King's Dragon (Crown of Stars 1)

“You are a well-spoken boy also. Quite unlike an untutored country lad.”

“I know my letters, Your Grace. Frater Agius has been kind enough to teach me to read, and I knew something of numbers from my aunt, who manages a large household.”

“She is a well-bred woman, I take it.”

He could not help but smile. “Yes, Your Grace. My Aunt Bel is a very fine woman, and mother of five living children and as many grandchildren born so far.” Perhaps more, since he had been gone; with the blanket last winter had come a verbal message that Stancy was pregnant again. Had the child been born yet? Did it live? Was it healthy? Had Stancy survived the birth? He was swept with such a sudden wave of homesickness that he almost faltered. He did not expect to miss them all so very much. Henri would be setting out again after Holy Week, as he did every year. Who would repair the boat this year? Who had tarred it last autumn? No one did as careful a job as Alain did. He hoped Julien was devoting as much time to helping Henri with the boat as he was to courting the young women in the village. And what of the baby? It must be well grown by now, if it had survived the winter. But surely it would have survived the winter; it was a healthy child, and Aunt Bel took good care of her own.

They walked for a time in silence. When they came to the clearing they halted to look out over the ruins, bare stone tumbled in a spring meadow strewn with yellow and white flowers. A broad stream ran along the other side of the clearing: He had not seen it on Midsummer’s Eve, but now the running water flashed in the midday sunlight as it flowed swiftly past the grass, bordered by a low rim of white stone, and vanished into the farther edge of forest.

“The Emperor Taillefer is said to have possessed a pack of black hounds,” said Biscop Antonia suddenly, her gaze on the ruins but her voice far away, as if she had been thinking about this during the long silence. “But so much is said about the Emperor Taillefer that one can scarcely know which is truth and which a story spun by the court poets for our entertainment.” Then, like an owl striking abruptly, she turned her gaze on Frater Agius. “Is that not true, Brother?”

“As you say, Your Grace.”

“Surely you have sterner views of truth than that, Frater Agius.”

He looked, oddly enough, ashamed. “I follow the Holy Word as well as I can, Your Grace, but I am imperfect and thereby a sinner. It is only through God’s unselfish love that I may be redeemed.”

“Ah, yes,” said the biscop. She smiled sweetly, but Alain suspected she and the frater had just conversed about something else entirely. “Shall we go down?”

They circled the clearing to find the original entrance, where a fallen gatehouse still stood sentry. Crossing into the ruin, Alain was struck by how different it looked now: No glamour gave the stone an unnatural gleam; shadows lay foreshortened on the ground, patches shading grass and overgrown paving. Once fine buildings had stood here. Now this was only a graveyard, the markers of a lost and forgotten time. He followed the biscop as she walked down the roadway, heading into the heart of the complex. She paused now and again to examine the carvings left on the stone: a double spiral, a falcon, its wings feathered with pockmarks, an elaborately dressed woman in a gown of feathers whose head was a hollow-eyed skull.

The clerics murmured, seeing these traces of the pagan builders. Lackling stubbed his toe on a half-buried block of stone and began to cry.

“There, there, child,” said the biscop, comforting him, though he was as grimy as only a stableboy could be. Agius stood with his hands folded at his waist and his gaze fixed disapprovingly on the altar house.

“Come along,” she said to Lackling. His sobs ended as soon as the pain faded, and he sidled away from her and dogged Alain’s heels. They arrived at the altar house. The clerics hung back, but Biscop Antonia crossed the threshold without the least sign of uneasiness. Alain followed her inside. Lackling would not enter.

“You came to these ruins,” said the biscop without turning round. She examined the white altar stone. “Or so I have heard the report, from Chatelaine Dhuoda, from Count Lavastine, and from the testimony of the half-free girl, Withi, who is to marry the young soldier. The girl told me she saw black hounds running in the sky but that you did not see them. She said when she first caught sight of you, you were looking toward this building and talking to the thin air, where no person or no thing stood. Did you see a vision?”

Alain had his back to the entrance, but he felt Agius enter, felt the frater’s presence behind him. What could he say to her? He could not lie to a biscop! Yet if he confessed, might he not be branded as some kind of ungodly witch? Suddenly being the bastard son of the shade of a long-dead elvish prince did not seem quite so advantageous, not if he could be condemned for it; just as the bastard son of Count Lavastine might become the pawn in a struggle to gain power over the count’s holdings if the count had no other direct heirs.

Alain touched his hand to his chest where, under the wooden Circle, his rose rested, warm and somehow bright under cloth. As he shifted, both Agius and Biscop Antonia turned to look at him expectantly, as if they could sense the hidden rose. Suddenly being the child of Merchant Henri and the nephew of Bella Adelheidsdottir, respectable householder of Osna village, seemed a much safer alternative to his other more grandiose dreams.

Yet neither was it right to lie.

“I have had visions, Your Grace,” he said reluctantly, lowering his hand, then added, “but I am pledged to the church.” Hoping that might explain it.

“It is true,” said the biscop calmly, “that many who are sworn to serve Our Lady and Lord are also granted visions, if they serve faithfully, but there is yet a taint of darkness in the world that may bring on false visions and false beliefs.” She looked again, pointedly, at Agius.

The frater was beginning to look angry.

“I believe this building is known as the altar house?” She bent to run an age-spotted hand over the marble surface of the altar stone. “This might be the Hearth of Our Lady, might it not? You see, I detect traces of old burning here, in the center.” With one finger she flicked dirt out of the runnels carved into the stone. These runnels traced a spiral pattern similar to the pattern carved into the walls outside, but here four spirals led into a fist-sized hollow sunk into the center of the white stone. She smiled, still looking at the altar stone. “It is a terrible burden to carry an inner heart that does not live in harmony with the outer seeming, is it not, Frater Agius? If we each one of us know what we ought to do and act as is fitting, then by our outward seeming Our Lady and Lord will know that we follow the faith gladly and with an honest heart. To profess belief in a heretical doctrine and yet conceal it from all but those who think as you do seems to me to be hypocrisy of the worst sort.”

“It is not a heretical doctrine!” cried Frater Agius. His face had gone bright red. “It is the skopos who denies the truth! It was the Council of Addai which denied the redemption and concealed the truth!”

Unshaken by this outburst, Biscop Antonia straightened. She surveyed the circular walls; next to the ground, half concealed by moss and weeds, carvings decorated the white stone, curled snails graven in stone surrounded by delicate rosettes. Counting out her steps, the biscop paced around the altar, measuring it. Then she walked past the frater, who stood as if rooted to the ground by his own passion, and went outside.

Alain hesitated.

Agius threw himself to his knees on the ground. “I will proclaim it,” he said, muttering as if to himself or as if to the heavens. “I must speak the truth aloud so those who linger in the twilight of the false belief can come into the true light granted to us all by His sacrifice and redemption.”

These were strange and troubling words. Alain sidestepped past the frater, but Agius, forehead resting on clasped hands, did not notice him. Outside, Biscop Antonia was helping Lackling stack loose stones into a pile. She looked up and smiled at Alain.

“He is devout but misguided. I will pray that Our Lady and Lord will bring him back into the Circle of Unity.” She turned to her clerics. “There is good stone here. It could be used to improve the wall of Count Lavastine’s stronghold, do you not think?”

“The local people refuse to walk up here or indeed to disturb these ruins,” said one of the clerics.

“Yet these ruins were surely once greater in extent than they are now. Someone must already have taken stone from here, for these walls to be as low as they are now. There is not enough fallen stone to rebuild them to what I might guess to be their former height. What do you think, Brother Heribert? You have studied masonry and building for the church at Mainni.”