In the Ruins (61 page)

“I have no reason to suppose there are descendants of those men, besides yourself and your daughter and young sons.”

“Then how—? What—? You are saying you believe there is another surviving descendant of my great great grandmother, Count Lavastina. She had no surviving siblings, no nieces or nephews to contest the elder Charles’ portion. The family lineage is written carefully by the Lavas clerics, but there is no record of it!” He grinned, the gesture more rictus than smile.

“If it could be proved that a rightful claimant existed, would you step aside?”

“My daughter inherits nothing except Lavas County.”

“If it could be proved that there exists a person whose claim supersedes hers, would you withdraw her claim?”

Geoffrey gestured recklessly, a broad swipe. Sorrow barked at the abrupt movement but at a word from Alain held still. “Why not? You’re a fool to speak so! If you’ll give your pledge to make no claim yourself, to reject the claim Lavastine made on your behalf, then I’ll pledge in my turn to accept that claim which supersedes that of my daughter. But it must withstand scrutiny! Biscop Constance herself, or a council of church folk with equal authority, must certify the truth of the claim. You can’t pass off some girl—is that it? Is that the story of the child you want to leave here?”

“No. She is the unwanted granddaughter of a householder from Osna Sound, nothing more.”

“Very well, then! We’ll make these pledges publicly and have them written down. You’ll depart, and leave me and my daughter in peace!”

Alain smiled sadly. “Beware of making such a pledge lightly, Lord Geoffrey, and only because you believe it will not turn around to bite you.”

“I just want you gone before the sun sets!”

“So be it.”

GEOFFREY had a guard waiting outside, and these dozen sullen men escorted them back to the hall with Mistress Dhuoda. The chatelaine twisted her hands fretfully as they walked.

“Sit here until the folk hereabouts can be assembled, enough to swear to what they see and hear,” said Geoffrey brusquely once they had come into the hall. He took his captain aside and gave him orders, and sent Dhuoda to fetch his daughter from the upper rooms.

Alain sat on a bench in the corner of the hall. The hounds lay down at his feet. He sat there so quietly that after a while, when most of the guards went out to round up an assembly, it seemed they had forgotten him. On this cold spring afternoon no one used the hall. It appeared, by the arrangement of tables, that no feast had entertained the rafters for a good long time. The high table was pushed up against the wall of the dais; neither chairs nor benches rested beside it. A pair of tables and benches sat end to end by the wide hearth, where a fire burned, although it did not warm the corner where he waited. In the good days, under Lavastine, fully four or five score people might crowd into the hall for a grand feast. Now it appeared that a dozen ate by the fire, perhaps on warmer days, and that otherwise folk ate in their own chambers or houses, or in the barracks and kitchen. The floor was recently swept clean except
for a spattering of bird droppings just to the left of where the entrance doors opened wide to the porch.

Alain gazed at the rafters by the door. A pair of swallows had been used to build their nest there, tolerated because swallows were thought to bring good luck, but he saw no activity.

Voices buzzed from outside, but no one came in past the two guards standing on the long porch, whose backs he could see. Once, long ago, he had sat in the high seat and presided over Lavas county, her lands and her people. He did not regret what he had lost. Those days seemed like a dream, something glimpsed but never really held. Once Tallia had sat beside him as his wife. How he had loved her! Yet what had he loved, truly? A dream. A wish. An illusion. She was not the person he had made her to be in his mind. Perhaps we can only be betrayed where we have allowed ourselves to be blinded. If we know a man is evil or untrustworthy, then we cannot be surprised if he acts dishonestly or in a way that harms others. If we see clearly, we cannot be surprised.

It was easy now to recall those days and see Tallia for what she truly was: weak in spirit, petty, frightened, cruel in a small-minded way, and intent on getting her own way, without regard to others. The broken vessel, Hathumod had called her, too fragile to hold the weight of the heresy she claimed with the authority of one who has witnessed. She had lied about the nail, but in fact when he thought back through his sad marriage, she had not lied about wanting to marry him. Her uncle had forced her to marry. She had stated openly from the beginning that she prayed every day and every night for a chaste marriage and perpetual virginity.

He had wanted to believe otherwise so badly that in the end he had betrayed Lavastine by lying to a man he respected and loved. Ah, well. It was done and could not be undone.

Dust filtered down around him. Sorrow’s tail thumped on the floor. A horse neighed outside, challenging another. A door creaked behind him, being opened. He wondered if he had dreamed that second betrayal, the one at the
mines. Those months were as a puzzle to him, seen in glimpses all hacked into parts that could not be sewn back into a complete tapestry.

Tallia had been pregnant, and she had ordered her steward to cast him into the pit because she had recognized him and feared he would recognize her and harm her. Which betrayal burned worst? That she had tried to have him killed, or that she had given another man the thing she had refused to him?

Desire is a fiend that devours its victims while they still live and breathe.

And still. What she had refused him, Adica had offered freely and with the sweetness of meadow flowers. Who could say which woman valued herself more highly? The one who gave that which was precious to her, or the one who lied to hold it all to herself?

“I pray you, I beg your pardon, my lord. Forgive me.”

He almost overset the bench because he was so startled by the familiar voice. The hounds remained still. Rage’s tail thumped once. Cook bent into an awkward bow before him. Arthritis stiffened her back.

He wiped his forehead, shook his head to cast off his thoughts, and took her hand as he stood. “Do not bow, Cook. I pray you. Ah! Here is Blanche!”

The girl squeezed up against him, hugging his side.

“I must speak before the rest come in,” Cook continued, wheezing. “They’re holding them all outside. I snuck in the back way.”

“Sit, I pray you.”

“It’s easier for me to stand with my aching bones, my lord. Let me just say my piece, and I won’t bother you more.”

“Go on.”

She had lost several teeth, which made her cheeks sunken, but her gaze remained firm and intelligent. “I beg your pardon, my lord. I did not mean for Lord Geoffrey to discredit you. Last year I told him what I did know, because he asked me for the truth.”

“You said nothing but what you knew to be true. You have no need to apologize for it.”

“Yet I’m sorry. I never believed he would treat you so cruelly. I wouldn’t treat a dog so, chained and caged like that! So I told him!”

“Then you did me a service for speaking when you might have kept silent. Never mind it.” He patted Blanche on the head. “What of the girl?”

“Oh! This one?” The pinched look left her face. She gave a grand smile and tweaked the girl’s ear fondly. “What a hard-working little creature she is, isn’t she, then? She stuck beside me all this time and did everything I asked of her. Good with a knife! Very careful handed, which you don’t often see in a child this age. I can’t trust just any lass with peeling and cutting. Washed me up turnips and parsnips, cutting out the soft spots, of which there are plenty, for these are the end of our winter store and some of them mostly mush by now.”

Blanche blushed, face half hidden against Alain’s tunic, but she was smiling proudly.

“Will you keep her in the kitchens, then, as your helper? And keep care of her? Can you do that?”

“For you, my lord? Willingly. I swear to you I will do by her as I would for my own granddaughter.”

“You’ll stay here, Blanche.”

“I want to go with you, Uncle,” she said into the cloth.

“You can’t.” He only needed to say it once. “Here you’ll stay. Tell me you understand.”

She spoke in a muted voice while her arms clutched him. “I stay with Cook.”

A dozen soldiers tromped onto the porch and came into the hall, placing themselves to either side of the dais. A pair of servants carried the count’s chair in from another chamber and set it in front of the high table. Folk moved cautiously into the hall behind the soldiers, their movement like the eddying of river currents caught in a backwater. A few crept close to him and knelt furtively, whispering words he could not really hear because of the shifting of feet and murmur of voices.

A door banged—open or closed. The assembly quieted as Lord Geoffrey entered with his young daughter. It was difficult to tell her age. She had a childish face and was
short and slender and in addition walked with a pronounced limp, but despite her pallor she kept her chin high and gaze steady as she looked first at Alain and then over the assembled soldiers and local people for whom she was responsible as Count of Lavas. The hounds growled, a rumble in their throats too soft for anyone but him, and perhaps Blanche, to hear.

Lavrentia alone sat. Even her father remained standing.

“Let me hear your pledge,” she said in a high, clear voice. She lifted a hand to give him permission to approach, and Alain smiled to see the gesture, which echoed Lavastine’s decisive ways.

He set Blanche aside, giving her into Cook’s arms, and mounted both steps to stand on the same level as the lady. He did not approach her chair nor kneel before her. Instead, he turned to face the crowd. The hounds stood side by side on the first step, and the soldiers nearby shrank back from them.

“I pray you, listen!”

As though a spell had been cast over the multitude, they fell quiet and listened. Not a murmur teased the silence, although one person coughed.

“I make this statement freely, not coerced in any way. I came here of my own accord under the escort of Chatelaine Dhuoda. You know who I am. I am called Alain. I was born here in Lavas Holding and grew up in fosterage in Osna village. Count Lavastine of blessed memory believed I was his illegitimate son and named me as his heir. I sat in the count’s chair for some months before King Henry himself gave the county into the hands of Lavrentia, daughter of Geoffrey. This you know.”

Geoffrey was white, shaking, and strangely it was his young daughter who brushed her small fingers over her father’s clenched fist to calm him.

“This is what I must say to you now, so you can hear, and remember, and speak of it to others who are not here today. I am not Lavastine’s heir. I am not the rightful Count of Lavas.”

“Nay! Nay! Say not so, my lord!”

“We won’t believe such lies—!”

“I knew he was a grasping imposter.”

“What of the testimony of the hounds?”

“I pray you!” said Alain. “Grant me silence, if you will.”

They did so. There was another cough, a shuffling of feet as folk shifted position, a handful of murmurs cut off by sibilant hisses as neighbors shushed those who whispered, and, from outside, a chorus of barking, quickly hushed.

“I will depart this place by sunset with nothing more than what I came with, all but this one thing: this pledge made by Lord Geoffrey. That his daughter, Lavrentia, will rule as Count of Lavas but will stand aside if one comes forward with a claim that supersedes hers and is validated by a council of respected church folk or by Biscop Constance of Autun.”

“I swear it,” growled Geoffrey. The hounds growled, in unison, as if in answer or in challenge.

Geoffrey wiped his brow. The girl bit her lip but did not shift or otherwise show any fear in the face of the fearsome black hounds. Pens scratched as a cleric, seated by the fire, made a record of the proceedings on vellum.

Alain descended from the dais and went over to the bench where his pack lay. He hoisted it, whistled to the hounds, and before any person there could react, he kissed Blanche, made his farewells to Cook, and walked to the door. He came outside past the brace of guards and was out into the courtyard and practically to the gates before he heard the rush of sound, a great exhalation, as the folk inside the hall rushed outward to see where he was going.

They crowded to the gate and some trailed after him to the break in the fosse that met with the eastbound road. A handful kept walking behind him all the way into the woodland until it was almost dark and at last he turned and asked them kindly to go back before it was too dark for them to see.

There was a lad, weeping, who sidled forward, grasped his hand, and kissed it.

“I pray you, be well,” said Alain. “Do not weep.”

There was Master Rodlin, without the whippets, who stared at him and said, “What of the hounds? They follow
you still. Is that not the mark of Lavas blood? And if not, then what is it?”

“They cannot answer, for they do not have human speech,” said Alain. “They chose to follow me long ago to help me on my path. Serve the rightful heir, Master Rodlin, as faithfully as you did Count Lavastine.”

“When will that one come?” he demanded.

“Like the hounds, I cannot answer. If Lavrentia is the rightful heir, you must serve her with the same loyalty you showed to Count Lavastine.”

Rodlin frowned but grabbed the lad’s hand and led him away. The holding was hidden by the trees and the stone tower by a twilight that caused colors to wash into one dim background.

One remained, wringing her hands. “Do you remember me?” she said. “Will you curse me, for teasing you when you first were come here? Do you hate me for it?”

Her eyes were still as startling a blue as when he had met her years ago. She had a well-fed look to her and her belly curved her skirts in such a way that he supposed she was in the middle months of pregnancy.

“Did you ever meet the prince in the ruins?” he asked her.

Her lips twisted into a resigned smile. “Did you lie to me that night when we both went up to the ruins?”