PROLOGUE (48 page)

Oak and beech had lost most of their leaves, though a scattering of pale gold and dull red leaves still clung to the branches of the trees. Here and there evergreens stood in clumps, shafts of dense green. Ghosts of morning mist wove around the boles of trees and settled in hollows or near pools of standing water. A light rain fell intermittently.

The progress of the hunters sounded a steady din through the litter and deadwood on the forest floor. Breaking through a dense growth of bracken, they flushed a covey of partridges. The king's huntsmen laid about themselves and clubbed some down, dragging the dogs still with the company out of reach of the birds. Ahead, braches belled.

"Deer!" cried a forester. The chase was on.

Now the forward group itself split into two groups, King Henry and the older nobles falling behind to leave pride of chase to the younger adults. Sapientia rode to the fore, Liath laboring after her on a gelding more hardy than agile. Lord Amalfred, Lady Brigida, young lords and ladies shouting and whooping in their excitement, all pressed forward. Theophanu came up beside Liath, face intent. The panther clasp sparked in a flash of sunlight through the branches. She glanced back over her shoulder and, reflexively, Liath did as well. Hugh was behind them, but his presence was curiously lost to Liath as if for once he was not aware of her at all. His head was bent over his saddle and his lips moved soundlessly. With his left hand he clasped a tiny gold reliquary hung on a golden chain around his neck.

Sapientia disappeared into bracken. Lord Amalfred's horse shied back, refusing to cross through the heavy growth of fern, and he kicked it forward, angry.

"Your Highness!" A forester called out to Theophanu. "A path! This way!"

Faced with a wall of bracken or a clear, if narrow, path, Liath chose to ride after Theophanu, but the princess' horse was superior to hers in these woods, fearless and surefooted. Theophanu forged ahead as if she meant to catch up and pass her royal sister. As if she meant to have for herself what her sister wanted to possess.

"Out of the way! Out of the way!" cried a man behind her, and Liath just got her gelding aside before a group of some dozen young nobles including Lord Amalfred pounded past on the track. "I see the deer!"

"A deer! A deer!" The others took up the cry.

Liath saw it, too, a handsome doe springing away before them, bolting through the trees. Amalfred and the others pulled up, taking aim.

Except it wasn't a deer. It was Theophanu, riding farther ahead of them into trees still wreathed with morning mist. It was an illusion. The memory of Gent hit her so like a blow that her hands went lax on the reins and she gasped aloud. An illusion that only
she
could see through. Even Sanglant, who wanted to believe, had not dared to.

She screamed. "Halt! Don't shoot!" She yelled as loudly as she was able. "Your Highness! Say something! Pull up your horse!"

Did her warning reach that far?

Theophanu slowed her horse and began to turn, as if she had heard...

"Ai, Lady!" cried one of the noblemen. "It's slowed. Now's your chance!" He turned to wave a new rider forward. "Princess Sapientia. Come forward."

But Lord Amalfred had already drawn down. "This one is mine!"

"Stop!" cried Liath, but Hugh rode up beside her and set his hand on her arm. Her voice vanished.

Theophanu was still turned, raising a hand in acknowledgment; there was an instant when her face registered the tableau behind her. Her expression froze in horror.

Amalfred shot. Another lord shot. The arrows sped toward their target.

She would not be powerless this time! She wrenched her arm out of Hugh's grasp. Please God let her bring fire through her eyes alone. Let the fire in the vision of the burning stone pass through her as through a doorway, as though a daimone of the fiery sphere above had reached down below the moon and pressed its blazing touch onto the speeding wood of the arrows.

Both arrows ignited in midair. Theophanu threw herself off her horse. The wailing and shouting that deafened Liath now was its own conflagration.

"My God, the princess!"

"A miracle! A miracle!"

"Lord Amalfred, what meant you by this?"

"But I saw a deer. These others
—!"

As all protested that they, too, had seen a deer, Sapientia began to sob noisily. Liath threw her reins over the horse's head, dismounted, and ran forward; she stubbed her toes on a log, jumped over another only to have her boots sink into the dense litter of fallen and rotting leaves in her haste to reach Theophanu.

The princess' hair lay in disarray, braids fallen loose, her riding tunic twisted at her hips, her gold-braided leggings ripped at the knees, her face scraped and stained with dirt. She shoved herself up and reached for her knife as Liath dropped down beside her. "Have you come to finish the job at her bidding?"

Liath threw up her hands to show she was empty-handed. "Your Highness! Are you hurt?"

"Your voice." Theophanu's eyes flared with astonishment. "Your voice is the one I heard warning me. What treachery is this?"

"They saw a deer where you rode, Your Highness."

"I am no deer to be hunted and slain. Was this an accident, Eagle?"

But now a forester had come up, and the crowd like a mindless writhing creature moved across the wood to engulf them. Back on the path, Hugh comforted a weeping Sapientia.

By now the king had come up to the others, and in their babble of voices Liath heard repeated over and over that all dozen or so there and even in addition the foresters had seen not Theophanu but a deer.

"Witchcraft," someone said.

"A miracle," said another.

"Too many damn fool young hotheads hunting for prizes and seeing visions in the mist," said Villam with disgust.

"This day's hunt ends now," said King Henry. A groom helped him dismount. He came up to his daughter and extended a hand. She took it, and he raised her up off the ground. "You are unhurt?" he asked. Villam by now had forced order into the milling mob behind them, pressing them back from the frightened horse. Far away, hounds bayed wildly. Henry released Theophanu's hand and beckoned a huntsman forward. "Follow the hounds," he said, "and bring back to the lodge whatever meat you take."

The man nodded. Soon, foresters and huntsmen went on alone, though some of the young nobles clearly wished to go with them.

"May I have a moment alone to collect my wits, Father," Theophanu. asked, "before I ride again?"

He gestured to his attendants to back off and himself moved away. Liath began to retreat, but Theophanu signed to her, and Liath hesitated, afraid to be seen with her, afraid not to obey.

"Was it an accident?" the princess repeated, her gaze hard, her mouth a thin line. "Did my sister devise this treachery?"

The thought of Sapientia concocting any kind of intrigue made Liath's mouth drop open in amazed disbelief. "Your
sister?
No! But it was not an accident
—" Then she broke off. She had revealed too much.

Theophanu said nothing for a long while. Slowly, one scratched and bleeding hand came up to touch the panther brooch that held her cloak closed. "Was it sorcery? And from whose hand?"

"I can prove nothing, Your Highness. I know only what I saw."

"Or did
not
see." She looked up at a sight behind Liath's back, and away quickly, as if she was ashamed. "Am I any better than those who saw a deer in the forest, which is only what they wished to see?" With a jerk and a sudden grimace, she ripped the panther brooch off her cloak and flung it behind her into the leaves. "I am in your debt, Eagle. What reward can I give you?"

She blurted it out, not meaning to say it, but it was more impassioned for its rash honesty. "Get me away from him, I beg you."

" 'The meekness of the dove with the cunning of the serpent,' " Theophanu muttered. "But I need proof." Still pale, she groped through the leaves until she found the brooch again. Gingerly, as though it were poison, she tucked it in between belt and tunic. "I will do what I can. Go now. It is not wise that you be seen with me, if what I suspect is true. Say nothing to anyone until I give you leave."

JriJcIN Jtv Y was furious. The hunt came clattering back early in an uproar to upset the quiet tenor of a day that Rosvita had hoped would be a productive one for her clerics. But the stories she heard, from so many different sources, were alarming enough that she was relieved when Princess Theophanu rode in unharmed. Strangely, for all that her dress was in disarray, her hair disordered, and her skin scratched and stained with loam and dirt, the princess was herself perfectly composed.

"So eastern," muttered Brother Fortunatus. "You know these Arethousans are inscrutable."

"Spare us these false wisdoms," said Sister Amabilia. "Poor Theophanu! To be mistaken for a deer!"

The king was not to be mollified by the testimony of all who had been present. Everyone, even the foresters and huntsmen who had raced ahead with Sapientia's party, had seen a deer in place of a princess.

"The rain confused our eyes." "The mist confused our eyes." "It was the shape of the branches above her head." On they went, all of them grievously shocked at the accident.

"Or there was a deer behind her in the woods and in your rashness you shot without looking closely! Lord Amalfred. Lord Grimoald. You are no longer welcome at this court. You will be gone by nightfall. We will all of us leave this ill-omened place tomorrow. One of my children I have already lost. I do not intend to lose any more."

No protest, even by Sapientia, could mitigate the king's judgment. The two young lords left the hall in disgrace. Henry spent the rest of the day at Mass led by Father Hugh. In particular, the king prayed and gave thanksgiving to St. Valeria, whose day this was and whose miraculous intervention had spared his daughter worse harm than the fall she had taken. Before the feast he handed out bread with his own hands to the usual supplicants who had gath
‍
ered outside the palisade. Hearing of the king's arrival at this southernmost of his royal hunting lodges, they had come from villages at the forest's edge. Some of them had walked several days on rag-clad feet hoping for food or a blessing.

At the feast, Theophanu begged a boon of her father. "I pray you, Your Majesty, let me undertake a pilgrimage to the Convent of St. Valeria to offer a proper thanksgiving for my deliverance from harm. Surely her hand lay over me this day."

He was reluctant to let her leave after such an incident, but the miracle had been attested by a dozen or more persons.

"I will take an Eagle," she said, "and thus any message can be sent quickly from my hand to yours."

"As a sign of my favor," he said, "you may take my faithful Hathui, daughter of Elseva, as long as you and she return in one piece to my progress by the end of the year. It should take you no more than two or three months to complete the journey."

"I would not take such a loyal servant from you, Your Majesty," she replied, as calm as if no arrows had sped toward her head and breast that morning. "But if I could take another Eagle
—" Here her gaze came to rest on the young Eagle who stood several paces behind Sapientia's chair.

Sapientia leaped to her feet, the gesture of anger made ungainly because of her increasing girth. "You just want what is mine!"

"Sit down," said the king.

Sapientia sat.

"It is true," said Henry, "that Sapientia has an Eagle, one whose service I gave into her hands, which I will not now take from her. But it is only right, Theophanu, that you be given an Eagle as well. Since you are going on a journey, two would be better. Hathui will choose among those who attend me now, at your pleasure."

The feast went on. But the damage had been done to Rosvita's peace of mind, for she suddenly recalled that Sapientia enjoyed the novelty of having an Eagle in constant attendance. Liath had been on that hunt and, surely, had seen the whole; someone had mentioned seeing her go to the princess after the fall. But no one had called her to testify when even the king's foresters and huntsmen had given testimony after the noblefolk had finished speaking. How could such a lapse be possible? Why did the young Eagle not come forward on her own?

Why should Theophanu, inscrutable Theophanu, notice her now and, even, attempt to take her into her own retinue?
Only
to provoke her sister?

For that matter, why should Theophanu undertake a pilgrimage across the winter landscape when she could as easily send servants with gifts of gold and silver and an altar cloth to grace the convent's church and treasury?