woman who is at peace with God and well aware that she also lies blameless in the eyes of the regnant. If she was as disgusted with Tallia as was Henry, Hanna could not tell from the smooth tenor of her face.

"Tallia," she said, pressing a hand onto the girl's thin shoulder, "you must control yourself. You will stay under my care here. That your mother bides here as well is also through her own choosing. As I hear it, you cast aside a vocation at Quedlinhame and then a respectable marriage. Now you will stay at Autun until we see what is to be done with you."