In the Ruins (Crown of Stars 6)

“I stayed to find you, Hanna. I waited at my teacher’s side long enough while you suffered under the Quman beast’s whip. I would not allow it to happen again. I knew you were alive. When we found the holy women and their companions, we marked the trail of those who had taken you. So, here we are. What do we do now?”

Hanna let it go, at last, and sagged forward. Sorgatani caught her, and she lay her head against the Kerayit woman’s silk-clad shoulder and rested there most comfortably. “I want to go home,” she whispered. “But what will you do now?”

“I will go where my luck leads me, of course.” She whistled sharply, a sound that made Hanna cover her right ear, which was nearest to Sorgatani’s lips.

The door slid open. Breschius appeared, his figure limned by the fading light behind him.

“Let Lady Bertha know that tomorrow we turn our path north. We will cross the mountains and travel west to Wendar.”

He vanished as he closed the door.

After a pause, Sorgatani asked: “What will we find in Wendar? What manner of place is it?”

“It will be as strange to you as this wagon is to me,” she said, half laughing, half crying, and completely exhausted, too tired, indeed, to stand and seek out a place to rest. “As for what we will find there, I don’t know. I think the world has changed utterly. I have seen such destruction that at first it made no sense to me. A vast city flattened as with a giant’s hand. Refugees on the roads, many of them starving. Clouds of dust everywhere. How much worse may it be elsewhere? What if there is worse yet to come? I must seek out the regnant of Wendar, whoever that is now, and give my report. That I must do first. Afterward—”

“Afterward” was too vast a landscape to survey.

VIII

THE PHOENIX

1

THE estate Ivar and Erkanwulf rode into looked very different from Ivar’s father’s manor and compound. It had no significant palisade, only a set of corrals to keep livestock in and predators from the forest out, and there was a wooden tower set on a hillock just off the road to serve as a refuge in times of trouble. An enclosure surrounded a score of fruit trees. Several withered gardens lay in winter’s sleep, protected by fences to keep out rabbits and other vermin. Four boys came running from the distant trees, each one holding a crude bow. Dogs barked. A barefoot child seated in the branches of one of the fruit trees stared at them but said no word. A trio of men loitering beside an empty byre greeted them with nods.

In Heart’s Rest the village had grown up around a commons, and in addition lay a morning’s walk from Count Hart’s isolated manor. Here, in Varre, houses straggled along the road like disorderly soldiers. Fields stretched out in stripes behind them until they were overtaken by woods. A tiny church had been built where the path they rode crossed with a broad wagon track. The house of worship was ringed by a cemetery, itself disturbed by a dozen recently dug graves. Wattle-and-daub huts with roofs low to the ground lay scattered hither and yon, but Erkanwulf led them to the grandest house in the village, a two-storied stone house standing under the shadow of the three-storied wooden tower.

“Who lives here?” Ivar asked, admiring this massive stone structure and the single story addition built out behind it. There were also three sheds and a dozen leafless fruit trees.

“My mother.”

Before they reached the stone house, the church bell rang twice. Ivar looked back to see that two of the men who had greeted them beside the byre had vanished.

“She’s chatelaine for the steward here, my lord,” Erkanwulf added. “It was the steward who asked Captain Ulric to take me into the militia. They’re cousins twice removed on their mother’s side.”

It was cold, and even though it was near midday, the light had the faded glamour of late afternoon. They hadn’t seen the sun for weeks, not since many days before the night of the great storm and their rescue by the villagers who lived deep within the Bretwald.

A woman came out of the farthest shed. Her hair was covered by a blue scarf and her hands were full of uncombed wool. “Erkanwulf!” She turned and fled back into the shed. As though her cry had woken the village, a stream of folk emerged from every hovel and out of sheds and fields to converge on the stone house.

It was a prosperous village. Ivar held his mount on a tight rein, preferring not to dismount in case there was trouble. He counted fully twoscore folk ranging in age from toddling babies to one old crone who supported her hobbling steps on a walking stick. There were older men, and lads, but no young men at all, not one.

long time Hanna was silenced by the force of Sorgatani’s tale. At last, she spoke.

“Why did you stay here in this country?”

“I stayed to find you, Hanna. I waited at my teacher’s side long enough while you suffered under the Quman beast’s whip. I would not allow it to happen again. I knew you were alive. When we found the holy women and their companions, we marked the trail of those who had taken you. So, here we are. What do we do now?”

Hanna let it go, at last, and sagged forward. Sorgatani caught her, and she lay her head against the Kerayit woman’s silk-clad shoulder and rested there most comfortably. “I want to go home,” she whispered. “But what will you do now?”

“I will go where my luck leads me, of course.” She whistled sharply, a sound that made Hanna cover her right ear, which was nearest to Sorgatani’s lips.

The door slid open. Breschius appeared, his figure limned by the fading light behind him.

“Let Lady Bertha know that tomorrow we turn our path north. We will cross the mountains and travel west to Wendar.”

He vanished as he closed the door.

After a pause, Sorgatani asked: “What will we find in Wendar? What manner of place is it?”