King's Dragon (Crown of Stars 1)

Page 242

She hurried up the steps and through the open doors. The cathedral was packed: with refugees, with townspeople, with the Mayor and his entourage. At the front, in the place of honor, knelt Prince Sanglant, his blue-black hair and the wink of gold at his neck a beacon for her gaze. He wore mail and his fighting tunic, and fifty Dragons knelt with him, all arrayed for battle, helmets tucked under their arms. The biscop stood before her gold biscop’s chair, set behind the Hearth; she raised her arms as she led the congregation in the final verses of the psalm.

“‘Our Lord is coming and will not keep silence: fire runs before him and wreathes him closely round.

Our Lady summons heaven on high and Earth to the judgment of the people.

Think well on this, you who forget God,

or you will be torn in pieces

and no one shall save you.’”

All were kneeling. Liath knelt in the side aisle, at the very back of the crowd, and spoke the final Kyria with the congregation.

Lord, have mercy. Lady, have mercy.

Then, in the hesitation as the final prayer died into the air and the congregation waited for the biscop to dismiss them, Liath stood and slipped along the wall to the shadowed corner of the vestibule where a heavy wooden door barred passage to the crypt. It creaked as she opened it. She glanced back, but the hum of the crowd, rising, stretching, waiting perhaps for a word from biscop or mayor about last night’s message, covered the noise. She left the door ajar behind her.

A thin line of light marked the door as she descended, and at the first sharp corner it glanced off stone and illuminated a bead of water caught on a delicate spiderweb. Turning the corner, she lost sight of the door, though the suggestion of daylight still trailed after her. She went as silently as she could, not wishing to disturb the peace of the dead. She reached the bottom, foot slamming into level floor where she thought there was another step down, and paused to let her jolted shoulders recover.

Strange, that the light from above still gave a steady if faint radiance, just enough that she could see the shape of her hand if she held it up in front of her face. Last night—but of course, last night it had already been dark when she and Wolfhere had descended; that was why it had been pitch-black. Abruptly, she heard a noise above, from the stairs. She froze, listening.

astern shore was shrouded with fog that the sun had not yet burned off. She could not see the Eika camp and only the suggestion of earthworks, dark forms shouldering through the white blanket of fog. To the west she saw clouds. Licking a finger, she held it up. The wind was coming from the east; those western clouds, then, were those that had covered Gent last night. She smiled, slightly; Hathui would merely snort at this profound observation and point out that a child could have made it.

But thinking of Hathui made her think of Hanna. Where was Hanna now? Had she escaped the Eika? Had she found safety? Had they reached the king, and was he even now marching to raise the siege? She missed Hanna so badly. The bite of cold made it worse because cold wrenched her mind back to Hugh, to that night when she had chosen not to die, when the light had bobbed an erratic course out to her where she huddled in the pig shed only to reveal itself as Hugh, with a lantern. Hugh, who had taken her back inside—

But there was no point dwelling on that. “No point thinking only of what troubles you,” Da always said. But Da had been a master at ignoring the trouble that stalked him, whether it be debt or whatever had finally caught and killed him. She wiped away a tear with the back of a hand, then clapped her hands together, rubbed them briskly, trying to warm them.

“Liath!”

She turned. Below, in the courtyard, Wolfhere waved at her. She climbed down the ladder and jogged over to him.

“I must prepare the body for burial,” he said. “But in my surprise and haste last night I forgot my flask in the cathedral crypt.”

She nodded. “I’ll fetch it for you.”

“Come back here after,” he said. “We’ll bury our comrade after Terce.”

The city was more restless than usual, this day, this early. People wandered the streets as if looking for lost relatives. The hammering of blacksmiths sounded a steady din from the armory, and a constant stream of men and women carried loads on their backs—metals, leather, anything that could possibly be made into weapon or armor—down to the warehouses where the armories had been set up. There were, Liath noted, no children on the streets at all.

When she reached the cathedral, she heard the final psalm of the office of Prime.

“‘God, Our Lady and Lord, have spoken and have summoned the world from the rising to the setting sun.’”