Now? Alain said nothing, but he waited.
Lavastine crossed the carpet to stand in front of Alain’s chair. The dim light made him loom above, more shadow than living man. “I began to wonder last autumn, after I returned from the campaign against the Eika raiders, but I forgot everything under the compulsion. Now, isn’t it as obvious to you as it is to me?”
At first Alain did not understand what the count was trying to say. But then he realized the hounds were lying every which way about the tent, some by Alain, some by Lavastine’s chair, some shifting as Lavastine moved. Alain touched the hem of his new, fine tunic, sewn with embroidered ribbon so rich even as prosperous a householder as Aunt Bel would have to trade a child in exchange for an arm’s length of such an exquisite piece of fabric.
Lavastine took one of Alain’s hands in his and lifted him to his feet. His mouth was set in a thin, determined line, and when he spoke, his tone allowed for no argument.
“You are my son.”
5
LIATH had nightmares. Every night, the dogs came and tore at her flesh, ripping her, tearing her limb from limb. Every night she would wake, sweating, heart pounding, and bolt upright in her blanket until the cool night air washed the stain of fear from her. But it could not wash away her grief.
Then she would weep.
Always Wolfhere slept through these episodes, or pretended to be asleep. She could not tell which. She did not want to know which it was. He was deeply preoccupied, spoke only when spoken to or when it was absolutely necessary to get supplies or new mounts. Only once, in an unguarded moment, did she hear him whisper a name.
“Manfred.”
They rode many days. Liath did not keep track of them. Though the skies were clear and perfect for viewing, she did not follow the course of the moon through the Houses of the Night, the world dragon that bound the heavens. She did not trace the courses of the planets through those same constellations. She did not repeat the lessons Da had taught her over and over again. She did not walk in the city of memory, so laboriously built, so carefully maintained for so many years.
She mourned and she dreamed.
Sometimes, if she chanced to stare into a hearth fire or campfire, she would get a sudden feeling she was peering through a keyhole, watching a scene that unfolded on the other side of a locked door.
There are spirits burning in the air with wings of flame and eyes as brilliant as knives. They move on the winds of aether that blow above the sphere of the Moon, and now and again their gaze falls like a blazing arrow, like the strike of lightning, to the Earth below, and there it sears anything it touches, for they cannot comprehend the frailty of Earthly life. They are of an elder race and are not so fragile. Their voices have the snap of fire and their bodies are not bodies as we know them, but the conjoining of fire and wind, the breath of the fiery Sun coalesced into mind and will.
“But are we not their cousins, then? Were we not born of fire and light? Is our place not here out beyond the sphere of the Moon, as theirs is?”
The first speaker shifts, studying the flames, for he, too, stares into the fire, and across some doorway impossible to touch he watches Liath. He seems to know she is listening, that she can see him. But he speaks to the woman who stands out of sight in the shadows behind him.
“We are not as old as that, my child. We were not born of the very elements themselves, though they wove themselves into our shaping. We are the children of angels, but we can no longer live cast out from the Earth which gave us birth.”
He lifts a hand. Liath recognizes him; he has come to be familiar to her, but he frightens her, not because he looks threatening but because he is so utterly inhuman, so unlike Da or any of the other people she knows, those few she has come to care for, even unlike Hugh, who is an abomination but a fully human one. He is Aoi, one of the Lost Ones, old, surely—such is the authority of his bearing—although he looks neither young nor old by any sign she knows how to read. He has the look of Sanglant about him. That frightens her, too, that seeing this strangely clad male reminds her bitterly of Sanglant, whom she wishes only to forget. Never to forget.
“Who are you?” he asks with simple curiosity, neither angry nor frightened, not like her. “Who are you who watches through the fire? Where have you found this gateway? How have you brought it to life?” Across his bare thighs rest the strands of flax he is twining into rope, a longer length each time she sees him through the fire. But the rope grows slowly, a finger’s-breadth, a hand’s-breadth, while days pass for her as she and Wolfhere ride south and west, seeking King Henry.
She cannot answer him. She cannot speak through flame. She fears her voice will echo down unknown passageways and through vast hidden halls, that wind and fire will carry it to the ears of those who are listening for her, seeking her.
The sorcerer—for he must be such, to have knowledge and vision together—plucks a gold feather from the sheath that encases his right forearm and tosses it into the flames.
Liath started up, scrambling back as the fire flared up and then, abruptly, died down. She blinked back tears, streaming from smoke, and wiped her nose. Her face was hot. Behind her, the door slammed open and Wolfhere walked in from dark night outside.
She sat in the middle of a small guest house—such as the abbot granted to Eagles, not the best of his accommodations but not the worst either—at the Monastery of Hersford. The fire snapped and burned merrily, innocent of any sorcery. She might have dreamed … but it was no dream. When she dreamed, she dreamed of the Eika dogs.
“What did you find out?” she asked.
Wolfhere coughed and wiped his hands together, dusting something off them. “Henry and the court celebrated the Feast of St. Susannah here, but they were called away west. According to Father Bardo, Sabella raised an army and Henry had to ride west to meet her, before she entered Wendar. She removed Biscop Constance from the biscop’s chair at Autun and set another woman there as biscop in her place. And took Constance prisoner, as well.”
Liath set her elbow on her knee and her head on a hand. She was very tired, now, and did not much care for the troubles and intrigues of the noble lords. “Sabella would have done better to send her army against Bloodheart,” she muttered.
“Well,” said Wolfhere, “the great princes most often think of their own advantage, not that of others. Father Bardo does not know what happened to the king, or if it came to battle. Come now, we’ll sleep and ride out at dawn.”
She dreaded sleeping, but in the end her exhaustion drew her down, and down, and down…
… into the crypt at Gent, where corpses lay strewn among the pale tombs of the holy dead and the dogs fed so voraciously she could hear the cracking of bones…
She started awake in a cold sweat, heart racing. Ai, Lady! How much more of this must she suffer? Wolfhere slept on the other side of the fire, which lay in cold ashes, as cold as her heart. Only one wink of heat remained, a flash of gold among the gray.