In the Ruins (Crown of Stars 6)

“We must be ready,” he said to his soldiers. “Make sure the supplies I mentioned are at hand. Her devils can follow us no matter how far we travel, so when I speak, you must obey exactly as I say.”

They murmured assent.

Anna laughed. “We can’t go!” she crowed. “You can’t weave a spell from the heavens when it is cloudy! You’re trapped here!”

He looked back at her. She clapped a hand over her mouth. Was that a knife, winking in the hand of one of the soldiers?

“Wise, after all,” said Lord Hugh. “But I possess an instrument that tells me where every star will rise and set. The music of the spheres reaches through the clouds. It is only our weak eyesight that stymies us for, unlike the angels and daimones, we cannot see past that which blinds. With this instrument, I do not have to see what I have already measured in order to know it is there. I can weave even when clouds shroud the heavens. I can weave even in daylight, although I must not let my enemies guess that I can do so.”

As night fell, he wove, drawing light out of the heavens although no stars shone where any human eye could see. He wove an archway of light and, at his command—for who would refuse him?—they walked through it into another place.

XIV

THE GUIVRE’S STARE

1

TO walk from Osna village to Lavas Holding was normally a journey of five or six days. Years ago, when Alain had walked with Chatelaine Dhuoda’s company, the trip had taken fifteen days because she had stopped in every village and steading along the way to accept taxes and rents or the service of some of the young people in the village. Now, although they stopped only at night for shelter, the roads had taken so much damage in last autumn’s storm that they were ten days traveling. Tangles of fallen trees barred the track. In two places streams had changed course and cut a channel right through the beaten path where wagons once rolled.

“God help us,” said the chatelaine in the late afternoon on the seventh day. She was the only one mounted. The rest walked. “What’s that?”

Alain went forward with five of the men at arms to discover a wagon toppled onto its side. The remains of several people lay scattered across the roadway and into the woodland on either side, disturbed by animals.

“How long have they lain here, are you thinking?” asked one of the lads, a fellow called “Fetch” by his comrades.

Mostly bone was all that was left of them, with bits of hair and patches of woven tunic ground into the earth and a leather vest half buried beneath dirt and leaf litter. It was impossible to tell how many had died here or how far wolves and foxes had dragged pieces of corpse.

“Months.” Alain wrenched loose an arrow fixed into the spokes of one of the wheels. “Bandits. Look at this fletching.”

The soldiers were young men, no one he knew from his time as Lavastine’s heir, although it seemed strange to him that so many new milites would have come into service in such a short time. They were all lads from villages owing allegiance to Lady Aldegund’s family, and had a lilting curl to their “r’s” when they spoke. They looked nervous as they scanned the trees and open clearings.

One shrieked. “What’s that? What’s that?”

It was only a white skull, caught in brambles, staring out at them.

“Go get it, Fetch,” said the eldest.

“I won’t. It might be cursed!”

“Have we a shovel or anything to dig with?” asked Alain. “Best we dig what grave we can and let these poor dead rest. It’s all we can do.” He looked at each of his companions in turn and shook his head. “Come now. Their souls have ascended to the Chamber of Light. They can’t hurt you. If it were your own brother lying here, wouldn’t you want him laid to rest so that animals would stop chewing on his bones?”

They had in their party only one shovel, but another man had an antler horn he used as a pick and the rest sharpened stout sticks and by this means and some with their bare hands they dug swiftly and deep. Blanche watched silently, sucking her thumb, and it was she who was first to help pick up bones that had been dragged away into the bushes and she who brought the skull and laid it on the heap collected in the pit. She wiped her hand on her skirt and sighed.

“Will I be just bones like that one day?” she asked.

“The part of you which is flesh will die, it’s true, and rot away to bone, but see how white and strong bone is. It’s to remind us of the strength of our souls, which lie hidden beneath flesh as well.”

She frowned at him but said nothing more. The chatelaine’s cleric said a prayer over the dead, and they filled in the hole. One of the lads shook out the leather vest and rolled it up; the leather only needed a bit of cleaning and oiling to restore it and there was no sense in letting such good leather go to waste.

“It’s getting late,” said Alain to the chatelaine. “We’d best think of camping for the night.”

“I don’t like to camp in a place of death,” she said. “We’ll go on a way.”

“Think you there are bandits still lurking?” Fetch asked Alain as they walked along at the front of the group.

“There might be.”

A branch snapped in the trees, and all the milites flinched and spun to look, only to see a doe spring away into the forest. They laughed and called each other cowards but hurried forward anyway to where the woodland dropped back into an open countryside marked by low, marshy ground and thickets of dense brush where the earth rose into hillocks. The road had been raised to cross this swamp, and it was out on the road they found themselves at dusk with nothing but mosquitoes and gnats and marsh flies for company.