PROLOGUE (5 page)

"We'll come back for you, Papa Otto, for you and all the others but especially for you."

The stairs led down a long way and all of it in darkness. They felt their way along, groping along the wall with the flats of their hands, and when at last the stairs ended and the wall curved and then straightened, a breeze caught her lips and she tasted something strange on it, something she had not tasted for many months: fresh air untainted by a city's death, and green things growing in plain good earth, not in the crevices between fallen stones.

They walked for a long while, resting a few times although never for long.

When they emerged from the tunnel, it was dawn.

They came out of a cave's mouth to see a field of oats run wild and a few buildings that looked abandoned. Behind the narrow cave mouth rose a ridge of rock and up this Matthias scrambled, Anna right behind him. From the ridge they looked back over the empty countryside to the city below, resting like a jewel on an island in the middle of the broad river. From this distance one would never guess what lay inside. It looked like a perfect toy model of a city, untouched, gently gleaming in the early morning sunlight.

"I should have killed it," said Matthias.

"Killed what?" she asked. "The Eika?" Without thinking, she clasped her Circle of Unity. She could not stop thinking about the Circle of Unity that had hung at its chest.

"The daimone," he said. "I should have killed it with the knife. Then it would have been free of the mortal body and able to go home to the heavens. Wouldn't that have been a better trade?"

Anna shook her head. "I don't think any human can kill a daimone. They aren't like us, they don't have our blood, and maybe they don't have blood at all the way we do. You would just have made it mad."

He sighed. "Maybe so. But I pity that poor soul. If it has a soul."

She hesitated, but then she asked, "Do Eika have souls?"

"Of course not!"

"But that one
—it saw us, and it let us go. It wore a Circle, Matthias. If it wore a Circle, isn't it kin of ours because it also believes in God?"

"It just stole it from a body and wears it as a trophy. I don't know why it let us go. Maybe St. Kristine watched over us and blinded its eyes." He turned his back on the city and began to climb back down the hill. "Come, Anna. I don't know how far we'll have to walk before we find people."

But St. Kristine, while surely saving them, had not blinded the Eika's eyes. Anna knew that. It had seen her touch her Circle, and it had copied her movement. It
had
let them go, knowingly, deliberately. Just as every human slave in the city had conspired to set them free, which was only what they would have done for their own kin.

It was a beautiful summer's day and they walked free through bright woods and drank from free-flowing streams and ate, carefully, a few moist berries. At dusk Matthias saw a campfire. The astonished woodsmen
—set here in the forest to hunt and to keep an eye out for Eika incursions— gladly traded them food for one of the extra knives, and let them sleep huddled by the coals. In the morning one woodsman escorted the children to the nearest village.

"Let me give you some advice," said the woodsman, who was small and wiry and cheerful, and who had lost one finger on his left hand. "There's little room in Steleshame these days, with all the refugees. But you've value in the news you bring, so don't sell it cheap, and you might get to stay there. Ask for an apprenticeship, lad, and something to keep your sister busy with and cared for until she's old enough to marry. Lady's Blood! It is a miracle. We never thought to see any other folk walk alive out of the city. How did you survive? How did you get free?"

Matthias told a brief version of the story, but when he got to the end, he didn't mention the Eika. For the Eika was not part of Matthias' story. And yet the Eika puzzled Anna most. But she kept silent. All humans hated the Eika. They had every reason to, for the Eika were savages and their dogs the most hideous creatures living.

"Your brother will no doubt find work with a tanner, child," the woodsman said to Anna. "Have you any skills?"

She did not mean to say it. It popped out unbidden. "When I'm old enough, I'll travel like the fraters do. I'll bring the Holy Word and the Circle of Unity to the Eika. They can't be meant to be savages."

He laughed, but not unkindly, only shaking his head as adults did when children said something they considered silly. Matthias shushed her and made a face.

But the day was very beautiful, and they were free, and perhaps if they brought news that slaves still lived in the city, someone
—some noble lady or lord—might lead an expedition to free the others. If only Papa Otto and the rest could hold on for that long.

She thought for a long while as she walked through the woodland. She and Matthias had lost both father and mother and been given into the callous care of their uncle. Yet it was not their uncle
—their only remaining kinsman— who had saved them. He had tried only to save himself and she supposed she would never know if he still walked among the living or rotted among the forgotten dead. It was Papa Otto—no blood father of theirs—and the other slaves who had saved them. If they, who were not her true kin, could act as kin, then was it not possible that even an Eika could become kin? This thought she held like a gift in her heart. Matthias had given the daimone the knife,
which it could use to defend itself or free itself if such were possible, and in exchange it had given them freedom.

But in the end, after all that had happened, it was the solitary Eika who had stayed its hand and let them go.

PART ONE DIVINATION r THE MUSIC OF WAR HE smelled the storm coming before the first rumble of thunder sounded far in the distance. The dogs stirred restlessly and nipped at him, but he slapped them aside until they whined and hunkered down at his feet.

Bloodheart appeared not to have heard the distant thunder. The Eika chieftain sat on his throne, just out of reach of his captive's chains, and measured leg and arm bones that had been scraped clean of flesh. Tossing aside those he did not want, he sawed off the knobby joint ends of the bones until he had half a dozen smooth white lengths of various sizes collected in his lap. With a sharp stick he hollowed out the bones, cleaning out the marrow. Then, using a stone burin mounted on a stick, he drilled holes down the length of the hollow bones. All this he worked in silence, except for the hasp of the ob
‍
sidian saw, the rasp of wood scraping, and his muted grunting breaths as he twirled stick between palms to drive the drill through.

Beyond, other sounds made a counterpoint to Bloodheart's task: The old priest crouched on the marble floor as he tossed out finger bones into a random pattern read and swept aside; outside, Eika soldiers played a game on the cathedral steps which involved a head in a sack; thunder muttered far away, and the Veser River, a low roar too faint here for human ears to hear, sang its constant familiar chant.

The dogs, slinking away, gnawed at the discarded bones, cracking them open for the marrow inside. The most faithful brought a few bones back to drop at his feet, his portion as their lord. God knew he was hungry all the time now, but never let it be said he had stooped to this: eating human remains.

He fought back the shattering despair. It came on him in waves as out of nowhere, out of the shadows or out of Bloodheart's enchantment that shackled him here, bound by more than iron. Caught in a sudden fit of uncontrollable snaking, he clutched chains in his hands and scraped them violently against the marble floor until his skin was rubbed raw and the chains polished to a shining gleam but with no least weakening of their heavy links.

Only then, when the dogs began to growl around him sensing his weakness, when his blood dripped on the pale marble to form little rosettes of agony against cold stone, did he remember himself, cuff them into submission, and look up.

Teeth bared, Bloodheart grinned down from his chair. " ," he said, his voice as whispery as the flutter of birds in the eaves. "Shall I make a flute out of your bones when you are dead?"

"You will never kill me," he replied in his hoarse voice. Some days, these were the only words he remembered how to say.

But Bloodheart was not even listening. Instead, the Eika chieftain lifted the smooth white tubes one by one to his lips, testing their tone. Some breathed high, some low, and on them, switching from one to the next, he played a rag
‍
eed melody while at last lightning flashed, seen through the great cathedral windows, and thunder broke overhead, and the Eika soldiers outside laughed uproariously in the sudden drenching rain and continued their game.

' months!" King Henry paced under the awning while rain drizzled beyond the overhang, dripping down the sides of his tent, curling down tent poles in slow streams. "I have wasted two months on these damned stubborn Var-ren lords when we could have been marching on Gent!"

Liath had taken shelter under a wagon; with night watch ahead, she had been permitted an afternoon's nap. Thank the Lady the rain had not drenched the ground. She was still dry, and now she listened as Henry's advisers rallied around him, soothing his temper.

"You could not have left Varre behind that quickly," said his favored cleric, Sister Rosvita, in her usual calm voice. "You have done the right thing, Your Majesty, the only thing you could do. Your anger toward the Eika is justified, and when the time is right, they will suffer your wrath."

"The time will never be right!" Henry was in one of his rare sour moods. Liath could see only legs and torsos from this angle, and while any soul would have known Henry by the belt he wore embossed and painted with the badges of each of the six duchies whose princes owed allegiance to him as king regnant, on this day he was also recognizable by the sheer irritable energy he projected as he paced from one corner of the carpet to the other. "Five sieges we have laid in, in the last two months."

"None of them lasted more than five days," said Margrave Judith with disdain. "None of these Varren nobles had any stomach for a fight, knowing Lady Sabella was defeated."

"Your Majesty." Now Helmut Villam weighed in, and the others paused to listen respectfully to the words of a man whose age and experience of hard campaigns eclipsed even that of the king. "Once Lady Svanhilde surrenders to your authority, we can turn east. You have sent what Eagles you can to the Wendish dukes and nobles, to raise the alarm. But do not forget that after the battle we fought near Kassel, your forces are too weak in any case to attack the Eika at Gent. It will take time to assemble a new army." "Damn Sabella," said Henry. "I was too lenient with her."

"She is our sister, Henry," said Biscop Constance. Though the rebuke was mild, only one of Henry's powerful younger sisters would have dared utter it.

"Half sister," muttered the king, but he had stopped pacing.

"She is safely confined under my authority in Autun, where I will soon return," added Constance, who despite her youth had the grave authority of a much older woman. He grunted, acknowledging this truth.

They began to talk about the disposition of this latest siege, invested yesterday afternoon, and what route they would take when they at last marched east through northern Arconia back into Wendar.

The rain slackened and stopped. Liath wormed out from under the wagon, strapped on sword and quiver and draped her saddlebags over her shoulder, then went hunting for food. Rations had been scarce the past several weeks. Hard as it was to feed the king's progress, it was more difficult still in these days of summer before the harvest came in. That they marched through lands hostile toward the king did not help matters any. Although the former kingdom of Varre was by right of succession under Henry's rule, the number of recalcitrant nobles and reluctant church leaders in Varre amazed even Liath, who had long ago gotten used to being an outsider.

Yet despite the hardships, she was as content as she could be. She had food, most of the time, and such shelter as a wagon or tent awning afforded. She was
free.
For now, it was enough.

The camp sprawled in a ragged half circle around a wooden palisade, the outer ring of Lady Svanhilde's fortress. The two siege engines and three ballistas sat just out of range of an arrow's shot from the wall; hastily dug ditches protected their flanks, and a wall of mantelets shielded the men who guarded and worked the machines. On either side of the mantelets a picket of stakes stood, protecting the camp from a charge of cavalry. The first line of mud-streaked tents, some listing under the weight of rain puddles caught in canvas, stood somewhat back from these stakes, and the tents of nobles and king yet farther back, almost intone trees. The patchwork of tents and wagons left many gaps and wide stretches of open ground, but Henry had been careful to avoid trampling the ripening fields. He needed grain to feed his retinue.