Crown of Stars (Crown of Stars 7)

“Has the lady of Autun no barracks in her palace for troops?”

o;Hoo! Ho!” Some of the soldiers jeered. “A country boy come to swing his spear in the town!”

Flames eating through a heaped mattress of dry leaf litter caught in a length of canvas and blazed. Elsewhere, fires ebbed down to glow as they lost hold of good fuel.

“We share and share alike,” said the sergeant. “How about your girl? Or is she your sister?”

“My betrothed,” Atto said, measuring the look in their eyes and, by the expression in his own, not liking it.

The sergeant marked the hounds, who sat, and Alain, who knelt beside the silent boy. He marked the shadows out in the far trees, but it was obvious from his expression that he had no intention of striking into the woods although it would be easy to do so.

“I like the way you stand up for yourself,” he said to Atto. “Can you ride?”

“I’ve ridden donkeys. We have no horses in my village. I’ll learn.”

“Maybe.” The sergeant examined Mara, who shrank closer to Atto’s side. “You rode that girl, I see. Come on, then. If the captain will take you, maybe he’ll set you up in the guard. They need men to police the streets and man the gates. Lots of beggars these days causing trouble when we don’t have enough food for those who deserve it.” He lifted his chin defiantly as he looked at Alain, as if daring him to contradict his judgment, but Alain only watched him, waiting to see what he would do next. He gestured, and his men fell into ranks for the ride back.

“Where do they come from?” Alain asked, rising. The hounds looked at him but did not move.

“My soldiers? Autun. Villages nearby. From the lady’s estates, and elsewhere.”

“I meant the beggars causing your lady so much trouble.”

The sergeant raised a hand to command his men, and led them off at a walk. Atto and Mara abandoned Alain without a word, although Mara glanced back at him and seemed, perhaps, to be crying. But she made no protest.

He had not, in truth, come to like Atto as the three of them had walked the road together these past few days, and although he pitied Mara he could not manage to respect her, even if he was sorry to find himself so hardhearted toward a person as anxious as she was. So it was that, scolding another man for being judgmental, he had already succumbed to the same fault himself.

Once the patrol was out of sight, Alain rose slowly so as not to frighten the boy and with his knife cut into the bottom portion of his cloak and ripped off a length of fabric. He had just tied this garment around the boy’s scrawny shoulders when the first figure ghosted back into the clearing, clutching a stout stick and a precious bronze bucket dented on one side as if by the kick of a horse. They came in pairs and trios and now and again as a single form clutching a precious bundle, or a cracked bowl, or a ragged handkerchief knotted around an unseen prize. They scavenged through the camp pretending to take no notice of Alain and the boy and the hounds, looking once and not again, as if by ignoring the stranger he would vanish. They took what they could carry. They looked like scarecrows, awkward, pale, ridiculous except for the desperation visible in their scuttling walks, their pinched shoulders and lowered heads, their sharp gestures and the way their gazes darted toward the road and the trees at each snap or thump or whisper of branches when the breeze gusted into a moment of real wind. The boy took no interest whatsoever in the people among whom he had been living. He kept staring at the hounds.

“Where are you from?” Alain asked finally, wondering if anyone would answer.

His voice, not loud, sounded as a crack of thunder might on a sultry day. Most of the refugees scattered into the woods. Where they meant to go he could not imagine.

There was one bolder than the rest, a man whose age was impossible to guess because he was missing most of his teeth and was so thin his face had sunken in like that of an ancient tottering elder. His skin was weathered. His hair was matted with dirt and therefore colorless, tied back with a supple green twig to keep it out of his eyes.

“Better not to go to Autun,” the man said. “Honest folk lose their homes there. Beggars are beaten on the streets and tossed out the gates.”

“Are you from Autun?”

“I am.”

“Now you hide here in the woods. Why is that?”

“Driven out, when the milites needed places to barrack troops.” He spoke in a level voice, as about the weather. Whatever outrage or grief he felt remained hidden. He looked too weary and weak to shout or cry. “We’ve nowhere else to go, so we camp here.” He gestured, indicating the filthy campsite.

“Has the lady of Autun no barracks in her palace for troops?”

“Not for so many as serve her now.”

“Why needs she so many soldiers?”

He flicked a fly off his arm and sank down into a squat. He was so thin that he looked likely to topple over if the wind came up. “How would I know?”

“You might guess. You might see things, and come to your own conclusions.”

He blew his nose and wiped mucus away with a forearm already streaked with unnameable substances. “I might. She fears some will take from her the duchy as they did before. Her Wendish brother took it from her. I saw that, I did.” He tapped himself on the chest. His ribs showed like bare twigs, his chest was sunken, yet he squared his shoulders a little, proud of what he remembered and what he had worked out, a common man never privy to the plotting and planning of his noble rulers. “Now she’s gathering soldiers to fight, she and that one they call Conrad the Black. I’ve seen him, too. Him and his lady wife, the one they call our queen.”

The one they call our queen.