In the Ruins (44 page)

“We’re all afraid. What lies within us can be as fearful a thing as all those terrors that lie without. He had courage when he needed it.”

“That is enough,” said Hathui through her tears. She sat back on her heels and placed a hand over Liath’s. “I’ll stand by you, Liath, whatever comes.”

“Will you stand by Sanglant?”

“He has already won my loyalty.”

“Then I accept your offer gladly, Hathui, and I’ll tell you, there is none I value more.”

Hathui’s gaze narrowed as she examined Liath’s face. “Did you know your eyes shine when it’s dark? I never noticed that before. It’s like a touch of blue fire. What lies within you, truly, Liath?”

“Power enough,” said Liath softly, “that I am afraid of what it can do if let go unchecked.”

“No!” said Sanglant from outside, clearly annoyed,
“but let word be brought to me at once if there is any news.”

Liath stood. Sanglant entered, and indeed he looked mightily irritated. Then he saw Hathui. He knelt at once to set a hand on her shoulder.

“What is this? Have you come to some hurt?”

“No, Your Majesty. Liath recalled a vision she had. She knows what became of my brother.”

“Brother Zacharias?”

“Yes. He is dead.”

“Ah.” He glanced at Liath. She nodded, and briefly told him the tale. “I am sorry. Brother Zacharias was a troubled man, but a brave one. In his own fashion. This is yet one more crime to add to Hugh of Austra’s list.”

“There is no sign of him, I take it,” said Liath.

“None. I’ve heard more of the tale now. He arrived in Austra out of the east but would not say where he had come from, only that he needed shelter. Gerberga brought him with her when she came west to visit Theophanu in Osterburg. Now Hugh has vanished. He must have plotted it all along. Give you the damning book, and fly away so that the taint could not touch him.”

“Where can he fly?” Liath asked. “His sister’s lands are closed to him. He must guess she has turned against him. Burchard and Liutgard will turn him over to you if they find him in Fesse or Avaria. No one in the North Mark will trust him, if he even wanted to return to such a benighted place. Where can he go? Who will take him in?”

“I’ve sent riders south and west. He might go to Varre, to offer his services to Sabella or Conrad, but Conrad never liked him either and Sabella has nothing to offer him. Where else can he go, then, except back to the poisonous nest where he gained so much power?”

“He’ll elude your searchers,” said Liath, shaking her head.

“So be it. If he flees to Varre, we’ll catch up to him. If he flies to Aosta, then he cannot trouble us here in Wendar, can he?”

“So we can pray,” said Hathui grimly, “for I would like to
sleep soundly at night. I have a boon to ask of you, Your Majesty.”

“What is that?”

“If he’s caught, I want recompense for the harm he’s done to me and my kinfolk. A grant of land, perhaps, to add to what they already claim.”

Sanglant smiled. “I so swear, Hathui. You will have satisfaction.”

“Your Majesty,” she said, head bowed, and kissed the royal seal ring on his right hand, the one he had taken off his father’s body.

He stood in unusual stillness for a long time, unwilling to break into her grief, but at last she shook her head and rose.

“There is wine,” he said. “Captain Fulk will see you get anything you wish. We’ll keep a close watch, but I expect Hugh is gone. And that you are safe from him for the time being. Still, we must be cautious.”

“Your Majesty,” she said. She nodded at Liath, and left the tent.

He remained still for a shockingly long time, and she watched him, curious and also not at all recovered from the unexpected memory of the weaving that had risen like a tide to engulf her. It had troubled her. It had roiled the waters.

“What is it?” she asked him finally.

“Did you touch him? In the library?” His voice was hoarse, but then, he always sounded like that.

“Are you jealous of him, Sanglant?”

“Of
course
I’m jealous of him! I know he—” He faltered, grimacing. “I know he … possessed your body.”

“He took what he wanted. I didn’t go to him willingly.”

“I know! I know! It just … gripes me to think of him touching you. That isn’t all of it. He has all the skills you treasure. He can read and write and puzzle over the mysteries of the heavens, just as you do.” He waved toward the walls, the ceiling, the lantern. “He knows sorcery. He’s more like you than I am.”

“That’s true,” she agreed, smiling as he got to looking
more agitated. “It’s a terrible thing to imagine that a man as evil as Hugh can be compared to me in so many ways.”

“That’s not what I meant!” he answered, laughing but still worrying at it. “He’s just so damned beautiful.”

“That’s true,” she agreed.

“How can the outer seeming so ill match the inner heart?”

“I don’t know. Yet in the end even his beauty has failed him. His own half siblings ought to trust and embrace him, but they hate and distrust him instead. He betrayed those who did trust him. He is a fugitive, a man without kinfolk or retinue to aid him. Perhaps God have set him before us as a lesson.”

“What sort of lesson? I am not well versed in these clerical riddles.”

He was amused, and no doubt a little relieved, but in her own heart laughter had fled. “‘Chaos in the world is the result of disorder in the human soul.’ I didn’t say it,” she added. “I’m just quoting. I read it in a book.”

“Which doesn’t make it any less true. Did you touch him?”

She thought of Waltharia, a nice enough woman, someone she had liked perfectly well. Someone who had shown her a moment’s surprising, and genuine, compassion.

“Why should I tell you?” she asked him, and when he winced, she was glad of seeing him pained. She hadn’t known she harbored so sharp a sting in her inner heart. Flame trembled. She had learned how to contain it, but maybe she was more like Hugh than she knew, wanting to hurt what she could not control.

“Nay,” he said raggedly, “I have no right to question you on such matters, God know. I trust you. Let’s leave it at that.”

“I would as soon touch Hugh as lie in a bed of maggots,” she said, relenting. “Let’s leave it at that. There’s much to be considered these next two days and not least of them is what royal garments can be found for your investiture. Waltharia has said she will help me in finding suitable clothing.”

“Waltharia?”

“Oh, indeed, we are quite close, she and I.”

She was doubly pleased, and ashamed of the pleasure she took in it, to see him look askance at her, and frown, and scratch one shoulder in a way that showed he was quite discomfited by these tidings, wondering what they meant and what the two women might have said to each other. He took refuge in pacing, and she let him pace as she allowed the turmoil in her heart to simmer in an alarmingly smug manner.

In time, he came to rest beside the bench. He picked up the book, opened it with the exaggerated care of a man who rarely touches such things, and shook his head as he stared at one of the pages. From this angle, she could not see which one.

“I haven’t the patience for this,” he muttered at last as he closed and set it down with proper reverence.

“I haven’t the patience for court life.”

“No,” he agreed. “You will always say the wrong thing at the wrong time.”

“Even if I’m right!”

“Especially if you’re right,” he said, laughing. “But court is a battlefield, nothing different. You must choose not just how you arrange your forces but when and in what order you attack, when to make a strategic retreat, when to make a flanking action, when to stand your ground.”

“Its own form of scholarship.”

“Perhaps. I would not say so.”

“We each received training in our youth. That can’t be changed. I wouldn’t have it otherwise. Because of that, there is much we can learn each from the other. I’ve been thinking about Gent, and strategy, and excommunication.”

“The nobles support me. As long as they support me, the church is limited in how far its influence can reach.”

“That may be, but
I
do not wish to remain an excommunicate in the eyes or heart of the church. Of course it didn’t affect me at Verna or when I was with the Ashioi because I didn’t even know of it. In the final march against Anne it mattered little. Now it matters a great deal. I know what I must do.”

“What is that?”

“You won’t like it.”

“Is that meant to encourage me to dissuade you?”

“I mean to do it, because I know it’s right.”

“So am I threatened! I pray you, if we are to be allies, we must know what the other intends.”

“Very well,” she said. “You are not the only one who must hold a vigil.”

“I don’t like you,” said Blessing, “so go away.”

Although Lady Lavinia’s enclosed garden had not yet begun to bloom, Antonia found a measure of peace there when she was not tutoring Princess Mathilda or receiving petitioners and penitents in the great hall beside Queen Adelheid. She had been sitting in solitude on a stone bench considering the nature of evil and the punishments and penance most fitting for oath breakers. Hearing the shrill voice of her enemy’s child, she leaned forward to peer through the foliage that concealed her. A screen of clematis grew alongside the picturesque ruins of a tiny octagonal chapel, a remnant from the old Dariyan palace that had once stood here. Beneath her feet a mosaic floor, swept clean, displayed an antique tale involving two hounds, a huntress, and a half naked man. She had often encouraged Lady Lavinia to destroy the floor, but while the lady was otherwise all compliance, in this matter she refused most obstinately.

“You can’t make me go. You’re my mother’s prisoner.”

“I can punch you in the face.”

“Bastard of a bastard!”

“Am not!”

“Are so!”

“Brat! Leave off!” A masculine voice entered the fray. Antonia parted the leaves with her hands so she could see. She had succumbed once to a man of that line. It was a bitter failing to know that a youthful face and laughing, generous features might warm her still, although he was young enough to be her grandson. Berthold Villam sauntered up from the far end of the garden along the paved pathway that paralleled the irrigation channel. He was conversing amiably with his Aostan guards.

The two girls faced each other like two young furies, although Blessing looked years older. Yet their expressions and stances were remarkably similar. It was difficult to remember, seeing a woman budding out of the girl, that Blessing was very young despite the age of her body. She looked ready to spit or bite, as little hellions may do, but Berthold’s command fixed her to one spot where she fumed and got red and then white as her temper flared.

Princess Mathilda spat at Blessing’s feet before bolting for the safety of the colonnaded porch where two of her servingwomen waited in the shadows. As they led the girl away, their chatter faded out of earshot.

“… and Meto said what? Here, now, Your Highness, your mother said you weren’t to speak to the child for she’s not of your station and a wild thing indeed. Let’s go in. So, go on. What did Meto say to her when he found out she meant to marry Liutbold?”

“Marry Liutbold! Is that what that was about? That’s the first I heard of it. What can she have been thinking?”

“She’s stupid,” said Blessing.

Berthold halted beside the girl, scratching at the peach fuzz he had been growing for the last three months. “Princess Mathilda is a royal princess just as you are, Your Highness. You’d do better to make her an ally than an enemy.” He had switched to Wendish, which the guards did not, perhaps, understand.

“She’s an enemy.”

“Perhaps. But she keeps stumbling into you when she isn’t supposed to see you at all.”

“That’s because she hates me.”

“She might. Or she might wish for a child her own age to play with. She might want to like you, and act like this because she doesn’t know how else to get your attention.”

How had this youth come to be so wise?

“She’s not my own age! I’m older!”

“You look older, brat. But you don’t act it!”

“I do!” She bit her lip. She pouted. But she shut up and fixed a stare on Berthold that would have eaten another man alive.

“Come, brat,” he said more fondly, extending a hand.

She laid her head against his arm as a dog rests its muzzle lovingly along its master’s thigh.

“Here is Brother Heribert. He’s found you a green apple left over from last season. Isn’t that amazing?”

“It’ll make me puke!”

“Anna can stew it up with herbs and make it all tasty. He found some flowers, too, a kind I’ve never seen before. Maybe you can dry them and press them to make something pretty.”

“I don’t want to. Papa let me fight with swords. I want to fight with swords!”

One of the guards made a noise halfway between a hiccup and a cough.

“I can so! I can so!”

“Blessing!”

She shut her eyes and to Antonia’s amazement did not burst into tears, as she would have done just two months ago. She struggled, that dusky face mobile in all its expressions, flashing quickly from thwarted anger through innocent bewilderment into a determination that showed itself by the way she jutted out her jaw.