King's Dragon (Crown of Stars 1)

He had won. He knew it, and so did she.

She did not open her eyes. “Under slats, beneath the pigs’ trough, in the inn stables.”

He bent to kiss her lightly on the forehead. “I will arrange for the girl to accompany us. We leave in ten days.”

She heard the latch lift and then Hugh’s voice as he spoke to Mistress Birta, drawing her away down the stairs to the common room below. Ten days.

She covered her face with her hands and lay there, despairing.

2

THE days dragged by for Liath, one long day after the next. It took her far longer to recover her strength than even Mistress Birta had expected. At first she slept most of the time, an aching, fitful sleep made worse by the uncomfortable straw ticking of Hanna’s bed. Even getting up to relieve herself in the bucket by the door exhausted her.

By the time ten days had passed, she could negotiate the stairs once a day. She was sitting slumped on a bench downstairs at midday, waiting for the Mistress to bring her a meal, when Hanna came in from the yard.

Hanna’s face was red from the sun, but her eyes were red from tears, and she wiped her nose with the back of a hand, sniffing as if she had caught a cold. She sank down on the bench next to Liath, looking no less dispirited. “Ivar left this morning. I ran down when I heard, but he’d already gone. He didn’t even leave a message for me.”

Bitter shame wormed its way into Liath’s heart. “Mine is the fault. I’m sorry. He needed you. I shouldn’t have begged you to stay with me. He never wanted to be forced into the church. He wanted to ride in the Dragons. And he could have, if it wasn’t for me.”

“Ai, Mother of Life, spare us this!” exclaimed Hanna, letting out an exasperated sigh. “You’re as bad as he is. Of course he’ll be fine. Count Harl sent two servants with him, so he’ll have familiar faces with him at Quedlinhame. And if it’s true that King Henry stops there each spring, then he’ll be able to see his sister Rosvita, too. She’s a cleric in the king’s schola. So between her position and the gift Count Harl is making to the monastery, I’m sure Ivar will be treated very well. Probably better than his own father treated him, for there’s only the one child younger than him, and she’s the apple of her father’s eye. With the help of his sister Rosvita, Ivar might even come to King Henry’s notice. Don’t you think?”

Liath was able to emerge far enough out of her own misery to recognize that underneath Hanna’s practical assessment of Ivar’s situation lay a real misery of her own. “Yes,” she said, because it seemed to be the reassurance that Hanna wanted, “I’m sure he will. They’ll educate him.” She paused and took one of Hanna’s hands in her own. “Hanna.” She glanced around the empty room, listened, but they were alone. “I know you can tally well enough, but I’ll teach you to read and write. You’ll need to know, if you wish to rise to the position of chatelaine.”

Like an echo, Hanna looked around the room also, then toward the door that led out to the yard and the cookhouse. It sat ajar, and through it they heard Mistress Birta ordering Karl to run eggs down to old Johan’s cottage to trade for herbs. “But I’ve no church training. If I know how to read and write, won’t people call me a witch or a sorcerer?”

“No more than they’ll call me one.” She let go of Hanna’s hand and wrung her own together, suddenly nervous. “Listen, Hanna. You’d better know now, before we’re in Firsebarg. Da—”

“Liath. Everyone knows your Da was a sorcerer. A fallen monastic, too, but one lapse, one child, isn’t enough to get a man thrown out of the monastery. There must have been something else as well, disobedience, defiance, something more, like studying the forbidden arts. Deacon Fortensia has told us as many stories as I have fingers and toes about monks and nuns reading forbidden books in the scriptorium and falling into love with the dark arts. But your Da never did anything the least bit harmful, not like old Martha who tried throwing hexes on people who offended her, after she got proud about old Frater Robert sleeping with her. But she stopped that, once it was made plain to her that no one here would tolerate such things. But your Da was generous. What’s the harm in magic if it’s a helpful thing? So says the deacon.”

“But Da wasn’t really a sorcerer. I mean, he had the knowledge, but nothing he ever did—”

Hanna looked at her strangely. “Of course he was! That’s why we were all so glad he put roots here and stayed each year, when we thought he meant to move on. You didn’t know? People don’t visit a sorcerer whose spells are useless. What about old Johan’s cow that wouldn’t calve until your Da wove a spell to open up its birth canal? What about that first spring, when the snow wouldn’t melt, and he called up rain? I could tell you twenty other stories. You really didn’t know?”

Liath sat stunned. All she could remember was the butterflies, fluttering and bright and then fading into the warm summer air like the phantoms they were, like the phantom his magic was, which had all faded and vanished after her mother died. “But—but did it ever do any good? A storm can come by itself, you know. The weather can change, even without tempestari to call it up.”

Hanna shrugged. “Who’s to know if it was prayer or magic or just good fortune? What about that wolf, then, the one that eluded everyone else until your Da trapped it in a cage woven of reeds? That must have been magic, for any wolf could have escaped such a delicate trap.”

Liath remembered the wolf. Da had been terrified, hearing reports that a wolf was lurking in the hills but not killing the sheep. He had trapped it, though he had let others kill it and had wept for days afterward. It had taken her three weeks of crying and pleading and arguing to get him to agree to stay in Heart’s Rest after the wolf.

Hanna was still talking. “Maybe he wasn’t a true sorcerer, like the devils who built the old Dariyan Empire, who built the wall south of here that stretches all the way from one sea to the other. It’s all fallen over now that there are no more sorcerers of that lineage to keep it standing.”

“I don’t think Da was that kind of sorcerer,” Liath said, more talking to herself than to Hanna. “Maybe he pretended to be, even tried to be, even once or twice succeeded. But it was my mother who was one. A real one. I remember that, if nothing else. She was murdered for it. I was only eight years old, but I do know that she had true sorcery, and that she worked …” Here she paused to glance around the room again, although nothing had changed. Her voice dropped to a whisper. “… old Dariyan magic.”

Hanna considered this revelation in silence. “The book—”

“It’s gone,” said Hanna. “Hugh came and took it. I couldn’t stop—”

“Of course you couldn’t stop him.” Liath was too numb to cry. “It’s a sorcerer’s book. It has so much knowledge Da collected over the years—” In his own writing. Lady, how she hated herself. She had betrayed Da by losing the book. “You don’t have to come. I should have told you sooner, about Da and the book, even before Ivar left. You might not want to stay with me, knowing the truth. You could have gone with Ivar—”

“As if I would have changed my mind! If Frater Hugh is truly going to be abbot, then he must know what he’s doing, taking you as his concubine.”

This, strangely, was easier ground “He says there are folk in the church who study magic. Da says Lady Sabella shelters heretics as well as sorcerers, to aid her against King Henry.”

“Well,” said Hanna, thinking it over, “better to be burned than married to young Johan. Lady Above! You need someone to shelter you from Frater Hugh. You’re still pale, but at least your appetite is good. Mother always says that so long as you’re hungry, then you’re not sick enough to die.”

Liath managed a chuckle.

Behind her, the door that led out front opened. Hanna stood up, lifting her chin defiantly. Liath stiffened. Why did he come every time she was beginning to feel free of him, of that interminable weight he laid on her? Was this his magic, to find and to know, to hunt and to devour? She wanted to crawl under the table, but she forced herself to sit without moving. She felt him, the heat of him, the simple physical presence, as he came up behind her. His hand touched her arm. She flinched.