King's Dragon (Crown of Stars 1)

There, he threw himself onto the stone floor in front of the Hearth, in his gold robes, heedless of the crown tumbling to the floor, heedless of his scepter, which slipped from nerveless fingers. He groped at his chest and drew from next to his skin an old scrap of cloth stained a rusty red.

He could not weep—not as the king must weep, easily and to show his sympathy for those of his people who suffer. This pain was far too deep for tears.

“My heart,” he murmured into the unyielding stone, “my heart is torn from me.” He pressed the cloth to his lips.

Hathui wept to see him.

Rosvita drew the Circle at her breast and then she knelt before the Hearth, beside the prostrate king, and began to chant the prayer for dead souls.

7

AFTER the hall was cleared and she and Wolfhere given bread and mead, after some hushed consultation between various noble lords and ladies whose names she did not know and whose faces all blurred into a single unrecognizable one, Liath was escorted to a small chapel.

Wolfhere did not come with her. Indeed, she saw they prevented him and led him away by another hall. A fine proud woman in biscop’s vestments brought her before the king, who sat on a bench, no longer in his fine robes and regalia. He was held upright by a cleric and several other attendants, one of whom wiped his face repeatedly with a damp cloth. Liath knelt before him. His right hand clutched an old bloodstained rag.

“Tell me,” he said hoarsely.

She wanted to beg him not to make her tell, not to relive the fall of Gent. Not again, Lady, please. But she could not. She was an Eagle, the king’s eyes, and it was her duty to tell him everything.

Not everything. Some things she could not—and would not—tell anyone: Sanglant’s face close to hers, the light in his eyes, the grim set of his mouth, the bitter irony in his voice when he told her, “Make no marriage.” The feel of his skin when she had touched him, unbidden, on the cheek. No, not that. Those were her memories and not to be shared with anyone else. No one need know she loved him. No one would ever know, not even Sanglant. Especially not Sanglant.

Telling the story would be like living through it again. But she had no choice. They all watched her, waiting. Among the crowd stood Hathui, and the Eagle nodded, once, briskly, at her. That gesture gave her courage. She cleared her throat and began.

Barely, barely she managed to get the words out. Terrible it was to be the bringer of this baleful news, and worse still to relate the story with the king staring at her as if he hated her, for whom else could he hate?

She did not blame him. She would have hated herself, too, did hate herself in a way for living when so many had died. At last she stumbled to a halt, having spoken the last and most damning part of the tale, the vision seen through fire. She expected them to question her closely, perhaps to lead her away in chains as a sorcerer. The king lifted a hand weakly, half a gesture. It was all he could manage.

“Come,” said the biscop. She led Liath away. Outside, she stopped with her under the arched loggia that opened out into a pretty garden, lilies and roses and brash marigolds. “You are Wolfhere’s discipla?” she asked, using the Dariyan word.

“I—? No. I don’t know. I am newly come to the Eagles, just after Mariansmass.”

“Yet you already wear the Eagle’s badge.”

Liath covered her eyes with a hand, briefly, stifling tears.

“What you saw in the fire,” said the biscop, going on in what she perhaps meant to be a gentler voice, “is known to us as one of the arts by which certain Eagles can see. Do not fear, child. Not all sorcery is condemned by the church. Only that which is harmful.”

Liath risked raising her head. The biscop was quite a young woman, really, pale and elegant in her fine vestments and tasseled biscop’s mitre.

“You are Constance!” exclaimed Liath, remembering the lineages Da had taught her, “Biscop of Autun.”

“So I am,” said Biscop Constance. “And I am evidently now Duchess of Arconia, too.” She said this with a hint of irony, or perhaps sadness. “Where were you educated, child?”

“My Da taught me,” said Liath, now cursing the fate that had separated her from Wolfhere. She did not have the strength to fend off pointed questioning of her past and her gifts, and certainly not from a noblewoman of Constance’s education and high rank. “Begging your pardon, Your Grace. I am very tired. We have ridden so far, and so quickly, and—” Almost the sob got out, but she choked it back.

“And you have lost someone who is dear to you,” said the biscop, and in her own face Liath saw a sudden and surprising compassion. “One of my clerics will show you to the barracks, where the Eagles take their rest.”

A cleric led her to the stables. There she found herself alone in a loft above the stalls. Shutters had been thrown open, admitting the last of the daylight. She flung herself down on the hay, then rose again, wiping her nose, and paced. It was as if, reciting the awful tale, she had passed some of her numbing grief off onto King Henry. Now she was too restless to rest. Grooms murmured below. She was utterly alone.

For the first time in months, for the first time since Hugh had taught her the rudiments of Arethousan—all those damned impossible verbs!—she was alone.

Carefully, she lifted The Book of Secrets out of her saddlebags and unwrapped it. She opened it to the central text, that ancient, fragile papyrus, dry under her skin as she ran a finger along the line of text, written in a language she did not recognize but glossed here and there in Arethousan. The Arethousan letters were still strange to her, but as she concentrated, opening doors in her city of memory, finding the hall where she had stored her memory of the Arethousan alphabet, she could transpose them in her mind into the more familiar Dariyan letters and thus form words, some of which she had learned from Hugh, most of which were meaningless to her.

At the very top of the page, above the actual text, was written a single word in Arethousan: krypte.

“Hide this,” she whispered and felt a sudden, sharp pain in her chest. Hide this.

She put a hand over her mouth, breathed in, calming herself, and then studied the text beneath. The letters that made up the text were totally foreign to her, unlike Arethousan letters, unlike the more common Dariyan letters; perhaps, faintly, they resembled the curling grace of Jinna letters although these had a squarer profile. She could not read them nor even imagine what language this was.