In the Ruins (37 page)

“Too warm all winter,” said Hathui. “Too dry in the south last year, when we were down there. A terrible drought, so bad every blade of grass was brittle. Up here, everything is soggy. I’ve got mold on my feet!”

Everyone laughed, and for a while they talked about how their feet itched and how their clothes and tents stank of mildew. Everyone had mold on their feet except Liath, who was never sick and never plagued by fleas or lice or rashes. She sat as usual in the back. The other Eagles were accustomed to her presence in a way no one else could be. They ignored her. For her part, she braided fiber into rope as Eldest Uncle had taught her. At intervals she played surreptitiously at setting twigs to burn, honing her ability to call fire into smaller and smaller targets. Mostly, she listened to their news and their gossip and their conclusions as well as the information they had gleaned speaking to the locals. She listened to Ernst’s earnest report of conditions in Wendar over the last six months or more, ever since that windstorm had swept over them. Folk even so far north as Wendar had felt and feared and marked this unnatural tempest, although they had no way of knowing the truth.

The Eagles with Henry’s army had seen, and witnessed. Yet even they did not know the whole.

“I wonder,” she said aloud, and noted how they all stilled and started and turned, then waited for her to speak. She smiled as she realized in what manner she fooled herself, wanting to believe they did not scrutinize her every least movement and word for hidden meanings. She was no longer an Eagle. That part of her life was gone.

“I’m just wondering,” she said into their silence, “if the strange weather is an artifact of Anne’s spell. It might even be an effect of the spell woven in ancient times under the
Bwr shaman’s supervision that rebounded on us. The Bwr shaman are tempestari, so the legends say.”

“So we observed ourselves,” said Hathui. “It was her magic that stemmed the blizzard that swept over us when we were in the east.”

“Or created that blizzard.”

Because she had power over the weather.

In a still forest, an unexpected wind may agitate the leaf litter, unearthing hidden depths and items long concealed by layer upon layer of detritus. She rose, tucking fiber and the short length of rope into a pouch. Thoughts skittered like mice fleeing across a church floor suddenly illuminated by a lamp. There was a pattern there, a plan, a potential action. All at once she was too restless to sit, troubled and stimulated by a hundred threads any one of which, teased out to its end, might give her an answer.

“I’ll come with you,” said Hathui.

Liath laughed as they crossed out into the drizzle, which was already fading into spits and kisses. “Did Sanglant set you on me, to be my guard?”

“Something like that.”

“Walk with me. Let me think.”

They walked.

Time had passed unnaturally for her. It was strange to be walking in the Wendish countryside after she had traveled to such distant lands. A damp breeze stiffened her hands until she tucked them inside her sleeves and promptly stumbled on uneven ground, tripped, and had to flatten her palm on the ground to avoid pitching headlong into a mire of slimy grass and mud. She swore as she wiped her hand off. Hathui laughed.

They had set up camp beyond the fields that ringed the hilltop fortress, in scrub country used sometimes for cultivation and sometimes for pasture and sometimes left fallow. Stands of young beech grew in neat copses that had recently been trimmed back by woodcutters. Sapling ash grew in soggy hollows, everywhere surrounded by honeysuckle or fescue. She knelt beside a tangle of raspberry vines and brushed a hand over its thornlike hairs. Too tiny to light. She could not focus that tightly.

Yet.

From out in the woodland cover, they heard a horn.

“They’ve caught a scent,” said Hathui. “Why didn’t you go with him?”

“It reminds me too much of my life with Da. Look. There are the griffins.”

They glided so far above that for a moment Liath imagined them no larger than eagles.

“They must be very high,” said Hathui. “There they go.”

The specks vanished into the south, toward hills and wilder forest lands.

Crashing sounded in the brush and they turned just as a dozen riders emerged laughing and shouting excitedly, a pack of hunters separated from the main group. She recognized Sanglant among their number. He rode over to them.

So often in these last months he had looked worn by the burden of ruling, but this moment he had that same reckless, carefree attractiveness she had fallen in love with back at Gent so many years ago. Not so long ago in her memory, not nearly as long as in his.

“What are you hunting?” he asked. “You have that look on your face.” He nodded at Hathui, marking her presence, and she inclined her head in answer to his unspoken message.

“I am thinking,” Liath said, “about the weather.”

He regarded her curiously before turning in his saddle to give a signal to his retinue. They rode back toward camp. He dismounted and handed the reins of his horse to Hathui.

“What?” he asked.

“Even the sages and the church mothers did not understand the vagaries of the weather. Only God know why there is drought, or why fine growing weather. Why famine strikes, or plenty waxes and wanes across the years. But what if this weather—” She gestured toward the sky. “—is not natural weather, rather than another pattern in the unknowable pattern woven by God? What if these are unnatural clouds caused by the spell and the cataclysm? By the return of the Ashioi land? When a rock is flung into the
sky and falls to earth, a puff of dust may rise where it strikes. Volcanoes blast smoke and ash into the air. So many rivers of fire ran deep in the earth on that day. So much was shaken loose. What if we made this ourselves?”

He considered, then shrugged. “If we did so? What then?”

“There are tempestari.”

“Ah.” He tilted back his head to look for a long while at the sky. Then he began to pace. “If only you had ridden east to Blessing. Li’at’dano might have helped you. If she lives.”

“I think she does live. I’m sure of it. It’s as if she speaks to me.”

“Can you ask her, then?”

“I don’t know how to speak in dreams.” She shrugged, impatient with this train of thought. “Anyway, had I ridden east, I wouldn’t necessarily have realized how badly the weather is affected here in Wendar. We can’t dwell on ‘if onlys.’ God know I regret losing Sorgatani. She could help me. Without Eagle’s Sight, I can only wonder and wait.”

Fest bent his head and snuffled among the raspberries, but finding no fodder to his liking he tugged toward greener pastures, and after a sign from Sanglant, Hathui let him lead her away.

“It’s possible,” he said. “I have myself considered how far the ripples of this spell will spread. That the Ashioi land has returned is, I fear, the least of our troubles.”

“I’m thinking …” She trailed to a halt.

He smiled at her, touched her cheek, and she leaned against his palm for a few breaths. With that touch, she might imagine herself in a place where troubles did not wind around her and weigh so terribly on them all. She might imagine peace and a quiet chamber furnished with an orrery brought north out of Andalla. She might imagine forest and fields and the brilliant dome of heaven with stars as distinct as the flowers in a spring meadow and as numerous as the sand on a pale shoreline.

Of a wonder, he did not move, content to stand with her as she dreamed.

At last she sighed. “Sister Rosvita once spoke to me of a
convent dedicated to St. Valeria, under the rule of Mother Rothgard. In that place they kept certain forbidden records of the sorcerous arts. If I went there—it isn’t that far from here—they might have the answers I seek.”

“To make of yourself a tempestari? Do you mean to shake the winds loose and unveil the heavens?” He withdrew his hand, but he was laughing at her with such sweetness and pride that she felt tears fill her eyes, although they did not spill.

“If I must. If I can. It is what I can do.”

“It is,” he agreed, “if anyone can.”

“I was named after her, the greatest sorcerer known to humankind.”

“Who is not human.”

“Perhaps that’s why.”

“When will you go? Should I escort you?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t thought beyond wondering.”

“Then favor me in this way, Liath. Wait until this matter with my aunt is resolved. Let me be crowned and anointed and you beside me as my queen. After that you will command a retinue of your own. It will be a simpler matter to send you to this convent on your own progress.”

She shook her head, smiling. “In this way, we’re well matched, Sanglant.”

“In what way?” he asked, shifting as might a hound that suddenly distrusts its master as she waves it toward a tub of bathwater.

“Where I am ignorant, you are wise.”

“And in like manner, in the other direction?”

She laughed and kissed him. The day seemed at once hotter, brighter, brilliant, but she knew how fragile happiness could be and how swiftly it could pass, veiled by clouds.

THEY heard the horn midmorning the next day. Soon after, an Eagle cantered up to the royal tent, dismounted, and knelt before Sanglant. He was sitting, hearing the morning reports, but he waved the others away and they stepped back to make room for the Eagle.

“You are Gilly, sent to Osterburg.”

She nodded. She was at least a dozen years older than he was, and slighter than most of the women who became Eagles, but she was tough like a whipcord. “I have returned in the retinue of Princess Theophanu, Your Majesty. I rode ahead to tell you this news.”

“What message from my sister?”

She looked at Hathui, then back at the king. “She sends no message, Your Majesty. She herself rides to Quedlinhame. She’ll be here today.”

Because of the way the camp was sited, set back about a league from the town wall and surrounded by a blend of scrub trees and open ground, they heard a flurry of horns at midday but saw nothing. Soon afterward, Lewenhardt noted a trio of banners flying over the tower next to the owl standard marking the presence of Mother Scholastica, but it was too far away for him to make out their markings.

Near dusk, with a wind whipping up out of the southeast, a sentry came running to announce that a party approached from town.

“Let the men assemble.” Sanglant took his place in the chair that his father had used while traveling. He drew his fingers over the carved arms: here an eagle’s sharp beak, there a lion’s rugged mane running smooth under his skin, and under this the hollows and ridges of its paws. He set his feet square on the ground in front of him, although he had to tap his right foot.

A host came, led by Mother Scholastica on her white mule who, as abbess of the venerable and holy institution of Quedlinhame, was as powerful as any duke. Four monks
and four nuns walked with lamps held high, lighting her way.

Behind her rode Theophanu on a gray mare. His sister wore a fine gown that appeared silver in the fading light, stitched with gold thread. There were other women with her. One he knew immediately, even with the lowering twilight and the distance, and he flushed and glanced at Liath, who sat frowning beside him, obviously uncomfortable but brave enough to stick it out. She was squinting, head tilted to one side, trying to see something. Her hands tightened. She took in a sharp breath.

Waltharia, margrave of the Villams, had ridden to Osterburg and now come to Quedlinhame, no doubt because she had heard the news of his return. She wore a cloak. What she wore beneath he could not discern, but he knew well enough the feel of her, that old and pleasurable memory. Desire stirred, and he shut his eyes briefly to fight it. He was a little embarrassed, in truth, because he still felt an abiding affection for her, and he knew that while it was all very well for Liath to accept and dismiss the existence of women who no longer had any chance to get close to him, it was a different matter entirely to have to dine and laugh with a woman who had been his first and most famous lover. Whom he had, not two years ago—well, never mind that. Perhaps Waltharia would hate him because her husband Druthmar had died in the south, fighting in his army. Perhaps, but he doubted it. She would grieve, and then find another husband; that was the way of the world.

He could not help anyway but be glad to see her, because he knew she would support him. He hoped she would support him. He needed her support.

Theophanu had come armored with other great nobles of the realm besides Waltharia: Wichman’s twin sisters, Sophie and Imma, Biscop Suplicia of Gent, Biscop Alberada of Handelburg, two other women in biscop’s surplices whose names he did not know, and three abbots. Margrave Judith’s heir, named Gerberga, rode at Theophanu’s right hand. He did not know her well. Beside her rode his
younger half brother, Prince Ekkehard, dressed as a noble, not as a cleric, and in any case easy to overlook among the rest.

They were handsome women, each in her own way, splendid and terrible, a phalanx that could help him or harm him depending on their wishes and their whims. These were the powers of the realm in whose hands he must place his father’s body and in whose eyes he must prove his worthiness to rule as regnant.

Three ranks of lesser nobles and courtiers rode behind them, all come to confront or placate the man who claimed Henry’s throne. Belatedly, he noticed that it was one of these, in the second rank, who had caught Liath’s attention. She stared, her expression fixed and cold and unreadable.

“I will not,” she whispered, so low it was clear she meant no man or woman to hear her, but he had a dog’s hearing, keener than that of humankind. “I have climbed the ladder of the mages. I have walked through fire and lived. That which harmed me can harm me now only if I allow it to, and I will not.”

A cold shock ran through him. He ought to have noticed. He had not. But Liath had. She had seen his beautiful face first of all:

Hugh
.

IT was a shock, but she let the anger and fear burn off her. A part of her would always remember, a part of her would always cringe. But not the greater part, not anymore. She could face what she had once feared without shrinking back from the expected blow.