Elliott, Kate - Crown of Stars 3 (29 page)

One woman among the assembly was not weeping: Theophanu. She had lowered her gaze but under those heavy, dark lids—so like Queen Sophia's—she examined Father Hugh. Her expression had the placid innocence of a holy mosaic, pieced together out of colored stone, and not even Rosvita, who knew her as well as anyone, could tell what she was thinking. Did she want to marry Conrad? Did she still hoard her infatuation for Father Hugh? Did she know the name of the maleficus who had tried to kill her?

Hugh had taken a book of forbidden magic from the young Eagle, Liath. Was it only coincidence that the unnamed magus had attempted to sicken Theophanu through the agency of a ligatura woven into a brooch shaped as a panther?

"Make way! Make way!"

Henry dropped Conrad's arm as a small procession appeared. Everyone began to talk at once, pointing and whispering. The king stepped back up onto the first of the two steps that mounted the platform, but there he paused, waiting, and Duke Conrad turned and with a surprised expression moved aside to make room.

"Your Majesty." Prince Sanglant pulled up his horse at a re spectful distance from the throne. He looked travel-worn and unkempt with his rich tunic damp from rain and his hair uncombed, but by some indefinable air he wore as always the mantle of authority. But the Eika dogs that trailed at his heels reminded everyone of what he had been—and what he still harbored within himself. He made a sign, and his escort of a dozen soldiers and two servingmen turned aside and dismounted.

There was one other person with them: a dark young woman with a regal air and a look of tense hauteur, held distant from the crowd that surrounded her. It took Rosvita a moment to recognize her, although it should not have. What on God's earth was the Eagle—as good as banished yesterday together with Wolfhere—doing with him? Or was she still an Eagle? She no longer wore badge or cloak, although she rode a very fine gray gelding.

Prince Sanglant was not a subtle man. Liath glanced toward him, and he reached to touch her on the elbow. The glance, the movement, the touch: these spoke as eloquently as words.

"What means this?" demanded Henry.

But every soul there knew what it meant: Sanglant, the obedient son, had defied his father.

Rosvita knew well the signs of Henry's wrath; he wore them now: the tic in his upper lip, the stark lightning glare in his eyes, the threatening way he rested his royal staff on his forearm as if in preparation for a sharp blow. She stepped forward in the hope of turning his anger aside, but Hugh had already moved to place himself before the king.

"I beg you, Your Majesty." His expression was smooth but his hands were trembling. "She no longer wears the Eagle's badge that marks her as in your service. Therefore, she is now by right—
and your judgment
—my slave."

"She is my wife," said Sanglant suddenly. His hoarse tenor, accustomed to the battlefield, carried easily over the noise of the throng. Everyone burst into exclamations at once, and after a furious but short-lived uproar, the assembly like a huge beast quieted, the better to hear. Even the king's favorite poet or a juggling troupe from Aosta did not provide as thrilling an entertainment as this.

The prince dismounted and everyone stared as he hammered i an iron stake into the ground and staked down the dogs. From their savage presence all shrank back as the prince walked forward to stand before his father. Clouds covered the sun, and rain spattered the crowd, enough to keep the dust down and to wet tongues made dry by anticipation.

"She is my wife," Sanglant repeated, "by mutual consent, witnessed by these soldiers and a freewoman of Ferse village, and made legal and binding by the act of consummation and by the exchange of morning gifts."

" 'Let the children be satisfied first,' " said Hugh in a low, furious voice. She had never before seen him lose his composure, but he was shaking visibly now, flushed and agitated. " 'It is not fair to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs.' "

"Hugh," warned his mother from her place near the king.

Abruptly, Liath replied in a bold and angry voice. " 'Even the dogs under the table eat the children's scraps.' "

Hugh looked as if he had been slapped. He bolted toward her. That fast, and more smoothly than Rosvita believed possible, Sanglant stepped between them, and Hugh actually bumped up against him. But to go around the prince would be to make a fool of himself. Even so he hesitated, as if actually contemplating fighting it out hand to hand, the gracious cleric and the half-wild prince.

"I did not give my permission for you to marry," said Henry.

"I did not ask permission to marry, nor need I do so, since I am of age, and of free birth."

"She
is not free," retorted Hugh, recovering his composure so completely that she might have dreamed that flash of rage. "She is either in the king's service, and thus needs his permission to marry, or she is my slave. As a slave, she has no right to marry a man of free birth—much less, my lord prince," he added, with a humble bow, "a man of your exalted rank and birth." He turned back to the king. "Yet I would not dare to pass judgment when we must bow before your wisdom, Your Majesty."

"I gave her a choice." Henry gestured toward the young woman. "Did I not give that choice, Eagle? Have you forsaken my service and thus rebelled against my rightful authority?"

She blanched.

"Let me speak," said Sanglant.

"Sanglant," she murmured, as softly as a person caught in the whirlpool whispers with her last breath before she goes under. "Do not—"

"Sanglant." The king uttered his name with that same tone of warning with which Margrave Judith had moments before spoken her own son's name.

"I will speak! The blessed Daisan said that it is not the things that go into a man from outside that defile him but the things that come out of him that defile him. Look upon him, whom you all admire and love, who is charming and elegant and handsome. Yet out of this man's heart come evil thoughts, acts of fornication forced upon a helpless woman, theft, murder, ruthless greed and malice, fraud, indecency for a man sworn to the church to cohabit with a woman, envy, slander, arrogance—and with his hands and his fine manners he has blinded you all with
sorcery
—

Theophanu started up out of her chair.

Margrave Judith strode forward, flushed with anger. "I will not stand by quietly while my son is insulted and abused—

"Silence!" roared the king. "How dare you question my judgment in this way, Sanglant!"

"Nay, Your Majesty," said Hugh with humble amiability, grave and patient. "Let him speak. Everything Prince Sanglant says is true, for I am sure that he hates lying and loves me. Who among us is worthy? I know only too well that I am a sinner. None censures me more than I do myself, for I have often failed in my service toward my king, and toward God."

Did Hugh say one thing more to Sanglant? His lips moved, but Rosvita could not hear—

Sanglant growled in rage and struck in fury: He hit the unresisting Hugh so hard backhanded that Hugh crumpled to the ground, teeth cracking, and before anyone else could move Sanglant dove for him like a dog leaping for the kill. The Eika dogs went wild, yammering and tugging on their chains as they dragged the stake out of the dirt and bolted forward.

People screamed and stumbled back. Liath flung herself off her horse and grabbed for the chains, getting brief hold of the stake before it was yanked out of her hands. Rosvita was too shocked to move while all around her the court scattered—all but Judith, who unsheathed her knife to defend her son. All but the king himself, who bellowed Sanglant's name and jumped forward to grab him by the back of the tunic to haul him off Hugh.

The dogs hit Henry with the full force of their charge.

Rosvita shrieked. She heard it as from a distance, unaware she could utter such a terrible sound. Someone tugged frantically at her robe. Sanglant beat back the dogs in a frenzy, away from his father, and behind him Liath shouted a warning to Vil-lam—who had dashed forward to the king—while she scrabbled in the dirt for the hammer and grasped the stake, trying to drag back on the chains. Lions charged in. They clubbed down the dogs, braved their fierce jaws to grab their legs and drag them off the king, and hacked at them mercilessly until blood spattered the ground like rain.

Pity stabbed briefly, vanished as Sanglant emerged from the maelstrom with Henry supported in his arms. Ai, God! The king was injured! She hurried to his side, vaguely aware of three attendants pressed close behind her: her clerics, who had not deserted her.

Sanglant thrust Henry into the arms of the princesses and plunged back in the fray.

"Down!" His voice rang out above everything else. "Hold! Withdraw!"

The Lions obeyed. How could they not? The prince knew how to command in battle. They withdrew cautiously, and he knelt beside the dogs.

Rosvita knelt beside the king, who had a weeping tear in his left arm, cloth mangled and stained with saliva and blood, threads shredded into skin. Claws had ripped the tunic along his back, too, but mercifully the thick royal robe had protected him from all but a shallow scratch. He shook off the shock of the impact and pushed himself upright. "Your Majesty!" she protested.

"Nay!" He shook off all who ran to assist him, even his daughters, as he limped forward.

"Your Majesty!" cried Villam, and a dozen others, as he approached Sanglant and the dogs, but he did not heed them.

One of the dogs was dead. As Henry halted beside him, Sanglant took out his knife and cut the throat of the second, so badly hacked that it could not possibly survive. The third whimpered softly and rolled to bare its throat to the prince. He stared into its yellow eyes. Blood dripped from its fangs; dust and the vile greenish blood born of its own foul body smeared its iron-gray coat.

"Kill it," said Henry in a voice made dull by rage.

Sanglant looked up at him, glanced at Liath, who stood holding the iron stake in a bloodied hand . . . then sheathed the knife.

The shock of Sanglant's defiance hit Henry harder than the dogs had. He staggered, caught himself on Villam, who got under his arm just in time to steady him. Rosvita's mind seemed to be working at a pace so sluggish that not until this moment did she register Father Hugh, who had somehow gotten out of range and now, supported by his mother, spit bits of tooth onto the ground. Blood stained his lips, and his right cheek had the red bloom of a terrible bruise making ready to flower.

"I will retire to my chamber," said Henry, so far gone in wrath that all the heat had boiled off to make a fearsomely cold rage beneath. "There, he will be brought to meet my judgment."

Villam helped him away. Servingmen swarmed around them.

Rosvita knew she ought to follow, but she could not make her legs work. She stared at the assembly as they parted to make way for the king, dissolved into their constituent groups to slip away and plot in private over the upheaval sure to follow. Images caught and burned into her mind: Duke Conrad staying Princess Theophanu with a hand lightly touching her elbow, a comment exchanged, the shake of her head in negation, his eyes narrowing as he frowned and stepped back from her to let her by when she walked after her father; Sapientia flushed red with anger and humiliation, taking the arm of her young Eagle and turning deliberately away from Hugh as if to make clear that he had fallen into disfavor; Judith with her lips pressed tight in a foreboding glower; Ivar trying to break through the crowd to get to Liath but being hopelessly caught up in the tide that washed him away from her and then held back bodily by young Baldwin.

"Sister!" whispered Amabilia. Fortunatus had hold of her right arm, whether to support her or himself she could not tell. Constantine wept quietly. "Come, Sister, let us withdraw."

Everyone, eddying, swirled away to leave at last several dozen soldiers, two dead dogs and an injured one, the bride, and the prince amid a spray of blood. Left alone, abandoned even by those who had championed him before.

This was the price of the king's displeasure.

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IN an odd way, the disaster only made her more stubbornly resolute. She stood beside one of the dead dogs, and as its copperish blood leached away into the dirt, she felt a desperate obstinance swell in her heart as if the creature's heart's blood, soaking into the earth, made a transference of substance up through her feet to harden her own.

She was not going to let the king take Sanglant away from her.