“Alain!” Lavastine had already mounted and now gestured impatiently for Alain to join him.
“You’re a good boy, Alain, to ask after them,” she replied with a look compounded of sympathy, distaste, and amusement. Then she recalled to whom she was now speaking. “My lord.”
“But where are they?”
“At the old steward’s house. They come to Mass each week faithfully, but many of the others can’t forgive them their good fortune.”
“Alain!”
“Thank you!” He would have kissed the old deacon on the cheek but he was not sure, with so many folk standing about and staring, if the gesture was one he was now allowed to make. She inclined her head with formal dignity.
He mounted. As the count and his retinue rode out of the village, children trotted at a safe distance behind them, giggling and pointing and shouting.
“What did you ask?” demanded Lavastine.
They rode past the stink of pig sties and the winter shelters for the sheep and cows. They crossed through the southern palisade gate and skirted the stream which was bounded on its eastern shore by a small tannery and the village slaughterhouse—still busy with the butchering of the animals who couldn’t be wintered over. Alain held a hand over his nose and mouth until they got downwind. If the stench bothered Lavastine, he did not show it; his attention remained focused on Alain.
“I asked about my foster family,” said Alain at last, lowering his hand. “I found out where they’ve gone to.”
“They’ve gone somewhere?” Lavastine said without much curiosity, although for an established family to pick up and move was unheard of.
“They’ve taken the steward’s house….” He hurried on since Lavastine clearly did not know what he meant. “It’s a small manor house. It was built in Emperor Taillefer’s reign for the steward who oversaw these lands then. That was before the port was established. An old man lived there. He was the grandson of the last steward, but he’d little to keep and no servants … the fields went fallow. And he’d no ship to send out, though there’s a decent landing spot below the house.”
“Make your point, son, if there is one you intend.”
But the road made Alain’s point for him: The packed-dirt way forked ahead. The wider left fork continued south, where it would eventually veer east to join the road that took the traveler to Lavas Holding.
“The path to the right leads to the steward’s house, which lies down in a sheltered vale by the bay.”
“And?”
But Alain knew he would never forgive himself if he did not see them. “I beg you, Father, may we go see them?”
Lavastine blinked. He looked, for an instant, the way a man might who has just been told that his wife has given birth not to a child but to a puppy. But he pulled up his horse just before the fork in the road, and his soldiers, obedient, halted behind him.
Alain’s breath ran shallow as he tried desperately to hold back further words, but could not. “I beg you,” he burst out. “Just this one time.”
Alain knew of no window into Lavastine’s soul and thoughts. His curt speech, his brusque gestures, his impatience and his efficiency, all melded into a whole so seamless that Alain could only suppose, as the church taught, that the outer man mirrors the inner. Only Frater Agius had taught differently: that an outer seeming might mask the inner heart—just as pious Agius had, until the end, concealed his belief in the heretical doctrine of the flaying knife and the death and redemption of the blessed Daisan.
“Very well,” said Lavastine crisply. Whether he approved this course or disliked it Alain could not have said, nor did he really wish to know. He had to see Aunt Bel and Stancy and Julien and little Agnes and the baby, if it still lived. He had to speak with Henri, to be sure that he didn’t—
Didn’t what?
Didn’t condemn him as an oath breaker for not entering the church?
He took in a breath and started forward. His mare, a meek creature at the best of times, picked her way through the litter of leaves shrouding the trail. Lavastine let him lead their little cavalcade down the narrow path that wound through oak and silvery birch, maple and beech. He saw the outline of buildings past bare branches, a small estate with a house, stables, cookhouse, and outbuildings set around an open court that could also serve as corral. They passed out of the forest and into the scrub surrounding the estate, stumps not yet burned and dug out, brushy undergrowth and new seedlings struggling up toward the light, strips of field cut out of the brush, wisps of winter wheat growing in neat green rows along soil ridges.
It took him a moment to recognize the young man standing in unmown grass at one end of a long log set up on sawbucks. Stripped of bark and being planed down to an even curved round, the log had the lean supple strength necessary for a mast. At the far end of the log, scraping, stood Henri, his back to the road; Alain knew him instantly. The young man at the near end had the broad shoulders of a soldier, but when he turned to stare, Alain realized this was his cousin Julien, filled out to a man’s stature now and half a head taller than he had been two winters ago.
Julien saw the cavalcade and cried out so loudly that first two children and then Aunt Bel came to the door of the house; several laborers Alain did not recognize emerged from the workshop. Henri looked up once and with a deliberate shrug went back to his work. But the others flooded out, all of them, Aunt Bel and Stancy, and little Agnes looking more like a woman than the girl Alain remembered. Even the baby toddled out, curly fair hair wound down around thin shoulders. Stancy had a new baby in a sling at her hips. A woman in the robes of a cleric hurried forward to stand next to Aunt Bel. A small child Alain did not recognize stood, mouth open and stick upraised, forgetting the geese she had been set to watch over. The birds strayed into the woods, but only Alain noticed because everyone else was staring at him.
Aunt Bel walked forward to place herself between her family and the count’s entourage. She folded her hands respectfully before her and inclined her head in the same manner, not quite as an equal but neither as a servant. “My lord count, I give you and your company greetings to this house.”
“Mistress Bella,” said Lavastine in acknowledgment, a fine mark of notice since Alain hadn’t imagined the count remembered her name.
The cleric murmured a blessing upon them all.
The geese were wandering unnoticed back in among the trees while the child gawped at the soldiers in their blue tabards and at the banners that fluttered in the breeze.