In the Ruins (Crown of Stars 6)

He nodded. She clapped her hands, and the eunuchs wiped her face again before moving back so the servants could carry her away. As the tent flap closed behind her retinue, the general turned to the soldiers waiting respectfully behind him. He pointed. A captain dressed in a blue tabard came forward and began delivering his report, but Hanna was too dizzy with fear to catch more than scraps of phrases:

“… may be the same bandits who shadow us … may be another group … scouts can never find them … nay, never a trace …”

She ought to memorize each utterance, to hoard them like the treasures they were. She was an Eagle. What she heard, she remembered. What she remembered, she could report to her regnant just as this man reported to his. But she could not concentrate because she could not banish from her mind a vision of whitewashed walls surrounding her, too high to be climbed and without any gate for escape.

A pair of servants trudged in bearing buckets of water. They set them down and busied themselves with the pitcher and basin. Her eyes were still stinging. As much as she swallowed, she could not get all her fear and frustration and anger down.

Is this all her life came to? Had she somehow angered God so much that she was to be passed from one hand to the next as a prisoner? The general might call her an Eagle, but she was no such thing. It would have been better to have stayed in Heart’s Rest and married Young Johan even with his smelly feet and braying, stupid laugh. A cow or goat was not precisely free, but at least it wasn’t caged within narrow walls. She knew better than to let self-pity overwhelm her, but the temptation just for this moment was to fall and fall.

One servant poured water from pitcher into basin. Because the scent of water hit her hard, she looked at them. They were both middle-aged men, wiry and strong, with stern expressions. They were the kind of men who have risen far enough to receive a measure of comfort and security as retainers of a powerful lord. One was, indeed, handsome enough that she might have looked twice at him if he hadn’t been old enough to be her father. Bysantius’ unwanted but flattering proposal had woken old feelings in her. It wasn’t so bad to be desired or at least respected. Ivar was lost to her. She had admired Captain Thiadbold, but held loyal to her Eagle’s vows. Rufus had, momentarily, tempted her, but in the end she had chosen the easier path. She had held herself aloof. She had never succumbed.

Not as Liath had.

In a way, she was envious of Liath, who had embraced passion without looking back, despite the trouble it had brought her.

I am not so impulsive.

Yet it wasn’t so. She had left Heart’s Rest to follow Liath. She had walked without fear into the east. She had wandered in dreams into the distant grasslands seeking the Kerayit shaman who had named Hanna as her luck.

The good-looking servant winked at her, then rubbed at his dirty forehead with the stump of his right arm, cut off at the wrist and cleanly healed. The position of his arm concealed his mouth from his companion. His lips formed a word once, then a second time, soundless but obviously meant to be understood.

Patience.

She startled back. Had she imagined it? Was he speaking in Wendish?

He and the other servant, carrying the emptied buckets, walked out the door, keeping silence as a new captain droned on with his report. She heard, in the wake of their passing, a faint tinkling like that of tiny bells shaken by a breeze.

Five breaths later she knew, and was surprised it had taken her so long. He hadn’t been wearing a churchman’s robes but rather the simple garb of an Arethousan peasant. He had looked different, somehow; harder and keener and even, strange to say, more like a man who might want to be kissed, not a celibate churchman.

Yet he had loved once, and passionately. Like Liath, he had leaped and never regretted.

The rank perfume of the camphor faded, but air within the enclosed tent seemed to rush in a whirlpool around her as though stirred by daimone’s wings. Why was Brother Breschius working as a servant in the camp of his enemy’s army?

The wasp sting burned in her heart.

3

SANGLANT’S army bedded down in and around yet another deserted village. The signs of abandonment did not tell a clear tale: had all the inhabitants died? Had they only fled, hearing the approach of an unknown army? Or had they fled days ago in the wake of the storm? Had some other force driven them away or taken them prisoner?

In these distant marchland borderlands, empty wilderness stretched wide, and villages were without exception bounded by log palisades, which protected mostly against wild beasts both animal and human since a true army would make short work of such meager fortifications. This one had not burned, but the gates sat wide and the vanguard had marched in without seeing any living creature except for a pair of crows that fluttered away into the trees, cawing.

“I miss birdsong,” Liath said. “Even in winter, there should be some about.”

Sanglant was out on his evening round of the army. Hathui had gone with him, leaving her with a trio of Eagles who regarded her with wary interest. She did not feel easy with Sanglant’s noble brethren and preferred the company of the messengers.

“Hanna spoke of you,” said the redheaded one called Rufus.

“Hanna! When did you last speak with Hanna?”

“Months ago. More than that, perhaps. A year, or more. She came south with a message from Princess Theophanu. Hathui says that she and Hanna met on the road, in Avaria or Wayland—I’m not sure which—and that Hanna knew the truth of what had happened to the king but she never confided in me or anyone.”

“Why not?”

“She was watchful. That’s all I know. I liked her.”

Liath propped her chin on a cupped fist and frowned at the Eagle. He was a likable, even-tempered young man who reminded her vaguely of Ivar but perhaps only because of his red hair. They looked nothing alike, and he did not have Ivar’s inconvenient and ill-timed passions.

She sighed. Heart’s Rest seemed impossibly distant. That interlude with Hanna and Ivar, innocent friends, could never have happened in a world as blighted as this one. How blind she had been in those days! Hanna’s friendship was true enough, but Hanna had been struggling with her own obstacles, which Liath had blithely ignored. Ivar had never been her friend; she had pretended otherwise because his infatuation with her had made her uncomfortable.