In the Ruins (Crown of Stars 6)

“Then you did me a service for speaking when you might have kept silent. Never mind it.” He patted Blanche on the head. “What of the girl?”

“Oh! This one?” The pinched look left her face. She gave a grand smile and tweaked the girl’s ear fondly. “What a hard-working little creature she is, isn’t she, then? She stuck beside me all this time and did everything I asked of her. Good with a knife! Very careful handed, which you don’t often see in a child this age. I can’t trust just any lass with peeling and cutting. Washed me up turnips and parsnips, cutting out the soft spots, of which there are plenty, for these are the end of our winter store and some of them mostly mush by now.”

Blanche blushed, face half hidden against Alain’s tunic, but she was smiling proudly.

“Will you keep her in the kitchens, then, as your helper? And keep care of her? Can you do that?”

“For you, my lord? Willingly. I swear to you I will do by her as I would for my own granddaughter.”

“You’ll stay here, Blanche.”

“I want to go with you, Uncle,” she said into the cloth.

“You can’t.” He only needed to say it once. “Here you’ll stay. Tell me you understand.”

She spoke in a muted voice while her arms clutched him. “I stay with Cook.”

A dozen soldiers tromped onto the porch and came into the hall, placing themselves to either side of the dais. A pair of servants carried the count’s chair in from another chamber and set it in front of the high table. Folk moved cautiously into the hall behind the soldiers, their movement like the eddying of river currents caught in a backwater. A few crept close to him and knelt furtively, whispering words he could not really hear because of the shifting of feet and murmur of voices.

A door banged—open or closed. The assembly quieted as Lord Geoffrey entered with his young daughter. It was difficult to tell her age. She had a childish face and was short and slender and in addition walked with a pronounced limp, but despite her pallor she kept her chin high and gaze steady as she looked first at Alain and then over the assembled soldiers and local people for whom she was responsible as Count of Lavas. The hounds growled, a rumble in their throats too soft for anyone but him, and perhaps Blanche, to hear.

Lavrentia alone sat. Even her father remained standing.

“Let me hear your pledge,” she said in a high, clear voice. She lifted a hand to give him permission to approach, and Alain smiled to see the gesture, which echoed Lavastine’s decisive ways.

He set Blanche aside, giving her into Cook’s arms, and mounted both steps to stand on the same level as the lady. He did not approach her chair nor kneel before her. Instead, he turned to face the crowd. The hounds stood side by side on the first step, and the soldiers nearby shrank back from them.

“I pray you, listen!”

As though a spell had been cast over the multitude, they fell quiet and listened. Not a murmur teased the silence, although one person coughed.

“I make this statement freely, not coerced in any way. I came here of my own accord under the escort of Chatelaine Dhuoda. You know who I am. I am called Alain. I was born here in Lavas Holding and grew up in fosterage in Osna village. Count Lavastine of blessed memory believed I was his illegitimate son and named me as his heir. I sat in the count’s chair for some months before King Henry himself gave the county into the hands of Lavrentia, daughter of Geoffrey. This you know.”

Geoffrey was white, shaking, and strangely it was his young daughter who brushed her small fingers over her father’s clenched fist to calm him.

“This is what I must say to you now, so you can hear, and remember, and speak of it to others who are not here today. I am not Lavastine’s heir. I am not the rightful Count of Lavas.”

“Nay! Nay! Say not so, my lord!”

“We won’t believe such lies—!”

“I knew he was a grasping imposter.”

“What of the testimony of the hounds?”

“I pray you!” said Alain. “Grant me silence, if you will.”

They did so. There was another cough, a shuffling of feet as folk shifted position, a handful of murmurs cut off by sibilant hisses as neighbors shushed those who whispered, and, from outside, a chorus of barking, quickly hushed.

“I will depart this place by sunset with nothing more than what I came with, all but this one thing: this pledge made by Lord Geoffrey. That his daughter, Lavrentia, will rule as Count of Lavas but will stand aside if one comes forward with a claim that supersedes hers and is validated by a council of respected church folk or by Biscop Constance of Autun.”

“I swear it,” growled Geoffrey. The hounds growled, in unison, as if in answer or in challenge.

Geoffrey wiped his brow. The girl bit her lip but did not shift or otherwise show any fear in the face of the fearsome black hounds. Pens scratched as a cleric, seated by the fire, made a record of the proceedings on vellum.

Alain descended from the dais and went over to the bench where his pack lay. He hoisted it, whistled to the hounds, and before any person there could react, he kissed Blanche, made his farewells to Cook, and walked to the door. He came outside past the brace of guards and was out into the courtyard and practically to the gates before he heard the rush of sound, a great exhalation, as the folk inside the hall rushed outward to see where he was going.

They crowded to the gate and some trailed after him to the break in the fosse that met with the eastbound road. A handful kept walking behind him all the way into the woodland until it was almost dark and at last he turned and asked them kindly to go back before it was too dark for them to see.